The Gospel of Doubt

It goes without saying:

I do not know what I am doing.

I killed all the tilapia in my aquaponics farm because I misunderstood how to keep them healthy.

30 chickens on the farm died because I built a substandard chicken coop that some average coyote easily penetrated.

I am not a famer

Yet I farm.

There are people in my life that want me to focus. To do one thing and do that thing with excellence.

But I have lived with the keen awareness of my death since I was 12.

I don’t fear it.

When I go, I want to be satisfied with my courage to have done my best and to have seen what was possible with my life.

There are seasons of plenty in our lives. Seasons where your actions align with just the right needs of the moment and your imagination blooms in the world vibrantly.

I am not in one of these seasons.

The Best Three Minutes of Your Day

Bee Careful

I am in no danger of becoming an expert.

In Anything.

She is calling me because she wants me to be safe.

I want to pick-up to tell her I am safe.

However, I am standing on a ladder

In a bee suit ?

which

If I knocked on your door wearing this bee suit

You would think I was there to clean the Ebola virus out of your carpets.

I am wearing leather gloves ? giant ones.

They look like I should be handling glowing red bars to be smashed on some anvil

And my hands are roughly the size of the average 3 grade girl

Which makes my ability to do anything but the most blunt work

Basically impossible.

I have been getting reliable texts from the man who is my mentor when it comes to beekeeping.

But the phone is ringing persistently in the pocket of my bee suit from my future wife.

Competing with the phone is the sound of the biggest bee swarm I had ever had my face nose deep in.

I can say this with confidence

Because it was the first bee swarm I ever tried to rescue

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46, 47

https://castbox.fm/episode/46%2C-47-id334572-id50603369?country=us

Somewhere in the development of the human species we learned to use tools. There is a great scene in the move 2001: A Space Odyssey that imagines the moment when our primordial ancestors learned to use a hammer.

In my development as a farmer on Grace Farms, I have somehow regressed to just before the point in time when human beings learned to use tools.

In trying to authentically develop a place where food can be grown,

my enthusiasm for avoiding contamination of any kind

created a sort of blindness to my own stupidity in how I am accomplishing simple tasks.

A good friend of mine ? who works with me on the farm ? illustrated this by showing how a project that had taken me 9 hours could be completed in 30 minutes.

What felt virtuous just minutes before his tutorial on using tools ? immediately became evidence of my stubborn habit of taking the long, hard way to learning my lessons.

The Best Three Minutes of Your Day

In The Weeds

In our desert, water occasionally falls from the sky sufficiently to create Flash Floods and awaken the seeds of future tumbleweeds and voracious milk weeds.

Let me do my best to avoid the farming ? garden cliché of discussing the spiritual virtues acquired by weeding their growing soil.

Don’t trust anyone who writes about how pulling weeds freed their minds.

I am walking along the fence line of my tiny farm

looking like the world’s ugliest cheerleader

holding two massive pom-poms of freshly pulled weeds

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