dreams
the first time i took the myers-briggs personality type indicator—that’s the one where you end up one of sixteen four-letter personality types, like ENFP—was in my junior year of high school, with the rest of my class. i came out right in the middle of the E/I extrovert/introvert continuum. all of my friends were introverts, and i figured i was, too, ’cause i liked to read books and listen to music by myself and i’d never been one of the “popular” kids. a few years later when i’d been in college for awhile and had met all these people who felt just like me and liked me as much as i liked them, i decided i was an extrovert after all, ’cause i loved hanging out with my friends doing nothing and/or everything in particular. i read somewhere that an introvert is someone who replenishes their energy stores by being alone, while an extrovert replenishes theirs in a crowd.
it’s been a busy couple of weeks here at the farm. my mom visited a few days before the solstice, and while she was here the two-week permaculture design course that happens here every june began. for two weeks an extra thirty-some folks camped out in the meadow and played music around the fire circle late into every night. caterers took over our kitchen and we played sous-chef for an hour and a half every day in exchange for our meals. on top of our regular farm duties, we set out coffee, tea, and snacks; maintained a little makeshift bathroom station down in the meadow; and so on. on the last night we all stayed up for a “passion show,” sharing songs and tales.
then in the morning some folks left but another hundred-plus folks arrived, for the bay area permaculture convergence. we found space for all of them, cars and tents—and one “coboose” made of bamboo and earthen plaster—and all. we scrounged up 150 plates and forks. we split everyone up into meal clean-up groups, which worked out all right for the most part.
i was pretty exhausted at this point. after a long day on sunday, i went to bed early with a little bit of a headache and woke up several hours later with a full-blown, full-body migraine. eventually i managed to fall back asleep, and woke up the morning of the fourth feeling okay.
the pdc was over and the convergence was over. the farm was hosting an “interdependence day” cob oven pizza party of indeterminate size sometime in the afternoon. so in the morning jason and i rode our bike the three miles to bolinas, over the rolling hills, mostly downhill, both of us suddenly exuberant in the sun. we watched the annual bolinas v. stinson beach tug-o-war across the narrow channel that separates the two towns (ten miles of road; a few meters of water), walked on the beach, and then followed the crowd to the sweetest little parade you ever saw, kicked off by an elderly woman singing the national anthem; when she hit the high notes everyone in town cheered. i liked bolinas before yesterday; after yesterday, i love it. i loved everything about bolinas yesterday. a booth where you could tell a joke and get a free beer. samba dancers and drummers. a ridiculous float parodying the tea party movement, complete with the mad hatter and a woman in a sarah palin mask with an inflatable machine gun. gospel flat farm’s float full of young farmers tossing fresh carrots at the crowd. the hot asphalt under my bare feet. and the sun and the ocean, o the ocean.
i biked back to the farm in the afternoon and fell asleep on a couch in the bunkhouse while guests chatted over pizza outside. i retreated here a lot when i wasn’t running around doing this or that during the pdc and the convergence, feeling just plain tuckered out by the sheer number of people wandering around the land that is the closest thing to home i’ve got right now. i didn’t connect the way i felt i ought to with too many of those people. i had hit a saturation point, i suppose, and, needing that certain kind of energy replenished, i flipped over to introversion. too much time alone finds me restless and aimless, and i flip back.
a couple of weeks ago i had a dream and then another sort of meta-dream, in which my subconscious sat me down and made me figure out what the dream had meant. the dream was gone in the morning, but the lesson remained: “the problems we create for ourselves are harder to solve than the problems others create for us.” in permaculture we call that “zone zero” work—where zone one is the area (or, in social permaculture, the people) closest to us, and zone zero is us. i have some zone zero work to do, for sure. for example: what, exactly, are the problems i am creating for myself? and what, exactly, is beyond them?
i have been feeling huge amounts of anxiety about my future lately. looking for a job, etc. (know of any sweet environmental education and/or elementary education jobs in the east bay? let me send you my resume and a kick-ass cover letter.) i feel guilty all the time about something i’m sure i should be doing that i’m not, yet. probably this guilt and anxiety is one of those problems i’m creating for myself. so i sit in the sun, listen to the birds, take some deep breaths and say to my community here, “maybe even if i’m doing everything wrong for my future, i’m doing something right for my present.” and then i do my work, and get my rest, and dance on the beach, and life, the way it does, goes on.
the end of spring
matt in santa rosa.
kohlrabi <3s you.
grandmother eucalyptus, poison hemlock.
rhubarb.
cabbage.
midsummer
today was the longest day of the year, midsummer, the summer solstice. this morning when i left my tent the sun had already spread across most of the garden.
we are hosting a permaculture design course right now; thirty-some students are camping in the meadow and hanging out in the yurt and occasionally getting a little raucous around the fire circle at night. last night one of the instructors, robyn francis, led us in a ceremony celebrating the shortest night of the year. we gathered plants and flowers to make garlands for our heads, sang songs, lit a fire, and stood around it sharing gifts.
i am thinking a lot about resiliency: our bodies, relationships, our confidence, human and non-human ecologies, and of course the seasons, the sun and the light: they all bounce back.
and also about humility, love, and compassion—the words we chose as a group to bring into the next turn of the seasons.
minus tide
on thursday morning a bunch of us woke up at dawn to head down to the beach for the minus tide to do some tidepooling and a little seaweed snacking.
(nori!)
(large fish head skeleton. pretty freakin’ cool.)
later i met my mom at the santa rosa airport—she came to visit for a couple days. i took her to the beach the next morning for more tidepooling and beachcombing.
green gulch
(this beautiful cob building is their garden tool shed.)
(really cool-lookin’ tree; some kind of red birch.)
(beekeeper; i can’t remember his name!)
(top bar beehive.)
not pictured: the tasty rhubarb cake that ashley and i made that morning; green gulch’s and slide ranch’s friendly interns; the zendo; a gorgeous hexagonal (or octagonal? i can’t remember) guest house made entirely with traditional japanese joinery techniques, no nails!
this last reminded me of something i read in this book i’ve been enjoying flipping through in the yurt lately, called home work, edited by marin local lloyd kahn. the book is a collection of owner-built homes-slash-works-of-art from all around the world. one of the homes included is a pretty incredible sprawling stone home that was built into a mountainside in south africa by one dude who did it all completely by hand, by himself. in the book he talks about how for 13 years folks told him he was crazy for building it, and then when he was done and living in it they told him he was so lucky to get to live in such a place! luck = crazy x 13 years of hard work.
or, beauty = patience x dedication.
just a little abundance
(flora made delicious challah.)
(give peas a chance!)
(a bed of bolted chard looks like a suessian forest. don’t worry, we have plenty of chard that hasn’t bolted, too.)
(iris makes poison hemlock look super tasty.)
(calendula.)
(remember those 1500 strawberry plants we planted? well.)
(growing through the netting!)
(yum.)
(yum yummmm.)
here i am
A week ago I applied for my dream job. The position was a “farm education apprenticeship” at a large CSA farm. 20% farming, 80% education, including working with kids from a local Montessori school. It paid real, actual money (a little). Many things about it were impractical. It was in Santa Cruz, not Berkeley. It started on July 1st, in theory, two months before I’m scheduled to leave here. I found the listing online while sitting next to A on the bunkhouse couch here at the farm and slid my computer over to his lap. “It’s too bad it would be totally impractical to apply for this,” I said. He read it and said, “You should apply. We could make it work.” So I wrote an amazing cover letter (it was easy), sent it off, and heard back the same day from the woman hiring that she wanted to interview me. The first bite I’ve had on any of the lines I’ve cast.
So I emailed her back about my schedule and danced around the room trying to shake out my nervous energy. When I didn’t hear from her I examined her email and the email I’d sent a dozen times, trying to figure out what I’d said wrong. On Monday I finally reached her by phone and found out that she had offered the position to someone else on Friday; turns out they were really looking for someone to start as soon as possible, and I guess they jumped at the chance to hire someone they liked. My anxiety crescendoed. I was really disappointed. It was a Bad Scene in my head.
But there were some positive consequences of getting excited about, getting anxious about, and not getting this job. I found out that my dream job exists and that there is enough real, actual money in it that people who do this stuff are hiring apprentices. Not only that, but I had a “very strong application.”
I learned for sure that my partner supports my happiness and fulfillment above and beyond his own convenience and desire to have me near him.
I reengaged in life at the farm here, which I’d been halfway checked out of for a week. Dude, this place is amazing. Our garden is full of abundance. Today I found a head of lettuce that is, I swear, eighteen inches across. There are good people here for drinkin’ beer and talkin’ with. There are good people here for baking rhubarb cake with. I have a lot of things to do here, still, and two and a half months before they make me leave.
Yesterday was Kalyn’s birthday. Christine cooked delicious Thai food for dinner and she and Flo made vegetable sushi and strawberry-ice-cream pie. After dinner we had a spontaneous dance party in the kitchen, including a ridiculous group rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Then I went to bed with my tent’s rain fly pulled back so the bright, big, bold moon shined right in.
Also: baby quails following their mum and dad down the paths between rows in the garden; the young fox I held eye contact with for several minutes the other day before it turned and slid through the mesh in our deer fence; fat bumblebees diving in and out of comfrey flowers; hawks screaming. So happy to be a part of the more-than-human culture here, too.
This afternoon we went on a field trip to Green Gulch, a farm and Zen center further down Hwy 1, to hang out with their interns and the interns from Slide Ranch, which is also on the 1 between here and Green Gulch. We attended a beekeeping workshop with Green Gulch’s beekeeper, got some zazen instruction, meditated in their gorgeous flower garden, and then ate dinner all together. I chatted with some of the Slide Ranch folks. Guess what Slide Ranch does, my friends. Environmental and farm education for kids. Yup.
Guess where I needed to be to get to where I am. Here, here, here.
Guess where I’m going next. I don’t know, but wherever I am, there I’ll be.
