to grow

A little like this banana leaf unfurling itself to the waiting world, growth takes a bit of patience, inner peace, strength...

and tenacity.

As we poke and pry at our bahamas plan I feel that we are sort of stuck due to the unforseen economic downturn. And yet every moment of every day spent on the project reveals more and produces more, in itsy bitsy increments. This weekend (and last, and countless other days) Bryan and I worked on the details of the Gathering House for Exnihilo. Yes, we are designing it ourselves within the framework of the oh-so-cool and very green round structures built in NC.

What a challenge.

If you ever want to find out how little you know about something, tackle it head on as if you know everything.

I think this has been the mode for most of my life. It involves the initial gutsy, "let's do this" (the easy part) followed by the "wow, this is harder than I thought," which comes before the..."holy crap what were we thinking"... which then by some miracle gets finished with...

"We did it!"

Getting to that point leaves a trail of newly learned lessons, some newly found communication skills, a lot of nail biting, and a good portion of humble pie.

But it is completely worth it.

It is true what they say about "the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time", and honestly if you knew it was an elephant you were going to eat you wouldn't even start. But here is the thing about not knowing...

you do move forward.

Maybe that is the advantage of this age. We have just enough possibility thinking left to be foolish enough to think we can do this thing and just enough experience to pull it off if we work like mad. While working on this building Bryan and I ran into roadblocks of many kinds. It was an exercise in problem solving of monumental proportions. At one point we were completely steimied working on the second floor. So we stopped working on it for a couple of months. Getting some new info and new ideas while in Hawaii, the solutions presented themselves and the roadblocks came down. And things that we were oh-so-sure about a few months ago got tweaked and changed when we realized there was a better way.

So, this week I sent off our new design to our project manager to review. If it goes anything like the little bungalow design it will endure many revisions to get it to meet up to code. Likely we will have to make some changes, but engineering will let us know what those will be and hopefully the compromises won't change the look and feel of the spaces. It is a long long road to the finish line.

But for today I can celebrate one more bite of the elephant.

Bryan viewing the first floor layout of the gathering house.