Goats and Ponies and Chickens, oh my!

Tam is in another cabin!!

Hello.. I’m back! It sure has been a while.

 During the month of May, I’ve decided to volunteer with goats with an absolutely beautiful family who has already, within a short week that has felt like months, taught me so, so much. Humility, kindness not only towards humans, but animals and nature alike.. They teach me to work hard (milking goats isn’t always a walk in the park!), and as Nike says it often, to “just do it”. No excuses, no procrastination.. and does it ever feel rewarding!  

 So often I have found myself lazy in my thoughts, telling myself that I don’t feel like doing one thing or another, be it washing the dishes, picking up my chickens’ eggs the same day, getting out of the house and being active.. let your mind wander for other examples.

 Working with these beautiful animals, excuses and laziness are not an option. I’m surrounded by 28 female goats needing to be milked twice a day and their dozen babies who hop around happily wanting to eat and play. I feel so fortunate. I already considered myself “living the life”..now things are even richer than before.. and guess what... none of it is bought! 

 Taking care of these waddling beauties has been so far such a humbling experience and as much as I want to stay here forever, I can’t wait to go back home and apply these practices to my own little family. 

 I’m also learning how inexpensive it is to get joy from life. Who knew we didn’t have to be stuck in front if Netflix all evening (I do know that not everybody has the luxury to be a couch potato in the evenings.. but I quite often do!). There are so many things to do! I have now mastered the art of almost juggling (does doing it with two balls count?), I’ve gotten closer to my ukulele, read and write so much more and spend my evenings playing music and singing with the temporary family who has so graciously adopted me for the month. I have never felt so much in my place. 

 Doing dishes with my crew of wipers and put-awayers has become a fun task, and preparing delicious organic vegetarian meals for each other is a rewarding challenge.

 I am lucky. I won the lotto with this family of humans and goats and chickens and horses.. soon baby piglets as well! 

 Grateful for the delicious cheese, grateful for my newly developed forearm muscles from all the goat-milking, grateful for my farm clothes that will forever be smelly and poked with straw, grateful for my unwashed hair and unplucked eyebrows, grateful for my dry hands pricked with shards of wood, grateful for my ever-growing gardening skills, grateful to have the choice and opportunity to be doing this. 

 Here comes the *goat* cheese: I am very aware that I am seeing this beautiful world through extra thick rose glasses, since I am on vacation and all these tasks are not truly obligations for me, just an opportunity to learn and grow more than anything else. I am aware that it

isn’t always as poetic as I might make it all come across, but we all do have a choice to see life a little lighter and brighter when things get tough. As my old buddy Dumbledore once said, “happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light”. 

Be happy, people. We’ve all won the lotto, really.

Ferme les Broussailles, thank you.