I know, I know! I’ve been away so long you may not remember why you ever asked me to include you on this crazy Journey to Joy in the first place. But it’s time for a change so I’m back and I’m hoping you are too : )
Last time I wrote we were 3+ years into homesteading in a fifth wheel at the end of the road in the middle of nowhere on my family farm where the last residents left in the 1940’s and my brother purposefully burned the house to the ground. There we permanently camped in an RV trailer, rebuilding, restoring, repairing, replanting and just plain working our tails off starting over in our 50’s with a childhood dream in our hearts. There were lots of fuzzy and feathered mouths to feed, my health and our finances were severely challenged, plus we had our Grandgirl a good portion of every week.
Then everything changed.
Our 100+ year old family farmhouse just down the road went vacant for the first time in its history so we moved in and sold the camper, delighted to have a solid warm place in winter with the luxury of full bath and laundry IN the building living not quite so far from town. But this unexpected blessing required starting all over again AGAIN, with furnishings, gardens, fences and outbuilding repairs. AGAIN! Did I mention AGAIN!!! Then a custody battle moved Grandgirl to Texas. My career entirely disappeared. Our adult kids moved leaving us true empty-nesters at last. My health gradually returned. Then covid hit, reaffirming our passion for relearning old ways and rebuilding old places where many generations would continue to learn to grow and raise and preserve and enjoy food and family and farm and faith together. Even if it’s just the two of us here for now.
So Hubby built a greenhouse! Using salvaged pieces and parts, generations old beams from the farm, we wrapped her in a new shell, then placed atop a string of solar twinkle light plus a fitting crown. From our frustrated desire to lengthen our growing season blossomed a backyard cathedral bearing undiscovered possibilities.
We so easily forget life is like that – as much as we plan or resist, good things, bright things, sparkly new discoveries can arise where and how and when we least expect, often BECAUSE things didn’t go as planned.
So here’s my revelation: IT’S TIME TO GET UNSTUCK. In heart and mind and dreams and writing. Even when things don’t look the way I think they should. Perhaps especially because of it.
It’s time to accept the cleared slate with trust that this isn’t the end of the story. New things tend to grow in empty places. Family and friends will fill this big old house again one day. Garden starts won’t be the only thing blooming in the new cathedral-greenhouse. Maybe baby chicks in the spring. Our first baby ducks as well? Potlucks? Camp-outs? Unknown prayers waiting to be answered… Life is like that.
Across this canvas without all the usual suspects in our daily, weekly and holiday traditions a vision of new strengths and talents and possibilities within ourselves and each other emerges. Priorities resort. New dreams arise.
In writing as in life, it’s a process of letting go this holding ourselves and others to an old expectation of how or when things were supposed to grow or look or bear fruit. Instead making the choice each day to refocus on the beauty being revealed just here within our reach. Today.
Remember not the former things,
nor consider the things of old.
Behold, I am doing a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness
and rivers in the desert. ~ Isaiah 43:18-19
Amen.
