The heat has finally broken here in Mariposa County. I’ll be the first to admit that I had no understanding just how hot it was going to get here from early July until late August. It was the kind of heat where you wake up thinking it won’t be too bad but by 2 o’clock you just want to hide in the house.
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Dreams are Worth Pursuing
Five weeks ago Jackson and I pulled out of San Diego and headed for Ahwahnee in a 16 foot rental truck from Budget. Several hours later we pulling into our driveway, the truck took out a limb on an old peach tree, and Murray and Kristen greeted us.
Tonight, Murray and Ms. Bey (our dogs) will load up the Subaru and head back to San Diego to wrap up. From there we’ll wrap things up in San Diego, pack another load of stuff, and (Good Lord willing) head back to our new home early next week.
Your Dreams
Last night I watched Adam Sandler’s new movie on Netflix, Hustle. He’s a 50-something year old NBA basketball scout who has pursued his NBA coaching dream his entire life and gone virtually no where. Early in the film he has his Jerry Maguire moment where he realizes that in order to fulfill his dream he’s going to need to take a chance so risky he might lose his job. He says to himself, “In your 50’s you don’t have dreams you have nightmares.”
What he meant was that by the time you get into your 50’s you should be done dreaming about your life. You should be locked into something secure. You should be thinking about wrapping up your career successes instead of taking on new, risky projects.
With respect, because I love Adam Sandler even though I’ve never met the guy, I disagree. The last thing I want on my tombstone is the epitaph: “He played it safe and still ended up here.”
Kristen and I look at the success in our lives we’ve built over the past 25 years and, while certainly tempting to ride out our next 20 years before we think about retiring, we’re thinking about getting after the next big dream for our family: Whatever it is that McLandia Farms can become.
I think about the risk we took in joining our friends at PPM… from the outside maybe that looked like a big risk? But to us it was a risk worth pursuing. And I’m really loving the work I’m doing, it’s hard, but stuff like launching PPM365 last month is exactly why I still think PPM is worth the sacrifices we make to pursue.
And as I look at the risk we took in selling our San Diego home to build a new life for ourselves here… sure, it’s risky. (You should see my homeowners insurance: They know it’s a risk!) But it’s a measured risk that brings us a ton of joy and opportunity, too.
Let me take the focus off my own pursuit and ask you about your own dreams. Maybe you’re 25 and you’ve got dreams for yourself so private you’re afraid to say them out loud because they might sound dumb? Or maybe you’re 35, got a couple little kids and the idea of pursuing your dream for your own self sounds foolish or even a bit selfish? Or maybe you’re 55, you’ve moved on from raising kids to grandkids and looking forward to retirement life?
I hope you look at Kristen and I and think: Maybe my dreams are worth pursuing after all?
It’s OK to say yes to the opportunity a smart risk brings along.
Do we build a barn here next for animals? This is one of the questions we’re asking. The Road Ahead
I’ve been going to the Mariposa Certified Farmers Market each Wednesday evening. It’s been a great way to get to know some locals who are into all things organic, plants, food, and community. It’s only 12-15 stalls each week but I really love going.
I don’t know yet if our dream will include something for sale at the Farmers Market but I’m not opposed to going that direction. Whether it is or it isn’t I’ve found the farmers market to be inspiring because it’s full of people ahead of us on this journey.
The past month has been fun getting to know the vendors. Each week I stop and chew the fat with a few, asking about their farms and what they sell and how they got started. Last night I had a nice conversation with a woman who lives in Fish Camp, 4 miles as the crow flies from our house, but 45 minutes over the mountain or around the mountain. I was describing our property and she nodded her head. She told me about her place being in similar condition when she took it over: dry, dusty, full of weeds, not much productivity and not much biodiversity.
Her sharing brought into my memory the journey Kristen and I took with our house in Rolando. When we bought it in 2015 it came with a “mow, blow, and go” type of gardener who quickly cut the grass and sprayed chemicals before leaving for two weeks. (No knock on those guys, they are feeding their families and providing a service people want.) But it wasn’t what we wanted for our home. We reluctantly fired him and started pursuing a different path towards native plants and edible gardening in an organic, regenerative way.
I know the path ahead on our dream for this place is going to be hard.
I joke with friends that everything in the mountains either wants to kill you, poke you, or make you itch. I’m waiting for some new footwear to arrive today that’ll hopefully help me not fall as much on the loose, sandy soil and rocks of our property.
The path ahead for Kristen and I is going to be hard. We want to move on from weed management to soil management. In the next couple of months we’ll need to make hard choices as we build out the infrastructure this property needs to fulfill our dream. That means spending money… and spending money isn’t in our nature… life has taught us to always hold our money.
And of course, we’re pursuing all of this part-time while we hold down our real jobs and raise our kids and all of that.
We know the path ahead is hard. But it was hard in Rolando. It was hard in Romeo. It was hard in Chicago. It was hard in South Bend.
Just because a dream is hard to pursue doesn’t mean it’s a dream not worth pursuing.
There’s something deep in me that likes that challenge. And, dear reader, I hope that you like pursuing difficult dreams too.
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“Hey dogs, want to go for a walk in Yosemite?”
We’re just over an hour to Yosemite Valley, truly one of the coolest places on earth.
When I asked our dogs if they wanted to go… Murray immediately went and jumped in the back of the car.
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Our Journey to Ahwahnee
Last night, I sat on the porch of our century old workshop enjoying the timeless cool, evening breeze. The sun filtered through our towering pine trees. We sat in the silence with only the birds and mosquitoes as background music.
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Shifting Your Parenting Goals
My blogging journey started when we learned Kristen was pregnant with Megan.
21 years ago, using a Gateway laptop, and a now long-out-dated version of Microsoft Word, I wrote daily entries into a documents pouring out my hopes and dreams for my unborn child.
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Risky Business
It’s late. Maybe it’s still February 26th? Maybe it’s the early morning hours of February 27th. I can’t remember. But I’m awake. Jackson is snoring next to me. Megan is tossing and turning in the next bed over.
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School Choice Matters
For families living in the City of San Diego, today marks the opening for the School Choice application. Here’s why school choice matters, especially for the poor.
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The scary place we’re at and how we turn it around
This afternoon a group of outsiders are coming to San Diego to attempt to disrupt the San Diego Unified School Districts board meeting as the district debates implementing a vaccine mandate for the prevention of COVID-19 among students 12 and up.
This debate isn’t controversial or out of context in the least. The district already has in place other vaccine mandates, most recently a mandate that all children have the MMR vaccine prior to entering kindergarten, a state law which stopped repeated outbreaks of measles in their tracks less than 5 years ago.
Of course, people have the right to protest and free speech. These are enshrined in our constitution. And people have freedom of movement to come to those protests from other areas.
But our society has seemed to forget that this isn’t where those freedoms end. While you can say and think what you want, you don’t get to do what you want all the time. And, if while expressing your freedom of speech and your speech is wrong… you should also be confronted for being wrong. And if you go too far in expressing your free speech by say, preventing others to that same right, intimidating or threatening people who oppose your view, or are otherwise being antisocial while you express your viewpoint, you should be held accountable for those actions as well.
Freedom of speech has constitutional limits. And freedom of speech does not equal freedom to create chaos or obstruct public meetings. As those who participated in the January 6th attack on our democracy have learned, you do have a freedom to attend a protest, but you do not have the freedom to kick down the doors to a public meeting and disrupt government without consequences.
It’s Deeper Than That
My concern for our society lies not so much with the extremist behavior but in the underlying lack of dialog in our communities which, left to fester, boil up towards extremism.
We live a society that just doesn’t talk to people face-to-face very much anymore. And we humans need that face-to-face interaction.
We find it so much easier to just huddle with people who are like us, who think like us, who like the same things that we do, and the net consequence is that there is no moderation. If I put my so-called “social media expert” hat back on for a second, this is exactly what the algorithms do in social media. The math doesn’t care about the sociological impact of doing this. All the algorithm wants is for you to spend more time on TikTok or Instagram so it keeps showing you things you like based on other things you like, which pushes you further and further into specialized buckets of content 100% customized for you. That’s why you see people doing things in public that are on TikTok and not understanding how weird they look. In their minds, “literally everyone is doing the Taco Bell challenge.”
But you do this in your community, as well.
You have 5-6 neighbors whose property touches your property. Chances are good that you know the names of 3-4 of them, maybe you even know them well enough where you hang out occasionally. Realistically you chitchat with a couple of them from time to time.
But you have a couple other neighbors whom you don’t talk to because of something that’s happened in the past. Maybe they rev their motorcycle’s engine early in the morning and you find that annoying. Or maybe they had one too many Hillary Clinton signs for just a little bit too long in 2016 and you didn’t like that. Or maybe they’ve got chickens and you don’t like hearing their noises. (That’s self-deprecating humor for those who don’t know.)
So what do you do? You ignore them. And that’s the worst possible thing you could do. When you ignore them your view of them naturally gets worse over time and whatever their viewpoint is that’s bothering you gets more pointed because it’s been unchecked.
I believe our society is drifting into extremes not because of the impact of social media but because neighbors don’t talk to neighbors.
Monsters, Inc (2001) Monsters, Inc
You’ve seen the movie Monsters, Inc right?
The entire premise of the movie was that our fears generate the power which fuels the world. (Whoa, I know some of you need to think about that for a second… go back and watch it!)
And the secondary premise is that once we get to know our fears they aren’t that scary and have less power over us. (Double whoa!)
Right now, fear has all the power in our society. Fear of disease, fear of controls, fears we’re all going to go bankrupt, fears the country is going to fall apart.
But you and I can be part of making a difference in our communities by doing the one thing we might fear the most: Talking to our neighbors. Even THAT neighbor whose Harley is too loud or political beliefs are too extreme or whose chickens wake up too early.
Why is this so important? Because as you get to know one another your view of them will change, your views about people with their views will change, and their views about people like you will change.
For me, the answer isn’t chastising the anti-vaxx outsiders who seek to disrupt a public meeting tonight. The answer is finding ways to engage with them. To talk to them as humans and not as objects of scorn, to truly hear them out and find common ground.
For you, I don’t know what that means. But I do know that talking to them is part of the answer.
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Is the world getting worse?
Is the world getting worse or do we just have more immediate access to everything that’s going on in the world so we notice it more?
Maybe I’m getting old? Or maybe things truly are really bad right now? It’s honestly hard to tell.
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Golf is Hard
Last week, I played in a mens club event and scored awful. Well actually, considering all of the bad things that happened to me during the course of the round, I managed to shoot 90 officially, which is pretty bad for me, I normally would score between 78-82. But I had one of those rounds where my ball just hit every little tree, weird bounce, and a person in my group incorrectly assessed an additional penalty on me because he didn’t know the rules… you know, abnormal stuff that added up.
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