The Choice to Farm - remembering Ray Nay Paw by Katherine Kelly, executive director, co-founder, urban farmer This last weekend, I went to the funeral of Ray Nay Paw, one of the New Roots for Refugees farmers who graduated from our Juniper Gardens Training Farm. She died from breast cancer, leaving behind six children and her husband. During the service, there was talk of how she had come from a farming family and been a farmer all her life, in Burma, in the refugee camp and now, in her new country. People talked about how she loved growing food and feeding people; how it was a deep part of who she was. In thinking about her and the life she was creating here, it is an amazing thing that she chose, again, in this new country, to farm. It is an amazing thing that, in all her life’s circumstances, through all the extraordinary and difficult changes she went through, growing food and feeding people was a core and ongoing commitment. The local farming movement is made up of people who, like Ray Nay, choose to farm. We farm because we love being outside, physically engaged, moving always in the sun, the wind, being part of whatever the weather gives us. We love the nurturing of plants and people, the dynamic flow from seed to plant to food to compost, from birth to life to death. We love the connections we make to other farmers and the people we feed, being part of a network of relationships that has existed for as long as humans have been hunting, gathering, and farming. Sometimes the daily choice to farm is an easy thing for all of these reasons. Sometimes, though, choosing to farm is a painful mix of inertia and willpower. Our embrace of the physicality of farming turns against us, we are exhausted, achy, cranky. The sun that was so kind in June has become unrelenting; the rain is too little or too much. The finances of agriculture begin to look like an extended bout of financial irresponsibility. The only thing worse in those moments, those days, those weeks, than continuing to farm is not farming. Ray Nay Paw had a lifetime of experience of those ups and downs, as well as generations behind her that had learned how to manage the unique manias and depressions that farming offers. Those of us with less depth of experience have to struggle harder to trust the process and ourselves through it. We are, in many ways, at greater risk of coming to the choice to not farm, because we don’t have that long view and that hard-earned knowledge of resiliency and survival. Her life is a story that can be told to help us keep that long view. In her farming, she found and offered a quiet joy that carried her through all kinds of changes. She had a radiant smile. She would be out in her field and you’d walk by and she would tilt her chin up at you and just smile so warmly that you’d feel yourself settle down and in a little bit. I invite you to look at her picture, see her smile, and let her share her joy and love of farming with you.
Posted on: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 01:31:01 +0000
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