For years I have been playing around with the idea of starting a blog. First there was the website I created for a small organic farm that I ran in my 20's. Wow, looking back I learned so much from that experience. I will always be grateful to the family who believed in me and gave me the chance to see what a girl from suburbia could do with a shovel. They even let me use their tractors! Side note: while I am not here to write about any version of farming that involves tractors, if you are ever feeling small or weak in your life and are given the chance to drive a tractor, do it! You will feel so powerful... just saying. But seriously, two plus years of learning to plant, grow and market mass quantities of food was a life-changing experience and without it, I'm sure I would not be sitting at a desk writing this today.
Then there was the "mom" blog that never happened. Well first there was the kid... The first of two of them. And I really believed that between nursing and changing cloth diapers and working part time for a kids' nature organization, I could find the time to write about all of it. Spoiler alert: I did not.
So now here we are, the fall of 2023 and I am finally writing my first blog post. While blogging never happened over the past decade, many other educational and growing experiences have happened in my life and consequently, maybe I will actually have more interesting things to write about! You can be the judge of that!
Plus, this blog isn't just supposed to be for my own entertainment, or for yours, though I hope it is. This blog is meant to change the world. Yes, seriously I'm not joking! I guess that probably sounds pretty cocky coming from someone who has failed to get started for the past ten years, but the time is finally here and the world needs changing more than ever. People are hungry out there and not just for food. Most of us in this country have enough to eat if you are only measuring this statistic based on calories. But how many people are lacking nutrition? I mean real wholesome food in the form of plants and animals and not just sugar and salt combined with a bunch of ingredients I can't pronounce. How many people around us are hungry for meaning in their life? In this life where everyone has everything handed to them via a delivery driver and no one has to directly work for their own basic needs, how can we feel fulfilled? A ten-hour shift at the grocery store to pay for a shopping cart of cardboard and plastic containers full of edible crap is not the same as a day spent in the sunshine and dirt followed by a meal of vegetables picked straight out of the garden. There is simply no comparison here.
What I want for this world is for people to feel empowered to take full responsibility for their own well-being and for the well-being of those in their community. To turn their back on those telling them that their happiness comes from a store. Abundance is everywhere around us if we would only open our eyes and look. Sometimes all it takes is a few little tweaks before we start to see the excess piling up!
So join me on my journey as we dismantle the system that has devalued our life experience, and as we work to build a new one using the teachings of Bill Mollison on permaculture along with our own brains (imagine that!). The more we can share our successes and failures with one another, the more we can feel inspired to get up in the driver seat of our metaphorical tractors and shape the landscapes of our lives!
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