The Present 3/17
Since so much time has passed between now and the festival, I think maybe the best way to proceed would be to start is from this moment right now.
Right now I am tired. Very tired in fact and feeling particularly unmotivated and uncreative. I'm watching the sun go down, being eaten by mosquitos and thinking I should go back to camp and help Arthur cook dinner. I'm all these things but I'm also very happy. :) The fact that it is difficult to explain ALL the things that I have been through even in the last week, let alone the last month, brings a small smile to my tired face.
Arthur and I have been apple picking now for two and a half weeks, and its been full on. We wake up each morning at 530 or 6. We pull ourselves out of our tents and welcome the new day with yoga and Qi Gong. Then we eat our musli, and walk down the rows to where we had left off the day before and we start picking. We've done some playful calculations as to how much we do each day. We're not quite sure how accurate they are but they are certainly ball park figures. We've been told that each bin we do is 400kg and about 5,000 apples. This means that on an average day we will have taken about 2 tons of apple from the trees, to the ground and into the bins. Two tons of apples per day per person! That is roughly 25,000 apples per person per day, and some of the fast pickers will do 8 or 9 bins a day!
We pick in all weather. Sometimes were in the hot New Zealand sun all day, sometimes it's rainy and wet, but most of the time its a clear day with clouds here and there to keep you cool, and maybe a cool breeze to keep the sting of the UV rays off your neck. After a full 8 hour day Arthur and I walk back to our little bush camp. Where this is the end of the day for most people it is in many ways the beginning of ours. We have no refrigerator or freezer so we make a grocery run by bike into town 3 or 4 times a week. Our water is from a sink further up the row and our showers, laundry, and internet is about a 2 or 3 minute walk from our camp. All these may seem like inconvenience but really they are quite nice little rituals that really make you appreciate each one for what they really are, food and water. Each night we try and get dinner started by 7. So we have a little time to do things like check the internet, take a shower, do laundry and all those things. On top of all this Arthur and I have diciplined ourselves to teach each other something new at least twice a week. Arthur has been teaching me Qi Gung and a mixture of other martial arts. I have been teaching him yoga, and meditation techniques.
We have really made an excellent team out here. We manage to get along really well considering the conditions.
3/18
I'm going to keep this as live as possible for the next three days or so. It is 21:11 on the 18th of March and we just finished dinner, probably read a little bit and sleep soon, in order to start our day bright and early tomorrow. :) Tomorrow is a grocery day....
3/19
It's 19:20 and Arthur and I just got back from grocery shopping. We got off work about 16, had a short break, maybe 30 min, then jumped on our bikes and rode into to pick up food.
It's amazing how difficult it can be to think logically when your brain is starving. The littlest things can sometimes be so difficult. Even this sentence right now I'm noticing how often I backspace, or how long it takes me to finish a thought and then type it out.
Getting groceries always takes such an effort because it is always right after work, and we bike into the Richmond mall where the nearest supermarket is. So you can easily imagine two guys who have been living in tents for 3 weeks and have still not showered from a days work in the field, coming into the mall... The Mall! Arthur and I jokingly call it our weekly trip back into Babylon, where consumerism, ego and judgment are glorified, but then we buy our fair trade dark chocolate and fuck off out of there. :)
Currently we are boiling water for some dinner, probably fat with carbs and protein of some kind. Nothing really that romantic. I should stop typing and check the water...
And now we eat food and watch the hobbit 2 :) 23:12. Another night, drivin to success by the root chakra. We've just finished dinner, and a bit of the second hobbit. Little luxuries like watching a movie in our bush camp that makes one smile at the end of each day, and puts it all in to perspective in order to really enjoy all of these moments. To think how crazy our lives are that have brought us to this moment...
Its the first night of a waning full moon and we certainly felt it this morning. Like a sadness, a lack of strength from the previous two or three days. My legs hurt, and I can see in Arthur that he is not as strong in some ways either. But we press on, and make each other laugh and smile when the moment is right. Little luxuries like the Hobbit keep us feeling good as well. But tomorrow will be another day started with yoga in the cold, really hoping our sun salutations at sunrise will bring out the rays of sun and keep us in good spirits. And we do thank the moon each night for her gifts and beauty as well, The energy of this moon seems to have a calm clarifying light about her.
Well lunch is packed for tomorrow. Musli is made a sealed so the rats don't get into it. Now I crawl into the cozy cocoon that is my tent and sleep like a baby upon the earth. :)
3/20
Its now 20:00 and we still need to eat. It was a long day today 81/2 hours and only 5 bins. Was distracted from the apples today, I made a couple music play lists. :) One for apple picking and the other for a friend, it was a good distraction and led me to some thoughts about why I'm picking thousands of apples each day. :)
Came back from picking and our tarp had come down in the wind today. The wind was from a different direction and it got up under it. No worries tho, not expecting rain. Did yoga and some Qi Gung. Which flowed into some energy work and some sparing forms I learned from Arthur. I should probably get back to camp now and help him cook...
3/22
It's a beautiful Saturday afternoon and I'm sitting in the shade of a pear tree determined to get this blog caught up. I've been thinking so much about my present and my future lately that I think this blog will refresh my thoughts about where I've come from recently. I am going to write about these experiences as honestly as possible while still keeping some of them my own. I hope it makes for good reading. :)
Evolve
I would like to start by saying that if you have never been to a music festival, go to one. There are thousands of them out there in the world for all kinds of different interests and communities. If you think your too old to go to one your lieing to yourself, and if you think your too young, then their lieing to you. There were maybe 450 to 500 people at Evolve and it was a lot of families. They had work shops and areas for the kids as much as they did for the adults and I saw people well into their 70's out on the dance floor Saturday night.
The Evolve music festival seems like so long ago. I know that many of you reading this have been to a music festival of some kind, so you can relate to how difficult, or impossible, it is to put that kind of experience into words. So instead of struggling to try and do so I'll simply explain a little bit about the festival and some of the things I saw and did there. The most exciting story comes from some people I met there and what we did after the festival but I'll get to that in a minute.
Evolve was a festival more about raising awareness than about music and dancing. It had loads of workshops, from energy work and yoga, to community consciousness and communication. It was a three day festival from Friday afternoon into Sunday, with music and work shops during the day and then music ending about 11 on Friday and Saturday. It was an all ages event that encouraged sober participation, although many people indulged in one thing or another more or less responsibly. There was only one stage at the center of the venue where all the artists would be performing. The venue was an outdoor heritage museum in Nelson. It was great place to have a festival. It had original buildings from the 1800's where many of the workshops were held. I went to a work shop on communication in the original church of Nelson and had another workshop held via Skype in the towns old printing press building where they would print the towns newspapers. :) Along with the music and the workshops there were vendors selling or trading art, stones, food, even skills or ideas. It was a gathering of good people looking to share space and share ideas.
The vibe here was all about raising awareness, about all the things going on in our world presently. From our addiction to oil, the mining of the sea bed, genetically engineered food, the changing weather patterns, all of the crazy things that are happening to our planet and to ourselves. But the vibe was not a cynical one. There was never a feeling of “All these things are bad we need to change them or we're going to die” it was more optimistic. It was more a feeling of “These are the things we can do NOW in order to live a happier more fulfilling life, I leave it to you to do them or not.” This was such a welcome change from the states where it seems there is this feeling of impending doom if we don't take action, and DO! DO! DO! And if you don't DO, well than we might as well party and get blissed out until someone else DO.
Many of the people there were already doing so much. Many of the people were WWOOFers or working towards permaculture practices. Some people had quite their unsatisfying jobs of years and years and were starting to travel or take steps to improve their own lives as well as those around them.
The bands that played there were great as well. There was lots of world music, flutes, and jimbes, but there were also some great alternative bands as well. Probably my favorite group was the Formidable Vegetable Sound System. They were just a couple of guys from Australia that made an album all about permaculture. Check them out on spotify or youtube if you get a chance, they've got a really positive upbeat sound with really brilliant lyrics. Many of these artists would jump onstage with each other and collaborate live as well which is always really amazing to witness and be a part of.
Overall the festival was great. Full of great people, great music, and great ideas. At this point in my journey I didn't really have a plan of what to do other than to find work apple picking someplace in the area. I knew Evolve would be a great place to meet people and share great experience, but nothing could have prepared me for what I would soon experience with Inky the hippy from the states and two young German girls, Silke and Louisa.
3/25
I'm sitting in a little room in a little shack on a little apple orchard on an island in the pasific smiling at my poor attempt to edit the writtings I did this weekend. It was another full day of work Monday and today and I'm feeling it already. This will be the last week for Arthur and I and then we are Free men once again. I"m finding hard to write during this time, and finding it exeptionallly hard to write creatively or concisely. I will post my most recent writtings and will try to keep up with this day to day, more like a little jornal. That way I won't be able to get so behind and work so hard to play catch up. So bearing that in mind, as I write from the present I will try and write about the past here and there when I can in order to catch everyone up with the unique expereiences I've been having. I'm looking forward to writting about my reflections on this apple picking job. It has been so full on and so intense that it has been hard to do anything other than just hold on, stay strong, and go with it. There hasn't been to much time to sit and think about all the deep shit I've been going through at the same time, and Arthur and I agree that there has been loads of deep shit thats we've both been going through.
Thanks for being patient with me and I hope that these stories from a small island in the pacific give you a little light and inspiration in your day to day back home.
:) Love :)
