I wrote and published a book last week.
Actually, I wrote the book in less than an hour, and then it took me the next six days to figure out how to get it formatted the way I wanted and up for sale on Amazon.
It all started when I pulled a turnip from one of the raised garden beds outside the kitchen window here at Spirit Hill Farm. At first I just leaned over and grabbed the feathery greens and gave a little pull, but soon it turned into a wrestling match where only one of us was wrestling while the other was just being—me against The Silent Force. After a bit, I had one foot up on the raised bed, risking flying back and landing on my butt because now I really wanted to know what was under there.
It turned out to be two stumpy turnips tightly twisted around each other like salsa dancers in love.
I had known those turnips as seeds, as little black specks of hope. When I’d planted them I’d tried to get one or two in each ¼ inch deep hole, but a pinch into the pile in my palm got me more like five or six seeds, and so, when they began sprouting little pops of green, I’d had to thin them out, muttering sorry, sorry, sorry the whole time.
These two had busted out of the seed’s shell, had survived the thinning, had managed to somehow mate or at least hug underground.
This is all to say that I have a new appreciation for turnips. Frankly, I never wake up in the morning and think, This is going to be a great day! I’m going to eat a turnip! and yet turnips are big deals!! They start off so small and then grow into these, dare I say it, works of art! I mean, I didn’t eat the dancing turnip that I pulled, but I sure did take a lot of pictures of it before feeding it to the chickens. (Don’t judge—it looked more like a science experiment than lunch—there was a lot of dirt lodged into all those crevices AND, may I remind you, I am a farmer-in-training. I am so far from being a farmer that I only recently learned that seeds need both light and water to grow. (I must have missed the day they taught us that in in first grade.)
I walked back to the guest house thinking about how hard those turnips had worked to grow and how they had ended up getting eaten by a bunch of chickens, and I thought that I better do something cool before the something similar happened to me.
Life is so short!!
Anyway. As a writing coach, I often tell my people that writing is like pooping—it’s something they were born to do and that if they just relaxed, good things would happen, and so I decided to write a tiny book arguing my point. If I could convince just one person who thought they couldn’t write to write, then it would be worth the effort, so I went inside and wrote it all down!
If there is one thing Spirit Hill teaches you, it’s to relax. I’m not sure exactly how a big house with a whole bunch of plants, some chickens, a pool, a hot tub, a fire pit, a bocce ball court, an apple orchard and some citrus trees (I’m leaving out so much! The figs! The grapes! The kiwis! The plums! The persimmons! The I forget what else!) gets you to relax, but it happens pretty much as soon as you get out of your car. You look around, take in a breath, and your body says, Hey!! Thank goodness!! You can let your shoulders fall away from your ears now!
And now you can go on Spirit Hill’s Instagram page and see me read Making a Mess while sitting on the throne in the Sugar Shack’s cool outside bathroom.
The moral of the story?
Life is good at Spirit Hill.
And turnips are unpredictable.