This Month: Coming Home, Little Adventures, and Seeking a New Normal

Mist on the Missouri River

We've been back in the Midwest for over a month now, and I still don't know what life is supposed to look like. Zach is back to Walmart (in online grocery pick-up), I just finished the Legends and Lanterns Halloween festival, and we are both working a lot and trying to catch up with friends and struggling to find equilibrium and direction in our new life back home. It wasn't the roughest transition in the world, but it's been long, very long. 

My instinct is always to rush myself, to get my life together right now, but I'm pushing back against that and trying to take things in bite-sized moments. One step at a time, we're trying to figure out what we want, and what we should do, and what "normal" means in this phase of our life.

Here are some bite-sized bits of what we've been up to lately…

New housemates!

The biggest news is that we have housemates now! Lydia, who's been my friend since high school, lived in and took care of our house over the summer, and it worked out best for everyone for her to continue living here while we moved back in. Our other housemate is Lydia's adorable cat, Eddie— he is one of the friendliest cats I have ever met, not even trying to pretend that he doesn't adore us and want to be around us all the time. All the benefits of a cat without any of the responsibility!

New car!

The other big news is that our old car (a 1993 Oldsmobile) finally gave up the ghost, and we decided that it wasn't worth repairing yet again. After some serious discussion and consideration, we decided to buy a very new car— a fully electric one. We are now driving a Chevy Spark EV, which has a range of about 80 miles and we plug into a regular outlet at our house. I'm going to write a whole post about why we chose an EV, so if you're intrigued, stay tuned. (UPDATE: Here it is!)

Legends and Lanterns

As I mentioned, I just finished the St. Charles Halloween festival. Other than a single day of rain, the whole festival had absolutely perfect weather, and we enjoyed large crowds come to celebrate the spookiness! My favorite part of the festival are the regulars who come weekend after weekend— they are welcomed, included, teased mercilessly, and find a place where they truly belong. 

Baba Yaga, the most famous witch of Slavic folklore

A Weird Sister from Macbeth, Baba Yaga, and a Victorian mourner

Making music videos

Our friends Tyler and Adrienne were in town, and we got the chance to film footage for upcoming music videos for our band, Insomniac Folklore. This involved spooky lighting effects, vintage white gunnysack dresses, smearing fake blood on each other's faces, and trying reeaaaally hard not to get blood on the aforementioned vintage dresses! I was so glad for the chance to sing and perform with them a bit before they head back to Oregon. Although the videos aren't up and won't be for a while, you can still check out our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/InsomniacFolklore

Taming the garden

It's no secret that our garden is a jungle, and unfortunately we haven't worked on it as much as we've wanted to. I'll post a proper garden update soon, but in the meantime, just know that we've harvested a respectable amount of food with very little effort— raspberries, strawberries, figs, elderberries, volunteer tomatoes, amaranth, daikon radish, some sunchokes (we have a whole forest of them to harvest after the frost), and, of course, ridiculous amounts of kale!

Fermenting adventures

Zach and I are committed to having more live food in our diet, and have gotten some fun ferments going. We've been eating sauerkraut every day, and soon we'll have some red sauerkraut (made with red cabbage, beets, and apples) and some pickled beets to try! Zach has also been brewing kombucha, and, as always, we have our milk kefir and sourdough. Next up: water kefir!

Soft focus on the pickled beets!

Foraging

It's wonderful how many things there are to forage this time of year! We haven't had a huge yield of anything yet, but we're learning a ton, and have so far foraged pawpaw, gingko nuts, and sumac. I'm going to write a whole blog post about this later.

Hiking

We've been able to do a bit of hiking— at the Lewis and Clark Trail in Weldon Spring and at Pere Marquette State Park in Illinois— to reconnect to the flora and fauna of the Midwest. Autumn is my favorite season, and I'm so glad that we've gotten to see the leaves turn from the very beginning.

Views from Pere Marquette State Park

Reading:

Storm of Locusts by Rebecca Roanhorse (Update: After reading reviews from Diné (Navajo) critics, I can no longer recommend this book. Roanhorse is a member of a different nation than the one she wrote about, and appropriated sacred religious figures in a way that the Diné reviewers found harmful. You can read more here.)

The Sacred Enneagram by Christopher Heuertz (A deeply thought-provoking book discussing the Enneagram personality lens and how it affects our spirituality as Christians.)

The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri (A gut-wrenching novel about one Syrian couple's journey to England as refugees. I felt really depressed after reading it, but it was an amazing book that reminds us of what refugees must go through to reach safety.)

Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin (Almost through my third reading of this book. I love it so much!)

What have you been up to lately?

~~~

Thoughts on Turning Thirty

Well maybe it is just the time of year

Or maybe it's the time of man

I don't know who l am

But you know life is for learning…

~Joni Mitchell, "Woodstock"

When I turned thirty almost two months ago, most people immediately divided into two camps:

1. "Well, I guess you have to start lying about your age now!"

2. "Congratulations, you survived your twenties! The twenties are the worst." 

It's funny how an arbitrary human measurement of time can create such a sense of significance: I'd been feeling the weight of my upcoming birthday for months beforehand. I was excited, but not in a rush to get there, and I definitely didn't fit into either of the two camps.

Now that I've been thirty for a while, I'm still happy about it. My body is still strong and in good working order. I love the bright silver hairs starting to show up on my head and the wrinkles around my eyes when I smile. I have better boundaries and a better sense of self than I did in my twenties and I like to think I'm at least slightly more mature.

On the other hand, my twenties were absolutely incredible. They began with my first solo trip, a month in Bellingham, Washington full of vivid memories of walking alongside the bay and exploring Northwestern forests and eating Belgian waffles at five in the morning. My twenties continued with a string of solo trips, a devastating heartbreak, then wider and more interesting adventures. Always on or planning for the next trip, blowing into town for a few months and then hitting the road again. I promised myself that if I was still doing that when I was thirty, I would reconsider my life.

Then Zach entered the scene, and life took an unexpected twist. Getting married, then years of planning for the Pacific Crest Trail. A six-month hike. A nine-month period of house-hunting. Buying a house, settling down, putting literal roots in the ground, wanting a baby, not getting a baby, getting restless, taking a trip, trying to put roots down again, failing at that, escaping to Portland for seven months. 

My twenties ended in July with another solo trip of a kind, touring with Insomniac Folklore back to Missouri for a visit. Fresh off an exhausting and elating and incredibly intense road trip, I was emotionally undone. I cried a lot. I spent most of my actual birthday bawling— but not because I was sad, but because I was so grateful. 

That day, I sat on the bed in my parents' spare room and wrote this in my diary: 

Thirty. It fits. It suits me. It feels right. It feels familiar. It feels inevitable, because, I guess, it is. And yet there is a sparkle of magic to it, a sense of gratitude that I've made it this far. So much has changed. I've learned so much.

And yet I feel that the past few months have not been about learning, but about remembering. Remembering to live in the Mystery. Remembering to come begging to God because I am not strong enough. Remembering that people like me and that I have so much to offer. Remembering to stand tall, express myself, take up space, be an inconvenience. Remembering how much I enjoy nurturing people. Remembering that I'm happiest in a group. Remembering how much it means to me when my friends are willing to let me go.

I want to be a vagabond, an earth mother, a healer, a giver, a dork who is unafraid. I want to bring magic to a world that desperately lacks it, and I want people to find the magic that draws them closer to God.

I have no idea what the next decade of my life is going to look like. I have no idea whether we'll settle down or take flight again, or where our interests will lead us, or what we'll feel called to do next. 

I had assumed that my life path would get clearer the older I got, but the opposite is happening. Grace is given to us moment by moment, and sometimes our plans for the future have to happen that way, too. This summer has been about learning to rest in uncertainty, to embrace it, to find joy and excitement in it. Step by step. Just keep walking. Wherever it is we're supposed to go, I believe that we'll get there.

~~~

18 Skills I Learned in 2018

When I look back and reflect on a year, my first instinct is to be negative. “I never did build those cold frames.” “I didn’t have a fall garden at all.” “I still didn’t learn how to drive!” However, while scrolling through my blog, I found an old post titled “16 Skills I Learned in 2016.” It was fun to read what I had learned that year, and thinking about 2018, I realized that I learned an incredible amount this past year. Sometimes I have to remind myself of how far I’ve come, even if I didn’t do everything that I hoped I would. 

In 2018, I learned how to...

1. Identify dozens of plants. Point out a bird and I can tell you whether it’s a warbler or a wren, but until this year I could only identify a handful of plants. Zach and I worked together to start learning more plants— beginning with the ones we could eat— and although I still have a long way to go, I’m able to spot patterns now, and at least make educated guesses about whether I’m observing a leguminous vine or some species of dock.

2. Raise chickens. This has been one of my favorite things I’ve learned! Reading about keeping chickens was incredibly daunting, but once we actually started raising them, I realized that, like many things, it’s easier in practice than it is in theory.

3. Be happy with a simple peanut butter sandwich.

4. Cook and eat weeds. I’ve always been able to identify dandelions, violets, field garlic (“onion grass”), stinging nettle, and mulberries, and even snacked on them upon occasion, but this was the year that I sat down and actually learned how to make them taste good. There is so much free food growing around!

5. Make sourdough bread. I have my favorite whole-wheat sandwich loaf recipe memorized, and incorporate it into my weekly routine.

6. Make flatbread through feel, rather than a recipe. After making bread so many times, I’ve started to get a feel for the proportions of flour, water, salt, and starter— and so I can make pizza crust or flatbread without measuring anything. It’s a fun way to use up the extra starter!

7. Notice when my brain is being hacked by advertisers. I wrote a blog miniseries about this, here, here, and here.

8. Cut hair. Well... this one is debatable. But I did give myself and Zach haircuts, and nobody reacted in shocked horror (or noticed at all). So I’m calling that a win!

9. Balance salt, fat, acid, and heat in my cooking. Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat is a must-read!

10. Grow sweet potatoes, butternut squash, watermelon, and cucumbers. I had never grown (or successfully grown) any of these crops before, but this year they all grew like weeds.

11. Use cloth toilet paper. Save money, save trees, gross out everyone even though it’s not gross! (If people can do it in the backcountry, I can do it with ready access to a washer.)

12. Allow my mind to be changed. I’ve tried to embrace more fully the idea that I can be wrong, and focus on reading perspectives and opinions that stretch me out of my comfort zone. It’s not fun, but the paradigm shifts are well worth the effort.

13. Preserve produce. I learned how to cure squash and sweet potatoes, cook down fresh tomatoes into paste, and preserve basil by mixing it with olive oil and salt. I also hung bundles of basil, thyme, oregano, and peppermint to dry in the dining room, and now I’m enjoying the benefits. 

14. Appreciate the true cost of food. I read several thought-provoking books about the impact that our eating choices have on the environment, the culture, and our spiritual lives. I highly recommend The Third Plate by Dan Barber, Kiss the Ground by Josh Tickell, and Food and Faith by Norman Wirzba.

15. Scale back our everyday spending. I came into this year hoping to cut back on our spending more than ever before, and I think we’ve been successful. It doesn’t feel like deprivation— we have plenty of walks and hiking, foraging and gardening, reading, potlucks, board games, and library DVDs.

16. Handle big expenses. Between a lot of doctor’s visits and having to replace our air conditioner and furnace, it’s been a year of cringe-worthy expenses. However, living below our means and having a cash cushion has helped us weather these expenses fairly gracefully, a trait I hope I’ll keep in the future.

17. Reframe questions. In permaculture design, knowing how to ask a question is an extremely important part of the process. For instance, instead of asking, “How do I grow all my own food?” you can ask, “How do I meet my food needs sustainably?” This kind of reframing has been key in our decision-making and dreaming this past year.

18. Make pumpkin pie from scratch. I grew pumpkins, harvested and cured them, baked them, scraped out and pureed the flesh, and used that to make pie for Thanksgiving. It was pretty simple, but for some reason, this was one of my proudest skill-building moments of the year. 

What did you learn this last year? What do you hope to learn this year?

~~~

Happy New Year!

After anticipating the new year for several weeks now (I kept on accidentally writing “2019” for the date), I’m happy that the calendar has finally turned! Zach and I kept up our tradition of ringing in the new year with my friend Amy, accompanied by board games, cocktails, and entirely too much cheesy food.

As I reflect on 2018, I think about the goals I scribbled on a note and stuck on the refrigerator a year ago: “Grow food. Share knowledge. Build community.” Looking at each of those intentions, I feel pretty happy. We grew several hundred pounds of food (not to mention all the miscellaneous trees, shrubs, and herbs that we planted), I blogged fairly regularly to share what I’d learned, and we made some moves to plug in more to our local community. 

Last year’s intentions came pretty naturally, but this year I set to work overthinking my intentions for 2019. After a ton of back-and-forth, I ended up with three words:

Explore,

Design, 

Create!

Although this list sounds suspiciously like an inspirational string that would end up written on a t-shirt in a saccharine font, each of these words has a lot of meaning to me. Specifically...

Explore new experiences, step outside your comfort zone, and be relentlessly curious.

Design your life with intention, simplicity, and abundance.

Create art, memories, and joy more; consume things less.

(Side note: The “design” point was inspired by a book I just read called Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Highly recommended!)

Even with their broad scope, these are only part of the picture as I continue to grapple with questions like, “What does God want me to do?”, “What does true community look like?”, “What does ‘being like Jesus’ really mean in a 21st-century context?”, and more. Still, I hope these words will act as a compass to keep me on track through the next year. 

Here’s to a joyful and abundant 2019— God bless you all. Happy New Year!

~~~

Six Expenses We Choose to Have

In my previous post, I talked about expenses we avoid. Today, I’m talking about things that we’re happy to put our money toward!

You’ll note that these are expenses, which are different from charitable giving, savings, and investments (all of which are financial commitments that we highly prioritize). We don’t have to spend money on any of these items— but we choose to because they’re important to us.

1. High-quality eggs, dairy, and meat. We have ethical concerns with all three industries, so we’re trying to move away from conventional animal products as much as possible. We spend a good chunk of money buying humanely-raised eggs from the farmers’ market and our neighbor (although obviously we’re hoping to start collecting eggs from our chickens this spring!). We get a biweekly deliver of Oberweis’s whole milk and butter. (This is the best dairy option we’ve found so far, but if anyone knows a good source of local small-farm dairy in the St. Louis area, please let me know!) We buy almost no meat (we eat it probably once every three weeks, if that), but when we do, we try to invest in pastured meat and use up every scrap.

2. Local food. I go out of my way to visit the farmer’s market for fruits and veggies. This is more an expense of time and convenience than money, since in-season produce bought directly from a farmer is often comparable to what you can buy at Walmart. The problem is that farmers’ market season is almost over! I’m still trying to figure out how to buy local food in the winter— I’d appreciate any tips on this matter.

3. Quality athletic shoes. I don’t know if you know this, but Zach and I walk. A lot. As a result, we wear through shoes quicker than anyone else I know. We figured out a long time ago that buying $30 pairs of shoes every two months was not worth it. We now wear Asics and Solomon brand. Not cheap, but so worth it.

4. Bike accessories. Zach recently bought an electric bike trailer that gives him the extra speed boost he needed to bike the 20-miles round-trip to work. Although his fluctuating schedule makes it difficult to do this on a regular basis, we’re hoping this is part of a long-term plan to get off car transportation as much as possible.

5. Chickens. Getting everything set up for the chickens has been expensive! From the henhouse to the coop materials, we’ve been dishing out some cash. However, it’ll be worth it to grow eggs right in our own backyard. (If you’re wondering, feeding chickens and collecting their eggs is not cheaper than buying the battery-cage eggs at the grocery store. But eggs from happy chickens and eggs from chickens crammed into cages are two completely different things.)

6. Travel. Although we always try to travel as cheaply as possible (see my tips on this), it’s still a big expense— but one that we’re happy to invest in. From backpacking in Olympic National Forest to visiting family in Pennsylvania, I wouldn’t trade our travel experiences for any of the “normal” expenses that we’ve avoided. 

~~~

Seven Expenses We Choose to Avoid

Homemade fondue dinner: best date EVER.

One day at work, Zach passed by a display in the electronics department featuring the newest toy: a set of drones that will battle each other mid-air. One of his co-workers asked if Zach was going to buy it, and when Zach said he couldn’t afford it, the co-worker laughed.

“What do you mean, you can’t afford it?” he asked. “Didn’t you guys just take a three-month vacation?” 

Zach answered, “The reason we could afford a three-month vacation is because we don’t buy random stuff like this!” 

Spending money is one of the most effective ways to show our priorities in life, and these priorities can be intentional or unintentional. Many people, if presented with a clear-cut choice, would take a vacation to Hawaii over a pile of random gadgets from Amazon— but in reality, they spend their money on the latter rather than the former.  A lot of people wish they had enough money to travel (or learn a new skill or just take some time off), but also sleepwalk through life without considering that the money they’re spending might be better placed somewhere else. 

One of Zach’s and my ongoing goals is to be intentional in the way we spend our money. That means spending less money in some areas and more money in others (see part two, coming soon!). I write this list not to brag, but to give an example of what we’ve chosen and how it’s working for us. For some people, these expenses are very important, and that’s fine— they’re just not important to us.

First of all, three expenses we’ve never chosen to have: 

1. Television service. If you’re about my age, this is probably a no-brainer for you— who watches regular TV anymore when there’s Netflix? News shows and sports games are online (not that I watched them to begin with), and the library has a massive bookshelf of interesting documentaries. 

2. Drinks out. I don’t drink to begin with, and Zach would rather mix his own drinks at home or buy a nice craft brew to enjoy while watching TV or reading books. He also makes coffee every morning before work so he’s not relying on Starbucks. 

3. A second car. I work from home (or at the historic district a mile from our house), so functioning on one car is quite easy for us. However, other friends in different situations have still made alternate transportation work for them.

And four expenses we’re choosing to cut out or minimize now:

4. “Just ‘cause” shopping trips. I almost never buy new clothes to begin with, but I had gotten into a habit of perusing thrift stores for clothes, household goods, and records. Although I’m not planning to cut these out entirely, I want to be more intentional about what I buy and focus on using and enjoying what I already have, rather than accumulating more.

5. Wi-Fi. We had gone Wi-Fi free before, but got Internet when Francis was living with us. Yes, watching Netflix was really nice, but Internet service is freakin’ expensive, so cutting this expense was an easy decision. That said, my job is completely online, so how do I manage? My smartphone (a basic Windows phone model) can function as a Wi-Fi hotspot, with 9G of high-speed data per month (check out “Internet Sharing” under “Settings”). This is plenty of data for surfing the web, working my online job, and watching the occasional YouTube video. I would miss Netflix, but our library owns all seven seasons of Parks and Rec, so the withdrawal hasn’t kicked in yet.

6. Pets. My neighbors tried to give me a free kitten, and although my heartstrings were tugged, I was firm in refusing. Pets aren’t really free— there’s the neutering/spaying, shots, vet visits, food, care if they get sick, etc. With our current priorities, it’s just not worth it to us. (That said, I fully support my friends getting pets so that I can visit them without the commitment!) And yes, chickens are sort of like pets, but they give you eggs and you can eat them when they get old, so they don’t count.

7. Eating out. We have a habit of going out for fast food once a week with our church friends, but these days we just pack ourselves sandwiches and order some fries, if anything. We had already started moving away from eating out in general since we started avoiding factory-farmed meat— vegetarian food at restaurants is generally either bland or grossly overpriced. (Cooking a nice dinner together, packing a picnic lunch, or making homemade ice cream are all great dates!)

Like I said, I don’t want this to come off as arrogance, only information. Now it’s your turn! What kind of “normal” expenses do you say “no” to in order to say “yes” to something more important to you?

~~~

On Fairy-Stories, Part One

With Tolkien on everybody’s minds, I thought it was a good time to bring up one of the most brilliant pieces he ever wrote: an essay titled On Fairy-Stories. (It is also a companion to the heartbreaking and beautiful story Leaf by Niggle, which makes me cry and feel powerful hope every time I read it.) In his passionate discourse, Tolkien defends the mythical and the fantastic as essential parts of adult life. 

“Fairy-stories,” or tales of the world of Faërie and how it collides with our own, are not falsehoods or child’s play: they are essential elements of the way we interpret our lives, understand our reality, and face the brutality of our present world. Fairy-stories are not factual, but they are truthful. They are, in a sense, the story of the world.

If you want to read the whole essay (it’s long, but well worth the ride), here is the manuscript in full. In the next couple days I’ll post a few excerpts that jumped out at me.

~~~

On Perfectionism

My desk at the Hook Spy Agency, with everything in
order, just the way I wanted. If it had been up to me, the
whole world would have been just as organized.

If I had been born into a different family, I’m pretty sure I would have grown up to be OCD. Given the choice, I will sort my m&ms by color, keep the kitchen stove spotless, and straighten the card deck every time a new card is played. As a kid, I wanted everything— what I said, what I did, what everybody else said and did— to be perfect.

This tendency was (metaphorically) beaten out of me throughout my childhood. Mom made me give impromptu speeches in school, even though the uncertainty of unplanned speaking made me break down sobbing. My dad rearranged my entire room, including my carefully-crafted book corner, one afternoon when I was away. My brother Christian focused a good deal of his childhood energy on singing lyrics wrong, just to annoy me. And I always shared a room with my sister, who left her toys lying around even when I wanted a clean floor (and, to be fair, vice versa). 

As a kid, sobbing into my pillow or yelling at my brother, I never could have guessed that those semi-traumatic events would be some of the biggest blessings of my life. I never could have guessed that the constant upsetting of my plans done my way in my time not only curbed my selfishness, but prepared my heart for my greatest adventures.

Perfectionism is dampening, even crippling. With rigid perfectionism you can’t create art (including writing), you can’t be open to new opportunities, and you certainly can’t get in a serious relationship with someone. Perfectionism is self-centered. It makes the world only as big as yourself, your expectations, and your standards. 

A messy life: washing mud off your shoes after an
intense hike in Oregon with your true love.

So I give this challenge to all my perfectionist-tending friends: break free! Start small, with doing something you’re not good at. Solve a math problem. Draw a portrait. Break up a routine that you rely on. Let other people into your life. Let them mess up your plans and your systems. Let them explode your expectations, challenge your ideas, and drive you nuts. Let them capture your heart even though you are absolutely not going to get into a romantic relationship until you come back from Europe because that was the plan you made and you’re not going to let anybody mess it up! Let the illusion of control shatter.

What’s left after that? Freedom. Once you break free of perfectionism, there is creativity, spontaneity, flexibility and compromise. You forget about being self-centered and accomplish the impossible in a messy way. This is essential in art (which can and never will be perfect and takes forever to become even “good”), travel (where an open mind is key to a meaningful experience), and relationships (when you must look honestly at someone’s flaws and love him just the same). 

Although I still battle perfectionist tendencies (and always will, I suspect), I’m grateful for my family, who let me know loud and clear that the universe did not revolve around me and my little expectations— the world is bigger than that. Thank goodness!

~~~