A Heart’s Home: Lost Valley Ranch
Of course it’s not fair.
And as a new friend at the ranch last week told me, “My mom always said – Fair is a place where pigs get ribbons.”
Her mom is right.
The word that perhaps best describes our awareness of this is grateful.
Just endlessly grateful. Deep and immense gratitude.
Our regularly scheduled week in May was cancelled. When the ranch was allowed to open in June, we assumed that we just missed the opportunity this year. We were elated to discover that there was indeed space for our family that first opening week and that several of our friends from past summers would actually be attending then too. (We were also so sad to learn that several of our other favorites over the years would not be able to join us that week though!)
I’ve written post after post after post about this ranch. I know it’s too many. I know I talk about it too often. But I also know that the role this ranch, its staff and this particular week plays in the fabric of our family’s collective life is truly integral and one full of hope and promise and beauty. It was a turning point in my own story – giving me desperately needed perspective on the death of my marriage and the new life God was working out in my soul.
Each year, without fail, it has been a moment in time for all six of us. A moment to jump right out of the hamster wheel. To turn the volume down way low, to silence the beeps, alerts, ringtones and reminders our world (and our phones) keep intruding with. To look nature and ourselves square in the face and decide what we want to keep and what should have been tossed out with last week’s garbage.
The challenge, year after year, is to return home with that breath of renewed life intact. To nurture that personal honesty that comes with extra alone time and forced radio silence. How can we keep the volume at bay in our regular lives? How can we see the world and our own role in it more truthfully when the distractions are mighty and strong?
Years ago, probably because of a book I read or a podcast I listened to, we started a home routine that looked like no phones for an hour or more daily (always at meals times too, of course), no tech in the bedroom, no phones or screens on Sunday and one week a year with all the screens and phones and buzzing silenced. It’s been a powerful rhythm and one that sometimes is harder to maintain than I would care to admit. But it’s a required daily, weekly, annual routine that helps ground and anchor my own heart and my own habits.
Lost Valley is that week and that rhythm has shaped and changed me and my kids. I think for the better.
Instead of texting, we talk to people. To their actual faces. We watch their expressions and they watch ours. Instead of watching movies, we watch sunsets and sunrises (if your name is Bergen) and we watch rodeos and we watch the scenery change at the pace of a horse’s trot. We lie down in the green grass and we stare at the crisp white clouds. London draws and Mosely takes a run. Otto fishes and Bergen hikes. Piper chats and plays the piano and I go to bed on fluffed pillows after I have removed my nightly mint from my turned down sheets.
It’s not actual real life, in many ways. Although it still is in other ways. It is a piece of our real lives. It is a recalibrating and a breath of the freshest, most life-giving air I’ve known.
It’s a place where I’ve watched my boys head straight into the journey of manhood. Guns slinging and freedom embracing. Where I’ve enjoyed long conversations with my girls about Life Post Childhood Home. A topic both terrifying and thrilling to their minds. A topic both heartbreaking and joy giving to my own.
On a ride through the valley with a staffer, she mentioned a phrase in her description of Lost Valley – a place where she had visited as a child for years with her own family before signing on to work in the kitchen this year as an adult. “It’s my heart home,” she said, hair whipping and voice raised as we talked on horseback. Her words drifted through the air to me.
A heart home.
I have couple of those. And I know that’s downright lucky to have even found one such place. I’ve got Virginia. And I’ve got this sweet hometown I am raising my own kids to love. And I have Lost Valley.
Heart homes.
Yeah, I understand that.
So I’ll keep writing and maybe you’ll keep reading. I’ll keep figuring out how to wheel myself and the folks I love out across the flat states that separate us from Colorado at least once each year. I’ll hold this place and the truths I learn about myself and my kids and the world outside of the ranch close. I’ll bring back the stories and the education and the hope that clings to us while we are riding the ranch like the humidity clings to us here in the south.
It’s a gift to find that heart home. And I hope you’ve got one of your own.
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