Farming is commonly the stressor and the therapy both at once. Some crazy job! The trick, of course, is being grateful for the good, and maintaining healthy perspective regarding the not-so-good. Again, quite a task; for me, writing helps. Here’s an example:
Farm Poem 2
To our lady of broken boards,
Saints of rotted fence posts,
Guardian angels of leaking barn roofs;
To ghosts of harvests failed,
Shades of pastures paltry,
Spirits of humus future;
To the Jesus of bent nails,
Buddha of clogged filters,
Vishnu of dead batteries,
We leave our skin, scraped and torn,
Our palms, our knuckles—
To DJs of dubious country lyrics,
Pink cammoed confederates,
Dating sites of bucolic animosity;
To two-star Yelp reviewers of February eggs,
Arugula-shaming Facebookies,
Instagrammers of self-anointed pulchritude;
To politicians feckless and infecund,
Thirty-nine cent turkey hucksters,
Fuelers and feeders who gaslight fooders;
Our self-righteous indifference hard-won,
We leave a thousand mile stare—
To petri-petro-burger enablers,
Vegan bacon warriors,
Flexitarians of prodigious fluctuations;
To lines eternal at Chick-fil-A,
Invisaligned teeth ribboned with flesh,
Mouths stretch-stuffed with white feathers;
To daydream dreamers of perfect sleeps;
Nightmare-sleepers of Saturday nights;
Lucid dreams of re-dreamed workdays;
We leave the numbers of our therapists—
Talking our way to stillness, dollars forever well-spent—
And to carrots cosmically entwined,
Baler twine torqued into pristine knots,
Stars dropped like matches from midnight skies;
To fragrantly seasoned firewood,
Broken-in brown coats,
6,000 hour tractors;
To dogs mostly good,
Milk-eyed barn cats,
The goat that talked us out of goats;
To exes of inestimable patience,
Spouses and partners of inestimable patience,
Future lovers of inestimable patience,
We leave heart-shaped stones,
Unpocketed haphazard on the hearth,
Plucked fresh from the tilth
Where soil, once clinging, crumbles.
