Tag: life

Still Here. Albeit Slowly.

I almost didn’t write this post.

Not because I don’t have anything to say. I always have something to say. But because putting this winter into words means sitting with it long enough to find them — and honestly, I’ve been too busy surviving it to do much reflecting.

It’s May now. I’m only just coming up for air.

Here’s what the last several months looked like.

It started in the fall. Epstein Barr — the kind of exhaustion that gets into your bones and doesn’t negotiate. I was still fighting that when late November hit and a neck injury decided to join the party.

I was already two fights deep when a week after Christmas the first bottle baby arrived. A kid — tiny, loud, needing feeding every few hours around the clock the way newborns do whether you’re healthy or not.

January brought Influenza A. And then on the 21st — right in the thick of it — the second kid arrived.

Late March. Triplets.

Five bottle babies total. In the house. All spring. And a Dysautonomia that was progressing in ways I was still trying to understand, dropping my blood pressure without warning and taking me down with it.

I want you to picture that for a second.

Epstein Barr. A neck injury. Influenza A. Progressing Dysautonomia. Two bottle baby goats in the house by January needing around the clock care. An Alaska winter outside that does not care about any of your problems.

And then three more in late March.

I have never been so simultaneously exhausted and kept alive by something in my entire life.

I couldn’t have done it alone. I want to say that clearly because I spent a lot of years believing that asking for help was a kind of failure and this winter dismantled that lie completely. People helped with animal care. People showed up. And I am grateful in the bone-deep way you can only be grateful when you genuinely needed something and someone actually came through.

We lost a few ducks. We lost a turkey hen. I won’t pretend that doesn’t hurt — every animal on this farm matters and every loss is felt. But the goats made it. The kids made it. The flock held. The farm held.

I held.

Barely. Slowly. On the days when my body fainted and my neck screamed and my energy was so depleted I measured it in minutes rather than hours — I held.

Not because I’m strong in the way people mean when they call disabled people strong. Not because I have some inspirational relationship with suffering that makes it meaningful instead of just hard.

Because I’m stubborn. Because there were animals that needed feeding. Because five bottle babies don’t care that you have Influenza A and they will absolutely scream about it until you get up.

It’s May now.

The kids are growing. The farm is still standing. I am still standing, slower than I was in the fall, quieter than I’d like to be, still finding the edges of what this winter took from me and what it left behind.

But still here.

That has to be enough for today.

Because tomorrow there’s more to do.

And I’ll be here for that too.

Dana Eden’s Edge, Nikiski Alaska

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What Hunger Actually Looks Like

People think they know what hunger looks like.

They picture a child in a foreign country. A photograph. Big eyes and a distended belly and a fly on the cheek. Something far away and dramatic and safely not here.

They don’t picture a senior in Nikiski who hasn’t had real protein in three weeks because her fixed income ran out before the month did and she’s too proud to ask anyone for help.

They don’t picture a veteran who knows exactly where the food bank is and won’t walk through the door because the last time he asked for help it came with paperwork and pity and a look that made him feel like less of a man.

They don’t picture a mother who feeds her kids first and calls it not hungry when there’s nothing left.

I know what hunger looks like because I’ve lived it. Not the dramatic version. The quiet American version, the one that happens behind closed doors and inside people who smile and say they’re fine and mean it less every day.

I grew up understanding that food was not guaranteed. That the difference between enough and not enough was smaller than people wanted to believe and closer than anyone comfortable ever admits.

That understanding never left me. It shaped everything I built here.

Because hunger in America doesn’t look like the photograph. It looks like dignity being quietly dismantled one skipped meal at a time. It looks like a person calculating whether the gas to get to the food bank costs more than the food they’d bring home. It looks like shame, deep, corrosive, completely unnecessary shame, that we have built into the very systems designed to help.

We have made needing food a moral failing in this country.

We have structured charity as a transaction that requires the receiver to prove their worthiness, to fill out forms, to show identification, to answer questions about their income, to stand in lines that announce to anyone watching exactly what their circumstances are.

And then we wonder why people don’t ask for help.

I built Eden’s Edge to be different from all of that.

No forms. No income verification. No ID. No questions. No pity. No performance of gratitude required.

You need food. We have food. That’s the transaction.

But I want to be honest about something that took me a long time to admit.

Even doing it right — even removing every barrier I could think of, people still struggle to show up.

Because the shame isn’t just in the systems. It’s inside the people the systems failed. It lives there even after the barriers are gone. Even when someone like me stands in the mud and says loudly and repeatedly, there is no judgment here, come get what you need, the voice inside some people is louder than mine.

That voice was put there by every time they were made to feel like a burden. By every form they had to fill out. By every look from someone behind a desk that said you are less than.

I can tear down external barriers all day long.

The internal ones are harder.

And that makes me angry, not at the people carrying them, but at every system and every interaction and every policy that put them there in the first place.

Hunger in America looks like a senior eating cereal for the third night in a row because she won’t ask for help.

It looks like a veteran going without meat for a month.

It looks like a family driving past a food bank because the parking lot feels like an announcement.

It looks like a woman on a farm in Alaska in the middle of winter wondering if anyone is going to show up for what she’s offering — and understanding, deeply, why they might not.

That’s what hunger looks like.

Not a photograph.

A person. Right here. Trying to hold their dignity together with both hands while the system that should be helping them makes it harder.

Eden’s Edge exists because I’ve been that person.

And because nobody should have to be.

Dana Eden’s Edge, Nikiski Alaska

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What This Farm Costs Me

People see the farm and think they understand what it takes.

They think about the physical work, the feeding, the mucking, the hauling, the endless list of things that need doing regardless of what your body is doing that day. They think about the money, the feed bills, the vet costs, the infrastructure that always needs something. They see a disabled woman farming in Alaska and they think, that must be so hard.

They’re not wrong.

But they’re not seeing the whole cost either.

Let me tell you what this farm actually costs me.

It costs me animals.

Not in the abstract. Not as a farming fact of life that you get used to and eventually stop feeling.

I never stop feeling it.

Every animal on this farm has a name in my heart even when it doesn’t have one on paper. Every one of them is part of the mission, part of the reason Eden’s Edge exists, part of the chain that gets real food to real people who need it. They’re not just livestock. They’re the whole point.

When I lose one I fall apart.

Not gracefully. Not with the stoic acceptance people seem to expect from farmers. I fall apart the way you fall apart when something you loved and were responsible for is gone and you’re standing there holding the weight of that and asking yourself every question you don’t want to ask.

Did I do enough? Did I miss something? Was there something I could have done differently?

Why do I try?

Why don’t I just quit?

I have sat with those questions in the mud more times than I can count. I have cried over animals in Alaska winters when the ground is frozen and the wind doesn’t care and there is nobody around to see it and nowhere to put the grief except into the next thing that needs doing.

And then — after the meltdown, after the questions, after the falling apart —

I try harder.

That’s the only answer I ever find. Not a philosophical one. Not a comforting one. Just get up, figure out what happened, do better, try harder. The mission doesn’t pause for grief and the animals still need feeding and somewhere out there a family is counting on what this farm produces.

So I get up.

Every time.

It costs me freedom.

Financial freedom first, because there is no such thing on a nonprofit farm run by a disabled woman in Alaska. Every dollar that comes in goes right back out. Feed. Supplies. Infrastructure. The endless hungry mouth of a working farm that is also trying to feed a community. I am on disability. I am poor. I built something that serves everyone around me and I do it on the financial edge of what is survivable.

I don’t say that for sympathy. I say it because people need to understand what nonprofit actually means at this level. It doesn’t mean comfortable. It doesn’t mean funded. It means you believe in the mission more than you believe in your own financial security and you make that choice every single day.

Personal freedom too. The farm doesn’t take days off. It doesn’t care about flare days or fainting spells or the fact that your neck has been screaming since November. It doesn’t care that you’d like to sleep in or leave for a weekend or have one day where nothing needs you.

Something always needs you.

I gave up the version of my life where I answer only to myself when I built this place. I knew that going in. Most days I don’t regret it.

But I want people to know it was a choice. A real one. With a real cost.

And still.

Still I am here.

Still the meltdowns end and the questions find their answer in the next thing that needs doing. Still the financial edge hasn’t swallowed me yet. Still the freedom I gave up feels, most days, like it went somewhere worth going.

This farm costs me everything some days.

And some days everything I’ve given it comes back in the face of a kid that made it through the night. In a senior who tells me they haven’t had real meat in months. In the particular silence of a farm at dawn when everything is fed and nothing is wrong and the thing you built from stubbornness and grief and refusal to quit is just… there. Alive. Working.

Worth it.

Ask me again on a bad day and I might hesitate before I answer.

But I’ll still answer yes.

Dana Eden’s Edge, Nikiski Alaska

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The Day I Realized I Was the Only Thing Standing Between My Community and Their Own Apathy

Here it is:

The Day I Realized I Was the Only Thing Standing Between My Community and Their Own Apathy

Three years. Three years of potatoes.

In 2023 I stood at a local ranch in the cold and watched volunteers show up — people who saw the call on social media, drove out, and worked alongside me boxing potatoes for distribution. A thousand pounds of good food that went home with families who needed it. I went home exhausted and grateful. This is what community looks like, I thought. This is why I built Eden’s Edge.

In 2024 I brought six super sacks home to the farm. Thousands upon thousands of pounds of potatoes. A few volunteers showed up. We worked. We distributed. Every last potato found a home.

Two years. Two successes. Community showing up for community.

So in 2025 when the ranch offered again I said yes. Of course I said yes. We had a system. We had momentum. We had proof that this worked.

There was one difference this time.

I couldn’t do the heavy labor anymore. The digging. The packing. The lifting. My body, which has been waging a quiet war against me for years, finally drew a hard line. I could be there. I could organize. I could show up in every way except the physical ones that apparently everyone else was waiting for someone else to do.

Two people came.

Two.

Thousands of pounds of free food sitting at a ranch waiting for a community that didn’t show up.

One of those two people, representing a food bank of all things, looked at those potatoes and called them crap. Wouldn’t take a single one. Turned around and left.

This is the same food bank that has sent me boxes of moldy food to distribute to families in need. They rejected free, good potatoes.

I stood there and did the math I didn’t want to do.

2023 — I was digging and packing and lifting and leading from the dirt. People followed.

2024 — I was hauling and organizing and driving the work. People followed.

2025 — I asked people to come and do the work themselves.

They didn’t come.

I wasn’t the draw because of Eden’s Edge. I wasn’t the draw because of the mission or the need or the thousands of pounds of food available for free to anyone willing to show up.

I was the draw because I was working harder than anyone else and people would follow that energy, as long as they didn’t have to generate their own.

The moment my body said no, the moment I needed the community to show up for itself instead of following me, it didn’t.

That broke something in me I’m still trying to name.

Because here’s what I know after four years of doing this work:

I am one woman. I am disabled. I farm on forearm crutches with no sensation in my limbs in Alaska. I have given everything this body has and then some to make sure people in my community don’t go without.

And I can’t be the only engine.

I shouldn’t have to be.

The food exists. The need exists. The opportunity existed and it was free and it was real and it was right there waiting.

But without me standing in the dirt doing the heaviest part, nobody came.

I don’t know what to do with that yet. I’m still sitting with it.

What I do know is that somewhere between convenience and community we made a wrong turn. We decided that caring about something means clicking a button or sharing a post. That showing up means showing up online.

It doesn’t.

Showing up means showing up.

And until more of us are willing to do that, I’ll keep standing in the cold counting the people who came.

This year it was two.

I’m hoping next year it’s more.

But hope isn’t a plan. And I’m done pretending it is.

Dana Eden’s Edge, Nikiski Alaska

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No Strings. No Shame. No Exceptions.

I don’t ask questions.

I don’t ask you to prove you’re poor enough. I don’t ask you to fill out a form or show an ID or explain why you need what you need. I don’t need to know your income or your situation or your story.

You need food. I have food.

That’s the whole transaction.

Eden’s Edge was built on one principle that I decided before I ever had a single animal on this property — nobody who comes to this farm for help will ever leave feeling worse about themselves than when they arrived. No shame. No strings. No exceptions.

I know what it feels like to need help and be too proud to ask for it. I know what it feels like to stand in a line and have someone look at you like you’re a problem to be managed instead of a person to be fed. I know what hunger does to your dignity before it ever does anything to your stomach.

So we don’t do that here.

What we do is simple. We raise animals. We grow food. We give it away to seniors, to veterans, to families who are stretched so thin they’re see-through. We do it without fanfare and without conditions because that’s what feeding people actually looks like when you strip away all the bureaucracy and the performance and the organizational self-interest.

But I want to tell you about some ducks.

I went to pick up some ducks recently. Just a farm transaction — animals move around, that’s the nature of this world. While I was there we got to talking about Eden’s Edge, about what we do here, about the mission.

They had more ducks than they knew what to do with. Sitting right there. More than they could use.

I suggested they process them and donate the meat. Feed some families. It’s not complicated.

They looked at me like I’d said something absurd.

“If I do all that work,” they said, “I’m keeping it for myself.”

And they meant it. There was no embarrassment. No awareness that what they’d just said was the exact opposite of everything I’d just described. Just a simple transactional logic — effort equals personal reward. Full stop.

I didn’t argue. There’s no argument to have with that worldview. You either understand that community requires giving something without getting the equivalent back — or you don’t.

But I thought about that conversation for a long time afterward.

Because that’s the gap. Right there. That’s the exact distance between the world we have and the world we need.

It’s not that people are evil. It’s not even that they’re selfish in some cartoon villain way. It’s that somewhere along the way we were taught — by every system, every algorithm, every transaction we’ve ever made — that effort belongs to the person who expends it. That work earns personal reward. That giving something away without getting something back is foolish.

We were taught that. Over and over. Until it felt like common sense.

And it’s killing us.

Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just slowly — in the empty chairs at food giveaways, in the unanswered calls for volunteers, in the faces of people too ashamed to ask for help because they’ve absorbed the same lesson from the other direction.

If I need something I haven’t earned — I am less.

I reject that. Completely and without apology.

Nobody who comes to Eden’s Edge has to earn a damn thing. You don’t have to be poor enough or grateful enough or humble enough. You just have to show up.

Because that’s what I’m asking of this community — just show up.

Apparently that’s harder than it sounds.

But I’ll be here either way.

No strings. No shame. No exceptions.

Dana Eden’s Edge, Nikiski Alaska

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