Bliss

Lately, I have been visiting farmers in the bush with a local friend. I am interested in improved farming methods for an agricultural seminar and want to see what local farmers are doing. My friend is interested in buying land and wants to stay up to date.
This involves several hours of walking and/ or bike riding along rural roads, greeting endless small smiling faces, and enjoying the low sloping hills and varying frequencies of green. For example, we visited Mr. Robert, an 82 year old retired teacher and government worker, who has raised over twelve children (from two wives). He owns his own hill, several cattle, a well maintained banana plantation, and experiments with several exotic plants, such as apple trees, beets, and even strawberries. Sitting in his quiet house, decorated with the pictures of graduating children (all have been educated beyond high schools) and traditional pottery and bead work a strange longing creeps up to my heart. Somehow, I don’t want to go back to town. I really don’t want to go to the city. I just want to stay there—digging, planting, starting seedlings.
I understand why my friend toils in his primary school classroom with over one hundred students under a corrupt headmaster. He is saving his small salary toward a similar paradise. He wants to be his own boss, with his own land and his own life. He wants to live this quiet, though unstable, life, depending on the tiny green lives of seedlings and trees, coffee berries and banana stalks. I think this is what we were made for. Living in this second Eden, humbly connected to what we eat and able to constantly marvel at the beauty of it all. At times—I can’t think of anything better.