Guidestone Farm

I spent the summer of 2003 working on a small CSA farm outside of Loveland, Colorado. I chose to use my summer this way because my education had introduced me to sustainable agriculture and I wished to know with my hands what I had read in books. I spent days caring for vegetable crops, selling produce at markets, milking cows, making cheese and yogurt. I talked to people. I learned their stories and their philosophies, I heard about what worked and what didn’t work. I got to test things out for myself.

Here at Guidestone I learned what it means to love a place with your body and your mind. If becoming native to a place means knowing the land with gratitude and caring for its health, then farming is the very best exercise in becoming native that I can imagine. These are my memories of Guidestone.

These plants have been my teachers and my companions these past months. I look on them with gratitude and affection. I know them by heart. I wander out into the garden mid-morning. The air is oven-fired, quiet, palpable, thick enough to climb. Somehow stillness and heat seem always to arrive together here, settling into this valley like a fog. Haying is in full swing now and the air smells like freshly cut alfalfa, sweet and rich.

I aim my ambling toward the ferny green promise of carrots at the far end of the field. The soil is moist from rain and my fingers penetrate the surface easily. I dig down a few inches and loose the carrot from the earth. I brush the soil away and eat it right there beneath the blazing sun, my crunching the only interruption in this immense quiet. The carrot is a subtle grower, less audacious in its cycle than squash or kale, but persistent. In life there are folks whose actions are loud and outward, filling up the room wherever they go. Then there are those who are daily in our presence, perhaps doing incredible things, and yet we scarcely notice. This is how a carrot grows, tenderly, on the margins of one’s observations. The cotyledons, the first growth, peak through the heavy soil and within a few weeks the carrots are harvested, washed, and ready for market.

As I chew I know the whole history of this plant, Apiaceae, friend of the lady beetle, companion of onions and parsley. I watched with anticipation the day of germination, watered carefully the soil as it nurtured the seeds below, covered the long rows to keep them warm in the cool weather. As I eat I know exactly what elements are fueling my body, that these plants have never known chemicals or pesticides. I am intimate with the lives and stories of the farmers whose hands have tended these carrots with love and devotion, harvested with reverence. I know I am cultivating more than this soil. I know I am harvesting something greater than vegetables. In eating what I have grown, a greater hunger is fulfilled. I am certain this carrot is both teacher and friend.

This moment of communion with my food is only a moment in the garden. There are other moments too. I will not pretend that this life was a botanical fairytale. There were days when I was exhausted, my body sore, my mind dull and clumsy. Days when everything I did seemed senseless, tedious—days when I felt I was doing nothing at all. The garden was often a place of extremes, cold, steady rain, but usually the fierce and unforgiving sun. Farming was not a paradise, not if one measures quality in degrees of comfort and immediate gains. But amidst the sweat and the dirt, the pipe changes and thistle pulls, I was the closest to wholeness, to mindfulness, to connectedness that I have ever known.
So much of my college career has been about finding answers, making bridges. Bridges between American politics and consumer culture, between salmon and spirituality, between agriculture and ideology. My college career has involved philosophizing about a better way in a world where so much is wrong. Farming has shown me a new kind of connection—life at the farm brought my body, my being, my hands and heart and head, all into the equation. I lived, trial-by-fire, that which I had imagined and written for so many years. This kind of learning suits me. I can feel it in my brown skin and strong arms; I can feel it in my appetite for food and for life. I can feel it in the stillness of my heart.

I pull another carrot, clean its orange skin on my pants, stand up and stretch my legs. I look around me at all of this and feel so much gratitude for my life that my heart aches with it. I had never known food could be so fulfilling, could bring so much joy. Jake, a tall blue roan Belgian walks over to the fence eyeing the carrot in my hand. I give it to him. We all have to eat.

~ back to community supported agriculture ~