At Canticle Farm, Food and Community Are Prayer for a Better World

On a recent Friday afternoon on a residential street in East Oakland, an unassuming front yard hosted several boxes of root vegetables, leafy greens, milk, canned tomatoes, and fresh bread. Neighbors trickled in and out, filling their bags with the free groceries. 

Cole Rainey and Willow Holiday sat in the shade on a wooden bench, greeting people as they came through. 

Hola, buenas. 

Buenos días. Bienvenidos.

The yard belongs to Canticle Farm, which, according to its website, is “an urban garden, educational center and community of intention.” 

Rainey and Holiday recently restarted the weekly food distribution — every Friday at noon — after a long hiatus. The food is sourced from Sage Steward Farm in Pescadero (where Rainey works), the Berkeley Food Network, and Canticle’s own gardens. 

From the street, the house at 1972 36th Ave. looks like an average single-family home with a green-thumbed resident. But a small wooden gate next to the front house opens up to something much less commonplace. 

Several main houses are joined by tiny homes, a yurt, a cabin used exclusively for restorative justice work, gardens, a fire pit, a communal kitchen, and a creek that was recently restored to its natural flow. Rainey and Holiday described the food distro as one small piece of Canticle Farm.

“A big part of what this community is about is taking down walls, taking down the barriers between our atomized lives,” says Rainey, who has been connected with Canticle Farm for around a decade. “The space is intergenerational, interracial, and interfaith,” and is home to about 50 people, Holiday adds.

One of the homes is for men who were paroled from life sentences. Another is for asylum seekers who may stay for days or years. These residents are not charged rent.

“Everything here operates on the gift economy,” says Rainey. That includes a lot of shared produce, meals, and cooking.

Ejna Fleury, an enrolled member of Crow Creek Sioux Tribe of the Oceti Sakowin, describes herself as the eldest resident of Canticle Farm — she’ll be 80 this year. She is the founder of Divine Mother’s Love, and serves in the Founding Mothers Movement.

She holds a vision of food sovereignty where every Oakland resident grows food in their backyard, the boulevards all have fruit trees, and the city coordinates with surrounding farms to be resilient in the case of supply chain disruptions. 

“How much fun it would be for communities to garden together. Like this block does all the potatoes, and that block does corn, and that block, they have a lot of citrus,” she says, adding that there could be neighborhood parties for planting, tending, and harvesting. 

“We better get food sovereignty down pretty good because food shortages are coming,” Fleury says. “We’re in the midst of collapse.” 

Fleury says food is a thread that runs through Canticle simply through the act of living together and sharing meals, and that there are several exceptionally talented chefs among the residents.

One of them is Jacob Sandoval, who has lived at Canticle for about two years. “Feeling the energy of the food from the land is such a lovely feeling,” he says, adding that a good meal can be “healing and bring people together.”

“Everyone from a few months old to 80 years old is living here in relationship,” Holiday says. “It really feels like a prayer for villaging and revillaging.” In other words, a return to the way people are meant to live — in connection with each other and in connection with the land.

To get involved with Canticle, everyone is welcome to attend Sunday morning liturgies from 9 to 10 a.m. There are also regular garden work days, which are sent to an email list for Bay Area residents.

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