Everything changes, constantly moving.
Rivers continuously flow downstream, across landscapes, and through channels carved by their own persistent forces. Our lives are equally dynamic, as we follow our own course through time.
When I started writing this blog over 10 years ago, it was from a very different place in the course of my life, and a very different landscape. I was raising young children on a modern homestead in Oregon’s Willamette Valley near the Long Tom River, and everything revolved around caring for them, creating a more self-sufficient life, growing and foraging food, and establishing my fiber-arts business. From there, life changed course as I left behind an unhealthy marriage and my homestead, navigating life as a single parent by making a home temporarily on a biodynamic farm, working a variety of jobs, and selling my fiber arts at local fairs. Eventually I met my partner and moved to a new homestead in the McKenzie River Valley where we worked hard to create the landscape of our dreams. Over the years as the kids grew into teenagers, I found myself working more hours as a remote customer service agent, homesteading less intensively, having less time to reflect and write, and in many ways following the path of least resistance through life.
We never really know where the currents of our life will take us. At some point I decided to join the local watershed council as a resident partner and as things slowed down enough for me to evaluate what I really wanted to do, and I realized that I was more excited about the meetings and presentations on scientific research and restoration projects than I had been about anything in a very long time. It became clear that the course before me was to pick up where my undergraduate degree in natural resource sciences left off and go back to grad school so I could get involved in restoration and conservation work.
Here I am a year in to my online Master of Natural Resources program with Oregon State University’s Ecampus, and the world around me couldn’t be much more turbulent with a global pandemic, a civil rights movement that is long overdue, my kids graduating high school and getting ready to set out for college in the middle of the pandemic, losing my job of 8 years and starting a new one. I am still loving every minute of grad school and am certain I am on the right course. While there is uncertainty about what lies ahead up around the bend, I’m here for it.
If you’re still following along with my blog, thanks for still being here. From here on out you can expect to hear probably nothing about raising children, less about the homesteading activities I don’t have as much time for, and occasional showcasing of my fiber art pieces as I finish one from time to time. You can definitely expect to hear more about natural resources, sustainability (and all the nuances of what that means), restoration, conservation, aquatic and riparian habitat, and plants. *So many plants.* I’m also in the process of learning more about diversity, equity and inclusion in natural resource management and the outdoors in general, so expect to hear about that too. And chickens. You can always expect to hear from me about chickens.
It’s going to be a grand adventure.
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