Yesterday my divorce was finally finalized, and I am enjoying a deep sense of freedom. Ethan was surprised that he must pay alimony and child support, but it is a very modest amount, and I was surprised that I didn’t get compensated for anything i left behind. Nothing.

He demanded EVERYTHING, he wanted it all – and there was so much!  For our whole married life any resources beyond bare survival we invested in that farm. All the young years of my life and my time of almost two decades and my energy went into it.  I thought i would get paid for what he kept, but apparently it doesn’t work that way. The judge gave me a little compliment about being good at compromise, and that’s all I got from 19 years of marriage and building a farm.

I had closure months ago about the old farm when I got a chance to see what it looks like now – overgrown, psychopathically broken, stacked up with trash. It looks like the tragic farm in Oh Brother Where Art Thou, where the wife “done R-U-N-N-O-F-T’d”and they are eating the dead mule for dinner. I realized the good things about it were what I brought, so they aren’t there any more.

I looked at my new farm here and just felt deeply grateful and glad to be where I am, but it also feels stunning to lose so much. That was all the wealth I had accumulated in my entire life. Most of all I feel marked by the intense greed i experienced from these people who wanted to eradicate me and hurt me and take my home and my life and destroy it. I can only describe it as Evil.

This is not just about my experience with Ethan and his parents. This is about the injustice in the world, how the most cruel and greedy among us just get whatever they want to the detriment of the rest. It is about grappling with an archetypal monster of greed and cruelty that exists in the ugly depths of humans, because the underlying experience here is not really about a pathetic little man grasping on to what power and resources he possibly can because he feels hurt and spiteful that his wife wanted out of the marriage.

It is an archetypal monster that runs through history, a monster we all struggle against even now.  It is the same monster that slaughtered my ancestors, the noble Gauls and Celts and enslaved the continent for over a thousand years. It is the monster that came to this beautiful, abundant land where humans lived in harmony and exploited and warped it into the depleted, toxic wasteland we live in now. We can look around us at what is happening right here in our world and see the actions and influence of it. And it feels like it always wins, and we always lose. Every single time.

My friend Danica, who studies history, shared the most beautiful and uplifting words with me:

“In history there are just so many men like Ethan. They just make up a sizeable part of the history of humanity, which is why things don’t always go so well.
The Earth could be beautiful and abundant. Every person could have an acre permaculture garden and be feeding themselves. We could have a beautiful planet, but we don’t because like you said, people are mixed up and greedy, and they often just run ramshod over the good people.
But Nature is always fighting back. Just think about it – a single plant produces do much seed. The Earth itself is so generous.”