In the garden.

My farming internship with Alemany Farm began this week. It was a beautiful experience, even if I would have chosen different weather for it. There are about 30 of us taking the course--a year-long program, one Saturday a month, for which we read several themed articles before class, then have a skills-sharing session, then work, harvest. Because it was the first class, we spent a long time learning about each other, touring the farm. We spent many hours under the willow tree, partly sheltered from the pouring rain, shivering and excited about what we were doing. For some of us--including me--this was the first time we had been on the farm. I know very little about farming/gardening/growing, although I always talk about it, and think of myself as a someday-farmer. Well, I'm now one step closer to fulfilling a ridiculous fantasy.

The farm is fairly large, for an urban garden. It's just off the 280, below Bernal Heights. A long bike ride away from my place. The lower gardens are more intensively farmed, with long, planted beds and a lower-lower garden of raised beds of carrots and potatoes. There is a huge natural pond, several small frog ponds, a pre-pubescent redwood grove, an old windmill from when SLUG (San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners, defunct after a funding scandal) first began the farm. The hill is terraced and maintained through permaculture methods. Lots of fruit trees up there, and perennials like artichokes and asparagus.

Immediately, it is clear that this place, and this sort of growth, only makes sense over the long-term. It is only productive over seasons, years. You plant something in October to harvest in May. You wait years, pruning differently, adjusting manure, compost, wood chips, hoping your olive trees will bear fruit. It is a trial. It takes belief, patience, endurance. In fact, it seems a lot like a long-distance relationship--something I've never been very good at. And so begins: a year-long learning process, a year of watching physical growth and hoping for some form of personal growth. An attempt to learn patience--or just how to live with things as they are, for a little longer than I am comfortable. Maybe a lot longer. Discomfort will undoubtedly be part of this.

Part of this self-tourism is, for me, a means of understanding what it is to be an adult and assume full responsibility for my own present and future. The hard part isn't the assumption of responsibility, it's the absence of a definite end date to help me look forward to the next step. That realization looks something like this: many of us are just in motion, just pushing ourselves through every day, trying to move, move, thinking that after this great show of force, something will be different tomorrow. It will be easier, it will be less complicated, we will have fewer things to do.

But that's not really how it is. Instead, we are so often moving, just to move, because speed propels us even when an idea of the future does not. Speed feels right even when we aren't doing anything useful with it. It is a purpose unto itself. And when the journey is just about the motion, the speed of it, as mine so often seems to be, aren't we missing so much? So my journey of self-tourism will be a slow one--a slow learning process, anyway, about the process. Not about the end result. Slowly, slowly, because the breath matters. And the seconds when your lungs are full. And the seconds when they are empty. And the tick tick of your mind as you wait for the process to unveil itself. But this is the process. Breathing and being and learning who you are by letting yourself ask the questions, and giving yourself space and time to answer them.

I am learning, slowly (and, sometimes, thoughtfully), to let those answers come into being without trying to force them. There is too much, and we are wading through it.

Inhale.

It's been a long time since I last posted. Although it may look like I have succumbed to the long working hours of the job, especially with the new year and the newly important billable hours tolling on my desktop timer, this is not the case. In fact, I took a few weeks out of the office--driving up to Sonoma and then down PCH with my South African boyfriend, showing him my corner of the world, and trying to convince him to make it his. He was here for 5 weeks, and all that mattered during that time was spending time with him. Of course, there were the rough patches and the moments when I wanted nothing more than to go for a run , clean my apartment, or read a book in complete silence, but it went well, all told. In fact, he's moving back here in March, at which point some of my perspective on "what matters" and the importance of myself in all of that might change. But for now, I've settled on the idea of this blog as a tool for self-exploration, and an invitation for any readers (my sister, maybe?) to do the same.

And this also starts with my understanding that "self-tourism" is an adventure over an ever-changing landscape. Few things are constant, but the way you move over that landscape seems to remain the same. Being conscious of that, and understanding what your method of movement means for the way you interpret the world, yourself, and others, is very important.

My (ironically) slow realization about my own method of movement is that it is VERY fast. I jump from thing to thing to thing, and rarely do a great job tying up loose ends, or completely understanding something. I just think: sweet! mission accomplished! maybe I'm a genius, after all! and jump right into the next thing without considering what else I can get out of a particular experience. As you may imagine, this impacts not only my extracurricular interests, but also my dating life, and potentially, my career choices. I don't know if there is much I can do about my short attention span (do adults take Ritalin?), but I can control myself beyond the initial impulse to change activities/people/jobs. I can slow the action, if not the thoughts and emotions. So that is the project for now. Trying to be more thoughtful, slower, in my daily routine. Focusing on fewer projects at work, for more time, and pretending that the hours billed to a client don't matter. And focusing on a set number of things that I love to do, and really getting into those things: writing, reading, outdoors physical activity, drawing. And, finally, trying to relax about how bad I am at keeping in touch, how crazily my list of emails-to-be-sent and phone-calls-to-be-made and subsequent thoughts of self-loathing and guilt accumulate. It's ok to focus on the people more immediately in your life--everyone does it, and there's no point apologizing your mutual inability to communicate on a weekly basis across continents.