The Planifesto

Several months ago, I read this great article by Martha Beck about the importance of attaching adjectives to your life goals. She cited a couple different examples of people wishing for things—one woman thought she would find happiness by being her own boss, another by having a baby.

Unfortunately, both women failed to accurately investigate the details of their goals before charging ahead. The woman who aspired to be her own boss was really seeking a job with freedom. She quickly learned that starting your own company means you're tied down a lot of the time. The woman who wanted a baby thought it would finally make her feel fulfilled. But it also made her exhausted.

These examples got me to thinking about the life Mr. Wonderful and I are hoping to create over the next several years (or decade). We talk a lot about how things will be "when we move to the vineyard." But we haven't really tried to flesh out what that will look like. And as I learned from dating, you gotta put color to the details (and then stick to them) or you end up with some really unflattering shades...

After all the wedding hoopla finally faded, I decided that Mr. W and I should sit down and start listing our adjectives. Penning our descriptors might help us to start paving the path.

So I found an empty notebook. The French cat one above (which Mr. W actually bought me in Barcelona at the gift shop inside La Pedrera) and we sat down with a glass of wine and brainstormed. The hope is that we will continue to fill the book with ideas, and by the time we've covered each sheet of paper, we'll be well on our way to living the list.

Here's a little peek at what we have so far:

• blissful • peaceful • low maintenance • fun • easy • rich in experiences • satisfying • inspiring • creative • challenging (in a good way) • communal • balanced • healthy •

It's sort of fun to hypothesize where we'll end up and when. I think maybe we'll be farmers... Or maybe a writer and a photographer... The possibilities are endless, really.

How Does Our Garden Grow?

Although we're planning to relandscape it this summer, I do have a bit of a crush on our backyard.

California poppies and red clover Mr. W planted between his grape vines.

I love it for its serenity. I love it for its sounds of chirping and buzzing. I love its breezes and patches of filtered sun. But most of all I love it because it holds our garden. There is truly nothing better than being able to walk out your back door and come inside with the fixings for a salad.

The first time I ever gardened with Mr. W, I was appalled at the level of precision he used. We didn't just carve out a space and throw down some seeds. We graded the dirt so it was level. We mixed bone meal and manure into the existing soil. We set up irrigation lines. It was intense. But oh how it paid off...

These are the best artichokes I've ever tasted. They're almost sweet.
Grilled with a little olive oil, salt and pepper and oregano—they're amazing.

We're very hopeful the family of skunks we discovered last week
in the backyard doesn't come feast on our baby strawberries.

Mr. W's old roommate grew corn a couple summers ago.
It was delicious but apparently when you only grow a few stalks,
you have to hand pollinate all of them. Anxious to see how ours turns out.

Practice for the mini vineyard we hope to own someday.

I didn't know that flowers had sexes, but apparently the zucchini
produces male and female flowers. The males fall off until a female
one is produced. We're still waiting for our baby girl to arrive...

In the summer, we try to get all the figs before the squirrels do.
And then Mr. W likes to do things like douse them in balsamic reduction
sauce or stuff them with goat cheese.

Hopefully the changes we make this summer will turn my backyard crush into a full-blown love affair. Until then, I'll keep enjoying the fruits (and vegetables) of our labors.

The Science of Certainty

If I'm going to start a blog about my relationship with Mr. Wonderful, I really should start at the beginning. Which goes back before I even met him.

See, I don't think it was just luck or fate or coincidence that we found each other.

I believe it was science.

Oprah likes to talk about the third law of physics to explain it. According to Wikipedia, this law states that "The mutual forces of action and reaction between two bodies are equal, opposite and collinear." Every action has an opposite and equal reaction. Or, what you put out will come back at you as an equal force and an equal energy—positive or negative.

Before I met Mr. Wonderful back in the fall of 2007, I made a conscious decision to put certain things out into the Universe. I believed that what I put out would not only shape WHAT but WHO came back to me. So I did a lot of thinking about who exactly it was that I wanted heading my direction. I made lists. I made a collage. If you've ever read The Secret, you know this drill.

But more importantly, I focused on who I was. I worked on being my best, most authentic self. During the 3 years leading up to Mr. W's arrival in my life, I took some big risks (quitting my job and ultimately landing in a much better one), I tested my physical limits (beginning to run and doing a 17-mile hike to climb Half Dome in Yosemite) and I dug deep into the cracks in my psyche and self esteem (hello, Therapy, I heart you).

I wanted to make sure the Me I projected was a Me I was proud of. By the time Mr. W and I met, I was in a great place. I was ready for him. I knew who he would be and I trusted myself enough to identify him. This was something I didn't have in the past. That ability to discern.

The reason I feel the need to talk about this is that I believe other people can do the same thing I did and end up with just as much happiness. I think anyone can concoct the right recipe for this kind of wonderful.

I also think that Mr. W and I can project goodness out into the world to create the life we want moving forward. And maybe this new blog will help document some of that.