Evolving High Holy Dream

Many of us have attended end of the year ceremonies where people make a list of what they are ready to release from the previous year and drop their writings into a Burning Bowl. It’s seen as a way to clear space for the promises of the New Year to take root and grow. It’s a wonderful reflective process that can be helpful at any time, and seems especially fitting as one year ends and another begins.

It's also a helpful process to remind us that our High Holy Dreams are dynamic and evolving. Deliberatly reflecting upon our High Holy Dream and taking stock of its both current state and how it's grown or changed over the past year, keeps us in consicous relationship with it. We cant then see what may need to be released or reclaimed, where our energies may need to be redirected, what it may be time to embrace. Sometimes we see that it is time to sit in quiet expectancy, awaiting further guidance.

Reflecting on my own High Holy Dream as this year comes to a close, I feel a readiness to release my chickens and my truck. Writing those words makes me aware that I’ll be releasing the last vestiges of Gaiabella, the little farm I sold 3 years ago. As an aspect of a High Holy Dream comes to a close along with the year, it feels like a finishing, a natural completion, more than an ending.

That dream of rural living, of animals, pastures, and orchards wouldn’t leave me. For over ten years I mused about it, imagined it, felt it viscerally, unabashedly longed for it, and sometimes, prayed to be released from the desire for it.

Sometimes the longing would fade and I’d assume that the dream had faded with it – that I’d moved on from that dream, and another would soon take its place.

There would be a short respite until, seemingly out of nowhere, the burning urge would return and I’d be poring over the Acreage classifieds in the Sunday paper and picking up the Little Nickel again.

Over the years, every close friend accompanied me on numerous long drives past fields and farmhouses to one or another of the places that just might be The Place. Two times during those years, the journeys turned into repeated ferry trips to possibilities across the water in Kingston and on Orcas Island.

Two other times contractors came along to discuss ways to rehab, remodel, or enlarge a one of the places under consideration. I belleived I knew exactly how the right place would feel, and I tirelessly sought it the way an unmarried person searches for The One.

The first farm I bought, though I named it Gaiabella, was not The One. My young granddaughter now refers to it as The Old Farm. The hundred-year-old farmhouse accepted my remodeling gracefully, photographers stopped and asked permission to take pictures of the remarkable old barn, but the land was wrong.

The true Gaiabella came almost magically when, having found the right land, my incredibly low offer was immediately accepted because a friend wrote the seller a six-figure personal check (thank you, David), making it an all cash purchase and too convenient to refuse.

In creating Gaiabella, I worked harder physically that I ever knew I could. I learned to use a chain saw and move hundred pound bales with hay hooks. I planted an orchard on the autumnal equinox, dug a pond, cleared a meditation path through the woods, and hand seeded a pasture.

I gave home to four dear alpacas and helped with their spring shearing three times. I held one’s head face to face with mine, looking into his eyes and cooing my love for him as he was euthanized. When the rendering truck came to collect his body the next morning, the driver, seeing the tears in my eyes, grabbed me up in a strong arm hug, then sent me into the house saying, “You don’t need to see this.”

I buried many aged chickens and sickly chicks, a duck drowned while mating, and my beloved dog Guthrie there. I planted a red twig dogwood over his grave. My granddaughter wrote prayers on cedar shakes and set them up as headstones for the chickens, singing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star as her father and I buried one she’d named Daffodil.

I planted blueberries, kiwis, corn, and pumpkins. I grew every herb I ever heard of, every flower I ever loved, artichokes the size of cantaloupes, and fertilized them all with the rich alpaca manure that I also shared with grateful gardeners in my book club.

I raised thousands of tomatoes; and ducks named Kwakiutl, Hickory Dickory Duck, and Fiona, along with the countless others who rushed across the grass to meet me each morning when I headed for the feed bins. Wearing a headset, I watched them scuttle noisily to the pond in the early evening as I stood at the window teaching a Healing Money Teleclass to students in Connecticut and Malibu.

I was an ordinary farm neighbor to the people at the feed store and the grange, received hand crafted sausage from a client who raised pigs and was too proud to accept pro bono counseling, and kept a running tab with the vet for farm calls. One Christmas a friend down the road gave me a posthole digger tied with a big red bow.

Gaiabella was an aspect of a High Holy Dream far richer than I’d anticipated in all my years of imagining. It nourished my soul in ways I did not know possible, and swelled my heart with gratitude each time I stood on the porch, awe-struck by the surrounding beauty, and heard the rooster crow.

One day, driving the truck loaded with 700 pounds of hay, I felt a quiet certainty that my time at Gaiabella was nearly complete. I hadn’t expected this part of the dream to some day finish, and yet, a sense of deep peace accompanied the feeling. A few weeks later, I surprised my daughter by saying, “OK, let’s go see what’s for sale around here,” when she told me, during a visit to her home, that she wished I lived closer to her.

Now I’m a suburban householder with theater tickets and an organic lawn service. I drive the zippy white Jetta in the driveway, while the now rarely used red farm truck that sits alongside it will soon be posted on Craigslist. The backyard chickens, whose abundant eggs have identified me as a farm girl for so long will, one by one, go to new homes.

I attend every one of my granddaughter’s basketball games now, and volunteer in my grandson’s kindergarten classroom on Fridays. I vote by mail instead of at the grange, and soon I’ll buy my eggs at the market just as my neighbors do.

And now as the year comes to its close, the Gaiabella chapter of this High Holy Dream is finishing right on time. Part of the next chapter has already been written, part is being written in these words, and in the words of the Healing Money book I am writing, and still more waits in the Mystery. It's time to turn another page and contentedly await what will come next.