SPONTANEOUS: Having an open, natural, and uninhibited manner.
“The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg, not by smashing it.” - Arnold H. Glasgow
There are few things that are still truly spontaneous. Everything is planned and on the calendar. There are laundry days, grocery days, food-prep days, hair-wash days, and gym days. We need self-care days, “me time”, vacations to escape life and all the planning because we are so exhausted from it all. No wonder we are so stressed out! Do we have to save the fun day for Sunday? Can’t we have fun every day? The more we progress with Biodynamic farming and natural fermentation, the more I am seeing that things don’t need to be so complicated. We can leave room in our lives to just live. To have little vacations every day. Heck we can even create lives we don’t even need a vacation from! Spontaneity still has its place in our world and I am opening myself up to it more and more. Watching the daily rhythms on the farm has me in awe of the natural world and has helped me to slow down in my own life. I even find joy in folding laundry. It’s clean and it’s a quiet, simple task. I have come to appreciate more of the simple tasks in this ever complicated world.
Working on the biodynamic farm most of the year I get to spend a bit of time with our animal helpers and animal friends. We have farm helpers like the chickens and turkeys and we also have the natural friends that hang around the property. There are cottontail rabbits, jack rabbits, ground squirrels, quail, doves, robins, hawks, Osprey, great horned owls, snakes, coyotes and badgers just to name a few. They remind us that life can be a bit more spontaneous. We don’t know what their next moves are going to be and sometimes they really surprise us. They are instinctual and it almost makes me laugh that humans have made life so complicated when it really does seem to come down to the simple pleasures. The chickens and turkeys that we have adopted have now become coworkers and farm friends. They wake up ready to start the day, they never complain and they always seem to have a happy disposition, even when they have their little fights it always seems to be “ok”. The excitement of finding one little bug seems to make them gobble with delight. They have little conversations throughout the day and I always wonder what they are chattering about. It’s one of the pleasures of being on a farm that has so much life and energy. We have more animals running around and it creates a spontaneous environment that is so much more refreshing than the scheduled life that we humans seem to all live. They have basic needs, as we all do, and somehow, they have figured out how to fill those needs and live a relatively peaceful life among the vines and among us crazy people.
I wonder, can we figure out how to do the same? Can we get back to the basics even after we have become so accustomed to being plugged in? We live life on the pages of Instagram and Facebook. We are constantly being hearing a ding on our phones from email and text messages. We check email throughout the day fearing that if we don’t we’ll miss out on something that we should be doing for work, or the next event that is happening. Can we ever get back to just having a weekend or is that not possible anymore if you work in the modern era of business. Do we always have to check our calendars before making plans and filling up life? Could we ever go back to just turning on the radio to see what song comes on or are we so accustomed to playing exactly what we want to hear and almost find ourselves getting upset when we can’t find the right song? Can we find time for spontaneity, for little moments of unexpected fun? I have been unplugging a bit more, which has been very refreshing. I have learned from the farm animals, mother nature, native fermentations and through just “experimenting” with truly living, that it will all be ok. Your friends are still there, you can still manage to work, to fill responsibilities even without constantly checking emails, texts and social media. We can go back to living like our animal friends, getting excited about the little unexpected thrills that life has to offer if we just start paying attention.
I’d like to offer a challenge to all of you who come and visit the winery. Put the phone down, grab a bag of chicken feed and visit our animal friends. Pour a glass of wine and see what unexpected and spontaneous things you can experience when technology goes away and you get sucked into your surroundings instead of your screen. Be patient, take a sip, and take it all in. We can still learn a few things from mother nature. She is, after all, the mother of us all.
- Sarah
