[00:05] Gabi: Welcome to the Hearth and Bloom podcast. This is a show where we have conversations about all things home while living a simple, unhurried life so you get greater peace, rest, and freedom in your day to day. I'm your host, Gabby Hobarer. After living on the hamster wheel of a hurried life for so many years, st and watching my health and relationship suffer, I chose to slow it all down, really focus on a life giving home and live my moments with intention and purpose. What came from that shift was a restored life, a focus on my values, and greater rest and renewal in my daily living. I'm here to guide you to living a life unhurried so you gain the abundance and peace that you've been looking for. So let's get started. Hello. Hello. Welcome to the very first official episode of the Hearth and Bloom podcast. I'm your host, Gabby Hobberer. I wanted to take a little more time to kind of explore what the idea is behind this podcast. It's been on my heart for quite some time. If you listen to the very first introductory episode last week, which was just kind of a really quick trailer to give you an idea of where we're starting and who knows where we'll end up together. But I wanted to cultivate a space, honestly, for women like me. I haven't really found that space in the online world, and I've been in the online world for a few years now with the membership community. I had another podcast. I have an instagram feed. I have a blog. I have a book coming out in the fall of 2023. So I haven't really found a place where I can connect with other women that have a desire to be a homemaker. I am a homemaker. I identify as a homemaker. But in our society today, in our culture today, I feel like it's kind of a denigrated role. It's a oh, you stay home kind of mentality with a little bit of disdain and a little bit of sadness in there because the idea of staying home with your children is kind of foreign. And it's not just foreign, it's almost looked down upon because as a woman, you should be out there earning your value by working for someone else instead of working for yourself, your home, your children, your husband, your family, right? That's kind of what this space is going to be about. So I really would like to take some time to celebrate all things home in this space. If you're like me, you are a highly motivated, self driven woman that just wants to go do all the things. You recognize that you can't do all of the things, and you have a desire to slow down, to be intentional with your time in your moments. My hope is that this place will be an encouragement to you, an encouragement for not just the stay at home mom, the homeschooling mom, but that self driven, highly motivated woman who wants to return to the old ways in modern times. I want this podcast to be a return to home, a return to family, a return to the earth, a return to our values, a return to community. CS. Lewis, one of my favorite quotes of his. He says, the homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only, and that is to support the ultimate career. When I first started my homemaking journey, I used to be an elementary school principal and a curriculum writer for a district outside of the Austin area. And when I met my husband and we got married, he actually had the discernment to say, gabby, have you considered staying home for a while and just being a keeper of our home and hopefully that the Lord gives us children, being a keeper of our children as well? And I thought, why would I do that? I have degrees, I'm important. I'm climbing the career ladder in my industry. I want to go out and make a name for myself. I want to go out and do all of these things. Why in the world would I stay home? I have skills, talents, I have a mind. I want to go out and use it and cultivate it and serve people and grow myself. And I had no idea what I was talking about at the time. And there are days these days when I also think I have no idea what I'm talking about because I look back at a wiser self or I look back at a younger self and think, wow, I had no idea. But isn't that part of our journey of sanctification? Isn't that part of the experience of growing older and wiser again, women our age also? I'm in my mid forty s at the time of this recording. We don't apparently don't have anything to offer society. But I do think, and not only does the scripture call us to this, I do think that we have something of value to offer each other in community and to offer younger women that are beginning their own homemaking, homesteading, homeschooling, home journeys, as the keepers of their home. And I'm hoping that this place is a place of encouragement for you, if that is you. So a little bit about me again, my name is Gabby. At the time of this recording, I am going on almost two years of being a widow. My beautiful, godly, wonderful husband passed away almost two years ago from a three and a half year struggle with brain cancer. It was all of our struggle as a family. It wasn't just his. I was absolutely 100%, day in, day out, night and day. His caretaker, his secretary, his receptionist, his investigator, his researcher, his protocol deliverer, his juicer, his cooker, his chef, whatever it was that he needed. I was in that role, and it brought me so much joy to serve him in that capacity. But my ultimate goal was I wanted him to live. I wanted him to not just live, but thrive with brain cancer. We were so thankful to have connected with so many other people. There are people out there, almost 20 year survivors of brain cancer, and somehow I believed we were going to be one of those and it was going to be our story together and the Lord was going to write that for us. And we were going to turn around and be a testimony to all of these other families struggling with cancer that there is another way to live with cancer. There are populations all over the world living with cancer and it was going to be us. But, oh, I didn't know, friend. I just didn't know. The Lord called him home after three massive surgeries, that third surgery had some complications and ultimately the Lord called him home. He died in the middle of the night right next to me. Yeah, when he was already in hospice. And so without getting this episode to be one of sorrow and grief and lament, which are still things I manage daily, really, I want to talk about the gifts that his life not just gave me, but gave me for my mindset, for my perspective, and ultimately for our son whom he also left behind. And so while we wait for the Lord to restore us, there is a calling on my life. And that calling from the beginning has been to make a home, to cultivate a home, to grow a generation, if you will, of our children, to encourage other women to be keepers of their home, to be mindful of the culture and the atmosphere that they create in their home so that that home creates life for the people that live in it as well as for her. So that's a little bit of my journey. We've been homeschooling now for going on almost twelve years. I had no idea I came from the public school system. But that also was a beautiful gift that the Lord provided for us and it restored so much, I recaptured so much of my own education in my homeschooling journey. And so I hope to also encourage you in that way. I have some interviews lined up here in the next couple of episodes that I think will really encourage you if you are new to homeschooling or if you're even in the trenches of homeschooling and you just are ready to throw your hands up. Because sometimes it's hard work. The work of keeping a home, of managing and cultivating and creating a life giving home, is hard work. But I also think it's joyful work. The Lord has called us as women to be those keepers of home. What a privilege. If what CS. Lewis says is true, and I believe it is, it is the ultimate career and all other careers exist for that one purpose, which is to support the ultimate career. So if you're in that place where you want to be a homemaker, or you are a homemaker and you're frustrated by just, you feel invisible. Some days when my son was in his younger years, he's still young, but when he was younger and we were potty training him and he's a boy, oh, goodness. I can't tell you how many times we call it tinkle because of the sound it made in the potty as he was tinkling in the potty. But I can't tell you how many times I had to clean a tinkle from around the rim of a potty, right? Or I'd walk in and it was sprayed all over the wall. If you are a boy mom, then you totally understand where I'm coming from. But I remember feeling sometimes this is such invisible work. Like, again, I'm cleaning up tinkle off of the wall. Again, I'm mopping it up off the floor. It's those things that I look back at now and laugh and think, wow, I helped my son learn how to use his body and be able to use it properly. I was there to help him hold a fork. I was there to help him learn how to tie his shoes, how to fold laundry. Those are beautiful gifts. They're privileges that the Lord has bestowed on me as a mother and has bestowed on you as a mother. If you are a keeper of home and you homeschool your children, or you want to homeschool your children, it's never too late to start that too. And we'll talk about that in future episodes. But my hope, my prayer is that you come to this space every week and that you just get encouragement, that you grab a cup of tea, you sit at the kitchen table with me, light a candle and just create an experience for yourself where you spend some time being encouraged and being fulfilled and know that you're not alone. There are more of us than they know. You are part of this group of this collective of women that desires to create beautiful things for the people that they love. And that's ultimately what I'm doing. That's what I want to do. That's what the heart cry of my life is when I am home with the Lord. I want to be remembered as someone who loved well and created a space where they felt loved. Right? Isn't that what we all want to do? I'll wrap up this episode, but that's kind of the vision for this podcast. That's why in Hearth well, let me talk about that before I let you go. So hearth has two meanings. It means essentially a fireplace, right? Like where you actually put the logs in and you sit by the fire with a cup of cocoa. Or on Christmas time, where I live in Texas, so we don't really get a whole lot of cold spells here, but our seasons are very short. Like we have a small cold season in maybe January, and then we have like summer from March on, if you will. So that's one definition, a fireplace. The other definition is a home. But when I think of the word hearth, I think big, abundant, warm comfort. I think life, I think shelter, I think provision, I think just this big abundance of just goodness. What are the words that define your home? And you can do this right now. Grab a sheet of paper and just jot down. If you go and are called home by the Lord, what would you want the words of your family to be about? The home that you created is comfort on there love, abundance, fulfillment, peace, rest, a deep knowing, a culture of life, of safety, of nurturing, of nourishment. Those are the things that I think about when I think about cultivating home and how beautiful friend that you as a woman, as a mom, as a keeper of home are the ones create that you can start today. If you look back and think, I haven't done this right, which there is no right or wrong, by the way, I'm here to tell you there's no right or wrong. And the Lord's grace covers all of those things. You can choose today to say, you know what? I want that for my home. I want my home to be a place of a respite, a place for rest, for a disconnect, if you will, from everything going out on in the world. All the busyness, the hurry, the hamster wheel, of striving, of pushing, of constantly trying to achieve. And I want this place, for all of the people that live in it and all of the people that I invite in it and all the people that come to it, to feel welcomed, to feel at rest, to feel abundant, to feel nourished, and to feel replenished, to feel restored, if you will. So I want to talk about those things on this podcast. I'm super excited that you've joined me on this very first episode and I encourage you to follow me on Instagram. You can go over to find if you didn't find me there and you're just stumbling on this podcast, come join me over there where I essentially showcase and talk about all things home, homeschooling, homesteading, and homemaking. And you can follow me there at N unhurried living, a nun living. I'll be over there on Instagram and you can check out my website, which is where I post not just these blog episode, these podcast episodes, but where I write. I have a book coming out in the fall of this year of 2023 at the time of this recording, and I'm super excited about that, a book on slow living, on how to live intentionally. And I can't wait to share that with you in the months to come. But for now, head over to Instagram and connect with me there. Connect with me there. I would love for you to DM me. Tell me, if you could define your home by a select number of words, what words would they be? What words do you want them to be? Because you have the power and the agency to change that right now. So I'm looking forward to connecting with you on the next episode. If you meet me here same time, same place, I will see you then. Thanks for joining me today. Bye for now.
