Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

Several thread headings contain musings about where people are in their 
homesteading and I wanted to inject the opinion here that homesteading isn't 
a 
place or a status but more like a direction, which way you are pointed and 
whether 
you are moving there .... maybe slowly, maybe inperceptably, but moving none 
the less.

We've owned this particular homestead for seventeen years and we've lived 
here for fifteen.  Incidently, tomorrow is also our 17th anniversary.  We 
never 
had any debt on it and that has meant that it has always been a work in 
progress (read: lived primitively for some time).

Today I was putting the seeds from this springs mizuma and tsa-tsoi plants in 
bottles against fall and spring planting and thought about how far we'd come. 
 We got a gig working at a hotel where we can bring the kids and put them 
around the pool and herself works the desk and I am maintenance man ("If I 
can't 
fix it, it ain't broke!")  We make the local actual minimum wage which is a 
little over $7 an hour and we pay all our running cash expenses by working 
two 
(ten hour) days a month.  We have other money making things going on, but 
that 
money gets stashed or is used for indulgences.  We're in a good place.

Getting here has been like tying a knot in your rope of days and saying to 
yourself that you will not slip back beyond that.  Like a barb working its 
way 
in, each small advance is safeguarded against going back.  And the inevitable 
result is that you get somewhere.

Another thing that put us on our way was adopting the mode of, as they say in 
Gaelic "beag is beag" (little by little).  The road needs a well defined 
drainage ditch on one side where the road is steep.  I put a shovel and 
mattock 
there and every time I pass, I dig two more feet, then quit and go about what 
I 
was going to do.  A great many "big" projects around here are like that.  
Weed 
out ten hills of corn on the way to check the mail every day, put one rock in 
the rut in the road each time you pass, drop $2 in the 401-Cow fund when you 
return from the store.  Some things are urgent, but in practice it turns out 
that not so much really is.

What I'd offer is to never look on any homestead operation, present or 
dreamed, as a done deal.  It is always dynamic and ongoing.  When our long 
time cash 
gig petered out and gas got to be expensive, we found that we passed those 
milestones with hardly a shrug.  Yet I wonder were else we will go, so many 
things left unexplored.  So if you are moving toward the self-sufficient 
life, you 
are a homesteader now.  It's a process now and it always will be a process.