Enjoying The Journey...Honest

Since I last posted we have mainly been on holiday (get us), taking some much needed time out to travel across Europe for a friend's Birthday in Sweden. The trip was amazing, taking us through Northern France (full of Brits), Belgium (they drive pretty fast), The Netherlands (Utrecht is a treasure), Germany (watching the harvest happen around us), Denmark (Copenhagen was windy but lovely) and Sweden (paradise on earth) and importantly was as much about the journey there and back as it was about the four days on Gotland (please don't ever go, you will only spoil its empty perfection) with dear friends.

I now realise that we should be looking at Project Farm in much the same way. As our planning application rumbles on, it has become clear that because we are learning in a vertical where the hell did the ground go kind of way, it is inevitably going to be more complicated, stressful and lengthy than we had at first thought. We do not have endless pots of money to pay a planning consultant to negotiate their way through the murky council speak and endless 'further requirements' so we are learning how it all works as we go. Sometimes this feels empowering and positive, as if we really could do it all ourselves. At other times (most of the time) it all feels a little bit overwhelming and I get Paula Abdul stuck taking an eternity to walk down some steps with a MC Skat Kat as an ear worm ("I take two steps forwards I take two steps back" - you're welcome). Like our mammoth 2500 mile holiday if the only prize we recognise is the end goal then all the time in between, all the delays and set backs, will only frustrate us. It is all PART of the dream, not, as it can be tempting to feel, a set of increasingly obscure obstacles put in our way to delay us fulfilling our dream.

Of course this is so easy to write from a cafe with power and wifi and heating and all the other things that we are still in the process of getting. In practice it is like our own bespoke brand of mindfullness. We are learning to see beauty in all the chaos. When it fells like the council will not let us have windows for fear of damaging the integrity of the building, the balance is redressed by a call to the NFU (my own personal heroes) who send us endless information to arm ourselves with. We wake with the mantra of "we will soon have power, we will soon have power" and we go to sleep muttering "Its ok, tomorrow is another day, its ok, tomorrow is another day". As it happens we will have power by the winter if all goes according to plan. Which of course it may not. That's fine too. It's all part  of the journey and we ARE loving it. Honest.

Behind every concrete wall is an old wall of dreams. This particular wall is from the old house that used to sit on our site. More on that another time.

Put your back into it Daddy

Beauty in the chaos