Tending the Inner Pasture
Here at Ridgemeade, I’ve learned that farming isn’t just about tending the soil—it’s about tending the whole web of life, including the wildest landscape - the one within ourselves.
I watch my sheep in the pasture, and I see something we’ve forgotten. When a hawk circles overhead, they startle, bunch together, alert. Their nervous systems fire exactly as they should. But when the hawk moves on, so do they. Back to grazing, back to presence, back to the simple business of being alive in this moment. They move as nature intended—in response to real threats, then returning to the business of living.
We humans have lost this gift.
Our bodies still respond as if the hawk never leaves—cortisol flooding, hearts racing, minds spinning in endless loops of what-if and if-only. But there is no hawk. There’s only the phantom birds of our making: the inbox, the news cycle, the circular worries, WWIII. the endless demands of a world that’s entirely forgotten how to be still - to listen, to be.
I’ve spent years watching the land heal when we stop fighting it and start listening. The moment I step back and watch, the healing occurs in leaps and bounds, as if the release of my grip was all it needed. The same wisdom applies to our inner terrain. We are not separate from the natural world—we are woven into it, part of a vast web of relationships that includes not just soil and plants and animals, but all the forms of “capital” that make life rich and meaningful. In this cyclical manner, stress is healthy - it’s what starts a new cycle of regeneration, just as when the herd moves through, tearing up the grass, stippling it with manure and urine - stressing out the ecosystem. But then, as the land rests, recovers, and heals, it comes back thoroughly nourished, more resilient and with deeper roots.
My fellow alumni Ethan Soloviev at the great unlearning institute, GAIA University showed us that wealth isn’t just financial—it flows through eight interconnected forms. There’s the living capital of soil microbes and mycorrhal networks, the material capital of tools and buildings, the intellectual capital of understanding how ecosystems function. There’s experiential capital earned through years of reading the land, social capital built through relationships with neighbors and community, and cultural capital that connects us to the stories and practices that sustain us across generations. At the deepest level lies spiritual capital—our capacity to live in right relationship with the unnameable that is larger than ourselves.
When I tend the pastures, I’m working with all these forms of capital at once (and we all are, in whatever capacity we move in daily life). For example;
my morning walks build experiential capital in reading weather patterns and seasonal changes.
The physical work generates material improvements while
the satisfaction flows into social connections with others who understand this way of life.
The intellectual capital of understanding stress physiology serves the living capital of my own nervous system,
while the cultural capital of dawn ritual connects me to generations of farmers who started each day by paying attention to what the land was teaching.
Here’s what the land has taught me about stress: it’s not the enemy. The deer doesn’t curse the coyote for existing (For a deeper treatment of this, see Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn). Drought and flood, predator and prey—these are part of the grand conversation of life. But what we’ve created—this constant hum of artificial urgency—this is different. This is stress without purpose, alarm without end, a system locked in permanent high alert like overgrazed land that never gets the rest it needs to regenerate. It just like our runaway consumerism - buying, throwing away, working to buy more.
Allan Savory discovered that grasslands and grazing animals evolved together in an intricate dance of disturbance and recovery. The hooves that compact the earth also create spaces for seeds. The grazing that appears destructive actually stimulates new growth—but only when followed by adequate rest and recovery. Without the recovery period, the system degrades. With it, the system thrives and builds resilience.
Our nervous systems follow the same pattern. We are built for the dance of stress and recovery, challenge and restoration. The problem isn’t stress itself—it’s the missing half of the cycle.
We graze our attention continuously on digital stimulus, compact our days with endless demands, but never give ourselves the recovery time that allows the system to rebuild.
I am learning to tend my stress the way I tend my pastures—through planned recovery and mindful rotation. I rotate my attention, give my nervous system rest, let it serve its function and then move on. When real challenge comes—a sick lamb, a broken fence in a storm—my nervous system responds cleanly, purposefully. Then it’s over. The system regenerates.
This happens through practices that mirror the farm’s rhythms and honor all forms of capital. I move with the sun, building living capital in my own biological systems. I eat food that comes from soil I know, prepared with my own hands—converting material capital into the experiential capital of taste and nourishment. I work hard enough to be genuinely tired, earning the spiritual capital that comes from honest labor for something meaningful, then rest deeply, allowing intellectual and cultural capital to integrate through dreams and restoration and tomorrows creative pursuits.
I stay connected to the people and places that remind me who I am beneath all the noise—investing in the social capital that creates resilience far stronger than any individual achievement. And I remember that my farm is not separate from the larger community of land and life, but part of a web of relationships that includes watersheds and weather patterns. local and regional communities, markets and cultural traditions, all flowing together in the great economy that sustains everything.
Most mornings, I sit with my coffee and watch the light change across the fields. Sometimes thoughts come rushing in—worry about weather, about markets, about interest and inflation and politics - all the ways the world seems to be spinning apart. But I’ve learned to let them come and go like clouds across the sky. They are not me. They are not the truth of this moment.
The truth is the steam rising from my mug, the cardinal calling from the oak, the way the grass holds last night’s moisture like a thousand small prayers.
The truth is that I am here, alive, connected to something larger than my small anxieties. The truth is that every act of attention is an investment in living capital, every moment of presence builds spiritual capital, every choice to stay grounded rather than spin out creates conditions for the whole system to thrive. And as I build up this immense treasure of wealth, I am ever more able to share the riches with those around me.
We are not broken machines needing complicated repairs and optimization. We are complex, living systems that flourish in right relationship—with the earth, with each other, with the quiet wisdom that emerges when we finally stop running from our own aliveness. Like the grasslands that Allan Savory helped us understand, we are designed for cycles of appropriate disturbance followed by regenerative rest. Like the multiple forms of capital that flow through healthy communities, we are richest when we recognize that our wellbeing depends not on any single resource, but on the health of the whole web.
Mark Sisson taught me this from a different point of view - that of ancestral health. Our very DNA is built for this type of life - all we have to do is honor the natural pattern already present. Instead, most of us are trying to reinvent the wheel in a life saturated with conflict and strees and striving, replacing rest and recovery with drugs, alcohol, and other unhealthy vices - ever pushing the ball further down the road under the delusion that we don’t need real rest, or don’t deserve it, or aren’t permitted it. The result? Our body suffers. Our heart suffers. Our spirt suffers. Our health suffers. The quality of our experience, our output, our very life suffers.
The land knows how to heal because it knows how to complete cycles. The soil knows how to be rich because it knows how to receive what’s given and transform it through relationship. We can learn this too - in fact, we already know it. Deep inside, we remember that we belong to the same vast web of reciprocity that holds every growing thing - and all of this can be our loving teacher. And yet we prioritize the lie - that we are somehow machines of production.
Stress will come—it’s part of the conversation of being alive. But it doesn’t need to be our permanent address. We can learn to inhabit it fully when it serves, then return to the deeper ground of our being when it’s time to rest. We can manage our inner landscape with the same holistic understanding we bring to managing the land—recognizing that true health emerges not from controlling individual parts, but from fostering the relationships that allow the whole system to regenerate.
This is what I aim to practice here at Ridgemeade, here in my life: not the conquest of stress, but the cultivation of resilience. Not the elimination of challenge, but the art of dancing with whatever comes. Not the perfect life, but the fully lived one—rooted in the present moment, nourished by right relationship, sustained by the endless generosity of a world that still knows how to be whole.
The eight forms of capital flow through my days like water through the landscape—sometimes rushing with spring melt, sometimes pooling in quiet eddies, always moving toward the sea of connection that sustains all life. In tending my inner landscape with the same care I tend my outer one, I am not separate from the work of healing the world. I am part of it, cell by cell, breath by breath, choice by choice, building the conditions for regeneration from the ground up - constantly failing, constantly succeeding, constantly learning.
PHOTO CREDIT: Sydney Leehmuis
