Our life on this farm has been one continuing protest, a disharmony if you will.

Or as I said in a comment for the site “Urgent Optimist”:

​My wife and are sheep farmers, small holders. I tell folks we are pasture farmers. I met Wendell Berry about forty years ago when I lived in Henry County, KY working on a dairy there. Those meetings make me laugh now. I mean he seemed at the time to be a bit of a jerk at worst and a curmudgeon at best.

As Berry said in his collected essays,  What Are People For?

“Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.”

I am that jerk now when I say publicly: keep your hopes to yourself. No one is coming to help you in the dark alley of the shadow of nada except your own personal hopes. And so it has gone for us. Sustainable hopes are often very dark and selfish.

This photo gives an apt open-endedness to the matter. Ask me how.