Our 31 acres here at Sweet Earth Orchard is evolving. In addition to producing food, our vision we are executing on remains to reconnect and ground, creating a place where people can rest.
A healing space. Somewhere a person could arrive carrying whatever they'd been carrying, put it down, walk around the alfalfa field, watch Longs Peak do what she's done for seventy million years, and leave lighter than they came.
Here's what I can't say. I can't point to much of my time on this land that produces nothing.
The walking out here is designed. One of the walks is a deliberate intervention I use with clients. Another is a filter, I take people out on it partly to find out who they are. Even the mountain got a list attached to it. I summited two fourteeners in August, and there was a bucket list involved, which means the mountain had a checkbox on it before my boot ever touched the trail.
I built the rest. I'm the last one resting in it.
The fourth permaculture principle is Apply Self-Regulation and Accept Feedback. A healthy system reads the signals it's getting and adjusts before it's forced to. Our first season here we hauled in truckloads of cheap composted soil, spread it, planted into it, and watched nothing grow. Not the vegetables. Not even the weeds. The soil was dead, and it pulled the life out of everything near it. That feedback took one season and it was unmistakable.
The feedback about my own pace has been arriving for five years and I'm still overriding it. Slow down. The land has been saying it since we got here.
Which brings me to drift, because I think most leaders have it backwards.
I trained as a sailboat navigator when I was young. One degree off course, held for sixty miles, puts you a mile from where you meant to be. No storm, no blunder, a small, sustained, invisible offset. And every boat has one. You are always drifting.
So a navigator doesn't treat drift as a verdict. They expect it. They take a sight, find out how far off they are, and makes an adjustment to come back onto course. Then again tomorrow. The correction isn't evidence that something went wrong. The correction is the job.
Earlier this month a coach I work with, Cate Baio, was playing with that navigation language and asked me a question I had no prepared answer for.
What is your sun?
It stopped me, because a sight only works if you know what you're taking it against. The sun doesn't move (it arcs across the sky, but the point is it is always in the sky during daylight hours). That's the whole point of it. And I knew the answer immediately: peace and calm. Not how much I got done this week, but when I'm genuinely off course, that's the number that tells me I'm fine, and peace and calm is the one that tells me the truth.
I walked out of that conversation lighter than I went in. And then I did what I do.
I'd already been sitting in meditation every day. There's a 108-day streak on the app now, and the sitting is real, it's changed things. But somewhere in there the practice stopped being something I am and became something I do. Something I completed. A number the app keeps for me, telling me daily how I'm doing at the one thing in my life I built specifically to have no scoring in it.
I took the fixed point and turned it into another tool.
Recently I listened to a recording of a coaching session. Not mine, someone else's hour. A woman described something rare that had happened to her: "I didn't have to meditate. I could be in meditation." Effortless. Given, not earned.
Then it went away. And she did what any competent, high-performing person does when something valuable goes missing. She made getting it back a goal. The goal became a project. And the project got run by her mind, the one faculty that cannot produce what she was reaching for, because the condition of the original rare spaciousness was that her mind wasn't gripping.
The sentence I wrote in my notes that evening was: she built the wall out of the ladder.
And I wasn't just writing about her.
A compass asks which way you're facing. A scorecard asks whether you measured up. The difference isn't the instrument. It's the frequency.
One sun sight a day is navigation. A continuous readout is surveillance. The old navigator took his fix, closed the sextant, and sailed for twenty-four hours on judgment and dead reckoning, off course the whole time and perfectly all right about it, because the correction was coming and the correction is routine. The moment the fix goes continuous, drift stops being ordinary and becomes a failing you watch yourself commit in real time.
Take the sight. Don't watch the dial.
There's a test for this, faster than thinking about it. What happens in your chest at the thought of getting off course tomorrow? If there's a flinch, it isn't your practice anymore.
And it comes back to the farm, because the farm is the largest version of it I own. Thirty-one acres of rest, converted into a portfolio of designed interventions. Not because I'm cynical about it, because it's what I'm good at. My whole professional apparatus exists to convert intention into rocks and to-dos, and I'm excellent at it, which is exactly the problem. Point that faculty inward and it works. My core value of The way I do anything is the way I do everything cuts in both directions.
Here's the part that took me most of this year to get right.
That faculty is not a defect. For a long time I didn’t really examine where the story around working harder came from. Perhaps underneath it sat some deficit I was covering, and if I could find the hole and fill it, the driving would stop. I no longer believe that. Working harder isn't a wound in a hard hat. It's a strategy, and the reason it's still running at 60 is because: it worked. It produced the training, the career, the clients, the barn, the thirty-one acres. It has never once failed to deliver.
The distinction matters, because you can't let go of something perceived as a defect that easily. You can try to fight it, use willpower, white-knuckle it into letting go. Fighting it is more evaluation, waged with the exact capability you're trying to stand down. The key point I’ve learned: you can retire a strategy, with gratitude, when it's no longer needed.
I’m not done with this yet, I’m still in it, not through it. What I’m being with next: sitting in meditation without the app and without a score. And stop defending the streak, letting go of that doing, while watching what happens in my chest.
Two questions for your September.
What's your sun? Not your dashboard, the one fixed thing that tells you how far off you've drifted. When did you last take a sight against it?
And the harder one, the one I'm still sitting with. What did you build for your own rest, that you have never once rested in?
With warmth from the orchard,
Steve
Sweet Earth Orchard — Hygiene, Colorado