The land and I are recovering after being in the midst of an intense winter experience.  Night after night the garden was bound up in frost, the cold wind tearing at the sheets of frost cloth.  There is something particularly bone-chilling about winter in Florida. It soaks in through all your layers and settles over you and drips.  This winter storm ripped in and threw down tiny, ephemeral flakes of snow and then crushed everything in ice.

All through it my goats are dropping their kids, always, thankfully, in the sunny afternoons. Plum blossoms began blooming in the midst of it, like little snow flakes themselves.  My little grandson was born. Holding his tiny, perfect little body in my arms I felt so much the circle of life – losing my mother, and gaining this new, beautiful little being to love.

There is something so equally cruel about winter, where nothing is spared. It is death all frost-veiled with beautiful ice. The stillness and supreme peace of a very frosty morning is like a graveside peace.

I recently was at a party of raw food vegans. They were all talking about how they run their different diets, and what seemed to give them more energy. Herbal tea fasts, fruit juice diets, plain rice and lentils, eaten separately before 4pm. One of them turned to me inevitably, and asked me what kind if vegan I am.

It sparked off a very deep conversation. It’s always interesting to talk about farming, ecology, and nature with people who have always lived very urban lives. Our separation gives us the luxury to think we can just do as we please without the interference of natural laws.

More and more as I work with the land, I see myself in the context of it as a human being. There are so many forces to work with – birth, death, sun, heat, drought, rain, fungus, the intensely competitive chemistry of plants….. so much. More and more i understand that as a human being, my place is not to judge or pick and choose what i like or reject about the system – but to humble myself and merely to work with it – the whole fabric of it.

There are many things about it I would rather not work with. Perpetual spring, no disease, no death, and constant abundance would seem perfect, but this is not in balance or keeping with how it must work. We think we want never to experience the hard side of things, but like the fruit trees that need the winter sleep, we need the frost and the death, even if we don’t love them. The stillbirths, the parasites, the disease, the frost, the blood, killing, sacrifice,  death, the terrible things,   yet they are all part of it, and in my work I must work with it ALL,  holistically.

The frost, the death, they create space and renewal and are at the very foundations of life and birth. Without them, life itself would stagnate and cease to function. To not work with them upsets the careful balance of the system in ways our human minds cannot fathom, in ways that might not be obvious, and may take many year cycles or even lifetimes to be revealed.

Yes, I greet each new life with love and joy, whether it is sprouting seedlings or fluffy chicks. And i also work with death. They must balance each other, the growth and the death, the beginnings and the endings, two sides of the same coin.