Summer in the year of genocide.

It’s summer. Dia is out of school (she just finished kindergarten 🥹). The cherry tomatoes are taller than I am; their vines are weeping long tresses of fruit beginning to ripen. The fields burst with food and weeds as far as the eye can see. Life is full and abundant.

This spring has felt overwhelming. As a farmer, spring is always overwhelming. It’s like drinking from a fire hose—there is never enough time, there is always too much. And it’s never a slow build to summer busyness, it’s always like BANG winter is over and all of a sudden you can’t breathe. Usually by the time June rolls around we’ve adjusted to the nonstop work of the season in full force. And, while there is no end to the work, the adjustment period is over and now we’re swimming. We’ve hit our stride.

This year has been more challenging. I can’t shake the feeling that we shouldn’t be this lucky. It doesn’t make sense for us to be this free and safe and fed when so many are suffering. Nothing tastes sweet or looks pretty in the face of children dying.

I want to quit the world and bury my head in the sand because the devastation globally feels so wrong and overwhelming. But, I also feel compelled to bear witness and use whatever voice I have to speak out and continue shouting loudly for peace, or at least for the end of genocide. And yet still, we’re just…busy. The weeds keep calling, the harvests don’t stop.

I don’t know how to square these truths.

First thing this morning, before a long harvest day, I picked the first blueberries and the last strawberries out of the field as a treat for the girls’ breakfast, a little welcome to summer gift. And the whole time I was crying, just feeling the pain of all of the babies who have had these simple pleasures snatched away from them, their lives a shambles if they even still have one.

The brutality and destruction and horror in Gaza hums in my mind all of the time. It is distracting and painful (and that is before I layer on the heartache of the ongoing civil war in Sudan). So much death, so much hurt. So much of which feels like it could be prevented if our country, our leaders were stronger and spoke up more loudly, more confidently for peace and justice. We should be louder, we should be braver. This is what I feel and hear in my heart and my head all day.

And yet, the weeds keep calling, the harvests don’t stop.