Tiny hands in warm soil

My vision to bring our tattered world back into alignment with what’s real

I had an experience when I was 15 years old that changed my life.

I don’t remember how it happened, but I was asked to be a camp counselor for a group of inner city kids for just one day.

That morning, we piled the kids onto a school bus. As we loaded up, I remember them hanging their heads out of the windows, arms stretched into the air like they were reaching for something.

We got everyone settled and drove out to the country. The kids were jumping out of their skins when we pulled into the farm. Our first stop was the barn.

We walked down the aisle and stopped in front of a horse stall. We’d split up by then, and I was shepherding a clutch of three or four six-year-olds. We stood in front of one of the stalls, and the kids looked up at the opening expectantly, like they were waiting for the show to start.

Then an old horse came forward and hung his head over the door, his big brown eyes soft and fluttering.

The children jumped back, surprised by the sheer size of him. Then one little boy looked up at me, wide-eyed, and asked, “Can I pet him?”

That’s when I realized this child had never seen a horse before.

He had spent his whole life standing on pitted and broken concrete. If he was lucky, his mother took him to a city playground, anchored, but leaning, on bare earth, the grass worn away under the swings and at the bottom of the metal slide where this boy and others like him planted their feet when they reached the bottom.

I said, “Yes, of course you can,” and I lifted him up so he could reach. He placed his tiny hand on the horse’s head, and the sweet old guy closed his eyes. He sent love to that child, as horses do. It was so big that I felt it too.

I think about that boy all the time. I think about his trembling hand and his wide eyes.

He’s the reason I’m building Undertree Farm.

My dream is to bring people back to the land in a way that helps them feel more alive and connected. I want to give children the gift of nature and teach mothers how to feed their children out of a garden patch.

I want to help people see the magic beneath the vacant lot, the bus stop, the world they know and, along the way, show them a path they can follow to reconnect with their own souls.

All because a slip of a boy, in a place I can barely remember, showed me how it could be.

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