Jessica and Justin

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Van, TX, United States
I am a farmer and a doula. My husband and I are recently planted into the soil of East Texas. Together we seek, we learn, we dance, we sing, and we grow vegetables, and I attend births. This blog is the ongoing story of our farming and birthing journey.

Friday, July 18, 2008

New and exciting

My computer died (sad). I am writing this post on my very own new mac book (happy), financed through my dad (yikes). I am now a very cool and hip kid.

I don't think I can explain to you all that which is glorious and beautiful in my life in such a way as to have you feel it and understand. Ellie, my roommate wrote a pretty nice little bit on all this goodness on her blog. You can read that.

Let me see what I can do for you: It is at times nearly incomprehensible, these countless things which are making my life so overwhelmingly good. For one who has longed for life in community seeking sustainability, pursuing environmental and social responsibility, things such as the worm compost bin we made yesterday, the day of work spent together transforming the front yard into a garden, the vegetable lasagna and fried bananas we ate with our guests, and the humane and chemical free roach traps we've set up around the house do more than just provide me with a smile, they instill in me the proof that life, as I've always wanted it, is really and truly possible- and is happening now.
I can't stop talking about these people, this place.

As Ellie said, someday I will tell my children about the time in my twenties when I lived with boys and we grew as much of our food as we could and we mended and re-mended our clothes. How while TJ built tables on the back porch and Ellie read the Russians, Kris played his guitar along side my clumsy piano renditions of Ben Kweller, Cat Power, and Damien Rice. Or how while Kris made jelly from hand-picked grapes, and I baked a blueberry cobbler, Ellie and TJ were creating something beautiful, in prose or song and maybe getting the clothes off the line

I see all of these things as ways in which the Good Kingdom is revealing its presence in the world, or at least on the 27 block of Fort Ave...which is precisely the kind of place that the King would likely move and work: small, a little obscure, oftentimes odd, but deep and rich in the lives of us four (so far).
It's like this: the beauty I'm living is like finding out more of a secret gradually being revealed, that has always been revealing itself, very slowly, and with perfect timing. And here in this place with these brothers and sisters, the loveliness and joy of the Secret, the implications and applications of this revealing Secret, is becoming less and less vague. On the 27 block of Fort.


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