pastoral musings.

i have just returned home from three days in milwaukee, wisconsin. two half days of traveling equaled one whole day and the other two days were spent as my interview/work days on the urban farm.

recently, i've have been trying consciously to not have preconceived notions or expectations of any new thing. this is difficult i know, especially since i've observed and participated in a spectrum of similarly grouped adventures and experiences, so things don't feel completely 100% "new." but i'm discovering that the more open and free i can be to life, the more i can see and learn from these different, if similar, events.

my time on the farm was a great exercise in being receptive, observant, and attentive. it also involved me being physically active in the hot heat of the sun, sweating profusely, and delighting in apparent daily progress. i helped take care of livestock--2 full (yet free roaming) chicken coops, a multitude of goats, turkeys, and a handful of ducks--trellised tomatoes, moved vegetables, soil, and muck to the compost truck, as well as try to catch rats. yep. that's right. armed with a shovel, i tried to catch rats by bopping them on the head while they emerged from their underground den. call me little bunny foo foo. but these weren't tiny mice, these were fat rats that squealed. it was an adrenaline pumping and frighteningly surreal experience.

it's not surprising that many farms experience rodent and pest issues. there's food everywhere! it's a rat's dream to seek shelter on a farm and gorge itself into gluttony. the farmer, however, will eventually realize this and the problem must be fixed. i, along with the other current interns, micheline and adam, mucked out the front room of the coop where the food was stored and in the process found a family of rats. a handful escaped, one rat went into the chicken coop and died immediately from the group pecking (those hens were FIERCE!), and the fate of the fattest one of all is unknown since it went into the chicken coop too, but we weren't able to locate its body. oh the happenings of life on a farm!

the two work days proved themselves to give me excellent exposure to what my 3 months as a fall intern would entail. hard physical labor aside, i learned more about the management and (dis)organization of the day to day functions. i am more than thankful that the current interns gave me their honest assessments and critiques of the farm. they confirmed what i had suspected...that despite the good work involved, the strained lines of communication, crowded living situation and work load that considers the demands of the organization without very many open modes of mutually agreeable and beneficial dialogues with the work staff, have me convinced that in this point in my life, milwaukee is not the best fit. which means, onward to, HALIFAX, nova scotia. OH CANADA!(impending confirmation...)