I've loved this Theodore Roosevelt quote since my pottery mentor shared it with our group several years ago. Perfectionist tendencies have always made me vulnerable to procrastination and making excuses for why I can't achieve some dream or goal. It's not that I'm lazy. In fact, I tend toward workaholism. I'm just crafty with deflection, deviation and dilution. I've always got several pokers in the fire. My interests and passions are many. I'm always thinking of the next project, always moving the goalpost further.
I've dreamt of living close to the earth and self sufficiently since I was a child. I thought I would homestead on a sunny plot surrounded by wooded acres located about a half hour from a small college town. But, my current reality is starkly (almost laughably) different. I live with my husband and two beagles just north of New York City in the lower Hudson River Valley in a tiny Cape Cod on a city-sized suburban lot of about an eighth of an acre, approximately a football field's distance from a vehicle-roaring and gas belching parkway.
Closer to retirement age now than leaving the nest, and having lost much along the way, I feel the preciousness of life and fleetingness of time acutely. I'm ready to self-acutalize all I've held at bay for all these years. I will live into my dreams, learn to be more self-reliant and make our small house and rocky, terraced yard into a nature inviting, food providing, and soul nurturing homestead. I will move forward a day at a time, slowly. I may eventually make it to that rural homestead in a woods, but for now I want to do what I can, with what I have, where I am.
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