Subsistence Farming - Hawaii

i had a sort of meltdown, nervous breakdown kind of thing the other day when scott and i were talking about how we are going to spend the sale of the earthship money (am i being dramatic!).

i was at first so excited to look at all the projects that we can get started on and after an hour i couldn’t keep myself awake. scott asked me what was up and some crazy person possessed my body and spoke through me and said things like “what the fuck (i knew it wasn’t me because i don’t cuss ) are we dong? at this rate i will be rebuilding buildings until I’m too old to lift an ohia. eight buildings that need to be made permanent! i mean are we thinking, building a building to house our clothes line! pastures out the wazoo loosing their fence posts nibble by gall wasp nibble….. adding more solar panels, converting to buried telephone cables, replacing the screen house.”

just the idea of redoing the barn brings to mind the image of dozing the whole thing and giving up on doing what ever we do to need the building in the first place. i started to scream to myself and stunned scott (who was wisely keeping his mouth shut): “i want 3 little acres and just me to be responsible for. not one work trade person and building, 3 interns and buildings, 1 rental person(s) and buildings plus all their infrastructure- parking spaces, poopers, hot showers, working phone, pick ups from the airport, work projects, food from the land, education for the interns. AND then there’s the goats, the chickens, the ducks and the domesticated fragile mutant horses….”

overwhelmed. i made myself so exhausted i couldn’t get up off the couch. i slept there all night. i fear my big ideas have run away with me. why is it so easy to dream expansion? i need to regroup. scott came up with a good temporary solution. he said: “lets just concentrate on redoing our living space (making it a permanent structure) and not look any further into the future.”

maybe that’s all we do for now. maybe we look at the barn and ask ourselves why we need such a big footprint. maybe we can seriously downsize. maybe i need a soak in the warm pond. maybe a week at a hotel in their hot tub with room service.