Wheel

[I just got home from work, almost two hours late, and I knew that I was going to have to write tonight – I needed to write something – and as a song came on the radio when I pulled into the drive, I knew what I was going to write about. However, after coming in, changing clothes, and settling in, I was having trouble finding just the right music. I finally settled on Rob Dugan’s Furious Angels (Instrumental) to at least get started with. I’ll keep skipping my iTunes as needed to keep the groove going. …just sayin’…]

My father was a horticulturist. He grew stuff. When he passed away twenty years ago, he was living alone on a 12 acre farm (2 x 6) overlooking a river valley. It had a 40×60′ pole barn which I helped him build, a small tool shed and a single-wide trailer which was his home. It also had an almost-half-acre garden, 150 fruit and nut trees which he watered from the pond using two 5-gallon buckets on a shoulder-borne yoke carried out to each tree in cycle, and at least two active bee hives working a hillside he seeded with native wildflowers.

The county extension agent had no idea how to classify the farm, being too big for a hobby and just shy of what was considered a commercial orchard. He had excavated a pit into the hillside with a great view of the valley with the intention of building an earth integrated home, but eventually passed on the idea as being overly complicated for his simple lifestyle. I had almost convinced him he should build it anyway, but as a bed-and-breakfast featuring fruit and nuts (and honey) from his farm as the big draw.

I don’t particularly like apples, having been forced to eat too many red delicious as a child and – finding them pithy and flavorless – gave up on the fruit as a go-to snack. However, I remember one September afternoon, when my siblings and family had wrapped up some proceedings after his passing, we all walked out to the orchard and we each picked fruit from the trees there: that was the most satisfying apple I have ever eaten before or since.

Being the resident agent for the ensuing estate, I tried my best to keep the trees and bees alive, but it required more work than I could provide living off-site with a decidedly different direction for my life at the time. I continued to suggest to my siblings we should invest in the B-n-B plan, and I was willing to move out to the farm and make it happen. I don’t think they had any confidence in me – that, or the vision was just too ahead of its time.

Fast forward those twenty years: I’ve left a cushy government job in Capital City to move in with my folks in Rural Kansas Town to help with my mother’s health challenges. Not one to leap into an open chasm intentionally, I was giving a vision for starting a monastery – yes, a monk-ery – as a place of escape and spiritual healing for overwrought Urban Dwellers. In that first year after the move, I realized that it probably wasn’t anything that God really wanted me to do, but rather it was a stone in the river to get me to start across. It is after all a pretty big thing – not just starting a self-sufficient monastery, but a Renaissance-themed monastery, with structures built from native stone, designed to tie into a destination castle-resort, where the monks provided labor and materiel to the castle in exchange for pay with which to continue the Good Work.

Yeah, who was I kidding. Besides, I was out of money from my previous job, and I needed to keep Netflix going. So I took a job at the local mom-n-pop convenience store. It was the right thing to do for me to get to know the community and for them to get to know me. Two years plus and I’m a regular community member – that part worked – but I remain seriously underemployed! Jobs are scarce, particularly the kinds of jobs for which I’m well suited.

This wasn’t intended to be a history lesson – though it does bring any of the old readers pretty well up-to-date in the general sense. Recently, I realized that these ideas for great things haven’t gone away, and I don’t hear many other people talking about big dreams. I’m concluding that God has created me to be this kind of big dreamer. More than anything else in my life, I’ve had big visions for what can – and often in my opinion should – be done. I’ve decided I need to be obedient to this gifting, and responsive to the visions. So just in the last few months, I’ve been trying to research and put together business plans for things that can be done and are needed here in the community:

• A bakery and restaurant featuring heirloom grains and organic local (farm-to-table) produce, and a menu besides midwestern Steak-and-Potatoes;
• A local version of Dave and Busters, with indoor recreation for young children as well as adult entertainment (bowling, billiards, and pinball, you perv!);
• A fireworks manufacturing concern, to humor my patriotic side and provide low-education but high precision jobs;

My step-father has cottoned to the idea of raising worms. His desire is for castings for his garden, to improve the soil. However, in talking with him, he has seen the potential for a low-labor residual income of raising worms for sale locally (and/or online), and generating castings for sale locally or online as well. I’ve discussed the possibility of combining worms with fish tanks and hydroponic veggies, leading to a home-grown fish market (hydroponics being something he’s also had a passing interest in for some time).

A young friend at church spontaneously shared her vision for a rural homestead where battered women could escape to, and learn self-empowering skills like milking a cow and raising a garden. That rang very close to the mission concept with which I had started this part of the journey. So I’ve started researching goats (which were central to that vision for purpose of low-land impact meat, milk, wool and hide), and this has led me backwards along the homesteading path of pigs, chickens, rabbits, ducks… to try to find a sustainable start to a remote shared farm-retreat experience.

Then I saw it someplace: bees. I can start a bee hive or two in the yard, right now, and have them ready to produce honey for next season. Just like with the worms, I should be able to multiply hives exponentially given enough of the right land use. Setting hives on local farm tracts, and so on. What if I leased some land on the interior of a section and set up a simple cheap cabin (that is trailer-able), got a Jersey cow or Nubian goat and started with milk (okay, my friend started with milk. That’s her vision…) and I set up bees?

What else do bees need? Water, yes, so a well or pond or other safe water source is needed (as it would be for livestock and people, too). And flowers; what if I cultivated wildflowers for the bees, and then sold flowers to local flower shops and at the farmer’s market? Why stop with flowers? Fruit trees need pollination, and fruit is good for self-sustaining food as well as profit at market! The mission can be selling honey, wax, candles, flowers, fruit, nuts…

I realized tonight that the wheel still spins slowly.

I am my father’s son.