Gratitude in the Woods

Musings from our off grid plot

Recently Andrew Vietze and I got back in bed after breakfast, bundled up cozy in our blankets, and got to work on our laptops. We have walled in one room of our off-grid house and insulated it so we could move onto our land and finish our house while living in it. Building the ship as we sail it as the saying goes.

Springtime in Maine can still be pretty chilly and some mornings we have to turn on the propane heater to take the edge off our room. It was a gray and rainy so the air was particularly raw. As we sat in bed I looked over at Andy and said ya know, in 20 years we will look back and say remember when we worked from bed to try to get warm?

I’m trying to live in the moment, practice mindfulness and I’ve started a gratitude journal as a place to focus only on the good, the wins, those little snapshots I know I will look back on fondly. I’m a bit of a notebook collector, and have a bad habit of not wanting to write in them, but I think this one is perfect for journaling gratitude in our sylvan escape.

I’ve come to believe that we never “arrive”… we never “get there” in life. There will always be a new challenge when you finish the last one. We can’t live to “make it” - we have to live for the moment. I don’t want to look back and only be able to see the treasures I had after they’re gone. I want to find joy in them now. Because now is gone so quickly.

Today I’m grateful for a shower, which I took from a bucket of water I hauled from the brook. I’m thankful I’m strong enough to haul that bucket, that we can afford the propane to heat water, and for the clever person who designed a rechargeable pump so we can have a portable shower head to add a bit of water pressure to our bucket showers.

I’m thankful for the forest all around us, full of budding trees that feel like gentle, giant friends, waking from their slumber. For the barred owl that hoots at night outside our window, for the beautiful tinkling song of the hermit thrush, for the pair of blue jays gathering nesting material the past couple days.

I’m thankful for the old town map that shows the last names of the few people who used to have homes on our dead end dirt road. I’d like to learn more about them and see if the stone walls I got attached to and forbid our site workers from touching are indeed a cellar hole - whispers from the past, now hidden within the clutches of the forest.

I’m thankful that Andy reports for duty as a park ranger again soon, which means half of each week we will once more live in our ranger cabin in the wilderness.

Above all, I’m thankful for Andy, who has a heart of gold, and makes me feel special. I was eyeing a particularly big slab of bedrock that had been dug up and mused how it would make a perfect standing stone. Andy said, “you can have a standing stone!” So one day I think our woods shall have a standing stone. Won’t that make the people talk in the distant future…

I hope you can find something to be grateful for today, and have a lovely weekend!

Lilly