Though each day of this course is filled with the highs and lows of learning new skills, and each evening is spent with laughter and camaraderie by the fire, Tyler and I are both filled with mounting dread. Here we are at the end of day three, and we've barely made a dent in the work to do. How is it going to be possible to raise this frame in two day's time? The negative voice in my head reminds me on an hourly basis the obvious answer to this query: it's not.

My worst nightmare is this:

We won't finish in time. Everyone will go home disappointed and angry with us that they worked so hard and never got to see a raising. Instead of being complete with a project we've been working on for months, one that has drained us physically and mentally and financially, we'll be stuck with a half-finished pile of timbers we'll be incapable of moving. It takes eight of us just to lift one!

Peter will leave, taking his decades of knowledge with him, and we will be utterly lost. It will take many more months of energy and finances to somehow raise the frame. And since we won't have a wonderful team of people working and learning with us, we'll have to pay for a crew to help, or spend weeks trying to organize a work party of our friends with energy we don't have.

At this moment, I don't know how we'll muster the energy to sort through the thousand photos we'll have taken by the end of this course, much less finish the building itself, by ourselves. In the meantime, all I can do is show up every day and do my best. I'll just have to trust that we'll figure it out somehow.