I woke up this morning to a turkey vulture, fat and bloody headed, eating a dead squirrel; a casualty of my assault on the chipmunks. I felt sorry for his death, as I did the others. But this was the circle of life. Imbalance throws things…out of balance. Some people might take issue with my speeding up the circle of life, but I imagine that they have never grown their own food, nor thought about where the food they eat comes from -vegetarian, vegan or otherwise. Things die so that we may live. This is a fact. (We won’t even get into the Havahart traps I set. My friends are now calling them havahartattack traps. Heart conditions in rodents is real).
Life on the farm can be tedious. Beautiful, but tedious. Plants are like pets without the snuggling. But we can eat them in the end, so there’s that. It’s been a long time since I’ve traveled. I don’t mean vacation, I mean a true journey. Nowadays my soaps travel more than I do. Hawaii + Iceland most recently. Today I was reminded that travelling is all about your state of mind. When you travel the smallest things are marvelous. The color of the sky. The smell of the air. I was stringing pole bean strings, realizing I would run out of twine, when I heard someone playing the bagpipes…or uilleann pipes (I could not be sure, I listened closely, but it has been many years since I lived in Ireland). Behind me in the pear trees bluebirds chattered. I stopped and stood up, listening to the pipes, watching the male and then the female fly from pear to apple. I wondered if they were egging on their new fledgling who Eric and I somehow spied with binoculars in the crook of a maple branch, all bloated, fuzzy and speckle-feathered.
“This,” I thought “is what travelling is like.”
I tied up the rest of my twine pretending I was WWOOFing somewhere in Ireland, Scotland, or Wales.
Every day is a day of make-believe, of adventure, if we so choose it. The dirty dishes, the ceiling that needs sheet rock, the bills that need paying -these are just distractions. They are not life. They are byproducts of it.
