Growing a Farmer - Part 1... Off the beaten path

"Growing a farmer" by Kurt Timmermeister is definitely promising to be an interesting book, at least after going through the first half. More than ever, the idiom "don't judge a book by its cover" is true. With its bright green cover, it's easy to mistake it for a farming manual. But digging through pages, you soon start to realize that it's much more than that. The author tells us how everything began, how his life suddenly changed when he decided to move away from the chaos of a growing city like Seattle and move to the nearby island of Vashon. Only a 15 minutes boat ride apart, these two places are described as being more distant than that. The river between the city and the island is not different from those we can find in literature. By crossing the Acheron, Dante and Virgil reached the inferno, as we can read in the pages of the most notorious work of arts in Italian literature, Dante's "Divina Commedia". In the XIX century, Renzo, one of the main characters in Alessandro Manzoni's novel "I Promessi Sposi", crosses the river Adda in Northern Italy and he's save, after escaping from the mass tumult in Milan,  where the police accused him of being the cause of the rebellious movement. In a similar way, the daily journey across the river was the continuos switch of two different identities. On the island, the author could dream and wonder about his future life as a farmer, while in the city he was grounded back to business and profit making.

I started feeling an empathy toward the author right from the first pages. Being brave enough to "cross the rivers" that keeps us away from our dreams is something not many people are capable of doing. In my case the river is even longer. It's an ocean, and then a land people defined it as "of the free". My beaten path is not any different than the driveway of Tim's new farm driveway, barely reached by the life of the main street. I wish more people followed this example, actually chasing their dreams no matter what, shaping their lives the way they want. Of course it's not easy, but everybody knows that "Rome wasn't built in a day". As the author mentions in the book, the process that lead him into this farm wasn't easy nor planned. I definitely admire him, being able to shape his life and being happy with what he has done by himself.

We'll see in the second part how this worked in details, in the meanwhile, we can just appreciate how brave he was leaving a profitable business for the beaten path in Vashon island.