What If You Got Everything You Wanted Right Now?
In their book, The Independent Farmstead, Shawn and Beth Dougherty have the following meditation to aspiring small-scale farmers looking to buy a plot of land for their families:
“And consider: our information, in this new-to-us area of farming, is limited; our experience even more so. Our sources of advice, in local farmers, veterinarians, and in the vast majority of how-to books, are themselves limited—almost universally espousing methods that are just those from which we are trying to escape, suspicious or even down-right scornful of the notion that agriculture may be practiced in any way besides the one they learned in ag school, or the one their seedsman or tractor salesman tells them is the latest problem-fixer. Supposing we could afford to go out right away and buy our vision of what a grass-based, ecologically diverse farm should be, would it be a good thing? Would ‘our vision,’ however well we have done our research, be sufficiently well informed and all-inclusive to make its realization the farm of our dreams? In our opinion, the answer is ‘no.’
Experience is, after all, the best teacher—and experience cannot be bought. It has to be lived—and lived with. Especially experience of the sort a farmer needs: experience of living systems, dynamic, fluctuating; experience of vagaries in climate, water availability, pest population, rest, and renewal. Experiences of changes in ourselves, our predilections, preferences and ideals, and in the circumstances of our own and our family’s lives. Designing the perfect barn and having a contractor put it up for us certainly gets the job done quickly, but what if we discover once we put some animals in it that the loose stalls are just a couple of feet too small for the breed we want to house, or the gate swings in exactly the wrong direction for when we want to load livestock into the trailer?”
This week, I invite you to consider:
What do I want most, that is, what’s my vision? If it were possible for me to get my vision right now in an instant, what might I be missing out on? Why might it be good for me to be patient (literally to suffer or endure)? What might I learn and how might I change while working to make my vision real the long way?
God bless,
Dan
P.S. I missed last week’s letter so lucky reader #102 gets a $100 Christmas bonus. I renew my commitment to send the Good Leaven Letter out weekly on Monday, and if I don’t, another random reader will be awarded $100. Thank you all for your readership and support!
