A wwoofing good holiday
As I mentioned I was getting pretty travel fatigued by this point of the trip and so looking forward to something different. It's not the cycling that's tiring but the constantly being in different places, with different people and needing to constantly plan where to go next and work out what you wanted to see and do. It wasn't so much a holiday that I needed but the old saying that a change is as good as a break. So I'd come to do some hard work on a farm for a holiday. (I hadn't done this sooner was because Australia's international woofing (Working On Organic Farms) book lists farms in Ireland and Spain but not the UK which requires paying a separate fee and I just hadn't got around to checking this out because I was having such a good time travelling.) So I signed up for a week (the usual minimum) on this farm. I would have done longer but was a bit conscious of time because I had to be back in Windermere in the lake district of England for mum's 50th Birthday. However I was also keen to give it a good go because I want to do quite a bit of woofing in Spain in order to maximise my time there so I can have a good crack at learning the language and thought it would be good to do a bit of woofing in an English speaking country first just to get used to how it worked. I was hoping to have time on two different farms, but just ran out of time before mum's birthday and had too much to see.
So anyway I had a week woofing on a farm near Boyle (south of Sligo in NW Ireland). I spent the first few days doing building work, helping Krzysztof put insulation (foam and sheep’s wool) in the floor of a small building he was constructing and then putting the floor boards on. The challenging thing about the insulation was that the building is octagonal and the beams underneath all pointed to the centre, so this left lots of strange angles to fit the insulation into. I don't think he'll be constructing a building like that again. Then he had to get some building materials in before starting on the walls so I spent the next few days working in the garden. They were constructing a labyrinth which will be planted with various vegetables, so we were removing and few weeds and mostly stones from the soil ready for planting. Taria (a Swiss woofer) had been doing this repetitive work for a couple of months so was completely sick of it but I enjoyed getting my hands in the soil. Over all it was great to have a whole week worrying about where to sleep or get food from and just do what I was told and do something constructive with my hands. I also got Taria to borrow Harry Potter No. 4 from the Library and got through that in the week. We had Sunday off to go down to a nearby park with a lake and just chill out which was nice as well.
On top of all of that, Krzysztof was an amazing guy who knew a lot about a lot of things that most people don't even think about. He and his wife Karen are practitioners of natural medicine and run an 'alternative' health centre in the nearby town of Boyle. In the meantime they are trying to establish an intentional farming and spiritual community, partially motivated by Krzysztof's belief that there will be a major energy crisis when we run out of oil in the next year or two and the remaining supplies are kept for military forces. They are hoping to be as self sustainable as possible. So staying on an organic farm run by practitioners of natural medicine, I've never eaten so healthy in my life and learnt a fair bit about the human body and various foods etc though barely scratched the surface I'm sure. Krzysztof also shared his experience of a campaign he'd started to get fluoride taken out of Ireland's water, as it is an industrial waste product, toxic to humans and a cause of either cancer, or kidney or liver failure, can't remember which. Unfortunately his attempts were quashed by the government. There were several things like this where knowledge has been kept form the public which tie in with ideas about the staging of September 11 by a group of powerful people running much of the world, as an excuse to take possession of the oil in Afghanistan. He also shared some of his knowledge of ancient Mayan (Central American), Essene (Middle Eastern) and Indian culture and spirituality about all of which he is very knowledgeable. Apparently both the Meyans and Essene independently predicted that there would be a world wide cataclysmic event in the year we now know as 2012, the Meyan's even put a date on it December 23 - so watch out for that! Apparently these ancient peoples also knew of energy lines that run across the earth and are still marked by things such as the pyramids and Stonehenge. Then there are those mysterious crop signs which Krzysztof claimed to know what was behind but wouldn't tell me as I needed to discover that for myself.
Anyway, it was a bit of a mind job staying with them and at first I really struggled with it and couldn't believe any of it but then as I asked myself why it was that I didn't or rather couldn't believe it, I opened my mind to the possibilities. Now I still don't believe all of it, but the most important thing I learnt that week, was not a particular piece of knowledge but that it is one thing to say you are open minded and another to actually be open minded. A reminder that we as humans don't seem particularly good at dealing with change and that if we encounter something that just doesn't fit with our previous experience, we just ignore it and pretend it never happened. We have to remember that we don't know everything (an never will) and thus always be open to learning from any source. Force ourselves to consider unlikely possibilities in a critical way, not get hung up on them in a paranoid sort of way but not just reject them off hand either, and that can be harder than it sounds.
So what is your mind really open to?
So anyway I had a week woofing on a farm near Boyle (south of Sligo in NW Ireland). I spent the first few days doing building work, helping Krzysztof put insulation (foam and sheep’s wool) in the floor of a small building he was constructing and then putting the floor boards on. The challenging thing about the insulation was that the building is octagonal and the beams underneath all pointed to the centre, so this left lots of strange angles to fit the insulation into. I don't think he'll be constructing a building like that again. Then he had to get some building materials in before starting on the walls so I spent the next few days working in the garden. They were constructing a labyrinth which will be planted with various vegetables, so we were removing and few weeds and mostly stones from the soil ready for planting. Taria (a Swiss woofer) had been doing this repetitive work for a couple of months so was completely sick of it but I enjoyed getting my hands in the soil. Over all it was great to have a whole week worrying about where to sleep or get food from and just do what I was told and do something constructive with my hands. I also got Taria to borrow Harry Potter No. 4 from the Library and got through that in the week. We had Sunday off to go down to a nearby park with a lake and just chill out which was nice as well.
On top of all of that, Krzysztof was an amazing guy who knew a lot about a lot of things that most people don't even think about. He and his wife Karen are practitioners of natural medicine and run an 'alternative' health centre in the nearby town of Boyle. In the meantime they are trying to establish an intentional farming and spiritual community, partially motivated by Krzysztof's belief that there will be a major energy crisis when we run out of oil in the next year or two and the remaining supplies are kept for military forces. They are hoping to be as self sustainable as possible. So staying on an organic farm run by practitioners of natural medicine, I've never eaten so healthy in my life and learnt a fair bit about the human body and various foods etc though barely scratched the surface I'm sure. Krzysztof also shared his experience of a campaign he'd started to get fluoride taken out of Ireland's water, as it is an industrial waste product, toxic to humans and a cause of either cancer, or kidney or liver failure, can't remember which. Unfortunately his attempts were quashed by the government. There were several things like this where knowledge has been kept form the public which tie in with ideas about the staging of September 11 by a group of powerful people running much of the world, as an excuse to take possession of the oil in Afghanistan. He also shared some of his knowledge of ancient Mayan (Central American), Essene (Middle Eastern) and Indian culture and spirituality about all of which he is very knowledgeable. Apparently both the Meyans and Essene independently predicted that there would be a world wide cataclysmic event in the year we now know as 2012, the Meyan's even put a date on it December 23 - so watch out for that! Apparently these ancient peoples also knew of energy lines that run across the earth and are still marked by things such as the pyramids and Stonehenge. Then there are those mysterious crop signs which Krzysztof claimed to know what was behind but wouldn't tell me as I needed to discover that for myself.
Anyway, it was a bit of a mind job staying with them and at first I really struggled with it and couldn't believe any of it but then as I asked myself why it was that I didn't or rather couldn't believe it, I opened my mind to the possibilities. Now I still don't believe all of it, but the most important thing I learnt that week, was not a particular piece of knowledge but that it is one thing to say you are open minded and another to actually be open minded. A reminder that we as humans don't seem particularly good at dealing with change and that if we encounter something that just doesn't fit with our previous experience, we just ignore it and pretend it never happened. We have to remember that we don't know everything (an never will) and thus always be open to learning from any source. Force ourselves to consider unlikely possibilities in a critical way, not get hung up on them in a paranoid sort of way but not just reject them off hand either, and that can be harder than it sounds.
So what is your mind really open to?
posted by James Tonson | 8:23 am
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