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  • From: sanrico AT highdesert.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] A direction
  • Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2006 19:28:54 -0700 (PDT)

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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