“What I love about the Ranch is it’s disorderly.”
I blurted this out at the annual trustees meeting this summer…then realized from the response that “disorder” might be another of those tricky phrases where we assume everyone has the same definition (e.g., “ego,” “boundaries,” “trauma”) but they don’t. I do NOT mean chaotic, anarchic, “hippy dippy,” or the opposite of orderly.
What I’m trying to get at is the contrast between what I see here and what I’ve seen in other settings that imposed “orderly” rules and regulations. Such places do need to exist—hospitals, prisons, emergency services, the military, factory assembly lines—because the border between our human desires for order, but also for freedom, is where all the action is, from a cultural down to a personal level.
What Spring Lake Ranch does unusually well is promote a “conversation” between those two poles; their “border patrol” is excellent. Bringing a working ranch into the conversation adds an experience of unpredictability that neither residents in angry rebellion against control nor the lonely, wounded ones needing safe connections can possibly take personally. (Although they try!) For instance, a resident can choose a project to work on in the Shop, but they must be safety checked on the equipment. They can plant and tend to the Garden, but a late frost or early thaw can change what produce is available to eat and when. One of my favorite examples comes from Farm Crew, when a sow unexpectedly gave birth to a litter in the woods, and ranchers only discovered the piglets by happenstance.
With therapy, community, and work, most can move towards an internal conversation between these apparently conflicting needs (shrink-ese: autonomy vs. affiliation). I’d say most of our residents arrive in a state of imbalance between those two halves of the whole.
One of my teachers summarized this way:
“Half the patients you see will need loosening up, and the other half will need tightening up.”
As much as I enjoy this as a meme, my experience is that most need some of both.
