Tending the Inner Pasture
In late summer, when the grass is still giving and the days still pretend they will never shorten, a hawk can make the whole pasture honest in half a second. The flock feels the shadow before I do. Heads lift. Bodies tighten. The sheep bunch, not because they are dramatic, but because they are sane. Their nervous systems do exactly what nervous systems were built to do. Then the hawk drifts on…one more moving comma in a wide sentence of sky…and the flock returns to grazing as if nothing happened.
That return is the part I keep staring at.
They do not hold a committee meeting about what the hawk might mean. They do not replay the shadow as a personal failure. They do not check their phones to see if other sheep are also worried about hawks. Their alarm has a purpose, and when the purpose passes, the cycle completes.
Humans keep the alarm running.
We live as though the hawk never leaves. Cortisol becomes background music. The chest stays slightly braced. The mind loops like a gate that will not latch. But there is no hawk. There are only the phantom birds we manufacture…inbox, headlines, circular worries, imagined wars, the vague sense of being behind on everything, even the things we have not yet agreed matter. A life can be perfectly safe and still feel like a chase, because the chase has moved inside.
I have watched land heal when we stop trying to dominate it and start paying attention. Let a pasture rest. Move the animals with intention. Stop scraping the last green blade like a miser. The recovery looks like a small miracle, but it is really just ecology allowed to finish its own sentences. The grip relaxes, and life does what it has been waiting to do.
The same pattern shows up in the inner landscape. Stress is not the enemy. On a functioning farm, disturbance is part of the design. Hooves break crust and make space for seed. Grazing takes the plant down, then the plant responds by rooting deeper, thickening, becoming more resilient…if it is given rest. The damage comes when there is no recovery, when pressure never lifts, when the pasture is asked to perform without reprieve until it thins out and quits.
Most modern stress is overgrazing. Not of grass…of attention.
We compact the day with constant stimulus and then act surprised when the system cannot regenerate. We keep grazing the same mental acre until it is bare dirt. We tell ourselves it is normal, because everyone else is doing it too. We call it productivity. We call it being informed. We call it adult life. But the body reads it as perpetual threat.
In Holistic Management, Allan Savory made a big, plain contribution by insisting on the missing half of the cycle. Disturbance without recovery is degradation. Disturbance with recovery can be renewal. That principle is not only about grasslands. It is about households, marriages, health, and the way a mind holds its own weather.
I learned a helpful language for this from Ethan Soloviev and the eight forms of capital. It is a way of naming what we already know but routinely forget. Wealth is not only money. There is living capital in soil microbes and mycorrhizal networks. There is material capital in tools, shelter, fences that actually hold. There is intellectual capital in understanding how systems work…how a pasture responds…how a nervous system responds. There is experiential capital gained by walking the same fields long enough to read wind and cloud the way other people read screens. There is social capital in neighbors, friends, and the quiet competence of mutual aid. There is cultural capital in rituals, skills, stories, and memory handed down. And there is spiritual capital…the capacity to live in right relationship with what is larger than you, the unnameable source you can feel most clearly when you stop trying to control everything.
Out here, those forms of wealth braid together whether I think about them or not. A morning walk builds experiential capital in the simplest way…eyes open, senses working, attention placed back into the world that is actually here. The physical work is material capital improved and maintained. The satisfaction of honest labor strengthens social capital with the few people who recognize that kind of day as a good day. The intellectual capital of understanding stress physiology serves the living capital of my own biology. Even the cultural capital of a dawn ritual ties me to generations of farmers who began the day by looking first, not rushing first.
What breaks the cycle is not the existence of stress. Even the deer does not resent the coyote for being a coyote. Predator and prey belong to the same grammar. Drought and flood are not personal insults. The real problem is stress without meaning…alarm without end…artificial urgency manufactured for profit, then sold back to us as reality. A system locked in permanent high alert starts to look like runaway consumerism. Buy, discard, work to buy again. No true rest. No real digestion. No recovery. Just churn.
So I have been trying to manage my inner pasture the way I manage the outer one. Not by eliminating challenge, but by respecting cycles. Planned recovery. Mindful rotation. When something real happens…a sick lamb, a fence down in weather, a problem that requires the clean, focused kind of adrenaline…the nervous system can answer. Then the event passes, and the system is allowed to come back down.
This sounds abstract until you put it into days.
Move with the sun, as much as you can. Eat food whose story you know, prepared with your own hands, and notice what that does to the mind. Work hard enough to be genuinely tired. Not the burned out tired of screen glare and scattered attention, but the earned fatigue of muscles that did something real. Then rest deeply. Let sleep be a form of stewardship. Let the mind integrate. Let tomorrow arrive without being dragged into today like a second wagon behind the first.
Stay connected to people and places that remind you who you are beneath the noise. Do not outsource your sense of self to the current temperature of the internet. On the farm, resilience lives in relationships…the web, not the individual hero. That is as true for a watershed as it is for a family.
Most mornings, coffee in hand, I watch the light change across the fields. Worries still visit. Weather. Markets. Interest. Inflation. Politics. The sense that the world is fraying at the seams. But I am learning…slowly, inconsistently…to let those thoughts move like clouds rather than settle like permanent weather. They are not me. They are not the truth of this moment.
The truth is smaller and more immediate. Steam rising from the mug. A cardinal calling from the oak. The way grass holds last night’s moisture like a thousand quiet beads. The flock shifting, patient and unbothered, waiting for me to be as present as they are.
Mark Sisson’s ancestral health lens names the same thing from another angle. The body is not a machine designed for endless artificial stress. It is an organism designed for cycles…effort and recovery, alertness and rest, danger and safety. When we refuse the cycle, we try to patch the deficit with substitutes…drugs, alcohol, numbing habits, the thin relief of distraction, the delusion that we do not need rest or do not deserve it. The body suffers. The heart suffers. The spirit suffers. Even the quality of our work suffers, not because we lack grit, but because we lack the soil conditions for regeneration.
The land knows how to heal because it completes cycles. Soil becomes rich because it receives, transforms, and returns through relationship. If the farm teaches anything worth carrying into the rest of life, it is this…health is not achieved by controlling individual parts. It is achieved by tending relationships…between stress and recovery, between body and breath, between attention and place, between a person and the community of life around him.
So I am trying to practice something less heroic and more faithful. Not conquest of stress, but cultivation of resilience. Not the perfect life, but a fully lived one…rooted in the present, nourished by right relationship, sustained by the quiet generosity of a world that still knows how to be whole.
And when I fail, which is often, the pasture still offers a correction. The flock still teaches the simple lesson. The hawk passes. The grass keeps growing. The day opens again.
Source for the original post’s themes and key images.
Author bio
Blake Ragghianti is a regenerative farmer and certified Primal Health Coach. He also continues a career in premium boutique distilling. He is a father of three and now raises nutrient-dense food with his family on a regenerative farm rooted in ancestral principles and respect for land, animal, and human. (primalhealthcoach.com)
PHOTO CREDIT: Sydney Leehmuis
