my brain hurts a little bit from so much happening.
family meals...
presents presents presents....
old friends i haven't seen in over a year...
spending hours in bookstores, so many ideas crammed in one building, which ones do i want?...
so many cars, so many restaurants, so many people... not to mention all the alcohol and sugar...

but then i'm walking outside all the stores, and there's music playing on the loudspeakers...
it's journey!
and i remember amelia singing and dancing to this song, holding a spatula for a microphone. or was it a wooden spoon? and the guy walking by me sings along, and i laugh.
joy is not in things, it is in us.

i realize how much i love the quiet life on the farm, cooking my own meals,
walking around with Eoin: discovering the ice breaking on frozen puddles, sitting on an old tractor pretending to drive it, playing in the bed of a pickup truck, peekaboo, watching big diggers dig huge holes in the earth (where the farmers are having a cohousing community built), watching geese fly overhead.

























i was still doing some farmwork until a couple weeks ago... picking kale in the snow, planting lettuce inside hoophouses, covering radishes in crazy wind. the farmers are still farming, but not me anymore.
and they have asked me to stay a while longer, so i won't be leaving on my cross-country trip until sometime in march, which makes more sense anyway, because the weather will be a little better.