Book details

A Time to Plant: Life Lessons in work, Prayer, and Dirt

9781933495262

01/12/2010

Kyle Kramer's A Time to Plant is the honest and uplifting story of his attempt to come to know God, himself, and the joys of real community through heeding the call of modern-day prophets like Wendell Berry and becoming an organic farmer.

In the spring of 2000, Kramer, an earnest and ambitious teacher at a private school in Atlanta, decided to forego a promising academic career in order to start a small farm. Buying some hardscrabble land in southern Indiana and tending it back to health, he founded Genesis Organic Farm and began to live the dream of growing organic, in-season produce for his community and crafting a self-sustaining and environmentally friendly home. However, he soon faced the tough realities of loneliness, his beginner (and outsider) status, his own mixed motives, and the need for off-farm income.

Taking a job, Kramer became a teacher at St Meinrad's, a Benedictine college and abbey, a move that proved fortuitous for his farm and his spiritual life. Kramer's account of the joys and struggles of building a home and family; coming to know a community; and cultivating a relationship with God is a meditation on hope, for a life well-lived, for fellowship and belonging, and for emotional and spiritual maturity. It is a story about having the courage to both pursue one's ideals and to re-assess those ideals when some of them are shown to be phantasms of ego. It is a deeply human story, one from which readers will draw inspiration, joy and hope.