My First Substack Post! Finally...

Welcome Friends, new and long-term, to Cultivate Your Life.

Intro (as brief as possible) - I’m 75 years old, which is no small thing for any of us, but it’s a BIG thing for me as a childhood cancer survivor from the early 1950’s when cancer treatment options were limited and primitive by today’s standards. Long story short, I’ve had more than my share of additional cancer diagnoses and medical problems secondary to the therapy that cured my childhood cancer. While I’m certainly not arguing with long-term success, surviving all of this (with a quality of life as high as possible) has been and continues to be an on-going challenge.

I’ve been writing for almost 40 years, including:

• A book titled A Dietitian’s Cancer Story: Information and Inspiration from a 3-Time Cancer Survivor (published in 1997, reprinted numerous times with updates, out of print as of 2019),

• Many articles in professional newsletters,

• My own email newsletters about nutrition and cancer survivorship,

• My own blog (also called Cultivate Your Life), which focused on recipes and nutrition information for cancer survivors plus the excitement and tribulations involved with starting an organic garlic specialty farm with my husband at age 59. All posts on my dianadyer.com blog from 2007-2019 have been imported into Substack. Feel free to browse them.

• Our farm’s weekly email newsletter (now discontinued since we are officially retired),

• Our farm’s Instagram page at @the_dyer_family_organic_farm from 2015-present, where I have enjoyed sharing happenings and photos of our 15-acre farm, our 40+ varieties of garlic, my husband’s honey, and many of the 133 species of birds that I have seen on our farm to date, particularly those that visit our year-round small front pond and waterfall, which I call The Dyer Farm Bird Café & Spa.

• On our farm’s Instagram page, I have also occasionally shared my successes plus the ongoing challenges of recovering from a traumatic brain injury that I experienced in 2016 when a car drove through our farmers’ market booth at high speed, hitting me directly from behind. Oof…..oof…..oof…..All I can say is: 1) with lots of different therapy and determination, I’ve come a long way, and 2) thank goodness, thank goodness I was the only one hit. My husband and our farm intern were missed as were all of the customers in front of our market table and the market itself at that instant. Perhaps the Universe was telling me to shift gears, to slow down, or even something else?

Ok. Whew. That’s (more than) enough background information about me.

However, what to write about on Substack? Why “follow or subscribe” to my Substack account? There are hundreds if not thousands of writers who are already available to read on this platform Why not just keep writing and sharing what I’m already doing on Instagram? These are questions I’ve been asking myself since I opened a Substack account over a year ago, questions that have been stumbling blocks for me, even as an experienced longtime writer, who accidentally discovered back in the 90’s that I have an almost irrepressible urge to write, to share my experiences and my thoughts, which I have done in various venues for the past ~40 years.

I’m now glad I delayed as long as I did to get started on Substack. I suspect I was stalling because I didn’t want to (or feel the need to) continue writing only about the same things I’ve written about for decades, or what is still perfectly appropriate on our farm’s Instagram page.

So, here I am today, still here. (There are at least a few doctors who would not have bet big on that outcome.) And, here we all are today. As a country we are in a national (even international) crisis, with multiple aspects of our life spinning out of our control, in the same way that a cancer diagnosis or a traumatic brain injury is a personal medical crisis with the outgoing ripples impacting every aspect of one’s life plus nearly everyone you know in some manner.

It’s clearly the time for a shift, a new and even urgent focus.

What?

Here are the issues that are the most important to me right now figuring out how I will help to:

• claw back back our country’s democracy from the current administration, which is stealing it away from us,

• protect our planet’s birds plus the ecosystems they need to thrive, and

• reverse our planet’s ongoing and accelerating climate crisis.

Why?

What do you need too much to lose? Your monthly social security check, your healthcare through Medicaid, clean water to drink, clean air to breathe, cancer research clinical trials, and more? I could go on and on and on.

In addition, and as equally important, what do you love too much to lose? The beauty of your favorite national park still intact (i.e., not being marred by mining noise, dirty air, and water pollution), plus the park being open to visit, fully funded, staffed and maintained? Or do you love the monarch and other butterflies fluttering around in your yard, the call of the loons on the lakes up north, or the songs of all the other birds in your own yard or local park? All of the above, and much, much more? Again, I could go on and on and on.

How?

I am like many if not most people I know right now. We are all are saying “I don’t know what to do to help!”, but far more importantly, we are also asking “What can I do to help?”

Even our farm’s instagram posts were never just about pretty pictures. We never needed to post anything on Instagram to sell all of our garlic or honey, no matter how much we produced. The bottom line (or reading between the lines) for our posts has always been to advocate for health, from the health of our soil to the health of our critical planetary ecosystems and the health of everything in between, through the lens of locally grown organic food and birds.

I have also more recently been sharing my worries, from the loss of our planet’s birds and other aspects of biodiversity, the slow (even thwarted) response to the need for serious coordinated global action to reduce (preferably reverse) the climate-related disasters and emergencies that people all over our planet are experiencing right now.

Therefore as broad as these concerns are, my Substack writings will share what I’m doing to cultivate a better world for all of us, our children, our grandchildren, and all the people we love, focused on our nation’s democracy, birds and other biodiversity, the climate crisis, and where they intersect. What good is democracy in our country if our planet’s biodiversity and ecosystems are fully disrupted? What good is a stable, healthy climate if we and (other countries also) are living under the whims of a cruel dictator and administration?

Who? When?

I look forward to sharing what I’m thinking about and doing, but I will not overload your email inbox. Spring is busy, busy, busy on our farm, even being retired from commercial farming. I hope to post once per week, but again, I cannot promise that. Here’s what I will promise. 1) I will read every single one of your comments, 2) I will do my very best to respond to all of them, and 3) future posts will be much shorter!

I can’t help you decide what you will do, how you will be called to help, but maybe something that I share will be informative or even inspire you to “do something”, no matter how small, to contribute to solving a problem that is of deep concern to you at this time. Please feel free to share your thoughts and actions in the comment section.

Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing

because he could do only a little.

~Edmund Burke, 18th century Irish philosopher

Thank you for reading. Let’s cultivate our life together, my friends. The time to do so is now.

Diana Dyer