Welcoming quiet & new life in the New Year

We’ve been absent from your inbox lately as the December holidays brought a flurry of travel and events to many of our lives. There’s something wonderful about January’s contrast to December, when the decorations come down and the weather gets colder and the world seems to stand a little more still. We are embracing this quieter pace of life, in a literal and figurative sense.

Silence is becoming scarce in our modern world. Acoustic ecologist (can I get that job title?!) Gordon Hempton was interviewed by the On Being podcast a few years ago in a beautiful episode about sounds and silence. He says silence is “an endangered species on the verge of extinction.”

I too fall prey to the habit of always switching on the radio in the car or tuning into videos on my phone when there’s a still moment. But something powerful happens to our nervous systems when we experience quiet. In a study published in Heart, just two minutes of silence produced greater relaxation effects than listening to soothing music. Silence lowers cortisol, slows the heart rate, and allows the nervous system to heal (article). Hempton emphasizes that real quiet is a presence — not an absence of sound but an absence of noise.

So I have been embracing quiet in small ways — leaving my phone behind when we take the dogs on a walk or making dinner without putting on music. There has been more space for creativity in these moments. Last night, I pulled out my vegetable mandala coloring back and actually found time to meditatively color. And a few days ago, my sister and I created collages with our hopes for 2026 (see mine above).

We are also welcoming new life this year! If you haven’t heard our news yet, we are expecting a baby boy in April.

I have been trying to let my body sleep in, move with care, and linger over nourishing meals. Because our lives will be ramping up in the spring when we bring a baby into the world, at the same time as our breeding herd will be calving.

The farm still demands our time, mostly CJ’s at this point, in the winter. We have 60 pigs that require feeding, checking in on, and making sure their water doesn’t freeze. The cattle herd needs fresh bales of hay every couple days and to be moved around our pastures, when the ground is frozen, so that we can spread the fertility of the wasted hay and manure. But even so, the pace of farm life slows down in the winter when we don’t have to keep up with the rapid growth of grasses, our garden, and on-farm events. Next month, we’ll use this extra time to tap walnut trees and stand around the boiler with friends while making walnut syrup — one of our favorite winter activities.

We invite you to join us in these small practices of presence, quiet, and creativity.