Spring, some updates, and some ranting.

I’m always amazed by how spring rolls around.

Down here in the south, it doesn’t come so gradually. Everyday you can see things getting greener, more flowers opening – even sometimes you can see the difference between the morning and the evening if there’s been a good rain during the day!

 

Within a few weeks, everything goes from brown and dead, to lively green and shades of pink and red and purple.

I love the spring – but it also opens up the year’s busiest season on the farm; gardens must be planted, the goats’ pens have to be mucked, pastures re-worked for the coming breeding season, buck pens built, bees tended to, honey harvested, hay cut (two or three times before the summer ends) and stored away, old hay sold or spread on the gardens, then once the veggies and fruits start coming in we have canning and preserving to do, besides all the milk to be processed, cheese and soaps made, and then all the dishes….

Dishes…dishes…dishes…..

Those never seem to have an end!

Besides this, we’re still working away from home.

Its been slowly of late, but we’re due to sign another contract on a large project this coming week (henceforth referred to as “High”), so we’ll be back to the old routine soon, Lordwilling – and then trying to fit in all our farm chores as well.

But still, all considered, I love the spring. 🙂 I love seeing everything come to life and I love working on our farm.

I haven’t been around my blogs lately – I suppose all this (and the fact that a cold’s been going round) gives a good enough reason for that.

(My sister Carra, working on mucking out the lounging pen and covering our garden.)

During this break from blogging I’ve seriously been giving some thought on why I busted up my interests into two separate blogs.

I write two blogs, one for my life on the farm etc, and one for writing.

I had a very good reason to when I did it – and it sounded logical to me at the time, but the more I’ve struggled to keep both of these up the more I find that my blogging – like my life – is all mixed up together and stashed into one compartment.

When I write I am – confessedly – in another world, and do sometimes feel like another person, but my writing takes up a great part of my life – whether physically or not – and its all mixed up and confused in my farm life, work life, and family life.

I don’t really see where I found the reasoning behind moving it to another site.

Or…yes I do.

I have a tendency to worry too much about what others think.

I try to tell myself I don’t – and in some situations I couldn’t care less what people think of me – but in others I’m just as vulnerable as the next person to a fear of rejection…or misunderstanding.

That’s why I moved my writing to a new site.

Because, by sharing my work and my love with my readers, I felt I was imposing on them.

I began this blog to document my life as a servant to the Lord Jesus – and everything that entailed; farming, working, music, everyday struggles, sewing, house-wifery…..the list goes on.

I had no intention of sharing my writing, per se, and for a long time I did not.

Here and there, I tried various ways of sharing, short stories, chapters from the stories I was working on, etc. but I always felt this sense of…heaviness? Is that the word?

I felt like people would not understand me, and that my posts on writing were more of an imposition than an asset.

So I moved them.

And now I feel like a person trying to live two lives – when really I am the girl who writes My Life in Him not the girl who struggles to write a literary blog like what Apples of Gold in Pictures of Silver has become.

That’s not me. Not me at all. The posts are me, most of them, but I’m not a ‘literary’ type person.

I don’t read a lot, I can’t stand most fiction, I’ve never delved into many classics, and contemporary works simply leave me empty. I don’t write book reviews and I don’t like to teach. I have steadily disliked the way young writers try to teach other writers how to write; writing is something that you are born with, the Lord Jesus puts it there, and He’s the One Who must fashion it and bring it up – with much labor and work on the part of His instrument. I believe in sharing this journey – not teaching.

And of all things, I have ended up writing a couple of these ‘teachy’ sort of posts on Apples of Gold in Pictures of Silver simply because I’m at a loss for something to write.

And that is just not me.

Writing to me is living.

What I write in what I live – in another world, as another person. I believe in the things I write, I believe in the people the Lord gives me to write about, and I struggle through their lives and trials just as much as I struggle through my own in reality – it just all comes out on paper instead of being lived out day to day.

I fear others will not understand me, because I do love writing so much, so I bury it amongst the other things that enliven my world – our dairy, our wonderful goats, our farm, my family. I hide behind the part of me that wants to go and just lay down in the grass and let twenty baby goats jump all over me.

I don’t show people the part of me that wants to hide away in a closet with pen and paper and scribble in another world.

I probably will never show this part of me to people as much as I would like to.

I have never wanted to be an author, since I was just a tiny girl (five or six) the very word author summoned up the picture of an all-knowing, sophisticated, somewhat crazy type person with thin glasses, the perfect physic, and a very stuffy character.

I know this is quite a stero-typing, but this is what I thought, sitting in public school (before my parents took me out and homeschooled me) and listening to my teacher, Mrs. Bradly, tell us all about what author meant.

I guess she made it sound like authors were a special class of people – something worth noticing above everyone else – and that’s what turned me off.

I have never wanted to be an author – I still don’t.

I just write what the Lord gives me to write, and I hope one day that others will read it and be blessed by it in someway.

In the same light I don’t want to have a literary blog.

I know over the years of keeping a blog I’ve proven quite….what’s the word….wish-washy?

I can’t make my mind up over a format, I keep changing the settings, swapping the name, making new blogs, now I’ve changed platforms, and now I’m merging my blogs together again.

That’s something else you’ll learn about me. 🙂 I am wishy-washy! My sister, Carra, will vouch for me – I change purses like I change my clothes, and I’m always looking for a better diary or notebook than the one I have. 🙂

But this time I think this change will be final. Writing is separate from my farm life – but its not – its separate from my work – but its not – its separate from my family life – but its not.

Would you believe I read my story on my Iphone while I milk in the mornings, or write scenes while we’re at work? And my family will be the first to tell you how ragged I run them talking about my story (I’m glad they can’t hear how much I think of it!)

I feel rejected in my work, I guess because I can’t talk about it like I would like to – because I’m afraid no one will understand, or because I think they’ll think I’m crazy!

But I’m tired of hiding.

I do take my writing seriously. I trust the Lord Jesus for my stories and for my characters, but I do worry – all the time – about how scenes will turn out, if characters are consistent – if things are real.

And I’m tired of being something I’m not.

I’m tired of writing about the farm, or cooking, or work, when really all I want to do is scribble about my latest work in Enslaved to Freedom or share a new idea for a story to something that will listen – beyond the pages of my diary.

My writing is just as big a part of my life in Jesus as farming and work is – maybe even bigger! – and that’s why I’m bringing it back to My Life in Him.