Allowing time to grow

How do you recommend responding to significant loss?

Back before we started pacing ourselves, I would scramble to fill any void quickly. At the end of a close relationship, for instance, I’d leap into a new one, despite common wisdom.

For that feeling, I prefer the word disappointment to regret. The redemption potential in any difficult circumstance is the overarching theme of the novels simmering on my writing stove.

Given that potential, we needn’t fear making decisions. But my husband and I have proven ourselves the type of couple to buckle down and live with the consequences of bad ones. So when Brian’s job ended and we sold our home of thirty-two years, it seemed prudent to take time for making the best decisions we could.

We envisioned living a more sustainable life, but the distance between the lifestyle we were leaving behind and the lifestyle we dreamed of was great. With a lot to learn, we needed to experience something of the life we were moving toward, to verify it as a good fit for us.

How do you turn dreams into goals?

A decade ago, when I was spending several hours a week volunteering in a natural market, I made a friend who paddled a canoe a notable distance down a large river, just to see if he could do it. From him, I learned you don’t know what you can do until you try.

I don’t identify as someone with an adventurous spirit. Maybe the most noticeable adventurers are the reluctant ones, like our chihuahua and his namesake, Bilbo Baggins.

For hobbit-natured folk like me and Bilbo, the best adventures happen when undertaken in community with experienced people. I spent many years clutching the highwire of self-reliance, until a couple of years ago when I locked the keys in my car and finally developed my capacity to regard community as a safety net that might catch me.

Since having one good friend drive me twenty miles home and another drive me back, all within their usual schedules and with the blessing of mutually edifying conversations on the way, I’ve come to anticipate that a communal grid of provision surrounds us all, a grid only visible as long as we’re looking for it with expectation.

The more I look, the larger and more complex the grid of community appears. I first heard of Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) a decade ago, from that same friend I met while volunteering in the natural market.

WWOOFers volunteer time and energy to a farm or homestead in exchange for a place to stay, amazing fresh food, and education in the areas of farming or sustainable living focused on by their host. WWOOF experiences are available across the United States and around the world, for time investments as little as a day and as great as six months to a year. The opportunities are various and include stays at wineries and flower farms. In May 2024, Brian and I enjoyed a week staying in a bus and working on an off-grid homestead.

Around the time we sold our home at the end of October and set out in our tiny house for a six-month WWOOF arrangement, the word GROW impressed itself on me as my word to live by in 2025. When my husband realized his word was FAITH, we knew we were in for an interesting experience at 12 Seasons Farm in southern Florida.

Stretching adventurer muscles inevitably invites growing pains. Mine on the farm have included learning to live amicably with fire ants and humbly accepting the limitations of a five-decade-old body not always well cared for in the past, next to bodies much younger and healthier. My husband has faced the challenge of learning to organize and prioritize a never-ending variety of maintenance needs.

There have been many memorable gains from our time of growing. Highlights for Brian include installing protective covers over orange trees and helping build large greenhouses for producing stunning crops of delicious tomatoes.

I’ve enjoyed helping with the harvest of multiple varieties of kale, radishes, beets, and carrots for weekly home and restaurant orders and farmers’ markets.

It’s been a special gift to share our growth experience with our plant-loving daughter. Grace spent an industrious week’s vacation working on the farm.

As Brian and I conclude the six-month commitment we made, the farm’s marketable growth is beginning to wind down at the approach of Florida’s hot summer season. I’m grateful for visible reminders around the farm that a future story of abundance and growth includes today’s loss.

Extending our stay at 12 Seasons a bit will allow us to witness the natural shift from abundant growth toward rest and recovery. Encouraged by the cyclical pattern of farm life, I know there will be another stellar growing experience for next year’s group of workers at 12 Seasons, a special place that allows folks time to grow in many ways. We rejoice in the gift the farm has been to us and in its bountiful harvests to come.

When loss next knocks at your door, may you find your own way to take time to grow, and may you be blessed with a season of bountiful harvest.

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Thank you for reading this Pacing Ourselves post. If something in it triggered an uncomfortable feeling of comparison for you, please know that’s not my intention. I invite you to visit the Pacing Ourselves disclaimer for my perspective on different worlds.