A city girl's explorations into sustainable living

Recently I found myself unemployed, pondering what I should do with my life next. All the career books say, do what you love. Find your passion. Follow your bliss. As if there is an answer -- a solution that will allow you to make money doing what you were meant to do. Help the world, help yourself, and make money!

For me, it's not so easy. I'm interested in a lot of things, but nothing that I am willing to invest in enough to turn it into a career.

I'm what Barbara Sher calls a "scanner," or what Margaret Lobenstine calls "the Renaissance Soul." At least that's what these self-help books for the career-stunted tell me.

What I tell myself is that I'm a learner. And what I want to learn about right now is sustainable living. I have a feeling it's what I'm supposed to be doing -- even if it doesn't pay. Even if it COSTS money to do.

I am meant to be a student right now, exploring peak oil, the economic crisis, climate change, sustainable agriculture, community building, permaculture, natural capitalism, Transition Towns, rural sociology, and my own spiritual growth. I honestly don't know where it will lead, or what it will amount to, but I invite you to share my journey.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Perfectionism & Farming Don't Mix

Today in class, one professor commented on how there is no perfect farm. No one can farm perfectly. It is simply too complex, involving a large amount of variables which are constantly in flux. You can never know everything; you can never control everything; you can never perfectly optimize your land by creating the maximum, ideal, unblemished yield of every marketable item the land could produce. In this way, farming is like an art. The farmer is always striving to make things better, aware that inevitably there still always will be areas that could use more improvement.

As a recovering perfectionist, this caught my attention. To maintain their sanity, farmers have to "radically accept" that there are always variables out of their control. Things will go wrong: there will be drought or flooding, chickens will get picked off by predators, or a plague of grasshoppers will eat all the forage. Ultimately, you are just a steward of the land trying to do the best you can at the moment.
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