Big Families Are My Secret Fetish

Since mid-March of this year, Ojo Conejo has been buzzing with life and activity. First, the baby chicks arrived — all 80 of them. Then, my best friend from Texas came for a visit and helped us keep those baby chicks alive by wiping their asses every ten minutes to make sure their colons didn’t get clogged. After that, Heathar’s parents came for a 2-week visit followed by the arrival of our friend and co-farmer Jack, all the way from Australia. While Jack has been here, we had a 2-week visit from our dear friend Andrea from Mexico and one day after she left, my father and his girlfriend surprised us with a visit. In between that, we have welcomed 4 pigs to the property and have had many visits from family and friends that live nearby. It has been FULL y’all. I know I have said this before but I will say it again — life out here on the mountain is anything but isolated.

I was reminded today, while in session with a client, of something important about the concept of home for me. This often happens in session where a client will bring something forward that is also present for me — the healing weaves out of my client and into me and from me into the client. For a moment, the wound is inseparable — I can feel myself in their pain. I can feel the nuances of what they are describing because I too have lived it and know it — it is alive in both of us at the same time and the soul lights up in recognition.

While working with this client, I was reminded of how crucial it is for me to feel that my home is alive. Growing up in a family where both of my parents worked and also not living in close proximity to any other family meant that when I came home, I often came home to an empty house. I remember the house being silent and still, quiet and full of afternoon shadows. I remember not wanting to be home and so I would go out in search of life and activity. I grew up in neighbor’s houses, running barefoot on the street from house to house, jumping in neighbor’s pools and having rotating dinners at all of my friend’s houses around Phoenix. I felt like I had multiple homes that were full and loud and messy. I frequented homes with lots of siblings and pets — the louder the better, the more chaos the more enticing for me. Big families were my secret fetish.

For the ten years that Heathar and I searched for a home, we largely lived by ourselves as a couple. There were moments when we lived with Heathar’s sister and our nephew but for the most part, we have navigated our quest for home as a duo. While this seems to be the cultural expectation, that a couple should live alone unless they have children, I have never felt quite right about it. When Heathar and I visit upstate New York (which we have done most summers until now because we have our own farm to tend), we stay with her parents in their two-story farmhouse. Heathar’s family has lived in that house for generations and there is a bounty of family around who frequent her family home. I have always felt at home there, comforted by the one bathroom we have to share between eight of us and delighted to cook dinner in a crowded kitchen while all the men watch the Yankees game. Life is full in the farmhouse. I have always wished we lived closer to Heathar’s family so we could spend more time in that kind of familial environment. But each year, Heathar and I trek back to the desert, just the two of us. Each year, we held the vision for our own bustling farmhouse.

For the first time since Heathar and I have been together, I am starting to feel like the house is full and coming to life. I am starting to feel like we are creating a place where life happens. While it is at times very overwhelming for me and I need to retreat to the solitude of my studio, for the most part I crave the life and the fullness. I crave the loudness and the unexpected neighbors driving up our dirt road and gifting us with cantelope plants in bright red cups. I crave the rooster crowing and the pigs grunting. I crave the coyotes howling and the guests asking me where everything goes when they unload the dishwasher.

The house is no longer silent. The shadows are no longer looming. The halls are no longer quiet and the loneliness of the home that I felt as a young girl is beginning to fade. I worry that it will become quiet again — that all the noise will fade away into a deep silence and all this life has just been teasing me. It won’t stay, it cannot stay. Winter will come and the veil of silence will fall again. The sun will give us less and less daylight and the rooster’s crow will fade into a halfhearted murmur. The darkness will come, the silence will commence — this I know to be true.

But I know that in this home, life is happening. Life has been invited here — we are physically building spaces for life to come, for life to be nourished and for noises to be made. We are building a space to hold the laughter and breath of humans, plants and the mess of all the animals. We are building a space for classes and workshops and retreats and therapeutic moments and healing nooks and transformational conversations and life-changing meals. We are building the space for so many people to be a part of something and that is where the healing is happening for me. That is when the little girl in me gets excited and screams and shouts down the silent hallways and paints them all red. Yes, there will be moments of space and rest and quiet — please let there be many moments of that. But may our quiet moments be intentional and chosen, not forced upon us by the isolation of our culture. Let the quiet and the spaciousness feed our hungry soul and not deprive us of the life we are so longing for. Let the quiet and stillness soothe us and comfort our frayed edges, not act as a barrier to the loud and noisy lives we are actively trying to create, that are asking to be lived, that are asking to be voiced through us. Let there be life. Let there be noise. May we let all the raucous in.