What I Cannot Carry

There is a particular kind of cruelty in asking a woman with a big dream to dream bigger when the problem was never the size of the dream.

I have never lacked vision. If anything, vision might be the problem. I can see the food business, the farm, the tables full of people, women telling stories that might otherwise disappear with them. I can see people who do not have access to land finding ways to build little enterprises here. I can see food growing, bees, kitchens, music, laughter, work that matters, people earning something, people belonging somewhere. I can see Nourishing Circles becoming something that does not just sell food, but actually strengthens relationships through food.

I can see it. I have always been able to see it.

What I cannot always see is how the hell one woman is supposed to carry all of it, and maybe that's the lesson.

We are sitting at the equinox, that strange little moment of balance between light and dark, summer and winter, what grew and what didn't, what gets harvested and what needs another season. I've been thinking about that a lot lately, especially as I look around at everything in my life that needs doing and ask myself a much more uncomfortable question than what comes next.

What am I actually capable of carrying without collapsing?

Not theoretically. Not if I become more disciplined or wake up earlier or work later. Not if I make another list or take another workshop about goals or somehow become an even more efficient version of myself. What can I actually carry and still have enough of myself left to live inside the life I am building?

Because here is the very unglamorous truth of my life right now. I need someone to chainsaw my logs down so we can split them for winter. My garage door needs repairing. My barn door needs repairing. My chicken tractor needs repairing. My yard is weeds growing through gravel and looking completely ridiculous, and I probably need another load of gravel before winter because rain is coming, and then snow, and then ice. My septic needs fixing and pumping. My house desperately needs cleaning. My basement needs decluttering and organizing, and truthfully, I would love someone to come clean my house every week.

Not because I am incapable of cleaning a house. I know I can do it. That has never really been the question.

There are things in this life I know I am capable of carrying alone. I said something about two years ago that came out of my mouth almost before I understood how important it was. I said, I know I am capable of carrying a farm alone. The truth is, I don't want to.

I have been picking that apart piece by piece ever since, and maybe even more over these past few months as relationships and partnerships around me have shifted or dissolved and I have been forced again to look at what remains in my hands when someone else lets go.

I have been taught, in ways both obvious and not, to measure success by how much I can hold. How resilient can I be, how resourceful am I, how many times can I find another way, how many times can I rebound from cruelty or abuse or persecution and still get up the next morning and keep going. There is power in knowing you can survive hard things. There is also a trap in making survival one of the primary things you are good at, because eventually everyone, including you, begins to believe that because you can carry something, you should.

And I don't want to live that way anymore.

I want more time in my own kitchen actually cooking the food I grow. I want to sit with my sheep and my dog. I want time with my son where some part of my brain isn't simultaneously calculating payroll, thinking about inventory, wondering about sales, planning the next route or trying to solve another problem. These do not sound like enormous dreams, and maybe that's the point. Somewhere along the way I have become very good at imagining huge things while treating the small things that actually make up a life as though they are optional.

Astrology has been part of how I have been pulling this apart too. I have been thinking a lot about Chiron and the wounded healer, about identity, about what happens when you stop becoming what everyone else needs you to be and start asking what is actually yours. I don't need astrology to make decisions for me, but sometimes it gives me a language big enough to hold the questions I am already asking.

And the biggest one right now might be this:

Can I build something beautiful without sacrificing myself to build it?

I think that might actually be one of the central lessons of my life, or at the very least one of the central lessons of this Chiron return. Because I love being useful. I love creating. I love seeing something in another person that perhaps they cannot quite see yet. I love saying, come here, there is room for you. I love opening doors, connecting people, building something bigger than myself.

But I am also beginning to understand that service and martyrdom can sit frighteningly close together.

That is the part I am trying to change.

There are people beginning to gather around the edges of this dream now. People growing things, cooking things, sharing things, carrying pieces that used to belong only to me. And maybe one day there will also be people building businesses alongside it, because that has always been part of what a commons means to me, and maybe it is actually the truest dream underneath this food business.

Suddenly the question is not simply how do I grow a business.

It is how do I build a container strong enough for more people to carry this dream without all of it resting on my back.

I don't entirely know the answer yet. I am trying to imagine it from a lot of different directions. I am looking at diversity in community by approaching Sunset. I am thinking about someone who desperately wants to grow food but does not have access to land. I am thinking about someone who does not have the physical stamina to do what I can do but still has something beautiful to contribute. I am thinking about people with skills I do not have, and people who need a place to begin, and what it might look like if instead of one enormous business trying to employ everyone and do everything, we created a place where a whole collection of smaller things could thrive beside one another.

Maybe the future does not look like one business becoming enormous, because it can't. I cannot carry it all.

Maybe it looks like a gardener and a beekeeper and a food maker and a storyteller and a retailer and a community, all bringing something different to the same table. Maybe the strength is not in building one giant thing, but in creating enough connection that none of us has to build alone.

I don't know exactly what that looks like yet. That is the truth.

I don't know how this story ends. I don't know whether every idea works. I don't know if I'll get through every layer of red tape. I don't know how many of the products that live in my head right now will ever actually make it through a retailer's door. I don't know if we will get beyond Nova Scotia's doorstep in the way I hope we will. I don't even know if the vision, exactly as I see it today, can sustain itself.

But I am not afraid to try.

I am willing to keep asking the questions until I understand what stays, what changes, what needs another season and what I have to put down.

I have learned to say, this needs another pair of hands. What I still have to learn is how to put myself far enough up the list that the abundance of having those extra hands can actually become part of my reality instead of something I keep imagining for later.

Maybe that is the harvest this year.

Not everything I planted will come with me into winter. Some things have grown beautifully. Some things have failed, some are still failing and need pruning. Some things need more time, another season, another way. And some things were simply never mine to carry in the first place.

Community has always meant something enormous to me. It is one of the threads underneath almost everything I have built. If I can be the woman who makes one other person feel like she can do it, who helps one other woman find the courage to speak up, who lets someone know that there is a person in her corner who cares about her and believes in her, then I will keep holding that space. That part is mine. I know that.

But I am finally learning there is a difference between holding space at the table and holding the table up.

I want to keep making room.

I just don't want to carry the whole damn table anymore.

Nurturing Curiosity,

Tawny

There is always room for one more at the Crowded table. The Crowded Table is where I’m gathering the longer stories, recipes, people, and conversations growing around Nourishing Circles. If this piece spoke to you, please join us.