How much money will it take ....

Paris Letters -
Janice MacLeod and
Cafe tea pot

I was drawn to Janice MacLeod's Paris Letters simply by the first line of the back cover blurb, "How much money does it take to quit your job?" Excellent question! In her case not as much as she thought, but her plan was to take a break for a year and rethink her career plans - I want to retire. I want to be done with working altogether. I'm still a bit young for retirement as I can't start drawing on the IRA monies for at least another ten years.

MacLeod did what many of us dream of, quit the job and go off to explore the world. She ended up in Paris. It seems everyone wants to run off to Europe to end up in Paris, or Provence, or Florence. To have a little apartment or reclaim a farm house and plant a garden. It all sounds so wonderful and I'm grateful to the numerous people who have done it and written about their experiences, but deep down I know it isn't what I want. I want a quiet little place on a lake or a lazy river where I can sit and watch the water flow, hear it lap against the bank, see sun or moonlight sparkle upon it. To set out in my kayak and paddle early in the morning or late in the afternoon as the sun sets. That's what I dream about. Now how much money do I need to make this dream a reality?

Money isn't really the object here, it's the belief that I can make this a reality that is at the heart of the matter here. I need to believe that I can have this dream. MacLeod wrote a lot about her 'old life' of being a copywriter and that it was her dream job but that she had come to dislike it. The dream hadn't turned out to be what she expected. She had been living a life that wasn't authentic. She began to strip things away until her possessions fit in a suitcase and took to the road. At some point she finally gave up one last reminder of her previous life and it was then that "I forgave myself for my prior judgements of not being good enough to be just who I was" (107). There it was - the truth - my truth. My constant daily struggle to be okay in myself no matter where I am. Quitting my job and going halfway around the world will not solve my problems. Accepting who I am is the only solution and discovering what it is that makes me happy and doing it is what's most important now. Everyone wants to travel to see Paris, but deep down in my heart I know it isn't for me. And that's okay. Step one - stop living someone else's dream.

"Write to learn what you know.... First and most obviously was that I had all the inner resources I needed to effectively deal with my situations" (240). Paraphrasing that - I read to learn what I know, and she's absolutely right, I do have the inner resources to deal with my life. I've been learning as I have managed to get through every challenge I have faced in my life. I've simply not given myself credit for the inner strength because I've been waiting for someone else to point it out to me. It's just not going to happen that way. The only person that can pat me on the back for all the hard work I've done is me. With that knowledge, I can begin to plot, plan, and save for rescuing myself from the life I thought I wanted and start living the life I really want. You can too!!

MacLeod, Janice. Paris Letters. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, 2014.

A Honey of a Dream

Tea and Honey for a Sunday morning

The inspiration for this blog post comes from reading Jennifer Barclay's Falling in Honey: How a Tiny Greek Island Stole My Heart.  Barclay's memoir reads like a romance novel and at times I had to remind myself that it wasn't a novel. The foreshadowing turns out not to be a literary device, but I could see the plot twist coming from a mile away. Spoiler Alert: Barclay manages to start "living the dream" by moving to the tiny island of Tilos. Should you like to learn more, visit her blog http://octopus-in-my-ouzo.blogspot.com/.

As for me, I continue to dream of one day having my lake house. The lake house of my youth was my father's dream and although I would have loved to hold onto the place after his death, his dream house is not my dream house. Today that dream house belongs to someone else and I'm hoping all their dreams are coming true.

My current house is pleasantly located on a wooded lot bordering wetlands; not quite a lake but there is water views through the trees. At sometime in the past a stream and perhaps a small pond became home to a pair of beavers who built a dam and transformed the landscape. Beavers are a foundation species who transform the ecosystem. Once the dam is built and the water begins to back up, other species follow: fish, amphibians, birds, small and large mammals, along with a huge variety of plants. We have it all in the back yard: squirrels (red and gray), hawks, owls, songbirds, toads, frogs, salamanders, the occasional fox, fisher cat, mink, deer, bear, and the list goes on.

Beavers can be a nuisance with their building projects causing tree fall and flooding. Several years back I watched as the water rose up through the woods and approached the backyard. I even called in the town health department and conservation committee as I was in fear of the rising waters contaminating my well. Since beavers were nearly wiped out here in North America they became a protected species which have rebounded very well. I couldn't legally do anything about the beavers without getting approval from the correct authoritative bodies. Luckily I didn't have to do anything as the waters finally receded.

Now as it happens, beavers will eventually move on to greener pastures, or should I say bluer streams. We haven't seen any activity in a long time. With no one maintaining the dam and two years of drought the pond behind the house has gotten a good deal smaller and ecological succession is doing its work to transform the ecosystem. All that silt and nutrient rich matter trapped by the dam has now settled and the primary species of grass and wildflower are making their comeback. Very often a beaver pond will eventually become a beaver meadow.

My dream of a lake house still exists even if the views of water through the trees is dwindling. One day I will be sitting out on the porch, with the sound of water lapping on the shore and typing away on the keys telling the world how I'm "living the dream."