One question is on a constant loop in my mind.  It doesn’t matter where I live, what I am doing or how I am feeling.  One question assaults me moment by moment, day after day…year after year like the drums heard by The Master in Dr. Who.

“Why are you doing this?”

The question doesn’t even refer to a specific activity.  It just hangs there…pestering me for an answer.  Why do I go to work?  Why do I like steak?  Why are hot dogs better than bologna?  Why?

I have beaten the budget to death with blog posts attempting (with varying degrees of success) to justify my farming habit.  Behind the scenes I have been scouring books, talking to friends (really pestering Matron!), and thinking.

From Gene Logsdon’s Living At Nature’s Pace

My father walked an empty, desolate barnyard, listening for the long-ago songs of life.  He heard only a loose sheet of tin roofing, curled over, scratching itself distractedly in the wind.  He cried.  He cried because he no longer had the energy to keep the barn full of life himself.  He cried because none of his children were willing to fill it full of life again.  He cried because he could not die here on the farm amidst life, as his forebears had been able to do, but might soon, too soon, have to shuffle off to the country home like his urban counterparts.

That’s certainly part of the answer.  I want to be surrounded by life!