Slowdown Farmstead

Hey folks, please access the video that accompanies this essay, along with the artwork and commenting function, here.

Last year we decided to eat foods solely from our farm. That includes the meat and milk products of our domesticated animals, the wild game we can hunt on our land, the vegetables and fruits we grow and preserve, and all of the wild plants that we use for food and medicines. We were already pretty close to eating all of our food from the animals we raised and then butchered right here, but we wanted to see how we felt and the things we would learn when we took the ‘off-farm’ foods, even if they were just 10% or so of our diets, away. 

What I expected to happen is that we would have a heightened awareness of the seasonality of our food. We were already doing a pretty good job of eating seasonally. Before we had our first farm, I worked as a nutritionist and we purchased all of our food from local farmers. We bought all of our meat and poultry in bulk, at fall harvest, because we understood that the “harvest” of food included animals. It’s not just the grain and potatoes. We want to harvest animals in the fall, after they have had a season of nourishment on quick growing, sweet grasses of abundance. Just as most of us harvest our cool weather storage crops in fall. So we expected to have even more of a connection to that seasonality. Feast and famine. No more organic lemons. No more coffee. No more dairy in winter. A lot less eggs with no farmer friend to save my hide when I needed more. In other words, my mind was anticipating scarcity. But scarcity is not what I got.

Farming has been one of my greatest teachers. I have learned more farming than I have learned anywhere else in my life. One of those enduring lessons is that every day a compromise must be made or, if that compromise is too expensive compared to the value you hold, something must be surrendered. For example, I understand that having a dairy cow in our cold winter climate necessitates feeding said cow some grain throughout the winter if I want fresh milk all year long. If I don’t supplement her usual grass only diet, the cow, who I have made the decision to raise with her calf, not separated from it, will quickly lose condition while her body struggles to keep up with feeding a calf and our household while using its fat stores to keep her warm. There is nothing more heartbreaking than an emaciated milk cow, giving all she has, skeletal in her generosity. 

So then, with my dairy cows, I have the choice to remove the calf and use the milk solely for us. I’m not willing to do that. I want that calf to be as vibrant and healthy as possible. We will eat or milk that animal one day. I can also continue milking with the addition of grain. I’m not willing to do that either. So, there’s no milking in winter. By removing the recent innovations in farming, we can see the seasonality of even our animal foods. Does it make sense that we have endless eggs, as abundant in winter as in spring and summer? Of course not, but with lights burning through those poor commercial bird’s eyes 24/7, we can take all those eggs all year long and she’ll be dead in a year. Probably a grace given her life. I could touch on every animal and explain how our recent turn to grocery stores over farmers for nourishment has cost us, the animals, and the planet exponentially. We want everything throughout the year and the cost of that style of production is enormous.

Of course, I knew all this before we decided to rid ourselves of those extras in our diets. I expected that I might find a few differences and have to make adjustments in my cooking repertoire. What I didn’t think about beforehand was how much deeper I was going to be pulled into the natural world around me, how that would feel, and how I would come to understand myself and my home. I live in a box on my home. That box is a house. My home this land. Strange, these houses of our ours, filled with all the things that make us ill and separate us from what makes us well. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for their lovely, warm shelter. Still, it behooves us to remember that they are a wedge between us and our real homes in nature and that we need to work every single day to be a part of where we belong, even if it is just sitting under a tree or watching some birds with our feet in the grass. We are beings of light. We need the infrared sun to anoint us. We need the water in our bodies to be clear and structured. We need to dig our toes into the earth to remind us, to feed the ghosts of our ancestors who live within us, starving for real nourishment.

What has really impressed itself upon me over the last many months, has been the difference in how my body feels eating foods of order and light that resonate with where I live. That sounds “woo”, I know. I will attempt to make it less so with little enthusiasm (mostly because I don’t really care about the “woo” entering my conversations, I quite like it actually). In everything we bring into our bodies - the food, the water, the air, our lovers - a message. Everything is information. Everything comes with a tale to tell. 

In my twenties I thought that all of the necessary energy we needed was found in food and water. Eat healthy food and drink lots of water. Stay hydrated. Exercise like a beast and you will look and feel great. And, truth be told, in my twenties, that’s about what it took. 

In my thirties, I saw the need for some refinement. Yes, healthy food, but the water was even more important than I thought. I gave up the water filters and distiller and we started going to springs to collect our water in glass carboys. Movement wasn’t all about grinding myself at every workout, some recovery was needed. Nature was the walks and hikes we took in the forests and trails. We sat in parks and had picnics. Nature was beautiful, but separate from my experience of life. Food, as I saw it, needed to be healthy so our family could be healthy. That’s why I purchased our food from farmers. That’s why I started working and volunteering on farms. I wanted to know, intimately, what went into raising and growing good food.

But in my mind back then, food was still about measurable nutrients and macros. It was still “good” if it was organic and “bad” if it was processed. I was still agreeing to the measures and values put on “nutrition” by the powers that be even when I knew there was more. Why was the carrot from one farmer so much sweeter and deeper in that carrot smell and flavour than the carrot of another? Why did the meat from one farm taste bland and feel dull in my body, but we ate with relish the fatty, deeply flavoured meat raised by another farmer? Those were the things I started to question and understand. 

By the time I reached my forties, and we had a farm of our own, I started to slowly understand how our modern farming practices came with dictates. Whether it be organic or free range or pasture raised, it doesn’t matter. In farming, if you want to actually make a living, a compromise of your value set comes. We sold grass fed and finished beef. That meant bringing our animals to the abattoir. That meant that no matter how we raised them, the last few hours of their lives were ones high in stress. That meant stress hormones were pulsing through their flesh when they were killed. We’re supposed to pretend that doesn’t mean anything to us when we eat them. We always killed and butchered our own meat, but anything sold had to be killed and butchered in an abattoir to be legal. 

This is just one example of many that had us make the decision to move from farming to homesteading. Since making that decision, there have been a myriad of other new decisions that get hidden in the farming model. In farming we could justify our decisions, even when they weren’t aligned with our principles, as being necessary for the bottom line. We needed to produce a certain volume of food because feeding people is what allowed us to stay afloat. Now, we have to be very calculated and smart with what we do because every penny we spend will bring back to us a return, yes, but not in money. Never in money. We spend our money to do what we do. In that way, some people would say it’s a losing investment. We have never measured investment in that way. Seems foolish to try.

And so it is, in my fifties now, that I am coming to more deeply understand food, our place in nature, these beautiful animals, and the abundance we receive from this land. But it’s only been through sacrifice and scarcity that I’ve really come to understand that abundance. And that’s why over this last year of eating solely from our farm, I’ve come to an even richer, more intimate understanding of what it is to nourish ourselves. What it is to live in union and communion with the holy lands that hold us. 

I am writing this on my porch right now. The sun is beaming through the ancient apple tree whose buds are just starting to open. There are two brown thrashers that like that tree. I’m certain they’re the same ones that have been here the last couple of years to lay their eggs in the protective limbs of such a magnificent home. One of my cows just mooed her morning moo. The same sun that is lighting up my fingers is warming her back. That same sun, telling my skin and eyes where we are in place and time, fills her body with the same information. The plants around me, growing wild and re-emerging from perennial plantings, are getting the same message. All of us, every living thing, beings of light.

This is what I have come to know, am learning with great humility, now that I am in my fifth decade of life. It’s not about macros and labels and certifications. It’s about the information the food and the water, the sun and the earth, carry into your body. We are great, electric beings and our batteries are charged with coherent information or we are drained with chaos and incoherence.

It’s been by eating solely from our farm over this last while that the static of misaligned information has been cleared and I’ve been better able to listen and connect to a feeling of resonance within myself. We wake up in the morning and stand on the earth to welcome the sun. We spend as much time outdoors as naked as possible. We walk outside every evening as the sun sets. We drink water that has been structured by the sun and the earth. We move outdoors. And now, all of the food we eat is from here, carries with it the familiar messages already stored in our bodies. The animal flesh is coherent and structured, honest in its delivery. All of the immeasurable is in place as it was intended to be. 

There can be between 50-200 different animals in one pound of grocery store beef. “So, what?”, some would say, “beef is beef.” Accurate enough when you’re measuring the infinitesimally small measures we have at our disposal. If you think a label of grass fed and the percentage of fat the ground beef has is what’s important, then yes, beef is beef. But what I’ve come to understand is the chaos or harmony that meat is bringing into our bodies. If food is information, consider the information received. Consider the stress hormones of 200 different animals in your body. Where did those animals live? What was their place? Was the sun on their backs at the same time it warmed your head? Did you breath similar air? Know the rain at similar times?

We are only now starting to understand the detrimental effects of living in our boxes with electric wires all around us, filling our environments with EMFs, and artificial light that destroys our circadian rhythm, our connection to place. If we are indeed energetic beings, and we are, we must admit that what we are seeing in our world - our poor health, obesity, and pervasive madness, is a result of the misalignment of ourselves with our true nature. It is not normal to be sick and depressed. It is common, but at its core, a telling symptom of how wrong we are living. We were put here to thrive in a perfectly made environment, but the smarter we get, the worse our species fairs.

Years ago, people were certain our declining health was from animal fats. So, everyone went low fat. That didn’t work out so well, so everyone went to whole grains. That didn’t do anything so everyone took dexatrim and did the grapefruit diet. Then artificial sweeteners and vegan hotdogs. Again and again, this mechanistic model - the body is a machine, had us stuffing down whatever it was that was going to save the day. Meanwhile, we slathered on sunscreen to ward off the sun’s essential rays. We injected our babies with vaccinations, more and more as time went on. We ingested bottles of antibiotics like candy for everything from ear aches to a fever. We cut out tonsils because they were useless. We pasteurized milk and mixed it with the milk of thousands of other cows. We put the animals inside buildings where the sun never told them a thing, blanketed them in the poisonous mercury filled fluorescent bulbs that glowed blue on their skin. We filled our homes and clothing with synthetic fragrances and chemicals. Rubbed chemicals into the skin and hair of our children.

Oh, but it was none of that. None of those things have contributed to the wild, rampant cases of mental illness in our midst. None of those things have anything to do with our withering species. We just keep chugging along, miserable but removed from how feeble we have become. Accepting that it’s normal to have joints cut out of our limbs and replaced with steel just like robots. Looking around us and shrugging at the state of things, all of us dulled by the rampant commonness of our sick society. “It’s aging, that’s what happens.” Ob-la-di, ob-la-da…

We’re as sick as the animals and land that we abuse. Of course we are. The web of life holds us all, for good or bad.

These are the things that I am seeing and feeling more deeply. As I experience what it is to get my nourishment from food that lives within the same ecosystem as I do, I have come to intimately understand how that nourishment feeds me in ways I haven’t truly known before. What I thought was just innocuous little extras in my diet were really static in my body. That static interrupted the messages my body was trying so hard to translate.

Does it really matter if I eat a handful of organic macadamia nuts from Hawaii? Well, yeah, I think it does. Does that mean I can never do that again? No, but I think it’s important that we all know what we are doing when we bring these things into our body. I think we should all know what it feels like to eat resonant foods, foods that hold the same sun and moon and water cycles that we do. What if we stopped being so hyper-focused on this macro and that macro and started putting our focus on the foods that we are in union with before they even enter our bodies? Familiar foods. Foods with messages in a language our bodies can understand. Imagine that, food coming into our bodies to nourish us instead of this chaotic mass that calls on our bodies to decipher and untangle.

Now apply that framework to processed food. Where does that food come from? How many animals are in those chicken nuggets? How many potatoes and canola plants in that bag of chips? From where did they come? Where did they grow and in what? Do they feed your body electrons or do they ask for your own just to make their way through your guts? Yes, of course it’s the seed oils and the glyphosate and the preservatives and all those ghoulish things. But it’s more than that. It’s deeper than that.

This is where the soul of seasonal eating lies. It’s not to reduce food miles or just to eat seasonally because it’s ancestrally appropriate or because it keeps our local food systems alive (although these are all essential and incredibly important). The crux of the matter is that eating seasonally, from food raised and grown around us, gives us what we need to remain rooted, connected, balanced. Our nourishment of food and water builds the body that can feed the spirit. We are not our bodies, no. But we are also not embodied in the fullness of our spiritual connection and understanding of this world when we are continuously pulled back into the limits of the body because it is struggling in whatever way that manifests.

The solution is to mimic, as best we can, what it has meant to be human since the dawn of time. Place. We must live in and from place.

Everyone wants the culprit of our time to be the seed oils, or the sugar, or the gluten. In reply, the food industry fries things in avocado oil, bakes things in artificial sweeteners, and fills the shelves with all manner of gluten free breads and cookies. It’s the great, and endless, magical swap. Every villain has a good guy to swoop in and save the day. But while I don’t eat those things, and don’t find any of them helpful in my body, I don’t think those are the main drivers of disease. They’re likely all members of the gang, but I don’t think there’s any one leader. We are in the infancy of our understanding of health, but we could probably all agree that with our modern way of living, our health has faded. The answers aren’t so easy. The answers are in the whole, big, full understanding of health, of feeding our bodies electrons not just through food and water, but through light and movement and love, and grounding our resonance to the earth. That is how we find our wholeness in health. 

In my mechanistic teachings of the body I came to see it as a machine that needed the right fuel to hum along nicely. That’s it, just fuel. Food is fuel, right? And we, the machines? I was recently walking my pups in the forest, thinking about a time, many years ago now, when my husband and I were on a farm tour on a biodynamic farm. The farmer was showing us his compost pile, delighting in scooping up huge handfuls of it and breathing in that composted poop with relish. He talked to us about bacteria and fungi, and the food web under our feet. My husband was in medical school at the time and commented, “It’s the exact same model in the ecosystem of our guts.” 

The same model. That idea stuck with me. God is a Genius Extraordinaire. Again and again we can see the sublime touch of our Creator through all that lives. As I trudged along in the forest, I was thinking about all that I’m coming to learn about our fascia. Some say it’s the biggest organ in our body - our information superhighway connecting every single cell to another. And imagine, we just slice through it like that’s nothing at all! And yet, our fascia interconnects everything in our body. It’s just like the mycelium running along the skin of our earth. Same model. Same critical importance. 

No, we don’t photosynthesize light like plants do, but we do photobiomodulate light. It is essential to every process that occurs in our bodies. From hormone production to fertility to the function of our every mitochondria. There is literally nothing in our bodies that remains excluded from the whole. 

I understand that there are many of you that don’t live on a farm. For years I have written about how we ate seasonally from farms on a meagre budget. I’ve even done whole podcasts on this subject to which I will link below. What I’ve known for a long time is that eating seasonally connects us to our local food systems and that it’s our local farmers that will always deliver to us the freshest, most nutritious foods we can get. For that reason, seasonality mattered. What I’m understanding now, is that this is only the tip of the iceberg. The immeasurable, the resonance, the messages of those foods - all these things you don’t even pay for but matter more than anything to your body, your mind, and your spirit, are the true gifts in eating from place.

The things I didn’t expect from this little eating experiment are the things that have been the most profound for me. I am a wee babe in my understanding of this place in which I’ve arrived but I’m open and I am learning. I feel grateful for the teachings of scarcity and evermore excited and able to receive the abundance without feelings of shame or guilt. Again and again, the pattern that has emerged in my life is the teachings of scarcity, of hardship, of heartbreak. Through them I have come to know abundance, pleasure, and deep enduring love. I don’t think it’s possible to fully understand these things in isolation. Everything is fleeting. All is to be experienced with acceptance and honour. This is how we participate fully in God’s design.

There are no labels for a cow who brings you milk when her body is fat with the abundance of sweet spring grasses and she is at peace with her calf at her side. A cow who produced milk as the sun rose and fell on her just as it did on you. A cow who ruminated with the earth under her belly, grounding her to the same place your bare feet walk on. Milk that was given and received within a mutual exchange of respect and honour. Milk that was chilled by the deep, cold water of the earth that satiates you both.

How do we quantify such things?  Easy, we talk about them without using the constraints of the models we’ve been taught to use. We acknowledge that we are truly infantile in our understanding of the world. We set as a basis of our thinking that it is not just the measurable that matters. Yes, science has determined that if it isn’t measurable, it isn’t anything at all, but we have the most sensitive, beautiful instruments ever created and we can all come to know these connecting, tender messages from within if we get quiet enough to listen. 

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

Further reading/listening:

In part one of this month’s Q&As we talk about artificial insemination, life without electricity, breeding animals, fencing, poisonous plants, feeding chickens, buying our first farm without any juicy inheritance or lotto winnings, the ongoing duck pond saga, herd management, and learning how to butcher your own large animals.

A few links for you:

Alright, this go around I answered questions on butchering tools, remediating soil, small farms vs. homesteads, hanging meat, milking a cow, cow illnesses, registering animals, feeding sheep, predation, silvopasturing, plucking ducks, goats, financially shifting from a farm to a homestead and more.

A few links mentioned:

Silvopasture book

Farming the Woods

The Resilient Farm and Homestead

A Soil Owners Manual

Restoration Agriculture

Dirt to Soil

Earlier this week I found myself in a darkened room singing a lullaby to my five month old granddaughter, Ana. It was, naturally, the same lullaby I sang to her mother, and then both of my other daughters, too. The same one my mother sang to me and my little sister.

I was singing to her, my chin on top of her sweet smelling head. She snuggled into me, resolving herself to her afternoon nap. She was so soft and warm, tucked so perfectly into my chest. In that moment there was nothing else. In that moment there was everything else. Lines blurred, time dissolved. I was with my sweetest new love. I was with all of my babies. My hands instinctively knew where to put themselves to cradle her to safety. My body rounded to hold itself around such a tender and soft little being. 

You are safe. You are loved. Go to sleep, little baby.

And in my arms, my own babies again. All of the love from one into another and another. Growing exponentially as all living things must. In that room with the ghosts of babies I sang that very song to. All of the babies grown and gone. All of the babies go.

When she woke up from her nap, we went outside. She spends most of her time outside. My daughter walks through the trees with her where Ana stares up into their branches, mesmerised by the sun dappling through their swaying limbs. She thrusts her chunky little arm out, asking to be brought close enough to everything that interests her so she can touch it. The flowering purple blooms of an eastern red bud is worthy of shoving in her mouth to figure out. A soft green leaf of a cedar or a clump of wild onion are all wildly interesting to her hands, always reaching and opening for the next of life’s lessons. 

I was sitting on a grassy knoll with her, playing with her soft, round little feet. Tracing her toes while she lied on the earth, content to watch the clouds for a time. I thought about my life up until that moment. Tried to unravel how it is that we get from one place to another. What happened? How is it that I, a woman in my fifties, came to find myself on this little patch of grass beside this pond with these turtles sliding into the water, with this sun on my shoulders, with this little human in Virginia? 

My life has not been an easy one. My life has been easier than some. My life has been harder than others. I have known deep loneliness and pain just like we all have. I have known divorce and the retreat of a father. I have lived through our house burning down, moving from home to home, country to city. I have been profoundly alone at a tender age. I have lived through the wildness of a lost teenage girl - giving myself away, reckless and thoughtless. I have been physically hurt by men I thought good enough. I have lived on my own, a refugee when my school and my parent kicked me out. I have worked at truck stops, fast food restaurants, and the army. I know the pain of infidelity and the agony of divorce. I have been poor and desperate. I have had to navigate the health care system with wrong diagnoses’ for my children. I have had to go to war for those children. I have lost friendships and had to end relationships that cost too much. I have lost babies, still growing in my womb. I have lived for close to a decade with chronic illness. I have moved from place to place, sometimes not having a friend in the world but the squirrel that offered to spend some time with me in the park. I have lived through the deaths of my mentors, my elders, my loves. I live through the death of my very own flesh and blood, my eternal beloved, my beautiful daughter, Mila.

And in it all there is more. I have felt the rough touch of a cow’s tongue on my cheek. I have slept on the earth with only the stars as my blanket. I have been pierced by the green eyes of a man amongst men who looked directly into me and proclaimed his undying devotion. I have felt little arms wrap around my thighs - me their safety and salvation. I have played in wheat fields and climbed mother pines. I have swam in the crystalline blue waters of rock quarries and the salty blue waters of the oceans. I have ridden white waters and old horses. I have nursed life back into dying animals. I have had life nursed back into me by bluebirds and dragonflies. I’ve spoken to bumblebees and visited with beavers. I have pushed myself beyond my perceived capacity and excavated depths I couldn’t fathom. I have watched three beautiful young girls I brought into this world become wondrous young women. I have loved. I have been loved. I have been taught. I have taught. I have learned. In the depths of despair, the light warm and bright.

Of all that I have known. From all that I have known. I am here. Here leaning over this round little thing who stares into me with such ease. Give her a smile and she gives it right back.

Why am I so deeply blessed?

I am not worthy and yet here I am with the softest of miracles in my arms.

I have known loneliness so I know a connection to my loves so deep and everlasting that it takes my breath away. I have known the heartbreak of broken trust so I live in the solemn value of my word and truth in my relationships. I have known being lost so I keep my own map. I have lived without an anchor, so I tether my soul. I know death so I know life.

We all have our own path in this life. Some seemingly easier, or maybe more straight forward than others. That’s not mine. For every drop of tender, a bucket of pain. And yet, here I am. It is spring. There is life. God reminds me, there is life. This is life. Easter is coming and all around me, the awakening. The buzzing of gluttonous bees feasting on dandelions. The bursting shoots of cottonwoods. The excitement of the nest building birds. “Life”, they sing, “we are here in service to life!”

All I have been given. All I have been given. All I can give. All I can give. The living and dying of moments, folded into a life until that life, my life, folds itself one last time. Until then, you will find me singing lullabies with tears in my eyes for babies that are here and and others that await. Singing with a heart broken open by anguish, but seeping in gratitude.

And now, back to the bumblebee rumble that plays out before me as I write. A tentative little salamander has come in to referee the match. Who takes the little rock pile they’re all after is anybody’s guess.

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

In part one of this essay I wrote about our mindset, perspective, and beliefs around being prepared for what may be coming. In this essay, I will get into the details of what that looks like in our lives. I will divvy up the information into six general categories: energy, food and water, first aid/medicines, clothing and shelter, tools, and community.

As I wrote in part one of this essay, our approach to building resilience to what may come centres around old school approaches for the most part. There’s a few higher tech things we use now in order to prepare for tomorrow (thinking of our freeze dryer here), but for the most part, we assume that should supply chains, systems, and/or governments start to crumble, we will be returning to the lamplight age.

There’s the other perspective, of turning to solar systems and other energy alternatives, but from our perspective, the cost of implementing these systems, along with their dependency on batteries, and the impacts of mining and production that these energy systems demand, makes them unappealing in our situation. Instead of investing in expensive systems that will only draw out energy use for a little longer, we have invested our dollars in old tools and structures that will allow us to live with relative ease, albeit without our blowdryer and washing machine. We’re okay with that.

Energy

Let’s say something has happened and the electricity is no longer. There’s a few possibilities here. First, the question must be asked if this is short term or long term situation. Short term, we have a generator hardwired in. That covers off that as far as freezers and water pumps and heat is concerned. But let’s say it’s long term - like weeks or months. Then what?

Well, first thing that would happen is we would be emptying our freezers if it was the warmer months. If it was cold outside, we wouldn’t touch them. Our freezers are outside and it’s cold here so that buys us time. I will write more about what we would do with that summer freezer rescue under the food category. 

Now for our house. We live in a climate of freezing winters and stifling summers. Our house is an old house. She’s seen the days when wires didn’t run through her walls. She was born in a time when indoor plumbing and electricity didn’t exist and to that time she will return. This can be a bit tricky and not every house is likely a candidate for such things. We have two wood stoves in our house. One is for heat and the other is a cook stove which also gives us heat. We’re considering buying a third for a part of the house that turns a corner and gets a little chilly. The stoves are situated so that

It wasn’t by chance that, many years ago now, we came to find ourselves owning a 200 acre farm with dilapidated buildings and a house built of pressboard and melamine. We had been looking for a farm of our own for close to five years by that time. Our list of all the things our dream farm would have dwindled with each prospective property we viewed. The reality of our budget and what was on offer brought us from the dreamy to the strictly necessary. We needed good water and good, mixed land. Beyond that, we were flexible.

But I want to back up a bit, to the time before we bought our first farm. We had been buying our meat and produce from farmers for years. We had our own plot at a local community garden where we grew and processed our own delights. I attended workshops on food preservation and raided our library shelves on all things farming and food. So when we started searching for our own little piece of rural heaven, the desire to grow and raise our own food was absolutely imperative to us. Having moved around the country so much with my husband’s job, we were in the unique position of having been able to meet with all sorts of farmers doing all sorts of things. Time working and volunteering on farms taught me that no two are alike. I saw many things over those years that steered me towards how I thought things should be done and I wanted to be the one to do them. 

During that time, the time of preparation for our farm to come, we were also paying attention to conversations around the direction of the world. There was no social media at that time (if there was we weren’t part of it), but there were books, conferences, and newsletters and, in retrospect, I can see that even mainstream radio (like our old national broadcaster, pre-woke) used to carry dissenting opinions and viewpoints. I suppose we were already quite inclined to question authority even back then. It seems a weird thing to say given we both served in the military, but in those days the military was composed of all sorts of people that came from all sorts of demographics. Many of them the salt of the earth and the ones close to the ground. We would accept the authority of a leader close to us but beyond that, well there were questions. Anyway, the point is that even back then my husband and I knew how wobbly the systems were around us. We had friends that were part of the “secret squirrels”. What we were being told and shown about our world was not a true representation about what was happening.

At that time I was aware of the threats against our food supply. Even then, ranchers were being surveilled and inspected for infractions like butchering their own meat or having more than the allowed 100 or 300 chickens (depending on what province you were on). There were stories of people being prosecuted for collecting rain water because the state decided they owned it (I hear these types of laws have spread since then). I brought our young daughters to the courthouse with me so we could watch as our justice system went after our raw milk farmer with the full weight of the law. We heard about things like “peak oil”. We read stories from people that were living lives separate from ones that the dependency systems require of us all. I had long left the medical system after two very serious misdiagnosis with our children. My first born had a serious vaccine reaction. That’s enough to get any parent questioning. Later I was told she had an exceedingly rare genetic mutation by one of Canada’s top geneticists. I will never forget the words, “If she was a boy, there is 100% chance she would die. As it is, she will likely be blind and mentally retarded within a year or two.” She didn’t have what they said she did. We found that out after close to a year of ongoing tests and “care” with the specialists we were assigned to. Years later, it was another chid and another misdiagnosis. Things like that have a way of opening your eyes about “experts”.

On one hand, we saw governments, institutions, and corporations growing exponentially in our society and on the other, the possibility of another way. We were meeting people that were taking on the full weight of responsibility for their lives. We wanted that for ourselves.

We spoke to our farmer friends about the direction our food supply was trending. We spoke to our elderly friends about the things that they could sniff out when others seemed oblivious. We read and attended farming conferences. All of our free time was spent in nature. We would go on long hikes with our kids that ended in picnics. I took courses on homeopathy for the family. I went on herbal walks with local wild women who showed me what to pick and when. We used wild medicines, food, sunshine, and even the cold to keep us well instead of what was on offer through allopathic medicine. We would explore the wild spaces around us, go to forests and lakes. Every time we left the city we would exhale. We lingered when we visited our farmers and we volunteered to shovel out barns and any other task we could be useful for. We learned the plants of our region by spending time foraging and observing. We hunted to fill our freezers. We read every book about gardening and farming, soil, permaculture, and biodynamics that we could get our hands on. The chasm between how we wanted to live and how we were living shrunk, even while we were still living in the suburbs.

In other words, like most everything in life, long before our dream came close enough to touch, we already intimately knew it. Everything we were aligning our lives with, we were breathing life into. That’s important. We weren’t terrified the end of the world was nigh and we had to start accumulating everything we needed to survive for a decade. We knew how we wanted to live and we did the things we needed to, the things we could do, to start creating that world. 

Our first years of farming included selling our grass fed beef, organic and pastured pork, and eggs. We live on our second farm now, a farm more suited to how we currently live, homesteading for us over selling to others. We’ve constantly raised and grown about 85-90% of the food we live off of. This year, we brought that number to 100% .

The last of our entangled systems, our mortgage, has been our prime focus these last few years. We didn’t inherit wealth or land. We had to buy our first and second farm with a mortgage. But debt is the most insidious type of dependancy and it’s been our aggressive mission to pay that off as quickly as possible. We have consistently increased payments and put any spare money onto our mortgage. We will be free of that ball and chain in just over a year. If there is anything I can suggest to young people starting out, it’s this: avoid debt like the plague. It is there to entrap you, to limit all future possibilities in your world. We were very vocal about debt with our children as they grew up. We taught them about how the debt system works and how it would plague them, limit them throughout their lives. When they were offered credit cards in their first year of post secondary, they opted for secured $500 cards instead. They bought cars by saving up the cash for them. They hustled and took on side jobs, some above, some under the table. There is freedom where there isn’t debt. 

We knew that we would have to get a mortgage and that we didn’t want to entrap ourselves in a life of endless payments. There are other ways around this and we know of people that were able to work out scenarios with farmers to trade their labour for land or to come to agreements where they could lease land for 100 years. There are all sorts of possibilities people can create when they leave banks out of the equation. For us, we had three children and we were coming from a place of military house rentals and continuous moving. We needed our own home and we knew what that meant so our only option was finding something within a budget that would allow us to actually crawl out from under that debt load within a reasonable amount of time. What’s the point of buying something to disentangle from the systems of dependance if you’re just continuously paying for that illusion? 

When we did find that good water, good land, poopy house and outbuildings I referred to earlier, it came with the price tag of $310,000. I don’t like it when people don’t give dollars when they’re talking about dollars, so for those of you that feel the same, there it is. To find a place within our budget we had to be willing to live in a certain area. That same size of land a short drive down the road was exponentially more expensive. We wouldn’t have been able to buy anything close to what we were looking for in many other provinces.

We had to put 20% down because the bank didn’t link any value to the land. Isn’t that something? We had saved most of that down payment and we had a friend that loaned us a portion beyond our savings with the agreement that we had a year to return the payment. We did return that payment with interest and from there on out, we aggressively tackled that mortgage while we used our energy and muscles to tackle everything else. We gutted the house and made it quite adorable if I do say so myself. We improved the farm buildings, put up fencing, and bought used farm equipment to cut our own hay. 

That old adage of needing to ‘spend money to save money’ can certainly feel true on a farm. Ever more applicable is that there is no such thing as free food on a farm, not even in hunting. Supplies, equipment, and tools are a necessary part of any food harvesting endeavour. The trick is in dwindling your list down to what is truly necessary and being comfortable with used stuff. From kid’s clothes to hunting equipment to farming tools and machinery, buying used allowed us to participate without going into debt. And, like I said, debt is the opposite of being prepared. Being prepared for what comes means the freedom and flexibility to adapt and make changes. Debt is quite literally being chained to a system.

Homesteading with the goal of producing all of your own food is tough. To do it with an eye to the future and being prepared for what comes, not just the next year, is indeed a lot of work. But like everything, it’s perspective that fuels the energy around that challenge. There are different types of people doing different types of things to make themselves feel more secure in a time when evidence dictates that our supply systems are changing, intentional or not. There are invested interests that want to see us living and eating quite differently than we are today. Their ideas around health and relationships are a perversion of the gifts we have been given by our Creator. To them, life is not sacred or precious, it is a thing to be moulded into their version of utopia. In the world they hope to create we put on goggles to participate in a fake universe where we can pretend to be the things we aren’t. We eat packaged, ready made meals that are nutrient deplete and make us sicker and fatter. We accept into our bodies anything and everything they tell us to. We buy what they say we can. Nature is something to admire in pictures but not participate in. As if we could ever be separate. If we don’t want to participate in this version of the world, what happens to us?

Ultimately, I don’t think those maniacs with the big dollars are going to be successful in their plan. I have great faith in my fellow human, both in their strength and their tenacity, but mostly in their capacity to love. But we prepare nonetheless. Not because we are living in fear, but because taking responsibility for ourselves and our future, in the limited way anyone can take responsibility for their future, is found in the actions of today. Whether it’s eating healthy today, exercising today, spending time with my loves, or tending my garden, how I spend today all contributes to my future self. We feel the same about preparing for a time when our systems fail. What that looks like, I do not know, but for us, there’s a few areas that we have been concentrating on over the years to build capacity and resilience into our lives. 

There was a time, before we were convinced of the ease and convenience of industrialization, where everyone had some level of responsibility and autonomy over their food, energy, and health. We forget that up until a few short decades ago, living meant carving out a living not applying for a government job. Jobs, as in working for someone else, seemed nonsensical. Why build the dreams for others when you have your own?  Even if there was dependancy, it was on our communities and families. Everyone contributed in some way. Everyone needed someone in some way. That’s the interconnectedness of a thriving society.

Then “progress” rolled in and said, “We can give you everything you need for cheap and you don’t owe us anything in return. Just pay for it. Use your money to free you from the drudgery of work.” And so we did. Women were liberated from the home. Men left the fields and moved to the cities. The ways of being and working on the land were wiped out in the blink of an eye. The great trap was set. 

Today we are wholly and totally dependant on the faceless entities that allow us to live in our houses. Some company somewhere pumps energy into our homes so we can be warm or cold. We turn on a stove and cook a meal grown and raised by people we will never see or machines we will never understand. We work for other people’s dreams so we can have the money we need to buy that food or the clothes we need to go to work. We ride in cars that only work if the oil or the electricity is turned on by the same system controllers. Warmongers hunt for conflict at every turn. Profiteers fill our bodies and our airwaves with all manner of untested poisons. Governments long ago forgot the people in the pursuit of their own individual ambitions. Institutions of learning stopped teaching children how to think and decided feeding them what to think was a good enough proxy. Now, the systems we are convinced are necessary for us to live are turning on the people for voicing dissent. Banks and payment processors are dropping customers for the sin of wrong-think. And now, the coup de grâce, the central bank digital currencies are being tested in many parts of the world all while the mainstream media bangs the drum of their salvation for all mankind. Everything is tentative, nothing is certain. 

Put all those things together and it can start looking bleak. I know. I get it. Even writing the paragraph made me feel dark and stormy inside. But while those things are true, they are not the entirety of truth. They may be true, but they are not reality. In other words, it is by living with and within truth that we can face those ugly things with more fortitude. I live close to the earth. I live close to my great loves. I spend time every day in my home in nature, even if that was, at one time, just sitting on the grass with my back against a tree while doing homework with my kids. I spend time with my God. In all of these things, the resetting and reminding of what is true. What is real and robust. The world, as Klaus or Gates or any of those wayward billionaires see it is a fiction. If I buy into that, if I feed that monster with my fear, I am participating in its creation as surely as they are. 

What motivates me to prepare for the crumbling of what is here is not fear. It is the confidence that beauty and love will prevail. How it will prevail, when it will prevail, none of us know. For years, friends and I have spoken about how the only way humanity would change is if the systems that have propped us up would crumble and we had to create new ways of being on this earth. Well, it seemed a little easier to say that then when we thought we would outlive those days. It looks like many of us will be here for that show after all. That’s not an accident and I believe we all have a role to play. 

I have this thing that I do when I’m feeling afraid or worried about something. It’s the “and then what” question. It goes like this: 

Oh my god they’re going to bring in these digital currencies and control our money and tell me I can only buy bugs and not let me leave my house if I don’t have my good social credit because I called Trudeau a donut and someone reported me and… 

And then what?

I won’t be able to leave my house. They will tell me what to do. 

And then what?

Yeah. Well, I’m not going to roll over and wilt. I’ll figure out other ways of living. The pioneers never used to leave their houses every few days, they didn’t need to. But what if they do start taking back farms and they tell me I can’t live here anymore?

And then what? 

I wouldn’t leave. 

And then what?

They’d try to remove me.

And then what? 

I wouldn’t go. 

Keep going here. Don’t stop if it gets scarier. In every scenario, when you play it out until the very end, you come to your finality. You drill into the deepest fears of being rejected, homeless, penniless, separated, and finally dead. Every fear or worry can be drilled down to one of two things: being alone and/or death. Both of which are fictions. Death is not an end and we are never alone. The only way to lessen the intensity of those dark places in ourselves is to enter them. Running from them only intensifies what lives there. Go in. Stay in there for a good while. Visit often. Light a candle or two. Look around. Bring some warmth and love into those dark crevices. The more you can interweave your shadow into your life, the less power anyone or anything has over you. 

The whole covid debacle ran on the fuel of our collective fear of death or being ostracized. Even in the world of “prepping” we see people buying hazmat suits or nuclear fallout structures. At what point do we say, “Ya know, if there’s going to be a nuclear bomb, it might just be better to die with everyone else than be the lone two or three people roaming the earth or living like weasels for a few painful months.” 

Those doomsday scenarios are necessary to think about, if only to get to that place of acceptance of the finality of such things, but they do us and our world no good to stew in. Take action. Prepare. Control the things you can.  Like I said, we are hopeful and genuinely believe that we are going to come out of this time into a new era of our evolution as a species. But that doesn’t mean burrowing our heads into the sand and pretending all is as it appears. We have been shown and it’s up to us to see. 

All around us, there are gifts from the last three years. People are starting to see that all is not as simple as they thought. Things are happening. Unplug from the static and you can feel it all around you. That’s where we need to spend our time and our energy in being co-conspirators in this unfolding new story of humanity.

Just as in natural world, for we are also the natural world despite the illusion of modern day life,  new life requires the decomposing of the old. We must first live through that decomposition. That’s how I see this time. The decomposing of the fallen and the withering. But look around. All around us, as the towers heave and tumble and the smoke fills our eyes, there are things happening. Go to the earth, get close to the ground. See the blooms pushing up through the ashes. Listen for the birdsong. There is life, abundant and joyous all around us.

In order to carry us through this time of transition, my husband and I have considered all facets of our lives and how dependant we are on the systems around us. We’ve considered the costs of investment today with the benefit of reward later. Our approach, mostly, has been to use the wisdom of our ancestors as a guide instead of the technologies that are on offer today. We’re not luddites, but we have noticed that many of the technologies of today, especially around energy systems, require a dependency of their own sort. We make decisions both on how we live today and how our lives would change in the future should those systems we are propped up by today collapse tomorrow.

In our goal to be free of dependancy on systems, we’ve considered everything from our food, medical supplies, real physical books, tools, ammunition, lighting, fire, medical supplies, energy, medicines, food preservation and storage, water, and clothing. We’ve only just now started really digging into money, but we have long considered goods for bartering. There are many ways to tackle these issues. We feel secure in our approach. We do what we can and then we let go of the things we have no control over. The stress in our lives comes from the things we can’t control or the things we can control but don’t. We want to spend our lives living in today, not fretting over tomorrow. So we do what we can in the areas we can and we live with gratitude for the simple pleasures we build into our now. We also know tomorrow is going to be okay.

In part two of this essay I will get into the nuts and bolts of how we’ve tackled each of those aforementioned categories and why we have chosen to set ourselves up to comfortably return to the energy and food production of yesteryear over investing huge chunks of money in off grid systems that prop up the conveniences of today. Nothing fancy, just us and common sense for what works to keep us living simply today with confidence that all will be well.

Until then…

A young woman was recently sharing a story with me about the state of affairs in the dating world.

“It’s s**t.” That was her synopsis. Tidy and to the point.

Lately, I’ve been regaled with story after story of the modern dating zeitgeist. Women are supposedly empowered when they have casual sex without emotional ties. Men are at their best when they don’t act like men at all. Modern day dating seems to be more about ‘take what you can get when you can get it’ over finding the right one.

We’ve found ourselves neck deep in strange waters. Whether it was progressive ideologies that many thought would improve our lot or it was concentrated agendas to erode the foundations of the western world (take your pick), we have arrived. Men are told that their worth is in being a good ally to women. They are portrayed as nincompoops and feeble morons on tv shows and movies - thank God for the eye rolling woman who steps in to take control. “Ahhh men, so useless!” They are told that masculinity is toxic and that any expressions thereof are outdated tropes, best to be avoided. The best they can offer is a version of themselves that looks an awful lot like how a woman communicates and expresses herself. We demand that they talk more. Feel more. Emote, dammit!

And then there’s the women. I suppose that being a woman, I am particularly saddened by what has been sold to us as the highest version of ourselves. While the men are busy trying to express their emotions, the women are told to ignore theirs or, worse, carry the catastrophes of planet earth on their shoulders. At one time, feminism promised liberation from the kitchen, but built in that promise is the message that the kitchen is something akin to a jail cell. Raising children and breastfeeding and the nurturing of our little humans became outdated. Feminism wasn’t just a choice, it was a call to arms. Today it’s tough to find what wave what feminist belongs to. What do these words even mean anymore?

Years ago I started reading books on feminism. It was an ideology, a veritable movement, that my life had been strongly shaped by. I knew little of it other than it meant I would grow up to be able to do what I wanted to do. I figured it was a good thing. Like everything else, what the original intentions were and where we’ve arrived may look wildly different. Every corporation and government are happy to grab onto a good revolution when it advances their causes. But when reading about the women that drove second wave feminism, I was disturbed by many of their worldviews. I realized how dark and cynical their perspectives on men and families were. In their world, the value of a woman was outside of the home. I don’t believe these things and yet, my life has been radically shaped by them. All of our lives have been. And we hear it all as if there was absolute acceptance when, in truth, there were many women that fought against second wave feminism. Why is that? Were they masochists? Or has our version of events been highly edited?

The awareness of how the ideologies of a few can cause sweeping changes in the lives of the many, especially when reinforced by governments and corporations (are they one in the same at this point?) is evidenced all around us. The cold hard truth is that we, the people, are more profitable as workers than we are in the home. Raising free thinking, creative, autonomous human beings has little value in systems that need our compliance. When we teach our children that the value of a life is based on the careers we choose and the money we make, we have lost the plot. Look around, the lost plotted are everywhere and they’re filling themselves with drugs and alcohol, casual sex, porn, food, sugar, social media, and shopping. We have arrived in a radically different world in which the act of mothering has been drained of its magnificence.

Young women are now telling me that the men they are meeting have an expectation of their wives to contribute “50/50” to the bank account. Or, they warn, they will keep their money separate. When the children come, the daycare is there. I know too many young women that have the desire to stay at home and raise their children but feel the choice is discouraged, if not outright shunned, by their families, friends, future mates, and society at large. So feminism and the goals of the powers that supported it have achieved the evolution as they deemed the evolution should look like and here we are.

I do believe that I now have enough requests to open up my own little dating service. What would I call it? Hmmm… Slowdown Singles? Women Wanting? Men 4 Marriage? In a world where young people increasingly find themselves growing up and being taught that there are no differences between men and women, is chivalry dead? Is being a gentleman passé? Are the values of family and tradition lost? I don’t believe it. I just think it feels so out of reach, that most dare not want it. Exactly why we must show that it’s not out of reach at all.

Just as food was stripped of its wholeness in the march to industrialization, relationships have been too. Many of us find ourselves today reclaiming the lost practices of preserving, butchering, homesteading, and growing our own food. Our parents or grandparents had these skills. The knew how to darn a sock and nurture an apple tree, but they let it go when they were shown a convenience that made all those things seem antiquated. And so it is with relationships and families. Divorce got easy. Women could make their own money. Children need not be raised by their parents. In everything there is good to be found, but the destructive consequences of many of these decisions cannot be ignored.

Many of us are collectively waking up to find ourselves on paths we never chose. Whether it’s the implanted ideas on what it is to be a woman or a man or just a human being living life as one thinks it’s worth living. We have been cleaved off from nature, from each other, from the gifts and uniqueness of our sexes. But something is happening. There is a shift afoot. And in every great shift, frustration ignites the

When I was a little girl, somebody gave me a book called “Tasha Tudor’s Christmas”. That book became one of my most treasured possessions. I remember pouring over the illustrations and reading every single detail within. I was enchanted with a time when simple, handmade things were held with such reverence. Even at such a young age, I think I was around seven or eight years old at the time, I dreamed of living in a world where a Christmas orange could be relished with such joy. Imagine that! A regular old orange transformed into something wondrous because it arrived in your stocking having taken a voyage over tumultuous seas from a mythical land far away. All we had were regular old oranges from the grocery store. How could I ever get my hands on one of those oranges, the ones that Laura Ingalls and Tasha Tudor knew?

Of course, I know how today. It’s simply perspective. Perspective and the decision to see the ho-hum as extraordinary. It’s been a revelation to me as I have moved into this place in my life over the last many years, that the value I place on what can be seen as ordinary transforms any exchange, any interaction, any gift into something altogether more meaningful.

I was thinking about this the other day after we had some dear friends over to share a meal together. They are farmer friends. What others may not know about fellow country folk is that the desire to offer gifts or meals is often accompanied by consideration of offering something that they may not have. It is farming custom, or maybe just good neighbourly custom, to bring a small gift with you when you arrive to one’s house for dinner or a shared cup of tea. Not mandatory of course, but good practice. In the city a bottle of wine or maybe some flowers are often given as a gift to the host. It’s different in the country. 

What to bring? And what to cook? 

For our meal, I wanted to make something that I knew they didn’t regularly eat, but the challenge there is that they raise their own beef and milk and chickens and pigs and vegetables and everything else they eat. But they don’t raise lamb and so lamb we had. Lamb encrusted with foraged and dried summer herbs and plants, roasted potatoes with foraged sumac rolled around in duck fat, raita made with the beautiful salt preserved lemons I received as a gift from California, and a whole host of ferments and pickles - everything from julienned pink radishes, slivered helios radishes, asparagus and carrots pickled whole. For dessert there was summer made buttermilk that I infused with foraged Labrador tea and day lilies and made into a panna cotta that was topped with a wild rose syrup and summer sun cooked brandied cherries and black currants. 

It sounds lovely, yes? But here’s what we simply ate: lamb with potatoes and some preserved vegetables with custard and fruit for dessert. Why the need to explain and distinguish? Why does my detailed explanation of our menu evoke a different feel and response to the simple, clear and succinct facts? Because within those former sentences lies the stuff that matters - the hidden gifts within. And it’s in the story of those gifts that we are linked to that which connects us. I can give of my time and efforts. I can transform my adoration into action that can be offered with joy. A connecting tether between us. And isn’t connection truly the antidote to the great maladies of our time?

When my farmer friends arrived, they brought with them gifts for us. A jar of beautiful milk from a beautiful cow with a name and a face that I know. There was preserved plums from a kitchen and hands that I know. And a beautiful jar of their own chicken liver paté given to me in a jar that I last used to give her some delights. Each one of those things an expression of affection and thought.

How many gifts do we receive in a lifetime? How many do we give? If you live long enough, you’ll forget most of them. But the ones that stick with us are always the ones made by the hands of people we love or purchased with thought and intention. Over Christmas my son-in-law gave me a vintage locket and put a picture of his infant daughter, our new baby granddaughter in it - something to keep close when we are far. I still think about the tenderness behind that gesture. Sometimes I open our mailbox and find beautiful, handwritten letters from people I have never met, likely will never meet. Letters expressing such kindness that they often bring me to tears. Presents, too, from readers here. A silk printed picture of a fancy lady with a cow. Handmade artwork and books. Pottery shaped by hands and precious salts. And while I may not have that rare and exotic Christmas orange, I have been sent something even better - California lemons plucked from a tree and sent to little ole’ me. 

When I was a little girl I made a mailbox out of construction paper that I put up with masking tape on the outside of my door. I told my parents that if any mail came for me, they should put it in there. I still have an off-cut of wood that my carpenter grandfather slipped into my mailbox when he was doing some work on our house for us. He used a pencil, likely the one that was always behind his ear when he was working, to scrawl in lovely cursive, “Tara, I think you’re special. Love Grandpa” on my wooden love letter and left it for me in my paper mailbox. He was a trickster and a joker, my beloved grandpa. That note was a rarity and filled me with such love. The pencil marks are fading away now. I suppose they should.

In every gift, beauty. Beauty of all sorts and shapes, but a contribution of beauty to the world. A call to open our hearts and receive with as much presence as possible. It’s so easy in our world to be primed and slanted to the frustrations and worries of our world. We live so much in our heads, playing out scenarios, imagining outcomes, analysing interactions and relationships. It’s such a monumental waste of time and yet I know people that live the entirety of their lives in those places. Distraction in the real world and made up universes in their minds. It’s getting harder and harder for people to be fully present, fully realised and connected in meaningful ways. Little thoughtful gifts, scattered here and there, are like throwing someone a rope. 

“Hey, come here with me! I have something for you! You mean something to me and I want you to know it!” 

It’s a love letter without the awkward sentiment for those that would find that too much. Or, it is the love letter with all the sentiment for those that would eat it up. 

Speaking of letters, I have all of the love letters that my husband and I have written each other since we first met. Thank goodness they weren’t on a computer but just good old fashioned paper and pen. When our kids were small I used to slip short little love notes into their bags. My husband got spicier ones. Those are gifts, too. A gift, after all is simply an expression of our love in action. Mending a pair of work trousers and tucking them back into the drawer. Writing a silly poem o’ love. Polishing a pair of thirsty boots. Buying that special something they would love but never buy for themselves. Listening, always, for those off-hand, casual remarks about the things that would make their lives easier or more sweet. I recently bought some wool insoles for a pair of boots, boring and plain maybe, but I bought them for my husband who mentioned that his shoes felt a little cold. I don’t want his feet to feel cold and I cared enough to do something about it. To me, that’s what gifts are all about. 

Consider this my call to arms - open and giving. Maybe when we make our summer jams and jellies, we can include an extra batch to parse out with love to our beloveds over the year. Instead of material things we can return to clay and paper. We can listen and observe the people in our lives and look for the things that would be meaningful and touching to them and then offer it without expectations. Maybe they recognise the work and love you poured into it, maybe they don’t. Maybe you’ll just never know. That part doesn’t matter. Instead, consider your gifts as the realisation of an emotion. A physical manifestation of love and beauty. Put that out into the world. The world needs gifts. People need gifts. We need to offer and we need to receive with open hearts, not suspicion. It is one of the few, instant ways we have to break through the cynicism of modernity. Receiving a gift asks us to be open and in that openness, our connection.

To give your words, your efforts, your loving intention is to transform the mundane into something of meaning. It’s powerful magic. With only our thought and care paper or thread or a plum or a piece of quartz the colour of an apricot becomes something real and alive. Consider the small, chubby fist of a child, opening to put in your palm a pinecone. That is no longer just a pinecone. That is wonder and awareness transformed by love and openly shared with the lucky human of such an innocent and honest heart. An invitation to share in the elevation of the ordinary - that’s a gift.

And when you receive a gift, stop for a moment and really receive it. When someone offers you a kind word meet that expression with your eyes and your stillness. Don’t brush away a compliment. Compliments are an egoless gift from the heart. Open yourself up to them, let the loving words of another in. Take the kindness of another whether it be in words or actions or gifts. Allow it in. Keep it. Roll it around in your heart. Let it grow inside of you so that what is right and good and loving has a chance against what is harsh and cynical. You, as the receiver of love, have work to do, too. Never diminish or weaken love that has been given. In any form. Lord knows we all need it.

An orange is still a revelation, you know. We just have to see it. 

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p.s. We had some good conversations in our chat this week on everything from feeding kids to how we deal with tough situations with family members or friends that desperately need us to partake in the walmart cake to making panna cotta with wild foraged ingredients. You should join. Such a wonderful and interesting group of humans.

“Rings and jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only true gift is a portion of thyself.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson