Originally published in Lake of the Woods Area News, Volume 54, Number 4, Fall 2024
This article will be coming out in the fall, but as I write this it is the peak of summer, and life on the farm is busy busy busy. As you may recall, I am one of three farmer-owners of Muriel Shores Farm. Writing this article series so far has been an exercise for me in how we can think about a sustainable future, by looking through the lens of story and relationship. In this article I want to use these lenses to look into a future that I want to see, and maybe you do too.
I can think of no better place to start than our farm, where we try to show that a more beautiful world is possible. I love when customers come to visit and marvel at our bountiful rows of vegetables and flowers, and just this past week we had a group of youth come and work for a day as a part of a summer program. After a day of hard labour in the hot sun, I thought they would want to get as far away as they could from our farm, but with genuine smiles on their faces they told us how much fun they had and how it was a highlight of their summer.
I appreciate these opportunities to reflect on how lucky I am. I get to spend my days with my hands in the dirt, connecting with the plants and the earth that they grow from. While I do this, I get to spend time with wonderful people, who I share a deep connection and interdependence with. When the work and weather allows it, my one-year-old daughter joins me up at the farm, and gets joyfully filthy while I harvest the days fresh vegetables, which will end up on the tables and in the bellies of people in my community. This feeling of having a place and a purpose within my community and within my ecosystem is what I want more of in my future, and this is what I want for everyone.
When I think about a sustainable future, one of the things I contemplate is local economy. When we go to the Farmers Market every Wednesday, it is a vibrant space. Beautiful ceramics, local art, dazzling jewelry, tasty treats, and of course, fresh healthy local produce and meats. It’s not that I suggest we reject global economy all together. There are many important components of our farm that come from far away, but I think that the more we lean into local and regional economy, the more we are leaning into quality, into meaningful vocations where people get to live their passions. This also include more accountability in terms of environmental impact and worker treatment.
My one-year-old daughter is great at helping me harvest lettuce
Local economy also has the potential to be resilient in the face of crises in a way that our larger economies don’t. Local economies keep more money in a community, cycling around and benefiting many people, rather than cycling in and quickly cycling out. In the example of our farm, practicing local economy is a way to mitigate climate change (fewer carbon emissions and biodiverse ecosystems) and to prepare for potential future crises (having a local food supply) while making a more beautiful world right NOW (healthier food, people, and ecosystems and connected community).
When I think about a sustainable future, I also think about the children that will inherit this world, a world that will come with a whole lot of baggage that they didn’t ask for. How are they going to navigate increasing forest fires, unpredictable weather, and volatile global events?
More than anything, I think they are going to need to know how to share, collaborate, and work together. This is the way nature works. We often hear of survival of the fittest, which can often be misinterpreted as survival of the strongest. When observing an ecosystem, it is the organisms that “fit” into their place in a community of plants, animal, and insects that thrive.
Freshly washed carrots. Veggies can be beautiful too!
To raise thriving humans, I believe we should be nurturing our children not to be the best at a school subject or at a sport, but how to be the best version of themselves that can find where their place is to thrive in this world, and to help others thrive as well. I’d like to quote Khalil Gibran, who wrote a wonderful book called “The Prophet”, and if you haven’t read it, I strongly encourage you to do so. He writes:
The future unfolds before us all at the same time, and each of our lives unfold with it. Together there are things we can do to affect the future, but it will unfold as it will, and we must accept that most of it is outside of our control. The best we can do is dream, and in our dreaming make today as beautiful as possible.
“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but are not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with his might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.”
