Life at a Human Pace

a Farm Note

A collection of farm-y thoughts and happenings. Thanks for being here with me. <3

I spooned red raspberry and nettle leaf into the fine mesh, then poured the steaming waterfall from the kettle’s mouth. Friday afternoon — bless it. But though I have weeded the garden, cleaned the bathroom, and turned in my week’s work, I’m not satisfied, because this monster keeps on devouring. Quick — the laundry needs to be brought in, the counters cleared, and a pile of papers sits on my desk. How much can I get done while the tea steeps?

(Maybe this sounds familiar…)

Only after I come back to the kitchen do I see the irony. Here is my life, a frenzied succession of tasks, each one of them teetering on the hope that I’ll fit them in between the others. It is a frenzy of my own making, until even afternoon tea, intended to be a calm and restful thing, becomes part of the parade.

Slow living is a paradox. Returning to the land means less noise, fewer trips to town and the grocery store, and more time spent in the wild air. But it necessarily brings more work, too. The grace to be found in farm work is that most all of it, when chosen to be, can be accomplished at the pace of nature. And for much of it, there is no choice.

When I was younger, my dad traded some hay for three ewe sheep. In those days, I was more interested in becoming a ballerina than a shepherdess, so their stay with us left me no practical experience in keeping sheep. I do have a distinct memory of standing inside the barn with my mom and feeding the sheep handfuls of grain out the window. Their tongues tickled my palm, and their silent enthusiasm had me giggling before I realized it. I remember my mom saying something like, “there’s nothing like it, is there?”

I still feel this way about the natural world. There is nothing like it. Nothing like burying your toes in loamy soil, or picking wild berries off the branch and dropping them straight into your mouth. I wonder if these things give us such peace and delight because they are some of the only remnants of our wild selves in an otherwise artificial world. The stress that fades away when I hold a kitten, or squat in my garden pulling weeds with no concept of the time, is stress that was never meant to be there in the first place. Like so much of the heaviness of this world, I was not meant to carry it.