I guess each day we make a thousand cumulative little decisions that reflect who we are, how we want to be and who we are becoming. Trying to embrace an elegantly frugal life means lots of these decisions are about what will we have for dinner, how shall we spend the day and how can I avoid going to the supermarket!
And sometimes, the little cross roads we get to are BIG cross roads. We can just keep going along the way we are, leading quiet, safe little lives, doing the best we can with what we have, or we can LEAP EMPTY HANDED INTO THE VOID!
Mr Duck Herder and I have been doing lots of thinking and talking and dreaming about this little farm. We are going out again tomorrow, with the Parents of Duck Herder to undertake some more indepth infrastructure assessments - "how deep IS that well?", "When will the house fall down?", Does that dam really look spring fed?", "Could we REALLY live without a dishwasher?", "How good are those plums?","How good is the food at The Loaded Dog?"
Anyhoo, as mentioned in a previous post, the whole living on a farm this is DEFINITELY a Duck Herding thing, and something that Mr Duck Herder has perhaps inadvertently married into. BUT I LOVE this man, who once he got a feel for the place, nonchalantly announced that yes he could live here, and if would please just organise a long settlement to enable him to complete the next 16 months of racing, that would be all the nicer. He seems very calm
Me, on the other hand, not so much. My emotions have been wildly swinging from delirious bursts of joy, spontaneous tears of happiness combined with a bittersweet premature mourning for our current gorgeous lovely sunny, warm in winter cool in summer urban jungle orchard home. My excitement has been interspersed with plunging tummy curdling fears....."what am I doing?!"
Its that whole BIG DECISION thing. Perhaps I should just stop YEARNING, and WANTING, and be a better Buddhist and learn to be where I am.
And then the answer came. Christmas Eve. In a bon bon of course........ enclosed in a golden paper crown, surrounded by family and those we love....these words from Henry David Thoreau:
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams,
and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined,
he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined,
he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Well. That settles it. Boldly on I say. I will keep you posted.
3 comments:
Boldly on I say too.
Very exciting.
Thoreau has many answers. He lead me by the hand when I first read Walden Pond. Although he's essentially against the ownership of land, he wrote this: "Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour."
And then this: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience..."
Wagons Ho!
Hello Lucy C and Rhonda Jean!
Thank you very much. Rhonda Jean I recognise that quote from your old blog! (somewhere in there....) I love it.
I think I am going to have to find a copy of Walden Pond.
giddy up!
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