After leaving my job last February, a colleague asked me to stay in touch and confirm whether or not the grass is actually greener after corporate life. I am happy to report that it is, in fact, much greener: 

It’s also full of weeds. And ticks. It sometimes requires breaking a sweat outdoors before 5:30am without any coffee. This can and often happens after many hours of intermittent coyote lamentations have kept you up. Some other things that have changed for me this year:

• I do not get to read, catch up on emails, attend meetings, or watch funny animal videos on my commute anymore. Instead of two and a half hours a day on the bus, my commutes this year have involved towing our temporary home up the west coast, driving across two states shopping for houses, walking to the barn, orchard, row crops or across pastures. 

• Scenery. Oh the glorious scenery! If nature/forest bathing really is good for your health, then I think I’ve added 5 years to my life in the last month alone. 

• Traffic jams and long lines. They just don’t happen to me anymore. Neither the roads, nor the grocery store lines and parking lots. Not even at the Post Office! If being in the Post Office takes more than 5 minutes, it’s because the one other customer there at the same time as me is someone I know.

• Strangers are nice. And they’re usually only strangers once.

• I’ve lost 10 pounds in under 2 months while simultaneously eating more bread and potatoes. 

These and many other changes are all symptomatic of a dramatic lifestyle change. For the last 20 years, I made a living sitting at a desk. Each year, I got bigger, slower, more tired, more cholestoralated, tinnitisized, blue light insomniated, spinally compressed, and poorly postured. I knew I needed to make changes but found my sedentary lifestyle very difficult to break out of. Gym membership? Nope, not for me. I could drop hundreds of dollars on access to the latest exercise technology and routines and I’d still find an excuse to sleep in and skip it. 

But, tell me the apple trees need pruning — I’ll set the alarm an hour earlier and be out of bed before it goes off. Vine-ripened raspberries? I’ll pick those little gems by head lamp if I have to. Build a chicken coop? I would love to, thanks for asking! Growing food and transforming landscapes into beneficial environments is a passion that has been growing in me for decades and the act of engaging these passions seemed to counter my ills. My gut was telling me that if I could get to a place with enough space and the freedom to fill more of my time with these activities, I could reclaim and restore myself — reverse the damage of falling back on a safe career. I knew I needed to be in a rural environment to get my mind, body, and spirit back in shape and working together in the best ways possible.

Fortunately, I have a partner that is all-in with me. Farley and I made a plan and the first stages of it went so well that we bought our first rural property in 2014, a year ahead of schedule. It didn’t work out. It was a great place, but we weren’t ready and it wasn’t right for what we wanted to do. New plan, new timeline, try again. For round two we went all out, armed with lessons learned and many years’ worth of dreaming. We did a lot of things right - a solid travel trailer to live in so we could save money traveling through the areas we were interested in, which also allowed us to sell our house before trying to buy a farmable property; a well-vetted budget and list of must haves, nice to haves, and must not haves for the new place; mountains of to-do lists and logistics plans, it goes on and on. But the real reason why things are working out is because we are super, amazingly lucky. Of all the things that could have gone wrong, pretty much none of them ever did. And most importantly, support from family and friends made a huge difference. Not only was our family and close circle of friends behind the idea, but those that could also made a place for us to stay while wrapping up our old life in various stages of this process. They came to moving-out parties and took away our extraneous stuff. They made donations to our cause. They cheered us on during our search through texts, emails, social media, and phone calls. These acts of generosity and kindness kept us going, reassuring us of our goals, knowing that so many smart and caring people were behind us.  

So now, after 15 years of dreaming, 11 years of planning, and 10 years of disciplined execution, we are finally, sort of, farmers. Buying a place in August meant that there wasn’t much we could do to get started on profitable agriculture for 2019.  Once again though, we got lucky. A local farmer with a lot of hustle was on our doorstep at week one with an offer to cut hay from our pasture. Thanks to him we made our first profit in agriculture (the Earth may beg to differ on the definition of profit here - more on that in a later post). Another farm has very generously given me a bit of work in their organic operation over the last week, generating a very different kind of profit for me - the kind that reminds me the next day of my productivity in the form of sore muscles, bruised knuckles, and rewards me with some of the best sleep I’ve had since being a teenager. When I do this kind of work, I’m on my feet, or my hands and knees. I’m muddy, wet, alternately hot and cold, and I can point to — and touch — the obvious and tangible progress caused by my efforts. My life — right this moment — is on the back half of a monumental turning point that I’ve been striving to achieve for a very long time.

So, what now? 

I really don’t know. I have a lot of ideas, a few rudimentary skills, and more than one or two delusions of grandeur. I know enough that if you want to hear God laugh, you should tell him your plans. Most of the signs I’ve been following are behind me, but a few new ones are emerging. I’ve been thinking that we probably won’t become what you envision when you hear the word “farmer”. I feel like a pioneer in a fully discovered world where much has been forgotten. I hope we will rediscover useful things, even if only for ourselves. We’ll try to put in words what we’re going through, just in case it might be useful or inspiring to others. In the meantime, we have a hot tub with an amazing view. I hope to keep this body and mind longing to interact with both.