Who is this farmer?

No bad fortune, no good fortune, no loss, no gain;

Never seek such things in eternal serenity.

For years the dusty mirror has gone uncleaned,

Now let us polish it completely, once and for all.

...

Always working alone, always walking alone,

The enlightened one walks the free way of Nirvana

With melody that is old and clear in spirit

And naturally elegant in style,

But with body that is tough and bony,

Passing unnoticed in the world.

--Zhengdaoge

It was difficult
to walk away from the George Jones Farm, a place to which I can honestly say I completely gave myself.
to take a chance and step off the hundred-foot pole and onto that farm, and then step off that same pole again off that farm.

It's been even more difficult
to let go of good fortune, and bad fortune.
to let go of losing the security of an unreasonable proposition.
to let go of some fancy of gaining liberation from others.

This year I decided to move on from the George Jones Farm, with a lot of sadness for a dream not fully realized, but with some renewed sense that that dream lies not in one field or another, in one network of relations or another.  What and where is this farming practice?  What and where does this work take place?

This year I will be concentrating on developing the acre of land our house lives on to grow vegetables, herbs, fruit trees, berries, and more, while working with students and others, sharing what I know and how I think about this work of growing with the world.  It will be an experiment in techniques and in approach.

Growing and eating and dying and growing and eating...
Who does this? 
Preparing fields or small garden beds, sowing five hundred feet of peas or twenty around the fence encircling an apple tree. 

These fingers knitting the soil gently over this seed or that seedling are themselves knitted together by sunlight and the searching mouths of worms in darkness and ever-hungry bees buried deep in flowers and other fingers before them.  Who is the farmer here?

In these last days of winter there is the bursting seed coat and the pale tenacity of roots pushing down and cotyledons pushing up.  There is growth and there is caring for that growth and there is eating. 

There is a farmer "passing unnoticed in the world" hoeing her rows and watering his children.  In spring her hands curl in green tendrils "naturally elegant in style."  In autumn winds, he sways and creaks with a "body that is tough and bony."

It was difficult to leave (or be left by?) my old job, but really the same farmer is still farming, all the time "always working alone."  My fingers knit into his and knit the soil in turn.