It's always about the heart
Jul. 14th, 2020 01:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormI hadn't realised how disconnected I'd been from my emotions for the last several months. I had access to annoyance and not much else really? At least, it all felt pretty distant.
I'm not sure if it's being back to some fieldwork at work, having a week off to do farm stuff, or what, but I'm settling back into myself some.
My emotions are showing up in two major places right now: the farm, and in my relationship with Tucker. With Tucker I'll just say that I'm present again: that might be present in my disappointment trigger, or present in love and security-feelings.
With the farm, well. I'd been drawing comfort in continuity and routine from the animals and the garden. It's been providing me with a kind of challenge and change I can cope with. But. I haven't really been getting ahead or thinking about things from a bigger perspective-- and I have to, because it's my job to have that perspective, and to improve on things. This was supposed to be a consolidaiton year but I haven't been consolidating things, just phoning it in some.
I've also been challenged because I don't want to sell my food, not really. At least not in the capitalist sense of a transaction between entities for a fungible required resource. I am in service to Threshold, and I orchestrate things such that lovely pork and goose is created. That generosity from the land -- which, yes, does require a lot of time and money from me -- provides for me, and can easily provide for more people. And it should provide from more people. But it wants to be appreciated as a spiritual experience, as a bounty, not as transactional on a financial level but maybe on a spiritual level. It's a receiving, not a buying.
So I had been looking at ways to sell pork that would make me comfortable. I mean, there's all the stuff with getting a good abbatoir and booking a date and all that. There's also figuring out what cuts who wants. And I would be fine doing that. But I'm not really fine... I mean, I don't really want to profit from it if that means the people who really need this food can't have it, and I don't want to undercut other farmers either. So I'd been looking at a tithe of 10% to the local food bank/first nation, things like that. And that felt like a solace but not a good system.
Well, I've had a bunch of piglets lately and people have wanted to buy them: first the vet tech bought a litter, then the person I got my pigs from originally bought a litter, and so my next litters I posted on kijiji. All but one of that set of babies found homes very quickly. It was neat to see where they went -- I delivered a couple sets of them, and there was always a quiet, serious girl between 12 and 16 hovering around who immediately took over making them comfortable -- and I felt a kind of connection I hadn't felt before in this work. People wanted these piglets, some to try eating and some to try breeding.
I'm always a little worried about selling live animals. People don't always treat their animals well, and I don't like the idea of any of my babies going to a home where they're starved, where they're too cold, where they're abused. But this was ok, this round, this time.
And I have people on a waiting list for Nox's litter, that's a week old now (Tucker and I castrated Nox's babies but not the 2 younger teen-mother-drop-off babies in with those). I have someone who wants the auxiliary boar, and someone who wants my spare boar from the new pair. With COVID especially there's demand for a pig that's human-scale.
That feels really good. So maybe selling piglets rather than meat is the way to start. And now I'm running into some feelings about which boar to keep, but that's another post.
I need to keep in this space. I need to keep feeling. It's good and important to do.
I'm not sure if it's being back to some fieldwork at work, having a week off to do farm stuff, or what, but I'm settling back into myself some.
My emotions are showing up in two major places right now: the farm, and in my relationship with Tucker. With Tucker I'll just say that I'm present again: that might be present in my disappointment trigger, or present in love and security-feelings.
With the farm, well. I'd been drawing comfort in continuity and routine from the animals and the garden. It's been providing me with a kind of challenge and change I can cope with. But. I haven't really been getting ahead or thinking about things from a bigger perspective-- and I have to, because it's my job to have that perspective, and to improve on things. This was supposed to be a consolidaiton year but I haven't been consolidating things, just phoning it in some.
I've also been challenged because I don't want to sell my food, not really. At least not in the capitalist sense of a transaction between entities for a fungible required resource. I am in service to Threshold, and I orchestrate things such that lovely pork and goose is created. That generosity from the land -- which, yes, does require a lot of time and money from me -- provides for me, and can easily provide for more people. And it should provide from more people. But it wants to be appreciated as a spiritual experience, as a bounty, not as transactional on a financial level but maybe on a spiritual level. It's a receiving, not a buying.
So I had been looking at ways to sell pork that would make me comfortable. I mean, there's all the stuff with getting a good abbatoir and booking a date and all that. There's also figuring out what cuts who wants. And I would be fine doing that. But I'm not really fine... I mean, I don't really want to profit from it if that means the people who really need this food can't have it, and I don't want to undercut other farmers either. So I'd been looking at a tithe of 10% to the local food bank/first nation, things like that. And that felt like a solace but not a good system.
Well, I've had a bunch of piglets lately and people have wanted to buy them: first the vet tech bought a litter, then the person I got my pigs from originally bought a litter, and so my next litters I posted on kijiji. All but one of that set of babies found homes very quickly. It was neat to see where they went -- I delivered a couple sets of them, and there was always a quiet, serious girl between 12 and 16 hovering around who immediately took over making them comfortable -- and I felt a kind of connection I hadn't felt before in this work. People wanted these piglets, some to try eating and some to try breeding.
I'm always a little worried about selling live animals. People don't always treat their animals well, and I don't like the idea of any of my babies going to a home where they're starved, where they're too cold, where they're abused. But this was ok, this round, this time.
And I have people on a waiting list for Nox's litter, that's a week old now (Tucker and I castrated Nox's babies but not the 2 younger teen-mother-drop-off babies in with those). I have someone who wants the auxiliary boar, and someone who wants my spare boar from the new pair. With COVID especially there's demand for a pig that's human-scale.
That feels really good. So maybe selling piglets rather than meat is the way to start. And now I'm running into some feelings about which boar to keep, but that's another post.
I need to keep in this space. I need to keep feeling. It's good and important to do.
