The Long Road Back

I'm a farmer on a Community Shared Farm, Valley Creek Farm, in Minnesota.

To get to the farm, I turn right on Snow Snake Road, which once was a real road, but now is more like a driveway. School bus drivers fifty years ago hated driving down the road, especially in winter. It is windy, and slippery when covered with snow and ice. Hence the name, Snow Snake.

When I turn right on Snow Snake, it is like going back in time, to a time when life was slower, when we picked our own food, when we walked most places. When we hung our clothes out on the line to dry, when we burned leaves, and canned beans and tomatoes, and milked cows by hand. We carried hankies in our pockets and blew our noses into them, folded them, put them back in our pockets, and washed them, eventually.

Paul Gruchow was always criticized for being "nostalgic," as though nostalgia, looking back fondly on what was, is a bad thing.

I want to go back to what was. I know that some things were harder. More people died of disease, I guess. The life-span was shorter. There weren't as many "advancements."

But here is what we have lost:

• We have lost our natural Circadian rhythms. Our lives used to be shaped by the rhythms of nature--the seasons, and the rise and set of the sun. We don't dream as much. We don't sleep as much. We charge our bodies with caffeine to stay awake, and take pills to go to sleep.
• We are out of balance. We are no longer in touch with the capacities and limits of nature, and our capacities and limits.
• We do not know the imperatives--doing what is necessary without complaint--planting and harvesting, caring for animals, and doing it because we need to in order to live.
• We have lost the deep feeling that we cannot harvest anything without planting first.
• We no longer know that it is nature that produces, not us. Whatever we do is a cooperative venture between us and the forces of earth and the cosmos.
• Working on a farm, making a life where we live, relies on what other generations have done, and our contributions will serve future generations.
• We have lost the knowledge that nature produces best out of variety.
• We have also lost the ability to find pleasure without things--without new cars, or boats, or video games, or new shoes, or movies, or T.V. or . . . .

In each post I will offer a tip to living a more balanced, simpler life. Make that right turn, one step at a time.

Don't buy kleenex any more. Buy some hankies and bandanas. Put a clean one in your pocket every morning. Blow your nose on that. It comes in handy for other things too, like drying your hands, wiping your brow, wiping dust off your shoe.

Make/Do

Olivia