Making Hay

Make hay while the sun shines. I grew up as a closeted polypathic nature-mystic on a marginal, at best, family farm in Michigan. This farm was my embryonic home, an extension of my vastly loved and nurturing Mother, more than my workaholic homophobic Father, who most emphatically did create a patriarchal god in his own image. His farm was for slave labor. Her farm was a garden for growing healthy wealth. I loved Mom's Multi-ReGenerational Family Farm like an extension of my ego's mind and body. And, like a turtle without a shell, when I first headed off to Ann Arbor's University I brought my happy and healthy ego with me, eager to begin my new adventure story, yet I emotionally stumbled, felt naked and exposed and depressed, for lack of my embryonic habitus, my eco-center, my home, my interdependently embracing love of sacred spaces and their seasons of regeneration and degeneration, growing still and fading without ego me conjoining. I was homesick, but not for Nurturing Nanny and Fearsome Father or even Perfect Princess Sister, whom I cherished, whom I could talk and listen with as whim might invite, and, although somewhat more of a sore detachment from our farmhouse interior spaces, my disorienting alienation from Ann Arbor was as a too-urban outside place just as my recreating resident embrace favored my dorm and classroom youth-learning multicultural race against more oppressive monoculturing times. To this day, despite a six week backpacking hike along California's Pacific Coast Trail, plundered by surreal vistas and fragrance and light and unspeakable beauty, when I imagine a meadow, a field, a woodland, a pond, a barn, an unpaved road, a gravel drive, a herd of cattle, a pen of pigs, a coop of chickens, a litter of kittens with eyes still sealed shut, I recall iconic scenes from this sacred originating home, my eco-memory calling my doubly-bound ego-enculturing self back home to where we permaculturally began together, making hay while the sun did shine.