Login to Real Life

What's the Truth Behind Your Selfie?

Boldness. The right kind helps us live a life that makes a real impact; the wrong kind leaves a trail of momentarily impressive footprints in cybersands that are easily washed away by the rising tide of real life.

Winter - the actual cold, ice-coated, everyone's water buckets in the barn and coop are freezing over more often than they're not, where did I put my gloves again, I need a kleenex and can't feel my face kind - finally arrived here a couple weeks ago, sneaking up on us after making a deceivingly quiet and gentle entrance, cloaked in the soft hues of an autumn that mimicked summer so well it was easy to believe the calendar was lying to us about the actual season in which we found ourselves. But each time I slip across the yard to the barn, chiding myself for not just taking the time to dig out those ice cleats we bought last winter and actually putting them on my muck boots before I have to pick myself back up off the ice, I'm reminded it is almost February, and worse, or better, yet, that much closer to the one year anniversary of my full time farm employment. My mind scrolls through the posts and pictures and comments from all those other farmers in the farm-centered groups I've joined on social media, and I wonder if I'll ever feel as on-top-of-it as some of their posts suggest they are.

Recently I've allowed such thoughts, and the myriad unsolicited advice or questions of well-meaning (or not) persons get under my skin to the point I actually started to get angry. But over the weekend the truth found a way to break through to the frontlines of this battlefield of thoughts, and remind me our story is just that - ours; it requires no defense or explanation, and it is not dictated by the expectations or preconceptions of anyone else.

Yes, the smiling, baby goat-cuddling selfies, with the painfully adorable goat kids that each Spring brings are genuine, but so are the frigid moments when survival is a fight, sometimes not won by even the most noble members of our herd or flock. And even after tasting the unmatched wholesome sweetness of golden honey straight from our own hives, there is that mid-winter realization six years and several lost hives later that as long as the fields around our 15 sheltered acres are every season sprayed with chemical pesticides and planted with crops that contain poison in their very seeds and leaves, we may have to store away our beekeeping suits for the foreseeable future.

With the picturesque stance of our historic big red barn in the center of our homestead comes also hour upon hour spent each year in the clean-out cycle of a deep-litter stall bedding system not everyone will understand or agree with. And despite the hard lessons of below-zero Februarys recently past that went into the decision to push back the schedule, as we enter into this February and see all the already-born goat kids listed for sale by other farms, with only 6 of 15 of our eligible does even bred yet, it's easy to question the wisdom of our 2016 goat breeding plan...

The struggles exist along with the triumphs.

Neither are what define us, but rather, how well we step equally through them with humility and confidence.

I refuse to click on the links that lead to competitive comparison; I will scroll past criticism, chin up. Today I choose to stay logged in to Real Life, mud-stained barn clothes and shiny, happy selfies alike.

I will choose the right kind of boldness.

"Therefore, since we have such a hope, we are very bold." ~II Corinthians 3:12

Resolved to Grow

Walking a Mile in My Own Boots

A rooster's crow breaks through the creaking cold dark, while the two big farm dogs, bellies full from breakfast, lay curled up on the rug at my feet, content to get in today's first nap as feathered, furry, and two-legged farm critters alike all await dawn to lift up her pastel face from her snowy pillow, and illuminate the beginning of this crisp new mid-January morning.

After leading us in with soft, still green-grassed feet and an unimposing, gentle blue crown, Winter has finally asserted her rightful position as the star of the season, and I lasso a few thoughts out of the wild, rumbling herd of New Year's contemplation, to inspect and digest and express.

With what will be come April 40 years on this earth under my feet, this is the first year that I've resolved not to resolve a Big New Change as of January 1. It isn't that I'm discouraged from past years' anticipated Big New Changes not growing up beyond their New Year infancy, or that I don't see value in setting new goals. Instead of stopping this or starting that, I want my focus to be just becoming a better version of me - and that's not an endeavor that can be fit into the tidy square box of a New Year's To Do List, it's a life-long assignment I have to choose to work on enthusiastically, and anew, each day I'm given.

And becoming a better version of the true me means I first must accept who I already am, with all my faults and shortcomings, and realize not all of them are meant to be conquered or changed, because without them I wouldn't be, well, me.

It also means being brave enough to filter through all the well-meant proposals and expectations of others, and stay true to the plan that's already laid out just for me.

It's so easy for each of us to look at others through the tint of our own perspective, and decide we know the path they should take, and how and when they should take it. But we have to remember that each of us is each of us, and gulping down - or doling out - every tidbit of advice or perspective that comes along, constantly changing to fit the new or widely accepted definition of who we are or should be, isn't fair to the advice giver or getter.

Now six years down this path of Life on the Farm, and nearly one year wearing these No More Office Commute Full Time Farmer boots, as we mark a new segment of time with the first page of a new calendar, I resolve to continue being busy becoming the true me, at the pace and in the particular way that agrees with the deepest promptings in my spirit. It may not look like What it Should to outside eyes observing, but in the end I want to be able to look into the eyes of the One who laid out His plan for me so long ago, and know I did my best to be the me He created me to be.

That is how I believe we can each make a true difference in each other's lives, and best help each other along our paths - by keeping our feet firmly on our own, letting each other know we understand how difficult it can be to walk a mile or even a minute in those shoes, when it seems sometimes that with every step, someone is trying to convince us to try on a pair not designed for the terrain our own road travels.

And as dawn glides quietly up into daylight, I choose to pull on my boots and step gladly up this new mile of my own road.