week 12: on becoming and being

this week on the little dream farm

Mar 23, 2025

At the start of last year, David and I were deep in the work of finishing editing and building the manuscript for his very first book, Simply Being Present: Lessons in Mindfulness and Insight Meditation.

I’ll never forget the first time we talked about it over the phone. We were casually catching up and he was telling me about a meditation class he was teaching down in St. Petersburg, Florida. The course was made up of a series of weekly lessons—essentially chapters—that David gleaned over more than four decades of practicing meditation and mindfulness. I’d asked him if he’d ever thought about publishing a book with this information, and he said he wouldn’t even know where to begin.

Conveniently enough, I was in the same place back in 2017 when I was wanting to publish my first book. Back then, I taught myself, from beginning to end, how to write, structure, edit, build a manuscript, design a cover, self-publish, and market my very first book, Such is Life: 29 Life Revelations from a 30-Year-Old Dreamer.

Knowing David and how he’s become the person he is, I couldn’t shake the idea that decades of hard-earned wisdom might remain as a printed handout or worse—a document stored in a folder on a computer. So I offered my assistance in turning his journey to being able to teach on the topic of mindfulness and meditation into a tangible guide people could hold in their hands…something that I felt very deeply would help people heal.

During one of our editing sessions in the first week of last year, I was telling him about some ideas that were swirling around in my head…about how I was feeling ready to shift to work that had been on my heart for many years but that I never really knew or understood how to turn into something tangible…like the ideas had always been kind of fuzzy or half-baked in my mind.

And he said to me something that has remained with me all throughout the last year. He said, “Maybe all this time you were in a phase of becoming. And now, perhaps it’s time for being.”

When we’d bought the farm from David in 2021, that fall as the farm exchanged stewards, he left me with this charge: “It would be unwise for you to simply mimic the vision I had for this farm,” he said to me as we were standing out in the garden. “Instead, I encourage you to come out here and place your hands and knees into this earth—to listen—and to allow the answers for what to do with this farm to come to you.”

I remember jotting it down as a note in my phone, as it felt really wise and important at the time he said it. I don’t think I knew or realized this then…but it’s become possibly the greatest piece of advice on living that I’ve ever come across in several decades being deep in the personal development and self-help sphere. To listen, and allow the answers to come to you.

I’ve learned through the years that just because you want something—especially when it comes to answers on some of the biggest questions we ask about our lives—doesn’t mean the answers will come in an orderly fashion or in a voice or decibel we can hear.

I’ve come to believe it’s not that the answers aren’t there…but they can be hidden in plain sight, if you will, when we have more to learn or—more importantly—when we have more to let go of.

Following several years of dreaming of one day having a farm of our own, I came to the Little Dream Farm filled with all these ideas. Once we were settled into our surroundings and started taking a look at what was possible, then all kinds of new ideas came rushing in.

And as we pursued one after another after the next and then the next, it was as if one door after the next kept being closed on us…like each thing we chased after was a dead end.

I’ve shared before that this very much had me wondering if maybe the farm was trying to tell us something…that maybe it was nudging us to move along to make space for someone with a vision that better aligned with what this farm—what this sacred land—was desiring to be.

But then I began to ask a different question…

Below is the caption that accompanied the words above from Brianna Wiest:

There is a path to everything you know is waiting for you, even if you don’t know what that is right now.

Sometimes, the paths we plan too intently end up limiting us in some way. There are possibilities available to your future self that your current self wouldn’t be able to consider. All your mind can pull from is what it’s known, and if you’re trying to build a life outside of that, then you’re going to have to open yourself to the possibility that not only is there a path forward, but that it may very well lead somewhere better than you thought.

Sometimes, we don’t know because we can’t know. The very fact of us knowing would disrupt the timing of what is unfolding. The very fact of us knowing would prevent us from learning the lessons that are here for us today.

And those lessons? They aren’t a due we have to pay or a purgatory we are being stuck in, they are the building blocks of the character of the person who is opening up to this next level of their existence. What’s here for you right now contains within it the wisdom and the growth needed to unlock the next phase.

I hope that instead of wondering and worrying how you will ever move forward, you can simply recall all the other times you feared you never would… and did. You can remember that you never would have imagined exactly what led you to most good things in your life, and I hope that will inspire you to keep your heart open to wonder, to mystery, to the infinite unknown through which everything beautiful and important will emerge.

I began asking, what if it’s not that the farm is telling us to move on from it by turning so many of the things we wanted into dead ends…but instead that the doors are being closed as if to say, No, not that. Not that way. Not that either… and instead re-directing me back to things that had been on my heart—promises I’d made to myself but didn’t keep. Little Dreams I’d dreamed but not chased after.

I heard Brianna Wiest say in a podcast interview, “The road you take to step away from the calling becomes the path that leads you to the calling.”

Mmm. I really feel those words in a way that would require a far longer Farm Note to describe.

As hard as these last few months have been—mentally, emotionally, and physically—I’ve had vast stretches of time to simply sit and think about a lot of things…about everything.

In a way, it feels maybe even purposeful that each of the things I’ve dealt with the last few months came to be all at once—that I’d lose my job, immediately find another, only to lose this one too (my last day will be May 31 in this current role). That for the first time in my life I had something with my health force me to not be able to do anything but rest. That the tough life things I keep mentioning but am choosing not to share were also coming to a head. That this all happened in the dead of winter when there was nowhere to go but within.

It’s amazing the ways we can avoid ourselves until we can’t. And while I struggled through the Why me?! pity party, I also know there are dreams I’ve buried in the busyness of life, things I still hold onto that I must set down, and too much from the past that I still let creep into today.

While the going within hasn’t been pretty or fun or easy, I do believe it’s such a necessary step to answering some of the big questions we face when life gives us lemons: What is this moment trying to tell me? What am I not seeing that I’m being asked to look at with clear eyes?

It was so many years ago that Chris and I can’t even remember the timeline of when I framed this…but the photo above contains a picture frame with the words, “You control what happens next” written in my hand writing. I’d hastily framed it as a reminder to display for Chris when he was needing to be reminded of it.

It was something one of Chris’ commanders (oddly his surname Burgstein…my last name but spelled differently) told him when he was in the middle of a really tough moment in his early Air Force career, well before we’d even met. But Colonel B’s words stuck with Chris…and with me, through the years.

This frame was sitting on a bookshelf in our home office. A few days after the news of losing my job just before Christmas, and as I was dusting myself off and trying to pick myself back up and take it in stride (I did not do this well, by the way), I went and got this frame off the shelf and hung it right on the wall above my desk where I sit to work.

These words have been a guidepost for me, as have David’s and Brianna’s, too.

I might not have control over many many things, but I do have control over how I think and respond and behave…I have control over how I meet this moment.

Maybe this all comes across as being very vague or meandering or mismatched…truly I have no idea…but the picture is starting to become clearer for me, and each of these pieces are part of the whole.

I’m sharing these thoughts just as they are…just as they come…because I have a hunch that possibly some of you might relate, but also because we’re so used to seeing the figured out, sorted out, put together parts of everyone’s lives on social media…and mine just doesn’t look like that right now—I’m finding myself in the in-between and I’m doing my darndest to embrace it.

My mom has this saying, “When one door closes another door opens…but boy, is it hell in the hallway.”

I’m trying to resist my unending urge as a chronic problem solver to white knuckle my way through what comes next. I’m trying to sit in the discomfort of the moment. I’m trying not to reach for or seek out or arrange the next most comfortable or easy thing.

I’m trying to make room to allow myself to be able to step into the best and most aligned thing, next. And I’m intentionally not sharing what I’ve been dreaming up and thinking about this last year, as it still feels like it’s as precious as a wish that may not come true if whispered.

It’s crossed my mind that maybe all this time the Little Dream Farm has been an instrument in helping me get back to…me.

In that same conversation with David early last year, he said, “I don’t think you even realize all the doors that are about to open.”

It feels even more impactful now that he said that back then…like an omen.

Admittedly, I’ve been so focused on the ones that were closing or slammed shut that I’d been ignoring the doors that were opening…the doors yet to open…the doors I can open myself.

I’d like to leave it here for this week…unfinished…unfolding…door open, if you will.

Especially because just as I was writing these last sentences I turned to look out the window over my shoulder and caught this view below…three days into spring and the very first double rainbow of the year over the Little Dream Farm. I added a quick video, too, in case you’d like to listen to the rain and take a couple seconds to take a big deep breath.

Until next time—here’s to our phases of becoming…and of being.

I’d love to hear anything that’s come up for you while reading today’s Farm Note…feel free to share in the comments with me today.

week 12: on becoming and being

this week on the little dream farm

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