Our MAKA Grandmothers are out on the road having more MAKA Adventures. We’ll catch you up on those in a future podcast. So they asked one of our supporters, Wren Clement Eli, to fill in for this edition, with her evocative short story, The Farmer” which is a thoughtful deep dive into kindness.
Yes, this is Episode SIX.
We’re not nuts – Kurt had started production on Episode Five, but got this one done first. Episode Five is in Production and is another Deep Dive into Kindess with Nana Dee and Grami Dodi, which we included a preview for in this edition! So look for that to come your way … real. soon. now.
No matter how loud and scary it gets out there. Remember to Stay Kind. Remain Human. Your Children are Listening.
“The Farmer”Wren Clement Eli
I was reminiscing recently.
Something about late summer, the scents being carried on the soft evening breeze, and the intention to make a fresh fruit pie took me back to when I was a little girl, my father was in the Army, and our family lived on a US military post in Heidelberg, Germany. I used to accompany my dad when he went around to the farms near Heidelberg, to buy fresh fruits and vegetables from the local farmers.
Everything was beautiful then. Magic was in the air. The grass and leaves and corn and peaches were fragrant with vitality, and what the German speaking farmers and my father could not communicate with words, they somehow managed to convey with kindness, mutual respect and generosity. And a few free jars of honey or jam, thrown in for good measure.
I found myself longing for those simpler times and the real presence of my father (who passed in 2006) with a desire so keen it made my heart ache.
It’s my belief that simple, natural kindness is inherent to all of us, not just to German farmers or my father, on the outskirts of Heidelberg, in the early 1970’s. Kindness is the True Nature of all of us. Yet kindness seems to get covered over with defenses, or assumptions about how other people will act, think or behave, rather than the knowing that no matter who people appear to be, deep down inside, they are simply our other self, in the form of a neighbor.
And even though I say that kindness is inherent, despite its occasional obscuration, I must admit that I am the one, when kindness makes a sudden apparition in my life, that can find myself taken by surprise.
This happened to me right after my heartfelt longing to return to the past for a harvest time trip through Germany with my dad. I had left my current neighborhood in the present, in rural Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, and was on my way, in real time, to spend disproportionate prices for not so fresh produce at the grocery store twenty minutes down the highway. But a mile or two just around the bend, there suddenly appeared a German-looking gentleman with freshly picked, fragrant, sugar-cantaloups, giant heirloom tomatoes, and a variety bouquet of other fresh fruits, vegetables and flowers. He was selling them from a rustic farmer’s market wagon on the side of the road. A road not that far from my house.
What was going on here? It honestly felt for a moment as if I was seeing things, or perhaps truly back in my past. Had I wished the European-looking farmer and his wagon, filled with fresh produce, into existence?
It turned out this man set out quite regularly the abundance of his crops (at a dollar or two for what you’d pay ten for in the store) as a “kindness to neighbors”. He had a simple honor system of putting money in a cardboard box. And he considered me his neighbor, and was more than kind to me, even though I had been blind to his generosity and kindness for so long.
Suddenly, magic was in the air again, and it was as if I could sense the smells and deliciousness of Heaven, peeking through earth. I sensed that the Real Magic and Real Kindness of human nature never leaves us, and we never really loose anything, or anyone we love at all.
It seems I only had to take off my own illusions of separation or hardness of heart, and shed the assumption that kindness can die (in a country beset with discord and grief) to see and reap Kindness’s eternal bounty, and behold the eternal unfolding of its variety bouquet.
So my hope is that I, and everyone, will remember to intentionally focus on and live in the magical and universal plentitude of kindness, because kindness is the natural byproduct of unity, perhaps, even particularly - where that unity remains invisible to the naked eye.
Let us not just act kind, but let us be Kindness. That form of Kindness is, after all, a form of Love which is the real sustenance of human existence.
Guten Appetit
– Wren
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 12habits4allofus.substack.com
