Chickening out

There’s a different article I want to write but I’m too scared to, so I’ll just write about the garden instead.

Over the weekend, Sam built a chute out of corrugated iron so he could get the four tons of gravel he’d ordered down the hill without a LOT of wheelbarrowing.

We just happened to have a bunch of corrugated iron and stakes lying around. As you do.

I wasn’t around when he sent the gravel down it, but he says it was noisy. I was around when the gravel delivery truck got temporarily stuck in the driveway. We had to use some of the gravel around the wheels so they could get a grip.

This morning I went and sat outside during the usual company standup meeting (on Discord). It was a beautiful mild morning, and I could feel real warmth from the sun as it fought through the thick layer of cloud. Coming back up the hill to the house after the meeting, I stopped for a chat with the neighbour from two doors down, who was planting a few geraniums and things along the edge of the next-door neighbour’s property. The next-door neighbour’s husband is recovering from a severe illness, and probably won’t be home for months yet, let alone doing garden work, so people are rallying around.

I’m embarrassed to admit that although we’ve lived here for eleven years now, I still haven’t even met the people next door on the other side, and I can never remember any of the various neighbours’ names. It’s very different from when I was a kid and I frequently popped next door to play with Stevie, or to visit Mr and Mrs Wilson’s dog. I don’t walk anywhere any more, I drive. I’ve never really gardened much. I don’t like being out in the wind, and it’s windy at our place on top of the hill, with the wind off the harbour funnelling straight up and over. So I’m never around to meet the people who live around me.

And of course, any time there’s something like “neighbours day”, or new people move in nearby and I think “we should take them biscuits or something”, or Civil Defence tells us we should get to know the needs in our community, I chicken out.

Suzette chickening out.

I guess it’s no wonder I often feel isolated and alone.

I’ve always hated gardening …

I’ve said so on this blog before. I’ve always hated gardening. I have the opposite of a green thumb. I can kill mint!

So of course I have decided that we’re going to turn our steep, 1-acre section full of scrappy trees and muehlenbeckia into an urban regenerative market garden. And it won’t just be my husband and his father (the landscape architect) doing the work. I’m going to help.

This was my inspiration: a TED talk by Niva and Yotam Kay of Pakaraka Farms.

As I watched it for the first time, I said to myself, “We could do that.” After watching it for the second time with my husband, we ordered the book. The third time I watched it, I dragged my younger son John over, and after he’d watched it, he went and looked up the rules for stalls at the Dunedin Farmers’ Market. He’s keen to come on board as a business partner.

These guys are superb communicators.

The book arrived. We read the first three chapters. We did as it instructed and went down to the garden with cups of tea (well, homemade lemon cordial) and discussed it. And today, the actual work began.

We had finished our cuppas by this point.

Me being me, I started a weather diary in the back of a cute little notebook on Saturday, and this morning I drew up a family Kanban board.

So far we’ve cleared some ivy off the house to prevent flooding (it’s complicated), decided on a spot to start in, and Sam and John have begun work on another new piece of path.

Before

After

In The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton wrote that the daily life at the Gethsemani Abbey contained a great deal more farm work and much less time for solitary contemplation than he expected. The contemplative life has long been attractive to me—possibly because life with three small children is so much the opposite! Perhaps, just perhaps, I can start to build something in the same spirit for myself.

Our mission statement

At church today, Tim Cooper preached from 1 Peter chapter 2. The first thing that jumped out at me was this passage.

Screenshot from Bible Gateway app.

Whenever people interview us about our work (and this happens quite often), we like to mention briefly that we are Christians, and that, for us, means that we want to leave the world a little better than we found it. That’s why we’ve made a computer game that is non-violent. That’s why we insist on treating our staff well, paying them well, avoiding discrimination in any form, and promoting these values more widely in the game development industry. That’s why we’ll never make games which promote violence or exploitation or contain elements of gambling or sex or predatory monetisation strategies, even though we may lose investment opportunities, because we’re not in this to get rich.

The truth is, I don’t think I’m actually capable of “making the world a better place” or “leaving it better than I found it” or [insert cliché here].

God is.

I don’t want people to see my good deeds and emulate me. I want people to see our good deeds, and hear about our good God, and maybe go looking for him. Then they can go find the good that they can do, to glorify the same good God.

My hope in starting this blog up again, is that maybe someone who reads it will be inspired to go find God for themselves.

We’ll see

I was having a bit of an identity crisis and I asked my oldest son what he thought I should do with my life. He said, “write.”

Unexpected.

So here I am, after a very long break. I have this idea that some day I could pull together all the threads of experience and thoughts that are in my head and turn them into a book. A book about faith, and failing to fulfil your potential, but changing tack and doing a bunch of different and surprising things, about being interested in psychology and business and contemplative prayer and music and how all those things do, or don’t, go together.

Also maybe a bit about how sometimes you get surprised by the shades of grey and the contradictions inherent in midlife.

We’ll see.