It’s January. Which means it’s the depths of winter and the work year is in full swing with no break in site. I feel like I just have my head down and I’m trying to survive. OK, yes, I live in Los Angeles, but it gets dark early and it’s been a little bit cold and we’ve had some rain storms. It’s enough to have me dreaming back to my days last summer in Switzerland...countless days playing in the mountains with endless sun and zero responsibility. I know traveling to the Swiss Alps sounds like a pricey endeavor, but I was actually there living completely free and I even got paid a small sum to cover my travel expenses. How is that even possible??
The culture of travel is changing. Young people across the globe are quitting their jobs or foregoing getting one at all after graduating, packing a backpack and working their way around the world! Finding work-trade opportunities in other countries has been made easy with sites like Workaway, Helpx, and WOOFER. Many of these opportunities are on organic farms and the host provides housing and food in exchange for about 4 hours of work a day. These work-trade and volunteer sites, along with cheaper flights, have made travel more accessible and more engaging. Volunteering for and living with locals is an incredibly rich way to engage with local culture and learn more than one would staying at a hotel or hostel. I had the opportunity to study abroad during college, but during the week I was busy with my fellow American students in school and on weekends we would race through cities across Europe too quickly, which began to feel a little empty to me. My thirst for richer, more immersive travel has been insatiable ever since. As soon as I graduated, I decided I was off again for six months for an immersive experience of travel.
The highlight of my journey was the 3 months I spent in Switzerland, working at a Sufi camp run by the Zenith Institute.This camp is actually not on any work-trade site; instead, I heard about it from a fellow traveler when I was at Taize (a french monastery) for a weekend. Three years after meeting Cody at Taize, I finally made it to the camp. Neither of us really remembered each other; only the memories of his tales of an intentional community in the Swiss alps had stayed in my mind. It was everything he told me it’d be and more. Frolicking barefoot through flower fields in the alpine meadows, jumping into the icy alpine river the German way (nude), and meeting people from around the world was an adventure I never could have dreamed of. I fully immersed myself in this time for an intense experience of life through relationships and through the wild depths of myself that occurs at this camp. I went places in myself and with others that I had never been before. I experienced wonder, whimsy, pain, awe, spiritual ecstasy, and restoration of my wild and loving soul, which was exactly what I was after.
The intention of experiencing life fully through spirituality and community is what led me to this beautiful camp in the Italian-Swiss alps outside of Lugano. The first 6 weeks is referred to as work camp in which 30-40 volunteers work together every year to build a host of white tents on wooden platforms in preparation for the four week long meditation retreat in which hundreds of people would come from around the world to come experience. It ended with two weeks of taking down what we had built so that it could all be done again the next year. The people this place attracts are loving artists, healers, and wanderers of the earth. We all come here for the same reasons; to live and commune together in nature, opening ourselves up in radical community exposing our full humanity to work towards peace and harmony....to sweat and work hard all day outside, to sleep peacefully under the stars, to play music together every night, to snuggle and hug with friends, to cook each other food with love, to laugh, to cry, and to wake up with the sun and do it all over again. Something is special about this little world in the mountains separate from normal society. Some magic here allows people to blossom into the fullest version of themselves, even if only for these sunny three months. Through each other, we are able to meet ourselves and soften to our deepest wounds, reflating this softened transformed matter to become anew. This is why I travel; to open myself up to new experiences and new people, allowing in the ego-death of who I think I am to allow me to become more of what I’ve always been. To find myself naked, feet in mud, alive.
In the depths of the dirt, Carissa