All Good Things Must Come to an End

So I’m sure you’re wondering how the heck this story got switched around. My boss? Really?

What about Sam?! My dream guy?!?

It’s funny because I remember my best friend telling me a couple of years ago that despite what I may’ve believed I wanted in a boyfriend, she thought that a hippie guy wouldn’t actually be right for me. Anddd.. she was right.

Sam and I had some great adventures. We connected so quickly and I admired so many things about him as a person. Not only that, I loved him for what he did for me – he freed me from my stifling life and brought happiness into my world again. He inspired me. Being with him made me love myself in more ways than I had before. In fact, he treated me better than any boyfriend I’ve ever had.

But sometimes, all of that doesn’t matter. Sometimes, even if it’s hard to swallow, you begin to realize that sadly you just aren’t right for someone. At least not in a romantic sense.

And as tacky as the cliche may sound – the truth in it rings so clear; It’s not you, it’s me.

That’s something I’ve really started believing in – that breakups, as bad as they are – are often the only truly fair decision. And they shouldn’t have such a negative stigma around them. I’d argue that a-lot of us are unhealthily attached to certain ideals in modern relationships. It’s all about possession and our own wounded egos when things get sticky. And that’s proven with how we react to breakups. It seems like they’re always so filled with stories of betrayals and evil people, right? We are so stuck to the idea that “this person fucked me over!!!” “How could they do this to me?!” that we don’t stop to consider the fact that maybe we both already knew we aren’t right for each other. That this is the best decision for the well being of both partners. And maybe, we were holding onto something that just wasn’t there, as badly as we wanted it to be. Love and compatibility are not always the same thing.

Have you ever thought about the idea that if you’re in a relationship with someone who you know is not right for you, you might miss out on the one who is? And so will your current partner? Why keep them from true happiness & love when you know you just aren’t cutting it for them? In a perfect world, all breakups would be simple and rational. We would accept that paths diverge from each other and that’s part of life. But heartbreak isn’t easy. It’s not simple or rational. We all know that.

So after a whirlwind month and a half, Sam and I parted ways. It wasn’t that straightforward, but that’s what happened. He was on to bigger & better things, and I was on to…. different.

One thing he said stuck with me – that I had changed, like a chameleon. I was ‘changing’ to fit my new environment. But what he and most people don’t understand, is that just because someone isn’t who you thought they were, doesn’t mean they aren’t being themselves.

Things had switched up real quick for me. I left Arizona in August as a broke bitch, expecting to work on a hippie farm in Humboldt for a couple of weeks, singing kumbaya with my brothers and sisters of the earth, and maybe ending up saving a couple grand. And I was totally ready for that. Instead, I had ended up in the Pines with some random guys from Texas, driving a big ass truck, getting paid fat $$, and living a life that didn’t exactly fit my M.O. of free spirit little bird

But honestly,

I have to admit… damn it felt good to be a gangster. And this was only the beginning.

Life in the Pines: My Adventures in the Wild West of Weed

There’s an ongoing joke that the farm should have a reality show – “Life in the Pines”, we’d call it.

Well, it needs to happen. People would love this shit.

When I got here, I was in awe. I had never even seen a cannabis plant up close. Now I was surrounded by more than 100 GIANT ones. Even if you don’t smoke, if you were eye to eye with a weed plant, you’d admit it is a beautiful creation. Just because of how it looks.

Sam, Will and I worked outside among the plants for the first couple of weeks on the farm. We were in heaven from the second we saw the fields. The sun was shining, the skies were blue, our little speaker was blasting and we laughed so often – it seriously felt too good to be true. I had to pinch myself – I’m getting paid right now? and getting paid much more than I’m used to?

I feel like for you to fully understand the rest of this story, I need to set the scene a little bit.

I was living in the wild west of weed, with cannabis cowboys. That’s right, cowboys – as reckless & lawless as the OGs. Only here, their horse power is in huge trucks with turbo exhaust.

And every single one of them grows weed. That old lady at the grocery store? She grows weed. The next five cars you see driving by? Yup. They do too. Even the cashier at the gas station grows. When I got here, I had never even heard of Hayfork, or Trinity County for that matter. But now, it’s someplace I will literally never forget.

Trinity pines has a long and infamous history. It was supposed to be just a normal rural neighborhood when it was built during the logging rush. But over the years, it’s been a breeding ground for all sorts of operations.

Not only have people been growing weed here and in the emerald triangle (three northern cali counties known for producing cannabis) for decades, the neighborhood’s also been home to a host of meth labs & most recently, there’s even been discoveries of opium poppy fields.

There are pages upon pages of missing peoples faces plastered across the wall at the one gas station in town. They say that there’s been incidents in the past where trimmers are murdered rather than being paid for a full season of work. Because who’s going to come looking for a dirty kid right?

What happens in the Pines, really does stay in the Pines. Even the locals don’t doubt that there are unmarked graves throughout the neighborhood. There’s even a facebook group called “Missing But Not Forgotten In Trinity County, California”.

Every person I’ve talked to who knows anything about the weed industry in California has had the same reaction when I told them where exactly I was working –

It’s not uncommon to fall asleep to the sound of automatic gunfire (to ward off possible burglars), or hours of barking & howling from the hundreds of abandoned dogs who were left behind by careless seasonal growers.

If you googled Trinity Pines Weed farms and read the forums and chats about it.. your mind would be blown.

…and here’s little old me, in the midst of it all. Living in a motor home, in the middle of the forest, with some pretty legitimate drug dealers and a couple of dirty kids.

Will, Sam and I were out of our league here. After a couple of weeks, I knew Sam wasn’t getting the same enjoyment out of the farm that I was – he was used to getting paid more than we were currently, and while I could easily bond with the bosses over trap music and sarcasm, Sam was missing his indie folk music. He needed stimulation. He wanted to talk greenhouses and learn about hydroponics. These growers could barely use their solar panels.

(Which, props to Sam, he knew he had goals – and this place wasn’t it.)

But I loved it here, I was free, and at this point, freedom was a mindset I was committed to sticking to. I had already come this far and I wasn’t about to be held back from anything that made me happy. Is that selfish?Probably. But this was an adventure for me. An excursion into a different lifestyle, a different world. In my opinion and experience, that’s the best way to travel. As a chameleon. To become a new person for a bit – or maybe it’s just uncovering who you were most meant to be.

And this was who I wanted to be. I was excited to learn about cultivating, to learn how all these different people in the community had made a livelihood for themselves by growing & selling medicine. It seemed like an art.. and my genuine interest had led to me being offered a permanent position to work on the farm, even nurturing a few plants of my own next season.

Was this going to be my life now? Or would I choose a new chance at love with a fearless world traveler? Before I came here, that would have never been a question for me.. duh? Go for your dream guy.

But, as if this experience hadn’t been weird enough (more anecdotes to come soon), it was about to get weirder. Remember that boss that I mentioned last time? The intimidating one from the grocery store? Well… I guess they’re right when they say ‘you can’t help who you fall in love with.’

To be continued tomorrow ❤️

Love, Little Bird

•••••••••••••••••

Tell me your thoughts on my blog! I’m sort of struggling to figure out how I want to continue telling this. Full honesty is a little scary for me

Leaving Everything to Live in a Van with a Guy from Instagram

Instagram is a weird place. It’s a curated reel of people’s lives, it’s a medium of self expression that anyone can use, it’s a place you can easily get sucked into. Whether you love it or hate it, it’s a part of a lot of our modern lives. And it’s a place where I personally have connected with a lot of people from all over, some who I’ve met and others who I’ve yet to meet. It’s brought me some of my greatest friendships. And for that, I love it.

Well, this time, Instagram brought me my dream guy.

In August – I was not feeling fulfilled. To say the least. Broke as hell, while still working two or three jobs shift after shift after shift. All I could think about was money and how I was never going to have any extra no matter how hard I worked. Trips I had been planning had to be cancelled because I just couldn’t afford to go on them anymore. & then there was school. The struggles and failures of the past semester left me drained and defeated. My physical and emotional health was crashing. I couldn’t find the motivation to pick myself up. I became distant from most of my friends and family and was so lost as to what I even wanted to be happening in my life. But I knew that crying in my car everyday before work and then again when I got home to my dark little room was not working for me. So I started daydreaming (manifesting?) what other lives I could be living. One day I posted on instagram that I would be happy living in a van for a while.

And that’s about when I met Sam.

Background info – I get quite a few messages on Instagram asking me about the Volkswagen van that my dad and I have. A lot of times people love to chat about their vans with me. This was just another one of those times.

Sam messaged me asking about our van, and my travels. He said he had a van too, and he was planning on leaving on a long term adventure in her in a week or two. We decided that we should meet and hangout before he left! So, we did.

Sam was everything that my little hippie chick heart dreamed about. He was a world traveler, he was quirky , and funny, and kind, and creative and different. We got along instantly. We ended up spending the entire day together, and then the next few days.. it was the beginnings of something new.

& so Sam invited me to go to California with him.

He knew I wasn’t happy where I was and he was convinced that this would help me. He was going to go trim cannabis to make some cash and be able to live in his van. I’d heard about trimming before, and knew it was a way a lot of travelers made good chunks of money to help fund their adventures for the year. Last year, I knew people who were getting paid $200 for every pound they trimmed, and an average person would be trimming 1-2 pounds per day! But I thought you needed connections to get it on this. What I found out was that if you hang out in a few certain towns in Northern California at the right time of year, you can pretty easily find work.

But what would this mean? Leaving now would mean quitting my jobs, dropping out of school for the semester, and going against the advice of people I cared about and were trying to help me. All to go HOPEFULLY find seasonal work on a weed farm. How would I explain that to my family? Was this really the best decision? I thought about it for a few days.

I’ll be honest with you. At that point, I thought – “what have I got to lose?” When you’re so deeply unhappy with yourself and you’ve been struggling to see the point of it all for a while, you’ll do anything to find a glimpse of happiness again. So I decided that the risk was with it.

I quit both of my jobs, dropped the classes I had registered for, and packed up my bedroom in my roommates house the night before we left for California. I was only keeping what belongings I could fit into my Jeep Patriot. Everything else? Goodwill in the morning & whatever was snagged on offer up that night.

With 300 bucks to my name and no real plan, Sam, his good friend Will and I left Arizona in the van and headed on the long trek up to our intended destination – Humboldt County. The famous hippie-dippie weed town.

Within the first couple days we met a wacky drifter couple who tagged along & made camp with us, we picked up a hitchhiker or two, we got offered a free kitten, and we ate a lot of camp food.

But I can’t explain to you the freedom we felt – 3 young kids out in the WILD and untied from their dead end jobs – free to spend the day how we pleased, on the road, cooking on our little stove and meeting other transients. We were all three becoming great friends and bonding in our little living space. I was beginning to be reminded of how much I could love life.

Now we needed to find work, or the little money that we all had was going to run out fast. Like I said, it’s easy to find work on a farm if you’re in the right place. You just have to ask tons of strangers at gas stations and coffee shops if they know anyone. Casual right? Well.. it was inevitably not that easy. Our first official day job scouting the three of us made signs. Like…. the type of signs made out of cardboard that homeless people and hitchhikers fly. Yup. Let me just say, it’s crazy to see how much differently people look at you when you’re holding one of those.

About 5 days into our search for work, we stopped in a town called Hayfork. Some hitchhikers from Spain who had been hanging with us were headed to a town close by, but before going on we stopped for a break. We parked at the local gas station, put our signs on the windows of the van and sat around for a bit chatting, not really expecting that this was the town where we would be successful.

Not 20 minutes had passed before this tall lanky guy walked up with his friend, and asked if we were looking for work. He said they weren’t ready for trimming yet, but they did need help defanning the plants in their garden. And they could take all three of us!

We weren’t about to pass up the opportunity, so after a bit of pay negotiation we said yes. We waved a bitter sweet good bye to our Spanish friends, hopped in the van and followed the two guys in their huge truck. We stopped at the grocery store first, and I went in alone with the boss to pick out food for the three of his new employees for the next couple days. Here I am, in a ho-dunk grocery store in a weird little cracked out town, with a strange and intimidating man that wasn’t super interested in having a conversation with me. What a trip.

We packed up the groceries and followed the guys about 30 minutes outside of town. We drove up into the windy mountains half excited and half wondering if we were about to get murdered. Take a turn onto trinity pines road and through some rough back roads and here we are – our new home. Little did we know we had just entered the infamous ‘Pines’ – a lawless & infamous neighborhood of over 700 cannabis farms.

“Welcome to the Pines” they told us as we gazed in awe over their huge terraced garden.

What the fuck did we just get ourselves into?

To be continued!!!

let me know what you thought about the first part of this story and if you’re interested in hearing the rest… things are about to get crazy!! Thank you for reading ❤️

Love, Little Bird

**Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.**

our power in life

Manifestation is REAL

sometimes we forget this

our thoughts and focuses are everything

so what is it that you want to manifest into your life today? this week? this month?

today and everyday I want to live in the moment.

I want to manifest my truest, happiest, most outgoing self.

I want to manifest adventures and moments where it all makes sense.

sometimes it’s hard to keep your feet on the ground when there’s so much to think about so much to consider and question in life. “What do I do, where do I go”

remember that you have real POWER in this

you can make things happen

the only thing is that first you have to know what it is that you truly want.

“..so..tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

The Divine Separation

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet

The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

This quote makes me feel so understood and also scares me beyond belief because in it, I find my biggest fear put into words.

That I will be so confused about what I want, that I end up destroying all possibilities of true happiness. That I will do many things half-heartedly and never really know the pleasure of being completely immersed and in absolute Love with my choices and my life.

Manifestation is the most powerful tool for us, but to truly utilize this, you must first know what it is that you really want. And that can be the hardest part.

Everyone is born as a single individual, but by the time we are mature enough to participate in life we have already become a crowd. This feeling is nothing special, in fact it’s something that happens within almost everybody. The difference is that you are becoming aware of it, which is good.

If you sit silently and listen to your mind, you will find so many voices. You’ll be able to recognize them very well. One is your grandfather, your grandmother, another is from your father, another from your mother. Some voice is from the priest, some voice is from the teacher, your friends, your enemies. All of these voices are jumbled up in a crowd within you, and if you want to find your own voice, it is almost impossible – the crowd is too thick.

You were probably taught to say yes to everything that your elders were saying to you. You were taught to follow what your teachers and parents are doing. Your own voice has remained very subdued and so the other voices are very loud, commanding, because they were orders and you followed them – in spite of yourself. You had no intention to follow, you could see “This is not right.” But one has to be obedient to be respected, to be acceptable, to be loved.

The truth is that the more you love your own decisions, the less you need others to love them.

Only one voice is absent, only one person is hidden in this conflict, and that is you. So show up. Otherwise there is a whole crowd, constantly driving you mad, because one voice says, “Do this,” another says, “Never do that! Don’t listen to that voice!” and you are torn apart.

If you want to become an individual in your own right, if you want to get rid of this continuous conflict and mess within you, then you have to say good-bye to these voices- even when they belong to your respected mother, father, grandfather. It does not matter whose they are, but one thing is for sure: they are not yours.

Some of us endlessly stress about what we should do and where we should go. What’s the right decision? Why am I so conflicted, why can’t this just be simple? But what we don’t see is that the conflict is the entire point.

Goddess, be grateful for the divine separation that the universe is calling within you, for it is bringing you to your higher self.

You are awake and you are living. You are not simply vegetating and believing. You are questioning and doubting.

Respect yourself enough to follow your truth. Allow your nature to take its course. Don’t force, don’t repress. Doubt the rules – because doubt is not a sin, it is a sign of your intelligence. Doubt and go on inquiring until you find. Find your true self inside the crowd.

Each person is born with a unique individuality, and each person has a destiny of his or her own. Imitation is crime, it is criminal. If you try to become a Buddha, you may look like Buddha, you may walk like him, but you will miss. You will miss all that life was ready to deliver to you. Buddha happens only once. It is not in the nature of things to repeat. Existence is so creative that it never repeats anything. You cannot find another being in the present, in the past, or in the future who is going to resemble you exactly. It has never happened. The human being is not a mechanism like Ford cars on an assembly line. You are a soul, individual. Imitation is poisonous. So following in anyones footsteps that are not your own is almost murder. Do not rob the world of yourself, of what you could be at your full potential.

‘When you are a revolution unto yourself it is a joy to see, because you have fulfilled your destiny. You have transcended the ordinary mob, the sleeping crowd.’ You have silenced the crowd in your mind, and narrowed the noise down to a single clear voice – your own.

One thing I can say: whosoever inquires, finds. It is absolutely certain; it has never been otherwise. Nobody has come empty-handed from an authentic inquiry. Silence the crowd and you will truly know what you want. You will know which fig on the tree is the next step in your path.

This divine separation is your chance to decide whether to remain awake in your growth or to be a voice slowly lost in the noise of the crowd.

Please, just be you. We need you. Not you with a mask.

Next step coming soon : Manifestation is REAL

Art by Archan Nair

Quotes & heavy inspiration from The Book of Understanding by Osho

Thoughts cultivated by countless conversations with friends and family all over the world

Road Dogs

Think of everyone as a guru. Be patient. Shut up and listen and learn. Kill your ego for the sake of knowledge. For enlightenment. We can learn so much from a single person. Realize that every random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as yours.

I have no fear and I haven’t decided if that’s a good or a bad thing. It makes no sense to me that people really let their fear stop them from doing things. From living in the realest way possible. If I have an idea, it’s happening. Doubts never stop me. Am I naive or brave? That’s my eternal question.

Why live a life that’s anything less than everything you’ve ever dreamed

It’s your existence, your soul, you should follow its every whim and desire. Let it flow and create. That is how destiny works. Follow your path and you will be led to your perfect life.

Continue reading “Road Dogs “ →

Wage Slaves – Koi Fresco

I am a big believer that this system we live in today is not the way, it is not the only way. People should not be so trapped in their jobs that they have to almost always sacrifice their own happiness just to survive. We should not be limited to a week of vacation a year. As I’m working my first few minimum wage jobs and growing old enough to start paying for my own things, I’m realizing just how impossible it is for most people to go upwards and save money. And you know why? Because we are wage slaves. Continue reading “Wage Slaves – Koi Fresco” →

A Peace of the Road

Adventures of Little Bird