Time and Goodness, and Balance : My name is Austin (45), I have a wife, Cecelia, and 3 young children. I have thus far spent my adult life, first, in ecology education -- elementary through college -- and, then, in organic farming -- geographically, MD, VA, PA, MI, NH, ME -- but also have degrees in Geography (BA), Sociology (BA), and "Philosophy, Theology, and Creative Non-Fiction Writing" (MALS). My children have forced a reckoning in my life; namely, one of time and goodness. These decades move fast, but that alone is the sum of their childhood, and, in the end, my life. Whatever I want for them or myself, I must do or begin right now, or I will have missed the train.
After too many years of 70-hour-a-week growing seasons, I have learned a bit about balance; rather, about imbalance. I think it would be more than lovely, but a kind of rightness, to design and build a home and way of life that honors the miraculous fact of our existence, and to share in it. Nothing fancy, nothing pretentious, just something simple, and honest, and jammed into the mud of being that gives us real life. One can go from good to great, I hear; but on the other side of that great is goodness, which though sometimes trickier in the steadfastness of presence it requires, is where I would prefer to live.
Walking, Pedaling, Paddling : I walked the Appalachian Trail (Northbound, and then Southbound), cycled some thousands of miles with a sleeping bag, and lived without a car. But I've also been part of his grand experiment of car-based dislocation, where we live lives fundamentally dis-jointed and dis-located, and feel, just like we would a shoulder in its wrong place, something -- our heart? -- aching.
As best as possible, my being prefers a human pace, which sews the world together in a way we shouldn't have to wonder at, but do. Farming has always given me this ... as a singleton. But family pulls me out. I would like to bind the farm and its pace to many of the needs of family, which, in the end, is community. Why not build a farm community that bakes into the honest necessity of walking, the opportunity for into-town pedaling, and the gift of the ritual of Sunday morning paddling? Why not have it all? I don't mind zippy cars and dirty trucks -- in fact, I like them a lot -- but in balance. I want more than less time in a vehicle, I want a way of life that senses, in my body, what they are doing to the world as they fracture it. Because, for me, that way of life has always grounded much bigger things.
Friendship & Fellowship, and What Is Not Hollow : We rotate through our grace before dinner, sometimes saying this one, which has the rocky dirt of New Mexico and a Boy Scout backpacking trip still in it for me, these 30+ years later. "For food, for raiment, for life, for opportunity, for friendship and fellowship, we thank Thee O Lord, Amen." For friendship and fellowship.
A good friend of mine recently died, but before, when we would meet at Thanksgiving for a walk in the mountains, we would exchange notes, and words. He liked "quickenings". I liked "resonance". For what the tuning-fork of our being zings too, but the sometimes-nearly-dead bear of our life in its momentum stomps over. For friendship and fellowship. That resonates. Sometimes the bottom falls out -- our plans, our dreams, our great span of bridge that we built over the chasm -- and there is nothing that is not hollow. Except for this : All we have is each other.
So, let's have each other, even if wordlessly, even if at a distance. "Uncle" and "Aunty" are the richest words I know to show the impoverishment of our culture; and "companion" -- the one we eat our bread (pan) with (com) -- the richest to show its potential.
Eating and Farming : The story is this : Buddha told his folks about suffering, and how to try to reduce it. Except that judgment lands on the heart, not on the consequence, he said. He mentioned how killing animals to eat is probably not something to do. And then he sent them off, begging, to live in the hands of grace, eating frog legs and chicken thighs, duck eggs and bacon. Because, ha! Life is bound to death, and there is no way around it.
I have eaten mostly plants these last 25+ years, but how to eat, how to live, and how to farm, has always been a response, not an answer. My experience tells me this : to seek to remove death from life is, by turns even greater, to remove life itself from living. While I can grow fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, grains and beans, maybe chickens for their eggs, maybe-maybe cows or goats for their milk, I will. But I do not have a bone of dogma in me.
Neighbors, and Tents : I am spending a lot of time working to get this ship seaworthy and sailing. Funny, then, that history has always found me as far from folks -- and probably in a tent -- as I could reasonably get. I like my privacy and space, and I haven't had a great need for others. (I have not been a people-person, as some would call it, though I have been and am decidedly a person-person.) But if left to my own devices -- really, if any of us are left to our own devices -- I/we will sooner or later discover our own imbalance, and the consequence of that, especially if we are a thing more made of rock than living and made of wood.
And so, that's what I am doing -- seeing my imbalance, and pliantly growing. I am recognizing what I have called "human fire" -- that unnamed feeling of warmth, that thing that actually seems to glow; if I don't put my finger right on it, could you? in the diner, the coffee shop, the ring around the campfire, itself. I am recognizing this, that it is like air for an old coal miner, and I am digging out. Or, really, I am gathering the timber and the sparks. I am trying to make something warm, beautiful, and good for my children, my wife, and myself. I can have the tent -- we can, actually, or a small hut on the far side of the farm -- and a hot soy milk 'howdy doody' (haldi doodh, turmeric / golden milk) in the commons house, with a notebook, among friends. Because that feels right, and following the thread of rightness -- often caught side-eyed, and nearly invisible, as we flit by -- can transform our life, and, I wager, the entire world.