I am a Baha'i. Since I am starting over with my blog life, I will start there.
I blogged nigh religiously (sans religion) for a number of years on a little site called OpenDiary. Marriage, divorce, remarriage, two children, and general life-ness kept me away except for the occasional private entry every few months. I had begun transcribing my childhood diaries and journals into electronic format on the site. Imagine my surprise when I went to log in this morning and discovered that the site no longer exists. I'm not feeling intensely any kind of way about this, but to say that there is no wistfulness, no sense of loss would be untrue. After all, journaling/blogging is so personal, and gives us reference points for where we've come from and where we are headed. So now thousands of little guideposts are gone, perhaps backed up somewhere, perhaps not, and I will decide whether or not to pursue them.
For now, the drive to write is reawakened by the desire to fulfill my life's purpose. I have been endowed with a certain capacity, and the need to serve humanity, yet I have allowed myself to become mired in socio-cultural expectations that prevent me from fully embracing what I could do.
Truth is, I want to be a farmer. I want to grow things and feed people and live in intentional community and be a safe harbor for the poor and lonely and downtrodden. I want to teach people about Baha'u'llah if they are seeking and want to learn. In reality, this also means I want a crack team of people at my disposal who know more than I do about the actual mechanics of affordable earth-sheltered dwellings and greenhouses and sustainably sourced energy and water. It is all in my head and I want it to come to fruition, but there are a few things standing in the way:
1. I live in South Carolina. I like it here just fine: my parents moved here in October and my in-laws are all within a 25 minutes' drive. Despite what you may have heard, not all parts of the state are terrible for education and health. The biggest concern is that with climate change, there may not be sustainable water: we don't have many hills and we don't have enough deciduous trees.
2. Not only do I live in South Carolina, I live right smack dab in the middle of suburbia. I actually own two houses here, and the tenants in my other house just moved out, so I am now paying two mortgages while I am praying for that house to sell. My prayer usually sounds a little bit like, "God, I can't really see the purpose of my continuing to pay $1300 a month for a house nobody is living in.
-- can you help? Thanks."
3. My family is… ideologically supportive? But my husband is a retail manager, and I am a hospice social worker. We have full time feed-the-economy jobs, send our kids to day care, live on .25 acres and don't come from farmers, is what I'm saying.
But the dream just doesn't have the sense to quit! So I am stuck, looking at acreage nearby and in Tennessee, waiting for the neon sign that tells me which way to go.
