In this gorgeous poem, wellbeing course attendee, Jackie Head, shares her experience of spending time at The Farm and the enormous benefits she found for her physical and mental wellbeing.
Jackie recently shared the poem at a fantastic ‘Words and Songs for Spring’ event at The Waldegrave in East Harptree, hosted by the Harptree Scribblers. We are enormously grateful for the Scribblers for inviting us to join and talk a bit more about the farm after the poem. The generosity of those attending the event raised a fantastic £450 for The Farm, enabling us to welcome more people onto the land to learn, connect and take action for a better future.
Plant a seed
Imagine an age of stone
before our kingdoms united
where seeds planted themselves
helped by the wind and wild animals
and flora and forests grew.
And humans roamed the land
hunting and gathering food.
A hard life I would think,
short and bloody.
Track forward,
to 4000 BC maybe
A mass migration
from Turkey and Greece
brings newcomers
equipped with skills
to feed larger populations.
Land was cleared
barley & wheat planted
and farming began.
Farming the solution finder
Farming the innovator
Farming the integrator.
Farming the safer, more steady,
food provider.
Farming the life saver.
Not an easy life exactly
But easier perhaps.
Now track forward to 2017
My life is caste in stone-
Or so I think.
I live like a hunter gatherer
free roaming the land,
excitedly preparing for the
next stimulating hunt.
High energy,
high stakes,
high on life.
And then my body lets me down
I drive through
It diminishes me more
I drive through;
a warrior,
holding high the burning torch-
but my zest is my undoing.
I cling on
dig deep
but it is no good
the wound is too deep
It will not heal,
And I am cast out of the tribe of work.
And so begins, another stone age
In me, in my retracted fingers
and ankles
aching with the weight
of immobility.
And pain,-
nerves raging in pain
muscles foreshortened by pain
my immune system waging war
within my heart and lungs and bones.
I am pain
I am nothing but pain
And I have lost my tribe.
In 1980, the anthropologist Margaret Mead
defined civilisation as a healed femur.
Looking at old bones,
this was the evidence
that a person who had broken their leg
(a catastrophic injury for a hunter gatherer)
had been fed and cared for
and given time to rest
rather than left to die.
In 2017,
trapped in my own dark space,
in a life-changing interruption,
civilization found me,
held my break
as a pause
and something within me began to heal
even without the medicines that now wrap around me,
a part of me tried to grow
towards the light.
And then came The Community Farm.
I remember the first moment
frost on the ground,
walking up the farm track
on sticks that rattled through
my broken body
to a yurt and a circle of chairs
calm words and kind faces
Soothing the broken hearted.
We made simple gifts
like a child might do,
strikingly imperfect corn dollies
and dream catchers,
but with the kernel
of some older freer me
reawakened,
and embedded seed deep,
where art and community connect,
the first shoot of some other
future me
began to grow.
We learned to slow down
to breathe
to play
to create.
Unruffled,
our facilitators
absorbed the unspoken pain
tended the land of our loss
and taught us
to plant a seed of hope
and imagine a future harvest,-
to gently tend our own crop
to feed ourselves
and each other.
The Farm was the solution finder
The Farm was the innovator
The Farm was the integrator.
The safer, more steady,
food provider.
The life saver.
© (2026) Jackie Head
