Wild Relating

Months after our basement was beautifully renovated by a group of wild craftsmen, we’re packed to the rafters with our two adult children, their beaus, and our family from Atlanta and their two magical children.

This is why we created this beautiful space – to share guest rooms and double showers and comfy sofas, to be together. We’re grateful to have little ones to bathe and feed and snuggle with again, and the company of newness in each other too, for we must introduce ourselves every time we visit – who are you now?

What I like about the way we relate in our family is the ability to tell the truth, our personal truths. I like where truths intersect, where the possibility of finding each other can happen. And too, I am beginning to like where my world can be upended in discovery of some aspect of life from another’s point of view. I don’t always enjoy the chaos – like when I screamed at my son in anger the other day over a sarcastic joke he made, because I had a dirty house and unwashed hair with guests arriving in ten minutes. Still, later, when I come to my senses, I will enjoy how a three year old scarfing my homemade divinity puts the prospect of domestic perfection in perspective; I will appreciate how my children feel free enough to describe their discomfort with my anger; I will like how my beloveds can give me spacious silence till I simmer down; I will investigate how an afternoon at the park makes me willing to see that I am fearful of not having it all together, a condition that will surely run nonstop when we arrive in India in a week.

The end of the renovation project happened with perfect timing, though it didn’t seem so when Joel Hester, an amazing welding artist lost all of his tools and materials when they were stolen from his truck shortly after we contracted him. Joel lives in Texas, and makes beautifully welded furniture from recycled cars. Our bathroom vanity is the roof of a Ford Fairlane, which has been molded, buffed and shined, so it now holds a laboratory style sink, curvy wall faucet and an ecohouse pressed paper counter.


I knew Joel’s work would be a great industrial-looking counterpoint to a rainforest marble that encases the double shower, and his work didn’t disappoint.


Strong, textured and masculine, the unconventional vanity balances the tree trunk and branch shapes spiraling up the bathroom walls.


Though we thought the theft would delay the project when it happened, there were other setbacks that caused delays, and the vanity arrived the same week that we were ready for it to be placed. The final decorating touches were completed in September, just in time for a series of parties leading right up to the holidays.

On the last day on the job, our contractor Michael Aaland relayed what had caused much of the delays on our job. The team had lost their main plumbing man when he committed suicide one week into our work, over a relationship issue in his private life. The contractors did not choose to tell us because they were worried that it would have affected our obvious joy in the renovation. I am not sure this is true. Losses, like anger and chaos, are as much a part of our lives as the beauty these wonderful men have created on our behalf. Though we didn't know this man, our hearts went out to every person on the team who worked here, in silence, through the loss of a beloved friend.

One of my teachers, Byron Katie, says “To exclude anything that appears in your universe is not love. Love joins with everything. It doesn’t exclude the monster. It doesn’t avoid the nightmare—it looks forward to it, because, like it or not, it may happen, if only in your mind.” In this blog, as we move into the days ahead, I want to capture our selves altered by culture, circumstances and mistakes, not excluding the nightmare, only love; I want to relate with full-on monster intact love.