Be Authentic, Find Joy, and Sometimes Fall Down

I want to tell an honest, real story. It is mine to tell, and I am not sure I am glad to share it, but I feel I need to.

At Heirloom Springs, I have two rules: be your authentic self and find Joy. Sometimes the simplest rules are the hardest. As a retreat guide and wellness facilitator, I am often asked how I take care of myself. The women who come to Heirloom Springs leave feeling transformed, having found something they had forgotten or found new ways to bring more joy and purpose into their daily lives, carrying that home with them. That is the easy part. That is why I do what I do, and what brings me joy in running retreats. And I want everyone to know what real, just-picked farm food tastes like, because there is no alternative. 

This story is not about the food we eat or the transformation our guests find. It is about what it means to take care of myself as the facilitator of all these things. In the last month, I ran two retreats that both started on Wednesday evening and ended on Sunday during the day. Months ago, our team decided to run them back-to-back and give ourselves two days off. Now those two days off are a bit of a farce, mostly because the first day was spent trying to collect my thoughts, get cleaned up, re-jig the linens, dishes, silverware, and all the various things up at the house, down at the barn, and everywhere else they live, and figure out where all the ample tables and chairs are going for the next round. I also had to collect any additional items needed for the following retreat and any groceries from local farms and neighbors. Tuesday of our day off included 12, I repeat 12, errand stops. By the end of it, we joked that I needed to feed my staff some ice cream on the way home for their good behavior, as though they had been teenagers riding along and helping Mom pick up the various things and put them in other things so they could be transported to the vehicle. In those two days, I also decided that I needed to keep up with at least one of my workouts and do my riding lesson because Ruby needs her exercise, too. 

So here we are, Wednesday afternoon, and our delightful campers have arrived ready to experience our adult women’s summer camp. The afternoon started beautifully, with a great farm tour, a little meet-and-greet, and then an animal-and-human happy hour full of summertime delights. Thursday morning also began beautifully. We woke up to greet our campers with breakfast and delicious coffee, followed by a hike and yoga class with our wonderful Grace. While Grace was teaching upstairs in the retreat center, I was running around like an insane person, trying to gather all the little bits I had forgotten from the day before and all the little perfections I pride myself on remembering. I had gone down to the barn, up to the house, back to the Herb cottage, back inside, probably at least one stop at a garden, and my final quick stop. Let me just get these five other little things, I thought, and then I sprinted to the Herb cottage to deposit the trash back at the back of the house, which is no more than about 30 steps, if even that. At just the right moment, the edge of my boot clipped one of the brick stairs. I was unable to swing my right leg forward because my foot caught a pot, and when my thigh hit the brick porch, I broke a second pot. My left knee slammed to the ground, and just above my right eye, my upper forehead slammed into the corner of the back door frame. I felt the searing pain immediately, and I knew something was potentially very injured, and I wasn’t sure how scared to be. My sweet husband had barely reached the library door to return to his office hours, which meant he was outside in the same vicinity as me and heard the whole thing, but didn’t see it as his back was turned to me. In moments, my loving, kind husband was at my side, holding me as best he could, but nobody wanted me to move in case anything was, in fact, broken. My forehead grew to the size of a couple of walnuts almost instantaneously, which was probably the most concerning, as I had promised my doctor back in Dallas, Texas, that if I ever sustained any sort of head injury because of an underlying issue, I would immediately go to the emergency room to have a scan of my head. My other friend Kathleen was inside. She is also a longtime Pilates teacher and a beautiful caretaker, and has spent a lot of time working, practically as a nurse, returning with two ice packs almost instantaneously. Chef Christine was also at the back door, checking whether she could do anything else to help the situation. 

Amid all the commotion, I knew 911 had been called, and an ambulance was on its way. Of course, in my standard hardheaded way, I was not thrilled to be considering the fact that I was about to be in an ambulance and on my way to a hospital. I am pretty sure I made it clear that I was questioning whether this was really necessary. Those who have known me for a long time know that I had both my children at home with a midwife, just for the sheer fact that I wanted to avoid the hospital. As a young kid, I experienced two different traumatizing situations in a hospital that left me feeling like I never wanted to return. The most concerning was the walnut on my head, which had formed twice the size of any naturally growing walnut, in addition to my neck, which had taken an impact like a head-on collision, and I could feel the whiplash heading down my spine; I didn’t know or couldn’t feel my thigh yet. I would later see not just a raspberry, that purpleish, pink-red hematoma, but something more like a very large basket of raspberries on my thigh, nor would I know that I had hit my left knee until about a day and a half later, when it turned black and yellow. 

I knew the ambulance was on the way, and I could hear chatter about how long it had been since we called and when it would arrive. One of my first thoughts was for my friend Grace, who lost her sweet husband, our beloved friend, a couple of years ago, and I was thinking about the trauma that this would trigger as she saw an ambulance arriving and not fully knowing what had happened. I was also concerned about how my husband was feeling and did not want him to be overly stressed, as I had not lost consciousness, was not vomiting, nor did I have a headache, and my vision was still fine. Other things flashed through my mind: what would my kids say? I hope I’ll be OK. Oh my God, there’s a retreat happening right now. What am I going to do about that? These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your mind when trauma happens, before one keeps coming back to the searing pain in their forehead. 

As the ambulance arrived, and I still don’t even remember if it was 20 minutes or 45, I’m certain my husband has that time stamp written down somewhere. The two very lovely paramedics who arrived were first and foremost just trying to talk to me to assess my level of consciousness, which I think they deemed acceptable. I expressed that I felt I could get up and walk to the ambulance, but nobody would let me, probably a decent choice, and then I thought, how are they going to roll this through my grassy yard with the very soft dirt, you know, random thoughts. I still couldn’t quite focus on one thing, just a myriad of thoughts. Once inside the ambulance, I could see us driving down the driveway, with my husband following closely in his vehicle. I thought, well, what’s done is done, I must surrender to the situation. In true storytelling form, I decided the paramedics needed one, so I told the women the story of my front desk girl in Dallas, Texas, who once jumped on the hood of a vehicle to try to rescue our computer that had just been stolen off our desk, and how she ended up telling that story to get her job as a paramedic herself. Then I thought about how grateful I am for paramedics, firefighters, sheriffs, neighbors, my team, and all the good people there are in my world. 

Once at the hospital, things went about as you might expect, although I have notes for them on their future process because I can’t help myself. After a CT scan of my head and neck, we determined there were no fractures and no brain bleeds. This was great news. I wept a few times sitting there waiting for the news, thinking about everything that was going on, thinking about how much I loved my husband, his kindness and care for me, and how I wanted to tell my kids, but I didn’t want them to worry, and then the reality coming back to light that I needed to return to the farm, try to act like nothing had just happened except this very big thing, and continue on with the retreat. Not to mention my black eye that was forming as gravity took hold of the bruise. 

The miraculous thing, and the true success for any small business, is whether it can function without you. This A-Team did not skip a beat, and as I wept again at dinner, expressing my gratitude to all who had just been involved, to my team for doing a stellar job without me, and to the guests for expressing their concern yet saying they had had a great day in spite of what had happened. 

This whole thing left me reeling. Thinking about how I do what I do, the decisions I make, the consequences, and then me. What about me? What do I, as a retreat guide and wellness leader, need to do to take care of myself? In this moment, I felt a lot like the cobbler with no shoes. A dear friend of mine came to visit on the heels of the retreats, and asked what I could do for myself. I answered, "I work out." She said yes, and that’s good for strength, but what do you do for yourself? I answered again, "I take riding lessons and ride Ruby regularly." Again, she pressed, "But what do you do for yourself?" Honestly, I couldn’t answer the question. I am not sure I can at the moment either, but I can tell you I have made my family sit outside and eat dinner on the steps of the porch and linger long past dark to enjoy the sounds of the forest, the lightning bugs that are in full effect right now, and just trying to sit in the joy of being. Here’s to slowing down and letting go of what doesn’t matter.