Part 4: Dreams, Dirt, and Dogs in the Road

It was early October 2023. Amy and I had slipped away for a few hours to explore some local shops, leaving our six dogs in the fenced area around the RV. The weather was fine when we left. But when we turned onto our gravel road two miles from home, the rain was coming down in sheets and thunderous roars were coming from all directions overhead.

And then Amy hit the brakes.

There, in the middle of the road — soaked, shaking, dripping — was our dog, Bobo. After enduring the thunder, lightning, and torrential rain — she'd found a way out of the fence and made it to the road, and there she stood, waiting.

I scooped her up, mud and all, and we raced back home. The RV awning had collapsed under the weight of the rain, snapped clean in half. The other dogs were cold and terrified. We dunked Bobo's shivering little body into a tub of water just to get the pebbles out of her fur.

The morning after the storm.

Bobo, finally warm and dry after the storm.

The next morning, Bobo was warm and dry and the sun was shining, but this was not the dream I had written down.

Before we moved to Missouri, I sat with a journal and let myself imagine it. Really imagine it. A working farm. Chickens, pigs, a milking cow. A large, beautiful garden. A greenhouse or sunroom. Fruit trees, nut trees, flowers. A huge kitchen. A huge pantry room. A place for all our special furniture. A fireplace. A wellness business. Cabins. A food truck. Peace and happiness. Oh, and a horse.

I had pictured something straight out of Instagram — prairie skirts and wildflowers, golden light filtering through the trees, a life that looked exactly as beautiful as it felt. What we got was a mud pit.

The land had been cleared and leveled to bring in the RV, and when the rains came — and they came relentlessly — our driveway washed away. We had to park by the road and walk in. Twenty-four canine feet tracked mud onto every surface we owned: the floors, the couch, the car, each other. There was no escaping it. I complained loudly. I got angry. I cursed the dirt and meant every single word.

The mud era didn't end with patience or perspective. It ended with Amy's ingenuity. With a borrowed machine, she started hauling gravel from the creek — bucketful by bucketful — laying it down along the driveway and the path into the woods.  It wasn't glamorous. It was the opposite of Pinterest. But it was ours, it worked, and slowly the mud went from something that was breaking us to something that we overcame.  

We also found our reset button.

When things get too hard — and they do, regularly — we walk into the woods. That's it. That's the whole practice. There's something in those trees that delivers a quiet I had never experienced anywhere before. Not in a spa, not on a vacation, not in any of the places I used to think peace lived. It's right here, a few steps from the front door, and it has never once let us down.

Almost three years in, the list from that journal looks different than I expected. The chickens and the horse and the greenhouse — not yet. But the garden is real and thriving. And something else is real that I never wrote down: WestLand Farms. The wellness business exists, though it looks nothing like I imagined. It grew out of the land itself — out of the plants we found here, the harvests we learned to read, the products we make by hand. The peace is real, the happiness if real and that matters more than any fruit tree or fireplace. 

The list isn't finished. Neither are we.

Some of it will come. Some of it may look completely different by the time it arrives. Some of it we may let go of entirely — and find that what replaced it was better anyway.

What we know is this: we wrote it down. We showed up. We hauled gravel bucketful by bucketful, walked into the woods when we had nothing left, and kept reaching for peace even on the days it felt impossibly far away.

That's the dream, it turns out. Not the horse or the huge pantry  — though we haven't given up on any of them. It's the reaching. It's the choosing to be here, in the hard and the beautiful, building something that is entirely and completely ours.

Write your list. Don't wait until you know how it will happen. Dream Big.

The resources will come.