34 Mouths – Writing and Farming
God’s Whisper Farm
I’m ready for winged and four-legged needs to tie me down. For them to rope me into a rhythm that keeps them alive and breathes pattern into the chaos. Of words and travel and meetings.
In just over a week, 6 guinea keets and 16 chicks will arrive here at God’s Whisper Farm. A month or two later, goat kids will come to frolic in the western town that P is building out of pallets.
Soon, the number of lives I help maintain will move from 6 to 34, and I feel a little tremor in my chest when I think of it. Then, that tremor settles into comfort. I think I’ve been looking for something – some one, some place, some routine to pin me to life. The place came two years ago, the one in September . . . now for the routine.
Jenna Woginrich of Cold Antler Farm wrote last week about how having goats made her nervous, worried about being tied so fully to a place, and I can relate to the fear, to the advice from loving people who wonder if I can do this – curb my travel, be home every evening, manage to run a business and the farm. I weigh the fear and the concerns carefully – or at least I used to – but mostly now, I’m eager. Eager to begin a new step.
I long to find a routine – with words and muck boots and straw and open sky. I’m eager to find the rhythm that takes me back and forth through the backdoor of the farmhouse – that requires the rubber shoes I so carefully leave there just in case. I want to scatter feed and check hooves while I ponder what exactly makes me love that line by that writer, to consider just why Mary has decided this is the best choice in my novel.
I do not yet know how the logistics of this life will work – how I will write before daylight and then feed 34 mouths in the morning, how I will negotiate those final few projects with the need to check fence line and weed potatoes, how I will balance making money and then spreading the labor money cannot buy. But I know I will find the way; I know that P and I will find the way together.
Because life has taught me this – when something is your passion, when you are willing to give the best parts of yourself to it, the details work themselves out, and they make you whole, and shining, and strong.
So here’s to words and the screams of guineas, to the dancing of goat feet and the waddle of chickens. And here’s to you – may you find your passion and live large into it, even when it’s scary.
Later today, my April newsletter is going out. In it, you’ll find my 9 Reasons I Love Having Self-Published and the 3 Reasons I Hate it as well as an announcement about the first God’s Whisper Farm Writers’ Retreat AND a big discount on my upcoming writing workshops. Sign up here if you’re interested – http://andilit.us4.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=0d8a386e478aaa9a99d46d06f&id=6db25ede1c. Thanks.