Simple Stories

Unitarian Society of Germantown’s Green Sanctuary committee organized a farm tour in April to Yellow Springs Farm in Chester, Pennsylvania. Here husband and wife Al and Catherine Renzi have a goat farm, an artisanal goat cheese business, and a native plant landscaping design enterprise.  Our tour was a small group fundraiser for Green Sanctuary, about 20 folks signed up.  Events like this are one way we fund buying fair trade organic coffee for USG’s hospitality hour after services on Sundays. Our committee has many projects in hand, but my heart belongs to good food, grown locally, eaten liberally, and teaching children the link between our earth, how our earth feeds us, who we are, and how we give back to the source of all physical resources and nourishment.

Kids enjoy feeding the farm’s goats.

Photo: Yellow Springs Farm Tour April 2010 courtesy of the Walsh family

Put two prepared dishes side by side, one made with organic, non-processed ingredients and one made with…whatever…is available in the average supermarket. Do a taste test. We can taste additives, pesticide residues, and the lack of flavor where nutrients are not present. We can taste these differences but the pace of daily life encourages us to ignore what our bodies tell us tastes good, or doesn’t. You should taste “Bliss,” one of the goat cheeses made at Yellow Springs Farm.

Simple. Right?

A while back, I lived on Vashon Island, which is just off the coast from Seattle in the Puget Sound. At that time, the island was a rural environment and home to apple farmers, artists, writers, musicians, and techi misfits who built their Microsoft McMansions or their reassembled Indonesian temples deep in the lush green woods where they could not be seen from the road. No one could tell me who had started the Vashon community dinner project, but it had been operating for several years when I moved to the island. The concept was deceptively simple. Every night of the week you could eat a nutritious meal in the home of one of your island neighbors. Folks on Vashon signed up to host a dinner one night a month. That was all it took. Enough folks signed up by going to the Community dinner web site so that quite literally you could host 12 people in your home on June 1st and then eat out every night through June 30th, at no cost. It was first come, first serve. You were asked to let the evening’s host know you were coming. As a host, you only had to prepare enough food to feed twelve people. No one was ever turned away, some nights you had the choice of two locations to go to. The cost of hosting one evening’s simple fare was balanced out by what you sat down to at another table, or another thirty tables for the rest of the month. There was no food insecurity on Vashon Island because if you didn’t have a car you could hitch a ride to the community supper and home again. You wouldn’t starve.

Another amazing story of the quality of community on Vashon Island. There was a small open green space in the center of town. In summer time, it became the farmer’s market and town gathering spot. The owner decided to sell the plot. Word spread quickly in the Thriftway and IGA markets, raced up and down the aisles of True Value Hardware and in the Vashon Hardware and General Stores, at K2 and at Green Mountain Roasters; islanders got wind that McDonald’s intended to buy the plot and the owner had no objections to selling the land to McDonald’s. Islanders put their money where many mouths were, and these mouths weren’t interested in Big Macs. In less than ninety days, islanders put $100,000 into a collective fund, bought the plot, and then donated it to the Land Trust with the caveat that the island’s farmer’s market had a permanent home in the center of town.

There are so many ways to build community.

I’ve never be a joiner, and I left “church” before the age of ten, passing through many versions of organized religion before settling on the solo practice of Buddhism. I moving back to Philadelphia from Vermont, I joined the Unitarian Society of  Germantown in 2009 to meet my need for spiritual community. This is a joyous, inclusive congregation that is heaven bent on connecting home-grown spirituality with social justice activism, environmental stewardship, and a commitment to the principles of Unitarian beliefs. Since becoming active in this congregation (after falling in love with our choir, and while developing a rewarding relationship with our dynamic, strutting his soul glow pastor, Rev. Kent Mathies in the midst of coming home as a prodigal daughter to Philadelphia after an absence of more than twenty years of world travel, heartache and good, old-fashioned character building experience) and somehow becoming a beekeeper and ending up as chair of the congregation’s Green Sanctuary  Our local Green Sanctuary offers Healthy Children, Healthy Planet to our congregation as an adult religious education course.  The discussion course material is generated by the Northwest Earth Institute based in Portland, OR.