Digging A Little Deeper
Last year I asked my long time friend Natalie to come and visit me on the farm, this year, I asked again! Since this was her second year to come visit in late spring, Natalie knew what she was signing up for and the beautifully grueling task that was in-front of us in the big garden. This year while sweating and digging in the garden we had much to talk about and catch up on. Being in nature and working in tandem with her seasons brings up many challenges that face us in life’s past, present, and future. I believe this is part of why I love gardening so much, and why being out in this magical place I call Heirloom Springs is so vital, beautiful and nurturing ~ this is what my talented, published author, and dear friend had to say about her experience on the farm year two.
Rachael Lieck Bryce
DIGGING A LITTLE DEEPER by Natalie Flowers
To tell you about Rachael, it’s important to note that she is a very strong woman and that her most important quality is that she has a huge capacity for love.
When I first encountered her, she was 19 years old and we were dancing in an improvisational dance class. I was 31. I’d never seen anyone move so freely and be so young.
Years passed, and we did some choreographed pieces, both individually and once, together. I formed my own dance group for a brief time; she formed one that had a lot more longevity. She got pregnant with her first child when she was 22 and had an adjustment time figuring out her life. Her family was supportive. Our little dance group also loved Rachael. We had her baby shower in a bar and I was the MC.
The last time I saw her, her daughter was three years old and Rachael was teaching Pilates in Austin, Texas. She is a serial entrepreneur. She had a clairvoyant relative who told her that she would marry a blonde haired, blue eyed man, and right after their first date, she told me all about him. She got married and I lost her for a couple of decades.
Her daughter grew up, went to college, graduated, and started working.
By that time Rachael and her husband had moved three times, once to Charlottesville, Virginia, and Rachael had already opened her third Pilates studio in Dallas, Texas.
Nothing Rachael does is half assed. Whatever she is doing, she does with care, time, and foresight. For a person to come right out of the chute and end up running 3 successful businesses with no formal education proves that some folks do fine without finishing college. Rachael is in the school of Methodology full time, and that name was the name of her last business before Covid came, and she and her husband sold everything by a series of miracles and ended up on a 67 acre farm in Monroe, Virginia.
Rachael started Heirloom Springs as a return to the self, and she has two rules there: “Be your authentic self,” and “Find Joy.” That’s ALL you have to do when you come.
For some, this is an easy task. For many, it’s not so easy.
I was fully functioning as my authentic self the first year I drove up there to visit, and I have to say I was pretty covered up in my habit of being a “Yes” woman to far more situations than most people. I didn’t learn to set boundaries until late in the game. I’m also a birthmother, and part of my service is to help mothers with children. It gets me out of my head, something that often requires significant pry bars to achieve.
My first year at the farm I overdid everything. I did tons of animal care, laundry, said “yes” to many gardening adventures, and wore myself out trying to be good, which at the time was my authentic self.
The second year I told Rachael I wouldn’t be able to work as hard because I wouldn’t be able to enjoy myself as much. When I arrived, she said “Do what you feel like doing.” With her, it’s always an invitation.
When Rachael invites you to help her in the garden, you’re going to experience something. It’s not the planning, digging, planting, or watering that’s going to teach you stuff. It’s in the listening.
The place is full of the prettiest songs of birds, and music from the running water in the streams.
When you are having a significant realization, the wind sometimes starts whispering way up top in the trees. It’s magical, and no matter how sweaty or tired you are, it’s healing.
Before I went to visit the farm this time, we had a little winter break. Rachael was thinking ahead and sent me some pictures of a tool I had never seen before, a broadfork. They come in a variety of sizes and it’s important to get the right one so you don’t throw your body out of whack while using it. We agreed on one and it was waiting for me when I arrived.
Allow me to describe this tool to you. It has a long metal bar filled with tines that are spaced 8” or 10” apart, like the teeth on a comb. Attached to the metal bar are two wooden broomstick-like poles about hip width apart. So you can set the tines into the earth, step up on the bar, which digs them in deeper, grab the poles and pull back. Pretty soon you are forking your way to paradise. This summer, for a brief time, I became a broadfork tilling machine.
The first time I used it I nearly crippled myself because I was so out of shape, but by the second or third time, I found that any held resentment could be easily loosed by my going out to the big garden and having a little communion with the broadfork.
We did Pilates, too, this time, but I must admit, the broadfork holds a special place in my heart, like if I ever got married, it would be to one little dog I babysit and we would jump over the broadfork at the end.
Rachael goes slowly but that does not mean she’s not working. There’s always work to do at the farm. The tiny compost pile last year transformed into compost mountain this year because she got Luke the horse, and he provides manure. You can let that stuff sit for months in the compost and have some pretty stout dirt for your garden next year.
This year Rachael was still buying bags of soil but next year she’ll have ALL the soil because she’s been saving it up on compost mountain.
I came to the farm this year after going through a depression so low I wasn’t sure I’d recover. Most of my problems are from holding on, not letting go. My most prominent teachers in this department have stated as much to me, all while refusing to acknowledge their contribution to my pain. Throughout the years, especially the past three, I have been sweeping my side of the street and telling these folks the truth, owning my part, acknowledging their part with compassion, and then watching them wriggle and writhe, still themselves unable to be accountable. A lot of folks get discarded in relationships, not just with loved ones, but with family members. It’s part of how things work on this planet. Each person has to evolve in their own way to become sovereign and free.
That being said, I had a meaningful conversation with Rachael in the kitchen that literally flipped my perspective 180 degrees. I called the folks I had tortured myself over for 30 years and set them free.
We planted squash one morning. Rachael likes to contemplate where everything is going to go and try to accommodate the eventual size of the plants. It’s a noble way to work and indicative of a more seasoned gardener. I just plant stuff in mine, leave a sprinkler with a timer, and pray. By July, Texas is like Hell and stays that way until October. I often think that the early settlers here probably died of old age at 40 because they couldn’t tolerate the heat while wearing wool trousers with no air conditioning in 105 degrees, not to mention some places in Texas where they were farming in caliche.
Or maybe as my friend George says, Hell is full. Maybe that’s why the rest of us remain in Texas.
Rachael loves to cook. She cooks food so delicious you want to eat it slowly so you can remember it. She made spaghetti sauce from the last of the tomatoes we planted last year along with some spices that made my taste buds detect about 8 things from ceiling to floor in my mouth. We had that sauce another night as well. It was so good, I wrote home about it to my friends.
If you have to wait for Rachael to cook something it’s always worth it. She makes life-giving culinary art and it’s always surprising.
We had a bear this year. A bear got into the chicken run one night by ripping the metal fencing off of the entry door and helping herself to some guinea snacks, four of them. One dead one was left behind, still warm. This event left only two guineas, staring at the chicken run full of guinea feathers, along with a pile of bear scat up the hill. There was a semi-bloody pile of feathers up the hill, too, as if the bear had a bird in its mouth and just spat out all of the feathers.
Needless to say, the door had to be repaired and we were all talking a little louder as we walked down the hill from the house.
When I got home to Texas I was wandering around looking for artists, and I met a crocheter at a little art show, and we started talking about mothers and daughters. The last words she said to me before I left were “Call your mom.”
My mom lives in a facility now, and the last conversation we had, I loaded the gun of my mouth and fired every word of resentment at her until I had spent all my rounds and she was crying. After that she didn’t want me to come visit and I didn’t want to come visit, either. Our relationship has been rocky since I was ten and she has never been able to tolerate my need to wear clothing that I can breathe in and live a life where I follow my heart and create most of the time. I started being her counselor when I was 8 and retired from that position at 57. 57 looks young from here, but I really tried to have an authentic conversation with my mother, and the amount of nurturing that was missing in our exchange reminded me of a scene from “Deliverance.”
Neglect and abuse are generational problems. Give a kid nothing when they are growing up and they have nothing to give to their kid when they have one. I repeated so many scenes from the movie with my mom that I made it my life’s purpose to live consciously and truthfully, no matter how hard it was.
I did call her. She was groggy from a nap and couldn’t put her words together except in dotted lines. This happened to my grandmother, too, so I was hoping I wasn’t looking at my future when I was listening to my mom.
The caregiver at the facility took back the phone and at first; we both agreed that mom needed a minute to reboot her brain. When mom took the phone again she started calling me “Sandy” over and over. That’s HER name. I kept saying “This is Natalie. You’re Sandy.” “Who are you?” she said. “I’m your daughter-Natalie,” I said. “Who?” She replied.
Then there was a little crack in the window of our conversation. I said to her “Mom, I’m sorry for all those terrible things I said to you. I feel really bad about it. Will you forgive me?” Lucidly, she replied “As many times as you ask, I’ll forgive you. I love you.” Then she disappeared and started calling me “Sandy” again.
After I hung up I was thinking about the irony of it all. Fifty years go by and you either work on yourself or you don’t, and the primary person responsible for your undoing is now helpless and speechless. You have finally evolved and let go, and now that person no longer remembers that you ever existed.
Had I not gone to the farm to spend time and learn from Rachael, I might not be in the place I am right now. I feel new, and lighter. I still don’t deal with stress very well; I’m learning new ways to catch the stress and reduce it before the cascade hits and disassembles-me for a while.
Here’s the thing I learned from Rachael: no matter how everything looks or how it plays out, love is everything. It’s the alpha and the omega of life, and most of our best decisions are made out of love and nothing else.
That lesson alone makes everything else in life worth it, and thus, worth living.
Natalie Flowers is a published author, talented musician, songwriter, and has spent the last 25 years on the road writing and producing songs.
She is both the writer and the trickster, laughing at her attempts at self-mastery with a compassionate and forgiving hand. Natalie's work is about awareness, either the lack of it or the insight that comes in gaining it. Her stories are not about arriving somewhere, but about the journey that takes one far and wide in pursuit of gaining access to the great mysteries of this life. Her teachers are people, animals, and mountains. She hopes you enjoy the ride.