Just a sign of life post letting y’all know that I’m still alive and Field & Story still exists. My academic year started last week, and students resume school this week. It’s always such a hard right turn to go back to school after luxuriating in summer. The first few days very nearly killed me. I was in excruciating pain because of a shoulder thing, it was oppressively hot (still kinda is), and because I’m in a new office with new equipment, I was thoroughly discombobulated. Part of that is dissonance from the world of food or farming, which I knew would happen upon my re-entry. I know I’m at the tail end of this officey part of my career. That my work with youth in the future will look much different and will take place on the earth and in creative spaces.

We wrapped up irrigation last week and are starting our module on horticulture tonight. A couple of weeks ago, Patrick, my EAT! instructor, met me and my dad at our wilded ranch property and we did walk-through. It was a very spiritual experience for me that I’m still processing because it broke a surface tension that had been there for many years. It felt like the first step of something big, that I’d had iron feet this whole time and maybe that was changing.

Patrick and I stood under some pepper trees and I told him how fraught being there was for me. How I felt I needed to move on work at the farm, but also how it was psychologically terrifying because it feels like I’m pitting that clock against the waning years of my parents’ lives. Even saying that here is difficult, but it’s true. He told me a similar story about his father who passed away a few years ago, and his own paralysis around the eight-acre property they owned. It was a relief for me to talk to someone with the same spiritual problem as opposed to a clinical practitioner.

I think that’s why stories of lived experience are important. I don’t think any kind of therapy can get you all the way with this sort of thing, at least not with me. I need to talk to people who have been in the same crucible. That’s what kinship is.

More on that farm visit and the beginnings of horticulture later this week. Sorry for being MIA! Going back to work will put me back on a regular schedule with this also. Because when there’s external pressure on our time, we fight to do the things we care about!!