I have a seven-year-old son.
This boy is a whirling dervish of constant motion and noise. During the
day I see him mostly just out of my line of vision, speeding from one
activity to the next. The world is a gigantic treasure chest crying out
for discovery, and a mere mother cannot get in the way.
Ah, but at night, when the
day has taken it’s toll on the boy, when he’s fought sleep as long as
possible and finally fallen in a heap to dream of dragons and pirates,
he’s there for me to see. Not just to check if he’s covered, or
taken some sort of amphibian to bed with him, but to see. Every
parent knows what I mean. You sit on the edge of the bed, in the quiet
murk of night and you etch every line of that face into your memory - the
freckles, the terminal bed-head, the chin and eyebrows so like his
father’s, every detail. And I defy any parent to deny bending forward in
the dark and inhaling the scent of their offspring’s head - clean from the
bath, or still filled with sunshine and sand from the day’s adventures,
that too is driven into your memory base. Because the details are what
you hold onto not only during his waking hours when he’s traveling so fast
all you catch is a blur, but forever.
Life is in the details.
Too much of life denies the
details. We’re too busy, we’re late, and we can’t waste TIME.
My daughter lives and works
in Washington DC and recently sent me an article. I’ll add the link to it
at the bottom of this page if you’d like to read it for yourself. The Post
did a little experiment to find out just how imprisoned within our own
busy-ness we all are. They got a world-class violinist to set up wearing
blue jeans and a t-shirt in the Metro - his open violin case for tips
normally holds his Stradivarius violin. He did not play popular tunes that
may have niggled someone’s brain enough for them to pause - he played
classical pieces. Beautiful classical pieces by a world-class violinist
playing a priceless instrument.
A few paused. A few tossed
some coins into his case without even slowing down. Most didn’t even
look. An artist whose concerts sell out at over $100 per seat collected
$37 plus change during rush hour in our nation’s capitol.
This is part of the
wonderment of living a rural lifestyle.
While a lot of the world is
planning for the future, today slips away, never to return. A homesteader
must be intimately familiar with the present, or lose everything and be
left with no future. And once your brain is trained to look for details
instead of the grand expanses, your horizons are limitless.
You can’t check your goats
without smiling at the kids frolicking. You can’t eye your chickens
without studying their social order. Try to examine your garden without
smelling the earth. Mentally noting the position of the sun leaves you
looking directly at the clouds (and yes, that one DOES look like a bunny).
Paying attention to the
details does not exclude planning for the future; it encompasses our plans
for the future. For we are planning not only for ourselves and our
families, but also for everything in our care- up to and including the
very land we are living on. Every decision is weighed and thought through
with attention to the details of the co-operation of everything and
everyone that decision will affect.
Because that’s what we do -
we co-habit, co-mingle and co-operate our homesteads with literally
millions of other living things, most of them not just benign, but
absolutely integral to the fate of our endeavors.
"For
the want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for the want of a shoe the horse
was lost; and for the want of a horse the rider was lost, being overtaken
and slain by the enemy, all for the want of care about a horseshoe nail." -- Benjamin Franklin
On your homestead, paying
attention to details will decrease what you will have to pay to the
Veterinarian, the hardware store, and people to come in to fix something
that got mucked up due to negligence. The physical safety and well being
of your place is reason enough to train yourself to hone in on the
details.
Learning to absorb the
peripheral images, sounds, textures and aromas is gravy.
And everyone loves gravy.
(the aforementioned article)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html
