On Change
It’s 6am, and I’m wide awake, my body refusing to forget the farm harvest schedule. I’m sitting in my brother’s high rise apartment, looking down at the bustling street of people beginning their daily grind. Coasting down highway 70 away from a blazing sun, my heart felt full as I headed into Denver this weekend. Being in the city is like night and day from life at Groundwork. The values we practice day to day at the farm have seeped their way into my mind and heart and become a part of me so quickly. Little things– waking up to the sound of the river, biking instead of driving, cooking instead of eating out, potlucks on friday nights instead of going to bars. Living proof that living simply does not mean a life of martyred self-denial. Reorienting life around community, nature, and collective work has brought me pure joy and a sense of fullness that I feel eager to share.
So much of modern life feels like it’s about controlling all the variables. Surrounded by four walls, I was oblivious to the wind, the heat, the overnight frost. Waking up for school at the same time everyday, I was ignoring the blanket of darkness over winter mornings. As the moon transforms from a sliver to a crescent, my busy life goes on without batting an eye to the cycles that rule my days. Going to the grocery store, I see the same shiny vegetables displayed in December as I do in August.
In the months that I have witnessed spring turn to summer here, the daily changes we practice at the farm allow me to mark these transitions– to shift and grow as the seasons change, and as I change with them. We spent the first weeks of April in the warmth of the greenhouse, seeding trays, transplanting, and organizing systems for the season. As April turned to May, we planted the spring seedlings, prepped beds, and sold our first veggies at the farmers market. As May turned to June, we are now planting heat tolerant crops like tomatoes and peppers, weeding, and harvesting. The variety of the seasonal tasks mixed with the monotony of the tasks themselves fill me with a meditative rhythm, a flow and connectedness. It’s something I never knew was missing.
It takes vulnerability to surrender to an ever changing environment, a warming climate, a constantly turning cycle. Some argue that farming is domination: forcing our will onto a landscape who is continuously committed to returning to homeostasis. But farming is also a radical act of surrender: to pour so much work and so much love into something so precarious. I’m learning that this contradiction sits at the heart of our food system. Cultivating nourishment and beauty where we can, and trying to make peace with the elements that could take it all.
As I sit on this balcony overlooking the city, I notice thistle growing through the cracks in the sidewalk below, the fading moon above me, almost full, and the heat encroaching as morning sets in. I don’t need to be sitting next to the river and surrounded by mountains to feel the profound shifts in my awareness and outlook on life. My first months at Groundwork have filled me with so much curiosity and life, I feel it spilling out of me into the land I inhabit, the people I connect with, and the space I take up. Octavia Butler writes, “All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you.” My relationship to farming, food, and the precarity of it all are shaping me. And as I sit with the beauty and discomfort that it brings, I’m feeling inspired to continue learning, listening, sharing, and working towards change with this beautiful little community.