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[sanrico AT highdesert.com]

Thank you. And a sincere happy anniversary to you both. You have many 
blessings -
the greatest of which is each other. Those of us who worry about what 'place'
we're in need to hear, and often, that place is a relative thing, and exists 
on
many levels. I can now feel better about where I'm going, knowing that the
getting there is a matter of baby steps and not leaps and bounds. Well, shoot.
You used all the good words. Celebrate!
Sandy

On Fri, 14 Jul 2006 22:06:37 EDT, Clansgian AT wmconnect.com wrote:

> 
> 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.
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