While modern folks may think doing things by hand is “old fashioned” and therefore morally reprehensible in some unspoken way, we find as a family that we have often reap unexpected rewards from accomplishing tasks in simpler, quieter ways.

As we hope to eventually turn almost all “lawn” areas here at this homestead into either gardens or grazing areas, we haven’t really wanted to invest in a lawn mower. So we decided to try out a Bow-Knife Weed Cutter from Lehman’s to trim some of the public areas of the yard. It is like a beginner’s scythe, I guess you could say, and is designed to cut brushy, grassy areas by human power. When we first pulled out the Bow-Knife Weed Cutter and started going after the burned out long grass and weeds of late summer, all the children wanted to give it a try. Once they took a few swings and the novelty was over, Carolyn (our 15 year old oldest) took a long turn. She loved cutting grass this way. She said that it wasn’t at all back breaking and that the tempo of swinging the tool made her feel like her body was singing. (Perhaps I should point out that she is a singer…). We both enjoyed the sound that it made as it cut through the grass and appreciated being able to talk while either one or the other of us was working.

Eventually she went in to make lemonade and I took a long turn. I loved watching the area begin to look more like a lawn all the while feeling as though I were deep in a meaningful agricultural moment in a Russian novel. Who knows - perhaps we will graduate to scythes next year. But what I appreciated most was being that close to the grass. I had time to observe what was growing and what condition it was in. I noticed areas of one kind of growth or another. I saw the juicy, green grass down close to the earth being revealed as the tall brown grass was cut away. I began to think seriously about how to transform areas of the yard into an inviting, luscious garden. My mind wandered through seasons and possibilities. It was like taking the horse and buggy of grass cutting. You get to where you are going but at a pace which permits you to interact meaningfully with your surroundings along the way. We didn’t just cut the grass in a noisy, brutal hurry on our way to doing something else. We got to know the grass while cutting it, got to spend time altogether in a pleasant and useful way and had the release of quiet physical activity to stir up dreams of the future.

Simpler may not be easier but it is often sweeter.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

Meals and snacks have become easier and easier to prepare under the assumption that easier and faster is better. However, this so-called improvement has not necessarily improved people’s lives or strengthened family ties. On the contrary, the mania for getting what you want and getting it fast has led to a rise in obesity and the nationwide descent into malnutrition. Behind the obvious issue of foods chock full of sodium, sugar alternatives, trans fats, dyes and chemicals being consumed in vast quantities, there is a deeper issue of the motivation behind wanting the quick and easy preparation of meals.

Families that are busy outside of the home want food on the go. Family dinners have become a rarity in many places. The idea of coming together to carefully prepare and intimately share a meal is nothing but a lofty ideal for a society in which family members run helter-skelter through individual schedules, occasionally bumping into each other on weekends or in transit. In short, fast meals and snacks not only allow for lessened family contact and interaction but ultimately actively contribute to the loosening of family ties. The more a family eats food on the go or at separate times, the more convenience food becomes an typical option rather than a last minute fallback. The change from the state of either making your own meal or not being able to eat, to the state where food is practically being handed to you has given the green light to our society to go completely unconscious about food, nutrition, family traditions and so on. An individual these days can get by with next to no knowledge of basic cookery where such ignorance would have been sheer folly fifty, even thirty years ago. Even The Joy of Cooking in its latest edition has been simplified and furnished with a glossary of basic cooking terms for crying out loud!

It has become OK to send your kid off to school in the morning and not see him or her again until nine pm. It has become OK to stop by the local McDonald’s and have everyone eat in the car on the way to soccer practice three times a week, just so long as you mix it up by going to Wendy’s once in a while. It has become OK to throw prepackaged food into the microwave on weekdays when dinner is late and you’re exhausted. It has become OK to let each person fend for themselves in the meal department as long as you remember to take everyone out for pizza some night in order to make up for all the lost meals.

Yes, this may sound harsh, and I am not saying that having a rushed dinner once in a while is a family shattering sin. I am saying, however, that when a family is so scattered that they cannot even find the time to prepare real food and eat it with each other, something is seriously wrong.

In medieval times when a peasant was convicted of robbery, the right hand was often cut off in punishment. This of course completely handicapped that person for life but it also served another purpose. In those times the left hand was considered lesser than the right and to eat with the left hand in public wasn’t even an option. Not only were thieves decapitated, said decapitation isolated them from the most social occasion of the day, i.e. the meal. This was the genius of the punishment. Consider now our fast paced culture in which a family meal is an infrequent event rather than a tradition. We, as a culture, are cutting off our own right hands not only in the sense that we no longer eat together, but also in the sense that in deepening the sense of alienation within our families, we are depriving ourselves of our most important resources and our most vital support system. We are handicapped in the truest sense of the word when we can no longer function as a whole within our families.

So if constantly eating food whose greatest virtue is that it can be prepared quickly is not only destroying our bodies but is also corrosive to our intimate family ties, what does it say about our culture that one of the biggest industries in America is the fast food industry? What does it say about our health and our values and our thought processes and our families? If the family is the building block of society, as a public school health textbook recently informed me, what happens to a society in which the structures of the foundational building blocks are disintegrating? 

Looking at that same analogy in another way, we can see that every building block in a structure counts. Therefore every family in a society counts in a similar way. In this culture where the phrase “dysfunctional family” has become commonplace, the families which are strong and united shine all the more brightly. We might always wish to be automatically surrounded with what is best and brightest and most beautiful. It doesn’t seem to work that way these days, however. But at least we can learn to create that health and harmony and beauty first within ourselves and then within our families. Changing the world without must always begin by changing the world within, both mentally and physically. Carefully preparing nourishing and meaningful food and eating it together on a daily basis is a decisive first step toward improving our worlds both individual and collective. Reviving this ancient tradition will take us a long way toward a revivified future.

Most sincerely,

Carolyn Grace

I have a vivid memory of sitting on the living room floor when I was five years old reading a Dick and Jane book. My mother said, “It’s time for dinner.” I replied, “Coming …” whereupon I promptly forgot about everything except the book I was reading. That was the beginning of a lifetime of saying, “Coming …” while reading. I guess with maturity, I have strengthened my ability to actually put the book down and go to wherever I am supposed to be, especially since I am now usually the one making dinner and calling everyone else! In any case ever since that day when I was five, I have been reading at least one book (usually several) every single day. Reading gives my mind a very large space in which to move about.

As a mother I now look at reading from a different perspective. I have been avidly reading about and engaged in homeschooling for almost 16 years now. I have read a lot about how to teach reading. What I have read is typically about what materials to use and why. When to start teaching and why. How to assess problems with reading and what to do about them. There are long discussions about research into brain processes and how it does or does not bolster arguments for and against phonics and/or whole language approaches to teaching reading. There are endless discussions as to which phonics program is best under which circumstances. There is the right brain/left brain discussion. There is talk about readers and whether or not to use accompanying workbooks. There are elucidating comparisons between the readers used now and the ones used one hundred years ago. And so on and so on and so on. Discussions may be neutral or very heated but they are almost always technical. I have never read a discussion about how absolutely amazing it is to teach children to read and what this implies about the human mind.

So guess what? Teaching children how to read is awe inspiring. Truly. If you can step back from the monotony of practice and keep everyone’s personalities in harmony when challenges are being faced, then the extraordinary nature of the process can’t help but fill you with wonder. While I remember reading Dick and Jane, I don’t remember what the process of learning to read felt like. So I am watching with care as I teach three of my children to read at the same time. The beauty of teaching three of them at once is that I can observe how significant differences in personality and seemingly slight differences in age (they are all within two years age of each other) impact the learning process. It is fascinating and deepens my appreciation for their individuality in ways that will serve us in the future in areas other than reading.

For the record, we use the TATRAS phonics program which is a “vertical” approach to phonics. Most phonics programs are “horizontal” which means that whenever a letter is taught, it is taught with only one of its sounds. In vertical phonics, all sounds of any given letter are taught at once and in the order of frequency of use. This is much more logical and gives young readers a wider scope of reading material that is within reach more quickly. I learned about this program from the Bluedorns (whose opinion I greatly respect on such matters) and they now sell it on their site.

We are happily using Pathway and Harriette Taylor Treadwell readers. The Pathway readers were created to use in Amish classrooms. As such, they are based in family life and extol the virtues of simplicity, obedience and cooperation. My children find the stories compelling and appreciate the black and white line drawings. I appreciate being completely comfortable with the material. Having three children reading from each of the three first readers all at once makes me feel like Peter and Rachel are a part of our family. Any of you who use these readers will know who I mean! The Treadwell readers (go here for the online versions and here to purchase printed books) are reprints from 1910. Both readers draw from classic literature and are designed to deepen an appreciation for good literature at the same time as they teach reading. The Primer, for instance, is full of classic stories like “The Little Red Hen” and “Three Billy Goats Gruff”. The illustrations are charmingly old fashioned and give opportunities for learning in and of themselves. For instance, in “The Little Red Hen” each child and I together looked at and discussed the wheat berries (like what we have in pails in the kitchen), hand scythes (related to a tool we use for trimming some of our grass), threshers, mills (both water and wind with a reminder about the water mill we visited recently), brick ovens and the system of having a village baker (along with a discussion about the clay oven we will someday build) and sourdough bread (and the rise of industrial foods such as quick acting yeast and what that did to bread making and nutrition). All of that delightful discussion - and it is delightful because it draws upon the old paths we ourselves are following into the future - was an added bonus on top of the already well known character lesson contained in this folk tale.

That is the nuts and bolts of how we are teaching reading here. Not only are these all worthy materials for teaching my children, I am learning too. As fluent as I may be in English, I never consciously knew that the letter “a” makes three sounds and in what order of frequency those sounds appear in our language. Furthermore, I never considered ahead of time that my methodical, detail oriented boy would read very differently than my emotional, storyteller girl. And that my more right brained, intense-drive-towards mastery daughter would seem to read almost as if by intuition rather than skill or knowledge.

This last bit is what brings me to my main point. Reading is an incredibly abstract, uniquely human activity. How do young children do it? So you teach them some phonics. Having read Charlotte Mason (particularly Volume 1) and knowing that the answer to almost all either/or debates is BOTH (i.e. the answer is not either phonics or sight words but both methods used judiciously and together), you also teach them some sight words in whatever way suits them. How does that suddenly leap into reading a funny story fluently enough to induce giggling in the new young reader? That is the awe inspiring part of all of this that we can forget about in our day to day march towards mastery.

Human thought force comes directly from God. It is made from God. Our thought force is our most potent force or ability. This is easy to believe when you watch young children soar into reading books. But what else can they do? Our minds are made to do much greater and more subtle things than we humans currently do with them. “The human brain has enormous but unexploited possibilities.” What other wondrous abilities (we aren’t even guessing at) do our children have latent within their minds and beings? How can we guide them into expressing abilities that we ourselves have long since forgotten we were also born with? How do we guide and educate these true “pockets of the future?

I think that being full of awe and wonder is a good place to start. Holding each of these children in prayer and acting on the inner guidance that flows from that is a good follow up and a lifetime practice. May we all be molded as Nature works to shape our children into shining examples, for the sake of the future.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

Soy has become like corn here in America. It is not a natural part of the ancestral diet of many of us and yet it is an (often hidden) ingredient in many foods. Furthermore, it is the basis upon which “fake foods” are built such as burgers and hot dogs and bologna.

Someone came to visit us recently to work with our donkey. As she spent a little time here and talked with us, she learned something about our lifestyle and eating habits and so on. Being interested in eating more this way herself, she asked us if we eat soy. When we told her that we don’t, she wondered how we substituted for it. It is a good question she asked and it shows how far off the food industry has taken our thinking that we all now believe that you have to eat soy in order to be successfully, healthfully vegetarian.

I used to eat quite a bit of soy 15 – 20 years ago. Eventually after years of eating this way and then my first childbirth, my thyroid gave out in spectacular fashion. Around that time, I made friends with a woman in my neighborhood was a devotee of a spiritual practice that has a special emphasis on food and its spiritual effects. She once mentioned to me in passing that her master had said that soy is too dense for humans and could only be suitable for animals. That comment has always stayed with me. It was some years before the negative effects of eating soy would come to the forefront of alternative health news. (And at this point I question it even as an animal feed.)

I think I first learned to be cautious with regard to soy from the Weston A. Price Foundation back around 2000. See their articles Confused About Soy? Soy Dangers Summarized and Myths and Truths About Soy for two excellent, quick overviews. A few years later I started reading Dr. Mercola’s Natural Health Newsletter (a highly recommended free email subscription newsletter with over one million readers). He commented with increasing frequency on the dangers of soy. I happened to read a compelling overview of the subject written by Debi Pearl in 2001 entitled Soy Alert. Then in 2005 The Whole Soy Story: The Dark Side of America’s Favorite Health Food by Kaayla Daniel came out. This 480 page book plus the other sites just mentioned give an exhaustive review of the details about soy and its potentially negative effects on human health so I won’t discuss those here.

Aside from possible negative health consequences, we avoid soy because most soy available in the US is genetically modified. So even if soy were neutral in terms of health affects, we wouldn’t eat it because of the quality of what is available here. The same goes for corn, by the way. If I can’t get us organic corn, we just don’t eat corn.

Suffice it to say that we have been off of soy here for years. The only soy we occasionally eat is tempeh. Tempeh is a traditional fermented soy product that has a delicious nutty flavor and chewy texture. For a description, instructions, recipes and detailed discussion about tempeh, read up at the World’s Healthiest Foods. I love personal pages people make about how they make or do things. Here is one such page complete with helpful photos about making tempeh at home. Maybe we will try it sometime as we really appreciate fermented foods these days.

In any case, our immediate reply to our friend’s question about what we substitute for tofu is panir. Panir is a simple fresh cheese that comes from the ancient cuisine of India. It is basically the same thing as queso blanco. It is a firm, white cheese that does not melt when cooked. It can be used in many, many ways and is really easy to make. I make a batch here every week, store it in the frig and then just use it as I go while cooking throughout the week. It can be the basis of a meal or just an added protein you through into something else at the last minute. There are also many uses for the whey, not the least of which is that of making the next batch of panir. My directions for making panir are posted under Recipes.

Leave aside those unnatural soy foods and try this easy ancient cheese. If you are interested in the adventure of making more of your basic foods yourself, panir is a great place to start as it is easy, takes little time, is nourishing, can be used in myriad ways and stores well in the refrigerator or freezer. Try it and then write in and tell us how it went. Share any delicious ways you discover of how to use it.

Actually, I have some milk building up in the refrigerator right now. I think I had better go make a batch of panir myself to have on hand for Sunday dinner. Bon appetite!

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

 

 

 

My wife, Leslie, had long had the idea to build an outdoor shower inside of a bamboo grove where the bamboo would be the shower curtain. At our last homestead we planted some Stone bamboo but did not have a place for the shower. However, after we arrived at our new place, I found an ideal location for the shower. We hoped to purchase some bamboo after the sale of our old house and plant it and let it grow until it was thick. Then I had a rough idea of what kind of shower I wanted to build.

The bamboo shower itself would give us a back system to our current bathing practices of an indoor shower and bath. The outdoor shower helps to conserve both water and power as the water can be heated by the sun. It would also provide its own gray water system as the water-loving bamboo will absorbing the water running out of the shower. Bamboo shoots can be harvested in the spring so the walls of the shower would also be a perennial food source.

This project was just an idea that we looked forward to attempting sometime in the future. However, about a month ago we drove by an abandoned house about a ½ mile from we where live that has a giant bamboo grove growing right next to it. A sign had been posted that read “Free bamboo. Take as much as you want (at your own risk).” Since buying bamboo is not only expensive but you limited as to sizes you can buy, we took advantage of that opportunity placed in our path. We transplanted a great deal of the bamboo as well as took a variety of bamboo poles that had been cut down to use for the shower walls.

The species we now have is the Yellow Groove variety which produces sweet shoots and tolerates cold temperatures. Since it obviously thrives locally, we feel blessed to have so many specimens. After transplanting the bamboo, we built the shower itself which is captured on the attached videos linked below.

We have already been enjoying the use of the bamboo shower in this hot weather. Bathing outdoors has an exhilarating affect on your system. And the bamboo has an otherworldly presence of its own. Being able to gaze up into the bamboo canopy while showering and hear the wind rustling through the leaves is not only relaxing but cleansing on all levels.

We are concerned by typical American water practices. Most of us are completely dependant upon electricity to power our water supply and waste disposal. Most other people worldwide do not have the access to fresh water that we have here in the US. http://www.rivers.gov/waterfacts.html As you can read from the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System website, facts about fresh water are staggering. Here are just a few:

:The United States consumes water at twice the rate of other industrialized nations.

· 1.2 Billion — Number of people worldwide who do not have access to clean water.
6.8 Billion — Gallons of water Americans flush down their toilets every day.

· Each day almost 10,000 children under the age of 5 in Third World countries die as a result of illnesses contracted by use of impure water.

· Most of the world’s people must walk at least 3 hours to fetch water.

· By 2025, 52 countries with two-thirds of the world’s population will likely have water shortages.

· The average single-family home uses 80 gallons of water per person each day in the winter and 120 gallons in the summer. Showering, bathing and using the toilet account for about two-thirds of the average family’s water usage.

· The average person needs 2 quarts of water a day.

· During the 20th century, water use increased at double the rate of population growth; while the global population tripled, water use per capita increased by six times.

· Water use in the United States alone leaped from 330 million gallons per day in 1980 to 408 million gallons per day in 1990, despite a decade of improvements in water-saving technology.

· Water used around the house for such things as drinking, cooking, bathing, toilet flushing, washing clothes and dishes, watering lawns and gardens, maintaining swimming pools, and washing cars accounts for only 1% of all the water used in the U.S. each year.

· Per capita water use in the western U.S. is much higher than in any other region, because of agricultural needs in this arid region. In 1985, daily per capita consumption in Idaho was 22,200 gallons versus 152 gallons in Rhode Island.

· A corn field of one acre gives off 4,000 gallons of water per day in evaporation.

· It takes about 6 gallons of water to grow a single serving of lettuce. More than 2,600 gallons is required to produce a single serving of steak.

Electricity and our other usual power resources are not guaranteed to always be available. They are also finite and will run out eventually. We can’t expect that water will be pumped into our houses indefinitely. So my family is building low technology back-up systems such as the bamboo shower which are more environmentally friendly and allow us to meet our needs in a new way. Our next projects will be a composting toilet and attaching a hand pump to our well.

The first 2 videos below are of us building the bamboo shower. The 3^rd video features the completed shower. The next two videos are of us harvesting and transplanting the bamboo. The last video is of an artistic and sophisticated sustainable home in Taos, NM featuring black water and gray water systems, off the grid power, alternative construction materials and techniques, passive solar design, art work, converted fuel vehicles, indoor jungles and more.

Bamboo Shower 1

Bamboo Shower 2

Bamboo Shower 3

Transplanting Bamboo 1

Transplanting Bamboo 2

Angel’s Nest

All the best,

Paul

Last night at the very moment my husband finished filling the wash pail for the evening milking, we lost power. The sky was blue. The sun was shining. All seemed calm and yet we suddenly lost power. Just like that the familiar can become unfamiliar. A warning about upcoming change is not a guaranteed part of the program.

After we finished milking, we realized with a start that all of the Plan B resources and systems we had set up at our old homestead in Louisa are not yet set up here. We had absolutely no water (drinking or otherwise) at all, for instance. Going without power for any great length of time could become kind of difficult. We also heard sirens a couple of times which we never hear here. We wondered if they were connected to whatever made us lose power. My husband decided to take the car to scout out the area to see what might be going on and to bring home some bottled water.

We have all become so accustomed to noise. We don’t even hear it any more. We have no idea what affect it may have on us. The noises of human-made modern day life sank under the level of our conscious awareness long, long ago.

My husband drove away and the children went outside. It was that time towards the end of a hot day in August when the breeze disappears. The thick summer air becomes still. Everything is quiet with waiting for the transformation of twilight. I stood in the house and felt the silence inside and out. The shell that the house provides when it is humming away with its electric tasks disappeared. I could hear neighbors I have never heard before. I could feel the out-of-doors in a way I never could when the power was on. I was almost outside. There almost was no “inside”.

In that thick summer silence, I experienced how much noise separates us from the larger world and from nature. Likewise, as individuals the noise in our heads insulates us from those around us and separates us from our deeper selves. True peace, by definition, has no boundaries. It just is – everywhere and at all times. Silence, as an expression of peace, is truly blessed.

My husband returned. We all drank water. The children went to bed. My husband and I walked back outside and pulled up a seat. Evening had fallen bringing with it a welcome breeze and the pulsing sounds of nightfall in the country. All was a beautiful harmony of movement and rejoicing. Behind it we still enjoyed the silence of an absence of man-made power and man-made activity. To sit quietly in this was rejuvenating.

Shortly thereafter, the power came back on. We were admittedly glad to go back into the now humming house so that we could take showers and drink water and sit by a fan. But we took in with us the natural silence that unifies all experience and lifts us up towards our real goal of life.

May such a silence become a permanent backdrop to our future lives, both inner and outer.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

Whether we think we like it or not, our worlds are built upon natural and divine laws. If we make it our business to seek out these laws and then set about living by them to the best of our ability, our lives progress as they should. Life doesn’t become easy by doing this as life on earth cannot be easy, but life can become congruent, blessed, peaceful and much simpler even in the face of perfect storms of difficulties. There can come a feeling of inner rightness that sustains you through all of the up’s and down’s life inevitably presents.

When we disavow the natural and divine laws that form the foundation of our lives, there will always be unforeseen consequences. As humans, we are not above the laws that operate within our internal and external spheres. Therefore we are – by definition – incapable of predicting the consequences of violating those laws. Examples of this litter the landscape.

Let’s take, for example, agriculture. For those whose minds were pointed towards industry, profit, mechanization and, eventually, a global economy where food is treated as a commodity, implementing the discoveries that have led to today’s “corporate agribusiness” seemed logical enough. Perhaps they even seemed like a “good” at the time. I am talking about discoveries like chemical fertilizers, chemical pesticides and fungicides, mono-culture on an enormous scale, genetically modified organisms, the machinery required to farm agri-business style, the laws and flow of money required to farm agri-business style, the set up of grocery stores – in short our modern food system as we know it. Readers of this blog are probably already aware of not only the shortcomings but the dangers to the earth and us as a species of the introduction of chemical fertilizers, say, or GMO’s. That finding a way to use up the excess industrial products created from producing explosives for World War I would lead to American consumers unthinkingly buying GMO corn in practically everything at a Walmart eighty years later could not be predicted. Unforeseen consequences cascade into the future. And while we are capable of starting such cascades, we are generally incapable of stopping them.

An equally important example that triggered me into thinking about this in the first place is in the article Yummy Vs. Slummy - And the winner is… who cares? we’ve become narcissist mommies, obsessed with our parenting choices and defensive when confronted with others’ in a recent Newsweek (online). Apparently for some years there has been an onslaught of “mommy-lit” novels and non-fiction books that analyze, describe, argue for or against, introspect, anguish over and otherwise hand wring and shine a giant spotlight upon what used to be a natural function - mothering.

Why is this? Why the onslaught of desperate or tongue-in-cheek or histrionic or strident books about something as basic and inescapable as mothering? I believe there is a rise in this “narcissistic, obsessed and defensive” expression because we as a society have long ago broken so many natural and divine laws with respect to family life, marriage and child rearing that any notion of those important undertakings being naturally accomplished is lost in the mists of nostalgia.

We are lost and have lost heart when it comes to building a healthy family life. Therefore we have lost our vision of the future. A warm, loving family life well conducted is a blend of preserving past traditions and wisdom with present skills and yearnings folded into a vision of the future that includes our children and their children living in a peaceful, smoothly functioning world with spirituality at its base. Past choices and wrong turns have taken us so far away from any of this that attempting to be a mother of any kind often gives rise to painful self-doubt and shelves of mommy-lit books of dubious value.

What place do mothers have in faith-based, forward looking families? How do girls and young women grow up to in turn become the mothers of such families? How do they go on to teach their daughters to become the mothers of such families? Are there natural and divine laws relevant to the conduct of family life? What cascades of unintended negative consequences from those laws being willfully ignored for so long are we laboring under as we become wives and mothers? Is family life meant to be stressful, isolating, alienating and overwhelming? Is that the natural plan?

Are there any mothers these days who are at least somewhat conversant with a natural approach to family life and marriage? If so, what do their lives look like? How do their husbands feel and how do their children turn out? When we find these “natural mothers”, do we uphold them, learn from them, feel blessed by them? Do they write books and do we choose to read these instead of the books passing as “mommy-lit” these days? Do we read the books of informed, natural mothers and take note and feel inspired and go on to create change in ourselves and our families?

We can use our hearts and our minds and our wills to choose out of the cascade of unforeseen negative consequences to family life that dominates today’s world. We can humbly and hopefully take the old paths toward a new future. We can determine to discover the natural rhythms, skills, attitudes and habits that can make family life joyful, simple, intimate and a “pocket of the future”. As things look now, it will take generations to ease our way into natural, simple family life. But we of this generation can start now. With loving hearts, internal guidance and a strong will, we can move as families into a new direction to be built upon by our children and their children.

Some of these mothers might even write books along the way. I wonder how their books will be different from most of the “mommy-lit” ones we have available now? Well … I imagine they will be full of enlightened conviction. I imagine they will be inspirational, practical and perhaps even poetic in places. I imagine their books will give hope by calmly and joyfully reminding readers of the gift of home life, the necessity of seeing to its spiritual foundation, the fruit of living simply and the boons that flow from unself-conscious service and sacrifice. Such mothers, such books, such families will encourage - literally strengthen the hearts - of those around them, their readers and their societies.

Then we can start living family lives of cascading intended positive consequences. Hearts will be strong. Futures will be bright. Peace will prevail. Our true human birthright will be within grasp.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

I haven’t visited the dairy aisle in a grocery store in well over a year but I learned in a recent article on msnbc that worldwide prices for milk are skyrocketing. The article entitled “What’s Behind High Milk Prices? Look to China - Growing taste for Starbucks, McDonald’s helps drive up costs worldwide” gives an international perspective on milk and milk prices. Elaborating on reasons for heated prices, it says, “Reasons include growing appetites for dairy foods in China and elsewhere in Asia, where chains such as McDonald’s and Starbucks are introducing unfamiliar taste buds to cheeseburgers and lattes. Other factors are rising costs for animal feed, shrinking European production and long-standing drought in Australia and New Zealand, the world’s largest milk-exporting region.” It cites prices in the US as being nearly $4/gallon although someone I met this week in Floyd says she sees prices of $5/gallon here and more.

While having a family cow certainly increases the workload at home, it also (along with every other aspect of homesteading) insulates you to some extent from the politics and foolishness of the world at large as it relates to food. Governmental price supports, corporate expansion and the vulnerability of producing food globally instead of locally subject natural foods like milk to very unnatural stresses in terms of how the milk is produced, how the milk itself is treated and then finally how it is priced and distributed. The result is a worldwide populace dependent upon governmental intervention, corporate farmers’ notions about how you feed and manage cows, profit driven marketing practices and the vagaries of weather patterns thousands of miles away for their milk. The result of this dependence is people ingesting a mere facsimile of what nature otherwise provides and ingesting it in a way that is completely disconnected from real food, cows, neighbors, nature or any other life affirming qualities and energies.

What is roughly our daily cost here on the homestead for several gallons of milk? Let’s start by looking at what costs we don’t have:

We don’t have the costs of:

* vet bills (our cows are rare breed, vigorous and live pretty natural lives);

* feed bills (our cows are grass fed only);

* expensive infrastructure (we milk by hand and build whatever simple buildings we need also by hand).

We do have the costs of:

* ongoing research into the natural rhythms and principles of raising healthy grass-fed cows;

* living on gorgeous farmland in order to provide pasture;

* providing them with natural minerals with kelp that smells so good that they nourish us twice (once going into the cows’ bucket and once coming out in the form of milk);

* storing up bales of alfalfa and other hay grown locally by farmers with whom we build fruitful relationships;

* the self-discipline, attention to family cooperation and the willingness to build the necessary habits and skills required to successfully milk twice a day with young children and then process that milk into whatever the family needs.

Thus far in our experience, our “costs” for providing nutrient dense unprocessed milk to our children are essentially the “costs” associated with natural living and character development. In fact if we didn’t have this way to pay those costs, we would have to go out and find another way.

Natural systems and approaches build upon each other. Submitting to the “costs” of natural systems and approaches allows us to find our true potential as human beings. Being aware of and grateful for the “costs” of natural systems and approaches brings us to the door of maturity and fulfillment. Working with natural systems and approaches brings us to a state of true health.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

The answer is that they maintain functional groups in which the leaders, the hens and cows at the top of their respective pecking orders, do not keep 90% to 99% of their societies’ resources for themselves.

On our homestead, we recently added 14 new hens to our flock of 12 hens. We knew that there was going to be conflict and some fighting involved as the hens established a new pecking order. Interestingly, the posturing and the pecking were not all that bad on even the first night and it only took three or four days for them to sort everything out. Within that short amount of time, they successfully put aside their differences and came together as a well-functioning, cooperative society. By the way, the 14 new hens were also a completely different breed from the hens we already had. There are videos at the bottom of this dairy documenting the process of these hens working things out.

Both our cows and hens live within hierarchies. Within their pecking orders where might makes right so to speak, the dominant animal has some privileges. Their privileges are limited, however, to the best eating spots and the best sleeping spots and going first for everything. For example if Phoebe, our dominant cow, wants to drink from the water trough and there is another cow in her way, she will butt that cow out of the way. The other cow does not fight back but stays out of Phoebe’s way and either waits until Phoebe is finished or drinks out of the other side of the trough. For her part, Phoebe does not claim 90% of the water and limit the rest herd to surviving on the remaining 10%. She only takes what she needs.

It makes sense that every leader, no matter what the species, gets some perks for leading. Hard work, ability, foresight and responsibility should all be rewarded in a natural way just as self-mastery and adaptability are rewarded in Nature. True leadership, after all, is exerted in the interest of the group. Only disastrous leadership claims 90% of a species resources and then gorges and hoards those resources by turns. No species can survive such a policy.

The earth is being pillaged in order to feed greedy consumption/leadership. It cannot sustain this. The earth’s people are being pillaged in order to feed greedy consumption/leadership and they cannot live with such a disproportionate distribution of wealth and resources.

All species are at the brink of disaster when the highest evolved species so far on our planet needs to take leadership tips from a bunch of hens. Democracy or not, the policies and lifestyles of greed by our leaders must change dramatically or society will collapse.

I hope you enjoy the below videos of a society of hens and a society of cows that are functioning in this way better than many humans are.

Our New Hens Part 1

Our New Hens Part 2

Our New Hens Part 3

Our New Hens Part 4

All the best,

Paul