But Seriously

Can it be that Thailand is not that much closer to NZ than it is to San Fran? I knew my geography sucked but seriously, I just had no idea. 17 hours on a plane versus 20 isn't much of a break. And, thanks to NZ being so expensive in the everything department, tickets are a lot-lot more from here.

Counterpoint: I'm a stubborn b!tch. Once I say I'm going to do something, it's hard to let it go.

So I'm going to go on a hike and let nature settle my brain. Leah had a dream that the answer would come to me there (strange, as I hadn't yet told her my plans, but in the dream I told her I needed to find turquoise in a forest in order to figure out where to go next). Tomorrow morning I say goodbye to my dear Blueberry Farm and head North.

But enough about the agony of my luxurious decisions. Who cares? What can I interest you in...

Today I found a dead hen in the henhouse. It was weird. Can I say it was sort of like seeing Big Bird dead? It's just weird seeing a bird all laid down.

But then life goes on and you make cookies out of their unborn babies. Never mind the unadulterated pleasure of a sunnyside up. The fluorescence of the orange in the yolk is blinding. And the taste of an egg that could only be fresher if lain directly into your mouth... Can I get an Amen!

Using the internet at work no longer means gchatting with friends about happy hour, but instead googling "do chickens have vaginas" (I said something about catching an egg coming out of a chicken's butt, and Leah was like, "out of the actual butt?" and I was like, "I don't think so, but let'ssssss check!")

[For the record, they've got all the parts, at least according to the internet, which is as much as I will investigate.]

Wanna talk about chickens more? Kiwis can't get enough of them. When you go to the beer store, you're supposed to buy chicken-flavored chips to go with your 24-pack (don't get anything smaller or they'll know you're an outsider, as this is an island nation of alcoholics). The flavor is not hint-of-chicken, like say in an oodle-o-noodle, but screaming at the top of its chicken-sized lungs HEY WOULD YOU LIKE SOME MORE CHICKEN WITH YOUR CHICKEN?!? There's even a picture of a cartoon chicken on the chip bag, just chillin all natural-like, as though he was born to a family of potatoes and couldn't be more at home.

I can mock them, I can even eat them, but chickens, in the end, always get their revenge. They poop relentlessly. When I sleep late and don't feed them first thing, they poop closer and closer to the house, just inside the doorway, once even in the laundry basket. They know what they're doing. And if you spend time each day waterblasting their poo off the concrete walkway, eventually the odds of bad luck and angles will catch up and you'll waterblast that poo right into your own eye.

At times like these, I'm okay with my departure from life on the farm. There's a lot I will miss. I will miss being offered fresh juice with fresh colostrum from Latte the Cow mixed in (colostrum, I learned, is the pre-cursor to milk from a teat, and is not just white but also yellow and a bit brown and kinda oily looking and you definitely only drink it because someone is offering it to you as something sacred). And I will especially miss the meaning of this special place.

That link up there is worth a click. Before leaving the Bloob Farm -- "Bloob" TM Sarah Montross, thanks Sarah! -- I must pass along the story of Nima, the Nepalese sherpa who saved a life and thus ended up in New Zealand lending his permaculture skills to the only organic blueberry farm around. I don't think the article explains how dangerous it was for Nima to leave Nepal, and then go back to bring his wife with him to NZ. In his village, having known connections to people with money was an advertisement for getting kidnapped. Crazy shit. The fam is doing great and living down the road now.

One thing I both will and won't miss is learning a different meaning of "a hard day's work." There's no "but that's not in my job description" when the chicken shits in your path. If you see a hole in the netting, or watch the dog knock over a 100-piece tray of chalk nubs into wet, knee-high grass, and two of your five fingers are functioning, it's your job. You don't spend half your day saying "I would do X but I'm waiting for Y from so-and-so at our biweekly meeting." Your ability to be effective is all on you. You don't know how to fix the mower? Well, how badly do you want to figure it out?

It's humbling. It's tiring.. but I think - for me, for now - it's been a bit less tiring than waiting around for an agenda to tell me what's important. And quite a good test to see what's there when you give up excuses.