Noonday Notes

Issue No. 27

December 12th, 2025

This week I’ve been thinking about why I love farming so much. Why it pulls on something deep inside me. Why it feels so grounding, so healing, so familiar. I think I feel this way because farming taps into something embedded in our creation, which is the ability to create life. Not in some abstract way, but literally.

As a woman, the theme of creation can be complicated. And beautiful, heavy, and complex. I’ve experienced the pain of life that didn’t continue in my own body. There’s something in us that knows we’re made to create life, and when that ability is interrupted or lost, it leaves space that’s hard to name. For me farming can stand in the gap.

Maybe this is why people are always impressed by farmers or anyone who can raise and harvest their own food. I know I’m not the only one watching way too many reels on Instagram of homesteading, turning yards into micro-farms, or raising chickens. It’s like super in right now y’all. And I don’t think that’s an accident. It’s our longing to create, to nurture, and to bring life from the ground. But there’s also death. Did you really think I’d get this far and not go dark on you?

This Wednesday I spent the morning helping my new farmer friend Jaime at Born Again Farm process over 40 of his chickens. “Process” is just a fancy word for taking life. It had been nearly twenty years since I’d done that kind of work, but it was the same as I remembered: reverent, sobering, and strangely beautiful. You feel the truth in each cut. We have the ability to nurture life and the ability to end it.

While we worked, we shared our testimonies and talked about our old selves dying, and what being born again looks like and feels like. Which can be dark. But I’ve never been one to pretend everything is “all good” all the time. And I loathe the “no bad days” stickers. It’s super cringe. And not real life.

There are bad days. There is real darkness. And pretending otherwise means we miss the miracle of the light when it finally breaks in.

Perhaps that’s what farming is for me, for all of us. The ongoing practice of participating in both the dark and the light. Seeds splitting underground. Some not making it. Plants reaching for the sun. Life ending. Life beginning. And God is in all of it.

I’ll leave you with more truth, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” John 12:24 ESV

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