Four Seasons

I've been at Four Seasons Farm for nearly a month now. The family that runs it is the last remaining part of a community that moved here in the late 70's on the advice of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche as part of the Shambala Buddhism movement because this area has a good energy, cut and shaped by the ocean and the elements. The old record collections and bookshelves at these farms are always my favorite feature and so naturally I've been listening to Billy Joel and reading a bit on Shambala and trying it out: a little daily breathing exercises and trying to foster a tenderness in my heart. Sounds a bit hippy when I say it out loud.

Then I try to practice it during the day. Results vary. The daily schedule is meals and work. We eat three meals a day together around a big family dinner table, seven to nine of us, simple breakfasts and lunches, taking turns cooking dinner. Eleven hours a day minus the oatmeal break in the morning and a one-hour lunch break is spent working, sometimes in the rain, sometimes in the sun, sometimes in the fields, sometimes in the greenhouses. Sometimes we work together, conversations fluid and varying as people move in and out as their tasks dictate, each person changing the dynamic and topics ranging from ridiculous to self-righteous to romantic, comments coming in from someone cutting arugula in the corner who gets it to someone cutting magenta right next to me who doesn't. Sometimes I work alone, sitting in silence, regretting or smiling about incidences past present or future or with songs surfacing and receding, the Mississippi delta, shining like a national guitar...on top of spaghetti, all covered with cheese...and any man who knows a thing knows he knows not a damn damn thing at all...moon river wider than a mile...slow down you crazy child, you're so ambitious for a juvenile...she only comes out at night, lean and hungry type...choruses, little excerpts, ones that I just heard or hardly remember from deep recesses of my mind that I look up and try to memorise.

On Halloween we dressed up as the farm, I as a chicken made out of cardboard boxes and went to the firehall to squawk at the Maitland Halloween Dance. One night it went from cold during the day to warm rain at night and we named the weather Cuba and walked through the forest to a house abandoned for decades, whips of warm air rolling through the field with the moon out. Everything feels immediate. The ocean makes the weather. Normal is a setting on the washing machine. This Nova Scotia farm experience is exposing me.