By Joel Salatin at brownstone dot org

In his iconic Brave New World, one of Aldous Huxley's recurring themes is the desire and mandate to never be alone. The whole life is taken up with working at a pre-determined vocation and otherwise being entertained in large groups. The eventual hero, The Savage, gravitated finally to an old lighthouse and hung himself when people came to gawk at him.

Although we don't have the breeding centers and embryo development factories in that book, we appear, as a culture, to embrace the "never alone" aspects. Social media and TikTok addiction crowd out quiet contemplation and solitude's many benefits. Nearly all strategically results-oriented self-worth remediation programs include periods of solitary meditation, thought, and self-awareness discovery.

Quiet contemplation not only stimulates innovation but also helps us know who we are within our relational context.

As a full-time farmer, I spend many hours alone and find this time especially rewarding. Unplugging from the hurried-harried frenetic-frenzied life brings healing and progress on many levels. But one time in my life launched everything since.

In our home, I grew up on The Freeman for economics and Organic Gardening and Farming for agriculture. While I embraced compost over chemicals, my real soul conversion occurred when I was 24.

Dad was an accountant; Mom was a schoolteacher. The off-farm jobs paid the property mortgage during my growing-up years. We had a glorified homestead and experimentation platform to try portable infrastructure, composting, and pastured livestock production. Our family had not and did not make a full-time living from the farm but always aspired to. As a teenager, I began dreaming and scheming about that possibility.

With a flare for writing and communicating, I began working weekends at our local daily newspaper as the newsroom receptionist writing obituaries, police reports, and whatever other tidbits came in during my hours. I loved it. Then came Watergate and Nixon's downfall, and I decided I'd find my Deep Throat, bring down the next president with a best-selling muckraking journalistic tome, and retire to the farm.

The newspaper staff liked me, liked my work, and offered me a guaranteed reporter's job after graduating college. Suddenly, I had a live-at-home option to stay at the farm and continue things part-time. And that's exactly what I did, graduating in the spring of 1979 and returning to the old newspaper haunt. My, how I loved the newsroom. But I loved the farm more and lived in the tension of both worlds.

As one of five reporters on staff, I was the only one with any interest in agriculture. Much to my joy, I received all the ag-related assignments. Teresa and I married in 1980, fixed up the farmhouse attic as an apartment - we called it our penthouse - and began saving voraciously. By growing all our food, heating with our own firewood, driving a $50 car, no TV, never eating out, never going on vacation, we saved half of my paycheck.

In the fall of 1981, a big ag story developed in our county. A black walnut processing company from Missouri had decided to expand into western Virginia, where many black walnut trees grow. They needed more walnuts to process, and our region had lots of walnuts.

The local Southern States Cooperative store agreed to host a buying station for the company and found two local FFA boys to operate it on Saturdays, beginning Oct. 1 and going through November. A week into the new venture, I interviewed the boys, the store manager, and did a story on this new way for farmers to make some money around the edges of their businesses.

One of the biggest problems was the hulls. Operating the hulling machine on a parking lot, the boys had to somehow dispose of all the hulls, which are 2/3rds the volume of a dropped walnut. I knew grass always grew well under a walnut tree, so Dad and I went down with our dump truck and brought as many hulls home as we could - being ecological f...