One Week on the Farm (Meditations)

One Week on the Farm (Meditations)

Though the week has been tumultuous, with my body rapidly switching between exhaustion and ebullience, I think I finally have my feet planted. I meant to write sooner, but six hours of farm labor plus two hours of house chores tend to wipe me out by the end of the day. The one constant of the week has been my slow reading of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, the seminal book of Stoicism. Though I've learned I am definitely not a Stoic, I have enjoyed trying to understand a philosophy foreign to my own sensibilities; the theme of the book I have most embraced is the concentration on the present moment, on which he writes:

"workest at that which is before thee, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract thee, but keeping thy [thoughts] pure, as if thou shouldst be bound to give [them] back immediately; if thou holdest to this, expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with thy present activity according to nature, and with heroic truth in every word and sound which thou utterest, thou wilt live happily. And there is no man who is able to prevent this."

The Beginning

The first two days consisted solely of two things: introductions and weeding. I met Gert Jan, the fair farmer, Miriam, the eccentric houseowner, Camille, another WWOOFer, and Chiel, a local boy with whom I work frequently. Camille arrived the day before I did, and so she also began working on Tuesday; she is a twenty three year old botany student from France who originally studied English (so she speaks the language almost better than I). 

The first two days of work were grueling: we spent six hours per day weeding cabbages beds (see right). Weeding isn't exhausting work, but it quickly becomes tiresome. Chiel, Camille, and I spent both days as a group, commiserating over the dull task which we were assigned and bantering while we knelt for hours on end puling roots out of the black earth. Camille explained her tendency to bemoan our situation by saying "to complain is to be French," which I found hilarious. The worst part was that once we got off our six hour shift on the farm, we had to do nearly two hours of house chores for Miriam, who has a strict set of house rules which include cooking for her and doing her dishes each night.

By the end of the second night I had grown very pessimistic about the prospects of my month long stay, will I be weeding for four weeks? Is Miriam always going to be so demanding? These thoughts were running through my mind when I came across an interesting line in Meditations: "a man cannot lose either the past or the future: for what a man has not, how can one take this from him?" I decided to not let the start of my stay, which feels like forever ago now, spoil the present moment because, as Marcus Aurelius wrote, "the present is the only thing of which a man can be deprived."

From Wednesday night onward, I have looked at this expedition differently: I abandoned my expectations, became engaged in the moment, and enjoyed each second for what it was: the only thing I had.

The Middle

So with a renewed sense of optimism, I went to work Wednesday morning and was greeted by Gert Jan like this: Camille and I were handed a bucket, some rags, and "toilet duck" and told to scrub out the bathrooms. While Camille bickered about the lowliness of our task (she actually cut her stay from four months to one in response), I mopped instead of moped, determined to accept whatever fate Gert Jan felt the whim to assign.

Miraculously, upon our completion of toilet duty we were not sent back to the cabbage patch, instead Gert Jan asked us to plant leeks! It wasn't glamorous but it was fun; finally I got the chance to learn something agricultural that I hadn't learned from having a front lawn. I stuck my spade into the ground, shimmied it either way until there was enough leeway for two leeks, and planted two sowed leeks in either end of the crevice. After that, I planted cabbage, fennel, and lettuce, all before lunch time!

At lunch, Camille and I met the third WWOOFer, let's call her Camille 2 (she is a Camille too). She is a nineteen year old French girl studying agricultural engineering and came to farm/learn English. She is very nice and while she can easily communicate with Camille 1 via French, it can be difficult to have a conversation with her in English. The three of us headed back to the farm and Gert Jan sent us once more with Chiel to weed cabbages, which I'm beginning to think is his hazing mechanism.

The best part about working in exchange for food on Hof van Twello is its amazing farm shop: farms from the area, gardens at Hof van Twello, and anything we harvest all get sold in the "Winkel." Gert Jan gives us free access to the organic vegetables, cheese, milk, and fruit in exchange for our daily six hours. As a result, I have amazing, fresh ingredients with which to cook dinner: I've made eggplant parmesan, pineapple fried rice, and pasta with roasted squash mostly with materials from the cornucopia.

After a delicious breakfast of leftovers Friday morning, I set out to go work with Chiel in the greenhouse. We tied little knots around the pepper plants and strung it up to a wire above them to insure that the healthiest branches of the plant grow upwards. Next, we moved out to the fields to harvest
some onions. There, we managed to have a great time, with him teaching me about Dutch things and with me schooling him in the Onion Olympics (impromptu games we made up using rotten onions). He is a good kid, a seventeen year old local who works on the farm on holiday, enjoys playing football, and eats a lot of stroopwafels. At the end of the day, the Camilles joined us and (you guessed it) we weeded a cabbage patch.

While Chiel started his weekend Friday, the Camilles and I went to work Saturday morning. I started the day with a new and interesting activity: harvesting zucchini. Courgette, as it is called here, are harvested by searching through the leaves of the plant and cutting any large article off. There are three main parts to any courgette plant: the fruit, the flowers, and the very very prickly stems. After an hour of zucchini diving (during which I met my fair share of stems to the face), I began my last activity of the week, shoveling wood chips onto a conveyor belt. 

I actually loved this job; I like exerting myself and this was the first opportunity I had gotten to do something I would deem grueling. When I expressed my happiness to the Camilles they were shocked, because from the outside it seemed like a miserable task, but I explained it to them with a blurb I had read on my break right before: "fortunate means that a man has assigned to himself a good fortune: and a good fortune is a good disposition of the soul, good emotions, good actions." Yeah... maybe I paraphrased a little to make it less patronizing but that was pretty much the gist of it.

Looking back, I spent the first two days of my work lamenting the fact I was not doing other things but in the final three days were different because I considered myself fortunate to be doing anything. I remember being miserable before I left for the Netherlands: loafing around the apartment, wishing I was in Los Angeles, and doing anything to distract myself from the present. By Saturday, I had assigned myself a good fortune, embraced the moment, and went into the weekend feeling hopeful.

The weekEnd

And what a weekend it was! On Sunday, I went with the Camilles to the largest book market in Europe, which was in Deventer. From there, I bought new boots (my footwear had quickly developed numerous holes), ate Dutch pancakes, ate Deventer cake, ate two doners (there was a lot of eating), and watched the Netherlands win the Euro Women's Final at a bar. From there I walked home and snapped a couple awesome photos!

Monday was mostly filled with napping, writing this post, and preparing for the week ahead! Thank you all for reading, and check out the other post from today with all the photos from this week!

To end, one more quote from Marky Mark Aurelius, "to conclude, always observe how ephemeral and worthless human things are, and what was yesterday a little mucus tomorrow will be a mummy or ashes."