Hof-Ubuntu

The last few days I was listening to the past. It answered with a farm.

Years ago I started it. Vegetables in rows. A few sheep, some goats, bees at the edge of the field. A smallholding — the kind that asks for everything you have and most of what you don't.

I called it Hof-Ubuntu. Ubuntu — I am because we are. I did not name it after myself.

The name was not only over the gate. We held garden parties — international ones, all walks of life at one long table. The word was lived there before it was understood.

It was a dream. Not the thing that kept the lights on — that was never my department — but the thing I wanted to build. A way of working the land that returned what it took.

A farm like that does not run on money. It runs on time. Hours that do not come back. I spent them in the rows and the pens, and at the house the people I loved were waiting.

One day it was put to me plainly. Family, or vegetables.

I chose family.

It looked like giving something up. It wasn't. The dream stood on the family the way a roof stands on walls. No family, no dream. You do not keep the roof by knocking out the walls.

The word was already over the gate. I am because we are. When the choice came I did not have to decide what was true — only whether I would do what the name had been saying all along. I let the farm go. I kept the thing the name was pointing at.

People ask what a man, a father, is for. I have given a lot of answers over the years, most of them about work.

The true one is plainer. The core is family. Take away the projects, the land, the dream, and that is what is still standing. Not what I do. What I am made of.

I built a farm to say it. I understood it the day I let the farm go.

Then, over the years, I forgot. Not all at once — the way a field is lost. Not by storm. By neglect. You stop walking the rows, and one season the rows are gone.

Seventy days now, I have been walking them again. Up before the sun. The body, the soil, the writing, the listening.

There is no fence against forgetting. Only the daily walking.

Seven places were on the table. The number was never the question. Now I am listening, the direction has been read. I am here to serve, with. The needs of the people who have been close to me all these years belong in this too.

Day 70b — Phase 11 — Thought — Gallbladder — Onyx — Ubuntu
Gut Nisdorf, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Baltic Coast
© 2025–2026 Michel Garand | A Pilgrim's Fitness Plan | CC BY-SA 4.0
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