This post marks my first week back at the Hawthorne Valley Farm. Working here 5 years back, I fell in love with this place, this way of life, this intention for healthy community. The farm was my first powerful experience of farming, healthy community, and youth fostering. And, those of you that have read the introduction to my thesis know, this was also the place where I first received a vision of DharmaFarming.
For those of you that haven't read this introduction, here is a brief piece, speaking to the impact Hawthorne had on me during that formative period of seeking...
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Dusk and the DharmaFarmer
The universe we live in is deeply connected--I know this to be true. I experienced it once, I remember. A vivid landscape, green on green, field upon field, a valley tucked into the lay of great hills. Between the Catskills and Adirondacks, at a place called Hawthorne Valley, I knew connection--spirit and soil and sublime surrender.
I can even locate this experience to one particular scene: sitting out in the simmering summer dusk, propped up against a heave of grass, I read the lines of a book close to my heart:
If one fathoms deeply one’s own neighborhood and the everyday world in which he lives, the greatest of worlds will be revealed.
A commonplace world surrounds us--immediate and mundane; yet its underlying pattern runs sacred and subtle.
I am pulled back to my own surroundings, mundane yet subtle, immediate and sacred. The deep twilight glow heating my skin, the pasture and cropland stretching out stoically, the sounds of children, the sense of fullness and life: I am overwhelmed by the intimacy of Here and Now. I begin to silently cry--not from grief or joy--but from a profound experience of Connection and Oneness.
~
The book I was reading was the One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka, and to this day it is one of the most poetic and precise descriptions of DharmaFarmering I have found. To Fukuoka, farming was the growing of people as much as the growing of food.
And working and living and playing at Hawthorne, I began to see this...the transformative grace of living close to the source of things. 5 year later, returning to this special place, I am immediately swept up once again in this mysterious grace. I say mysterious because what we do here seems so practical, so ordinary, the very definition of mundane. We live together and grow food and tend animals and care for the land and raise children...it is the bare bones of human co-existance, no? Yet somehow it brings release to the heart, steadiness to the mind, health to the body. It seems to bring the highest and best of human experience.
For for the next piece of time, I will be here, in conscious co-existence with farm, nature, and community. My next posts will offer up some photos of the various aspects of farm life with the kids.
With a warm heart,
Eka
The universe we live in is deeply connected--I know this to be true. I experienced it once, I remember. A vivid landscape, green on green, field upon field, a valley tucked into the lay of great hills. Between the Catskills and Adirondacks, at a place called Hawthorne Valley, I knew connection--spirit and soil and sublime surrender.
I can even locate this experience to one particular scene: sitting out in the simmering summer dusk, propped up against a heave of grass, I read the lines of a book close to my heart:
If one fathoms deeply one’s own neighborhood and the everyday world in which he lives, the greatest of worlds will be revealed.
A commonplace world surrounds us--immediate and mundane; yet its underlying pattern runs sacred and subtle.
I am pulled back to my own surroundings, mundane yet subtle, immediate and sacred. The deep twilight glow heating my skin, the pasture and cropland stretching out stoically, the sounds of children, the sense of fullness and life: I am overwhelmed by the intimacy of Here and Now. I begin to silently cry--not from grief or joy--but from a profound experience of Connection and Oneness.
~
The book I was reading was the One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka, and to this day it is one of the most poetic and precise descriptions of DharmaFarmering I have found. To Fukuoka, farming was the growing of people as much as the growing of food.
And working and living and playing at Hawthorne, I began to see this...the transformative grace of living close to the source of things. 5 year later, returning to this special place, I am immediately swept up once again in this mysterious grace. I say mysterious because what we do here seems so practical, so ordinary, the very definition of mundane. We live together and grow food and tend animals and care for the land and raise children...it is the bare bones of human co-existance, no? Yet somehow it brings release to the heart, steadiness to the mind, health to the body. It seems to bring the highest and best of human experience.
For for the next piece of time, I will be here, in conscious co-existence with farm, nature, and community. My next posts will offer up some photos of the various aspects of farm life with the kids.
With a warm heart,
Eka
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