Most of the time I try to keep my preaching to myself and try to keep my musings about family farming, real food and the value of transparency. Every once in a while life overlaps and the things that both compound and facilitate my art creep into the areas I desire to be pure. Sometimes work that should stay at work keeps me awake at too late at night. Most of you but certainly not all know that our dream of being full time and vocational farmers has not yet been realized. Our farm is growing and we are headed in that direction and are trying to “stay behind the power curve” as Christian Seger at Blue Heron Farm teaches. I keep a more than full time off the farm job as an ER Nurse working 1pm to 1am. Putting on the scrubs and doing that job into the early morning hours is not as rewarding as those that first meet me often asume it is. It is a thankless job serving a mostly underserved group that have little other options for immediate results health care. Our medical system is obsessed with customer service and is leaving the art of medicine far behind in exchange for the business of healthcare. What started as a desire for my career to serve the greater good has turned into a steady stream of entitlements, complaints about lack of instant relief, and managment of people’s self inflicted diseases steming from their diets and lifestyle.
I need the farm probably more that the farm needs me. The farm is my art my purpose and my craft and life without art has no purpose. Art brings innovation, beauty, inspiration, community and hope where there was previously not. Art reminds me that grace and hope are touchable and feelable and smellable. Art opens the door to my heart while nursing tries to close it like an elephant leaning against the otherside. This is the honest tension that every dreamer has in some respect. Everyone that is not settled with simply fulfilling their duty has tension. Husbands that are sick of missing their families and mothers that have to work a second job to provide for necessities. Daughters that want to connect with a role model and sons that crave mentorsip into manhood. This is life right? The art of thriving in the tension and being creative rather than destruction. The art of turing the table on the opressive part of the equation and moving toward beauty. Taking the part of the nursing job that facilitates farming while leaving the negative in the dust. The art of seeing the glass not half full but overflowing. The art of feeling in your heart, the joy that your daughter standing in a field in Sugarland, Tx , holding a lamb can overcome all the negativisim in the world.
What is your art? Please have the courage to practice it and leave the pain of a world that want you to stop creating art behind.
