I have to corral the voices that tell me uncertainty is an unwelcome guest. I have to grapple with the messages of our western culture that promise certainty and assuredness if we are “on the right track”. I have to become suspicious here and instead, bend into the mystery. Ambiguity is the mysterious sister and this sister lives closer to my reality. She is the translucent sister, the muse, the siren that beckons us with her haunting but irresistible call. She is the sister that winks at me out of the corner of her eye — I don’t quite know what to make of her. The elk come and the full moon rises and I am touched with magic. But more often, I am touched with ambiguity.

Needless to say, our farm is messy right now. Everything is in disarray. We have been here for five months and I look around and things look disheveled. Our farm looks like I put my head out the window of a fast moving car for twenty minutes and let my hair blow around. There are piles of dirt, holes that have been excavated, stumps that have been removed without anything to take their place, piles of old wood stacked for burning, chainlink fences, a garage door that do not close property, wood that is dry and needs desperately to be stained, bare trees that do not have their leaves back yet, cement that is chipping away because of the salt I placed on it this winter when I was trying to melt the ice, old sinks that have been removed and taken apart and left to the mercy of the desert sun. We have a lot of work to do and I am overwhelmed. Nothing is in its place and nothing feels clean.

I am deeply grateful for the men who show up to our property at 7:30am in the morning and I am also deeply resentful of their presence. There is nothing more promising than the sound of men chainsawing down the dead cottonwood tree in our backyard, standing pale and barren for decades without care and yet, they disrupt this reverent and deeply quiet mountainside that is becoming my home.