Halfway Between Birth and Glory
What I’m Still Learning on the 45th Parallel
Here on this quiet sliver of 45°, the bulk of the tourists are finally headed home. Our beaches are shifting now — from families creating memories to retired couples carefully walking the pier, pausing to enjoy the view.
The lake hasn't quite cooled off yet, though the fall waves have arrived. The kids and I live for those churning, crazy lake days when the swells undulate and toss us halfway up the pier ladder before we jump in again. The Great Lakes are great indeed, and Door County is still everything I dreamed it would be when I longed to live here — even if, like much of the world, it’s gotten a touch more commercial than it should.
My potager garden is still everything I wanted it to be — even if it’s not yet everything it could be. Or everything I have the capacity to make it.
Capacity
Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s reality. It’s certainly God’s grace and mercy toward me.
Over the past five years or so, I’ve started to embrace the idea of capacity in a new way.
I’ve always had room for a lot. Six kids? Tough, but I’ve got this. Big house? A lot to manage, but I’ll do my best. Firstborn, achiever, executor — I always felt it was my duty to do something simply because I could. But little by little, I’ve been learning: just because I can doesn’t mean I should. Or that I have to.
Shocker: my worth is not attached to what I can accomplish.
Of course, I’ve always known that. But there’s a difference between knowing something and living like you know it.
I have permission to sit. To contemplate. To read more. To garden without a YouTube camera beside me. To end the day with no visible accomplishment.
For the me in the back row: To end the day with no visible accomplishment.
After all, I have six "successes" walking around in human form in front of me. What more could I ask for?
Confessions of a type-A, much?
This year, capacity looks like trimming down. Clearing out what causes mental clutter. Again, I’m doing this as best I can, with no illusions of arriving at some perfect, I’ve-got-it-together life. But I am doing “radical” things, like giving away books I’ll never read, tossing items that seem to circulate endlessly through the house, and ordering an ugly filing cabinet from Amazon to finally put the eternal (but tidy) stack of papers on my desk to bed. Once and for all.
I’m spending time doing what I love, and filming those moments more sparingly. YouTube videos are shorter now — because this is my life, and I have to live it. From the beginning, I simply wanted to share beauty with my audience. To inspire others to make their own. I never wanted to be a how-to channel.
Does my channel suffer for that? Probably. Will it suffer more with shorter (hopefully more inspiring) content? Probably. But I’m okay with that. Because the people who stick around are wise and gentle and creative. And they understand — capacity.
This week, I spent hours in my garden without the camera. The gravel is in. The new fence might finally go up this week. The Japanese beetles have been scarce, and a few of the roses I’ve been nursing back from spring’s ice storm are blooming beautifully. The lime I added to our poor soil is working. The slugs got the cabbage, but I’ll ferment what I can. It’s all so flawed. And it’s all so beautiful.
Like my outlook on life.
Flawed. Beautiful.
I live on the 45th parallel. Halfway between the North Pole and the equator. I want to live to be one hundred, so, God willing, I’m halfway between birth and Glory.
My garden gets better every year. I hope I get wiser every year. I hope I’m a blessing to my family more and more each year. And more this evening, even, than I was this morning. I hope that my coming to terms with capacity tells them they are what matters most — and that it gives us more time to walk the garden together.
Walk the evening garden with me. Let me share the few quiet moments I did take the camera with me this week, as the sun was setting.
