The Weekenders

Saturday morning at the farm (I am hesitant to capitalize for copyright reasons-check The Farm) was ushered in with a bang on this 5th of July. A fellow-volunteer and I, the newest newbies coincidentally, are in charge of farm chores this weekend while interns are working, Lotos are eating, and volunteers are 4th traveling.

We awake at 6:15, grab some cold water, and head up to the dairy. Three hours later we finally are able to leave the hard-headed goats and their glassy-eyed ways. This is not typical of course. We are new, we are young, we are paraprofessional goat herders chasing 15 goats around lush pasture and plump garden space. Saving-face explanation: the pastures are divided by electrical fencing, and the new pasture's wiring has mysteriously become impotent. After D and I move into the kid barn for some mom milking, we look up to see dairy G running into the kid barn, a good 300 yards from her current pasture (with impotent wiring). G was just the leader; every dairy goat followed swiftly. The barn is swarming with Lotos volunteers already, most of whom are thinking this is a cute phenomenon to see goats rushing the feed bucket from all directions. They (goat not Lotos) escape a few times, D and I make chase a few times, the morning hours grow long.

Point of story? Sometimes goats are friends, sometimes goats are anti-friends (not quite enemies still), and sometimes a volunteer works for five hours without a breakfast (on three hours of sleep nonetheless-but thats a story for another blog).

INSPIRATIONAL INSERT
And for those of you who enjoy introspective, meaningful thought as opposed to stories about friends'/strangers' daily happenings...
M is a community service volunteer from the local community who has been coming out to the farm every day to work from nine until three. He is fifteen, going on sixteen, a high school powerlifter and football player, and talkative. For some incident at school or a practiced he was issued somewhere between seventy and one-hundred hours of community service at WHR, or the farm with a lower-case.

On Friday L, A, M, and myself were seeding fall squash and pumpkins for a couple of hours. We made jokes about his future in farming, to which he guffawed and said, "But hey.....ya know...it's cool this, like, stuff we're doing, I wouldn't say it's me or anything, but I'll probably come out'n visit you guys sometime....yeah, I like it."

While M and I were watering some tomato cuttings from the day before, he struck up the conversation about what he first noticed, and what has continually surprised him, at the farm.
paraphrase: M was strongly taken aback to see nobody arguing. Since he has been coming for about two weeks, anytime somebody has a request or a question, the responder drops what they are working on the give a hand or give full answers without frustration. The 'without frustration' is what caught M's eye. He has not seen any disagreements that he can classify because nobody is arguing. I noted that we do not all see eye to eye on issues or ideas here at the farm, but M made the point that he has never seen a large group of people or even a small group who live together resolve things without anger or frustration. We briefly talked about selfish love/ selfless love; M said it was good to see that people could get along somewhere because he has never seen it last.
end of paraphrase: I (also an M, but remaining the I for the post to relieve confusion) could not help but sit in awe that an outsider to the farm, a high school outsider at that, is noticing and leaving with the impression that we at the farm are different in our relations with people. For almost two weeks on and off we have been glossing over the idea of Christian love in devotions; and by no means are we all selfless, but I was encouraged that perhaps God's spirit of Love is within us individually and communally to enable us to be a community in the first place.

Cheers,

M with a y