Farm Friday, February 16th, 2024
Where have you been?
After almost two years of dependable weekend photos and stories from our farm, I have been absent for six weeks. What happened?
I’m ok, thank you, and thanks to Occasionalh and Jacqueline Laughlin for doing a wellness check on me last week.
I went on vacation for two weeks in January to visit friends in Honduras and when I came back, I didn’t feel much like writing or taking photos.
I might not go back to every week, but I do think I will continue to post Farm Friday when I have something fun to share on my phone’s camera.
So here are some photos from last week:
Why did I quit writing? I don’t know.
This winter has been one of the warmest on record with hardly any snow. I came back from seeing my friends’ coffee farms devastated by climate change to see my own corner of the world experiencing unprecedented warmth. Instead of snow, we got rain and t-shirt weather in February. The world news is disheartening, too. People keep deciding to do horrible things to each other in Palestine and Ukraine. There are more and more unhoused people. We have the upcoming election between declared fascism and uninspired democracy and the f-ing fascist is leading in the polls.
I decided to skip Farm Friday the week I came back. To look at the world with enough wonder to take photos and share them requires a well of optimism that had run dry for me. So I passed. Then the next week it was the same. And the next.
I started to wonder if Farm Friday was done. And then I started to wonder if my commitment to writing anything on Medium was done because I hadn’t written a word since January 5th.
It didn’t help that my local paper now only wants a genealogy story every other month. With a break from that monthly pressure, I started to think that commitment to that had run its course, too.
It has happened before. I did Duolingo French every day for almost two years and then I just gave up one day and never looked back. I used to go to competitive Scrabble tournaments and train and memorize words for literally hours a day, and I gave it up and never went back. I spent years not eating sugar and dairy and then just fell off the wagon one day and stayed off.
For me, a habit (or an obsession) can become an obligation and I just keep doing it because that is what I do — until I have a disruption.
It was amazing to see how quickly my previous constant interaction with Medium slowed to a trickle. While in Honduras, I didn’t look at Medium except to answer specific comments. By the time I returned two weeks later, the flow of comments and claps had diminished enough that I didn’t have the pull to check so often. Then, as more weeks passed without me writing anything, even fewer notifications came. Medium had lost its hold on me.
I started to wonder: is Medium worth my time?
Maybe. Maybe not.
I do like to develop my thoughts in the form of essays. I like it even more when people in the comments section interrogate the ideas in the essays. I like the human connection of sharing thinking about big ideas.
I think about Socrates. He allegedly said that the unexamined life is not worth living. And, for him, the way you examine life is to have conversations. You make a statement and use logic to defend it or abandon it if logic dictates. You ask questions that you do not know the answers to and then use the process to come to a new understanding.
For better or for worse, writing essays on Medium and commenting on others' essays are my current best ways to understand the world.
