Slowdown Farmstead

In this episode we get into what to do with all the fat leftover in our pans, combatting the NWO by heading to the woods, seasonal eating, sauna therapy, newborn babes and so, so, so much more (that means I can’t remember). Enjoy!

I’m always on the lookout for a lesson in this life. It seems to me the whole point of why we’re here, what I’m being called to do. How can I evolve and grow into the meaning of my life if I don’t use what I’m being shown to do? And lessons, as I’ve learned, don’t seem to come in ease and joy. That’s the letting down your hair and taking a breath part. The lessons come in waves, before there is to be any letting down of the hair. The lessons come as insistent teacher, demanding we learn. If we don’t, the teacher will patiently wait in the broom closet for another opportunity to be the star of the show.

This is what I’m thinking about right now. It’s what I think about a lot. My flaws are profuse, but one of my strengths is my ability to self-reflect on the choices I make in my life. And they are choices. It’s important to get that straight right out of the gate. If we start off with the mindset that we are but victims, bobbing around on random currents and storms on the sea of life, well… Where do you even go from there? Stay on that little boat I suppose. No, I see that I have oars and muscles and a brain and will and tenacity. 

I also understand that what comes into my life comes as friend. Friends aren’t always friendly and warm with a plate of cookies. Friends can come as salty jerks that call us out on our BS. Friends can grind us because they see something in us we haven’t yet

It’s 4:30 in the morning and I’m sitting in our screened-in porch all alone in the world of the calling barred owl, “Who-cooks-for-you?” “Well, I do, thank you very much. And who, pray tell cooks for you, my fine feathered friend?”

It’s going to be another jam-packed day as all days at this time of year are. This is harvest season for us. I told that to a vegetable farmer friend the other day and he later said, “I thought, pffft… one family garden isn’t much, but then I remembered you harvest all your own animals.” That’s right, we do, and that’s a great deal of time and effort to build into all of the other projects that need to be completed before the snow flies. 

I’ve done a winter edition of ‘a day in the life’. I thought now would be a good time to do another. The “now” being in that time between summer and autumn where the myriad of tasks grows. Because we harvest all of our own food, there has to be time set aside as the demands of nature unfold. That requires a great deal of coordination between my husband and I. Take today, for instance, there are three sheep to harvest while I’m making my way through a winter’s worth of carrots that must come out of the ground and 150 pounds of fruit that has to be processed. I also have many, many foraged plants for food and medicine that have to be tended to in one way or another.

So, without further ado, here’s today:

0415: Wake up. Put tallow on stove to render. Meditate. Drink herbal infusion while writing (red light glasses on/screen filter on/lap filter on/house lit by oil lamps or candles).

0530: Empty dishwasher and load with first batch of canning jars to sterilise. Get ingredients set out for first canning recipe of the day. Make two tinctures with medicinal mushrooms I foraged yesterday afternoon.

0600: Take soap out of mould and slice. Lay on drying racks. Get dressed. Feed dogs. Go for walk or other form of cardio outside.

0700: Breakfast

0730: Farm chores. Farm chores at this time of year are extensive. We have some ducks that snuck in another batch of ducklings that we were too late to stop. We started the year with 12 ducks and we’re ending it with well over 50. They’re hard to count! That makes for tight living conditions at night when we put them into their duck house. Everyone is happy to get out in the morning. Except the geese. If they’re ever happy, I don’t know about it. 

The rabbits, too, are reaching max capacity. It takes me over 20 minutes to forage all of their feed. They need two bushels full of packed fodder including everything from branches with leaves to garden weeds and plants to whatever is growing in the fields that the cows and sheep don’t like, but the rabbits love. A current favourite is Queen Anne’s Lace/Wild Carrot. 

Chickens are the easiest of any farm animal. Open the door and feed them. The end. This morning they’re getting the spent fatty bits of the tallow I rendered two days ago. They’re most appreciative.

Our turkeys live with our chickens so it’s the same for them. Everyone free ranges throughout the day and gets locked up at night.

Feed the barn cats and commend them on any offerings they’ve left for us. A barn cat must always be appreciated. 

Because our cattle are in two herds, we have to move electric fence around for two herds and water two herds and get the minerals/salt out to two herds. The dairy and the beef are separate in the summer to manage our pastures effectively.

Earlier in the summer, we would milk first thing in the morning, but with our cows further along in their lactation, we are able to just get milk when we need it now. That’s another great reason to keep the calf with its mother. If we want some milk, we just separate them in the evening and we have milk in the morning. We are, however, not needing any milk on this fine day so there is no milking to be done.

0900: Chores over and the work of summer that sustains us over winter commences. I’m starting with my peaches. I’ve already done my chutneys and sauces with the early summer peaches. These peaches are all for canning in a simple honey syrup. Word on the street is that my son-in-law loved the peaches I brought them on our last visit so it looks like I’m going to have to do a case just for them.

While I’m canning, Troy is setting up to harvest three sheep. Usually I do that with him, but ripening fruit waits for no-one. He brings me in the knives and I have to pause kitchen tasks to sharpen them. The sharpening is my job. He goes about preparing the water, bowls, and cooler. I washed out the walk in cooler and turned it on yesterday. This is where we hang our meat. It will run straight through until winter now.

I spend the rest of the morning canning fruit while also congruently starting our lunch around 11:15 or so. At some point I remember to get outside and get my calendula off the solar dehydrator, bring it in, and cover it with organic olive oil to hang out in a sunny window for a few weeks.

12:00:  Eat lunch outside together, soaking up as many rays as possible. Demanding beef cows interrupt with their moos until I finally relent and fill a basket of apples for them. They eat contentedly while we finish our meal, serenading us with their crunching.

12:30:  Head out to field to gather the organs from the sheep Troy has killed. I put the heads into a cooler. I will deal with them tomorrow. The livers/kidneys/caul/tracheas/spleen/pancreas all go into a separate cooler. I will wrap them all tomorrow as well.

1300: Unload my second round of jars from the dishwasher and start washing and preparing for more peaches. Start my recipe for plum chutney which can cook down for the many hours it takes while I’m making my way through peaches. Troy is done with the three sheep. I can hear him milling wood for the root cellar shelves. It’s a project that has to be fit in around more imminent tasks (just like everything at this time of year) and it’s taking longer than hoped. He’s stacking the milled wood on the old hay wagon. I’m watching that pile grow with a little trepidation. I definitely need those shelves done, but it’s my job to pine tar all of that wood and there’s an awful lot of wood. Another job to fit into the cracks of many others.

1400: Weight lifting and sun bathing. All else is on hold. We sun bathe together. It’s important for us to gather all of that vitamin D now in our climate - tummies and bums and legs need sun! It’s a nice time to talk and maybe even take a nap if it comes.

1500:  Start supper, check on chutney, keep plugging along with fruit.

1700:  Eat supper outside on picnic table. Cows find us and start bellowing again. Troy tells me to ignore them. I just can’t do it. Gather apples and feed. I’m well trained.

1745:  Usually this is our end of day wind down time. But the days need to stretch at this time of year. So, I continue on with fruit. Chutney is ready to be canned. Continue slicing and processing peaches. 

1900: Troy’s doing evening chores. Those entail locking up animals in their houses so any wild critters looking for a midnight snack leave empty handed. I’m cleaning up the kitchen, taking stock and deciding where and what I will tackle tomorrow. Get outside for walk with my love and the pups while the sunsets.

2015: A nice bath, a good book, chatting with my man. He usually joins me tub side and we chat for a time while I soak my bones. He doesn’t like baths. He thinks it’s “stewing in your own dirty water”. Funny guy.

2045:  Reading in bed for five minutes before I’m out. 

I’d say this is a typical day this time of year. If it’s a day when we harvest a steer, the meals and other timings are similar but instead of canning I’m skinning or gutting. If it’s a day when I’m cleaning out the freezers all day (an upcoming task), I’m still following that basic template and just plugging in different things at times I would be canning.

We always aim to be done our work day by supper, but at this time of year that’s not possible so we modify things to add a few hours onto our day after supper without burning ourselves out. We’ve done that burning out bit and we aren’t going to do that again. At our first farm, we would commonly be working until 11:00pm with headlamps on. No thanks. Nothing is worth that hit on your health and wellbeing. 

On a farm there is always calamities and surprises. When you work with so much life, there is sure to be unplanned events. You never know what’s going to find you when you go outside. “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” I’ll vouch for that and so would the victims of our talented barn cat hunters. Maybe those failures and hiccups happen so often now that we just don’t react as we once did. Or maybe we just have the competence and experience to know whatever it is, we’ll fix it. I’m not sure which one it is, but things just don’t get us as riled up as they once did. If nothing else, farming removes the illusion of our own control. We can do what we can do and from there, we can only solve the myriad problems that arise.

Tomorrow I will skin those sheep heads, butcher the organs and wrap them up, get my carrots out of the ground and more of my apples off of the tree to ferment/dehydrate/freeze dry/pickle. Every time I feel like it’s all a bit too much, I remind myself of the pleasures of winter. In the meantime, we are sure to build in those little bits of pleasure into every day. I hear a naked cold plunge is in order for tomorrow morning’s sunrise with my love. I’m all in. 

I propose that the shift from parent to entertainer has been of little benefit to our children. I’m not that old that I think all parents are raising their kids by running them from class to class, screen to screen, event to event, but there most definitely has been a shift in the collective view of child rearing. To be bored has been transformed from “well then do something” to a quasi-medical emergency. As if a child’s boredom is something for a parent to fix. In fact, boredom is a wonderful opportunity. It’s a launchpad into all sorts of unexplored universes just waiting for the child’s creative mind to find them.

I see the theft of children’s imaginations as one of the great tragedies of the screen generations. Where once lived silence and stillness, both necessary components in creation, there are now space fillers. Empty junk to keep a mind full, but hungry. Sound familiar? Yes, we do it with our nutrition, too. Also with our understanding of our place, our connection to the earth, our Creator, our clothes and homes… I could go on. Let’s stick with imagination which is, after all, the bloom that grows out of a field without added weed pressure. 

When our children were small, an “I’m bored” would get a curt “Well, what are you going to do about it?” There are many things a parent must do in a day to keep their little ones well loved and nourished and thriving. Entertaining happens, of course, but it’s not one of those tasks. In fact, I think we’re robbing our children of learning how to create and problem solve and trouble shoot when their only access to play is via structures and “realities” imposed by adults. I could never come up with some of the crazy games and pretend worlds that my children did. Their pretend worlds were unencumbered by social norms and good manners. They could be witches with drawn warts on their noses and draw whole villages of chalk on the driveway where each building housed a different person - the snarly baker or the timid stable hand. They created magical shields out of towels and became open water mermaids in the lakes. Nothing was out of reach of their imaginations.

Allowing our kids to enter into these wondrous, mythical lands of their minds goes far beyond entertainment. When we learn to play, to be playful, with ideas, we enter into adulthood with that power-packed mind. That mind becomes an ally in the creation of our worlds in very real ways. Not only to serve us in developing ideas in any given moment, but in bigger, overarching themes of one’s life. I know for certain that I would not be where I am, with the great love that I have, had I not been able to imagine it and then feel it and then know it.

I’ve witnessed the power of imagination in our children’s lives in endless examples. There is no option to conform to the offerings of society when your mind can come up with so many better ways to be. Why take that 9-5 when you can come up with 147 other things you would prefer to do instead? With our imaginations, we create. And through creation we learn to be flexible, to dance with outcomes and shift and pivot when necessary. Anyone can build a fort, but what do you do when Mommy the Troll or Daddy the Dragon come and demand you feed them your nose? You better think fast, little one.

And that brings me to the parenting part of imagination. Be silly dear humans of the adult persuasion! When did everyone get so serious? I am blown away by how bloody serious we’ve all gotten! It’s okay to be silly. I’d say I regularly cross over into nutty-ville, even still. When we can demonstrate play and silliness and our own imaginations, we enter into a world not governed by the regular mom and dad stuff. We enter into their world where “reality” does not rule. And how else does a mind learn to think outside of the context of what is offered as “fact” or “real”?

When our eldest daughter was just a sprout, I bought her a book called, “Red is Best”. In it is a story of a little girl named “Kelly” that just looooves the colour red. Throughout the book, Kelly laments that her mom just doesn’t understand her love for red. Her mom uses logic to persuade Kelly to, let’s say, wear her black boots in the rain because they’ll keep her feet dry, but Kelly knows that her red boots help her jump higher in puddles. Something like that, you get the idea. When I would read that story to our daughter, I would, as any narrator worth their salt must, make a special voice for the little girl, Kelly. I can still remember reading that story, again and again and again, with my little girl on my lap looking up at me, not the book at all, while I read. At one point she said, while staring longingly into my eyes, “Kelly, what other things do you like that are red?”

Well, of course, “Kelly” looked right back at her, closed the book and said, “Steak and my favourite red marble and Clifford the Big Red Dog and poppies.” And that was it. Kelly left the pages of that book and became an imaginary friend for our daughter. Sometimes when we would be having a bubble bath or a picnic outside on a blanket she would say, “Kelly, what did you do today?” Or she would ask “Kelly, do you want to play lego with me?” There was a time when I wondered if Imaginary Kelly was going to do everlasting damage, but she turned out to be a pal that my daughter could work through some things with and be silly with.

As the years went on, and another kiddo came into the world and then another, my cast of characters grew. There were all sorts of alter personalities I was called on to become. I was “Shoofly Pie” a lovely, robust woman from the South. I was “Rockefeller”, a little white rapper kid that was rich and annoying (yeah, that was fun to make raps up on demand). I was so many different characters I forget half of them. But those different play people were just some of the things we would do. We planted a sunflower jungle and carved out a hollow centre to tell secrets in where no other goblin or human could penetrate the magic of the sunflower stalks. I put on orchestral music and my three little ones would crawl up on my lap while I made up stories to go with the pace and feel of the music. Great giants would rise from the crevices between the earth to rampage the villagers at night as the thunderous drums pounded. I remember them still getting tears in their eyes, or clutching my neck as the great battles began.

I don’t think our dining room table was available for the first five years of their lives. There were houses under there. Stores and teashops and gingerbread houses. They went outside and married ants and climbed trees that became pirate ships on the choppy seas. I could write endlessly of the things they came up with, but it’s how they came up with these things in the first place. There was a need they wanted to fill. They were bored. They would lie on the kitchen floor while I was cooking and wiggle around lamenting their boredom. They’d make themselves look hopelessly sad. It was all simply too much for them! They were boooooooored. Would I not do the just and honourable thing and fix the situation? A movie perhaps? Play dolls with them, maybe? Of course I played with them sometimes, a lot of the time, but play had to be created by them.

I was recently talking to a 20 year old woman who was telling me how frustrated she is with the state of the world. I was listening to her as she described her fate, as she saw it. Her parents are paying for her to go through university. She has two years left and then she’ll have her bachelor’s degree. From there, she said, she has no choice but to do a masters. “Do you like what you’re learning?” I asked. “No, but I have to do it to get a decent job.” But, she told me, that decent job won’t even bring her in enough money to buy a house or a car or, likely, a family. That was her take on her state of affairs.

I prompted her a little bit, asked about what she loved to do, about how she could maybe see things outside of her worldview, to open up to wild possibilities and different ways to generate income and the structure of her life. And I realized at some point that I was talking a foreign language to her. I know this young woman, I know that she was raised in a beautiful, loving family. But I also know that she used to wakeup before school to go do early morning training sessions for the sports team she was on. After school, she went from language class to sports training to another sports training to a school tutor. Her whole life was structured, right down to “play groups” for socialization - a managed time slot in her life. She’s a wonderful young woman, but she has no way of knowing that the gnawing in her, that quiet instinctual voice that asks for something different, can be fed by the imaginations of a mind looking for possibilities outside of what’s on offer. She just doesn’t know her own power.

All of that play. All of those fantastical worlds and daring adventures children create, follow them into adulthood where we’re called upon to continue being co-creators in our lives. When the cookie cutters don’t serve, we can carve out our own possibilities. I see that in our daughters who have worked on farms oversees, nannied children in Europe, taught themselves how to sew and bead and draw. They’ve sold art for music band’s album covers. They’ve sewn and hand beaded beautiful lingerie. They’ve created income from their imaginations. I don’t worry about their futures. I know they have all that they need to take care of themselves and it has nothing to do with circumstance. 

If we cannot imagine a world outside of the one that is held up as reality, we are doomed to be shackled to whatever is on offer. And look at what’s on offer. Institutionalized learning. Rote and repetition and the trappings of success. If what’s on offer doesn’t seem worth the effort, well there will be a universal basic income. If it’s too hard and too fruitless, well, we all know that you won’t own anything and you’ll be happy about it. An avalanche of false choices that all lead to the same destination. We are dependant when we rely on authorities and experts to give us our choices. Our choices, in truth, are limited only by the power of our imaginations. 

Let them be bored. It’s amazing what they’ll come up with, now and forever.

We live in a time that offers the great falsity of dualism. It’s this or it’s that. It’s one or the other. You don’t like what’s on offer? Well then that equates to liking the opposite of that thing, whatever thing, all the things. We even do it to ourselves. We see s…

This essay could just as easily be called “let them fail” or “let them experience” or “let them experiment” or, maybe the one I like best (although it doesn’t really fit in with the title theme) is “you’re not their only teacher”. We’ll stick with what we got.

Let them learn. In that I speak not of learn as in send them off to school. In fact, I think learning is best done outside of those dreary walls. When I say “let them learn”, I am suggesting that we allow our children to try things, to experience things that might look risky or doomed to fail, to know that what they are doing is not going to work but to allow them to do it anyway. We can absorb information by reading a book, but to fully learn, we must experience. We need to take information gathered from pages or ideas or inspiration, apply it, and then observe how things unfold. 

Children, like us, learn through doing. They learn through experiencing. The greatest lessons are ones that come after strife and struggle. Sometimes those lessons are exciting and fulfilling and sometimes they are sad and disappointing. Neither is wrong nor right. Neither requires the parent’s intervention. Let them build the tower knowing the next block will collapse the whole thing. Let them make their homemade recipes that taste like hockey pucks and then walk them through a recipe that doesn’t. Let them see the fruits of their efforts either wither or bloom. Your judgment call is not relevant when there are lessons to be learned. 

It can be hard for parents to see their little urchin really struggle with something and fail, but it’s their reaction to this that we should be more concerned with. Do they collapse in failure? Do they wail and throw a tantrum? Do they shrug and abandon their project? Or do they use their frustration to return to the drawing board? There is a serious lack of resilience in youth today. Too much helicopter parenting, too few exposures to wild, unmanaged play and imagination. We’ve traded life learning for book learning and confused them for the same.

We need to connect how our efforts bring forth or fail to bring forth a desired result. That’s how all of us learn. Having been on Instagram for many years, I sometimes felt like I was hiding behind a one way mirror, observing people in the other room. One of the things I was most surprised by was how many people confuse absorbing information for doing something. They will read and collect information and ask many questions. It’s a sort of ‘slight of hand’ on the soul. We think that by reading we are learning and that learning is doing. This is altogether backwards. By collecting information, we are collecting information. It’s in the doing that we learn. There is no shortcut. If we can teach that to our children, they will be far better off.

In experiential learning, parents have to get out of the way a little. We have to be there, to do the little dance of near and far. As much as we love our children, we are not their creators. We are their caregivers and their protectors, their loving and loyal ma and pa, but they come from a Creator with big ideas for them. To dampen or stifle what they are here to do and learn is no favour.

I remember when one of our daughters became immersed in a book series when she was young. They all tended to do that. But this daughter, our youngest, was absorbed with the heroine in one of her books - a young woman proficient in bow hunting. Our daughter would talk about bows and how to string them and how to hunt a squirrel, but she didn’t really know. She read the story. We suggested that if she wanted to learn how to use a bow, we would find her a teacher. She did and so we did. 

Only the bow student wasn’t as proficient as the imagination led her to believe. She was frustrated with “how hard” it was to actually learn, but she kept with it. We always had a deal with our kids, we would sign them up for sport’s teams or classes, but once they made that decision, it was a commitment. There was no quitting. They had to go until the season or the classes ended. There is a moral obligation to a team that supersedes one’s whims. Our family still laughs at some of the shenanigans of our older daughter who wanted to play soccer at six or seven years old and then decided she despised it. She would stand in the middle of the field glaring at us for making her go while both teams played around the human pylon. We pretended not to notice as we cheered on her team. That was a long summer. But I digress…

Our little bow hunter in the making stuck with it. With arrow after arrow shot, her frustration reinforced determination. That’s what we’re after as parents - allow the frustration to build determination. Teach that. Demonstrate that in your own life. Let your kids see you take on new things. Talk them through what you’re doing and what you’re going for. In the end, our daughter not only stuck with her teacher, she practiced continuously on her own. She learned about her body, her frame, her concentration, the nuance of her bow and arrows. She became extremely proficient and earned confidence through tenacity. The squirrels had reason to fear her.

For us, this was the great benefit of homeschooling. We wish we had done it with our two older daughters, but it wasn’t until our last child that we really understood the failures of the school system. I remember when one of our daughters was absorbed with rocks and geological formations. I told her teacher how entranced she was, how we were going to the library every week and getting books, and that we had a date with an elderly fella’, a retired gemologist, to learn from him and see some of his collection. The teacher was horrified (not the reaction I was expecting). “Don’t do that! We don’t learn about geology until next year. You’ll confuse her!” That was it for me. School was not the place for my children to learn.

Learn or absorb? Which is it? To learn is understanding beyond the facts of a thing. There is a framework to it. It calls upon our character and our fortitude. If I had a penny for every time someone said to me, “I love learning about X, but when it comes time to do it, I have paralysis by analysis”. So they spend their whole life pretending that when they collect enough information, they will actually start doing something with it. That’s self-inflicted torture. That’s a terrible way to have to move through the world - unable to trust that you have what it takes to just do, to learn, to risk whatever because the outcome, though not assured, is worth the effort. Who cares if you mess up. And why do you? If you get it wrong, you will be able to sift through the failure for the nuggets of experience that will bring you closer to your desired result next time.

Perseverance. Teach that. Teach that by backing off and allowing your children to experience it. Let failure and disappointment sit sour in their mouths and love them all the while. Don’t try to fix it. Just love them through it. Talk to them about it. Share some stories from when you were a little girl or boy and really wanted that thing and that thing felt so far away and so you had to work really hard to get it. Read them stories that exemplify the hero’s journey. Discuss those stories. Point out all of the failures along the way. Watch for the cracks.

Be honest with yourself about your children’s character. It’s not a dereliction of duty to think your child is anything but angelic. If you see, when they’re young, that they tend to avoid challenge or fly off the handle when things don’t go their way, address it. Sure, talk to them, but continue to expose them. It’s not just our job to entertain and brush their teeth, cheer them on endlessly, and hand out allowance once a week. As parents, we need to show the trust and confidence in our children that we want them to develop in themselves.

So let them learn. Be clear on what learning is. When they grow up, they will carry into the world, the framework of learning and not even know it’s there. They will be curious and willing to try things. They won’t confuse information with action. They will trust that trying something, even if it doesn’t turn out as hoped, is not a reflection of their inadequacies, but that there is something even better waiting. These are no small things but they start with small things. Let life teach them. Let them learn. 

Last week, my husband, our twenty six year old daughter, and I drove around a field all day gathering hay bales and stacking them on our old hay wagon. We did this until I, the hay stacker, stood high aloft the trailer on my tower of hay. Then, we drove the tractor back to our barn and unloaded it before starting all over again. It was an unforgiving, scorching hot day. We were covered in sweat and dirt and we were bone tired. But the hay waits for no one and so we returned, again and again, until there were no more bales to throw, stack, unload, carry, and stack back up again.

All the while, working in such extremes, I was thinking about how much I love working with my family. My husband is a beast, all strength and skill. It’s amazing to see how easily he can move or heave something that we mere mortals struggle with, but the best part is his attitude. He’s always patient. Always easy going. He can quickly take the feel of a group and shift the mood of drudgery to one lightened by his good nature. And give me any of my daughters to work with, side by side, over anyone else on earth. They are hard workers. Good workers. They are strong and diligent with their tasks. They don’t complain. They don’t stop. They understand the need to complete a task and they do it. 

But how did that happen? I’ve had the displeasure of working with young people who disengage, sulk, or just plain leave the job at hand when it doesn’t please them. As much as we’d like to chalk these things up to personality or hope that when they grow up, they will learn to work, it just doesn’t work that way. To my husband and I, as parents, including our children in the work of our family was natural. We always had standards and expectations of our children. Our family was a cohesive unit and in such a structure, everyone contributes. Today, expectations are increasingly seen as some sort of injustice. We’ve taught young people that life is fulfilled when there is entertainment and ease. Comfort is right, strife is wrong. In our family, that was never our way.

Anyone that’s worked with our adult daughters has commented on their work ethic and we experience it for ourselves. That doesn’t mean they have been formed into good little soldiers, ready and able to work for the man. That’s not the point in teaching children how to work. It’s entirely antithetical to developing a work ethic in a child. What teaching children the joy and value in working means, is that they approach work with an inborn sense of pride and expectation of themselves and that, in turn, serves them in profound ways. Our adult daughters have created lives where they’re their own bosses. That allows them the flexibility to shape their worlds as they want to. If they weren’t good workers, able to just set themselves to a mission and accomplish it no matter the effort, they wouldn’t be able to create the lives they want rather than a life beholden to following the dreams and dictates of others. 

“The soft bigotry of low expectations.”

- George W. Bush

I’ve heard that quote is attributable to George Bush. I wish it wasn’t. I wish it was coined by Aristotle or Pericles or Gandhi. But there it is, one of my favourite quotes and I have to give props to an un-cool guy who said something incredibly poignant.

“The soft bigotry of low expectations.” Wow. It’s the defining ethos of where we’ve arrived, where we’ve driven ourselves to. All around us, the construction of “harm reduction” spreads into every facet of our lives. What started as an approach to drug addiction has blown like old dandelions into every system and organization in society.

We cannot be so cruel as to hold high expectations of anyone - they are broken and scarred and to do so would only be unjustly harsh. We must meet them where they’re at. Jump in the hole with them and cover the light streaming in from the exit. That light is not hope, it is a unreahable temptress that they will never reach. Expect nothing. Trust that they’re all that they are and where they should be. That is kindness. That is love.

- upside down Tara, 2023

“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible… Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness… the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. Where there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms…”

-George Orwell, 1984

This pervasive, toxic approach has found its way into sports teams - nobody keep score! We see it in schools - individualization is okay if one wants to claim an alternative gender or species as their own identity, but the expectations around quality of work, attendance, punctuality, exceptionality, and free thought are lowered to accommodate the lowest common denominator. It’s a belief that’s infiltrated into every nook and cranny of our modern world. But it’s in the home, in parenting, that I think this approach is most destructive.

I had a friend over last week. He’s a skilled tradesman and a wonderful, relaxed guy with a shy, but sly, sense of humour. His comments sometimes take a few moments to reach the right corner of my brain to decipher into something incredibly insightful or hilarious. The kind of guy that you want to have a beer with just to get him to tell you stories about growing up in his small village in Europe. He came to Canada less than a decade ago as a young man and started his own business as a skilled artisan that learned from masters in his hometown. He was telling me that in the last year he has fired eight young men that came to work as apprentices with him. “They just won’t work”, he said. “Half of them wanted to work two days a week. The others wanted a start time after 10:00.” Just that morning, on his way to our place, his latest hire texted him four minutes before he was due to be at work and said, “Can’t come in. 2 tired.” I was flabbergasted. He wasn’t surprised.

To that story I could ramble on with handfuls more. My dairy farmers who can’t find people to work at their farm. My electrician friend who, after years of trying, has given up and just cut back on jobs he takes. My favourite courier guy who always brings our dogs liver treats and chats with me for awhile who, looking particularly tired the other day, said he started work at 2:00 in the morning to sort the parcels before jumping in his truck at 8:00 and working a full day. When I asked why, he said it’s been like that “since covid” because “nobody wants to work”. 

Maybe it’s a good thing that nobody wants to work in the sorting plants and the factories, but what’s the alternative? Is that because they’re out there hustling to create a new business or to develop a new idea, a new way of doing things that contributes to this beautiful world of ours? Or is it because they’re in their mother’s basement waiting for the universal basic income to roll in? Is it, at its core, because a lot of these young people have spent their lives being entertained, having nothing asked of them, that they see expectations and structures as unpalatable?

We need to let our children work. As much as we need to let them play (and I will be addressing that in an essay coming soon), we need to understand the value of letting them work. Asking them to work. We need to hold expectations for the things they haven’t yet achieved. We have to be okay with seeing more in them, with fostering potential without feeling like it diminishes who they are today. You can do both. How can we expect our children to grow into adults that have authentic confidence in themselves if we never trust them to handle what comes their way? We have to allow them to be challenged and to overcome. I see so many parents and teachers now applauding their children for the most menial of accomplishments and jumping in the moment there’s some struggle. If we don’t let our children struggle, how can they ever trust that they have the stuff they need to succeed? 

When our children were small, toddler age even, we would do small tasks alongside them. We would clean up toys or books together. Back then there was usually a song attached to the task or we made games of it. As they aged they were responsible for setting and clearing the table. If they made a mess in the car, it was their job to look around and clear it out when we got home. Their dirty clothes went into their laundry hamper. Every task was, and should be, a relevant one. It teaches consequences to have to pick up all of your lego when you’re done playing. It teaches responsibility to clear plates off the table after your parents fed you beautiful food. They got to play a part in the roles of their family. Their contribution was necessary, meaningful, and expected. Children raised with these expectations take pride in the roles. And when they don’t? So what. The job remains. And maybe that’s the most important point of all. The job remains and it must be done. It’s not always fun, but the job remains.

Where does that happen anymore? Well, it happens in real life, that’s where. I know that if I don’t walk around my farm, collecting bushels of wild forages for my meat rabbits nobody is going to do it for me. They’ll live, but not be very healthy if I don’t do it. If they’re not very healthy, why am I raising them? What does that mean for us, the eaters of the “not very healthy”? I understand that not only is there a task before me that I need to do, whether I feel like it or not, but that if I don’t, there are normal and predictable consequences. That was a gift we were intent on allowing our children to experience in endless and varied ways. That can be tough on a parent and I think it’s why most would rather give in and soften the world for their kids. Only the real world is not going to soften itself. What happens then?

I was with some parents and their five year old daughter a few weeks ago. They’re wonderful, loving parents. Their daughter came upon a raspberry bush dripping in fat, perfectly ripe berries. I told her she could have as many as she wanted. But she didn’t want to pick them because of the “prickles” on the bush. Her dad showed her to just pick the berries, not bury her arms in the branches, but she resisted and asked him to pick them. He showed her how to pluck the berries off the bush, but she still resisted. She wanted the berries but wanted someone else to pick them for her. Her mom came over, picked a handful of berries and handed them to her. Victorious. But a great, simple, run of the mill, every day opportunity gone.

It’s innocent enough, but it’s also the type of consequences we were always cautious to reinforce and support. In that situation, our daughter would either pick her own berries or not eat any. At two years old that wouldn’t be the case. I hope that’s obvious. But as they age, we need to step back and allow our kids to be taught by more than our good intentions. Our children need to be uncomfortable and cry and be angry because they don’t get their way. And then they learn how to change those outcomes, sometimes simply by enduring something unpleasant or unwanted in the moment in service to something even better.

As parents, we have received endless praise and feedback on the work ethic of our daughters. Sports team coaches were all blown away with our kids (and I know I sound like I’m gloating, but it’s very true). Our adult friends who were everything from farmers to welders to physicians, and everything in between, have told us how impressed they are with our daughters’ work ethic. That’s a wonderful trait to share with people in your community. It’s a real ‘leg up’ to have other people want to collaborate and achieve things with you by their side. But even more importantly is how it has affected their self confidence. Authentic self confidence earned by facing strife, having to figure out ways over or around or through and accomplishing that goal no matter what. That’s where confidence comes from. It doesn’t come from clapping, “GOOD JOB!” every time your kid covers their nose when they sneeze.

We need to earn trust in ourselves. We need to earn confidence in our lives, every single one of us. Nobody can tell us what we are or what we’re capable of. Words slide off the human that is slicked with niceties but has no callouses. It will forever ring “untrue” until we earn it for ourselves.

Work should be meaningful. It should have a beginning and an end and a purpose lest we be cogs in an ever-grinding wheel. But what has meaning for one is very different than what has meaning for another. In teaching our children that work is good, that it has meaning, that it is valued in our family unit, we are setting them up for the big

In part one of this essay, I wrote about the foundational things that I had to learn and employ to help my body heal from chronic illness. Here I’ll write about some of the other things I did including more details around supplements, herbs, clothing and environment, and how I approached adding in each of these. Some of these things seemed to have more of an effect than others. Some seemed like they were doing little initially, but over the long run delivered profound benefits in my life. Other things here are things I was already doing when I got sick and continue to do to this day because they’re essential to health. In case you aren’t doing them, and you aren’t well, I will include them.

Water: I can’t emphasize enough the importance of good, clean water. How do you know if you have good, clean water? If you’re in the city drinking tap water, you don’t. If you’re in the country and you don’t get your water tested, you don’t know. When we lived in the city, we vacillated between water sources. We got our water from friends’ wells, from springs, and from distilling our own. In the early 2000s, we bought a water distiller and then remineralized and structured it because one of the military bases we lived on had no water sources around it and the water we had was awful. Distilled water has its own problems, but there are times when it’s called for. You probably don’t have to go that far. Our daughters were both gifted Berkeys (from us) with the fluoride filter when they left home. They put their water through there and then structure it in large glass vessels. What is structured water? I will put a few links in with extra reading of all sorts at the bottom of this essay. 

Ozone therapy: Ozone was a big benefit to me when I was ill. I used to drive three hours each way to go and get my ozone treatment in a clandestine office in Quebec. It’s illegal here and hard to find a practitioner that believes in it enough to put their neck on the line. I’m amazed by the effects of ozone and its myriad applications. There are different ways to administer ozone with different opinions on the effectiveness of each. My physician used an I.V. to withdraw my blood then mixed it with ozone and returned it to my body. I used to leave that office feeling like a million bucks. And when you’re sick for a long time, feeling like a million bucks is really quite miraculous. I’m looking into getting a home unit in the future.

Supplements/herbs/medications: I was already taking some supplements when I got ill. Then I started taking more. And more. And more. It got silly after awhile. I had the sense that all the things I was taking were more of a burden on my already burdened body. There are all sorts of programs and kits and packages in the supplement world that promise to address what ails you. After I was diagnosed with Lyme, I was put on this guy’s “protocol” and then that gal’s “protocol” - all of them brought great hope followed by disappointment.

At one point, having already spent thousands of dollars on “the protocols” and on the Lyme physician I was under the care of in the U.S. at that time, I was told, by the good doctor, that I was at the point where herbs weren’t going to help. I needed to go with the big guns, the antibiotics. I was very resistant. I initially said no. It was urged again and again on subsequent appointments when I continued to show little improvement. I finally relented. At that time, it seemed like the thing to do. We had our first farm. I had young kids. I needed to be able to show up in my life. 

Here I could write about how I regret that decision. While I wouldn’t make that decision again, that’s only because I did it then. I’m not a believer in regretting any decision. I am here now writing this having learned and experienced what I was meant to. Was it a good experience? No. It was an awful experience. Those antibiotics ravaged what was left of my guts. I developed a hiatal hernia. I was weakened and exhausted and depressed. I stopped taking them after a couple of months. I realized that remaining a patient of that physician was no longer where I needed to be. As much as I wanted to find the doctor to fix me, there wasn’t going to be one. I needed to listen to myself and the God within my soul to heal. That’s when the real healing began (as I wrote more about in part one of this essay). And for that, I am grateful to those dastardly pills.

From that point forward, I focused on what should have been focused on initially - my ability to detoxify. I researched and implemented the right herbs, practices, and supports to assist my wilted eliminatory organs to properly detoxify what was in my body. What was the point of taking herbs and supplements to help clear the body if my liver and kidneys, my skin, and my lymph couldn’t get rid of it? So instead of slash and burn I moved into supporting my body to heal. I did healing baths with clays and balneotherapy. I dry brushed regularly. I moved every day in the sun. I took off my shoes and grounded. I started meditating. I took herbs and homeopathics to assist with drainage. We bought a sauna and I used it regularly. We bought a full spectrum, full body light panel for the long, cold winters when I didn’t get enough of the sun’s healing rays that my body needed. I put castor oil packs on my liver and kidneys. I went to acupuncture to open up blocked meridians in my body. My whole focus shifted from one of “kill those buggers” to listening to my body.

Our bodies want to heal. If they’re not healing, there is something blocking them from doing so. Some toxin or parasite or hunk of trauma mutating away. Never do our bodies want to take us out. I think that’s one of the most malicious, vile lies that western medicine tells us. We have autoimmune diseases where “the body turns on itself”. We have cancer where “rogue cells try to kill us”. They would have us believe, and indeed did a great job of it over the whole plandemic, that the body is this fragile sack that is unpredictable and can turn on us in an instant. The body, our bodies, are us. They are a miraculous invention from a miraculous God that hold us, nourish us, allow us to discover and learn and explore. Our bodies want life as much as we do. Imagine the endless processes your body is doing right now, right this very second, just so you can quietly fill your brain with these words. And they want us to believe our bodies just all of a sudden decide that they’re going to take us out? Pffft… What nonsense. A body that turns on itself is a body that has been struggling for a very long time and is calling for help.

Back to the supplements that I employed to assist with my body’s natural tendency to heal. There are all sorts of herbs and supplements that fall into different categories. There are herbs that you would take in acute situations, things like echinacea when you feel a scratch in the back of your throat. But there are also herbs that are taken as part of an approach to assist with longer time healing, detoxifying, and building of the body. These would be unique to each person. I also found medicinal mushrooms to be a powerful adjunct to how I was crafting my health reclamation.

Integrating plant medicines was integral to me and I continue to make herbs and wild, foraged mushrooms a part of my daily life. I think every one should know herbal medicines. It doesn’t mean we have to be herbalists, but understanding the plants and their healing gifts, especially the plants native to the areas we live in, is important. I believe we have entered a time when even basic knowledge of these important allies is critical. It’s important to know how to use the gifts we have been given. Reliance on corporations of any sort to keep us well is folly.

Once my body was working better by detoxifying with the therapies I have just mentioned, I again returned to a specific Lyme protocol. I used Stephen Buhner’s Lyme protocol as outlined in his book. I continued doing all of the other therapies. Within nine months or so, I started feeling better. By a year I was feeling significantly better.

At the same time that I was taking these supplements and herbs, I was taking binders. I continue to take binders. It’s important to make sure that as our bodies are breaking down and ridding us of pathogens, that those pathogens actually make it out of our bodies and don’t get recirculated back in. I tried all sorts of binders at different times until I found what worked for me. There are clays and charcoals and all sorts of binders out there. If you go with charcoal, know that there are very different qualities out there. I prefer the Takesumi activated bamboo charcoal. I always have it on hand.

Teeth: Oh boy, this is a big one for me. By the time I was 12 years old almost every molar I had was plugged with a giant mercury filling. When I joined the military, the dentists there would just give root canals like they were candy. I left the military with three root canals. Unfortunately, in my early twenties, I had all of the metal fillings in my mouth removed with absolutely no precautions. Nobody talked about those things then. My dentist drilled out the mercury fillings without any precautions and that mercury was swallowed and inhaled. I am certain this is part of my current issues with essential tremor which I am addressing by removing heavy metals. I had already worked on removing certain heavy metals from my body when I was ill. But it’s slow and ongoing and now I need to make my way to the mercury.

But back to the teeth. I have had all of those root canals removed. I had all of those military dentist root canals replaced by materials I was tested for by my holistic, “biological” dentist. Unfortunately, I came to understand that there’s no such thing as a healthy dead thing right under one’s brain. Which means I had three back teeth pulled. I just left the spaces initially but now I am feeling well enough to tackle the next stage of this adventure (ha). I’m going to an experienced dentist to have the cavitations cleaned out. The ongoing infection, even though I don’t notice a thing, is there to be sure. I think that might also be a contributor to my developing essential tremor. We’ll see.

If you have mercury amalgam fillings or root canals and you’re not well, I recommend digging into the resources listed below. If you have them and are well, I would still recommend researching what’s going on in your mouth.

Diet: At the time I became ill, I had already been eating a solely organic, traditional foods diet for decades. I didn’t eat processed foods or sugars or grains. I was eating very well, better than most. It didn’t matter. Food is only a piece of a much bigger whole. I continued to eat well throughout my healing journey, but it was when I went on a solely animal based diet (“carnivore”, if you will) that things just blew open for me. My mind was clearer than it had been in years. There was quite literally NO inflammation in my body. I was able to lift weights again. It’s was marvellous!

My approach to my animal based diet was to eat nose to tail. I relied heavily on organ meats like kidneys, heart, liver, and included things like tails and brains and eyes. My body was not absorbing the food I was eating so I needed concentrated forms of nutrients. I consumed bone broths regularly. I kept taking my plant and mushroom medicines at this time but dropped all of my other supplements. I have tried all sorts of elimination diets, but in my opinion, a solely animal based diet was exactly what my body needed to be able to do the work to turn things around.

Fasting: Fasting was another thing that really moved the needle on my health. I found that longer duration fasts were more helpful with my lyme symptoms. For a time I was doing five day fasts every month with 48 hour fasts every week. I lost far too much muscle but it did really help me with my symptoms. It was extreme though and not something I would recommend to anyone else. Today, I fast for five days about twice a year, at the change of winter to spring and fall to winter. I no longer think that regular fasting is a good idea. I need to keep my lean muscle mass as I age, not speed up its demise.

Mold: I’m now certain that I had Lyme a long time before I got ill. It’s often the case that our bodies are struggling with something and there’s another factor that pulls the trigger of that loaded gun. In my case, that was a heavy duty exposure to mold. We had an old barn with a hay loft at our first farm. I would go up in there everyday and fork down mounds of hay to the cattle, being ever so diligent to avoid the black mold clouds lifting into the air. Sure… Yikes! I also used to just go up there to lie in the hay and daydream. I know, I know…

That house had some mold issues as well. We pulled everything back to the studs, but by that time, the damage was done. The mold took up residence in me. Mold is diabolical. Everything from cancer to lethargy, chronic illnesses of all sort, and poor immunity can be a result of mold in the home. It’s serious and needs to be addressed. All of the protocols I did for drainage, including the support for my eliminatory organs greatly helped my issues with mold. It was at this time that I also started adding in some food grade, hydrogen peroxide to my water in the morning. That was very helpful as well. I continue that practice to this day. I also take molecular hydrogen which has also been very effective.

Next to skin:  I had serious skin issues with my mold exposure. I was constantly itchy and had a crawling sensation on my skin. It kept me up at night. I couldn’t go anywhere near a computer because the static and EMFs would intensify that crawling sensation. Through a lot of insane-inducing days and nights of feeling like there were bugs eating me alive, I started to figure out things that would make me feel better. One of those things was clothes.

I figured out that cotton clothes were awful for me. They would really intensify the skin issues. I fell into a nightmarish rabbit hole of researching morgellons, wondering if that’s where I was headed. What I found on those forums were that many people noticed a worsening of their skin conditions with cotton clothes. I knew that cotton was mostly GMO (Bt - a bacteria that is inserted in the gene) by that time and I knew that it was grown saturated in chemicals, but surely those issues were resolved by the time that it made its way into a pair of pants or a t-shirt? Turns out not to be the case. 

I got rid of all of my cotton clothes. I also got rid of anything I had that was synthetic (although truth be told, there wasn’t much of that). We also got rid of our bed sheets and towels and even our organic mattress (I was convinced it had mold in it). That was tough. And miserable. But things started to change. To this day, I won’t wear non-organic cotton. There’s all sorts of videos of how GMO cotton actually reacts to magnetic and EMF signals. Believe it or not, I’ve experienced it and choose to stay away. Why take the risk of being the sponge for those chemicals seeping into your body every day. Our eldest daughter won’t put any synthetic or GMO cotton on our granddaughter. I’m so relieved by her many wonderful decisions as a mama. 

The clothes I wear now include old cotton if I find some vintage number I can’t resist (like pre-70s), linen, silk, wool, hemp, and leather on my feet. Mostly, I wear linen which has incredible health properties including being protective against radiation, fungus, and actually elevates the frequency of the human wearing it. Every material we put on our bodies carries a measurable resonance - just as our bodies do. A study done about a decade ago now shows that not only is linen the most healing material we can wear, but it actually raises our own body’s frequency. Take it or leave it. I can feel the vibration of clothes on my body. You can, too, if you just take some time to notice

Surely I’m missing many things. It was years and years, with many starts and stops for me to get well. It was sunbathing and gardening naked. It was sitting in the screened in porch with my husband, admiring the ancient apple tree encircling us, drooping under the weight of her apples. It was the freezing winter nights in our wood fired hot tub watching the stars while we tumbled around each other, slippery as fish. It was my good dog, loyal and joyful - the one that just licked my big toe. It’s a hint I can’t ignore. And that’s my biggest tip - do not ignore the small things. Get into a rhythm with your body so that when it whispers, you can hear. Then it need not shout to get your attention.

It’s always your choice to be overwhelmed with the enormity of it all. Or you can remind yourself that nothing is linear here. It’s a bit of this, a sprinkle of that. It’s intention and loving oneself enough to know when you need a good kick in the pants and when you need some soft care. You can see it all as a burden or you can accept your path as one you were built for and get on with it. Break it down, move with what resonates the strongest, learn the language of your body. We are meant to be a unified being - body, mind, soul. Everything in our world sets us up to be cleaved off from that natural relationship, but our Creator calls us back. How we answer is up to us.

Lastly, I leave thee with this - an eloquent, impassioned plea for the changing of one’s ways. It was written in 1845 and addresses the scourge of the times - people unwilling to take a bath. Hard to believe, huh? And yet, somehow, they make poetry out of their argument. Maybe, one day, the people of the future will look back on our reliance and devotion to our modern day salesmen pitching their modern day snake oil in the form of pills and injections, as archaic and ignorant. We can only hope. In the meantime, that’s the momentum I’m rolling with. That’s the world I’m working to create.

Thank you for reading Slowdown Farmstead. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Further reading & resources:

I had someone recently ask me how I got better from Lyme disease. I get asked that question pretty frequently. I’ve written about it before. But the question was one that got me thinking about all of the things I incorporated to get well and the things I continue to do to stay well. How to sum that up in a conversation without someone getting overwhelmed or zoning out by minute ten? Actually, I’m not all that pleased to just stay well. I want to continue to find a healthy, robust life by continuously learning and changing what I’m doing. I’m not in the same body I was in two years ago, never mind two decades ago. There’s so much I don’t know. So many things I would like to try. But here, for this essay, I thought I might sit down and write out what it actually took for me to get well after a prolonged, so-called “chronic” illness.

Mindset: I will start with that last sentence - the “chronic” bit. A diagnosis, received by the trusting mind, can be akin to a curse. If you believe what the doctors tell you and you believe that you’re body will play out their script as they say it will, there’s a good chance you’re right. Everyone talks about mindset, but implementing it when you’re down in the dregs can be hard. When I was so sick that just moving felt like an accomplishment, I didn’t want to hear about mindset. I didn’t want to hear about perspective. I could barely hold my life together. All I wanted was to find THE RIGHT DOCTOR to help me with their illuminated expertise so I could be done with what ailed me. It was only when I realized that nobody was coming to save me, despite my fervent wishes, that my healing actually began. I refused their prognosis. I rejected their fear. I started taking care of me. Who better?

Perspective: Spend as much time as you need grieving your lot. Be mad or sad or whatever you need to be. You don’t have to put a plastic happy face on your life if it’s not feeling all that happy. As toxic as negativity is, so too is denying your authentic feelings. That doesn’t mean your feelings are true or guides to live by. You can acknowledge how you feel and decide to feel differently. Feelings are not reality, they’re just feelings.

It’s important to hold standards for yourself. Have expectations of yourself even when you feel lousy. Find the things around you that you can hold gratitude for. In practice, you can’t hold self pity and gratitude at the same time. If you feel overwhelmed, recognize that’s because you have a lot to feel overwhelmed by. But you are still responsible for what you do with that overwhelm. You are not a victim. Nothing will keep you sicker for longer than thinking you are. If you’re overwhelmed or exhausted or feeling defeated, you are still responsible to do something about it. Go outside and sit in the sun for awhile and pull in that gratitude again. Say prayers of thanks to your body for its healing even when you see no signs of it. Imagine your body moving with ease and strength even when you are exhausted. No matter what you are confronted with, you must know and feel and act like you are aware that you are blessed. Give thanks for those blessings. Hardest, of all, give thanks for the lessons of your illness. There’s never much learning going on in the peaceful chapters of our lives. The growth comes from the challenges. After so many decades of learning this, I’ve come to be more accepting of the hard parts of our lives. I don’t need to wait for hindsight so much anymore. There’s a great peace in that awareness that can be had by anyone that chooses to have it.

Relationships: Toxic relationships are detrimental on so many levels. There is a cost to such negative energy in your life. I have come to learn that harbouring resentments has a cost to my body. I won’t do it. So, I have a choice. I won’t remain silent and stew in my resentment juices. I’m not giving that kind of power over myself to anyone. So, I can speak. And that’s what our hearts want - they give us messages because they want us to release them. That doesn’t mean I go around telling people off. It means that I speak up no matter my discomfort. There will always be relationships where you are limited by the expression of yourself. Extended family is often like that. The weighing of the costs and benefits of those relationships on your life are up to you. There are some people that you may have in your life where resolution and a mutual, respectful exchange just isn’t possible. With others, you may find an equilibrium that you can manage. Hopefully, there are a few, maybe even one, that allows you to be wholly, wildly you.

“Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.”― Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, A Life For A Life, 1859

Nutrition: Nutrition is a fundamental pillar in health. If you are eating foods that inflame your body, you are keeping yourself in a perpetual loop of putting out fires instead of generating energy and allowing your body to heal. Whole, organic foods, eaten from your local environment, respectful of the seasons you live in, are the basic foundation of what should be going into your body. No seed oils. No margarines and plastic foods. Stick with foods that don’t have ingredient labels. Learn to cook. Avoid restaurants which are serving you everything I’m telling you to avoid. From there you may have to further refine. I do best without grains and nuts and sugars. I feel great when I make sure I have adequate protein in my diet that’s also full of fermented and cultured foods from our farm. Animal fats for us. Fruit when it’s here. That’s how my mind is most clear, my body the most fluid, and my emotions and spirit most at peace and connected. 

If you’re not eating right, you will not get better. But nutrition is not the be all and end all of our health. Other foundational pillars of health include our environments, movement, and spiritual connection. I will endeavour to break those down. 

Movement: Movement is different than exercise. But just shuffling around a house is not movement. We were meant to walk and bend and squat and twist and balance and jump. Losing these things as we age is commonplace. We lose our sense of play. We stop climbing trees and crawling into caves. Our joints stiffen and range of motion declines. Walking outside, even better if you’re wearing barefoot grounding shoes, is a simple, free thing that is one of the foundational pillars we need to include in our lives. Even if you’re not well, you can walk. I don’t care if it’s for five minutes, start there if you must. 

My husband and I recently noticed that we were making little creaky noises when we got up from seated positions. We didn’t like that. So, we started digging into what movement looked like when not moving and that opened up a rabbit hole for us that we’re still burrowing into. Suffice it to say that we got rid of all of the furniture in one of our rooms. It’s the floor for us now, baby. I will write more about that in a future essay. For now, sit on the floor for part of your day, every day. Better yet, sit outside on the ground. It’s life changing.

Grounding: We used to be in constant contact with the earth. We accept and release electrons all day long. Or at least we should. The flow of the energy from the earth below our bare feet (and here you see the issue with rubber soles) into and out of our bodies is essential for the charge in our bodies. Spend time every single day grounding. That can be be simply walking barefoot. In winter, I wear leather soled mukluks outside that accomplish the same. You can lie on the ground, sit on the ground, hug a tree, meditate against a tree, swim in the lakes or oceans near you, have picnics on a blanket instead of eating inside at a table. It doesn’t matter, just do it every day. It’s non-negotiable.

The beauty of grounding our bodies is that we are also grounding our spirits, our emotions, and our minds. Nature is a touchstone for our souls. It is our home. It’s not something that’s optional, a little walk on a trail once a month. Find nature around you every day and connect to it. It’s where you find yourself.

Circadian health: Our indoor environments are toxic on a multitude of levels. Let’s tackle light first. Get rid of all of your LED and fluorescent bulbs. They off-gas and they flicker. Even if you don’t register it, it’s happening. Their unnatural, blue light is telling your body it’s the middle of the day all day long and that has a diabolical effect on every system in your body. Use incandescent bulbs. We are wondrous, intricately designed creatures. Our bodies react and respond to the signals of light in our days. We need to be outside when the sun is rising and setting. A little walk during those times is lovely, but even just standing outside for five or ten minutes during sunrise and sunset, even better with bare feet, cue our body on where it is and what it should be doing. Everything from our hormones to our immune systems are tied into the circadian rhythm.

During the day, we don’t put lights on in our house. The light in our house is from the outdoors. We try to be outdoors as much as possible which, granted, is easier for a farmer than it is an office worker. If you have to be inside, and if you have to look at screens, purchase blue light blocking glasses or shields for your computer. In the evening, when the sun goes down, your eyeballs need to be kept away from blue light entirely. Our body uses the signals of the setting sun to end and start different processes in our body like the production of melatonin. We use blue blocking glasses, red incandescent bulbs, and we read by firelight. We have small oil lamps that we use in the evening. Not only is that infrared light safe for evening viewing, it’s actually beneficial to creating a peaceful, pre-sleep ritual.

Sleep: Seeing that we’re talking about light, we really should get into sleep. Go to sleep and wake up at the same time every day as much as humanly possible. Have a ritual, wind-down time every evening. We like to read in the evening. Sometimes we’ll sit down and I will work on some of my wool crafting and my dear man will whittle away at some wood project he’s carving or we play some low key board game. We still have only red light on. If it’s winter the wood fires are always going. 

What you sleep on matters, too. We have an organic bed with a wool topper and linen sheets. An off-gassing bed built of synthetic ingredients that don’t breathe but develop mold and dust mites is not great for anyone, never mind a sick person. Years ago, we got rid of our original mattress and bought a wool stuffed, organic cotton futon. It wasn’t the most comfortable, but it made a big impact on how I felt when I was quite sick. We’ve since moved on and have purchased two different organic mattresses since that time. Our present bed is a dream and I hope to have it until I kick the bucket.

You don’t want to get hot when sleeping. A cool, dark room is a must. There’s a lot of talk about having black-out blinds in a room. I think that’s probably necessary if you live in a city, but if you live in the country, I’d say avoid them. It’s important that the moonlight comes into our room with its own secret messages to our bodies. We are as tied to the moon as we are to the sun. Wonderful things happen under the light of a full moon.

EMFs: You can have the most peaceful, lovely night time ritual but if you’re sleeping with dirty electricity zooming all around your head or your wifi is buzzing away all night long, you are disrupting your body’s sleeping tasks of detoxification and rest. We had our house professionally mitigated by an EMF professional. We have a “kill switch” that we press when we go to sleep that makes the house inert. Before we had that done, we manually shut off the power to our house every night. We’ve never had wifi and never will. Even our TV is connected to an ethernet cable so we can download a movie on it every now and then if we want to. 

Mitigating your cellphone usage is just as important for your health and the health of the people around you. In our house, all phones are off and in faraday bags. When we need to use them, we use them and then they’re off again. We have a landline and people know that’s how they can contact us. There are no notifications on our phones, nothing to draw us in or excuses to keep them on. We have our screens set to red. Have you done that with your phone yet? It’s quite interesting to see how much interest you lose in using your phone when you take the dopamine hit of blue light away. 

There are other things that I had to tackle on my journey to reclaim my health. I always like to remind people that I didn’t come from a processed food, sedentary background when I got sick. I had already been eating a traditional foods diet for a couple of decades. I got sick anyway. I can now look back and see how my perspective ramped up my stress in that time. I can see that the emotional stuff I was jamming down needed to be brought into the light of day. I can see that my idea that movement meant beating myself to a pulp in the gym wasn’t all that helpful. I’ve also come to learn that my brutal, push harder attitude wasn’t serving me any longer. 

If you’re unwell, or just not where you want to be with your health, it’s worth honestly reflecting on how you’re showing up for yourself. It’s tempting to look at the worst examples all around us and feel smug about what we’re doing, but that’s not really honest at all, is it? We know how we feel. We know if our bodies are sending us messages that we’re ignoring. What relevance does it have in our lives to look at Mr. Big Gulp or Ms. Dorito Mama and pat ourselves on the back for our choices? Don’t use anyone else as a measure for where you are. Listen to the messages from your soul. Ask questions of yourself. Act out of love and compassion, instead of punishment.

In part two of this essay, I will continue sharing the things I have used and continue to use in my never ending, lifelong quest to show up in this life as fully as I can.  In the meantime, I will add some links below regarding the topics I hit on in today’s essay for you to dig into.

We live in an extractive society. We want to know what parts of the whole are the ones to focus on. Quick and dirty - give us the bullet points. All around us, the whole is increasingly being fragmented with a peddler for every part. Promises offered for any malady. Solutions for any problem. A guru for every subject. Everything, including you, broken down into its effective parts.

Some people have chalked up the failings of our time to politics or corporations or evil. I think it’s probably all of those things, but it’s also us. We’re responsible too. All around us we see the fragmentation of the whole. We want it. We pay for it. Just give me what I need to make it happen. Social media allows us to flit from person to person, collecting a few nuggets here, a few easter eggs there. We have come to see people as their useful bits. The woman who gives recipes. The guy who talks about exercise. The politician I like because he says some things I want to hear. The new trend that might just be ‘the thing’ that fixes whatever needs fixing. All of us feasting on the dopamine snacks offered. Constantly nibbling.

We’re all babes in the woods, wandering around looking for the next shiny thing to put into our basket, unaware of the majesty of the forest all around us. We’re like crows, fixated on the shine. Only crows know their connection and place in the wild. We’re not so certain. Our eyes are focused on the tangible even as the the wind blows answers through our hair. Our fingers search for the things they can grab and hold onto while birds sing messages that dissipate into the ether. A great orchestra plays all around us, welcoming our participation to complete the song, but we’re too busy listening for the echo of our empty calls.

I’m acutely aware that some of my readers don’t give a hoot about all of the topics I write on. I understand that some people find their way to my little corner of the internet because they saw me making ice cream or writing about eating traditional food and they figured that was my schtick. Only to realize that there’s too much ‘fluff’ - the stuff they aren’t here for. Others like that. I know that and I understand that. I could talk about health without talking about why my cow needs her calf, but it wouldn’t be me talking. And I don’t know how to talk about movement without talking about our living environments. I don’t even want to talk about growing and raising our own food if I can’t talk about the man at my side doing it with me. In fragmenting my life as an offering to fill another’s desire, I am lying. Maybe not to you, but to me. And there’s enough of that going on all around us.

What does it matter if you wake up at dawn and get outside under the sunlight if the callings of your spirit are being blunted with busyness and distractions?

Does it help you if you’re drinking raw milk but you approach the work of your life with bitterness and self pity?

Can you even be a loving mother or father or human being participating in this world at this time if your mind is so clouded and your body so neglected that you can’t open up to what comes? 

Can you feel the depths of misery and the saturation of joy or are you too busy searching for answers outside of yourself as a way to run from that pain?

Have you come to know your Creator, our Creator, in an intimate and meaningful way? Is your heart open and vulnerable to possibility? Or are you finding inspiration by watching videos of women in long dresses, touching wildflowers with their fingertips, pretending they’ve figured it all out? Or maybe it’s men blasting out their workout with their handsome features and endless confidence claiming something you want. Is it want that rules your heart or careful cultivation? 

Beauty can only be truly known and loved as a whole. We can admire the plumage of a stuffed bird, but to witness it in flight, free and weightless, soaring against the backdrop of the endless blue sky fills us with awe. A birthday cake from the grocery store serves a function, but it isn’t an offering of time and love and energies like one made in the kitchen by someone that loves us. The wholeness, the story of a thing satisfies in meaningful ways. The portrayal of that satisfaction by another has no claim on what will be our path.

The internet has taught us to reduce people down to a theme. The problem is we can go from subject to subject, site to site, feeling like we’re actually doing something. We open up our skulls and allow information in, endless pieces of information with no context. There’s no whole to hold the pieces as one. There are no examples moving and living around us so that we can put into context the whole. And without context, our life experience, our judgment is skewed. We just know this one little drop, presented with slickness, void of our participation in questioning with conversation and evaluating with observation.

Everyone has one piece of an answer. But a bunch of pieces do not come together and form the totality of us. They’re just a mashed up pile of pieces. We are still called to come forward and into our lives and excavate our authentic whole. You can bypass that, but that looped train you’r

e on never ends until you decide to get off.

So collect your pieces from here and there. Find the bits and bobs that fill your curiosity and passions. Just be sure to roll them over, hone them with your experience, question their relevance in your life. These are the things we must do to make anything a part of our whole, our unique selves, here for our unique reasons. Lest we just end up with a mountain of pieces that belong to other people. We can’t just open up our hungry maws and fill them with pieces from another without our intuitive filters. All the glue in the world can’t take bits and make them into a coherent whole when they come from endless origins. Fragments with endless origins with no discernment can never make a complete whole. We remain hungry. Unsatisfied. Questing. Unnecessary cravings when all that we need was breathed into our beings the moment life sparked in us. 

Maybe overwhelm, the word I hear most frequently these days, has little to do with tasks and more to do with the incongruence of stuffing bits into our selves without pause. Information and ways of being presented as absolutes and taken in without question. Foreign matter ingested without trusting the wisdom of our own filters. If I offer something to you that isn’t yours to hold, let it go. I do what feeds me, what I have passion for and take joy in. It will be different than what you love. We may share some things, but we won’t share all. Otherwise you would be me and I would be you and that just isn’t so and never will be. Trust in the refinements of your own heart and cultivate a life that brings you into harmony with your own spirit. That is the antidote to overwhelm.

I cannot find myself and my connection beyond the veil of the physical world if my mind and body are inflamed. I need my physical self to fully realize my spiritual self. That’s the deal on this realm. I cannot be the love I want to be if I am not well. To be well, I need to eat with intention and move. I need to have sunshine on my skin and the earth under my bare feet. I need to drink good water. These physical things are necessary for my physical body which allows me to experience the bigger callings of my life. These things in themselves are not the bigger callings of my life but they are foundational. Without that foundation, I am dull and foggy and irritable and sore. My body becomes a limiter instead of an expander. I want to expand beyond myself, not be held captive by my poor choices.

Beyond the foundation of a well functioning body comes the desire to experience life and be a part of life according to my design. What can I, a lowly gal living on a big rock, do in this world? I can be open to receive and transmute and offer. I can give love without expectation. I can use the gifts I have been given in ways that open up to me. I can work hard without expectations of accolades. I can search for what’s right and stay true to that even when the tides are against me. I can do the work of my spiritual callings knowing that this me, this soul that is me, is what I will be when I shed my body one day but that work of preparation starts here. I can have the faith in a Creator that thought the small things I do with courage were important enough to bring me here and keep me here for the years I’ve been around. Who am I to doubt such brilliance? 

I can walk in the forest and be in the forest and be of the forest. I can live as a whole, an imperfect, dinged up whole.  I can look for the real people and be in relationship with them. The ones that let you see their sadness. The ones that get some of it right, some of the time and fail miserably at other times. The ones that create and love and work hard for things bigger than themselves.

Here I am, “slowdown farmstead” writing about all the things that I have learned. I am not some enlightened soul. I just have a few years under my belt and was given lessons and hardships and messages that profoundly changed my understanding of life. If I had a nickel for every person that has told me how “profitable” I could be if I would take what I’ve built and write cookbooks or stick to a niche, I would be rolling in the dough. I think there’s enough people doing that. It’s not me. It’s not the point. Such a thing would feel, to me, like I was feeding the mechanistic beast. I have always resisted being broken up into my useful parts. I have always resisted doing that in my relationships with my husband and children and friends. I have no interest in the polished presentation of a human. Give me it all and let’s see what we can do in that quagmire together. 

You can drink all of the structured water, bask under the UV rays, dim your EMFs, clean with baking soda, only wear organic materials on your body, breathe good air, lift weights and move until the cows come home, (and you should) but if your mind is full of poison and your heart is closed to light, it’s all for naught. We are not meant to chase others for answers that they have come to by chasing others for answers. An endless relay race, each person passing the baton after taking their lap. You are so much more than fragments. You are a luscious whole, here for us all. Let us have you as you were intended to be. Let you have you in all of your searching, wandering, wondering glory. Find the dark, empty places and light a candle. Stay for a while. Open yourself to the flow of life where answers come through us if we’re still enough to listen. Where prayers are answered. Where direction is offered. Are we home to receive the gifts that come or are we off looking for another shiny bottle-cap?

Slowdown Farmstead is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Slowdown Farmstead is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Slowdown Farmstead is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Slowdown Farmstead is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Slowdown Farmstead is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Slowdown Farmstead is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Slowdown Farmstead is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.