Confessions

Okay, I confess.  The reason I farm is to make sure I spend enough time outside because I believe that is the most loving thing I can do for myself.  It's also the way I can give myself enough time away from modern technology and modern distractions.  Being outside in nature is an immersion in the peacefulness of current, local reality.

I confess that I am excited about learning in so many topic areas that I can easily get stuck in front of a computer or reading books for more hours than is balanced.  Between barn chores to get me outside and all the gardens that surround the house it is hard to get back inside once I leave the house.  Each morning during winter I head out and do morning chores and then I laze around with the goats and dogs in the pasture.  There's always something to explore, someone who wants to be scratched or rubbed.  I finally drag myself away because I have desk work to do and flower essence orders to pack.  During the summer  it's similar but there is the added attraction of gardens to commune with.

How would I live if I didn't have to run a business?  I'd probably rarely go back inside.  I'm pretty good at going without much food from years of farming as a young mother with not enough hours in the day.  A handful of nuts in a pocket and I'm good for the hours!  I can pretty easily fall into the herd schedule of lazing around in the sun with a few forays into different parts of the pasture.

There is at least one other reason I farm.  I really like to eat good food.  Well, let me amend that.  I actually end up spending more time growing good food than eating it but I like to make food happen!  Fruit, nuts, vegetables, herbs, edible flowers.....it's all exciting to me!  The only way I know to make sure I eat quality food is to know where it came from and how it was grown.  That's pretty hard at a supermarket.  When I was 19 and growing most of my food someone expressed that it must be difficult to do that.  My reply was that it seemed a lot easier than to have such a huge disconnect between me and the food I put into my body.  Most of the food I ate was part of my life from seed onwards at that time and in those days not much distraction from the rest of the world to dilute my relationship with my food crops.

This year I'm working on finding balance in my schedule.  I seek to create days with less information distraction from the greater world and more information from the extremely local world.  I'll keep you posted!

Here's a photo of one of my close neighbors, also focused on an extremely local world.

Photo note: I took this photo several years ago.  She/he is about the size of an almond.  I spent hours watching the 10 that hatched in one of the water lily ponds here.