happy thanksgiving!

We wrapped up our life on the farm last week and already time is doing its magical thing where the hard and gross and uncertain and dirty parts of our life over the past 11 months are mixing together with the glory of it all and making the whole glisten.  

This Thanksgiving I'm finding myself more grateful for ordinary things, things we have gone without while on the farm.  Things like clean water coming right out of the tap and dishwashers, heating that you don't have to split and carry and build, schools, grocery stores and neighbors close by, clean organized spaces free of rats and toilet seats free of banana slugs.    

But even more than that, I'm finding myself more fully thankful and aware of how amazing life is, such a perfect package of experience and adventure all designed to challenge us and propel us forward in our progression.  The learning curve was steep on the farm this year.  We gleaned lots of useless information that we may never need again, but in the process we learned how to solve problems and work and be together and learn from life and, perhaps the most priceless lesson of all, that we can do hard things.  

This experience wasn't easy.  The farm work was a stretch for us city slickers. But even harder was the intensity of it all, the non-stop pace of homeschooling while trying to figure out how to do countless things we'd never done before, all without some of the support and conveniences that we've learned to rely on.  But it was also full of time and space and beauty and togetherness and adventure and challenge.  I'm thankful for all of it, really, I am (and that's kind of saying something).   It has taught me (again) that you have to have the hard to have the good.  That life that just rolls along swimmingly doesn't have the power to change us.  Life needs the dark shadows to provide contrast and beauty to the light. 

It really is the whole of life, the good and bad and hard and easy and dark and light that makes life the glistening adventure that it is.