the non-renewable human

I'm on day four of this ankle injury which neatly segued withh David emerging from seven days on hold with COVID.  So which would you choose?  seven days in isolation with COVID or six weeks incapacitated with a moon boot?  

The doctor said if I could imagine there is a hammock, and someone very heavy sits on it.  It could tear the hammock or it could pull the hammock out of the wall, taking a part of the wall with it.  I have the second scenario.  

I always feel grateful for my health and the ability to own a piece of land in my 50s, but it feels different when you are appreciating that fact from a sofa in a moon boot.  I still have my health and I'm confident I will heal and will do the things I need to do to support that, but this is a very concrete reminder that this can be taken away in a heart beat.  This rural dream we have achieved through hard work and dumb luck is precarious as all hell.

We came to this lifestyle because we wanted to explore and embody regenerative agriculture.  We wanted to live closely with the cycles of nature, but do we?  When a goat dies, another goat takes its place and pretty much does what that previous goat does.  What happens when Pi Wei and David die?  What will the next humans do?  Even if they were our own children there is no continuity of the quality of the relationship we have with the land to continue.  Human needs and impacts on the land are really novel and "unnatural".  (we've built a fricken skate bowl off the milking shed for crying out loud!)  Our indivual mindscape drives, perhaps overrides our natural realtionship with nature.  What the hell is a natural relationship anyway?  I'm thinking about the human analogue to animal behaviours like eating (humans forage and hunt), disturbance (we tend to be a shelter making animal), pooping ( we generally poo on the land and I don't know the anthropological evidence to say if we dug a hole or not for that).  But you get my gist.  I'm looking for clues in our previous ancestors to find the moment we took our first steps from being more human than animal.  

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Wild Geese Mary Oliver

I wonder about the phrase "stewards of the land".  What started me on this line of thinking is my broken leg bone and the question of what will come of this farm when I'm gone?  As if the grass would not grow the the birds would forget how to fly.  Perhaps the land is steward to me, and I am the student of the land.