Lessons on How to Live Your Dreams

The air was a tad cooler. The leaves on the trees had started to turn yellow, crimson and orange, and some were already scattered across the lawn. It was the type of day that might call for a nice glass of Syrah or Pinot Noir while sitting by a fire and gazing at nature’s splendor.

Fall was most certainly here on Hardy Feather Farm.

As I like to do, I am puttering around the yard. The rows of Hugelkultur-style garden beds we implemented last year, vibrant and in full bloom just a month or so prior, were now in decay. They had produced hundreds of pounds of produce – most of which was either eaten, given away, or sold at the local farmers market. All that was left for harvesting were pumpkins, butternut nut squash and some winter kale. 

Archer, our Great Pyrenees, who joined the family during our first year on the farm, watches on with a bored yet expectant expression as my wife puts the final touches to an upgrade on the chicken coop. About 70 chickens surround her, curiously clucking, pecking, peeping, and scratching the ground. She’s the mother hen of this brood – which had nearly doubled in size each year we’ve been on the farm.

I always chuckle when I see her in the coop. Since she was a little girl, Janna dreamed of having chickens, a dream that is now fully feathered.

This particular reflection of my wife’s poultry wish leads my wandering mind to a picture hanging on the wall in my mother’s bathroom – a picture that asks the question, “What will you do with your one precious life?” 

It’s a good question. One I often ponder while I’m puttering around the yard, stacking or chopping firewood, or moving dirt around in the compost.

During these precious, quiet moments on the farm, I often imagine what I will do with my life, but I also make an effort to reflect on the gratitude I feel because I’m actually, already, “doing it.” Like my wife’s barnyard fowl, I’m actually living the life I want. 

This whole farm represents the embodiment of a dream.

"All of the buildings and all of the cars were once just a dream in somebody's head"

                                                                                                                           – Peter Gabriel  

You see, over the years, I’ve come to better understand to act toward my dreams and the mostly positive consequences of doing so. This is what I’ve Iearned so far about turning the dreams of our life into reality. 

In author Michael Ondaatje’s Skin of a Lion, he writes, “Before the real city could be seen, it had to be imagined.” 

Thus, we must imagine the life we wish to live and live it as we have imagined.

That said, charting a course in life comes with a slew of uncontrollable factors. It takes intentionality, clear intuition, and a strong will to overcome the often-overwhelming challenges life throws at us. We’re as much a participant with the ebbs and flows of life as we are the commander – finding ways to fill our sails with, not against, the changing winds and currents.

Always, we must aim to keep our expectations high and imaginations fertile while we chart the stars and follow the course of our dream.

As I’ve grown up and found myself leaving the green pastures of my youth, where it seems these dreams were more readily accepted, I’ve noticed the terrain of middle-age to be tougher and more wrought with skepticism and doubt from others in my life.

A call, if you will, to drop the sails and bring the very ship that carries my dreams and curiosity for exploring into a safe harbor. Their sentiment, as I get older, it seems there is too much at stake to risk sailing the treacherous and unknown waters of my dreams any longer.

Looking around the farm at the now-pruned back gardens, then over to the coop, I could not provide a convincing defence that any of this lifestyle was safe. We’d lost much of our natural, no-spray garden to inexperience, and consequently, various pests gnawed at the food before anyone else could sink their teeth into it. We lost many chickens to diseases (thanks again to our inexperience), having rescued baby chicks from another farm that, unbeknownst to us, carried a disease and infected the rest of our flock. 

If we depended on the farm’s income and food provision alone, we might as well have buried ourselves right there in the pumpkin patch; we never would have survived these past few years. 

It wasn’t only the farming that posed a risk to our livelihood either. I hunted for our protein, which meant time away from work and the family with no guarantees of success. I am also an entrepreneur and film maker – a vocation that has, for me, experienced innumerable ups and downs these past few years. To top that all off, we homeschool our children and often travel together as a family on my business trips (in an effort to be together as much as we can) which, going against the status quo of child-rearing in the West, comes with its own inherent challenges. 

For these reasons, as I reach my 40s, I find the sentiment about how I choose to live has become bifurcated between two groups of people: those who get “it” and those who don’t.

As such, I’m all too often asked by the latter cohort:

Why hunt for and grow your own food when you could just get it at a grocery store?

Why homeschool your kids when there are schools? Isn’t that a ton of work?

Why travel so much as a family? Isn’t that tiring and hard on the finances?

Why not wait to make your films?

Why not go get a real, secure job with a good pension and benefits?

For starters, I don’t want a job, I want a life. And while I acknowledge it may work very well for some people, I don’t believe the paradigm I was taught about “how to live life” is right for me.

It’s not that I want some life of frivolous luxury and freedom from responsibility. In fact, in a way, I want the opposite. I choose to struggle because I believe we become what we want to be through hardship not handouts.

I’ve always asked myself the question, “Can life, and living it to the fullest of your imagination, not be at odds?” In other words, can still actually enjoy our life alongside the challenges that come with pursuing our dreams?

So, while some in my life remain perplexed, even repulsed, by the magnitude of my vision on how to live, I’m unperturbed. Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to have cultivated a group of friends that believe in, trust and celebrate my family’s way of life.

I’m on the path I’ve always envisioned. 

Much like cultivating our garden year after year to produce a bountiful harvest, we must plan and live with intention that allows our life to grow freely toward the light before the weeds strangle us.

“Water the flowers, not the weeds.”

– Fletcher Peacock

Your imagined life links you to what is possible, and your attention, action and mindset will take you there. This, like the seasons, is always in a cyclical flow.

A fait accompli, if you will.  

Choosing to live in pursuit of passion and purpose won’t be without struggle or chaos even… 

It takes endless action, persistence and positivity in the face of endless resistance – the latter so much of which exists in your own head. It takes vulnerability and willingness to have your heart hurt from disappointment and rejection, without letting it be broken. For to live out your dreams means you wear those dreams (born of your mind and carried by your heart) out in the open. They are not protected against the harsh elements of the world and the harsh opinions of others.

Heartache is okay though. For it is not pure happiness or hedonist pleasure that we really seek by living our dream.

It is personal growth. Growth to a place, much like the Hugelkultur garden, where the foundation of your strong character is sustainable and not affected by the atmospheric conditions – that are always changing.

In this way, as a result of living our dream, we become more capable of living our dream. Able and willing to adjust the sails and keep the tempests at bay…

I choose to live in the idea of abundance for me and my family and for everybody to live out their wildest and most ambitious life dreams. No matter what.

I choose to cast the wide net of my dreams and watch and wait to see what comes.

“All men are the same except for their belief in their own selves, regardless of what others think of them.”

– Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

Janna is finished her work in the coop now. Accordingly, my puttering is finished as well. Our dog, excited for some attention, joins us as we make our way back to the house. It’s time to go have that glass of red wine, gaze at nature’s splendor and keep imagining.