Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

Rob writes:

> I am interested in how other people made the shift to the country and what 
> they would do differently. 
> 

This list has always been on more of a cordless drill and septic system basis 
(and that's not a critique but just an observation) than on a life's choice 
and philisophic homesteader basis, but it's important enough to inject a bit 
of 
it here:

The most important key ot "making the break" [says I] is to have a change of 
mind.  I should resist this but I'm weak this morning - 'change of mind' in 
Greek is 'metanoia' and is the word translated in ecclesiastical work as 
'repentance' which itself is Latin for 'think again'.  After considering 
one's 
prospects, possibilities, proclivities, and inclinations ... has one actually 
and 
really changed their mind, changed their thinking and found that independent 
living is something to embrace as one's way of life?   

Before this 'change of mind' takes place, someone can look at, say, a bowl of 
spring salad and say "I can get that at the Mart for $3.  I can make $20 an 
hour so I can have that salad for ten minutes work.  Why on earth would I dig 
a 
place and plant the seeds etc?"  After the change of mind the self-reliant 
looks at the same bowl of salad and says, "This is a salad that I brought 
about. 
 There is no amount of money in the world that could buy it."  

So the toolbox I'd advocate equiping would include the following:

1) Are you comfortable with your own thoughts and your own company.  Most 
likely on the farmstead you won't have the much of the "fishbowl" existence 
that 
is so much of modern life.  There'll be no audience.  Things will have to 
have 
worth in and of themselves.

2) The animals and plants on the farmstead won't care whether you are young 
or old, sick or whole, male or female, wise or a fool.  One's ego becomes 
blurred in the field and forest.  Nature will be concerned with only whether 
you 
are dancing to her tune.

3)  Know and have clearly in your mind what it would take to pry you loose 
from your homestead.  If that point is relatively fixed in your mind, 
everything 
else will revolve around it.  If even "dread disease and poverty" would not 
induce you to leave, then the rest of reality will find a way to line up with 
your intentions.

4)  Expect prospertiy but allow for poverty.  Do you "know how to be abased 
and how to abound"?  Provide for, say, a stint of beans and rice and one 
heated 
room in the winter.  Then go for the opulent rest of it.  The farmstead is 
the source of untold wealth if only one has the eyes to see it.

Talking for many years with what I consider to be successful homesteaders, I 
have found that when a change of orientation takes place, what occurs is a 
sort of "But seek ye first ........ and all these things shall be added unto 
you."




James