From the author of the popular Slowdown Farmstead Substack: a raw, poignant collection of essays about cultivating authenticity in this age of great pretend. When she was young, Tara Couture had a deep fear of death. In her twenties, determined to manifest her long-time dream of owning a farm, she worked alongside a cattleman whose perspectives on life and death would come to transform her own. When she found herself in the passenger seat of the cattleman’s truck out on the Alberta prairie, in search of the bison herd from which they would harvest an animal, she could hardly believe this was the life she was living. But even more surprising was the realization the experience awakened in her: that life and death are inextricably connected. When we shield ourselves from death—or from any of the hard things in life—we close ourselves off to the beauty and richness of a life fully lived. Full of evocative prose that elicits the smells, tastes, cold winds, and sticky summer sweat of Tara’s