It’s been awhile since I’ve written one of my “in my kitchen, around the farm” essays (you can find all of the previous ones under the “Explorer’s Roadmap” tab). Seeing that I’m on day five of my fast, I figure, what better way to exercise some depleted brain cells than to sit down and try to be coherent?
I wanted to include the video above, one similar to another that I posted around this time last year, because it’s just one of my favourite moments around our farm. I hope you might just let that sound work its way into your every cell for a few moments. Working in our running streams, clearing out leaves and debris is one of my favourite things to do and it only happens at this time of year. I’m in that running water, soaking up the sounds and the energy of returning, flowing life. My hands are numb with the cold, but I don’t care. The stream runs from one large beaver pond to another. I like watching what the beavers do as I free up the stream to roar into their holding waters and they get to work to regulate their pond as they see fit. It’s like working in tandem with some of the most wonderful creatures on our planet.
Spring is definitely nudging out winter. This is the time of year where it’s a battle between the two. Surely, we think, spring has winter beat this time only to have winter reappear out of the blue, raining down sleet and snow while the returning geese question their timing. But spring always wins. There’s an honest assuredness in that.
With the changing of the seasons comes my longer duration fasts. A spring cleaning if you will. And boy, did I need it this go around. Little aches and inflammation, small injuries that wouldn’t retreat were all the impetus I needed to set my mind to a longer fast. This is why I do these longer, water fasts. It may be my unique biochemistry, my health history, or simply my constitution built of a constellation of everything I am, but my body just doesn’t seem to get rid of the old, unhelpful cells as well as it might. The profound autophagy that comes with longer duration fasts is what I’m after. A turnover of the old mitochondria for the new.
Well, let’s start with the farm, shall we? Last year we purchased our first sheep, six in total. They should have had between 5-6 lambs this year. We had one. To be more precise, we had two, one of which was rejected by its mother. Our daughter took that
