remaining embassadors of trust

At 4:47 in the morning, racing down the highway at 145km's an hour doesn't seem that fast. Glancing in my rear view every once in a while, the dark sky was slowly fading into a hazy grey. I suspect it's a color not very many of us are familiar with. I've only ever seen it this early in the morning - the color of transition - I imagine it's the color of sunrise before it hangs itself upside down from the sky and is flushed with shades of blood orange, red and pink.

Half an hour later I am well out of the city now... and noticing that every sunken valley is a hidding place for fog. In the farmers fields it was beauty... but ahead of me that same fog stretched itself across my path and now my stomach was sinking. I knew I wouldn't be able to see a thing. I exhaled long and slow as I let the car slow to 100. If you can picture it in your head I was at the very moment of disappearing into the fog listening to Phil Collins "Long Long Way to Go." I am not kidding. And I was right, I couldn't see. But in a blink, and without enough time to even spell the word "worry," it was over and the fog was breaking up and then gone. Ignoring the road in front of me, I starred dangerously in my riew view mirror as the image of the fog laying limp across the road became smaller and smaller. A smile stood from the corner of my mouth.

Words started coming to me as the highway unfolded. Questions. Wonderings. Like whether or not our newest generations will ever get to know the value of dirt under their finger nails? Or understand the simplicity of sunshine and rain and the power it has over sowing and reaping. I need to know... do farmers experience more of our world than we do here in the city? Or just a different part of it? Have enough of us paid attention to a single sunrise?... not counting the times one may have blinded us through the windshield as we crept along on our morning commute.

I worry because we are such a busy society. We miss so much, including each other. Famous for scheduling the masses into our tiny timeslots. How many of us still remember what it feels like when a conversation comfortably ends all on its own? Without an "I have to get going," or the ring of a cell phone "sorry, I have to take this." How do we ever scratch the surface with each other? How can we say we truly "know" one another? Having studied the cover... can we really say we've read the book?

Field after field... farmers amaze me. They are perhaps our last remaining embassadors of trust. Watch any one of them plant their seeds. A farmer knows that even with all of his effort some seeds simply won't grow, and with that same confidence, he also knows that the rest of them will - and that's what matters. I have never seen a farmer run back to his field after a long hard days work, drop to his knees and start digging up his seeds to see how they're doing, or check if they've taken to the soil okay. There is trust... and even more so, there is incredible patience.

We should think on this for a while. It applies to the way we invest in each other. It applies to those moments when we give... and for some reason can't let go, can't separate ourselves from the act. To embrace our part is to simply plant the seed. This is a whole other kind of farming, and a whole other handful of seeds need to be sown... with trust and even more so, with incredible patience.