LEMON SLICES ON THE BOTTOM

Hands-on Work > Discernment > Politics > Common Ground

It’s garden time here in Mississippi. That means it’s also pea shelling, preserving, and pickling time. If you’re a reader from the South - or a gardener or preserver anywhere, you likely understand why this Substack has been neglected for a bit.

If you’re new to growing and preserving a harvest, just know these processes are some of the most functionally demanding, multi-tasking experiences on the planet. Little else can teach so much about what works, what doesn’t, and how important details are. (Unless perhaps it’s personal healing, but that’s a post for another day.)

Take the pickling of okra as a newbie. You’re following a recipe from an experienced pickler who knows to include all the details. Your water bath canner is coming to a boil, the jars are getting hot, the okra is washed and trimmed, the brine is beginning to simmer, the spices are mixed and ready, and you know timing is important. You carefully discern among the okra pods - large, medium, small, tiny - what will fit artfully into your first jar. Then you start on the second. Halfway through you remember the spices, lemon slices and garlic. When and where do they fit in? Oh no, on the bottom. Shoot!! Are you going to remove the skillfully, tightly packed jars? The water bath is still bubbling with the jar lids now in. No. No. No. But you don’t know what it will mean to put lemon, et al on the top of the first and the middle of the second. But you do it anyway, making the third jar the correct example of lemon-garlic-spices on the bottom.

Learning details and functionality . . . this is the gift of hands-on work. Something one learns by doing, most especially from making mistakes while doing. Farmers, gardeners, and cooks know this very well. Rural and homesteading cultures everywhere are functional places with functional people. People who can nuance around what works and what does not, around the impacts of weather and the big picture of cash crops and markets and changes in consumer demand. People who are given to discernment and asking what, when, and why. This is who we were when survival depended on getting things done in everyday life.

When rural farming began its ‘big change’ toward industrial commodity agriculture in the 1960’s, a whole generation of farmers-and-cooks-to-be became college students instead. Now retired, they watch as next generations work in the ever evolving world of big tech, big medicine, and big food; and their grandchildren in fast food and phone stores.

Discernment around matters of everyday living has changed, the need to watch daily weather, check for tomato worms, or consider food supplies for the winter has disappeared. As long as there is food in the grocery store, a clinic nearby, and a pharmacy around the corner, the hard questions about life essentials and survival seem to no longer be with us. We don’t have to consider all the factors that lead up to success or failure in a garden, or discern the why of our pain when the doctor can write a script.

Is convenience dumbing us down?

How did we get here from lemon slices and pickles? By the thread of an argument for doing hands-on work with life essentials so that we better understand how things work. This learning of detail creates an awareness that allows for nuance and discernment in the things that make up everyday life . . . and then builds the common sense that eventually leads to wisdom in other things.

Was there ever a time in human history that these skills seem as lost as they are today? Let’s take politics. How many of us take the time to look beyond political labels and attempt to understand issues for ourselves, or at least read differing views? How often do we allow official narratives on any subject to go unquestioned, whether it’s climate change, pandemics, or wars? Do we question the silencing of dissenting opinions from credible professionals, especially when most of us agree that science is never ‘settled’?

Is this how matters of science become political issues? Because we’ve lost some ability to discern and to question, to step back and take a broader and longer view of an issue?

If we are allowing political labels and official narratives to govern how we think, and if we do so without questioning or allowing others to question, then freedom and democracy are in a danger zone. We need nuance and discernment more than ever in a complex world. We especially need them at the ballot boxes of democracies and to help find common ground with those who see things differently than we do. We must be able to go beyond political labels and official narratives based on ‘settled science’ to find the details, to parse out as much of what is real as we can. Artificial intelligence, the metaverse, and the next generation of deep fakes will challenge reality in ways we can hardly imagine, and they will demand nuance and discernment if we are to keep alive any sense of what is real.

Pickle-making anyone? Or gardening, or baking bread, or fixing a bicycle, or healing dementia? Doing hands-on work trains us to look at details and think for ourselves, to be discerning. Because hands-on means looking for what works and what does not, it can teach us to consider methods and views different from our own. In politics, discernment is a valuable skill, one that may be essential to seeking out details and finding common ground.

Living Well Locally envisions more hands-on in daily life, more discernment around which conveniences keep us well and which ones do us harm. The foods we need for healing will not come from factories or fast food chains, they will come from farmers who live nearby, from the cooks in our home kitchens, and from the gardens more of us are planting. Hands-on work helps create a life of our own making, it shows us what is real and possible and how we can get from here to there.