Why farming is my refuge when everything else is uncertain

First came the 2024 presidential election and everything it precipitated - the arguments with MAGA family, the cutting out of said family, the anger, the grief, the anxiety. Then came the inauguration, which ushered in the 70+ (how many fucking days are we into this dumpster fire?) days of watching our democracy and the hearts and minds of our fellow Americans unravel. The sleepless nights. The stress.

Just as we started to see Project 2025 taking shape as promised, my company announced a massive layoff - two months ahead of the actual event. Cue two more months of even less sleep and more anxiety…

Culminating in getting laid off, along with 900 other colleagues. On my birthday.

The past three months of my life have been absolute hell. It’s hard to believe that this is reality - that so many vastly shitty things can all happen at the same time. And yet, here I am.

Everything around me that used to be certain has been rocked to its core. The country that I grew up in is unrecognizable. My day job of eleven years is soon coming to an end. In the midst of all this, I’ve come to the heartbreaking acknowledgement that my original dream of rehabbing and rehoming horses on my farm is no longer (or maybe never was) a viable plan - for multiple reasons, but mostly financial. My business, my dream of several years, my investment. I’m losing almost every sense I ever had of who I am, who I want to be, and what I can become in this world. I have no career. I have no surefire direction to go in. I don’t even know what’s going to be possible in a country that is becoming more difficult and dangerous by the day just to live in. Dreaming no longer feels doable.

Now, more than ever though, I take solace in my farm. The one solid thing I set my feet upon in the morning. No matter what else is happening in the world, the ground outside my window is here. The dirt and the grass and the trees are here, solid and set. The chickens peck at worms. The horses graze. There are water buckets to fill and hay bales to haul and there’s a never-ending supply of manure to pick. Life continues as it does in nature - mundane, reliable, predictable. The birds don’t know about Trump - they still sing in the trees. The mulberry tree puts out its berries, blissfully oblivious to the concentration camps full of disappeared immigrants. Here, I’m just one of the many creatures moving beneath the branches of the oak tree that shades my front yard - I’m alive in the most basic and blessed of ways. The most innocent. The most peaceful. I belong to this rhythm of a world so far removed from the cruelty and power-hungering of the regime in D.C. that it almost seems ridiculous that both things can exist at the same time.

It is my farm - and all the life within it - that I cling to right now for assurance that there is still something real to live for and hope for. It shows me that there is real sanity still in this world, that there are things that still make sense even when everything else around me has been upended. That’s the magic of nature - humanity’s first and most real home that we often forget about.

I don’t know what’s going to happen next for me, in terms of career or otherwise. But remarkably, fortunately, blessedly, I can continue to set my boots on the ground outside and fill the waters, feed the grain, pick the poo, and find connection to the only place that feels safe, reliable and real anymore.