Where to start this Thanksgiving week Beet? So many threads to weave into the fabric of thankfulness here. 2025 has been a remarkable year of bounty and benign weather. Our rains have been plentiful and gentle. The community of hands here – some 80 year-round workers – have been connected through a common task of creating fruitfulness and manifest abundance.
Migrating birds, bats, insects, and friends have stopped by this year, generally filling their bellies before flying on. The soil seems richer, smelling funky and sweet. Cover crops radiate vibrancy, complexity and lushness. The cultivated crops strikingly green and lush provide us with sweet abundance. The dynamic whole – this land, the people, the life above and below – is reflecting a community that is expressing its love for life. It has been our work, both hopeful and beautiful, to grow a place more complex and remarkable each year.
I hope that you understand that the community extends to you – you who are eating our food – you who read and follow our farm. You who do your work – while our connection is one of a thousand threads that grounds you to hope, in a small way manifesting through a mindfully sourced and thoughtfully prepared thanksgiving meal.
Our friend Wendell Berry writes:
“A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.”
Adding to that integration, community extends itself to you in the life that abides here: soil, root, leaf, hawk, people, mountain lion or work. An integrated whole, connected all by the thread of gratitude, complexity, and vitality of the food you eat from this farm.
So while we harvest from our fall crops to fill your boxes this week, much of this farm is turning to rest, sleep and renewal. The leaves of walnut, pomegranate, persimmon, fig and almond trees yellow and fall. The brown dead grasses of the Capay hills to the east and Blue Ridge to the west are greening as last year’s brown overstory fades. As cold and moisture charge the cycle of renewal here, we feel both reverence and delight for this silent dropping, and the layering of one generation becoming the blanket and cover for the next moment. The dying is ushering in the passing of a season while sheltering of those elements that will foster a new and hopeful coming.
In the past weeks, a service for Jane Goodall was held at the National Cathedral. The messages given there honoring the life of a simple, clear-headed, wonderful woman who was a point of light, illuminating for us her delight and wonder in the natural world. Memories and reflections of the speakers echoed Jane’s life and work. Clearly Jane had a gift of relating both as an individual and as an international spokesperson for conservation.
Pastor Mariann Edgar Budde, in a distinguished eulogy, closing a lovely memorial service, spoke of Jane‘s “Fully Alive” humanness choosing and relating relationships with other fully alive creatures. Pastor Budde recalled Jane’s journey of mystical moments when she felt aware and connected a divine goodness. That deep and spiritual connection to all living creatures and the world they inhabited required care, love, attention and conservation. She became a bridge for the experience of being intimate to the place and creatures she studied. She crossed that bridge of oneness with the natural world and then showed the pathway for others to join her. Mystical/spiritual/certain/knowing Jane was able to then share the message of beauty and hope gained in that clear state of being.
As we celebrate Thanksgiving and our blessed lives, may it be a day of gratitude. Pastor Budde spoke of the meaning of being “blessed.” She related the meaning of “blessed” at the time when Jesus lived. Then the word was more a verb that was active rather than a passive state of receiving. For Budde, “blessed,” or to be blessed was translated as action. “Get up. Go ahead. Do something, move!”… This was, she said, original meaning of “to be blessed.” She added, as a direct message of Jane’s work, “Move to preserve our beautiful planet for all living beings.”
We are more apt to protect that with which we have a relationship. It is more rewarding to be in a blessed association which is an act of both being and creating at the same time.
Touching the earth, walking in silence on a wooded path, breathing in the funk of a field or forest, or cupping in the sweet smell of fertile soil help us on our pathway to being alive. It is a relationship that is not wholly of our making but is a deep biophysical connection of body, bacteria, aroma, and inspiration as part of our evolutionary history.
We can release the serotonins impacting our mood, delight and happiness by handling soil or gardening or playing in a muddy puddle. Kids know that instinctively. They are realizing the deep microbial connection of bacterium Mycobacterium vaccae to our evolutionary history. Playing in soil can act as a natural antidepressant. In the same way, gut microbiota can influence both gut and brain serotonin levels by affecting the production and metabolism of serotonin through the gut-brain axis.
So with this November 2025 Thanksgiving, when many are a bit angry and without hope. When violence in parts of the world becomes a long running horror, it may be necessary to inject some of Jane’s Hope, to find a pathway through the news cycle into a more connected place of community, mental well-being, and feeling fully alive. Jane acknowledged her mission: to think with a “clever human brain,” to act with a “compassionate human heart,” to live by her maxim that every individual matters.
Finally, Wendell Berry writes the following:
“There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say ‘It is yet more difficult than you thought.’ This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
also
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world and am free.
― Wendell Berry
Blessings on your meals- may we actively create the world of justice, equity and inclusion as a pathway to being both fed and fully alive.
With love from your farm,
Paul Muller
Both photos courtesy of Ella Galaty – thanks Ella!
