A psychologist/scholar named Boris Levinson wrote in the early 1960’s that Americans were becoming disconnected from animals and the natural world and disappointment in the institutions and advances that were supposed to uplift and inspire them – religion, politics, technology, work. More and more Americans, driven from the land by economic notions of progress and by pure greed and consumerism, migrated from farms and the country to cities and suburbs, where they found money and jobs and many of their lives slowly turned hollow and fragmented. In the future, he predicted, some pilgrims would return to the farm and a life with nature and animals and turn to pets in record numbers and very emotional ways to try heal their broken worlds.

Those of us who choose to buy and live on farms are a particular tribe. Real farmers and locals often laugh at us – we are called “gentlemen farmers” or “second-homers,” or “city people” no matter how long we stay. There is no mythic place for us in the culture, we are often seen as odd ducks, square pegs in round holes.  And we often laugh at ourselves, as we struggle to learn the land the and tasks and challenges of our farms. I have learned never to pretend to know more than I do, and if I am not arrogant,  there is always help when I need it. We are pilgrims in one way, refugees in another. We can never go back, we are too attached to our farms, and we will never completely fit in, and we never really fit in the other world either.

We are happily trapped in between these two worlds, and by choice, occupying our own space and embracing the natural world Levinson wrote about. I think farm dreams are also healing dreams, and farms are healing places. We have come because we want to, not because we have to, and it is hard work, but not work in the sense of a dairy farmer on his knees for hours each day or in his tractor for hours and hours. We are seeking meaning in our lives, running from the hollow world. I have never known one of us to ever want to go back or to voluntarily return.

We come to these farm dreams, I think, not because it is unnatural, but because it is so natural. Going out every morning with Maria to tend to the animals, check the water, monitor the grass, repair the barns and locks, I never feel I am in an alien world, I feel I am in the natural world, my world. I am healing here, becoming whole, just as Levinson predicted. For our world is broken, Mother Earth is weeping and gasping for breath and so many of her children are dying, victims to human greed and blindness. If we can heal ourselves, perhaps we can come to heal some of them.