Leaving

It’s been seven months here at the farm.  Seven months of chores, facilitation, cold weather, extreme heat, beautiful views, great people, and baby animals.  And what of it?  Is there anything I would have done differently?  What would I never change?  What will follow me when I leave?  These questions, asked by a few close friends, are the definition of a job that is complete in so many ways, but yet again, one that will chase me for the rest of my life and evolve and offer new insights and fodder for thoughts. 

There’s something about afterbirth that never leaves the mind.   It’s the gruesome truth about life that people don’t really think about when they’re chasing their dreams.  We watched around 90 births, 90 bonding moment where gentle mothers cleaned up their babies, and 90 babies rising to their wobbling legs and insecure feet.  It makes sense.  The beginning.  My mammalian instinct says so.  In those terms.  Then I think about the c-sections and the swinging.  Babies back and forth with liquids draining from their mouths and noses and hope.  Sometimes it makes even more sense this way.  The community of people working together, hoping together, that the life that has not begun might be a good one.  A good life.  So I’ve learned that a good life is messy.  It’s something that doesn’t make logical sense, but it works on an unconscious, instinctual level.

With each change and evolution in people’s lives they are reborn in all the mess, and eventually they learn to clean off themselves and move on from their busted ectoplasm and everything that is familiar. But the familiarity becomes them.  It augments their thinking and dresses them in an aura of know-how.  And so I drag my proverbial after-birth with me to the next stage of my life, not forgetting, but moving on.