Florida Prairie Regenerative Farming and Bathing Sandhill Cranes : Finding Peace When the World Feels Unsafe

This is Part 1 of a three-part meditation on Florida prairies, sacred ground, and what it means to be a steward of the land.

This week has been hard. The kind of hard that comes when people misunderstand you, when conflict arrives uninvited, when the noise of the world tries to convince you that you are something you're not.

In the middle of the noise, we had to go to work.

Had to smile.

Had to pretend.

Hope all things.

Believe all things.

Endure... all things.

Wipe burning tears.

Hold my husband's hand tight because maybe at any moment, it's just he and I against the world and I needed to hold his hand with a fierceness so as to be ready.

We visited a client in Morriston—a man who isn't just farming; he is building. He has spent this past year reading every regenerative farming book he could find, obsessed with a singular mission: to turn a 10-acre sandy plot of his vast prairie land into a native Florida food forest. Standing beside him, I realized something, "A man's life is not his own, from birth to death he is bound up with other lives and places, and with the lives of the dead and the lives of the unborn."  -Wendell Berry. This man understood that. He wasn't looking to farm for profit. He was farming for the future.

As my husband and I stepped into his blank canvas of a field, my mind still racing with the battles of the week, and then... silence.

It wasn't empty silence. It was the symphonic silence of a Florida prairie.

I watched our client's face as he talked. He wasn't stressed. He was glowing. He spoke of arrowheads and ancient native tangerines that have survived on this land for generations—fruit carried by settlers, nurtured through freezes, passed down like a blessing. He pointed out the low-lying spots where the prairie holds water—even now, in our drought—because the geology deep beneath our feet knows how to save for a rainy day.

The water in that low spot wasn't just water. It was time itself, pooling. It was the memory of centuries of rain, the patience of the aquifer, the future generations of cranes who would drink from it.

It was past and present and future, all holding hands just as tight as I held my husband's.

And then, the moment happened.

Four deer walked out of the tall grass like they had nothing to fear, only pausing a brief minute to study us to be sure we were safe. Their ears forward. Their eyes bright. Not running. Not flinching. Just walking with the slow confidence of creatures who know they are home.

In the distance, amongst roaming cattle, Sandhill Cranes danced in the marshy water, their prehistoric calls echoing off the ancient oaks—the same calls their ancestors made when this land was young.

I snapped a photo.

Through the camera lens, I saw what I had forgotten: a world where conflict doesn't exist, where evil isn't possible, where the only thing that matters is that the water holds space for the birds, the grass holds space for the deer, the soil holds the memory of a thousand years of growth, and the human holds space for the trees.

This is what Wendell Berry meant when he wrote of finding peace in the wild things—not escape, but homecoming.

This is what it means to remember that we belong to something larger than ourselves. We belong to the prairie. We belong to the water. We belong to the community of all living things, past and present and future.

I remembered then in that moment that this is why we fight for the soil.

This is why we protect the land. Because when the world feels unsafe, the land remains our sanctuary. The prairie doesn't judge. It receives.

We understand something essential standing in front of this excited and hopeful man: we are not separate from the ecosystem. We are the ecosystem. What we do to the soil, we do to ourselves. What we build for the cranes, we build for our children's children. That is the culture of belonging... of regeneration and the culture of the community this man wants so desperately to be apart of.

A place to call home. A place to belong. As Eugene Peterson describes the church, "a place to be accepted for who we are, free to be what God created us to be. We're not competitors; we're a community. All of the distinctions we're used to making are dissolved here. Each of us is accepted in terms of our own unique contribution to the Glory of God."

If you are going through a storm this week, I hope you can find your patch of prairie. I hope you can find the spot where the deer feel safe enough to walk slowly. I hope you can hear the cranes calling you home.

We are helping this client build his soil. But I think, yesterday, for at least a few minutes, he helped rebuild my soul. And in doing so, he reminded me of something I had nearly forgotten: we are all connected. Across time. Across the earth. Through water and soil and the unbroken thread of all things working toward good.

Coming Next: The Memory of Water

In Part 2, we dive deeper into the geology beneath your feet—the ancient karst plain, the limestone sponge, and how understanding the earth’s memory changes everything about how we farm and pray over the land.

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