The other day I happened upon the below comment and it moved me very much. I am forever amazed at how little I know about anything including how much is done for me and provided for me by Him but about which I remain unaware. I long for greater sensitivity and awareness if, for no other reason, than to be able to be grateful for that much more.

The grace of God is the love of God, love manifested in innumerable blessings, known and unknown to us. Human beings live on Earth in their shells, mostly unaware of all the privileges of life, and therefore ungrateful to the Giver of them. In order to see the grace of God, one must open one’s eyes, raising one’s head from the little world that one makes around oneself, and thus see above and below, right and left, before and behind, the grace of God reaching one from everywhere in abundance. Hazrat Inayat Khan

It seems like our view of things is always so much more narrow than we think. Even of the good stuff. We long for so much and there it is before us and within us and yet we still don’t see it.

May we yield gracefully in our lives as our Higher Selves - our inner bits that are Him and Nature and All - draw us into circumstances and possibilities that will allow us to become aware and grateful for all that there is. May we do all of this and still get dinner on the table night after night. That is the real trick. Expanding on and on into endless gratitude while still harvesting the squash in a timely fashion, sweeping the kitchen every morning, and pouring love into each child no matter what. It is striving to achieve the delicate balance of inner and outer, however, that is exactly the minute-by-minute challenge that propels us forward the most quickly.

May we all harvest and sweep and love beautifully in gratitude for all that there is.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

Beauty springs up in the humblest of places, astonishing us and inspiring us to pause and imagine the possibilities.

Inexplicably, this beautiful lilly grows right next to the well casing within the cinder blocks that surround it.

Generally the boys use the cinder blocks as their “wood shop,” tucking away handmade tools and meaningful stones in the nooks and crannies. At this time of year, though, this area simply becomes the place where the lilly grows. We admire it as we pass by every morning and evening on our way to the milking barn. We all gaze at it and remark upon it. It refreshes us as it quietly goes about its flowery business. We don’t know how or why it is there but no matter - every day at this time of year we pause and imagine the possibilities.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

We are going through a very formative time of financial stringency these days. It has its place, I guess, because we learn that much more about faith, have that much more gratitude towards those who extend a hand, and experience that much more vividly just how much you really can do without and still survive well enough.

Just yesterday, though, I noted that we didn’t eat one single scrap of fruit or veg all day. What veggies we have are in the ground (!) so inaccessible to us at the moment. I don’t care so much about me on this score but I do want the children to have lots of vegetables while they grow. But fresh produce is like protein - expensive to buy. Never mind organic produce. Yikes.

So how amazing it was to receive a box of organic veggies from the Organic Vegetable Club in the mail today out of the blue! Look at this:

Oh joy. Oh joy. What a lovely dinner we had tonight.

Thank you so much, dear sister. You lifted hearts as well as nutrition and taste levels. And, yes, organic produce really does taste better. And, yes, there is even some left for another couple of meals! Oh joy, oh joy!

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

I want to thank all of you wonderful readers and supporters with a big bouquet of beautiful flowers still dewy from a morning on the farm in the mountains. Your uplifting comments mean so much and thanks to you our computer bill was paid for the year. Thank you for your generosity.

My husband and children went out into the yard and picked this bouquet for me on Mother’s Day morning. I want to share it with you as a token of my gratitude and esteem for you all.

Here is to another blooming year together filled with the color and scent of natural living.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

Dear Friends and Supporters,

Our annual computer hosting bill is upon us. This is the fee we pay to keep all of these web sites and blogs on the web and freely available to you. This is a very challenging financial requirement for us to meet on top of everything else. Please help us keep the Pockets of the Future project going and all of this information and experience available to all by making a donation of any size.

We also want to say that we are taking a brief pause from blogging while we complete our first e-book on a homesteading, simple living topic that has already proved to be of great interest. We should be finished up shortly and back to blogging in no time.

Stay tuned and thank you for your continued interest and generous support,
Paul and Leslie

When you stop to consider rainwater, you realize that it is nothing short of crazy to not collect it somehow!

I have had putting together a rainwater catchment system (gosh, that sound official doesn’t it?) on my list of things to-do for years and years. I just haven’t gotten around to it yet, I guess, and neither have we gotten around to footing the bill for special rain barrels or cisterns or whatever other equipment is now considered necessary for “harvesting” the rain. And yet all this time the rain falls and we miss it.

In addition to our snug little 1940 farmhouse, there is another small two-room house just a few yards behind our house. It is rather tumbledown and we use it for storage and to hold tools and feed and so on. We all call it “the granny house” only because our then 9 year old started calling it that when we moved in. We understand nothing about why it is there but it does have a nice metal roof and is tucked under two very large chestnut trees. In the fall, the chestnuts fall off and bounce off that roof with a loud thumpity-bump before they smartly smack the ground but I digress. In the spring, the snow on it melts slowly and cascades down to the ground with no organized results whatsoever.

A couple of weeks ago, I was investigating a new publication by Yesterday’s Classics called The Sandman, His Farm Stories by William J. Hopkins (find it on the bottom of the page in the lefthand column). This is a collection of bedtime stories told over and over again to a young boy sometime before 1902 when this book was first published. Each story is very small, proceeds very slowly and provides each little detail of the actions and way of country life from earlier in the last the century. It is almost hypnotizing to read these carefully paced stories but for me it is also fascinating because learning the details of that way of life is important to me.

The first chapter is called The Oxen Story and is about fetching water with which to wash the clothes. After describing the farmhouse, it proceeds thusly:

Not far from the kitchen door was a well, with a bucket tied by a rope to the end of a great long pole. And when they wanted water, they let the bucket down into the well and pulled it up full of water. They used this water to drink, and to wash faces and hands, and to wash the dishes; but it wasn’t good to wash clothes, because it wouldn’t make good soap-suds. To get water to wash the clothes, they had a great enormous hogshead at the corner of the house. And when it rained, the rain fell on the roof, and ran down the roof to the gutter, and ran down the gutter to the spout, and ran down the spout to the hogshead. And when they wanted water to wash the clothes, they took some of the water out of the hogshead.

But when it had not rained for a long time, there was no water in the hogshead. Then they got out the drag and put a barrel on it, and the old oxen came out from the barn, and put their heads down low; and Uncle John put the yoke over their necks, and put the bows under and fastened them, and hooked the chain of the drag to the yoke.

See this? It was unthinkable to them to use well water to wash their clothes. Isn’t that interesting? As much other work as they had to do, if they ran out of rainwater in the hogshead (this was a large cask or barrel, by the way, which also became a unit of measure), they hooked up the oxen and went to the river to get another barrel of soft water. In fact the rest of this story details exactly that and ends with:

And the next morning, when they wanted water to wash their clothes, there was the barrel of water, all ready.

Even now, many people know that it is easier to wash in soft water (i.e. rainwater) than in hard water (i.e. well water). Some folks go to the trouble of installing water softeners but how many would go to the trouble of actually collecting the appropriate water? And how aware are we of how much better it is to use rainwater for washing clothes if our clothes are always washed for us by a machine hidden away in a dark corner of our house?

This passage from The Sandman stayed on my mind these last weeks. Then last week it snowed quite a bit while Friday was warm and sunny. I was outside hanging laundry when my attention was drawn to the steady dripping of the snow melting off the roof of the granny house. Somehow I just couldn’t stand it any more and was galvanized into action. I went tearing into the basement and ransacked the place looking for empty storage bins. I found two large ones, raced back outside with them and put them under the best spots of melted snow water coming off of the roof. By the next day, there was enough water in them to do one load of laundry.

Yesterday my husband carried the bins in for me and poured the water into the wash tub and the two rinse buckets. Watching him pour that fresh water into our hitherto only filled by well/tap water vessels filled me with awe. It was a gift purely and freely given. All I had to do was stick a bin outside and precious soft water was waiting there next day. It seemed almost magical or Divine or something. Perhaps rain water has a charge that well water just doesn’t. I don’t know. I didn’t expect to have such a strong reaction.

Then came the next reaction - that water was ice cold! It was so cold that it took some time for the laundry soap to disperse. It was cold enough that my thyroid deprived self felt a a shock so my husband helped out a bit with the laundering. I couldn’t help myself, though, and I helped with the rinsing. I just wanted to experience that water. So even with all of the snowy cold, the clothes sparkled and I was put into a state of wonder.

In the summer, this will be easier for me because not only will the water be freely given but so will enough heat to at least bring the rain water to something close to body temperature. Two gifts from nature just to wash our clothes. Imagine that. It makes me feel so grateful.

It’s not like I am morally opposed to using well water or anything. It just occurs to me, though, that well water is taken by extraction or force while rain water is freely given. Perhaps we should at least attempt to use the latter first before falling back on the former?

Rain for uses other than watering gardens is one of those things that is easy to overlook. It is easy to miss the fact that it is one of the most significant gifts freely given by Nature to all of creation here. It is easy to overlook until you stop to consider rain water …

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

I am sure that those of you who hang your laundry out to dry even in the winter are familiar with the problem I am about to mention.

Laundry hung out during the winter does not dry all that fast. On a warmish, breezy day, if you get it hung early enough, some of it may actually dry completely. Some of it won’t though. If, like me, you are combining washing your laundry by hand with homeschooling and baking all of your bread, you may find that on some days you don’t get it hung out all that early which just compounds the winter conditions. On other days, it is too cold for the laundry to dry anyway. The water in the fabric freezes and then it takes forever to dry. (One remedy for this particular problem is to go out and hit your laundry with a stick, knocking out the ice. Then much more of the water still remaining in the fabric has a chance to evaporate. I personally try to dry my laundry inside on days that are that cold as the wood burning stove would definitely be blazing away anyway.)

Anyway, at the ends of such half and half kinds of winter days in which the weather is half and half and the laundry itself is half dry and half not, I have a very hard time figuring out if any given item is just cold or if it is still damp. Do I hang it to dry some more or fold it and put it away? I probably comment on this every single time I bring the laundry in during the winter months.

About an hour ago, I set the floor dryer up by the wood burning stove in the kitchen and started to sort through the laundry I had just brought in. Carolyn, my 17 year old, was standing at the kitchen sink finishing up making the butter. I exclaimed for the millionth time, “Gosh, I just can’t tell if this shirt is cold or damp.”

She turned to me and said, “Rub it against your cheek. We just learned that in my pottery class. If you put a clay piece that is still damp in the kiln, it will explode. So you have to be very sure that it is completely dry. Our cheeks are more sensitive than our fingers so we learned to rub a piece against our cheek to make very sure that it is dry before firing it.”

“Oh. OK. That makes sense.”

So I tried it. I rubbed a few pieces of clothing against my cheek. They felt dry to my fingers and to my cheek. Hmmm … However, I was also aware that I could really feel the weave of the fabric against my cheek in a way that I couldn’t with my fingers. Interesting. Next I picked up a big shirt of my husband’s. I felt it with my fingers. Damp? Cold? Couldn’t tell. I rubbed it against my cheek and TA DA - it was clearly damp! I almost jumped it was so obviously damp against my cheek!

Wonderful. Now I have a method for determining damp/cold and another small yet niggling problem of daily life is solved. I am grateful for this simple (and completely portable!) solution and wanted to make note of it here and share it with any of you who struggle with this same difficulty with winter laundry. I am also grateful for the “associative property” of nature. Many solutions are there if we observe nature closely and then correctly apply what we learn to what appears to us as separate categories of life (but probably really aren’t).

Finally I want to say, “Thank you, Carolyn.” It obviously takes a family to raise a mother.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

Honestly, we homestead because we feel like we are supposed to. We homeschool because we feel like we are supposed to. We meditate because we feel like we are supposed to. We strive every day to live more simply because we feel like we are supposed to. We work towards living in harmony with each other because we feel like we are supposed to. We share our up’s and down’s in blog posts and videos and books to the best of our ability because we feel like we are supposed to. We want to do all of these things and we are supposed to do all of these things and so we do them.

On what basis are we “supposed to”? Well, judging by our personal experiences and development, it is obvious that we are supposed to live this way because it is good for us as individuals. My husband and I have changed radically in the last few years purely through following what our hearts tell us we are supposed to do in this regard. We are very grateful every day for the opportunity to step outside of the typical modern, technology-based way of doing things because it is opening our eyes and strengthening our hands. It is deepening our spiritual understanding and melting away self-imposed, unnatural boundaries.

Judging by our observations and experiences with our children, it is obvious that we are supposed to live this way because it is plainly so good for them. They are growing sturdy and strong. They have retained their natural curiosity and empathy. They are building spiritual foundations and intellectual structures of beauty and resilience that will serve them well throughout their lives. And they have each other in full measure. Their relationships are not diluted or fractured by modern day amusements and obligations. From time to time, my husband and I step back and watch them and murmur to each other, “It must be amazing to be them.” Neither of us had anything even close growing up so watching their lives unfold creates a sense of wonder in us.

These two aspects of “supposed to” are obvious to us and very nice but they aren’t enough to fulfill the full obligation of “supposed to” as we experience it. There is much more to it than just us and our children. There are the many others - our brothers and sisters of the present and our brothers and sisters of the future. About them I am endlessly restless. I have a personal obsession with our brothers and sisters of the future for reasons completely unknown to me and my husband and I both feel very compelled to share what has been given to us with others in the present. We know that we humans have grown weak and unnatural. We know that the earth is headed full tilt towards a massive correction that will create much suffering. We also know - from many years of going through what has often felt like too much change at once - how hard it is to make many adjustments all at once and without warning. However, what we have gone through as a family pales in significance compared to what is waiting for humanity. We really feel that we all need to start now with making serious adjustments and with training our children towards a new way of life!

And this is the toughest bit for us. How to really make contact? How to share in the most meaningful ways? We seem unable to make much contact with our own spiritual community. That is the most bewildering to us. We make some contact with other people at large through our blogs and videos and so on which is good but it doesn’t seem like enough yet. We are struggling with how to bridge so many gaps. How do you bridge the gap between “start adjusting right now today for the radically different tomorrow that is gearing up for you” and “naw, that is never going to happen and besides I am protected by (fill in the blank).” How do you bridge the gap between living for the future and the impositions of the still skewed present day system? How do you bridge the gap between “passionately deconstructing modern life back into some semblance of the Original Design” and “sucking up every last bit of unnatural pleasure and comfort for as long as it lasts”? We have no idea.

This winter has seemed a bit long to me this year. Many cares and confusions. It is four degrees out right now (plus whatever wind chill from the brisk breeze that is hitting the house) and my adrenal fatigue gets the better of me more often when it is cold, I think. It is harder to stay simple in the face of complexity and harder to maintain even emotions and perspective. These questions and mysteries (see, I said in my last post I would switch over to “mysteries” and so here I am!) have been weighing me down lately, I guess. What to do? How to proceed? Where is everybody???

I provide all of this longwinded context to try to convey how much two bits of mail that came in the last couple of weeks meant to me, to us. After a visit from a couple who feel like family to us (Will, the Gentleman Blacksmith who is training our young Will in the ways of both blacksmithing and gentlemanly deportment and his lovely, vivacious wife), they sent us the following:

Dear Paul and Leslie,
We admire your pioneering spirit and appreciate your generous sharing of knowledge and skills.
Love to all. Will and JoAnna

Enclosed was a check. Will also sent our Will a letter he will surely keep and re-read and the first book for his blacksmithing book shelf. All of these were stunning surprises that created much delight and warmth of heart here in the mountain cold.

Last week another envelope arrived from two dear sisters in our spiritual community. In it was a check silently proffered with full and caring hearts.

Both pieces of mail brought tears to my eyes and, in fact, bring tears to my eyes now as I write about them. We are very grateful for the donations and especially grateful for the supportive thoughts and sense of community and fellowship these two pieces of goodwill gave us. There are donations of money or goods or services and there are donations of goodwill and prayers and supportive thoughts. Both parties gave to us all of these and it means so much to us. Thank you all.

I am grateful that our personal “supposed to’s” happened to have engendered such generosity in others and I look forward to a deepened, broadened fellowship of the heart that keeps us altogether beyond distances or time - a garden of hearts as some say that will ever be in bloom.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

About a week or more ago, my boys did a father-enforced deep clean on their rooms and finished switching out their summer clothes for winter clothes. This resulted in a sparkling room for them but a rather large pile of laundry for me.

When laundry day dawned (for it is still a weather-based activity for us), I was dismayed at the formidable mountain of laundry waiting for little ole hand washing me to tackle. My husband responded by pointing out that we still have our old washing machine in the basement. He thought it would be a good idea to hook it up, use it to wash all of the extra laundry this one time, but just stand there through its cycles to stop the machine as it started to flood.

Now that was a very logical, thoughtful suggestion. But you know what? I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. Even though hand washing our laundry takes so much time (and would especially take so much time in this circumstance) and I get absolutely starving from doing it (!) and I am usually in pain for a couple of days afterward (I am plagued by loosey-goosey joints), I just couldn’t go back to using a machine even in the face of an unusually large pile of laundry. I just couldn’t.

I said, “Thank you but … well, I would know that those clothes aren’t really clean.” (He understood what I said and, I think, understood what I couldn’t quite say.)

OK. Yes, it was partly that I guess. But, honestly, it was much more than that. There is something about doing laundry this way. I don’t know if I can quite put it into words. It is the elemental simplicity of it. It is the sound of the water and the rhythm of the movements. It is the quiet attention you can pay to each piece of clothing and each beloved family member to whom it belongs. It is the feeling of connection with brothers and sisters all over the world who wash their clothing in a similar manner. It is working together with enthusiastic children and strong, broad shouldered husbands to accomplish this necessary task of daily living. It is laughter and water and prayer all rolled up into one “mundane” activity.

What else can I say? I think that it is the naturalness of it. Yes, that’s it. The naturalness of it. Hand washing the laundry and hanging it up to dry feels congruent. It feels right. It feels … well, natural.

A slapdash, machine-made, apparent efficiency cannot make up for laughter and water and prayer and naturalness. All the machine really does is move clothing mindlessly from one pile to another. Hand washing the laundry, on the other hand, always holds the potential to increase awareness, build muscles and character, and extend love. It fits into a natural day like the in fabulous quilt above. See the block showing hand washing laundry? It is all of a piece.

I never, ever would have guessed this on my own. Only doing the work, paying attention to the actual experience, and submitting to the discipline of it showed me. I am truly grateful for myself personally, and am so glad that the children will grow up with more naturalness in their lives. Functioning a bit more naturally will come naturally to them. I view that as a good thing.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

This is cross-posted from our Bamboo Grove Press Blog.

My husband and I were raised with pretty much the same attitudes as any other middle class Americans. Yet somehow, we ended up here. Where is here? Well, we are out in the country with six children, an assortment of rare breed dairy cows and goats, chickens, a garden and so on. Here also includes baking in an outdoor wood-fired earth oven, taking showers in an outdoor bamboo shower (during the summer!), hand washing our laundry (all year), making all of our food from scratch, building all of our outbuildings from scratch and so on. Furthermore, here includes homeschooling, heartfelt meditation, ongoing scriptural studies and daily relationship building in a very intimate family setting. And, honestly, it feels like we have only just gotten started.

So how did we end up here? We ended up here because my husband and I share a passion for answering the question “What does it mean to live a natural life?”

What does that even mean … a natural life?

Discovering answers to this question endlessly fascinates us here. It challenges us, inspires us and constantly reshapes our thoughts and actions. Let’s see, living a natural life surely includes eating locally grown, organic produce and learning to tough out humid summers without air conditioning. Right? What else? It surely includes being willing to use our hands to carry out the tasks of daily living and living with far fewer possessions than is the norm. Yes. What else? We think it seems to include stepping away from cities and disengaging from a wide range of urban attitudes and dependencies. Definitely yes. But still - what is all of this? Does living a natural life go beyond lifestyle concerns and economic choices? Why do so many people crave “a natural life” and yet not know how to create one? And how did our passion for this question get us here?

What we have realized after years of considering these questions is that living a natural life means living according to the Original Design. It means that we live contentedly (obediently even) within the supports and guidelines of “natural laws.” It means that we are willing to scrap virtually everything we have been led to believe is true or necessary for a successful life and aude sapere - dare to think - for ourselves. Dare to think fearlessly, creatively, In harmony with each other, by looking within for answers, and, most of all, in faith.

There is an Original Design for humans and human life on this sweet, green Earth. We only have to keep editing and editing and editing out what we humans invented over millennium until we find what the Creator designed for us and in us in the first place. Pretty much everything works better according to original plans and instructions, yes? This is no less true of human beings. And this is rather less a statement about technology than it is about inner attitudes and ways of acting.

Being passionate about something brings an inherent discipline and responsibility with it. As I read this morning:

Anything you don’t give your life to is not worth doing. Swami Vivekananda said, “Give me men of passion.” Passion does not mean sexual passion; it means a passionate nature, that if I do this, I must do it perfectly. I must do it as well as I can. I must do it now. And promises do not constitute work. He who wants to give must give now. Youth: A Time of Promise and for Effort, vol. 2, p.157 P. Rajagopalachari

Our passion for this ongoing process of discovering what a natural life can be has brought us such a deep feeling of well being and has provided so much “grist for the mill” for our growth that we have for some time now felt a likewise passion for sharing what we are discovering with the many other uncomfortable people who also crave a natural life. It is for this reason that we write extensively on our Pockets of the Future blog and share photos, videos and information there and on our POTF web site. We are pleased that so many people are finding these resources useful for expanding and re-shaping their lives. But we are restless to do more.

As such, my husband and I are very pleased to announce the launch of our family-based publishing business - Bamboo Grove Press. Through Bamboo Grove Press, we will have the means to share much more of what we have been blessed with and what we have discovered during our own transformation. We will be able to share our delight in family life, our complete dependence upon a spiritual perspective, and the fruit of skill building in many areas. I am happy to say that we will be publishing books for children as well as for adults. (We even have a game in mind but we will see how that goes.) We will just generally be leaving as complete a paper trail as possible so that the many people who will be increasingly craving a natural life themselves will be able to have companions in their homes on their book shelves. While remolding oneself and one’s family life into a life that is more natural brings ease and contentment, it is nevertheless a profound transformation to undergo during otherwise hostile and uncertain times. Companions, friends, associates can help so much. We want to be that, to the extent that we are able, for brothers and sisters now and in the future.

Last week, P. Rajagopalachari advised a group of young people to:

Be Natural, Be Fearless and Have Faith

It is on that basis that we present Bamboo Grove Press for your consideration.

From the rustling leaves of the Grove,

Leslie