Listening to Myself

Thursday, February 24, 2005

About that job and other things

So that job I was thinking about (and mentioned in this post) - I decided not to do it. Things were very much up in the air, and there was no confirmation that I would get it or even when it would start... but still, I decided to take myself out of the running. After I had made my decision, and before I told anyone, I came across this quote which I found particularly relevant. This is from an essay written by Real Live Preacher (aka Gordon Atkinson) called Mountaintop Searching. He speaks about what he feels when he is in the mountains, and this is a part that I felt particularly hit home.

And I often feel a strong desire to speak out loud to the Great Intelligence I sense is behind the universe. So I pray, and my prayers sound something like this:

Thank you for my life, for the gift and the responsibility of it, both for the good and the bad of it, for the joy and even the pain of it. Thank you for not being fair. Fair is entirely too predictable and human a thing for the likes of you. Thank you for trusting us to fill in the details. Thank you for the freedom, especially since you understand more than anyone the great evil that often comes from it.

I’m sorry for wasting so much time and life. I’m sorry for what I should have seen but did not see. I’m sorry for giving so much of myself to any Tom, Dick or Harry who offered me a paycheck and a little security.


I think by going down this path, I would be committing the grievous error that Atkinson speaks of in the last part of this quote, and I would regret it. I think I can even venture to say that I know I would regret it.

So, what now? Matt and I have been talking a lot (all the way up and back from Tahoe - which if you know Matt really says something!), and we're starting to think that option one is sounding better and better. We recently received the latest issue of Mother Earth News, and the cover article reawakened Matt's desire for a log home. I'm not so sure that I like them though - to me they seem heavy, dark, and perhaps even a little oppressive. I also really don't like the floorplans we're seeing - all these homes are HUGE! They seem to be substituting room size for design ingenuity. I was looking a little at other options, and I came across the Glidehouse, which I promptly became enamored with (especially this floorplan - it would be perfect for us!). So, yeah, Modernist prefab is a completely different style (although there are some parallels in function, general construction, and impact) from log building, and I'm not sure what we're going to do about that. But we still need to figure out if we really want to do this, where we want to do this, how much money we think we can scare up, etc. etc. etc. and all of these things will also heavily influence our end result.

So, right now we're brainstorming about mountain communities with a strong homeschooling presence in California. Anyone have any suggestions or thoughts on how to do this kind of research?

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