Stewardship

I’m sitting out on the verandah with a cup of coffee enjoying a rare sunny day as the geese fly back and forth getting ready for the big trip south.  Louise and I went to check in with our local pair of Trumpeter Swans the other day.  They have two young ones that are about the size of an average Canada Goose and they look like they are about ready for a long flight.  We recently hosted a family reunion and we are just now returning to our normal routine and feeling rested.  Reunions are tough if you are an introvert like me – even tougher when you live in semi-isolation and the people come to you!

It was nice having everyone here and sharing our space with them, as well as our vision for what we want to do here.  It has given me pause to reflect on our journey here on the land and an important spiritual dimension that has emerged for me – stewardship.

We have held title to this property for a little over three years now.  We began our search for this farm online and quickly identified 48 different properties that fit our general parameters.  Closer scrutiny of these properties quickly cut the list in half.  We then set out to see all 24 of these properties, which were scattered all over the province.  A couple went off the market before we could see them, but we saw at least 22 places.  It was fun driving around seeing these places.  We got to see a lot of the province and to appreciate the beauty of a prairie winter.  It was a real adventure for me.  While we had our list of features we were looking for and a vague sense of what would be nice to have…

Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of geese just went by, and they were all honking!

…anyways, we soon realized that there was something else operating in the background for both of us independently.  We always had an emotional response to each property – a like or dislike, a sense of ease or discomfort, a connection to a place or a sense of being deflated.  We agreed to honour these reactions from the beginning and always included this intuitive assessment, the gut reaction if you will, in our overall assessment of the property.  After we viewed a place we took note of its features and how well they seemed to meet our identified needs, compared it to the other properties we had seen to get a ranking, and then we allowed our response to influence the ranking.  Sometimes it knocked a property down to the bottom of the list.  Sometimes it was the tie-breaker criteria.  On a couple of occasions it moved a property up the list from where the objective criteria suggested it be placed.  In the case of this property, the strong connection we both felt to the land here overcame what were some significant objective disadvantages.

My experience over the last three years of entering into and exploring my subjective response to this land has been very rich and wonderful.  It has been a healing journey for me; one that has opened up new opportunities for growth and new vistas for contemplation and reflection, as well as, new ways to access my faith.  I feel at peace here.  I feel truly connected to the world around me and I have a sense of where I fit in the cosmos, within creation.  I can zoom in to appreciate a small flower or insect, and I can zoom out to gain a perspective on the flow of time and human action within creation.  In both instances I hold up for scrutiny my relationship to the Divine, viewed and experienced in new fresh and wonderful ways.

I have discovered that this sense of connectedness to the universe is for me a connectedness to God, and that this connection is strongest for me in a more natural setting.  The closer I can get to living in a state of nature, the stronger this connection feels.  My own Garden of Eden as it were, or a personal paradise.  Apparently my garden is best kept at a constant warm temperature and free of biting bugs, and mammals for that matter, as physical discomfort serves to distract me from the experience.  I think it is in this connectedness, this profound peacefulness, that I experience the healing of God.  It isn’t a dramatic healing…more like a movement towards wholeness, fitting things together, cleaning the mechanism, integrating aspects of Self and past experience.

This healing began almost immediately with my arrival on the Land three years ago.  It gave rise to a sense of sacred connection, which I feel particularly strongly in certain places here.  It has also given rise to a sense of being in relation to the Land itself, of being responsible for it, or more accurately, being responsible for what I do on it and to it.  I also feel a responsibility to tend to it, preserve it, to care for it.  This has come out in a few different ways.

Firstly, I seem to be trying to minimize our impact on the land, and to mitigate that impact where possible.  I say seem to be because this isn’t really a conscious strategy.  It is more of a spiritual or aesthetic preference that is emerging as I take down buildings we don’t need or modify old ones for new purposes, remove unnecessary fencing, limit and restrict vehicle movement. 

Secondly, the old three Rs: reduce, reuse, recycle.  I don’t claim to be an expert in repurposing building materials, but I sure do try my best and I buy ‘new’ with reluctance.  We have also tried to incorporate Net Zero design features into our home reno, and we intend to implement a grid-tied solar system and geothermal heating when money and related projects allow.  Of course we do the other stuff: separate trash, compost and recyclables; use CFLs and LEDs; 100 mile diet, etc., but we also have spent a lot of time investigating things like compost toilets, and contemplating the larger issues associated with what happens when stuff goes down the toilet or the sink.  Ideally we would like to operate as near to a closed system as is practical with as little reliance on fossil fuels as is possible, i.e. a truly sustainable agri model, but this ideal is tempered by our financial reality, geography and the state of current technology.

Lastly, tending to the garden.  I find myself drawn to what I have described with tongue and cheek as the need to get the forest organized.  This involves collecting up deadfall that is at hand, ostensibly for firewood, but also to allow for the free movement of wildlife and to remove some hazards from the forest such as widow makers; putting in some culverts to allow water to move more naturally; improving the tracks to reduce the impact of the cattle moving about.  This work is barely begun and will never be done.  Tending to the garden never is.

In doing this work I also tend to my spiritual garden.

The Garden