Natures Time
When I decided to become a farmer I knew there was going to be a learning curve. I understood that caring for animals and growing food would require a lot of new skills. What I didn’t know was that nature was going to change my perspective, and teach me deeper lessons – trust time.
Over the course of my farming journey I have come to see time in a way that is different from when I was living an urban life. When I first started I would often watch, read, and listen to how people structured their time and days at their farms or in their gardens. As a lover of all things planning I wanted to plan out my weeks and seasons. There was, and still is, so much I wanted to do and felt that everything was vying for my time.
The thing I have discovered about country time – natures time, is that it is deeply personal but also collective. Time, while shared, doesn’t always stick to rules society has generally agreed upon: hours, weeks, days, months. I can say I will do this for an hour, or someone could say yes they will help with something, or I will harvest that next week. But that doesn’t mean that it will happen when I thought it would; an hour becomes three, that help may not arrive for a couple months, or that harvest may not get done for two weeks; it could decide to rain and ruin most the harvest.
This idea of time is something I have been thinking about off and on since being confronted by the fact that I don’t get to control so much of it. Starting with the fact that there was an agreement upon how time is measured. I did not participate in this collective understanding of how time works. For example, where I live it is generally agreed that a season starts on the first day of a month ( April 1st, June 1st etc.) but when I was growing up I always thought it was based on the equinox or solstice. In fact I have decided for me the equinox and solstice is when my seasons start. This has been a great shift for me as I no longer feel frustrated when they say summer started but it is still cold and wet. Also it turns out that there is no universal agreed upon start date for a season this is often regional, so I don’t feel bad about defining when my seasons start to reflect the patterns I have observed.
In the southern hemisphere they follow the same pattern of year end as the northern hemisphere. It feels weird that a year would begin in summer. As a farmer trying to plan out your year in the height of the growing season feels ridiculous, to me. What I choose to grow or how I choose to stock my farm is heavily influenced by how the previous year(s) have gone. What patterns have been observed and knowing where I had put things before. I need space to reflect. I long for cozy days where I can cuddle up by the fire and consider, reflect, ponder without the need to rush around caring and tending to the many growing things. This, for me, is best done in winter. The crispness of the air sharpens my mind and the hibernating world leaves space to dig deep. So I have decided to follow what feels intuitively right for me and start my year in July. Yes people look at me funny when its May and I say next year meaning September haha.
Time for me is no longer this straight line from point A to point B. I see time more like water. Like many streams coming down the mountain, everything has a stream and our streams have their own obstacles. Sometimes they are shallow and fast moving, sometimes they are slow and meandering yet they all converge at some point with one another. We can harness time and choose time but time can do the same to us.
There is cow time and garden time, country time and city time, child time and adult time. We don’t own time we drink from it, swim in it, play in it, and work in it. It surrounds us and pushes us, scares us and comforts us, time heals or causes us to grow bitter. Time is dynamic never static – time is change.
It is with this shift in perspective that I have decided to slow down and trust that everything has its own time and when its ready our streams will converge. I will take my time to observe and connect, I will trust time to know the best way down the mountain on its travels to the sea. I will know that it will ebb and flow like tides; it will swell and dry up like streams. I believe just like a stream knows how to find the ocean, time knows where it needs to be and where it is going.
I would love to know how y’all view time. Have there been ways you have chosen to redefine time?
