​The deep comfort of routine seeps back into my bones.  If you don’t break it sometimes, the routine can feel monotonous.  But absence makes the heart grow fonder, they say, and this is most true when it comes to steady beat of routine.  Alarm goes off, dress and head to the gym for “routine maintenance”-a routine within the routine.  Scarf down some yogurt and fruit, and work begins.  Monday work is Monday work, Tuesday work is Tuesday work, ad infinitum.  Boy did I miss ad infinitum.
 
It will get old, hopefully, before the next break in it.  And then, the return to it will again flood my veins with comfort as we settle back in, this time for the long haul that is a main growing season.  It’s one of the things I’ve always loved about farming-the seasonality of it. The winter, the cold, the short days and long angles light-that’s when the breaks happen.  We settle in, then break out, then settle in, then break out.  We interrupt ourselves with visits to family, we open our eyes to far flung places, we attack the “to-be-read” pile.  And in between, we inject ourselves with the warmth of habit.

Six weeks later and the devastation remains quite evident in Spruce Pine.  The roads are mostly open-at least one lane of the main roads-but businesses remain closed, it appears there is still no sewer (as evidenced by the hundreds of porta-potties everywhere), and it’s going to take a lot of effort and equipment and skill, and a long time to rebuild and recover.  I am only here for the day.  I get to drive away from here, back to my normal life, to my friends, to my path of infinite joy.  I brace for the survivor’s guilt to crash over me as I pull out of town.

​And there it is: gratitude.  In the form of a hand painted sign on the road out of town that reads, “Thank You for Helping Us.”  Helene brought us a whole lot of destruction, disruption, loss, and suffering.  But Helene also brought us together.  It’s enormous: the disaster zone, but also the relief effort.  Thousands of people across the region on any given day offering their time and treasure, working alongside complete strangers in the service of complete strangers.

And someone, in the midst of that suffering, with enumerable losses of their own, took the time to thank those of us who get to drive away unscathed.  The light and the dark at play together in a dance that spins out before us and behind us for eternity.  The grief and the gratitude.  The pain and the joy.  Interdependent, like us.  

Porches were made for October.  To sit, still, in the late afternoon, and absorb the low hanging rays of warmth. The trees glow orange and yellow and red as if lit from within.  I watch the bees, frantically foraging the last of the blooms, knowing my own pantry is full of the food we tucked away all season long.  We are slowing down.  Tucking in. It is the season for rest and repair.

​We have decided to grow food all winter long, but my body is slow to catch on.  It refuses to adhere to this new schedule.  It resists the change in plans.  It is counting on the seasonal down shift.  And so I find some compromise.  I try to free up more leisure time in my schedule (I schedule the leisure time-HA!); I wind down the day a bit earlier. I allow a bit of focus to fade. I sit, still, in the late afternoon on the porch that was made for October.

In an attempt to make time to create a healthy movement routine as we edge toward winter and changing roles on the farm (read: more office chair time), we dragged ourselves out of bed and headed to the gym for an hour before sunrise.  We came home and poured ourselves a big glass of kombucha and had some yogurt and seeds, like we were checking “healthy habits” off from a list.

​To be sure, there is something to this whole mindset shift thing.  In sociology we called it the broken window theory and it went something like this: a broken window, even a tiny one, in a public place will lead to more vandalism and broken things.  I like to translate that to the positive in my “made bed theory”: a made bed, even an imperfectly made bed (which I assure you, mine is), will lead to more things put away instead of strewn about.  Turns out, our environs impact out mindset. And today, ours began at the gym.

And so, our instinct to do ALL the healthy things this morning after the gym probably comes from a similar place. You know, doing one healthy thing puts your mind in a healthy mode and you’re more inclined to do other healthy things. But you know how I feel about maintenance (in case you don’t: I detest maintenance),  I had the urge to check it off my list forever.  Like, “let’s get this healthy stuff out of the way today so I can sleep in and eat donuts tomorrow”.

I know I could probably live a long time and more or less function without maintenance.  I see it happen all the time around me.  The problem for me though, is that I still have a long list of things I want to see or do, and my hobbies mostly involve a highly functioning body.  Sigh.  I don’t want to have to miss out on a fantastic view because I can’t hike up there to get it.  Unfortunately, this requires reminding myself of this when I’m cozy in bed at 5am as it gets colder and colder outside.

I have always had at least a little bit of trouble with the whole “let go of what is not under your control” thing.  I mean, for some things, there’s a chance I could get it under my control right?  Today, I was actually en route to Burnsville (a 5 hour drive round trip) with my tiny load of campstoves and butane (per request lists for those areas still without power) when I thought to call another local organization to see if they had larger loads headed up there that I could contribute too and stay local to volunteer. Yes, they said, they have trucks going all the time. So I re-routed and figured I’d start there.

​I arrived to utter chaos.  I mean, did you know diapers multiply if left to their own devices?  The evidence would suggest they are related to rabbits.  And they were everywhere.  Pallets of them stacked, boxes and boxes and loose packages of diapers nearly two stories high, filling the equivalent of at least an entire Lowe’s home improvement aisle.  And there were stacks and stacks more of them outside of the giant warehouse!  I tried my best to ignore them, but those little buggers would be playing in what was left of the aisle (probably attempting to reproduce) and trip me up.  I looked politely away from them at the chaos that was the rest of the warehouse.  I mean, where do you start?

What I’ve learned from the enormous destruction and mess that Helene left us with is that you just start with what’s in front of you (unless, um, it’s diapers, then you start with what’s in front of you when you look away from the diapers).  You let go of the efficiency you’ve practiced for twenty years and just carry the one little thing around until you find its place or find someone who knows where its place is located.  Then you grab the next little thing and do the same.  Eventually, people will ask you where something goes and you’ll know.  And eventually, the lot of you will put a tiny little dent in the chaos.

​But it seemed like we were only unloading trucks and trailers and cars and buggies and never loading them.  My campstoves and butane remained in my truck. The full warehouse had a magic spell on it that allowed it to invisibly expand to take on all the new inventory and the volunteers accepted it all with grace.  Even the brave woman who decided to tackle to mountain of diapers.

Finally, an empty truck and trailer pulled up and I saw generators and fuel and heaters being loaded and I thought “well there’s the truck going to the place that needs my campstoves and butane!”  I loaded them on with all the other stuff.  At some point, I asked where the truck was headed, expecting to hear about someplace in Mitchell or Yancey counties (the counties still mostly without power). “Creston” the driver replied.  Huh.  All of the Blue Ridge Electric customers have power, which covers Creston, and so I began to question (silently) the appropriateness of the load of generators that we were sending up there, but figured this was a good time to let it be out of my control.  It was time to let those campstoves and butane go, even to where they were, perhaps (there may be things I don’t know, after all), less useful.  And then to turn the next thing in front of me and find its place; to keep working my little niche in the chaos for the day.

I am panic scrolling, desperate to find a place to plug in, paralyzed by the sheer grandiosity of human need.  It has turned into an obsession.  I cry at the drop of a hat.  In town, businesses are open, people are going about their lives.  The normalness of it amps up my anxiety.  It feels crazy that life should just go on here while life as been torn to shreds just a few miles west of here.  I am wild eyed, a bit out of control. I just want someone to tell me WHAT TO DO. 

Eventually, I come to realize that I am that person.  I breathe deep, and start small.  I mean really small. Start with the things I can do. Right now, as we crank the farm back up and I am needed here a bit, I can donate money.  I create a disaster relief budget.  This is starting to feel a tiny bit better.

​I narrow my vision from the sheer vastness of need to what I know and love.  My friends.  My friends that have lost their livelihoods.  Start there. Get that old Venmo account back up and running.  Take care of my friends first.  Then, widen the focus just a tiny bit to the places I love the most.  The Toe River.  Devastated, but the community is working to tirelessly to help each other and I can support them from afar with funds.

Breathe some more.  Put your own oxygen mask on before you try to help those around you.  Okay.  Systems, even if still a bit unorganized, are starting to take shape. Systems allow me to see more clearly where I can be of help.  The farm has power and water and communications and doesn’t need me much.  Now.  Ten days in.  Now is the time to plug in.  It doesn’t matter where.  Just do it.  They can shuffle you to where there is more need.  Just take that first step and plug in.  Another step will appear, and then another.  Consider that other people are doing exactly the same.  All those tiny steps.  This is what humanity is about.  We are nothing without each other.

Wednesday, I thought to myself how strange it was that the Maximillian Sunflowers hadn’t bloomed this year.  Thursday morning, they were blooming.  Friday morning, I thought to myself, “I’m going to get the Wordle in two tries today”, and lo! And behold, I got the Wordle in two tries!

​Suddenly, I believed I could manifest anything and my imagination began running wild.  A little too wild.  I couldn’t decide what I wanted.  My mind vacillated between this and that, rampant with possibility. Like a cartoon character, my feet spinning uselessly beneath me, I tread a hole in the street of action and burned up an entire Sunday (funday) bouncing off ideas.

I love the word “manifest”.  More specifically, I love how we’ve taken the word from it’s “original” meaning of demonstrating or showing to making things happen.  My mortal self clings to this notion of control.  I am not so cynical, however, that I don’t believe our mindset influences our behavior and our behavior influences our outcomes, but skeptical enough to understand that I can’t manifest the blooming of flowers.  Heck, I am continuously surprised at how remarkably challenging it is to “control” the one person I am purportedly able to “control”.  Despite a decade of practice, my emotional reactions still take me by frustrated surprise sometimes. 

Still, I allowed myself a brief feeling of power and a gloating grin when I got the Wordle in two tries.  As if, just for a moment, there was a tiny crack in the universe and I slipped through briefly to a plane of unlimited manifestation.

Sometimes a stranger knows just what you need.  Instinctively, intuitively.  They know nothing about where you’ve just come from or where you are going, or what is going on in your life.  But somehow, they hold the key to you.

​On my long list of things that are most definitely not on my bucket list (for which you can imagine your own name for), is, now I know for sure, bailing a friend out of jail.  I never know what is on said list that you are imagining names for until, as they are wont to do, things appear there as if written in Harry Potter’s magical ink and I’ve accidentally said the magical words.  But no matter what our wishes are, when we get that call, we drop whatever unimportant thing we are doing, and go and collect our shattered and disheveled friend from the hands of the surprisingly helpful detention center staff (which, in case you are wondering, they are indeed surprisingly helpful).

We deliver said friend to their abode, comfort them as best as possible, promise to help in any way we can (which is surely not many, being completely ignorant of “the system” and the laws now dictating their life), and eventually leave to return to whatever unimportant thing we were doing before we got that call.  Except, now it’s well past lunchtime and we’re hungry and fast food is the only game in town, so we comply with the laws of nature and head inside for some decompression and fast food.

I am finishing the food that has represented a meal, wiping my hands on a plethora of napkins placed on my plastic tray, when a soft spoken lady who has been cleaning the tables nearby approaches me and asks if I need a joke.  I DO need a joke!  She gives me two.

I leave, nourished not by the food that represented a meal, but by the gentle stranger who knew instinctively exactly what I needed to head back to my unimportant tasks with a smile on my face, heart full of delight.

I get nervous before every rapid in the river.  The little voice kicks in, “am I good enough? Do I possess the right skills to safely and competently descend this?” The same is true at the bottom of every mountain: “am I in good enough shape to ascend this?”  This same questioning voice enters the fray before any big leap of change.

​Many of you know that I am working toward stepping back from the farm a bit to pursue a writing “side hustle.”  Working only part time earlier this year, and fancying myself a writer, I subscribed to “Poets & Writers” magazine and “The New Yorker” (did you know that comes weekly!!??).   As I work through the piles of print, not to mention my “to-be-read pile” that somehow continues to grow taller, I find lists of degrees and accolades, previously published books, teaching positions, etc. beneath the authors’ names.  The questioning voice notices the blank space that follows my name.

As I ponder this leap from the known to the completely unknown, the question, “am I good enough?” pervades my work.  But today, I decided to look to my oft-used metaphor of whitewater kayaking.  When I am nervous about a challenging rapid, I ask another question before I decide whether or not to run it, “what are the consequences if I fail?” Are they worth the risk?  Nearly always, the answer is yes.  Failure is rarely dangerous to anything more than ego.

And so it is with most leaps in life.  From today on, I’m going to look at the potential consequences, and thumb my nose at the questioning voice, say, “I don’t care if I’m not good enough (yet), I won’t ever get better if I don’t try!” and take the leap.

So, you’ll still hear from me here, and see me at occasional markets, but by the end of the year, I’m going to shift to working mostly behind the scenes at Tumbling Shoals Farm.  Don’t worry, I’m handing the reins over to extremely competent hands and I’ll be behind them supporting them the whole time.

Last week I made a lot of time.  I never realized I could do that: make time.  I thought it would require much more magic than I thought possible of my mere mortal self.  It turns out, though, that “making time” is actually more of a shuffling of priorities than true magic (depending on your perspective). You shift a few things around, decide what tasks can actually wait for another time and voila! You’ve made time.

​All that making of time is exhausting!  I arrived at Monday thinking, “whew! It’s been a long week!” before I realized it was, in fact, the first or second day of the week depending on your calendar settings.  So today, I made some more time.  I stood above the cauldron and stirred, whispered some magic sounding words, neglected the records I still had yet to enter for the last two weeks (a victim of all that making of time) and poof! I made some time to can tomatoes before it was too late.  

Tonight, I think I’ll sacrifice the vacuuming to make time to visit our neighbor.  The more time I make, the easier the making of time seems.  I guess magic is like anything else: it takes practice.  Let me go wave my magic wand around in the name of practice.