Pleroma Farm: Biodynamic Farm and Therapeutic Retreat

Letters from Patients

Chipping away at the past through biography work, and eventually realizing I was not a victim of my life, but rather part of its brilliant educational design, I began to free myself from its tenacious grip. Working with chickens, cows, plants, tools . . . all deep mysteries for one from the city life, I was in a constant state of unknowing, needing to be awake and respond. I was being forced to be present! And I was pissed. My thoughts raging like a hurricane, "why isn't the farmer doing this with me?" "It's his farm." "Why isn't this baby calf cooperating with me?" The world was fighting against me . . . no, I was fighting against me. My thoughts were fighting against me, and my ability to just be.

This all became acutely conscious for me one morning when I was driving the cows back out to pasture. It was a beautiful morning, and I was nervous and anxious, I asked myself, "why on earth am I nervous and anxious," and at that moment I heard my thoughts. Those thoughts said, "God I hope the cows don't stray from their line . . . please God let them stay in a perfect line." When I heard this I was shocked and the layers began to peel away and I realized that it was this line of thinking that was keeping me away from actually experiencing the cows. How could I ever know anything about the nature of a cow if it continuously walked in a straight line? And then I traveled deeper, these thoughts were preventing me from understanding and thus loving the cow, loving the reality of the cow. I was stunned. Everything became quiet and I realized my thought structures had been getting in the way of experiencing the real. Getting in the way of the possibility for loving the world.

This was a painful awakening at first, because I was bumping heads with these thought structures everywhere, me against the world when I wanted so deeply to be with it, but how? Then one day, I was cutting a bed in the garden, my hands were so sore that it felt as if they were black and blue with bruises, I was in so much pain that I started to cry and fell to my knees beside the open bed. I couldn't physically continue, I didn't know how to proceed, and then it happened. I heard it, "put your hands in the soil." This wasn't like those other thoughts, this was coming from the soil and from deep inside me at the same time, gently revealing without motive. So the only thing I could do, was it. I put my hands in the cool, rich, dark soil . . . and they began to drink. They began to drink the water of the earth. When they were full, I pulled them out, stood up, and continued to work with renewed strength and no pain. From that point on I realized that everything I needed to learn was right there, open and willing to speak if I could just be quiet enough to hear it.

That become the "how." All the chores, tasks, and dealings with animals became listening activities . . . or shall we say the constant attempt to listen, and bit by bit I started to experience the farm. She started to reveal herself to me, and I to her. This is where I began to understand the term "therapeutic farm." I could make mistake after mistake, and she didn't judge, she merely provided another experience in which to have the possibility of understanding, and the anger that filled me, imprisoned me, began to dissolve and eventually break through to the possibility of gentleness. I didn't have to fight myself to find myself. I had to hold myself, and listen.

Time passed, wellness increased, and I began to meet others coming to the farm. What were they looking for? I asked an 18 year old this very question, and she replied with steady eyes . . . "the truth." Another common answer among people was, "I don't know." It began to become clear to me that deep within we are all looking for the truth, and the reason we don't know it is because we are avoiding the pain of it. The pain of letting go of the illusions that veil it, our thoughts that veil it. This was what happened for me on the farm, my illusory thought paradigms crumbled, and I was left with nothing but the possibility of the activity of finding truth in the present, in the doing, in the conversational interactions with everything that was the farm. I believe I needed to be in that kind of an environment because it is easier to love a daisy on a patch of green than a used needle in my alley-way. It is easier to want to know something that welcomes you, easier to sink into the soil than the concrete. The beauty of the environment openly inviting you in as if to say "it's okay guys . . . the water's fine." This is what I believe to be the most important aspect of the farm. It is a safe, beautiful place to step out into the world, into yourself, and begin to say yes to it. It is a place where life is revealed, and joy found in its revelation. Certainly this eventually translates to the needle in the alley-way. But the initial steps out into the yearning to perceive the world require a certain tenderness . . . the kind that wells up in heart when one sees a new born calf get up and stand.

It is my firm understanding that unless we can begin to perceive and communicate with the forces of life, the joy will dwindle and we will be overcome. Right now the world of technology that sucks the life from us and draws us ever more away from reality is taking a strong hold. It does our doing. It thinks our thinking. It runs our lives. Unless a counterbalance is created we will be in its clutches with little possibility of freedom. The counterbalance is life. The life within, and the life that surrounds us, we must learn to perceive it. This relationship must be cultivated. Nature can help us.

Young people today are raised with and through technology. I am not going to pretend I know the full extent of what that means, but what I do know is that "reality" is becoming lost in translation. With computer games such as "Second Life", where people can live a fantasy life based purely on their desires and thoughts of what they want, and web pages such as "My Space" where people can create a sense of false identity, we are getting further away from the reality of the world and our self. These things must be met and understood, but I believe we need a fighting chance. A healthy starting point.

By connecting with the realm of life and beginning to harmonize our relationship to it we will have a fighting chance. It is my hope that a therapeutic farm could serve to build a foundation of health, a relationship to the real, that could give young people an opportunity at not only surviving in the world, but thriving. Through healthy food, farm labor, work in perception, movement, and learning to disarm destructive thought patterns, we could work to create an educational environment where a young person's true humanity could be given the chance to begin to unfold . . . the chance to flower in the ever challenging harshness of the modern world climate.

Stacey S. February 14, 2008

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