This is the time of year when there is just too much of the good stuff. I find myself starting something, spending an hour or so on a project, and having to move to the next thing I scheduled on my calendar. Never quite having enough time to get to all the things. 

Christina here, writing about what happens when back to school and harvest season collide and the different ways that I try to measure value.

Currently, on the floor in front of our wood burning stove, I have no fewer than five plastic crates filled with potatoes, apples, tomatoes, and peppers in varying stages of ripening/rotting. I haven’t put away the big pot I used for canning the other night, and I have decided that today I really need to just roast all of the remaining peppers and tomatoes so that they don’t go bad. Oh, but not the hot peppers! Those need to be fermented.

In the garden right outside my window where I am typing this moment is a garden bed that is full of what are likely big delicious potatoes waiting to be harvested. I’m hoping that they’re still there at least, as I should have dug them up weeks ago!

And somewhere on the other side of the village, a fridge is full of goat and cow milk that needs to be turned into cheese or yogurt or ice cream or butter.

I had clean team on Sunday and we have Land Clean this Saturday, and somewhere in between all that I’m trying to get my kids to do their math and keep up with their reading.

I’m not the best at relaxing and giving myself a break, but during this early fall season it does feel like there’s more to do than usual. And when deciding how best to spend my time, it’s not always easy to measure the different areas of my life.

When the economy was doing better and I was making more money online, it was easier to take time away from income work to just do things that I valued for other reasons, but that choice is less easy now, and the urge to do more income work is not something that I can always ignore.

But if I make it about the monetary return, then it definitely doesn’t make sense to spend three hours canning eight pints of tomato sauce that I could probably buy for 20 dollars. When you add in the time for planting, weeding, and harvesting, then it really seems silly to dedicate so much of my life to growing and processing food.

If I think about where I am needed most, where my unique skills or experience can do the most good, then it also definitely doesn’t make sense for me to spend my hours making “beginner level” cheese. It’s something that just about anyone could do, and I’m not even all that good at it. Even writing this column, taking the time to figure out some ideas and enough details to interest a reader takes the time that I could be spending on any number of things. I mean, in no way do I want to suggest that I want to go back to the regular work-week grind, but there is something about not having to make all of the decisions in my life that I kind of miss.

One thing that does help me figure out what to drop and what to keep is to think about my values and how or when I can align with them. When I see my schedule through this lens, then spending time emailing about a conflict and listening to people talk about why they are upset feels like less a loss of my valuable time and more of a chance to walk the walk. Since I value alternative forms of conflict resolution, decision making, and governance, it makes sense that I practice those forms in my everyday life, even when they take a lot of time. Similarly, spending my time making cheese or canning tomato sauce might feel silly if I look at it as a way to save money, but if I think about it as aligning with my value of land based food production, then it’s a lot easier to take that time in my week.

For sure living a life that is more align with my values is a major reason why I wanted to come to DR. I don’t want to take that gift for granted or pretend that it isn’t very real. Maybe I just need to spend more time writing weekly columns to remind me of the ways that my day-to-day life choices align with my core values.

Christina Lovdal-Gil is what we would call a typical seven on the Enneagram scale; an individual with talents galore who finds it hard to pass up all the choices in life! We are glad that she continues to write for this newsletter and share her DR life with honesty and openness.