CHAPTER ELEVEN

A VISION QUEST IN ECUADOR
We had already made a connection to Ecuador, built our house and now we had an opportunity to live there.
I was lucky in the timing as the market for organic milk was still growing. I sold my cows for a very good price and I was able to recoup my losses. I had no plans to get back into farm ownership when we moved to Ecuador. However, by true serendipity, I was offered a twelve-hundred-acre farm that I was able to buy with the money from the sale of the cows. This land had some of the purest air, water and soil on earth and represented true wealth. We don’t live on the farm but once a week I go out and make sure everything is OK. I have a young farmer, Andreas, run it for me and we have a wonderful relationship. It’s great having a farm but not have to worry if the cows get out.
Farming is very low tech here, so I have to rethink many things I have learned. Andreas grew up on the farm with ten brothers and sisters and it was his dream to run the farm one day. However he never had the capital to buy it from his mother and support his young family. I pay him three hundred dollars a month, which is on the high side of average and was able to buy thirty beef animals and pay for some capital improvements, such as fencing and extending the watering system. What makes it financially viable here is that I can sell a full-grown bull for six hundred dollars, which is a bit less than I could get in the States. However my expenses are so much less, three hundred dollars for monthly wages instead of three thousand plus back in the States. And everything is cash. My property taxes are sixteen dollars and sixty eight cents per year. My house is a bit more, forty eight dollars per year. However, on the down side, bureaucracy is a nightmare. There is no mail delivery; we still have no mail box in Loja, the main city an hour away, so it took three trips to Loja to be able to pay my taxes. The best way to do business is to smile widely and apologize for my poor Spanish while I learn it as fast as I can. “Desculpe me, yo hablo un poco Espanol “excuse me, I only speak a little Spanish” goes a long way. People are very kind and patient and I do my best to be kind and patient in return
We have other projects that help us integrate into the community. Before coming down, a philanthropist friend of Susan’s gave her twenty thousand dollars per year for three years to give away for the highest good (FlowFunding.org). There are a few healthy conditions attached. The money cannot be used to pay oneself or one’s relatives or one’s expenses and it cannot be used for your own projects. Susan was so touched by the generosity that she decided to create one of her KINS Innovation networks pro bono, and let the members give out the money, since local people would know how it could do the most good. After six months of ferreting out collaborative people in different sectors here, she started a little network called Ayni, the Ketchua word for reciprocity. Eight of us (four Ecuadorians and four foreigners) get together about once a month and discuss how the money can best be used to help the community. For instance, in the valley below our house, there is a very poor indigenous community of the Saraguro people. The young women had asked that we pay for a dance instructor so that they could learn their traditional dances. An Ayni member decided to support this project pro bono and I help him, so every Saturday I pick up the dance instructor (herself a student at the university in Loja) and watch the women practice for two hours. If neither my colleague nor I are there, the young men disrupt the lessons. At first, the girls were very shy and self-conscious but they gradually got over it. Usually I take a book along to read and occasionally I nod off. That brings a smirk to their faces and it brings us to the same level. The women are very suppressed by their men and this dancing has given them a new belief in themselves. They came in second at the Vilcabamba carnival parade. Now that my Spanish is getting better and I can have simple conversations, I am starting to make friends with them. All together, Ayni has more than a dozen projects that are carried out by the members pro bono, with all the out-of-pocket expenses covered. They range from a “Pay It Forward” program to the free healings offered by our leading shaman to covering the cost of rebuilding materials when people have lost their houses to landslides. In all there are more than 3 dozen Ayni projects in various stages of development and total out-of-pocket costs after 3 years has been $36,000.
Vilcabamba has many interesting people and we enjoy their company but mostly I stay at home meditating, reading, writing, and working with our gardener and the cows I run on the Finca VIVA land surrounding us. Susan is the people person, so she always has lots of people to meet. She is a driving force in getting the waste disposal problem fixed through Ayni. All of Vilcabamba’s waste is going to a site just above our house where it was being burned. If the wind was going the wrong way, we would be sitting in a cloud of toxic fumes and then it would drift down to the village. This was rather upsetting, as we had travelled thousands of miles to be in a clean environment and all around us there are thousands of miles of clean Andean mountain air. Now, with the help of Ayni funds, the garbage is no longer burned and a report showed that 80% of the garbage is organic. Soon a recycling program will be started which will create lots of organic compost which will be given away to local farmers to encourage them to try organics. The non-organic garbage will be recycled or taken to a proper land fill in Loja. We must also mitigate the existing open-air dump. While estimates of the mitigation were $300,000 at first, by locals and foreigners collaborating, we are hoping we can do it for $3,000.
With the history of my back problems, about a month ago my back went out again in a more serious way. It was like old times in East Troy, where I had to lie on my back for three days, with every movement being excruciating. This surprised me as I know that my back only goes out when something is bothering me and I have been in serenity here. In fact, my worries got so bad that I developed a fever and felt nauseous. Carlitos, the shaman healer from Vilcabamba, visited and told me that I was on “a vision quest at home.” I knew this was true. For two years, I had been trying to live in the moment and still my mind. As I have mentioned, when I sit on our patio early in the morning and watch and listen to nature, I start to feel light and part of the formless all. I lose my mind identity, which is a wonderful experience. I guess my body was not agreeing with this assessment. Over the years, we put our stresses into our bodies, and for me I seem to put them in my lower back. I went through a serious crisis with this recent back pain and was determined to get to the bottom of it. By the second night of not being able to move, I was able to break through. It really is hard to not worry about the future based on past experiences. It is hard to believe that my value does not lie in what I have accomplished or will accomplish in the future.
Help did come. I was able to detach myself from my life and to go to the mountain top spiritually. I looked at myself growing up and pursuing my dreams. I saw how I lived a life full of joy and sorrow, but a wonderful life, living with what I had inherited, both good and bad. I had wrestled with the earth to make a living and in the process I was molded and taught, hard head though I always had. The earth embraced me, loving me and allowing me to fulfill my destiny.
As I write this, my back is still slowly recovering and Susan and I had to celebrate our 5th wedding anniversary at home rather than hiking the Podocarpus National Park nearby as we had planned. But my bad back served its purpose because I am more firmly planted now in the present, trusting the spiritual world more deeply than I ever have before. I am fulfilling my intention to spread Biodynamic agriculture by writing this book…..and I hope you enjoy the chapters coming next on Biodynamics for non-farmers. My Spanish is getting good enough that I will soon be giving talks on organics to local farmers. I will find ways to fulfill my intention of teaching non-farmers how to steward the earth, such as by offering talks and walks here on Finca VIVA and other locations. What is important is that I have moved into a deeper level of trust in myself, in staying present and in receiving help from the spiritual world. That is enough.
We are so lucky to be on this beautiful earth. I feel lucky that I was led to farming. Despite all the hardship, the flies and manure, the kicking cows, the broken down machinery, the draughts and floods and all the hard work with little financial reward, I am excited. At night when I look at the uncountable stars glowing overhead, I experience the infinity of peace and love and wisdom of the spiritual world. Out of spirit, all this has risen. In all humility, I have been allowed to take part in the alchemy of creation and destruction through farming. All around me, I see and experience this beautiful world and know that I am blessed…..that all creation is blessed. This is my love, a farmer’s love.