Interview: Timothy Boucher, “Farmer of Quebec”
What’s the deal with the “real” Timothy Boucher?
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Timothy Boucher, my co-editor here on Invironment, not only churns out insightful commentary on the ins-and-outs of running a small-scale organic farm in Quebec, but also has contributed substantially to the conversation on Medium as a publishing platform for small authors.
Fresh off of the success of “going viral” with Invironment’s most popular post, “What I do for money,” Timothy (or “Tim,” as we sometimes call him) had a chance to take a break from eating grass and clover and answer a few Important Questions that give us some insight into his own personal Invironment.
Invironment (I): What is your favorite kind of soup? Can you share the recipe?
Timothy Boucher (TB): I have no soup recipe, sorry. But I like lentil soup.
I: Do you have a “philosophy of life”?
TB: Probably.
I: How did you end up in Quebec? Do you identify as a “Quebecan” in the “nationalist”/independence sense?
TB: How I ended up here is a long story, but I followed a trail of dreams, signs and intuitions and trusting to that process has seemed to work out. There’s a saying up here that I’m sure I’ll slaughter, but it’s something about when you prendre un mari, you prendre le pays. And that definitely applies for me with maybe the genders reversed. I’m definitely “naturalised” in the culture at this time. Could I pass as “one of them?” Probably never, but then I never could in my own country either. I think if Quebec really wants to explore the restoration of independence issue, there are a lot of hard problems to solve: like how do we smoothly transfer back to tribal rule by the First Nations…
This might give more answers/shed more light on the background subject:
https://medium.com/invironment/je-suis-charlie-ca78c66f806
I: Why have you taken such a visible role as a “Medium Gadfly”?
TB: I’m just in it for the free t-shirts, one of which I will hopefully one day actually see. If they ever do arrive, I will just sell them at a markup at my farmer’s market stand. Because twenty bucks is twenty bucks, after all.
I: You used to be an “Occult Investigator” — are you still interested in ghosts, UFOs, bigfoot and the like?
TB: Yes, totally, but I’ve not really found any good real world links on these subjects in Quebec. The trail is totally cold up here. The best thing with that kind of stuff is always to go and meet with all these weird people and talk about things that are maybe real, maybe not real and maybe you both don’t agree on which side whatever of what you’re talking about actually falls. Living a few years now in another culture has taught me really just how common that is: how you think you’re talking about the same thing in the same language and maybe really you don’t understand each other. You’re just saying yes, and thank you and waiting for whatever other cue happens next… and maybe you do or say the right thing or maybe you don’t. But you don’t know, because the experience — except for the mysterious signs — is occult to other people.
I: Why plants?
TB: Because Nature is way more mysterious than things in our imagination, because for some reason it is really happening and we can literally interact with it and impact it in real-time. It’s almost like a 3D immersive hologram — if you think about it!
I: Any books/websites you would currently recommend to our readers?
TB: I’m reading What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly, slowly. It’s hard for me to read anything that isn’t fragmentary texts nowadays, anyway. But I like ebooks as a format now that I have a Krindle — though I can’t believe what kind of horrid state that technology is in. I wish Medium would do something about it. [Ed. Hint hint @Medium]
I: What is the most important thing?
TB: Probably that question!
I: Do you fear for the future of humanity?
TB: I cry for everything all the time, that it’s all passing — all the beauty — and it’s just not being witnessed. I expect that trend to continue indefinitely.
I: What is your favorite colour, and why?
TB: Paintbrush. It would have to be the “colour” difference between the word “color” and “colour”, because synaesthetically speaking when you add in the “u”, it shifts it into a tone of more white, like a cloudy grey day, versus a cloudy gray day…
For more from Timothy, and for more invigorating writing on plants, nature, farming, food, foraging, start-ups, Soylent, and whatever else we feel is interesting, be sure to follow Invironment! Now accepting submissions!
