TNP171 Crystie Kisler Is Connecting Land And Food

It’s wonderful to have a genuine friend named Crystie Kisler with me on the podcast today. Crystie Kisler is the co-founder of Finnriver Farm & Cidery, (@finnriver) and is a mother, farm wife, and community networker in the Chimacum Valley, on an organic farm located along a salmon stream on the north Olympic Peninsula of Washington. Her partner, Keith, is farming heritage wheat at @finnrivergrain

I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing Crystie’s warmth and generosity in circles together, workshops together, and could feel it in the atmosphere when I visited Finnriver on a trip for my son’s 16th birthday. If I had a farm-based business, I would use Finnriver as the model and template.

 

Where Crystie and I could spend probably forever talking and visioning and activating dreams together is where land-based spiritual connection and social justice meet, where business ownership and equity and advocacy intersect, where dismantling supremacy culture meets building a worthwhile and beautiful and delicious future.

 

This is a conversation between two white ladies grappling with what it means to connect to land you don’t come from, and how we might try to learn how to belong there.

Here is the poem that Crystie wrote and read to us:

 

Belonging (draft)

 

What will it take

to belong here truly

 

To a land I was not

born to, nor my parents

or theirs or theirs?

 

Once I have learned

the timing of the swans’

swooping return?

 

The names of the many 

feathered ferns?

 

Once I am on familiar terms

with all the wild berries?

 

Been covered head to heel

by nettle stings 

and blackberry briars?

 

Immersed myself 

in the sea 

wrapped in kelp?

 

What if I smeared 

Semiahmoo Muck

all over my body? 

 

What if I packed it 

in my mouth?

 

What if I ate only

from this ground?

Drank only rainwater 

and creekrun 

from these clouds?

 

What if my feet never left 

this land again?

 

If the birds knew me by scent 

and did not scatter 

when I went by?

 

If all my neighbors waved?

If I knew the names of all

the bones and stones

I found on the beach?

 

Is there any way

to belong here? 

In this place. 

This time and space?

 

Will I always feel

Extraterrestrial? Invader?

 

What would cedar say

about me?

 

Could I become familiar to here?

Make family? Grow roots?

On a farm? 

Can I untangle from harm?

 

Could I learn the real word 

for home?

 

Could I assemble myself 

whole among the mycelium?

 

Could I find my way 

by the feel of it 

under and through me?

 

Is it morbid to say

I feel like I will only

fully belong

when I am buried here?

 

When I have given

All of myself

back?                 

 

~Crystie Kisler, 8/2