The Farm

It’s a funny thing, the way people imagine things.
When I went off to New York to live in the city trying with hopeful tenderness and grim determination (a combination that would have been well uplifted by self love) to become a Broadway singer, everyone said I was Brave. 

Brave is not what I felt. I felt intrepid, adventurous, excited. I felt afraid and inspired and elated. I felt ready and I felt welcomed.

It’s not that I think people are wrong to think it is brave to go off to a new place by yourself to follow your dream but on this side of this year I wonder what it is that makes people imagine it is so much more brave to be in a city than it is to be on a farm. 

Probably because of the pandemic (and a little bit because of the silent yearning all humans have to get away from Worldliness and get back to nature), everyone who heard that I had transferred myself from the city to a farm emphatically toasted the transition and expressed with surprising earnestness how much they wished they could do the same. 

And it is one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever experienced.

It’s also the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

I didn’t grow up on a farm. I grew up seven blocks from the beach in a small city town known for sultry warm weather, nightclubs, lots and lots of people, and no gardens. Our yard was a small strip in front of our house: one of the only unpaved driveways kept triumphantly wild with a hedge of brilliant green, long grass and one sweetly arcing tree that tumbled down one year in a hurricane. The neighbors directly behind our house had raucous parties almost every night of the week. It has always been easy for me to fall asleep to noise.

I have always loved the water, the wind, the sky. But the forest was foreign to me. I have always loved animals but I didn’t grow up taking care of any; watching them grow, having to go out in the cold or dark to take care of them before taking care of myself. 

Then we moved to a place that did have land and I began to familiarize myself with the forest that terrified me. I jumped whenever an evergreen branch touched me. I was always sure it was a bug. 

I went to college in the cultivated-rose-garden land of L.A. I then flitted off to the concrete jungle of New York City whose parks are half statues and half bridges, curated for history.

After moving to Las Vegas one week before the full pandemic country-wide shut down, the sweet love of my life and I got in the car and arrived back home, at my parents house.

And that’s when the farm found us.

As with most things, we went to the farm because of my mom. Bursting with excitement after having gone there with her herbal medicine class, she pronounced that we must all visit immediately. She called that afternoon to see about a tour for the whole family.

We arrived on a glorious, sun-glowing day in August, lavender blooming ebulliently in such abundance it felt like a sea of purple haze, green everywhere, plants shining with wholeness.

There was an energy in the air, a Home-ness, a welcoming hand. It felt like the the people of the farm, and the farm itself, was a friend. A friend full of joy and openness, the friend you know will always help. Don’t ask me how I felt all these things. I didn’t label them, they just existed, like the warmth in your gut when you smile at a stranger and they smile back.

Kyle wanted to stay immediately. We had been looking for something to make sense in our jobless COVID lives. Something meaningful. And I felt it too. The Something we’d been looking for. But I felt anxiety well up in me. A farm? I didn’t know the first thing about farms. Every plant I’d ever acquired I’d managed to kill. I wasn’t cut out for this. New York City made sense.  A remote island farm all the way back in my home state felt like a foreign language I had no idea how to start learning. 

But the eager dance of Kyle’s excitement and the deep stirrings of Knowing in my gut led us to the moment when, the night after our visit, we asked if we could come and stay and work.
Two weeks later we pitched our tent under a tree near the farmhouse next to dense brambles of blackberries.

Suddenly we entered a completely new existence. Every single day meant (and continues to mean) learning brand new things: how to harvest lavender, how to distill essential oil, how to milk a goat, how to harvest herbs and vegetables and pick fruit, how to make soap… 

Even more than that it meant how to forget about time and lunch and sitting down; it meant diving deeply into projects and listening to the call of the birds more than the chime of my text messages (in fact, I have so little service on the farm I don’t even carry my phone with me). It meant learning how to cook and how to navigate living with a whole new family- a farm family of fifteen people. It meant learning how to say yes and help even if you are tired. It meant not taking things personally. 

And for me, it meant facing the voices in my head that living a high-paced dazzled city life had managed to push to the back of my consciousness.
Amidst constantly learning new things and focusing solely on farm life rather than the myriad of events/classes/people/relationships/work/practice/volunteering/auditions that smashed together the ball of my life in New York, the depth of my self-enmity started to rush to the surface. 

‘You’re not good enough’ echoes in my head underneath a roar of I can’t believe I made this mistake or I clearly am wrong inside that I just reacted like that in this situation.

But here, everyone is working toward a common goal—not just the flourishing health of the farm, but the flourishing expansion of the heart toward Superconsciousness. 

Here I am nourished by souls around me that see each other as souls. Here I learn by example how to treat humankind and animals alike, how to exist with nature as one. Here I stumble but I am not judged. Someone reaches out a hand. Here every day is like the enchanting merriment of the holidays: full of joy, warmth, laughter, good-natured silence, thoughtful conversation and, of course, an abundance of delicious food.

Every day we meditate together from 6:30 am until 8. In the stillness of the morning I hold myself to the light and I take baby steps in the right direction.

Being here for me is the bravest thing I can imagine. I am finally unearthing the rooted hopelessness of my ego self and recognizing the bright sweet sunshine of my whole divine soul.

in joy and sunshine,

Alexa