Hello,
And welcome to A Hit of Hope.
For a few years now,
I've been longing to find a place to nest.
It didn't have to be big,
It just needed to ooze bright energy and good spirit.
And I wanted some land where I could create wild,
Ephemeral altars out of branch and bark.
I closed on Clover House,
My new cabin with 3.
6 acres,
This past week.
It was literally turnkey.
Bedding,
Canoe pillows,
Coffee filters all waited to greet me like I'd suddenly stepped into a Folgers commercial.
In fact,
If Norman Rockwell were to paint a picture of a cabin,
It would surely look like this one.
And this was it,
My chance to live the perfect dream of retreat and restore.
And,
Barely 24 hours after I closed,
I started to see the flaws.
Oh,
That has to be fixed.
And what is happening there?
Is that something I need to worry about?
And then,
There were the 37 ticks I pulled off my body.
Crushing them with my thumbnail and throwing them into the toilet I didn't flush because I didn't want to fill up the septic tank too quickly.
After seeing the pictures,
A friend suggested this was the perfect place to learn the art of idleness.
Yes.
And,
Even though a quiet nest was the very thing I had longed for,
I wanted to write my friend back and admit what was already becoming painfully obvious to me.
I don't know how to idle.
I only know how to rev.
What in the world have I done,
I thought,
As I tried to fall asleep on my first night in the cabin?
Which was hard to do because my skin still crawled with the memory of all those blood-sucking bugs.
It was a classic case of the tectonic relationship between expectation and reality.
Whether it's a cabin in the woods,
The love of a lifetime,
The life path of a child,
The promotion we've been longing for,
Or whatever,
All of us have probably experienced this friction between what we want,
Imagine,
Hope,
Plan for,
Strive for,
And what the actual offers.
Expectations can crush the life out of what is real.
Because nothing is perfect.
Not my cabin,
Not our lives,
Not our experiences,
Nor anyone else's.
Everything and everyone has flaws.
That can bring us frustration,
Despair,
No end of sleepless nights.
Yes,
And it offers us yet one more opportunity to choose the real.
That sounds good,
But here's what we often forget.
When we choose the real,
We will invariably mess up.
It's what we humans do.
We do the wrong thing,
We make the wrong choice,
Speak when we shouldn't or don't speak when we should.
All of which is to say,
Expecting mess and even failure and not perfection might just be our surest way to find joy.
Expecting mess and even failure in ourselves and others allows us to step out of the crushing jaws of expectation.
So we can run into wide open love.
And I am not talking about the soda pop version of love.
The kind that's all bubbly,
Sweet,
And light.
I'm talking about the good trouble kind of love.
The kind that shows up in the hardest,
Scariest moments.
The kind of love that stands beside us,
With us,
For us.
The kind that confuses and disrupts.
The kind where we can bask one minute and thrash the next.
The kind of love where we have a capacity to hold what is.
Whatever that might be.
And say,
Yes.
Even this.
Yes,
Even this relentless stirring in the soul.
The one that moves us into spaces that turn out differently than we could have ever imagined.
Like my cabin.
A place I cannot wait to return to.
So I can learn again and again,
Or even practice again and again,
How to be with what is.
Living a real life.
Not a Folgers commercial.
So,
Yes.
Yes to a drooping gutter.
And maybe even yes to tick bites.
Because at least they mean I've put myself out there.
Where I think is our best chance to experience a real and wild crashing into joy.
Live light and shine.
