Trees Tall as Mountains (The Journey Mama Writings: Book 1)

by Rachel Devenish Ford

  the third year

  This was a momentous time for us.

  It had been clear for a while that things weren't working out at the Land, though we were committed to being there. We saw that we were putting a lot of money and leg work into repairing buildings and had very little time to do what we knew we really wanted, which was building a haven for spiritual seekers. For around three months out of twelve, the Land was everything we dreamed of, with lots of travelers coming through, sunny days in the garden, and worship around the fire in the evenings. But during the other nine months of the year we seemed to be spinning our wheels, working in areas that had nothing to do with what we were genuinely gifted at. We worked on plumbing and chopped fallen trees. When we looked at how much we had done and how far we still had to go, we knew we needed to make a change. We knew we wanted to start a meditation center in the Christian tradition, but where? After a lot of thinking, dreaming, prayer, and even fasting, Chinua and I and other members of our community made the decision to move to India. We put the steps in motion fairly quickly, one of which was putting the Land up for sale. It was one of the hardest things we ever had to decide, and I'm so glad that we didn't do it alone, but that the other leaders of our non-profit as well as our board of directors were part of the decision. We saw God's hand even in the sale. We never advertised and the Land sold just months before the California real estate crash.

  Still, it was difficult for people who had previously lived at the Land, as well as others who were emotionally involved. While most people were enormously supportive, there was some hurtful criticism of our decision from the outside, some from people who had never lived at the land, but felt attached to it for different reasons. This criticism really hurt, and in my writing during this time, you can read me working my way through it.

  It was a hugely adventurous time. We packed up our things and moved to Sacramento for five months, just before leaving the US to live across the ocean. Things happened in this year that were more important lessons than any I had ever encountered. One experience (in driving) taught me that no matter how dangerous things seem, God's hand is with me. Another experience (with my house) taught me that often what seems safest is still a part of the unknown of life and that we can't cling to what seems safe. These two lessons still sustain me in the years since I've moved away from my home country and adopted country and have encountered many more unknown things. God is here. I am never alone.

  August

  August 14, 2007

  Last night we returned from a trip to San Francisco and we are back in the forest. I love my shade. And my peas are doing very well. The broccoli? Not so much. Oh well, I am learning.

  We stayed with some dear friends for a bit, which was amazing. The kids had a blast, and we drank coffee and talked for hours. And we caught glimpses of other friends who break my heart with their dearness. (I sound like my Grandma.) It was too short, too short. I mean, I literally caught a glimpse of my friend Curtis as he ran from work to sleep to school.

  We slept on a church floor while we were in San Francisco. It was interesting to see what a wimp I've become. Ten years ago, I slept directly on the floor quite often. I even slept sitting up in vans, slept on the grass in the open at rest stops, slept on chairs pulled together and in backyards and sometimes I didn't sleep at all. Now my sleep is very precious to me and if someone points at the floor and says, "That's where you're sleeping tonight," it takes a few blinks before I can smile nicely and say, "Sure!"

  We had a great time, it was fun and we met a lot of people. But it's so exhausting to take care of the kids under these circumstances—traveling from place to place, figuring out what to feed them, (and ourselves) keeping everyone busy and entertained. And I started thinking, what is a home? I mean, at home we do the same things. We eat, we sleep, we play. But at home it feels safe and relaxing, while when we were away it felt a little tiring. I wanted to go home, at the end of it, looked forward to being in my own place. What was I looking forward to?

  I ask because we are moving to India. And things are moving very quickly now. We may be moving away from our home here within the next couple of months, and we'll be traveling for a little while before we settle into our new home in India, wherever that may be. It is vastly, amazingly exciting. We have been longing for this for years, since we last left India, right before we were married, and now it is coming to pass.

  But what makes a home? I know that my longing for home springs from something eternal. I know that it is about more than four walls and a front door. I know that I am very simple in my needs. Give me enough space and some beauty and I'm fine. And enough space here, in this house, is about 850 square feet. But I need more than space, it is something more central than that. It is like a delicate web of security, and I'm beginning to realize that I have been placed here to weave this web for my children. Even as we move around.

  Some things that come to mind are routine; a rhythm that pulses through every day faithfully. Not easy when you're traveling, but necessary. Familiar objects, maybe; a certain tapestry or picture that moves with you from a wall in your home country to a wall in a hot country across the world. I know that at this stage in the growth of my children we are their home. This will take more thought as we get ready to go.

  September

  September 6, 2007

  We arrived home from a trip to Canada the night before last, after a day of driving filled with rain, cold, NPR podcasts, (many, many NPR podcasts) and our friends who drove with us. They were coming from the same direction to visit us at the Land for a couple of days, and we had fun playing with the configuration of drivers and passengers and vehicles. Girls in the van! Girls in the car! Boys in the car! Boys in the van! There are endless possibilities.

  When we got home, I opened our front door and looked inside, and wow! I fell in love. Again. With my house. It was so beautiful, the warm wood everywhere, and Renee had cleaned it up for us (she was housesitting) and I felt so, so sad to be leaving. I went to bed happy to be home.

  And then, yesterday.

  I think it took me about two minutes to become stressed out. So much to do, finances out of control, (I say to myself, I am about to have a heart attack) weeds in the garden (despite Renee's valiant weeding while we were gone).

  I have not yet complained much about living at the Land. But right now the burden of these ten acres is pressing down on me. We handle our finances with the combined contributions of the people who live together. Right now, as we leave, we have so few people living together that this isn't working. Neither is a shared work force, maintaining and improving, since it turns into a handful of us running around the Land in circles.

  It's like a bad dream. I run and I run and I can't get it all done.

  I've never wanted to simultaneously leave and stay so badly before. This is my home in a way that no other place has ever been a home to me. Driving back into the Redwoods was like driving into the womb, or something. (Bear with me.) But the situation has become unsustainable, and it is time for the next step. And this is breaking me, a little more, when I thought I had done all the breaking I can. There are so many other people who have history here, too, and our leaving has become symbolic to them of the end of something.

  Selfishly, I feel like I can't carry their sadness along with my own.

  There is no way to escape this, no other home I can go to, no possibility of getting away from doing what I hoped I'd never do, dealing with the end of our community being here after ten years, hurting with it. Leaving the river.

  The only way over this is through it, we have to put things in boxes. We have to stretch farther than we've ever been stretched before, and this is no small thing. I fret about money and I fret about mess and it has no result.

  And yet, God is here. He is calling us forward and we look for small miracles in the journey. I hear him in the rush of the river and think of being swept over, again and again. Once more, I am being combed through, and I pray that I will eme
rge a little more free of burrs, of the stinky me that sometimes refuses to lie down. I pray for grace, for the ability to be more than me, more than what I am, because what I am doesn't seem to be enough.

  September 12, 2007

  Dear Checker at Costco,

  Yes, you. The guy at the register.

  The other day you and I were having a little conversation about why I didn't want to renew my executive membership. "Just give me the plain ol' plain ol' membership," I said. "Because we're going away." This is where our discourse became, well, ridiculous. Because you assumed that when I said going away, what I meant was going to prison.

  You paused and said, "you mean, to the slammer?" And I scratched my head and thought, what an odd way to joke around with a customer, but I went along with your joke and said, "Yeah, what I should have said was, 'they're putting us away.'

  And you paused for even longer, then said, "that's terrible. When?"

  I said, "Oh you know—soon."

  And then you looked at me and said, "Wow. Are you serious?"

  And that's when I realized you weren't joking.

  I was having my own little joke there, all by myself. Because you thought that I was going to prison and that I was confiding it in you while I was buying my groceries.

  Okay, so 1. If I was going to prison, I probably wouldn't tell you. I mean, I know we have history and everything, but I just don't think I'd be broadcasting it around the large warehouse store that sells Polish dogs and chocolate fountains.

  2. If I was going to prison, I wouldn't be buying a huge bag of organic baby carrots and a huge bag of toilet paper. Why would I be stocking up on carrots and t.p.? You really need to think about this before assuming that people are going to be doing time. It would be better for customer relations, my friend. You need to know your target market. I'd probably be buying a giant pack of pens, for all my letter-writing.

  So, I asked you, "Do you always assume that when someone says they're going away, they're saying they're going to jail?"

  And you said, "Yes, when... uh... (pause) you come from a town like mine."

  What? What? That little pause said it all. You meant, when the someone looks like you.

  I mean, we know that people assume that we grow plants. That we have big huge marijuana forests. That's what people do, on land around here. But we don't grow marijuana. And I wish more people would ask, rather than just assuming, because then I could set them straight. But it isn't done, because it isn't done, you know, and that's what happens when you live in a county as secretive as ours. So I guess I can only say this:

  Next time, if I'm going to tell you that I'm heading for prison, I'll be clear, okay? I'll say, "I don't want to renew my executive membership because they don't have Costco in jail."

  And you can make sympathetic noises and think pleasantly to yourself that all your suspicions about me have been happily confirmed.

  Signed,

  The dready girl who buys all those carrots.

  September 13, 2007

  Yesterday afternoon, as I was enthusiastically, sadistically, and tyrannically pulling weeds in the garden, I was listening to an NPR "Story of the Day" podcast. It was a little story on the new corporate world, and how much different it is for the twenty-somethings now, who seem to want to climb the corporate ladder much more quickly than ever before.

  The corporate world was as far from me and my gardening; our wonderful trees literally crippled with apples, the grapes on the fence, the weeds that I was ruthlessly, murderously, and determinedly ripping; as far as maple syrup is from the poison dart frog. But one thing the guest mentioned caused me to sit up in the dirt and listen.

  She said, and I paraphrase, that she would not encourage twenty-somethings to attend graduate school because the twenties are a time for many relationships, for fun, for travel, for discovering yourself and who you are, not for responsibility, not for settling into something that will cause you to spend too much of your time working or studying. (Once again, my paraphrase.)

  Well, I thought, I don't think I got THAT memo! Rip. Rip rip rip rip.

  I am all about alternate lifestyle (in case you didn't notice). One of my mottos in life is "Do things a different way." Something not working? Do things a different way. Feel trapped or stifled? Do things a different way. There are so many myths of the way things have to be. The rules of conduct that North Americans have written for themselves are sometimes treated as the ten commandments. I'm reading a great book recently (about parenting) that suggests that sometimes the things we do, which we think are righteous, we actually do because we can afford them. Because we have more money than most people in the world.

  And that is precisely my beef with the guest author (whose name completely escapes me) on this show. A whole decade for self-discovery?

  How much time do you think we have?

  We are all much more responsible than that. We have a say in the way things go on this big ball in the sky. There are so many possibilities, worlds of ideas, forests of actions that each person can run through, screaming with hope. We demean people if we put stock in the idea that a career is for making money, life is about climbing the corporate ladder. I believe that to truly radiate the potential that we are given, with integrity, we will inevitably make decisions about our lives that cause us to earn smaller paychecks, because we couldn't with good conscience earn the bigger ones. Corporations will have to make a few million less because they decide that they can't use sweatshop labor after all. It's not worth it to take the livelihoods of most people of a nation into subjection in order to make the stuff that another nation's kids will break and throw away. We need to stop building our empire on the backs of others.

  Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about graduate school. And I love to travel. And have fun. But I think that if we are assuming that our thirties is the decade where we start to get serious, it is only because we can afford to.

  September 14, 2007

  Lulu made a good comment on the last post about twenty-somethings burning out young.

  She writes: "Many have left demoralized. They have barely had a chance to learn the rules much less to learn how to work with unhealthy people. They are beat up all the time until they quit. Many of these kids would have been just what we needed to reform the system. And we've lost them. We don't allow them appropriate time for family, friends and life."

  Whoa. I wanted to clarify a little, after I read this. Because "Ranter Rae" was on the loose, and might not have been as clear as she should have been.

  I did what Lulu is talking about. I almost burned myself out. I told Renee yesterday that when I was in the community house in San Francisco, which was one of the hardest points of my whole life, I realized that I didn't know how to care for myself at all. I couldn't figure out how to take care of my kids and eat, also. You know, ingest food. I lost a lot of weight. I didn't know how to order my day in a sane way, and so skipped around between talking to people in the house, changing diapers, bookkeeping, and feeding people on the street. I also spent time yelling at people trying to park in our parking spot, and yelling at people who were trying to pee on our wall in the alley.

  I was traumatized, when I came here to the Land. And then God and the Land began to heal me. I began to establish order in my days, to do one thing at a time. I hung my clothes on the clothesline and watched the river glinting at me through the trees, and I ate when I needed to. I swam in the gentle river.

  When I say "doing things a different way", I don't mean burning ourselves out. When I say "responsibility", I don't mean carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders. I have to tell you that I am healing from over-responsibility, from feeling that anytime anything goes wrong anywhere, I am somehow to blame. It's a ridiculous idea.

  This is what I mean: every person has a story, and I believe it is more than making money to live, to make money to live. There is a wild thread running through all of us, and I'm just beginning to discover what that means. My Supersta
r Husband and I have spent many years doing a lot of things that are not linked to our wild, brightly beckoning thread, and we are just now trying to rectify that.

  Rest. Work. Play. Discovery. Giving, giving, giving. Creating.

  I do believe that things are formed in us in our twenties. I can't count the number of times that I was crippled with angst over who I am when my Superstar Husband and I were first married. He is seven years older than me, and I was twenty-one at the time. He'd say, "Don't worry, it's your age," and instead of feeling patronized, I felt liberated. You mean, there might be an end to this?

  And there is, I think. I am becoming more myself than ever. And thinking less about it. And the shaping of my twenties and the things I have had to learn are carving the way for the next decade, and the next and the next.

  I think what I objected to in the statement of the woman on that show was the idea that experimentation is all we really can expect from that decade. And the idea that settling down is not for that decade. I have friends who have starting life-changing companies, coffee shops, ministries. All in their twenties.

  I want to start with my kids even now, building into them a sense of giving and empathy, as well as playfulness, joy, freedom and creativity. To look at them and wonder, what will they be? Who will they touch?

  But, really, and honestly, I have no idea about how it all works. So I definitely don't have all these solutions up my sleeve. And I am afraid. I have ideas of things I could start, things I could do, and I back down because I am afraid of failing. And I know, I know, that fear should have no place in me. I just think that we can do things a different way. Deconstruct.