Purpose & Meaning

S P I R I T | Connection to your purpose & meaning. The Farm. 👩‍🌾 🏠For the last five days my family and I have been on the farm in Pennsylvania. Once a dairy farm and coal mine, the farm is now verdant rolling hills with soothing sounds of trees swaying, birds chirping, owls hooting and the soft quack of ducks.
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We try to come out once or twice a year, to visit with my partner’s extended family, many of whom live on the land that their parents, grandparents, and great, great grandparents grew up on. The land, the hills and fields, the hay and trees, feel just as much like family as the people the share it with.
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I have never felt knit into a place like our family in Pennsylvania. My mother is an immigrant from Mexico with strong ties to her home town and to where her family lived in Chicago when they immigrated. My father grew up in rural Illinois away from extended family in Wisconsin. We ended up living in the suburbs of Chicago for almost all of my childhood until we moved to Oregon when I was seventeen. Each place feels familiar and homey but along with them, I feel the absence of a lifetime or generations of lifetimes in one place, like my family here. I just don’t know what it’s like to live in one place, with and among my family, for my whole life. Although, I see how thoroughly meaningful it can be as I watch them tend to the land and tell stories they’ve told for ages about place they call home.
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I find meaning and medicine in this. In difficult times, my mind will wander to the imagery and feeling and stories of this place, reassuring me that whatever I face, it’s there for me. During labor and delivery with my first child, I came here in my mind. When city life overwhelms me, I come here in my mind. When I’m ready to end an argument with my partner, I’ll go to the farm in my mind. It’s actual, real live place, but it’s also I place in my mind. 

Photo x @mariellevchua