Farming for Land, Community, and Connection

September in Maine.

The sun still shines brightly, warming everything it touches.

But the cool air shoots shivers through my body, a sign of things to come.

I sit on the porch of our farmhouse, looking out over the Sheepsgut Valley, the land we steward.

Cows graze contentedly.

A flock of starlings takes off and flies through the sky, little black dots cascading through the clouds.

The canopy of green is just starting to shift.

Bits of yellow and orange and red are just peeking through.

It's a magnificent sight.

Take out my phone and take a photo.

I have hundreds of photos like this.

My path to the farm was not a straight one.

I didn't grow up knowing about or really valuing this life.

I dreamed about and trained to do this, exactly what I'm doing right now, standing on stage in New York City, storytelling.

The last time I was on stage was in 2013, the summer we bought our farm.

Late night rehearsals followed by early morning milkings was something only the enthusiasm of youth could have managed.

I threw myself into both, determined to make it all work.

The sad reality is, it couldn't.

There are only so many hours in the day, and dairy farming requires most of them.

While I knew I was giving up something, losing something, quieting the artist inside me, I made the other choice and I gave up the theater.

That was it.

Then the children arrived.

One by one, those tiny humans broke me in half.

But they filled the broken pieces with their sweet breath on my face, their dirty little hands reaching for me, their too loud inside voices, and their love for the land that we call home.

I followed them around the farm, camera in tow, through the barns, through the fields, in the pasture with the cows, witness to their discovery of the world, our world.