WOMBman in Agriculture

You won’t see the photo of the series of women cradling each other’s descendants on any billboard advertising the future of agriculture. Yet, that photo, and the one on the left, is what moves me to not give up on the Heartland I love with all my heart. 

The women in the photograph from left and the key attributes they taught me:

Grandma Laura (Strobel) Tonniges showed us resolve, class, style, and courage with limited means. She was generous, determined, and a caregiver, raising her own siblings and later even starting a small nursing home in her own home. She achieved schooling in nursing and was proud of that because it was achieved on a dream and a dime. 

Grandma Ruth (Heine) Gonnerman was unapologetic about being a ceiling breaker, a college-educated woman when many women simply could not, or were not allowed, to advance their careers. We didn’t find out Grandma Heine was a nationally-awarded teacher until we read her obituary. She was a pragmatic, good-humored, lifelong learner, witty conversationalist, community volunteer, tireless mentor, and the family glue. 

My mom showed me four, (far too short), years of presence I have felt forever with me. The memories I have of her are like an impressionistic painting of feelings: laughter, warmth, and acceptance combined with her sense of adventure and creativity. 

I miss all of them. I still walk with them. I daily reach for their presence.

I was their child and grandchild and the child of the outdoors. I spent most of my formative years inside my imagination, barefoot, skipping, and pretending. I circumvented the way others did things. I ran around on my own. I always had this dream though, to save the feeling I had with them and the land. 

A feeling that a precious few neighbors gave me too, when times were simply tough for all of us at home on the farm. I ran away to warmth and acceptance, a different aura inside a different farmhouse, wherever my bicycle would traverse down those gravel roads. I would also rest under cottonwood trees and skip around in the mud. I wrote little stories, got covered in soil from head to toe, and I searched for myself. 

I also dispersed myself to others for attention and to survive. It got messy, and then it got better, and messy, and better, and so on ... Because I had to figure me out. I had to straighten myself out. Keep learning you know? It was very hard and good, and hard. Like life is for all people … good and hard.

After college and such I went ahead and gave ag business a try, to save the family farm and ranch. To save those feelings I felt on healthy farms with healthy families at kitchen tables and in mom and my grandmas’ arms. 

But the global, conventional ag corporate business model and I didn’t jive. They “loved me” sort of (as much as there is love in corporate life). Love for someone who just wanted to bring back poetry to the plains butts up against corporate jets that just want to sell more seed corn to it. They appreciated my work ethic, my ability to help and stay out of the way too I suppose. But they didn’t really get my heart. My heart sewn like we all are, by design, seeded in a womb. 

So, I had to design a business, a profession of my own, because none of the other ones I worked for suited me. Because, well, they couldn’t be me. Because I am the only me. As you are the only you. The world needs that full expression of the only you too. 

That’s when I decided to become my core self, a WOMBman business owner in agriculture. But ultimately a woman from a womb with a womb, hoping to truly help. Help humans. Help earth. 

My womb has given birth to all the children I will ever have. However, its influence on my profession to the world is not over.  My goal has never been to be a man in a man’s world. It has been to be myself in a human world. We’re all humans in a human world. That’s really how I see things and feel things. 

So the photos with this post would be the first billboard I would put up for “Hope Sojourns for the Heartland Powered by the Graze Master Group.”

Because we are all from wombs that will one day return to the soil for eternity. In this short streak of lightening time I have here, I must be myself and you should too. 

AgriCULTURE needs our fingerprints, not so much our sales strategies. AgriCULTURE needs its heart and soul again. It needs everyone who eats. 

Nothing is for sale in these photos. They are mine, flesh and blood, ancestors inside me, Creator-willing a portion of what is good in me will blossom in future wombs too. Renewed and brought to life by that miraculous circle of life. You know, the way things go. 

The way life has always been on this vast land, before we staked any claim. Before maps, property lines, fences, bombs, billboards, and wars. Before the seeds that sustain us were sold to us. 

We are all connected by that beginning shelter, a WOMBman somewhere loved and gave love and gave us life. 

That’s all our fundamental story. It started in a WOMBman. That’s why I see that story in all of you. Everyone was born. Isn’t that something to nurture, celebrate, understand, and have hope about? I think so. I really do. All the way down in my heart. 

The “Hope I have in the Heartland” was sewn in many mothers before me and was always in me. Just as someone in your lineage had great hope for you that is woven inside you too. 

To me, that is what it means to be a WOMBman in agriculture. That is my business, but it’s not a business really. It’s the source of my story, mine and all our lives. I just want that source of life to continue: soil, soul, water, air, and the breaths of life that find their starts in a mother’s womb today and some future day under shade and abundance I hope to plant but won’t see, except through the eyes of someone else whose DNA has a part of me. 

Sending everyone love today. Rest your mind’s eye and the chambers of your hearts on at least one WOMBman in your ancestry circle that means the world to you. See the light of hope there. See that seed of hope in you. 

I mean, why wouldn’t we want to protect the living water, land, air, and all creatures great and small? Those are the precious resources that sustained a womb that carried you too.  

www.grazemastergroup.com/hope-sojourn-sessions

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