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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> 
>   Hi clansgian...do you have a first name?
>   Well...ya won't hear me complainin' about lack of work...I'm seventy 
> years 
> old and still goin' strong...don't think I will be seizing up and 
> 

It's, James, Franklin.  And it is my considered opinion that you will seize 
up and deteriorate if you subscribe to the myth that using gadgets gives you 
more time to do other things.  It most certainly does not.

I as at a gathering a small ways back where the first meal was everyone 
bringing their various versions of chili and the organizers were providing 
the 
cornbread and slaw, which I was preparing.  I was talking with someone, a 
devoted 
gadgetologist, while I, tipped out a dozen cabbage heads on the counter, 
schwinged out my well honed chef's knife, and began making slaw.  When we had 
spent 
25 minutes or so solving the world's problems, all the while my knife keeping 
up an even tattoo on the cutting board, I was wiping the knife to put it away 
and my companion looked wide eyed at the mound of finely cut slaw.  "How is 
it that you did that with just a knife while we were talking??"  

He'd have sworn, much as the chainsaw wielding hydrolic splitter jockey, that 
you simply have to have a vegetable processor. Why, I have better things to 
do with my time than cut up supper with a knife!  

So each to his own, Franklin, but the notion that, Renaissance man that you 
may be, you can't spend your valuable time in manual labor but must use 
gadgets 
to do the work for you is a myth.  It's easily dispelled by stading hip to 
hip with a skilled sawyer and AB splitter.  You might finish more quickly 
(adjusting fairly for the difference in our ages if you like, I'm 54) but not 
significantly more quickly.  A trifle in fact.  

Yet I will come away with denser bones, deeper respiration, improved 
mobility, having expended more calories, and relaxed in body and soul from 
the lull 
and rhythm of saw and sledge rather than the serentiy tearing gnarl of a 
chainsaw.  I get visits to the mountainside, the companionship of a pack 
donkey, time 
to think my thoughts through and think no thoughts at all ......

.... now what was it you were doing with that extra time that I'd trade that 
for?

You had asked, Franklin, what is a homesteader.  I can't answer that and I 
doubt anyone else could to universal satisfaction, but I would identify 
myself 
as a practicing homesteader for 30 years and a homesteader at heart for 
longer 
than that.  Through magazines, meetings, acquaitances, and finally through 
the 
internet I've had opportunity to observe and interact with a great number of 
homesteaders.  There are certain characteristics that seem, like clockwork, 
to 
promote the success of the homestead or foreshadow it's demise.

One of the foremost is this:  Whether the homesteader views work as a friend 
or whether he views it as the enemy.  Whether we take pide and satisfaction 
in 
having more or being more.  Have less, be more.

Those who view the Way of Gadgets as being preferable to skill and patience, 
even when effort and time involved are not much different, or when they fall 
sway to the myth that they are, will also take the next Gadget Way solution 
rather than capacity and skill.  And thus they gravitate toward a purchased 
Gadget existence until they are more machine than man.

Those that crave skill and capacity will resist the machines unless there 
just isn't any other way to do it.  As a result the come to see that all that 
leisure and freedom that was supposed to come about as a result of the 
machines 
is a myth and they had been shuffling and staggering about chained to all 
those 
gadgets.

Like homesteading, it's a matter of degrees and orientation.  Do we reach 
farther toward real self-sufficiency and an increase in our skill and 
capacity no 
matter where it is that we begin, or do we abdicate that freedom for the 
gadget myth?

James   </HTML>