#99: Brigid Blue Wallace
"Because what you reap is what you sow, everything you do to others you are doing to yourself."
Brigid Blue Wallace (@brigid.blue) is a farmer living in New Jersey. I didn’t know much about her before inviting her on, and truthfully didn’t need to. Longtime readers of the newsletter will know that “good-on-paper” credentials often make for a boring interview. The less obvious the guest, the better.
You can find more of Brigid on TikTok and her baking Instagram.
#99: Brigid Blue Wallace
Pisces / New Jersey
What does health, or being healthy, mean to you?
Being healthy is like winning the golden ticket of life. Sometimes you don’t win the golden ticket, and sometimes you do, and you try to keep it in mint condition, but over time it bends and folds and wears down. Sometimes you accidentally leave it in your pants pocket and put it through the washing machine, and find it all crumbled up in faded pieces. Health is the will to live. It transcends the flesh. It’s the spirit in the flesh.
Animals can smell health; it’s the first thing they do when they meet each other. We do it too. It’s a sixth sense that women, in particular, have. I can smell a rat from a mile away like a prize bitch hound, and I feel most healthy when those senses are sharp. When I want to know if one of my animals is sick, I see how the rest of the pack is responding to them. Every living creature has its own special value and contribution to the collective consciousness of the group.
For me, most of my desire to be healthy is due to my fear of death. I suppose my healthiest day will be the day I make peace with the fact that I’m going to die. I’m a body for God to experience life on earth through, and right now I don’t want it to ever end.
How would you describe your current lifestyle?
It’s a life of chores with small pleasures along the way, like a crumb trail keeping me going. It’s devotion to the land and the animals, and in turn, myself. I don’t see a division between myself and them. There is no place where I end and the garden begins.
I’m still in my heaven body, so I’m trying to use it to its full potential. Every day, I try to perfect my crafts and learn new skills. Some days the window is wide open and the flowers are in full bloom, and other days I’m laughing as I throw a punch at life and it throws one back at me.
Gambling is very spiritual to me. It’s devotion to fate and the practice of believing before seeing.
How do you start and end your days?
My days begin early. When I get up, I drink hot water and make myself a latte from Blizzard’s (our cow’s) milk. Then I try to get my rockstar gf of a dog up out of bed to run amok before I leave for work. Just before the sun rises, when everything is washed in my favorite color blue, I sit and drink my coffee by candlelight and watch the birds eat from the bird feeder.
Once I get to work (I am a farmer), I feed and tend to the animals, then I hook up my team and do the farming work with horse-drawn implements instead of tractors. I spend my days plowing the earth from which I came and to which I will return. I plant and harvest the crops and fatten the livestock and the men. The cow has to be milked every day, and when I get home, so does my lover. A woman’s work is never done.
I end the day falling asleep in front of the fire on my old lambswool rug with my dog. There’s a cold glass of milk in my hand, a belly full of dessert, and a shit-eating grin on my face.
Can you recall a moment when you became more aware of your health, or your relationship to it changed?
My consciousness feels and has always felt really old, like it’s been here forever and is never going to leave. In my twenties, I lost three people very close to me consecutively, and I started questioning how my consciousness could still be here while theirs, somehow, was not. I started wondering where it went, and where it always was.
This spurred a desire to control life itself, and “health” was a part of that comedy skit. I think that’s why I like farming so much — it’s like a mini diorama of the circle of life. The curtain is drawn, and we act out a Shakespearean play with plows and seeds, earth and rain, semen and female bodies. Creating life and caring for it gives the momentary illusion that you can control it, but reality comes creeping in like a bad omen, reminding you that playing God doesn’t let you outrun fate.
I suppose my healthiest day will be the day I make peace with the fact that I’m going to die.
Do you have a spiritual practice?
Manual labor brings closeness to God, and God speaks to me through the radio A.M. 103.5.
Gambling is very spiritual to me. It is believing in luck and a higher power inside yourself. It’s devotion to fate and the practice of believing before seeing. Cracking open peanuts and throwing them to the birds is my current rosary.
I was raised Irish Catholic (should have never told my therapist). I grew up with that culture and spent a lot of time with family in Ireland. Irish people are very superstitious. We believe in miracles and exist in a spiritual landscape that communicates with those who have a tuned antenna.
I have been practicing Transcendental Meditation for many years now, and use it as a pacifier in my toolkit.
What’s your relationship to self-healing?
Unfortunately, you just have to wait for your brain to fully develop. When I turned thirty, it was like a switch went off and everything was rewired and smooth. Like when you bang on the TV in just the right spot and the static magically goes away. The suffering was lifted.
Do we not become one another when we sit face to face? You have to be careful whose eyes you look into every day. Love and Devotion have always lived deep inside of me, and life has been a trial-and-error journey towards finding the right spot to put them.
Do you work with any practitioners, texts, or modalities on a regular basis?
The animals will tell you all you need to know about someone. You have to ask your senses and trust that intuition, hone it like a superpower. Your nose will not steer you in the wrong direction.
I have a few deities that I have made up for myself; they look over me, protect me, and guide me. The Ice Man and The Fat Man. They appear as warning symbols when darkness shows up in my life. They are like a lighthouse piercing through the fog when I’m lost out on choppy waters.
When do you feel the most nourished?
I feel most nourished when spring and summer come around. It’s like in The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy enters Oz and everything turns from black and white to color. I love blue skies and warm golden light and hate when the sun sets.
Getting a good night’s sleep feels like falling in love. I have small teeth, and I always joke that when I fall in love, my teeth double in size. It has that way of making you feel beautiful. But also, like stepping into Oz — at some point, night always falls. There are many dark corners in colorful Oz, and things are not always as they seem.
How do you reset?
Music, Transcendental Meditation, gardening, eating and cooking good food, bathing, deep sleep in clean, soft sheets and warm blankets, going to the movies, painting, swimming in the ocean, eating fruit, sour candy, and coffee.
Do you have a favorite meal?
My favorite meals are nostalgic of what my father used to cook for me. If I could reenter any memory in my life, it would be eating the food he used to make: Shirley Temple, steak, pickles, sour green apples with salt, olives, potatoes, bubble gum (a pack a day), licorice, plum jam and butter on rye bread, beef stew, ice, berries and milk, coffee, sour candy, A-1 milk, cigarettes, salad with a poisonous amount of vinegar, and mint chocolate chip ice cream.
What advice would you give to your younger self?
I wouldn’t.
What advice would you give to the person reading this?
Be kind to animals. Do not move stones. Every cockroach becomes a king. Only with love can you pay for love. Let go of suffering at any chance you get. If evil is passed to you, let it end with you, and do not pass it to someone else. Because what you reap is what you sow, everything you do to others you are doing to yourself.
What would you like to see or create more of in the world?
Rest, fun, internal and eternal peace and love.
Listen to Brigid’s Health Gossip playlist here.
Thoroughly enjoyed and wrapped with “I wouldn’t” got me good 🩶