As spring has emerged, it has been a delight to watch leaf after leaf poke up from the ground and begin to grow. Day by day, I can see changes as my perennials have doubled in size, and it is sheer joy to see plants that I tended faithfully last summer grow with even greater vigor this year, spreading out and sending up new shoots! My one lupine seedling that survived the summer heat is now a huge plant, and I can’t wait to see what the flowers are like when it blooms this year!
But what would happen if, instead of delighting in my own garden, I compare what I have to my neighbor’s? What if, instead of seeing the beauty in what I’ve successfully grown, I resent what my neighbor can grow that I cannot, or what she has spent years cultivating that I only planted last year? Do this for long enough or with great enough intensity, and your own garden with all its beauty and its potential, will wilt and die.
Isn’t life like that? What we have at any given time is usually what we’ve cultivated over the last months or years of our lives. Sometimes what we try to cultivate just doesn’t grow, or it doesn’t flourish and we finally realize it’s time to uproot that thing and put our efforts elsewhere. Then, sometimes, we look at our neighbor and the life she is living and we imagine that our life should look just like that. We’re angry that it doesn’t and we begin to resent her. But the crazy thing is, so often what she has that we are resenting isn’t even what we tried to grow, if we’re honest with ourselves! I’m sure all of us have been there.
Jealousy kills. It’s like spraying herbicide onto your neighbor’s garden out of spite, and killing your own garden with the drift instead. We need to learn to rejoice in the life that we’ve been given, the garden that God is allowing us to cultivate. Quit staring at your neighbor’s garden, quit envying what she has that you don’t have. Quit comparing, and quit telling yourself that you deserve her life. God has given you a beautiful life!
Tend your own garden. And find joy in the beauty that’s there.
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I knew I was getting close to (or had passed) my eight year anniversary writing this little blog, and I’ve been wanting to write a little something to that effect, and in gratitude for the people who read my blog. Some of you have been following along for years, and that means a lot to me. So to satisfy my curiosity I went back in my archives and, what do you know, eight years ago today I published my first post!
As I look back at some of my early blog content, a lot of things bounce around inside my head. One, what in the world was I doing with that camera? There are a few good pictures, mostly by accident. But more importantly I’m reminded of the excitement and difficulty of moving to South Dakota, of moving into an 800 square foot cabin with my parents and two of my three sisters, of sharing a bedroom with siblings as an adult, of starting over as an adult, beginning a new life in a new place and of learning to trust God with all the outcomes.
I look back and see so much change. I see struggles and losses and failures and dreams that were made and broken. I see so much growth – personal, emotional, relational, and spiritual. Yet I see at the same time I see so much sameness, heart longings that made no sense at the time, common threads woven through my entire life that speak to God’s love and His authorship of even our hopes and dreams.
I see seeds of desires that God has satisfied, one way or another, in His own time. I look at the beauty I was trying to capture with my camera, the things that tugged at my heart strings, and it amazes me to think that I am so wonderfully immersed in those things my heart was just starting to love. I look back at my early attempts at gardening, my love of the beauty of the Hills and the beauty of the agricultural lifestyle, and I see seeds for where God finally planted me. And then I look back further. When I was 10 or so, I had a memory book that had questions and space for written answers. One of the questions was “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I answered, “I want to live in South Dakota and have horses.” Little did my 10-year-old self know that it would take 15 years to get to South Dakota, but that I would in fact get here! And little did I know in 2015 when I was working for the rancher who runs cows on my family’s place, and falling in love with the work and the outdoors and the dirt and the sweat and the smell of horses and cows, that eight years later I would be the wife of a rancher and a neighbor to the rancher I had worked for. Funny how life works. Correction, funny how God works. Sometimes those heart longings that make no sense are God’s way of foreshadowing the work He’s doing.
I look back on my early blogging and see an at times very lonely 20-something single gal, with desires that could only be satisfied by God in His own timing, doing her best to thrive where she was, growing in her trust of God, knowing that God is a loving God Who knows our needs and even cares about our heart desires, clinging to some of those hopes and dreams that honestly seemed hopeless, dreams of marriage and a little home in the Hills and a garden and maybe a couple of chickens.
It’s like a garden. The first year you plant perennials, some do well, some don’t. Some die off over winter, others come back pretty hardily. There is growth in those first few years, and then they just take off and there is no stopping them. That’s the impression I have of my life, looking back on the 8 years since starting this blog, and the 8 years, 1 month, and 21 days since moving here. I see seeds planted that were slow to take off. Some did well but were pruned out eventually. Other just died off, and that’s fine. Others were slow to get started and have just exploded.
Life has overflowed. I came here with my books and my family and a college degree, and that was about it. I had no friends here, no community, a jumbled mess of recently-rediscovered dreams and disappointed hopes, and I hoped I would find somewhere I belonged. God has given me so much. He has brought struggle and loneliness and has allowed pain, and has been faithful through it. He has given me a life I love with a husband I adore, work to do with a new family that feels like blood family in a community that warms my heart and brings so much meaning to life. He has brought into my life all the spice and savor and sweetness I had dreamed of, and then more.
So I’m just sitting here thanking God for eight years in South Dakota, and eight years of this blog, and for those of you who read this blog and let me know when it touches your hearts. I’m thankful for growth. I’m thankful for change and sameness. I’m thankful for dreams and answers to prayer. I’m just thankful.
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It is everywhere! Mud, absolutely everywhere, on everything, tracked into the house and well beyond the mud room, caked on boots, worked into the denim of jeans and crumbling from the legs of the pants. I’m scrubbing it from the floor, washing away those telltale paw prints from one of the pups who busted through the mud room gate or got overzealous when we headed inside.
I’m sweeping up piles and piles of it, combing it from puppy fur, and washing it from my face, from that one cow who turned suddenly and splashed me – twice – in the corrals, flinging it on me head to toe. And that’s special mud, corral mud. It flings up from the tires of the four wheeler, snow and mud spraying up and all over everyone. Coveralls are stiff with it. Floorboards are caked with it. It’s everywhere. Eventually you just have to accept it.
And it’s glorious.
Mud is a promise.
A promise that springtime is coming, the thaw really is happening. Winter is coming to an end.
A promise of moisture. Life-giving. Sustaining.
It’s hope.
Hope for a good year.
Hope for grass, for healthy livestock.
It is an answer to prayer.
Oh, how we have prayed for relief to this parched land. How we’ve prayed for water to fill the dams. For respite from the drought. Without water, there is no mud. And there is mud. Plenty of it. So there is water.
It’s a reminder.
God’s answers to prayers don’t always come all nice and tidy and recognizable. In fact, usually they don’t. Sometimes they’re mud-caked and messy. Sometimes answers to prayer come paired with reminders of our own fickleness, wanting something but grudgingly trying to tell God that the manner of gifting was wrong. “Sure, that’s what I prayed for, but what I meant was….”
So I’m thankful for the mud. For warmth and thaw. For wet and running water trickling down all the trails, pooling in the most inconvenient places. I’m thankful for springtime. For life. For mud-covered blessings.
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It starts with the simplest of requests, made as we drink coffee and eat breakfast. “Do you have time to help me vaccinate calves in the hayfield?” Well, of course I do.
The exercise is simple. Nothing to it, really. We approach the agreeable new mama in a friendly manner and explain our task. We quietly lay the calf on its side and vaccinate it and give it an ear tag while the mother cow patiently chews her cud and looks on pleasantly, thankful that we are so diligent about the health of her calf.
Oh, please.
It has to be a comical sight. It’s cold out, so we’re bundled up like Arctic explorers (or at least I am), hardly able to bend over due to the spring load effect. We are armed to the teeth with ear tagger and notcher, vaccine gun holstered in my coat, and a lariat hanging from the left handlebar. Brad is driving standing on the left running board of the ATV, I’m perched precariously on the right side, sharing the back with Pearl and both pups as we whizz and bounce around the frozen hayfield looking for new calves. And then a snow squall blows in from who knows where.
The wind is biting and freezing our faces and hands, as we try to stealthily approach the mama cow without raising suspicion, but those cows know the sound of the ATV and what it means. A cow with a suspicious look might as well be plotting murder. We steal her calf, which promptly starts bawling and screeching, and all the threatening pounds of the annoyed mama comes barreling down on us with her head lowered and snot flying. Geez Louise. Well, at least now we can read her ear tag, and fish the correct tag out of the plastic bag. Gosh, I thought there were only 8 tags in here, not 800. Meanwhile, the dogs go tumbling off the four wheeler to hide, the vaccine gun gets stuck in my coat pocket, while the ear tag won’t go on the tagger because the plastic is stiff with cold and so are my fingers. Brad is hanging on to the roped calf and trying to talk down the mother cow, but his occasional choice words ruin the calming effect, while I’m trying to tell everyone, cow, calf, and pups, that “everything is going to be just fine.” Finally I get the tag on the tagger but the calf screeches again as Brad tags his ear, and mama cow starts bellowing, which scares the calf even more. The calf jumps and prances on the end of the rope and the ear tagger goes flying, and the mama races off ten or so paces, just enough time for Brad to flip the calf on its side and sit on it. I finally get the vaccine gun out of my coat and hand it to Brad as the cow comes barreling back over, raining snot, clumps of dirt and grass flinging up behind her. With a yell, Brad manages to simultaneously vaccinate the calf, release it, and jump behind the four wheeler, with agility that would put the best bull fighter to shame. With a parting snort, the cow gathers up her calf and moves off.
We rescue all our scattered items, load the pups back up from their various hiding places, and go on our merry little way.
Just like that. Nothing to it.
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The dead calf was lying covered in snow, and the maternal cow wouldn’t leave its side. The calf had been dead for a good 24 hours but the determined cow, who required doctoring, wouldn’t budge. We got a lariat around the calf and the good mother followed as the calf was dragged slowly behind the truck all the way up to the corrals where we could give her the antibiotics she needed.
The knot in my stomach became a lump in my throat, watching that poor cow following pathetically behind her dead calf, her animal mind not understanding the situation, her instincts everything they should have been. A frustrating contrast to mama cows who birth their calves in a snowstorm and then forget about them. It would be easier if the bereaved mamas just walked away, but the tenacity they show can be heartbreaking. It is such a defeating sight – A good mother cow who wants a calf and is deprived of that calf. This storm, a series of storms and multiple nights of snow, has been deadly.
As I followed at a distance on a four-wheeler, a glimmer of movement caught my eye. I looked up and the word, “Wow,” escaped involuntarily, getting past that lump in my throat. The sky! What a glorious blue, clear as clear can be, and the whole depth of its blueness sparkling and shimmering with swirling snow. Where was the snow cloud? It was a wonderful sight. I looked out over the hayfields, still and soft like a painting, covered deep with insulating and moisture-bringing snow, snow that resulted in the loss of multiple calves but will be life-sustaining as the year continues. The trees were white with snow and frost. There was enough snow that the road was almost indistinguishable from anything else, just continuous white. It was spectacular. A beautiful and encouraging sight it was, seeing the clouds break and the sky clear and the sun rain down its invigorating warmth. As we came up to the barn, the sound of water running off the roof was like healing music. Water! Life-giving water. Spring is just around the corner.
One of the many paradoxes of life, the intermingling of heartbreak and hope.
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Ranching isn’t for the faint of heart. The best of the beauty of life can be tangled up with gut-wrenching sadness. The beauty of a maternal cow with a healthy calf and the light in her eyes can quickly be marred by the heartrending sight of a mother cow refusing to leave the side of her dead calf, or the lost look in the eyes of a mama who finally walked away. A successful save can happen one minute and a tragic outcome can happen the next. But, frankly, truly living life with your eyes and heart wide open isn’t for the faint of heart, regardless of occupation. Ranching is just one manifestation of that.
Because sometimes things do go wrong, sometimes tragically and horribly wrong. Calves die in the cold. We have a year, or three, of hardly any moisture. Freak accidents happen, leaving everyone bewildered and shaken. You are up for hours in the middle of the night with a cow, only to lose her calf and maybe even her. Faithful dogs die. Other loved animals die. Friends die. Hearts break. We suffer sickness or injury. Relationships aren’t what they should be. Vehicles break down and financial hardships threaten one’s sense of security. I could list off any number of tragic circumstances, big or small, that everyone can relate to, to a certain extent.
But it makes me think. Why is it so easy to list off the bad stuff? Why are we so slow to see all the goodness in life? Is it really because there is so much bad? Or is it rather, as I suspect, that what we see has an awful lot to do with what we are looking for?
We are really good, to a sad and destructive fault, at waiting for moments of big triumph or of obvious good to celebrate. Frankly, that sets us up for never celebrating at all! We go about our day oblivious to, sometimes willfully, the beauty and the joy and the blessings that really, really do outweigh the bad, fixating instead, like a cat toying with a mouse, on every little thing (or big thing) that goes wrong and drowning in the frustration and the heartache. Because there is frustration and heartache.
But what about the twenty cows that calved without incident, providentially missing the worst of storms and cold?
Or the baby calf on the warmer that was a successful save?
Or the calf we found before it could get chilled down, the calf that is now happily dried off and nursing in the calving shed?
What about the tiny blessings of animals to love and be loved by?
Or the bigger blessings of family, or friends, or spouse?
What about the blessing of working alongside family members?
What about the community we live and work in, faithful friends and neighbors?
What about the few inches of snow and the gift of moisture?
We should be reveling in gratitude from the moment we wake up! Giving thanks for another sunrise. Giving thanks for a new day. We should be giving thanks over the simple and exquisite pleasure of a cup of coffee, whether it starts the day or warms cold hands halfway through the morning.
Yet all too often our daily habit is to sit and stare fixedly at every little thing that goes wrong, until that’s all we see, and then sink down in devastation at those bigger trials that God had the audacity to allow! (As our minds think, imagining that God owes us anything at all!)
Oftentimes God’s blessings are intertwined with reminders that we still do live in a world of hardship, and that we don’t call our own shots. We aren’t masters of our own destiny. We don’t decide our fate. Those are lies of the devil. Instead, and so much better, we rest in the hands of a God who loves us! Rather than kicking against the trouble He does allow, we are much better to sit back and give thanks for the good that He lavishes instead, for “every good and perfect gift” that He gives. And He has liberally rained little blessings in our lives to remind us of how kind He is.
So I want to train my heart and mind to see and appreciate and, yes, to rejoice in those little things. Things that maybe only mean anything to me.
Like the warmth of a kitten purring on my shoulder. Or irresistible puppy snuggles. The aroma of fresh bread, and the tart-sweet of plum butter from this summer.
Because it doesn’t start with being more thankful for the big things. That really takes no effort. It starts in our gratitude for and joy in the littlest things. And that takes time. And effort. And sometimes sacrifice. We have to slow down long enough to see them.
Things like the first handful of tomato seedlings that have sprouted.
The beautiful calves that have been born.
Frost-clad ponderosas.
Baskets of eggs.
Flurries of activity at the bird feeder.
Like enough clothing to go for a winter walk.
Like the winsome eyes of a border collie pup.
Like the pleasure of sharing a home-cooked meal.
Like the comfort of a hug. Like groceries in my fridge. Like propane to heat the house.
Like good mama cows with the best of the instincts God gives to His creatures.
Like coffee.
Like a hand to hold.
Because sometimes life is hard. Because sometimes, without a heart tuned to see the littlest joys and littlest pleasures and littlest graces, we’d be overwhelmed by “what ifs” and “whys” and pain and sadness. Because there is plenty of that sort of thing. But there is also plenty of joy. And that’s why I write about it. To remind myself, and hopefully to share that joy with other people as well.
Life isn’t made up of big events. It is made up of millions of small ones, good and bad. We can choose to focus on the good, or we can blind ourselves to the good by focusing on the bad, like throwing dirt in our eyes. We’re not pretending the bad doesn’t exist, anymore than we pretend there isn’t dirt. We’re just keeping it out of our eyes.
And those joys, those blessings, those graces, multiply and overflow and crowd out the discontent, the frustration or anger, because gratitude to God creates more gratitude to God. Joy in life begets more joy in life. A heart tuned to God’s goodness and His gifts will see His goodness and gifts where other people might not.
That’s why the little things matter.
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