The Mindful Farmers Daily Diary Day 66

Good morning everyone once again and welcome to Ballinwillin House Farm and gardens. Another beautiful May morning. As I was leaving my morning meditation my mind angled towards what I would be doing before Covid 19 at this time of the morning. I would be going towards the kitchen to help Miriam organise breakfast for our guests. That’s something I really miss at Ballinwillin House Farm – our wonderful guests every morning and we are really looking forward to having them all back once the new normality returns and it will. So what I would like to speak to you about this morning is hospitality, what we Irish once perfected but then it faded. That is my honest opinion, especially during Celtic Tiger times, OK you might say I am being OTT but am I? How many houses today can you walk into without prior announcement? Question answered I think. The hospitality I am going to talk to you about is what we do here at Ballinwillin House and what I was brought up with in West Limerick. The open house. Hospitality is love, it is openness to the unknown and the unfamiliar, it is being open to the complete stranger and to that what frightens us and to what we may not like. It is being prepared to accept people with different views and perceptions because as we all know, people differ in many ways. We can start all enthusiastic but sometimes it is difficult to remain open when we come up against our own insecurities and that is why the spirit of hospitality needs to be cherished, fostered and cultivated. It is well worth it in the long term because as we well know at Ballinwillin House, hospitality, as well as being challenging, is live giving to many great people. True hospitality reaches the inner depths of people and carries across continents. It can be the love that clothes people on their journey homeward. It surrounds them and will never leave their memory, yearning once more to return.

Continue to pray, bless and heal each other.

The Mindful Farmer

Patrick