All day I’ve been waiting for inspiration to strike: how do I tell the story of the last few years?

Do I start with the story of my divorce, and how I found the courage to leave? Do I tell the story of all of the upheaval of every little tiny piece of the life I knew? Do I maybe start with the revitalization and community that roller derby brought me? Do I talk about the grief of losing friends because of the process of restarting my life? Do I talk about Ellie’s courageous fight against anxiety? May be the brain surgery would be good place to start…..or the story of falling in love madly and deeply only to have my heart broken? See, none of these make sense to me, because I think this may be a story that is best told backwards. Maybe this is a story that starts with now. With today, and works it’s way organically into the braid that I’ve been weaving. Scars have a way of speaking for themselves – becoming prominent when their time to express has come. So I’ve decided to stick with that.

Getting back into the habit of writing and posting and creating is so similar to getting back into an exercise regime….I start out pretty damn rusty, and it’s a fight to motivate and “find the time.” Everything stands in the way, and other things just seem just so much more important…and then when I finally get moving, I’m happy I’m moving, but I’m  weak and hardly where I want to be. But I get up the next day and skip the sugar in my coffee and pass on the pastry while eating some protein and avocado….and soon, I’m back in the swing of things…it’s just a matter of discipline. So I’m guessing the next few weeks will be the same for my writing…pretty weak, hardly impactful, but building toward a healthier me.

Things in the Deer Park Family are pretty upside down right now. Ellie, Banks and I are staying at my parents’ while our floors at Castleridge get repaired…you see, there was this incident back in July 2017……………..but I’ll tell you about that tomorrow…this was just my first day back.

About sums up our life together!  The Deer Park Farms family

For years now, I’ve avoided doing this: sitting, legs crossed, computer in my lap and….writing…

Writing HERE….on Deer Park Farms….the place I used to come to spill and release and create and express. The place that for so many years provided me with joy and fulfillment, and gave me a light even in incredibly dark times. In this virtual space, I felt as if I had SOMETHING: something of worth, something that was meaningful.

When I  left the farm, I thought I had lost all of this – I didn’t live there anymore; I couldn’t write about a farm when I lived in the city. For crying out loud, I didn’t even have a window herb garden – how could I write about making onion soup from freshly harvested spring onions??? What possibly did I have to write about? And with what authority?  I left the DPF blog because I felt I had no right to write. I avoided DPF, tried to start new things (including The Martha ScrewIt Way). I tried to reinvent myself. I tried and tried and tried. But nothing stuck.  My journey from city to country was over. It no longer was my life. It was no longer ME. I no longer had what DPF was.

Or so I thought.

But then this morning in that half-lucid moment between solid sleep and the slowly dawning grounding of awake, a thought danced across the front of my head:

What if DPF is actually ME. 

What if all of these ramblings and recipes and projects and stories really have nothing to do with that ridiculously amazing, beautiful plot of land out in Wilsonville that someone else now owns. What if this collection of expressions isn’t dependent on the place. What if I simply take ownership of it, of its virtual place in the cloud? What if I just say, “So what if I don’t live there anymore???”  What if I commandeer the space that DPF held, and instead of attaching its worth to the place where it was written, I reassign its value to the heart-property from out of which it came. Deer Park Farms can become my own – physical address attached to it or not. Because, in reality, this blog was never truly about a farm – it was about living life…it was about doing whatever it is I can with whatever it is I have.

So today, I’m going to try again. I’m going to follow my own damn advice and DO IT.  It’s gonna take some work and discipline and re-establishing of habits, but I’m gonna give it a shot…because I no longer am comfortable handing over my value and creativity and passion to an idea of how things were supposed to be.  All of this shit here came from my heart, not from an address…

So let’s do this, shall we?