A Nuova Beginning

Codroipo and Nuova Terra:

                Well…we managed to stay at our first farm/my personal purgatory for about a week and a half. Alayna and I made contact with a farm that we communicated with before leaving for Italy and they have graciously delivered us from awkward, stressful suckiness. It was an especially awkward couple of days after telling our previous hosts that we were leaving. They left for the whole day with Johanna the French WWOOFER without telling us where they were going. In a way it was a blessing to have the place to ourselves, but still nerve racking. We hadn’t felt comfortable since we arrived, and it wasn’t just the mosquitoes. Later we found out that they took this epic boat ride around the Adriatic Sea without us while leaving us to pick tomatoes in the field. ..Awesome. Whatever, we escaped and have found a comfortable new WWOOF farm in Codroipo. It’s a very cool little Italian town with all the rustic flair of Italy and a giant villa that once belonged to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, Villa Manin. Very cool! The best part is Nuova Terra. First day we get there we are welcomed by the group with great hospitality, given personal bicycles, a room in a nice apartment, and spectacular vegetarian cuisine! This is what we had been waiting for! What Italy had promised in our fantasies! This farm is much more organized and you can tell that it is truly a community of caring, supportive people who want to help others learn about natural living and food cultivation. There is, however, one catch. They are sort of homeopathic fanatics and …Catholic.

On the issue of philosohpy...again:

                Don’t get me wrong, I think everyone is free to their own beliefs and that different spiritualties suit different people. This however does not stop me from stating my opinion and criticisms on the matter. Homeopathy is primarily pseudoscience that acts as nothing more than a placebo. You think it works, so you see it working. This mixed with the Catholic faith is a whole new genre of weird for me. Religion and I tend to knock heads, and their reverence for some celestial beings leaves me a bit….unnerved. It is like they are living only to please these beings and to get rewards from them for their insubordination; living for the rewards of tomorrow instead of reveling in the here and now. In my opinion, the here and now is the only thing that is guaranteed to us. This does not mean that we can act however we please and be destructive; instead it means that we must act as our best selves because we don’t know if we will have the chance to later. I can sense a bit of disturbance in the community because of my free-wheeling attitude which does not coalesce with theirs and I recognize it from being part of other religious communities. I simply cannot be satisfied by dogmatic means and this has come to displease many people.

I have really come to be endeared to some of these people and I love working with them, but I can’t buy into the whole spiritual aspect of life with them and the unrecognized daily toil that comes with it. They use symbols to promote harmony and dispel bad energy, but I think this takes away from what good effort brings. You depend on the powers of symbols instead of empowering yourself. Maybe certain shapes, proportions, and geometry really do bring about harmony. I know that with architecture certain angles and shapes provide a stronger structure, so why couldn’t that be applied elsewhere? But people here speak in more mystical than practical terms. One example is when Silvia, one of our personal guides, was telling me about asking the “knomes “to do good works for the plants. I revere nature and love soaking it into my veins, but this kind of belief sets you apart from it. Mystical beings bring about the works instead of your relationship as part of the whole.  Consequently, my approach and feelings towards the work have been quite different from how they are trying to run their organization. It is not only difficult to express myself because of language barriers, but because of intellectual barriers as well.

Being a transient wanderer has its pluses. I can live and be part of this for a little while, appreciate it for what it is, and then move on to the next place. Sometimes I wonder though, if there is something to this cosmic, religious mumbo jumbo. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing to believe in something ridiculous if it brings harmony and peace of mind. I have some beliefs that stray towards the hippie-ish, but I’m no zealot. My personal Daoist-like philosophy means I may never be settled into a community, but when you stop moving and changing all that’s left is to deteriorate. Still I try to approach the matter with respect towards all persuasions. I am simply a wanderer blown by the winds while the people here are seeds rooted into the earth and trying to grow strong. We each choose what gives us the most satisfying advantages and receive their corresponding shackles.