It all started in the summer of 2020.
Not having anywhere to go (there was a pandemic, so EVERYTHING was closed, and Austin was, as usual, 100+ degrees – there was nothing to do but be inside), and in a state of absolute boredom, I happened upon a series of Youtube videos of a woman named Nicole building a pool in her backyard. I was convinced that if she could build an entire pool by herself in one hour and twenty two minutes (that’s how long the video was), I could too.
Of course, it snowballed. Ben did at least talk me out of trying to DIY an in-ground pool. He maintains we would still have a mud-filled pit in our backyard today if he hadn’t intervened, and he’s probably not wrong. Over the course of a year we managed to save up the money to pay for the shell of a pool to be craned over our house and placed in a hole in the backyard. And aside from adding the water to fill it and the concrete to hold it in place, that’s where we left it. We have our very own watering hole…and a yard full of dirt, dead grass, leaves, and weeds that the dog drags into the house at every chance he gets. But it’s worth it to live in the water from March through October.
And now we’re on the cusp of taking another step forward. After spending over a year trying to design and build the hardscaping around the pool, and connect it to the rest of the yard, all by ourselves, we finally decided to seek help on this too.
There are lessons in here about realizing when you’re in over your head, when the constraints are not inspiring creativity and are just keeping you from moving forward at all. There were months of feeling stuck and not really knowing why this project, this dream, could not get off the ground. It’s a place I know all too well.
And I can feel that the energy has shifted. Last week we came up with a design for the hardscaping that I cannot stop thinking about. It’s gone from a project that I wanted to spend as little money as possible on (hello old friend, restriction/deprivation mindset) to one that I cannot wait to build, and I will find a way to come up with whatever money it costs. It’s even better than I let myself dream it could be. It checks all of the boxes (using native plants and keeping lots of impervious cover, while being architecturally interesting) and it feels so alive, grounded, colorful and cozy.
It’s this feeling of joy and excitement that I want to hold on to, to memorize how it feels to have my body and mind on the same page and want to move toward the same thing, to not be at odds with each other. I’ve known this feeling before, this sense that I am finally moving and no longer stuck, that even if I’m not sure how something will come to life, I am certain that it will. It’s the feeling of being on the path rather than lost in the woods. It feels like my whole being moving toward a vision it’s determined to bring into the world and make real.
I mentioned in the last post that this is supposed to be a week for visioning what I want to make this year, and that integrated energy, the full-body pull toward an idea, an image, a concept is what I’m seeking. I like to resist the visioning step because daydreaming often looks like doing nothing, so there’s also excavation of the shame around how much time it takes. Right now my body shows me glimpses of what it wants to make, but my mind comes up with all of the reasons we can’t do that. And maybe what I’m seeking is not just the vision that I feel pulled toward, but a reliable process that takes me from the place of longing and imagining to the place of seeing myself fully living in the dream, bringing it out of the realm of possibility and into reality.