Nourishing Bites | Nightsong
Fall is coming.
In the early mornings as I tend the animals, I can feel the shift of the seasons. There’s a different quality to the light now, a tinge of chill to the bookends of our days that signals the slow end to summer.
I can also feel fall taking up residence in my physical body. All that momentum that carried me through to this point has begun to ebb, and some things just take a bit more effort now to overcome the drag force of sheer weariness.
While I love the colorful, celebratory flash of bright tomatoes and smooth skinned gloss of summer zucchini, there’s something compelling about the cadence and rhythms of fall.
This is the time of year when Nature asks me every day in ways small and big, to let go, to accept, to harvest and winnow and glean the lessons of another year.
I’m accustomed to this shift in our farming season after many years of practice, and truth be told, even though it’s hard to bear witness to the slow death of crops under our care, there’s a pocket of relief too.
The last harvest of summer squash or field beans, the last pass of my hands over the browning cucumber vines, the last moments I spend bent over or on my knees in the field absorbed in final annual harvests of this crop or that-- these are bittersweet moments.
Moments in which I find myself full of heaviness, for the end of what has been. And moments in which I find myself full of thanks for the abundance and generosity of Nature herself.
Fall is the time of year things start to come full circle and I begin to question what I think I know. I become curious about the disconnect between my expectations and the actual experience of my life. I revisit the assumptions of my farm framework -- meaning I pose a lot of reflective questions to myself.
I ask, what did this year teach me about our incredible farm system that I wasn’t even aware of until now?
I ask, if I’m granted another go, if I could start again, what would I change?
I ask, is this working, and for whom?
Unlike conventional approaches, all this deep thinking and strategizing doesn’t occur in a conference room with flip charts and PowerPoints. It happens organically, in real time, in the heat of the hazy wildfire smoke in which I labor to breathe, while my arms are scratched up in the middle of harvesting squash, while I’m sharpening my pocket knife, while I’m scrubbing clean the water bucket for the donkeys, while I’m pitching raspy hay bales two stacks high.
Right now, there’s not an opportunity to record answers with pen and paper, my hands are literally just too full.
But you can be sure I’m registering what’s important, tucking away the wisdom of my collected years inside my head and my heart. Some experiences, some revelations, simply can’t be unrealized.
**
Farming, just like any commitment, asks a lot of me, and fairly often, especially in the fall, I ask myself, is this worth it?
Beyond the physical nature of this work lay the emotional tonnage, the weight and the pressure of having given my word -- that my work, this farm, will provide for 23 straight weeks. This year, that’s a promise I made to 84 families, plus the mouths and beaks we feed here at home year round.
What keeps my heart lifted is the gratitude for how much I have already accomplished, for how many delicious meals and moments my work with this land has made possible.
I’m thankful and grateful that this whole miraculous system has grown and spiraled in such creative ways that I could not have envisioned. That’s the best part of a healthy farm- the steadiness of the familiar rituals surrounded by an everyday- evolutionary unfolding that we can’t possibly imagine.
I’m the same as I was last year, and yet, I’m also someone remarkably different.
As I turn the calendar page to September, I find myself realizing once again, that things are often more complicated, more intricate than they appear. Letting go of false assumptions, of expectations, of fantasies, and undertaking the work of authentic intentions- of being willing to scale back and see straight to the bones, the very structure of life without the frivolous- that’s the dance we’re asked to step into as the daylight fades and brightness recedes and the shadows of winter creep slowly forward.
Is it worth it?
You bet.
**
At dusk now, winged termites in significant numbers take flight along the canyon edge. Our poultry coops are tucked along this edge, between the packing shed and the wild ravine. A week ago, Brad discovered that our good hen Red was reticent to retire each night. He’d find her and her chicks meandering the barnyard, long after even the donkeys had settled in for the night.
At this point in the year, it would have been so easy to chastise this hen, and rush her to the safety of the night coop. But Brad always believes in the intelligence of our creatures; his patience with and willingness to learn from animals is truly a gift. He’s ever-curious, always asking, ‘What’s happening here?’ instead of blindly assuming some human-centric stereotype.
And he was right to pause, right to step back, right to patiently wait.
Because what was Red really doing? It turns out, she was teaching her chicks to harvest their own bedtime snack. She was jumping up and catching termites right out of the air, and showing her chicks how to do the same.
One night Brad showed me their new ritual. From afar, I soften my eyes, and it appeared as though our gentle, old hen and her eager, young students were dancing together to a lively, staccato laden nightsong. It was both a welcoming, joyous sight and a quiet way to mark the beginning of fall.
Brad and Red, her chicks and I-- we were all alive to the mystery and magic of what is- and with a little awareness and imagination- what is possible. -AJ
Two shades of orange: Sherbert relaxes under the shade of our Marigolds.
“My approach is to assume that people, like ecosystems, really want to be cooperative, work together, and heal together. Let’s blow open every single door and think, ‘If everything were possible, what would that look like...?’ ”