Today was my day off of working on the farm so I spent most of my time working on this blog, catching up on emails and having conversations with people. It has been raining all day today and continues to do so currently and has been unseasonably chilly. I wasn’t expecting it to be this cold so I didn’t really bring that many warm clothes, but it’s okay because I’m from Chicago and I know a thing or two about the cold.
Most of the day was spent doing computer work and just observing the hotel and restaurant work around me. I was kind of secretly hoping for rain because I wanted an excuse to just sit here and watch.
Over the last week I’ve been talking with a lot of guests and we’ve had new volunteers come and I always wonder how people came to know of this place. From what I gather thus far, word of mouth is the winner. People hear about this place from a friend or someone they know who stayed here and they want to come. I was thinking about it and it makes so much sense. When people travel and return home, they take lots of stories with them. Individual stories of people staying at Rancho Margot are stories that people are excited to tell and hear because it is so unique and wild what’s going on here. With all of the insanity and bad things going on in the world, this place is like a diamond in the rough and it’s very unique. People feel good about staying here and being part of this sustainable system, they’re excited about telling this story to their friends and their friends get even more excited to come here so they can tell their friends that story too.
I spent the evening talking with Ivannia, Fiorella and Chris. We talked a lot about inner peace and how there’s so much bad stuff going on in the world, but we must find peace within if we’re to do anything about it. Ivannia was telling me stories of her solo travels in India, Switzerland and Colombia and I was really impressed by her bravery and tenacity as a solo female traveler. She talked about how there’s no reason for us to be sad for bad things happening in the world because everyone is on their own journey, and each of these experiences serves a purpose; we’re meant to learn from everything. She and Chris pointed out that all this bad stuff was probably happening before, we just are more aware of it all because we have the technology and the tools to know. Besides, bad news sells really well, media companies are mostly trying to make a profit so they sensationalize, dramatize and over-analyze the bad stuff to the point where they’ve convinced us that it’s all bad. Maybe it really isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be on the news?
Later Chris and I talked about his project and how he just rented this house in Savannah Georgia where he plans to grow a garden with food, keep chickens, have yoga and volunteers. His excitement was so contagious that I feel like going to Savannah to be a volunteer at his house. The community here continues to amaze and energize me. This place attracts people that want to emulate what’s going on here at Rancho Margot in some way, shape or form with their own flavor and they’re doing it. It’s awesome. Step by step, we can all make things better.