From an Upper Floor

Much comes to mind when I read Jon Katz’ s blog http://BedlamFarm.com which is a favorite. His problems I can relate to because my most formative years were on The Farm.   When I write my memory is always sitting in some farmplace.   His blog by guest writer Carol Gulley on My Farmer and Me took me back again with her words about how it really is with farmers.

How it was before we really knew how to farm and what it was like rising every morning in a freezing house and getting dressed around the stove pipe which went up through a corner of my sister’s and my bedroom before going into the chimney. How it was before the bathroom was put in because other matters in the barns where our living was made before we could think about improvements in the house. The animals, the cows needed to be milked twice a day and the horses needed tending and the chickens needed to be fed and the pigs needed their nourishment.   My brothers and my sister and I were new to farming, but our mother made the decision to get us out of the city so that we could breathe fresh air.   My father had lung problems from working in the chemical plants and he knew he could make a living on a farm.   But he over estimated his abilities. His inability to understand nutritional needs of plants and animals made for arguments every day.   His memories of farming in the old country were not what our farm demanded.   What we demanded of our land to sustain our large family was not what the quality of soil originally could do. That it did in the long run was due to the perseverance of my mother (who I often said would have been able to run the auto companies without having to go to the government for bail out monies) and my brothers.   They learned what the land needed to produce and what the vegetables and fruit trees and the cows needed for optimum production.   It was not an easy way to live and many times the argument came up to go back to the city.

Yet my best learning years were on The Farm, where I learned to love the land and my Earth planet was like wearing her as a second skin.   Memory told me of other times and places where I was able to flourish with a sensitive heart but also with an awakened mind.   Old city friends visited in their new clothes and polished cars.   And my mother gave them baskets of strawberries and crisp apples to take home.   I do not remember money being exchanged. My mother’s way was to pay it forward. My sister went to market with mother with fruit, vegetables and eggs and those years brought real money home.   It is not a way to live for the fainthearted. Much to my chagrin, I also learned to love heavy cream as a staple yet and missed it sorely during the years of marriage when budgeting to the penny was crucial.

Carol speaks true. Her words bring to mind many memories that were difficult for the teenager I was to live through. But living through those times helped me to grow in ways I could not imagine. Throughout my life I yearned for horizons where sky met my earth with no obstruction.   My eyes hungered for the places from ‘whence cometh my strength.’

(The Red works I have made is a deeply satisfying thing now for me to do.   I missed it completely during the years of parenting when it peaked. They are for sale. Contact me if you are interested. I use old wood patterns for my block designs.)

It is a wonderful play on words when we are given a phrase and then run like the wind with it.  I was reading about a ‘sense of snow’ and the history of it.  How someone with this sense can tell you many things when seeing a footprint in the snow and who made it,  which direction he came from and where he was going.  It is a wondrous sense.

 We have also a sense of time.   With this comes our feel for history,  where someone or something comes from and the circumstances surrounding the event. Jane http://littlehousehomearts.blogspot.com has this valuable sense. In her feel for the civil war fabrics, she reveals what the times were for women, how they functioned in the mud and rain, with their lack of wares; how hard the winter was on everyone, what they had to do to care for the sick and wounded.  Women gathered together to make blankets from materials at hand.   All this background when added to the traditional home arts which spoke of the sense of time, sense of Spirit when handling fabric of that time.

There is also a sense of place, a sense of self, a sense of who we are and what we bring to the moment.  It sums up what we do in gathering ourselves, however many parts of our self and bring to the present moment the substance of us.  It is a rich substance we are to give our present meaning.  We will take the fullness of today into tomorrow, into our future to give meaning to whatever world we find our tomorrow in.

When we see our place in the larger scheme of things, when we enlarge our premises and push out boundaries, we see how we contribute to universal evolution.   It is our purpose in life in this dimension to contribute to all of life.  It takes elastic thinking to think in these terms, but we are not an incident or accident of life with no meaning.  What we do for one we do for all we have been told.  We are familiar with the widow’s mite; she gave all she had, but contributed.  We can apply this ‘sense of’ whatever talent we possess.  When we contribute to ongoing life we enhance evolution.

As the wise Ethel Waters said,  ‘I am somebody.  God don’t make no junk.’  We are not a whim of the Potter.