The ties that bind, they are barbed and spined, and hold us close forever.

I often mean to write about farming itself... sentences trickle into my minds eye in the morning when thoughts are fresh and clear, and by the evening I am worn and can barely remember what I did, which is why I try to write them down in some semblance because by tomorrow they may be gone.

Up until this year, I hadn't considered farming as a... a job. A viable "career" option for me. I have always been passionate about the idea of maybe one day owning a small cottage, raising sheep, using the land to provide me with materials for my house... I have been passionate about historic "ways of doing things," resonating with images of beautiful landscapes, historic architecture, heritage crafts... I almost went to school for architecture. I thought it would give me the foundation to build structures out of materials that I found in the building's natural surroundings... clay, wood, stone.

I have also always been passionate about having a part in the origins of an object that is part of my life. Perhaps to own a mug that I made from clay that I harvested... or leather from an animal that I reared and slaughtered, skinned and tanned... I remember telling Bryn that all I wanted to do in life was to "complete a cycle". To raise bees and use the honey for the beer I made with my own barley and hops, the wax with some tallow and neatsfoot oil from a cow I knew... have it come full circle. I'd die happy having done that.

But farming? Surely I'll be a carpenter or something. I ain't no farmer.

But mostly, whenever I was on farms for short week stints, I felt lonely. I couldn't imagine isolating myself in the country, away from culture, away from community. Only cities had that, so I guess I couldn't have sheep. When I came here, I found I was backasswards wrong about that, and suddenly my dreams were not only attainable, but maybe a bit better and more exciting than even what I imagined.

And as for farming itself...

See... farming isn't really the same as being a carpenter or a cobbler or a cook. At least not this kind of farming. In fact, farming, as it turns out, can be all of those things.

Farming is what you do when you live on a farm. It is living and working with the land and all it can provide, sustain or hold, whatever that may be. It is assisting and accompanying forms of life and helping or seeing them grow, then incorporating them back into our lives to sustain us and our communities and our other enterprises. It is building, it is creating and often playing. It is... whatever you want it to be.

And in the end, farming, to me, isn't farming at all. It is living. It is the art of living, and Life is in turn the medium itself. Both mine, and the lives of plants, animals, insects and soil around me. I see birth, I see growth. I see nurture, sickness, failure, thriving and death. I see the cycles, I know the weather intimately. I know the soil, I have helped make it what it is. I have tasted what it can provide me, and I know exactly what it feels like today.

So in that sense, I have always wanted to do this. I have always wanted to live, and be apart of the Life around me that becomes my life when I interact with it in the form of food, shelter, clothing, relationships, landscapes... I just didn't realize they called that farming, and that you could do that for a... well, for a living.

So maybe I still don't even consider myself a farmer. But I know I will buy land, and make my enterprises dependent on that land. I know I will aim to feed and shelter myself off that land, using its resources as my creative medium. I know I will probably raise cows, sheep, pigs and chickens, house horses, grow my own food and plant orchards. But that's not farming, that's just living.

Speaking of which, the wheat we planted is sprouting.