It's been a strange six weeks. I attended a month-long yoga teacher training program in Upstate NY and while there, felt a ton of constant, lower back pain. This was different from the sometimes-lower-back-pain I have had for about 8 months now. I chalked that 'sometimes' pain up to an active lifestyle filled with strenuous activities I love, namely farming and yoga. I thought it was the early onset arthritis I was diagnosed with in 2005 acting up. I wasn't gonna let a little arthritis get me down, so I kept moving, not addressing the pain. But this pain was different -- it was sharp, and unrelenting. After a doctor's visit, I found out I have a fracture in my lumbar spine, L4 to be exact. My physical therapist tells me to forget about the fracture, that I'll probably have it the rest of my life and that it won't impact my functioning if I focus on moving properly for my body, and strengthen the areas around my lower spine. I am happy that my medicine is not a pill or surgery, but rather a series of core strengthening exercises and that the worst of it is forearm plank for 3 minutes a day. (sidenote: I literally cannot do the forearm plank without cursing wildly when it's over.) So that's what I'm doing these days-- convalescing in NYC. And I have to admit that once my personal pity party stopped, I started feeling lucky and happy again. I think healing is my work right now and am very fortunate to be able to have the time to devote to moving slowly. But then there are the plants! They don't speak English and don't understand that I hurt my back and can't drive to PA every week to care for them as I have been. First of all, driving is pretty painful these days, and then of course, there's the activity level that farming involves. It is just too much for me right now. I have to be okay with this. I am learning to be okay with this. There are several hundred tomatoes at the farm right now, ripe as can be, that will just go right back into the earth. I picked some a couple weeks ago, on my hands and knees, with my spine in a neutral position, and enjoyed the heck out of them. These days, the weeds are making a jungle out of the garden that I poured hours of time and labor into earlier this year. The strawberries and young fruit trees are not on their regular watering schedule. I, and they, have to rely on the rain. And it is what it is. We can't control nature, farmers only try to. There are so many lessons embedded within the work, or in this case, the non-work of farming. It's part of the reason I love it. If I had my old desk job, I'd be able to let the work pile up and then one day, climb back into the saddle and pick up where I left off, but farming is different. Nature doesn't stop, time doesn't stop, we all know this. So it seems appropriate that I'll climb back into the saddle and find an entirely different landscape. I'll be able to see all that the plants did on their own. They don't need me, they really don't. They'll survive, or they won't, and either way, it'll be fine. I also really like the idea of a vocation that needs me to be healthy in order to do it. What a good reason to focus on getting, and staying, stronger. It's not all for me, some of it is for those little green guys.