Summer 2022 into an October that has been a lovely stroll through some of the best days of stable weather we have experienced in many years. Fall has unwrapped herself as the leaves gently turned yellow gold, orange and red and even as today will bring our first taste of the coming bluster and fierce winds of winter the morning is yet quiet as the skies are streaked pink and tangerine.
It has been an enormously tough farming season of huge temperature swings into heat that left the ground dry and grass crackling beneath our footsteps.
As a farmer, deeply aware of the planetary groans of drought and fire and instability using water and maximizing plant production through what is known as the French intensive method has been my response to climate disruption.
Also being on the tail end of a global pandemic that literally killed millions of people worldwide trying normalize returning to a working economy while a Russian President wages a terrible war on Ukraine, Womens rights being reversed inch by inch in The United States and even worse the killings of women struggling to break free of religious zealotry in Iran and the divide of our Country still being deluded by a former con man and disrupter as President the life of a farmer still goes forward.
The routines and seasons of growing food, caring for livestock keeps us in the present. For me, it is a place to quiet the noise of our Nation that is also changing filled with intolerance and anger, fear based rhetoric and faithless politicians.
Sometimes the smallest acts of beauty and path to kindness are the greatest part of a resilient response to outward chaos is to break bread with friends to cultivate the rich relationships created by food.
I hope to see a day where we truly make a marked effort to take weapons and turn them into ploughshares. A return to where we recognize on a cellular level beyond the reach of temporary short sighted politics that to create a safe world, a Nation, a state, a city, a village a Place of Peace we all must return to our agrarian roots. It is in the soil we relearn how to produce goodness, how to steward our precious resources, it is in the soil we return to a balance of seasons that temper our passions and give us a reckoning of how it is this the most basic thing to grow, to nurture, to eat it is here where we can begin to come together and find what is our common need for community, compassion, and respect for all that surrounds us.
May the closing of this year bring us more awareness of how we all have far more in common with one another as we use winter to reflect on how the optimism and opportunity to create lives more in step with the beauty and trials of the world together.