Part 4: Breaking Ground: A Reflection on Feeling Crazy!

Breaking ground is so much less intense and yet so much more terrifying than you anticipate… no excavator trucks rolled in and began tearing rocks from homes they never knew they would leave; nor hundreds of men, in hardhats, flooding a once untouched place; not that we would have had a budget for either.

It was as quiet as any other day, and breaking ground only required: a few sticks, some string, a square, a level, and “un maestro”. El Maestro is the head dude, he is the leader of his construction team, and he and a helper would show up and begin to map your dreams, right there in the dirt, and these marks would set the trajectory for everything he would build from there on out… When El Maestro shows up with string it’s serious …This was serious.

For as little chaos and overstimulation that was actually occurring (which was none), the seriousness of his eye contact when receiving and then marking our “where”; and the intensity of his attentiveness while converting our “what” into the makings of foundations & footings was

enough to make any one person feel like there were 100 plus hard hats setting in stone things that I had only calculated and reworked 100 times, knowing I could have probably given it at least a solid 101 TO BE CERTAIN… leaving me overwhelmed by the certainty he had in what I was saying we wanted and needed…10ft beyond the mountain peak? Not a problem: “We can build it up from below”…Literal mountain in the way of the foundation? No problem: “we know a guy, built like a horse, and never met a rock he couldn’t move with a pickaxe.”

My worries had answers, and our dreams now had four corners, squared and perfectly leveled by sticks and string; and although I hadn't seen the pickaxe they had also brought up the mountain that morning, they would begin to move the dirt between those markings within moments; and with that, the bumble bee shaped butterflies that had taken up residence in my belly had finally gave words to their swarming and I whispered to the person next to me…”am I crazy?” We were once more about to embark on moving mountains, at least bits of one for our dream, and in my head, a moment of panic “who told us we could?”, “what makes us think that we can?”, “why haven’t I found a reason we CAN’T”... After all it was "ME" that told "WE" we could (GULP) so am I crazy to think that we can, to be taken so seriously by un Maestro, that he and his men will begin negotiating with this mountain TODAY! To which the person next to me, having heard none of the torrential down pour of panic & anxiety, only having heard the initial

question, yet still chuckled, as if he had, and replied “I guess we'll see won’t we” … I guess we will…

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