Why I Changed a Pillar
When I first laid out the four pillars of Gardener of Life, Farming & Agriculture felt like the obvious one. I spent twenty-six years working California’s Sacramento Valley. Three generations of my family farmed that land. If anyone had the right to write about farming, it was me.
So why did it keep nagging at me?
Somewhere around midnight a few weeks ago — the kind of quiet that makes honest thinking unavoidable — I sat with that question. I’d been looking at what I actually wanted to write. The stories forming in my mind. The things I felt urgency about sharing. And I kept noticing something: the farming wasn’t the point. What farming taught me was the point.
There’s a difference. A significant one.
Production agriculture as a content frame pulls toward the technical — crop yields, soil chemistry, equipment, market cycles. That world is real and I lived it. But I’m not farming anymore. I’m seventy-six, living in an independent living community, a long way from those Sacramento Valley fields. Writing about farming as if I’m still in it would be performing a version of myself I’ve already moved past.
What I haven’t moved past — what I carry with me every single day — is the worldview farming built. The patience that comes from planting something you won’t harvest for months. The five-year thinking that agriculture demands. The understanding of cycles: drought and abundance, loss and recovery, the long arc that outlasts any single season.
That’s not a farming column. That’s something else entirely.
I’m calling it The Long View.
The Long View is the pillar where lived experience becomes wisdom. It draws from decades of farming, business, and now this new chapter in independent living — not to tell farming stories, but to share what those experiences taught about patience, planning, cycles, and resilience.
Where the other three pillars tend toward the practical — what to eat, how to stay well, which tools to use — The Long View steps back and asks the bigger questions. Why does this matter? What does the long arc tell us? What would I tell my younger self?
The voice here is unhurried. The perspective belongs to someone who has seen enough not to be rattled — and has earned the right to say so. This is not nostalgia. It is wisdom in active use.
Next week I’ll go deeper into what The Long View will actually cover — the themes, the questions, the territory. For now I’ll just say this: the pillar change isn’t a retreat from farming. It’s a promotion of everything farming gave me.
A good farmer knows the difference between what grew in the ground and what grew in him.
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See you next Tuesday.
