The Practice of Being Needed
After dinner this evening, Heathar, Jack and I all stood underneath the barn and watched the rain pour down on the land here in Northern New Mexico. The roof of the barn spit out large slices of water onto us, making us all huddle closer together. The chickens were doing the same — cuddled underneath their piece of plywood, sheltering them from the spring rains. We waited out the short but powerful early evening rain and then emerged from the barn to admire the newly patched chicken coop attached to our barn. While we were standing underneath the spacious slats of plywood, it occurred to me that we had a barn to stand under. A barn is a very new existence in my life and one I am only starting to get to know. In fact, tonight was the first time in six months I’ve ever spent any real time standing under it and inside of it.
As we walked out from under the barn, we gazed upon our newly renovated chicken coop (one of five structures currently on the property to house our 80 birds). This chicken coop was built alongside the original house and is made out of adobe, chicken wire and some sad pieces of wood. We have cleaned out this chicken coop and made it useful again for our meat chickens. Remember, these are not the chickens we will be naming, but rather the chickens that will be feeding us and those we love long through the winter. We have spent the last three days cleaning out old rat nests and piles of decomposed blue jeans, dented cans of Alpo dog food and empty Budweiser containers from the chicken coop. I am still smelling the faint odor of leftover rat urine in my nose but I don’t mind because our chickens have a good place to sleep now, and one that is far away from our kitchen and down by the barn as it should be. If you’ve never raised meat chickens before, you should know that they are quite smelly. They eat an enormous amount of food and promptly shit it all back out again on the ground where they step in it and then get it all over your hands and clothes when you pick them up.
Jack and Heathar quickly learned how to patch an adobe wall today and repaired the missing adobe pieces on the chicken coop so that it looked almost fancy, the wet patches of mud standing out proud from the rest, not yet integrated and dried into their rightful place. The chickens will sleep in their new pen tonight and we will cross our fingers that the structure holds out the rats and the coyotes and whatever else might want to wrap its teeth around our beloved hens.
As we comb through the property and make more use of the five acres we have here, it seems that almost every structure needs some major tending to. We found out that the electric did not work in the barn or the lower chicken coop. Luckily, our new friend Nathan (we are learning it is wise to befriend as many electricians as we can) was able to come and run wires from the electric pole into the barn, laying the wires temporarily on top of the ground. Tomorrow, you can rest assured that the three of us shall be digging a 15 inch deep trench in order to house the wires in PVC pipe and safely lay them to rest in the ground where they will live a long and happy life. Jack has a new motto on the property which makes me feel safe, “We can do anything.” I am starting to believe this, that in fact, we can do any and all things from digging a trench, to figuring out how to adobe a wall, to buying cedar boards and sheep dung compost from the local miller and his herd of free range sheep.
The mornings and the late evenings here have been so incredibly beautiful that it is painful to go inside. I am reminded of when I was 16 and had so much trouble going to work because I just wanted to hang out with my friends long into the summer nights. I lost track of time so often while wandering around with my friends that I would often miss shifts at the restaurants where I worked, almost always getting fired because I refused to give up time with my friends for a couple of twenty dollar bills. It’s happening again now. It’s hard to pull myself away from the sunshine and the grass and the flowers blooming and the friends and the chickens. It’s hard to go to work or rather, it’s hard to work in the way that I’ve been accustomed to.
I’m used to writing newsletters and hustling and pouring over content for social media and studying and writing papers. But there is a Work that now pulls me outward, onto the earth and out into the world. There is a relational pull, a communal pull, a being with the world pull. Even now as I write this, I am pulled by the setting sun outside. I can feel Heathar and Jack out there somewhere doing something very earthy. The farm pulls so strongly that phone calls are left unreturned and unanswered. I am more apt to encourage my beloved friends to just come here, be here and see. I can’t talk now, I have to feed the chickens but come here and see and we’ll hang out together. There does not seem to be any time for wondering what life is like outside of this small valley.
Those of us seeking this life of farming, homesteading and rural living — perhaps we are all seeking to be so pulled out of our heads and into the present moment that we cannot resist it. The movement toward living outside of cities and in rural communities is growing. More and more of my clients are talking about it, more and more of us are beginning to live this kind of life. Those of us who are farming and learning how to farm, are learning so much more than how to take care of chickens and put up electric fences. We are learning how to hold responsibility again. We are learning how to become containers. I think we are wanting something to be required of us. We are hungry for it. We feel empty when there is nothing asked of us, nothing needed of us. And on a farm, every ounce of us is needed: 0ur energy, our bodies, our input, our questions, our emotions, our soul. The farm is simply the vessel — the tool for the beckoning of life.
In moments, the feeling of being needed is suffocating, all encompassing. Perhaps we think we cannot live one more moment where we have to heed the call of another human, chicken, dog or plant. Everything needs something at once and we collapse in overwhelm. Our bodies are exhausted and depleted. We must rest. We have no choice. But this is the excruciating paradox: the pain of being needed and the desire for it. As one of my favorite composers and lyricists Stephen Sondheim wrote, “Somebody need me too much, somebody know me too well, somebody crowd me with love, somebody force me to care, somebody let come through…” We want to be needed. We want to feel crowded. Perhaps this is what we are all seeking in coming to live in rural spaces. How do we let ourselves be needed again? How do we let ourselves be part of something again? How do we bear the overwhelming feeling of it?
It makes sense that we would feel overwhelmed when we first give this a go. We are so accustomed to trying to live sovereign and independent. We are so accustomed to searching out our dreams and goals. We are so scared that we are going to “lose who we are” and get swept up in someone else’s needs or pleas for us. We try and fight our way back to autonomy, we try and hold on. But in seeking out farming, perhaps we seek to live on the dangerous edge of being deeply needed and trying to also keep ourselves. We leap into a place that supplies us with incredible and all-consuming need and then we experience autonomy whiplash. There is no way we can keep who we are and feed 80 chickens, 4 piglets, 1 dog, 2 future donkeys, one cow, 10,000 bess, the hummingbirds, one wife and a basket of friends. It’s impossible.
But perhaps there is something deeper we are searching for. Maybe, even without knowing it, we are searching for less sovereignty, less autonomy. We are sick of independence. We are longing to be pulled on, pulled out of ourselves and pulled into something bigger and something faster than our own jumbled thoughts. We want to feel the tug on our sleeve, the cries of hunger and the begging of being let out into the pasture. We want to feel that we are connected to helping satisfy desires that live outside of ourselves. We want to come through. We want to show up. We will buck and bare and resist at first. And we will absolutely have to take breaks from being needed but I believe, something is being composted inside of me, inside of us. Something is being broken down. We are in the practice of being needed once again and in fact, we are desperate for it.
I am not great at it yet — at letting myself be needed. It’s still very messy and imbalanced a lot of the time for me but it is becoming my daily devotion. Can I feel the hunger around me, even let myself be consumed by the cries, and come back home to myself over and over again? Can I lose my balance and regain it? Can I not expect the perfection of my autonomy but rather the messy imperfection of getting swallowed by the need and once again, emerging from the belly of the whale; tired, sweaty, smelly and ready for some alone time? Can I allow myself to live (for now) as an apprentice to the need, to the hunger and see what happens?
