this is real life

“It may be when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.”

-Wendell Berry

I have been privileged here at Taproot Farm to invest my days in a manner congruent with my mindset, cycling naturally with the rhythms of the sun & moon.  While oftentimes my mind and heart churn & boil, my head and hands engage in meaningful collective effort.

In crisp autumn moonlight, washed in a sea of stars, I stepped into the labyrinth.  The path to the center seems convoluted because it is.  It must be.  Each step, each moment in the maze, lends clarity to the whole...

maybe sometimes it's necessary to lay awake nights, staring into the darkness, allowing all the uncertainties of being to bubble up from the secret depths.  hearing & seeing - listening & believing to-- the raucous chorus of emotion, feeling each one deeply.... it must be... must be.

but, just as you could classify me as a visual/kinetic/impulse-driven/mistake-based learner, you might consider me a kinetic healer.  it's easy for me to get lost in the stories my mind tells my me. i tend to get caught in loops.  somehow, though, it's mostly when my hands get dirty interacting with life on earth (i guess you can call it 'working,' if'n ye must) that the torrent swirls into manageable eddies. 

Undoubtedly, there are bits of me that are broken. All I can do for now is embrace that & hope that the hugging helps to heal it.  Eso si que es.

When we were rooted in Querencia, swimming silently in the vast ocean of our bodies, Beth's voice purred through the void:

Remember that you are the Mountain.

yes.

please.

this place, this place! saddled between the Alleghany and Appalachian mountains, birthed of devonian rock, shedding its waters into the Cacapon river as it flows into the Potomac and out Chesapeake Bay to commingle with the deep birthplace of us all: the salty seas.

There's a kind of wild magic on this farm that Beth, Tim & Alexor have found a way to cultivate.  If life is located at the intersection of here & now, then Taproot is there too, at the nexus of plants, animals & spirit that you can see when you finally realize you've arrived.  

thank you.

thanks for the photos Lex!

These 3 weeks seem to have flown by, and the longer i stay the less i want to leave.  It's rare in this world to find places to feel completely accepted, where humans interact reciprocally with each other and their environment.  I feel blessed to have stumbled upon it and grateful to have been welcomed back time and again.  And i'm happy that i can say "see ya next time" and know that it's going to thrive in the care of these stewards, and that i've had some small hand in the process.