Organic what?!
Jan 17, 2024
So, this is not so much about hypnotherapy or massage, but it is super important to me. I have come back from the Oxford Real Farming Conference just over a week ago and I had my heart truly warmed. Meeting and listening to the most interesting, kind, compassionate and thoughtful of people; hearing the truths of how our systems are pretty messed up; the reality of how hard people are working towards making this country a better place to live, grow, eat and drink, buy stuff that’s really what it says it is, and so on!
What has farming got to do with what I do? Well, pretty much everything! It is the foundation of all we have: what you eat, what you wear, what eyeshadow you decide to put on, what chair you are sitting on…. The list is endless. It’s a way of life, a system that looks out for other systems. Everything comes from someone having grown it, processed it, shaved it, milked it, sown it – you can pretty much count everything you see around you as having come from a farm somewhere on this planet. You probably think of a farm with cattle and sheep on it, no – there are farms farming everything. Minerals and stones from the earth are farmed. Fruit and veg is farmed. Cotton is farmed. Meat, dairy, candles even. Not an exhaustive list!
It might sound cliché, but we really have lost our connection to life. We are squeamish about birth, about death, and everything in between. We have lost sight of being independent inasmuch as we can’t do very much without picking up a phone and googling it. It’s a pretty sorry state of affairs. But there is hope! As I discovered while listening to the amazing people talking in Oxford just over a week ago.
I did feel a little justified, there is a large disconnect between us and the planet, but people are doing something about it. The conference was not about intensive-give-me-all-you-got-farming. It was about farmers who are essentially, as far as I could gather, fed up with the processes which lack the connection with the land that they manage, lack of control, lack of value, but they are doing something about it, have been for the past 15 years and more. Corporate ways do not fit in with how farming should be. You can’t just have what you want when you want, and too much of it all. Moving away from the corporates of the world and doing what comes naturally, is the way forwards. We should be listening to the earth, the seasons, the soil, the flora, and fauna, all of it, which is how previous generations farmed basically.
This was so heart-warming. In my ignorance I only thought there were 1 or 2 organic farms around but no, there is so much more than that! It’s so great to know that we are taking our power back from the bottom up. But we need to do more - farmers don’t even get to say what goes on the label that is stuck on to the food they produce. Which to me seems ridiculous. But we need to support farmers now. Easier said than done yes, supermarkets make it so easy to lure us in. Life is meant to be easy, no? Not when it has such dire consequences, and we end up losing ourselves in amongst the shelves of unending choice of food which we have no relationship with other than to eat it mindlessly. Rant over – point I wanted to make was that it’s so good to just open your eyes and really start to question “where does my food really come from?”. Thoughts can be changed. Behaviour can change. Especially, when thinking about where the actual source of what we eat/drink/wear/sit on etc, comes from.
