Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

This past year another homesteader passed out of this life, someone about 
Tvo's age and like him someone who had done everything, knew everything, and 
lived larger than life.  John Seymour died on his Irish homestead attended by 
his 
daughter.  He is the author of "Fat of the Land" and a score of other 
self-sufficiency books.  He was controversal and colorful having been 
arrested five 
years ago (at the age of 85) for leading a raid to destroy a Monsanto sugar 
beet 
field.  At his trial he pleaded that it was his duty defend his adopted 
country against all invaders.  The judge found him guilty and fined him one 
pound.

At this stage of my homesteading life I no longer so much need advice on 
power tools or hardware or water systems.  What I've cast my eye about to 
find are 
examples of fully embracing the homesteading way of life completely and to 
the end.  Alas, the published examples are few.  I have a stack of 
"homestead" 
books where the person decided after a few years that homesteading really 
wasn't something to give themselves to as a way of life and their story is 
written 
in retrospect including the day they locked the door and left the homestead.  
The stories and examples I want to examine are the ones where someone else 
has 
to write the final chapter.  Seymour's was just such a story.  Tvo's is 
another.

My understanding is that Tvo lived his last days on his homestead having done 
what he could do to prepare that way for those of his family to live that way 
after him if they so chose.  Looking back over Tvo's many posts I find that 
theme running strongly through what he had to say.  He did not spend his time 
complaining or excusing himself, although he certainly had cause to.  He 
chose 
anonymity over self-pity.  So this is how the homesteader, the self-reliant 
spirit, passes.  Well done.

The psychologist Eric Erikson examined the human personality and came to view 
it as developing in eight steps over the lifetime of an individual.  As an 
infant, says Erikson, the individual develops a sense of trust or mistrust, 
as 
toddler a sense of autonomy or doubt, and so through his life: industry or 
isolation, identity or confusion, intimacy or isolation.  Finally as an adult 
the 
person develops a sense of generativity or self-absorption.  The generative 
stage of life is when one has children, contributes to the material world, 
and 
in the overflowing ability to create and produce, gives of themselves to the 
world at large.

Then when the person has navigated his way successfully through the first 
seven stages, he reaches the stage of integrity (vs despair), much as the 
apostle 
said "I have fought the fight, I have kept the faith."  It is at this stage 
that the person has credible wisdom.  The last part of Tvo's life was the 
very 
living example of Erikson's stage of integrity and is the rare example of 
with 
it is like to live the independent life to the end.  Well done.




James