February 16, 2009 – 5:46 pm
I’ve added a new link. It’s for Path to Freedom. I read about their urban homestead (a self-sustaining home in the city) in Mother Earth News Magazine and now have concluded that slowly transforming our home into a homestead, or something close to it, is the perfect goal for me to aspire to! It combines the life I yearn for, in my depths, with the life I now live, offering me so much to work toward. And after all what is life without work? Ask King Soloman! So I hope you’ll check them out and glean something good.
I feel like I’ve been slowly and unknowingly drawn to the homestead lifestyle for several years now, we home school, we do home haircutting, and all three of our children were born at home, with a midwife. Also, I’ve enjoyed using cloth diapers since Miss Aveline was in them, my sweet husband erected a clothesline for me in the backyard last Summer. Then there’s my sincere affection for Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, also I had a great garden at my previous home including an abundant luffa harvest (though all of my gardening efforts in my new yard failed miserably last Summer), then there’s the knitting and sewing that I enjoy, the homemade lip balm given as Christmas presents in 06 and 07, and the loquat jam I made last Spring from our lovely loquat harvest. So now, hopefully, with the stock of info and inspiration offered by the Dervaes Family, we can continue on toward our dreams for this life and land of ours! I am beyond thrilled that my husband is just as excited about this endeavor as I am!
February 1, 2009 – 10:54 am
Check out this great article . . . Thanks Jeanine!
Babies Know: A Little Dirt is Good for You
The latest scientific findings support that we were created to live on the earth, intimately connected with nature. It used to be that the more we’d find out, the more we’d have to worry about. But now it looks like much more balance is emerging. To me, that declares God’s love and tender care for us, that he created us out of love, and created us to live on this most glorious, beautiful, dangerous, challenging and serene planet. Things that we find out through the latest scientific research, like dirt being good for babies’ immune systems, speak of God’s motherliness. I know that my joy in watching my kids get into the mud, into the dirt, into the land, and my joining in with them, is an experience created by God, for me, in the image of His own joy. And I now know (though I’ve always known, intuitively) that there is very little risk in allowing them to follow their instincts outside! This brings me such peace, such a sense of the freedom that God wants me to have all the time. I want to live in it! Never leave that peace and freedom! To me, these are the features of a life, closer to the land. Trusting the wisdom of the generations that were here before me, learning the skills to survive with little and making the most of abundance. This is what I would be seeking in living a homestead life. The older I get the stronger the urge and the more intense the longing. I feel like that would be where real life, with God, would begin. More quiet, at times in need and struggling, praying in new ways, living with big questions, no answers and seeing God everywhere, outdoors, in my longing, in the faces of my family, in my cold and in my warmth. But who the heck willingly seeks out a higher level of adversity in their life? I know it would be worth it, in my depths, but society’s voice is a loud force in my brain, one that exerts much more influence over me than I would like to admit. And if I’m honest, I do not have the strength nor the will to pull and persuade a strong man and three children to join me in that adversity. Or do I?
