Up/Rooted

on turning pages + opening doors

Welcome to Slow Folk - a community for gentle hearts and rebellious creatives, thirsty for a slower life in a world obsessed with speed.

Welcome to the Unbusy Revolution.

Good morning my people. Long time no chat.

What a whirlwind this season has been. The part of myself where my writing lives retreated amongst the chaos, the busyness, lost in the couch cushions under a pile of unfolded laundry.

For over a decade, 13 years this September, we have loved this old farmstead back to life.

We raised our babies here, half-feral farm kids bare naked in the fields wearing nothing but gumboots, trailing barn cats behind them. We have planted trees and roots and dreams in this soil. Built a community of curious, kind, warm-hearted humans.

And now we are leaving.

It’s funny how grief claims us, how we can mourn a place and time, as well as a person.

That space has left no room for writing, for contemplation. Day-to-day and the all encompassing work of coming to terms have consumed me. As spring finally pokes her head out and the bees return to the cherry tree outside my kitchen door, I wonder, if maybe, that’s exactly how it should be?

I often wonder if our most basic desire for safety and comfort gets in the way of us living our purpose.

What if, doing what is expected, continuing to grind through a story that is no longer ours - gets in the way of writing the one that’s waiting for us?

She says - I write this as an escape from expectation.

And what if that’s the secret? To give expectation the slip?

What if it isn’t outside expectations but our own hearts we need to give a pass?

What if it’s ok to acknowledge that we’ll leave a part of ourselves behind in that old story?

What if it’s necessary to trim our roots in order to have a healthy start in new ground?

When we move a tree, we cut its roots. Clean and sharp edges slice where they sleep, entangled with soil and fungi, cleaving apart a symbiotic universe of time and place. Part of them will stay to feed the soil that has sustained them all these years.

Maybe we need these clean cuts and this gesture of sacrifice, this sacred offering of life and limb, to move forward.

I have loved this place and time and these people with my whole heart.

I have held nothing back. Have rooted myself in this place with joyfully rebellious abandon. It will hurt like hell to leave.

This is the price we pay to live a wholehearted life.

And yet, already, slowly, quietly . . . I can feel that new story stirring. That turning of a page, that blinking curser on a white screen. The pause at the top of breath. Where anything is possible. Where we get to begin again.

P.S. Thanks to everyone for your patience while I navigate this strange and disorienting season. I’m back at my writing desk now, so you’ll see me in your inbox each Sunday with your slow Sunday letters. So glad to be back. xo

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Stacey Langford is a writer, renegade farmer and slow business mentor living and working in Canada’s Fraser Valley. In 2010 Stacey ditched her cubicle in the city to turn her attention homeward, farm and help others craft a simple life, from scratch.