I’ve had a few crazy dreams brewing in my mind for the past few years:
- Own a sturdy, intelligent mountain horse that can handle any terrain I put it on. A horse that will be a good friend to me, who will accept my adoration and adore me in return. Teach that horse, gently, about shotguns and get it to a place where I can hunt birds behind my bird dogs from off its back in the wild and desolate chukar and Hungarian partridge country of Idaho. Can you imagine? Oh, I imagine it daily. I’m starting to worry about it in my sleep…about making it happen sooner than later.
- Find a ranch property big enough and wild enough to erect a little yurt-village area (or maybe wall tents or something delightfully shabbier than that…or a mini-lodge…) where I can have women come visit me with the intention of learning how to bird hunt, how to ride horses, how to cook wild game, how to garden, how to do canning and preserving, how to go forth confidently into nature and the woods and the mountains, how to catch/gut/cook a fish, how to build a fire with wet or dry fuel, how to do all of that stuff that they never learned from their mums and dads. I don’t want to have a dude ranch. I want to have a place folks come to where they can learn how to grab life by the horns. I want to teach independence. I want to teach homesteading stuff in a natural, everyday setting and help ladies, specifically, change their lives and start living their dreams. People keep asking me if I’ll teach them how to make jewelry, but that’s not the place my teaching heart is at. It’s elsewhere. Somewhere bigger and wilder and more life altering…
- I’d like an English setter, an English pointer, a gordon setter and more German shorthaired pointers. I might even like to breed one these breeds professionally, aiming to keep hunting drive as strong as possible in my kennels bloodlines.
- I’d like to have a sense of permanence again. A feeling of settledness. A feeling of belonging (more steadfastly) to a place. I’m ready for a home but we’re picky about how we would like that home to be. I’d like to have peace about being so unrooted all the time. I’d like to be better at being nomadic or I ‘d like to no longer be nomadic. And chickens.
I keep waking up in the morning and evaluating my life, figuring out what still works and what doesn’t. I navigate like this. I outline my joys and tether myself to them, dig up, discover and dissect my fears and failures, take what lessons I can from them, and toss the grubby tailings in the rubbish pile.
This is a time for illumination, pace setting, dream getting. This is life. This is every moment of life. Always. It’s like I need a seatbelt for my spirit at all times so that the force and power of momentum doesn’t slingshot it out of my body and into thin air to be lost and wandering forever.