From the Farm

I began reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius on the flight to the Netherlands, but when I was half way through the book I put it down, deciding to read the latter half at the end of my journey. It was partially due to curiosity about how my experiences would impact my reading, somewhat because my eagerness to read other literature, and a little bit stemming from the fact it was getting stale. I love the book, but Aurelius tends to cover the same points repeatedly throughout each chapter, which makes it tough to stay engaged when reading in one go, but helpful when picking it up after several weeks of neglect. As I was reading through Book Seven, I stumbled upon the word "eudaemonia" and it jumped out at me. In the text, happiness was written next to it in parenthesis but a google search returned a more interesting definition:  commonly translated as happiness or welfare; however, "human flourishing" has been proposed as a more accurate translation. With my ...

A cow at midday My days start early: when my alarm sounds at 5:30am or whenever I'm awoken by the sound of rain on the roof of my caravan. I get dressed, donning a sweater and overalls with a waterproof shell layer on top, and meet Siebe Klaas, the farmer at Natuureiland Gouden Boaiem, in the stables. There, we turn on the lights and close the fences so that the cows have a circuit to walk. Next, we head out into the fields and herd the cows. I've started to get more comfortable around the giant animals, but the fear of encountering one of the two bulls in the hundred-plus flock of cows keeps me from getting too aggressive. Siebe Klaas on the other hand seems like he's walking through a field of wildflowers instead of one populated by half-ton, eating machines- but for good reason: over the past two days I have learned a lot about the gentle giants, each cow has a unique personality which gives her an endearing quality. A view of where Siebe Klaas and I stand;...

Today was literally something to write home about: it was my first day on the last farm I'll visit in the Netherlands. I can't even write about the farm work yet, that starts tomorrow morning, but the trek up to Smallebrugge is worthy of a post in itself. After saying some tough goodbyes Saturday morning, I left Hof van Twello and set off for Amsterdam, where I would be having dinner with some friends. I had made this trip before so it was a cakewalk; when I got into town, I did some reading and then had a great dinner with a family I'd met earlier in my trip. Around 8pm I set off for Zaandam, a thirty minute train ride away, to sleep. Now, this is where the trip got a little more complicated: I had no celular data. I was able to find the family's house in Amsterdam by piggybacking off of some restaurant's WiFi, but by the time I got to Zaandam my phone had died (woohoo for water damage) so my Maps came up blank. With no connection, I set out what I thought w...

It is my last day at Hof van Twello today and I'm going to miss this place. My farming adventure is not over, I am going to spend two weeks at another farm, but it is past its halfway point and thoughts of Los Angeles are constantly creeping into my mind. I'll reflect about all the experiences I've had at the Hof later in this ramble, but I want to talk about something from my last post. In the last post, I talked about committing myself to dealing with some of my flaws which I tend to avoid thinking about. Luckily for me, one of those flaws got thrown in my face yesterday: my crippling fear of rejection. After being chosen for the last stage of an application for a research opportunity at UCLA, the professor that I wanted to work under " did not find that there was a match in your interests and his current research projects." The first rejection I remember feeling the hurt of was when I was in eighth grade. That was the year my stepmother, Christy, rejected ...

 Mostly Nature Pictures from Walking Around ™ The view of our house from the barefoot trail on the farm, stinging nettle in the foreground A flower on the side of the barefoot trail Reflections of a scummy pond on the barefoot trail (blote voeten pad in Dutch) Bamboo forest on the you guessed it The fields of "some type of gluten, oh I forget it in English" -Gert Jan The unpicked potato fields, over the course of the week following this photo, Chiel, Camille 1, another WWOOFer named Jan, and I harvest this entire field by hand (it's not all pictured) The farm cat that Camille 1 insists on calling Sydney though her name is something in Dutch Sunlight through the leaves on a walk to Deventer Cotton candy skies with cows in the foreground Two ducks swimming inn the IJssel  Pictures from Camille 2 & my trip to Amsterdam, 9/14 A view of the Rijksmuseum from the Museumpromenade A Van Gogh drawing from late...