On time (and taking it anyway)
A note about slow builds, long dreams, and the value of starting anyway.
If I’m honest, this whole thing probably started in middle school.
I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation like it was scripture. I remember being genuinely confused—why couldn’t the real world work that way? Why couldn’t people just get along? Why couldn’t we explore together, build together, take care of one another like they did on the Enterprise?
I didn’t yet understand that Star Trek was utopian fiction—a vision of a future where humanity had moved beyond scarcity, capitalism, and conflict. Where replicators could make anything, and collaboration wasn’t just possible, it was assumed. I didn’t know that Earth, with its mess and money and marketing, wasn’t built that way.
But still, that vision stuck.
Somewhere in high school and then throughout college, a series of strange little business ideas started to take shape: a bookshop with beanbags, a barter market, a traveling animal café. A farm that doubled as a festival space. A quiet place where people could gather, connect, and maybe—just maybe—build something better.
Most of it wasn’t fully thought out.
Much of it still isn’t.
For a long time, I believed that to make any of it happen, I’d need to become wildly successful first. Save up a nest egg. Quit my job. Then I could build it. When I had time. When I had land. When I had money. But what I’m learning—slowly, stubbornly—is that it doesn’t work like that. Not for me.
Big ideas take time.
And the only way through that time is to begin.
Wyrdstead is made of dreams that live on a 5-year, 10-year, 25-year timeline. Bellhollow, the bookshop and third space, might not open until my kids are grown. The animal café might take five years of permits, partnerships, and secondhand espresso machines before it rolls into its first park. The event farm might never look like I pictured it when I was in my early 20s. But that doesn’t mean the vision isn’t alive. It just means it’s not done yet.
In the meantime, there are tiny ways to begin.
A free running club—Grindsboro—where a few people meet each week outside a coffee shop to move and talk. A small herb garden in my sunroom, where I’m learning how plants grow (or don’t) in pots. A half marathon in the rain, after a lack of preparation left me soaked and hypothermic—but still moving forward.
This site, this project, this umbrella dream I call Wyrdstead—it’s a forcing function. I put it online because I knew I might otherwise put it off forever. Because building something real takes so much time, and the time will pass anyway. Because I don’t want to wait until I have “enough” money or land or confidence to start living like this matters.
Because the only way to do it later is to begin it now.
I’ve learned a lot about failure over the last few years. It’s not as scary as it used to be. Sometimes you break your foot training for a marathon in honor of your baby turning one. Sometimes you host a market and it rains. Sometimes no one shows up. But you show up. You learn. You do it again, and you do it better.
This isn’t a fast project.
It’s a long life.
And I’m building it, one weird, wonderful, stubborn little piece at a time—rooted not just in practicality, but in the same hope I had on the living room floor as a kid: that we could live differently. That we can.
