When I was 14 I had a crushing, crush on Aubrey. She was from a French family living in our NYC suburb. But I was too shy to connect. Aubrey was beautiful and I couldn’t look at her directly. I yearned to the point of tasting it. One summer night walking down her road she called out to me from her porch. I was invited and sat beside her under the buggy light, speechless… She asked me if I had read any Persian poetry. The question struck me dead. She was reading The Prophet and she read me a chapter on ‘Work’. The takeaway was that ‘Work is Love made Visible’. Our passions in life get expressed in the shape of our life. I never forgot.
Now my wife and I farm.
I am an older man and love flows from some very simple ways. The farm is made beautiful from our work and it can honestly be tasted. The joy put into the labors of tilling, planting, cultivating and harvesting flow into the look and taste of the produce.
It’s like everything. If you like what you do it isn’t work as much as an expression of your happiness. And what you produce is good by the nature of your spirit.
So much so that the carrots, beans, peas, beets and even kale we grow on the farm can turn a head. We’ve often heard from the mouth of vegetable hating youth…”Wow, I didn’t know that’s what they really taste like”.
Professional chefs, mothers, foodies and the rest of us seem to know the difference between a nurtured crop and a commodity. And given the choice between them .. there is none.
Good food makes you happy. Gives you the vitamins and minerals needed to carry on. The farmer loves giving that. The farmer loves the straight forward beauty in the process. The farmer loves sharing that.
Aubrey read in my youth, ” work is love made visible”. Today, what proofs it out in farming is the produce people yearn for. I tasted one of our golden beets this past summer. I pulled to from the earth and cut a slice. The black brown soil fell off as I opened up a color not unlike sunrise. It was shockingly sweet. Tasting with my eyes closed, that unrequited evening of Aubrey came back. I was practicing what she preached.
burnettfarms 