What is Lexicon Farms?
At the most basic, LF is a place, the four acres on the last mile of pavement in Urbandale, Iowa. It’s the end of the world and the beginning of suburbia where I (Nick Richtsmeier, more on me later) resettled my family in 2018, returning to my birth state, words I swore I would never say.
It’s also the name of a giant project in its early stages, one that connects community, doing our best work, and connecting to the deep roots that drive us all. On the wall of our entry, it says, “All the Stories Matter.” What I have come to understand is that stories are how we string together our agency: our ability to have a say in the way things go. We farm from the complex and sometimes polluted soil of our histories and with any luck decide to engage questions that matter… and help make a better world.
As it grows and develops, my hope is that Lexicon Farms and writing I do from this vantage point will connect you deeper to yourself and to the ground on which you tread.
Who Is Nick Richtsmeier? And Why Write Here At All?
At some point, we awaken to the unwelcome truth that something is terribly wrong with the world. The story we are offered is that nothing can be done, leave it to the professionals, or worse… our kids will have to deal with it.
I’ve been on the path of this awakening, as so many of you have for as long as I can remember. I spent much of that time in organized religion, a place I no longer belong. I’ve tried to convert my angst into professional success, an idea misguided at best.
In middle age, I found I’m a very novice gardener (at the time of writing, of solace in be the vegetable garden is overrun with old growth and mismanagement), a lover of all creative things, and a recovering misanthrope.
When I am seated with my deepest, truest self, I am overrun by the thought that despite everything wrong, I might fall in love with the whole world.
Being a terrible gardener has taught me that every season, the soil either gets better or worse. This season is ours, and we will leave the soil with the fertility (or lack thereof) of our choices. A lot of what makes soil good is compost. Taking the things that are dead or past their usefulness and letting their once vibrant capacity for life fertilize what’s next.
It is easy to suppress the natural instinct to cultivate goodness and instead live by scarcity, enemy-making, and world-building.
I have tried all of them. What I am left with is the stories. Stories and how we tell them are one of best tools for composting. When we tell each other the truth, the light breaks through, the soil warms, and life starts its verdant process again.
You are welcome here.
