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  • From: Melody Oliphant <melody AT feedngrow.com>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Hand tools-for firewood
  • Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2007 09:49:12 -0700

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




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