a pattern that supports us to simplify –

on integration

there’s a pattern that supports us to simplify and streamline our complicated lives, to give ourselves a bit more quiet connection. it’s a pattern of integration.

between homeschooling, homesteading, working from home, we turned to this pattern to sustain us. we turn to it again as our lives take on other shapes.

all through to university, the kids were homeschooled. this is by nature an intensive choice to make, but in our approach here it is almost indistinguishable from living. their emergence from the schooling years is almost seamless, so deeply were they life-learning. while the children grew up relating to the world by reading a good deal, writing, image-making, it was in making with their hands, in conversation and in the daily tasks of living on the farm and in community that they tested and integrated. this isn’t often felt as hard graft, quite unabashedly the opposite, in that way a party springs up when many hands make light work on the farm. projects in learning can be inherently projects in living.

my youngest is eerily my likeness in being wholly project-based. i’d never dream of assigning her the tasks she’s crafted, say, to tell the ducks a story every single night (after feeding them and locking them safely in the duckhouse she helped design and build) never mind sustaining this creative writing project for eight solid years. yes, even organising others to tell the bedtime story if she’s away, maintaining an extraordinary devotion to this work. this is the power of integration.

so too my work in filming, writing, supporting folks through farm tours and mentorships to grow more resilient, collaborative, regenerative, ready for uncertain futures, is also how i help us to become so. this work is almost indistinguishable from tending to the farm and farmhouse. visitors to the farm are inevitably collaborators on whatever interesting project the season yields up. there are always so many, we can find one that appeals to what they want to learn, to what skills they bring. we like choices that meet multiple needs, stacking functions. work done once can feed us and our community many times over.

the principle of integration repeats. we see it as we free-range geese in the orchards, food forest, ponds, creek and silvopasture, to protect ducks and chickens from predators, and so too, trim the grasses, convert them into microbially rich compost distributed effortlessly across the farm. the flocks pick up every windfall apple, plum or pear, tidying and nourishing at once, setting carbon as the grasses root-prune and feed a microbial underground that feed trees that feed flocks that feed people.

we see it in the compost we produce for the orchards and gardens, that converges from the deep litter systems in the chicken, duck and goose houses, as well as the barn and the household compost loos, that all, eventually, after hot composting and resting and the like, end up in the deep litter chicken run for some final months of cooking and turning and micro-creature activity. digging it out is like cutting slices of a massive chocolate cake to give to the land. everything ought to end and begin with chocolate cake, i figure.

now, as i reach a half-century and our children are adults in their own right, we are looking at ways to integrate community on to the land, to nurture other needs, to give us more time for adventures, to create the spaciousness that emerges when we collaborate. mentor-volunteers? co-farmer landmates? artist residencies? farm stays!

immersed in these multiple languages, connected to the needs of the ecosystem that we support and that supports us, we can find a rhythm to simplify how we learn, live and work.

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the return of my more intense insomnia in this intense season can be observed in the latest ‘matinée’ letter to you, in which my retrospective of the film ‘goosehouse’ held, instead, the link to watch ‘broody hen’. let me put that to rights, below. as our broody did hatch out some gorgeous chicks, so i include that here too. and now for another nap.

thanks for taking the time to read and watch and share, thanks for supporting. i feel it holding me, every day.