From Farm to Home
My personal experience so far this summer has been quite the change of pace, one that was sorely needed. The pace of my life has slowed down. At the same time, I feel like I’m much more effective. I typically struggle with trying to do too much all at once. Here, I’m forced to focus on one thing, but I can’t get too carried away. I have my daughter with me, so I’m forced to switch tasks periodically. Take a break. I can’t go all out for hours on end. We still have about five weeks left and I’m starting to envision what that can look like when we go to our own home.
How do I take this slower pace of life with me when we move to our new home?
From Home to Farm
Years ago, Isaac and I took the Farm Dreams Workshop from the Land Stewardship Project and they asked us to consider what we were looking to get from farming? What does a farm represent to us? Because it probably isn’t about the farm, or just the farm. All these years later, that has continued to help us make certain choices in our life.
For us, the desire for a farm and land stems from a desire to move towards self-sufficiency, to break free from the Standard American Life (at least the parts we don’t enjoy), and a way to integrate multiple layers of our lives. If we are always moving towards those ideals (among many others that we hold), but we never actually get to our own physical farm, that would be okay. We aren’t interested in compromising on our dreams, so we have been careful not to tie our dreams to a specific physical reality.
That being said, there are many things I’ve enjoyed about farm life, so I’m trying to envision what farming can look like when we move home.
How do I continue to incorporate aspects of farming into our life once we aren’t living on a farm?
Here’s a picture of some prairie next to a lake, my work space last week.