How we see the world

There's no ambiguity in THIS picture — healthy cow + green pasture = beautiful spring sight!

When I was growing up, I loved looking at books of optical illusions. I loved that experience of thinking I knew what I was looking at and then having it completely and fundamentally change into something different. A classic example is the old lady / young lady drawing. I’ve seen this one so many times that I can easily see either lady just by choosing to shift my focus. One moment she’s a young lady, the next an old lady. Just like that.

Can you see the two ladies?

Even though I know this illusion well and can see both ladies with ease, I can never see both at once. I know there are two, but I always see one. When I choose to see the young lady, everything around her shifts in that context — the old lady’s large nose morphs into a slender chin, her eye into an ear. The whole picture changes completely. That lady is the real lady in that moment.

Last week Casey and I had the experience of seeing, experiencing, believing two very different versions of our farm within just days of each other. The result could only be described as a spiritual crisis followed by revelation.

Here’s how it began: we sat down to rework our 2014 budget for the farm using the numbers from the first two months. Expenses were up a lot from our earlier estimates but income was not, and it was frightening to look at our new projected bottom line. Once that fear took hold, we began looking at everything about the farm from that vantage point. A feeling of scarcity set in and we found ourselves seeing shortages everywhere. Suddenly everything about the farm felt hard. We agonized over the pricing of our different CSA programs and enterprises. We wrung our hands. We fretted. Before too long, we’d worked ourselves practically into a panic that resulted in us making some sudden, unwarned changes to our Full Diet program. We temporarily felt at ease, thinking that by tinkering with pricing and such we would alleviate our feeling of scarcity.

But it persisted. Then we started worrying about other things. And before too long, we realized that our fearful way of looking at the farm was sucking all the joy out of something that we (and many other people) dearly love. By Saturday afternoon, a knot had formed in my chest so tight that I could barely breathe. The situation felt wrong.

So, we went for a walk with the kids. I barely saw the cottonwood forest as we walked through it, but I know that immersing myself in the spring sunlight and the scent of opening buds helped my soul discern what I was seeing — it opened the possibility of rethinking and radically re-seeing our situation.

As we sat by the river and the kids waded in the water, Casey and I started talking. I told him how I felt. I told him that I felt suffocated by this feeling of scarcity, that the joy was gone — I told him that I didn’t think it was necessary, that there was a different reality to be had. We just had to choose to see it, and then choose to trust and embrace that other vision — one so radically different than what we had been seeing. We had to trust that this other vision could also be just as real — perhaps more so, because it would be a vision that could actually sustain us, the farm, and our customers.

We talked. We soaked in the sunshine. And, then with tears in our eyes, we chose. We chose abundance. Gratitude. Plenty. Growth. Joy. We chose to look at our budget and realize that not all the data is in yet — to know that our farm is ever so much bigger and more amazing than we see by focusing our attention on these numbers on a page. We chose to reflect on the past eight seasons and see the pattern of abundance and trust that our farm can carry us through times when we can’t immediately see that next step. Even though the projections might not be where we want them to, there is a whole season of growth ahead of us. Every week, I manage to pay our bills, and we feed people. Week by week, we move forward into this season.

We went home and emailed the good news to the Full Diet CSA members — no cutbacks or changes in price after all. We embrace abundance and joy and the awesome experience of nature’s flowing gifts. And, now that we’ve made this decision, the farm looks different. The farm again looks like a place of plenty, where it feels impossible to think that we could ever worry about scarcity. Spring is here, and growth is all around us.

These are the things that happened in one week, but the decision to see abundance and trust our farm has a bigger significance. Over the last few years, Casey and I both have experienced a slipping in our optimism and spirit of generosity. At the river, we tried to remember when or why our outlook on life shifted, but perhaps it’s simply that we have been growing older. We started this farm with high hopes and optimism, but that feeling came more from lack of experience than from a spiritual grounding. We were optimistic because we simply had no reason to believe life would be anything other than awesome and pleasing. We naively assumed that everyone would always like us and that we would always get things right. Ha!

As we lived and farmed, we necessarily encountered “hard” things — crop failures, negative interactions with people, challenges to our bodily health … our optimism didn’t have any foundation for dealing with these parts of life. And so it slipped, along with our generosity in many areas of life. Trust of other people and the process of life was replaced by walls and a mean kind of analysis. I don’t know how to describe the experience well, except perhaps to simply say that life plus farm and kids hardened us a bit. The soft young bright eyed new farmers grew into more worried and less trusting adult farmers. And, as with the optical illusion above, we could see plenty of reasons why to feel that way — that was the context of the picture we were looking at. We could easily dwell on all those hard things and believe that there was no reason to trust, because gee look at all this sh*t that has happened. Life felt heavy. The farm felt heavy. I think this is not a unique story about growing older and taking on responsibility and experiences. When you see yourself as a separate person carrying your own load, it’s easy to slip into negative feelings of all kinds.

But, thank goodness, that’s not the end of the story for Casey and me. The universe has told us — through people, nature and books — that there is another possible way to view it all. A world where our farm’s ability to thrive isn’t just about the balance between our income and our expenses. A world where our bodily health isn’t just about blood pressure readings. A world where people are connected. A world of abundance and plenty.

Casey and I have seen hints of that beautiful world many times over the years. There’s no doubt that it’s the promise of that world that drew us away from any traditional path of success into farming. To connect people, the land, ourselves into an intricate interdependent web of goodness — oh yes. Pardon my swearing, but oh f*ing yes.

But we lost our way. The details clouded our vision. The bits we didn’t envision as young naive farmers — the bank statements, the inevitable conflicts, the draw to feeling greed (a danger for any business owner), the many many many failures and mistakes of all kinds. I mean, yes, it’s hard. Being a farmer is hard. Being a parent is hard. Really, being a person in the world is hard. But that’s not the whole story. Because also present in all of those experiences is the ridiculous beauty, love, wholeness, and inspiration.

So, now that we know how hard living/farming/parenting is, we are making a choice. To know that sh*t will continue to happen (sigh, yes it will) and to still trust in the beauty and abundance of it all. To not live or farm in fear. To see the picture of our life that changes the context of everything. To leave behind meanness and embrace generosity and gratitude.

Revisioning our life and the farm feels like good work to do at the beginning of spring. Certainly the world around us supports our vision in every vibrant growth-filled day! Even now when we look at that same 2014 budget, we see something different — more hope and breathing room than we felt late at night when our trials all began.

We’ve committed to supporting each other in this new/old/revised vision of the farm. Old patterns stick around for a while — negative reactions that are unnecessary, etc. But after struggling so much with the expansion of the farm over the last two years, we feel like a significant burden has lifted. We’ve chosen to no longer wonder whether we’ve chosen the right direction for our farm. We’ve just decided that yes this is what we are doing and yes it is beautiful and will produce abundant, wonderful food, happy people (and yes a suitable income). The picture of our farm is no longer wavering in our doubt.

There’s so much more I could say on this subject, including more elements of our inner life that probably cross the line into “way too personal” to share here. In fact, I wonder if all of this is too personal already, but for better or for worse, these farm newsletters have served as a documentation of both the farm and its farmers. Once upon a time, very very close to the start of our farm, I dreamed of a day when Casey and I would be so intricately connected to a piece of land so as to lose sight of the point of separation. Back in 2006, I closed my Master’s thesis with these words:

This is what I seek: a place to plant my roots, literally, as a farmer, a full-time tender and resident of a place … And so, with awareness of the mind of the colonies living inside me and the lives I am bound to by flesh, blood and love; I continue to seek the place that I hope is seeking me.

Eight years later, here we are: so intertwined with this farm of ours that crises of our spirit reverberate out through every aspect of the farm, and crises of the farm echo back into our spirit.

As much as we are deeply grateful to be moving into this season embracing trust and a positive vision of the farm, I am also grateful to have seen that other side of the picture for a few years. Just as with the optical illusion above, both pictures do exist in our life. And, it is only now, after truly seeing and experiencing those harder parts of the farm and life, that we can really choose. Our optimism today is no longer based on the naive belief that we can avoid hard sh*t; it’s based on the knowledge that hard sh*t will continue to happen but that life is beautiful and abundant nonetheless. Both pictures exist, just as with the ladies, and we choose to focus on one, changing the context of our experience (and the farm and all the ripples it creates out into the community and universe).

This post wouldn’t be right without closing with a Wendell Berry quote:

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.

Amen.

Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your humble farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

P.S. I read voraciously and could list a million and one books that have contributed to a life of growth and change, but I couldn’t let this post go without a shout-out to the most recent influential book: The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible by Charles Eisenstein. The title is quite a mouthful, I know! I finished reading this book in the days between the low point of our scarcity mindset and our turn around, and it played a big role in helping me realize how far we had strayed from our foundation.

~ ~ ~

Meet this week’s vegetables:

• Apples — A mix of different storage varieties of apples
• Salad greens — Casey thinks this is an especially beautiful batch of salad mix. It’s very diverse with greens from the greenhouse and the field.
• Radicchio — Casey harvested this radicchio with braising in mind rather than salad. Feel free to ask him more about this at pick-up!
  
• Cabbage rapini — We said recently that we don’t have rapini this year. We were wrong! Some plants survived! Oh, hoorah!
• Carrots
• Beets
• Chives
  
• Garlic