EarthDance

I am spending a week at earth dance. earthdance.net. It is 45 minute drive away from the nearest town (Northampton) and thus it is different from anything I have ever done. I am not really doing it. I mean, I am doing it. I just went to the creamery. a little shoppe. down the road, a lot of miles. we picked up an order of yogurt from sidehill farm in vermont, where we get our yogurt [apparently.]

This week is different from most weeks here at Earthdance - its salsa camp/week/ convention. 50 women are here from all over the world (I know this because a handful of them don't speak English, and I can't understand when they try to request butter knives or spare towels or jugs of water, or an amalgam of the 3.) So I am a staff member here, and that entitles me to be here. I have a shift or 2 or 3 a day, cleaning, sweeping, taking out the trash, cursory bathroom cleaning (obligatory grimace) and burning the burnables! In every bathroom there is a bin for burnables. It means burnable things. Like toilet paper rolls or paper towels used to dry off your hands. No bodily fluids, please! Those are NOT burnable here. So this morning, Ben (head honcho-type) and I headed off through the woods to the furnace/sauna / quarry place and lit some fire in a fireplace-type-place and kept stuffing the burnables in and watched their edges curl in iridiescent orange flamules, as they became ash and char, making way for the rest of the burnables to burn.

I have been asking a ton of questions here, becuase I am not afraid to ask, and I have questions. Nothing that goes on here is typical of the supposed world that I was brought up into. I helpedCalyan, the head chef, make dinner last night. from 4-7 pm I chopped, peeled, diced 'n' sliced veggies, and then stir fried them in a wok, which all resulted in a sore arm and fingers, and a small sliver of skin sliced off of my left middle finger, and a hot splash of safflower oil on my wrist. But all is well, and we created a mean meal for 65 people. 50 salsa dancing women and 10 staffers. Fish chowder, Sweet potato Lentil stew, kale, veggie stirfry, and some other stuff that I can't remember right now. Everything is made in these huge bowls. Late last night Calyan came into the kitchen and made granola from scratch. I watched him make it. I don't think he is terribly fond of me, as I was asking him lots of questions and every time he said something to me I had to say "what?" because it was hard to hear his soft lyrical voice over the bellowing vocals of the tribal celtic / what-have you alternativish music blasting from his arcane laptop perched directly about the 10-burner oven. So calyan made granola. So much granola. We ate it for breakfast this morning. I had it with milk and maple syrup and cinnamon. Heavenly. I want to do some intense outdoor manual labor and frisbee today. I was teaching this woman who is bou 34 years old but certainly feels more like a 12 year old jumping around in a freeing new world, how to throw a flick. I was kind of impressed at my frisbee throwing knowledge, I suppose in comparison to the layperson. We got sweaty, we cut for each other, we climbed trees. There's a guy here, he made a commitment to live here for a year - he is the "buildings and grounds" guy, his name is Justin, but people call him "Just" or "Just one". Yesterday I pulled out weeds with him around this apple tree for an hour and a half, and we had a nice, albeit a bit forced, chat. He told me he has a younger sister who is 28 with special needs, and about a place he has been considering for her to live once their mother is no longer able to care for her. It's called ploughshare farms, and apparently its a self- sustainable community based heavily on the tenet that it is a bunch of people living together, and not in a hierarchical way - the people who need the support of the neurotypical "Staff" are meant to feel equal to said helpers. Would I maybe want to spend sometime working and living in a place like that? Maybe.

The more I think about it, or allow myself to submit to the different way of life here, the more I realize that I don't always have to be busy. I just wrote "busty" - I also don't always have to be busty, but that is less in my control than my business. It is quite a frightening sentiment, to have free time, and be in a rural place, as I have been used to the opposite for so long. This summer went pretty much like this for me:

Take care of kids, fret about various issues surrounding the respective babysitting jobs, play sports, think about the sports and the pickups and the people and myself in relation to everything else going on, take lots of subways, and play more sports on weekends, and spend time with friends. Oh, and fend off / appease the family. But I must say, my nephews and neice are definitely the sweetest, cutest babies ever. Albeit every baby is the sweetest and cutest. Well, every white baby. (!!) But really, the soft skin, the undifferentiated eyeball pigment, the wispy thin short hairs, the barely shaped nose, the limbs that flail arbitrarily and get more padded week by week from suckling just milk. It is all of those things but also, and most key-ly, the idea of a baby that is so powerful. The whole responsibility, extension of self, amalgamation of 2 people in love (sometimes), the we-made-this-life, or God-made-this-life-through-us thing... kind of makes someone with an ounce of sense just shut their mouths. Not me though. I can't shut my mine, apparently. It is time for me to do a cursory cleaning of the bathrooms here in the main Earthdance Farmhouse.

Needless to say, I am proud of myself.