Epiphany

I almost didn't go to church today.

We have been in struggle, my husband and I. We are at risk of losing the farm that we have been building for three years, and that we have loved for many, many more. The strain of Christmas and wanting to give our children a joyful (and commercial, yes, to some extent) holiday while still trying to send as many pennies to the mortgage as possible has created a constant buzz of anxiety. We believe in our mission deeply, and there are enough people behind our mission that we know it can work, but the logistics - and the overdue bills - have exhausted us. We have both run nearly out of steam and out of inspiration. I wake in the night several times, and instantly think, "Oh, I'm still here. Still in this house. But will I be here in a month?" and the buzz starts. Lately the buzz has escalated to a constant, burning pain in the center of my chest, and a roaring in my ears that I can almost taste.

It tastes like fear.

We don't really have much to fear, not compared to some. I have a good job - good enough, anyway, to rent us a smaller place and give our kids a decent Christmas, if not good enough for trips to Disney. We have a good marriage. We have three healthy kids, and we have a solid community of family and friends. We are blessed in so many ways. For the last month or more I have asked myself daily - sometimes more than a few times - why I am putting myself through this stress. Why this farm? Why this struggle?

This question has been the source of my anxiety even more than the risk of financial disaster. Or to be fair, the answer to this "why" question is the source. I have lived through catastrophe before. I have lost a marriage, a home, moved suddenly and desperately more than once. I have known trauma and fear and poverty. Anxiety is an old companion. Overcoming the situation itself is not what I fear, although I don't like it any more than the next person. The true struggle is, as Brene Brown says in her book Rising Strong, "Act Two." The calls this dark place the part of the story when all else has failed, and the heroine must overcome something internal, not external, to finally reach the denouement. It is what we must go through to get to the resolution. What I fear, more than the fight to figure out how to get there, is not knowing how the fight is going to work out, and the clarity of my own decisions. Are they right? Are they wrong? If I feel this way, what does it mean? Second guessing becomes third, fourth guessing, and finally just a black hole of "I don't know what to think." If I could only see the ending, I could prepare myself to get there. I could control the journey and stop feeling the turmoil.

Brene (her teachings live so firmly in my self-talk, I now believe we are on a first-name basis) would tell me that skipping to knowledge of the ending is trying to cheat out of Act Two. She would say that Act Two is vital to growth and strength. She would be right, as much as I hate it. So here I am, firmly in Act Two, and spiraling further from the answer with each anxiety attack.

And so, I went to church. Today we celebrated Epiphany. I was not raised with any faith. In fact, I was raised by my father to believe that faith is for the weak-minded, and I have come late (and reluctantly) to my own faith only in the past few years, and only after observing that people with deep wisdom and confidence most often have equally deep reserves of faith. I love my little church. I love the scant few people who always attend, the community that is technically my mother's town, not my own, but feels more like home than any other place I have lived. I love my pastor, who was the first to fully embrace this farm's mission with her confident energy and a resounding, "Go for it!" Maybe I needed the touchstone of a hug from the first person who believed in us. This morning as I entered the little church, I told myself I was there for the community. These people and the energy of their presence have been the heart of my faith experience. I sat in our family's pew - not assigned, nor owned, but occupied by my stepfather's family since he was a small boy 70 years ago, so ours by association and loving connection - and waited for the music and the love of community to surround me and calm me, as it always does. I wanted the energy of the these people to recharge my batteries.

But today, instead of a healing calm, the buzz of anxiety entered my chest and spread into my forehead. The hymns, which normally give me such peace and joy, were stuck in my throat. Each word threatened to come out as a sob, so I closed my mouth and stared at the floor. I went through a litany of self-care practices, from deep breathing to finger holds to just plain shutting down, but the panic continued to spread. Self-analysis kicked in: is this shame? Fear? Why, and what is triggering this here, in this place of quiet and calm? Images of our farm popped into my head, like a demon of near-failure on my shoulder and flipping through a slide show. Tears rose. In an effort to push them down once and for all, I went out on a limb and told myself, for the first time, the escape-route words that a well-meaning friend had just that morning said to us: "It would be easier to just cut and run."

I was in full tears within seconds.

My stepfather handed my mother a box of Kleenex, and she passed it to me with concern. While I pressed tissues into my eyes and tried to decide if I should step outside, our pastor opened her sermon with a musing about what it would have been like to be one of the Magi, one of those wise men following the star. My husband has been reading a book of Celtic Christianity, and recently discussed the Magi with me, sharing the Celtic version of their history. We loved the story because in that tradition, the Magi were stewards of the earth and of their faith, just as we strive to be on our farm. This return to the same theme caught my attention, and momentarily slowed the floodgates. Our pastor noted that a Magus would have been nocturnal, and would have been aware of the sky through observation and an appreciation of natural details (how very permaculture-esque, I managed to joke with myself). She went on to say that a Magus would have been alert to tiny miracles. He would have watched for these signs, and trusted in them to guide his faith. The Magi would have turned away from Herod and what was expected - what was easy - and instead trusted in their faith to show them another way. The followers of easy would not have understood their faith in Jesus' birth, but the Magi trusted in their vision of what they knew was right, in spite, I imagined, of well-meaning advisors telling them it would be easier not to take the risk that the trail would be too difficult.

The congregation had moved on to another hymn, but I was still stuck on the miracles, and on the notion of easy not always being the same as right. I was stuck on the recent voices of people telling us to stop making our lives so hard. But is it truly that hard? Or is this merely the struggle to get to what we know is right? The biggest problem, I realized, is not that we need to decide to stay or go. The problem isn't even the excruciatingly hard task of finding the money to solve the problem of whether we can stay or go. The problem that wakes me up each night in terror is that we have allowed ourselves to stop putting faith in our vision. We have allowed ourselves to believe that right must mean easy, and when it was not easy, we lost our way.

Resolutions are something we all make in the New Year because we are supposed to. We can easily say, "I resolve to make this farm work." Will that make it work? Doubtful, because there is no measure of why it's important to make it work in the first place. This, though - this idea that if our decisions are made with God (and by extension, our core values) in mind, if we are following our values and choosing right over easy when the two cannot be the same - felt so true I could not ignore it. It was an echo of something else we had read when we first started this business of building a business out of the farm: Simon Sinek's book Start with Why focuses on this same imperative, even without faith in God coming into the picture. In The Seven Habits, Steven Covey instructs us to do the same as well. A theme this universal, one that is not limited only to a faith or business model or "self-help" method, is not a convention. It is a core truth of our humanity. Somewhere along the way, we lost sight of the why in an effort to figure out the how. We lost our faith.

This was the shift in perspective I so desperately needed.

Perhaps they were unable to sleep through their own anxiety, those Magi, and so they were alert to the star that others couldn't see. Perhaps they were awake because they were searching for an affirmation of their why in a world dictated by how. Perhaps they knew that "how" is the easier part of the equation. It's the plan that leads us directly out of Act Two without going through the harder part of knowing the struggle's purpose. Without the "why" there is no purpose for Act Two in the first place, and the wanting of a why leaves us lost, floundering, and terrified.

A thousand tiny miracles that have come into our farm life in the last few months suddenly sat in that pew with me, staring me in the face and saying, "This is why it matters." The notes from visitors, asking us to continue on our path. The friend who offered to start a business with us just to help us keep the farm, because he believes in our "why." The outpouring of love and kind words when we finally spoke out and asked for help. My prayer for guidance on how to shave down an already impossible budget, answered that same night by a neighboring farmer carrying boxes of leftover grocery produce for our animals, and a promise to deliver as much more as he could just because, he said, he wants to help other farmers. The offer of free firewood from someone who didn't even know we were in struggle. The "poor-decision" pigs that have since led us to a network of community we otherwise would not have met. How many do we need to see the clear path?

There is no decision. Keeping hold of our vision is the right thing to do simply because it IS right. If we hold onto our central vision for this farm - to do good for the earth and for its people in any way we can, period - and put our faith into working hard for the sake of that mission, then aren't we the Magi of our own lives?

This is the same lesson I had just spoken to my son that morning over something seemingly trivial. A small life lesson that happens a hundred times each day: "Do it the right way," I told him, "not the easy way."  Isn't that the point?

The buzzing anxiety is not fully gone, even now that the tears are spent. There is still real fear, and I am still a  student of Brene, not a master: I still wish I knew how this will all work out so I can just put my head down and move on. But the fear is quieter. In its place is a conviction that no matter where we end up, the only thing that matters is that we hold firm to our values and have faith in our promise to do good in this world. As Terry Pratchett's beloved Tiffany Aching would have known, we must "trust the knowing."

How simple, really. And yet, what an epiphany.