Mr Garcia's Field and Casting Your Nets

(An excerpt from Christine's forthcoming book

Navigating Change, on initiating your vision)

Just down the road a piece from our land is the most perfect field in all of our rural village of Tesuque. It receives full-tilt southern exposure sunlight all day. It is always freshly disked, the sun-warmed earth begging for planting like a woman all set for her lover. But the lover doesn't show up. He's too busy out buying her beautiful lingerie, or chilling the champagne, or shaving, to get into bed and make love with her, which is of course is the point of the preamble.

It was a Sunday spring afternoon, and my husband Kenn felt like getting naked on our lawn in the hot sun. Barring an earlier, impressive full naked plunge and ablutions in the frigid spring waters of the Tesuque River that ran through our front yard, it was only the second time I've seen him be naked on our land, and the effect was charming. I am fond of his wild man self, the real man underneath the polished literature professor and high-level art dealer, the man who cries over killing gophers and builds stone walls by the river and does Native American chanting up on the mesa and lies around naked. But I digress.  

Two months earlier, driving down my road, I'd stopped to meet the old Hispanic man I saw each day in a pith helmet and impeccable work coveralls, readying his field. Mr. Garcia (not his real name) stood at the fence in wonder that a blonde Anglo* (Anglos: common jargon for anglo-saxons in Santa Fe) woman had pulled over to connect. His neat rows of irrigation sprinklers stood at attention in the glistening, weedless ploughed rows. I went back later and left a note in his elegant wrought iron gate, inviting him to stop by for a visit sometime. I forgot about the invitation as Anglos do, being so busy with our important emails and projects that wedge us off from life and friendships, neighbors and meaning.

As Kenn took the rays on parts unknown to most, into our driveway pulled Mr. Garcia. He was Coming Calling, it being Sunday afternoon. Kenn raced into the house while I greeted Mr. Garcia and poured us all glasses of wine and hastily thrown together hors d'oevres. How charming to Come Calling! What has happened to us that we don't go calling anymore?

In perfectly ironed Bermuda shorts, fresh white polo shirt, and neat loafers, Mr. Garcia sat on our portal and told us his life story. 85 years of deep work, two world wars of service and raising a family as a welder who helped create the Golden Gate Bridge. He had built his beautiful white plastered Spanish casa on his five Tesuque acres for his beloved wife, now passed and gone. He informed us that a realtor told him his property was now worth 5 million dollars, "but I will never sell!" he declared, jumping to his feet, flecks of spittle landing on the cheese and crackers for emphasis. "I built that house, and farmed that land. I will live there until I die!". We murmured approval.

"But my son does not understand anything about land!" he said, his volume increasing as the wine flowed and he became worked up. He leapt a second time to his feet, his mustache at attention over a quivering lip. "I tried to give him some land and he told me what I should be doing to farm it! So I took it back!~" he was almost yelling now, the spittle getting more profuse, and I suddenly remembered a neighbor telling me--how did he put it?-- "that old man is nuts". But I found him charming and interesting, and liked his Spanish passion for land and home, and his fiery delivery. We calmed him with clucking noises and soothing words, and more wine and cheese, and the afternoon closed.

The years passed, and each day I drove by Mr. Garcia's field. I wondered why I never saw a crop out there, a garden, vegetables, roses, orchard, nothing. Spring, summer, fall, Mr. Garcia is always out there sweating in his coveralls and pith helmet, ploughing, disking, irrigating..but the field stands naked, begging: "We're ready! Plant something! But no.

I imagine him at the kitchen table of his magnificent home over his morning coffee, planning the marvelous things he is going to plant this year in that field. Always planning, never creating. Sound familiar?

Some people live like Mr. Garcia, always meditating, dreaming, visioning, planning, going to workshops, getting coaching, talking about their Big Plans, and then never planting a seed. Never planting the seed is a great way to convince yourself that you are really Michelangelo or Virginia Woolf or Barack Obama, only no one realizes it yet. After all, you haven't really shown what you've got. You're still readying the field.

If there's a polar opposite to the error of rushing to fast to create a new vision for your life, before you've done the inner work to move from a different center of Being, it's not taking clear, decisive, concrete action when you are ready to enact your dreams and visions. You have to actually move into gear and bring those dreams and beautiful instinctual urges into worldly action. Call the person you dream about calling, make the contact you fantasize will propel you into greatness, sign up for coaching and get to work. It is time in the fourth phase of change--Enacting your Vision into the world--to move forward and plant.

How do you take massive action to move a big vision into the world? One step at a time, with an inspired to do list at your elbow. Take risks to get rejected, and then, don't take rejection too personally. Hemingway's first book was rejected by 100 publishers before he got a yes. Reach out to more than one person, agent, gallery, job, friend at a time. If you reach out to five people, chances are good one will return your call or meet you for lunch or look at your portfolio, manuscript, or resume. If you stake all your dreams on the fantasy of one big opportunity coming through, you set yourself up for failure and collapse.

Cast a big net. Get help hauling it in. See all the many fish in the net--there's your book contract, here's your new workshop, there you are doing research in Paris. Choose the fish you want to keep, and the ones you want to throw away. Did I mention you can't do everything? You can't, so choose well and from your true heart. Choose what's passionate and exciting to you, not staid and secure--unless, of course, you want a staid, secure, passionless life, in which case I don't think you're reading this book, but "Safe ways to Plan for Your Retirement".

Haul the net in once it's full. Don't keep casting more nets and dreaming of the fish out there, while starving for dinner. Pull the nets in at the right moment. Choose the liveliest, most colorful fish and get dinner started. Fire up the oven, invite some friends over who like your cooking, and set the table. Your life is calling.