Crazy Wife Farm

Rule of thumb: When things appear to be going perfectly, you are probably missing something. My advice is duck and cover because it’s just about to hit you. I woke up this morning with the same smug buzz I wrote about yesterday — opened all the doors and windows, meditated, breathed deeply in the sun, made a visit to my gardens, fed the chickens, walked the dog.

The chickens come to the back door when they hear me moving around the house in the morning, as if to hurry me to fix their breakfast. Lately, as I have been leaving the back door open for Moon while I’m home, some chickens have ventured into the breezeway and onto the screenporch, a habit I discourage.

Totally blissed-out on nature, tea in hand, I sat down at my computer to read the morning news. A second later I heard the scream of a chicken being chased and the fall of furniture to the floor. I ran downstairs to find Moon chasing a chicken around the table on the screen porch. She ran toward me, into the house. He ran past me, ignoring my yelling. Behind the couch he got her by the neck and proceeded to do laps around the livingroom with her in his mouth, showing off his trophy. I was apoplectic, which I believe he took as me sharing his glee. Finally, he leapt into a big stuffed chair and sat there proudly with the limp chicken dangling from his jaws.

Streaming my entire vocabulary of curse words, I grabbed him by the collar, hollered in his face, made him drop the bird to the floor, smacked him a couple times, and threw him in his crate. I know dog psychologists will say these were all the wrong things to do, but I was really nuts with anger. There were feathers everywhere, from one end of the house to the other, on the floor, on the furniture, blowing on the breeze, stuck to Moon’s crate, my pants, my fingers. The chicken was alive, but she was hobbling. I picked her up, took her outside, and sat with her for a while. Moon howled.

She limped across the patio and fell down the steps. Not good. She had a broken leg. This was a very different morning than I planned. I went back in the house and vacuumed up the feathers. Moon was still howling. The chicken was still hobbling.

Moon is a nineteen-month-old puppy. I have been spoiling him because he has a genetic immune deficiency and somewhere inside myself I am mourning the untimely loss of the dog I still have, the dog that loves to play with feathers, and jump on the bed, and chase things. Moon rules the roost — until he kills a chicken in the livingroom. Just yesterday, I was feeling good about his resurgent puppy-ness as we rolled back his steroids 25% and he seemed to feel better instead of worse. I thought, How cool is this? He’s going to be my rocket boy again.

Evidently, the price of my new rocket boy is one chicken who now needed to be dispatched without delay. I wished for a moment one of those PETA whack-job activists was here to help me make this decision. A hen that can’t walk won’t last a day in the barnyard. If a predator doesn’t get her, the other chickens will, and in the meantime she is frightened and in pain. She is not a pet. She is not domesticated. She does not want to live with me. She certainly does not want to live in my house. There are no chicken veterinarians, no chicken leg splints, cast and crutches, no physical therapy and recovery for a chicken with a broken leg. She is food. That’s all she is. That’s all she ever has been. We all are. Everybody is somebody’s food. In this case, she is my food, and because that is so, I respect her, I care for her, I love her. Life with purpose, death with dignity. My first commitment to my animals is to keep them from pain. And so it goes.

Now I’m finishing my tea and venting. The hen is in the crockpot on the kitchen counter. And Moon seems to have lost something behind the couch. Lesson for the day: Let go of being smug about letting go.

I harvested the last of the asparagus in my former vegetable garden before I turned the cows into the south pasture for the second time this season. It has been a three week streak of me doing farm work in every available hour, and I am feeling smug about my accomplishments. So many seasons past I have been tortured by my lack of synchronicity with the weather, my failure to use my arsenal of tools effectively, my lame decision-making, and my fear for every creature’s health and welfare, including my own. This season I am breathing deeply, perfecting the farming systems I’ve designed, and witnessing my accumulated wisdom. So far, things are going beautifully. Knock on wood.

It seems being happy is a skill, not just circumstance. Yes, things are better on the farm this year because I am more experienced. But it’s not just that I am getting better at farming. I am also less afraid of things going wrong. Things feel better in my life, not because there is no drama playing on my mental stage, but because I am getting better at letting go of the outcome. The more I let go, the better I feel, the easier things become.

For example, I am letting go of my dog, Moon’s illness. He seems happy. He isn’t moping around obsessing on the side effects of steriods, his vulnerable immune system, and his reduced life expectancy. He is running up and down the stairs, chasing moths, and splashing in the pond. If he’s happy, I’m happy.

I am letting go of my barn cat, Bea, moving out of the barn into the bungalow behind the house. She wants to be closer to me and she has developed a coy relationship with Moon. I enjoy watching them flirt. I can see her working her way into being a house cat this winter. I have vowed never to have an indoor cat again, but I lover her. Perhaps I’ll be able to let go of the love the first time she scratches up the leather couch. In the meantime, I’m sure I will have snakes and rodents in the barn without her, but I’m letting go of them, too.

I let go of my big vegetable garden across the road from the house. This would have been its fourth year. It was enormously productive, too productive, more than I could handle, much more than I could eat. There is a development going in up the road from the farm and the traffic in front of the house has increased significantly. Crossing the road to pick a few herbs became a hassle last summer. The road is not as safe as it was, the garden not as intimate, my landscape not as private. So the cows have inherited the garden and the goats have inherited the hedgerow around it. The ruminants are happy. I have let go of  all that amended soil, the raspberries and the rhubarb. Last night was my last meal of fresh asparagus from my own garden. C’est la vie.

I have put in six raised beds on the lawn so I can have a kitchen garden. Just enough space for herbs, greens, tomatoes and whatever seeds inspire me. I let go of growing squash and pumpkins.

I must say, I am enjoying letting go of some things more than others. I have decided I like the way my lawn looks when the grass is almost knee high, all those lovely yellow flowers. And it doesn’t seem to matter if my house is clean or not. I am letting go of the white glove test.

I’ve stopped closing the chickens in the coop at night so I don’t have to go out and open the door for them first thing every morning. Yes, it’s risky. But it’s a risk I’m releasing into the Universe so I can sleep a little longer in the morning, something that would have been heresy to me a year ago.

I am leaving the back door open while I work in the office so Moon can go in and out whenever he wants. I am giving him his freedom and letting go of a bug-free house. I have decided I don’t mind all the flies, bees, and wasps thrashing against the window screens.

These exercises in living differently may seem mundane, but they are my training wheels for letting go of my entire future. I figure if I can get good at letting go of all the little things that used to matter so much, I’ll be in good shape when the next really bad thing happens and my entire life force wants change it. My practice of letting go is what helps me cope with whatever reality presents. So bring it on! Weeds, cat hair, snakes, and flies, anything that helps me perfect my ability to do absolutely nothing.

These photos are a few weeks old, but I wanted to post one last look at the ruminants in their wooly winter coats. They’ve been on grass for a week. The first grass since November. Already they are gaining weight and slicking out, shedding their teddy bear fur. Now the pressure is on to mend all the pasture fences wrecked by snow and ice.

With the appearance of tulips, spring morphs from pastels to jewel tones, and the grays and browns of winter are finally crowded from the landscape. My electric orange tulips are the mark of warm days on the farm. Before they arrived, when I needed to be reassured of the end of winter, I purchased a couple bouquets of the most brilliant tulips at the market. Now that I have my own home grown, I am noticing a difference in their behavior. Tulips behave. They respond to their environment with a circadian rhythm as sweet and simple as sunlight and shade.

The market tulips raised my spirits and brightened the room. After a birth in warm soil somewhere far south of here, and a shocking week of going from wholesale to retail in the refrigerator, when they finally got to my place, they were just glad to be warm again. They opened, relaxed, smiled for a week, and died, in a slow arc from the cellophane stiff of the market bucket to face down on the kitchen counter.

I generally don’t pick my garden tulips, but the chickens, my co-gardeners, trampled the stem and leaves of a lovely little girl and I had to bring her inside to enjoy her bloom. For a day she drooped in her vase while her girlfriends cavorted in their fancy orange skirts with the lime green peplums. Then she came back to life, opened, tilted her head, and smiled at me. The urgent color of her face would stop traffic on the street. But at night she changed her pose. Like her sisters in the garden, she moved imperceptibly from curved to straight and tall, closing her cup to the darkness in an air of chastity.

Again the next day, her face was there to greet me at the kitchen sink, and again the next night she shunned my affection. Even cut from her roots she knows when the sun is shining.

I thought, am I imagining the life of tulips? Is this real? Then today, as I filled my teapot in the gloom of morning rain, I see she is still sleeping. Her face is closed and toward the sun, waiting. I peer out at her sisters, twenty feet and a wall away, and they, too, are wrapped tight and tall, faces closed to the clouds and drizzle.

This is the rhythm of nature. My market tulips were strangers here, out of synch under a different sun. But these girls are at home. This is their sun and they know it. Their aspect is patient. Their pace is genteel. They are settled in for the season, gracefully in synch with each other and the farm. Today, I aspire to the rhythm of tulips.

Here on the farm we’ve been looking for Earth Day inspiration and we found it in Texas where Governor Rick Perry yesterday proclaimed three “Days of Prayer for Rain in Texas” as a way to mitigate climate change. I guess if you’re going to kick a problem upstairs, you might as well kick it all the way to the top. Please God, now that we’ve trashed the Garden of Eden, please make it rain in Texas.

Honestly, I believe in prayer, but I want to pray for something bigger than Texas, so today I’m asking God to stop Americans from being fat and stupid. It’s not our fault that we over eat, under exercise, and watch too much TV. We did not invent cheap food, couches, or television. They just happened to us — like the drought in Texas.

Yesterday, the New York Times presented their own take on “it’s not easy being green” with an article on the plummeting sales of green products. O cataclysmo! The sales of Clorox Green Works have taken a nose dive even with the endorsement of the Sierra Club! Evidently, sales of Green Works were $1oo million a year in 2008, the year it was introduced, and now they have fallen to a mere $60 million a year, and sales of other equally green products are, according to the Times, “sputtering.” Woe is me. Is it possible consumers have figured out those “green” products are just more marketing bullshit? Or is Western Civilization giving up going green just as the term becomes as mainstream as Chevy, Mobile, the Whitehouse, and GE?

Is it possible Americans have discovered white vinegar, soap and water, and hydrogen peroxide? Could it be that going green means not buying the cleaning products advertised on TV? Are we really measuring America’s commitment to reduce our ecological footprint by the sales of a Clorox product?

Oy.

Here on the farm we see things in a greener light. We think cheap food, a sedentary lifestyle, and television are a plot to take over the world by keeping the populous fat and stupid, and making the rich richer. Just the way an over abundance of simple sugars goes directly to your liver to create instant deadly belly fat, an over abundance of bumpersticker news stories and fantasy plot resolutions goes directly to your brain to create over-simplified solutions to complex problems. The fat stupid people are anesthetized by simplicity. The fit smart people understand complexity.

To make matters worse, the fit smart people are saying being fat and stupid is not our fault. Television hypnotizes us. Sugar is addictive. Marketing is the Siren Song of media. Watch TV and you will have no choice but to gain weight. Watch TV and your world view becomes stupid. Research shows sedentary lifestyles truncate life expectancy. Hours of TV and video games are hours off  your life. You are a victim of the machine. It’s not your fault. Your life experience is changing your physiology. Your brain is being reshaped by your choice of stimulus, stupid stimulus. Stupid stimulus shortens your life, and yet, it is being sold to you in your livingroom.

Advertising companies pay for billboards on the city skyline and along the highway. But you pay for the billboard in your livingroom. Television is there beyond your couch to sell you things. Not to entertain you. Not to inform you. Television requires advertising/sponsorship to fund production of television programs. If you do not buy the things that are promoted on TV, those stories go away. You are funding the production of television with your purchases, and yet, you are cut out of the profit chain. The producers and actors in your favorite TV shows are getting paid millions based on your purchases of the advertiser’s/sponsor’s products. You are getting paid nothing. You think your TV costs you no more than the price of the box, but if you do not purchase the things advertised on TV, television programs go away. So why are you not getting paid to have a TV in your livingroom the way advertisers pay for billboards everywhere else?

We should be paid to have a TV in our home the way other property owners are paid to have billboards on their property. We pay for TV programming with our purchases. We should share in the profits of TV. How stupid are we?

Scientists are establishing links between consumption of certain substances and what they categorize as mental illness, blurring the line between purchasing habits, addiction, and genetics. It turns out the nature/nurture argument is not an argument at all, but a feedback loop. How you live becomes your brain chemistry and your brain chemistry becomes how you live. Are you fat because you don’t have the motivation to stop overeating? Or are you addicted to sugar and therefore fat?  Is addiction a mental illness? Is obesity a mental illness? Who is to blame for your fat? Is fat a mental illness caused by sugar  in the same way alcoholism is a mental illness caused by alcohol? Is sugar the equivalent of nicotine or cocaine or heroine? Where does our self determination end and our victimization begin?

Here on the farm we see substance abuse and addiction as maladies that may be controlled by the disciplined individual. Addiction may be a mental illness in that we may have a genetic predisposition toward the addiction, but any addiction may be overcome with discipline, therapy, support, and the triumph of will over circumstance. Not every mental illness is destiny. There are degrees of mental illness. Being fat is not the equivalent of being born with organic brain damage. So get a grip, people. If you are fat, you are in control of your destiny. Consume fewer calories and exercise more, or die earlier. But quit whining.

The majority of Americans are fat and stupid, but we can correct that. Mental illness is a marketing tag. We don’t have to accept it. A few generations of eating unhealthy food can be corrected by conscious eating. Although over-consumption of certain foods may impact the way our brain functions, this in and of itself does not make us mentally ill. We can make sugar and meat special occasion foods, eating them once a week instead of every day. We can make television a permission-based media, limiting our exposure to the programs we find beneficial and inspiring. We can choose our own path and in doing so choose a path for the Earth that is more sustainable, helpful, beneficial, and productive. When we choose not to be fat, stupid, and mentally ill, we are chosing the path that is best for us, and best for the Earth. This is my Earth Day Prayer. Please God, give us the will power to eat fewer calories, exercise more, turn off TV, maintain our fitness, and take responsibility for our health. Amen.

I am trying to go with the flow. I thought it would improve my technique to know the origin of the phrase. According to UrbanDictionary.com “go with the flow” was first known to be used by Marcus Aurelius who ruled the Roman Empire from 161 to 180. I remember my Grandma Best, a lifetime school teacher, telling me about his tome, The Meditations. After my grandfather died she lost interest in television and started devouring the classics. Marcus Aurelius was one of her favorites. Although I did not find an exact quote, I found approximations enough to convince me he was advocating for the idea, including: Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

Nailed it. Going with the flow is accepting reality and kissing it goodbye at the same time — learning to live in the moment. Things come and go. That’s the nature of existence.

The farm is an exercise in going with the flow. The seasons set an inexorable rhythm. Every colorless winter gives way to the riot of spring. Plants and animals are born. Spring exhausts itself in summer. Autumn harvest is the celebration of death, the death that sustains us through the long sleep of winter. Life cycles churn. Life and death are deeply integrated and utterly synergistic. The intense complexity is the beauty of it. The interdependencies are both the risk and the reward.

I am pulled from the house by the faces of my hungry animals peering in the window each morning. The task of feeding them forces my feet to collaborate with my arms and my hands. I put out hay and talk quietly to the cows, rub noses with the goats, free the chickens from the coop, notice who is healthy, who is fast, who is slow, who is missing, who is anxious, who is frisky, who is grumpy, who is lame, who is sleeping late, how the light is falling on the land, where the warm spots are, who needs water, what needs to be fixed, what comes first, what comes last. I visit my gardens, pull a weed, taste something. Birds and frogs sing to me. Moon follows me. The cat scampers on the fringe. In the evening I do it again. We all do it again. And the next morning and the next evening. This is the flow of the farm. I sustain them, they motivate me. I watch over them, they witness me. I think of them, they recognize me. I disappear into them. We are a tribe. Caring for them sustains me. Every day is different, yet everything remains the same. Day after day after day.

While I am in the barnyard working I go with the flow. The deaths that live so conspicuously in my memory recede. Illness appears as a natural phenomenon, always present to some degree. I stop worrying about the erosion of cancer and auto-immune disfunction and heart disease and substance abuse. Competing life forms are all around me. Life is a process, not a destination. We are dying from the time we are born. In the barnyard, I stop missing the people who aren’t here. I stop fretting about my finances, my house, and my possessions. I am immersed in the work and everything else disappears. Peace comes effortlessly.

Google “flow” and one of the first links is the work of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (MEE-hy CHEEK-sent-mə-HY-ee), whose theory is that “flow is completely focused motivation…In flow, the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand…The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task, although flow is also described  as a deep focus on nothing but the activity — not even oneself or one’s emotions.”

This past Saturday I saw Csíkszentmihályi’s flow in action. I organized an afternoon work party of a dozen friends because I need help getting the farm ready for the growing season. I cannot run my farm alone. I work full-time off the farm and I don’t have the time to do all that needs to be done. There isn’t enough of me to go around. I depend on my friends to spend a few hours with me each season to accomplish a week’s worth of work in a day. Their reward is a fabulous lunch, a deep sense of community, and flow.

The group gathers in the yard. I walk them through my project plan: take out the big garden across the road from the house, then move the pasture fence to include the garden inside the pasture, then fix the fence wherever the snow has wrecked it.

Without further instruction people walk off into the garden and absorb themselves in dismantling trellises, edging, wire cages, and cold frames, piling them up alongside the road. The remains of last year’s arugula are picked. Blueberry bushes are salvaged. Poppies, spring onions, and rhubarb are on the list to be relocated.

After a quick lesson in using the fence post pounder, the strongest take an armload of metal fence posts and put in the new corners. Others take down the old polywire fence line, coil it, and re-route it along the new fence line. Plastic insulators are added to the new fence posts. The line is connected to the posts. Weeds are cleared. The tractor ferries all that’s been dismantled to its new home in the barn where a couple people are sweeping up the chaff in the hay mow and spreading it on the mud and manure in the paddock. Bushes are being pruned. Lunch is being prepared. The dogs are romping. Time stops for a few hours as we focus on something other than ourselves.

Just as the work is finished the rain starts. We are exhilarated, energized, engaged. For an afternoon we have become a family working together, eating together, getting dirty and stretching our muscles, breathing chill air, playing and feeling the wind on our face, blessed to have each other and delighted to go with the flow as we each disappear into the task at hand.

Thank you. Thank you all. I couldn’t do this without you.

Photos by Samantha Dow

Fifty-seven 101

These photos appear in consecutive order, all taken within a half hour at dusk this evening. The difference in lighting is the camera flash on or off. That brilliant orb in the sky is the moon rising in the east. Tomorrow is the official full moon, 7,000 km closer to the Earth than in the past eighteen years, 14% larger, officially a Super Moon. It’s pulling on me. And the farm. Today I heard the first frogs.

I believe
in the power of the Universe
the beneficence of Nature
and the sacredness of planet Earth

I believe
my life here is a gift
my work here is my joy
and my death here is an opening
between this life and the next

I believe
in life I will be loved
as I have loved others
and in death I will be remembered
as I have remembered others
and in those memories
I will live forever

Cinco, named for Cinco de Mayo 2008, gave birth to Seis, a girl, on Sunday, March 6th, 2011 at approximately 7:00 am. Seis’s father is the hunky Norman. Cinco and Norman have the same father, a pure-bred Devon from Foxhill Farm named David. Cinco’s mother was half Red Angus, half Devon. Norman’s mother was a purebred Brown Swiss. That makes Seis 5/8 Devon, 1/4 Brown Swiss and 1/8 Red Angus. Seis looks like a Devon.