There are so many things I am learning on this new journey. I am learning now to mark the boundaries. The corners are the most important things to make strong. Posts must be level. Fencing is really hard work. Machinery is amazing. Friends who help you with fencing are real friends, no doubt about that. Measure more than once. Don’t be stingy. I am learning about things I like, and things I don’t like. I am settling into how things really make me feel – people, places, relationships, without making excuses for them.

As a child and as a young woman, I had a “difficult” personality. I often felt at odds with other people. I felt at home with animals and in wild places. The order and beauty in nature spoke to me. I didn’t understand people and why they do what they do and how they do things. It felt like an artificial world they lived in, and there was SO MUCH MORE to the world. Things that were fake irritated me, and people always seemed to want to surround themselves with fake things, whether they were smells or fake food or screens or personalities, and I was not afraid then to be outspoken and seek out what was true.

I don’t know what happened since then – a lot of things happened. The heartbreak of realizing no one in the whole world would care if I stopped existing. Losing significant friendships at a very difficult time. The death of the one person I felt a connection to. Being treated like I was worthless by people I loved and cared about. Trying to love men who were addicted to things and didn’t care about anything. Passing through physical death and coming back to life. Things that broke my heart, and then my spirit.

Life here on Earth is so hard sometimes. There is want and lack and desperation. Needs are sometimes hard to fulfill, and it’s all so complicated. We end up doing things we don’t think we will, and becoming people we never wanted to be. For so long I was afraid to be true to myself because I knew I would lose my farm if I tried to fight my way out of a bad marriage that was making me and my family suffer. 

On this journey I have had so many women come to me, and tell me the terrible relationship conditions they are living with for different reasons. Their reasons to stay are all good reasons – and my reasons were good reasons too, and for so long I stayed and I stayed. I stayed too long, swallowing up the trouble and unhappiness into myself.

It was a dream I had – the kind of dream where you feel it in your body so deeply that it takes a few minutes after you wake up to realize it isn’t true. It was a terrible dream, about horrible death and suicide and regret. It made me see that I had become someone I didn’t want to be. I saw that I was stuck on a path that would never bring me happiness, and I would reach the end of my life and look back with so much regret that I had spent my short time here that way. I realized I was already dead inside, but I still had a choice – now. I felt that this choice ran so, so deep – back through generations and generations of my ancestors. I felt it in my cells and in the twist of my DNA. It was worked into the spirit-pattern of myself. 

When I awoke from that dream, I awoke to myself. I realized that I had succumbed to fear, and let it rule over me. I knew I had to find the courage to make a different choice. I had to do it, for my daughters, for myself, and for our ancestors. I felt like that dream was sent to me from a divine place – and here I had the choice to listen to it, or to let it fade away. I could wake up and be alive, or I could go to sleep and live out my days in that place of walking death that, for some reason, felt so comfortable for so long.

I am still in at my old homestead for now, and sometimes it is very difficult to still be here, but every day I work towards moving to a new place in my life. Every fence post that is put in, is one little step towards freedom on this long journey. At first I was crushed by the grief of what was being taken away from me, but I have come to realize it was things I had to shed, old things I didn’t need anymore to be the person I was to become – whole, true, uplifted. No longer a coward, no longer believing I can be treated like I am worthless, I feel I am walking the golden path of faith, the path of the blessed, and my path is leading me deeper and deeper into myself – and the more I sink into myself, the more I feel the light of the divine. 

These earthly things I was so attached to – I see now that they were the sacred earthly sacrifices I needed to make to receive true blessings – the way Odin traded his real eye for sight of the unseen. That giving of something you are truly attached to leaves a painful hole, but the hole is soon filled with power and light if you willingly embrace the sacrifice. I have had to leave so much behind – again and again I am being called to give up not just material things, but also friendships and memories and people and animals I love. It has gotten easier, because I see that when the pain of the sacrifice stabs my heart I can at last leave behind that skin, and the gift of the golden light of Spirit takes its place. As I leave behind the things I once felt I couldn’t do without, the brighter and lighter my journey becomes.

I thought at one point I would be crushed by grief, but almost every day now I feel only the joy that the eagle must feel, when it is a small, small speck in the blue, blue sky, flying with the sunshine on its outstretched feathers. Freedom tastes so, so sweet.