Where Home and Wildness Meet

Living a real, "Yes, and" life

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 good numen—bright energy and spirit—and to have some land, where I could create wild, ephemeral altars out of branch and bark.

I closed on Clover Haus—my new cabin with 3.6 acres—this past week.

It was literally turnkey—bedding, canoe pillows, and coffee filters all waited to greet me like I’d suddenly stepped into a Folger’s commercial.

In fact, if Norman Rockwell were to paint a picture of a cabin, it would surely look like this.

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’s happening there? Is that something I need to worry about?

And then there were the 37 ticks I pulled off my body and crushed with my thumb nail, throwing them into the toilet I didn’t flush because I don’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 him back and admit what had already become painfully obvious to me—I don’t know how to idle. I only know how to rev.

What in the hell have I done? I thought as I tried to fall asleep on my first night there, which was hard to do, because my skin still crawled with the memory of all those blood-sucking bugs.

(Upon returning to my loft, I went to Urgent Care because of one of the bites looked suspiciously like a bullseye. I’m still waiting for the results.)

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 can experience this friction between what we want, imagine, hope, plan, strive for and what the actual offers.

Expectations can crush the life out of what is real, because nothing is perfect—not our lives or experiences, nor anyone else’s. Everything—and everyone—has flaws.

That can bring us frustration and despair and no end of sleepless nights.

Yes, and . . . it offers us yet one more opportunity to choose real.

But here’s what we often forget: when we choose real, we will invariably mess up.

It’s what humans do.

We do the wrong thing.

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 be our surest way to find joy.

Expecting mess and even failure in ourselves and others allow us to step out of the crushing jaws of expectation and run into wide, open love.

Not the soda-pop version of love—all bubbly, sweet, and light.

But the “good trouble” kind. The kind that shows up in the hardest, scariest moments.

The kind that stands beside us, with us, for us, no matter what.

The kind that confuses and disrupts.

The kind where we can bask one minute and thrash the next.

The kind 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 ever have imagined.

Like my cabin. A place I cannot wait to return to and learn again and again how to be with it as it is—living a real life. Not a Folger’s commercial.

So, yes. Yes, to a drooping gutter and, as much as it pains me to say it, maybe even yes to tick bites—because at least they mean I’ve put myself out there . . . where I have my best chance to experience a real and wild crashing into joy.

Who knows what might happen when we do that?

Maybe a big black bear will scamper out of the woods and head straight toward my cabin, looking right at me, as if to say, “Hey, are you ready to play?”

Because when we live real lives at the edge where home and wildness meet, the Big Energy is just waiting to come bounding out.