Farm Meditation #4: Right in Front of My Face

“Farm Meditations” are a series based on events that happen on Whippoorwill Creek Farm in South Central Iowa. We raise grass fed and finished beef, goats, foraged mushrooms and some veggies. We will also soon have farm stays and space for small events!

Visit our website to learn more about the farm, our journey and my book Bet the Farm: The Dollars and Sense of Raising Food in America. Or contact me at bethaudio@gmail.com.

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My stepson Antonio used to laugh when John and I said we were going mushroom hunting. “How can you hunt something that stands still?” he’d ask. He had a point. Mushrooms are about as sedentary and non-stealth-like as Mother Nature gets. They are often even flashy and colorful, making them—one would think—stand out like an orange in a case of apples.

And yet wild mushrooms are much like an elephant grazing out on the African plains—beautiful creatures with the ability to hide in plain sight, almost invisible if you are not actually looking for them (or with the case of elephants, they don’t move). Yet once you turn your awareness to their existence, once you recalibrate your focus to see the amazing beings right in front of your face, suddenly you can see them clearly.

Even though they are brightly colored, it is often hard to see wild mushrooms

This happens to us all the time in our daily lives. You learn a word, and then, poof! It is everywhere. You focus on how dirty your house is and you are bound to see only dust; you can choose to notice the kindness in strangers and it will be everywhere if you are looking for it. You can even read about an event in history, and suddenly your perspective of the world shifts and you can understand its relevance to everything.

So I headed out on my mushroom “hunt” to look for chanterelles—an elusive and delicious bright orange mushroom that covers the forest floor like specks of gold when it is out. I was hoping to find a few to sell to restaurants in Des Moines, and knew from past years just where to look, in one of my favorite areas on the farm—the “riparian zone.”

The “riparian zone” is in quotations because, while it is actually a riparian zone (a creek and its surrounding ecosystem), it was called “the ditch” until quite recently. “The ditch” was a place where generations of Hogeland threw things—everything from household trash to dead farm equipment—creating what I like to refer to as “a heap of shit.” The heap is rather well contained in one small area of the ditch, a place especially easy to drive a tractor up to and toss a radiator or hog feeder into.

But it struck me as soon as we moved to the farm and I saw the garbage in several of these ditches: does calling a place a “ditch” allow us to treat it badly? Does the disrespectful sounding name have anything to do with the garbage thrown into it?

I get it that there was a time not so long ago when trash pick up was not a thing. John’s great, great grandparents and even parents didn’t have much choice when it came to getting rid of their garbage, even if that trash was an old harvester. Often much of a household’s waste was biodegradable—seed sacks in canvas bags, food scraps, paper bags. But by the time Leroy (John’s dad) inherited the farm, household trash was full of plastic, and there was a whole lot more equipment needed on a farm to toss out when the next new thing in agriculture arrived.

When we took over the farm five years ago, we started to clean up the ditches. John’s sister Andrea, her son Lucas, John and I would spend hours hauling stuff out of creek bottoms with the tractor, filling entire trailers full of metal scraps for the recycler and garbage bags destined for the landfill.

And as part of the renovation of the creek bottom and its surrounding area, I asked that it also be called something different, something that might instill more respect and inspire people to treat it better than a “ditch.” “Riparian zone” is what I came up with, and although it is a mouthful and the words don’t exactly roll off the tongue, at least the area sounds a bit more scientifically important and even high class. It insists you look at the area as part of an ecosystem and to treat it in a different way.

So there I was in the riparian zone, looking for chanterelles, my eyes slowly attuning to the world around me in a new and different way. And poof! Like that, there they were, all around me. I saw one chantrelle, then many, the clusters of mushroom-gold everywhere. And not only were there chantrelles, there were mushrooms of all kinds, even ones I had never seen before.

Snooks and I excited about the chanterelles

The point of this meditation, then is two fold; two separate yet dependent concepts. The first is something I forget all the time, namely that if I just take the time to adjust my eyes and focus, I can learn to see what is often there right in front of my very own eyes. This act in and of itself changes the world around me, often from one I see in a negative light to one that is full of awe and grace.

But then the second part of the meditation is equally as important; once we see the world differently, we have to recast it in our brains. If I see an area teeming with chanterelles and other life forms, it transforms from a ditch to a riparian zone. If I turn my gaze to see the kindness of strangers, it is no longer a world full only of hate and despair and I can change the way I think and talk about it with others. Similarly, if I learn more about history and how it has been unkind to so many, I can incorporate other perspectives into the telling of my own story.

A bit of a heady meditation for a Saturday morning. Please share your stories of seeing the world in a new light below in the comments. And I would love if you shared the meditation with someone you think might also like it this week.

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Please read and support my colleagues from the Iowa Writers Collaborative:

Laura Belin: Iowa Politics with Laura Belin, Windsor Heights

Doug Burns: The Iowa Mercury, Carroll

Dave Busiek: Dave Busiek on Media, Des Moines

Art Cullen: Art Cullen’s Notebook, Storm Lake

Suzanna de Baca Dispatches from the Heartland, Huxley

Debra Engle: A Whole New World, Madison County

Julie Gammack: Julie Gammack’s Iowa Potluck, Des Moines and Okoboji

Joe Geha: Fern and Joe, Ames

Jody Gifford: Benign Inspiration, West Des Moines

Nik Heftman, The Seven Times, Los Angeles and Iowa

Beth Hoffman: In the Dirt, Lovilla

Dana James: New Black Iowa, Des Moines

Pat Kinney: View from Cedar Valley, Waterloo

Fern Kupfer: Fern and Joe, Ames

Robert Leonard: Deep Midwest: Politics and Culture, Bussey

Tar Macias: Hola Iowa, Iowa

Kurt Meyer, Showing Up, St. Ansgar

Wini Moranville, Wini’s Food Stories, Des Moines

Kyle Munson, Kyle Munson’s Main Street, Des Moines

Jane Nguyen, The Asian Iowan, West Des Moines

John Naughton: My Life, in Color, Des Moines

Chuck Offenburger: Iowa Boy Chuck Offenburger, Jefferson and Des Moines

Barry Piatt: Piatt on Politics: Behind the Curtains, Washington, D.C.

Macey Spensley, The Midwest Creative, Davenport and Des Moines

Larry Stone, Listening to the Land, Elkader

Mary Swander: Mary Swander’s Buggy Land, Kalona

Mary Swander: Mary Swander’s Emerging Voices, Kalona

Cheryl Tevis: Unfinished Business, Boone County

Ed Tibbetts: Along the Mississippi, Davenport

Teresa Zilk: Talking Good, Des Moines

The Iowa Writers Collaborative is also proud to ally with Iowa Capital Dispatch.