What I Learned Down on the Farm

Most of my friends know how girly I am (swirly skirts, jewelry, makeup, perfume) but they also know I like to be hip-deep in the garden and am perfectly capable of repairing a fence or building a cold frame. I’m definitely not allergic to dirt or hard work. This combination confuses people, sometimes.

Over the holidays I did a lot of reflection about how I came to be the person I am now, and I realized something: Though I officially grew up in darkest suburbia with my parents and sister, I learned my life values from my grandparents in the time I spent on their farm.

How much time was that? If it wasn’t a school day, I was there. As a family we spent weekends and school holidays at the farm. My mother sent me out there for long stretches during the summer as well. (She once even tried to give me away to my grandmother, after my sister was born and Mom decided she liked the new child better. Grandmother declined; that’s the only time in my life I ever heard her raise her voice to anyone.)

A small family farm is hard work with little room for frills or foolishness, though there was usually time for play (I was a kid, after all). I spent my days wearing blue jeans and covered in dirt, hay and manure. From my grandparents, especially my grandmother, I learned most of the values that have carried me through life. Those values helped me get through all sorts of things that, at the time, I didn’t believe I could survive.

This blog post is dedicated to my maternal grandmother, Noreen Crews, one of the wisest people I’ve ever known. She passed away a few years back but her common-sense approach to life, and her unconditional love, still live on in me.

In all the time I spent with her, all the dumb things I did, she never framed any experience I had with, “And the moral is…” In fact, she rarely talked about lessons learned at all. She simply lived her values every day and encouraged me to do the same.

I’ve collected up a few of the things I learned on the farm, to share with you. Perhaps you might find them useful, too.

-You have sense. Use it.

-Everyone has limitations; some are just more obvious than others. Don’t let your limitations define you and never use them as an excuse, only as an explanation.

-The difference between people and trash is not what you have but how well you take care of it.

-Don’t stand there waiting for someone to tell you what to do. Figure out what needs doing and do it.

-Assume you’re capable of doing (or learning to do) whatever needs doing until proven otherwise.

-If you choose to have children, do not behave as if they are a nuisance, a bother or something to escape from. You chose to have them. You are an adult. Act like it.

-If you say you’ll do something, do it. Your word is your bond.

-Dream all you want but take care of the real-world stuff first.

I wouldn’t be here today - literally - if it weren’t for the values Grandmother taught me. The best tribute I can give her is to share those values with my own daughter, and be thankful for the time I spent on the farm.

New Year's Resolutions? Try something different this year!

New Year's resolutions? I don't do them. Never have. They just don't resonate with me. But there is something I've done for years, something a little different, and I'd like to share it with you. If you like, you could give it a try.

One holiday season, back in the Stone Age (all right, it was really about 20 years ago) I came across a short saying that just stuck in my head. The words: All life is one life. The result: I spent the whole next year contemplating it, keeping it in the back of my mind all the time, mainly because I just couldn't get rid of it. I guess you could call it a long-term meditation, though not exactly a voluntary one.

The results were profound. It really did change my life.

So I decided to do it again, only by choice this time.

Throughout the holiday season, I remained alert for another phrase or saying to appear and nudge me in the ribs. And one did. So I repeated the process, with equally amazing results. I've been doing it ever since.

Some years, as January rolled around, I worried that my Saying of the Year wouldn't show up. It always did, though I found I couldn't rush it. I also found I couldn't just pick a saying that I heard or read somewhere. It had to come to me, not the other way round.

This year it showed up a little early, about a week ago. It's like a snippet of catchy song lyrics, stuck in my head and refusing to budge, so it must be The Saying of the Year.

It's an Eckhart Tolle quote: You do not live life; life lives you. Life is the dancer. You are the dance.

This should be an interesting year.

Gotta Love Those Pigeonholes

We sure love pigeonholes, don’t we? I mean, as a species. We like to generate tidy labels and categories for everything from amoebas to divine beings and then force whatever we’re thinking about into those categories. We’re so great, we’ve figured all this stuff out and can demonstrate our control by labeling it all.

I’m pretty sure life isn’t really that simple.

I can see where it comes from, though. On a basic level, being able to tell self from other, one-of-us from not-one-of-us is helpful and might even be life saving. I’ve read some anthropology journal articles that address this issue in pre-modern human societies. It’s an uncomfortable subject, but the fact is, most (possibly all) groups of humans at one time or another in the past were cannibals. Here’s the thing, though - they didn’t prey on members of their own group.  Only people outside the family, tribe or clan were fair game.

I’ve noticed that many cultural groups have names for themselves that mean, simply, The People. In other words, “We’re people and all those other folks aren’t.” If they’re not people, then they’re fair game. Us Versus Them on a very pragmatic level, with each group’s survival depending on it.

But our survival no longer hinges on dividing the world into our own group (predators) and prey. Life is far more nuanced than that, but I’m not sure our brains - or our cultures - are keeping up with those nuances well enough. And it’s not just Us Versus Them.

Back to those pigeonholes. They have served us well in the realm of the sciences. We now have vast organized collections of nomenclature for living things - Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus Species. We label and categorize chemical elements, atomic particles, stars, planets.

We use those labels to feel comfortable with the information, to separate out small bits that we can get a handle on. That primitive part of the human brain still tells us, “Label everything so you don’t get eaten.”

But what about the things that don’t fit so well into the pigeonholes? As hard as we try to force them into tidy categories, spiritual beliefs don’t really fit that well under discrete labels. Political ideologies don’t sift out that well, either. And human sexuality - I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard my friends say there isn’t a label that fits them exactly. I’ve talked with a few scientists whose experience tells them the distinct groupings we sort bits of the world into aren’t as clear-cut as we’d like to think. And it’s pretty obvious by now that Us Versus Them doesn’t serve anyone any more.

Maybe it’s time to move on from the pigeonholes. Sure, you put your sweater and your lunchbox in a cubbyhole when you were in kindergarten, but you’re not in kindergarten any more. So what to use instead, to get a handle on the world?

How about a rainbow?

No, I’m not about to go all goodness-and-light on you. I think the rainbow is an effective symbol for the nuanced, one-thing-merging-into-another property that real life demonstrates. Bear with me here.

You might have memorized the colors of the rainbow as a child - ROYGBIV - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. I’ll bet you drew rainbows with your crayons, each color a tidy, distinct stripe, separate from the next.

But those colors aren’t tidy and distinct; it’s only our labels that make them seem so. Look closely at a rainbow and you’ll see each color merging into the next with no specific demarcation where one ends and the next begins. That’s the way the spectrum of visible light is. Sure, we can generate fancy scientific labels that say one color stops and another starts at a particular frequency, but the fact is, it’s a continuum.

If you look carefully, you’ll see that most of life is a continuum in one way or another. The lines on the map exist only on the map, not in the big world. Ask an astronaut.

Continuums are scary. It’s hard to tell where one thing ends and the next one begins. It’s hard to tell who you’re supposed to like or dislike, how you’re supposed to think, what you’re supposed to do. How on earth can you get a handle on a continuum?

But that’s what happens when you graduate from kindergarten - you have to deal with the world without those cubbyholes. Maybe it’s time for the human race to move on to first grade.