Remembering Life on the Goudreault Farm

Aligning Earth and Infinity

People often wonder what it must have been like to grow up on the Goudreault Farm; to be part of a family that in one generation carved out an iconic natural landmark in rapidly developing rural New Hampshire with reverence, faith and tireless will. When so many other area farms were being divided up for housing, and the organic and eat local movements had not yet taken hold, visitors found it hard to fathom what kept us going; to take on so much physical work, and always in the face of Nature’s uncertainties. For decades our family’s fearless passion to cultivate and preserve 40 acres of uniquely rich farm land was an unexpected teaching, especially for those who had little contact with Nature and could not conceive of such a life. Over the years this grew into a community of deep appreciation, and many still remain curious about what inspired us to rise every day with a vision to concentrate and hold the radiance and beauty of the world in that one place; to secure that foothold of green-space even in the difficult years when it seemed counter to evolving modern culture.

With my parents, I shared a feeling of inseparable oneness with the Earth and of a greater Force which ushered life into form. It was a way of life where in order to survive, rather than trying to control Nature as if it were an inanimate obstacle, we worked to increase our inner sensitivity to its flow, aligning and harmonizing our own efforts in relation to it. We followed the sun, the moon, and the cycle of the seasons. These were the guideposts of the time and space in which we lived, and through hard earned experience, intuitively participating in the order of Nature while keeping its balance, abundant harvests followed. It may sound rather primitive now in a technologically driven global society, but year after year it bore fruit, and in me an awareness of Earth’s alignment with infinity and our own universally networked human nature.

Whatever else was happening in the world, I would wake upon a land that called my name and was a bridge to discovering my own purpose; whose every leaf and creature sang of the unison of life; and who’s power to sustain us was an echo of our own sweat and every breath given to serving it. For all that we sought to plant on the land, it was I who was seeded, sprouted and born out of its earthen womb as much as my Mother’s. I was its devoted student and willing muse, as it carved in me an understanding of its truths and made clear my inseparable connection to Nature. I ran its perimeter and crossed its every rise and slope until I knew it like my own body and watched, in its growth, my limbs too grow into their fullness. Ralph Waldo Emerson described such a place when he wrote, “To the attentive eye, each moment of the year had its own beauty, and in the same field, it beheld, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.” If only I could recreate the dance of the sun as it moved from field to field, horizon to horizon, bringing the furrows of plowed earth to life and shaping our lives with the rhythm of its light. Then perhaps others might know something of our life.

I can say there were few cars passing by in the early days, and even fewer neighbors and friends. It was an alternative lifestyle and a childhood which allowed for creativity to blossom in long spans of fertile solitude. Sometimes in that child’s solitude I would open a window, especially when the scent of lilac hedges filled the air and write poetry in the corner of my bedroom on a desk I was barely big enough to reach. I always felt Whittier’s presence just over the hill, as if he still lived; a silent Mentor called too to this place because verse flowed naturally into mind here and Nature still had a voice that could be heard. I remember orienting my desk in the direction of Corliss Hill Road, sure that it would keep open a stream of connectedness between us.

In the words of Arthur Rimbaud, “in a loft I got to know the world.” Often after the physical work of tending the summer gardens, I would steal away up the steep ladder steps to the barn hay loft to contemplate what existed beyond the physical dimensions of my world. I would climb and climb ‘til I reached a vantage far beyond the fields which married my family to the Earth. Here, away from the noise of preconceptions and convention, I watched the swallows as they navigated the hilltop breezes and let them carry me even farther in mind across the few short miles to the sea. The loft was a space of seemingly boundless dimensions and possibility, and seated on bales of fresh cut hay, while sun fell gently through the cupolas in circles round me, I would resume what seemed a familiar journey to understanding the totality of our humanity, the sensed mysteries of the unseen and the nature of our connection to all that exists. In what seemed the unlimited expanses of our great barn loft, I learned that even as a child, my experience need not solely be that of a child’s; that there is something more to each of us, a Consciousness which seeks to be realized if we can only practice listening in the space of silence. If we can meet the veils of dust and shadow and see only the inscrutable radiance of Light penetrating all life. Here stronger than the physical presence of animals and plants surrounding me, I felt the Light within; supporting me like the matrix of beams that formed the structure of my humble hay loft cathedral; my bridge between the finite and the Infinite. It is a perception that would continue to grow in clarity throughout my life. See Author’s Note

Summer evenings were never surrendered casually to the more popular drive-in theatres or TV. Nature was our companion and artist of choice who, after dinners of fresh tomatoes, “cukes” and corn, would summon us to the cushioned metal 50’s swing couch on the screen porch. Here while we waited for a breeze, she would serenade us with choruses of crickets and peepers, and we would watch her paint the night with moonlight, stars, heat lightening, and fireflies. In the subtle light my eyes would trace the silhouette of trees that were as kindred as my own brother and sisters. The “Silver Tree” whose long low branches and glistening leaves were my celestial hiding place on Earth. The grand “Nut Tree” on the hill that would carry us on a swing far out over the lower field, and to heights that seemed beyond the clouds where I imagined dreams waited to be called into being. There were also the two great Pines who, whispering the secrets of time, cradled me to sleep and embraced me on waking as they had for centuries done for all the families who lived within reach of their Farm rooted branches. I thought they were indestructible; immortal beings that would live far beyond my years…but in my lifetime on the Farm I would see all these great trees fall. One by one they would depart by storm or disease and leave, in the space of sky they opened, a lesson about the inevitable cycle of life and letting go. They were like my four grandparents who also passed leaving in their wake deep imprints of wisdom and experience.

I myself was once very ill as a girl. After a critical diagnosis, I thought for a time I too would pass, and that the Farm would be all I ever knew of the world, but I was healed to live on. Decades later when I returned from living in Arizona, I still remembered the gift of life I had received and honored that healing by designing a Native American inspired medicine wheel and public garden for meditation in the field behind the house. It was built with the help of many hands, most of whom I had never met, out of stones gathered from the fields by my Father and healing herbs and perennials grown by my Mother. The participants came from communities near and far, each feeling what science cannot yet measure about our wholeness; that the Earth and all of us who live here heal and destroy, elevate and consecrate each other. It was to magnify an energy and intention of harmonizing union on the Farm and be a vital center point from which it would radiate out into the world. In subsequent years it became a popular destination and gathering place for people to walk the circle, find comfort in Nature, be inspired to let go of pain and loss, and feel new strength blossom in colorful abundance like the Gardens of the Medicine Wheel.

So much life happens on a farm where you live as a partner with Nature, so many conscious decisions are required to keep stable the balance of Earth, to honor animals and plants in a way that also allows you as humans to thrive. I remember the day my father held me up by the corner stall in the barn, and for the first time watching a cow give birth to a healthy new calf. It was so unfathomably beautiful I cried and, though beyond my child’s understanding, it was something I would instinctively honor the rest of my life; that Source of life I witnessed coming into being…life equal to my own and having every right to be. Not long after, I saw a truck come to take the calf away, and my father explained that we grew them for meat and that it was not an uncaring act, rather essential to our survival. There was no concept of vegetarianism in New England culture at that time, but I fought to maintain that diet despite my parents’ protest and relished in the harvests of summer and fall, preferring the subtlety of roots, sprouts and greens as I do today.

We were an established dairy farm before the greenhouse business expanded with my brother’s vision, and I remember the intense commitment my father made, with surgeon-like attentiveness, to maintain the herd’s and the milk’s purity. When many years later I travelled to India and saw them washing their temple floors every day with milk as a way of purifying those spiritual grounds, I felt I understood something of their ancient tradition. Pure raw milk is truly a sacred nectar that in a pasteurized and homogenized world few now will ever know. I remember what it was like to drink raw milk; tasting the cream on top that was as rich as butter and sweet as honey…I remember the silver pitcher my Mother used every day to bring raw milk in for the day’s meals. It was a ritual too, filled with devotion and gratitude.

Immeasurable beauty came to our family and to thousands of others through my Mother’s hands. She was a vehicle of Nature itself, and any seed or plant she touched grew exponentially greater than that planted by another. Her mature plants were consistently larger, healthier, and more resilient than any others in the area. Landscapers and seed company representatives would constantly marvel at their performance. I was educated with a scientific mind, but what could not be calculated by research instruments and yet evident in her work was that it is the energy between man and Nature that is essential for plants to thrive, not just appropriate light, soil, and fertilizers. Clearly some people are better vehicles of this transfer than others, and my Mother was distinguished by such an ability. My Father too, born into a farming family had a special gift for growing vegetables…specifically corn. People would come from far away towns to buy his carefully curated silver and butter and sugar varieties. I once packed a suitcase full of late season corn for a loyal customer who was flying to Florida for Fall and Winter. Corn was definitely my Father’s legacy crop. He would take great pride in picking it fresh, sometimes twice a day for the farm stand, and taste tested it for lunch daily every summer from July until the frost. There were also years when together my parents dedicated greenhouses to growing ornamental lilies for the Boston flower market. This was before supply became globalized and it was too difficult to compete with less expensive imports. While they grew them; perfect specimens even in the seeming dark of our unforgiving NH winters, those lilies made their way from our greenhouses in Plaistow into arrangements in the finest hotels, museums and restaurants in Boston. The Casa Blanca variety was the supermodel of lilies at the time and in high demand. It was when these tall stemmed Casa Blanca lilies filled the greenhouses with an aura of white light and the scent of heaven that I realized in my parents’ farm worn hands, growing had become a refined art.

Oh, if I could give you readers of this history a way for your senses to experience the richness of what mine recall. The “breaking” of the ground by the first plows of Spring, and the scent of newborn earth released when the fields are turned and take their first breath since the Winter freeze. Walking barefoot down newly cut rows, leaving impressions of my presence in the soft dark soil. Remembering the intimacy of touching it like living skin, feeling its heart, and its waiting to be planted like a horse waiting to run free across an open field. Oh, that I could express what it is to have memories forever entwined with the land and its seasons. To have the rich fruits of its soil become part of my flesh. To have eyes opened by its light, ears made sensitive by the wind moving wavelike across its tall grass fields. To have a nose that will forever seek the fragrance of lilacs, lilies and fresh cut hay, and a palate refined by the exquisite sweetness of my father’s corn. To have been given a sensitivity that surpasses all the senses and a deeper connection to life beyond its visible surface nature. It is a prayer to hold the space for such a force of life to rise upon the Earth, and to keep Nature whole in a harmonized and abundant state of being. It is a blessing to be given the chance to try. I was born into a family that was so blessed. I was born a child of the land, and a servant of Nature and the Light which enlivens it. I will ever be grateful to have had a life in which I could participate in preserving the Goudreault Farm as part of the living landscape of Earth and the greater cosmos of vital forces and energies. Our intention was not only to survive, but always to increase the health and vitality of the whole, starting with our family and extending out into the community of visitors, gardeners and fresh food customers we served. We were all on a transformational path working with the Earth, and I believe we left an imprint which truly changed and uplifted the way we lived together.

In early May 2018, my family’s time on the Farm which began in 1962 came to an end. Nature has new dreams waiting to manifest there and calls out to other hands and hearts to serve and protect the land. But, there is no ending with this passing of the baton. The Earth I came to know there now speaks to me in all of Nature, and my work is an evolving projection of its voice and beauty in the world. May the Goudreault Farm and the land it occupies in New Hampshire ever remain a place of enduring peace, harmony with Nature, community, and infinite beauty.

Author’s Note: While working as a Photographer on images of New England barn lofts 2015-2017, I realized I still perceived and was drawn to portray every loft I photographed as a shrine to our inseparable connection to Nature and the totality of our own human nature. See lightmindimages.com “Disembodied Barns: The Cosmic Threshold” Collection. This collection of barn loft images evolved neither as symbols of a forgotten agricultural past, or a desire to romanticize that life. Like the loft of my youth, each image is a key to opening the lost spaces of dormant potential and unvisited Light which exist in so much of humanity at present. They offer the viewer an empty space once filled with devotion to a life working with nature, not to inspire us to repeat how that connection was experienced historically, but to expand our understanding of the subtle dimensions of its matrix and how our relationship to it critically affects our human advancement, even in a technologically dominant culture. The images sound a call to go within, into the silent lofts of self, the subtle undiscovered realms of our being, and refine our awareness of our own nature as that loft where the new answers we seek lie waiting to be discovered. They are the inspiration and promise that as we climb the dark stairs of our evolving Self, toward a more infinite experience of our humanity, we will meet a new light of understanding. They carry hope in a greater architecture of being, where we will discover the power to harmonize our individual and collective lives and dissolve every perceived limit to our human potential.

VIEW IMAGES HERE

Farming Light

by Deborah Goudreault

My body still remembers how it bent to wield the spade,

with knowledge that in planting each small seed my own future was made,

and bending further to obey the ruling rounds of moon and sun

connecting each cell with the Force that moves where winds and rivers run,

and serpentine concealed in us, uncoiling day, recoiling night,

transmuting earthen elements, igniting water, soil and blood,

to grow, from their essential goodness, harvests of abundant Light;

a yield that would sustain and heal us, save us from mind’s darker plights.

My body still remembers how it bent to wield the spade,

the lonely, tender, fearless heart required to create,

and how with humble hands our digging carved a human dignity

that never conceived of giving up on anyone or anything.

To passersby it seemed our toil had no end but to till the ground,

while we were farming Light whose touch, the life of every seed, unbound.

The seeds of corn, the seeds of Spring, of thoughts and feelings too,

the seeds of unmet wisdom and unfathomed dreams to guide us home.

My body remembers how goodness prevailed in cloudless rays o'er a sanctified land,

where man and Nature, always one, uplifted each other hand in hand.

View Images Here

Deborah GoudreaultMay 13, 2018