Nature
Our garden is amazing right now and the apples are getting ripe too! One of the great parts about renting Spirit Hill Farm is you get to reap (and eat) the benefits of what is growing on the property. We still have a couple of weekends left to rent in August and September. Learn more […]
The girls are hard at work. Just another beautiful, Summer day at Spirit Hill Farm.
Having left Spirit Hill after living there for two years, I understand even more acutely why so many guests return to stay. There is this world, and then there is Spirit Hill Farm. The other night there was an almost-full moon, and I stood outside and looked at it and tried to connect to the […]
A couple of weeks ago I learned that if a tree falls in the middle of the night at Spirit Hill, no one hears it. Well, the chickens must have, since it fell on top of their house, but they’re still not talking about it. Who knows, maybe they are heavy sleepers and they slept […]
As farmer-in-training at Spirit Hill, I have learned that whatever I plant is as much the birds’ and the animals’—deer, turkeys, chickens, moles, gophers, birds, insects, for example—as it is mine. Growing things at Spirit Hill is a good exercise in non-attachment. Hello, three sunflower plants I bought at Harmony and love so much. Hello, […]
We’re getting the pool resurfaced in April. Carolyn and Julie picked out the tile for the edge, and the color made me cry. It’s so this place—it’s the kind of blue you feel you’ve seen before in your childhood or later as an adult during times when you were very happy or in love or […]
When I wrote “small kindness” as a title I thought, Hmmm, that’s not exactly it. Small is so…small. Can something be small and massive at the same time? The acorn comes to mind. And so does the package we, at Spirit Hill, got in the mail. It was…small. And in it was a small card […]
A year ago, I didn’t know I’d be living at Spirit Hill Farm. I was visiting from Boston because Carolyn had invited me to fly out and stay in the guest house for a week so I could finally see her beloved property after hearing about it for years. A week away from Boston winter […]
According to the vegetable garden, summer’s over. The squash plants look like they got cooked, and the parsley looks like it fell asleep. Secretly, the frosting and subsequent toppling over of the garden is a big relief to me. I worked hard all spring and summer figuring out how to get plants to grow. (As […]
“This place is like a second home to us,” a guest said to me recently as he and his family were getting to leave after another weekend at Spirit Hill. I asked him what he liked best about the place, and he told me it was how it made him feel. “It’s so Zen here,” […]