The living center of Wayward Haven Farm
Our life is a reflection of the soil in which we grow.
We live in conditions we rarely think about, but we feel them, whether or not we know what they are. Our brains embed them so deeply that they don’t appear in our awareness unless we go looking for them.
It’s good that our brain does this, because our experience is dictated by so many inner and outer variables that tracking them all is impossible. But they’ve been there, some of them buried beneath layers of teaching and guidance from people who meant well but who grew up in a different environment.
Those people—parents, teachers, ministers—raised us, taught us, shaped us, and sent us into a world that no longer exists. Their pressures became our pressures. Their rhythms became our rhythms. And off we went into the Brave New World, unequipped for its spiraling, relentless urgency, speed, and chaos. We inhabited a human-constructed system that promised to help us keep up, to help us find what we were looking for. If we worked hard and paid our dues, happiness could be ours, it said—someday.
Maybe those former days made happiness possible. Today, not only do they seem farther away, they seem unattainable altogether. The conditions have changed, and now achievement and happiness are a gauzy dream that keeps disappearing amidst the charge of streaming advancement. We keep trying to adapt, but our biology is screaming at us to slow down, to stop, to resist, to hide until we feel safe again. But the threat lurks and invades, and it will for years to come. What do we do when there’s no relief?
It’s time to rethink the conditions of our lives. It’s time to listen to and heed our biology. It’s time to reclaim our capacity for living well.
We start with an ancient notion, one our ancestors probably never noticed: they weren’t just in nature; they were nature itself, an absorbed part of the whole. Nature wasn’t flawed or a problem to be fixed. It taught them that life unfolds and collapses, ebbs and flows, advances and recedes, brings forth and withholds. They lived, moved, and grew in those rhythms without having to wonder if they were enough, worthy, or better.
Here at Wayward Haven Farm, we ground ourselves in the wisdom of the ancients: we live in nature and cultivate the conditions for living well—conditions that exist within us all as they have for millions of years. We feel the same gravity of seasonal rhythm, the movements of the cosmos, the drives within ourselves for care of self and others. Our work aims to unearth an inner separation from the distortions that surround us—the pull to scroll, buy, fix, and accumulate. We devote ourselves to what it means to live well, even amidst the chaos.