To Be Kissed by Goats and Bumblebees

a re-intro, of sorts

Goats at sunrise.

When I certified as a women’s health and nutrition coach (believe it or not) a few years ago, I had marketing training in how to set myself apart, stand out from the crowd in a saturated health and wellness industry, how to make a name. It mostly all came down to refining and targeting my niche, the tighter the niche the bigger the success, the mantra goes. “Women’s health” is much too broad, is it menarche or menopause? PMS? Fertility or childbirth? Businesswomen wearing suits or stay home moms wearing babies? Narrow it down, tighter, tighter! We spent many hours, us student coaches, refining and defining our “target audience”, profiling our “ideal client”. Any marketing pro in any sector will tell you the same: find your niche, narrow it down, hone in and target your “ideal” client/customer/buyer/reader.

It never felt right to me. I couldn’t imagine who my “ideal client” was, nor narrow my broad and open curiosity to a single line of specialty. To trade breadth and wonder and the freedom to explore new and wide avenues, to think freely and broadly, for a narrow line of focus, targeted and marketed to earn “success” (aka money) felt more like the same old drudgery of a nine to five that I was trying to escape from. But then, none of it felt right. None of the hustle of the health and wellness sphere that I was becoming more and more disillusioned by, that was feeling more and more like a money racket, or just another lane of the rat race that I was never made to run, when all I really wanted to do was tend my little flock on the mountain, grow forests and food and wildflower meadows, be kissed by goats and honey-drunk bumblebees, tread barefoot in the soil and watch the sunrise and cultivate a life of meaning and belonging on the land that holds and feeds me, and then paint it and weave it and write about it all!

Molly, my love. And a bumblebee drunk on the devil's bit.

A while ago someone on Instagram said in a comment that they were thinking about starting a Substack, but they were holding back because they felt they had so much to say, so many topics to tackle, that they couldn’t narrow it down to a single focus. Or something along those lines. I get that. I feel it too. If I wanted to knuckle down and keep to a category, narrow my niche, target my reader base, focus more on numbers and less on the poetry of living or the things that make my heart sing, and bore myself silly inside the walls of a “specialty”, I could probably write a good enough niche blog on “raising milk goats” or “homesteading for hormonal health”. But what if I want to write about peace and love and war? Or the beauty of birth? Or an ode to the oak? Or tell you stories of howling winds and of salty seas carried in on raindrops and feathered wings? Which box does that fit in?

I cannot compartmentalise my life, or squash myself into a box. I cannot segregate the parts of a life intentionally lived in wholeness. So you get all of it, from the soil and the land to the blood and beauty of birth to the food that nourishes and grounds us to our place, and everything in between. All written under the umbrella of life on the land, and evolving as life does. Maybe I’ll lose a couple of subscribers each time I write outside the category they’ve put me in, but I’ll be true and open and real. I like Substack as a place to write freely about all of the things inspire or fire me up, or that I have enough learned knowledge and experience of to share, enough to write a little bit about and offer to whomever it may speak to, or at least enough to humble me to question, to seek the depth that writing about it requires, and know that there is, always, so much more to learn. I can only write from my own evolving truth and understanding, there is always nuance, and far more that we do not know than what we do. I try to stay open and humble to it all.

I have a lifetime of growing up with, raising and training animals, from horses to chickens, dogs and sheep. This recent story I wrote on the robust and resilient health of animals living free to express their natural behaviours serves as a sort of introduction to the ethos from which I approach all aspects of animal husbandry, from their keep and feeding to how I handle and work with them. My animals are my soul and sustenance, and the heart of my life and farm. On a biodynamic farm, animals are considered essential for soil fertility and an integral and interconnected part of the whole farm organism. The farm as a living ecosystem with each element — animals, crops, soil, nature, us — supporting and supported by the rest, like the spokes on a wheel, or the threads of a spider’s web. That’s my aim and guiding principle as a farmer and keeper of livestock and land.

I grew up in a garden, homeschooled and wild. Chunks of my childhood were spent between my parents’ and grandparents’ largely self-sufficient smallholdings. I did a short stint at agricultural college studying Equine, very many years ago, until a giant horse almost killed me, and gave me a profound near-death experience (I might tell that story some time). I worked on riding schools and trained ponies for a decade, and then worked as a gardener for another decade, growing food and flowers. I studied nutrition, and spent two years on a herbal apprenticeship learning the art and practice of folk herbalism (and even went a little way into clinical practice before changing course into women’s health), which gave me a solid framework to a lifetime dabbling in plant medicine, and how the land provides. I have raised a child, fledged and flown.

Growing, cooking and preserving food; the connections between food and health, soil and health. How food, farming, human health are inseparable from the land that holds us and feeds us and the web of all life. Living with, not just on, the land. I strive to live the life I write about. I’m not perfect — who is? — and I don’t always get it right. I have known what it is to struggle, to have to compromise, to just survive. I have known heartbreak and I have loved and lost and loved again, and I have been known to drink a little too much whiskey and wine. Sometimes it got me in trouble. Life is messy, but that’s part of the ride.

It bears saying in this strange time we live in when one cannot be sure of what is true or real or human and what is not, that I have never and will never use AI to write other than a basic spellcheck. I used to paint. When I find the time I felt and weave rugs with sheep’s wool grown from the rocks and rain in the colours of this land. But right now my words are my art, amalgamated from a lifetime of source and inspiration, flawed and human, agonised and sweated over. Sometimes I might rant political, and other times I’ll wax poetic on the meaning of it all.