Two nights ago it was the coldest here it has been in over 12 years and we were without power for most of it. We were without power from about 1am to 5am. It came back on for a little while and then went out again for some hours yesterday morning.

I found this more unsettling than usual. Part of the reason is probably because I have a disconnect notice from our utility company sitting on my desk which I have no idea how to pay. Some of my unsettled feeling is due to my deepening thinking about man-made systems and the uncertainty of the future we all face.

We Americans believe - no, have a certainty - that the power will always come back on. This certainty doesn’t just out of a feeling of entitlement but is embedded in our view of reality. We have never known anything else. To confront going without, not just out of poverty, but because there simply isn’t any (electricity, gas, food, health care…) rocks our world view in fundamental ways.

But one day, that will all come true. There simply won’t be any. What will we do? How will we respond? At what point will we respond? Tomorrow, first thing? Or the day the power goes off and doesn’t come back on, and not a minute sooner?

I lay awake most of the night thinking about these things, observing the vulnerability, praying for all of those out there on a bitter cold night with no heat.

And, I thought, as close as we are as a family to living off the grid - we are still nearly close enough for my taste. We are vulnerable right now because I don’t know how I am going to pay our bill and avoid having our utilities shut off in a few days. We are vulnerable because I couldn’t get the pancakes I was already in the middle of making when we lost power again to cook properly on our wood burning stove. We are vulnerable because we don’t have immediate community around us with whom to share risks and problem solving.

I am grateful that as hard as we are working on these changes of lifestyle, we still keep getting enough small shocks to keep us highly interested in seeing this homesteading/living a simple life/getting off the grid/spiritually based family life project to its conclusion. Well, “conclusion” is probably a bad word. How could there be conclusions to such things? How about “full expression”? We are receiving enough shocks in terms of worldly bad news and challenging personal experiences to remain highly motivated to see this project through to its fullest expression.

Yes, and we also receive confirmation in many ways for the direction we are taking. A feeling of peace or satisfaction, for instance. Observing the growing competence and fortitude of our children, for another. Or the positive comments of other like-minded individuals and families or this that our spiritual Master noted recently:

Nothing is difficult. You just throw away everything and you will find that you are as happy and comfortable as you were before you got hi-tech. What does it take? Leave your computer at home, disconnect your telephone, disconnect your electricity: you are back in the beginning. It doesn’t take much. What is civilisation? It’s nothing but a few instruments of communication and illumination! What else is civilisation?

You sleep out one night and look at the stars - you are where your original forefathers were. It’s beautiful. And then you begin to wonder why on earth you went where houses are air conditioned 24 hours of the day, where you don’t know from inside whether it’s raining or not. The wind is blowing and you think it’s cool outside and you go and it’s 120 [degrees]! You wonder because it’s all artificial. So to cut off artificial is natural. There is nothing primitive about that. Natural was always natural. Sahaj Sandesh Dec. 29, 2008

Oh, it meant a lot to me to read those words. “Natural was always natural.” And always will be natural, I might add. It is us who are unnatural. We must deconstruct all that we have piled on the natural state to find our way back to a simple way of life that allows us to re-focus on the goal of human life. That is the only option. We can take it willingly and in a timely fashion or unwillingly and with all kinds of suffering and angst but take it we must.

A couple of weeks ago, a thought boomed into my mind that didn’t seem to come from me. It was, “Nature will support you if you are content to live with what Nature naturally provides.” This keeps ringing through my inner chambers completely unbidden by me. It seems to me to be one of those statements that is deceptively obvious, deceptively simple.

What does Nature willingly provide? What was the Original Contract between Nature and humans (if we can even think of humans as being at all separate from Nature in order to require a contract)? What is the difference between what Nature is created to provide us and what it will yield when forced to by humans? And how long will this yielding hold out? No. No, I want to get back to the Original Contract. I want what is willingly given and not what has perhaps been reluctantly yielded all of this time. I want to live within the Original Contract, the Original Design. I know it will be better, whether I understand it or not or even know how do it right now or not.

This notion of living within the center of what Nature willingly provides is how I understand the famous Matthew 6:25-34:

25″Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? 26Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life”?

28″And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? 31So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

Notions about Christianity and paganism aside, I take the idea here as being the same as what I am talking about. Live as He would have you live, and the resulting harmony with Nature will provide you with all that you truly need. This is a startling thought when you think about it freshly. Fulfilling our needs comes perhaps not through our great intellect or organizational abilities or sheer (often brutal) efforts. Fulfillment of our needs perhaps comes about most quickly and easily through living in harmony with natural law.

Run as fast as you can to any corner of the universe and the Law will be there waiting for you. Cornbread Nation 3, p. 14, from Marilou Awiakata’s “Compass for Our Journey”

So for a long night and following day I considered these matters even more deeply and more urgently than I usually do. This morning I was grinding some cumin seeds for our Sunday morning breakfast in a coffee grinder when I thought, “I am going to make a list, by crackey!” Yes, I am going to make a list of all the ways we as a family rely upon “the grid” to accomplish our daily life tasks so that I can keep track of the changes and adaptations we still need to make.

I can immediately start my list with:
mortar and pestle.

Quickly I can add:
wood burning cook stove;
alternative lighting;
water storage and (hopefully) a hand water pump for outside.

When I complete our list, I will post it here in the spirit of us all working together. I do enjoy crossing things off of lists. Don’t you? But crossing items off of this list will be a special pleasure and gift, no matter how long it takes. But even more, I look forward intensely to the day that it all just dissolves into a simple life led only in Him.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

There are two particular sorts of sounds associated with hand washing our laundry I love. They are a kind of a slapping sound and a sweet whisper.

Set up for sound #1:
You fill the hot water and soap in your wash tub, soak the clothes, plunge the clothes until you are nearly breathless. You scrub them on the washboard and wring. You drop them into your first rinse bucket of more hot water and plunge. Wring. Drop them into your second rinse bucket and plunge. Wring extra well…

Sound #1:
… and toss those well-worked clothes with a wet, heavy satisfying slapping sound into a basket set out to catch the clean, clean, heavy clothes on their way out to be run through the wringer and then hung to dry. I just love that slapping sound. So satisfying. So indicative of patient work and the light dryness to come.

Set up to sound #2:
Oldest daughter and youngest daughter become hand washing laundry buddies. Together they plunge and splash while listening to Enya. Oldest daughter teaches youngest daughter songs they then sing together while washing some of the family laundry. Oldest daughter is good at directing the activity. Youngest daughter specializes in plunging with extraordinary energy and enthusiasm. Oldest daughter leaves town for several days. Within moments of her return home, youngest daughter rushes up to me and whispers in my ear,

Sound #2:
“Can Carolyn and I go hand wash some laundry together now?”

No matter how tired I may sometimes get from doing by hand what most Americans do by machine these days, I could never give up those sounds. They are too wonderful.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

About the only thing that takes the sting out of having to sell animals for us is that all of the animals we have thus far sold have moved on to great situations and caring, hopeful people. The same is true for our little herd of Nigerian Dwarf goats.

As I posted earlier about the family conference we had on Thanksgiving Day, we realized that on our small property we had to pick and choose very carefully what we grow and husband and that we need something more in our homegrown diets than milk and milk products. So we decided to sell our goats and plant vegetable gardens in their pens (most of which had been used as gardens in the first place by previous owners).

Well, a most earnest and hopeful young man came and picked up our herd last weekend. He is bringing back into productivity a good sized old farm in West Virginia and very wisely he is beginning his efforts with getting goats. The goats will eat the weeds out of the old hay fields and clean up the woods and give him a start on a handsome income stream. Very wise indeed.

It was hard to see our goats go, however. It is very quiet around here without them. Peaceful, my husband says. Goats have such a playful, mental sort of energy compared to cows say. I always miss the bit of the spectrum of consciousness that each animal fills. I don’t know if that makes sense to anyone else. Yes, I miss their milk. I love feta cheese and would otherwise happily keep goats for no other reason but than to have flavorful feta cheese. But it wasn’t their milk I initially missed after they left. It was their “beingness,” their qualities, their ways of thinking and interacting with the world. Each creature (and plant too) has its own intelligence, its own way of contributing. Put the many intelligences together and you have Nature, I guess, so I am aware of any piece that suddenly goes missing. However, Maggie May and Iris and Ivy and Ramone are doing good work in a new place that needs them with fine young people to care for them so a new fabric of natural intelligence will be woven up there in West Virginia.

Meanwhile it is past time for us to get going with planning our gardens and ordering seeds. I have read in many places in the blogosphere that heirloom and open pollinated seeds are already in short supply for this upcoming growing season. Ahem. I guess I had better hurry it up. These are the catalogs I am receiving and studying:

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange - emphasizes heirloom and open-pollinated vegetable, flower, and herb seeds that grow well in the Mid-Atlantic region.

Fedco - cold hardy selections for the Northeast. I don’t know if our mountain location qualifies our otherwise mid-Atlantic region location enough to use their seeds or not. A very neat co-op worth checking into in any case.

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds - offers heirloom seeds from over 70 countries. People rave about them and also talk about attending interesting homesteading type events at their place in Missouri.

Amishland Heirloom Seeds - You have to go to this site and read about this woman. She is a one woman show of traveling and saving precious seeds. Incredible. She comes highly recommended by Rob at Wildcraft. Read his comments on his Seed Sources page.

Heirloom Acres Seeds - I have also seen this company highly recommended. I think Scott at Homesteader Life uses this company. They have over 1000 varieties of seed as well as seed potatoes and organic herb plants. We are in the market for all of those things and so will be studying their catalog closely.

Seed Savers Exchange - This organization is well known but I don’t think I have ever gotten their catalog. Maybe once when I was gardening back in Denver almost 20 years ago now. In any case, being a part of a non-profit organization of gardeners who are sharing and preserving rare seeds can only be a good thing. I really look forward to it.

I used to use so many other catalogs back in my gardening days like Territorial Seeds (I know a number of people who get their sprouting seeds from them these days), The Cook’s Garden, and Seeds of Change. I will have to check them out again this time around but to start with, I am going to focus on Southern Exposure because they are located so close to us.

So this is the latest development here on the homestead. It is a good development - a necessary one - but it is also one that has required and definitely will require a good deal of adjustment and more hard work and slow but sure knowledge and skill building. There is always more, isn’t there? But we are taught in Sahaj Marg that the natural reward for work well done is more work, so I guess we are on the right track!

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

We are eating lots of oatmeal around here these days for “first breakfast”. I have a good supply of oat groats at the moment and our ten year old has become adept at all of the evening-before preparations. He rolls the oats, puts them in a bowl and adds the soak water. I add a few spoons of whey and a bit of salt and cover the bowl. Next morning I boil some water in the bottom of a stockpot, add the soaked oats and stir. I add water over and over as the oats thicken and come almost-but-not-quite to a boil until the entire pot full is the desired thickness. This cooking part of the process only takes a few minutes and then there is a big pot of hot oatmeal ready for anyone who wants or needs it.

Next step is to continue reinforcement of the fact that real oatmeal eaters do NOT eat it sweet! The Scots did not eat it sweet and John Seymour notes somewhere that eating oatmeal with sugar is a travesty. Good enough for me and, therefore, good enough for my family. (Personally I think eating almost anything sweet for breakfast is a travesty to the body so I have been moving the breakfast menu away from anything requiring sugar or syrup for quite a while now.) Actually eating oatmeal that is swimming in melting farm fresh butter and salt and pepper is delicious. I also find tamari delicious. Try it. I mean, what grain isn’t good with butter and some form of salt?

Anyway, we make so much oatmeal at a time that there is always a lot leftover. I can reheat it for breakfast the next day. I often add some to bread which seems to give it a wonderful rise and tenderness. I also make savory oatcakes out of the leftover oatmeal which are a particular favorite around here. What with oatmeal being the blank canvas that it is, you can flavor these in lots of ways. Here is how I made them yesterday morning:

Savory Oatcakes

Ingredients

Cool or cold leftover oatmeal
Onion
Sunflower seeds
Flour
Eggs
Salt
Basil or other herbs
Nutritional yeast

Procedure
1. Take leftover oatmeal out of the refrigerator or cool shelf. It will likely be nice and stiff which helps in the oatcake making. Put into a large bowl.

2. Saute chopped onion in a cast iron frying pan until fragrant and brown. Towards the end of the sauteing, add sunflower seeds and tamari. Stir and fry until the whole thing is redolent with juicy brown fragrance and everyone is going crazy waiting to eat it. Allowing them to hover around the stove or not is a personal decision.

3. Add to the oatmeal in the bowl and stir thoroughly.

4. Add enough eggs to give some binding to the mixture. Yesterday for about 8 cups or more of oatmeal, I added 4 eggs. Stir thoroughly once again.

5. Add enough flour (I used freshly ground whole wheat flour) to make the mixture stiff enough to hold together on the griddle. I have no idea how much I used … maybe about 4 cups of flour. Maybe a bit more.

6. Add basil, salt (I added two rounded tsp. of salt to my batch), and nutritional yeast to taste. Be generous with your flavoring agents as oatmeal can absorb a lot of flavoring due to its mild nature. You can easily taste it right out of the bowl in order to add more of this and that as needed, by the way, because it will taste pretty much the same cooked as it does now.

7. Fry by the mixing spoon full (maybe about 1/4 cup at a time) on a buttered cast iron griddle on medium high heat. Don’t make them too big or they will fall apart when you flip them. If you fry them just right, you can get a lovely crust on the outer surface while the middle remains creamy and hot.

Serve these by the plateful with dollops of sour cream or kefir mascarpone cheese on top. We are particularly fond of the latter. Various chutneys or fermented veggies would also be delicious and healthy with these savory oatcakes. Oatcakes are a great way to start the day plus they make delicious snacks, hot or cold. You can also build them into tall, filling sandwiches full of bits of this and that.

Savory oatcakes are a yummy and easy to make comfort food for the cold, inward days of the winter season. They can be adjusted and flavored in myriad ways and they are fun to make. Plus they add variety to the oats part of the menu. We love them and will probably invent many more variations with time.

It occurs to me now that I should have taken a photo to add here but the family ate them too fast for the shenanigans of picture taking. Perhaps next time.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

Alas, my adrenal fatigue is keeping my mind very diffuse lately which makes writing very difficult for me. However, I can still read ‘cuz reading is what I do!

I thought I would share two great resources I am reading and studying right now to strengthen what we are doing here on the homestead.

The first is all about food storage. Sharon at Casaubon’s Book conducted an online food storage class last spring which starts here (or click on the Food Storage category on the right and make your way backwards to the beginning). What I most appreciate about her class is that she covers the topic in the way that I personally would approach it which is to say she discusses ethics and local eating and planning for caring for unexpected others and, well, health. No ready to eat meals here of dubious nutritional value. Rather how do we grow, procure and store healthy real foods for family and vulnerable others for the future? All excellent questions with many excellent answers and suggestions provided not only by Sharon but also by her educated, highly aware and committed readers. (In other words, do read all the comments.) I have read through every post, taken notes, copied and pasted, followed up on links and so on. A worthwhile odyssey. In the final post I discovered that she ran a yahoo group alongside the blog posts to allow for more information sharing and deeper discussions of vital issues. Luckily her yahoo group is still running and now I am carefully making my way through that in the same manner I made my way through her initial set of food storage posts.

Secondly, we are very focused now on working towards becoming more self-sufficient with regards to our flock of hens here. Going for months just feeding the hens and getting no eggs whatsoever is… well… for the birds (and not for the humans - get it?). We want to introduce some different breeds here such as Buckeyes and Dorkings and become proficient at incubating eggs and caring for chicks and so on. In other words, we want a closed flock of productive, largely self-sufficient, broody, rare breeds hens so we are going to have to do what it takes to make such a flock ourselves. Furthermore, we do not appreciate being chained to the feed store in order to feed these hens what is clearly not real hen food anyway. So while my husband is madly inventing a way to incubate eggs with equipment we already have at hand, my resource for figuring out the rest of this business is currently The Modern Homestead. I have read articles over the years by Harvey Ussery in Countryside Magazine and have found them to be uniformly excellent. On their web site, he and his wife have an extensive section on raising poultry that includes ways and means of feeding live foods to your flock, peak oil considerations, and many other very interesting and timely considerations for productively and conscientiously raising a homestead flock of hens. In other words, the ways I have always wanted to approach maintaining a flock of hens this couple already knows and put into practice long ago and they have spelled it all out for others eager for such a thoughtful and effective approach. I am thrilled to have such a “nutrient dense” resource available to help us find our way to the next level of husbandry here.

So those are the top two of my current homesteading studies at the moment. I find them so useful and forward looking that I thought I would pause in my mad dash to consider and explore and copy and paste to share them with you all.

Study well and go forth effectively!

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

Many people who are deeply concerned with the deteriorating condition of the earth and are personally committed to changing their lives so as to have less of a negative impact upon that condition, also believe categorically that no thinking person should contribute more children to the overpopulation of humans already burdening the earth. They may relent that there are going to be people who have one or two children and perhaps that needs to be accepted. However, families like us who are riveted to the idea of living simply but who also have more than the regulation two children are considered to be, at best, anachronisms and, at worst, hypocrites.

I noticed the other day that recently my husband and I each separately happened to partially address this belief system in other forums, each in our own way. I thought I would just post our comments here one after the other for reference. I must add, though, that the deeper spiritual reasons which guided us in our choices with regards to “family planning” and which illuminate for us the vital issue of overpopulation remain unspoken by either of us in the comments copied below. I am not sure those reasons and insights are for public consumption so I will continue to leave them unspoken for now.

To start here is a comment I wrote in response to a question about using political pressure to reduce childbearing:

All approaches to this subject that do not have a spiritual understanding at their base are mental machinations only and not based in a broader reality. When you think about it, it is mental machinations and living unnatural lives that got us into the large scale mess we are in to begin with. To mandate (or wish we could mandate) one more way in which people should become even more unnatural is not really a solution to the problem of overpopulation, to my way of thinking. To suggest that persuading people to deny their instinct, their longing and their responsibility to the future of lovingly being a conduit for souls to come here is as incomplete a response as those who shout that overturning Roe v Wade is the principle way to slow abortion rates. It just ain’t so. It is coming at the problem from the wrong end, the symptom end.

To suggest that no soul/person would want to be here on earth 20 years from now is only a material analysis. From a comfort, physical body perspective that may become painfully true (and may become true even sooner than that - in fact is true for many right now) but on other levels it may not be true. Humans have created a mess here by thinking they know more than they do and ACTING on that to the detriment of all species. Yikes. It is possible that this way of thinking of having no children based on a turbulent future may be one more example of that.

An alternative position is to know that in the future the majority of people will be suffering and clueless. We have the option of having children naturally (and “naturally” here has a very deep meaning, not the common meaning of “typical” but a meaning more like “according to original design”) and raising them to have a kind of consciousness and skill set that will give them the opportunity to serve the suffering people they will find all around them. It is conceivable that that might be a life worth living.

It seems to me that a rule or rigid stance won’t help here but rather only a new condition can help. In other words, only consciousness, awareness, sensitivity, self-discipline, knowledge of more subtle realities, a willingness to be uncomfortable and so on can lead people to act responsibly in their own lives. Hopefully we can all find ways to encourage this in ourselves and each other. Rough words that shame people about acting naturally (when in fact the creation of babies is undertaken naturally!)will probably make them shut down and this goes in the opposite direction away from creating a condition of heightened awareness.

In my limited, individual experience there is always more to these complexities than meets the eye or the material analysis. We have to keep digging. We have to be willing to discover or uncover an entirely new approach. I have found that this definitely applies to the very important topic of childbearing within families and humanbearing on the planet in general.

In a forum discussing government regulation of real milk, real seeds and real farming practices, someone raised the issue with my husband of his daring to raise six children in our present world. He responded as follows:

I agree with you that presently overpopulation is a major problem. The 7 billion mark that will be upon us in 2012 will be a disaster for the earth.

However, I believe that the real problem here centers around man’s desire for control. People living in moderation and taking only what they need would allow the earth to comfortably sustain more rather than fewer people. In fact it is conceivable that people living in harmony and attuned to the natural path could work within natural systems to actually improve conditions for all life on the planet. Instead humanity has chosen to do its own thing and that is what has caused the overall problem.

Nature, in fact, wants vast reproduction and abundance and is set up for it. When a species overpopulates, there are natural systems in place that assure a return to balance. Human beings have applied great efforts to overriding such natural systems and so again this has caused a great many problems.

The problem as I see is that we don’t have a real authority figure and we are operating independently from the whole. We don’t truly believe in God and don’t put God in charge of our existence and yet we don’t follow our scientific discoveries to the letter of the law either.

For example, science tells us that in nature only the best of a species is allowed to reproduce.
Members of each species go to great lengths to win reproduction rights. As a homesteader I can tell you that people with livestock always breed the best of their herds to the best of their herds. Yet with humans these days, the ones with success, education, privilege, abundant food, health care and so on (i.e. the elite, the people “who rise to the top”) choose not to reproduce or to reproduce at below replacement rate at best. Therefore it is often (not always but often) the poverty stricken and uneducated people who are the ones growing the population. Often the uneducated and poor are malnourished and suffer from chemical toxicities that impair their genetic makeup. So what is happening to the human stock then?

As a whole, we humans are not relying on God, nature or science in this matter of reproduction and population limits. Rather we are just dong what we want. In fact, we are going directly against the system that God and nature have set up for reproduction and population control which necessarily means that our species is going the wrong way. I know it is a popular view here [where this comment was posted] and in the overall progressive community that birth control is irrefutably a good thing but then where are all the progressives going to come from in the future? And beyond that, what situations are all of the higher developed humans going to be born into?

So for these reasons, my wife and I (both of whom have Masters degrees and a variety of other things that are supposedly important) have used a different system than the one currently employed by virtually everyone we know. We surrendered our choice to the God that is within us to determine how many children we would have and have let nature run its course. We have also set the intention to keep an open invitation for higher developed souls to come into our family and we have spent the majority of our resources in providing a rich environment for them to grow up in. I cannot fully go into the benefits of this approach but my wife and I both feel that we have been greatly rewarded from approaching our family size in this way.

There is one more thing that I want to add. Everything we humans have done from polluting the world with phytoestrogens and other pollutants to having the collective human consciousness become filled with the thought that ‘having babies is bad’ indicates the likelihood that there will be a future in which having children - especially healthy ones - will be difficult. As everything is cyclical, there will be a time in the future when conceiving and giving birth will perhaps be a much more rare occurrence than it is now. People will perhaps look back on these attitudes and approaches to having children with an anguished wonder.

Differences between “family planning” as it is usually talked of and “Divine family planning” as is pretty much never talked of are very large issues. Becoming willing to expand the definition of living naturally and doing whatever it takes to enact that expanded definition of natural living into one’s very own life is a very large issue. The discord that arises from the set of beliefs with which humans typically analyze their world as opposed to the spiritual realities that actually govern this world is an even larger issue. In comparison to these very large issues, our comments are minimal at best and yet I thought I would share them here in case they might spur fresh thinking. For instance, I was particularly struck by my husband’s observation that we are setting up future generations to have great difficulties with trying to normalize childbearing. As such, I pray for all of us now and especially pray for future generations who will have much to deal with on all fronts, including the essential one of childbearing.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie