The other day, while enjoying a good ear scratch, Eddie asked me “Are we poor?”
“Poor?”, I responded, “What makes you ask a thing like that?”
“Well,” said Eddie “I may just be a small cow, but I notice things. Like when I first came here. You were all working on putting up fences. It was summer and sure was hot. I watched you dig the holes and install the wooden poles all by hand. There had to be hundreds of them! I figured that I was living on a farm that couldn’t afford the machine to pound the poles into the ground, or at least the machine that digs the holes. Poor humans, I thought. Then, a few weeks later I saw you bringing in the hay. You used the tractor to cut it and some other attachment to rake it. I thought ‘Things are looking up for them!’ But then you gathered the hay by forkfuls, tossing it into a wagon and stacking it in the barn. By hand! And now I’ve been watching you out in the pastures these last weeks doing all sorts of crazy things. First it was walking around and around, digging in the dirt and getting all excited whenever you saw a worm. A worm! Then there was dragging parts of the pasture with a chain link fence panel and concrete blocks, mowing parts of it on that tiny ride on mower and actually walking around spreading seed by hand. By hand! I heard someone ask you what you are growing on this farm and you told them ‘Soil.’ All I can figure out is that my poor humans are too poor to afford plants or seeds.”
Eddie you certainly are an observant little cow. But all the things you’ve observed have nothing to do with whether or not we can afford to do them differently. That is, our decisions on this farm are guided by a philosophy, a belief , not a bank account . How can I explain this philosophy to you? Maybe these words will help: slow, deliberate, natural, observant, sustainable.
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