A Night at the Farm.....

One evening last week I went to the Visalia Friends Meetinghouse for a planning meeting about Quaker Oaks Farm.

The farm and the Meetinghouse are inseparable in my mind, and their history together is a point of light on Tulare County’s sometimes dark map. In the mid-1970’s, the 25-acre farm was purchased by Bill and Beth Lovett, one of the three or four couples who founded the Visalia Friends Meeting. The Lovett family developed Quaker Oaks Christmas Tree Farm there, where families from all over Tulare County have come for 20 years to cut their own tree, drink cider, and see Quakers living on the land just a little lighter and more appreciatively than most of us.

In the mid-1980’s, the Meetinghouse was built on a 2-acre parcel carved from the farm’s southwest corner, which sits at the end of the frontage road running east from Farmersville on the north side of Highway 198. The Meetinghouse was designed and built with the same loving care as the farm and is surrounded by it, lending the same beauty and peace. The Meetinghouse has been used by non-Quakers for weddings and funerals, day-long business meetings and staff retreats, a get-away only 15 minutes from downtown Visalia. Those who visit the site are usually stunned speechless, then become part of the place in some tiny space in their hearts.

I’m still stunned even though I’ve been going there since 2005. Mostly I go in the daytime, where its beauty is visible no matter the weather, from winter’s dense fogs to summer’s thickest days. But that night I saw another kind of beauty: the intimacy of the dark.

There’s something about night on a farm. Partly it’s perceiving the animals’ preparations for it as darkness deepens. It’s sensing things go quiet and watching things disappear into the dark. It’s discovering the path through your feet rather than your eyes.

And it’s a wonderful loss of identity, or self-centeredness, a melting of boundaries as the reality of your common animalness sinks in. I never realize how much of my self I’ve lost to lights until the lights are out and I’m returned to a sense of wholeness by the dark.

And after the meeting, I found myself not wanting to leave, wishing I could just stay the night and wake up there with the land and the birds and the gray fox we call "George" in honor of George Fox, the founder of the Religious Society of Friends. Most of the plans for the farm involve bringing groups of people in for various educational purposes. No one can argue the benefit of that - except perhaps the land and the birds and George.

Maybe a night at the farm could be part of its future, now that its Christmas Tree days are over. I’ll add it to the discussion. For now, anyway, we’ll keep the lights off for you.