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Kate Spring

~ growing a deep-rooted life

Kate Spring

Tag Archives: thoughts

A New Story

02 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by Kate Spring in Farming, Politics, Writing

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

change, inspiration, life, thoughts

photo by Katie Spring

I’ve been thinking about stories lately, about the larger story of our society that plays out over and over again, and about the undercurrents of alternative stories that whisper through the static.

At a Hanukkah celebration a few weeks ago, our host stood to give his yearly toast, and he said, “I’m having a hard time celebrating the myth of Hanukkah this year.”  He went on to tell the story of Hannah and her seven sons, all slayed in front of her as they refused to denounce their faith to the invading army.  Eventually the Jews won, and the story told was one of martyrdom and the birth of Hanukkah, and so we celebrate the victim overcoming the enemy.

And this is where the tiredness came into Harlan’s voice.  He spoke of the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernadino.  He spoke of the whole of written history with all its beheadings and wars and conquering of one group over another.

“It’s always the same story of victim and martyr.  It’s not getting us anywhere.  We need a new story, and I don’t know what it is.”

I was quiet as a discussion ensued.  His emotion swirled around inside of me as I herd his plea and understood the depth of yearning for change, for peace, for a future that will hold our children safely after we have gone.  In the weeks since, that one statement has gone through me over and over as I try to answer it: we need a new story.

As his words resound in my head, others come in to answer.  I think of my friends who run Earthwise Farm and Forest, and how Carl said, “Our lives are not a rehearsal.  We advocate for the life we want by living it.”

I look at their lives and see another story: one of resilience, of interdependence with their land and community, of activism balanced with the steady building of a home and family and farm.  I look at their lives and see how true their words are, how they are living the story they want to bring forth into the world.

I think of Harlan and the weariness in his voice as he said I don’t know what it is.

While I may not have the complete answer, either, I do know that while the world is bigger than any individual, change is not.  Sometimes we all feel small, and that is okay.  Sometimes we all feel defeated and frustrated, but still it is important to witness.  It is important to feel.  The only true defeat is in thinking we are too small to matter.  You are not too small to matter.

Every beginning, every story, starts out as a seed.  Some of us are the seed sowers.  Some of us are pollinators.  Some of us are the wind and birds that scatter the seeds wildly across the land.  Some of us are seed savers that carefully and tenderly carry the story into the next generation.

You do not have to play every part.  Only your part.  You do not have to be recognized with a Nobel Prize or a plaque or anything at all.  Just discover your heart.  Discover what makes you feel light and do more of that.  Share it.  Most of the time you will have no idea how many lives you are touching by simply living in a way that brings you more alive.

This is what brings me alive: touching soil, planting a field of vegetables, growing flowers, feeding others, writing.  In my personal story, I’m a seed sower, but in the larger story of the world I think of myself more as a pollinator, helping a new story bear fruit and flower.

Think of pollinators: insects, bees, butterflies, birds.  They are so small.  And we need them.

Don’t wait until you have more money or a better car or more time.  Create the life you want by living it.

That’s the only way a new story will take root.

 

 

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It’s Okay and Good and Beautiful

19 Friday Jun 2015

Posted by Kate Spring in Wildness

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Tags

life, nature, thoughts, vulnerability

Some days I feel more than I think.

This morning is overcast with intermittent rain, as if a shower head is being turned on and off and on at random intervals.  It’s a morning I want to turn a shower on, rather than pump water into a pot, heat it on the stove, take it out to the sauna, scoop it with a yogurt cup, and pour it over my head.

On most days, I love this.  I look down at my feet in the small black tub, meant by its manufacturer as an animal watering trough, and see how little water my bathing requires.  I stand alone in the sauna and breathe in the solitude of an enclosed space dedicated to one thing, so different from the open circle of our yurt, where there are no lines or doors between bedroom, kitchen, living room, playroom, and office.

But today I feel the clouds moving overhead, and I can’t put into words the vulnerability and power that pushes against each other within their deep gray forms stretching across the sky.  It’s a day I want everything to be easy and a day I know nothing will be if I hold to this desire.  It’s a day I feel vulnerable for no particular reason.  A day I feel emotion and creativity and power well up inside me from that vulnerability.

It’s a day I want to tell you that it’s okay to take pictures of things that aren’t pretty.  It’s okay and good and beautiful to sit with the things that slow you down, the things that make you vulnerable, the things that for whatever reason make clouds billow up in your chest.

I don’t have any pictures for you today, just these words and the wind blowing diagonal up the field, which will perhaps reach you, wherever you are, to tousle your hair and pull you from somnambulism into presence.

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The Importance of Being Gentle

04 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by Kate Spring in Seasons

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

2015, consciousness, growth, life, nature, New Year Resolution, New Year's, spirituality, thoughts

P1000599

You know, I’ve never made New Year’s resolutions.  I don’t like the idea of waiting until January 1st to implement the changes you know you want to make.  I’d rather do it now, whenever that now is.  Still, there is an energy about the New Year that seems to encourage and hold space for setting intentions.  Perhaps it’s all those people who are taking time to look at their lives deeply and ask, what do I want to change?  How can I make my life better?

I believe in consciousness and it’s power to move across the land and into our hearts and minds.  I believe that when enough people stop to sit with their lives and choose the path that brings them alive, that energy swirls out on the wind, brushes across another’s cheek, tugs the hat off a neighbor walking their dog, and fills their lungs as they inhale.

It seems right, then, that the New Year comes in winter, when the weather slows us down and the forest bares itself and the long dark nights begin to inch back toward light.  January holds so much space; it invites us into it, lets us spread out our lives on the canvas of snow and give up all that doesn’t serve us.

My intention is just that, to give up what doesn’t serve me, and to be gentle with myself in the process of letting go.  If there’s one lesson I learned in 2014, it is the importance of being gentle.  There’s so much out there about how to let go and how to change your life, but I’ve found that great change can often be accompanied by doubt, judgement, and fear.  If we’re not gentle with ourselves, we run the risk of sliding back into these clouded moments and missing the change we seek.  If we’re not gentle with ourselves, forgiving the clouded moments becomes that much harder.

So I will be gentle, and I will soften as I let go of what does not serve me.

I encourage you to try, too.  In a society that reinforces so much closing off, I think that softening may be one of the most powerful things we can do.

 

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The Courage to Try

29 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by Kate Spring in Morning Inspiration

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

change, courage, learning, life, thoughts, Vermont

 

I’d like to learn how to make whiskey

and play the fiddle

and how to sew quilts.

At a certain point in life it seems we give up on some desires, the big, far-away lofty ones, and a few small, close, dear ones.  We accept the idea that we needed to learn how to do it when we were young, and a small measure of defeat sets in and reincarnates itself as hopes for our children.

But I still want to learn how to speak Spanish, and French, too.

I’d like to learn how to ride a horse, and then have one of my own someday to ride along the logging roads in the forest that stretches out and rises up from this hillside pasture.

Learning doesn’t have to stop.  Childhood wonder doesn’t have to fade away.

We wake up everyday and we can open our eyes to possibilities, because that’s what each new day is: a possibility.

I don’t know what I’ll approach first, the whiskey or the quilting, the horse-back riding or the fiddle.  I just know that it’s not impossible.  All it takes is two hands, an open mind, and the courage to try.

DSC_1373

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Alone at the Cafe

18 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by Kate Spring in Morning Inspiration

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

coffee, life, motherhood, thoughts

Before responsibilities–land, a farm, loan payments–before motherhood, how could I have known the luxury of a morning alone.  How could I have known the beauty of sitting at a counter with a window seat, a cup of coffee heavy with cream exhaling steam upward on a cold morning.  How could I have known the stillness a slice of coffee cake could offer, its moist crumb coalescing with crystals of brown sugar in my mouth.

Before motherhood, how could I have known the contentment that comes when time floats out of mind, thoughts dissipate in the steam, and I nurse that cup of coffee–or should I say when that coffee nurses me?  This moment of taking instead of giving–how could I have known how marvelous it would feel?P1010040

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Wild Spring

25 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by Kate Spring in Wildness

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Tags

change, thoughts, wild, writing

A new name for the blog!

Wild, adj: going beyond normal or conventional bounds; deviating from the intended or expected course, specifically: a life rooted in joy and freedom

Spring, n: a time or season of growth or development; the season between winter and summer; a continual source; a surname, specifically: Katie Spring, a writer, farmer, and mama.

Wild Spring, n: a blog on growing a deep-rooted life through homesteading, simple living, and embracing the wildness that weaves through each day.

I’ve been searching for a new name, but always come back to wildness.  Even after weeding in the garden or cutting the grass, I tumble into wildness, into the intersections of a cultivated and untamed world.  Gary Snyder writes, “Wildness is not just the preservation of the world, it is the world.”  And so I see it as I walk the fields, in the rows of crops, the pac choi going to seed, the witch-grass coming up in the pathways, and in myself: dirt pressed into fingerprints, freckles darkening in the sun, wisps of hair flying free from my braid.  And I see it in Waylon’s face, in his uninhibited joy and excitement, at his surprise when he stands on his own or discovers something new in the soil.  Everywhere I look, wildness pulses through our days.

In thinking of a new name, I came back to this post I wrote a few years ago, titled Wildness and Words:

If I were to ask each person one question, it would be this: what sustains you?

Not where do you work and how do you pay the bills, but what makes you wake up each morning, feed yourself each day and continue to breathe; what is it that really fills you with life?

If you were to ask me this question, I would respond: wildness and words.

(…read the rest here)

I hope you like the new name, too.  The posts will keep coming, but right now rain on the yurt roof is lulling me to sleep, and it’s time for rest.  Be well~

droplets on fern

 

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Still To Be Discovered

15 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by Kate Spring in Travel, Writing

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

change, life, thoughts, travel, Vermont

I wasn’t ready to save the world, at least not by myself, but this is what I was told after college.  “You’ll save the world,” resounded baby boomers, friends of my parents, who must have somehow felt their saving abilities had passed.  I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do–I knew I wanted to write, and to be happy, but in the spring and summer of 2009, what I knew more than anything was that I could not hold the wants and expectations of others; it was all I could do to just to find the scattered pieces of myself in a time of great transition.

So, in 2009 when it may have seemed smarter to make decisions with my head, I instead threw out the valiant idea of saving the world and followed my instinct, my heart, on a much more important journey to let the world save me.  The looping path led me from Vermont to New Zealand, Tasmania, Alaska, and back to Vermont again, and now here I am, on a western slope facing the Worcester Range, with a husband, two dogs, fifteen acres, a burgeoning farm, and a baby growing inside me.IMG_1852If you’ve read my journey from my first blog post, you know how I got here.  But what I’ve learned is that how I got here is not always as important as the fact that I am here.  Sometimes, I feel full of possibilities with everything surrounding me.  Other times, I look at our bank account and wonder how we will ever get to where we’re going.  We keep moving, though, finding a balance between our heads and our hearts, and from it all I am learning patience and how things take time.  I am learning the beauty of slowness, though one day we will look back and say how quickly it all happened. I am learning the pace of moment to moment, allowing things to unfold as they are ready, and as I am ready.  We take in only as much as we can hold, and then we overflow, and both the filling and the flowing are beautiful.

It has been a while since I’ve heard the declaration, “You’ll save the world,” and I admit I don’t miss it.  It it not to say that I don’t love the world, though.  After all I’ve experienced, perhaps this is what I’ve learned: the world doesn’t need to be saved, it just needs to be known.  So let yourself be filled, and let yourself overflow.  There is so much still to discover.

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Late Summer Harvest

05 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by Kate Spring in Local Food, Seasons, Writing

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Tags

food, harvest, life, summer, thoughts, time

I’ve washed the salt out of my hair

and rubbed the soil back into my skin.

Late summer harvests fill my kitchen—

tomato sauce simmers on the stove,

carrots wait to be made into soup,

zucchinis pile up,

and melons balance on the table while

peppers, onions, eggplant, beets, basil, parsley and more all

teeter and spread over tables and floor.

The only thing lacking is time

or is it?

Time is relative, Einstein said.

He also said, “the only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen all at once.”

Late summer doesn’t listen to that logic.  The only option then is to stretch time out, blow it up like a balloon, and let it grow at the speed of the garden.

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Emptying My Pockets

04 Monday Jun 2012

Posted by Kate Spring in Wildness

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Tags

birds, change, life, nature, thoughts, truth

“How is a child to find her own beliefs, unless she can stuff her pockets with all the truths she can find?”

~Barbara Kingsolver

I’ve been stuffing my pockets all my life, and now it’s time to empty out.  I’ve been watching birds in flight, how they carry nothing as they glide.  It’s time now to join them, to give up my pockets all together and to play in the wind with my hands stretched open, greeting a truth too big and too free to be held.

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Wildness and Words

22 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by Kate Spring in Wildness, Writing

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

life, nature, thoughts, wildness, writing

If I were to ask each person one question, it would be this: what sustains you?

Not where do you work and how do you pay the bills, but what makes you wake up each morning, feed yourself each day and continue to breathe; what is it that really fills you with life?

If you were to ask me this question, I would respond: wildness and words.

Wildness because it simultaneously pulls me outside of myself and brings me deeper within.  Wildness because it wakes me each morning with bird song and leads me into the forest to follow trails marked by coyote scat and lined with hobblebush.  Wildness because it leads me off the trails to discover pink lady slipper, trillium, and fields of blue cohosh where I lay down to rest and feel my own body rooting into the soil.  Wildness because it leads me to rivers and lakes where I take off my clothes and dive like an otter, water slick against my skin, as loons paddle in alcoves and wind ripples over the surface sending waves to the shore, and the sun warms the laughter that bubbles up out of my belly.  Wildness because it stretches my heart open and tells me I am part of this world.

Words because they are the creation of voice and a tool of creation themselves.  Words because they give meaning to sound, shape and light.  Words because their meanings bring understanding and understanding brings me deeper into wildness and wildness brings me through sound and into the heart of silence.

If I were to ask each person one question, it would be this: what sustains you?  If we were to listen to all the answers, I think we would find a world of convergences where one person’s sustenance gives rise to another’s, and that person’s sustenance meets another’s at a crossroad, until an entire web takes form that cannot be clipped in one place without it affecting the whole.  If we were to listen to all the answers, I think we would slow down enough to remember that our lives are energy and there are endless ways to manifest that energy.

So I ask: What sustains you?

Female Red-Winged Blackbird, Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, Utah 2011

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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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