Mindfully
Sharon June 22nd, 2010
There are some chores on a farm that can only be described as meditative – they involve lots of not-too-strenuous but deeply repetetive labor. These are the kind of chores that I sometimes have trouble getting started on because they look both boring and endless.
Facing a bazillion chamomile blossoms, half a bushel of shelling peas or 1000 onion transplants can look like a long slog. And yet once you get into the rhythym of it, somehow the endless work seems more manageable than one expected – it can even be enlightening.
I’ve done a lot of this work recently – first was the weeding of the long beds, then the filling of the holes in the cinder blocks with compost and soil mix, then the shelling of shell peas, followed by the removal of stems and strings from an awful lot of snap peas, both to go into the freezer for winter. And this morning we finally started on the chamomile blossoms that started calling me (and which I totally ignored) last week.
Picking chamomile blossoms by hand is tedious – the stems have no real medicinal value, so all you want is the flower heads. It cannot be done rapidly and it requires a precision totally unlike many of the plants that I harvest with pruning shears. And chamomile blossoms are tiny – an hour’s work in the sun will get you a bowl full, if your bowl is small.
And yet there’s no substitute for doing this right – the taste of chamomile tea, dried fresh minutes after picking is so different than anything that comes in a bag. Their value for calming, settling, easing and getting ready for bed is vastly greater when correctly harvested and handled as well.
This morning I found myself filling our drying area with hanging herbs, putting off the chore of facing the flower heads. I clipped extra lemon verbena, fiddled with the catnip, went back to the yarrow again to cut some more, mostly to avoid the chamomile. I picked the calendula blossoms, even though there weren’t many and it could have waited. I looked over at the clover, but decided that was worse than the chamomile and I was starting too late in the morning.
Finally, I got to it. And I found I didn’t mind at all, actually – the sweet applish smell of chamomile on my fingers, the smooth motions as I go through the feathery greens, the chance to just listen to bird song and to just watch the goats nibbling goldenrod shoots, the chance to think, it was a good thing.
Isaiah and Asher came out and joined me for a while, chattering away about their ambitions and projects, asking questions about the plants and coming back to tell me what the thermometer in the drying area read. They picked and I picked and we talked, and suddenly, half the patch was harvested.
After they left I did some more, leaving about a third of it for tomorrow or the next day. The funny thing is that it didn’t seem like a big deal anymore – the work had passed almost without noticing. There were so many things to think about, or even not think about, to just immerse myself in the sounds and smells and feel of my world. For moments, even long moments, I achieve that much desired state of mindfulness, the sense that one is doing the the thing wholly.
And then the kids are back, and we’re talking about summer projects and guests and building birdhouses and finding salamanders and when the pumpkins and watermelons will be right, and the bowl is filled again, and so are the drying racks, and what seemed endless and impossible was just a bit of work sandwiched in with a lot of good watching and listening and thinking about things and nothings, and talking.
Sharon