Wild Lives, Wildlife
To us and an untold number of non-human friends, our farm is a place of refuge. For sure, this has been a summer of wildlife; we’ve had more critter sightings than I can remember from all past years.
At dusk, we’ve caught sight of a family of raccoons traveling across the open paddock to cavort near the big vine maple. Several does and fawns make routine visits to our apple trees and just last weekend Brad spotted a wild turtle the size of a football making its way across the yard. This turtle had lichen growing on its back and a beautiful, healthy shell the color of wet granite.
Meanwhile, our young cat Sherbert has found multiple skinks. We’ve never seen any lizards here before and thankfully Brad rescued both ‘discoveries’. Once in July, Brad caught a flash of color as an even bigger member of the lizard family we couldn't identify darted into the grass.
Last night I walked up to check on the ripening plum trees and found a pheasant’s feather. It was tan and rust colored, with black striping that caught the fading sun and shimmered with refracted light when I twirled it through my fingertips. Last week out mowing the field near our young orchard I found myself at the epicenter of a looping, diving group of tawny blue barn swallows feeding on insects.
Each morning I clap my hands and traverse the edge of the canyon when I let our chickens out of the night roosts. The young coyote roaming our wetlands has cut a stealthy trail alongside the chicken yard. Whenever I become dismayed at the loss of one of our birds, I remind myself she too, is probably feeding a family.
As are the squirrels, who are now ever present around the ripening walnut trees. They carry off one nut at a time, all while we are still finding remnants of last year’s stash of walnut seedlings in odd places.
All these sightings remind me of how many lives and rhythms are playing out, often unnoticed, but right within our midst. The farm is home to whole communities, social circles, and networks I can’t even begin to diagram. That’s a good thing to be reminded of-- and one that is evident on every farm tour I’ve ever hosted. I usually share a myriad of examples of how one element of our farm is integrally connected to another. This concept is critically important when contemplating the value of farmland. We have a vibrant, diverse city of non-human beings at the farm-- hatching, growing, creating, building, and dying. At every stage these creatures are contributing to the whole of a complex eco-system that requires no fossil fuels, and produces no pollution.
It seems as if we humans tend to only value that which we can see, and only within the context of how it personally benefits us. Our work is to learn to see deeper and wider, to see beyond the superficial, and to stop judging worth from a human-centric perspective. Our work is to find and honor the webs of connections. On a diversified farm, these precious networks are literally everywhere.
Yesterday morning, Brad and I took a walk through our fields. Perched on cluster of six foot tall Mugwort was a mixed flock of yellow finches and yellow-tan warblers. Like kids on a summer tree swing, these little birds would alight at the very tips of the long, pliable stalks which would then bounce up and down, up and down. Brad and I fell into a silent pause. I became aware of their chirping- it sounded like cheerful playground giggles. Fly, land, bounce and sway. One warbler would take up an airborne game of chase, peck at sunflower seeds, taste the drying oats, then return back to the Mugwort jungle gym.
A small garter snake glided past, the oregano flowers thrummed with pollinators, the sun emerged from the cloud cover and was bright and warm on our backs. My clipboard hung slack at my side, for a few peaceful minutes, I set down my pressing work list and glimpsed this whole other world: alive and brilliant as my own, full of abundant changes.
The building blocks of a wild life are made up of change. And change is a family of connections: past to present to future.
Here in the heat of August, it’s amidst the lengthy to-do lists and constant abundance, this rapid hum of summer life that I paradoxically make time to stop. To set down all that jumble of work heavy in my brain, and recognize, or rather honor, with my full awareness, all the interesting, brilliant, and industrious lives at April Joy Farm.
I say it’s a paradox that I take time to stop, because this is the time of year where everything starts to feel a little out of control. The farm sprawls. Weeds proliferate, tall stalks shade and bend, encroaching into neighboring rows. Grasses become fibrous, their sharp blades yellow in the heat. Thistles show their downy heads thick at fence posts safe from the mower’s blades. Blackberries arch and stretch and overshadow the drive lanes, insidious field bindweed curls and climbs and chokes with innocuous looking heart shaped leaves. Brad and I walk row after row, rows we’ve weeded in triplicate, and yet here before us stands two-foot-tall summer interlopers. How is that possible? Almost daily, we farmers are reminded: past is connected to present is connected to future.
In the wrong mood, this constant barrage of change is enough to make a person call it quits.
But we don’t. We find a way to release the need for control, we focus on what we can manage, the corners and pieces that we hope will highlight our future. We sow soil-building grains and clovers, tend kales, cole crops, winter squash and fall roots. We dig potatoes, clip onions, save seeds.
Most importantly, we occasionally stop. We stop so we can acknowledge the often unseen, unimaginably complex communities of wildness surrounding us. We stop so we can be right smack in the middle of now, aware and alive, witnessing those building blocks called change streaming all around us.
With the help of the wild lives at work and at play, these August days are the point in time where I set down my beginnings and turn my full attention to tending, and to endings. I learn to see beyond my narrow task-list view of this farm and recognize that it is, to all manner of wildness, a miraculous home.
Every day I work, and then I practice letting the rest go. Every day I practice resting, and then I work to let go.
August is when I remember to pause in the swift, churning current of change and be thankful for my teachers: this ever-abundant community of wild lives.~AJ
“The sacred is not in heaven or far away. It is all around us, and small human rituals can connect us to its presence. And of course, the greatest challenge (and gift) is to see the sacred in each other.”