What is my Job?

I've been thinking a lot these days about jobs. I currently have one, thankfully, but I'm looking for another one, and trying to figure out what kind of job I want. I find the most difficult aspect of this is sifting through and reconciling "The Way Life Is Supposed To Go" with "What I Want." These two things, I'm realizing, may not overlap so much. Twenty-eight years of subtle and explicit cultural and societal messages about ambition, success, career, education, etc. have become a mountain atop the latter, which I am now trying to unearth, slowly but surely.

I read something today that helps. It's by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a Buddhist teacher who wrote the book Wherever You Go, There You Are. I read one short chapter every morning before meditating. It is an excellent and accessible guide to meditation and mindful living. The passage I read this morning is called, "What is My Job on the Planet with a Capital J?" I want to share a small part of it:

Rarely do we question and then contemplate with determination what our hearts are calling us to do and to be. I like to frame such efforts in question form: "What is my job on the planet with a capital J?", or, "What do I care about so much that I would pay to do it?" If I ask such a question and I don't come up with an answer, other than, "I don't know," then I just keep asking the question. If you start reflecting on such questions when you're in your twenties, by the time you are thirty-five or forty, or fifty or sixty, the inquiry itself may have led you a few places that you would not have gone had you merely followed mainstream conventions, or your parents' expectations for you, or even worse, your own unexamined self-limiting beliefs and expectations.

...[Asking this question] may not mean that you will change what you do, but it may mean that you may want to change how you see it or hold it, and perhaps how you do it. Once the universe is your employer, very interesting things start to happen, even if someone else is cutting your paycheck.

Kabat-Zinn also talks about Buckminster Fuller in this chapter, and about how, from the depths of depression, Fuller decided to live his life from then on as if he were an employee of the universe, basing his actions on the question, "What is it on this planet that needs doing that I know something about, that probably won't happen unless I take responsibility for it?" He says that Fuller also liked to point out that, for the honey bee, it's all about the honey, but in its pursuit of honey, it becomes nature's (or the universe's) pollinator.*

It's still not easy to figure out whether I want to be a farmer, a baker, a social worker, or something else entirely, but it's reassuring to know that no matter what job I find myself doing, if I approach it right, it will be my Job.

*from Kabat-Zinn, Jon. Wherever You Go, There You Are. New York: Hyperion, 1994.

The best thing ever.

I am such a procrastinator. I've had posts in my head for weeks, and haven't been able to sit down and write them. And then I go off and do something else, and this really can't wait, so you'll just have to bear with me for some out-of-order postings coming up (hopefully).

So I just got back from Torres del Paine National Park, in southern Chile. I left the farm two and a half weeks ago and took a 26 hour bus to El Calafate, where I am right now. I had planned on spending a few days here and in El Chalten, hiking around Glaciares National Park, where there are some ridiculous glaciers and huge mountains. I knew that it would be amazing, but in the days leading up to my departure, I just couldn't get fired up about it. Twenty-six hours seemed like a really long trip, and I was feeling a bit reluctant to unstick myself from my cozy farm home for the last time to become a tourist again.

As soon as I started my trip, though, I got into it. Travelling in Patagonia is different than travelling up North; down here, everyone is a tourist. Everything exists so that people can enjoy the spectacular natural beauty, so I didn't feel any of the anxiety or discomfort that I had felt last time I travelled. I met some Swiss girls on the trip, and spent my first full day with one of them, Corinne, visiting Perito Moreno glacier near El Calafate.

On the bus to the glacier, Corinne told me that she was planning on going to Puerto Natales, Chile, the following day, and to Torres del Paine National Park, to hike the 8-9 day "full circuit," a popular backpacking trip around the park. I had no definite plans, but had no intention of crossing the border to Chile to visit Torres del Paine. I had been there for a couple of days of hiking in 2002 while studying abroad in Valparaiso, Chile, and felt like I had checked it off my list of places to visit.

Later that day, I spent about an hour sitting on an observation deck watching the glacier. Every once in a while, a thunder-like rumble would announce the breaking off of a chunk of ice and snow into the turquoise lake water below. Mostly, though, I just took in the presence of this mammoth, frozen river of ice and snow.



At some point, a young pair of Americans, a guy and a girl, sat down next to me, and I couldn't help but overhear their conversation. At one point, the girl leaned over to the guy and whispered, "I like the other glacier better." "Me too," her companion agreed. Without thinking, I turned and asked, "Which one?" Surprised and embarrassed at my uninvited participation in their conversation, the girl told me they had just finished hiking the full circuit in Torres del Paine, and that an entire day was spent walking along an impressive river of ice called Glacier Grey. Was I planning on hiking in the park? she wanted to know.

Until that point, as I said, I hadn't been, but I suddenly realized that I had travelled near to the end of the world to be in proximity to some of the most spectacular natural scenery that exists, that it likely won't exist for much longer, and that I had absolutely no reason not to take the next two weeks to see as much of it as possible. How could I come so close to a glacial experience possibly even more magnificent than this one, and pass it up?

That afternoon, when our bus arrived back in El Calafate, I bought a ticket to Puerto Natales, Chile, for the next morning. Two days later, Corinne and I set off hiking. And the next nine days were some of the best days of my life.



We carried our tents and enough food (kind of) for ten days, and took a route recommended to us by an outfitter in town, expecting driving wind, rain, and maybe snow--all the nasty weather this park is known for. Incredibly, however, we were blessed with several days of blue sky and only a couple of brief rain storms. Every day we walked through postcard-like beauty: jagged, granite and magma spires of rock, snow-capped mountains, surreal turquoise rivers and lakes, honey wheat fields of grass and wrinkled rolling hills, scattered brilliant fall-red lenga trees among the green ones tucked into grooves in the sides of mountains, pure blue rivers of glacial ice and snow, breaking off their ancient resting places in thunderous avalanches. It was like being inside an issue of National Geographic, though that never occurred to me at the time. Instead, I found myself stopping, slack-jawed, dozens of times each day, as some new, magnificent vista revealed itself around a bend in the trail.



It's hard to put into words what this experience was like. Corinne commented yesterday that she didn't know how to respond to her mother's excited prodding for stories about the trip. It was amazing, but it's not the kind of thing you can tell in stories. For me, the most powerful experience came on the sixth day, as we walked six hours along hillside paths. The sky was clear, the wind was blowing, and we were accompanied by the oblong, turquoise Lago Paine to our right, with snow-capped peaks beyond. As I took in the landscape, the sensation of being alone in a place of such vast, pure natural beauty (for we were truly alone for much of the time, it being the end of the season), was, more than anything, a consistently spiritual experience. I couldn't help but feel, over and over again, that I was in the presence of god, or rather, that everything around me--each gnarled tree, summer-dried blade of grass, grooved granite mountainside, was filled with the divine. It was strange but also utterly clear to me, that rather than being an outsider, an intruder in this place, I too was part of it, and I understood more completely than I ever had, how every living thing is inextricably connected. It was an overwhelming realization, at once positive and frightening, but definitely unforgettable.



I brought my camera with me, of course, but didn't bring a charger, assuming, falsely, that there'd be no opportunity to recharge the battery while on the trail (a few nights were spent camping outside of refugios/hostels where this would have been possible). On the morning of Day 5, the low battery light began blinking. I spent the rest of the trip carefully preserving the remaining battery life, taking only a few photos each day. At times, it was frustrating not to be able to capture some of those incredible scenes, but it forced me to take in each view in the moment, and I tried hard to imprint in my memory those things I couldn't photograph, and choose carefully the images worthy of a bit of my camera's remaining battery life. Each night I listed in my journal, "Images to hold on to," calling forth the single fire-red lenga tree amidst a forest of green, or the small clump of yellow, slipper-like flowers by the side of the trail.

Corinne and I returned to town on Tuesday tired and sore, having walked eleven and a half hours the previous day in order to not have to get up early and hike on the final morning. We were ready to be done, splurged on a private room with a king-sized bed in the hostel, and took ourselves out to a gringo-style dinner (veggie curry and a bean burrito w/ cilantro, yoghurt, and avocado!). I think they were luxuries well-deserved, though I was lucky enough not to have suffered much more than sore hips from sleeping on the ground each night. I'd say we made out pretty well :).

Staying in the now.

My current schedule allows a lot of time for thinking. Which is good, of course, but as I tend, like many, to think too much, I´d like to spend some of that time not thinking. One thing I´ve found myself thinking about is the time that lies ahead of me, and how I might possibly spend it. Will I find a farm I like and stay there for a few months? Will I decide to travel around the country after another month, and hop from Bariloche in Patagonia to Mendoza or Salta in the Northwest? Should I look into plane tickets to travel to other countries in South America?

Last night, Gustavo, one of the non-H.K. (Hare Krishna) residents of the finca, showed Dagmar and I a video of a speech given by Eckhart Tolle in Barcelona. The speech was in Spanish, but he spoke slowly and clearly, as he is a non-native speaker as well. I haven´t read his books, The Power of Now and A New World Now (I think), but they´ve been very popular in the US and elsewhere (both Dagmar and Gustavo had read one or both). His philosophy incorporates aspects of different religions, but much of his speech focused on living in the present, a la Buddhist philosophy. He makes it sound very simple: the past and the future don´t really exist except for in our memories and our thoughts. The only life we have is right now, this moment, so we should not obsess so much over what´s to come, and rather live each moment as it comes.

I´ve come to town today to see if I´ve gotten responses from the farms I emailed the other day. I think I know now where I´ll be headed in a couple of weeks, but I´m going to try my best not to think too much about it, and to focus instead on getting the most out of every day at Eco Yoga Park. Wish me luck.