“I feel that I am failing,” he spoke in a plain admission, one given up of fronts and airs but simply speaking as one discerns. “I feel I’m failing as a farmer, and I know I should care, but I’m not sure if I do. I examine how I’ve grown and developed in the last thirteen years. After the first three or four—I’m not sure that I have.
Rest of life, I’ve grown and changed and developed much, but here, I’m the same role and cog that I have been, and I don’t see much that will change—not immediately. The farm needs a body, not a mind, and I give more value to the latter, and the spirit cultivated of its thoughts.
Do you ever feel this way?” he asked to Anna, “maybe not in this dimension, but others where you feel you haven’t moved or grown or improved in way for time?”
“I don’t see the farm as a viable future, not in the way it is right now. Expenses increase. Less is purchased—the price is raised—there is no viable management of costs when every input is externally reliant. I think of old-ways, smaller plots, long-term sustainment over immediate volume and gross numbers. Cash is the crop we try and raise—not wheat, not corn, not beans, not meat—and I believe in time we’ll see how poor of a crop it is: for the land, for the farmers, for our spirits—they’re all dying.
It doesn’t take much to make a living, to have enough, but we’ll never know we’ve attained it when we’re always focused outward onto more.
I don’t want more. I want enough. I am simple. I can be simpler. I can be happy with a plot and simple tools and appearing archaic but in living older ways, and simpler means, finding what modern world has lost.”
“And what is that?” Anna asked.
“Joy—non-dependent on material externals.”
Anna thought of the farm, the open space, simple of wood stove heated home and summer cooled in wind through opened windows—and its heavy humid of heat when wind was still. She thought of a garden, pantry’s fill of canned jars as her grandmother had made, reward of labor not of cash but of the bounty she had grown. She thought of the quiet never-ending, gathering fallen wood of storm from the trees—felling and curing one a year for the bulk of winter’s burn. She thought of the quiet, in dawns and eves, way light sought and touched through cover of trees, changed and different in every season.
Something touched to her in heart, displeasure with materialists’ moment, and she felt a pang and call as well for live of a simple life.
She saw earth tilled with labor of hand without whine of mechanics of machine, birds and wind sound of the tools in turning of the earth the sounds that spoke around.
Even if the world refused to change, she could. They could, returned to a simpler way in seek of a serene—peace—at evening shade, when day’s work was done, and dreamlight fell through trees.