Soil and Spirit: Cultivation and Kinship in the Web of Life by Scott Chaskey

I listened to the audio version of this book of essays as I walked our farm in the afternoons. Scott Chaskey’s reading voice as well as his poetic prose provided a meditative and spiritual accompaniment to those outings. These essays honor his work as well as the work of many land and seed stewards across the globe. They were also accessible to people who aren’t in farming as well and touched this beginning farmer in a way that sparked a sense of knowing and curiosity.

About Soil and Spirit:

As a farmer with decades spent working in fields, Scott Chaskey has been shaped by daily attention to the earth. A leader in the international Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, he has combined a longstanding commitment to food sovereignty and organic farming with a belief that humble attention to microbial life and diversity of species provides invaluable lessons for building healthy human communities.

Along the way, between “planning the rotations of fields, ordering seeds and supplies, and watching the weather,” Chaskey was “always writing, poetic stanzas or pages to piece together a book.” And in this lively collection of essays, he explores the evolution of his perspective–as a farmer and as a poet. Tracing the first stage in his development back to a homestead in Maine, on the ancestral lands of the Abenaki, he recalls learning to cultivate plants and nourish reciprocal relationships among species, even as he was reading Yeats and beginning to write poems. He describes cycling across Ireland, stopping to taste blackberries and linger in the heather before meeting Seamus Heaney, and farming in Cornwall’s ancient landscape of granite, bramble, and twisted trees. Later in life, he travels to China for an international conference on Community Supported Agriculture, reading ancient wilderness poetry along the way, and then on to the pueblo of Santa Clara in New Mexico, where he joins a group of Indigenous women harvesting amaranth seeds. Closer to home on the Southfork of Long Island, he describes planting redwood saplings and writing verse in the shade of an ancient beech tree.

“Enlivened by decades of work in open fields washed by the salt spray of the Atlantic”—words that describe his prose as well as his vision of connectedness—Scott Chaskey has given us a book for our time. A seed of hope and regeneration in a time of widespread despair.

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