My life today is mostly an agrarian one. It is not quiet or romantic in the way that people imagine when they think of farm life. It is demanding and physical and often exhausting. Animals do not wait for my convenience. Weather does not care if I slept poorly. Pipes freeze, animals escape, fences break, and the work grows faster than I can keep up with it. There is no weekend. There is no “clocking out.” There is only responsibility and whatever the day requires.
A few years ago I lived a very different life. Most of my time was spent inside restaurants in Southern California, on Sunset Boulevard or in Culver City or Pasadena. Now my days are shaped by chores, children, soil, and animals that depend on us. That shift has changed the way I see the world, and I felt it strongly on a recent trip to the zoo with my kids.
What surprised me wasn’t the animals. It was the people.
Walking from exhibit to exhibit, I overheard parents explaining things to their children with full confidence and almost no accuracy. One man told his son that the plant in front of them wasn’t a tree because the bark was green and “real trees have brown bark.” Another child asked how giraffes survive the winter in Texas and his father told him they grow fur. They do have fur, but without heat and shelter they would never make it through a hard freeze. Still, the boy accepted the answer because it sounded certain.
As we continued through the zoo, I noticed something else. A woman behind the gift shop counter corrected me when I said “Thank you, ma’am.” She told me she identifies as “they” and “them.” In Texas, “sir” and “ma’am” are simply ways of speaking respectfully. There is no commonly understood third option, and people are fumbling to adjust to language that is shifting faster than meaning.
The teenage boy who sold us popcorn wore eyeliner, painted nails, and dyed hair. Not unusual anymore. A surprising percentage of people under 30 seem unsure of something that used to be one of the simplest truths of life: male or female. Now it is a question instead of a reality.
Meanwhile, my children were being their wild selves and could not understand why any of this was strange. They did not understand why they had to stay on the designated walkways. They did not understand why they could not pee on a tree.
“But nitrogen is good for trees,” my son said.
“I know,” I told him. “But we are in the city, and people here think that is a crime.”
He laughed because he thought I was joking. I wasn’t.
My daughter wanted to climb the rocks beside a bridge, because she knew she could easily jump them. I told her she had to stay on the bridge. She asked why, because in her mind the rules did not match reality. I told her that this place was designed for safety and control and not for learning how to move through real terrain. She sighed and crossed the bridge like someone who had been demoted.
My 2-year-old crouched behind a trash can moving side to side with the seriousness of a predator. I asked her what she was doing. She whispered that she was hunting a fat squirrel. I asked her why it was fat, and without hesitation, she answered, “Popcorn.”
My older kids asked why the female lion was alone. Where was the male? Why weren’t herd animals kept in herds? Their questions were rooted in nature and truth instead of discomfort or ideology. In that moment I felt proud. At least in my home, the connection to creation has not been severed.
Looking around that zoo, it became clear that confusion is everywhere. Confusion about identity. Confusion about nature. Confusion about strength and even about common sense.
And then another thought emerged. We are no longer a culture that admires resilience or capability. We are not a survival culture anymore. We are a cushioning of the weakest culture.
In an agrarian life, we mirror nature. We live with the natural world, not above it or beyond it. Plants reach upward. Animals protect their young. Everything in nature strives toward strength. Nothing thrives by becoming more fragile.
Yet many men today seem to be reaching toward softness. Toward frailty. Toward something that looks more like vulnerability than responsibility. Strength is treated as suspicious instead of necessary. But without strength, there is no survival. Not on a farm. Not in a family. Not in civilization.
That truth became even clearer a few days earlier when two young men from a moving company came to help someone leave our land. They were kind young men but nervous the entire time. Within minutes, one whispered, “Does your husband have guns?” I told him yes, but as long as he didn’t do anything to make my husband want to use one, he’d be fine. They didn’t laugh.
They kept watching the sky like prey animals. “It is going to get dark soon. We should leave,” they said.
They asked whether the cows at the end of the road were extremely old. They described them as gray with loose skin and hunchbacks and assumed that meant age and weakness. I explained that they were Brahman cows, young breeding females built for heat tolerance. They still insisted I must be wrong.
When they saw my goats, they asked whether someone might steal them. I told them nobody drives around the countryside looking to steal goats. One said, “But that’s a lot of meat.” I told him it was an OK amount and then asked whether he knew how to turn a goat into meat. He didn’t. So I told him I wasn’t worried.
One of them finally asked what I do all day. He asked if I “just chill out here.” I told him there is so much work that it never ends. They drove away without collecting the required signature and had to come back because fear outweighed doing the job correctly.
All of these moments revealed something I can’t unsee. We are raising people who know screens better than soil. People who trust systems but not themselves. People who are disconnected from the very world that sustains them.
Without God, without purpose, without nature, without truth, people lose their bearings.
A zoo should remind us that we are part of creation. Instead, it revealed how far we have drifted from it.
We belong here. We were created on purpose. And it is time we remember how to live like it.
