Do you recall those times in your life when you never thought you would find home?
We grow from family roots—maybe it’s a deep taproot, a creeping rhizome or a shallow one that breaks off to tumble in the wind. Yet rootedness does not come naturally for people. Instead, we have legs, cars and suitcases. We can roam freely and transplant ourselves. Unlike plants, when things go wrong we move on to another place.
I remember times in my own life when I planted, uprooted and transplanted myself, again and again, never believing I would find a home. I sowed seeds in some places, and many bore no fruit. This journey ultimately led me to a Rimrock farmstead that I feel is home—a place to mingle with deep roots of trees and a long history of ancestral people tending this land.
The desire to share what I am learning about living, growing and farming in this place led me to become a host through Willing Workers on Organic Farms. WWOOF pairs farms with individuals for short-term work help in exchange for room, board and experience. Last month, we hosted our first WWOOFer, Steve, a 26-year-old young man from Buffalo, NY. Steve has volunteered in Buddhist Dharma centers and on farms for the last three years, crossing the country multiple times in a van with a partner, and solo in an SUV, looking for adventure and the life he is destined to lead. He tried various scenarios: CBD production, tropical food forests and Hari Krishna homesteads, in ten different states. He arrived at Wild Heart Farm road-weary and in the midst of a twenty-something dark night of the soul, searching in earnest for a place to settle in, send down roots and grow.
Steve spent a good deal of his time helping me with the backlog of mundane tasks like washing pots and spreading mulch. On the eve of Valentine’s Day, we set up a booth at the Sedona Farmer’s Market with dried flowers and a typewriter station for spur-of-the-moment poems. It is part of my brand that gardens grow flowers, endless metaphors and poetry. Steve had never used a typewriter. I gave him a quick tutorial and he began composing poems on the spot.
Not long into the market, Kevin Devaney, a typewriter street poet, dropped in as if drawn by the tapping of typewriter keys or by cosmic forces (it is Sedona after all). I immediately recognized him as the street poet who wrote me a poem about a pivotal experience as an apprentice at the UC Santa Cruz Farm just as our season was coming to an end. I read it to our cohort at graduation, a song to our moment together, a balm to soothe the parting.
“What poor plants people make
all up rooting and unbound
chasing their wanderlust stars!”
I cried these lines out to Kevin as we embraced in front of my market stand. He promptly joined our booth with not one, but two typewriters, and suddenly three people were composing poetry on the spot. He added his Valentine’s Day swag to the mix including tiny matchboxes filled with accordion-folded poems on the subject of love, and even some dirty poem collections. It seems poignant to me that Kevin would return to my farm orbit during this chapter. He illuminates the possibilities for composing your life, from street corner to festival backstage, one day and one poem at a time. His joy and talent for spur-of-the-moment compositions have also been woven into his day-to-day life. He follows his instinct—an inspiration—one word typed on paper leads to the next. Imagery and metaphors are bread crumbs on the path to the next place.
When I met Kevin in October 2015, he was only just beginning to write poems on the street as a full-time gig. Not long after that, he took to the road; first living in a van with a partner, then scaling back to a Prius minus a partner, and always lugging around a few typewriters. At his street desk, Kevin operates a mobile publishing house with carbon copies of the poems from various towns, which he then binds into palm-sized collections with bobby pins. Poems, he marvels, bought him land outside of Moab, within a commune of creatives and carnies who come and go. In this way, he continues to build a life bound by convergent creation.
Kevin came for dinner at the farm before leaving Sedona, on his way to learn as much as he can from an elderly typewriter repairman in Phoenix who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness.
Our time together, although transitory in nature, can have a tremendous impact on one another.
Meeting Kevin at a furtive time during my search for a home, and experiencing his impromptu poem, further connected my love of farms, flowers and poetry.
Our WWOOFer Steve has settled in Salt Lake City with his box of seeds and all the miles and farms and meditation halls behind him. I have no doubt a typewriter is in his future.
I opened to a page in one of the poetry chapbooks Kevin left with me and found this poem: “Finding Home,” a word map for the journey.
