The following is an excerpt from the working manuscript of my memoir. This information may or may not be in the finished book, but if it is, the writing will undoubtedly look a lot different as it continues to undergo editing and revising.

In fact, as I have begun to exercise and strengthen the writing muscles in my brain over the past month here on Substack, I’ve come to realize that what currently sits on my computer is definitely what Anne Lamott refers to it as “the shitty first draft.”

Even though I wrote this in 2013 and have read it many times since then, I just now realized that this needs a lot more than a line edit. It may be unsalvageable. I may just need to start over entirely. It’s honestly kind of embarrassing. But I said I’d share it with you, so here you go.

If you’d like to read the prologue first, you can find it here.

Chapter 1

When people learn that we live on a homestead where we grow a lot of our own food, one of the first questions they ask is, “Did you grow up on a farm?” It is a very odd question because when I tell people I’m a writer, no one has ever asked if my mother was a writer. When my husband says he is a college professor, no one ever asks if his father was a professor. Yet, most people think that growing up on a farm is a prerequisite for what we are doing.

I have no quick answer to explain why we moved out here, because there were many things that influenced our decision. Both my husband and I grew up in small towns – he in Illinois and I in Texas – with parents who had an agrarian upbringing but moved to town to find a better life.

My mother cursed her childhood on the farm and blamed it for her many ailments, completely ignoring the two packs of cigarettes she smoked daily from her teen years until she died of a heart attack at age 67. She wanted me to have a modern childhood in town, complete with canned spaghetti, frozen pizza, and Tang, which she proclaimed was “good for you because that’s what the astronauts drink.”

Perhaps it was the days on my grandparents’ farm that made me long for a life in the country, although those days were rare. I remember helping my grandmother make butter one time, and that’s when I learned that food comes from somewhere. It doesn’t just show up magically in the store. It grew somewhere, or someone made it from something that grew or was produced by an animal.

I remember them butchering chickens, which I did not like. I also remember the day I met a cottonmouth snake hiding behind the door of a chicken coop, and I ran to the house screaming, “Snake! Snake! Snake!” the entire distance. Although I only spent a handful of days on my grandparent’s farm before they moved to town when I was nine years old, it was real.

They grew their own food and cooked from scratch. Although they only had a few acres, it seemed that I could spend hours outside with their chickens and the milk cow. At home, in the small town where I grew up, I spent my days watching television, even though there were only three channels from which to choose.

Although neither of my parents had even attended high school, I was going to college, so I could get a high-paying job in an office. My mother was thrilled that I was on track for living her dream when I left Texas to attend college in Connecticut. Looking back, I realize that my college experience was what started me on the path to where I am today.

I had never read a food label in my life until one of my roommates at Eastern Connecticut State University picked up a can of potted meat that I had bought for sandwiches. She asked what it was, and not content with my answer – potted meat – she turned the can around and began to read the label.

She was obviously appalled as she read ingredients such as beef tongue, liver, and kidney. I was equally disgusted because, having never read the ingredients, I had no idea I had been eating something that used to be in an animal’s mouth or a body part that used to have urine running through it.

I never bought potted meat again. Canned Vienna sausages and pork rinds also were stricken from my diet because other equally helpful friends read labels when they saw me eating those foods. I don’t know why I didn’t become a rabid label reader at that point, but I still believed that everything in the grocery store was good for you.

While my Connecticut classmates opened my eyes slightly to the world of food, I spent a semester in Nebraska, which was probably what set me firmly on the road to a non-traditional life. When I read Walden by Henry David Thoreau, I realized that my closet filled with designer clothes would not impress everyone. I began to question what was really important, rather than believe everything the advertisers said. I loved Thoreau’s idea of living deliberately and sucking the marrow out of life. When my boyfriend asked me to go on a geology field trip to Colorado, I said yes, and that was clearly when one of the first seeds was planted.

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It wasn’t until my visit a year ago with an orthopedist that I heard someone use the word “trauma” to describe what had happened to me as a child when I had dislocating patellas. When he put his thumb and forefinger on each side of my kneecap, I immediately gasped loudly.

“I didn’t do anything,” he said. I quickly apologized, and he said, “That kind of automatic response only happens because of severe trauma in the past.”

I’d periodically think about his use of the word “trauma” to describe what had happened to me as a child. At some point, I realized it explained why I had avoided exercise and sports my whole life, even after my knees were fixed.

A couple of weeks ago, I told you about how I was the sickly kid growing up, and when I got pregnant the first time, I learned about the connection between your diet and your health. As I learned more about what I could do to keep myself and my children healthy, I also learned about the importance of exercise.

As much as I wanted to exercise and knew it was important, I just couldn’t do it regularly. I tried walking around our suburban Chicago neighborhood. When I failed to keep it up, I thought we should get a treadmill so that it was in the basement and I could do it regardless of the weather. When the treadmill started to collect dust, I got a membership to the Y, thinking that if I had made a financial commitment to exercise, I would stick with it. Wrong again.

When I became disillusioned with the availability of natural and organic food, as I explained in my egg label lie post, I started to think about moving to the country to grow our own food organically. I also realized that this would involve a lot of physical labor ... a.k.a. exercise!

Moving to the country would solve all of my problems. We would be eating healthier because we would be growing all of our own food organically. We would be getting exercise naturally in the process of growing our own food, and we’d be outside getting lots of fresh air and sunshine. My children would be having too much fun to even realize that the TV was not on during daylight hours. And they would be learning real responsibility by helping to care for the animals, as well as learning where food really came from.

So, in 2002, we moved to our farm. And I was right about all of those things.

In the beginning, I couldn’t lift a 50# feed bag, and I could only pick up a five-gallon water bucket if it was half full. But with daily repetition, it wasn’t long before I could hoist that 50# feed bag over my shoulder. And I gradually added more water to the bucket until I could carry a full five gallons.

We were outside every day, morning and evening, to feed and water animals, milk goats, and muck out stalls, and during the summer we were in the garden. I’ll never forget the day we harvested 70 pounds of tomatoes and canned enough pizza sauce to last a year. For a couple of years, I kept track of all the food we produced, and it added up to 5,000 pounds one year and 7,000 another.

Four years into our homesteading journey, I started a blog, which was really just an online diary of all the things we were doing. People started asking me to teach them to do the things. After doing a lot of free one-on-one instruction on the farm, it finally occurred to me that this was taking a lot of time, so I started offering paid group classes, first on the farm and then at libraries, colleges, and conferences.

When I spoke at the first Mother Earth News Fair in 2010, a woman walked up to me and introduced herself as I was about to walk onto a stage to give a presentation on baking bread. She was from New Society Publishers and wondered if I had ever thought about writing a book. Perhaps we could talk before the weekend was over?

While I calmly said yes to her and nodded, I was jumping up and down and squealing like an excited eight-year-old on the inside. I had been dreaming of becoming an author for practically my whole life.

That excitement lasted through our weekend conversations as well as subsequent phone conversations. A few weeks later, I walked into the living room to announce, “I got a book contract!”

As I talked about the details (70,000 words with the deadline at the end of January), my son nodded and said matter-of-factly, “That’s a little less than a thousand words a day.”

Although part of me understood the gravity of that statement, another part of me was too excited to be worried about it. Of course, I could write 70,000 words in three months. What’s the big deal?

Everyone in the family was so excited for me. They said they would take care of all my chores so I could focus on writing the book. And they did.

For three months, I spent 10 to 14 hours a day at my computer, even writing on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s.

I submitted the 70,000-word manuscript on deadline.

But it came at a cost. I had developed severe carpal tunnel in my right wrist.

Last time, I told you about how I never said “I can’t” to a PE teacher, even though I knew that by running and jumping, I might very well wind up screaming on the floor and clutching my left knee in pain.

I never told my publisher “I can’t” meet the deadline, even though my wrist became weaker and more painful the more I forced myself to work.

Submitting that manuscript was a huge milestone, but my body was keeping score. I thought I had solved all my health problems by moving to the farm.

As I wrote more books and created online courses, and spent less time working on the farm, I’d find myself in doctor’s offices and in physical therapy over and over again … tennis elbow, frozen shoulder, pinched nerves, autoimmune disease, gallbladder surgery, GERD, asthma, and more.

I had moved to the country to force myself to abandon my sedentary lifestyle so that I would be naturally healthier. But reaching my publishing dream meant losing the daily movement that had been keeping me healthy.

And that’s a story for next time.

Have you ever pushed so hard toward a goal that your body forced you to slow down?

The doctor said I was born with a birth defect in my knees that caused patellar dislocations. The only permanent solution was surgery, but they couldn’t do that until my legs stopped growing, which wouldn’t happen until my teens. Until then, I would just have to live with it.

The doctor’s notes to excuse me from PE class activities grew longer each year in terms of what I could not do. In first grade, I couldn’t do jumping jacks. I was still allowed to run, but more and more frequently through the years, I would wind up on the ground clutching my knee and crying, so I hated running because I knew the kneecap would frequently dislocate under the stress. I was always the last kid chosen for every team.

I had my first surgery on my left knee in eighth grade. It was a lateral release, which we were told at the time had a 75% success rate. I felt like the unluckiest person in the world when I wound up with even more frequent dislocations following the surgery.

(I’ve been told by orthopedists today that they no longer do this surgery because it didn’t work, and sometimes it actually made the problem worse.)

In ninth grade, I had a doctor’s note completely excusing me from PE class. Although dislocations in early childhood were the result of some type of jarring movement on my knees, by my early teens, simply walking could result in a dislocation. I wound up wearing a metal brace on my left leg all day, from the time I woke up in the morning until I went to bed at night.

Then I would wake up screaming as my kneecap started to dislocate in my sleep. I knew that keeping my leg bent would prevent the kneecap from sliding over to the side, but we move when we’re sleeping. It was impossible to avoid straightening my knee at all through the night. So the doctor recommended that I start to sleep with the knee brace on.

Around my 15th birthday, an X-ray finally showed that the growth centers in my knee had closed, and they could schedule the surgery that was supposed to fix my knee forever. Until that point, it was only my left knee that had been dislocating, but with surgery on the horizon, my right knee started to dislocate.

When we went to see the doctor with this new development, he nonchalantly said, “Okay, we’ll do the surgery on the right knee also,” as if he was simply adding a tire rotation to his car maintenance appointment.

I was terrified and thinking that we should give the right knee a little more of a chance after the left knee surgery is done. But I was “just a kid” and didn’t say anything, as my mother simply nodded. The doctor was always right.

The second surgery would involve cutting into the bone below the knee cap, which sounded infinitely more scary than just cutting a few muscles on one side, which is what the first surgery involved. And now they were going to do it on both knees.

So I wound up with both legs splinted and sitting in a wheelchair with both sticking straight out in front of me for many weeks following surgery. This was way back before the ADA, and the high school janitors built wooden ramps so that my wheelchair could be pushed up and down stairs to get me to and from classes.

After 15 years of pain and uncertainty — my entire life — never knowing when I was going to wind up hitting the ground screaming, my kneecaps finally stayed in place.

During my last post-op doctor’s appointment, he told me that I was now free to do whatever I wanted to do physically. You might think that I immediately went out and started doing all the things that I could never do, but that’s not what happened.

I had a hard time believing it was true. But I also knew I was too scared to try.

Not only had I lived with a lifetime of pain from dislocating kneecaps and the resulting falls, but there was also a lifetime of humiliation. Over and over again, I failed to do something as simple as walking down the hallway without landing on the ground. Who fails at simply walking?

The psychological and emotional scars were too deep for me to try anything as challenging as a sport.

When I tried a yoga class in my 30s, I would get sick to my stomach in every class. It didn’t matter what or when I had eaten. My yoga instructor had no solutions, so I quit. It wasn’t until recently that it occurred to me that this could have been a somatic response to a deep-seated fear of exercise.

My body was technically capable of doing the poses, but my mind was fighting a battle against a long history of real trauma.

This is why it drives me crazy when people say, “I can’t,” simply because something is uncomfortable, inconvenient, or requires effort. I spent my childhood never saying, “I can’t,” to a PE teacher, even though I knew that my participation could end in excruciating physical pain and embarassment. I stood in line, took my turn, and pushed through until a doctor explicitly put it on paper that I was forbidden to do it.

When you spend the first 15 years of your life defining “can’t” in terms of doctor’s notes, leg braces, and bone surgery, your definition of the word is very different than most people’s.

So today, when I hear someone say “I can’t,” I know they are almost always lying, not just to me but to themselves. And the absolute worst person in the world to lie to is yourself.

Lying to yourself will limit your possibilities more than what anyone else can say or do to you.

People often ask me where I find the time to do all the things I do. First of all, I have to give credit to my husband and the team working with me. I am not doing it all.

Beyond that, however, one of the biggest things I attribute my productivity to is the fact that I am not a TV watcher. When I was a child, in addition to eating mostly convenience foods, canned and frozen foods, I also spent all of my waking hours in front of a television set unless I was at school. I honestly can’t tell you what else I did.

I knew the theme songs of all the popular TV shows. I knew the names of the actors, and I had seen all of the episodes as many times as they had been rerun. When I saw my small children starting to follow the same path in the early years of their lives, I canceled our cable subscription. And without cable in the 1990s, there wasn’t much to watch.

Before you accuse me of being the meanest mom in the world, giving my children no entertainment — we would sometimes rent videos (back when video rental stores were a thing), and then we got a Netflix subscription when you could rotate three DVDs.

In other words, we made entertainment thoughtful and planned rather than a regular habit.

Once we moved on to the homestead, my rule was simple. If the sun is up, there are things that can be done outside. TV watching is for the evenings, typically in the winter when the sun goes down at 4:30 in Illinois. In fact, early on in our homesteading life, I started to view winter as the hibernation season.

Whenever I say this to people in a conversation, most of them immediately say that they “don’t watch much.” Then they list one or more shows that they watch, or they say something that sounds minimal. “I only watch an hour or two at night.” But an hour or two every night adds up to 7 to 14 hours a week, which is the equivalent of one or two work days.

Throughout history, if someone wanted to be entertained, they had to leave their home and go to a theater. For centuries, entertainment was primarily a benefit for the wealthy.

For decades now, I have watched only a handful of TV shows, almost never more than one every few years. Downton Abbey, Fixer Upper, Ghosts, and Ted Lasso. This might add up to 10 hours a year. That’s less than 12 minutes per week.

Warren Buffett is often credited with saying, “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.”

There are so many things I want to do in my life. Choosing not to watch TV isn’t about superiority or denying myself relaxation. It is simply about being very intentional about what I say yes to.

Between helping people raise their goats, spending time with family, and volunteering, I’ve chosen to say yes to those priorities. Skipping TV isn’t a sacrifice. It’s just the trade-off that makes room for the intentional life I want to live.

As I began searching for my first border collie almost two years ago, I found it curious that almost everyone I met with a border collie had more than one. Then I got Meadow, my first border collie puppy, in May of last year.

From the day I got her, I was continuously amazed at how smart she was. I quickly declared that she was the smartest dog I had ever owned. She seemed to understand almost everything I said to her from day one, and she was only eight weeks old.

But the downside to having a smart puppy is that they also need a lot of stimulation. They need a job. And as with children, their job at a young age is to play. We started training immediately, but you can only train so many minutes a day. The rest of the time, she was demanding my attention and interaction.

In spite of all the toys I bought for her, she still wanted me to play with her, and I was getting no work done. In August, I was talking to her breeder, Shari, and said that Meadow really needs a playmate, but there’s no way I could possibly handle a second puppy.

As it turns out, someone who had a five-year-old dog from a previous breeding of hers needed to rehome it. They had another dog who had taken a dislike to him and was frequently attacking him.

Both Shari and the current owner said that he had a fantastic personality and liked everyone — children, dogs, puppies, cats, and livestock. He had previously competed in agility and a few other dog sports, so it sounded like he would be a perfect addition to our family.

And I just assumed that since he was a border collie, he would also be a great herder.

So in early September, we brought home Sprocket, who also responded to the nickname Broccoli.

He was the perfect big brother. He was incredibly patient with Meadow. She was constantly climbing all over him and wanting him to play with her. And he just stood there patiently, sometimes engaging in play, but always keeping her busy somehow.

In case you’re wondering why he doesn’t look like a border collie, it’s because his mother came from Italy, where they apparently bred in the bearded collie, which is what accounts for his incredibly long hair.

I always say, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” What I didn’t know is that by adding that other breed, it could change his personality … And it did.

Sprocket is not your typical border collie. He has zero interest in herding. He is not the most obedient dog and is not that eager to please. When you say “sit,” he kinda looks at you like, “What’s in it for me?” He is highly food-motivated, but you can’t have treats in your pocket all the time. And he is not even convinced that he needs to potty outside all the time.

He does love everyone, including children, and every other animal he has met since his arrival. He would undoubtedly make the best therapy dog in the world — if we could just convince him to stop licking everyone, which is a definite no-no for therapy dogs.

One day, when our daughter brought her family to the farm and someone pulled out a frisbee and threw it for the children, we discovered Sprocket’s hidden talent — playing frisbee. He will endlessly retrieve a frisbee for you.

Instead of getting a goat-herding, hyper-focused, eager-to-please border collie when we brought home Sprocket, we got a sweet, goofy companion who does things entirely on his own terms. Meadow got her playmate, I got my work time back, and our family got a lot more love and cuddles.

I have always had a very high level of curiosity, perhaps abnormally high. I was the child who continually asked why, and even as an adult, I continue to ask why. If someone tells me to do something but doesn’t explain why, there is a very good chance that I’m not going to do it unless I figure out why.

Why? But why? And why is that? And what caused that?

Last week, I had my first-ever bone scan, and the results came back showing that I have mild osteopenia in my lumbar spine. A couple years ago, I mentioned to a friend that I wanted to get a bone scan at some point because my grandmother had osteoporosis. She responded that she was never going to get one because, “They’ll just want you to take drugs.”

Although there are drugs available, no one can force you to take them. There are a lot of lifestyle changes that you can implement to reduce your risk of fractures, especially when started early. I have only sort of paid attention to the information shared in the media about osteoporosis, but I knew that weight-bearing exercise was one of the most important things you could do to increase your bone density.

I started lifting weights two years ago after going into physical therapy because I had a pinched nerve in my neck that was causing my left arm to go numb. It absolutely helped to reduce the problems with the pinched nerve because when the muscles are stronger, they can hold your neck in the right place so that the nerve isn’t being pinched (as explained by the PT).

A dreadful side effect of the frozen shoulder I had earlier this year is that I was not able to lift weights for months. My right arm became incredibly weak from lack of movement due to the shoulder pain and loss of mobility.

My neck started to act up again, so I was always one step ahead of my physical therapist trying to increase strength in my arm so that I could get back to lifting weights to increase my upper body strength.

Knowing that my neck problems increase when I’m not lifting weights is very motivational for me. It keeps me lifting weights — but only upper body weights — because let’s be real. I’m busy. I don’t have time to do anything that I don’t have to do. So I’m not going to do any more weight lifting than needed to keep my neck happy.

I had no clue that my lumbar spine bone density was decreasing, and even though I knew that weight bearing exercise is protective, I just couldn’t manage to make time to do more to prevent some theoretical risk. Now I will be finding the time.

I’ve also started to dig into the research a little. I’m learning how vitamin D, calcium, K2, and vitamin C complement weight-bearing exercises to help rebuild bone mass. But I have more research to do. I hate taking pills, and I know I’m not going to be very committed if I’m not convinced of the benefit. That means I need to read the research and believe that it’s valid.

I’d also love to be able to figure out how to get enough of those vitamins and minerals without pills. But that means looking at the actual number of milligrams per serving, as well as absorbability, which is way more complicated than most people think. (For example, due to oxalates in spinach, the calcium isn’t helpful.) My biggest challenge in getting calcium into my diet is that I can’t consume dairy, which is by far the easiest way to get calcium.

Knowing that I had a grandmother with osteoporosis, as well as being unable to consume dairy for more than a decade, gives me two risk factors, which is why I wanted to have the bone density scan. I didn’t want a broken bone to be my first clue that there was a problem.

And with my lifestyle, I have a very high risk of falls. Last October, I had two massive spills, one when trying to move goats across the farm and one when Meadow ran into the back of my legs at full speed and knocked me flat on my back. These two falls, six days apart, resulted in a torn shoulder muscle, inflammation, and capsulitis, more commonly known as frozen shoulder.

I see far too many people who don’t want to get diagnostics for themselves or their goats because they don’t want to know the answer. I’ve seen every excuse under the sun, from “a test isn’t accurate” to “I’m not going to take their drugs.”

But there is a very famous adage in business which applies to many aspects of life, and that is that you can’t fix what you don’t measure. How can you fix a problem that you don’t even know you have?

Ignorance might feel comfortable, but knowledge brings power. By looking at the numbers, I have the power to make informed choices, adjust my lifestyle, and stay in control of my health.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
~ Henry David Thoreau

Prologue

Was I losing my mind? As I was milking Lizzie the goat, I caught myself chanting, “I think I can! I think I can!” in rhythm with the milk swooshing into the bucket. No one actually says that, right? But in a strange way, it seemed to help. I had not milked more than two goats at a sitting in my life, and now at midnight, I found myself with nine to milk. My hands cramped in pain. Milk was squirting on the wall, on me, and on the goat’s legs as much as it was squirting into the bucket.

My exhausted hands seemed incapable of positioning the goat’s teats so that the milk would go into the bucket. Normally, my 20-year-old daughter would have milked several hours ago, but several hours ago, we were sitting in the emergency room. And after six years on the homestead, I realized it wasn’t Walden or Little House on the Prairie or some fictional place where everything wrapped up perfectly by the end of a chapter or an episode.

Earlier that evening, our 115-pound livestock guardian dog attacked my five-foot-two daughter as she tried to force him to go into the pasture. I stood in the barn a few feet away, paralyzed. He jumped at her, his giant paws planted on her shoulders as his jaws closed on her face. She tried to push him down. He growled and twisted toward her right side, then her left. He bit one arm, then the other, growling.

She screamed, “No! Bad dog!” I heard more growling and more screams of “No!” and “Bad dog!” I should do something. I’m her mother. I should help her. I’m a terrible mother! What kind of an idiot just stands here watching a dog attack her daughter? But what? How? More growling. More screams. Then the dog was on his back. My daughter was standing over him, straddling his body. I saw a drop of blood fall onto the dog’s chest, then another and another.

“Am I bleeding?” she screamed. My daughter looked up at me. I gasped.

“You’re fine.” That was a lie. The skin around her eye was swollen and turning purple. Blood was streaming down her face, mixed with her tears, dripping onto her chest and the dog’s fur. Both of her forearms were covered in streaks of blood. She began sobbing hysterically. I tried to correct my obvious mistake. “You’re going to be fine.” The voice of my first aid teacher from college resonated in my mind. Never let an injured person know the seriousness of their injuries, and this looked very serious. I’d never seen a person with so much blood on their face or arms, rolling down her face, dripping on her clothes.

“Take him,” she screamed, thrusting the dog’s lead toward me. I hurried to her and grabbed the lead. The dog stood up and walked with me, but I stopped after a few steps. I didn’t know what to do with him. I opened my mouth to speak, but my throat was tight.

“I don’t know what to do.” I started to cry. This sucked. “Should I put him in a stall, or should I put him back outside? He should be outside, but if I put him outside, he’s just going to come back in.” That thought terrified me. Who would correct his misbehavior after this?

He was supposed to stay outside guarding the sheep, but lately he’d been coming into the barn, and we were losing more lambs to coyotes every night. Margaret had tried to put him outside only seconds earlier after he jumped the lower half of the Dutch door. “If I put him in a stall, then he’s won. We’ve given him what he wants.”

“I don’t care what you do with him!” she screamed. Tears and blood were streaming down her cheeks and dripping onto her shirt. “Just get him away from me!”

“Okay. Right. Well, if I put him in this stall, he can jump out.” I babbled on about the pros and cons of the various stalls available in the barn and forced myself to stop crying. Finally, I put him in his favorite stall, where I knew he’d fall asleep. Less than a minute earlier, the most important thing had been putting him into the pasture to guard the sheep, but now I needed to concentrate on Margaret.

“Now, let’s get you washed up. You know it might not be bad at all. It might just look bad because of the blood. You know when there’s blood on something, it can look a lot worse than it really is, and head wounds are the worst about bleeding, and your face is part of your head.”

I took her hand and walked her towards the barn storeroom, where there was a sink. She was obviously in shock, staring straight ahead. When we reached the sink and she lifted her arms to wash them, she saw the blood and sobbed harder, “Oh, my God!” It felt like I had been punched in the stomach.

This was entirely my fault. It had been my idea to get a livestock guardian dog. It had been my idea to move to the country. It was obvious now that we were a bunch of frauds with no idea what we were doing on a homestead. We never should have left the suburbs.

“What’s going on?” my son asked as he walked into the barn. “I was feeding the chickens, and I heard screaming.”

“Oh, Sovalye bit Margaret, but she’s going to be okay.” I spoke matter-of-factly, like this was just another day on the homestead, hoping he would understand that he should stay calm when he saw his sister. I just kept hearing that first aid instructor’s voice in my head. “We’re going to take her to the hospital, but everything is going to be fine. Go get Dad. He’s across the creek picking blackberries.” I spoke as if going to the hospital were no different than going to the grocery store for a loaf of bread.

Margaret kept asking about her face. All I could muster was, “Yes, it’s bleeding. It’s going to be okay. We’re going to take you to the hospital.”

My mantra for the next few hours became, “Everything is going to be fine.” I wanted to believe it was true. I was also afraid of saying something utterly stupid if I strayed off script. “Everything is going to be fine.” It was technically true. Everything would be fine – eventually. The immediate danger had passed. Sovalye was sleeping in the barn.

My husband Mike and I spent three hours in the emergency room watching Margaret’s wounds “drain,” as the doctor described the bleeding. She cried almost continuously. In the middle of conversations she would say, “That fucking fucker. I can’t believe he did that.” At least she stopped crying when she said that. Anger seemed to be a good antidote to fear. She also felt a deep sense of betrayal, because she had been the dog’s primary trainer, and she thought he respected her.

I pointed out that he did respect her. We saw him kill his first raccoon at only eight months. We could hear the raccoon’s bones cracking between Sovalye’s jaws as he shook his head from side to side. The louder the squeals from the raccoon, the harder the dog shook it. He was tenacious, and he knew his goal. When the squeals ceased, he’d stop shaking briefly, still holding the raccoon in his jaws. When he heard the tiniest squeak from the raccoon’s body, he knew he had not reached his goal, and he’d begin to shake again. It was not until the raccoon was completely quiet and lifeless that he finally dropped it on the ground. It was horrifying to watch, but this is why we had a livestock guardian dog, and the raccoon had been killing our chickens for several nights already.

It was hard to feel sorry for an animal that had caused equally brutal deaths for several of our chickens, and it gave us a profound respect for the dog. We saw him kill a raccoon. Only weeks later, my two youngest children saw him kill another raccoon. Sovalye could have killed Margaret, crushed her face, or mauled her beyond recognition, but something stopped him. He did not want to go outside, but he also had no real intention of hurting Margaret. In the end, he was laying on his back, showing her his belly in submission.

We concluded that Sovalye had bitten her face, both forearms, and right hand. Only four bites? No wonder I didn’t have time to do anything. It must have lasted only seconds, even though it felt like an interminable hell. X-rays of all the bites showed no broken bones. We realized that her entire face had been in the dog’s mouth. His upper canines had gone into the skin of her lower right eyelid, scratching the right half of her face as he’d let her go. His lower canines scraped under her left jaw without breaking the skin, but created a wide abrasion. We were thankful that his teeth had not been any closer to her eye, so there was no damage to the eyeball.

After three hours of the wounds draining – which looked like bleeding to my untrained eye – the doctor glued together the bites on her face and put a single, loose stitch in the wounds on her arm. He said they don’t like to stitch up dog bites, because they tend to get infected, so it’s better for them to drain as much as possible. Draining? Really? Why don’t they just say bleeding? There is red stuff coming out of puncture wounds on my daughter’s body.

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In my last morning missive, I told you about the nutritional and health reasons that we moved to the farm to start growing our own food organically, but that is only part of the story.

A couple weeks ago, I had coffee with a friend, and he asked if I remembered the moment I decided we needed to move to the country. I gave him a shortened version of what I told you last week, but he pushed more. Was there a single moment?

I sat quietly for a bit, thinking hard. Then it clicked.

The moment that propelled me into action was when I saw the confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) on the Phil’s Fresh Eggs website.

Having an online presence in the early 2000s was rare, and I was excited when I saw the URL on the egg carton.

I had started buying Phil’s eggs because they were advertised as cage-free. I assumed that meant the chickens were running around outside chasing bugs and enjoying fresh air and sunshine … like the chickens I had seen on my grandparents’ farm when I was a little girl.

I was wrong.

And when I saw the rows of large warehouse-looking buildings, I was angry. I had been lied to, and this was not the first lie.

Last time I told you I was angry when I learned that my blueberry muffin mix contained no blueberries. That’s when I started reading labels, assuming that the labels were being honest.

I thought I could trust the labels, that I could trust the companies to represent their products honestly. I didn’t realize that a company could define words however they wanted, and Phil’s had decided to define cage-free as chickens that were not stuck in tiny battery cages inside a big building.

That is a world apart from what I considered to be cage-free. The chickens were confined indoors in crowded conditions and would never see sunshine or breathe fresh air.

I immediately started buying eggs from the farm that we would pass on our way to my daughter’s orthodontist appointment in another suburb. I could see the chickens running around outside and knew how they were being cared for.

It had been easy to make this switch because there was a sign on the road that said “eggs for sale,” but I couldn’t possibly find a farmer from whom to purchase all of our food. This was in the early 2000s, and phrases like “farm to table” and “100-mile diet” didn’t yet exist. If there was a farmer’s market anywhere in our area, I didn’t know about it.

And Phil’s had proven to me that I couldn’t trust what I read on labels. If they were advertising eggs from their confined chickens as cage-free, who knew what other shady definitions marketers were using to sell their products? What did all-natural or pesticide-free mean?

We had quit eating meat more than a decade earlier when I learned how factory-farmed meat was produced. We had even tried to be vegan, not eating eggs or dairy products, but in the 1990s, that was virtually impossible when you ate out. I hated the idea that animals were being tortured to produce food for me, but I didn’t know how to eliminate all animal products from our diet.

You know that phrase, “if you want something done right, do it yourself”? Well, that’s what I thought we had to do if we really wanted all-natural food, even something as simple as eggs or milk, which had a single ingredient. We were going to have to grow it ourselves.

When we started telling our suburban friends that we were going to move to the country to start growing our food organically, the first question everyone asked us was, “Did you grow up on a farm?”

Nope. We had zero farming experience. But we had a ton of false confidence based on the naive assumption that it couldn’t really be that hard because people had been doing it since the dawn of agriculture.

It never occurred to me that almost all of those people had grown up on farms and learned from their parents as they were doing farm chores every day. They’d been getting on-the-job training since they started walking.

Spoiler alert! Growing your own food is a lot harder than it sounds.

When I was interviewed on the Be Freakin’ Awesome podcast a year ago, Angela, one of the hosts, pointed out that it was my interest in human nutrition and health that led us to the farm. That passion and curiosity naturally evolved into goat nutrition when my goats were sick and dying.

You may have heard me say that if you get nutrition right, you’ll have healthy animals that almost never need to see a vet, whereas if you get it wrong, you’re in for a world of heartache. I have known a sad number of people who gave up on goats because, in their words, “We couldn’t keep them alive.”

Many years ago, there was a holistic vet with a traditional vet degree and 40 years of experience who said, “I’ve known a lot of people who’ve gone broke treating sick animals.”

Sadly, there are vets today who went to vet school more than 15 or 20 years ago and never looked at the research that was done since they graduated. They still say outdated things like, “Goats are just looking for an excuse to die,” or “A sick goat is a dead goat.”

Maybe this is why I have such an affinity for goats (in addition to their charming personalities). I was the goat when I was growing up, and I don’t mean greatest of all time. I was the one everyone gave up on.

Just as people write off sick goats as doomed, doctors and family wrote me off as “just a sickly child.” I remember my mother once saying that if a sick person flew overhead in an airplane, I would catch whatever they had.

In twelve years of school, I had one six-week period where my number of absences was zero. To me, that was a perfect attendance record. Never mind that there were students who didn’t miss a day all year. A goal like that seemed as impossible to me as running a marathon or climbing Mount Everest.

I believed that just as some kids were naturally able to run fast, some were naturally healthier than me. Almost all kids were healthier than me. I even remember being hospitalized twice as a child with mysterious illnesses that were never figured out.

When people say a goat is just looking for an excuse to die, what they really mean is, “I’ve run out of ideas and I don’t know how to fix this.” I recognized that attitude immediately because I grew up hearing people talk about me in a similar manner. Labeling a child as “just sickly” or goats as fragile creatures is a convenient way to throw up your hands and stop looking for the real answer.

When I got pregnant in 1987 with my first child, I attended a childbirth education class, and that was the first time I ever heard anybody talk about the connection between your diet and your health. I was blown away. My diet could affect my health. If my children have a healthy diet, they won’t be sick all the time like I was as a child?

I had grown up eating fast food, frozen pizzas, and canned ravioli. If my lunch wasn’t fast food, it might be Fritos and bean dip from the convenience store. This was back in the day when even fourth graders could leave campus and walk somewhere for lunch. I still remember throwing up one day after having a whole can of Pringles potato chips and a quart of Coke on an empty stomach.

We would occasionally have green beans fresh from the garden that had been cooked to mush, and I remember eating canned spinach and asparagus. I don’t think any raw vegetables ever passed my lips until I was somewhere in my teens, and then it was just iceberg lettuce that had been drowned in Thousand Island dressing.

When I first got pregnant, I truly believed that a hamburger and fries was a healthy meal because it contained bread, meat, vegetables — and dairy if you added a piece of American cheese to the burger. I thought that the fries, pickles, and piece of lettuce on the burger counted as my vegetables for the day.

Our homework assignment, following our first childbirth education class, was to look at the ingredients on one of the foods in our pantry. I was shocked and angry that my blueberry muffin mix contained no blueberries, only artificially colored, artificially flavored blue bits.

The first thing we did was to start cooking from scratch and to stop buying food with multi-syllabic ingredients that could never be found in nature.

After my first child was born, I attended a La Leche League meeting for breastfeeding moms and was surprised when someone started talking about the difference between American cheese and cheddar cheese. Whaaat?

Then I learned about chemical pesticides and fertilizers and started buying as much organic as I could find. When I learned about the deplorable living conditions of animals in factory farms, as well as the drugs they were routinely given, we became vegetarians. The more I learned about food production, the more I started to think about moving to the country to grow our own food organically.

When my husband got out of the Navy in 1993, we started looking for a place in the country. He had two job changes in the 1990s, and each time we would initially look for a farm. Because we always needed to find a place ASAP for the new job, we would always have to settle for a place in the suburbs.

It wasn’t until 2002 that we finally found a place in the country that checked all the boxes. Or so we thought. But that’s a story for another day.

When we moved to the country in 2002, our children were 9, 12, and 14, and each one had only seen a doctor for a sick visit once or twice in their entire lives. After moving to the farm, their only visits were to the emergency room. And that’s a lot of stories for another day.

But one story I will tell you today is that when my youngest was bitten by a cat as a teenager, the doctor asked her if she was allergic to any antibiotics. My daughter and I looked at each other with furrowed brows, and I said, “She’s never had any.”

Before goats ever came into my life, I learned that nutrition plays the pivotal role in our health … for the two decades that I was raising my children and two sickly decades growing up myself.

So when I found myself on the farm with goats that were sick, not getting pregnant, not staying pregnant, and even dying, it made total sense to me that there could be something nutritional at work, and I dove into the scientific research to find the root cause.

When four vets told me that a copper deficiency was impossible 20 years ago, I thought of all the doctors I saw as a child who had no clue that malnutrition was keeping me sick my entire childhood. And I knew that I couldn’t give up on my goats the way everyone had given up on me.

“For the first year you had her, you said she was the dumbest dog you ever owned.”

He laughed and said, “Yeah, she thought her name was Damn It.”

The audience erupted in laughter. I was also laughing. I heard what he said. She was not a perfect dog. But I thought, of course, puppies are puppies. I had sworn off puppies in our house decades ago and only brought in adult rescues.

One bit of advice I will never forget was that my mother always said, “Never say never because when you do, it’s gonna come back to bite you.” But I really thought it was safe to say that I would never again have a puppy.

Another bit of sage wisdom that is always in my head is that you don’t know what you don’t know. I had originally made that decision back in the suburbs when I thought that the only job dogs had was to make their owners happy as pets. And there are plenty of rescue dogs in the world willing and able to fulfill that role.

However, if you’ve already read my morning missive “You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know About Border Collies,” you know that it’s not so easy to find an affordable border collie that already knows how to herd. And decades after swearing that I would never have another puppy, I found myself with a border collie puppy.

I put “border collie” in bold because a border collie puppy is a puppy on an exponential level. When I announced on a family Zoom that I was getting a border collie puppy, my daughter in South Dakota said in a concerned tone, “Mom, those are really active dogs.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said as if I had the whole thing under control. No worries!

My declaration that I would never have another puppy didn’t just come back to bite me. It knocked me flat on my back … and head … and knees. It created a level of chaos that I never dreamed possible … on multiple levels.

In the beginning, this adorable little puppy just wanted me to play with her all the time. I thought how lucky I was that I work at home so I could give her the love and attention she needed. But that came at a cost because I spent time playing with her when I should have been working.

And a few toys simply were not enough. I spent $150+ at least three times on toys. The floor of my office looked like a day care center with toys strewn everywhere.

I thought I could wear her out if I took her on enough walks every day. I can hear the experienced border collie owners laughing right now. “You thought a human could wear out a border collie by walking?”

I finally gave up on that naive idea after twisting my ankle and taking a layer of skin off my knee that left the skin darkened for months.

I thought I could wear her out if I played ball with her while I was talking on the phone. When the call ended 65 minutes later, she was still looking at me eagerly, begging me with her eyes and body language to throw the ball again.

I gave up on that naive idea after the herding instructor told me that some dogs do not have an off switch and have dropped dead from a heart attack from playing too long.

Then one day towards the end of last October, I was walking down the driveway. Meadow was in the barn. I called her and then turned away and began walking. I heard her sprinting across the gravel, coming towards me as I continued walking. The next thing I knew, Meadow slammed into the back of my calves and took my legs right out from under me.

I threw my arms back to break my fall as my head and back came crashing down on the gravel. My left wrist was in so much pain I thought about getting X-rays, but decided to wait a couple of days to see if it got worse or improved.

Luckily, it was already cold enough that I had the hoodie of my sweatshirt pulled over my head. Otherwise, I probably would have been bleeding from where my head hit the gravel driveway. My back had rock-shaped bruises on it.

It wasn’t until I had the results of an MRI two months later that I learned that the worst damage was a torn muscle in my right shoulder. Thankfully, it wasn’t bad enough to require surgery; however, by then I was already dealing with chronic inflammation and capsulitis, more commonly known as frozen shoulder.

In addition to all of my medical bills, Meadow has had a few of her own, mostly related to digestive issues. Through a lifetime of owning dogs, I had never had one of those that ate all sorts of non-food items. Now I do.

The hot pink poop was perhaps the most shocking. Her breeder had given us a snuffle mat where you hide treats to keep the dog entertained. It was made with strips of fleece blanket fabric. At some point, Meadow’s strategy switched from simply trying to find the treats to deciding that the whole thing was edible.

I have also learned that we don’t need to go to the vet every time she wakes me up three times during the night because she has to go poop … Especially if she is still running around with her usual amount of energy and throwing toys on my desk, insisting that I play with her.

Hiding toys doesn’t work because she has a great nose and can find them and will bark at the hiding place, which is what gave me the idea to put her into scent training. Speaking of barking, she barks at everything, whether she loves it, hates it, or isn’t sure what to think of it.

But my biggest revelation about owning a border collie didn’t happen until just last weekend, when I met the owners of Scout, the dog that starred in Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival.

“She was so active we had to get a puppy for our puppy.”

So that’s why so many border collie owners have at least two — including me.

Last August, only three months after bringing home Meadow, I was talking to her breeder about how exhausting it was. “She needs a playmate,” I said, “but there’s no way I can handle a second puppy.”

The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Someone who had adopted a puppy from one of Sherry’s litters five years earlier needed to find a new home for him.

And that is how Sprocket came to be our second border collie. But that’s a story for another day.

I listen to a lot of audiobooks. I have over 300 on my phone, and almost all of them are related to business or self-improvement. Ever since the business retreat in Wisconsin, the remnants of a quote from one of those books have been rolling around in the back of my head. Yesterday, I realized it was from Stephen Cope’s book, The Great Work of Your Life.

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

That quote is attributed to Jesus from the Book of Thomas, but it is repeated many times throughout Stephen’s book, which is about following your dharma or that which is truly in your heart. Reading that quote out of context may sound overly dramatic, but the book tells story after story of people (starting with his college roommate) who were destroyed by suppressing what was truly in their heart and instead doing something else.

Stephen also tells many stories of people who did follow their dharma and were not only happy but gave true gifts to the world, such as Susan B. Anthony, Henry David Thoreau, and Jane Goodall, to name just a few.

Most recently, I have been listening to Martha Beck’s Finding Your Own North Star, which has a similar message. She also includes many stories about coaching clients who struggled to find or follow their North Star, which she describes as being our essential self. Why is it so hard to just do what we love? Because our social self is always telling us that we need to do other things.

I was immediately able to fill in all of the blanks of Martha’s road map when thinking about my own life for the last five or six years. My social self has been very loudly telling me that I need to focus on my business helping people raise their goats. It is definitely not a false path because, as I mentioned yesterday, I am obsessed with goat research. However, the more I focused on the business aspect, the less time I had for writing, which is my North Star.

Over the winter, as my husband was preparing to retire from 30 years of teaching college, I suggested that we read the book Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life. We both know that teaching is his North Star and his dharma, and that it would be important for him to find something equally fulfilling to do in retirement.

Prior to reading the book, I had heard that ikigai was the intersection of what you are good at, what you love, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. However, as we quickly learned when we started reading the book, that is simply your reason for being.

“Our ikigai is hidden deep inside each of us, and finding it requires a patient search. According to those born on Okinawa, the island with the most centenarians in the world, our ikigai is the reason we get up in the morning.”

Immediately following that paragraph is a subhead that says, “Whatever you do, don’t retire!”

The larger meaning of the word Ikigai is the art of staying young while growing old. Have you ever heard someone in an unsatisfying career say that their job is killing them? If you think about that, Stephen’s idea of following your dharma does not sound overly dramatic.

As we worked our way through the book, we kept realizing that his ikigai was teaching (and he ultimately did not retire). I kept thinking that my ikigai was goats, but yesterday I realized that it’s actually writing and that goats are just one part of that.

As the concepts of dharma, North Star, and ikigai rolled around in my head yesterday, the past couple of weeks started to make complete sense. My dharma, North Star, and ikigai are writing. As I told you a week ago, writers gotta write.

Since then, I have been happier than I have been in ages. I start every morning feeling that I’ve accomplished something as I hit the post button on the article I’ve just written for you. I quit complaining about my sleep, and I’m actually sleeping better. I’m also getting more and more ideas about all the things I want to write.

And I know one thing that needs to be pulled off the back burner is that memoir that’s been sitting in the cloud for 13 years. And that is where one more book comes into play.

Last year, I listened to the audiobook of Jim Murphy’s “Inner Excellence,” not just once, but eight times all the way through. I listened to individual chapters many more times as I felt I needed to re-hear certain messages. I purchased the paperback and marked it up with highlighters and notes in the margins. At some point, I need to devote an entire morning missive to this book, but for today ...

Jim talks about living with love, wisdom, and courage … and letting go of the outcome. All I can do is my personal best in writing my memoir. I can’t control what happens when it’s published. Whether people love it or hate it is entirely up to each individual reader. Whether it only sells a few hundred copies or a million is entirely beyond my control. And in the end, none of that matters. I simply need to do my best in writing the book.

I love writing, and there are many subjects I love writing about… Nature, dogs, health. Chickens, homesteading, gardening, and of course, goats. The reality is that I love writing about any subject that I am passionate about.

My challenge is having the courage to share all of that writing with the world. Yes, I know I have put a lot of writing out there, but there’s also still a lot that stays locked inside because I don’t know how to tell all the stories yet.

A year ago, when I sent the first 27,000 words of my memoir to an agent and she responded that it read like a chronological telling of events rather than a story, it stopped me in my tracks. I understood what she was saying, but I had no idea how to fix that.

So I’ve decided that I would like your help. If you would like to see those first 27,000 words as well as the first draft of everything that comes after it, I’ve turned on paid subscriptions. If you’re not interested, that’s fine. I will still be here at least three or four times a week talking about whatever happens to be on my mind that day.

But if you get a paid subscription at any level, I will be sending out a chapter a week, or maybe half a chapter if one is especially long. I want your feedback. I’m not sure if all of the stories belong in the book, so I may cut some based on what you say. That means you may be the only person who ever sees some sections. On the other hand, there may be some stories that still need to be told, and I’m just not seeing it. So if a chapter needs to be longer or more in-depth, I want you to let me know.

I’m inviting you into my writing room or salon, as they used to say in the 1800s where you’ll be able to offer feedback on the manuscript as I continue writing it. In addition to posting written comments on the manuscript, you’ll also be invited to attend a Zoom meeting once a month to talk about it, which includes asking questions to get more details about some stories. Even if you don’t think you have a suggestion, I know I will learn a lot about what is needed based upon questions you ask.

I’ve also turned on referrals so you can earn up to 10 months free based on the number of friends who subscribe using your referral link.

I am excited to be embracing my dharma and ikigai and following my North Star. it feels wonderful to no longer be flopping around like a flounder when the tide went out, not knowing what to do. Regardless of whether you become a paid subscriber or not, thank you for walking this path with me.

Hopefully you didn’t already put down a deposit on a border collie puppy after reading Saturday’s post. I’m planning to write about the challenges of the first year with a Border Collie puppy, and I’m not doing it today because I’m making a list.

These morning missives are pretty much stream of consciousness. When I write about the challenges, I want it to be as inclusive as possible, and I don’t trust that I will come up with all the challenges just sitting here on my bed with my laptop.

What I do want to talk about this morning are my challenges with work-life balance. In case you ever wondered, I really am obsessed with goats. I am not talking about hanging out in the pasture watching them for hours or spending hours on social media watching videos of goats in pajamas bouncing across the living room floor.

If only it were that simple, a loved one could stage an intervention and save me from it.

But no, I am obsessed with answering all the questions about goats. I want all the goats everywhere to have the best possible lives, and that means getting the right information to their owners.

And that is actually harder now than ever, mostly due to the overabundance of bad information online. It was challenging enough when it was just humans creating the bad info, but now we have the world of AI slop creating more than humanly possible.

I want to answer all the questions that people ask in all of our online spaces:

• our two Facebook pages

  • Thrifty Homesteader

  • For the Love of Goats

• an Instagram page

• our YouTube channel

• our website

And then we have 150 members of Goats 365 who are my top priority. I have three paid team members who respond to the questions on Facebook, Instagram, and our website. As I write this, I’m wondering why I’m still answering questions on YouTube.

Most of my time is spent responding to Goats 365 members. Although I do sometimes just bang out a quick response to a question in our private group, I also wind up getting sucked down a lot of rabbit holes. If I don’t know the answer to a question and can’t explain the science behind it, I start researching. Sometimes I spend two or three hours researching something, trying to find just the right study.

What is just the right study? One that was published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal — As opposed to a predatory journal that someone can pay to have their so-called study published in. Yeah, there is such a thing, and I see people on social media and YouTube quoting this dangerous information far too often.

The “right” study is one that is definitely relevant to the question at hand. It is in live animals, not in vitro. It has enough animals to actually be valid. And more …

One of the biggest advantages of being on the faculty of UMass is that I can access the scholarly database in their library. Far too many people see the abstract of a study that says XYZ, and they take that as gospel. As a college professor, I have never allowed my students to do that because sometimes when you dig into the study, that abstract is not exactly accurate.

It’s frustrating that journal editors sometimes allow an author to let bias creep into that abstract. It shouldn’t happen, but it does. Many scientific journal publishers will charge you $30 or more to see the full study of an abstract that you find online. But as a UMass instructor, I can log into their library and see those full articles for free.

I read a lot of studies that are great studies, but not as relevant to the question at hand as they need to be, so they get lost to obscurity without me talking or writing about them. That’s one reason I keep thinking about starting a paid newsletter that comes out once a week and discusses a different scientific study related to goats.

So what does all this actually have to do with work-life balance? I used to spend 50 to 60 hours a week working at my computer answering questions, creating articles, creating videos, and otherwise speaking, writing, and thinking about goats.

When I was writing books, I could easily spend 70 to 80 hours a week at my computer (10 to 12 hours a day, seven days a week), which is why I ended up in physical therapy multiple times. Carpal tunnel, tennis elbow, frozen shoulder, neck problems.

Over and over again, I have proven to myself that I am completely untrustworthy when it comes to limiting my work time. So I’ve tried to build in forced breaks. Last fall, I got season tickets to the Illinois State University volleyball and women’s basketball games. I am not a sports fan, and I don’t even know the rules of either game.

I bought season tickets because I knew that if I spent the money, I would be much more likely to attend games, so I wouldn’t feel like I had wasted it. Of course, it’s fun to see my team win, but beyond that, I spend most of the game thinking about the life lessons playing out on the court. (Any Ted Lasso fans out there?)

My summer distraction has been the Illinois Shakespeare Festival, which is why I’m writing about this today. The season ended last night with the Bard Bash and Cabaret, a variety show highlighting the actors’ talents beyond acting.

Sitting there watching such incredible talent, completely unplugged from the internet, reminded me why these forced breaks are so necessary. In fact, as I write this, I just realized it's time to buy my volleyball season tickets for this fall!

I might never be fully cured of my obsession with answering every goat question on the planet, but stepping away for a little theatre helps me come back refreshed—and ready to tackle that list of Border Collie puppy challenges for you next time.

When the border collie puppies were eight weeks old, Shari took them to her herding instructor’s farm to see how they would respond to the sheep. She gave future owners the opportunity to come to the farm that day to watch and take their puppy home. I was the only one who took her up on that offer.

When they work with young puppies around sheep, they put them on a long line to protect them from the sheep. You don’t want an overenthusiastic puppy going after the sheep and getting itself into trouble because it could get trampled if a sheep decides to turn on it.

When Shari first took Meadow into the pen, she was of course completely focused on Shari. But Shari kept encouraging her to look at the sheep and walking her around on the lead. All of a sudden, Meadow noticed that her movement was affecting the movement of the sheep. And it was like a light bulb went on in her tiny little brain.

“What happens if I move here?”

“If I go over there, where are you going to go?”

“Oh boy, this is fun. What if I run this way?”

Of course, it has to be noted that these are school sheep, which means that they are very easy to move because they are used for training dogs. Nevertheless, it was obvious that Meadow had found her happy place.

Of the four puppies, Meadow appeared to have the best herding instincts and definitely the most drive to work the sheep. I knew Shari had picked the right puppy for us.

Meadow’s drive for herding was so strong that, at the end of the class, the herding instructor warned us to be sure that all of the gates and fences were puppy-proof. If Meadow were unattended for just a short amount of time, she might go through a fence and try to move the goats or sheep. Being small and clueless, she could wind up getting trampled and killed.

For the first time in many years, I thought about all of the challenges we went through to make sure 5-pound Nigerian dwarf bottle babies could not fit through any little crack in the fence or the space between the gate and the fence. I was confident that a 12-pound puppy was not going to get into the pasture with the goats or sheep because it had been more than a decade since we had a baby goat escape.

From the day we brought her home, I knew that Meadow was the smartest dog I’d ever owned. How does an eight-week-old puppy know what the word “wait” means the first time she hears it? But as I was about to walk through a gate and told her to wait, she sat down and waited for me. I thought it was a fluke or just a coincidence, but every single time I told her to “wait” as I was going in and out of a gate or a door, she did it.

Initially, we only took her into the pasture with us on lead to be sure that she would not get herself into a pickle, and she proved very quickly that she knew how to respond around the goats. If she felt threatened, she would immediately run behind my legs to hide. No saccharine heroics here. She knew her limits.

Goats and sheep can, on occasion, turn on someone, either a human or a dog that’s trying to move them — as I’ve mentioned in stories over the last couple of days. The last thing I wanted was for Meadow to wind up with a broken bone or to lose her confidence.

Once I was confident that she wasn’t going to do anything dumb with the goats, I would let her go into the pasture with me without a lead.

We took her to a private herding class in the fall when she was seven months old because I didn’t have a clue how to teach a dog to herd. The class was more for me than her. She once again proved that not only did she know what to do with the sheep, but she loved doing it.

About a month later, we brought her into the pasture when we needed to move a small group of goats from one area to another. It is a well-known fact that goats are much harder to herd than sheep. In fact, some people may be reading this and screaming at their computer, “Goats don’t herd.” I remember being told 20 years ago that goats challenge dogs, so you really can’t use goats to train herding dogs.

Knowing all of this, I was prepared to remove her from the pasture at the first sign that this was not going to work. And it did become obvious that she was intimidated by any goat that would turn and look her in the eye. She was doing nothing to move the goats in any direction. And I know that with any kind of dog training, a bad lesson is worse than no lesson at all, so I removed her from the pasture.

This May, when Meadow was 14 months old and at least six months had passed since her last encounter with the goats, we needed to move our five bucks through three gates. The pens were about the same size as that training pen at the herding instructor’s farm, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to see what Meadow would do.

I didn’t even think about doing a video because I assumed it would be something close to a dumpster fire with goats scattering in all directions and Meadow running in all directions. I stood there in complete astonishment as she circled around them and moved them through the first gate in less than a minute.

As she moved them toward the second gate, one of the goats broke away from the group. I assumed I would have to go get him and push him towards the group again, but instead Meadow turned and got behind him and put him back with the group as she pushed them all through gate number two.

The goats all ran into a shelter. Meadow ran up to it but looked at me like, “What do I do now?” The shelter was small enough that if she went in there, she would be dangerously close to the goats. If one of them turned on her, it could easily smash her into the wall.

I called Meadow to me and praised her wildly for everything she had done so far. As she jumped on me, I totally forgot that I’d been trying so hard to teach her to stop jumping on people. I told Mike to go into the shelter and push the goats out.

Once the goats were again out in the open pen, Meadow easily moved them through the third gate. After I closed the gate and once again praised her wildly, she started running back and forth next to the fence as if she was asking me, “Okay, what next? Who do I move next?”

“I’m sorry, girl. That’s it. Your job is done for the day.”

That was it. Five minutes. She’d moved five goats through three gates.

I felt bad that no one else needed to be moved that day.

Five minutes of pure instinct proved that all the waiting, researching, and puppy-proofing were worth it. I definitely have a lot more to say about Meadow—including our next big challenge: scent training her to find mold—but we’ll take a breath here for today. Stay tuned!

P. S. Let me know if you like the audio version! I recorded it on Substack, which has no editing options, so there was one “oops!” but if people like having an audio version, I’ll look at using proper software for recording.

When you hear a man with a cane tell you that he couldn’t run his 200-goat dairy without the help of his border collie, you listen, especially when just about any fall lands you in physical therapy.

I’ll never forget the time early in our homesteading years when our three teenagers, my husband, and I were moving 20 sheep. We were walking behind them in a huge semi-circle, waving our arms to get them to move in the direction we wanted them to go.

Suddenly, a ewe turned and ran towards me. Because sheep are, well, sheepish, I stood my ground with arms widespread, confident that she would turn around when she got too close to me, but I was wrong.

Before I knew what had happened, her head had connected with my legs, and I was flying over her body.

My children came running towards me, and one of them screamed in excitement, “Wow, Mom, that was so cool how you tried to catch her!”

“Are you crazy? I wasn’t trying to catch her. I was just standing there, and she ran into me.”

I stood up with no injuries, and we continued moving the sheep to their final destination. That incident simply became a funny story that we love to tell people.

But I was in my early 40s then, and you don’t bounce like that when you’re in your 50s and definitely not in your 60s.

Even then, the idea of having a dog move the sheep and goats for us was appealing, which is why we got Porter (who I’ve talked about over the last two days). But when I saw the man with a cane talking about his border collie, I realized as we are getting older, a real herding dog becomes a necessity.

My online dog searches moved from standard poodles to border collies. One of the things I loved about standard poodles was their incredible intelligence, and they are ranked as the second smartest breed. Border collies are ranked number one.

I had sworn off puppies years ago, so I immediately began looking for a border collie that was already trained to herd. I talked to a herding instructor who provided a link to a website where people advertise trained herding dogs. She said that a lot of people train a dog to herd for competition, but then it’s not “competitive enough,” so they sell it to a working farm. Perfect, right?

Yeah, that’s the perfect answer if you have $5,000 to spend.

So, with a great deal of trepidation, I began my search for a border collie puppy, as well as dog trainers. When I posted in a local Facebook group asking for trainer recommendations, I met a woman who already had two border collies and was planning to get a third.

It turned out that her second border collie came from the breeder I was considering getting a dog from. And that dog had a number of problems in the early years, possibly related to not enough socialization as a young puppy. Sara said she was planning to get her next dog from a breeder who competed in dog sports, including herding.

That’s when it clicked that the other breeder didn’t use her border collies for herding — or anything other than breeding.

Okay, if I can’t afford a dog that’s already trained to herd, then at least I need to get one who has parents that are excellent at it. I asked Sara about the breeder she was planning to get her next dog from, and that’s how I met Shari and got on the wait list for a puppy from her next litter.

You don’t know what you don’t know, and I will forever be grateful that I met Sara when I did. Just as I am happy to help people avoid problems with their goats and learn from my mistakes, Sara was happy to share her hard-learned lessons about border collies with me. I really hate to use the phrase “at my age,” but it’s true that I don’t have time to buy the wrong dog and learn everything the hard way at my age.

Shari and I met online. We messaged back and forth. Talked on the phone. I waited months for her female to come into heat, get pregnant, and give birth to the puppies.

She created a private Facebook group for everyone on the wait list and posted lots of photos and videos. She was always talking about the unique personality of each puppy as they grew, knowing what each potential owner wanted:

• A 4-H dog for the children

• A dog to compete in dog sports

• A working dog on a farm with sheep and goats

She was always thinking about which one would go to which home. As she described the personalities of some puppies, I remember thinking I really hoped that wasn’t the one she would choose for us. And she didn’t.

I was so excited when I got the message that Meadow was the dog for us. She explained a lot of nuances about her personality, and why she would was a good choice for a working farm, but I already knew a lot from simply watching the videos and hearing her descriptions over the past weeks.

I knew Meadow was the velcro puppy, the one who always stuck close to Shari when the others were running off, playing with each other. She was the one with the best eye contact, which is important for herding.

Finding the right working dog felt like a long journey, but hearing Shari’s description of Meadow made it clear the wait was worth every second. Next came the trip to pick her up and introducing a puppy to farm life. And that’s the story I’ll tell you tomorrow.

He was going strong until he was about 12 years old, and then he started having trouble going up and down the stairs. Sometimes when I would pet his back, he would yelp and duck as if I had hurt him. When he started tumbling down the stairs, I took him to the vet, afraid that she would say he had a terminal illness.

I was happily surprised when she said it was just arthritis and that he would probably improve with a glucosamine chondroitin supplement. Within only a few days, all of those symptoms had disappeared. He was once again running up and down the stairs, and I could pet him as much as I wanted, and he never yelped.

That lasted for somewhere between a year or two before it gradually didn’t work anymore. A pain med was prescribed … and then another. Each would work for a few months before it failed to help. Then he stopped even trying to go up and down the stairs, and he lost complete control of his bowels. Poop would just fall out when he was walking across the floor.

Taking him to the vet became almost impossible because he was in so much pain. He couldn’t jump into the car, and when we tried to lift him, he would snap at us. I don’t even remember how we got him into the car for that last visit to the vet, but they told us there was nothing else we could do. It’s been four years now, and I’m crying as I write this.

The thought of getting another dog never even entered my mind. The odds were good that I would outlive any dog that I brought into my life. And I never wanted to face that kind of sadness and prolonged pain again, watching an animal slowly decline over a couple of years.

But my heart eventually healed, and I started to feel a longing for another dog to share my life with. Then, on a trip to North Carolina, I had the opportunity to spend a few hours with a standard poodle and a few days with another one, so I started to think of getting another standard poodle. Have you ever heard me say that before moving to the farm, our livestock experience consisted of two cats and a poodle?

Addy: Our suburban poodle

Addy was a beautiful and brilliant standard poodle that was my dream dog. A dog hair allergy diagnosed in my teens meant that the dogs I had earlier in my life were all non-shedding breeds: poodles and bichons. My dream had forever been to have a standard poodle, but I could never afford the regular grooming until a year before we moved to the farm.

After searching for months to find a standard poodle in a local rescue, we drove to Florida to pick up Addy. The rescue had failed to mention that she had a problem with urinary incontinence, a problem that we discovered only hours after putting her in our minivan to head back to Illinois. But she was my dream dog, so the thought of returning her never entered my mind. We put her on daily medication to control the incontinence.

Addy spent a year with us in the suburbs before we moved our family to the farm in 2002. She was actually part of my very first dumb city slicker mistake. I was so eager to get started with everything homesteading that when I learned that chicks had to spend their first month in a brooder, I decided that we might as well get them while we still lived in the suburbs. They could live in our basement.

When I brought the chicks home from the post office to our suburban house, I opened the box as the whole family sat around picking up the chicks and cooing over them. With a chick in my hand, I naively placed it within inches of Addy’s nose and said, “Look, Addy!” Within a split second before I knew what had happened, the chick was in Addy’s mouth.

I screamed “No!” in horror, and she dropped the chick, but it was too late. The chick lay on its side, kicking and taking its final breaths. I immediately realized my mistake. I had presented the chick to her as if it were a delicious treat. I felt so dumb, but I had learned a valuable lesson. Thankfully, Addy was a very fast learner and never again hurt another chick or chicken.

Considering how little I knew about dogs on the farm, I feel incredibly lucky that Addy was the dog that made that transition with us from the suburbs to the homestead.

I had been planning since yesterday morning to tell you all about Meadow today, but I guess it just wasn’t time yet. I told someone yesterday that I had written an article about Porter. It was a tribute that was long overdue. The kind that I used to write about all the special animals that died on the farm when I kept my old blog between 2006 and 2016.

Reminiscing about Addy and Porter reminded me of just how far we've come since those early homesteading days. I had planned to introduce you to Meadow today, but it felt right to pause and honor their memory first. But don't worry. Meadow's story is the one I’ll tell you tomorrow.

Almost two years ago, I was at the American Dairy Goat Association convention in Wisconsin, and I walked into a room thinking I was going to hear a talk about extended lactation. When the speaker, a man walking with a cane, introduced himself, he said that he had a 200-goat dairy, and he “couldn’t do it without her help.”

A picture of a border collie popped up in the slides.

He then spent several minutes talking about how helpful she was on the farm every day. The wheels in my brain immediately started spinning, and I started wondering if a border collie would be right for our farm.

Since our English Shepherd had died in 2022, I had been very slow to get another house dog because the last couple of years of Porter’s 15 years had been incredibly painful to watch as his once-agile body gradually became more debilitated. The last six months were especially challenging when he completely lost control of his bowels, and the poop would just fall wherever when he was walking. Thankfully, all of the floors in the farmhouse are either wood or tile, so clean up was easy.

We had originally purchased Porter from a friend with a sheep farm in Wisconsin because I had heard that English Shepherds were good all-around farm dogs. They were supposed to be good guardians and herders, which I quickly learned was not exactly accurate. Porter loved to chase the sheep and goats, but it was entirely without purpose.

I took him to see a herding instructor once, and she said his biggest problem was that he didn’t respect the sheep’s space. Unfortunately, her farm was too far away for me to take him there on a regular basis because I still had three children at home in addition to a farm to run.

Although Porter never became a herding dog, he did help me move the goats into the barn every night when they were in a remote pasture and had to run across the yard to the barn. I would tell him to sit next to me as I opened the gate, and the goats would run towards the barn because they knew where home was. As soon as I saw the last goat go into the barn, I would say to him, “Go get the goats.”

He would run into the barn and sit at the door of the stall that the goats had run into. On the surface, that does not sound like much help. However, I could not run as fast as the goats, and if I didn’t have him do that, they would all be turning around and coming back out of the stall into the barn.

Although Porter did have a little more of a herding instinct than a killer instinct. One night we let him out of the house to go potty, and we suddenly heard him barking non-stop. When I looked out into the dark night, I could see him running around in a small circle, looking in the middle of the circle as he barked.

When I got a flashlight and shined it into the middle of the circle, I saw a possum laying there, “playing possum.” If it had been discovered by one of our livestock guardian dogs, it would have been immediately snapped up and shaken to death, an act that we witnessed for the first time when our first livestock guardian dog was less than a year old.

Maybe with enough instruction, Porter could have been taught to be a decent herding dog. But no one can teach a dog to kill predators. For a number of years, I was really disappointed that he was not the great farm dog I had expected.

But then I realized I had never heard any great stories of things that English shepherds had done, unlike the incredible stories I’d heard of livestock guardians taking care of sick or injured animals and killing predators. I’d also never heard anyone rave about how helpful an English Shepherd had been herding their sheep or goats.

Porter was a good farm dog. He never killed a chicken or any other bird. Although he loved to chase the sheep and goats, he never came close to grabbing one or hurting it. He was a great obedience dog, always happy to please us.

His greatest accomplishment was licking the poop off of the back ends of bottle-fed baby goats while they were in the house, as well as licking extra milk off their faces. I never realized how much baby goat poop he ate until he was gone.

He may not have been a great herding dog or livestock guardian, but he was a wonderful companion and a very good boy. He gave us 15 great years that I wouldn’t trade for anything.

Watching that presentation in Wisconsin made me realize it was time for a real herding dog and the start of a completely new chapter on our farm. And that’s the story I’ll tell you tomorrow.

In the last six years, I’ve been so busy running my online business that most of my writing has been limited to responding to people who email me or comment on one of the social channels where my business has a presence.

Yesterday morning, as I was writing in my journal, I realized that in the last four years I have actually been doing a lot of writing that no one ever sees. In 2022, I read Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way, in which she recommends writing in a journal longhand every morning, first thing when you wake up.

After I started doing that, I read Natalie Goldberg’s book, Writing Down the Bones, where she also recommends writing every morning without editing or judging. In fact, she even recommends abbreviating words and not worrying too much about punctuation. As someone with an English degree, I have to admit that was very challenging for me, but I now do it all the time in my journal.

I think it was Natalie who reasoned that you should do this because no professional goes out and only does their thing as a performance. Actors rehearse plays for weeks before going on stage and doing it in front of an audience. Football players practice every day in anticipation of one game on the weekend. Why should writers think that everything we write deserves to be seen and read by other people?

I get that 100%. These past four years, I have viewed my journal as a very cheap therapist. In spite of the dozens of pens I have purchased and the many beautiful journals I have filled up, it is pennies per day. And no one wants to hear me complain about my sleep problems every morning, which has become the unfortunate first few sentences of every daily entry.

However, it recently occurred to me that there is no way I would complain to a human being about my sleep problems the way that I complain in my journal. In that regard, it seems like a journal is a little too indulgent and forgiving.

And I probably had some really great writing wind up buried in the pages of those journals, never to be seen by human eyes. Maybe that’s why it feels like I haven’t done any real writing in the last six years.

When writing the post two days ago, I checked my old Antiquity Oaks blog, and when I saw how prolific I was, it made me kind of sad. One year I posted two out of every three days, and another year I posted every other day on average. I was writing more and more every year until I got my first book contract. It should come as no surprise that when writing an 80,000-word book, I would have less time to write blog posts.

That old blog really did serve a purpose similar to morning pages. I started it because all of our suburban friends kept saying that I should write a book, but as someone with an English degree, I knew that a book had to be more than just a series of cute little stories. My idea was to get all of the cute little stories out into the world while practicing my writing, and perhaps at some point a story would bubble to the surface.

And here I am, more than twenty years after writing that first blog post. The story did bubble to the surface in 2013, and that’s when I started my memoir. I had just written my third book, and at that point I felt like I had given people all of the information they needed to successfully get started and well on their way with homesteading and especially with raising goats.

But information alone doesn’t give people the confidence that they need to do it. As we faced a multitude of problems through the years, when animals died and when humans wound up in the emergency room, many people told me that they would have quit and moved back to the suburbs. But we didn’t. Why not?

There is no short answer to that question. But I’ve got a book inside me that can explain why we never gave up and, even more importantly, how we managed to keep trying.

And I think I may have just figured out how to extract that book. I have been faithfully writing morning pages in my pretty little journals four to seven days a week now for the past four years. It honestly felt self-indulgent and somewhat lazy. Like, did I really need an hour of “therapy” every single morning? There were many mornings where I felt like I had wasted an hour or even an hour and a half, but at the same time, I just couldn’t stop.

Writers gotta write!

So this is my new morning routine. I’m ditching the journal, and instead I am going to be writing in here every morning, or at least four or five mornings a week.

What on earth could I possibly write about four or five days a week, you ask? Just off the top of my head, I can think of so many things, starting with the struggle between (a) wanting to write my memoir and (b) being a digital entrepreneur with 150 Goats 365 members (my #1 priority) and 14,000 email subscribers plus tens of thousands of followers on social media platforms.

On my old blog description, I said I would write about “house building woes.” Oh Honey, the Things You Didn’t Know! We found it challenging to actually finish building the house, so there was always something to write about up until the time the blog ended in 2016, and here we are 21 years after breaking ground. There’s not even trim on all the windows, and yet we are now ripping out walls because of tiny water leaks in the copper pipes that leaked behind the drywall and created mold.

I’ll also write about training our border collie, Meadow, as a mold detection dog. Her first scent class starts in one month. We bought her a year ago as a puppy to help us with herding the goats and sheep. But then a friend told me that she had paid for a dog to come into her house and find mold. What??? I have a dog, and I know someone who teaches scent training!

There are so many, many things that I want to share with you. The farm. The goats, the sheep, and the chickens. Traveling. And I just found the time to do it.

I have an hour available almost every morning, and I want to spend it with you.

Today, for the first time in years, my morning writing isn’t hidden in a notebook. It's right here in your inbox. Now I'm off to do my yoga and start the day knowing I've actually created something real.

See you back here tomorrow … where I will probably tell you all about Meadow’s first year on the farm and her future as a herder, mold detector, and maybe a therapy dog if I can ever teach her to stop licking people!

Two weeks ago today, I was flying to Minnesota for a business retreat in Wisconsin. I had forgotten that we would be doing Hot Seats, which is where you talk about a place in your business where you're stuck or want feedback. It seemed rather serendipitous that I had just received a response to an email that I had sent to my followers a year earlier, talking about the possibility of a paid newsletter that would discuss a different study on goat health every week. It was an email of encouragement, similar to many that I received a year ago when I first sent the email. So I started talking about that, but before my conscious brain knew what was coming out of my mouth, I found myself talking about writing a memoir that I started 13 years ago.

I started the memoir within days of sending my third book manuscript to my publisher in 2013. But then my health completely fell apart, and I was in and out of doctors' offices for six months, with one diagnosis after another. I realized that writing three books in three years was probably not the best thing for my health.

So the memoir went on the back burner with 11,000 words on my computer. I focused entirely on restoring my health, reading more than a dozen books on autoimmune diseases and food sensitivities, and even getting certified as a health coach.

Two years ago, I decided to pick up the manuscript again. It grew to 27,000 words before my left arm went numb, and I couldn't type more than a sentence or two before I was in too much pain to continue. That lasted about six months.

If you've ever read the book "When the Body Says No" or "The Body Keeps the Score," you might be thinking that something is going on in my subconscious about writing that memoir. My body is saying, "Noooo!"

It's scary to write about yourself and your mistakes, and there were a lot of mistakes in the first six years of our homestead, which is the time period that the book would cover.

But there is still this part of me that will not shut up. It really wants to tell this story. Not because it's about me. I honestly wish it was about somebody else, because then it wouldn't be so scary.

I just feel like this is a story that so many people need to hear because it's about going for a dream, even when all your friends think you’ve lost your mind, and the timing isn't perfect, and you don't have all the answers.

And as I reread this last sentence, I realize that it's also important for people to know that you need to go for your dreams even when it's scary.

"I've always wanted to be a writer."

I said that during my Hot Seat, and I started crying, and someone said, "You are a writer!"

Yes, I've had six books published, more than a hundred magazine articles, several hundred newspaper articles, and thousands of blog posts. But my last book was published in 2020, and I hardly ever write blog posts any longer. I don’t remember my last newspaper or magazine article. I've done very little writing in the past six years because I've been too busy running a business. But I want to write. I need to write.

I don't have all the answers, and the timing isn't perfect, but at least my friends don't think I'm crazy when I say that I want to go for this goal. I just have to push past the fear and figure out how to fit writing back into my life.

And thanks to Becky Lee Launder for sneaking up and snapping this candid photo one morning at the retreat.

A decade ago, if you had asked me what I needed most, I probably would have said more time.

More hours in the day. More efficiency. A better system. A way to get more done.

Like a lot of people, I spent years pushing myself. There was always another article to write, another class to create, another email to answer, another problem to solve.

And for a long time, I thought that was not just normal but something to be applauded.

Then something unexpected happened. In 2020, I started meditating and quickly realized it was something I needed to do every day to stay calm as the world around us spiraled into chaos.

Then, recently, I started spending more time simply sitting by the pond on our farm.

Not working. Not planning. Not listening to a podcast while answering emails on my laptop.

Just sitting.

Watching the water ripple in the wind. Listening to birds. Watching the goats graze in the distance.

And I realized that what I needed wasn’t better time management or a better system.

It was perspective.

The farm had quietly become something I never intended it to be — something I never thought it could be.

When we bought this property years ago, it was simply a place to grow our own food organically and homeschool our children. Over time, it became a business, a classroom, and a gathering place for people who wanted to learn about farming.

But somewhere along the way, it also became a refuge.

Visitors would arrive stressed and distracted. Within an hour or two, they seemed different.

They breathed more deeply.

Their shoulders relaxed.

They sat longer than usual.

Many commented on how peaceful it felt here.

At first, I thought they were just being polite.

Eventually, I realized they were noticing something that I had taken for granted for far too long.

There is something about being surrounded by trees, water, animals, and open sky that helps us remember who we are underneath all the obligations and expectations of everyday life.

That realization led to a question.

What if we intentionally created a space where people could experience that?

Not a luxury resort.

Not an activity-packed vacation.

Just a simple place to rest.

A place where someone exhausted by emails, meetings, deadlines, and constant notifications could spend a day—or a few days—remembering what it feels like to think clearly again.

A place where nature does some of the work.

A place where we can watch an ant crawling across the floor of the pavilion or a frog sticking its nose up from the water of the pond.

A place where there is no pressure to accomplish anything.

At the same time, I realized there was another group of people who might enjoy spending time here.

Over the years, I’ve heard from countless people who dream about owning a farm someday.

They watch videos, read books, follow homesteaders online, and imagine a different way of living.

But farming looks very different from the inside than it does on social media.

What if someone could spend a few days here and get a taste of farm life before making a major investment?

They could wake up to roosters instead of alarm clocks.

Watch goats grazing instead of traffic passing.

See what daily life on a farm actually feels like.

Not as a tourist attraction, but as an experience.

Those ideas eventually became The Retreat at Antiquity Oaks.

The first step is surprisingly simple: a wall tent overlooking our pond.

A comfortable place for someone to disconnect, breathe deeply, and experience the farm.

Which brings me to the Kickstarter.

We’re launching this campaign for a reason that may sound a little unusual.

Yes, the funding will help us build the project.

But just as important, we want to know whether people actually want it.

One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is creating something nobody asked for.

It’s easy to fall in love with your own idea.

It’s much harder to find out whether that idea resonates with other people.

A Kickstarter allows us to test that.

Do people want a place like this?

Do they want a chance to spend a few days on a working farm?

Do they want an opportunity to step away from screens and responsibilities and reconnect with themselves?

The answers will help shape what happens next.

If the idea speaks to you, there are rewards that allow you to experience the farm firsthand.

Some are designed for people who need a break from the noise and busyness of modern life.

Others are for people who have always wondered what it would be like to spend time on a real farm before deciding whether that dream belongs in their future.

Either way, the Kickstarter isn’t really about a tent.

It’s about creating the kind of place I wish I’d had years ago.

A place where it’s easier to slow down.

A place where clarity can find you.

A place where, for a little while, you can remember that you are more than what you produce. Before we're employees, parents, business owners, or caregivers, we're human beings.

If this vision resonates with you, you can learn more about the Kickstarter and the rewards here.

While I immediately agreed, a little voice in my head told me I should not be wasting half an hour sitting by the pond.

Was it the workaholic who is always telling me I must be productive in every moment? Or was it the perfectionist who knows that stillness is very challenging for me?

When I try to meditate, my mind tends to ricochet between work projects, unfinished tasks, worries about the future, and even mistakes I made 20 or 30 years ago.

Usually when I meditate, I close my eyes. But before we began, he suggested I keep them open and look around.

My gaze settled on the middle of the pond.

There was a tree reflected in the water, but the reflection was never still. Ripples kept moving through it, reshaping it moment by moment. The image was always changing, almost shimmering. I was mesmerized.

It felt almost magical. The pond was like a magnet to my eyes.

The wind moved gently. Frogs croaked. Insects chirped. Birds tweeted and layered song over song.

And for thirty minutes—something astonishing happened.

I did not think about work.

Not once.

My son-in-law asked me for feedback afterward, and I told him the only moment my mind drifted away from the water was when I thought I was a little cold and could use a blanket.

(Which, incidentally, led us to realize we need yoga blankets at the retreat.)

But what stayed with me was not just that I had focused.

It was that I hadn’t forced focus. I wasn’t constantly telling myself to “be here now.”

The water held my attention ... effortlessly.

There’s actually a name for this — soft fascination — the way natural environments gently engage the mind without demanding effort. Flowing water, rustling leaves, birdsong — these things can quiet mental chatter and restore attention in ways brute-force concentration often can’t.

The fascinating thing about soft fascination is, “We aren’t focused on one specific thing; rather, we experience the world using multiple senses—sights, sounds, smells, sensations—instead of working so hard to filter things out in the name of productivity,” according to Virginia Thomas, Ph.D.

As I thought about my time on the pond a few hours later, my brain started to connect the dots. I realized that overwork had become so normal to me that I had stopped seeing it.

A friend recently asked how long I’ve been working this way—six or seven days a week, twelve-hour days.

I had never thought about it. Really. It’s just who I am. It’s what I did.

But I can trace it back to 2010, when I signed my first book contract and agreed — somewhat naively — to write a 70,000-word book in three months.

I worked every day.

Thanksgiving.
Christmas.
New Year’s.

That first book, Homegrown and Handmade, sold out its first print run of 5000 copies in nine months, and everyone was thrilled. That’s a big success in book publishing with an unknown first-time author. I’d proven myself as reliable and marketable.

Then came two more book contracts.

More deadlines.
More travel.
More striving.

And somewhere in there, hustle stopped being something I was doing and became who I was.

I became the person who works seven days a week.

Why wouldn’t I?

What would I even do if I weren’t working?

Ambition gave me meaningful work I love, helping people, but it also quietly trained me into overwork without my realizing it.

Even more deeply, I’ve begun to notice an old belief underneath it:

If I’m not working hard all the time… do I deserve success?

That’s a hard thing to admit, but I know I’m not the only one carrying some version of that lie.

We live in a culture that often treats exhaustion as evidence of worth.

And yet so many breakthroughs happen when we step away.

One of my favorite examples is Lin-Manuel Miranda getting the idea for his play, Hamilton, while reading on vacation at the beach.

Not in an office.

Not to meet a deadline.

On a beach ... on vacation.

Sometimes clarity doesn’t arrive through pushing harder.

Sometimes it arrives when we finally get quiet enough to notice.

That’s what the pond gave me.

Not productivity.

Perspective.

And maybe a glimpse of another way to live.

It also made me realize how much people need spaces like this … a place to step out of the chaos and turn off the autopilot that has us overworking without even realizing it.

To let wind and water do some of the calming.

To discover, maybe, that the monkey mind can be quieted not by force but by attention held gently by nature.

And to remember — if only for a morning — that we are more than what we produce.

I’m grieving about how long and hard I’ve pushed myself. Over and over, I have pushed myself until various body parts rebelled. Over the last two decades, physical therapy has helped multiple times, as has a support group for people who live with chronic pain.

I’m disappointed that this pond has been sitting here since before we moved to the farm in 2002, and I never knew it could harness my monkey mind and turn my brain’s default mode to rest.

Now I need to let go of the disappointment and the grief and move forward. I know what I need to do, and I know how to begin to learn a different rhythm.

Now the work is simply to trust that rest is not laziness.
That stillness is not wasted time.
That I do not have to earn peace.

I’m more excited than ever to share our space with others—because if moving water could teach my overworked mind to be still for thirty minutes, I have to believe it can help others remember something they also may have forgotten.

Sometimes another way of living begins with nothing more dramatic than sitting beside a pond and watching the ripples.