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Kate Spring

~ growing a deep-rooted life

Kate Spring

Category Archives: Uncategorized

I want a leader who…

06 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by Kate Spring in Politics, Uncategorized

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

life, political discourse, politics, social change

I want a leader that will inspire without anger.

I want to live in a world where disagreements are sparks for explorative conversations, where every side is willing to listen fully before formulating a retort, where there is space between words.

People are complicated.  Politics makes people more complicated.

I want the space for complication to be okay.  I want the space for the changing of minds, for the willingness to converse and to discuss and to examine the ways in which we have changed and the ways we haven’t.

I want a leader who knows her or his heart and who knows how to hear another’s heart.  I want a leader who understands that hearts are wider than religion or race or gender, and also understands that experience is shaped by religion and race and gender.

I’m thinking in terms of government, but I don’t know that this type of leader can be found in government.

I hope it can, though it feels unsafe to question deeply in public forums.  The anger is so much that the risk of posing a question begins to feel too great, and I see how questioning is met with condemnation by those who have made up their minds.  We have grown so far apart that the meeting of “other” threatens our very existence.  We have grown so far apart that “other” becomes anyone with a  different soundbite.

I want to go beyond the soundbite.  I want to sit and look at each other and hear each other and feel the way our words fumble like ice cubes in our mouths even as fire ignites in our bellies and screams up the narrow tunnels of our throats.

I want you to know that you are allowed this.  This fire and ice.  This knowing and questioning.  This anger and love.

I want you to know that everyone is allowed this.

Anger has its place.  Anger can trigger us to wake up.  Its spark can create an opening to another way.  If anger is the only way to shake your eyes open, then let them open, but know that what we do when we wake up matters.  Wake up and root back in love.

I want a leader who will root themselves in love.  The expansive, forgiving, rolling kind of love.  The kind of love like air, like a breeze, like a gust of wind: willing to let us breathe, and willing to tug at our shirts when something needs to shift, and willing to blow our hats off when our haze becomes too thick, before calming into stillness again to let us be with ourselves and each other, stopped after the hurricane to meet the hearts of our neighbors.

I want a leader who knows that we all have this power of air and wind.  That we all breathe every moment.  That we all have this power to wake each other up.

Mostly, I want us all to know we have this power, and I want us to know we can use it with tenderness and care and deep, deep love.

 

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Alaska to Vermont: Eloping with Edge!

20 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by Kate Spring in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

{In celebration of National Poetry Month, I’ll be posting a poem each weekday through the rest of April, and I invite you to join me! Leave a link to your poem of the day in the comments section below.}

Though it may not be poetry in the typical sense, today I’m reflecting on my wedding day four years ago when Edge and I eloped in Tok, Alaska.

It was a day filled with wildness and joy~May you find the same today as the songbirds whistle on this spring morning.

Kate Spring

We made it back in a 1988 Subaru DL wagon, all the way from Alaska to Vermont with no GPS (not really a problem since we drove on the same road for half the trip) and no cruise control (a bit more of a problem since our right butt-cheeks got sore from continual pressing on the accelerator).  Besides the engine’s tendency to overheat, causing us to always have the heat on and the windows rolled down a bit, the trip was smooth–especially after buying two new tires in Whitehorse.

The day before we left Fairbanks, we decided to honor our love through marriage, so on the morning we left the Viking Lodge, we drove back through Tok and, with the town librarian and judge’s assistant as our witnesses, we said our vows and became husband and wife.

The road trip turned into our honeymoon, and as we traveled through the…

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Because it Just Happens

04 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by Kate Spring in Uncategorized

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“What’s within comes from what’s without (or is it with out?). It’s a reflection of what we see and hear and think, of the landscape we dress ourselves in, of the people we come to know and love (or conversely, to reject and dislike).” ~A post from Ben Hewitt, a writer/farmer/activist in Cabot, Vermont. It’s well worth reading.

Lazy Mill Hill Farm

IMG_9541

The first cold morning. Not cool, cold. 23 degrees, wind gusting, ice on the cows’ water a half-inch thick. Long underwear. Gloves. The buttugly hat I got at the thrift store for a quarter. Penny tells me it’s not flattering and she’s right, but I wear it anyway. The sun came on me as I milked, first Pip, then Apple, and I squirted a little milk on the tips of my fingers to warm them. Web duck waited at my side for her morning ration and got it. The sound of her drinking: I love that sound.

Every once in a while, I find myself caught in old ways of thinking and I begrudge the milk she drinks, a cup a day or maybe a little more, 300 days each year. 300 cups. 75 gallons per year for five years now or maybe more.  All for a damn duck.

Actually…

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“Going out the door can be going home”

13 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by Kate Spring in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

“Nowadays we are encouraged to think that travel is for variety and discovery, but travel has its own rhythm and routines, and maybe the best journeys are the ones worth repeating and are repeated.  That’s what I had for the years when I plunged into the west every summer…This is how home becomes bigger, the opposite of leaving home.  And home has to mean something more than a house; it has to mean a place, so that going out the door can be going home as much as going in.”

~Rebecca Solnit, “The Art of Arrival” essay in Orion Magazine

Mount Hunger Summer, Worcester, VT

Edge and Waylon on top of Mount Hunger

This is part of our work, as well.  To reach beyond the boundary lines of the tax map, to step outside the yurt, to step beyond the pasture, to put one foot in front of the other, to walk into the mountains and find ourselves home.

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How to Build a House, part 1: Start With an Armful

19 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by Kate Spring in Nature/Environment, Uncategorized

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Tags

home, land, life, place

Some days I dream of a house.  It’s not that I don’t love the yurt–I do.  This round womb of a home has kept us warm and dry for over three years, its simplicity let us move to our land quickly, and it held us inside the circle of its arms as Waylon was born into the world. For all of that, I love the yurt.  But there are reasons I dream of a house…insulation, for one.  Windows, for another.  To have morning light stream into the kitchen–to have a proper kitchen.  I won’t get into too many “to haves,” though.  Those kinds of statements always end up sounding whiny, impatient.  Instead, I will share my actions.

I just started reading A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams by Michael Pollan, a book about his journey to build a writing cabin behind his house.  At the end of the first chapter, when he shares the idea with his Architect friend, Charlie, Charlie asks:

“So where do you want to put this building?”
Aside from someplace in the landscape framed by that window, I had no idea.  Much as I’d been daydreaming about the buildng, I’d neglected to settle on a spot for it.  I hadn’t even ventured out those three hundred feet to walk the land yet, at least not on foot.  I realized I’d flunked my first test in Concrete Reality.
 
“Look, there’s no point talking about this or any other building in the abstract,” Charlie explained, “because the site is going to dictate so much about it.  This thing is one kind of guy if we perch him on the edge of the meadow looking back toward the house, and something completely different if he’s sitting off in the woods all by himself.  So that’s the first thing you need to do…”
 
Charlie was trying, gently, to bring me and my daydreamy notion down to the ground.
First this, then that.
The time had come for me to site my building, to fix this dream of mine to the earth.
 

I myself have spent countless hours dreaming of a house, searching the internet for timber frame house plans, sketching out the open floor plan and bedrooms and attached glass greenhouse.  Edge and I do have a general idea of where we want to put the house: just past the Northern edge of the pasture, where a red pine plantation had been harvested before we bought the land.  We’ve paid attention to how long it takes the winter sun to spread up each inch of the slope.  We’ve visited the area on snowshoes, in the afternoon, in the spring, slightly less in the summer (all that farm work, and my pregnancy last year).  But for me, this house has remained mostly in the wispy dream world of my mind.

So yesterday, with Waylon on my back, I walked to the Northern corridor, stepped over the threshold where pasture turns to brush, and began moving debris.  Layers of branches is all that’s left of the pine plantation, and who knows just how thick they lay.  Wild brambles have begun to poke through in some places, and hardwoods–birch and maple–create a dotted border line between the debris and the pasture.  There is a sizable break in this border line, a window into the cleared strip, where you can stand and look into the pasture, and out beyond it to the southwest, into the valley and the soft hills that rise to the Worcester range.  The slope here almost levels out before heading down again to the northwestern corner of the field.  To the north, hemlocks anchor in a steep hill leading down to the brook, and beyond that is forest.  This is the spot.

View from the Northern border in winter

View from the Northern border in winter

I started with an armful, taking the dry pine to the edge of the field.  And I continued like that, carrying a load of smaller branches, dragging larger ones along the ground, piling them higher and higher for a future bonfire or the creation of wood chips.  It didn’t take long to see a site begin to appear, and as I worked I envisioned different layouts: the entrance into a mudroom, the south-west windows into the living room, the porch off the down-hill and western end of the house.

There are faster ways of clearing land, I know.  But there was nothing else I needed to do.  And how else am I to ground my dreams to the earth?  I must start somewhere, and this clearing, armful by armful, is a means of discovery.

How long until a house is built?  Who knows.  A year?  Two, three?  I hope not four.  But I am beginning, in the way I know how, in the way I can with Waylon on my back: with my own two hands.

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Gallery

Baby, Lamb

16 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by Kate Spring in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

This gallery contains 3 photos.

Originally posted on Good Heart Farmstead, L3C:
Look who Papa found in the barn today…

The Space That Returns

19 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by Kate Spring in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

change, life, spirituality, yoga

It was one of those mornings without enough time.  I woke feeling tight inside and looked at the last entry in my journal: 11/12/13.  Eight days ago.  No wonder.  I haven’t taken even a few moments to write in the morning all week, and now that I’m back at my winter job three days a week, the hours before 7:00 am are precious, time to snuggle with Waylon and breastfeed him before my Mom picks him up for the day.  Edge and Waylon hugged me together, and the tears that threatened to come dried up.

The radio turned on with my car, but I didn’t get far before switching it off.  Too much bad news: reviews of books on war zones, updates on tornado damage, and reports of suicide bombings.  I put in a cd and the music of Steven Walters played to me as I drove:

just this moment, always changing always the same
just this moment, so wild and yet so tame
just this moment, I’m dancing in the flames
let them burn, let them burn, let them burn,
I am what remains

As I walked into work I passed an adjoining office and saw two co-workers in mountain pose and hands in prayer.  Just seeing them brought a deep breath back into my body, and I took my coat off and assumed the same pose before joining them in sun salutations, breathing and stretching down to my toes.

Before I left the yurt today I took a moment to write, ending with this prayer: May I find the quiet at the core of my being.

I sit here now feeling calm, still, quiet.  Thankful for impromptu morning yoga and the space that returns with breath.

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Welcome, Waylon

04 Sunday Aug 2013

Posted by Kate Spring in Uncategorized

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

baby, birth, family, life, motherhood, natural birth

Waylon has been with us for eight days now.  This morning Edge said the word “Sunday,” and it sounded foreign to me–time may be moving, but days and hours and minutes melted away when I went into labor.  Now, moments blend together like breath as I deeply inhale, filling myself with this life in front of me: a baby boy.

He was born at home, filling the yurt with his first cry at 1:52 am on July 27.  I looked down at him on the bed and announced, “It’s a boy,” before the midwives could tell me, and I fell back onto Edge, who held me as I held our son in my arms for the first time.  Now, the memory of physical pain has melted away, and I remember only the whole room breathing with me, the clarity of my cousin Amy’s eyes as she helped me through a contraction, the calmness of the midwives as labor intensified, the steady encouragement of Edge as I held him with all my might through each push, and the easy release of Waylon’s body as it squirmed out after his head finally made it through.

Waylon’s birth changed me in a way that has no words.  Everything but breath and love fell away.  Even in the pain I could breath, I had to breathe, and through the pain I found release.  It was the biggest letting go of my life–my body physically opening to let this being that grew inside me out into the world.  So it is that birth has taught me the first lesson of motherhood: letting go.

Letting go brought Waylon into this world.  Letting go brought love, space and peace.  May I remember this always, especially when I try to grasp onto him as he grows and needs to expand or contract without us.  Let me always remember how we did it together–how I had to push, how he had to leave my body to meet my eyes, how we had to put space between us to know each other in a profound new way.

Thank you, Waylon, for your breath, your voice, and your life that you share with your Papa and me.  Thank you so much.  We’re so happy you’re here.


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Human Beings are Makers

15 Saturday Jun 2013

Posted by Kate Spring in Uncategorized

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Good Heart Farmstead, L3C

In an interview with Poets & Writers magazine, poet Frank Bidart was asked, “The word making for you is a crucial word…For your poetic vision it’s more than an aesthetic endeavor; it means more than mere creativity, does it not?” and Bidart replied:

“As you say, a crucial word.  It’s one of the principles of the world.  We live in this awkward culture that tells people that they have to have a job, have money to buy things, but that the job does not have to be connected to one’s soul, one’s inner life or spirit or sense of self-worth.  On the contrary, the aim of work seems to be retirement where you can fish all day or go to Florida or someplace–which seems to me grotesque, an absolute impoverishing of the idea of human life.  Human beings are makers.  It’s the only thing that gives human beings something approaching…

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Lambs, Seeds, and Re-building

14 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by Kate Spring in Uncategorized

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Good Heart Farmstead, L3C

It’s amazing how fast weeks go by, especially as the sun stretches longer into the day and a new set of to-dos pops up with spring time.  Edge has been working full time on the farm since April began, but I am still working at High Mowing Organic Seeds until the end of the month.  I took a day off to help catch up on things and realized I could take the whole week off and still have more to do–but that is the way of spring, constantly growing, and a new energy comes with the changing days as birdsong returns to the mornings to gently wake us up and enter a new day.

This past week we’ve had four new lambs born: twin ram lambs from Benna and twins, one ewe and one ram lamb, from Deloide; The seed house is greening up as seeds continue to emerge and…

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Welcome!

Kate Spring

Kate Spring

Welcome to The Good Heart Life: an organic gardening and lifestyle blog where we grow beauty, joy, and nourishment for the body, soul, and earth. I'm Kate Spring: organic farmer, mother, and chief inspiration officer at Good Heart Farmstead and The Good Heart Life. Grow along with us, and together we'll cultivate a more lively, joyful world one {organic} seed at a time.

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