Poetic Focus™ — Entry 14: The Spirit of Meadow House
Saturday Smiles: The Spirit of Meadow House
Saturday Smiles: The Spirit of Meadow House
I am so happy and grateful for Saturday Smiles — the one day a week where smiling is required by law.
My law, of course.
Saturday is the day I try not to take myself too seriously. The day I revisit the chaos of the week — or honestly, the past decade — and attempt to see it from a humorous angle.
I’m not a negative person.
I’m an intense person.
An intense high performer. A recovering perfectionist.
And somehow I got into the business of building… where perfection goes to die.
Actually, no. That’s not why.
I think construction was already in my bones.
My dad was in construction, and growing up, we never lived in a finished house. Ever. The moment one was finally done, he sold it and we moved into the next unfinished one. At one point we even lived in half a duplex while he built us a house from the ground up.
So I grew up seeing the bones of homes.
Electrical. Plumbing. Gas lines. Framing. Mechanical systems.
I learned early that water under pressure can carry things very far away.
Yes.
Plumbing too.
What I didn’t understand as a child was the magnitude of logistics involved in restoring a home. Now that I do this work myself, I realize logistics is an art form.
Or maybe a science… depending on how much caffeine and financial risk is involved.
But right now I’m restoring a home built in exactly 1970, and the second I walked into the sunken living room with the parquet floors, I immediately imagined OU students sitting barefoot around a conversation pit after a football game.
Cigarettes. Whiskey on the rocks. Walnut paneling. Low amber lamps.
Somebody says, “Put Dylan on.”
Cool people who think they’re philosophers having conversations nobody remembers.
Girls in suede boots pretending they’re Indian.
Back when the country still called Indians “Indians.”
Now we say Native Americans.
Which is funny, because when I picture my own parents in that setting, it couldn’t be further from reality.
My dad — straight out of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation — looked more like Elvis.
And my French mother’s beehive hair and pencil skirts would’ve never touched the shag carpet of a sunken floor.
They were closer to “Southern Cross” and the silent majority than Woodstock.
So maybe my fascination with bell bottoms and hippies is just my own delayed rebellion.
Either way, I’ve had my work cut out for me trying to bring this place back to life while still honoring what’s in the bones.
And I took on the challenge.
Now here’s the funny part.
Six months after we started this house, I’ve completed THREE massive commercial projects by comparison… while my contractors on the 70s house seem to have spiritually drifted into another dimension.
Like Judy Blue Eyes stole their tool pouches and raising the floor required a pilgrimage to the moon and back.
Meanwhile, I’m losing money nightly and drafting legal arguments in my head involving punitive damages because apparently I’ve decided I’m going to sue my own contractors and start over.
Full courtroom scenes.
Opening statements.
Cross examination.
None of which are ever actually going to happen, by the way.
But here’s the conundrum:
The place looks phenomenal.
Fucking phenomenal.
Excuse my French.
My mother absolutely would not.
In fact, I’m pretty sure I could still get grounded at 58 years old.
But the house is becoming so beautiful that now I’m intimidated to decorate it.
And that’s when it hit me.
Maybe the spirit of Meadow House isn’t speed.
Maybe it’s pace.
Maybe slowing down actually is part of the design.
A retreat.
A reset.
A conversation pit for the nervous system.
And honestly… pace might be the only thing capable of negotiating with my perfectionism.
Patience, however?
We’ll leave that one for another Saturday.
Smile.
It’s the law.
And —
Wake up.
Build anyway.
🏡 The house is the story. The lesson is pace.
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Poetic Focus™—Entry 13: Regret as a Lifeline 🎭
I am so happy and grateful for regret.
Once, I lived in an attic. I was broke and needed a place to live that I could trade time for instead of money. The outdoor shed at an assisted living facility had an attic space, and my ex-husband and I made it a home.
I worked nights and went to school during the day. I have never felt exhaustion like I did then.
And yet—it was fun.
It was the days when phones had cords, and we strung a very, very long one from the facility into the attic. It barely reached. So when we talked on the phone, we had to sit at the very edge. It was an A-frame room, so our heads had to tilt. It was actually better just to lie down. Graduation was approaching, and I wanted something to wear besides hiking pants and Birkenstocks. I didn’t know where to shop, so I called a professor.
Not because they teach.
Because I loved how she dressed.
She was from New York, so I was certain she’d have the skinny. But when I called, I was derailed. She answered crying. She was one of the founders of a salon theater in town—and it was going under. I couldn’t bear to see that happen. But more than that, I needed to stop the tears from falling. So I offered to help and set out to do the impossible: bring a 49-seat theater in a small town in Colorado out of the red and set it up for the future.
It still thrives today.
But when I think about that year, I think of failure. Because at that time, I didn’t know how to regulate. I didn’t know that high performance meant starting a day with Poetic Focus—giving gratitude and making sense of things that don’t. I didn’t know that alcohol depleted me of positivity. I didn’t know that sleep enhanced cognitive performance and flushed out metabolic waste—the unusable, often toxic byproducts created by cells during normal metabolism. So I exhausted myself. By the end of the year, I could barely function.
Total burnout.
Total collapse.
I had gone to college for a communications and theater arts degree. I had the best job in town. And I lost it. I don’t believe we should avoid regret. I believe regret is a powerful tool for enhancement—the part of life that gives us the most perspective. It leaves a hole in the heart that is never fully filled—except by knowing you’ve become a better person because of it.
Regret didn’t ruin me.
It refined me.
And today, I have a vision: to return to that theater and speak.
To spread the message that rebuilding after collapse is possible.
And perhaps that will be the ultimate moment—
when I string the cord from that assisted living attic
and it becomes a lifeline to possibility.
A metaphor made real.
📸 Different phone. Same lifeline.
#WakeUpBook
Poetic Focus™ — Entry 12: Peace Under Pressure
Peace is not the absence of fear.
For high-capacity leaders, fear is often the signal that growth is near.
Right before expansion, there is turbulence — not because something is wrong, but because something consequential is forming. Most performance models don’t account for this internal threshold moment. They measure output. They don’t measure integration.
Some people are built for repetition.
Others are built for pattern recognition, calculated risk, and systems under pressure.
That wiring carries adrenaline.
And adrenaline carries fear.
The shift is not eliminating fear.
The shift is learning how to interpret it.
Fear becomes data.
Pressure becomes information.
Turmoil becomes a doorway to higher responsibility.
What changes the game isn’t avoiding hard decisions.
It’s refusing to abandon yourself inside them.
Slower trust thresholds.
Clearer boundaries.
Stronger pattern recognition.
Deeper consequence awareness.
Peace, for leaders, is not stillness.
Peace is self-trust under pressure.
And when you understand that, you stop trying to escape the threshold —
and start building through it.
Wake Up. Build Anyway.
— Cary Stillwell
Poetic Focus™ is an ongoing series of reflections on identity, leadership, and the practice of building a life that holds.