Remember when I blogged about a family road trip and outed myself as a word search nerd? Yup, on that one road trip I completed 84 word search puzzles while riding shotgun. It’s a seriously good device-alternative way to spend time! On that same trip I started a note on my phone with the title Keweenaw Word Search. While dreaming about making my own word search book, I brainstormed topics for word search puzzles that were Keweenaw related. It wasn’t hard. I love where I live and try to immerse our family into all aspects of Keweenaw life – from history to sports, waterfalls to fishing, and lighthouses to cultural foods (ahem, pasties, am I right?). Well, those ideas all happened in that phone note in 2022. Sometimes ideas require time that doesn’t exist, so I just held on to it. This past winter, at the start 2025, I FINALLY did something about it. I wrote, designed and published Keweenaw Word Search and Color!
And this isn’t your typical newspaper print wordsearch from the CVS on the corner. This is something so much more. Because I love culture, history, travel and teaching, I brought those passions to the book. For each word search topic there is information about that topic, highlighting the uniqueness of the Keweenaw region. Also included are simple illustrations that the reader can color. Each word search is topic specific to the Keweenaw (say, copper mining), so the reader will search for words like pasty, ingot, slapshot, and agate, all associated with their respective topics.
News Alert! I enjoyed doing this so much that I also wrote, designed and published Michigan’s Upper Peninsula Word Search and Colorwhile I awaiting the publishing of the Keweenaw version. Both are printed in the USA and available for purchase on Amazon!
Oh hey, get this, more will be coming! You know that travel bug I have? Well, these books are a great way to tap into what I love and share my immersive travel with others. It is a fun, knowledge sharing endeavor. The Word Search and Color will become part of a collection of place-based word searches – Circle The World. Locally owned stores in the Keweenaw have the Keweenaw Word Search and Color books on the shelves (woot!), so my hope is to have local shop participation elsewhere for each regionally specific book.
Have ideas for the next book’s geographic location? Drop me a message on my “Lisa Reitz – Author” Facebook or Instagram posts! A follow would be nice too. 😉
One more thing, I saved the best for last. This Word Search and Color passion project of mine along with having a short story that I wrote and had selected to be published in a juried anthology has given me the confidence to do something I have always wanted to do – WRITE A NOVEL. (All CAPS friends, because it’s very exciting to me.) I’ve been at it for over a year, and it has been a labor of love! I have so much to learn so I am not rushing the process. I have a routine of writing daily and since I’m new at this whole writing a novel thing, I have attended a few workshops, conferences, writing sessions and am reading books to support my goals.
Here’s what I have going on!
Keweenaw Word Search and Color and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula Word Search and Color are PUBLISHED and for sale on Amazon, local shops, and direct through me if you are local (bulk orders with drop ship are available for retailers too). A third Word Search and Color will be in the works soon, just need to finalize a place or region. And lastly, with a working title and basic cover I threw together for the image above, The Sandstone Cabin is a historical fiction (more leaks on this along the way).
Thank you for coming along on my journey with me! We’re still rocking our homesteading dreams (year 8, wowsers!) and living a good, soul-filling life. With these writing projects, I’m giving my soul a good dose of joy while always growing and learning.
It’s been a while since I’ve blogged. It’s easy for me to lose track of this space when time seems to be on some sort of warp speed! Anyone else notice that? By mid-October last year we wrapped up our preserving and growing season. We usually take longer than that to get through it all but we hustled this year because we were getting on the road for an epic 6-week adventure to the Canada and US Pacific coast. We adjusted some of our processes to allow this to happen. For instance, I didn’t have time to make all the tomato sauce so the last picking was cut and frozen and processed after we returned. Also, since we wouldn’t be eating the winter squash right away we diced and froze it all. This way we wouldn’t come home to any rotten squash stinking up the storage space. Winter squash usually has a very long shelf life, but we just didn’t want to risk it. Other small changes and flexibility in process allowed us to leave worry free.
We traveled from home in Upper Michigan to Washington state and then drove onto the Black Ball Line ferry and were transported to Vancouver Island, British Columbia. We then came back to the U.S. and traveled down the 101 experiencing the Pacific Coast through Washington, Oregon, and Northern California. We had so many new experiences, saw the most incredible places, met many people, navigated through weather of all sorts and road conditions of all sorts, and thankfully avoided an emergency car breakdown by finding a service center that could get us in (more challenge then you would think) to diagnose the issue, order the part, and service the car during our stay on the Oregon Coast. I was so grateful for this crew of people that were able to service the car which led to keeping our family on the road safely. You see, safety and security are very important factors for me, so while they may have just been repairing our car, for me it was so much more. It was during this car repair experience when I was swelling with gratitude that I began to reflect on how impactful our interactions with others can be. At that time I started taking notes to keep experiences fresh in my mind and I’d like to share some with you. I will be brief, but some of these interactions were so much more than that.
Chinatown Docent, Victoria, British Columbia
As Flora and I wandered around the small museum that shared the history of Chinese immigrating to Canada (specifically British Columbia), we were looking at a wall of immigrant documents when one of the docents approached us and started to tell us a little bit more about the documents. She then told us about her own Father’s document, how he immigrated to Victoria, BC and began a job there. He left his wife and children at home in China with the hopes of reuniting with them when he had earned enough money to bring them over. Unfortunately money earning was slow because Chinese immigrants were doing the lowest paying jobs. In the meantime, while her father worked hard to support himself and his family in China, he had received news that his whole hometown had perished in a natural disaster. Knowing his wife and children were gone, he sent to China a request for a new wife, a common practice. She came to British Columbia and they started a family. To them were born our museum docent and her siblings. Ready for the twist? Years later (through research, I believe), this family found out that in fact, the mother and children in China did not die in the natural disaster. So, our docent learned that she had a family of half-siblings still left in China. While it doesn’t sound like the family physically reunited, our docent’s father started to financially support both his family in Canada and his family in China. I was so in awe of this story – a rollercoaster of opportunity and grief and new joy and struggles. So much the immigrant story. What a gift to us to have this docent spending her (VOLUNTEER) time in a place where she can share personal stories which help other people learn about history.
Fan Tan Alley, Chinatown, Victoria, BC. The narrowest commercial street in North America. Trivia time! Made famous in what movie with what actors??
Kathy, Sointula, Malcolm Island, British Columbia
As you may know we live on an old finnish homestead in the Upper Peninsula in Michigan. We didn’t expect in British Columbia to have the opportunity to learn about a settlement of Finnish people on an island nearby where we were visiting. I knew we had to go check it out. Being out of season, the local museum was closed, but I emailed and Kathy, who is involved in the museum, wrote back and opened it up exclusively for our visit. We made a nice donation expecting to walk about the museum and learn on our own. To our surprise, Kathy gave us a personal tour. Such as here in the Keweenaw, Finns went to Vancouver Island in the late 1800’s for a better life working in the mines. As most immigrants found out, working in the mines wasn’t a good life at all. A group of Finn’s determined for a better life wrote back to Finland requesting the services of a Finnish philosopher who worked with them to build a “utopian society” on Malcolm Island. However, as things typically go, there are challenges along the way. Fire. Death. Lack of access to food and materials (this is on an island long before ferry systems were in place). Conflicts between people. The Utopian society fizzled, but the island remains steeped in the Finnish heritage and philosophy of working together to help your neighbors. Kathy (an expat) told us about her own journey to the island, her interest in the history there and her own experiences. She was passionate to share and how generous she was with her time! Without Kathy we would have visited this beautiful island, but we would never have understood the true meaning of it.
A view from Malcolm Island, home of Sointula. Sointula is Finnish for “Place of Harmony.” Seems aptly named.
Lastly (although I have dozens more to share), we’ll go to…
David, Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
OK, saying that I hate hotels is putting it lightly. But when we travel it’s inevitable we have a hotel or two on the drive to our final destination. When we arrived in Sioux Falls it was cold, like -9 in November (what the heck South Dakota?!). I didn’t want to be at the hotel. We were on the homestretch, but hey, you gotta sleep. We unpacked the car and headed in. We were greeted by David, the guy behind the desk. After checking in we asked if there was decaf coffee and hot water for tea in the lobby. He explained that it was due for a fresh brew and quickly hopped to it. We settled our stuff into the room and then Flora and I headed down to get tea and decaf coffee. David was just finishing up and was making small talk with us. He was friendly and talkative (as an introvert, I always seem to attract these kinds of people, ha!). We had a surface level conversation and went about our evening. In the morning we headed down for hot breakfast. We were greeted with a whole new version of the hotel – fully decked out in Christmas decorations! And David. Wait.This was at a minimum 12-hours from when we checked in and David was still here? Managing the front desk, the entire breakfast spread and somehow he became Santa’s Christmas elf overnight and turned the hotel into a place of Christmas joy?! We said good morning to David and remarked on how he could possibly still be here? And be awake? David said his shift was supposed to end a few hours ago, but the guy on the schedule after him doesn’t usually come in until a couple of hours after his scheduled time. David said he’d called him several times, with no response. I’d like to add that David was the ONLY staff person in this entire hotel. We were exasperated. First at the lack of ethic of the staff person who had a long term record of not showing, then that that guy was even still employed, and lastly exasperated at what an amazing job David was doing under these circumstances. He admitted he’d been working for 16-hours, and that he was a bit tired, but that he did find joy in decorating the hotel overnight. We had a lovely conversation with him about how his wife and child love to camp and they have a goal of camping at all the state parks in the Minnesota. He told us about how they visited the north shore of Minnesota and we talked about how they’d probably love the Porcupine Mountains and the Keweenaw. It was obvious to me that even though David was dealt a crappy hand in the workplace, he took pride in his job, his family, and was living his best life under those circumstances. Flora and I still refer to David, like he’s our buddy. He made our hotel experience a positive one, even though he easily could have slacked on the job, especially after 16-hours.
My point in sharing these stories? It’s inevitable that many of the people we have small interactions with are having challenges in life – big or small. History proves this is a human condition. Life throws you lemons. People in my own circle are navigating life threatening diagnosis, job loss, loss of a home due to natural disaster, caring for a family member who is no longer able to care for themselves and the death of a spouse, just to name a few BIG, life-altering things. What’s amazing is that during these challenges I see these people finding love, making new friends, sharing their experiences with others (which helps them heal and gives insight to others), or rebuilding their life in their new, unexpected reality.
As a person who enjoys history, I have always been impressed with the resilience of individuals and groups of people. One common thread I see in this is that when people find community, they have hope. Another thread in this is seeing the amazing ability people have to keep moving forward – moving through adversity, for themselves and for their loved ones. No matter how big or small the problem is, no matter your race, religion, political views or anything else that seems to get in the way of people caring for each other – we all have experiences in life that connect us and we all need connection with others. Common threads. We see what we are looking for – so if you’re looking for ways to see that people are bad, different, or separate from yourself – that is what you will see. While our culture and media news cycles make it easy to focus on the negative experience, when people look for the positive they find it. Kindness and Authenticity are your superpower. How will you use yours?
I recently heard a quote in context of navigating change – “A little bit of something is better than nothing at all.” The smallest effort can make a difference in your day and someone else. Be open to community and be yourself, smile at a stranger, engage in a friendly greeting, make eye contact with someone and thank them – you could make someone’s day – including yours!
The garden is growing! As usual, year after year some types of vegetable plants do better than others. This year looks to be a great year for cucumbers, first time ever! I think we finally got the growing location, nutrients, and water cycle just right!
In a moment of zeal, I planted too many cucumber seeds in my second planting so I had to thin the plants. I find the process of thinning plants very challenging. I see every plant as its potential, so when I pull a small plant or seedling I see myself taking all of its future fruit with it. But for two reasons, I don’t need so many plants. First, too many cucumbers can be a problem. I only need so many cucumbers for our eating, preserving, and farmstand sales. Second, growing more than I need isn’t doing the soil any favors. It takes plentiful nutrients to grow these plants. Such as having a overly packed calendar schedule (we have 24 hrs in a day) is too much for the human soul, having too many plants in a small space is hard on the fertility of the soil (it only has the ability to carry and provide so many nutrients).
As I pulled the cucumber plants, I set the seedlings in a pile that would end up in the compost. They slipped easily out of the soil but I saw that they still had excellent root systems started. By the time I was done with my project, I went back to gather the first plants I plucked and noticed these plants were already visibly responding to having been pulled from the soil. They were becoming limp. In otherwords, they were losing the signs of being healthy and full of life.
The soil I pulled the cucumber plants from has many elements of nutrition that the plant needs. I fully pulled the plant from the soil, so I took it from the more important thing it needed, the support of the soil which gives it a sturdy foundation to grow in. If I had left it in the soil, it would still grow but it might not be as healthy if it was lacking certain nutrients from the soil. Also, it would not be as healthy if I added too much of a certain type of nutrient. Cucumbers love potassium in the soil, but if I gave it too much, that could be as detrimental to its growth as too little potassium in the soil.
People are like this too. We have the core thing we’re rooted in. We also have various nutrients we need to feed our souls. And, what we need to grow is different for each human (such as it is for plants too!). If a person is pulled from what they are primarily rooted in, they will begin to wither. Or, if certain nutrients are removed or given too much of, a person will survive, but not thrive in this scenario.
Life in balance is an ongoing personal project for me and is always changing because of my environment. Summertime, for example, has a lot more dosing of my necessary nutrient of community. In summer I get more of that, but adjust elsewhere to make room for it. Just as the cucumbers may find perfect balance, then suddenly there is a cold snap, they may struggle. But, if they are in healthy balance in the first place, the cold snap will be less impactful on them.
What are you rooted in? Family? Community? Faith? Adventure? Learning? Teaching? Nature? Or….what else? Which one is your SOIL? Which ones are your NUTRIENTS?
Peace, Love and Nature,
-L
P.S. If you’ve been on long-time blog reader, you know I absolutely love learning from nature. I enjoy being part of it and I’ve learned that its a major nutrient I need for my soul to grow. Nature teaches me so much. And, in return I love to teach about nature. Last year I held Foraging Adventure for Beginners at White Sky Woods. This year I’m partnering with The Keweenaw Land Trust (KLT) and bringing Foraging Advernture for Beginners to KLT’s Steve Farm Nature Area. We’ll explore, identify, sketch and experience what wild plant foraging the Keweenaw region has to offer. Get all the details here!
It’s my birthday – I’m 45! (Holy crap!) What better time to reflect than a birthday?
Blooming daffodil’s on the homestead.
Every morning we start the day with a family walk, but the other morning I was up early and I decided to go walk out to one of the ponds. I went for this peaceful nature walk ALONE. This is a pretty rare event since I usually have at minimum one two-legged or four-legged family member with me. That morning I enjoyed the quiet and the ability to focus in on what was happening around me, without distraction. It was quite early in the morning and the sun and birds were all waking up. Oh the birds! I sat down, enjoyed the scenery and let my mind relax and wander. A thought that crossed my mind was that if I am lucky to live to the age of 90, I am now at my halfway point. Cue the “over the hill jokes” and terrible gag gifts like a cane with a horn on it, haha! That’s pretty foolish stuff, and I think that this idea of halfway is pretty exciting, not some sort of decline. Regardless of if I’m actually at my halfway point or not, there is so much more in life to experience and so much more to learn about and grow and see change and express joy in.
1980’s Me.
I wanted to write this blog to share a few pieces of wisdom I’ve learned in my first 45. Well, actually most of these conclusions were realized within the last 7 years (although the experiences in the years before are what informed them!). When we moved to White Sky Woods 7 years ago it was like a life reset. A lot of big things happened before these last 7 years that were full of lessons: college, more college, marriage, career, and family, but then we made the intentional shift to a simpler way of life at White Sky Woods and all the adjustments that came along with that life change gave me a wholly new perspective. Maybe you can relate to all or some of these or are recognizing these perspectives in your life now.
Time is limited and I choose how I spend it wisely. I consciously choose to spend time with people that fill my cup (rather than drain it). I consciously choose to spend time doing activites that fill my cup…but not too much because too many good things can turn into a big bad thing (cup overflow!!). And after many years of just plain doing too much, I now also remember that I only have one cup to fill (because afterall, I am just one person). Gosh, what was I thinking all those years?!
Plan for the unexpected. I try to never operate with a schedule so full that an unexpected event will be a tipping point to my time, wellness, or sanity. Or put in another way, every day needs to include some flexibility and downtime, lest I lose my mind and nobody wants that.
Regarding downtime – daily meditation is a life changer. Simply taking 10 minutes every morning to settle into myself and start the day fresh with a routine created the downshift that my busy mind needed. I still get busy mind. Somedays it’s hard to focus on my meditation at all, but I still practice. According to my app I’ve meditated 1,440 days. That’s almost 4 years of keeping up this habit. Through my meditations I develop self-awareness and a connection to others through observation. I find that it increases my intuition which helps me stick to my values and make intentional choices when life hands me options.
Stop giving to everything and everyone else before myself. This was probably the most radical thing I’ve ever done – listening to my own needs and meeting them first. And when I did this a crazy thing happened – I got better at giving to the other people and other things and when I do it is meaningful and energizing rather than depleting.
Being busy is not a status symbol. Plain and simple.
Expect joy and I’ll find it. We cannot control everything that happens in our lives, but we can always control how we respond to it. The way I choose to respond is a reflection of my attitude and a prediction of my experience.
Up to this point, I believe I have been learning to honor myself as a perfectly imperfect being. I still have a long way to go in this, but no matter what length of life I have…I hope to continue to be on a bettering journey – one that makes a difference for me and the people I encounter through my life. If I am lucky enough to have this point be my halflife, I can’t even begin to imagine what will build upon these lessons and what teachings and I experiences I will learn in my next half.
Cheers to many more years of living life to the fullest as is possible in each moment. ♥
The biggest draw for us to be living here and doing the homesteading things that we do is our call to nature. When we established White Sky Woods Homestead (moved in 2017, purchased in 2009), we knew we’d be living a more self-sufficent life growing our own food and living with a more flexible schedule. When we were planning our future back in 2009, a big motivator of what land we were looking at was about access to nature. We could have purchased something smaller sized that could perfectly fit the homestead needs of animals and gardens but we also realized we were seeking the ability to access nature on a larger scale. We used to have to drive to places to go for a hike and we wanted to be able to skip the drive so that nature would be right outside our door. When our kids were born and we became a family, we knew we had made the right choice – with White Sky Woods we had a place where they (and us adults too!) can have nature as their playground.
While we have nature at our fingertips here, we still love a road trip – seeking new experiences we can’t have at home. Our first road trip after moving to the homestead was in 2017. Being drawn to the natural experience of seeing an eclipse in totality – we drove to Wyoming to view it. We had never seen an eclipse in totality before (it hadn’t happened in our lifetime in the continental United States) and after seeing the 2017 eclipse in totality we knew we had to make plans for the next chance we could get which would be the 2024 eclipse. If you’ve experienced a solar eclipse in totality, you know that the experience of a false twilight in the middle of the day cannot be beat – seeing a partial is neat but not even closely comparable. In the path of totality you not only see the full eclipse, but you get an experience that can be felt to the bones. Temps drop, light disappears, birds go quiet, night sounds rise up….it’s so incredible and eerie. For anyone, even someone not closely connected to nature, I think the experience can be profound.
A year and a half ago as the solar eclipse hype started I knew I needed to get a trip planned before our options narrowed due to the popularity of traveling to see it. We settled on a trip to Canada and found a cottage on the north side of Lake Erie, facing south with an open view and in the path of totality. The only thing we had to do was get there and have good weather. Guaranteed good weather…..well, that’s a crapshoot, especially in springtime! We prepared ourselves that we may not see the eclipse. We spent a week in Ottawa to make the trip about more than just the eclipse immersing ourselves in all things Canadian (what a great time we had in that parlimentary city!) and then we headed to the Niagara Peninsula (of Canada) for the eclipse. While there was nothing flexible about the eclipse itself (it was universally determined – date, time, location), our experience with it was going to depend on a lot of factors including how the weather shaped up. The forecast kept changing: terrible, great, something in-between. We knew we had to remain flexible and make the best of whatever nature offered up to us.
Well, we got something in-between which added both suspense and awe to our total eclipse experience. We saw the eclipse and it was completely different from 2017, but equally as awe-inspiring!
In August of 2017 – Clear skies, Wyoming (USA) wilderness, heard the birds go quiet, temp dropped significantly, totality of just over 2 minutes, went pitchblack and the stars came out.
In April of 2024 – Mostly cloudy skies, Niagara Peninsula/Lake Erie (Canada), didn’t notice the birds due to Lake Erie sounds, temp dropped but not significantly, totality close to 4 minutes, didn’t go completely dark rather looked like a “sunset” over the vastness of Lake Erie, no stars due to clouds.
Another difference between the two was how our kids experienced it. They were with us during the 2017 eclipse but they don’t remember the event because they were too young. Watching them experience it this year made my soul smile. They thought it was awesome! When it went dark – their response was so honest and full of wonder. Later Woodland said that he would describe the experience as “incrazing”….which he says is a mash up of incredible and amazing. I thought so too kiddo!
Our entire experience of the eclipse in 2024 was a great reminder that while having a plan is great, we need to remain flexible and make the best of whatever comes. There is nothing we can do about the weather so allowing it to control our mood or ruin our plans is pointless. This experience with flexibility is useful in so many aspects of life.
Now, heavy traffic not controlling my mood……talk to me about that another time, ha! I shouldn’t complain though, the only trouble we had was going through Toronto and it was barely any delay on the trip.
Usually we’d have our seeds started indoors by late March and our spring sowing started in the high tunnel by mid-March. Since the eclipse planned it’s visit on April 8th, we got a late start on planting and starting seeds, but everything seems to be coming along well.
I find nature to be awe-inspiring. From a small mason bee to the total eclipse. A blue-flag iris growing in the ditch to an Aurora filling the sky with color and movement. I like to connect to all of it and remember that I’m a wee little part of this incredible universe. What part(s) of nature do you connect to most? Rocks/minerals? Plants? Animals? Sky? Water? Or…..?
-L
P.S. Seeking a summer or fall season connection with nature? As of publishing this post we have just a few more weeks of 2024 availability at the Cabin at White Sky Woods – 2 weeks in May, 1 week in June and 1 week in September, along with a few days in October. Week long stays (7 nights) receive a 10% discount! Otherwise, there is a 3-night minimum. We hope to host you!
Well, just like that another year has just about breezed by. Winter Solstice is right around the corner and thank goodness – I’m already begging for more daylight! It’s a very busy time of year for many people, but for our family winter signifies rest. In winter we spend the majority of our time with our most valued things – without the distraction of a busy schedule! For us that is family, friends, education, and wellness. We participate in these things all year, but there are more things going on in summer that pull us all different directions and sometimes we can find ourselves a bit too full and distracted away from what matters. Thanks to a tradition we created 3 years ago, we’re rolling into this winter feeling well, relaxed, and open to that which really matters.
Have you heard of high school students who graduate and take a gap year before starting college? A gap year gives these young people time to rest, rejuvenate, focus on health and wellness and oftentimes traveling and experiencing new opportunities is part of this. It’s about growth and positive change to prepare for the next phase of life.
I love this idea of a gap year. How about a gap month? Or even a gap week? A few years I discovered how I could implement a sort of gap into my own life, for our whole family. An area I needed the gap the most was at the end of growing season. Growing season is hectic for any homesteader. The growing, the weeding, the harvesting, the putting up of food, the cleaning up of the garden and in the meantime, other summer projects and projects we need to complete each year before winter. In the far north here we have less season to do things in good weather, such as preparing the woodpile for winter and any other outdoor projects. Any extra days at the end of the growing season that we can work outside, we will. It often feels a like a race to wrap everything up for winter and it happens after our busy season when we are most tired. It used to be stressful, but we’re finding ways to minimize the load so that we aren’t in an end of season frenzy (which in the first years was mostly due to being new at homesteading and also making choices that left us having more responsibility than we could balance in our schedules).
It’s especially hard to turn the busy off when you work where you live and you can find work and projects everywhere you look. There isn’t a switch to turn off busy. Or is there? Several years ago we planned a week long getaway not too far from home to take place after growing season. I clearly remember feeling stressed about the deadline for the work to be done. But really, the work is never done on a homestead, so choices need to be made – insert the gap. We left the homestead, took a week away, and when we came back it was like having a complete reset. Removing ourselves from the homestead for a brief time was enough to distract from that “work is never over and therefore I will overwork” unhealthy mindset and behavior. We had time to decompress, experience new things, and be a little out of our element – and wouldn’t you know, it was invigorating and liberating! We came back reset and ready to work, but also approaching homestead life in a new slower going perspective. We fed our souls in this gap. Homesteading does this for us too, but like anything, too much of a good thing can turn unpleasant because it becomes too much.
After that first trip, it was very obvious to me that I needed to build in a gap. The gap helped me reset so that I could find balance and so that I could honor myself, my family, and the rest we need to thrive. And not just the reset from that one week, but enough of a reset that due to the first gap go around I began to learn the importance of rest during all seasons.
My end of growing season gap now extends beyond a week. With purposeful choices I spent nearly a month reseting. Seeing friends, going new places, finding more time for books and making a nest for myself on the couch. I’m learning that I do best when I dabble in microgaps every day – no matter the season. I’m on my third year of end of gardening season gap and it had been so impactful in my choices in how to experience life that at the end of gardening season I’m not feeling chaotic, stressed, and overwhelmed (don’t get me wrong, this isn’t fully eliminated, some is always inevitable). I prepare for the gap feeling excited for the upcoming time (rather than stressed out about being prepared for it). It’s a little dangling carrot that I look forward to and it brings me joy thinking about it (and even more joy being in the gap).
Gap recommendations: hike a new local place each day, clear out your book stash and deliver them to little free libraries near you (permission to grab a few good books if you see them), take a vacation – it doesn’t need to be far!, meet up with a friend you haven’t seen in a while, spend a week preparing new, unique foods from different cultures, pick a topic to learn something new about and create a cozy space to do your learning. Remember – the gap isn’t about making a project out of something (we don’t need more projects!), it’s about FEEDING YOUR SOUL and giving yourself a RESET.
This year’s gap for me included a visit to new places, reading “breezy” books (you know, the kind that don’t make you think too hard), playing games at the kitchen table with my family, taking longer walks for health, and meeting up with friends I haven’t seen in a while. My heart feels full and my soul rested. I am a better version of myself because of it. A few highlights in the photos below. You’ll see that for me my gap is very nature oriented (Vitamin N – Nature, provides its own dose of soul wellness!).
Is there a time of year you need a gap? What drives your need to have a reset (and could you make any small changes to ease up on this)? What will you do you in your gap (message me, I’d love to hear!)? A gap doesn’t need to be extreme (does anything?!), it just needs to be time doing something different and something that brings joy.
Solstice is just a few days away meaning the longest night is just ahead of us – the darkness in this season is a reminder that there is always light ahead.
Have you seen a young tree growing amongst a dense area of trees? It has a long thin trunk and sparse branches. It needs light to survive so it’s doing absolutely everything it can to get upward to the light, giving very little energy to trunk girth or expansive branches that produce leaves for photosynthesis.
A tree inherently knows its greatest potential is when it can reach the open canopy in the sun, giving it access to the food and energy it needs to survive. But in a dense growing space, what it takes to get there results in it being scrawny and susceptible. It gave up everything for that light, most importantly the thick, strong and sturdy trunk.
If you see a young tree starting out like this and you clear away the older neighboring trees, you’ve now given this tree an opportunity to grow to its fullest potential. Instead of sending all its growth energy upward, it will put effort into a thicker, more stable truck. It will branch out into its TRUE form. I will likely live longer and it will FLOURISH in the time that it is alive.
If you’ve been a reader for a while, you know I’m head over heels for symbolism and specifically, I am enamored with nature and what it has to teach me. Living at White Sky Woods Homestead and immersing myself into the garden and wild spaces has raised my personal intuition and gifted me a lot of personal growth. (Read my past ramblings about learning from nature here).
Over the past years I’ve been learning about letting go to grow. This year I turned it into a mantra – give space and give grace. Through life I was conditioned to believe that the more I did (to prove something, to make money, to be successful, to be engaged, to get an A, and on and on) the more I would grow. We made the intentional move to White Sky Woods to jump off the hamster wheel and live a more simple life focusing on family, community, and supporting ourselves through growing our own food and reducing stress through debt-free living. Well, we did that, but there was still one hitch for me. That darn conditioning that told me that success looked a certain way and that in order to grow I had to have an agenda and push it. And, before I knew it I was jumping back into the hamster wheel. It looked different than the one before. Instead of the hamster wheel being my career, my education, my extracurriculars, my goals, my <fill in the blank> it became an unending list of excessive planting, harvesting, and food production, heavily scheduled activities for the kids, tackling every project that needed doing in a unnecessarily limited period of time, going places, doing things for other people, and more <fill in the blank>. I hopped right back in that hamster wheel…and it was a squeaky one!
It. Was. Detrimental.
Something had to change. I didn’t lay out a plan or set any crazy agenda to it. In fact, I did the opposite. I surrendered the agenda. I trusted myself. I knew that in a lifetime of building my dependable character I would not “fail” myself. I already had the proof I needed. Like that aforementioned tree in the forest seeking light, I thought I was growing, seeking exacty what I needed. But these behaviors left me in a less than ideal state of wellness. It was time to clear the trees around me. It was time to surrender my agenda. Not to make a plan to surrender my agenda, rather just surrender. Let go. Trust myself.
When we surrender the agenda and trust ourselves, it is actually an act of allowing. Allowing ourselves permission to be and to flow. All this control we assert into our lives (via lists, impossible personal expectations, over scheduling) impedes our true nature. When we surrender our agenda, we now leave an opening to see what comes into view. When I surrendered my agenda I was fearful I would be lazy and not get the things I needed to done – but somehow everything I needed to do still happened. And it got done without anxiety, stress, and negative feelings. Surprisingly, even more got done! I found myself finding more time for creative expression, meaningful conversations with friends and family (because I could actually be present rather than agenda focused), and filling in space with things that feed my soul, which in turn gave me the fuel to live a full life – but full in a non-agenda way. There is no list to cross things off of.
I am becoming the tree in its true form (I don’t use the word “became” because I believe it’s an ongoing journey). I have cleared the space to create the most abundant life, and that creation took very little effort from me because once the space was cleared, I started growing just the way I should in my environment, just like the tree. What a liberating feeling to release my own contrived (well-intentioned but detrimental) agenda from my life. To release the agenda I thought was benefiting me, but what was actually holding me back. To just allow.
For all you perfectionist, goal-setting, driven to succeed people out there that think this blog is silly-business….I am one of you (still!). Letting go is possible. It doesn’t need a plan or a chart or anything…..those are completely counterintuitive to surrendering the agenda. If there was a step-by-step process to this, I am definitely the type of person who would have written it down because I love process (nerd). But I believe there is only one step to this – GIVE YOURSELF PERMISSION. It all opens up from there, in the way it is meant to be and on the timeline it should. Assert nothing. Be Patient. Observe. Allow.
If you clear space, how will you (the tree) flourish? What’s just one thing you think may come your way when you surrender your agenda? Creativity? Forgiveness? Contemplation? Progress? Rest? I would love to hear! If you have cleared space – what happened? Tell me!
-L
P.S. Several years back a friend shared this poem with me – She Let Go, by Safire Rose. I read and listened to the poem many times and it began to take new meaning overtime. First, seeming completely unattainable – or even false and impossible. Now, it is fully relateable. It is a great partner to my blog post here, I encourage you to check it out!
Old homesteads have junk. Here in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and I imagine most other places too. It’s just a fact that comes with places that existed before routine garbage pick up and/or living rural. 80+ year old car frame? We have that! Barbed wire in the most unsuspecting places. Got that too. Piles of empty wine bottles stashed in the woods? Of course we have that. (It’s rumored a very long ago former resident was quite the wino.) Some cool things too, like old horse drawn farming implements of all kinds (and even many of the same kind). When you purchase an old homestead, most likely you also purchased a lot of junk. The next step after purchase should be getting a tetanus shot.
Slowly we’ve been doing clean up here and there, but there has been a lingering project. The Shed. We originally planned to raze the collapsed structure prior to opening the vacation rental cabin, but time didn’t allow. We cleaned up around it an went on our merry way. But it remained on the list of things to do. We needed to wait until good weather and when we had enough time at the cabin with no guests so we could work in that area without impacting someone’s restful stay. Also, in honesty, we also experienced some procrastination due to project dread.
Well, the opportunity presented itself. We had a guest cancellation and we decided to block off the calendar to just get it done. Of course it happened to be 4th of July extended weekend and it happened to be really hot.
I’m not going to sugar coat it, The Shed project sucked. Hot weather, sweltering sun with no shade, battling allergies, mosquitoes, black flies (OMG the black flies!!), sweat in the eyes, moving metal, garbage, wood and avoiding endless rusty nails – it was pretty much the worst project we have ever done. Even mentally it was challenging because I couldn’t help but thinking about how I ended up responsible for cleaning up someone else’s junk. It’s like always getting stuck doing your co-workers dishes in the kitchen at the office, x10,000. We found some interesting things in the shed but since the shed’s roof collapsed at least 20 years ago, we mostly found rusty useless things. And, a bucket of tar with a lot of live yellow jackets inside.
But, while it was a multi day, physically and mentally challenging project, I’m so proud of our family. We did it together and we all did it to the best of our abilities. And, the upside of the whole project…it’s done!
All said and done we hauled out over 2 TONS of garbage! Several trailer loads of scrap and several trailer loads of garbage. While working on the project, it really had me thinking about our own footprint on the land. Are we holding onto things that will be someone else’s problem in the future? Or maybe more proactively, do we have things we don’t need or don’t use and could do without in the first place? Also, clean up your own mess so someone else doesn’t have to!!! (Apologies…having a Mom Moment here.)
Here’s our before and after photos.
BEFORE. Note aspen tree growing up through the center, about to be set free.….and AFTER! We will be collecting wildflower seeds through summer to spread here, but in the meantime we cut down brambles that were growing next to the shed and we spread them over the exposed ground to cover it.
Here’s a little photo gallery:
Side of shed. Back of shed with additional remains of another collapsed structure.Shed made of all scrap materials, mostly sheet metal and doors.Tree growing up through the center.Back of shed before.Back of shed after.Initials carved on board. B.I.C.(??) 4/12/25.First detach this, then detach that. There were a lot of nails holding the materials together.View from the scrap pile, including the deep freezer next to the decaying dry wall.What remained after 2 loads to the dump and 1 load to the scrap metal place.
Even with all the efforts of The Shed project, The Fourth of July weekend wasn’t all work. We had an amazing community event on the 4th, our annual parade (it was actually 2 minutes long this year!…that’s double last year) and our social gathering and potluck. What a gem of a community we live in. Small, welcoming and wonderful…much unlike The Shed (ha!).
I’m dropping a quick blog here to share about an event I’m hosting this July! Since 2019 I’ve been offering private foraging tours at White Sky Woods Homestead. I even had the opportunity to be highlighted on the show 906 Outdoors! I have met great people along the way and seen the spark that lights up in their eyes when they learn about and are able to identify local plants that we explore during the tours. I’ve added an element – sketching – to create a new workshop calledForaging Adventure for Beginners.
As a teacher and leaning heavily on visual learning myself, I have learned that reading about plants is one way to expand my knowledge, but when I read, seek out the plant, and then draw my observations, the sketching acts as a seal to my knowledge! Am I a drawing artist? Nope. Do I have any special experience sketching? Nah. Is sketching creative, fun, and helpful to the learning process? YES!
I absolutely love foraging so I’ve designed, written and published “Foraging Adventures Journal and Guide” for beginners who want to learn about foraging (with a focus on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan). All participants will receive this book and start using it during the workshop. Leave your worries behind because absolutely NO artisic experience is needed to participate or create your own plant sketches – we’ll talk about tips for sketching and practice while out in the field.
Do you see any plants to forage in this photo? After the workshop you’ll easily be able to identify them!
During this workshop experience participants will:
learn about foraging ethics and safety
learn how to accurately recognize 15 (or more) of the most common plants to forage around the Keweenaw and Upper Peninsula and what their uses are
use the art of sketching to get to know the plants they forage
forage their own plants to take home to make their own herbal tea
receive “Foraging Adventures – Journal and Guide” booklet
The tour will end with herbal tea time, light snacks and group discussion.
Pre-registration is required and a limited number spots will be available. This limited number allows us to have a small group for maximized individual experience. The cost is $65 per participant. The workshop is being offered one time this year – July 15, 2023.
P.S. If you live out of the local area, I have two nights (7/15 & 7/16) available to rent at our vacation rental cabin, which is right here at White Sky Woods. I’ve blocked off the dates (they will look to be unavailable on our booking calendar), so contact me directly for assitance in making the booking through the platform.
It’s been a while since I’ve written. Before homesteading, in my career part of my role was creating and directing digital content plans for clients. But, for my own blog I vowed I would only write when the feeling and idea grabbed me. Yeah, I know, if I published more content I could improve my website SEO, blah blah blah. But that’s not what life is about for me anymore. I’m a-okay with a quality over quantity approach (doesn’t this apply to so many things?!). Plus, writing is often a means of me generating ideas and understanding myself. I’m glad to have people who happen to be reading during this process – so, I’m very grateful for YOU.
Let’s just get honest about why I haven’t written for months – this winter has been hard. Not the physical hard (especially since it has been a more mild snow total this winter), but the crummy winter mental wellness kind of hard. It makes me a bit uncomfortable writing that here, but I know by sharing this I’m doing a little part in stopping the stigma of talking about mental health. I wouldn’t try to hide a broken arm, so why should I try to hide the fact that this winter seasonal depression really grabbed ahold of me? Especially since I know when I talk about it, many people share that they have experienced the same. Being a homesteader, we definitely see winter as a time for rest, which is essential. This winter I rested a lot, which actually supported the healing my physical body needed (woot!). But, there were some added pressures in the home starting this January, and by early February I could feel that my mind was just not functioning wholly.
Here on the Keweenaw our winter solstice (shortest daylight time of the year) is approximately 8 1/2 hours of daylight. Compare that to our summer solstice with 16 hours of daylight…yup, winter is long and dark and drastically different than our summer. Being aware of this I have been doing everything I usually do to help with our extra long winters here: Vitamin D supplements, continued daily meditation, daily indoor and outdoor exercise, drinking lot of water, long vacation in sunny places, short getaways with friends, and using my special “happy lamp” during the dark mornings. It is a fairly comprehensive list, so why have I been feeling the effects of seasonal depression more this winter? I have no idea. The good news is I have slowly been sensing it escaping me as the days get longer, but it’s still here, just presenting in a more mild way. I’m glad to be out of the days where I could just sleep forever, or when I couldn’t even find the focus to read a good book, watch a program or scroll a feed. If you’ve made acquaintances with depression, you know, depression typically isn’t just a feeling, it affects how you function to the core of your being.
Today though, with the late winter temps warming, we had a winter project that still needed to be done – clearing trees that have fallen into our ponds. From this winter and the past few years, trees at the edge of the pond have taken the tumble. Getting out on the water to remove them is only possible when the pond is frozen. This is our first winter with our Taiga Dog machine, which is an all-season utility machine for us. In winter Tim uses it for grooming our private 3-mile trail system for family and our vacation rental guests, and for times like this when we need to haul heavy materials (such as chainsaw, timber, etc.) back and forth around White Sky Woods. We have 240 acres so this machine is a great asset to us!
Taiga Dog parked on the center of the Amikwag Pond.
If you are familiar with this machine, the operator stands behind the machine in the sled. The materials being hauled (including me today), ride in the additional sled. It goes over deep snow and can be used in all seasons on all types of terrain. We haven’t had it for quite a year, but it has been so handy! Check out this short video to see.
For the project we had two ponds to visit, one with light work and the other with heavier work. Tim took care of the first downed tree on his own. It was a tall, skinny, lightweight fir tree. It just needed to be cut up and pulled aside to be off the pond and out of view from our favorite sunset spot. The animals will have a chance to finish browsing it and then it will eventually turn back to the land. Then, we headed back to the second pond. This was going to be a bigger project. The tree has been downed for several years and was a very tall and wide cedar. Tim chain-sawed, I hauled branches and large pieces of the trunk off the frozen pond onto land, stacking what we can use to split for kindling (cedar is so good at this) and the rest was laid aside to eventually decompose back to the land.
Short of shoveling, snowblowing, and hauling wood into the yurt, my outside work this winter has been limited. As we were working, I felt my senses light up. Stewarding the land is a big part of our homestead experience, and it was so very nice to be doing just that and best, as a team. The sun was shining, the temp was rising into the 30’s and when the chainsaw wasn’t running, it was completely soundless except for a few chickadees (whose song seems to be switching to “Hey Sweetie” – spring must be near!).
While I am normally out on the trails for a snowshoe, having a specific purpose to today’s outdoor time sparked me. I work outdoors all summer long and then in winter my projects generally turn to inside work. Working in the woods, in the snow, and by the water – it just lit me up inside. Also, this particular location at White Sky Woods feels to me to be a space for healing. The land is recovering here, where it was quarried for sandstone 120 years ago. Today, I feel I “recovered” a touch more. I just needed that internal flame for purpose in the outdoors to be fanned.
The project even provided me with a limb shaped like my initial – “L”. Hadn’t seen that before!
What’s left for this winter and in the upcoming winters, this will need to be a coping method I add to my “go happily through the long winter” list.
What are some things you do to help stay well in the winter months? Please share, I would love to hear from you.
Wishing you peace, love and nature,
-L
Because this post includes the topic of mental wellness, I feel compelled to share this resource. If you don’t know who to talk to and are having a mental health crisis, dial 988 or visit Suicide and Crisis Hotline. Your life matters. ❤️
whiteskywoods.com 