fragmentation

The Fairy Tale, James Sant, 1845

We live in an extractive society. We want to know what parts of the whole are the ones to focus on. Quick and dirty - give us the bullet points. All around us, the whole is increasingly being fragmented with a peddler for every part. Promises offered for any malady. Solutions for any problem. A guru for every subject. Everything, including you, broken down into its effective parts.

Some people have chalked up the failings of our time to politics or corporations or evil. I think it’s probably all of those things, but it’s also us. We’re responsible too. All around us we see the fragmentation of the whole. We want it. We pay for it. Just give me what I need to make it happen. Social media allows us to flit from person to person, collecting a few nuggets here, a few easter eggs there. We have come to see people as their useful bits. The woman who gives recipes. The guy who talks about exercise. The politician I like because he says some things I want to hear. The new trend that might just be ‘the thing’ that fixes whatever needs fixing. All of us feasting on the dopamine snacks offered. Constantly nibbling.

We’re all babes in the woods, wandering around looking for the next shiny thing to put into our basket, unaware of the majesty of the forest all around us. We’re like crows, fixated on the shine. Only crows know their connection and place in the wild. We’re not so certain. Our eyes are focused on the tangible even as the the wind blows answers through our hair. Our fingers search for the things they can grab and hold onto while birds sing messages that dissipate into the ether. A great orchestra plays all around us, welcoming our participation to complete the song, but we’re too busy listening for the echo of our empty calls.

Agostino Ramelli, Theatre of Machines, 1588

I’m acutely aware that some of my readers don’t give a hoot about all of the topics I write on. I understand that some people find their way to my little corner of the internet because they saw me making ice cream or writing about eating traditional food and they figured that was my schtick. Only to realize that there’s too much ‘fluff’ - the stuff they aren’t here for. Others like that. I know that and I understand that. I could talk about health without talking about why my cow needs her calf, but it wouldn’t be me talking. And I don’t know how to talk about movement without talking about our living environments. I don’t even want to talk about growing and raising our own food if I can’t talk about the man at my side doing it with me. In fragmenting my life as an offering to fill another’s desire, I am lying. Maybe not to you, but to me. And there’s enough of that going on all around us.

What does it matter if you wake up at dawn and get outside under the sunlight if the callings of your spirit are being blunted with busyness and distractions?

Does it help you if you’re drinking raw milk but you approach the work of your life with bitterness and self pity?

Can you even be a loving mother or father or human being participating in this world at this time if your mind is so clouded and your body so neglected that you can’t open up to what comes? 

Can you feel the depths of misery and the saturation of joy or are you too busy searching for answers outside of yourself as a way to run from that pain?

Have you come to know your Creator, our Creator, in an intimate and meaningful way? Is your heart open and vulnerable to possibility? Or are you finding inspiration by watching videos of women in long dresses, touching wildflowers with their fingertips, pretending they’ve figured it all out? Or maybe it’s men blasting out their workout with their handsome features and endless confidence claiming something you want. Is it want that rules your heart or careful cultivation? 

Beauty can only be truly known and loved as a whole. We can admire the plumage of a stuffed bird, but to witness it in flight, free and weightless, soaring against the backdrop of the endless blue sky fills us with awe. A birthday cake from the grocery store serves a function, but it isn’t an offering of time and love and energies like one made in the kitchen by someone that loves us. The wholeness, the story of a thing satisfies in meaningful ways. The portrayal of that satisfaction by another has no claim on what will be our path.

The internet has taught us to reduce people down to a theme. The problem is we can go from subject to subject, site to site, feeling like we’re actually doing something. We open up our skulls and allow information in, endless pieces of information with no context. There’s no whole to hold the pieces as one. There are no examples moving and living around us so that we can put into context the whole. And without context, our life experience, our judgment is skewed. We just know this one little drop, presented with slickness, void of our participation in questioning with conversation and evaluating with observation.

Everyone has one piece of an answer. But a bunch of pieces do not come together and form the totality of us. They’re just a mashed up pile of pieces. We are still called to come forward and into our lives and excavate our authentic whole. You can bypass that, but that looped train you’r

e on never ends until you decide to get off.

So collect your pieces from here and there. Find the bits and bobs that fill your curiosity and passions. Just be sure to roll them over, hone them with your experience, question their relevance in your life. These are the things we must do to make anything a part of our whole, our unique selves, here for our unique reasons. Lest we just end up with a mountain of pieces that belong to other people. We can’t just open up our hungry maws and fill them with pieces from another without our intuitive filters. All the glue in the world can’t take bits and make them into a coherent whole when they come from endless origins. Fragments with endless origins with no discernment can never make a complete whole. We remain hungry. Unsatisfied. Questing. Unnecessary cravings when all that we need was breathed into our beings the moment life sparked in us. 

Maybe overwhelm, the word I hear most frequently these days, has little to do with tasks and more to do with the incongruence of stuffing bits into our selves without pause. Information and ways of being presented as absolutes and taken in without question. Foreign matter ingested without trusting the wisdom of our own filters. If I offer something to you that isn’t yours to hold, let it go. I do what feeds me, what I have passion for and take joy in. It will be different than what you love. We may share some things, but we won’t share all. Otherwise you would be me and I would be you and that just isn’t so and never will be. Trust in the refinements of your own heart and cultivate a life that brings you into harmony with your own spirit. That is the antidote to overwhelm.

Courage, Anxiety and Despair: Watching the Battle, James Sant, 1850

I cannot find myself and my connection beyond the veil of the physical world if my mind and body are inflamed. I need my physical self to fully realize my spiritual self. That’s the deal on this realm. I cannot be the love I want to be if I am not well. To be well, I need to eat with intention and move. I need to have sunshine on my skin and the earth under my bare feet. I need to drink good water. These physical things are necessary for my physical body which allows me to experience the bigger callings of my life. These things in themselves are not the bigger callings of my life but they are foundational. Without that foundation, I am dull and foggy and irritable and sore. My body becomes a limiter instead of an expander. I want to expand beyond myself, not be held captive by my poor choices.

Beyond the foundation of a well functioning body comes the desire to experience life and be a part of life according to my design. What can I, a lowly gal living on a big rock, do in this world? I can be open to receive and transmute and offer. I can give love without expectation. I can use the gifts I have been given in ways that open up to me. I can work hard without expectations of accolades. I can search for what’s right and stay true to that even when the tides are against me. I can do the work of my spiritual callings knowing that this me, this soul that is me, is what I will be when I shed my body one day but that work of preparation starts here. I can have the faith in a Creator that thought the small things I do with courage were important enough to bring me here and keep me here for the years I’ve been around. Who am I to doubt such brilliance? 

I can walk in the forest and be in the forest and be of the forest. I can live as a whole, an imperfect, dinged up whole.  I can look for the real people and be in relationship with them. The ones that let you see their sadness. The ones that get some of it right, some of the time and fail miserably at other times. The ones that create and love and work hard for things bigger than themselves.

Here I am, “slowdown farmstead” writing about all the things that I have learned. I am not some enlightened soul. I just have a few years under my belt and was given lessons and hardships and messages that profoundly changed my understanding of life. If I had a nickel for every person that has told me how “profitable” I could be if I would take what I’ve built and write cookbooks or stick to a niche, I would be rolling in the dough. I think there’s enough people doing that. It’s not me. It’s not the point. Such a thing would feel, to me, like I was feeding the mechanistic beast. I have always resisted being broken up into my useful parts. I have always resisted doing that in my relationships with my husband and children and friends. I have no interest in the polished presentation of a human. Give me it all and let’s see what we can do in that quagmire together. 

You can drink all of the structured water, bask under the UV rays, dim your EMFs, clean with baking soda, only wear organic materials on your body, breathe good air, lift weights and move until the cows come home, (and you should) but if your mind is full of poison and your heart is closed to light, it’s all for naught. We are not meant to chase others for answers that they have come to by chasing others for answers. An endless relay race, each person passing the baton after taking their lap. You are so much more than fragments. You are a luscious whole, here for us all. Let us have you as you were intended to be. Let you have you in all of your searching, wandering, wondering glory. Find the dark, empty places and light a candle. Stay for a while. Open yourself to the flow of life where answers come through us if we’re still enough to listen. Where prayers are answered. Where direction is offered. Are we home to receive the gifts that come or are we off looking for another shiny bottle-cap?