The Way the Daffodils Grow

The daffodil bulbs have been on my mind – patiently waiting out their dark, winter days until the warmth of the sun rouses them from their long sleep. They still have a number of weeks left of their earthen slumber as they are still tucked in under a two-foot blanket of snow.

Are they impatient? I wonder. Do they miss the sun? Are they worried that this year the conditions may not be right for them to immerge, soak up the warmth and light, make enough sugars to sustain them for another year of life? Are they concerned that they are “behind schedule?”

They may not be worried about these things, but I certainly am. My mind keeps turning to the daffodil bulbs because I long to be like them. I long to be content with what is—the gifts of the present moment, the present season of the earth’s cycles and the season of my life. To flower when it’s time to flower, and to let the rest be. To do what is mine to do, and let the rest be.

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Until this year, I have been quite patient with the long drawn out springs here in northern New England. A friend from Pennsylvania recently asked me if spring has sprung yet at our homestead. I’m afraid not. Spring can’t spring until winter melts. And there is a lot of winter left to melt.

All this snow has really got me down because this year, more so than other years, we have things to do on the land. IMPORTANT things. BIG IMPORTANT THINGS that we can’t do until the snow is gone. This summer we have plans to build a house with an attached bakery. Before we can even begin on the project we need to finish demolishing the original farmhouse on our homestead, fill in the hole from the farmhouse basement, have a septic engineer test our soil for a septic system, set up a temporary electrical box, determine the well sight, and improve our driveways to handle heavy equipment. It’s all quite overwhelming on its own. We have the additional factor of waiting for the snow to melt and the subsequent mud to dry out. The longer the snow is here, the longer we have to wait.

March 20: the first patch of bare soil on our land since November 9

The snow does not share my sense of urgency, however. I moped around for a good two weeks, bent over my phone nearly every hour, checking the weather yet again to see if the forecast had turned in my favor. It seemed like every time I checked it, the weather forecast got a degree colder and the promised rain was steadily turning to snow. So, eventually I stopped. Yet I still glared out in frustration at the white landscape that was so beautiful to me a month ago. But a month ago, the snow wasn’t in my way.  Now it is so very much in my way.

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This resistance to life is exhausting and not super fun. It is humbling too, especially since so much of my work and life is about being present to reality exactly as it is. It turns out it’s a lot easier to embrace reality when it’s not negatively effecting your best laid plans. At some point, the futility of my fretting finally sank in. I could recognize that if our project took two years to finish or even more so, was never finished at all, everything would be just fine. My perspective gradually expanded until the subject of my worrying became appropriately small in the shadow of God’s love, the gift of life, and the abundance of marriage, community, a warm home, and good food.

I always wonder what the catalyst is for a change in attitude. What moves me from that narrow, inward facing perspective to one that is more expansive, present, and free? What finally leads me into these mini-conversions? A regular practice of Centering Prayer – a silent prayer of receptivity to God’s presence—and a loving husband who sees me better than I am able to see myself in such moments are two daily gifts that gently invite me out of a grumpy reverie. This go-round, the season of Lent and the reminder that “I am dust and to dust I shall return” has been the perfect antidote to delusions of overindulgent self-importance.

And, of course, the daffodil bulbs. As I meditate on those hidden, patient bulbs, I am inspired to imitate their trust and their contentedness. In this season, they have become my spiritual teachers.

May 2017

“Learn from the way the wild flowers grow. They do not work or spin. But I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was clothed like one of them. If God so clothes the grass of the field, which grows today and is thrown into the oven tomorrow, will he not much more provide for you, O you of little faith?’” – Matthew 6:28-30

Gleaning Gifts & Making Mistakes

I am beginning to understand that the first few years of homesteading is primarily about observing, receiving what is already there, and doing a lot of things the wrong way (or not doing things and discovering the consequences). This post is a seasonal highlight reel of late summer and autumn – the gifts gleaned and the mistakes made.

August: Mushrooms & Tobacco Horn Worms 

In August, our woods behind the yurt turned into a wonderland of gourmet wild delicacies. This year was a particularly good year for mushrooms in our region and our home range did not disappoint. Over a two to three week stretch we had wild mushrooms every night for dinner! Mark has been harvesting wild mushrooms for years. This year was the year I got hooked going out for a daily walk in the afternoon and coming home with dinner.

Chicken of the woods

Chantrelles & Lobster Mushrooms

 

If you’ve never had wild mushrooms you be unable to relate to my joy. Take this testimonial of my friend’s four-year-old. She said this 5 months after eating some wild mushrooms we took to their house: “When I’m a mommy I’m going to collect mushrooms in the forest because I hate mushrooms from the store but Mark and Lisa’s are good. So good and so creamy.” Or if you really want to experience the joy, come visit us in August!

Weighing known varieties and identifying unknown varieties from just one afternoon jaunt

Disclaimer: NEVER EVER eat a wild food if you do not know with 100% certainty exactly what it is and that it is safe to eat. The above photos are NOT adequate for mushroom identification.

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By the beginning of August, my tomato plants were thriving. Their leaves reaching for and soaking up the sun. Big green tomatoes continued to fill out promising a scrumptious yield. One day, I was admiring their beauty, my mouth watering as I anticipated the first sun-ripened fruit. The next day, there was nothing but skeletons where my promising tomato plants once stood.

TOBACCO. HORN. WORMS.  My first hard lesson in novice gardening.

Any gardener of tomatoes knows this other-worldly monstrosity of a pest. Tomato horn worms are as equally as destructive in their behavior and almost as grotesquely beautiful in their appearance. I so almost because the tobacco horn worms, the cuddly little guys that visited us, have the distinguishing feature of that bright red “horn”. It’s really harmless, but is quite effective at looking like it could kill you. Let me tell you – I will never again let these suckers feast on my food like they did in August 2018. I can say this with confidence because there were definitely plenty of signs that I just didn’t recognize until the plants were decimated. Next time they try to gorge themselves on my tomato plants, their little green eggs will send off crazy alarm bells in my head, along with the sound of incessant tomato leaf munching.

Mark being an all-star. Meanwhile, the unsuspecting hornworms enjoy it’s last meal. (There are two hornworms in this photo… can you see the second one?)

I thank my lucky stars for a husband who is less squeamish than me to finish these guys off. I’m not even that squeamish as far as squeamishness goes, but these juicy babies were definitely too much for me!!

I also thank the good earth, sun, rain, the tomato plants and the Creator of them all for life’s amazing resilience. The photo below is from TWO WEEKS after we discovered the hornworms. Of course, we lost a lot of tomatoes, but the plants continued to put forth leaves and fruit and the sun ripened the tomatoes.

The universe is bent towards life.

Hope.

 

September: Apple Sauce & Gluttonous Bears

 We have a gorgeous apple tree on our land. It was once tamed and managed, but after years of human absence has unfurled into a twisted, gnarled shade tree. Throughout August hundreds of little apples begin popping out of the vacuum left by the blossom. All the apples are out of reach as the branches have stretched heavenward in their unquenchable thirst for sunlight. They begin to turn from their undifferentiated green to red apples on one half and yellow apples on the other – a brilliant grafting success that provides perfect cider apples (the yellow) and delicious no-sweetener-needed applesauce (the red) from a common root. The apples warm to the perfect ripeness in early September and subsequently drop to the ground.

In between guiding excursions, I was able to glean at least some of these apples and preserve them for these colder, darker days.

However, I wasn’t the first one to help myself to these gifts of the land.

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In mid-September, after resting and recovering from our most recent guiding trip, I reached deep into my inner reserves of motivation and geared up to reclaim the ground beneath the apple tree. The ground needed reclaimed because, in our absence, approximately half of the fallen apples had turned into unappetizing “applemush” with the assistance of critters, microbes, wasps, and time. I needed to reach deep into my motivation reserves because, well, it was disgusting. Yet I was determined to glean the remnant of unrotten apples, if only for a token amount of applesauce to freeze for winter. Armed with gloves and resolve I dove in, pulling the solid apples from their deteriorating kin. Am I successfully relaying how unpleasant this was?

Typically, the more time you spend with something the more readily you are able to observe subtle differences between similar-looking objects. It turns out, this is also true of “applemush”. As I combed the yard for salvageable apples, I noticed a peculiar-looking substance with subtle, but distinct divergences from the majority of the “applemush.”

Please note: My finger is merely there as a size reference, lest you think I touch this!

Not only was the consistency and coloring slightly off, but the location and organization of these rotting apples was absurd! There were six distinct piles of mush beyond the edges of the tree branches. It was almost as if they had been moved there, but by whom?

 

In retrospect, it’s somewhat embarrassing how long it took me to put the pieces together. As soon as the story coalesced in my mind I ran to summon Mark so we could share in the absurdity. We chuckled and groaned in sympathy for the poor bear who made himself sick on our neglected apples.

October and November: Salvaged Boards & Tractor Search

Life on a homestead involves a shocking amount of time moving things around. Fire wood from the forest down the hill. Water from the stream up the hill. Cement blocks for the yurt foundation. Cedar posts for the woodshed. Salvaged boards for the siding of the mudroom. A HUGE stone for the step out the yurt’s backdoor. Snow from on the deck to off the deck, on the driveway to off the driveway, in our way to out of our way. So. Much. Snow. At least the way we homestead, we seem to always be schlepping around heavy things.

The heavy things that we have been moving over and over again are the boards salvaged from the farmhouse we are slowly dismantling.

These old boards – some as wide as 20 inches! – were moved from the house to the outside of the barn to dry, to the barn hay loft to store, and now are being moved all over the property as they live into their new roles as woodshed siding, mudroom siding, counter extension and office walls. These old trees haven’t experienced this much commotion since they were harvested, milled and assembled into this old farmhouse and that was probably 200 years ago!

 

We spent sixteen months on this homestead moving all these things by hand. Sometimes, when it was helpful, we used a utility sled to maximize moving potential. When we had three adolescent boys here for a week – two cousins and a nephew – we gladly welcomed their muscular motivation inspired by a challenge from their older relatives. Much to everyone’s surprise they moved a MASSIVE stone up the steepest hill on our land with the utility sled, oomph, ingenuity and teamwork.

Despite the innovation and muscle toning gained by moving lots of heavy things from one place to another, we decided it was time to invest in a tractor. The search was on.

Red tractor. Green tractor. Blue tractor.

This tractor is too small. This tractor is too big.

(Looking for a tractor oddly resembled a children’s book.)

This tractor is just right.

I truly had no idea how excited I could get about a tractor.

And it was! And is! At least so far, we have been delighted with our Ford 1320, or Babe as we’ve begun to call it. In lieu of a handful of teenagers, it can move a lot of heavy things.

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Life happens quickly and I’m still learning how to keep up with writing about all that life. I hope you enjoyed the update and, if nothing else, the photos of all that luscious green! My eyes had forgotten such colors existed!

Let the Wisdom of the Earth Seep Into Your Bones

The beginning of my summer has been filled with long, glorious days on the homestead. Settling into this place and learning the way the sun and moonlight bounces off the contoured land. Familiarizing myself with the habits and voices of those that share this hill. Slowly working and dreaming alongside Mark with nothing marking time but the turning of the earth and the liturgy of the hours.

Most of this post I wrote last fall. With each day I don’t get in my car, the longing for intimacy with this place is both satisfied and continues to grow and deepen. When I read an article in the Northern Woodlands magazine this morning, I knew I had to dig out these words. 

More soon on what my hands have been doing during these long days, but first an update from my heart…

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“Whh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wh! Whh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wh!” “Mmeeep! Mmeeep!” These sounds accompanied our meditation one evening last October as the day transitioned into night. Our friend and neighbor, Tom, was with us and as we eased back into conversation, he and Mark (my husband) began to comment on the unusual sounds. They knew exactly who the wing flutters and calls belonged to – the woodcock. The sounds themselves were not unfamiliar, rather the time of year is what was odd. The fluttering of the woodcock’s wings and his piercing call is part of the springtime’s symphony, not the fall’s. As the woodcock called out, Mark and Tom, who have been witness to Vermont’s rhythms for 20 years and 30 years, respectively, had the feeling of spring in their bones even as we sat under a warm October dusk.

I, however, being new to northern New England did not have the same experience. I heard the woodcock, proudly knew it was woodcock, but had no idea what was so significant about its presence in mid-autumn. In my two years of lived experience in New England, woodcocks fly and sing in the fall just as often as they do in the spring. The next time I hear a woodcock in October, I may now know in my head that woodcocks aren’t typically around in the fall. But I will never know the original rhythms of the woodcock the way Mark and Tom do. I will never know it in my bones.

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Over breakfast this morning, I read the Editor’s Note in the Northern Woodlands – a quarterly magazine about the northern New England woods. The author, Dave Mance III, wrote about the recent news that the Emerald Ash Borer was found in Vermont. This news is a 5-10 year death sentence for a whole genus of trees. As a professional forester, he writes about his grief – “like loving someone with a terminal disease.” He tells of a black ash basket-maker in Minnesota who made a “burial basket” in her mourning. He wonders about what his daughter’s memory of the ash tree will be and how we will begin to explain the loss to the coming generations.

The title of the article is “Bearing Witness.” (You can read the article by purchasing the current issue – Issue 97: Summer 2018 of the Northern Woodlands Magazine. It’s only $6.00 and WORTH IT.)

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Bearing witness. Listening. Fostering intimacy. In the wake of environmental crisis, I believe these are the ways we must turn back to the earth. We must welcome the rhythms, the joys, and the sorrows of the land into our very bodies – into our bones. Local ecosystems are already changing as the earth’s temperature rises. I have already lost the opportunity to know deeply the old rhythms of my Vermont home, but I can begin where and when I am. With each passing day, season, and year, the wisdom of the earth, even the earth in a rapid state of change, will seep into my body.

In June and July 2017, I had the honor of co-guiding a 40-day pilgrimage down the Connecticut River in which we prayed with the land, honored sacred sites, and mourned places of desecration and destruction at the hand of our species. On the morning of the fifteenth day, I woke up with a sense of intimacy with the created world in general, and the Connecticut River in particular, previously unknown to me. I realized all at once, as if waking up from a dream, that the river and I are equal players in the same story. We have the same Creator. We have the same home. Our stories our intricately interwoven with each other in such a way that I cannot thrive, or even survive, if she does not thrive. We will live together or we will die together. I could feel the river’s life, her pain, and most astutely, her patience with humanity. Throughout our shared history – the river’s and my people’s – she has literally carried the burden of our sins in the form of trash, factory run-off, eroding topsoil, and stagnation-inducing dams. That day, she became for me an image of the body of Christ, bearing all things in gentleness and in love.

In the same moment, I saw another face of her patience, a forbearance of our inattentiveness. I have come to glimpse, incrementally and in the gift of sacred moments, that our most destructive habits as humans cannot be solved by recycling, electric cars, wind power, or our favorite green initiatives. The human behavior most destructive to our precious home and our fellow earth-dwellers is a pervasive culture of inattentiveness. Our fractured relationship with the earth is not simply a result of what we have done (and are doing), but of what we have failed (and are failing) to do.

That beautiful July morning, waking up to the river flowing as she has for millions of years, I turned to the natural world in a new way. I realized that our species will continue to be a destructive force until we turn back to our rivers and our land, engage with them like the keepers of wisdom they are, and seek to be their pupils. We must know in our bones the way in which this world turns.

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This is why we live the way we do – in an off-grid 314 square foot yurt on a Vermont hillside. We sold (or in our case – bought) the farm for this one audacious hope– that the world’s hope rests in individuals, and then communities, turning their full attention to the earth and to her Creator.

This is why we lead people on wild pilgrimages where we pray for and with the land, bless and be blessed by the natural world as we move slowly through it. We pray this helps more and more people turn to the earth, allowing her wisdom to seep into their bones. I believe the future of the world – the trees, the birds, the rivers, and the people – depends on it.

As we listen, as we let the wisdom of the earth seep into our bones, our behavior will change. It has to, because it is then that we realize our well-being cannot be divorced from the earth’s wellbeing.

But first, we must pay attention. We must bear witness. We must listen, for the earth has much to tell us.

Instant Spring – Just Add Sun

Spring has finally reached the hills of Vermont! Without warning – but with much anticipation – the sun melted winter’s final white dusting and called forth the dormant seeds and trees. Our 314 square feet of living space has expanded (literally) overnight to 10.3 acres of space to romp, work, & rest. Spring ephemerals, trees, & so, so many birds are finally awake! Spring has come!

Here’s a taste of spring on our hill:

Colt’s Foot

Trout Lily

Spring Beauty

Spring Beauty soaking up the sun!

My current favorite place to visit – I call this stump our fairy castle!

Trillium

A Maple Seedling!

A slightly more mature maple waking up

One daffodil of THOUSANDS on our property – pure gift from the previous steward of the land!

Rushing streams cannot be captured in a photo – the sound, the coolness, the smell of earth and water waking up!

Perhaps my favorite sign of spring – bare feet! ❤

Oh and this – the morning of April 30th taken two days before all the other photos in this post. Oh what a little sun can do!

I hope your spirit is waking up to and with all the signs of spring wherever you are!

It’s so easy to notice beauty this time of year. My spring prayer is that my eyes and heart remain attentive to the tiny signs of hope and life all the year through!

Lenten Reflection: Mud Season of the Soul

In the summer of 2017, Mark and I led the River of Life Connecticut River Pilgrimage – a 40-day journey of prayer and reconciliation with the land. I invited the more than 50 pilgrims who joined us to return to the prayers from our pilgrimage this Lent. Throughout the season of Lent, I am writing weekly reflections drawing on the themes from the Connecticut River Pilgrimage. They are also being posted by Kairos Earth, the organization that sponsored the pilgrimage. Enjoy!

The earth has begun to thaw in my home region – the Upper Valley along the Connecticut River – with unseasonably warm 40+ degree days. When the frozen ground begins to melt in Vermont, where the majority of the roads are dirt, we experience mud season – the messy, mucky, unwieldy transition from winter to spring. This season, the limbo between the frozen waters and waters that flow clean and free, is an apt metaphor for grace.¹

Grace is good news. It is the gift of God’s infinite and loving presence available to us at every moment. It is the freedom that does not bind us to our past faults, foibles, and ways of being and acting that wrought pain to the world and ourselves. It is the promise that true healing of our wounds, relationships, injustices, and the earth is possible.

Yet in the transition from our hardened, frozen hearts to life, freedom, and wholeness we need to walk through some muck. When we seek to discard idols and attachments that we may experience the infinite riches of the present moment, our “senses will cry like disappointed children” (Jean de Pierre Caussade in The Sacrament of the Present Moment). When we embrace the freedom of forgiveness we need to look squarely at the pain we caused. When we work for true healing in our lives, our community, and the earth, we must first name the hurt, the disorder, the fracturing. We experience grace to the extent that we have eyes to see the reality of the world in front of us – the muck of wounding, injustice, and exploitation as well as the spring flowers of forgiveness, reconciliation, and freedom.

Lent, then, is our liturgical mud season. It is the season in which we fast and pray, intentionally looking at the places we have fallen short, grieving our role in the cycle of woundedness, and asking for the grace of a transformed heart.

May we embrace the difficult, uncomfortable, painful invitation of Lent, knowing that the muck is a sign of God’s fiery grace melting our hardened, frozen hearts.

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¹It’s important to note that true mud season in Vermont is typically late March into April. The sloppiness of this week is unusual.

Living Without Electricity in the Darkest Time of the Year and What It Reveals

It’s 4:00pm and the sun is casting its last golden rays on the far hills. I won’t need to light the candles for another thirty minutes. Enough fading light will make its way into the yurt through the skylight. But by 4:30 any last warm, reddish hues will set with our planet’s nearest star. Even still, some light lingers, but it is cool, shadowy light, painting the white snowy canvas with purples, then blues, then grays, then darkness.

Beech Tree Shadows

Or, almost darkness. It looks like it will be a clear night. On clear nights, the stars – those faraway pinpoints of light – are bright enough that I don’t need my headlamp to walk the unlit path from the car, up and over the knoll to our yurt nestled in its tiny dell. The collective brightness of the stars astounds me.

I’m learning to love the dark more than ever this year as I spend my first winter without electricity in a 20-foot yurt. Many (myself included) thought the lack of electric light would make the dark of winter more difficult. It has actually made the darkness more magical! It is stunning what is revealed when light, among other things, is stripped away.

Twinkling distant galaxies, the smoky milky way, and the array of constellations are always hanging in the sky, but modern humans so rarely see the masterpiece. What keeps us from marveling every clear night at this wonder? Light pollution, yes. But there’s other stimulation that keeps us from seeing the stars. There’s the quick shuffle from one climate controlled space to the next, heads down, cursing the cold, thinking about what just happened, or will happen, or might or might not happen. What do we need to finally marvel at the sky’s glory? I suspect we need no thing. What we need is less. Less light. Less work. Less parties. Less obligations. Only when the light and the busyness is stripped away can we finally see the galaxies.

The full moon rising at dusk!

 

As it is with the starry night, so it is with all of life it seems. Like this evening’s clear, star-speckled sky so much of life can only be enjoyed when unnecessary stimulation is gone. My first few months of yurt living has definitely been a stripping down. We’ve given up most modern conveniences (many of which we’ve come to assume as necessary) in order to embrace this life. No internet means walking or driving to a neighbor’s house to send an email. Living without electricity requires the use of an icebox instead of refrigerator, cleaning up dinner in the dark, and makes nearly every modern time-saving kitchen gadget an impossibility.

Our kitchen – just the bare essentials

That’s right – no crockpot, microwave, blender, toaster, toaster oven, coffee grinder, electric coffee maker, mixer, electric kettle, etc. We definitely don’t have an automatic dishwasher and no hot tap water means heating water on the woodstove before each round of hand-washed dishes. Some of these conveniences were easy to give up. The absence of others, however, has caused me to throw mini, inner (or sometimes… ahem… larger, outer) tantrums while I wait for a pot of water to heat up with a stack of dirty dishes on prominent display.

Why put yourself through this? I’m not surprised if you’re thinking this. It’s a question I’ve posed to myself during those occasional hissy fits. The reason? In the act of simplifying my life, there is a richness and abundance I can see more clearly than before! Like the stars revealed when we turn off the lights, abundance shines through as I strip away these outer accoutrements. Stripping away conveniences, even conveniences I’ve been most hesitant to relinquish, has revealed a daily beauty I’ve previously only enjoyed away from home on retreat, a wilderness trip, or vacation!

What are the stars revealed by this crazy, off-grid yurt life of mine? Intimacy. Presence. Space. I’m still figuring out how this works, but as I’ve simplified my life, stripped things down to the bare essentials, I have so much more room for intimacy, presence, and spaciousness. Instead of feeling like I have less of something because the basic chores take a little more time and effort, there is a sense of abundance! I’ve been experiencing a renewed and uncontrived intimacy with nature, with my husband- Mark, and with the Spirit. I more often feel at home in my body, my place in the world, and the tasks at hand. I have a clearer understanding of what to say yes to and what to say no to. The temptation to distract myself from reality is lessened as I experience the fullness of each moment.

I will be the first to admit that this sense of abundance is not my moment-by-moment experience. Sometimes I’m hunched over, tunnel-visioned on my shuffling feet, annoyed by the darkness and the inconveniences. In those moments, I have no idea that what seems like a nuisance is revealing a masterpiece around me.  But as I commit more fully to this life of inconvenience, these moments of abundance are much more common than at any other time in my life. Whereas I used to need to retreat from my regular life with its light pollution and conveniences in order to see the stars, now all I need to do is look up.

Twilight view from the yurt

Remembering I’m a Mammal! or Why I Love Snow Days

Ahh…  Snow! Snow days unapologetically insert their will into our modern lives, clogging the gears of our machine-driven society. I’ve always delighted in this phenomenon, but this winter – my first winter living in an off-grid 314 square foot yurt – I more fully understand why it’s just so satisfying!

The stream the day after the storm on a snowshoe trek around our land

We had our first big snowstorm of the year this week – nearly a foot! Mark and I cancelled our day’s plans and burrowed into our cozy home. We spent the hours stoking the fire, drinking cream-doused chaga (an immune boosting boiled tree fungi…yum!) and balsam needle tea, slurping soup that simmered on the woodstove all day getting better each hour, praying, reading, resting, burrowing… ah! My body and soul finally felt aligned with the cold and darkness. I needed this snow day to finally embrace the season. Herein lies the magic of a heavy snow – it forces us into our creatureliness. When our roads are blocked and our meetings canceled we can finally burrow in like the mammals we are.

Of course, I didn’t need to live in a yurt to experience this snow day magic – I’ve been experiencing it my whole life in perfectly modern, wired, square houses. Yet experiencing my first snowfall in a small round home with not much more than the bare essentials, I felt a new and deep kinship with the creatures just outside our thin walls. As we drifted off to sleep, my mind wandered to these critters. Where are they burrowing?

The barred owls we still hear most nights are roosting in the pine trees – the splayed out boughs providing shelter from the heavy snowflakes. I imagine their heads shrunk into their fluffed plumage and their eyes squeezed shut – waiting.

A squirrel’s nest!

The squirrels and chipmunks burrow deep into their nests of leaf litter in semi-hibernation. Do they wish they slept as soundly as brother bear does like Mark wishes he slept as soundly as I do? Who knows? I do know both rodents and bears curl up and wait.

The deer yard up under a stand of conifers, taking advantage of the natural protection of the ever-green boughs like their winged friends. They huddle close, the warmth of the whole greater than their individual heat index. And they wait.

Our porcupines – or “quillpigs” as we affectionately call them – are indubitably cozy in the rocky foundation under our workshop. This prickly family has become a nuisance as they’ve made home beneath our infrequently used workshop and gnawed on the wooden door. Gratefully only the wood of the one door seems to satisfy their taste buds. Otherwise the entire wooden structure might be a porcupine’s smorgasbord! We lived in this workshop for a few weeks before building our yurt and were amazed at how much porcupines had to discuss! All. Night. Long. They murmured back and forth with an intensity that led me to think Mr. Quillpig got home from a night out a little later than Mrs. Quillpig felt acceptable. Whatever squabbles we’ve had with them (or they with each other) I am grateful to know they’re cozy and warm under our hand-built structure just as we’re cozy and warm in our yurt up the hill. Harsh conditions evoke mammalian kinship I suppose – especially if we’re already well-fed by other means.

Our Shaker-inspired workshop

The quillpigs’ home…

and their damage!

The porcupines huddle up and wait… and so do we.

The societal forces to be out and about during this cold, dark season feel absurdly incongruous with our creatureliness. Holiday parties, Christmas shopping, hosting preparations, charitable drives shout for our attention – all on top of our ordinary contributions to a productive society. Meanwhile, our bodies, the darkness, the cold, and the snow are inviting us to burrow, to rest, to cease productivity. To wait.

For our non-human friends, burrowing is about survival. Going to holiday parties would use up precious energy needed to make it through the winter. Productivity would be deadly. Human animals have discovered other sources of energy beyond our caloric intake. We have oil and hydro-dams and coal and wind turbines. Lucky us! We don’t ever have to stop. We can keep going and burning and producing and consuming and…

We have much to learn from our instinct-driven friends. For the health of our bodies, our culture, our earth, and our souls, may we learn to burrow, to listen, to wait.

Two sets of tracks…

…

…and two burrowing mammals!

(Is it Mr. or Mrs. Quillpig?!?)

The Whimsy (and Practicality) of Living in a Yurt

From the moment Mark and I started talking about our future homestead, dreams and what was realistically possible were all thrown into one giant imagination pot. Fantasies I’ve had since I was a kid – an outdoor fort with moss carpet, a house with a fireman’s pole inside, a treehouse with a swing bridge– are not immediately removed from the table just because they’re whimsical. In fact, their whimsy may be in their favor because whimsy implies creativity, passion, and doing something for no other reason than it’s fun. And we want all those things in our life.

However, as we dream up, and now build up, our homestead we don’t throw all practicality to the wind. In addition to whimsy, we want to live in radical union with the natural world. So, a giant waterpark filled with plastic tubing and water that will make your eyes sting is automatically out. Not all my childhood fantasies are on the table. And even if a waterpark inspired by a maple sugaring operation was in line with our values (seriously, think how cool that would be?), we have other limits to bear in mind– money, space, zoning, Vermont winters. Sometimes those limits actually fuel the whimsy, if approached the right way.

Why a yurt? The short answer is a mix between practicality and whimsy. First, the long answer of the first part: practicality. This summer we had a limited amount of time to make a warm winter home. The majority of our income comes from guiding and we had a busy year, which left us about six weeks of summer building time available. We also have limited financial resources (see our primary source of income, listed above!). We are doing are darnedest to stay out of debt, which drastically reduces what we can afford.

We could have perceived these limits as an insurmountable problem, causing us to take refuge in a rented apartment until the spring sun melted the snow we know is coming. If the only voices in our lives were the capitalist voices prescribing the good life in square feet minimums and modern conveniences, we would have been forced in that direction. During the aches and pains of getting to where we are, it was a tempting direction.

We discovered that the limits in our life could become a joy, if we approached them with creativity, passion, and whimsy. Our yurt, deck and woodshed took five days and less than $15,000 to build. We are still working on the internal systems – a bed frame with clothing storage underneath, counters and sink for a kitchen, shower, etc – but we are warm, dry, and oh-so-happy.

Living in a yurt brings with it a whole new set of limitations. We have a lot less space than we’re used to – 314 square feet. We don’t have electricity or internet. And we have to walk 150 yards uphill to get to the yurt from our parking area. But so far, each new set of limitations only brings more opportunity for whimsy. Or, if not whimsy, an opportunity to surrender our attachments and see reality more clearly. Sometimes, it’s both.

Limited space: I was nervous about this one. I’ve done my share of ooh-ing and aah-ing through the online galleries of tiny homes, delight for the efficiency and beauty of every square inch coursing through my nervous system. Yet, I knew that both Mark and I were given an extra dose of big ideas in place of organizational aptitude. A small space has little room for clutter, or for error.

I have always procrastinated organizing, but I’ve always had enough physical space to squeak through life without organizing. There was a crisis from this lack of organization at least once a year – misplacing important documents, paying a bill late, buying something I already had because I couldn’t find the one already owned, so on and so forth. Living in such a small space is forcing my hand. I bought a desk and a filing system, and I’m actually using them. I have to! There’s no space for this stuff to accumulate. I have to deal with it. It has actually become a challenge I enjoy! Who knew organization could be fun? (I know… lots of people who are very unlike me!)

The other joy of small living is cleaning. Cleaning was also one of those things that would routinely fall off the bottom of my to-do list. Now? It takes me 15-20 minutes to clean our entire house. So, I actually do it – every morning! I clean up the clutter, I sweep, I beat out the rugs when the weather’s nice. It’s so manageable that I’m not even slightly overwhelmed at the prospect. Plus, if I don’t clean, there’s no other space to retreat to.

No electricity: So far this is my favorite thing about yurt living! The absence of electric lighting is the most dramatic and also the best thing about being unplugged. As the days grow shorter, I don’t rise and set exactly with the sun (my waking hours exceed the sun’s), but it’s pretty close. But while I may stay awake three to four hours after sunset, there’s a noticeable shift in my energy, orientation, and activity choice. As the sun sets and we light the two or three candles – all that’s necessary to illuminate a small, corner-less, white walled space – my soul unbidden falls in step. Productivity transitions into reflection. Work flows into rest. Outward turns inward. Without all the light and screen stimulation that has become the modern norm, I can hear my body when it’s telling me it’s time to sleep. Then I do.

Whenever I laud the benefits of life without electricity, I always add the caveat that we haven’t made it through the winter solstice yet, and so I add that here too. The joy I find now in experiencing deeply the fading light may turn into despair and impatience as the night subsumes more and more of the day. Yet, there’s a part of me that looks forward to that feeling of despair – the part of me that desires to know reality in all its beauty and its harshness.  I look forward to keeping Advent as I feel the ever-encroaching darkness– hoping beyond hope that more light is coming despite the clear pattern of increasing darkness.

I also take my daily dose of Vitamin D.

The walk uphill: Whimsy was definitely part of the equation when we chose where to build our yurt. Our home isn’t at the highest point of the land, but it’s close. The front arched door is aligned with the sunrise as it crests over Center Hill painting a new and different masterpiece every morning. For this, we traded the convenience of driving right to our doorstep. It’s an inconvenience that is most magnified after a substantial grocery run or when our truck’s four-wheel drive is out and we have furniture to move in. But more often than not, the walk itself is as much a gift as the view. The 150-yard walk to and from the yurt is a daily invitation to notice, and to check in with the land. How are the clouds moving across the sky? How have the leaves changed since yesterday or last week? What critters have shared our pathway last night and left their mark? This walk reminds me that my home is not limited to the curved walls of my dwelling.

The choice of our home – in all its whimsy – was a conscious decision to align our lives with the natural world that sustains us. As we become more in tune with these natural rhythms, we begin to know deep within ourselves that we are creatures and we are dependent on this home beyond our doorstep. Dwelling in nature is leading us to an ever-deepening reverence, which leads us to care, which leads us to wholeness. That is not just whimsical – that’s a serious business!

The Return

Step away from your screen

Long enough to see

To notice

The enchanting worlds

At your feet

Moss, grasses, cracks in the sidewalk

Reminders

We share this earth

 

Step away from the news

Long enough to dream

                                To imagine

A world where there’s enough

A world

Where all funding is cut

And we have

Everything we need

 

Step away from your point

Long enough to breathe

                                To feel

Your chest rise

And fall

The air, dry, in your nose

Each in

Each out proclaiming you’re alive

 

Step away from the mirror

Long enough to look

                                At one

Who has been where you are

Our society

Praises youth over age

But ask

Where have the elders gone?

 

Step away and be still

And know God is here

                                And know

You are loved

For to act

In any other way

Is to work

For the one whom you fight

 

Step away and listen

Long enough to hear

                                The earth

She has words for us

She longs

To teach us the new, old way

And again

We will dwell

In the land of the infinite

The Backstory

Welcome to the Land of the Infinite, the story of two embodied souls’ journey back to the land, to love, and to the sacred.

My husband (Mark) and I (Lisa) are on a life-long quest to make room for the Spirit, for the thriving of souls, and for a harmonious relationship with our fellow creatures (from rivers to turkeys!) in our lives, community, and culture. The daily drama of this life plays out on a humble 10.3 (Mark never leaves out the ‘point 3’) acres in eastern Vermont.

View from our front porch, October 2017

To some lookers-on, drama may be a bit of an exaggeration. Listening to barred owls calling back and forth in literal surround sound while drifting off to sleep or relishing in the exquisite and short-lived sparkle of the field at morning frost doesn’t quicken the heart for everyone. And if I’m going to be honest, which I intend to be, my soul doesn’t always sing in response to these gifts either. Sometimes it does. But often it doesn’t. Sometimes all I can see are the inconveniences of this life we’ve chosen – walking up the hill to our yurt in the rain, in the dark, with an armful of groceries, with menstrual cramps does not always evoke a grateful heart. At least, not yet.

The premise on which we are building our lives (and what this blog is about) is simple. Infinite joy awaits us in each moment of our lives – even the crampy, tired, and wet moments. When peace and contentedness is not our experience it is not because of an external reality (as we have been so effectively trained to believe), but an internal perception. Infinite love, infinite wonder, and infinite joy rest in each moment – we just can’t see it. We are blind.

We have chosen three trustworthy practices to help us recover our sight – intimacy with the natural world, committed and vocational marriage, and relationship with the Divine Source of Life. It’s incredible to witness how these pathways faithfully challenge our egos, refine our desires and priorities, and bit by bit invite us into greater freedom. It’s hard. It’s beautiful. It’s totally worth it.

What is that you want – those of you seeking perfection? Give your desires free reign, setting absolutely no limits, no boundaries to them. Listen to me: let your hearts demand the infinite, for I can tell you how to fill them. There is never one moment in which I cannot show you how to find whatever you desire. The present moment is always overflowing with immeasurable riches, far more than you are able to hold. Your faith will measure it out to you: as you believe, so you will receive. Love, too, is also a measure. The more you love the more you will want and the more you will get.

– Jean-Pierre de Caussade, The Sacrament of the Present Moment