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Before I ever decided to leave Manhattan for the farm I wanted to learn "real life skills" as Matt and I called them. Skills like growing food, building things, getting our hands dirty and having a more balanced understanding of how life worked, things that were always left for other skilled people to handle and things that we viewed as obviously important for any human being to be introduced. Where does our food come from and how was our house built were never questions that crossed my mind growing up, there were more important things to me at the time. There were basketball games to win and miles to run, girls to find and basically other experiences that never led me to slow down and ask these simple and seemingly innate questions, instead I had trust. I started having countless conversations with people about how little we felt we actually knew outside of the city world, a world of dependency and an unwritten trust that someone was taking care of these answers. It wasn't until I stepped outside of my reality that I realized that there was much more going on behind the scenes. It's funny to look back and think how much I assumed the world had taken care of over the last few thousand years. I grew up just assuming that people had already sorted through the tough questions about health, food, medicine and land and it was time to go into outer space, yet once I stepped off this island I realized that as a society we are only just beginning to see the results of our actions. Time is so relative and with an 80 year average lifespan, there just isn't that much time to develop from the past. I mean we spend the first third or more of our lives learning how to speak coherently and many of us never quite get there, then we're supposed to play catchup by sorting through the puzzle pieces the past generations left us and figure out solutions to problems we can't even understand why they were problems to begin with. It's pretty amazing to think how far we come and yet how far we still have to go. Nevertheless, I say le me take certain matters into my own hands on this journey and let me tell you nothing feels as good as seeing a project through from start to finish. Whether it's seed to carrot or wood pile to trellis, the opportunity to build something is a validating and invigorating feeling. This week I was given the task of building a trellis for a plant breeding experiment...
