Don't regret it, would never do it again.

One day I may have internally processed enough to write something meaningful about my last two weeks. When I was on the phone with someone from back home, I came to the disheartening realization that I may describe and explain and tell stories about our time at the first farm but I won't ever be able to make anyone feel what I felt or understand the nuances of the absurdity.

Sunrise Farm was an organic farm indeed where everything was recycled (including the toilet paper) and nothing wasted. I found myself tearing apart the components of my yogurt cup every morning to be recycled 3 different ways and living in fear of what would be said to me if I left anything uneaten on my plate. I was shown the pee-toilet and told it gets dumped in the blueberries to fight a leaf-eating fungus. I nodded and (shaping up to be the worst WWOOFer ever) made a conscious decision to never use the foul smelling pee-toilet and to avoid eating the blueberries as well.

On work days we worked hard-weeding the garden, chopping wood or building a compost heap. On Fridays we baked in the bakery and on Saturdays we sold at market in the tiny town of Mount Shannon on the edge of Lough Derg.
We made friends with others our age in the town and the other WWOOfer on the farm, Eileen from Boston. We spent two extremely enjoyable evenings with them in the local pub, peppered with live traditional music, Eileen's alcohol-influenced version of a Janis Joplin song and our German friend's glocenspiel-a mini xylophone. After one of these evenings, we had been promised a lift home from a very nice Japanese man. Unfortunately, he was both a bit small and overly-cautious and so after 1 beer consumed over the course of 3 1/2 hours, he declared himself too drunk to drive. We found ourselves standing outside of the pub, in the cold, an hour after it had closed while he downed pints of water in an effort to "sober up". I'm telling you, when a not-drunk person thinks they are drunk, there's no telling when they will think they are sober. I am thankful we made it home eventually.

All this sounds normal enough, I suppose, but it wasn't the farm work or activities that made it so strange, it really was the lady who owned the farm. Didi was 60 years old, never married, from Vermont and had lived a transient life working for the Peace Corps in her youth and as a volunteer in other countries- Haiti being the most recent. She sounds lovely, and really she was at times, but mostly she was used to being in charge and never having to live with someone else in any sort of equal relationship. She was incredibly controlling, in every detail of what we did and made her wishes known through biting side comments and passive communication. If she though you were incompetent, she had you wash dishes or pick greens from the garden instead of the more complicated work of baking or cooking etc. This never happened to me but I watched with frustration as it happened to others. Our relationship shaped up to be like boss to employee instead of teacher to learner or even just as a community as I had hoped.

Didi also seemed to live in her own, alternate reality. As far as I understood, she was a higher-up spiritual leader in her religion, which she often referred to as the Yogis (something close to a modified Buddhism), and thus she was called Didi. There's lots of Didis, I don't know how they tell them all apart. Her day involved lots of ritualistic meditation and yoga and strict ideas about how to feed oneself. Few of her ideas about nutrition or how the body works would be found in any medical textbook and I found it increasingly harder to bite my tongue and not argue with the things she said. I continually wanted to say "just because you want something to be reality does not make it reality!" But, clearly, I didn't.
Once, she told me the Yogis cured cancer. And once she made cream of broccoli soup but instead of cream or milk she had used pasta with tomato sauce ground up with boiling water dumped on it. She told me this was, in fact, a milk substitute. Pasta with tomato sauce ground up and mixed with boiling water is, in fact, NOT a milk substitute and so Julia and I (being the worst WWOOFers ever) found ourselves dumping that soup in the river one day while Didi was in London. (In our defense, it had been sitting out all night.)
She had us sing-chant a blessing over our food every meal, a Yogi phrase in a different language which essentially meant "There is love in everything". This did not sit well with me and so I stopped participating even though it was incredibly awkwardly obvious that I wasn't singing. Problem was, she had a CD which had nothing on it but this phrase sung in a song 12 different ways over and over again and she must have had 14 copies of it because we listened to it in the kitchen, the bakery, the car and anywhere else that had CD-playing capabilities. In a fitting way, it was the last thing I heard when she dropped us off at the bus station to head on to our next farm.

When we left for our trip, I expected that I would learn a lot and know God more deeply, but not in the ways it has happened this far. In the midst of the spiritual heaviness that I felt at the farm, I was forced to go to Romans and the basics of Christ and the meaning of his life and death and our salvation. Didi and two other girls who came for a spiritual retreat participated in structured meditation and strived to become some sort of better or more spiritual person. I turned it all over and over in my head trying to figure out their source or motivation or even the ends of what they believed. It was exhausting. One day I climbed the highest hill I could find and could see 360 degrees, all around me. It was breathtaking. Suddenly I felt the weight of freedom in the absence of requirements to do or be or earn. I now more fully and powerfully understand that idea that it is in Christ that we live and breath and find our existence and it is through him that we have freedom-freedom from the law, rituals, strivings and anything in our power to do. That is incredible.