A Glimpse Into A Life I Didn't Get To Live

And A Year Of Wearing All The Hats.

As many off you have picked up on at this point in the saga of my Substacks’ and through the portal of the gram where I share far too much about my life, I’ve had to search for humor and joy this year because at a glimpse, things could easily look super bleak, and although I do, and have needed to actually process and heal my wounds from last year, I also do not choose to wallow in self pity or doubt.

I train my focus to seek elements of comedy in my situation, because I need to laugh more, because joy is the closest any of us mortals will ever get to enlightenment (IMO) and because I think making lite of the dark just may help someone else see that there is light again after darkness.

Another thing that’s helped me tremendously this year is to travel. Travel brings me great joy and although with my situation; ie dog/farm, it is fairly stressful on the out-swing and the inbound, I haven’t yet felt like it’s something I don’t want to continue doing. It gives me stamina, in a way, to continue. The fortitude to circle back on my ‘‘why’’. Travel also allows me to learn, grow, and live different parts of my life and career that I’m not sure I’m ready to let go of just yet.

Among other things that have all collaborated in being the perfect storm that is known as my life, attempting to build all the infrastructure necessary to support and then build multiple structures, all off-grid on raw acreage in the most isolated island chain in the world, and then permit them all myself, alone, has proven extremely difficult and exorbitant. Anyone who has ever attempted to turn raw land into permitted houses in Maui County please raise your hand. If you know, you know, plus I want to talk to you!

It’s one of the reasons why I moved here to begin with, nearly seven years ago. I loved that I was trading people for jungle. I loved that the island was preserved. That nature far exceeded humans. That I had only one market, three restaurants, and a gas station here on the north shore. I loved that it removed the paradox of choice from my life. I love still that I can’t order Instacart or Grubbhub or take a Lyft from my home. I love taking my trash cans to the top of my road for pick up myself and that my mailbox sits up there as well. I want that kind of stillness and quiet in my life. I’m okay with Amazon taking a week or more to get here. I don't want or need anything in a hour. I chose an intentional amount of distance from modern conveniences so that I could actually continue learning how to do things myself. I didn’t want to be crippled by tech that raves about making my life ‘‘easier’’ while I slave away to pay for all the services I now need.

But there is of course the other side to that coin… try opening a brick and mortar business here for instance. There are not a lot of options for anything and that’s because the county is notorious for making things incredibly difficult, slow, and just plain out of reach. Extortionate fining for un-permitted this or that, county drones checking in, and the price of living, building, and owning makes Maui extremely inaccessible.

So as I go into the last quarter of the year, realizing that my architect did not submit the grading and grubbing revisions he was meant to for the county or correct the fire sprinkler issue back in April that I myself spent hours calling the fire protection bureau to sort out, that someone (who even knows who when there are this many people involved) dropped the ball on pursuing my Ag inspection, that I am completely unable to find my septic engineer to approve the corrections that I made to my leech field regardless of how many times I drop by his office, email, or call/text, and that my ‘‘consultant’’ seems all but completely unhelpful if not straight up rude and unprofessional, never mind the thousands of dollars I’ve paid each and every single one of them, I think taking space may be for the best. From the farm, from the journey I’m crawling along on out here, all whilst laughing and joking about it, and staining wood to make shelves, as if shelves are what I need in my life.

That’s exactly what I mean though, we all find joy in our own ways and when shit goes sideways I find it in the mundane, the un-special, the rather ordinary. It’s like stability in a tornado for me. The taking of a ceramics course so I can eat out of my own pottery. The staining of wood and building of my own DIY shelving. The learning to scrub, pressure wash, repaint, and patch my little tent in the jungle that was only ever supposed to be temporary, until I lived happily ever after with my fiancé and new baby in the house with the nursery.

Yeah, plans change, and change they have.

Yesterday my new neighbors stopped to talk story quickly on the road when I was taking the pups on their 3 mile loop walk. I only got to introduce myself for the first time a few weeks before. I was taking her number down when one of their little girls in the backseat rolled down the window long enough for me to say hello. I noted their San Diego area code as they rushed off and I was left with my thoughts swirling on the rest of my stroll. Sometimes I let them go because it’s not altogether morbid to me, they’ve also started to bring me some joy too. My notions of her have started to be a kind of happy, in a way, like keeping her alive in my mind. I allowed myself to wander to a parallel universe where my little girl Maverick was alive, and not much younger than those two little girls, after her first birthday on the 6th of this month. I thought how they’d have been friends, and I could’ve had another connection point with these new neighbors. I wondered who Maverick would’ve looked like, and who she would’ve become. I daydreamed about all the things I’d be teaching her, and how even if it was just me and her out here, we’d be making it, together. She’d have been my little BFF, just like Pete.

I found my joy in those moments of preserving her memory yesterday, and once again as I stood at the precipice of my own personal Everest, both in the physical farm development and in the emotional story behind it, I grasped onto my why all that much more tightly….

With love always,

H