on becoming tenderly rooted

During the summer of 2015, Jenn posted a picture on her Instagram of our garden produce and tagged it with "#tenderlyrooted". It resonated deep within us; I felt it captured more than just our garden, it seemed to capture our state of being as a family. 

Then, in 2017 Kaben was in Thailand and saw a street vendor with art that resembled a deer blending in to a tree. The image passed quickly, and Kaben didn't stop to talk to the artist or gather more information -- but the image wouldn't leave his mind. With nothing but an impression in his mind, we commissioned a freelance artist to develop the concept further and the result is the logo you see on this website. So, what does it represent?

Like the Parker Palmer quote above, the image of a deer evokes a representative concept of the soul - it is visible, but perhaps not in the means and times that work best with our busy lives. Why? Our belief is that the soul is inherently without defenses: it is pure vulnerability. And so, in the rush of life, the soul hides itself away safely out of sight until the noise dies down a little.

Our whole life is filled with this imagery of being tenderly placed. As a deer in the woods, attentive to the cool of the trees and rustle of leaves, calm, ready to flit away at a moment's notice. You look and notice the deer, and know that if you look away and back again it may like not be as it was: it may be gone without a sound and probably not too far away, just outside the line of sight.

Like our farm, the image of a tree evokes a representative concept of the soul - it is firm, growing slowly, and active in the areas most often out of our eyesight: in the upper canopy and in the root structure. Trees are the quintessential image of the "steady and reliable": a towering Redwood, an enormous oak, a sprawling walnut. We are wired to relax in their embrace. Trees are also the essential image for the wholeness of life and the holism of the connected world: history is stored in the rings, love is found in the shade, animals make homes, the roots go down and the branches go up. Even the most primal stories center on trees: the fabled Tree of Life being just one example.

Likewise, our whole life is filled with this image of being firmly rooted. And yet, the image of the deer and the image of the tree cannot be more opposite: one is "now you see it, now you don't" and the other is "you can always see it in the same spot for generations." So we have moved from dualism and now see these apparent opposites as friends, compliments, even the very same as one another when looking at the world from a long enough and close enough view.

With the merging holism of the image and the lingering impression of the art in Thailand, we sought to create an icon that represents what it means to be tenderlyrooted. The result is an image that shows a deer becoming a tree, and a tree becoming a deer; they are one. The deer has one hoof raised as if ready to move, and it's head is on a swivel as if paying attention to the slightest sound. The tree has roots going down deeply in a mess of eager and tangled life, grabbing hold of all the rich goodness of the soil. Likewise the antler-branches are bursting with life and extend all the way to the edges of the image.

This image represents the soul, our dreams for our farm and our movement in the world; it represents the story of our lives and the story of this land. And so, like the deer-tree, we seek to align our lives with a cadence of attentive wholenss, fully rooted into our place, our time, and our history of what it means to be momentary deer in an eternal forest of Great Stories.