Dear friends, don’t you just love the energy of early spring? This time of year is crucial for anyone who is directly involved in the raising of their food. It is a time where you set everything in motion, where you essentially stock your freezer and pantry for the summer, fall, and winter to come. It’s a delicate and exciting time! Amy and I have been reverting to our college selves a bit lately, engaging in discussions of philosophy as we work and plan. We’ve been thinking especially of the concept of “kairos”.
As we understand it, in ancient Greek, there were two types of time: “chronos” and “kairos”. Chronos describes standard time that we are all generally familiar with, when normal things happen sequentially, hour to hour, day to day. The “chrono” in chronological comes from “chronos”.
Kairos, on the other hand, indicates the heightened times that exist when everything falls into place, when the things that need to happen do happen, just as they should. The kairos is fulfilled in these heightened moments. When Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, perhaps. Or maybe when John Lennon and Paul McCartney met. Or hey, maybe when Amy ordered that local half pig share years and years ago.
Maybe that pork share didn’t have as much of a global impact as Dr. King or the Beatles, but for Amy and I, it fundamentally changed everything. We explored cuts of meat we’d never seen, going literally head to toe and beyond. We complimented our farmer at the markets and talked everyone’s ears off about the great meat. We were set on a new path that shaped our future. In fact, were it not for that pork order, you may not be reading these very words.
Kairos, doing the right thing for the right moment. And as we make decisions that are crucial for the seasons to come, I don’t think we’ll find a better way to describe this time of year than that!
As maple sugar season begins to wind down, planning for the rest of the year picks up rapidly. We’ve organized and planned our seeds for the vegetables. We’ve even started seedlings.
We are expanding our growing area to a new part of our land which has a promising amount of sunlight and might even be safe from the hens and the wild critters that roam our woods (we can hope).
And yes, speaking of chickens, we have been crunching numbers to figure out how many broiler chickens we can handle raising this year and we’re super excited to share that the chicken preorders are now open!
If you’d like to be a part of our little kairos for the year and set yourself up for good food in the coming seasons, you can have some of our chicken. Click here to learn more.
Ahh, finally. It is the equinox, the time of change and new beginnings. The world is fresh again.
A busy spring brings a bountiful year, and we wish you the happiest (and busiest) of springs! It is kairos time!
Your friends,
Amy and Brian
P.S. We are changing the way our newsletter works so the emails are simplified. Instead of writing about the week in those emails, we’re going to start posting diary entries like this right on the blog. But we have been writing stories in the newsletters for many months now, so for those not subscribed to the newsletter who might be wondering what stories we’ve been sharing, the past 20 weeks of newsletters are archived! You can find them here: Ferrin Brook Farm Newsletter Archive.
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