Day 62

While I was shoveling horse poop yesterday I realized just how much time I have to think these days. It is a hell of a lot of time. Half the day I spend singing "Bring It On Home" by Sam Cooke in my head, but still I always find my thoughts wandering farther and father away from what's happening in reality; I'm re-living past events, I'm envisioning myself a month from now, a year from now. And the ever expanding green fields, now sprinkled with snow, seem to give my mind all the space it could ever want to run wild. Sometimes it's nice to reminisce or plan, but right now it's frustrating. I've done this great thing for myself, I've taken a gap year with the intention of discovering all that my soul has to offer me. Yet, for some foolish reason, my mind prefers to be elsewhere, while it should be soaking up the present moment as much as it can before this year ends and I'm stuck wishing I could go back. So what to do. I guess first off I need to stop calling my mind "it" and realize that I am my mind, and no one has control over my mind but me. Meaning, only I can solve this problem, no one can do it for me. Abatiwaha, so is life.
I think things started to get weird in my head a few days into being on the farm. Maybe you can tell by now but Europe isn't really for me (at least at this point in my life) and I've been struggling to establish a connection to the cultures, people, etc. As much as I've enjoyed working with Neinke and Auke, the lack of direction that I've felt since being in Europe has started to weigh on me, making me feel even a little anxious (I hate that word) to move on to the next trip. This aimlessness has led me, I think, to distract myself with visions of past events or with grand ideas for the future, and surprisingly, to yearn for structure. Whereas in Nepal, one intense and challenging experience was followed by the next, this semester everything is in my hands, and naturally I decided to sort of plan as I go. So here I am in Holland working on a farm but simultaneously planning out what I'll do in Thailand and where I'll visit and what I'll eat and so on. And as exciting as all of that is, I've been losing sight of the present moment. Even if, at present, I'm not overwhelmed by joy or so in love with my surroundings, the present is where I must dwell and must stay. Past Emily is climbing the Himalayas and exploring the desert, while future Emily is hangin with the gibbons in Thailand and meditating in India (?). So all present Emily needs to do is be on the farm with Neinke and Auke and their dogs and their two-day-old goat babies and their horse poop.
I said to my mom the other day that I'm not feeling challenged enough, and she responded, "You are traveling the world completely on your own, how can you not feel challenged?" And hey she's right, maybe I ought to give myself a little more credit. Challenge won't always come in the form of eating frog in a rural Nepali village. So the challenge that I need to face for now is letting go of my wandering thoughts about the past and the future and just be in the now, and take it a day at a time. I want to leave the farm feeling proud of how hard I worked and feeling at peace with my environment here. So that's exactly what I'll do, I'll keep shoveling poop and making goat cheese and I'll use the simple landscape to calm my mind and reign in my thoughts to the present. And of course the wolf woman in me will always keep howling.


"This is what you shall do: Love the Earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or any number of men, go freely with the powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.."
- from Walt Whitman's introduction to his book "Leaves of Grass"