A room of his own: life under an olive

Most mornings I spend a long and therapeutic half an hour walking the periphery of the garden to see how the plants have faired through the night. Stretching my back, I'll bend to look at the green tips sprouting from the ground. From small seedlings reaching from the ground only a few inches to towering vines of green going to flower, each plant responds to the morning light in their own way. And like the plants I wake up and slowly shed my dreamy imagination. A natural man living amongst a natural kiwi forest watching out for God. Living here you hear often that out in the kiwis is where God is lurking. I dont know what to believe. Regardless though, certainly living here I have found myself thinking in a more spiritual fashion than ever before. It seems that once I made connection with this place, time and space as concepts have become almost dependent on life spawning from my fingertips. Placing seeds smaller than pintips that will grow to be as big as me. I can't help but find metaphorical power in the process on this farm.

Most of these early April mornings I have been spending at least an hour in the orchard weedeating around the base of the trees. While this might sounds like a simple and haphazard exercise of running a machine through the low grasses of the orchard , sometimes it takes on mythic proportions of stewardship. Walking down the long aisles of trees surrounded by green, I feel centered and powerful. Focused and silent like so many million farmers before me, I take on the task of protecting this majestic land. Protecting and thereby surviving by the breast of the earth; this is the most salient point and power of natural beauty. In our uniquely ego-centric worlds, many humans are convinced of their supermacy to all others, but once I am confronted by the perseverance of the land's bounty I realize a personal existentialism.

Silence is one of the most potent affordances here in rural California. Whereas in an urban environment we all have countless stimulaes, here I have fewer intrusions into my minds space. After working for 6-7 hours in a day I will retreat to the northern end of the farm and sit with a couple books and just think and reflect on ideas, themes, and myths, and the ways I live them every day.