The woman who pledged zero

Back in my early 20's I heard a story, it sounded like a fairy tale back then. About a farm with three farmers longing to grow food for their neighbors in a place where that had become impossible due to rising land prices. And so, they approached a group of interested neighbors with a plan. Or at least a proposal or a plea. For the possibility of local food again in that place. And this included a budget for what it would cost them to undertake growing a year's worth of vegetables for 30 households. Vegetables as well as milk and meat. And they sat the interested folks in a circle. And they asked if they could go around the circle so people could pledge different amounts until the budget was covered. It took a couple of rounds but they did it. They're actually still at it 40 years later. And so ... I carried that story around through my 20's and 30's as a seed, and then once I stopped farming for business that seed began to germinate, and I figured it was time to go and talk to the those original farmers. Older men. One no longer alive, two still alive. They responded to my email and invited me down to the farm. And one of them told me that a few years into the project a family, a woman came to him, to Anthony. She said: "My husband and I loved being a part of this farm and community. But we're going to have to drop out since we've both lost our jobs." He said: "I think you could do us and the membership as a whole a real service if you came to the meeting and pledged zero." By golly she had the courage to do just that. And then, the farmer told me, what happened next ... there wasn't a dry eye in the room. There was a group of middle-class folks weeping in a way that would've been downright embarrassing in public. So what happened there? Why were they weeping? We could tell a story that they were weeping out of pity. That they pitied the poor woman and her family. But that might be a little bit too easy of a story to tell. That maybe instead in that moment they had a felt sense of themselves as people who had the capacity to carry their neighbours. Which also means that they might live among people who had the capacity to carry them on the day that they needed to pledge zero.