Who knew one’s excitement to plant gardens can lead to a life in the fast lane? Eyes opening of every morning give way to breakfast, and onward bound in a short commute to the barn to pick up tools. Away I roll into the fields with only dogs and chickens to swerve around.  I’m calling it the new home/landowner speed trip; so excited I am to get a veggie garden in, and arrest the development of more invasive plants, I seem to have forgotten indoor life.

Just as others rush daily to fit in actual paid work, children’s schedules, errands and god forbid a doctor’s appointment, I’m recognizing the pace setting rhythm of working with the land to live with and from it. Which is exactly what landed me on the couch a couple nights ago, returnable-beer bottle in one hand, and Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food Nation text in the other. Thus another intriguing chapter in pondering about good life.

As the title indicates, Petrini describes an approach with life wherein people look around them with greater interest, and are receptive to the details and flavors of the world (pg. 183). “The contrast should not be between slowness and speed – slow versus fast,” he writes, “but rather between attention and distraction; slowness in fact, is not so much a question of duration as of an ability to distinguish and evaluate, with the propensity to cultivate pleasure, knowledge, and quality.”

I’m almost two generations shy from interacting with family members who held a knowledge of the land gleaned from extensive home gardening. Now, as my life path continues to branch into broader awareness of land usage and food production, I feel an urgency to do work on my own land in order to retrieve and cultivate the knowledge of generations. Knowledge which many of us are separated from. Here are some more words from Petrini to ponder. I enjoy sharing these writings as a window into how I am learning as I shovel along:

“Reappropriating the senses is the first step toward imagining a different system capable of respecting man as a worker of the land, as a producer, as a consumer of food and resources, and as a political and moral entity. To reappropriate one’s senses is to reappropriate one’s own life and to cooperate with others in creating a better world, where everyone has the right to pleasure and knowledge.” (pg. 99)

So today I’ll be cultivating my senses with some cracker baking and onion planting; I know I’m learning because the soil has begun to show it’s character to me, and the mysteries of yeast and wheat flour continue to reveal themselves in the kitchen.