Ed's Big Adventure

Installing that clothesline atop our deck, after arguing over options for 18 months, feels amazing.

Our entire household economy depends upon learning to use this space we’re stewarding, a 113-year-old home set upon a 50 X 140-foot lot, most effectively. All our income is generated from a three-legged stool—farm, art, writing—in this place of surprisingly varying micro-climates and other variables. Putting further pressure on the property, our family of four must also live here in a relaxed manner inside a place of refuge. Business and life integrate hand in hand, always in motion atop a tandem bike.

Finding efficiencies and maximizing the space doesn’t come naturally to me, requiring a patient approach of arriving at solutions over lengthy periods of time. Incidentally, the receiving end of our new retractable clothesline is anchored into a piece of old growth white pine, a board salvaged from the garage we tore down 15 years ago. That piece sat around all this time waiting for something meaningful that would bring me joy. Seeing old and new come together activates something inside me, inspiring awe, wonder, and gratitude.

Pinning that flower-patterned shower curtain to the line, and watching it give shape to the wind like a lung filling and emptying, produced irrational joy. I can hardly wait to wash that next load of laundry.

Jobs, school, and humdrum necessities of life, all have a way of sanding off eccentricities. Eventually, you might find yourself rounded into the shape required for that cubicle job, as happened with me. Learning to indulge these moments of irrational joy, when time stops as you become enthralled in something that others ignore, is key to getting the train back onto the tracks.

Thousands of hours spent on this book, which I hope sees the light of day before the fall equinox, has illuminated this beautifully as I’ve mulled over the milestones en route to this place.

An obsession with clotheslining, for example, was essential in the journey toward farming. I was captivated with harvesting as much sun on our property as possible, one of many natural assets, free and abundant to all. One afternoon stands out in particular, after enduring a book event in which I failed to sell a single copy. A cold, foggy morning, the sun burned off the fog as I biked home from the downtown coffee shop with a trailer chock full of books.

The goal of a year’s income for a year’s devotion to the book was a pipe dream. Two hours of fruitless book-hawking was a cold dose of reality, but critical for moving forward.

At this perplexing moment, pinning individual socks to the clothesline might have seemed like a waste of energy, but I was beginning to understand the impossibility of thinking yourself out of such jams. The brain is an amazing thing, but it is not everything. Learning to override its desire to reduce every decision to cold, calculating, practicality was a marvelous discovery. The command and control center has a Spock-like tendency to brush aside deep visceral needs. By engaging the body, the whole person, we may bypass this one-dimensional way of being. Like an overactive dog gnawing on a bone in the corner, my brain settled on saving a dime or two in energy costs as I became overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude for every piece of clothing and memories attached to them.

Sitting there in the yard, with baby chicks and ducklings out on grass for the first time, I snapped this picture as a choir of songbirds transformed the space into a cathedral…

I might be the only person on Earth who appreciates this odd juxtaposition of interests and passions in this peculiar way. Rather than stifling such things, they should be cultivated to flower. Ignore them to your peril! Eccentricities are signposts leading the way toward your unique offering to the world.

Of course they don’t make sense! Cubicle Land, and the dominant systems, want predictable widgets. I’m thinking of a former co-worker right now, stuck in Cubicle Land and deeply unhappy, because he is failing to recognize that the root of his problem is a persistent tamping down of his weirdness. He should be slowly raising his freak flag instead.

This is as simple as pulling up a chair and reveling in whatever it is that you find beautifully soul-stirring. Instead of rushing to that next meeting or gassing up the car, one sits in this place as time stands still and your heart soars in worship and delight. These unexpected moments point us toward the sacred underlying all of existence. All five senses perceive the weight of glory only in part, but the beauty of it pulls us inexorably onward.

And this is the journey of life.

Beyond cashing checks and paying bills.

Writing this book feels like discovering fire and struggling over how to carry these coals back to society.

Tapping into our God-given eccentricities fuels a lifetime of discovery. In an act of generosity, we share what we find with others. It’s remarkably simple.