Casey O’Neill is a farmer and owner of Happy Day Farms in Laytonville, Calif. The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of The Mendocino Voice. If you’d like to write your own column for The Mendocino Voice, send your idea to info@mendovoice.com.
Love is generous and kind, a driving force for connecting and binding good in the world. Love shows, in action and the truth of effort, demonstrated in care and clarity. When we speak of love we call it forth into the world, and when we act from love we build towards a loving future.
The older I get the more I see that acting in haste lessens the clarity with which I express love. When I get going too fast I don’t take the time to proceed with care and caution. I rush through life checking jobs off the list, but I forget to take the time to appreciate, to love well.
I make a habit of expressing love, of telling people I love them, of honoring the time we get to spend together. Community is the basket of great joy we create through love in this shared journey. LIfe is a series of days, each lived through interactions that hold potential for positivity, even in the most difficult of times.
These days I am reminded that I enjoy being around people, that I appreciate the myriad gifts we each possess, that sharing in the burdens and gathering in celebration is a big part of what it means to be human. We are social creatures, capable of great upliftment but also great catastrophe. I am reminded to choose love in each step of my day that it may grow and replicate.
I’ve been working on loving myself, both in the figurative sense of how I talk to and think about myself, but also in the literal sense of how I care for my body and soul. Just as I’m learning to farm with more emphasis on care, so too am I working on my routines. As I age I realize that in order to continue in this life of loving labor, I will need to care more for my body, that pushing on through now comes with a heavier cost than it once did.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but I’m still learning the lesson that I feel good when I eat meals prepared from quality ingredients, get plenty of sleep, drink enough fluids and don’t over- caffeinate. It’s hard to resist the cravings for dirty snacks and extra go-juice, but over the long run I’m happier and healthier when I keep to routines that emphasize cooking, eating solid meals and not overworking.
My mentality around work and routine began to shift when I started to reflect on the ways in which I love, and the realization that I am only able to love outwardly as much as I love myself. So much comes back to expectations, which can be set and governed by routine. The older I get, the more I realize that being accurate in my time projections and what can be done in a day impacts my mental landscape and feelings of self-worth.
There is a thread of dialogue in the small farm community about the manufactured sense of urgency we create for ourselves by piling too many tasks on the plate, by planning badly, by setting expectations too high. My experience of life is so different when I feel overwhelmed by the amount of work to do as compared with how I feel when the workload is manageable, and it all comes back to planning and expectations.
It feels good to enter a segment of my learning curve as a farmer in which our operation is becoming more efficient and more capable of producing high quality without producing burnout. We’re still learning to be sustainable in our human efforts, not to take too much from ourselves to make the show go on, but we’re getting better at it each year. We learn to apply the old adage that “many hands make light work,” and to ask for help rather than push on through and do it ourselves.
Part of this learning involves applying new tools and techniques that make us able to accomplish more, and part of it is the simple refinement that comes with repetition. Each time we do a task, we analyze the steps, the pieces involved, looking for ways to make it easier and more efficient. We read from farm journals and social media to learn new methods, applying the learnings and then refining within the context of our unique operation.
Cannabis has been helping remind me to slow down, to take time for extra care, and to treat myself with love. When I smoke the herb, my reflections of late have focused on how to transmit love through my work, and that this conduit exists from the soil we tend, through the roots that grow, into the food I eat, and thence into the food and herb we offer to the world through our interactions in community.
My friend once said “cannabis makes me want to be a better person,” and I’m learning to apply this to how I treat myself. When I think of my choices in terms of how they support my body and my future self, it makes it easier to make healthier decisions, to choose love. Above all, when I give love, it returns in greater amounts than I have given, swelling and expanding to light the path ahead. As always, much love and great success to you on your journey!
Casey O’Neill owns and runs HappyDay Farms, a small vegetable and cannabis farm north of Laytonville. He is a long time cannabis policy advocate, and was born and raised in the Bell Springs area. The preceding has been an editorial column. The Mendocino Voice has not necessarily fact-checked or copyedited this work, and it should be interpreted as the words of the author, not necessarily reflecting the opinions of The Mendocino Voice.