The Missus and I used to have a home tucked away in the mountains of Colorado.  There, I could steal away into my studio and write and produce Inspirational music to my heart’s content without interruption, without sirens, without telephone – even the neighbors were far away.  Part of my reason for buying this home was to find the seclusion to write and focus.  It didn’t always turn out that way.

The surprise was that in trying to crawl off into an isolated corner somewhere, what was unexpected was that we fell in love with many of our neighbors.  One, our closest, was Don and June, who lived about a half mile down the road.  Don was a wise old salt of a retired minister who knew the mountains and lived on a wonderful spread amidst an aspen grove and a mountain stream that ran through his property.

His land was gorgeous and even had a series of beaver dams up and down the stream and a beaver pond right outside his front door.  I thought this was amazingly fortuitous until he explained to me that though it was beautiful to look at and they were fun to watch, he was constantly at war with his beavers because they were so good at building their dams and so damn industrious (sorry, couldn’t help it) that if he wasn’t careful, they could dam things up and flood him out of house and home.

So as they went about building, Don went about breaking up the dams to protect his home.  This was not an easy task for a man in his forties much less a man in his seventies and though Don was as stalwart as God made ‘em, he still had a mighty battle before him several times a year.

One day, as we sat and watched the beavers work, I said to Don, “When you’re tearing these things down, Don, where do you start?”  Ya’ see, like an iceberg 9/10ths of these dams were under water and only the top part of the things stuck out.  Don’s response taught me a lot about life.

He told me for years he had tried to dynamite the dams, but the dynamite would do little more than rattle the air.  He really couldn’t get down under the water to place the dynamite and besides he didn’t really want to hurt God’s beautiful creatures and the real owners of his land.  He just simply wanted to maintain his own home and occasionally break up the logjam.

So what he learned to do over the years was to sit and study the dam from all angles for hours and understand its construction.  He had learned that if he took his time and really studied the dams, he would finally see a flaw in their building – usually one log that somehow seemed out of place or not in harmony with the rest.  It often stuck out above the water and beckoned him because of its irregularity in the design of all things.

Then, because of his years of experience in dam-busting he had gotten pretty good at picking out the flaw or the weak spot in the dam, but to remember that it took important preparation time and acute focus and thought before he went to work.  The pre-work time of sussing out the weak spot was the much more important a part of the process than the actual work itself.

Once he had studied the situation – sometimes for weeks – he would simply grab a rope, wade out to the appointed log, tie the rope around it good and tight, then hitch the other end of the rope to his horse and pull it out of its place in the dam.  If his horse couldn’t do it, his jeep could.

Sometimes the one log wouldn’t do the trick but it would usually up-root another log that beckoned a repeat process and that would usually work.  Immediately the water would begin to reside.

Of course those industrious beavers would go madly back to work immediately and Don would focus his attention on the weak spot and keep pulling it apart in his lonely war.  It required constant attention, but little actual work in comparison.

As it turned out, this tale had strong application to my life here in the mountains of New York City.  Not a lot of beavers around, but I got to a point in life with Watchfire Music where the seven major projects in my life all seemed to be dammed up at the same time.  A week to ten days went by and there was literally no movement on any of them.  Day after day of this finally revealed to me that I was simply stuck.  No matter what I did, I just could not seem to un-stick any of them.  It was exhausting.

Then I remembered Don’s life-lesson.  Study each damned situation and take the time to spec out each to locate where the flaws are.  Don’t just go wading in there every day tossing sticks of dynamite.  One, you might hurt the beavers, your neighbors, and two, you weren’t using your time or your mind properly.

The water is running now.  However, some mornings I wake up to find things just dammed up over night so I try to sit and study the situation and find the weak spot – that one log that’s just out of place.  Once I understand the faulty construction, I usually know what to do.

So then I get my horse…