2011 Goals

As 2010 comes to a close and I relfect on the year past and the year ahead I compose my goals for 2011:

I would like to live intentionally, in the moment. The two biggest things that prevent me from doing so are planning ahead and catching up. I want to be in the season at the time of the season and reap all the things that season has to offer. I want our life to be fully integrated and seemless with regards to work, play and education. I want a more natural ebb and flow to our day and I want to learn what that means and what that looks like for this family.

I would like to become a calmer, quieter and gentler mommy and wife. I find myself far too often speaking to my kids in an unkind and loud way (bc they listen then!!!) and I don't like the way it sounds. I would like to keep my focus on Jesus even when things are chaotic and especially when they are not.

I would like to continue to learn more about making herbal medicines and actually make several more things for personal use. I will educate myself with on the use of 5 more herbs, and grow five herbs I have never before grown. The ultimate long-term goal here is to set myself up to be somewhat of a local herbalist.

I would like to continue to increase our home food production by growing more intensively, adding meat chickens, and propagating berry producing plants. I would like to offset the cost of poultry by possibly growing mealy worms or sprouting. I would like to maximize this effort by documenting through journaling, labeling, and blogging. I would eventually like to compile my experience into a book on suburban farming.

I would like to do at least one randomly nice thing for someone each weekly. I would like to be quiet enough to be attentive to opportunities to help others and to give to others all the time, not just when things are going well for me but especially when they are not.

I would like to continue my work in localizing food systems by opening another community garden.

I would like to read through the Bible in one year with a great group of people brought togehter by the woman of the metamorphasing moniker. I also plan to read through Deitrich Bonhoffer's Cost of Discipleship.

I would like to declutter both the attic and the basement and set measures to prevent them from becomming akin to the great abyss again.

Resurrecting The Butterfly

The last year since I've blogged has been a year of uprooting and growth. It is now time to resurrect The Dancing Butterfly and make retrospective sense of the past many months. As 2010 draws to a close, I begin setting goals for the coming year. One goal for 2011 (and more on these goals later) is to keep a garden journal. I have been gardening for greater than a decade and have yet to wrote anything own, including labels for my plants. I actually attempted this once in the past but the journal became unusable after being left outside in an April rain. This will be the year that I write things own so that I remember what I have learned from my experience and so that I don't kill off sprouts below the soil surface by plopping another plant on top of them, so that I take the time to slow down and contemplate my experiences and write about them here. So that I can look back, laugh, cry and revel in the resurrection of The Dancing Butterfly.