I received the below article by Bryan Welch entitled "Are We Brave Enough to Love?" the day Emotive Acres suffered its first tragedy. This October had been Missouri's wettest, and two weeks of nearly endless precipitation had made certain patches of our land thick with soupy mud. Our herd hadn't had much problem with the conditions, though the girls seemed especially grossed out by the feeling of nasty wetness on their skin. It just so happened that this night, as John and I were making our six o'clock rounds to check on the horses, that our dog found one of our fillies separated from the herd and swaying gently by the shelter. Following Sampson's alarm, we rushed over to the baby. What we saw horrified us. It was like something out of a ghastly nightmare. Her leg was broken, and a huge chunk of flesh had been ripped away from the bone between her ankle and knee. She had a deep gash on her cheek, and probably more injuries to her side that could not be seen by the dim light of the cloudy evening. A monster must have done this to her, I thought in my panic, imagining wolves the size of Clydesdales descending upon my little girl. What are we going to do? How could we have let this happen?
Our phone had not even been hooked up yet, and my prepaid cellular only picked up spotty service, but I managed to get a call in to the emergency vet and relay enough information for him to know where we were and who needed help. "Something attacked my horse!" I tried shouting into the phone, though all he could hear was my last word. "Is she going to live?" the vet asked, and I was floored. How could I make that call? I couldn't bring myself to commit to an answer. It took the vet an hour and a half to get to us, forcing the residue of my suburban immediacy to dissolve into rural patience. We covered the filly up with a blanket and placed a halter around her head. In the rain, my husband and I waited. We cried, we held each other, we let her lean on us, and we got to work bringing her warm water and comforting her concerned comrades. When the vet arrived, he confirmed our fears. The break was nasty, and there was nothing that could be done for her. With so much flesh missing, there wasn’t a cast in the world that could keep her from contracting a fatal infection. The kindest thing we could do for her was let her go to sleep that night, and to let her stay that way.
This was our first night at Emotive Acres. The responsibility was crushing. Silently, John and I blamed ourselves for the filly’s fate, while the vet expressed outwardly how he wished he could have done more. Three humans surrounded the gentle beast, and three human hearts broke for her. I asked the vet what could have done this, and he replied that she must have gotten caught on something, probably due to the mud, and when she tried to pull herself out, she caused the majority of the damage. But he encouraged us not to blame the land; he knew this property well, and had served its previous owner under much better circumstances. “We’ve never had rain like this,” he explained. “It’s just one of those things…”
The vet gave us the number to Ronnie’s Stump Removal, offering that he’d be willing to bring his truck out to help us bury her on the property. I had to swallow down the lack of decorum of a funeral by stump removal service, and remember that in the country it is the spirit of Ronnie, not his service, that was meant to preside over the burial. Having suffered this tragedy, John and I committed ourselves to rectifying the problem, clearing out the mud, and never allowing it to build up again. But this was our first night on Emotive Acres. There was nothing we could have done.
Had John and I allowed ourselves to react to this situation as victims, we would have drowned in our guilt and self-punishment. We may even have blamed each other, or any of the other humans who had dedicated so much concern for her wellbeing during her life. Had I not read Bryan Welsh’s article not half a day before saying goodbye to my first farm fatality, I would still be torturing myself over my perceived impotence as a farmer. But as Welsh explains, it is our job as farmers to learn to love “unsentimentally.” We’ve taken on the world’s hardest role; it is a role that defies emotional logic and promises to be heart-wrenching if it is done right. Welsh explains: “We believe that the lifestyle we provide for our livestock is humane. Their well-being is a personal concern for us, day in and day out. We really care. And that’s what hurts.” I believe that the spirits of animals are not unlike the spirits of humans, though their communication is limited and their time on earth is far briefer. They teach us lessons and care for our spirits, as we care for them during their allotted time on earth. Our filly took on a powerful role that first night; she took it upon herself to teach us the most difficult lesson of stewardship – the lesson of loss, and of companionship over self-pity. Having started this way on Emotive Acres, our spiritual learning has been accelerated. My appreciation for our filly’s sacrifice is immeasurable.
In the comfort of our suburban homes, we surround ourselves with predatory animals – cats and dogs – and then deny them their predatory instincts. Similarly, we deny ourselves our predatory instincts by allowing the grocery store to close our hearts and minds to the wellbeing of the creatures who end up on our plates every night. We’ve labeled predators as antagonists, usually rooting for the gazelle over the lion during Discovery Channel documentaries. But God had a reason for making man a predator, and then giving man the responsibility of stewardship over his land and prey. It is not for us to preserve life at all costs. It is our job to learn companionship through loss, and spiritual connectivity through death. Welsh remarks of other neighboring predators, “Coyotes kill one animal at a time and eat them immediately [sic]. Coyotes are all business.” There is no evil in the coyote, just survival and stewardship. We too, must live as predators – not killing unnecessarily, but being present for death, and then making that sacrifice worthwhile. It is a heavy responsibility. Though I still wrestle with the apparent unfairness of having lost a companion rather than a livestock, I understand that her loss is not unlike any other loss we will experience on these acres. Horses and humans are forever separated as prey and predator, though we've learned to trust, to love, and to live together. As farmers, we see our animals die, often at our own hand, sometimes through accident and tragedy, so that we can experience the loss of loved ones before having to experience it through our own kind. When we see the mortality of our prey, we have reverence for our power and respect for our own fragility. When we let our prey lean on us for support, when we offer our strength for her comfort during her final moments of life, we've truly learned the lesson of companionship.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Monday, October 26, 2009
Are We Brave Enough to Love?
10/19/2009 4:56:57 PM
By Bryan Welch
I came home one day to find five sheep dead, piled in a corner of their shed. It took me a couple of hours to dig a hole big enough to hold the carcasses. Two days later I found six more in the same spot. Five were dead, one moved when I touched her. I pulled her out of the pile and she staggered away to recover.
This was my worst moment in farming.
I stayed home for a day to watch for the cause of the carnage. I was pretty sure I knew the culprits. Sure enough, mid-morning, about an hour after I would normally have left for work, our three border collies crawled under a fence, rounded up the sheep and brought them into the pen, crowding them into a corner of the shed. We discourage the dogs from working sheep by themselves, but a certain amount of self-study is good for a sheepdog. They teach themselves by practicing. In moderation, it is a productive exercise.
If a border collie is not fascinated by livestock, they don’t make good stock dogs. They learn to move the herds and flocks because they love to move them.
The two older dogs mostly stayed back, moving this way and that to watch the way the clump of sheep moved in response to them. The youngest dog, Chico, was a pup, about five months old, and he was much more aggressive than his parents. He darted into the flock and nipped the sheep. He barked and ran at them. I went out and called the dogs off. Then I brought Chico inside and started looking for someone who wanted a free border collie.
Sheep dread physical contact with a predator. To the sheep, almost nothing is more upsetting. As Chico goaded and harassed the ewes, they would have packed themselves more and more tightly into the corner of the shed until they knocked each other down and climbed over the fallen. Eventually those on the bottom died of suffocation or panic.
We were pretty sure the dead sheep were the victims of dogs because so many were killed and none of them had been eaten. Coyotes kill one animal at a time and eat them immediately. Coyotes are all business. And they almost never hunt in the daytime. We guessed our dogs were to blame because the sheep had no wounds. Border collies are bred to herd sheep without touching them.
Mop had been our primary sheepdog and a fine farming partner for four years. Pitch, her mate, had been around for about two years and was a dependable ally as well. Chico was their pup. The other four pups from the litter had been sold and we were thinking about keeping him.
Was it Chico’s aggressive personality that caused the deaths of all those sheep? Was it the chemistry of three dogs together, a dog-pack chemistry, that tipped the balance?
We don’t know. But when Chico went away to live with a new family — a family without livestock — our problem was solved.
That was the worst catastrophe was seen on our farm. However, there have been others. A visiting dog — a friendly dog — killed about 30 chickens one day. A neighbor’s pit bull terriers killed a mother and two baby goats one evening just after sunset. They maimed and nearly killed a third goat, “Mr. Big,” an ancient angora wether who somehow recovered.
I failed to notice a heifer calving in a distant pasture once. The calf died in the birth canal and the mother became septic. She died soon after in the veterinarian’s corral.
The chickens died because we left the visiting dog unattended. The goats were killed because I had separated them, temporarily, from the mule who normally watched out for them. We keep mules and donkeys with our goats and sheep because they naturally become members of the flocks and, by instinct, protect them from predators.
The heifer and her calf died because I accidentally let her breed too young and then wasn’t attentive enough when she went into labor.
And there have been other fatalities over the years. Chickens and turkeys, mostly. Poultry has a genius for suicide-by-predator. Or, rather, every predator on Earth recognizes poultry as the easiest, most delicious meal on the farm. Every dog has to be trained to ignore the chickens and turkeys. In fact, our dogs had to be trained to ignore the chickens and then, when we expanded into turkeys, they had to be taught that turkeys were also not on the canine menu, all over again. Hope springs eternal. On the other hand, the dogs help keep the raccoons, possums and skunks out of the chicken house. The cat had to be taught not to eat the baby chickens. Once we had assisted the hens in teaching him that lesson, he provided another line of defense against the possums and skunks.
Each and every time one of my mistakes has caused a creature to die, I’ve considered selling all the animals and pulling out the fences. I care about each of the animals personally. I can’t help it.
I’m not emotionally detached when it comes to the livestock. I name nearly every animal. Some people — even in my own family — consider this ghoulish. After all, we’re going to eat some of them and sell most of the others to people who will eat them.
But I relish their presence. The names help me keep track of them and I enjoy socializing with them. I chat with them while I’m working around the farm. They are, in a very real sense, my companions. They might even be called friends.
Of course this makes the process of taking them to slaughter both painful and poignant. But that’s nature. All prey animals die, in nature, in the jaws of predators. And our methods are, generally, more humane than the ways other predators kill.
It is much more painful, to me, when one of my constant companions is killed as the result of my bad judgment, my lack of attentiveness or my laziness.
Our animals are raised in their natural families in a nutritious environment where they can enjoy good health, companionship, clean air, fresh water and generally as much space as they desire. When our animals accidentally get out of their fenced pastures, they usually hang around until we show up to put them back in. They have family, friends, health and a sense of home here.
Every living thing should be so lucky.
Industrial agriculture cannot spare the time or the space to provide many amenities. So the animals we raise are sparing some other creatures whose lives would mostly be crowded, lonely, chaotic and often unhealthy.
We believe that the lifestyle we provide for our livestock is humane. Their well-being is a personal concern for us, day in and day out. We really care.
And that’s what hurts.
Raising animals for food forces us to confront nature’s own tough logic. Raising healthy creatures on a specific amount of property while allowing them to reproduce more or less naturally, we need to harvest more animals than we keep each year. If we fail to harvest enough of our annual crop of babies, pastures are soon damaged and animals become sick from malnutrition. If any of our animal-care systems fails, animals die.
So we live with this burden, day in and day out. At its worst, it can make you feel like quitting. Sometimes I feel like letting someone else raise my food for me. Maybe I could pretend that the rice, broccoli and salmon on my plate are the products of some immaculate conception in which nothing had to suffer.
But of course that would be sentimental nonsense. The salmon were captured and killed. Cultivation of crops destroyed some creature’s habitat. When we don’t consume, some other creature quickly takes advantage of the extra resources. Some campers drove across one of our empty pastures one late summer day. It was a big summer for grass and too set to cut hay, so the grass had been left alone all summer. In one round trip the car mashed three prairie voles. One car circled through a 10-acre pasture once and managed to cross paths, fatally, with three voles. The implications for how many rodents had made their home in that pasture during that summer are staggering.
Every creature that draws a breath or burns a single calorie has, to some degree or another, displaced another. That’s one level of responsibility.
When we engage in the active management of our environment as farmers or loggers, gardeners or city managers, we exercise another level of responsibility.
If we commit ourselves to truly exercising our responsibility, if we choose to be true stewards of the land, then we cannot afford sentimentality. To be good stewards of nature, we have to respect and acknowledge nature’s laws. If we love nature we will care for it more successfully. But only if we love nature for what it is. Undoubtedly a thousand small tragedies were acted out in our lower pasture that summer we left it alone. Voles are monogamous. They take only 30 days to grow from birth to adulthood. Across our pastures tiny mommies and daddies can raise several big families in a long summer. When a coyote or a raccoon digs up a vole nest, well, you can imagine the drama. It is never accurately depicted in what we would call a “family” movie.
So nature challenges us: Can we love the world around us unsentimentally? Our enormous achievements have brought most of the planet more or less under our control. Now that we have this powerful role in the world, are we capable of accepting our responsibility?
Ref: http://www.motherearthnews.com/Rancho-Cappuccino/Raising-Food-Animals-Human-Responsibility.aspx?utm_content=10.26.09+HE&utm_campaign=HE&utm_source=iPost&utm_medium=email#
By Bryan Welch
I came home one day to find five sheep dead, piled in a corner of their shed. It took me a couple of hours to dig a hole big enough to hold the carcasses. Two days later I found six more in the same spot. Five were dead, one moved when I touched her. I pulled her out of the pile and she staggered away to recover.
This was my worst moment in farming.
I stayed home for a day to watch for the cause of the carnage. I was pretty sure I knew the culprits. Sure enough, mid-morning, about an hour after I would normally have left for work, our three border collies crawled under a fence, rounded up the sheep and brought them into the pen, crowding them into a corner of the shed. We discourage the dogs from working sheep by themselves, but a certain amount of self-study is good for a sheepdog. They teach themselves by practicing. In moderation, it is a productive exercise.
If a border collie is not fascinated by livestock, they don’t make good stock dogs. They learn to move the herds and flocks because they love to move them.
The two older dogs mostly stayed back, moving this way and that to watch the way the clump of sheep moved in response to them. The youngest dog, Chico, was a pup, about five months old, and he was much more aggressive than his parents. He darted into the flock and nipped the sheep. He barked and ran at them. I went out and called the dogs off. Then I brought Chico inside and started looking for someone who wanted a free border collie.
Sheep dread physical contact with a predator. To the sheep, almost nothing is more upsetting. As Chico goaded and harassed the ewes, they would have packed themselves more and more tightly into the corner of the shed until they knocked each other down and climbed over the fallen. Eventually those on the bottom died of suffocation or panic.
We were pretty sure the dead sheep were the victims of dogs because so many were killed and none of them had been eaten. Coyotes kill one animal at a time and eat them immediately. Coyotes are all business. And they almost never hunt in the daytime. We guessed our dogs were to blame because the sheep had no wounds. Border collies are bred to herd sheep without touching them.
Mop had been our primary sheepdog and a fine farming partner for four years. Pitch, her mate, had been around for about two years and was a dependable ally as well. Chico was their pup. The other four pups from the litter had been sold and we were thinking about keeping him.
Was it Chico’s aggressive personality that caused the deaths of all those sheep? Was it the chemistry of three dogs together, a dog-pack chemistry, that tipped the balance?
We don’t know. But when Chico went away to live with a new family — a family without livestock — our problem was solved.
That was the worst catastrophe was seen on our farm. However, there have been others. A visiting dog — a friendly dog — killed about 30 chickens one day. A neighbor’s pit bull terriers killed a mother and two baby goats one evening just after sunset. They maimed and nearly killed a third goat, “Mr. Big,” an ancient angora wether who somehow recovered.
I failed to notice a heifer calving in a distant pasture once. The calf died in the birth canal and the mother became septic. She died soon after in the veterinarian’s corral.
The chickens died because we left the visiting dog unattended. The goats were killed because I had separated them, temporarily, from the mule who normally watched out for them. We keep mules and donkeys with our goats and sheep because they naturally become members of the flocks and, by instinct, protect them from predators.
The heifer and her calf died because I accidentally let her breed too young and then wasn’t attentive enough when she went into labor.
And there have been other fatalities over the years. Chickens and turkeys, mostly. Poultry has a genius for suicide-by-predator. Or, rather, every predator on Earth recognizes poultry as the easiest, most delicious meal on the farm. Every dog has to be trained to ignore the chickens and turkeys. In fact, our dogs had to be trained to ignore the chickens and then, when we expanded into turkeys, they had to be taught that turkeys were also not on the canine menu, all over again. Hope springs eternal. On the other hand, the dogs help keep the raccoons, possums and skunks out of the chicken house. The cat had to be taught not to eat the baby chickens. Once we had assisted the hens in teaching him that lesson, he provided another line of defense against the possums and skunks.
Each and every time one of my mistakes has caused a creature to die, I’ve considered selling all the animals and pulling out the fences. I care about each of the animals personally. I can’t help it.
I’m not emotionally detached when it comes to the livestock. I name nearly every animal. Some people — even in my own family — consider this ghoulish. After all, we’re going to eat some of them and sell most of the others to people who will eat them.
But I relish their presence. The names help me keep track of them and I enjoy socializing with them. I chat with them while I’m working around the farm. They are, in a very real sense, my companions. They might even be called friends.
Of course this makes the process of taking them to slaughter both painful and poignant. But that’s nature. All prey animals die, in nature, in the jaws of predators. And our methods are, generally, more humane than the ways other predators kill.
It is much more painful, to me, when one of my constant companions is killed as the result of my bad judgment, my lack of attentiveness or my laziness.
Our animals are raised in their natural families in a nutritious environment where they can enjoy good health, companionship, clean air, fresh water and generally as much space as they desire. When our animals accidentally get out of their fenced pastures, they usually hang around until we show up to put them back in. They have family, friends, health and a sense of home here.
Every living thing should be so lucky.
Industrial agriculture cannot spare the time or the space to provide many amenities. So the animals we raise are sparing some other creatures whose lives would mostly be crowded, lonely, chaotic and often unhealthy.
We believe that the lifestyle we provide for our livestock is humane. Their well-being is a personal concern for us, day in and day out. We really care.
And that’s what hurts.
Raising animals for food forces us to confront nature’s own tough logic. Raising healthy creatures on a specific amount of property while allowing them to reproduce more or less naturally, we need to harvest more animals than we keep each year. If we fail to harvest enough of our annual crop of babies, pastures are soon damaged and animals become sick from malnutrition. If any of our animal-care systems fails, animals die.
So we live with this burden, day in and day out. At its worst, it can make you feel like quitting. Sometimes I feel like letting someone else raise my food for me. Maybe I could pretend that the rice, broccoli and salmon on my plate are the products of some immaculate conception in which nothing had to suffer.
But of course that would be sentimental nonsense. The salmon were captured and killed. Cultivation of crops destroyed some creature’s habitat. When we don’t consume, some other creature quickly takes advantage of the extra resources. Some campers drove across one of our empty pastures one late summer day. It was a big summer for grass and too set to cut hay, so the grass had been left alone all summer. In one round trip the car mashed three prairie voles. One car circled through a 10-acre pasture once and managed to cross paths, fatally, with three voles. The implications for how many rodents had made their home in that pasture during that summer are staggering.
Every creature that draws a breath or burns a single calorie has, to some degree or another, displaced another. That’s one level of responsibility.
When we engage in the active management of our environment as farmers or loggers, gardeners or city managers, we exercise another level of responsibility.
If we commit ourselves to truly exercising our responsibility, if we choose to be true stewards of the land, then we cannot afford sentimentality. To be good stewards of nature, we have to respect and acknowledge nature’s laws. If we love nature we will care for it more successfully. But only if we love nature for what it is. Undoubtedly a thousand small tragedies were acted out in our lower pasture that summer we left it alone. Voles are monogamous. They take only 30 days to grow from birth to adulthood. Across our pastures tiny mommies and daddies can raise several big families in a long summer. When a coyote or a raccoon digs up a vole nest, well, you can imagine the drama. It is never accurately depicted in what we would call a “family” movie.
So nature challenges us: Can we love the world around us unsentimentally? Our enormous achievements have brought most of the planet more or less under our control. Now that we have this powerful role in the world, are we capable of accepting our responsibility?
Ref: http://www.motherearthnews.com/Rancho-Cappuccino/Raising-Food-Animals-Human-Responsibility.aspx?utm_content=10.26.09+HE&utm_campaign=HE&utm_source=iPost&utm_medium=email#
Saturday, October 24, 2009
It Started With A Worm
I seem to recall from my high school English classes that Inherit the Wind, a powerful drama about the Scopes Monkey Trial, began with a worm. A child, I believe, taunts the defiant teacher of evolution with an earthworm, remarking how silly it was that Mr. Scopes believed all humans have come from that slimy little creature. Though the child is little more than a literary personification of ignorance, there is significance to the power of worms and their role as creators. My family’s dreams, all of them, have come true. And they all began with worms.
There is nothing out of the ordinary about our family, apart from our exceptional ability to imagine great things and then turn those imaginary things into reality. My oldest daughter wanted horses, my youngest daughter wanted kittens. My oldest boy wanted a farm, my youngest boy wanted an ATV. My husband and I wanted all these spoils for them. So, collectively, our unit began to work. No, we didn’t have horses or kittens or ATVs yet, but we did have worms. One thousand worms to be exact, all happily nestled in a large can with thick, lush dirt. We declared ourselves “Worm Farmers,” the only such family on our suburban block. We took pride in scraping our table waste into the dirt, fattening up our worms for the production of rich soil and good fishing. It didn’t take much to keep the worms happy. They were, after all, just worms. But our family knew that these were baby steps; just one rung on the ladder to bigger animals, greater production, and more efficient sustainability.
Shortly after our excursion into the profession of worm farming, the miracles began to happen. An ad on the seemingly pedestrian website of Craigslist led us to sixteen acres of prelapsarian paradise. That paradise consisted of rolling pastureland, thick-wooded hills, an acre-wide lake, and a view of the Milky Way that would have a nonbeliever swearing he sees angels. We named that paradise Emotive Acres, a tribute of land’s ability to stir us to our very core. Craigslist also led us to a beautiful sorrel filly for one hundred fifty dollars, and a gelding, a mare, a stallion and another filly were soon to follow. Immediately thereafter another Craigslist ad for an ATV fell into our laps, and kittens, cows, sheep and more are soon to come.
We found our Emotive Acres in the midst of an economic recession, during which old ways of thinking were being forced into revision as jobs were lost, homes were seized, and simple comforts like food and heat were becoming unaffordable. Our pockets felt same blow that everyone else’s did, and our family clung together in a community fear of the unknown. As a kid, I watched my post-Depression grandparents hide cans of food in every nook and cranny of their household, terrified of another national economic disaster. My generation endured a similar disaster, but could no longer afford the cans of food. But we could afford seeds, and we could afford worms. We were willing to get our hands dirty, to do what we had to for the security of our children.
This is the true “grass roots movement,” for which I believe our generation will be remembered. City people and suburbanites like my family are moving outward, returning to our divinely-declared role as stewards of the earth. In doing so, we bring new green – the green of the city dollar – to those who need it most. We have been humbled; our ironclad capitalism has exposed its chinks. It is now the people, those who make things with their hands and provide services with their skill, who are stepping back from the brink of economic disaster. The entrepreneurs, the altruists, the hard workin’ men and women are reaching out to one another and creating a community safety net. We don’t recover from disaster by having a fortune showered upon us; we do it dollar by dollar, classified ad by classified ad. Anything else would allow us to avoid the lesson the disaster was meant to teach. Because my family dedicated our energy to the nurturing of worms, we created a reality of delicious fish dinners and juicy organic produce. Having secured our endless supply of loaves and fishes, we opened ourselves up to the miracles that were bestowed upon us. The human race may not have evolved from the earthworm, but the earthworm may indeed be what saves us.
There is nothing out of the ordinary about our family, apart from our exceptional ability to imagine great things and then turn those imaginary things into reality. My oldest daughter wanted horses, my youngest daughter wanted kittens. My oldest boy wanted a farm, my youngest boy wanted an ATV. My husband and I wanted all these spoils for them. So, collectively, our unit began to work. No, we didn’t have horses or kittens or ATVs yet, but we did have worms. One thousand worms to be exact, all happily nestled in a large can with thick, lush dirt. We declared ourselves “Worm Farmers,” the only such family on our suburban block. We took pride in scraping our table waste into the dirt, fattening up our worms for the production of rich soil and good fishing. It didn’t take much to keep the worms happy. They were, after all, just worms. But our family knew that these were baby steps; just one rung on the ladder to bigger animals, greater production, and more efficient sustainability.
Shortly after our excursion into the profession of worm farming, the miracles began to happen. An ad on the seemingly pedestrian website of Craigslist led us to sixteen acres of prelapsarian paradise. That paradise consisted of rolling pastureland, thick-wooded hills, an acre-wide lake, and a view of the Milky Way that would have a nonbeliever swearing he sees angels. We named that paradise Emotive Acres, a tribute of land’s ability to stir us to our very core. Craigslist also led us to a beautiful sorrel filly for one hundred fifty dollars, and a gelding, a mare, a stallion and another filly were soon to follow. Immediately thereafter another Craigslist ad for an ATV fell into our laps, and kittens, cows, sheep and more are soon to come.
We found our Emotive Acres in the midst of an economic recession, during which old ways of thinking were being forced into revision as jobs were lost, homes were seized, and simple comforts like food and heat were becoming unaffordable. Our pockets felt same blow that everyone else’s did, and our family clung together in a community fear of the unknown. As a kid, I watched my post-Depression grandparents hide cans of food in every nook and cranny of their household, terrified of another national economic disaster. My generation endured a similar disaster, but could no longer afford the cans of food. But we could afford seeds, and we could afford worms. We were willing to get our hands dirty, to do what we had to for the security of our children.
This is the true “grass roots movement,” for which I believe our generation will be remembered. City people and suburbanites like my family are moving outward, returning to our divinely-declared role as stewards of the earth. In doing so, we bring new green – the green of the city dollar – to those who need it most. We have been humbled; our ironclad capitalism has exposed its chinks. It is now the people, those who make things with their hands and provide services with their skill, who are stepping back from the brink of economic disaster. The entrepreneurs, the altruists, the hard workin’ men and women are reaching out to one another and creating a community safety net. We don’t recover from disaster by having a fortune showered upon us; we do it dollar by dollar, classified ad by classified ad. Anything else would allow us to avoid the lesson the disaster was meant to teach. Because my family dedicated our energy to the nurturing of worms, we created a reality of delicious fish dinners and juicy organic produce. Having secured our endless supply of loaves and fishes, we opened ourselves up to the miracles that were bestowed upon us. The human race may not have evolved from the earthworm, but the earthworm may indeed be what saves us.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)