| No. 2 | MONTH IN REVIEW

January is one of my favorite farming months. During the rest of the year I am so acutely aware of time passing - noticing every detail of changes in day length, temperature, the pace of growing weeds. Everything feels like a sprint, and I am always, always lagging behind. In January time is suspended. Life is quiet outside and the plant growth indoors is hardly measurable. The days are soft, time passing like a stroll through the woods.  And we do, in the month of January, gently stroll through the snowy woods. It is the time of year I recreate outdoors more than any other, (that is, if you don’t count farming activities). While we do start crop planning, its like we are squinting at the impending season from a distance, the details abstract, the outlines fuzzy. It feels far enough away that I can forget about the long harvests and longer market days, the inevitable failures and mistakes, and instead just dream of the colors, flavors and textures we will soon crave as we re-enter the accelerating passing of time.

Highlights:

-Deep-cleaning the kitchen, including rubbing mineral oil onto all of our wooden kitchen items (cutting boards, wooden spoons, and countertops). I’m ashamed to say I have never done this before. It felt revelatory.

-Getting together in San Francisco with my sisterhood. There are six of us living in various parts of the country, and we have made it a priority to all be together at a very minimum of once a year. It’s amazing what just 48 hours with my girlfriends does for my soul! It’s the ultimate reboot.

-Attending the first annual Flowering in the North Conference. Since focusing on flower production, I haven’t found farming conferences to be as relevant until this conferences. It was so well planned with excellent topics, all tailored to flower farming. The bonus was that it was held  in Maine, so we got to spend an extended weekend in my hometown.

At the end of January we reach ten hours of daylight, which feels like a seismic shift. Everything starts to wake up. The snow comes and goes, however in the greenhouses growth rates are increasing, and it feels like mud season is right around the corner.

| No. 1| 2018 RESOLUTIONS: TO NOT HAVE ANY.

I am not making any resolutions for 2018. For the last while, my resolutions have fallen into predictable patterns. The categories are always the same - there is the exercise resolution, the dental hygiene resolution, and the be-nicer-to-people resolution. There are the goals to be more mindful, do more yoga, and eat more green things. At the beginning of every year, I end up just adding these self-help tasks to my growing to-do-lists. I’m done with that.

We had a big 2017. On the first day of 2017 we moved across the country. We picked up everything from our lives in Portland, OR spent three weeks traveling east to the Hudson River Valley in New York. We started new jobs. We got married and had bi-coastal wedding celebrations in the middle of the summer growing season. There were ups and downs and some steep learning curves. By the time we got to December, we were exhausted. We spent New Year’s Eve at home, fixing frozen pipes in the middle of the coldest, darkest days of the year. I had not even begun to process the last twelve months, let alone set intentions for the following year. I didn’t want to make a list of resolutions, I wanted to take a nap.

January has been a pause. I entered it feeling thankful for making it through an exhilarating year of unknowns, however recognizing that I wanted to do this next year with more intention. There were points of the year that felt like a runaway train, and we were just trying to not steer the whole thing off course. This month has had a lot of reading, resting, and of course farm planning, and in the process I have uncovered two new strategies for saying goodbye to one year and welcoming another, sans traditional resolutions.

1. January will be a month of rest and reflection. It’s a time of the year relatively free of obligations and is prime for journaling, processing and planning. I love the holidays, but the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are the opposite: full of (albeit fun) traditions and engagements, with little breathing room, and I would say an impossible time, at least for me, to properly reflect and make meaningful intentions for the coming year. December can stay what it is- an outward facing month, time to visit with family, friends, and do end of year reports, etc, and January will be a month for inward reflection.

2. February 1st is the new “New Year”, where I set an intention for the coming year. After a month of deeper reflection, I come out of the month not with a list of resolutions, but a single word, or mantra, that represents some action I want to incorporate into my life more fully. I will then have twelve months to work on incorporating this singular concept into my daily life.

I have had a pretty hard time coming up with just one word, and ended up settling on two, somewhat interrelated concepts, joy and compassion. We navigated a lot of stress-inducing situations last year, and I wish I can say I met the challenges with grace and composure. But even more than that, I realized that letting the stress take over also took away a lot of the day to day joy that I want in my life, which I think everyone deserves regardless of whatever is going on in the external world of politics, work, disasters, etc. And with joy comes softening, and with softening comes compassion. There were a lot of other words that spoke to what I want to achieve this year, but ultimately I realized that I won’t have success, at least in the way I would like to have it, without more of my heart opening. So, every day, every moment, my 2018 mantra is, joy and compassion. We’ll see where it leads.