Homestead mailing list

[Melody Oliphant <melody AT feedngrow.com>]

Clansgian AT wmconnect.com wrote:
>   
> >   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>
I really appreciate this wisdom, James.  I moved to town a few years ago 
and have been waiting to be "a homesteader" until we go back to the 
country.  A silly thought, since it has been 5 years and the country is 
no closer to a reality now than it was even two years ago. 

Homesteading is more of a mindset than a location, I do believe, and I 
intend to start doing what I have procrastinated all of these years 
waiting for a change in location.

Melody