A month and a half into the school year and I am tired. Thankfully, for the first time in what feels like years, there is no emergency. Nothing has happened that requires me to immediately rearrange my life around surviving it. There is no crisis unfolding in the background, no singular thing I can point to and say, 'this is why I am tired', and somewhat frustratingly, this makes the tiredness harder to justify.

My children are doing well. The dogs and goats are happy. My students are learning and beginning to make things. There is food in the refrigerator and hay in the feeder. The bills are getting paid, although lately it feels like I am forever moving money from one place to another and hoping nothing unexpected happens. I am ordering supplies for my classroom with money that seems to disappear before I can spend it.

I haven't made much jewelry. I haven't written in weeks. The house is never quite as clean as I want it to be. I exercise less than I want to. There is always another bucket to fill, another email to answer, another project to grade, another load of laundry, another thing someone needs from me.

When I look around, I know this is a life I love. I don't want out of it. I want to be more fully inside it. I want to do it well. This is where I keep getting caught. I have high expectations for myself and my life, and I don't want to lower them. I want to be an attentive mother. I want to be an excellent teacher. I want my students to have what they need. I want to care well for the animals that depend on me. I want to make beautiful things. I want to write. I want to be strong and feel good in my body. I want to cook good food and keep a home that feels cared for. I want to be a person who notices when someone else needs tending, too. To me, these are the things worth pursuing.

But lately, I wonder if the pursuit of a well-tended life is keeping me from being present for the life itself.

There is always a better version of it just ahead of me. A cleaner kitchen, a stronger lesson, a longer run. More money saved, more jewelry finished. An essay written, more patience with my children. More time outside, a more secure fence for the dogs and goats. A quieter mind. A more disciplined spiritual life. None of these desires feel wrong to me. Individually, most of them even feel possible. It is their simultaneity that feels impossible.

A friend said something to me recently about making room for prayer and for my spirit. I've been thinking about that.

If I'm truthful, prayer has often seemed almost selfish. Or maybe not selfish exactly, but something that belongs near the bottom of the 'list', after the things that are tangible and urgent and depend on me. Children need breakfast. Animals need feeding. Students need materials. Bills need paying. Laundry actually does need washing. And prayer can wait.

But what has all that waiting cost me or the people I love?

The problem isn't really time. I could find twenty, even ten minutes. My old ways of thinking tell me the problem is choosing those ten minutes when there will always be something more visibly 'useful' that I could do with them. And then, once I decide prayer matters, another familiar impulse arrives: I want to do that well, too. When should I pray? Before milking Bambi? After? Before the children wake up? In the car on the way to school? Does it need twenty minutes? Should I wake earlier? What kind of discipline would make me faithful to it?

And there it is again. Even prayer becomes something to tend well. It's a problematic, limited way of thinking and being.

I want to remain someone who reaches toward excellence, who believes that attention and discipline and stewardship matter, but there is a space between devotion and control.

How much of tending something well is giving myself to it, and how much is believing that if I am attentive enough, disciplined enough, careful enough, I can keep everything from slipping?

Can everything matter without everything needing to be held by me at once?

Can a life remain unfinished and still be inhabited?

I know in my heart of hearts that the answer is yes.