Episode 4: How is life like a tapestry weaving?

I think of it like this: 

When we are faced with decisions, it’s easy to get all worked up.  Knowing whether you are making the right choice is impossible. If we agonize over the right choice, we can become paralyzed and get really stuck.

Rather than grasping for answers that have a guaranteed outcome, we have to be willing to try and face the possibility of failure. When we have an openness to possibilities and courage to try them, we might experience success.  It’s also possible that we fail and have a good laugh. Butat the very least we for sure, gain knowledge on what to do next.

In Season Three of our podcast, where we’re diving into the theme of capturing ordinary moments. And what’s more ordinary than making decisions? We make countless decisions every day—from whether to snooze the alarm, to what to eat for breakfast, to how long to brush our teeth. These small choices are a constant part of our daily routine. Then there are the bigger decisions, like moving to a farm or raising fiber animals. You know the kind.

But let’s be real—do you struggle with making decisions? Do you agonize over the next step, spending so much time weighing risks and doing research that you end up stuck and wanting to quit? We’ve all been there. Sometimes, when you’re paralyzed by the need to find the right answer, it helps to hear how others have faced failures and kept going despite making wrong choices.

Since moving to the farm, we’ve had our fair share of flops—some of them quite funny, really. We’ll share a few of those stories with you today. Plus, we’ll talk about the forest thinning project that Greg and our neighbor Josh are working on. It all started with one small choice and has grown into something they can now imagine being a success.

“I want to hear the story of how to grow brussels sprouts,” Lisa said.

“Okay,” Greg responded. “There are there are a lot of things we’ve tried that. Because we didn’t know what we were doing with farming or raising animals that people suggested we try. And I was always willing to try stuff. So one time I was talking to someone about how difficult it was to grow brussels sprouts up here.”

“Where were you?” Lisa asked.

“I think I was buying something from him off the Drew’s list,” Greg said. “I think that’s what it was. I don’t remember really. And it’s odd that it would be difficult to grow brussels sprouts here, because if you just crossed the water on the other side, there’s lots of Brussels sprout farms where they grow lots of Brussels sprouts. But I had difficulty.”

“It was probably exactly how you were talking with him about.” Lisa said.

“Right,” Greg responded. “I had difficulty and he said, “Well, the reason it’s hard to grow them on Whidbey Island is because the soil doesn’t have any sulfur in it. And brussels sprouts need sulfur to grow. And so what you have to do is break the head off of a matchstick, and throw it in the hole with the seed or the plant you’re planting the seedling. And that will provide enough sulfur for the brussels sprouts to grow and be very strong and big and for a loss.” And I said, “oh, I didn’t know that.””

“So you come home and you’re like, “Hey, do we have matchsticks?”” Lisa said.

“And so yeah, so I got a bunch of wooden matchsticks and I cut off the heads,” Greg said. “And I threw them at the bottom of the little seedlings plants that I was putting in the ground and did about two rows of brussels sprouts that way, and was looking forward to them sprouting and being wonderful to eat and instead, the sulfur burnt all of the brussels sprouts. Dead killed them. I mean, within 48 hours. They were dead. All of them.”

“How not to grow brussels sprout,” Lisa chirped.

“And even though you are interested in what people have to say, and you’re always willing to learn a little bit, you need to be a little discerning in terms of which suggestions you take and what you don’t,” Greg said.

Like I said, one small decision can lead to failure. And when you are just starting out, there are so many things to learn and so many potential failures.

“And remember when we were going to keep our animals calm all night, and so they wouldn’t scream and wake us up?” Greg recalled.

Lisa began, “We were told, Paige was like, “They can’t see out and no light. They are going to be in darkness at nighttime because it makes them really nice and calm, and they just lay down and they’ll just be mellow good animals.” So we got here and we were going to block in the whole barn and you were pricing siding and a sliding door and this whole complicated system. But then I got the brilliant idea of using tarps and stringing them along the, what is it? The sprinkler line?”

“Well actually we put up a metal line for that like we like a shower curtain,” Greg said.

“Yeah. And then all how many feet do you think that is?” Lisa pondered. “Probably 40 feet. Forty feet worth of tarp right with showerhead ringlets that always kept falling down right we would bring our guanacos in at night. Shut the gate. Close the curtains on them tie them so they couldn’t open the curtains. Right. And we thought we were having calm animals.”

“And were they calm?” Greg asked.

“Well, they fought over the one corner of light that they could actually see,” Lisa said. “And I don’t believe that is calm. I think that’s fighting at night over light.”

“Yeah. Over being able to see out,” Greg said. It didn’t work. It did not work. It was like totally stupid. And when you think about it, how do these animal sleep in nature? Are they tucked in and enclosed completely, or are they out in the middle of the wilderness?”

“Yeah. So that didn’t, that did not work,” Lisa said. “I don’t remember how we decided to finally…”

“I think we’ve just decided, let’s just leave the curtains open one night and see what happens. And they were all much happier.” Greg said.

Can you hear all the small decisions that went into tucking our guanacos into darkness at night?  And how hard we worked to implement them?  And then—in the end it was a flop. Not good.  But we learned.  And at least, now we have a lot of spare tarps in case we ever need one!

The choices and trials continued.

“You started out having to figure out how to scour wool,” Greg recalled. “So could you tell me about that?”

“Well, okay,” Lisa agreed. “So, I researched a whole lot about how best to scour wool to get the lanolin and the dirt out. And one of the most sort of hands off seemingly easy ways that I was very open to trying was called suint fermentation. And that’s where you put the wool in a big, huge plastic bucket, like a big one of those rectangular storage buckets, big as big as you can get. And preferably black. And then you put water in it. And then you close the lid and you put it out in the sun. And it basically bakes itself to death. And all the grossness of the wool starts to ferment, like the sweat and the bacteria and all that kind of stuff. And it starts to like, melt away, the lanolin and the stinkier the better. Okay, and so I put it out there and I kept re-listening to the podcast that gave me information about how to do it and it kept saying let it get stinky, let it get stinky. And I was like, Oh, good. It’s getting stinky. And then finally, I was done. And I took it out. And I rinsed it. And it’s stunk, but it was not clean. And so I mean, I was open to trying and sounded like a really good thing and people do do it. You know? People do it. But it’s not for me. I mean, it smells like sewage.”

“Like a septic tank,” Greg said.

“It was bad,” Lisa recalled. “It was worse than the garbage dumpster behind the elementary school plus a sewage tank all mixed together. It’s really, really bad.”

“Strike one,” Greg announced. “We don’t want to try Strike two. Right. Okay. So that’s, yeah, you try something and then you need to discern whether it actually works or not.”

Sometimes there’s a big, overwhelming project that requires more decisions than you feel equipped to deal with. Nearly half of our property is forest. And that’s the same for our neighbor, Josh’s farm. When we walk past our pasture gates and into the forest it feels dark and damp and endless.  And while I love it, it’s not a healthy forest, and you can feel that with the trees so close together, very little light coming down to the floor, and mostly just mushrooms and a few ferns for undergrowth.

If you think the learning curve for taking care of guanacos was steep for us, you might be surprised to hear how difficult it is to navigate the permitting process to take care of your own forest.

Josh and Greg have been working on this overwhelming forest issue for years now.  From the very beginning of their project, they’ve had to make choices and find next steps without knowing if their work would eventually pay off. They’ve faced failures and have gone down rabbit holes. They’ve had to pivot and retreat and reach out for support. We still don’t know the exact outcome, but we do know that the way they stayed open to answers and willing to try them was essential to getting this far.

“So, Josh, you bought this bought this property a few years ago?” Greg asked.

“Yeah. It was July of 2020. I think we moved here,” Josh responded.

“Yeah. And it has a big wetland in the back of it,” Greg said.

“What I remember most is buying this property, you know, having primarily lived in urban areas,” Josh said. “Most of my life, though, having studied environmental science and policy, and being very overwhelmed by the state of the land, and immediately talking to you our next-door neighbor about what the heck we were doing here. How to deal with it all.”

Whether it’s big projects with high stakes like the forest or littler issues like how to grow brussels sprouts, or when to change colors in a tapestry, I want to point out that they are all decisions.  And because they are all decisions, they take the same muscle.

“Our neighbor Josh had a background in environmental planning,” Greg said. “And his property like ours is mostly forest. And he suggested just mentioned to me that there was a class that was free from Washington State University, on forest stewardship and forest management for small forest holders. And so, I looked online at WSU, and I found the course. And I signed up for it. And it ended up being the most enlightening and inspirational kind of thing. That has contributed enormously to the way we look at managing the forest on this land.”

“For sure,” Lisa said. “And I mean, would you say that your response to his remark about the forestry program at WSU was on par with your response to the matchsticks for the brussels sprouts?”

“Yes, I was curious,” Greg said. “I was willing to try. Okay. I was like, Oh, okay.  All that. Right. That could be good. It could be. And it actually was, it was spectacularly good. Yes. I mean, it has, it has given me so much knowledge about our trees and our forest. And I did research about them. And the fact that we, the forest here was timberland for oh gosh, over 100 years, maybe even longer than that. And it was clear cut, and then over planted and clear cut again. And what we have here now is nothing like a native forest on Whidbey Island, what it looked like before the industrialization of timber harvesting. So, we’re going to slowly try to return it to a native forest.”

“It’s been so awesome to be on the sidelines of the two of you working that through, Lisa said. “Along that path, were there any other breadcrumbs that were like, you know, you’re up, you stayed open to it, and then it turned out to be not so good, or you stayed open to it and turn out to turn to be the very thing.”

“Oh, there were lots of stops and starts and stops along the way. Yeah, I mean, we started and I wrote this beautiful plan for the forest and realized I needed to get it thinned in order to make it happen. And you have to get a permit in the state of Washington to do that. And of course, our application for the permit initially got turned down. And we had to redo it and work again on it. It’s been very difficult to find a logger that’s willing to log such a small parcel we finally have a contract with a logger. That’s been very hard,” Greg said.

“Like the whole thing is like, “Oh, we’re on the track. Yay. And then, “oh,” Lisa said.

“Let’s start all over again,” Greg said. “It’s been a lot of that starting and stopping, but it’s, I feel like it’s gonna happen next month. Knock on wood, but I feel like another castle look forward to.”

“But so, okay, if the saying yes, or the let’s say if the opportunity. If the response to the opportunity is the same. I’m curious, Lisa said. “And there’s lots of examples of being curious where it has gone nowhere or not just nowhere. It’s been a big old flop.”

“A disaster,” Greg said.

“A disaster,” Lisa replied. “Yeah. And then there are others that have led to you if you had never taken the WSU course for instance, right? you would not at all be the place that you are now, with your forest management plan.”

I guess the thing is—when you make a decision there’s no way to know whether it is right or wrong.  But, I think we can know that it will lead somewhere—no matter what the decision.  And sometimes all we can do is keep trying, one small choice after another, until we get to where we want to go….or not.  And, I want to mention, that it seems so much better when we are in the company of others along the way.  Here’s Greg and Josh talking about their forestry project. As you listen try and count how many choices are part of the story they tell together.

“Do you remember suggesting to me that I think that you were enrolled in a course through Washington State University and forest management, or forest stewardship, and that I might be interested?” Greg asked.

“I do” Josh said. “So, through the WSU Extension Forestry program, I was doing their coach planning forestry course for forest stewardship for small forest landowners like us. And thought, this is exactly what we need to learn about how to manage our forests and our wetland. And so, I suggested that you take it as well, mostly because I didn’t want to have to do all the work myself and figuring this out.

“So, we are when we finished the course,” Greg said. “I remember they sent a forester out to look at both of our forests. That’s right, which was nice. And they were very encouraging. And, but we, when we looked at it, were concerned, very concerned about the impact of the wetland on our ability to log and the impact of any logging on the wetland as well.

“Yeah, both of those. Yeah. And we, at some point, I don’t do you remember that we both bought hip waders and we were gonna try to walk in the water and figure out if there was a culvert underneath to clear it to make the wetland a little smaller. You remember that?” Greg asked.

“I think we’ve explored all kinds of avenues trying to understand what’s going on and how to manage it at this point,” Josh said.

“Yeah. It was like that was really a dumb rabbit hole to go down. I think, you know, if we just make the wetlands smaller, we can log,” Greg said.

“Well, I think we were also trying to understand you know how the wetland on our side of Frogwater connected to the wetland, North Frogwater  goes into Glendale wetland preserve and feeds into Glendale Creek and just, you know, there’s wasn’t a lot of clarity on how it was all connected and what was feeding what. And so we needed to just start unraveling the puzzle a little bit,” Josh said.

“Yeah, and then we decided, or I guess I decided, and roped you into it, that if we applied together, we would be much more likely to get both our permits approved and someone that would be interested, and help in removing some of these overly dense, not very healthy trees,” Greg said.

“Yeah. We have definitely small acreage by logging standards,” Josh replied. “So, combining our land made it much more attractive to any logger that might potentially want to take the job here out on Whidbey Island.

“So we applied together,” Greg said.

“That was now gosh, maybe like three years ago, or four years ago, when we first submitted our applications. And it’s been a long process, and the Washington Department of Natural Resources sent like four or five people out the first time do you remember that? Yeah, they were to evaluate our applications,” Josh said.

“Foresters from DNR, one from the Department of Ecology that was a fish specialist, and then two fish biologists from the Tulalip tribes, because salmon were potentially involved in the project. And so they have a stake in it, as well. Right? And yeah, we got permission from the northern neighbor to trek across their property to look at where the connection to the wetland is,” Josh said.

“And what did you discover over there?” Greg asked.

“Well, they decided that Frogwater Road was a temporary, potentially removable barrier to the wetland that bisected our side from the northern section of the wetland.”, Josh said. “And so by regulation, that becomes potentially fish bearing waters. So that makes our wetlands a lot more heavily regulated than we realized.

“And so, the Department of Natural Resources for the state of Washington basically told us it was a type A wetland,” Greg said.

“That’s right”, said Josh. “A fish bearing wetland. It’s a type F water, which is fish bearing, but a type A wetland, it has the strongest protections. So that’s how it’s getting deemed for the application”, he explained. “And at that point, basically, we talked with them and decided that we needed to withdraw our applications, rework the whole project, redraw the maps and typing and put in different buffers than we had understood before they decided it was fish bearing. And so that was kind of the first pivot point where we had to pause and regroup.”

“So how did you feel at that point?” Greg asked.

“A little tired. I think we considered throwing in the towel,” Josh said.

“Yeah, we did,” Greg said.

“Given, like the many hundreds of hours we had devoted at this point, getting this project off the ground,” Josh said.

It just felt like it was just going to be too much to me,” Greg said. “And then they sent us Hollis.”

“That’s right,” Josh said. “Yeah, Hollis Crapo was one who came and did a lot of work with us on the ground mapping the wetland and laying out the boundaries for harvest that would be permissible for that type of wetland.”

“He was a godsend,” Greg added.

“He was so helpful. Yeah. So I mean, I remember he put on his waders I think and went out into the muck of the wetland and was, you know, taking measurements with us and bushwhacking through the mud and the vines. And it was quite a day that we spent in the field together. And so, then we resubmitted our permits our applications. After Hollis was out here for a while. And they were approved.”

“I think there was a pretty quick turnaround, once that we had gotten everything remapped, and put the boundaries and correctly, they sent out another forester to walk the property with us and look at all the layout of the plan”, Josh said. “And then yeah, it was approved. And that was maybe a year ago about this point.”

“Yeah. My, my feeling when it was approved is okay, now here we go. Now we have to figure out actually how to do it,” Greg said. “So when you look out at this, how do you imagine your place looking when it’s thinned when you’ve got far less dense trees? What do you what do you see there?”

“Well, I’m trying to look out, you know, on the longer horizon, because I know it’ll take you know, 5-10 years for it to really, fully rebound and thrive from the thinning”, Josh said. “But, you know, the goal really is biological diversity and starting to bring back mature forests to this landscape where they’ve been missing for so long. Yeah, you know, much larger Doug firs, and cedars and Alders a lot of habitat for the biodiversity that we have here and the wildlife  and hopefully, someday, you know, when I give this land to my son, if that happens, it’ll be a really thriving forest and wetland ecosystem again.”

“I look forward to when we’ve finished this project,” Josh continued. “And we’re on to whatever next project there is, but we can at least, you know, breathe a sigh of relief that we’ve made a difference here and gotten important work done together.”

They made so many choices and even kept going in spite of so much frustration.  They could have decided to quit the project for lack of progress at many different points.  But they didn’t. They just kept making one decision after another.

Greg and I deepened our look at what goes into finding the answer to “What the heck do we do next?” or how to make a good choice.

“So then, I mean, how do you know?” Lisa asked.

“Well, I think part of it is using a reputable source or getting information from a reputable source. Not the Drew’s list guy, not Paige. You know, I think that’s part of it,” Greg said.

“How do you know they’re reputable?” Lisa asked.

“That’s another yeah, sometimes you I don’t know.  Sometimes you just have to try stuff I think,” Greg said.

“So, okay, so then, if you have a reputable source, then it’s more likely to be maybe a good thing. But you still don’t know,” Lisa said.

“Well, exactly. I mean, I think that’s true. You still don’t know. I don’t know how you know, sometimes I think you just have to stay positive. And keep trying and stay interested. And just try it,” Greg said.

“And you have to be willing for it not to work out,” Lisa said.

“Yeah, I mean, I guess that’s part of it, isn’t it? Even though you aren’t going, “Oh, if this doesn’t work, I’ve just burned up all my brussels sprouts.” But you don’t? I don’t know. I think you just have to be willing to try sometimes. I don’t know,” Greg said. “What do you think?

“Well, I think I don’t it’s a curious thing. But I actually wonder about, do you now think of defeat? Do you not think of the bad consequence that much? I didn’t a couple times,” Lisa said.

“But if you’re like, “Oh, sure, I’ll try that.” And then it’s a disaster there’s, there’s less to lose, because you haven’t invested so much, first of all, Lisa said. “And second of all, my guess is there’s some kind of unconscious or intuitive response that you’re working with, don’t you think? Like, yeah, it’s like there’s something that said get curious about that.”  “I’m curious.” You’re following curiosity from a different, non-scientific place.”

“Right? There’s something that has touched your intuition,” Greg said. “And so you, you’re going to try it. Right? And you’re and you’re not going to agonize over whether it’s the right thing to do or not.”

“And so like, you know, suint fermentation, it’s like, “Oh, that’s fascinating. I’m curious about that.” Did I ever really research like, Do people really love it? Do they really, really work? I just was like, “Okay, how do you do it”? And then just learn that?” Lisa said.

“Yeah. Can bacteria really make this all perfect?” Greg asked.

“So, there’s like something that you grab with your intuition and take it? Do you think?

And then if we fail once, try again,” Lisa said. “And then if we fail twice, try a third time, and then eventually decide it doesn’t work for us. Right? Which, I mean, I’m glad we tried that, so that we can know.”

“Okay, so then I have one more question about the forestry stuff. So then, how do you know whether it’s like, if you’ve gone down the path and follow, you’re following the breadcrumbs and things are sort of happening, but then you come to a dead end? And there’s like a, like a, no, this is a fish bearing wetland and you’ve got to, you’re not gonna get the permit, and it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to do anything with this forest. Okay. How do you know if you should just take that or keep going?” Lisa asked.

“Well, for me, that was an easy decision,” Greg said. “Because what learning about the forest through WSU did for me was it created a vision. A new story for me of where I wanted to be, how I wanted to interact with the forest, a whole new meaning for that interaction and for that vision. So it would have been really, really hard to discourage me.”

During the time I’ve been writing this podcast episode I’ve become very aware of just how many decisions I make in a day.  It’s pretty astounding—like constant.  And it takes me back to tapestry weaving.

People say, “Life is a rich tapestry”.  There are all kinds of reasons this metaphor works.  The interwoven threads, the messy back compared to the beautiful front, all the patterns that create a broader image or vision.

But for me now, probably the most powerful way this metaphor works is because when we view life as a tapestry, we can appreciate the interconnectedness of our choices and the complex, beautiful patterns they create over time. Which means that all the choices count, the ones that lead to burned brussels sprouts, the ones that leave us with a bin full of wool sewage, and even the ones that tell us to keep trying for the sake of the forest and healthier land we can give to our kids.