I got very overwhelmed last night. We currently have thirty laying hens growing bigger and bigger, living in a feeding trough on the room off of our kitchen. They are big enough now to fly out of the trough when we take the cover off and we spend a good portion of our morning corralling the bravest chicken back into the trough. (I have named this bold and brave chicken Yee-Haw). Luckily, Heathar’s dad built a cover for the chicken trough otherwise, they would be all over the room by now and chicken feces would be everywhere.

Today, we started a new Easter tradition — we put together our very first beehive. I identify as whatever comes before being a novice bee keeper. I am completely inexperienced and yet, our bees are arriving on Saturday. I think this is what Heathar and I like to do — we create a very imminent deadline that involves live animals and then run like wild dogs at the last minute to get everything prepared. It is very motivating. I think this is also what they call procrastination. But yes, we are creating our beehives.

I realize that I am completely out of my element right now. Wandering around Home Depot yesterday looking for six inch fan vents, complete with metal ductwork almost put me over the edge of abysmal panic. I watched other women, glazed and glass-eyed, pushing their empty carts through the looming aisles. The most tragic, is the one-item cart. There is one lonely pair of gardening gloves in the enormous Home Depot cart or one bag of birdseed. I know the one-item cart game. It feels so exposed, so vulnerable as though people know you have no idea what you’re actually looking for.

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.