March 17th

As much as I love farming, I find that it reflects for me the old adage, “The dose makes the poison”. In the right measure, with the right amount of care, the work of farming is healing for me. My new job as Farm Manager at Ojo Caliente Spa has in so many ways physically and mentally rejuvenated me. I have felt in love with the day to day, with the challenges and the new learning that has come along with my new land and climate.

The right dose is good medicine, but the wrong dose - the too much dose - is poison. This is what I experienced before when I was at the end of my farming days in Tennessee. Too much weight, too much stress, too much physical wear and tear, too much repetition, too many challenges. We call it burn out, and I wonder if it is because it originates as a perfect sparkle of love which feels so good, and then morphs into a toxic flame that consumes us from the inside out.

I have found myself feeling tired lately. For a time I was waking up at night filled with adrenaline, visions of crop planning in my head. Now I lay awake and worry about my family, and my dog, and if our farm in Tennessee will sell. I worry about my husband alone, trying to juggle sanding and painting our floors, his full time job, keeping up with the animals and the ever-growing spring time grass, and maintaining his mental and physical health. I worry about what our next steps are once we are fully here, with no more farm and a moving truck full of belongings, and how long it will take for us to find a home.

Although this process of moving is right on schedule and is as we intended, it is also feeling like too much medicine. This adventure, this dream, that has felt so good is currently feeling like a bigger dose than we can handle. I can sense the life that my husband and I built together in Tennessee unraveling - the loose threads and holes appearing. This moving process is on a trajectory and we are now just trying to hang on for the ride, as things like comfort and familiarity slough off and float away. We are in the hard part, perhaps the second or third hard part in a long line of hard parts. But we are doing it. As Rumi says, “We are pain and what cures pain, both”.

The thermostat alarm in the propagation house on the farm went off early this morning, saying the inside temperature was quickly falling below freezing. The propagation house is currently filled with baby kale, broccoli, cabbage, lettuce and onions plants, which are cold hardy but I could not bear to risk losing them. I ran down to the farm in my slippers, coffee in hand, and saw that for some reason the propane flame of the heater had been snuffed out. I got it fixed as the sun rose over the valley, instantly warming the air inside and outside the propagation house. I sat out in a chair under the old juniper tree, sipping cold coffee and listening to the red-winged blackbirds that inhabit the large, tangled brush at the edge of the field. In the dry grass, two magpies hop around hunting for insects and worms in the golden light. I had a good long cry, and felt better.

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