Willa Cather gets why millennials are searching to re-root themselves in community and on the land.

I realized this as I was reading her novel O Pioneers! for a class this semester, and came across an exchange between the main character, Alexandra, and the man who understands her best, Carl.

Carl unexpectedly returned from the city, where he had moved from rural Nebraska to become an artist. As he looked at the farm Alexandra had cultivated, he shook his head in wonder.

“I’ve been away engraving other men’s pictures, and you’ve stayed home and made your own.”

Alexandra waves away his praise:

“The land did it. It had its little joke. It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to work it right, and then, all at once, it worked itself.”

She laments to him,

“I would rather have your freedom than my land.”

Alexandra sees the culture Carl has experienced, far from the rural farmland, and she longs for the opportunities he had.

Carl verbally shakes his head:

“Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities, there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike, we have no ties...”

Carl’s insight provides a window into the downside of independence, to living a life disconnected from responsibility to a community and the land. Millennials (the generation born between 1980 and 1996) know the least about a lifestyle like Alexandra’s, have grown up in a culture with increasing social isolation and separation from the land.

But it seems millennials are sensing that they’ve missed something, in buying mass-produced vegetables in grocery stores and living in the digital community online.

Molly Shaw writes in the US Business Executive,

“A generation that’s grown up in the midst of the digital age is turning back to the basics and the land for a lesson in a sustainable life. The 20- and 30-something demographic has turned states across the nation, particularly in the Northeast, into hot beds of activity for small farming.”

Just like Alexandra, these small farmers are finding ways to innovate to make their ventures profitable. For Alexandra, that meant planting alfalfa and turning her hogs to root in her harvested fields; for today’s farmers, it means using fewer chemicals and positioning their products to appeal to consumers who want locally-sourced, clean food.

As millennials move toward the land, finding ways to live a more ecologically friendly lifestyle, some are finding the satisfaction Cather describes Alexandra finding in the land. While she chose to take on the farm at her father’s request, she finds herself falling in love with the land, and realizing it drew her creativity out of her.

Cather comments of her farm,

“You feel that, properly, Alexandra’s house is the big out-of-doors, and that it is in the soil that she expresses herself best."

Laura Sackton, a millennial who started First Root Farm in Massachusetts, could relate. She discovered farming when she spent a semester at a boarding school for kids who wanted to learn about agriculture, and then worked on farms in the summer, between her years of school.

She told the Boston Globe,

“I wanted to be doing my summer job all the time.”

Her customers see her passion, and it changes the way they think about what she produces. One commented of Laura and her employees,

“Knowing the people growing your food somehow seems to make it taste better. You’re a part of their lives, and they’ve really changed the way I think about food.”

Another added,

“First Root is a great venue for hands-on learning about local farming, sustainability, and healthy eating.”

Alexandra probably never realized the value of her local, sustainable, healthy farm, since it was normal to her. But like Carl, who came back and noticed just how much she had, millennials see farming with new eyes, after being separated from its stabilizing, nurturing lifestyle.

But let’s not over-romanticize this picture too much. Alexandra gave up a lot to build the picturesque farm Carl praised. She sometimes felt confined in her small community. She yearned for the travel and culture Carl enjoyed, learning to know the broader world. And few in her community understood that longing.

What is striking, though, is that Alexandra stays in her culture, saying that even knowing there are other artists as industrious and talented as herself working and creating beautiful things makes her own work meaningful. And as she sticks with the community, even when they do not always understand her, she builds a solid network of working relationships.

That’s what Carl meant when he said, “Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed." And it seems millennials feel the poverty of relationship Carl felt when he called himself a “rolling stone.”

Millennials are breaking out of the suburban isolation to look for community. Cohousing is on the rise, Ilana Strauss writes in The Atlantic:

“Among other things, many residents are drawn to the company that cohousing offers, which DePaulo [in her book, How We Live Now] says is the main reason people choose to live like this. ... [I]t .. provides deep support systems.”

The distressing reality is that Americans suffer from their long-cherished independence. The same Atlantic article notes,

“Since 1985, the number of Americans who have no friends to confide in has tripled, reported a 2006 American Sociological Review study.”

It is small wonder, then, that millennials are finding ways to build community, even if it means letting other people share their living space. Strauss explains rising costs of living make this even more attractive, as people can share duties like childcare and home upkeep, as well as living expenses.

Alexandra herself always had three girls she hired to do her housework and cooking; although one could probably have handled what needed to be done, she enjoyed the girls’ lively conversations. She also invited the community eccentric, Ivar, to live with her—asking only that he help with hitching up her horses—when she feared he could no longer live alone.

While Alexandra certainly could have lived very well alone, she knew just what millennials are finding—we live more healthy lives connected to other people, even when we struggle with them.

As I emphasize what Cather shows can be gained through reconnecting to the land and to community, I do want to note one thing that struck me--one that millennials may find difficult to accept.

And that is this: Alexandra chose to take on her father's dream, and work at it for years before she saw a reward. Living connected to the land was her passion, and yet it meant giving up other dreams she had because she cared about her family's legacy.

Millennials--and I speak to myself here--care a lot about pursuing meaningful work, righting social wrongs, and finding support networks. Work that is meaningful to us. Righting social wrongs that we connect to. Finding support networks to help us.

I say loudly and clearly, that is a good thing. We need to stay healthy. At the same time, if we really want to live well in community, we need to care for something way bigger than ourselves--contributing to the people who live next to us.

For millennials, that is probably quite a bit less intuitive than it was for Alexandra.

So this is why it is worth all of us giving O Pioneers! a re-read, one hundred and three years after it was first published. Cather shows us how Alexandra found the satisfaction and freedom that came, paradoxically, not through cutting her ties to her community and land, but through embracing both. She realized what she gained, even with the frustration and loneliness she sometimes suffered—an identity, a network of community support, and a meaningful life work.