Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> We all value our time in different ways. The issue is worth examining.  


It does indeed.  And here is perhaps another perspective on time:

I'm a bit distressed when I read accounts of the homesteader running about 
madly from dawn to dusk an later breathlessly trying to keep up with it all.  
You see, the main reason I turned to homesteading was to have MORE time to 
pursue my interests, not less.

A friend of mine, a blues singer, wrote a song whose refrain goes:

"You can run like the Devil, but you still can't get it all done.
 You can run like the Devil, but you still can't catch the setting sun."

I've realized this, thankfully, long ago.  It led me to divine why we seem to 
have such little time and we are always running like the Devil.  My coclusion 
is that it has little to do with our age or our prosepcts of longevty.  It is 
because we so badly mismanage whatever time it is we have.

And I don't mean schedules, planners, and the like.  In fact that only makes 
matters worse.  What I mean is our cultural tendency to segment our lives.  
Do 
you recall a bit Gene forwarded a few months ago about the guy speculating 
about Life, the Universe, and Everything while tending his horses on a cold 
starry night?  He observed that humans. unlike the horses, were the only 
creatures 
that had the sad habit of indexing our lives.

We segment and index our lives and thus rob ourselves of all our time.  We 
take jobs and contracts that require the bulk of our time for years on end 
whether we need or want the continuous flow of money or not.  That time is 
blocked 
off, and the bits and snippets left over we allot to ourselves in which to 
live our lives.

Homesteading breaks that, if we let it.  That's why, though a prophet without 
honor among his own people, I have tried from time to time here to make stark 
the comparison of a subsitence economy to a cash economy. the difference, for 
example, of using homesteading to grow your own food as oppoesed to making it 
a cash business from which you try to earn Caesar's coin.

To but it more mudanely, how many of you when you had (or have) off homestead 
jobs and commitments, have driven past your garden badly in need of attention 
on some pristine sunny Thursday morning and longed to be there instead of the 
cubicle purgatory to which you were headed?  Then that Saturday, when the 
Matrix released you for a brief respite, it was cold an pouring rain!  

The reality of this Devil's bargain was all to apparent to me.  So I worked 
for a considerable time to find a way out, or as Disney's Davvy Jones put it, 
"an essscap-puh".  So the goal of the homestead was to provide fuel and food 
and fodder enough to not need Caesar's coin for it.  As to the fourth F, flax 
(it's Fuel, Food, Fodder, and Flax, and sometimes the house is included as 
Flaggs), not having to venture into Babylon to earn Caesar's coin meant that 
cheap, 
long lasting, most often used, clothing is fine and we can provide for 
ourselves a decade of it at a pittance.

On a sunny spring day, I don't have to go anywhere.  And I don't.  If the 
gardening is up to par, I go fishing.  Today is cold and rainy, so I will put 
another log on the fire in my workshop and take up the work that I do for 
cash.  
On MY time, at my pace.

Thus my time is amplified.  There's plenty of time for most anything and this 
is irrespecitve of whether one is twenty or ninety, because it is not a 
matter of calendars and planners, it's a matter of the dynamic use of one's 
opportunities.

I divide homesteaders into two categories (actually, a lot more, or at times 
none, but this suits my twisted purposes right now), those for whom the 
homesteading experience was a genuine lifestyle that they enjoyed until the 
very end 
of their life or very much close to it, and those who dabbled in it and 
essentially gave up for other pursuits.

Is homesteading a genuine, viable, feasible, permanent lifestyle?  I have 
intended to find out.   I read a lot of homesteader's testimonies in books, 
and I 
have two abrevieated lists of books use as references:

List one:
Far Out Is Not Far Enough    (Tomi Ungerer)
You Can't Live on Radishes Alone (Jerry Bledsoe)
A Small Farm in Maine  (Terry Silber)

List two:
Payne Hollow (Harlan Hubbard)
The Good Life (Scott & Helen Nearing)
Fat of the Land (John Seymour)

This is a partial list in both cases.  I have found many things in the books 
in the second list to be insightful, useful, and have stood the test of time. 
 
For example, all the homesteaders in the first series of books had the notion 
that they would be mineature agribusiness farmers.  They would raise 
vegetables, sheep, what have you, pay all their expenses with the proceeds, 
and maybe 
eat a little of what was left.  All the homesteaders in the second list 
disparaged the notion of selling food off the homestead.  Not only did I try 
this 
and found the latter authors were correct, but I do not know of a single 
instance of the paradigm of the former authors that has ever worked, although 
it is 
tried or at least planned often enough.

The main difference, however, is this:  the authors of the second list 
homesteaded all of their considerable long lives and died on their 
homesteads, or 
very near to it.  Their posit that homesteading was a feasible, viable, and 
desirable paradim to pursue all thier lives, into old age, and until their 
deaths 
is well documented in that they did it.  In the case of the first list of 
authors, all of them failed at homesteading.  They were writing their 
accounts 
after having given it up.

My goal is to not give it up.  So I am not interested in the advice or 
failures of those who have given it up.  I want contemplate and incorporate 
those 
things that kept Seymour, Nearing, Hubbard and the like on thier place, 
pursuing 
the things that interested them while being supported by their subsistence 
operations.

My own personal greatest failure would be to have to live away from my 
homestead for any phase or period of my life.  I hang on every word of those 
who 
succeed at this, both the living and the dead.  

So as to the inexorable fleetingness of time, any time forced away from the 
homesteading life I advocate and embrace is a waste of time in my estimaton, 
might as well die early and be done with it.

"Who can say where the road goes, 
Where the day flows, only time? 
And who can say if your love grows, 
As your heart chose, only time? "
 
         (From Enya "Only Time")


   </HTML>