the daily grind: luck

We spend a lot of words expatiating on how good a life can be had with a few acres of grass and a dairy cow, and still we are only capable of understating the truth.

So much of how a small, grass-and-ruminant based farm works is just natural. Cows want to graze; given the opportunity, they will learn to maintain excellent health on native pasture. Pigs and chickens love milk; make milk a part of their diet and the rest can be simple, farm-produced calories. Plants in an active, living soil are healthy, and eating them conveys health; returning organic matter to the soil accomplishes both goals.

But every blessing requires something of those receiving the blessing -- the greater the blessing, the more profound the requirement. When folks tell us how 'lucky' we are to live the way we do, Shawn says 'tell us that at five in the morning.'

This kind of 'luck' is a choice -- and it's a choice you make every day.

When you get out of bed at five to milk the cows. Or at two in the morning to sweep snow off the high tunnel. Every time you leave a picnic early because there are chores to do, or drop a good book because the cows are out.

Most painfully, you make the choice for real farming when you're scared.

Something dies. Much-needed rain fails to come. A shipment of piglets gets shipping fever. A ewe rejects her lambs.

Stuff happens. Events don't proceed according to our expectations. Nature, that wild, powerful, unpredictable hand of God, gets scary.

Because the same Thing that makes farming so absolutely, phenomenally exciting and rich and beautiful is the Thing that has other plans than ours. Better plans. Sublime plans.

And we can either hang on for the ride, warmed by the smooth parts, exhilarated when we are lifted up, and grimly committed when we are plunged in the depths -- knowing, believing, that there is an order and a genius to Nature that will carry us to good places if we let it -- or we can quit and go back to our soft couches and bright screens, fed and warmed we know not how, and leave the mixed bag that is farming to someone else.

Or no one else.

Of those to whom much has been given, much will be required.