Subsistence Farming - Hawaii

your commitment to point yourself in our direction is exciting for me. i have plenty of general fears about adding another family to our family. can i experience the commitment necessary to get through the tough stuff when it happens? do i have the skills to be assertive and compassionate? am i comfortable with the idea of another person witnessing me so intimately (my warts and all). you get the idea. but mostly, i feel confident that we can draw on NVC, council and other skills i have in my tool belt to get to the gift of any conflict.

scott and i have been going to some deep places in our selves and in our relationship. we are talking about things that we had earlier unconsciously “agreed” were taboo. we are really looking at what was going on for each of us during the time of the land conflict. it takes great courage for each of us to tell the absolute truth to ourselves and each other. i am amazed at how hard that is to do when our hearts are closed and we are not vulnerable. the contrast between that and the times where one of us can choose to be empathetic is unbelievable to me. but what is more unbelievable is the number of times i do NOT choose to be empathic even with the experience of how beautifully it works.

scott and i realized yesterday that we are both living in hawaii (and i was living in taos) because we considered it was as far from mainstream usa as possible. that has opened up some interesting discussions and begs the question: why are we living in the usa? what do USers have to teach us? maybe we would be better served living in a place that knows family, village, sustainability because it has been honed generation after generation instead of trying to reinvent the wheel here. what about places on the earth where people are really tribal, where people have lived in villages for as long as they can remember, where it is a bike or on foot culture, where stuff isn’t valued more than people/relationships. and… i don’t want to live in some outdated patriarchical tribe somewhere just to escape the ugliness of the usa empire. i do want to draw from some source of wisdom that i am not finding in my neighborhood.

took a break and had a fun chat with our new intern on the land. she is “eyes wide open” and like a sponge.