Fava & Bay

Maybe the reason my flat is so crowded with stuff is I seem to bring a little something home with me from wherever places I visit. Last night, I rediscovered a basket of coins from all over -- Australia, Tahiti, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, India, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Bermuda, Costa Rica, Panama, Honduras, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands, Britain, Norway, Canada, Mexico, for starters.

(Remind me to scan copies of the D-Marks my Dad brought back from Nazi Germany at the end WW2.)

Returning from Farm School, I avoided the temptation of loading up on manzanita this time, and carried out only a few edibles -- fava beans fresh off the vine and bay leaves fresh off the tree down by the pond. Just boiled, then sautéed in olive oil lightly with the cracked bay, these beans emerge with a light green cover that opens to yield a deep green inner treat that one savors slowly, sweetly. The bay adds a spicy after taste.

My jobs at Farm School were to teach a poetry class, help cook dinner, and help clean up camp, which involved taking down tents and other camping material.

The poetry class consisted of sitting quietly by the pond and listening to the birds around us, observing their flights, absorbing their songs, and imagining their lives.

I read some poetry out loud written by adults imagining the life of birds, mostly in metaphor. The kids then spread out to sit alone on rocks or logs or grassy meadows to construct their own poems. The results, when they read them, were stunning in the way children's art can be.

Each child employed a different strategy with words -- one likening the act of flight to "pushing off" (or through) a difficult challenge. Others imagined the lives of birds; one sang the song of a Peregrine Falcon swooping down on its prey, then returning to feed its brood.

All the poems had psychological aspects, story-telling elements, and vivid imagery.

One of the beauties of escaping the city for the countryside is we seem almost immediately to begin to sense new possibilities for ourselves. Vineyards surround this “farm,” which sits high on a ridge above Dry Creek in Sonoma. The owners, who also were among the founders of the school the kids attend, have planted a grove of olive trees, which will be yielding olive oil -- so delightfully peppery when it is harvested.

They also have gardens of beans, peas, gourds, other vegetables and flowers. And fruit trees of many varieties. The kids come back up here for "Harvest Day" in the fall, bringing back pumpkins for their Halloweens.

There are many classes at Farm School that exploit the immediate environment for its instructional value. Kids make toys out of wood, cornhusks, and feathers; they become better swimmers in the pond; they draw patterns in the sunlight; hike wordlessly to a nearby summit after dark, guided by the galaxies overhead. They study Botany; and perhaps best of all, they cook meals for the adults.

There are some spiritual rituals, largely based on Native American beliefs, as well as an underlying Buddhist sensibility of inter-connectedness. You'd think, by my advanced age, I would not have been surprised to return home transformed, yet I was. The city has its way of seducing us anew with its pleasures, which are so plentiful.

The simpler, harder life on the land, sleeping out under the stars, and walking up and down hills so regularly that your initial breathlessness eventually yields to a new sense of physical strength and freedom -- these more complex and deeper pleasures of the country lead to the feeling that a day has been well-lived.

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