As I sat this morning snuggling with Ruby over my morning coffee I got thinking about the lengths we go to in our modern lives to avoid this kind of pain, to numb ourselves to the darker, more difficult aspects of our emotions and life at large.
We collectively dream of a utopia free of pain and suffering, but I can't help but wonder if in doing so, have we missed the mark completely?
Alrighty. Enough doom scrolling! Time for some positive action.
I know a lot of you are worried about what the future holds, and are realizing that our modern life hasn't provided much in the way of concrete skills or resilience in the face of this kind of uncertainty.
Well folks. Here we go. Another week, another round of doom-scrolling.
Honestly, this past week has left me at a loss. I'm not sure what to say so I'll leave you with this gentle reminder : Suffering is not pie.
Noticed a lot of you lately feeling the weight of worry - about the state of the world, your personal food security and more. Worries that are hard to find the edges of or fit your arms around.
I see you doing everything you can to ready yourself for this thing that we can't seem to name, but many of us feel coming, that we can see out of the corner of our eye but can't quite pin down.
This time of year is a bit chaotic, but so, so joyful.
Weirdly, this season of chaos always gets me thinking about Slow Living. I've been reflecting on how so many of us confuse slowness with moving at a snail's pace all the time and therefore dismiss it out-of-hand.
Well - no more than the regular number of folks cancelled me from their inboxes this week after my last email, so thanks to everyone who stuck around! Hehe.
Ya know, I know that my speaking about things like human rights and social justice isn't what most folks expect when they sign up for a local farm's newsletter.
And yet, those issues are exactly what brought me to farming in the first place.
...We got talking about how as a culture we've gotten mixed up with both Darwin and the creation story - that there is so much more cooperation in Darwin's work than competition and that we've misinterpreted the directive of the old testament as dominion over the earth instead of the more beautiful notion of stewardship.
It got me thinking about the theme of stewardship in my life, here on the farm, in the garden, as a parent and in my world as a whole.
Despite our collective hope for something better, some relief, a little breath ... It's been another tough year.
As we move into 2022 full of uncertainty and more than a little heaviness I hope you can take a moment to pause before launching into the New Year, full of new plans and new hopes, and take a moment to acknowledge how far you've come.
Well. We did it. It took some doing, but we made Christmas happen for two deserving families.
Together, we provided both families their entire Christmas dinner, a big breakfast for the morning, TWO carloads of gifts and clothes, a whack of gift cards and $1200 cash, each. Overall, counting both cash and in-kind donations, we raised well over $4000 in less than two weeks.
What an emotional couple of days.
In other happy news - WE FOUND A FAMILY TO SPONSOR!
Finally. Mom's name is Sherry. She's a single Mom to four kids and was already having a pretty rough go prior to the floods. In 2018 her eldest son was killed in an accidental shooting on Canada Day. Just two weeks before the flood she had to move her Mum into palliative care.
