One Crazy Farmer

It’s one of hottest summers on record. What in the world are we doing planting seeds and moving animals across the land everyday in this God-forsaken heat? When you think about it, why are we doing any of this, anytime, with a future of laboratory grown food and a climate crisis upon us?

Well, it’s the same thing you do everyday when you know that she will never change and he will never stop, so you work on your boundaries and responses and reactions.

It’s the same thing you do when the depression cripples and the anxiety overwhelms and you find that voice buried deep inside of you that says “this will not last.”

It’s the same thing that happens when everyone around you is so sure that polarization and alienation are our only future, but you proclaim a different future with phrases like “let me just listen,” or “I apologize” even, “I forgive you.”

One of my neighbors said to me this morning “I used to watch you out the window moving all the animals. I thought you were one crazy farmer!”

He’s right. It is crazy to have the conviction of things hoped for and not yet seen. To work for something that the world says is not possible. To hope for a future of healthy soils and real food, a future where you are not in toxic relationships, and anxiety nor depression have the last word, and forgiveness not resentment is the common response of the day.

By the way, my neighbor who once called me “one crazy farmer?” He now works with me side by side, day after day doing the work that a regenerative farm requires. He turned into one crazy farmer too.

And then there is this. I have a friend who is very sick. He has done all the things you do to try and stop drinking but now he has given himself over fully to the disease. Alcohol is killing him from the inside out. Sooner than later.

I decided a few weeks ago I would give up on helping him and just resign myself to being his friend until he died. “Just walk him home” I said to myself. I was at peace with my decision but we have another friend who refused to give up and said “let’s just try one more time to get him to rehab.”

Miracle of miracles. After lots of back and forth, my friend will start rehab this weekend. He called right as I was finishing this blog and he coherently told me that he is now eight days sober.

Everywhere you look, the world is filled with doomsayers and naysayers. Gently put aside the future of which they are so sure. Start planting for our future yet to be born.

Let’s just try one more time.