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