Grace Yoder

Tiny Disarmaments

Long before meeting Grace Yoder, I knew her backyard. Modest in size, like most in the neighborhood, she’d miraculously transformed it from grass and narrow flowerbeds into a wellspring of vegetable bounty. From every crumble of earth something lush and verdant pushed forth. I can still remember reading Scott and Helen Nearing’s The Good Life from my rooftop in Manhattan in my twenties and longing for their homesteader life but this was my first time encountering an actual homestead. My lapsed desires rekindled.

Eventually Grace, her husband, and two children bought six acres down the way, still in our small city limits. They built a house from a kit and then began homesteading on a larger scale. Grace grows garlic, squash, tomatoes, potatoes, a variety of greens and everything in between; recently she’s integrated more perennials in the way of fruit trees and nuts and horseradish. They raise rabbits and chickens and goats and ducks. And Grace forages for mushrooms and cleavers. She’s also gifted with fermenting and canning so that the summer abundance lasts the whole year. She and Jeff and the children approach the land with such deep reverence, keen intuition, and an earnest desire to learn what she may teach. They also really listen.

Grace posts the most incredibly thoughtful contemplations on social media; they start with the land but pull in many other aspects of life in gentle, insightful, and fiercely honest ways. I always see the world a little differently after reading one. I asked Grace to write something for Beyond and am delighted she agreed.

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Tiny Disarmaments

I was raised by Christian hippy pacifists. Not just the big war protesting kind, but the ones who didn’t even believe violence was right in cases of self-defense. They didn’t act like they were above it, but they did call all of us kids into hard moral spaces to think about what our values were going to be on the subject. I don’t think they believed we could take a passive position on this front. What kind of world were we going to help build with our values? My dad often said that what informed his radical pacifism was the knowledge of his great capacity for violence- making a point to relay to us the shadow side of his deeply held convictions. He worked to consciously cultivate an ethic of love in response to it. The big thing was that they believed that violence precipitated more violence, all of it interwoven. They believed poverty and racism and many of our persistent social problems could be considered part of this fabric of violence.

As I grew up I developed a more nuanced perspective. I found inconsistencies in their arguments and behaviors, and I wondered more broadly about the different classes of violence that existed. Surely there is a difference between the natural violence that exists in the hunt between two wild animals and the version of it brought about through corporate greed. I figured we needed more words for what we were working to describe. I started to farm and grow much of my own food, and my perspective broadened even more. My parents valued human life above all, but as I became more enmeshed in living systems, that hierarchy felt more and more absurd. I am not a purist on the subject, but what I have carried with me into my adulthood is that notion of interconnectedness. How do our values and our stories about what’s possible translate into the living world? I remember questioning my dad about whether or not non-violent strategies actually worked, and he mused about how he didn’t believe that they’d been tried enough to know. We would talk about how scary it must be to flip the script, to decide to “lay down your sword” on an individual level, let alone what it would take for entire nations to risk it. We also discussed the difference between non-violence and passivity, thinking through what it means to bravely embody our values. We wondered together over the years about how much faith you would need to try something so new, to create new stories and to question what feels otherwise inevitable.

I’ve been thinking about war stories and how they play out, even in my own garden. Specifically, I’ve been re-evaluating my relationship to thistle. You know, the spiky dusty green plant with pretty purple flowers that grows on the side of the road? I’ve had many battles with this plant. Over the past 5 or so years I’ve worked to eradicate it from my current gardens, yet it shows no sign of going anywhere. I’ve pulled it, chopped it, and smothered it. I’ve done my best to make sure it never went to seed. Every year, back with a vengeance. So. Much. Thistle. All my years of growing food has also meant that I’ve invested a large amount of time working to stop things from growing where I didn’t want them to. Pulling weeds, smothering and mulching walkways, putting up fences and barriers to keep things in or out, etc. Managing. This element of the work has taken its toll on me over time. Last year the battle with what-wants-to-grow-but-doesn’t-fit-into-my-plans felt so fruitless that I hit a kind of bottom. I spent so much time mulching my walkways and yet every time I turned around there was a fresh and energetic batch of thistle, ready to party.

I’ve learned that fatigue can be a great teacher. If I hadn’t gotten so tired of it all, I wouldn’t have slowed down and started to ask some pretty important questions. From one perspective, this is my spiky plant nemesis, aggressive and mindless and greedy for garden space. From another, I learn that thistle is part of a class of “first responder” plants. It thrives in areas of compaction and drought, growing where other things might not. Its taproot goes deep into the earth to restore healthy function to the soil, pulling up nutrients and water and improving the structure, inviting other life in after it. Its blossoms and nectar are an important food for pollinators. Its spikes, I imagine, make it less palatable to browsing animals and so more likely to mature and continue to do this work. This is ultimately a plant with an important and specific ecological job to do. All of this begs the question: What is the difference between the story of the Thistle as Enemy and the story of the Thistle as Hero?

I’ve begun to wonder if anything grows where there isn’t an environment and an ecology to support it. The story of the Enemy is rooted in a mythology of individualism. How do any of these problems or characters look when I remember that we are absolutely and completely relational? I realized that in trying to fight the thistle I had unintentionally created the perfect environment for it, solidifying the future war. Is it possible that by releasing this fight I can actually release the thistle from its job? What happens when I acknowledge my energetic part? What kind of a request have I made here, to ask that there be large swaths of earth that grow nothing and feed no one? I think it’s possible that the true underlying problem was my insistence on control and my unwillingness to take feedback from this plant. For years I wasn’t listening to a persistent and faithful message, which at the very least was telling me that my creativity was lacking. I was designing for perpetual war by asking for unreasonable things.

I decided to step forward with a little faith and a new story. I’ve stopped pulling and smothering. I’m trying something else entirely and letting all my garden walkways return to life. I’ve been amazed by how quickly they’ve filled in. First the thistle, now plantain and yarrow and grasses and clover. I’ve learned from other gardener friends that these living areas so near to my garden beds are the perfect habitat for many beneficial insects. Who knows what I might learn and how much healthier things might be in time. It feels a little chaotic, a little strange… and better. Again, this isn’t about passivity. I’m still showing up. I still have some requests, some interventions. But I’m engaging in a fundamentally different way. This is all so small in the grand scheme, but it got me thinking about those old conversations with my parents. I admire them for steadfastly envisioning a kinder and more loving world. It has me wondering about if these tiny disarmaments just might add up to something that looks a little bit more like peace.