A few years ago, my wife and I needed assistance moving our homestead from the world of ideas to the material world. Neither of us grew up on a farm. Both of us had little homestead related hands-on experience. One could say that the first step had been taken years ago when my wife started researching this way of life. We had also gradually begun planning for our homestead, had written a family mission statement which included a homesteading way of life, had had children whose very natures demanded a farm life, and we had at last succeeded in moving to the country. Each of these actions got us moving in the direction of the homestead but we weren’t sure how to take the next concrete step. Shortly after moving to our own place in the country, one particular event put us past the point of no return and that was when our Border Collie, Lucy, came to live with us. She was our first farm animal. With each additional animal we became more and more like homesteaders but it all started with Lucy.

Lucy came to us through a homeschooling exercise. My wife and I were designing a homeschooling curriculum to supplement an ABC book we wrote for our children based upon our spiritual philosophy. The curriculum features lessons and activities that correspond to each letter of the alphabet. We worked on the letter D for over a month because we started doing a unit study on the dog. Dogs remind us of so many spiritual characteristics important to us such as devotion, love, loyalty, and service and there are many stories and books about special dogs that illustrate these qualities beautifully. The whole family enjoyed this study so much that we just couldn’t seem to move on. We would find another story or come up with a new exercise so that we didn’t move on to the letter E. As we studied the qualities of the dog, our hearts began opening to the idea of adding one to our family. My wife and I were starting a business at the time as well as beginning to homeschool our children while developing the aforementioned curriculum. We felt maxed out. With six children, four of them under six years old, we did not feel ready to take on something new. But the dog talk was reverberating all through the house and there was no stopping it.

So then we went to a local vegetarian festival where I had a booth promoting my now defunct counseling business. Early in the day, I walked around the venue. I noticed a set of booths for a group trying to save doomed dogs and cats who had a week before they would be put down. One happy looking dog that looked like a Border Collie caught my eye. I walked back to our booth and mentioned the dog to my wife who had just read something about Border Collies a few days before. Before I knew it, my children were excitedly taking turns walking around the festival with the dog. I knew that there was going to be no turning back then. We brought her home that very evening. In one of the mysteries of life, my counseling business and our homestead intersected that day. The homestead just took off after that with one animal after another coming to live with us, one skill after another being learned, barns being built and milk pouring in whereas the counseling business was shut out on all levels. It seems that nature gave a nod to one while stiff arming the other. Even though Leslie and I put more into the counseling business in terms of time and resources, the homestead grew and flourishes today whereas the counseling business is but a distant memory.

It was soon clear to us that Lucy possessed all of the qualities we had been studying about in dogs. Border Collies are working dogs first and foremost. They are highly intelligent and sensitive. They really, really want to please their owner or master. They are devoted and eager to please, hanging on their master’s every instruction. At the higher levels of master and dog, artistry is reached where the nonverbal communication is so precise that dog and owner become one. The Border Collie can anticipate what their master wants them to do sometimes even before the owner themselves has thought of it. Lucy was such a dog.

Lucy has gentle, deep brown light-filled eyes which reflect the nature of her essence. She is extremely patient and gentle with the children and above all else she wants to serve the family. At first she would not even relieve herself on her own. We had to walk her into the woods on our property twice a day. Some Border Collies only relive themselves in the woods and not on the pasture unless the grass is really think and deep. Lucy was so intent on serving that she would just sit and wait at the back porch. If we didn’t walk her into the woods, she would not relieve herself but only wait for us.

Lucy had boundless energy and enthusiasm. After doing a little research, we quickly learned that Border Collies need to work. They are like gifted children who have an essential need to put their talents to use. If they don’t have a venue for their talents, they turn to mischief and can eventually develop antisocial type behaviors. It was obvious that Lucy had herding talents that needed to be expressed. As a thoroughbred needs to run, a herding dog needs to herd. It is a part of their genetic structure. As we had no livestock at the time, we taught her to catch a Frisbee. We tired out her out with this a few times a day but that was really not enough for her. I felt personally responsible to help Lucy develop her gifts and actualize the herding dog she was destined to become. That is one of the wonderful things about being a parent or pet owner or supervisor. You are responsible to create the conditions for your charges to become their best and that makes you change and grow. There were a lot of forces within our family unit pulling for a homestead and these forces began pulling the homesteader out of me, a change for the better.

A year or so after Lucy came to live with us, we began to acquire livestock. Each new animal added a different element and condition to our lives. Unfortunately, we were unable to train Lucy to herd properly. We did not know how to train her and we were juggling so many balls that we never had the time or the resources to either learn ourselves or bring her to somebody else to train her. More often than not, Lucy would do the opposite of what we wanted her to do when it came to herding. We tended to drive the animals from behind so Lucy would get in front of the animals and push them back towards us. This is not what we wanted her to do but we later learned how this made sense from her point of view. We also learned that Border Collies are so sensitive and eager to please that they can easily have their spirits broken by harsh words and treatment. That is why you’re not supposed to say “No!” to them. Instead you say, “That’ll do.” (This translates nicely into aspects of parenting too, by the way.)We tried to remember this and usually praised her for doing the slightest thing right. But there were times of frustration, of course and deep down Lucy must have known that she was just sort of “pretend herding”.

She is now about four years old. I was getting concerned that the window of opportunity for her to learn to be a proper herding dog was probably closing. She is such a valued member of our family and such a contributor to the joy of our homestead that I felt, to some extent, that we had failed her. We have been making videos of our homestead for months now. We had just completed the video series “A Day on Our Homestead”. The next series was scheduled to be a day in the life of our Border Collie. And in the magic that is a spirit’s need to actualize itself, Lucy had a major herding breakthrough a week before we shot her video. She suddenly just got it one day and ran out into the pasture and brought the cows to us to be milked and then took them back out to the pasture when milking was done. She has been doing it ever since as you will see on the videos. This has been wonderful for us and for Lucy.

We are still fine-tuning her skills but now Lucy is a genuine contributor to the work of the homestead and has become what she was meant to become - a herding dog. When we first got her, her temporary name was Blair. That was not her real name though. Almost immediately after bringing her home, the name Lucy came through. “Lucy” means light and that is what you see in her eyes and that is what you feel being around her. She lights up the area wherever she goes and people everywhere respond to her that way. We are lucky to have her. The videos are embedded below.

Part 1

Part 2

Part3

Part4

All the best,

Paul

In these last many years of family life and homesteading and meditating, I have observed that to be adept at living a simple, natural life you actually have to be pretty good at a lot of “primary labor” type things. You have to know which foods are really nourishing, for instance, and know the long, slow ways to best prepare them. You have to know the moods of nature and plant your garden accordingly and milk your cow and turn your children out of doors for spontaneous nature study accordingly. You have to know what it means to be a wife and submit with grace and lead from behind with loving artistry. You have to know what it means to be a mother and teach your children how to read and think mathematically and how to live harmoniously and how to honor their internal lives. To live such a life it is best if you already have informed notions about modest ways of dressing and lovely ways of home decorating along with all attending skills such as sewing, knitting, painting, flower arranging, and frugal everything. And this is just a list of mostly material life type skills. This list does not include the deep creativity and devoted discipline that comes from a well-led meditation practice and profound service orientation. This last bit can lead you into all kinds of uncharted waters.

Personally not only did I not grow up learning any of these skills (either material or internal/spiritual), I grew up in a typical middle class environment that actually spurned both engaging in such skills as well as any subtle philosophy that might lead one to value learning such skills. So while I have a very nice Ivy League type education including a graduate degree, I have spent much of my adult life feeling completely unprepared for the important stuff that lies before me to do. I feel like I am always playing catch up with time too short and the vision too big for me to be spending so much time playing catch up.

As such, almost any knowledge or skill I possess of value to me now has come to me through prayer, intuition, reading books and hard work on my own. I sometimes get aggravated to be only beginning to learn about this or that in my 40’s. You certainly aren’t an adept when you are first learning a skill but at this point in my life and in the life of my family, I feel I need to be good at these things already! As a matter of fact, I need to be more than good. I need to have many of these skills sufficiently internalized that I don’t have to think about them any more, leaving my mind free to think of the next thing or perhaps a more subtle thing. For many skills important to a homesteading or self-reliant kind of life, I will probably never have that level of automatic skill because there really is no substitute for learning at your parent’s knee.

At times not only do I lament not growing up being taught useful homemaking/homesteading skills, I also lament that my children are not really growing up with them either. What they are growing up with is a mother hungering to understand what a simpler, more natural life might be and discovering along the way what skills are generally needed to conduct same. They are growing up with a mother whose entire life will have to go far more towards asking the question than towards the living the answer (Rilke’s take on this notwithstanding). In other words, they are growing up with a mother who realizes that knitting is a great skill with all kinds of potential but who can only get as far in her life as knitting dish cloths rather than sweaters but wants her daughters to be able to knit any sweater they fancy.

I wish that I knew about and could do so much more than I currently am capable of so that I could pass it on to them, my precious six children, saving them so much time in their adult lives. If they could start family life already grounded in character development, spiritual practice, family dynamics, educational theory and practice, skills in homemaking and homesteading, the innate knowledge of how to live within a sturdy nature-based rhythm of daily life and whatever else would allow them to be successful in living a simple life, they would have the space as adults to really break new ground. Or so it seems to me.

So what keeps me from fussing about this all the time? Well, for one I am too busy! For another, I see that there is a plan. Nature has a plan. If I look always to my internal guidance system and work sincerely (i.e. without ceasing) towards what my Guide suggests I should work towards then whatever results come from that must be a part of Nature’s plan, no matter what it looks like to me. I am no more able to judge myself or my contribution than I am able to judge anyone else or their contribution. Beyond this, I have faith in these children of the future who give such direction to my daily life. I suppose that if I can at least work towards maintaining an environment in which they are permitted to become ever more natural (a word which signifies a great depth beyond usual meanings and interpretations), then their innate willingness and abilities will carry them through whatever portion of Nature’s work is allotted to them in their adulthood.

Who knows what the future holds? Maybe there won’t be any need to knit after all. But there will always, always be a need for adults who look to their hearts, look to the future and look after their brothers and sisters. There will always be a need for love and faith and obedience. I realize as I write this that the more I live these things now with myself and my husband and my children, the less I have to fuss about all the skills and insight I fret I am not able to pass on in time to my children. The more I live in love and faith and obedience now with myself and my husband and my children, the more adept these children will be at carrying whatever torch Nature places in their willing hands at their appointed hour. And so the vision can carry on from generation to generation despite the limitations of any one generation. A new world with spirituality as its base will eventually be fashioned from generations of families cooperating with Nature and each other over space and time out of love and faith and obedience.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

Our nine year old’s bedroom faces east. He came down this morning exclaiming about the incredible sunrise and asked to use the camera. When I gave him permission to use it, he grabbed the camera and his brother and sisters and joyfully ran out the door and took a whole memory card full of wonderful, dramatic photographs. His photos captured many mornings we enjoy here.

And so we started our day with the drama of a powerful sunrise, the excitement of wonder-filled children and the sweet breath of patient cows.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

A little over five years ago I was working as a clinician at a treatment center for adolescent sex offenders. The clients themselves were difficult to work with but what was worse was that the administration was abusive and exploited staff and clients. It was a bizarre place that asked for top dollar from the clients’ sending agencies by selling a state of the art therapeutic program but in reality treated both therapists and clients with loathing and contempt. One by one my fellow therapists dropped from the stress and hostility at this treatment center.

Eventually I also began exhibiting stress related symptoms including migraines, extended illnesses as well as an array of negative emotional states. I would come home to my pregnant wife and five children in our cramped two bedroom, cockroach infested apartment above a laundry room in a college town. There was no air conditioning so the heat from the laundry room in the summer was unbearable. Due to the stress from my job, I felt disconnected from my wife and children while at home. I realized one day that I was working/commuting to work for over 48 hours a week. What little downtime that left was spent recovering and preparing myself to go back to work. My children were basically growing up without me. Everything I had was going into a job that I hated and that was making me sick. I was missing out on my life. This needed to change.

We were living in a beautiful part of western Massachusetts. The area outside of the towns was farmland that was being eaten up by the urban sprawl monster. For a bit of fresh air, we sometimes drove through the countryside peering out our car windows at the rural setting. My daughter three year old daughter loved animals and everything to do with the farm areas. Every time we turned to drive away from the farms and back to town, she wept uncontrollably. It tugged on the hearts of both my wife and myself. Obviously a rural life was essential for her existence.

Meanwhile my wife had done research about the homesteading way of life for many years. Furthermore, our shared spiritual practice called Sahaj Marg (the Natural Path) emphasizes living natural and simple lives in harmony with Nature. We were clearly not doing that. We were also painfully aware that the current political/economic system was breaking down on all levels. We could see, for instance, that the petroleum based system that is now in place to raise and transport food to large cities would not be around for our children. Life on a homestead, in our view, would be the best way to prepare our children for the future while learning to live in harmony with nature in the present. As we could not afford land in the expensive northeast, we finally settled on rural Virginia as the place for our future homestead. Leslie gave birth to our six and final child with a home birth at the apartment. A year later we loaded up the truck and headed down to Virginia.

That was three and half years ago. Since that time we turned a small home on 3.7 acres in central Virginia into a working homestead and then last May moved to an old farm house in southwestern Virginia that has much better pasture. We now have two rare breed Dutch Belted dairy cows and their two heifers, a donkey, three rare breed Nigerian Dwarf goats and 24 free ranging laying hens as well as two cats and a border collie that holds it all together.

Since making these large changes towards a homesteading, more self reliant way of life, we have found our lives and our relationships have improved in every possible way. We still experience problems and stress but instead of facing intractable problems that have no solutions, we are now presented with problems for which solutions seem to come in natural, doable ways. Living more in harmony with our natural path and spiritual laws, we find that we are much more in the flow as a family. We are now living in a way that is much more congruent with our inner natures. This has brought remarkable progress to us as individuals and to us as a family unit. Furthermore, the positive energy that the homestead, the surrounding rural area and, especially, our animals emanate actually boosts everyone’s energy level and brightens our spirits. For us the return to the original agrarian environment away from the manufactured bright lights and loud noises of urban and suburban mainstream environments has been a Godsend for us. Our path now is much clearer to us. As hard as it may be sometimes to learn this way of life and adjust to the constantly changing conditions of nature and so on, we can at least soldier on doing and being in something that we truly believe in. We can work hard each day knowing that we are building a sustainable future for our children and giving them the skills and mind set to share that with others as they grow older.

We have posted a new series of homesteading videos on YouTube. We were asked by viewers to post video on day in the life of our farm. We were happy to oblige. It took nine videos to chronicle one particular day outside on the homestead from start to finish. The links are posted below.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Part9

The very first point Charlotte Mason made on page one of her first volume of her six volume work on educating children is that children are a “public trust”. What might this mean and how might it shape the way we guide our children through their growing up years?

It is an adage in the philosophy of science that the answers you get depend upon the questions you ask. In other words, “answers” are not static bits of nature or pieces of an unchanging thought. Rather they are distilled responses to the question asked and the state of the questioner.

Before officially launching our homeschool, The Lionsgate School, my husband and I asked ourselves the above question as well as many others. For whom are we training and educating these children? What is the goal of “educating” them? What kind of a future are we preparing our dear children for? What will our children need to thrive in that future and what will the future need from our children?

We take as fundamental the idea that while we have been blessed with the company of these children, they belong to something much larger than us or our family. Personally we don’t take the public in “public trust” as referring to a neighborhood or even a nation. We take the public in “public trust” as referring to Nature itself and, by extension, the Future. Where Miss Mason continues on pages 5 and 6 to correctly reason that parents, therefore, may not be capricious in how they shape their children, we would only add that since nations are equally as likely to be capricious as any individual these days, children must be shaped for acting on a higher plane than even nations. They must be shaped to act for the highest and in the service of the greatest number and with the greatest, deepest changes for all in mind.

As we have articulated our goals for homeschooling, one aspect that has stood out is the joyful responsibility of developing the innate sense of wonder our children are born with into a receptive and daring lifelong sense of imagination. It takes a great imagination, after all, to imagine a new world and it takes great imagination to participate on whatever level in the creation of that new world refashioned upon spiritual principles. Aha, my husband and I concluded years ago, we must find an approach to education that fulfills this important need. We discovered that Charlotte Mason’s approach does strengthen the imagination in natural and non-gimmicky ways and does it within the context of her profound understanding of a child’s potential within Divine creation.

It is that ever present sense of wonder in young children that makes them so delightful to be with and reminds us adults of the beauty of a freshly viewed world. It is tragic that public schools and society in general pound that wonder right out of them. This leaves children relatively lifeless and creates adults who are easily led into following stultifying ways of life. Through homeschooling, we can protect the divinely given sense of wonder in our children. What an enormous improvement and how it does lead to a rich family life permeated all through with wonder and discovery. But even with this, more is actually required. How do our children go on to learn to really see? How do they go on to learn how to hear? How do they develop powerful imaginations that will bring insight, great leaps in development, inner nourishment and material improvements to themselves and all they may serve in the future?

Everything about Charlotte Mason methods leads exactly to this great transformation of wonder to imagination. I think that this is actually a normal developmental process that is the birthright of every child. Since her method follows “natural laws” and can be thought of as a natural education, it follows that concrete ways of facilitating this necessary transformation inform every aspect of her approach. I will visit just a few aspects here for your consideration in this new light of moving from wonder to imagination:

*******

A child is a person in whom all possibilities are present – present now at this very moment – not to be educed after years and years and efforts manifold on the part of the educator.

Her underlying philosophy starts where it should with a sense of the child as a whole, unique being placed in a natural setting. If that setting is maintained as natural and in a spiritually disciplined way, normal development will occur naturally and sweetly in the child (and in the parents!). No birthright of a child will be easily fulfilled without this foundational view and in fact respecting, nourishing and strengthening a child’s imagination pivots on this view.

*******

Now this is not a matter for the physiologist alone, but for every mother and father of a family; because that wonderful brain, by means of which we do our thinking, if it is to act healthily and in harmony with the healthful action of the members, should act only under such conditions of exercise, rest, and nutrition as secure health in very other aspect of the body.

The building blocks of good habits and physical energy and strength are indispensable and must not be squandered in childhood and young adulthood. All Miss Mason’s precepts about eating strengthening foods with a happy spirit, wearing breathable clothes, being out in the fresh air, etc. are wonderfully right on. It turns out that being receptive, bringing an idea forward, articulating that idea, getting excited about it and sharing it with others, and then taking action based upon the new idea all require enormous amounts of energy. The physical system must be strong enough to sustain a powerful imagination. She sees even to this aspect of the life of the child.

*******

We would rather not reduce the pleasures of childhood and youth by one iota; rather we would increase them, for the disciplined life has more power of fresh enjoyment than is given to the unrestrained.

A disciplined mind is the landing ground for higher ideas. The Charlotte Mason approach helps to build a disciplined mind through its emphasis upon the habit of attention. A well developed habit of attention involves at least three important aspects, i.e. paying careful attention the first time something is presented, being able to begin to translate an idea into one’s own framework quickly (i.e. narration) and having the capacity to fruitfully mull over one important idea for as long as it takes to reach a conclusion of some kind (i.e. reading great works slowly no matter the pull to gulp them down). All three of these aspects are critical to constructively using a powerful imagination in adulthood. A special idea may only be whispered to us once. If we miss it, we may miss it forever. When we catch that whisper, we must be able to understand it within ourselves and our framework. Implications the idea may have that are new or fresh, we must have the mental fortitude and the patience to mull over until we reach a satisfactory conclusion. All of these capacities are rare in this day and age and are especially strengthened through application of Charlotte Mason’s natural methods. I would also like to add that taking the care to add daily doses of handcrafts is very useful for building both character and a disciplined mind. Furthermore, it can be exactly while so pleasantly engaged that some of our best ideas may come to us. The imagination can soar while the hands are usefully occupied.

*******

Education is a life; that life is sustained on ideas; ideas are of spiritual origin, and that we get them chiefly as we convey them to one another. The duty of the parents is to sustain a child’s inner life with ideas as they sustain his body with food.

The strength for which this approach to education is the most famous and which is so important to the development of an inspired imagination is the nourishing food a Mason derived curriculum provides. Living books, nature study, continued study of art and music, and daily copywork and dictation of lofty thoughts and beautifully articulated sentiments are indeed the best daily fare for the imaginations that will grow to color and shape our future together.

If we as parents and educators of our children ask the question, “How can we best teach them the Three R’s? or “How may we best outfit them to support their families? we may get a very wide range of answers. These are good questions but are they the best questions? Will they draw to the parents the very best answers? If we ask the questions “How best might our children naturally become who they are meant to be?” or “How might our children develop that which is most vividly human?” or “How might our children grow in mental discipline and physical skill based upon a rich inner life?” or even as here “How might our children develop their inborn sense of wonder into a powerful imagination that will cooperate with Nature towards the end of building a Divine Future?”, we are very likely at some point to receive the answer to look deeply into the natural educational methods of Charlotte Mason.

We gratefully use the Ambleside Online curriculum as the basis for implementing a natural education here at The Lionsgate School. Our children have such an extraordinarily wonder-filled, imaginative life together that my husband and I often sit back and muse over what it must be like to be them. We are blessed, all of us.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

I was casting about for a way to bring some freshness to our day when I chanced to think of our outdoor reading room. Near the house and yet somehow far away, we have a hammock stretched out under some beautiful huge maple trees in a shady, romantic, ivy covered portion of our property. I am currently reading the children Little House in the Highlands which is full of the sweet breezes of a childhood in the Scottish countryside of long ago. I grabbed our book off the shelf and outside we went. Our oldest stayed on in the girls’ room (aka the music room) playing the piano and singing.

The children knew just what to do. With whoops and giggles, the four older ones scrambled up into the tree and found comfortable spots from which to listen to the reading as well as survey the surrounding bucolic landscape.

The youngest one flopped down in the hammock with me. You can just see his knees next to me.

Being a wiggly young boy, though, he often changed positions. Sometimes he perched at the head of the hammock, for instance. I tried not to get dizzy from reading while my seat kept unexpectedly rocking back and forth.

Strains of singing wafted their way toward us from the house. The breeze rippled through the leaves where the children sat. An autumn blue sky gave us our ceiling and ancient ivy gave us our floor. We were perfectly content as we listened intently to descriptions of the Scottish countryside. As the images formed in our minds, we gazed out at our own cows and the lush green grass and the blue mountains beyond.

After several chapters, the outdoor room with a mountain view eventually emptied. Mother and children left refreshed. The trees and the mountains carried on as they were. The blue mountains embraced all.

What better way to get away from it all on a lovely warm autumn afternoon.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

So many people understand now that the food they put into their bodies becomes an integral part of them that “you are what you eat” has become a slogan. It is experientially logical that putting something into your system makes that something become a part of you and science has also proven this to be the case in detailed (and often alarming) ways. Therefore, many people also now agree, at least in theory if not in practice, that we should only put natural and healthy foods into our systems.

However, “you are what you eat” has a much broader meaning for our health than just whether or not we should eat an apple instead of a candy bar. What is less well known and much less accepted is that all of our experiences, thoughts, feelings, reactions, the energy or condition at the places we frequent, TV shows, what we read, all of our interactions, everything we say, think, do, inhale, watch, hear, smell and taste also become a part of us and leave a trail within us.

From seven years of waiting tables, I learned firsthand that the energy and atmosphere in restaurants, particularly in the kitchen where the food is prepared, is full of stress at best and worse is often full of hostility and malevolence. (Hell’s Kitchen the TV show which pushes for hostile behavior actually is an exaggerated version of the condition of the kitchen at many restaurants.) In the restaurants where I worked, kitchen staff was forced to put out sometimes as many as 400 meals in a short period of time while working in extreme heat and with burns and cuts on their fingers. The pace and pressure were crushing. Many kitchen staff used rage and blame as a way to cope. I have since learned that the condition the cook is in when preparing food leaves an indelible stamp on the food itself because our internal states have an effect on the quality of our food. Food cooked in a loving atmosphere in which the cook is connected to their divine essence while cooking is the most desirable. Eating food prepared in such a way and in such an atmosphere and enjoyed by an eater with the same peaceful orientation is also optimal for health on all levels. It has the best effect on our systems and contributes greatly to our personal growth and development.

Given that the majority of us are fed on food that is toxic from how it is grown, what it is made of, and the attitudes and condition of those handling it, it is no wonder that we live in a hostile and deteriorating society. When most of our food is full of unnatural toxins (both material and subtle) and generated in factories and the pills we take to redress the imbalances caused by toxic food and water are chemicals themselves which cause further imbalances, then we are living with a constant and undesirable cascade of chemical reactions which are causing human beings to break down from malnutrition and toxic intake. When we turn on the TV, we view hostile people spitting venom at one another in sitcoms, or the lying, plotting and unholy alliances formed by reality TV contestants, or the sex and violence that make up the rest of the programming, or the stomach turning twists and turns of the nightly news. The internet is no better with hostile outbursts and constant conflict appearing on even the mildest, non-political message boards and open forum discussion groups. Everything else you may analyze is the same whether it be Hollywood, Madison Avenue or many workplaces. Everywhere we go, we are being saturated with toxins and toxic behaviors. This constant toxic assault is worsening the current negative condition of the modern human being.

Given the sensitive nature of the human being and all organic matter, it is time to start eating healthy in the truest and broadest sense. We have to start perhaps with our physical food, looking to buy local and organic both because such foods are in their natural state and because they are usually handled by very few people (most often only by the farmer who cares deeply about the quality of the food and about the quality of the relationship with you). We also have to look beyond just our physical food and look for healthy conditions in our environment, our thoughts, our interactions, the people we do business with, whatever we read and watch and so on.

For years it has been our focus here to treat our home as the ashram type environment it is meant to be, i.e. a place where the material world meets the divine world. It has been our great fortune that over the past two and half years we have been able to turn our family home into a family homestead where we are growing, making and harvesting more and more of our own food. Gathering the food graciously bestowed upon us by our two dairy cows, our twenty five laying hens, our wild blackberry bushes and now our two chestnut trees and then preparing and eating that food in a meditative state of gratitude has had a profoundly positive affect on all members of our family.

A while back I posted videos of us milking our cows and picking from our blackberry bushes. Here is a new batch of three sets of videos of us opening up a new pasture for our grass-fed cows, planting blueberry bushes, and gathering chestnuts and making them into a delicious soup.

The first set of videos is about pasture management. There is a serious drought here so our cows have eaten down our barely growing pasture and we are having trouble finding hay. We were in a difficult situation but our neighbor has now graciously rented us an adjoining pasture. These videos are about putting in barb wire fence and trying to get the existing electric fence to work as well as a related homeschooling video about connectivity and the circular nature of things.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

The second video documents our family planting blueberries along our front fence in our quest to expand our edible landscaping and add another nutrient dense food to our diets.

Blueberries

The chestnuts are the latest gift for us. We purchased our old farm house without knowing that the two large trees in the back were Chinese chestnut trees. We had only a little experience eating chestnuts as my wife had occasionally made a delicious chestnut soup over the years. As we have been gathering the falling chestnuts, we have also been gathering information about them. It turns out that they have long been valued as an important resource in other countries but due to chestnut blight the American and European chestnut trees have all been almost completely wiped out here and Americans don’t really know much about them or how to eat them. Luckily the Chinese chestnut tree is blight resistant and thrives in most locations in the US. Due to containing only 1% fat, having a soft, starchy meat and providing nutrition similar to that of brown rice, chestnuts are often referred to as “the grain that grows on trees”. In addition to being used in soups, stuffing’s and side dishes, chestnuts can be dried and ground into flour for making breads and polenta type foods. This ability makes chestnuts a valuable and nutritious addition to gluten free diets. Chestnuts are sweet, beautiful and just fall from the trees which makes harvesting them pretty easy. The two videos here are about harvesting, shelling and making them into a soup. For links to recipes and American chestnut growers, click here under our Recipe section.

Part 1

Part2

All the best,

Paul

Faith is usually the first of the younger children to get up in the morning. Now that chestnut harvesting season is on, she is especially motivated to get up and get moving. She has discovered that she enjoys being out alone in the early morning air snatching up all the chestnuts she can find that fell during the night. She tosses on a light jacket, grabs her Beatrix Potter backpack and is off to work.

Here she is holding up an empty bur. These things are really sharp on the outside. You have to handle them gingerly if you are removing chestnuts from them or be careful walking around them if you are in sandals. Our donkey can actually eat them, though, which is amazing to watch.

Showing her daddy some of the nuts she has gathered.

We have gathered over 30 pounds so far and have them safely in the freezer. Now we are starting to gather recipes and look forward to a winter of fine eating.

It is a such fun to have food literally falling from the air!

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

Dutch Belted cows were bred by the nobility for the nobility hundreds of years ago. Being what is now a critically rare breed, they have been able to retain their original characteristics. I somehow find their air of nobility especially noticeable when they are quietly grazing in the early morning mist and fog that so often embraces our farm here. The sight of them this way always inspires me to calmly reach higher as I proceed through my day.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

We are confirmed users of Right Start math combined with the lesson plans from Living Math. The flow of learning from this combination is at least as interesting for me, the mom and teacher, as it is for them, the children and discoverers of the beautiful world of mathematics. Just in time, I learned that Reliable Resources for Educators is offering all the Right Start materials at a sale price good enough that we can get what we have needed for some time as well as stock up for next year.

The substantial and interesting sounding box arrived from them yesterday. I cut the box open and then let the children unpack it because I wanted to see what they would do. This was well worth it. They carefully examined and joyfully and imaginatively played with every single thing in that box. The living room turned into a colorful Right Start festival of manipulatives and activities.

An hour later I was in the kitchen making lunch. The girls had moved to the dining room table. They had invented some kind of game which involved one girl using the math balance to sing out a problem while her sister responded with an answer by using the little abacus from the Math Games box. Math facts were sailing through the air thick and fast. As a matter of fact, I have never heard any of them chant so many addition problems. The materials were already working and we hadn’t even cracked open a book yet!

I guess we are off to the right start.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie