Self-Reliance Reimagined

This article is available online in audio form at MotherEarthNews.com

It’s the middle of summer. Still, the barn in which the sheep spend winter needs to be raked out. Three piglets used the space before they were put into the hayfield. Nothing much is different about this raking chore, except that Paul, 51, is doing it using one arm and only enough vision to see through a pinhole.

Paul has cerebral palsy, and he uses a walker. He lives in a life-sharing community called Innisfree Village on 550 acres in Crozet, Virginia, and he can only ride in a rough-terrain vehicle (RTV) to weekly worksites after putting on elbow pads and a full-face helmet. The cows know his voice, though, and after checking water for the sheep, farm managers Nich Traverse and Tim Wool leave Paul to his own devices. Paul explains, “I scrape the hay like this, and I have an orange wheelbarrow to fill up for compost.”