Slowdown Farmstead

In this final episode of our three part adventure, we discuss more pickles, quandaries, and strategies in the sometimes challenging relationships in marriage, parenting, and extended family. Hubs and I gibber-on about what’s worked for us, things we’ve learned, what seemed like failure at the time (but turned out to be pretty good), and offer up some en…

In this episode we chat about boundaries, unhealthy relationships, evolving relationships with children as they grow, finding time for each other when kids are small and a ton more things I’ve forgotten. Hope you all find a few helpful nuggets in what we share.

On making decisions, finding your person, discipline, the toll of longterm illness, raising independent/confident kids, a wholistic approach to health in a sick care system, and more. Hope there’s a nugget or two for anyone that listens.

I spent some time with a dear friend of mine this week. He’s a bit older than me, in his sixties now. A lifelong farmer that plants his fields with horses still. It had been too long since we had seen each other. In that space of time our worlds, each of them, had forever shifted on their axis. Our daughter had died. His beloved wife had died. I am not the same person. Neither is he. Never again. 

I was a bit nervous to meet this new version of him. Could I be comfort? Could I be willing to sit in his fresh, jagged pain as an offering. Could I be what he needed?

We stood in his strawberry patch with the heady sweet smells wafting up around us. One of my daughters picked berries. I watched her, remembering that the last person in those fields with me was my other daughter. My Mila. The daughter who finds me now not with her voice and the touch of her fingers, but with a voice transmuted from unknown places as messages to my heart and a touch that comes through the winds into my hair, and across my face to dance in-between every eyelash. She is there, but she is not sitting on the earth beside the strawberries. That is my other daughter there.

As we drove to my friend’s house that morning, I told my daughter, my Ella, about the last time I was there. I told her about her sister’s exuberance for the bounty of endless, sweet strawberries, shoulders warmed by the sun. She ate as much as she picked and then she ate some more. It was a scorching hot day. The only sound was cicadas reverberating off sunbeams. When we were done, our flats of strawberries overflowing, my friend’s wife, the one now dead, insisted that we share in some strawberries and homemade ice cream she had made from their cow’s fresh cream earlier that morning. Somehow, Mila mustered the fortitude to eat more strawberries. An enormous bowl with an enormous amount of ice cream. We sat at a small table in the grass under the shade of wild lilac bushes. Our entire drive home, my dear Mila, was doubled over with a tummy ache. She swore off strawberries for a lifetime. She ate strawberry shortcake with us the next day - extra whipping cream for her - as always.

Now two of those four people are gone. Off to Terra Incognita. Soon enough, the other two will be joining them. But not yet. Not now. Now was there, feet covered in strawberry vines, facing my friend.

I stood close, speaking with him. Every now and then, each of us bending over and reaching for a berry we spotted and couldn’t resist. We spoke about horses and cows and experiments with breeds we were excited by. We spoke about the pace of summer and our families. I asked him how he was, how he has been since his wife died.  When he said “Oh, I don’t know” I asked for more. I stepped into that shaky voice that tried to hold back pain. I couldn’t leave him there alone with that. “Tell me. I’d like to hear.”

That’s a load, isn’t it? To saddle up to someone so entrenched in pain and to be there. We don’t do that much. I learned this when our daughter died. Most people can’t. Many people won’t. They think that asking and speaking of your love is cruel or painful. That’s what we tell ourselves - to let sleeping dogs lie. As if the grieved will forget if we don’t bring it up. It’s a cop-out on our end, that’s all. We can choose that path, but we should be honest with ourselves about why we do it. About who we are actually protecting.

At our eldest daughter’s wedding recently, a family member came to my husband and I privately and told us that he just wanted us to know that he empathized with how hard it must be for us on such a day - celebrating incredible joy with two of our daughters in the glaring absence of another. He opened up that space to us, told us of his love for our girl, spoke her name. It was such a generous and loving gift - to be met in those dark corners most shy away from. It touched us deeply and we will keep that act of generous kindness with us forever. And because we will, because we know, we have the capacity to offer it to another. 

It doesn’t mean every interaction should be one of deep conversation, but there, in that strawberry patch, with my friend who has little family and lives a solitary life, I understood that all I had to give was my open heart and my ear. His pain was my pain. His sadness, mine. I have been heartbroken.I have lived in anguish. I still do. I live in anguish and I live in joy. The joy found in the deepest of despair. I live in the fluid of life now. In there, somewhere, is the gift I could offer to my friend - my vulnerable heart, willing to take on more. I will not run from his pain because there is nothing more that I’m afraid of. I cannot be mortally wounded because I already am. I am here and I am not. I am not afraid. 

I saw tears in his eyes and I kept looking. I heard about the suddenness of his wife’s death. How he was unsure of how to do the things he did when she was at his side. The whole rhythm of his days has dissolved. He is trying to figure out who he is now, how to be, how to move through the life that remains his alone. He has lost weight, too much weight. He can’t figure out how to stop losing weight. “I added an extra potato to my lunch today”. She did all of the cooking. She did the nurturing. She did the organizing and the relationship building. She was home to him. 

He stopped talking and apologized for “going on”. I asked for more. We often feel self-conscious about sharing our hearts with another in this culture. We don’t want to burden other people. We feel guilty for taking up too much space or time. We hold onto our darkness lest we dampen another’s light. All of us, propping up this b******t idea that presenting a facade is the acceptable, good manners we must all uphold. And then each of us, retreating to the isolation of our homes where we block out our loneliness with noise and visuals and distractions of all sorts. If we could all just start being a little more real, a little more courageous, we could be the conduits of grace and love we are meant to be. 

I want to be that. I want to be the woman capable of great feats of bravery. Not of scaling mountains, but of a willingness to let my pain be exacerbated by the pain of another. Not because I’m a sadist, but because I have come to understand that this is love and love is the all and the everything.

His wife’s devoted dog barks too much now. He is off-kilter, frenetic, always searching and pacing, smelling for hints of a trail. “He’s always looking for her. I wonder when that will stop”, my friend said.

“I used to go into the kitchen at lunchtime and there would be a good meal for me.”

We could hear those words and think them callous or diminishing. I wept when he said them. So simple and pure. Here, a man of the earth, plain and hard working, that was nourished for decades by the food that passed through his hands and into her’s. She in her farmhouse kitchen, cooking food that honoured their place, his efforts, God’s creation, the soil and the animals. She, feeding her man. An act, as ordinary as this very moment, practiced again and again. A sacred ritual manifest in the robust wellbeing of her beloved’s life. Meals into days into weeks into months into years into lifetimes. Her lifetime. Until the end of her lifetime, but not his. Now he sits at an empty table in a still kitchen. The love of his woman no longer fills him.

We kept talking. He asked me when things started to fade. Pain, he meant. “It softens,” I told him, “but it never leaves. Not one bit. You will come to know how to live with it. And you will draw closer to God. And you will find her in places you would have never imagined possible before.” 

We hugged each other. And in our embrace, his thin frame, slumped and fragile. It wasn’t the body I have hugged many times before. Neither is mine. I gave him a book and promised to call. We made future plans, most important plans, around cow testing and pasture ratios and cross breeding that I will need to be there for. All sorts of rues to just be in each other’s company. To just be his friend, however he needs it.

I went to my friend’s farm with thoughts in my head about the path our planet is on. I have been struggling with my understanding of the issues of our day. We are bombarded with information on the seeming collapse of tradition, culture, morality, and a dissolving common sense around the worth of the good and the innocent. We are slathered with lies about who or how we can be saved. I have chosen to focus on my spiritual development in this time of their mad drive towards transhumanism. What am I if not machine? I am human. I am spirit. I am more than the sum of my parts. I am a symphony.

But I have been struggling with how. How do I allow the will of my Creator to move through me? What is meaningful enough to combat the steamroller vision of the maniacal and lost that seek to destroy all that is nature, all that is Godly and mystical and wondrous, and replace it with concrete and digitization and fragmentation? I found it. I know it. It came to me in a strawberry patch with an orchestra of cicadas chanting the answer, a beloved daughter picking strawberries with the ghost of her sister near, and an older man, a friend, offering me his trust and softness.

It’s all there. It’s all here. All of all. And nothing is more powerful. 

p.s. If you’re interested in seeing a documentary that was made of us, our farm, and our sharing of life and death as we have come to understand it, you can do so here.

Everyone has their own motivation for trying to detangle from our systems. For many, the last few years have been eye-openers. What they thought was turned out not to be. Securities felt a little more shaky. Truth, no longer felt all that true. Rugs were pulled out and curtains drawn back. The great illusion dissipated into the air like morning fog.

For us, it was different. Our illusions were long gone. We were conspiracy theorists long before anyone used the word. We were anti-vaxxers long before they came up with that moniker too (and nobody cared back then). There was a reason we wanted to own land twenty years ago. And those reasons were known by many of the old-timers in our circle who also owned land and remained as self-sufficient as possible knowing the basics of “never trust the government”. It’s more than the government that’s the problem, of course, but the sentiment of independence from systems is sound.

In our part of the world, Covid side effects included a rush on rural properties and exploding housing costs. I hear it was like that in most places. Despite the mainstream narrative, it seems that many people realized how costly the return on their dependance. Where once dollars poured into trips and shopping, there was suddenly a run on vegetable seeds, backyard chicken supplies, land, and certain herbal medicines. That’s great. That’s fine. But that’s not the time to be doing those things.

When we first started looking for our first farm, it was with an eye to continue to build the skills and life necessary to feed and shelter ourselves. In part one of this essay, I explain how that started happening well before we found our farm. Through wonderful teachers, mentors, and guides in our lives, we came to understand the lies of our system. We raised our children without medical doctors and vaccines. We learned about our bodies and health in robust ways and implemented that knowledge in how we ate, moved, and lived. We never did get wifi and still don’t have it. We never did get sucked into the norms or practices of our culture. We just did our own thing. Sometimes that was lonely. Sometimes it felt isolating. But a used muscle gets stronger and as I stood in my decisions, my confidence grew. People thought we were weirdos for wanting to find land and farm, but I was used to being the weirdo by then.

I wanted to provide a bit of this background to demonstrate that while the lockdowns and mandates, the vitriol and segregation, of the Covid years woke a lot of people up to the direction the sociopaths are steering this ship, it was not a surprise to many. Nothing new is happening here, we’re just marching along with new scenery. We’re closer to the end than the beginning. Just because we can go into a store without a mask on doesn’t mean it’s all gone away. In fact, things are progressing faster than ever. I don’t say this to scare anyone. I don’t think fear is the right emotion here, but if you do feel fear, I would direct you to focusing on your spirit over a vegetable plot. If you’re lucky, you can do both.

It was with our understanding of the need to take responsibility for our food, our health, and our children’s education that we understood the need in our lives for a farm. When we finally found that farm, we had the land but no tools. We needed animals and machinery. We had just purchased our farm, but we then needed to purchase everything to make a farm work. We had very limited funds. All three of our children needed our time, guidance, love, and, yes, money. In those first few years on our farm, we were constantly weighing the costs of something against what it would bring us.

Our farm needed to make money in order to pay for the things we needed to save money. An example of this is haying equipment. We didn’t have any. In order to save money, we needed to cut our own hay to feed our animals instead of buying it. In order to cut our own hay, we needed equipment. In order to pull that equipment we needed a tractor. It’s a great tsunami of costs if you let it be. One thing begets another. In order to have beef for us, we needed to raise enough beef cattle to sell them. In order to sell enough beef, we needed to have that haying equipment for winter feeding and we needed to buy thousands of dollars worth of electric fencing reels and energizers and posts just to move them around. The reality is that these start up costs are significant if you’re working within a tight budget. Things have to be continuously

It took us close to five years to find our first farm. I suppose the first few years of that time we were more about investigating than actually being in the realm of possibly buying. We were collectors then, collecting information and understanding. We were collecting the fodder we needed to build the reality of a farm we wanted but had no idea how we would ever get. We were conspiring in a new reality for ourselves. In this essay I want to both get into the logistics of how we were able to buy our first farm, including our must-haves and deal-breakers, and I also want to get into what was the bigger part of us finding our new ways of being - the mindset we had (and have) that consistently brings things into our lives in ways unimaginable to us.

There was a time in my childhood where our family lived in a home in the country, tucked into a corner of my grandparents’ farm. It was the most formidable and missed time of my life. A pivotal turning point happened in my young life when our house there burned down and we moved into the city. From that moment forward, everything in my life changed. I never stopped dreaming of my days watching clouds while lying on a bed of wheat in the fields or the song of the prairie birds.

As an adult it was my passion around nutrition and feeding our family that saw me return to school to become a nutritionist and, even better, meet many farmers. My husband’s military career meant frequent moves for our family which necessitated finding new farmers to source our raw milk and food wherever we went. This meant that we were able to visit all sorts of different farms and build relationships with farmers of all ilk. Over time, I started volunteering on the different farms that fed us. Sometimes that was just pulling weeds and shovelling poop. It didn’t matter. It gave me access to conversation and discussions around why some farmers did things differently than others. I started to build my understanding of livestock care and challenges, gardening and foraging. I was returning to a relationship with the earth.

I soon came to learn that every farm is its own ecosystem. Or at least it should be. How one farmer raises and milks their goats will look quite different from what another does. Maybe they found that different fencing works better on their patch of land. Maybe one prefers a breed another dislikes. One may struggle with parasites and the other has no issues at all. I learned to ask a lot of questions and listen. What else was there for me to do at that time? Like I said, I was a collector. We weren’t in a situation to own our own farm, heck we didn’t even know where we would be living a year down the road, but there was plenty I could do to get ready for the day when I would have my own place.

How we would ever have our own farm, I had no idea. We were cash strapped and renting military housing. The “reality” surrounding me was struggling to keep up with our pricey grocery bills (real food was not something we ever compromised on) and raising three young daughters with a husband that was frequently away. I remember counting the days he was gone one year and it amounted to somewhere around 300. But I’ve never really been one to get bogged down in the things I have no say over. There was plenty I could do and that’s where I set my sights.

In the building of relationships with our farmers, I was able to spend hours upon hours of learning directly from the source. It’s been my experience that the offering of some physical labour, being dependable and humble, and a willingness to learn has been what has reaped the most benefits for us as a couple in our learning journeys. So few people want to do that anymore. It’s like deferring to someone else’s knowledge somehow negates your own. Such shaky little egos we have. Don’t do that. Be humble. Close your mouth. Listen. Learn. Do.

In addition to learning from our farmers, I spent years sitting on library floors with my daughters. They reading their treasures and me reading everything I could on farming. I read about soil. I read about minerals. I read biographies. I read animal care books. I read books from the 1800s to see how they used to do things. I read about the threats to seed and food from agro-chemicals. I got involved with fighting for raw milk and small farms. We rented plots of land to grow our own summer produce on. We supported CSAs and worked with them when we could. I started a buying club for organic fruit, eggs, organic grocery products, raw milk (shhh…), and even things like organic, authentic olive products direct from Greece and preserving jars. If I wanted it and it wasn’t there, I got it going.

I also took courses at that time. I took courses on alternative funding and working models when starting a farm. I took courses on animal husbandry, rotational grazing, holistic management, animal butchery, permaculture, and biodynamic farming principles and approaches. I was living on a military base with zero savings in the bank, a little compact car that we squished our family of five into, and no prospects of making that farm happen. I just knew it would and I kept moving in the direction of my passions. The details weren’t mine to solve.

Years later, I came to understand that in every course or workshop, I was aligning myself with the reality not as it was, but as I knew it would be. I can’t emphasize the importance of this enough - no matter the subject matter. We bring into our lives what harmonizes with our every atom. If we are aligned with hopeless despair, prepare to be despaired. If we look for the ugly and hopeless because we think that’s what the world is, well then, we’re right. That is the world we create.

I now understand how important this perspective was (and remains to be). At the time, I just followed my hunger and filled it in as many ways as I could. I thought it was important to learn while I could so when I did get some land, I would be ready to go. I knew that we would be older when we finally got to buy land. I was already in my thirties at that time. We didn’t have a farm to inherit. We wouldn’t be getting any windfall from good ole’ Aunt Martha. It was all going to have to come from us. Somehow.

I’ve come to learn the lesson of co-conspiring with God again and again in my life. Some people call it manifesting. It is that, yes, but it’s not as if it’s some magical trick where you keep dreaming of a yellow Lamborghini and you wake up one morning and there it is in your driveway. For me, bringing the things into my life that I would like to is simply the alignment of knowing in my bones that the dream of my heart is a calling. And a calling is divine. And Divinity does not make mistakes. I just need to

The “bucket list”. What do we want to do before we die? What do we want to see and experience? What do we want to eat or jump off of or ride in? I’ve always found a “bucket list” to be a little befuddling. It’s a good way to focus on the material of a fictional future, but what about what really determines the quality of our lives? Why set our sites on stuff in lieu of where we actually have power and providence?

I submit to thee, good reader, a suggestion that has actually made my life better in the real, every day. It’s a daily bucket list. It’s a bucket list with a focus not on the circumstantial but on the mighty pieces we can collect and give away throughout our days. It’s a shift from the entertainment of life to the being of one. Instead of what we want to do, it’s a continuous reflection on who we want to be.

The illusion of a bucket list is that there’s some possibility of a far-off or a “in good time” that awaits us. A daily bucket list is honest. It promises you no more than this moment. You don’t even get to the end of the day. You get now. There’s a reciprocity there - the honest truth for your honest acceptance of it. And then what? How will you be in this very moment? And if you get more than that, if you get to lay your sleepy head on your pillow this evening, will the thoughts that walk you to slumber be ones of satisfaction and gratitude? They will be as you’ve seen your day. How did you see your day?

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. - Annie Dillard

My daily intentions are thus:

Daily, I do the things to take care of my body. I eat well. I move. I spend as much of my days under the sky with the earth underfoot. Not because some program or person told me to, but because I am indebted to this wondrous creation I get to move through life within. I live in my physical body with delight. My time with this miraculous body is short. I will move on from it and it will go into the ground. Imagine that? The physical of what keeps me breathing, my powerful lungs, will collapse. My heart, strong and true, will become motionless. My thighs, the thighs that have moved me through all manner of adventure and pumped wildly to allow me to outrun danger, will be still. All of my body will end. It ends. It will have served its purpose and then it will end. I will go on, leave it. But my flesh will feed the worms and the universes in the soil and then the birds and the deer until, finally, my body becomes all that will ever be and ever was on this planet. I hold this truth in my bones. I let it bubble up and permeate my complaints of my imperfections. Imagine spending time on how our jeans fit when these incredible bodies of ours allow us this time here to smell and taste and laugh and jump and climb and make love and feast and hug?

Daily, I learn. I look to minds brighter than mine to teach me. That may come in the form of reading. That may come in the form of humbling my ego and listening. I take courses and classes regularly and study things from a diverse group of subjects. I am a student of life. I want to learn. I am a voracious wisdom seeker. Teach me. I am here to learn. In every day, I learn.

Daily, I pray. Daily I interact with God in meaningful and substantial ways. Daily I reinforce the tethers of my spirit to the mystical and unknown. I don’t want to be so sure. I don’t want to look for all of my answers in the measurable. I’m okay with questioning and uncertainty. I believe in the answers given to my heart. I have come to know myself through my Creator. In every day I make time and space to balance the scales of who I have been told I am with who I know myself to be. It is an unending, ever-evolving process. But I am not the physical and I am sure to stay close to this truth. It’s easy in this world that sees us as machines to start believing such nonsense. Every day, I commune with and lace my soul into, the sacred and the divine.

Daily, I love. Loving through kindness. Loving through selflessness. If in a day I found ways to bring sweetness in the smallest of moments, I have lived as the Tara I want to be. If I kissed and teased and made someone laugh. If I complimented the smallest of acts and reached out for a hand to kiss or hold. If I said I was sorry. If I was bigger than my ego. If I made time to connect. If I showed interest in the story of another. If I told my beloveds how they are such beautiful mothers, talented seamstresses, generous friends, skilled artists, wildly creative, dependable providers. If I have done these things, I have loved. Love in actions to show the love in my heart.

My daily bucket list is simple in concept, but potent in application. At night, I go to sleep next to my steadfast soulmate, my life’s partner, my man. We go to sleep together, side by side. Into an unknown world we go, one that takes us away while our bodies continue to work. How miraculous is that? I always fall into sleep with my hand on my husband’s chest. I can feel his powerful heart thumping steadily mere centimetres below my fingertips. I will do this every night until I will do it no more. I remember that, too. I keep that truth close.

It’s good. It’s all so good. Yes, good enough for me.

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

p.s. I would love to hear how you craft your days to build your lives. I will be sending out a prompt in our chat today for everyone to share. Hope to see you in there.

We harvested two of our sheep this week. Our ram, “Gentle Gerry” and a Shropshire ewe named “Martha”. It was as most days are when we are to harvest our animals: solemn and serious followed by jubilation that only comes hand in hand with enormous gratitude. The moving from such a heaviness found in the act of killing something you have affection for to the time after, when the body that is left behind fills us with wonder and awe. The emotions are everywhere and diametrically opposed from second to second. It’s in that space, our lives, their deaths, that I’ve come to know a fullness in who I am and how I fit.

I remember the first time I walked one of my cows into an abattoir to be killed. She was a gorgeous, deep, red haired Highland with magnificent, regal horns that spread wide and reached, with a flair, to the heavens. Her name was Rosa.

I insisted on walking Rosa through the gates. I watched as she entered the fluorescent lit, white plastic lined room where they would shoot her between the eyes with a bolt gun. The room smelled of bleach. There were no windows. Under her hooves, plastic matting. She was wild-eyed. I watched as she stepped a foot forward, into the “kill-box”. I watched as she crumpled.

I made myself participate even though I would have rather dropped her off and drove away. I didn’t want that weight. I didn’t want to know. I made myself know.

Beautiful Rosa. Born on the soil of our land. Nourished by the grasses that were nourished by the soil. She had given life to sweet, slippery calves on that soil. All of Rosa’s every breath under the same blue sky. Hooves puncturing the skin of the earth into divots that little microbes would turn into whole universes.

And then one day, a trailer. And then there, surrounded by stainless steel, clanging metal, and white sanitized plastic without a single window to let in one lone ray of sunlight to rest on her long red hair as she died.

A perversion.

I learned how to harvest animals in the field. I learned how to shoot an animal in the head from a distance, while it chewed its cud or used its enormous tongue to rip grasses from the ground. Years later, with a farm of our own, we continued to harvest our own animals. But when we started selling our meat, we had to abide by regulations. Regulations and rules and laws that dictate that animal meat sold must be brought to abattoirs to be killed and butchered.

So, we stopped selling meat. We moved to a smaller farm.

To the uninitiated, it may seem that the tools needed to harvest one’s own animals include a hard heart and a courage out of reach to most. The truth of it is that what’s needed is a compassion beyond that for self. A compassion and duty-bound value to do what is right even when it’s the last thing we want to do.

That’s the hard part to convey. The hard part, but the most honest part of it all. We kill our own animals. We kill our own animals, the ones we have raised and nourished, been delighted by and worked so hard to ensure their good and fulfilling lives. We dedicate ourselves to the exchange of our work and energy, efforts and money, to give them all they could want and need to live in the fullness of their lives.

We name them. We scratch them. We learn their personalities. We come to understand the dynamics of their flocks and the hierarchies of their herds. We allow them to mother and protect and pass on their knowledge, wisdom, and vibrant health to their offspring. We keep our animals for a long time. Our cows die well into their teens. Our steers years older than most. We do all of this and then we kill them.

There’s nothing strange in that. No misalignment. Nothing wrong in what I’ve written. It is nature’s design. A law above any. In knowing the natural world, really knowing it, we must be humbled by the brilliance. We are not smarter. We are not so evolved, so civilized that we can pluck out parts, rearrange, and improve. That’s not what we’re doing when we decide to do things our way. We’re just looking for shortcuts and convenience and profit and then we mislabel it all as progress.

Doing what’s right when it’s easy is no measure of character. We have far too much of that in the world today and look where it’s bringing us. It’s doing the hardest of the hard, the toughest of the tough as you see it that matters. It’s in the stretching of your every fibre to go beyond what you want to do and aligning yourself with the noble truths of Creation that we come to know what lies dormant in us all. We honour the innate intelligence and gifts generously bestowed to us by aligning ourselves with that higher, worthy place over the limitations of self.

That’s what I have learned, and continue to understand in my participation in nature as an integral part of nature, according to her laws. My separation, my individuality is an illusion I was sold long ago. I was raised to see the twisted as straight and the true as harsh. We all were. By stepping out of my emotions and into humility and servitude to the sacred, I have come to find what I didn’t even know was lost. It’s been through that willingness to serve the design of Creation instead of the design and offerings of man that I have come to experience great peace and love in my life in ways that theoretical offerings or intellectual reason cannot offer. When I live in God’s design, I live in God.

Nature and peace is in the holy blood of a lamb running over my fingers as surely as it’s in the waves crashing ashore on a tropical beach. In fact, there is infinitely more beauty and more meaning in the nourishment of that lamb than in any instagram-worthy image of a lone soul walking forlornly on a beach. That lamb brings with it the nourishment of body for my body. That lamb gives life for life. That lamb designed by an ever-loving God to fill me with all that I need so that I can move through the world to do the work I am called to do.

I now know myself beyond what I have ever known. I see in myself so much that I was blind to. I’ve been able to understand myself as spirit and flesh and human and animal, as crucial and needed in this time and place as the fertile soil below my feet and the sun crowning my head in a hallowed ring of warmth.

I am needed. Fully.

You, too.

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

Further resources:

* Dr. Chris Palmer, mental wellness and “Brain Energy” book

* Peak Human podcast on sleep, “Unlocking the Natural, Limitless Pill”

* Analemma structured, coherent water

* German New Medicine - food intolerances and other habituated patterns

* Mother’s Best Liver Pills small, independent farmer mama sourcing liver directly from farmers she personall…

Further resources I mentioned:

* On learning more about the fundamentals of ancestral nutrition: Weston A. Price Foundation and Price-Pottenger (both have extensive online libraries). Nourishing Traditions is a great book …