Commons and the myth of burnout
In which Magda reframes 'burning out' and extols the virtues of community and commons

Read the full article on Substack.

~Transcript Below~
Hi, welcome back to Scrap Kitchen.

This is my third episode so far. I think I'm going to call this one Commons and the myth of burnout.

Previously I have had some things to say about burnout. I have previously written about avoiding it, but I had an interesting reframing recently. Please note I don’t want to be all clickbait-y but more share what was presented to me. I'm going to hopefully rationalize it.

Housekeeping: my interview with Iona from the Cherry Log is now out!

So I just came back from a conference; OEFFA, the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association conference. I'm currently in Michigan, but they're very kind and they let people from different states come. The whole conference was really interesting. It reinvigorated the already-building excitement in me to start farming this season. And I got to see a lot of really fascinating people talk, especially about things that are very close to home. I love going to these kinds of conferences and making friends with people. Got some very interesting takeaways.

Asking for help


One of the people who spoke was Sophia Buggs, of Lady Buggs Pharm, who gave an absolutely heart-wrenching speech about asking for help. Specifically with long Covid and the complexities of her as a woman who is Black, saying that she could not breathe. Because of long Covid, but also because of the compounding stresses that she was under (working in farming and going to DC). Eventually, she had to ask for help and while she received it, the speech was more about learning to ask for help.
This struck me, as someone who had Covid and then took a very, very long time to recover. I spoke to a friend a few months back and she asked if I still needed a full day in bed every week. And I was like, what? Then I remembered that actually when we met (in Colorado on a farm), I did actually need one full day in bed [per week] for months. For the whole time I was there. At the time I was still suffering from long-Covid and nursing myself back to health slowly. That conversation was a really interesting reminder of not how far I'd personally come. But also what destabilizing events I was just absolutely (actively) forgetting from my own history. How hard it can be to ask for help in times like that.

‘Burnout’


I also listened to Jim Embry, who recently won a James Beard award recently (along with seed keepers Ira Wallis and Rowan White). He’s a seed guy. He's also a slow-food movement guy. He had some amazing things to say, that boil down to how we treat the world the same way we treat women. So we need to treat the world and women better. We need to return to ancestral knowledge and the knowledge keepers within indigenous communities. And it's people of colour and women and queers and indigenous people who will be leading the climate recovery.
In his second talk at the conference, he was asked how he does it all. He is a speaker, travels around, works a farm etc. His response stuck out to me. His answer was this; that we have in some way been conditioned to think that if we get too politically involved or we get too invested within our communities, we will #burnout. That the weight of it all will just crush us and that we'll not be able to do anything anymore. And while that is a possibility, if we take on too much and bite off more than we can chew, we could absolutely get crushed by the weight of our own ambitions.
His point was this:If you are building community if you're building a web of reliance and mutual support, mutual aid, mutual encouragement and shouldering the burden for someone else, they also shoulder the burden for you.
We create an interwoven mycelial network of support. And so by doing the scary thing and getting involved in our local political scene, getting involved in our local communities, doing acts of resistance (that are at times technically illegal or at times just like scary because we haven't done them before), or relearning things, that it seems a little intimidating. By doing that, you stabilize yourself within a community. Within a space. You give the community a chance to help you. In turn you get to serve your community.
His response makes me think of a book that I read recently; Who is Wellness for? by Fariha Roisin. I heard about the book because I was listening to Nikki Franco's Venus Roots podcast where she interviews the author. Roisin was saying (it was actually a very Capricorn sentiment of hers), isn't it so sexy, so exciting to be beholden to other people? To have a responsibility to other people. We could go around and be little islands, but it's so exciting that we are interconnected because it means that you are accountable to people, they're accountable to you, and you get to work together. So here is my jumble of all those interconnected little things.

This week on the farm (that we're managing)

We're doing a lot of little things to get ready for next year. I am going to be doing a germination test on some corn that my boss saved a couple of years ago. Glass Gem corn and Dakota Black. This season I want to grow these out in the three sisters, which is corn, beans and squash, and it's an indigenous technique native to America. Well, to Turtle Island. But I need to check that the corn will grow.
To do this she's given me some pots of corn. I am (quick and dirty) going to put them in a little Tupperware with a piece of wet paper, and I'm going to put out a ten by ten square of each corn type and then see how many germinate. That will give me a germination percentage, which is actually something you have to do by law if you're going to be selling seeds. But I'm not going to get into the technicalities of that. But I'm doing germination tests this week.
We're also seeding onions, building, and continuing to build our new soil table, which I talked about last week. We're going to a meetup for veg growers in the area. We're going to some training on how to make sure that your veg is kept clean post-harvest. Just to make sure that we're up to date on all of the laws or the guidelines.

Long Term Updates
There are no true updates. But I am really, really hopeful, which is an update.
When we were at the conference in Ohio, there were four or five different offers from people who were saying, I have two acres, I have a greenhouse, I just need to find some young people who want to farm it. Which made me so excited (if I was going to live in Ohio). But still, the idea that there are probably farmers like that in the UK who just don't know where to look. As long as we keep putting our word out there, we might be able to connect with them. And even if we connect with them, and it's not the right person, as long as we keep growing our networks, we can connect the right people to the right farmers.
If anyone listening to this has any farmer connections who happen to have two acres (and a greenhouse), please get in touch lol. But otherwise, very hopeful, very excited.
It snowed in Ohio while we were there. Lots of the people at the conference had made points about not getting snow anymore, and then it snowed. It's still not to the same extent that it was pre-climate chaos, but it was beautiful to see, so I got to see a little bit of winter that I thought I was going to miss.


I'll keep you updated.
Thanks for listening.
Bye.
M

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