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Below follow the resolutions I made for 2016. I don’t want to make any new ones without first revisiting last year’s to see what of this list I did or did not accomplish. A review, if you will, of imperfection and humanness, good intentions and fickle will. Let’s take a peek and reflect, shall we?
- Become best friends with my body–maybe do some juicing, a little cleansey+detoxy sort of thing, and (ahem) start working out again. Easy, right? Well, I did start off last year with a detox, so technically, check mark. The rest is a long story for another time–but the short story basically involves me being tested for multiple neurological diseases and ultimately being diagnosed with Lyme. Again.
- Take trumpet lessons. Didn’t happen. But I did learn the C major scale and played a rousing rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ to myself when I turned 42 last year. And I’m signed up for lessons which begin later this month. So… I’ll call this one good.
- Grow a bunch of awesome seedlings for the garden. Sadly, no. But not for a lack of trying. Things started off really well, and then one day, after I’d moved the seed trays outside, it rained, filling up the trays. I didn’t find them until the next day, and they were very, very drowned. But I drained them off and thought maybe they could be saved. Then it got balls hot 2 days later and baked the shit out of them. It was terribly sad and frustrating. The garden still grew things, though, as it is wont to do when I throw seeds at it and then get out of the way. Points for trying, right?
- Establish proper dye, herb, and medicinal garden beds. Alas, no, as all those seedlings perished in the above catastrophe. GIANT SADFACE. I did, however, successfully establish a Missouri native wildflower garden in one corner of the vegetable garden space. It is very pretty. This is a native copper iris.
- Do this fun Plant Ally Project Challenge. I did not do this. Instead, I kept the tab open on my laptop for almost a solid year and stared at it every day thinking, tomorrow. Many great things are never done one day at a time.
- Two words: Dye. Yarn. My great disappointment. We won’t talk about it. I have yarn washed, tied, and ready to go; buckets of poke juice sitting in the garage staring at me petulantly. Sometimes your groove gets shelved as you run around putting out fires instead of tending the creative fire. Nothing to do but be kind to yourself and allow things to unfold when they will. I love dyeing, and I could not push this.
- Have the soil at the farm tested. Nope, but for good reason! This year, I went to several intensive grower’s conferences. Major research mode. Two were for growing native elderberries, and the other was for holistic orchard practices. Both Terry and Michael were absolutely fantastic, and I learned so much important information–including what specifically to test for when establishing orchards. So, I am now properly prepared to do the soil sampling and have contacted my county extension already.
- De-fence the pasture pastures. Re-fence the pastures. Yes! I didn’t get all of them, but I did take down the worst offender. And now that I know how to do it, the rest should be much easier. We decided not to re-fence any pastures with permanent fencing, and instead my dad has invested in some good movable electric netting for the sheep. This has worked remarkably well. I’m planning on purchasing the next set of fencing so that we have more flexibility for group separation.
- Begin intensive grazing. Of the sheep. Not of me. Slowly, but surely, this is happening–especially with the aid of the portable fencing. There is a learning curve for sure, and until I’m on the farm full-time, it won’t happen quite the way it needs to. But improvements are being made. Check.
- Start drawing again. Play with the inks (that I’ve had for 5 years).
- Fix my sewing machine. Sew. No and no. Although, I did figure out what was wrong with the sewing machine. And knowing is half the battle, right?
- Learn how to make tinctures and more medicinal tea blends. I worked on this quite a bit. I’ve done a lot of reading on medicinal herbs this year. And listened to some excellent talks, as well. I made several tinctures and tea blends this year. Check.
- Learn how to can, freeze, and dehydrate. Canning and freezing, no. But I did do some fruit dehydrating. Love me some dried mango.
- Take more walks. Yes, I did this. Most of my walks were taken with my best friend, Ronin, who unfortunately went on to the great gig in the sky in November, after a short but sucktastic tangle with metastatic lung cancer. My heart hurts. I still feel his spirit with me, but my walks will never be the same.
- Paddle the MR340.
- Prolly ought to practice paddling. I did not paddle the MR340. Instead, I learned something about myself: I am not a competitive person. Not with this kind of thing, anyway. I’d really like to paddle the length of the 340, but not in some frenetic, heat stroke inducing, sleep deprived, timed contest. That sounds fucking awful. I am the tortoise, not the hare. I did manage to go paddling a few times. Slowly, with much looking around and dipping my fingers in the water.
- Sprout broccoli. Eat the sprouted broccoli.
- Make water kefir. Drink the water kefir. Yes and yes. Although, I had a difficult time keeping my water kefir grains alive for more than 4 or 5 batches at a time. What I did make turned out good, though. And broccoli sprouts are zesty and delicious. And full of sulforaphane, which is exceptionally good for you.
- Figure out what I want to do when I grow up. I feel like I’m getting closer…
- Send postcards to friends and family. Sorry, fam. I did email more, though.
- Go on a silent retreat. I wish.
- Write down the stories in my head. Stories, no. But I did write down more of my thoughts and kept a bit of a journal. Occasionally.
- Clean the basement. LOLOLOLOL. The answer is still LOLOLOLOLOL.
- Welcome the magic in my life. This was a priority, and I worked very hard to keep a committed daily practice in motion. Even when I didn’t feel like it. Kind of like flossing. You just get up and do it no matter what. This daily dedication has been a real blessing and a true lesson in the depth to be gained from a slow, sustained practice.
- PLAY MORE. And relax, everything is ok. This one I think I finally remembered how to do. This might be my best accomplishment all year.
Even though 2016 was a year that was in many respects quite tragic, it also brought many, many good things. We talk about a year as though it was an entity that acted upon us, instead of us acting within it–a measure of time that holds our deeds, good and bad. I have no resolutions for 2017. For me, they end up being To Do lists anyway. Instead, I simply want to remember that while I may not control everything around me, my circumstances or the actions of others, I am always in control of my actions and my attitude–the two things that count. So no matter what I might accomplish this next year, may I always reflect with honesty, discern with wisdom, act with integrity, and above all, respond with lovingkindness and good cheer. Because at the end of it all, it will be the love and kindness and good cheer that will be remembered. Not cleaning the basement.
Happy 2017 to you all! May this year bring you many blessings–good company, good food, good health, and grand adventures!
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What? Fortitude, mostly. It’s a lot of garter stitch. 280 stitches per row. 472 rows. That’s 132,160 stitches just on the body. Add maybe another thousand or so for the neck. At times, it felt like a million more than that. It was the neverending story. But as far as stories go, it was a lovely one to listen to and to create. Warm, soft, lustrous, and colourful. It was these qualities that kept me coming back to the knitting. It was so enjoyable. I stopped seeing garter stitch as ‘basic’, and started to experience it for what it truly is–foundational. And the ruana, safe and constant, gave me space to think.
And like the best stories, the ones that are unhurried, that take time to pause and call attention as they turn and unfold and build, the ruana demanded patience and rewarded with depth. Demanded reflection and rewarded with insight. She holds a story. Each stitch a word, each row a phrase flowing into the next; the wool providing both characters and setting, my hands the action. My own story knit into it whole cloth.
One of the joys of this project was playing with so many different, glorious skeins of yarn. I loved choosing at random (which is never really random) and seeing how each colour blended into the next. Each skein had its own personality, and I’ll say this: you have to listen to your yarn. It will tell you who it wants to sit next to, if it wants to stand out or blend in.
We have a larger tractor, simply called The Big Tractor. It’s a Ford, and it’s blue and has racing stripes like my tattoo. I’m sure that’s a coincidence. He’s almost as old as I am. I do not know how to drive The Big Tractor. Yet. That lesson is looming large around a nearby corner. The Kubota, however, is easy to drive once you get your hand-foot coordination going, and once all of the completely illogical knobs and levers have been thoroughly explained and their accompanying pictographs translated. It’s set up pretty much like any manual transmission: gas (in this case a throttle–both hand lever and foot pedal), brakes (left and right, independent or locked together), gear shift (forward, neutral, reverse), and a clutch. It also has something called a Glide-shift which allows the driver to shift gears (ie, speeds) without engaging the clutch or braking. This is particularly important because the clutch also controls the PTO drive shaft for all the useful things that attach to the back end of the tractor. In this case, the brush hog. Which is also called a bush hog. Potato, tomahto.
The project for the day was brush hogging a pasture on the northern end of the property. As you can see below, it is madly grown up with 
Once the engine is revved to the correct RPM to run the PTO (there’s a little unmarked arrow on the tachometer to let you know), you can engage the PTO (there’s a knob-thingie with hieroglyphics) and start mowing. Easy. You have to make sure to overlap just a little bit so that you don’t get a stripe of unmown grass between passes–especially since the giant back tires push quite a bit of it down. Then it’s just back and forth around the field. For hours and hours. Mowing down great swaths of tall grass. If you are like me, and you’ve learned to embrace your OCD, this is a rather pleasant job.
Or it is until you hear a bad ruckus (as opposed to the good ruckus that indicates everything’s functioning properly) and look behind you to find the brush hog bumping along, listing badly to one side of the tractor. WTH? So you stop the tractor, engage the dual brake, put everything in neutral, disengage the PTO, throttle-down, drop the front bucket, turn the tractor off. Go investigate… Ah. A bolt is missing. The important kind that holds parts together. In this case, a bolt that holds one whole side of the brush hog on the tractor. So you walk from the very top of the pasture–because that’s where tractors break down–to the barn to find your dad. Because he knows how to fix everything, and you don’t. Well, I don’t. So I got my dad, and he got replacement bolts (which he, of course, had on hand in an old coffee canister on his workbench) and a couple ginormous wrenches that looked like they came from an A-ha video, and we fixed the brush hog.
Here is the newly replaced bolt/nut/quick-release lock pin. Exciting, isn’t it? It made my day, let me tell you. On a farm, fixed things that work right are fucking fantastic. I am not upset that this broke. These are the lessons I need. And I am very fortunate to be able to learn so much from my dad now. I am constantly in awe of the fact that not only does he know what all this stuff is, but that he knows how to fix all of it. I feel the weight of that knowledge and know that my shoulders are not yet up to holding it. One lesson at a time.
All fixed. Back to brush hogging. I had a moment while on the tractor, about 3 hours in, where I realized that I could happily do this for the rest of my life. Not brush hogging specifically, although I wouldn’t mind that, but rather this whole tending the land thing; having my days measured out not by the clock, but by what needs to be done on that day, in that season. This was a good realization to have, seeing as how it’s kind of what I’m here to do. Affirmation by actualization.
The weather is changeable where we are. Christmas day was a balmy 60 degrees this year. Strange, but lovely. Then it was all thunderstorms and tornadoes. And flooding, lots and lots of flooding. Not what one would expect at the end of December, even in the Midwest. Now it’s cold. Finally. And still flooding.
Yeah. That’s a radish bigger than my head! And you know what they say–never eat anything that’s bigger than your head and certainly not three that are bigger than your boots… Should I be a radish farmer or what?
