I hand write by candle light onto pad now. I forgot how different it is writing just for yourself until I started doing it again.I leave the farm most Fridays for the city and burn up the energy that comes from working hard all week. It's a whirlwind of cell phones, jazz bands, dance floors and cheap chinese food, until Sunday when it takes me an entire evening to slow back down to the pace of a different life.
It can get lonely at nights in an unconnected cabin. No music or radio, no TV or hot shower or internet to distract from the enveloping darkness. The sky darkens and the moon takes over, sending out beams of solitude and I swear to you the coyote's howl out of the neighbouring forest sends chills through you like a wind through a wind chime.
The days are of course beautiful and seemingly endless. Farming is basically working your ass off
for next to nothing (monetarily) but getting rewarded in a different, more traditional and more whole-wheat way. Wildflowers smiling at the sky, swaying in the wind and hearty meals and hardy dogs playing with country-bred kids and planting and digging and haying and their respective rhythms and idyllic looking clouds and jokes about the weather until christmas and donkeys and trying to ride donkeys and learning about wild tea and zucchini flowers and pollinators and long shadows over seas of wheat or canola and exploding sunsets over the huge Canadian horizons and all that kind of thing.I chase something entirely different on weekends, consuming and looking outwards for something to fulfill me, that smile, those laughs, those eyes, that night out, that awesome concert and that attitude of 'people like me and you should too and what do you think of my shoes.' I want to fill a hole with a whole lot of fun and I'm definitely not the only one trying that out. And so it takes me all Sunday evening to change gears. Alone with the dark and the quiet, I have nowhere to look but inward and maybe it is slowly forging strength.
So I think I can do this. It's beautiful, healthy, and colourful. It's sustainable and fulfilling. But I don't think I can do it alone.
(Donkeys, haying, wildflowers)
