The Beauty That Persists

Five years after farming through the pandemic, maybe this is the work

Jun 27, 2025

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The other day, my phone popped up a photo memory: five years ago today.

And it hit me all at once: it’s been five years since 2020.

I write “2025” every time I date a journal entry, but it wasn’t until I looked at photos from that summer that this marking of time sunk in. And it feels like we should mark it. Like an anniversary we don’t want to go back to, but must remember for some deep-marrow sake.

What I see when I look at these photos is bounty.

How that was the summer we grew for 100 CSA shares on 1 acre for the first time. How beautiful the strawberries were.

How the evening light was a relief that eased us out of the heat of the days.

What I remember when I read old blog posts from that summer is how dry it was.

How smoke from Canadian wildfires set a near constant haze in the sky. I remember how despite photos of CSA shares, those images of bounty stretched us thin. When I read a letter to other farmers (that was really a reminder to myself), I remember how it was always changing, with beauty and stress braided together.

What no one knew then is how we’d been planning to pare down that year.

How at the end of 2019, I’d told Edge I wanted to shift away from the farm business. And then 2020 came like an undertow pulling me back into it with full force. I’m a good swimmer, though — and in 2020 I was grateful to be on the farm, to live in this beauty and safety with my family.

After the pandemic summer pulled me back in, it took me three years to finally pivot away from the farm business, and another two for us to wind down the CSA.

Lately I’ve been wondering why transitions take so long.

And maybe the answer is that transitions are seasons of their own. There’s a reason Vermonters have accepted mud season and stick season. It’s wiser to acknowledge the shift from spring to summer, fall to winter, than to lament it.

Which brings me back to 2025, five years since the pandemic.

What have we learned from that pause? There’s so much in the world that feels worse right now, but when I look back I see lessons scattered like seeds. Like this, written in push and pull of 2020:

So you wake up again, not knowing if the day will be good or bad, only that you will do what you can. When it’s over, you’ll rest in the song of crickets and wood frogs, cradled between land and sky, and breathe in the beauty that persists.

Last night I walked outside, breathing in the smell of clover and bedstraw.

All this beauty grows in the transitional space between cultivated rows, mowed grass, and forest.

I still wake up in the mornings not knowing if the day will be good or bad, but realizing now how it’s always been beauty that carries me through.

Beauty, this concept so sentimentalized and commercialized we can almost forget the point of it. But the heart of beauty is too wild to be captured by commerce. John O’Donohue writes, “When we awaken to the call of beauty, we become aware of new ways of being in the world. We were created to be creators. At its deepest heart, creativity is meant to serve and evoke beauty.”

And maybe that’s my work now, to grow beauty.

Maybe that’s always been the work. Maybe the truth is that we’re always in some sort of transition, and beauty is the wayfinder guiding us toward possibility.

Wherever you are today, may you notice beauty and feel held.