The Year in Reverie

The Wreath Sale and Harvest Open House is a week away. A cycle on our small farm is nearly over – in many ways it is a completion and a closure for us. It’s helpful to consider the experiences and insights of a year’s turning – look back and forward from this present moment, a significant point on the spiral of living and learning. There is great value in staying put, seeing a season (or many seasons) through. We learn and grow – more able to meet the challenges ahead. As for apprentices, some are leaving – a season of being immersed in a garden really complete – on to other gardens and other challenges.

Everyone who has been here this year has worked hard in our struggle and dance to make the land-based life survive and flourish for another season. Many have given and worked hard to pursue land for other species to be able to live, for us to have healthy clean air and water, places to renew our spirit and see models of health.

Our life here is definitely a local and, so far, a sustainable economy. It all hangs together like a complicated fabric. We are a school, a library, a learning center, a business, neighbors helping neighbors, local marketing of locally grown food, flowers and herbs, CSA, Central Coast beekeeping,  home school, school tours, summer kids’ class, interns, apprentices, cohorts, friends, co-creators of a land-based livelihood that changes people and creates competence, confidence and competence.

. So much needs preserving – our histories, our stories, our plant varieties that feed us, our family recipes, the many local businesses that sustain our needs, real and imagined. We live, we use land and resources. Do it with consciousness. How can we restore, preserve and enhance so we can pass on the same choices to our children’s children? 

We hope all our friends and relations stay warm and fed, and find safe homes and work in the next year’s cycle.

Jim Nelson

Time held me green and dying

but I sang in my chains like the sea.

Dylan Thomas