We’re wannabe, gonna-be farmers. We like food. Let me rephrase that, we love food. A lot. We kind of freak out our friends, that’s how much we’re into the stuff we eat. We love food that is old and slow: fermented, roasted, raw, smoked, sometimes very nearly rotten. It tastes better, fuller, and is pretty darn good for you. It is our three times a day choice we have to make, not because we want to but because we have to.
We believe in perfecting our will in every choice we make. We want others to make good choices. We believe that one of the best ways to change people is through their delight, and that the best place to delight people is in what people taste, because taste pleases in the body and in the mind. We believe in helping people to change; to care about what they eat and where it comes from because they like to eat it. We believe in dirt: the raw gorgeous ground and all the things people seem to want to wash away. We make things out of the earth, both our food and the vessels we use to serve it. We believe in vessels; they hold us and help us to hold others. Food is about serving. It is about making better people.
We’re wannabe philosophers. We believe in thinking. We believe in learning how to think. We believe in teaching and learning; giving and receiving. We believe that embracing is better than abstaining. We believe that the way out is through. We believe kids. Most of all, we believe in nothing. Nature takes care of herself. We watch, we assist, we do nothing. We work towards mind-like-water, always the path of least impact and least resistance. We believe power is like water, both gentle and strong.
We are not wannabe, not gonnabe, teachers. We are teachers. We believe everything can be learned from. All that happens, all that is, everything on this earth is a tool, is a way to learn. We believe we were made for learning and made to learn. This world was made for our edification. We believe in people who learn and who teach. We believe in hearts and minds that expand wills.
So all this stuff we believe in, it means not thinking about things alone, or liking, or even loving alone. It means getting dirty: hands-down, balls-out, dirty. It means no abstractions. It means knowing instead of thinking. It means eating the meat and the fat. It’s about organ meat spread on toast and bone marrow dissolving into stocks. It’s about eye-dampening onions. It’s about winters without fresh vegetables. It’s about putting up. It’s about putting up with mice in the kitchen cupboards and cats in the silverware drawers and life in a house made of trapezoids. It’s about mornings spent watching the wet-green backsides of cows. It’s about slaughter: blood and guts and hairy death. It’s about sending life to its death and watching their calm faces drive off away down the road, only to return in parts, frozen, and vacuum packed. It’s about last sunsets and last sunrises and pigs in thorny brier patches.
It’s about children. It’s about the children left to grow up on their own. It’s about the measured-then-forgotten souls. It’s about finding ways to improve the fertility of classrooms. It’s about reaching in to what is corrupt and pulling out what is still good what is still pure. It’s about the rose in the onion. It’s about building bridges between heaven and here. It’s about getting in it and making it better. It’s about black, dirty, dirt.
Once upon a time, we worked, played, and ate at Hickory Nut Gap Farm. We worked for Spring House Meats. There was a real spring house, and it kept the eggs and the opened food cold. We loved those mountains; we loved how tired they made us. There is a tired in the body and a tired in the spirit. We swapped tired spirits–tired of the hurly-burly of the urban and suburban, tired of sitting at desks, tired of buying everything, tired of a life lived only on and for the weekends–for tired bodies–bodies that sleep well and deeply, that get hungry, that hurt way deep down, that get lots and lots of fresh air, that walk up hills, that chase, lift, and jump. We thought we were getting the better end of the deal. We were. We we want more.
Now we have moved home to the lowest rolling hills, the root of the Appalachians: Chattahoochee Hills, where those high mountains we so love descend and dissolve into the river. We’re building a farm there; our farm in these hills made into many folds. In these hills there will be sheep and ducks, chickens and rabbits, and a few cows. There we will make cheese. We will try each morning to enfold the flavor of this our land, our home into a milky bite that can be shared, that can remind us of what it is to be here. We believe that this fermented milk tells a felt story in flavor and smell. It tells a story about what it is and where it came from that can get inside you. That’s what we want to know a little better too: who we are, where we come from. Above all in these hills we will put down our root, there we will tap into the soil and instead of drawing out we will draw in, put in, and make it well and whole again. We believe in having our hands in the folds, that that is our full and rightful place. We believe Masanobu Fukoka when he tells us,
The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops,
but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.
We believe Wendell Berry when he instructs,
. . . Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
We’re here to find out, to know if it works, if it’s true, to test the thought, to find out if this is the way. We’re here to find the dirty way.
