on fairytale feasts and freak farmers.

we celebrate our fellow farm friends with feasts of donald duck pate and cinderella-esqe pumpkin - dancing and dining in a fairytale world with popeye, peter pan, and neil rowe miller. singing joyful joyful this little light of mine.

we name our livestock with a nod towards prestigious literary references - (aldous) huxley hamilton and donnie (of the big lebowski).

we garden gangsta-style with kids in the community, careful to avoid dirtying their new nike airs, quick to embrace growing enthusiasm in salad consumption and pickle fermentation.

we spend our afternoons mainlining caffeine and consuming large farmer words like mycorrhizal and saprophytic as applicable to soil biology a la wisdom of d.cole.

we roadtrip to gatherings of christian-libertarian-environmental-capitalist-lunatic-types, dressed in crocs and cowboy boots, carhatts and cardigans.

we eat up the words of a man in the business of mob-stocking herbivorous solar conversion lignified carbon sequestration fertilization.



we are encouraged by long, late-night talks with folks from places not here living out the dreams in our heads like we didn't think possible. knowing full well God is behind these mysteriously magical meetings.

we celebrate our sabbaths under the old tree, perched upon defunct yard-swing reading rilke aloud, rolling in the grass, racing old bicycles up and down the old farm lane.

we like banjos and prefer our guns unloaded (except when the skunks come after our chickens), and our knives dull (except when harvesting salad greens). regardless of the former, we are blessed to read about all things ted, white, and nug every sunday morning over pancakes.

we are not the only ones. "we are the new blood in the old body." we are part-time poets, merry music-makers, sabbatically-estranged students, theorizing theologians. patched together, we are that crazy ragtag body of christ.

"By means of his one Spirit, we all said good-bye to our partial and piecemeal lives. We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which he has the final say in everything. Each of us is now a part of his resurrection body, refreshed and sustained at one fountain—his Spirit—where we all come to drink. The old labels we once used to identify ourselves—labels like Jew or Greek, slave or free—are no longer useful. We need something larger, more comprehensive." 1 Cor. 12:12-13

love, gretel (who, in her fairtytale mind, smells not of dirt but actinomycetes - with a hint of patchouli)