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  • From: EarthNSky <erthnsky AT bellsouth.net>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Musing at the final turn
  • Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2008 03:47:12 -0500

First, Gene, this "final turn" stuff sounds like you are on your deathbed!! :)

Gene GeRue wrote:
I am currently spending my last winter here in Phoenix. In the spring, Chris will quit her job--if her job has not quit her first--and we will transport every last cup and nail to Heartwood. Right now, at this time of transition, expectancy and pause, I have time on my hands and I am musing over what has been, what will be, and how things came to be as they are.

When I was perusing the archives a few weeks ago, I noticed that you had made another post several years ago, talking about your last year in Phoenix, but alas, that was at the beginning of the housing industry crisis. I see that that has taken you off your intended timetable, putting you several years behind. Or does this work better for you?


It seems to me that the keys to a happy life are finding one's path, being true to oneself, developing a general and flexible plan, then finding and fitting the pieces that will contribute to the plan. Then sustained focus and persistence, the tried and true paradigm for success.

I think that might be the smartest and most universally true thing you have ever written here.



Something increasingly important, I think, is learning to eschew extraneous chatter: the so-called news that gushes forth from television sets each night, the news roundups and round tables and interviews and inquisitions cast upon us ad infinitum and ad nauseam. With the Internet, unlimited offerings of every level of information. With blogs, universal voices, where each sovereign soul may share their thoughts with the world. The primary distraction is the mainstream media, trolling and chumming, those with the connection going for the bait. Certainly the action can be entertaining, even instructive, but it can also be a huge waste of time and a great distraction from one's focus. The greater society will always have roller-coaster concerns. At issue is the ability to make those concerns largely irrelevant to one's own life.

Go back and read Al Toffler<sp> Future Shock if you haven't read it in a while. He talks specifically about this 'noise' and how things change so fast that we can't adapt to it..



Media distraction has been a contributing factor to my slow journey to the permanent homestead. Too many interests, too many side journeys. Too easily diverted from the main path.

Please explain more.
Also Gene, I know you are in your seventies.. was there a time in your life when you did homestead full time, year around?



Yet, at Heartwood, on the homestead, we will live better than they. And it came to me and I said, the reason is not that we will live the pure homestead life and subsist on only homegrown food, cook and warm ourselves only with home-produced fuel nor because our pleasures and entertainment are very low-cost. It will not be because we deprive ourselves. It will because there is no mortgage or rent payment and no car payments and very low taxes. It will be because the plan has finally come together.

I can't wait until this mortgage is paid.


Learn what conditions make you most happy and make a plan to secure those things. Find land. Pay for your land with city jobs if you must. But tools. Learn skills. Follow your passions.

Now, this sounds more like your book. ;)



It is ironic that in the land of plenty, the country seen as the most advanced the world has ever known, that so many people are so upset, so angry, so disillusioned--that their lives are so precarious. We have been for too long looking to others to show us what is important and how to get it. That ability is within each of us. We have only to look inward and to be true to ourselves.


That is very true.

Bev, with days and nights mixed up now.


--
The true significance of Sacajawea's involvement in the Lewis & Clark
expedition is that it was the first documented trip in history where men
asked a woman for directions and followed them, allowing them to arrive
at their destination.




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