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Most of my life, I have lived as a farmer. I live and work with my extended family on an organic subsistence farm. We live this way, not necessarily because of intellectual conviction or high ideals, although we can drum those up if necessary, but because we have always lived this way and it suits us. It gives us abundant amounts of food, independence, and a sense of connection to our roots and to a piece of land that is indescribably precious and familiar.
As a farmer, my life is about growing food, being fed, and feeding others-animal and human. I think of our land in particular, and the earth in the abstract, as a place that nurtures me, keeps me safe, fed, warm, and that has created the person I am. It is a place to which I belong, and without which I am not sure I could, spiritually and in other ways, survive. It is infinitely lovely, awesome, constantly changing.
After half a lifetime on this one small piece of land, I think of it as both ultimately unknowable yet wonderfully, securely familiar. I know, for example, that a certain piece of ground will generally produce abundant corn, and another piece will produce scabby potatoes-and I know that from a lifetime of experience and practice. I know more than I think I know; the feel of grass stems ready to cut for hay, the moment the peaches will begin to drop from the tree branches in August, the sombre look of a cow in labour. I know I am at home here, and I know how much that, being at home, I am subject to and part of the mystery that surrounds me.
Consequently, when I first read about ecofeminism and about the recovery of ancient goddess-linked spirituality, I was both excited and intrigued. It seemed to fit so clearly with what I already knew, and it created a new sense of empowerment in my political work as a feminist and an environmentalist. I also spent some time working with First Nations people, reading and researching about indigenous people's traditional view of the earth. I learned from such writers as Paula Gunn Allan and Carol Lee Sanchez about what Sanchez calls the "gynocratic"...