Soil and Spirit
Cultivation and Kinship in the Web of Life
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Soil and Spirit
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Narrated by:
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Scott Chaskey
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By:
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Scott Chaskey
About this listen
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, even while planning rotations of fields, ordering seeds, tending to crops and their ecosystems, Chaskey was writing. 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, a surprise meeting with Seamus Heaney, and, later, farming in Cornwall’s ancient landscape of granite, bramble, and windswept trees. 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 under the canopy of an American beech.
“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.
©2023 Scott Chaskey (P)2025 Milkweed EditionsCritic Reviews
“How to classify this collection of interconnected essays by community-agriculture pioneer and poet Scott Chaskey? Science and nature? Memoir? Poetry? Rhapsodic exhortation? Soil and Spirit is all of those things. [. . .] Chaskey's ruminations and celebrations are reminiscent of, and often pay tribute to, poets and planters who have come before him [. . .] Like them, he emphasizes connections and kinship, noting, for instance, that recent studies of how plant life, especially trees, are linked by a vast network of mycelium model the benefits that humans could reap from closer connections with nature and with one another.”—Pamela Miller, Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Scott Chaskey’s elegant and spirited essay collection Soil and Spirit concerns the interconnectedness of elements and life forms. Studded with literary quotes, poetry, personal anecdotes, and scenes from a well-traveled life, these essays consider how flora and fauna, earth and sky, and rock and water are linked through different ecosystems and cultural traditions [. . .] Soil and Spirit is a sensuous and serious collection of nature writing, replete with passages about the layered wonders of the natural world. It is also unwavering in stressing the imperative of working to undo the environmental damage that imperils all human beings."—Foreword Reviews
“Scott Chaskey embraces a deep respect for the land, the plants and animals that depend on healthy soil, and the knowledge of indigenous peoples. In his travels across borders, he finds common ground by celebrating the farmers and peasants who work the soil around the world. Chaskey’s personal understanding of laboring the land is reflected in the book. In this collection of essays, he recognizes the challenges that we face and counters them with an abundance of knowledge. Many seek to repair the harm our species has caused. His message is filled with love and hope, backed by a lifetime of knowledge, and interspersed with a bit of poetry. Its rich layers rival the first forkful of silt loam in Spring or a relieving lungful of air in a forest. In just over 200 pages, this is one of the most inspirational books that I have ever read.”—Todd Miller, Arcadia Books, Spring Green, WI