Slow

Everything has gotten way too fast. Way too quick, too easy, too convenient, too expedient, too disconnected to pay the least bit of attention to what is actually going on. This isn’t, incidentally, a veiled attempt to make excuses for the long delay between my last post and this one. For that I truly apologize. Actually, scratch that. Instead I’ll say that I missed this way of connecting and I have heard that others have too. I am happy to be back here with you! I hope that everyone is well. I hope that everyone is finding their way along the path of your own individual and our collective evolution. 

I have been busy. Busy, busy, busy. This is perhaps shocking given how much things have slowed down in response to COVID-19, but we are in a rush to rebuild our home before snow falls. It wasn’t just that. Somewhere in there, after a hiatus since in the midst of last winter, the calling came to pick back up writing my book. Book has now become books. I have written the first two and am now onto the third. Don’t get too excited though! I am going to take my time editing while beginning the long process of moving toward potential publication. So that’s my brief update.

Now for the longer, slower version. The house reconstruction is a bear. Everyone who has ever gone through constructing their own home knows that it is an emotional roller coaster. We knew that it would be going in. Fortunately this is not our first rodeo. Shannon and I have worked on quite a few design-build projects together. We have learned many lessons along the way about how to navigate ourselves and each other. That doesn’t mean that it will ever be easy, but at least we have some skills that prevent us from actually killing each other. We have been employing those for sure!

The harder part is the inevitable meltdowns. We finally hit what we hope to be our biggest doozy thus far (and hopefully for the duration) this week as we were demo’ing the interior of the house. Actually it has been building for more than a few weeks now, beginning with the realization too late that the house didn’t come down as level or as plumb as we hoped for. It’s one thing dealing with an old camp that has been through at least four iterations over its lifetime. It wasn’t level to begin with, so it wasn’t like it was going to magically be so after the new foundation was put under it. It’s just that it could have been better than how it ended up. The out-of-plumbness is beyond what I would consider structurally sound. That means that while we were already planning to do a great deal or reworking of the structure, we now have to do even more reworking than we were planning. The end conclusion: we should have torn it down and started over. That would have been way easier. 

We had considered- no belabored- that option, but couldn’t quite pull the trigger to just flat out demolish Shannon’s childhood home. We just couldn’t bring ourselves to do it. We couldn’t bring ourselves to submit it to a wrecking ball. That would have been faster, of course. It would have been gone in a matter of a day or two. The bandaid would have been ripped off and discarded. As it is, we are dismantling it stick by stick, board by board. Much, unfortunately, will go to the dump. That said, we are saving anything and everything that we can, carefully removing things like wood finishes and dimensional lumber, which I then carefully denail (as in pry out the nails one by one). It’s slow and tedious work.

We started on the second floor ceiling and walls last weekend. Then by midweek we had moved on to the first floor. Opening up the walls revealed a veritable shit show of one mangled surgery after another. No, let me rephrase that. What is being revealed with each blow of the hammer, yank of the crow bar, or buzz of the sawzall is the long, complicated, twisting and turning story of this place. We had moments of appreciating that up until the opening of the first floor walls. That threw us over the edge as we realized we would have to reconstruct much more than we had planned. Let me just be honest. Our meltdown wasn’t pretty. 

The thing with Shannon and I is that we are so finely tuned that typically when one of us heads into a tailspin, so does the other. That is the nature of our interconnectedness. That leaves neither of us to save us from ourselves. We know this, however, so we have learned some strategies for how to deal with it. I took space by heading home to sit with myself and feel my feelings. Shannon stayed behind, reaching out to the ever supportive Bob and Edie (thank heavens for Bob and Edie!!!!). Bob was able to remind us that we got this, which Shannon shared with me when she came home to find me curled up in a ball on the couch in Tiny Drop. We were then able to talk ourselves off of the ledge. 

By the following morning it dawned on each of us separately that we could have it no other way. Our decision to move forward as we did was not arbitrary. It was not without careful consideration. Yes, we could have opened up those walls to understand better what we would be confronting, but I suspect we would have made the same decision. And the truth is that nothing really prepares you for the journey. Sometimes you just have to step into the shadow of the valley of death not fully knowing what awaits you. In many senses it is better to not know. That is what we had done. The best way- perhaps the only way- forward is through.

After our crash we found ourselves centered enough to reflect on what was actually happening. With each step we were not only uncovering the story of this place, we were confronting each and every decision, pressure, skillset, knowledge, limitation, hope, dream, fear, and love that had shaped that story. We were learning it one board, one nail at a time. Slowly. Ever so slowly. That is the only way to truly take in a story. We go way too fast these days to notice how much we miss. Within this particular story is not only the story of Shannon’s childhood, but also her family, their family friend who gifted his camp to them, and of the place that brought them all together – Lake Hortonia. 

The only way forward is through. Shannon and I have both been committed to our shadow work for quite some time now. That means that we go in to face and heal our childhood wounds. Incidentally, if you don’t know this already, we all have one. When we don’t acknowledge it, face it, notice the patterns that we have constructed around it in order to survive, work to deconstruct those patterns, and reconstruct new ones by nurturing the innocent child within, then our shadow rules the day. When our shadow rules, we slowly rot from the inside out, all while projecting the cause of that rotting to some force outside of ourselves. The rain, the wind, the snow, the whatever, is the problem. The house itself isn’t the problem. Or so we tell ourselves.

The only way forward is through. If we want to live in healthy houses, we need to slow down to deconstruct the house that we are living in board by board, nail by nail. We need to learn our own stories. What shaped them? What did we include? What did we not include? How did we respond to the various experiences that shaped us? What skills and knowledge did we have at the time? What skills and knowledge did we not have? What pressures were we responding to? What were we aiming for? What did we accept? What disappointed us? What gave us the hope and strength to continue? I could go on and on. Just ask the question and then go down that rabbit hole. Is it scary? Yes. Is it worth it? Absolutely. On the other side of that abyss lies our true selves. Walking through that abyss is the path of healing. What awaits us on the other side is pure potential, wellbeing, freedom. What awaits us on the other side is the world that we all long for. In order to get there, we each need to face our own shadows while we together face our collective shadows. Story is our way in and through. Let’s do this. We got this. A better story awaits.