Nothing Was Wasted
How old skills, overlooked beauty and faith became Farmstracts
Recently, a family member looked at Farmstracts and asked me, “Do you realize what you have built?”
They called it a window into my world. I understood what they meant, but window did not feel quite right. A window lets people look from a distance. Farmstracts feels more like a doorway. I have spent nearly three years building it, and now I am opening that door to anyone willing to step inside and look.
At first glance, it may appear to be a portfolio website: photographs, mixed-media artwork, stories and collections arranged across four worlds - Garden Gold, Chrome and Country, Creatures Great and Small, and Country Places and Curiosities. But the finished pages do not show the hours spent beneath them. Every image needed a title, a description and alt text. Every collection needed order. Every page needed links, search descriptions, articles and a reason for existing. The smallest details had to work together without flattening the art into a product listing.
That kind of work draws on more than creativity. It requires patience, organization, research, writing, judgment, technical problem-solving and the willingness to keep learning after the excitement of a new idea has worn off. Somewhere in that long process, I realized that almost every job I ever hated had taught me something I needed to build this.
The skills I thought I had left behind
Back around 2005, I was trying to find a way to work from home. The internet seemed to offer a path, although the tools were nothing like the ones available today. I did not know how to code a website, so I bought turnkey sites and learned how to populate them with content.
One of those websites was about balding. I researched the subject, wrote enough articles to fill the site and submitted articles to e-zines, because that was one of the ways people built traffic then. I experimented with Google AdWords and AdSense, and the site did surprisingly well. I learned that many people care deeply about hair loss. I also learned that a subject can be a workable niche without being your niche.
I could do the research. I could write the articles. I could study what people searched for and build something useful around it. But I did not want to spend the rest of my life writing about balding. The website succeeded better than my connection to the subject did.
Other seasons taught me other things. Selling on eBay taught me presentation, consistency and how much trust can rest on a photograph and a description. Making friendship bracelets taught me patience and pattern. Coloring taught me to stay with detail long enough for it to become a world. None of those pursuits became Farmstracts by itself. Together, they trained my eye and my hands for the work I am doing now.
Farmstracts grew in the opposite direction from that old balding website. I did not begin by searching for a marketable subject. I began by paying attention to what I could not stop seeing: weathered barns, insects in the garden, a bloom opening in difficult light, old machinery, ordinary harvests and the strange beauty hidden inside things people pass every day.
Looking again
The way I came to this work was not simple. There was hardship, isolation and a great deal of time spent learning who I was when familiar roles and plans fell away. My faith became essential to that process. It did not erase what happened or turn every painful experience into something pleasant. It helped me believe that pain did not have to be the final author of what came next.
I believe there is some form of beauty in everything I stop to photograph. It may not be obvious, and it may not be what most people would call beautiful at first glance.
Sometimes it is buried beneath age, damage, shadow or familiarity.
But I believe God shows me the beauty that is there and allows me to catch a glimpse of what might otherwise remain unseen. My part is to carry that vision into the finished work.
That is the faith at the center of Farmstracts. It is not an argument I need to force upon anyone. I am openly faithful because faith is part of who I am and part of how I see, but visitors do not have to believe exactly as I do to recognize wonder, tenderness, survival or light. My responsibility is to open the door and show the light I have been given. What happens after that does not belong entirely to me.
This is also why I believe nothing was wasted. That does not mean everything that happened was good. Some hardships were simply hard. Some losses remain losses. Some roads closed and stayed closed. Faith does not require me to rename damage as a blessing before it can be acknowledged. It allows me to believe that God can still gather what remains and make it useful.
The doorway is open
By the time this article is published, Farmstracts will be live. That will not mean the experiment is finished. Going live begins another phase: learning how people find the site, what invites them to stay, which stories reach them and how the four worlds grow without losing their character.
I have stood at the edge of that kind of learning before. In 2005, I learned the internet of turnkey websites, e-zines, AdWords and AdSense. That internet is gone. The principles of curiosity, persistence and paying attention remain, but the landscape has changed. I will have to learn it again, and that new adventure is waiting just beyond the doorway.
For now, Farmstracts is a place people can come. It holds the photographs, the transformations, the stories behind them and the evidence of years that did not look connected while I was living them. It is creative, but it also carries the business skills, research habits, technical lessons and stubborn persistence gathered along the way.
The things that hurt were not necessarily good.
The roads that closed were still closed.
But even there, something remained that could be gathered.
Nothing was wasted.
The rest is still unwritten
This song kept returning to me while I was writing this Field Note.
