YOU Can Make A Difference!

From the minute we were engaged, and dreaming about our future together, Jacob and I talked about a little farmhouse on some land. A big garden, a few chickens, and lots of barefoot kids running around, exploring, digging up worms, and eating raspberries off the canes.

This was the dream.

The part about lots of barefoot kids came pretty easily, but the farmhouse and the land turned out to be a little trickier to come by. Finally, after 15 years, we found the perfect little spot. A 100 year old house on 3 acres.

We were ecstatic!

It turns out that when you are desperate to fulfill a long-awaited dream, you are likely to forget to stop and think before charging ahead full speed. After we bought the house, we realized that we just might be in over our heads.

There was A LOT of land, that was for sure. We were excited to plant trees and grass and the gigantic garden that we had dreamed of for so many years. We quickly learned however, that it takes a lot of time and money to tame all that unruly land...Much more than an busy scientist and a pregnant mom of 5 had to give.

We were quickly overwhelmed, but what was there to do but try.

We borrowed a tiller from a friend, and plowed up an ambitiously large, (too ambitious, we soon learned), plot of land for a garden. We had been waiting years for this garden, and we got a little crazy with the seed catalog. We planted peas, carrots, beets, pumpkins, corn, zucchini, tomatoes, cucumbers, spinach, and sunflowers.



















In no time, with the help of Colorado's seasonal monsoon rainstorms, the garden took off. Everything was growing like weeds, especially the weeds.

Jacob and I spent hours almost every day in the garden, working furiously just to keep the weeds down. We pulled and pulled and hoed and hoed until our hands blistered, and still, we couldn't keep the weeds at bay. The garden was just too big, and the weeds were just too pervasive. There was no possible way to win this battle. The weeds in one part of the garden grew 5 feet tall! We would weed the spinach one day, and the next day when we came out to weed the tomatoes, the spinach needed weeding again.

It felt hopeless.

We didn't quit. We kept weeding and tending our garden, because we knew that if we stopped, the weeds would take over completely.

Some days I felt like I was barely making a difference. But I WAS making a difference, and I was being changed in the process too! All that time outside, working in the sunshine and fresh air, made me stronger, happier, more at peace, and my whole family was benefiting from the homegrown produce.

That was a really long story about gardening for a post that has nothing to do with gardening, but is instead about staying hopeful when things look overwhelmingly grim, about giving all you've got to make things better, even when all you've got doesn't seem like very much, about realizing that one person, doing their part, does make a difference.

Mahatma Ghandi wisely counseled,

It's the action, not the fruit of the action, that's important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there'll be any fruit. But that doesn't mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.”  

Do something. Keep loving and accepting and helping in the best way YOU can. Don't lose hope. Every thoughtful, conscientious, little thing you do makes a big difference.

Ghandi knew what he was talking about,

“In a gentle way, you can shake the world."

Today's a new day; let's make it purposeful!
Kara