Living the Good Life in Guatemala

"The time has come," the Walrus said, "to talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing wax--
of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
and whether pigs have wings." -Lewis Carroll
image from wikia.com
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The time has indeed come, my friends, to talk of many things. Well, actually one: myself. Here's my overdue #introduceyourself post. I'll begin with a little story:

It's 2008 and I have recently graduated from university. I'm working in a small technology commercialization firm; decidedly not what I had dreamed of, but a good and respectable first job out of college. One that would help me later to get a job in, perhaps, urban planning. Or gain access to a master's program in economics, say. I wasn't exactly sure how the next several years would shape up, but I knew the drill: get your bachelor's, work a few years, go back for your master's, build a rewarding, successful and respectable career while simultaneously beginning a family. The American Dream.

But after only 6 months at said tech comm firm, I was becoming jaded. The boss was more and more unreasonable, the work was hard to take seriously, and I was wondering what the heck I was doing there. Still, I only had a few months left to stick out on my 1 year contract and I could certainly make it through. And then, after one particularly insulting and demotivating exchange with my boss (and the company's CEO), I'd had it. I decided to take one of the biggest risks I'd ever taken, and I quit my very first job out of college with no plan and a bit of savings.

Guess I always loved to take a plunge

Luckily, I wasn't alone. My beloved @squdsi1 had also become fed up and left the company with me. As newly-in-love and recently unemployed young ones in our early 20's, we did the only logical thing: we packed up our backpacks and jetted off to Central America for 7 months (or so we thought at the time). @Squdsi1 had agreed with my suggestion to travel on one condition: that we would farm while doing so. And so we arrived in Belize and went to the STAND Center for two months of serious bush farming, cooking over fire, hauling water from the stream, thatching palm roofs, harvesting breadfruit, putting out wildfires, and in general being off-the-grid badasses.

Guatemala was our next stop and it was supposed to be two months, but lo and behold! Here we are still, ten years later. Lake Atitlan isn't known as the most beautiful lake in the world for nothing. Unable and unwilling to pull ourselves away from the magic and beauty of Guatemala we found reasons to extend our stay more and more, until we finally found a piece of land that called to us and we decided to make our stay permanent.

I never get tired of this view

That was 2010. Now nearly 8 years later, we are the proud owners of Atitlan Organics, a small-scale permaculture farm in the highlands of Guatemala. Admittedly, Atitlan Organics is more of Shad's story than mine, as he was always the farming ninja. I moved away from farming to work as an early childhood teacher in Escuela Caracol, Guatemala's first Waldorf school, for five years. I'm sure you'll be hearing more about it and my experiences there in future posts (and if you're interested in the topic, you can check out this post I wrote on storytelling.)

But after 5 years in the classroom, believe it or not, I was tired. If you are or know any teachers, you'll know what I'm talking about. It's not the cushy 9-3, holidays and summers off job some think it is. It's a buying-classroom-materials-with-your-own-money-because-the-budget-is-too-small, visiting-children's-homes-after-hours-to-connect-with-their-families, working-7-days-a-week-to-craft-a-curriculum-that-addresses-everyone's-needs, crying-yourself-to-sleep-over-a-student's-troubling-homelife type job. I wanted a bit of time to myself.

Escuela Caracol staff and students, 2016

So these days you can find me at our homestead and farm, happily cooking, baking, fermenting, knitting, dancing, reading, marketing, Steeming, and dreaming up crafting projects for the future.

It's taken me awhile to come to terms with the fact that I don't have a quick one-liner to pull out of my pocket and use to define myself. These days those self-identifiers are mostly career-based: I'm a Nurse/I'm a Farmer/I'm a Teacher (ok, ok, that one worked for me for awhile), etc. Or perhaps it's about parenthood: I'm a Mom/I'm a Dad. It's comforting and gives a sense of certainty to be able to define yourself so clearly and give others the opportunity to peg you as something. But I've never quite had that one thing that made me, me. Instead, I'm coming to accept that I can be a hodge-podge of interests, activities, and streams of income without it meaning I that have a compromised sense of identity. And hey, having varied interests gives you a chance to talk of many things! That walrus would have nothing on me.