Ellie arrives.
“It’s not about the project it’s about you.”
Note by author 11/11/2024: A new volunteer arrives. She is Italian, from similar northern regions. She once pointed at a trail near Matilda’s castle and said it would only take about six days to walk that trail to get to her house. I replied with nothing although I’m sure my face asked why she ought to know that.
04/05/2024
Ellie has filled this place and brought me into her love bubble. She arrived in a grey minivan, a dream catcher hung around her rearview mirror. No, not a dream catcher, but several popsicle sticks with green and yellow string cast around until a diamond apparatus came to. She climbed out where S greeted her in the makeshift driveway. They hugged for what I thought was too long, and I watched them until they broke apart. Ellie’s arrival meant work on the farm was to finally commence. I imagine S considered giving me directions when the team was just the two of us, tossing the idea back and forth before deciding Ellie was better suited to play translator and generally less burdensome when it came to reaching common goals. A huge part of my relief came from the fact of her arrival. Anyone could have jumped out of the van today. But now as Ellie and I sit in the garden for siesta, I realize I’m glad it wasn’t anyone else. I’ve been keen on watching her today, her movements, her expressiveness, her shamelessness with her laughter. She is here for the experience, whatever form that may take, and this is abundantly clear to me. Within hours, I have the unshakeable knowledge that for her, it doesn’t matter what she takes up, what she learns, how she learns it. She could be doing anything and find joy in it. I feel impressed that joy isn’t the only thing important to her. She has a seriousness to her, the kind that someone has when they look at you and say, “I trust you” and make you feel bestowed with the world’s greatest responsibility. Ellie isn’t taking notes about this or that. In a day, she has showed me that building the stone path could be the channel for strength, that fixing the broken fence could be a channel for strategy, that miscommunication is a channel for patience.
It’s interesting that almost every anecdote and every allegory she shares are lessons with which I am already familiar. I know them, these stories. I’ve told similar ones, with a few changes of detail. Suddenly it becomes inevitable to pick out and play with this elusive difference between her and me. Two women from two sides of the world yet awfully similar, as it couldn’t have been much difference that brought us to the same time and place this summer in Parma, could it? Similarly curious about a place in this world, and yet, I carry such a heavy load which sets me apart from her. Dread is often one of them, anxiety about uncertainty, definitely a piece in my unconscious collectibles. As we go back and forth talking availingly about life, freedom, love, womanhood and the rest, I can see it’s that I am the one who doesn’t believe in the lot, succinctly clear that I haven’t adopted these little factoids into my belief system. Like a student who only absorbs the material to pass the test, here I am having only studied about experiencing and being. I’ve ignored the chapter’s closing paragraph about how being requires more than just hearing about it, reading about it, talking about it. Staring me in the face is the message that being is breathing in these lessons, an all-inclusive practice, meditating on them, until they seep further into those parts of our brain that operate without our saying so. And as I feel the magnitude of how I don’t believe what I’ve learned, I realize how believing itself is a “be” activity, not a “do” activity, where a gut instinct, a nervous system response, an intuition’s work must be employed.
Ellie leaves in a week for six days. It concerns me since her joy is so contagious that it becomes our joy. Whose joy will I latch onto then?