Oct 26, 2021
"Others have laboured and ye are entered into their labours" St. John 4--38 "The earth shows up those of value and those who are good for nothing" Pig Earth, John Berger. Much happens in one pastoral day, you only realize how much you've really done if you list it off by hand (and farmers in their humble ways rarely ever do). mike and linda has entrusted us, 5 twenty something city folk with running the show while they're away vacationing in eastern oregon. we wake up early and start by feeding and milking the animals. ive worked my way up to milking all 6 goats twice a day; its an accomplishment that im very proud of considering when i started a month and a half ago I couldn't get through one. something always goes awry before noon and you just have to anticipate it with a resigned acquiecence. today, all 3 milking cows escaped through an ajar gate during milking. you always get a little nervous handling 1000 lb ruminants in tight quarters but with a scoop of grain and some nervous sweet talking we persevered. before i could sit down again, emily notices that our sow had wandered way out to the other side of the hill towards the compost. it took all five of us buckets of peanuts in hand to convince this very unruly saffron back to her quarters. then it was back to the regular programming of moving the turkey tractors across the pasture. emily uses the atv to drag each one, while i haul buckets of feed up and down the hill behind her. I had to run back to the house immediately after to fix the laundry machine that I had foolishly clogged with the hay in my pockets. I was nervous that I had done some serious damage but it was an easy fix thanks to a british man on youtube. before i could finally sit down to write this, we notice that our resident guard dog had decided to go on a walk around the property so we don all our coats again and walk him back up to the barn. All of this happened before noon and this evening we do it all over again.
Oct 23, 2021
(Transcribed from my notebook) The dogs ate my last entry! It's my last month here and my comfortability has just about sky rocketed bc of the tight connections i've been forging with the people out here. you gotta express gratitude somehow because those kinds of connections happen quite rarely and when they do it colors your world a little. emily, another pennsylvania native, arrived here a couple weeks ago with this lightness that makes it all that much harder to leave. if i had to name it, its probably this attuneness to each other that makes you feel seen and like really comfortable and normal in your own skin. I'm afraid what im trying to describe won't translate so well over text here but here's an attempt anyway. one night we were delirious on our 4th or 5th consecutive work day and it's 8pm and we're feeding the animals. we're both staring at the bale of hay kind of in a daze and when i cut open the last twine i say "terra farma memes- when you cut open the last string and the hay busses open" we were laughing so damn hard at that i could barely finish the sentence. then this morning i come downstairs in a rush as i often do and before i could sit down at the breakfast table shes looking at me with a funny look and the words that come out of her mouth are the most mangled "magandang umaga" (her attempt at saying good morning in tagalog???) and i nearly lost it. sometimes i'll be way up on the hill meditatitng or something and i'll open my eyes and there's emily hiking across the pasture (?) with a hiking stick (??) in each hand. like damn everything this girl does is so funny. its nice to be around someone to laugh at all the things with because it makes the world that much lighter.
Oct 16, 2021
"You need to make a genuine commitment to doing something with or without remuneration. The bible calls this casting your bread upon the waters" I have thousand words to say about farming.. but I’ll start with this- boy the confidence that you get after doing a damned thing (and doing it for a while). I mean, putting in the work, but never not once even mentioning it. That’s the unspoken code of farmers. Because there’s always work to do and if you’re always moving and stepping up to do the things without being asked to and never once comparing, people start to notice and respect you a little. But that only comes with time, you can’t get to that in weeks or even a couple months. I think they call it grit and there’s a good reason you only find it in grange halls.
It’s so different, like so wildly different, from the bravado that comes from say stepping onto some country thinking you know things because you’ve read about it in a book. I always find it funny when someone shows up wearing like Carhartt overalls because I’ve never not once seen a real farmer give a damn about that stuff (except for Vince, he owns a pair).
Because on farms, shit will humble you real fast. Get overzealous and you’ll end up carrying the 70 pound feeder up the hill while they pull the tractors with you in it (all because you weren’t paying attention). The most important thing is to start with a beginner mindset and keep at that for a while. The second most important thing is to mind your own, but lookout for the team. The only time you ever need to look in someone else’s wheelbarrow is to see if they have too much.
I have so much respect for farmers because every single one of them also happen to be the smartest people I know. You can learn a lot by just watching how they move and asking them a ton of questions about the grass and the damn compost and they’ll tell you all you ever wanna know.
Oct 4, 2021
I've been watching Serial Experiments Lain and meditating on the potential for the web (the wired as they called it) as a manifestation space. That was the main inspiration for creating this site, as a sort of homage to virtual spaces of the early 2000s and my own way of carving out a corner for myself online. I think its a real shame that so much of our virtual experience is limited to the streamlined style of today's social platforms. Back in the days of 1.0, you could really make your site your own, rainbow scrollbar panic at the disco on autoplay and all. A lot of younger people today have never experienced the joys of html/coding and like what a way to grow up on the web ya know.
