Nikiko Masumoto:

You are welcome here. You who are multitasking. You who are powering through a hard day, a hard work, a hard year. You who are full of excitement and curiosity, and you who carry the unknown and unsure. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

That was Nikiko Masumoto delivering the opening poem at Rural Women Everywhere, a virtual gathering that was held in October of this year, where we celebrated the voices and contributions of rural women and their allies. I’m so pleased that Nikiko is today’s guest on Everywhere radio.  

Everywhere Radio is a production of the Rural Assembly, and I’m your host Whitney Kimball Coe.  Each episode I spotlight the good, scrappy, and joyful ways rural people and their allies are building a more inclusive nation. 

Nikiko Masumoto is an organic farmer, memory keeper, and artist. She is (Yun-sei) Yonsei, a fourth generation Japanese American, and works the same soil her great-grandparents worked in California where Masumoto Family Farm grows organic nectarines, apricots, peaches, and grapes for raisins. In an agricultural world where 86% of farmers are men, most landowners are white, and few are queer, she employs art and creativity to access her power as an organic farmer.  

She’s co-authored two books: a cookbook entitled The Perfect Peach and Changing Season. You can catch a slice of her performance work in a TEDx talk from 2015. She’s also the co-founder of Yonsei Memory Project which creates inter-generational spaces for ‘memory keeping’ within the Japanese American community and in alliance with other communities and movements for justice and healing. 

Her most cherished value is courage and most important practice is listening. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Nikiko, I’m so glad you’re here today. Thank you for saying yes to this conversation. 

Nikiko Masumoto: 

I am equally glad to be here. Thanks, Whitney. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

So you and I have known other for almost a decade now, which just blows my mind. I think we met in 2011 in Ashfield, Massachusetts, and I have a memory of you and I lying in the grass or on concrete in the dark, looking at the stars together. Do you remember that night? 

Nikiko Masumoto: 

I absolutely remember. Yes, I remember that moment in life and wondering what work and life and love was going to look like. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Oh yeah, we did. We talked about what was coming. What was our future going to be like? And we were surrounded by a really incredible cohort of colleagues who… I hadn’t met many any of them, but now we’re all good friends and have kept up over the last decade, and have now a cohort of rural arts and culture colleagues across the country. Do you still stay in touch with a lot of those folks? 

Nikiko Masumoto: 

Yes. Yes. And as you were bringing up that time period of a decade passing, it’s hard to believe from my perspective too. And at the same time, it’s also been really beautiful to watch people step into their power. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Give me some story about that. What have you seen in the last decade, and maybe how have you stepped in to your power? Do you feel like you have? 

Nikiko Masumoto: 

Well, it’s one of those things I feel like it’s harder to see in the mirror than it is. I mean, seriously, Whitney, I mean, watching you from afar and also feeling deeply connected. I mean, watching you run for office, watching you build networks and start events from scratch. Even the ones that I haven’t been able to be at, I’ve felt the ripples, and it’s just quite incredible to see the evolution from that moment of connection and spark and curiosity to you’re doing it. I mean, you’re changing people’s lives by opening these spaces. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Thank you. Reflecting it back to me, being my mirror, that’s really lovely. And reflecting back to you now, you as farmer, as artist, as a poet, as a performer, an activist, a community organizer, a writer, just a leader in many, many ways, you’ve been an influential leader in my life. And I wonder as you look back over this last decade of our knowing one another and all the things that have happened in our world, really, in the last decade, what are some of the lessons you’ve carried forward in these 10 years? And what are things that maybe you’ve just decided to leave by the wayside? 

Nikiko Masumoto: 

I love this question, the idea of what is it that we carry with us by choice and what can we release? In this particular moment in my life, it’s very interesting. I find my great-grandmothers to be larger and larger in my mind and heart, even though I never got to meet… I’m thinking particularly of two of my great-grandmothers, who were immigrants from Japan as teenagers. And they came to this unknown land, not speaking English. Came because life was hard back home in Japan and they didn’t see a future for themselves. 

And so as I get older, I wonder more and more and more about the textures of their lives, the little pieces. I know I have a couple pictures, I have a couple letters. I have a few artifacts from their lives, but the space in my heart that I feel like I get to walk with them is becoming bigger. And that’s interesting. That’s interesting, because I never met them. So carrying ancestors, how do we invite them in, even when we don’t know… You know, so many, especially rural histories, especially histories of immigrant communities, especially histories of women, especially histories of people of color, our stories and our families are underdocumented. We don’t have as many materials for many of us. Not all of us, of course, but in my case, that’s certainly the case for these great-grandmothers, Tsuwa Masumoto and Masa Sugimoto. 

So what do we do with the pieces? What do we do with the scraps? What do we do with the fragments? And I’ve chosen to follow the lead of my dad, who’s an artist also, and really embracing those scraps. Embracing those fragments and filling in the gaps with our imaginations. So that’s what I’ve been carrying forward. How about you, Whitney? Over a decade of work and life, what have you been keeping close? 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Wow. Well, some of the language you used really resonated with me about the textures of our lives. And I think back in 2011, I had just moved back to Athens, my hometown in east Tennessee, and I was wanting to put roots down again and rekindle relationships and make new relationships and come to understand my neighbors better. And I think that has been a journey and it will continue to be a journey of knowing my community and learning how to stay in a relationship with people over a long period of time, even as we don’t honor one another sometimes, even as we really disappoint one another. Particularly I’m thinking about the pandemic, and even in the year since Trayvon Martin and George Floyd and all of that, we’ve not really come to a full reckoning with all these things and it’s been difficult to stay in relationships sometimes. 

But I think a whole lot about also my grandmothers and how they put roots down and stayed in relationship for many decades in specific places. So what does it take? Those are some of the questions that I wake up in the morning with. How am I going to hold on to these relationships? So that’s some of what I’ve been thinking about. Thank you for asking me that. 

I’m also interested in what your days are like on this organic peach farm. You’re a fourth generation farmer, so your family’s been doing this for a very long time. What are your days made up of? 

Nikiko Masumoto: 

Yeah, this is one of the biggest parts of the practices of farming, is probably the best teacher of my spiritual health, my mental health, my health as a person trying to live in relationship, and relationships are difficult. 

So, living by the seasons is part of my job and work, so what I do changes based on what’s happening. So right now, for example, it’s fall, and so literally the trees and the vines… We also have grape vines… They’re taking in nutrients. They’re taking in nutrients from their leaves, getting ready to shed them. The colors of the leaves are starting to change. And so getting to live in relationship with that, I ask myself the question, like, what do I need to take in? What nutrients do I need? What nourishment do I need to prioritize to get ready for winter, to get ready for less sunlight, for colds? 

And as I get deeper into this life and this working relationship with the land, I am just even more enamored by the cycles and the seasons that we get to live in, and really unearthing some of our assumptions. Like I have now begun to crave darkness, because after the height of harvest, where we are just giving every ounce of energy that we can to harvesting the best tasting fruit, getting it to market, tending to all of the things, all of the logistics around that, my body is tired, and so that darkness becomes respite. 

Yeah, so right now we’re finishing up tying up the last of our harvest. We grow grapes for raisins, and so we have thousands of pounds of raisins. Even though we’re a small farm, but we still grow thousands of pounds of raisins, tons of raisins, and we’re just getting ready for the last step before we deliver them. And so I’m looking forward to some quiet, some quiet in winter. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

And how do you manage all of these hats that you wear out in the world? You’re not only following the cycles of the land and the harvest and the planting and all of that, you’re also writing, you’re also performing. Yeah, how do you hold all those things? 

Nikiko Masumoto: 

Probably clumsily. Yeah, yeah. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

[crosstalk 00:12:01] weaving them together too in a lot of beautiful ways, so maybe that’s part of it. 

Nikiko Masumoto: 

Absolutely, and a lot of the circles that I get to participate in that are more arts or creativity-centered, I find myself offering lots of questions using metaphors of the land and metaphors of plants and metaphors of seasons. So yeah, they’re definitely not disparate, separate practices for me. 

But on a work survival mode, it’s hard. It’s hard to juggle. It’s very hard. I find myself getting better and better at focusing in short spurts of time. And at the same time, I was just articulating to a friend the other day, I think one of the challenges of working across many different sectors, as many of us do it… I mean, I would argue, especially in rural communities, a lot of us hold a lot of different roles in relationship to people and institutions and organizations, and just work, just daily work. 

And so as I deepen skills, the counterbalance to that, I find some of my muscle atrophying a little bit, which is the connective tissue, like the ability to step back and see where things can fertilize each other. Or I identify and make space for tending to areas that there’s some tension or conflict, whether that’s literally between am I spending enough time doing bookkeeping for the farm versus some of my contract work that I get to be a little more creative. That’s maybe a little bit more fun for my soul, but the bookkeeping is part of the grease that keeps the gears going. 

So, yeah. If there’s one thing… To go back to your first question about letting go. As I get a older, I’m letting go of any illusion of perfection in life. I’m trying to instead steer toward wholeness, like what happens when we let go of perfection. Not excellence. I still think excellence is something, a driver for me, but if I let myself surrender to wholeness instead of perfection, I find that more soothing. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

One of the things that I admire so about you is your ability to be so self-aware and so intentional about how you see the world, how you practice your life in it, how you move through it. And I was reading something you wrote. I think it was an article that you wrote for Civil Eats, maybe, where you talked about your most cherished value being courage and your most important practice being listening, so courage and listening. And that tracks for me, as I know you. But I also wanted you to say maybe a little bit more about how you weave how courage and listening show up for you as a queer farmer in Del Rey, as a performance artist out in the world, as a contractor. Yeah, how are you using those? 

Nikiko Masumoto: 

Oh, Whitney, as you read that, that really brought up a lot of emotion. I’m not sure why, and I’m embracing it. I do, I think about courage and listening a lot. And the way that courage shows up I think has been one of the most surprising parts of being an adult. You know, we have wonderful fairy tales, folk tales, stories about heroes and what courage looks like in the face of daunting challenge. And I do love those stories. And at the same time I have found some of the most courageous moments, or the moments that I’ve been called to courage is probably a better way of saying it, have been some of the quieter moments, the moments of those long days when crisis happens, when that question comes, how am I going to get through this? 

And being able to return to breath in the body, in those moments, and sometimes quietly, sometimes alone, just breathing in and thinking, “I’m going to take that question seriously.” How am I going to get through this? I’m going to take it seriously, and I’m going to make up and use all the wisdom I have. And somehow I’m just going to make one decision right now, one decision, the smallest decision I can, to get me on the path of fixing things or addressing things or tending things. And so yeah, the courage part, I feel it every day. I think a lot of us do, especially in… It feels like in a multi-generational moment of facing the healing and the wounds that we have both inflicted upon each other and upon the earth. You know, we’re really at a moment of reckoning on so many levels. And sometimes courage is just that deep breath and just that one moment of choice to keep going, even when we don’t know… I don’t know that success is imminent. I don’t know. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

I love what you said about courage, taking it seriously. Taking it seriously, that’s an active stance to take in the face of something that’s difficult, as opposed to just letting it fly by or pushing it away. But taking it seriously, that really resonates with me. What about listening? 

Nikiko Masumoto: 

Yeah, listening. Oh, can we ever listen enough? No, no. Exactly. Yeah, just listening, listening, listening. Listening with a beginner’s mind, listening from multiple perspectives, revisiting pausing. Again, as I get older, I just think I’m such a beginner at listening, and I want to keep it that way because there’s so much room for misunderstanding, isn’t there? 

 Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Something you brought to us at Rural Women Everywhere recently, our virtual event, you opened the space for all of us and we were all listeners in a way, but it felt like through your words, through the opening poem you were offering us, you were also listening to our hearts. Like the words that you were offering up to us were in fact… They came from a place of deep listening that you’ve been doing for a long time, I know. So we’ll definitely want to play some of that for our audience today,  

Nikiko Masumoto: 

You are welcome here. You who are multitasking. You who are powering through a hard day, a hard work, a hard year. You who are full of excitement and curiosity, and you who carry the unknown and unsure. You who want to reach through the screen and hug somebody. You who almost forgot every click on the link. You are welcome. You who are familiar, friends, family, long time lovers of rural places and city cousins re-finding your roots. You are welcome back. 

You who come with dreams of dust and soil, of sweat, of reaching your palm to the sky to pick the ripest fruit of that first bite warmed by the sun of that nectar, from the song of the land, dancing on your tongue. You whose ancestors endured, whose ancestors survived, whose ancestors lands were stolen, whose ancestors were forced to work on stolen land. You who have lost your ancestors. You who invite your ancestors home every year. You who keep our kitchens full of our grandmother stories. You who bake pies and cookies and make preserves and keep seeds and ferment vegetables. And you who wash our dishes and clean up our shit. 

You who I love fiercely. You who I do not yet know how to love. You who think this poem is maybe just a little too intense. You and you and you, you are welcome here. You are welcome here. You are welcome here. We are welcome here. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

I wondered if you could talk just a little bit about how you prepared that radical welcome that you offered us at Rural Women Everywhere. What were you thinking about? 

Nikiko Masumoto: 

That poem emerged from a couple different places, and I want to name them with gratitude. This past year, I’ve been part of a circle of artists hosted through Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. And we’ve been convening virtually, we’ve had weekly meetings. And one of the questions that has come to the forefront in our conversations about this time as creative people and taking in the world and feeling our way through it, is the question of what makes you feel welcome? Just this simple question. What makes you feel welcome? So in that circle, that question has really resonated so deeply with me. 

And so the first iteration of this poem was, for this past summer on our farm, we host an Adopt a Tree program, where teams of people apply to adopt an heirloom peach or nectarine tree, and then they come and harvest it themselves. And this summer, at the end of the summer, in what feels like a emergence… We still have pandemic, we still need to tend to each other, we still need to be cautious, and at the same time it does feel like we have more information. We know a little bit better about how to care for each other. 

And so as I was preparing to welcome people back on the farm physically, it just felt like making space for the practice of welcoming, I felt like I needed that. And so that was the first iteration. And when you invited me to Rural Women Everywhere, I just thought, “Could I do this virtually?” Would this be a way of warming up the space of naming things, both naming things with warm, fuzzy feelings, but also naming things that are hard that we’ve been through, that some of us have been through and some of us haven’t, some of us understand as bearing witness to other people’s experiences, and some of us understand as having gone through it ourselves. 

And so that’s what I hoped to bring, that space of you are welcome as you are, and I see you in your specificity as well as our connection. And I really hope that people took away from that moment something special. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Well, yeah, it did feel like radical welcome, and I use the word radical in the sense of like the rootedness of a welcome. You put us there. It was really great. I also wanted to ask you a question that we asked a bunch of Rural Women Everywhere participants and speakers throughout the conference. We were really interested in how people have been just moving through life during a pandemic and during this time of emergence. And there’s a lot of hard things, but there are also a lot of good things to name. And we were wondering what sort of traditions women are keeping right now that either help tie them to a hope for the future, or tether them to their roots and the deep connection they have there? Yeah, or just medicinal in some way. And I wanted to ask you the question. What sort of traditions are you keeping right now? 

Nikiko Masumoto: 

I love this question. I love this. What a beautiful… I’m just imagining so many answers. For me personally, through especially these pandemic times, I’ve been called to recommit and dive into some of the food traditions, you know, the special food traditions that are passed down that sometimes we reserve for special occasions, which are amazing and beautiful. And I’ve been trying to cook some of the foods of my ancestors more on a daily basis, so not just the special occasions. So for me, that’s meant I’ve been eating more fermented foods, especially miso, a fermented soybean paste, and just making a lot of broths that my ancestors carried with them from Japan. And the slow cooking traditions, those have been really amazing. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Those have been nourishing. That’s wonderful. That’s wonderful. Well, I have just one more question for you today. And it’s one we also ask all of our guests on Everywhere Radio, and we get some really great answers and I’m sure you have one too, for what are you reading, watching, or taking in media-wise that is just good medicine for you right now? 

Nikiko Masumoto: 

Oh, so many, so many. I’ve been reading a lot. I am a polyamorous book reader, so I’m always reading many books at the same time. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Me too. 

Nikiko Masumoto: 

I will say one of the fun connections with people that has grown through the pandemic, someone who is a friend, Devoya Mayo, has become a deeper friend through the pandemic. And she’s a DJ, and I call her like a magician at sound, soundscape creation. And one of her practices every week, she’s been curating a podcast and a playlist. And so she’s been curating these playlists that you can follow, Sucka Free Sunday. She posts playlists on YouTube. And then on Spotify, she has a podcast, where she invites people to come up with a five song playlist. And so I’ve been really thinking about curation. And so much of the heart of her work is celebrating black genius in music and in life. And so I’ve been just very grateful to have her as a friend and as a leader for me to listen to. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Thank you so much, Nikiko Masumoto. I just love talking to you. We could go all day. It’s just wonderful to see you and speak to you. 

Nikiko Masumoto: 

Likewise, Whitney. I’m just so grateful for all the work day in and day out that you give to your family, to communities, and a community I feel really part of.