When suddenly there are so many things to do, when it seems to get heavy to imagine making that next post, once in a while you have to go do some hobby.
My hobby is Permaculture. I guess I like to imagine that I am transforming and revolutionizing agriculture itself, but what I am definitely doing is building a living laborynth.
Inside my living laberynth of on-contour biomass bunds are countless biodiverse species in experimental cultivation and so "pruning my bushes" becomes managing an ecosystemic laberynth.
Sometimes it kind of looks like gardening, but if gardening were a sport this would surely be "extreme gardening".
This farm, and my 4th dimensional sculpture of a living laborynth on it, is my life's work - my pension plan. In some ways everything else I do is time taken away from this "job", which is the fickle transitional management of a piece of land once used for monoculture.
While "farming" this way isn't yet profitable in the traditional sense, or maybe any sense at all; I still think its a "good investment" of time and energy, especially as a counterweight to some other parts of life.
When I need a break, I break out my machete and the pruning shears and the bow saw and sometimes even the chain saw and I go around "cleaning the paths" again and remembering all the different ideas about 4th dimensional ecosystem management. Which of course should be very profitable, as biodiverse life is the source of all ROIs.
Its just the way it is, sometime I have to go into maintenance mode for a while. I don't have to "work on the farm", that's just what I do on my day off, if that concept exists in a digital "freelancer" sense.
The issues that make scaling any activity in farming challenging - are quite parallel and similar to the issues faced by trying to scale any product, service or company in the "digital realms".
First, you "have to" focus.
By focusing on one thing, there are some benefits, yes, but there are also some drawbacks. Everything in life is a trade-off, and that includes time and attention. The many boons of doing "a little of everything" are a lot harder to quantify than the one big benefit of doing one thing and one thing only, with 100% of your time and attention.
But anyway, doing just one thing gets really boring; I guess sometimes you just have to meet with the neighborhood council. No one really wants to, everyone is busy. But we all show up anyway. Luckily I had cleaned up a bit around the laborynth, it was our turn to host.
I suppose to be an integral human being, we can't do "just one thing". We cannot be monocultures, in our hearts. I'll prune my bushes until I can't stand the activity anymore, and then I'll do something else, obsess myself with some other task.
And sure, my living laborynth spends most of the year unkempt. But no matter how long I ignore it, whenever I come back to visit it with machete, with scissors, with saw - it's fuller and richer and deeper and wider than I ever saw it before.
Its growing on me.
