Human Beings are Makers

Reblogged from Good Heart Farmstead, L3C:

In an interview with Poets & Writers magazine, poet Frank Bidart was asked, "The word making for you is a crucial word...For your poetic vision it's more than an aesthetic endeavor; it means more than mere creativity, does it not?" and Bidart replied:

"As you say, a crucial word.  It's one of the principles of the world.  We live in this awkward culture that tells people that they have to have a job, have money to buy things, but that the job does not have to be connected to one's soul, one's inner life or spirit or sense of self-worth. 

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Someday, Today

Tags

change, life, pregnancy, small farm, writing

It’s been two and a half weeks, I know, and it’s only May.  The farm is not supposed to pull me away from the blog this soon.  But in truth, it’s not just the farm.  It’s my tired eyes asking for a sabbatical, a vacation away from screens.  It’s my hands and the pen and my journal, asking to loop ink across the page while I sit tucked in bed, or on the front stoop looking out across the field, or at the kitchen table where our only lamp sheds light at night.  And it’s my growing baby, pushing out at my stomach, stretching my skin as a little foot traces a half circle from within, making me pause and lay longer in each moment, my hands resting on my belly so I may feel the movement on both sides.

With all my intentions to blog each week, I find it hard sometimes.  The internet is such a distraction in my life.  When I sit down to write at an empty screen, I find myself checking email, facebook, any number of websites, until I realize how long it’s taken me to get down to the point, and then I think of Edge in the field prepping garden beds or moving sheep.  I think how I must check the chickens’ water bucket and the starts in the seed house.  I look up and tell myself that today I will finally wash the pile of dishes sitting on the floor–yes, the floor–of the yurt.  This is why writers need a different place to be.  To throw away the easy distractions.  To be honest, I’m writing this at work, where the phones are so slow that this blog itself has become a distraction from the slowness of the day.

Someday I will build myself a writing cabin on the edge of the field.  I won’t have internet access there, just windows looking out toward the Worcester range, bookshelves from the floor to the ceiling, scrap paper and post-it notes stuck to the wall filled with quotes and ideas that I jot down as inspiration, a small wood stove and a tea kettle.  Someday.

But this is today.  And this is what I have: time.  Time to fill with distractions or with creativity or with nothing at all.  I have fingers to type and to write with, hands to make tea and plant seeds and to carry my journal into the world wherever I may go.  I have this world, or this world has me, and I am here, and someday I will be sitting in a writing cabin feeling distracted and decide that I need to open the door and go out into the trees and to explore.

Dreams of Discovery

Tags

discovery, dreams, life, Vermont

I’ve been having dreams of discovery: an underground barn on our property that we didn’t know about until a neighbor came by asking to lease some space.  Once he asked, I could see the windows lining the bank, and I walked inside to a long finished barn with a milking parlor and tie stalls.  “Edge!” I said, “I can’t believe we didn’t know about this when we bought the property.  I can’t believe the guy who sold it to us didn’t know about it!”

And last night, too, another dream in the same realm–this time we were in the barn that Edge built, waiting for the shearer to come for the sheep.  The building changed as the dream went on, and we found a basement that we hadn’t known about filled with recreational supplies–flippers and bikes–plus a bathroom, a commercial kitchen with four or five stoves, a living room with couches and cots to sleep on.  Friends and family were there hanging out, and our neighbor came over and said she and her son used to come here and spend the day.  There was a second floor, too, that was more finished, and I felt the same amazement–”Edge, I can’t believe we didn’t know about this before!”

In waking life, I haven’t found an old barn or outbuilding, but I’m beginning to wonder what is here that we don’t know about yet.  We are in the process of designing a multi-purpose barn, so perhaps my own desires propel these dreams, but I think there’s more too it than that.  I’ve had too many dreams that manifest in waking life to ignore the power of their messages.  So I’m opening even more to let the discovery in.  What is it that is waiting to present itself to us, or waiting for us to stumble upon it?

To Remind Myself…

Tags

life, nature, place, poetry

I stumbled across this poem when looking for a Wendell Berry quote the other day, and it woke up a small quiet place inside me.  I printed it out and keep it at my desk at work, to remind myself of the centering space I enter while writing, and to have a few words to bring me back to that enlivened stillness where creativity is born.

“How to be a Poet (to remind myself)”

 

Make a place to sit down.

Sit down.  Be quiet.

You must depend upon

affection, reading, knowledge,

skill–more of each

than you have–inspiration

work, growing older, patience,

for patience joins time

to eternity…

 

Breathe with unconditional breath

the unconditioned air.

Shun electric wire.

Communicate slowly.  Live

a three-dimensional life;

stay away from screens.

Stay away from anything

that obscures the place it is in.

There are no unsacred places;

there are only sacred places

and desecrated places.

 

Accept what comes from silence.

Make the best you can of it.

Of the little words that come

out of the silence, like prayers

prayed back to the one who prays,

make a poem that does not disturb

the silence from which it came.

 

~Wendell Berry

 

 

Living In The Space Between

Tags

family, farming, life, local, nature, place, pregnancy, spring, Vermont

This is April: snow storms and sun, freezing rain and a weekend thaw, a precarious balance between hibernation and re-emergence into the world as spring comes, then slips away, and slowly comes back again.

I feel like a seed struggling to sprout.  Though all the ingredients are offered–water, sunlight, warmth–it seems it takes weeks to crack the shell and work a shoot up through the soil. Last season I flowered, through the winter I tucked in quietly among the snow, and now I pray that I will germinate.  April is not just a balancing act for seeds, but for us as a farm and family as well.  It is when we are spending money and relying on more people to sign up for our CSA, it is the last month of my full time job before I go to part time and devote more of myself to the workings of the farm, it is when I cross the bridge from second to third trimester and walk ever closer to the birth of our baby.  For now I am living in the space between questions and answers, the space, as my midwife says, where divinity lives.

I have doubts, but I have persistence, too.  I must be a parsley seed.  It takes so long to sprout that I almost give up on the whole tray until the first seedlings push ever so slightly at the soil and remind me of the strength that patience requires.  I tell myself: if I am a seed, all I have to do is to know that every potential is inside me.  I tell myself: the life that is easy is not necessarily the one that brings me alive.

I am living in the space between the questions and the answers.  Some days I cry in a swell of emotion.  Some days I am steady.  Some days wildness fills me and pulls me to the forest where so much life is waking up.  I don’t know if I will ever get to the answers, but like a seed I persist, for I fiercely believe in this earth.  I believe in the goodness of the world, in the tenacity of the world, in the connections that keep us alive.  Like a seed I persist, pushing up at the soil, working my way toward the sun.

The Official Start to Spring

Tags

life, nature, place, spring, Vermont

Spring is officially here, and it’s not because the calendar said so almost a month ago–I know it’s actually spring because yesterday I saw a robin hopping on the soggy earth, because tonight we ate a salad of pea shoots harvested from our seed house, and because for the first time since November, we turned on our propane stove and cooked dinner without the heat of our wood cook stove.

In the forest streams gush down the hillside, while green creeps back into the landscape, speckling the field with new growth.  Even the chickens have an extra bounce as they spread over the pasture foraging.  Everywhere I look, the world is waking up~

Lambs, Seeds, and Re-building

Reblogged from Good Heart Farmstead, L3C:

It's amazing how fast weeks go by, especially as the sun stretches longer into the day and a new set of to-dos pops up with spring time.  Edge has been working full time on the farm since April began, but I am still working at High Mowing Organic Seeds until the end of the month.  I took a day off to help catch up on things and realized I could take the whole week off and still have more to do--but that is the way of spring, constantly growing, and a new energy comes with the changing days as birdsong returns to the mornings to gently wake us up and enter a new day.

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What You’ll Find Will Be Wonderful

Tags

life, nature, wilderness

“You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.  What you’ll find will be wonderful.  What you will find is yourself.” ~Alan Alda

It’s scary.  To live in the way my heart pulls me, to live in a way society has taught me is not possible.

It’s scarier not to.  The confining expectations that come from a world where the only growth that matters is economic.

My heart pounds, my breath calms, my legs propel me through the field, past the stream, into the forest where steadiness and creation are always in play.

I want to live in a world where trees are more valuable than money, where richness is determined by the depth of humus, the reach of roots, and the stretch of limbs and leaves toward the sky.

How do I do this?

I’m not completely sure yet.  But I’m going to the wilderness~

Tumble and Fly

the wind is blowing

swirling dust, shifting grass,

lifting rivers into the air

 

how am I to live

straddling passion and practicality

wildness and society?

 

the wind is blowing

I gulp it in

let me tumble and fly

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Saturday Again, One Week Since the Fire

Reblogged from Good Heart Farmstead, L3C:

It's been a week since the fire.  Last Saturday I woke to a birthday breakfast of blueberry pancakes, chai and a fruit smoothie.  Today Edge woke me just before he slipped out at 6:30 am to borrow some tools for the day.  After he left I laid in bed and watched the light slowly shift as the sun rose, thinking of the Rumi quote I read the other day:

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