🪱 Brisket + Badass Worms

The good soil of our lives with Jeff Chu

Very Brief Housekeeping Note: Tonight is the last pre-order bonus if you pre-ordered I’ve Got Questions - the live q+a! You should have received an email yesterday with links and passwords oh my, but if you didn’t, please email me at hello@erinhmoon.com and we will get you sorted! Okay, on to the show!

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Editor’s Note (so many notes!): A couple of weekends ago, I attempted to return home from Charlotte, NC, after a book tour event. My flight kept getting pushed back (and pushed back and pushed back): what was originally a 2pm departure stretched to an 8pm departure, as air travel is wont to do.

Luckily, I had an advanced reader copy of Good Soil by

Jeff Chu 朱天慧

in my bag, so I settled into a ridiculous plastic chair and started reading. Four hours later, I was blubbering into an Einstein Brothers bagel as I turned the last page.

Something I’m having a hard time with right now is the idea that, alongside the omnishambles happening what feels like every day, there is still love and belonging, sometimes coming out of said omnishambles. What we need is someone well-versed in helping nourishment and beauty grow out of (literal) shit. So that’s why I want to share about Jeff’s book with you today.

You’re welcome for not sharing a picture of worms with you.

I don’t share these types of things with you unless I think you’ll resonate with them, they’ll encourage you, or they mean something to me¹. But obviously, everything is not for everyone, and the people I think will most resonate with Good Soil are:

• Enneagram 1s/3s/4s/5s/9s

• Failed gardeners (🙋🏻‍♀️) as well as prolific ones

• The Fun Fact Crowd™️ (also 🙋🏻‍♀️)

• Introverts

• People who can have long conversations about food (again 🙋🏻‍♀️)

• Dog people

• Anyone at the intersection of seminary and farming

• The Metaphor People™️ (hello again 🙋🏻‍♀️)

Below is an excerpt from Good Soil, as well as an interview I did with Jeff via email. There’s also (equally important) a walk-thru of Jeff’s brisket fried rice at the end, so if nothing else…

I realize you might want to brush this email off as another marketing ploy to get you to buy yet another book, but could I entice you with a quote from our interview to pique your interest?

I can't avoid that "love one another" and "love your enemies" are commands in the present tense, not in the future. It would have been much easier if Jesus had said, "Love one another later, when we're all remade and better," or "Love your enemies as they will be someday." Annoyingly, I don't think he did.

If any of this clicks with how you’re feeling these days, I’d love for you to share in the comments. I’ll pick one commenter at random and send them a copy of Good Soil²!

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Orchid
excerpt from Good Soil by Jeff Chu ©️ Convergent Books

The magazine where I worked occupied half of the twenty-ninth floor of a Manhattan skyscraper. There was nothing organic about the space. It was all sleek steel and polished glass, shouting of progress, technology, and human ingenuity.

My husband used to send me flowers from time to time: elegant lilies, cheery sunflowers, delicate tea roses.

Tristan knew never to send anything with carnations, which reminded me of cheap grocery store bouquets and perfunctory Mother’s Day church giveaways. He also learned not to order predominantly white arrangements; among my people, white flowers show up at funerals.

Occasionally the arrangement included something more unusual. Ranunculus, each orange bloom like a miniature labyrinth. Long stems of delphinium, which I loved because pale blue flowers aren’t common; also, they’re named for dolphins, and who doesn’t like dolphins? If I was especially lucky, lisianthus, whose slightly ruffled petals were showy, but never to the point of garish.

I loved the gentleness the flowers brought to my office. When anxiety flooded in, when one of my stories came back rewritten (read: mangled), when yet another idea was rejected by the higher-ups, I could pause, take in the bouquet’s beauty, and summon a deep breath.

One day, a courier brought a potted orchid. It was a phalaenopsis, the kind that costs maybe fifteen dollars at Walmart but multiple times that if you get some Midtown Manhattan florist to wrap it in cellophane and send it downtown. This one had purple speckles on white petals. Its wide, droopy, deep green leaves shone with health.

I took very good care of that orchid. I watered it, but never too much. My mother had kept orchids when I was a child— dendrobiums and cattleyas and oncidiums—and I could hear her voice in my head, warning me against overwatering: “The roots will rot!”

My goodness, this orchid flourished. Even though there was little natural light in the office, this plant burst with life and color—a beacon of serenity amid the mess of papers scattered across my desk. It had arrived in full and vigorous bloom, branches heavy with flowers, and it just kept on blooming. I felt like a good son who had absorbed his parent’s wisdom about caring for another living thing. I imagined myself a faithful partner, nurturing this apt and enduring symbol of Tristan’s and my love.

A couple of months later, I was sitting at my desk and— I don’t even know why—I reached out to touch a blossom. So purple. So pretty!

As soon as my fingers brushed a petal, they drew back in horror and my whole body felt hot. I wanted the thing to die. Except it couldn’t.

The orchid was fake.

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Erin: At the beginning of the book, you lay out this beautiful meditation about your grandmother and her fried rice and the idea of returning to things you once knew as blessings instead of curses. And then later in your chapter, scars, you talk about the work of Reverend Richard Joyner, who has returned to farming some of the same land his ancestors worked as enslaved people and sharecroppers. I was struck by the pattern here of how we sometimes reject or neglect the things we grow up with because we grow up with them, but these can often be redeemed and/or good on their own. We often come back around to what made us, seeing it from a different perspective. How do you see this playing out on a spiritual level? Are there things we can easily reject because they were part of a painful story for us, but in truth, they are ripe for redemption? How do we inspect those stories for root or rot?

Jeff: The first thing that comes to mind for me is the Bible. Even before I came out, I had pretty much stopped reading the Bible, and for years, I didn't go to church regularly either. It hurt too much. I identified Scripture with pain and suffering. I can't tell anyone else how they should approach the things that have been sources of hurt for them. For me, though, I came to a point where I realized that I was giving way too much power and authority over my life to those forces—people, hermeneutics, theologies—that I claimed I didn't believe in anymore. So I tiptoed back into the pages that I'd grown up with, and slowly, I tried to encounter the stories with new eyes and from different perspectives. I learned to love the Bible again, and to contextualize it differently, and to receive it as a gift that belonged no less to me than to those who had used it to shame me.

There was a point when I realized that my hurt and my anger were the driving forces in how I was seeing not just the Bible but also the Church, and religion, and family, and the religious communities that I'd been a part of. I'd go so far as to say that I wanted those who had hurt me, even inadvertently, to know how it felt to hurt like that. But vengefulness is not a great place to live. It's corrosive, and it ended up hurting me more than it hurt anyone else. Anyway, I had to acknowledge that what I really wanted, deep down, wasn't revenge; it was love. I wanted to know that I could be loved, and I wanted to know that I am loved. Slowly, as I began to learn that love might have been all around me all along, it opened the door not just to redemption but also to reimagination.

Erin: It is my personal belief (developed over the past weekend when I read this book) that the chapter worms should be required reading for literally every person who claims Reformed theology. In it, you write about how, contrary to Calvin's worm theology metaphor, worms are badass, and they have a lot to offer. Are there any other "Biblical standbys" that got turned upside down for you while learning about farming?

Jeff: The worms are a great example of the kind of reimagination I'm talking about. To view the worm through the lens of love is to ask, Wait, what was it actually made to do? What does it mean for the worm to live its best life? And yes, it turns out, worms are badass. They have a superpower: They're capable of helping to transform what we would deem trash (rotten vegetables, say) and turn it into something that can foster new life—good soil.

Another major upending for me was the concept of Sabbath. I took a class called Soil & Sabbath. I had always believed that rest was something we earned; six days of work, and then you get your one paid vacation day, right? One day, Nate, our professor, made us review the creation story, and then he asked us what humanity had done to earn their sabbath. And the answer, of course, is that they hadn't done anything at all. Humanity's first full day of existence, according to the biblical creation narrative, was a day of rest—just pure and total grace. The goodness of the Sabbath, which is to say rest and ease, is our beginning, not our end. How radical is that?

I spoke at a church conference recently, and I dared the folks in the room to design a ministry job in which a person would be hired and then instantly be given, say, a month of free time. Wouldn't that be more in keeping with the biblical record? Anyway, I will say, I'm still pretty bad at rest, but it did change my perspective on it.

Erin: One of the last lines of your book is, "We love what passes away, right?" That's been ringing around in my brain as we contend with the *gestures wildly* state of the world currently. I see a lot of "I've read the end of the Bible, I know we win" kind of rhetoric, and I feel a tension between those two statements, even though I think they may originate from the same hopeful place. Can you talk about what it means to care about loving people and places and ideas that pass away, even if we know (or hope or maybe we don't!) that the story will end up alright?

Jeff: Death and loss are a part of life, even if we believe there's redemption at the end of the story. To love in the midst of an unfinished story is to pay attention, to be curious, to grieve well. No eschatological bias should give us a free pass to be assholes in the here and now. Even if you believe, for instance, that there will be a new creation, does that mean you should trash and exploit the old one? No. That's not only bad stewardship of what we've been given but also bad theology. It treats God as if God were one cosmic "get out of jail free" card.

Another way to think of loving what passes away: I grew up attending very conservative churches (Chinese Baptist as well as PCA), and in college, my Bible study was the most conservative one on a very secular campus. I no longer subscribe to much of how my childhood pastors of my childhood or the chaplains of my college years taught Scripture. I also acknowledge that who I am has been significantly shaped by them and by the communities they led. To love what passes away in that context means to acknowledge not just the bad, not just the pain, not just the harm, but also the good, also the ways in which they did show up for me, also the care and humanity I found there. Love is honest.

One final thought: I can't avoid that "love one another" and "love your enemies" are commands in the present tense, not in the future. It would have been much easier if Jesus had said, "Love one another later, when we're all remade and better," or "Love your enemies as they will be someday." Annoyingly, I don't think he did.

Erin: There are so many good nature facts in this book, my inner nerd was crowing. Prince Max the frog namer, the little bit about the Cornish Cross chickens, all the great info about compost and flowers and growth. What's one nugget or tidbit that got edited out for length or a darling that had to be killed you wish was in the book? What would have made it into the director's cut of Good Soil?

Jeff: One day, I posted something on Instagram about digging in the dirt, and a woman whose dad had been a soil scientist lit into me, telling me that I was digging in soil, not dirt, because dirt is lifeless, whereas soil is alive. I had no idea! That led to some research, which didn't make it into the book, about dirt vs. soil as well as how "soiled" is common phrasing for something, well, dirty. Why is it that the word "soil," in its verb form, is equated with filth?

I also wrote a meditation on my favorite tree on the farm, a bald cypress that, in the autumn, turned Texas Longhorns orange. (My husband and nearly all of his family are UT Austin alumni.) I didn't know at first that it was a bald cypress, but there's an app for everything now, including tree identification. So I'd wander around the farm learning what was what. When I told Nate, the farm director, he told me that I was wrong, that he'd been told it was a Chinese species called the dawn redwood, and wasn't that amazing, because the dawn redwood had nearly gone extinct? I was pretty sure it was a bald cypress, though, which is a much more common American tree—and it struck me that we so often want the rare and allegedly extraordinary, like the dawn redwood, such that we don't recognize the beauty and the glory of the "ordinary" that we actually have.

Erin: And finally, I'm from Texas so brisket is obviously a very important part of my culture, and the way I discovered you on the internet was many years ago, someone reposted your brisket fried rice recipe. But I need to know how you prepare your brisket, so I can get the full experience, this has been haunting me and I am using my one wild and precious shot for selfish purposes. Do you smoke it, are you a slow cooker, what's the strategy here?

Jeff: You give me way too much credit: I absolutely do not smoke my own brisket! My husband and I have gotten pretty good at freezing brisket; we make sure to bring a half or whole brisket back from Texas almost every time we're there. It has to be unsliced, or else it will dry out. (You didn't ask, but I'm telling you anyway: Among our favorites are Micklethwait in Austin; the Pit Room and Truth in Houston; Cattleack in Dallas; and Helberg in Waco. Franklin in Austin is outstanding, but I'll only do it if I preorder because I cannot wait in those absurd lines.³) The key to not ruining someone else's gorgeous brisket is pretty much along the lines of how they smoked it in the first place, which is to say low and slow. I wrap it well in foil and pop it in the oven—250 degrees or so, but absolutely no more than 300. Then we have a little brisket festival: sandwiches one day, maybe breakfast tacos the next, and finally, brisket fried rice.

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Don’t forget: leave a comment about something here that resonated and I’ll pick one person to receive a copy of Good Soil. Big thanks to

Jeff Chu 朱天慧

for letting The Swipe Up share about Good Soil today!

1. I also, just for the record, don’t get paid for this by Jeff’s publisher. Just me sharing stuff I like, homies! ✌️

2. US residents only, strictly for budgeting purposes.

3. Jeff is correct about all of these places, but he hasn’t been to the Panhandle, and now I need to send him a brisket from Tyler’s, which he can expect sometime in the future. Just a giant cow breast on his doorstep one day.