The cooperative event between Debra Tyler’s Motherhouse and Bluestone Farm Living Arts Center was billed as such:

Women’s Wisdom: Sacred Agriculture

Mar 16,2013  –  Time:  9:00 am – 4:00 pm

Motherhouse and Bluestone Farm invite all women to join in a full day celebration of our connection to the earth through sacred agriculture. We’ll share our farming herstories, rituals, pea planting, pot-luck lunch, earth blessing way of the council, drumming circle and more.

In case you’ve never thought of sacred and agriculture together, here’s a good short read on the spirituality of farming. In case you don’t readily picture women when you think of farming, consider that the first farmers some 8-10,000 years ago were likely women and that the fastest growing group of those entering farming today are women.

My apologies for the pictures below. I used a phone (which is not a camera, despite what they say) and I was so caught up in the event, I forgot all about an illustrative progression. There are much better shots over at the Bluestone Farm Fans Facebook page and at Motherhouse’s blog.

We began with a fire and some food, mostly homemade from scratch. When I say from scratch, I mean the cheese spread was made from cream from their own cows. From scratch.

We blessed and sorted the dry peas, which are both food and seeds. These peas are not your garden variety peas, but a pea that’s more like a bean (whose name I should have written down but didn’t). Although much smaller, they have culinary attributes similar to a garbanzo, yet thrive in our climes. We were sorting through them to find the best specimens to plant—those that would produce the best plants. We prepared the beds, put up fences for the plants to climb, and planted the pea seeds in the still-frozen Earth.

We visited with the cows.

We ate a fabulous pot luck lunch.

We smudged with sage, we drummed, we spoke.

While I left exhausted, it was a most excellent day. This was the inaugural event of the space that had previously been a school, which is now something new. It was a pleasure to be part of the energy transfer.