Riches: Good Soil, Fragrant Hay, Food, Feed, Seeds. Books, Time And Silence
Happy New Year to you and yours.
Winter hay meadow.
Rest and restore; take time with family and friends. Commonsense commentary amid real life wonders are overlooked by many; slow down and consider where your life is headed as 2016 launches a new chapter in life and business.
“Inside a barn is a whole universe, with its own time zone and climate and ecosystem, a shadowy world of swirling dust illuminated in tiger stripes by light shining through the cracks between the boards. Old leather tack, lengths of chain, rope, and baling twine dangled from nails and rafters and draped over stall railings. Generations of pocketknives lay lost in the layers of detritus on the floor.”
― Carolyn Jourdan
“But then we would cut open half a dozen hay bales. Good summer hay. The most beautiful smell on our farm, a smell that is sweet and good. It is a breath of sunshine in your face in the depth of winter. It breaks open in thick slices that reveal the pressed flowers, vetches, grasses, and herbs that were folded into it by the baler in July. As we spread it in the winter for the ewes, the ground is scattered with countless seeds of meadow grasses. Timothy. Common bent. Meadow fescue. Yellow rattle.”
– James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life
“Only those who sow seeds of change can hope to grow and reap a harvest.” – Andrea Goeglein
“Land is the place where lessons are taught, where Wisdom abides; where we learn lessons about life and death from the seed broken open in darkness, dying in order to come to life in a different form, and from the compost which teaches us that decay is needed for life's richness. Land is the place where we are healed when no words can comfort or explain. It is the place where we are taught about and find community; where everything is connected to everything else, and nothing exists independently; the place where everything feeds on and depends on the other.”
– Jeanne Clark
“We shall not be kept from continuing our mission by those who claim it can't be done… Indeed the whole of agricultural and livestock science and even human medicine, if sound, is merely the business of discovering certain natural patterns already in existence, putting together the various pieces and discovering their relationship to the whole universe; indeed such a process is science itself.” – Louis Bromfield
Read. Most people don't.
“One must always be careful of books,” said Tessa, “and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.”
– Cassandra Clare
“Where he gallops, the earth sings” – inscribed on the granite marker memorial for the great racehorse Kelso.
“As soils are depleted, human health, vitality and intelligence go with them.” – Louis Bromfield
Flow of life. Water seeks the lowest point and carries what it finds along the route.
“We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.” – Jacques Cousteau