WoodWind Park

Where’d You Grow Wednesday? Earth Day at the End of the Road

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As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kinds of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.                      Henry David Thoreau

Choosing to Grow has dominated my life. As I knelt on the cold linoleum of a rented bathroom sixteen years ago, my prayer of desperation yielded the instruction to Choose to Grow. I’ve pursued that ever since. What CTG means is I never settle for blind acceptance of someone’s idea. I investigate, deconstruct and analyze continually to see what growth is possible and what noticing I should entertain.

To be honest, growing started in the dark recesses of my mind long before I realized it was aiming my shoulders to find blossom at the end of this road.

From a deep interest in Thoreau’s instructions for Civil Disobedience at Waldon Pond, to journal entry reflections written prior to 9-11, through the first book I researched, and because of all the moves we endured oscillating between still quiet and robust busyness in our married life, I’ve sensed this house would be our landing spot and our legacy project would be The Park.

Now that we are here, I’m more challenged than ever to allow space for the thoughts that will tread deep paths in my mind.

This Week’s Growth

It is Earth Day 2020. Fifty years since its inception and smackdab in the middle of  a contentious and deadly pandemic. What began as a Wisconsin senator’s launchpad for environmental activism has proven to be a chasm in today’s political climate. It’s one more thing people have decided to fight about. Many have become far too frustrated to sit still for a second, look at the world literally in their back yards and attend to the plants, or the weeds, or the birds and animals that work to exist there- even when a deadly virus mandates it. Finding satisfaction in the simple is not the way of our American life and especially not our stay-at-home resistance.

An increasing number of people prefer to fight. Joining causes and raising voices that pit science against beliefs and responsibilities against freedoms.  I stand firmly between the contrasts, contemplating all of it.

Fuel for my thinking this week came in both a book and a movie. The book Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant has challenged me to stay courageous in the ways I chafe at societal norms. I also found plenty of food for thought watching the movie, The Biggest Little Farm, about natural, organic and co-existent farming that is an actual place with actual awe-inspiring growth.

My husband and I are spending this down time better laying plans for The Park. We want to make use of the landscape for the enjoyment and enrichment of all people able to visit. We want to encourage a gentle balance between the natural tendencies of the land to grow and people’s recreation on it. We have adopted a business model of Just Enough. Just enough visitors to keep the resources abundant. Just enough money to keep the business viable and the employees well paid. Just enough profit to make regular charitable contributions to those around us who need it. Just enough scheduling that there is balance between work and recreation for our family too.

Today is not a political day for me. To be honest, every single day here at the end of the road is Earth Day. Especially now that I have time to observe the spring version of this property, I am compelled by the life that struggles to bloom, emerging through decaying layers that were yielded before the winter snow buried them. I’m distracted by the return of birds to nests and the cyclical rhythm of next-generation-eagle-pairing. I am not an activist, but I guess I will claim I am an environmentalist because the world around me is too fascinating to disregard.

Here are today’s Earth Day postcards from the end of the road.

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New sprout sidled up next to last year’s dead root.

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A pair of geese chatting about the wind-driven waves and the direction they intend to fly away from me.

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A discarded fishing reel from over fifty years ago…one of the trash items collected for Earth Day.

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Budding trees are subtle, but incredible when observed up close.

May this Earth Day provide at least a moment of contemplation and fertile ground for your choice to grow too.

Meagan Frank

Copyright 2020

It’s a Calling. It’s a Dream. It’s a Park!

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WoodWind Park

Hubby and I are pretty quiet people with loud, preposterous dreams.

Since 2001 we have actively sought purpose. Much of that time has been spent throwing out ridiculous ideas over coffee or while laying awake in bed. Sometimes we would stop in the middle of the trail we had been walking because an awesome idea had arrived.

“Let’s build a free sports center.”

“Let’s renovate an old movie theatre and turn it into a music venue.”

“Let’s buy that old creamery and use one part for a bar and grill and the other part for a formal dining room.”

“Let’s sell t-shirts with a character doing fun active things. Let’s call him Pudgie.”

“Let’s make fried ice cream in every flavor imaginable.”

“Let’s find a way to bring people together for events and ideas.”

My journals have recorded this messy pursuit. I wrote down whisperings and nudgings that got louder and louder for us over the past ten years. What I realize is that every curiosity, every misstep, every miscalculation was a flat-out answer to prayers.

What felt like simply fun and interesting conversations was a calling neither of us realized we were contemplating answering. I kid you not, these “visions” were so strong for me that I literally wrote an entire draft of a novel about this magical place that houses eternity and some of the elements of what I wrote about three years ago are actually starting to be real-life things.

Hubby and I realize we were meant to buy an abandoned ski hill and turn it into something amazing. To foster a place where activity can be offered for practically nothing, where music can be enjoyed in big and small ways, where informal and formal dining can co-exist, where apparel highlighting the antics of our cartoon Pudgie is actually possible, where fried ice cream has a place to be created and where events and ideas will be endless.

For this imagined thing to come to life, we will be selling our house, downsizing to our cabin on the lake that is less than twenty minutes from our new project, changing the nature of the jobs we have and working like crazy for the next couple years to get the doors open and the outside welcoming.

The progress and setbacks are being chronicled on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and we are grateful for the support and prayers we are receiving from all corners of the world.

Copyright Meagan Frank 2019

 

 

9/11 Led Us to The Park

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If you were old enough, you remember where you were the day planes crashed into buildings and the world changed forever.

I was shaken awake by my husband at the news we were under attack. “We”: our small nuclear family of three, thousands of miles away from actual destruction, death, and chaos. Yes, “we” were under attack.

What we believed about the world was no longer true. How we trusted goodness and leaned into love was challenged to the absolute core. I’ve never felt more a part of that larger “we” than I did with the events of that horrible day.

Maybe I had no right. I had walked away from the TV images and taken our then one-year-old son to the empty and silent playground at a park in Castle Rock, Colorado. No one was there playing. No one was laughing, or swinging, or chasing, or sliding. No planes flew overhead and yet in that silent stillness I felt this guttural connection to the contrast of noise: the sirens, the roar of collapsing buildings, and the screams of terrified people.

What I discovered at that playground is that we stop living when we’re under attack.

The trajectory of life changed for a lot of people on that day, and our family was no exception.

Later that fall, on a road trip back from Minnesota I asked my husband whether he felt like our lives were purposeful. Lots of people asked that question in the wake of 9/11 and those who spent time truth-seeking found unique and various answers. Some felt called to rush to the scene as helpers. Others felt the need to take up arms and physically defend against other possible attacks. Some moved home. Some set off to see the world. Some got married. Some made babies. Some made art. And some, feeling utterly useless otherwise, set out to the park.

No matter what our next steps were, we all had to step into a brand new world.

The attack changed us. For those who honestly sought guidance to return to truth and purpose, I have watched in so many beautiful ways how the gaping hole of 9/11 has planted gorgeous outgrowth in response.

It certainly happened for me and my husband. It has been a slow-growing and unexpected revelation but we did keep earnestly seeking in pursuit of the one thing that felt like our battle against attack. After eighteen years, we have landed at The Park.

I will spend time in upcoming blogposts writing about how this story has unfolded for us,  but here is a glimpse of the destination we didn’t even know we were pursuing. It is a testament to the power of faith and proof that goodness and love remain. No attack can diminish them.

WOODWIND PARK VIDEO

 

Meagan Frank Copyright 2019