I wake up from a bad dream. I sit in my bed, take a sniff of the fresh air. All that I smell is methane. I happen to live with cows. I also live with pigs, sheep and llamas. I live on a farm. A funny farm to be exact. This I shall explain a little bit later. Tucked away in in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts is a farm of the name Gould Farm. I am part of a community, a unique community. I have a manageable mental affliction. Schizophrenia to be exact. At least that's what they say. Where I stay we don't talk about our problems. Instead we work. We let our work heal us.
Here, there are forty guests. That's what we call ourselves having manageable mental afflictions. This place is a very special place. It's a self-sustaining farm. We make our own furniture, we drink our own milk, we eat our own vegetables and we eat our own meat. We are in a sense an American kibbutz. The only difference is that we pay to come here. We pay and we work for free. I once asked a guest how he feels about these working conditions. He said: "It just gives us a certain unique view on work."
There are six working teams on the farm. There is the maintenance team. There is the farm team. There is the gardening team, the kitchen team, and the forestry and grounds team. We also own and run a roadside café. The people that work in this café comprise the sixth team.
To balance out our work obligations we also participate in an array of recreational activities. We have our own volleyball field, our own basketball court, our own home-style softball field, and we have our own tennis court. On the farm we also have our own weaving studio, we also have a person come in every week to do basket weaving. On our farm we also have trails. These trails are good for mountain biking and for skiing. And when it gets hot we go to the local lakes to cool down. Right by us is the town of Great Barrington. We shop at Great Barrington's malls, we go to the movies and we bowl in town.
It's beautiful up here. I mean it's awesome (by the way the farm is one square mile). It's so pretty up here it's unfathomable. Sometimes I think that since some of our inner selves are horrific, we deserve this outer beauty. A good trade-off I guess.
We are Gould farmers. We take care of ourselves. Not only do we harvest vegetables from summer through fall, we also "harvest hope" all year round. We are beautiful people.
So come one come all. Help us widen the circle up here at Gould Farm