We have reached the Summer Solstice! And it certainly feels like summer with temps in the high 90s this week. Of course despite the heat, there is still lots to do on the farm each day. We are harvesting, planting, weeding, and doing lots of watering!
Though each day is filled with purposeful tasks, it is still easy for our minds to be here, there, and over there all at once, especially with such a busy pace. I may be walking in a straight line, but a map of my thinking would be squiggles, loops, swirls, and zig zags all over the place!
There is a lot of advice in the modern enlightenment market on cultivating a quiet peaceful mind. All we need to do is focus on the moment and top it off with a dash of gratitude to achieve lasting inner harmony and balance. (In case you’re wondering I have found that doing all the meditation vidoes on YouTube has gotten me no closer to this ‘ideal’ state of being).
However, the summer season always reminds us that life should actually be many things at the same time. Just a small snapshot of the farm right now contains potholes with tadpoles, baby carrots, amaranth weeds, potato beetles, Rothbart the singing sparrow, blazing hot sun, rows and rows of tomatoes, pebbles on the road, and squash in bloom. Each field is filled with different crops and as we drive around the farm the plants each have unique colors, shapes, and growing styles.
It seems the same applies to our mindset and emotions. We may want to plant only monoculture rows of calm and tranquility. In actuality the true diverse inner ecosystem can have joy, sadness, humor, confusion, clarity, worry, overwhelm, focus, creativity, frustration, gratitude, and much more all in one day (and to be honest sometimes in one hour). Each of these fields of the mind are valuable in their own way. The only one to put to rest is the inner critic, which often seems to act like the most important field when it should be left fallow and filled with replenishing cover crop!
The skill of embracing everything going on in both the inner and outer summer fields is not easy. Sometimes when there are weeds in one field of worry it is difficult to leave them behind and work in another field. And there may be some crops that we don’t always like growing (I am not a fan of onions so that field is strikingly similar to my own inner frustration field). However, no field needs to be perfect and all crops of both the mind and the soil are worthy in their own way!
May your Summer Solstice be peaceful (or crazy or hectic or fun or whatever field you find yourself in!).
See you around the farm,
Kirstie
Farm Manager