Stupendously Serendipitous Opportunities on Organic Farms
Some people take matters into their own hands and do something they’ve always wanted to do as soon as they can afford it in time or money. They have a bucket list of places to go and things to do and are proactive about enhancing their lives. I am not one of those people.
My bucket list is a list of potential futures, each of which I understand is associated with a probability distribution representing how certain I am that I would do the list-item in question. By “accomplishing” one thing, the probability distribution of all the others changes: some experience “unlock” others where as other experiences are probably mutually exclusive to each other. (Don’t ask me for examples, I don’t actually have a list.)
Convoluted Memory Orb. Source: Pixar Wiki
Now, I say “accomplishing” in air-quotes in recognition that serendipity probably accounts for so much of what happens in my life. Of course, nothing that happens is either serendipity or initiative. Consider the memory orbs from Inside Out (2015), where a memory is associated with a convolution of emotions. Similarly, events are a complex convolution of serendipity and initiative. If you take all the moments in my life, deconvolute the serendipity-based and initiative-based components, it would probably be 80% serendipitous? (That’s a wild guess. I still don’t intuitively understand convolutions in Calculus … and I’m sorry if you accidentally clicked on that link.)
Now I am going to add another layer of complexity, because somehow this is the only way I know how to introduce the idea of WWOOFing in Norway…
Within the spectrum of Serendipity and Initiative, there are those who leave can leave the Details in their lives to Serendipity but must take initiative with the Big Picture of their lives and vice versa. So naturally, I put it the possible combinations in a matrix (see Table 1). Obviously, it also depends which Big Picture decisions and which Details; people are complicated fleshy-things that can’t be summarized in tables, I know I know I know.
| Table 1. Methods of navigating the world as a Privileged Person* | |||
| Details*** | |||
| Serendipity | Initiative | ||
| Big Picture** | Serendipity | Lackadaisical | ??? |
| Initiative | ??? | Micro-Managey | |
| * This only applies to The Privileged otherwise you would not have access to the choice of being a Micro-Manager. Otherwise “serendipity” may just be “misfortune”, or, at best, “luck”. **This, too, is relative. Obviously, no one has the choice of which century they are born in, where they are born, whether an opportunity they want to take is willing to take them, etc. *** And obviously, there’s a spectrum of how detailed your life plan has to be to be considered “detailed”. ^ In general there are a lot of problems with turning things that ought to exist on a spectrum into tables†, let alone multi-dimensional ones… just BEAR WITH ME?? D: † Putting things in a table always makes it seem like I give things more thought than I do. In fact, the number of footnotes is proportional to how much I have not thought this through††. ††Gosh, even my footnotes have footnotes. |
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ALL THIS IS TO SAY, that my decision to go WWOOFing in Norway be like:
| Table 2. Methods of traveling as a debbie‡ | |||
| Details | |||
| Serendipity | Initiative | ||
| Big Picture | Serendipity | Lackadaisical | debbie wuz here ♥ |
| Initiative | ??? | Micro-Managey | |
Segue, complete!
The Bucket List
This journey actually started some point within the first year of my masters. I was waiting for a computer simulations to run … and took the opportunity to run a mental simulation of my future in parallel.
I had (and still have) a very insecure relationship with money. I really don’t want to become dependent on others from not having enough, and I didn’t want to responsibility of having an excess either. This Proverb resonates with all the heart-strings:
Give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. For if I grow rich, I may deny you and say, “Who is the LORD?” And if I am too poor, I may steal and thus insult God’s holy name. — Proverbs 30:8-9
At some point, I wanted to do without money altogether. If only I could barter [1] my skills, energy, and services in exchange for a decent quality of life (food, water, shelter) without money as some intermediate medium. This desire marinated in my bucket list for the majority of my masters.
Some time later, I learned that not only am I not the only one with such thoughts, but the entire thought process has a community, and the community already has a name [2]: WWOOF.
This seems as good of a time as any to explain what WWOOFing is. WWOOF stands for World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. It is a website that facilitates the non-monetary exchange of labour for food and shelter across many countries. Many people, WWOOFers, use it as a method of travel. A way to get to know locals and get some cheap boarding simultaneously.
WWOOFing was bucket-listed with an assigned status: low probability of ever happening. It just seemed like a thing that only White couples living the #vanlife have the opportunity to do.
[1] I think it’s time to reevaluate the idea of making bartering mainstream again. With some many people in the world and so much technology to connect those people, there has to be someone that has something you want that also wants something you have (…consider Bunz!)
[2] Heck, the community even has denominations (ie. WorkAway).
The Serendipitous Big Picture
As mentioned on a previous post, the whole going-to-Europe thing was contingent on a one-off application to speak at a conference because “All grad students speak at conferences. Debbie is a grad student. Debbie ought to speak at a conference, I guess”. Not to mention the whole traveling-in-Europe thing was the strong suggestion of my adviser.
With inhibitors such as not liking to travel for the sake of travelling as well as the general wastefulness of plane-travel, I suspect there will not very few opportunities to “go places” in my future unless catalyzed by something else in my personal or professional life. In this way, by choice, much of my leisure life is contingent on serendipity and I would have it no other way.
The Self-Directed Details
Only when I tried to think of what I could do in Europe other than roam around eating up landscapes and croissants gluttonously did I remember that dream of WWOOFing I stored in the mental attic and reconsidered it as a possibility.
From there, it was a matter of where in Europe do I want to WWOOF? Which farm should I WWOOF at? How long do I want to go for? These were relatively simple decisions, I wouldn’t care to read about if I were you. (PROTIP: Just skip to the end).
Each country has its own WWOOF website. If you decide to make a profile for that country, it’ll cost some $30 CAD to sign up. For that reason, I only let myself choose one country. Without signing up, I had access to the profiles of the host farms. The strategy was simply to subscribe to the country that had the largest number of desirable potential hosts that are actually likely to respond to messages. I made a spreadsheet with all the farms, their response rate, predicted likelihood of taking me, what I liked about them, etc.
Just from the way their hosts present themselves, I learned that each country has its own flavour. You know how you have some friends that are cool to hang with, but are terrible people to work with? I felt that way about potential hosts. And as must as I was tempted by ideas of a chill life herding goats in in the Austrian Alps, and people embracing freeganism in self-made Hobbit houses in Sweden … very vague host-profiles was not something I wanted to bank a long-haul train ticket from Munich + my entire summer on, especially if I would be going solo!
Ultimately, most of the Norwegian organic farmers replied to their emails fast, were very descriptive about what living and working conditions to expect, diligent with posting pictures, and I appreciated how a lot of them tell you what they care about or how they came to be.
And then I must confess, I also had these less-than-noble thoughts:
- I’m a cheapo who knows that large chunks of time to dedicate to WWOOFing are hard to come by in life. So I might as well go somewhere MEGA-EXPENSIVE if my food and boarding are accounted for. (Read: Scandinavia)
- I’m also afraid of commitment. Norway being such a loooong country, gives me opportunity to go to mega-adventurous route of ARCTIC FARMING IN THE FJORDS or stay in climates I am more used to.
Once I chose the Norwegian chapter of WWOOF, I decided to narrow my search to permaculture farms. I had been influenced by auditing lectures at UofT and reading academic material from eco-theologists that praised permaculture. Naturally, I wondered how the practice synchronizes with the theory. It turns out the permaculture farm hosts tend to be pretty academic, and therefore write profiles that appeal me with a familiarity that puts my stranger-danger thoughts at ease. After ranking the Norwegian rows on the aforementioned spreadsheet, choosing a farm was a matter of contacting the hosts from most-to-least preferred and managing the combination of my schedule with their schedules like Tetris.
How long I decided to stay was arbitrarily based on being back in Canada for weddings and an estimation of how long it would take me to be homesick if I ended up WWOOFing alone and WWOOFing actually sucked (like, even if the hosts are good, what if the other volunteers are nutcases??). Soft.
Stupendous Expectations v. Reality
I didn’t end up WWOOFing alone and WWOOFing didn’t suck. I went with a BFF, returned having made some new BFFs, and the rumours about Scandinavia being the happiest place in the world are true. (Hahaha okay, so maybe not the last item entirely, but more to come on that!)
In a world based on monetary exchange, it’s such a breath of fresh air that WWOOFing can facilitate voluntary labour relations without monetary exchange. In a world with humans taking advantage of technology and globalization to sickening extremes, it’s kind of beautiful that WWOOFing uses the realities of both technology and globalization to facilitate the exchange of culture, friendship, and experience. That said, I am so grateful for the welcome of our hosts–that there are people out there who would take a risk to invite us into their precious family space after exchanging a couple words over the internet … Isn’t it such a strange world we live in?
EDIT: a sidenote
Tables that are incomplete and have sub-par categories gnaw on my brain like earworms. I am currently agonizing over how fundamentally flawed the tables on this post are, so I cannot… stop… thinking… about it. I mainly just wanted to illustrate how different persons of privilege “let” serendipity play different roles in their lives. Below is an example of my attempt to figure out which quadrant other aspects of life belong in, but the exercise was ultimately frustrating and I don’t recommend you think too hard about it.
| Table 3. Decision-making strategies of a debbie, by category | |||
| Details | |||
| Serendipity | Proactive | ||
| Big Picture | Serendipity | How I furnish my room How I make friends |
How I long-distance travel How I finished grad school If I were to adopt a pet |
| Proactive | How I short-distance travel How I keep friends How I eat |
How I maintain this blog (so far) How I did projects in high school If I were to adopt a kid |
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Each item probably warrants its own justification, but let’s just say (1) I am planning to dedicate a whole blog post on dumpster diving (2) I feel sorry for anyone who had me in their high school group projects.