If I can be honest, it has been a heavy couple of weeks. There are plenty of reasons why — work and home responsibilities adding up as they do, fear of the unknown which I think it is fair to say we are all navigating right now, and running an organization dependent on the generosity of others to sustain the work we do in service to our community in very uncertain times.

In our staff meeting, I said we must live in the “both/and” so we can see what is actually working (as opposed to the chaotic noise that is constantly reminding us what isn’t working). The “both/and” was easy to find this week at Jones Valley Teaching Farm: field trips at the downtown farm, classes on our school sites, after school culinary clubs making their final preparations for the family dinners they are planning next week, our fellowship alumni building gardens in their communities, our farmers and interns transplanting Spring veggies, and hundreds and hundreds of seedlings getting picked up to be planted across our communities.

This work is love in action and is a foundation for our community. When we know how to grow our own food and then share it with one another, we are taking care of each other –intentionally, thoughtfully, and inclusively. My amazing therapist stressed to me last week, “Remember what you do! Keep it simple!” We over analyze — especially given the access to the tools we have that assists us in over analyzing (“comments section, anyone?”).

At Jones Valley Teaching Farm we grow food. We use the act of growing food as a tool for kids to engage in learning at school in an exciting, connected, and valuable way. They also learn lifelong skills of knowing how to feed themselves, their families, and then share it with their community. We also create spaces of belonging where our community can come to learn, share, and truly be IN community with one another. Food is at the center of all of it and it does an incredible job of bringing us all together.

In this moment of profound polarization, I am realizing that the simplicity of what we do has incredible impact. Perhaps it is a lesson for all of us as we continue to navigate our way through the noise? Chaos, blame, shame, and our ego will always try to get in the way of love, vulnerability, and the willingness to do and be better. This week, I was reminded that the “both/and” absolutely exists and we have to find it in order to make sense of this big, wide, terrible, and beautiful world.

In addition to ALL of this, here’s additional inspiration:

A note from a friend:

“The author Maria Popova, from whom I’ve borrowed before, draws an analogy to chemistry:
 
This chaos of particles that liquefies solids and vaporizes liquids is just the creative force by which the new order of a more stable structure finds itself. The world would not exist without these discomposing transitions, during which everything seems to be falling apart and entropy seems to have the last word. And yet here it is, solid beneath our living feet — feet that carry value systems, systems of sanity, just as vulnerable to the upheavals of phase transition yet just as resilient, saved too by the irrepressible creative force that makes order, makes beauty, makes a new and stronger structure of possibility out of the chaos of such times.


That captures precisely, it seems to me, our challenge. Calling on deep creative forces that preserve what is precious and inviolate . . . that look beyond the momentary madness . . . that adapt, refine, and reimagine how the values of equity, respect, humility, and grace can forge a new equilibrium.
 
Those creative forces lie within each of us – and within the institutions of civil society we seek to steward and fortify.“

This sunset:

This link (also, Maria Popova):

Women Holding Things: Artist Maira Kalman’s Tender and Quirky Ode to the Weight of the World and the Barely Bearable Lightness of Being

This quote:

Love,
A