Wild & Untamed

Back to the land

A wasp eating a ripe banana I left for them. Photo by author.

I live in the Andes Mountains. The mountain range is extensive, and the country I live in is small. Relatively speaking, if you combined California and Texas, that would equal the size of Colombia.

I live in a small pueblo (town) with an average of 12k inhabitants, which is much larger than where I grew up, a small town in Kentucky. I live in the countryside, where they call it ‘el campo,’ in the rural zone, or ‘zona rural.’

A dragonfly. Photo by author.

I live in a small house with a small piece of land that I purchased last September. The land is on the side of a mountain, like most farms here. We grow coffee, plantains, bananas, yuca, and lots of flowers.

When you buy a home here in these mountains, almost 99.9% of them will contain a few hundred or thousand coffee trees since coffee is a lucrative crop. On my small farm alone, I have between 1,000 and 1,400 coffee trees.

Already a small, working coffee farm.

I moved in and began to clean up the land and trees, transforming it into a mini homestead, where I am one of thousands who have decided to "go back to the land." A new-old movement, but for me, it was a simple return…