Thoughts... Part One
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My greatest skill has been to want but little.
-Henry David Thoreau,
naturalist and author (1817-1862)
Our blog doesn't generate income. It's an online journal where I write about our family's thoughts, feelings and daily activities.
Some of those daily activities include (but are not limited to) preparing to donate all of our things in order to simplify our lives and allow us the ability to travel, learn about organic farming, and natural healing (and I'm pretty sure a whole bunch of things I never realized I needed to know) and offer free use of our supply of herbs, tinctures, oils and essences and reference materials to help people along the road to heal themselves the way we have.
Can you imagine having the ability to be together as a family, spend copious amounts of time outdoors, travel the country, meet new people and have a whole life where you dedicate yourself to learning and giving.
What could a child learn from a life like that?
How to grow food they can eat. How to live in a truly sustainable way. How to make friends, climb trees, catch fish... They learn the awesome energy of being able to help someone. How could life be if you really loved, loved, what you did to support yourself.
We want to be able to help people. We want to learn everything that we can about life, providing and caring for ourselves, and being happy. We want to teach that to our kids. We want to be able to say that we really, really did something to make the world a better place...that we really, really did whatever we knew we could to increase the chances that they will inherit an earth and a life that is healthy and happy.
Life! Liberty! And the Pursuit of Happiness!!
That is what we're trying to teach our kids.
What does that mean??
Let's take a look at life...
Life-health "the general or universal condition of human existence".
What is it we believe to be the "general or universal condition of human existence"?
How many people do you know who are sick in some way? What are the current numbers of children with Autism spectrum disorders? MS? Fibromyalgia? Cancer? Heart Disease? I could go on, but I know I don't need to. We all know a great many people who are suffering illness in some form. How many ads do you see for drugs for the sick? The tired? The sad? The dying?
What if it could be different? Did you know that even the top hospitals in the country are now embracing, using and studying what they refer to as CAM; complementary and alternative medicine? What if true healing in the form of real, sustainable nutrition, herbs, accupuncture, massage, reiki, you name it, were available for free? What if every person with Fibromyalgia could utter the words, "I used to have Fibromyalgia"?
I say it now. I live it now! Others are doing it too, surviving and curing all manners of dis-ease with non-traditional therapies. What if healing were free?? What if every person had the right and the ability to acquire health?
I believe such a thing can exist. Deb Talan says that "Anything worth anything takes more than a few days and a long long night." What if it began with a handful of people and spread like a wildfire? What if someone built it? Would you come?
Then there's liberty...
Liberty-ib·er·ty -- freedom from arbitrary or despotic government or control.
What are we doing to ensure the continuation of the those freedoms and are we actually being granted those rights?
And who is it that is granting us rights/freedoms/liberties?
We used to have this bumper sticker that read I wasn't using my civil liberties anyway! It got a lot of chuckles and agreement. I used to think it was funny too. Now, I'm a bit concerned about truth behind that statement. Why is it funny? It's sarcastic comment to the unsaid... "Fine! Take them!"...I wasn't using them anyway...
How sad is that? I want to make sure that I'm exercising my rights, and I'm not just talking about our so called "God given rights" but about those rights that we believe that we have as free people, protected and served by the documents on which this Free Country are based.
I want my children to see the Constituition, the Bill of Rights....
I want my children to understand what they mean...what they promise...why they are so important!
I want my children to continue to have the rights that I didn't mean to take for granted.
I want my children to live in a country where those who abuse their power at the expense of others are held accountable for their actions!
I received an email the other day equating the process of capturing wild pigs to America.
I could write an entire book on examples of how our liberty is being lost. Can you?
Then there's the final one...seems simple...the pursuit of happiness....
And the Pursuit -
What are you pursuing? We've spent an aweful lot of time pursuing income. To spend.
What is wrong with a country when our president suggests that in response to 9-11 we go shop?? Shop?
People, do we really need more stuff?
Then the kicker...Happiness...
Happiness- hap·pi·ness -- the quality or state of being happy.
—Synonyms 1, 2. pleasure, joy, exhilaration, bliss, contentedness, delight, enjoyment, satisfaction. Happiness, bliss, contentment, felicity imply an active or passive state of pleasure or pleasurable satisfaction. Happiness results from the possession or attainment of what one considers good: the happiness of visiting one's family. Bliss is unalloyed happiness or supreme delight: the bliss of perfect companionship. Contentment is a peaceful kind of happiness in which one rests without desires, even though every wish may not have been gratified: contentment in one's surroundings. Felicity is a formal word for happiness of an especially fortunate or intense kind: to wish a young couple felicity in life.
I'm not going to ask if you're happy. Happiness is subjective, but let's take a look at something...
Google: number of americans diagnosed with depression...see what you get.
Google: incidence of childhood depression, number of americans being treated for depression, antidepressants in drinking water....
What was that I was asking about "the general or universal condition of human existence"?
-Henry David Thoreau,
naturalist and author (1817-1862)
Our blog doesn't generate income. It's an online journal where I write about our family's thoughts, feelings and daily activities.
Some of those daily activities include (but are not limited to) preparing to donate all of our things in order to simplify our lives and allow us the ability to travel, learn about organic farming, and natural healing (and I'm pretty sure a whole bunch of things I never realized I needed to know) and offer free use of our supply of herbs, tinctures, oils and essences and reference materials to help people along the road to heal themselves the way we have.
Can you imagine having the ability to be together as a family, spend copious amounts of time outdoors, travel the country, meet new people and have a whole life where you dedicate yourself to learning and giving.
What could a child learn from a life like that?
How to grow food they can eat. How to live in a truly sustainable way. How to make friends, climb trees, catch fish... They learn the awesome energy of being able to help someone. How could life be if you really loved, loved, what you did to support yourself.
We want to be able to help people. We want to learn everything that we can about life, providing and caring for ourselves, and being happy. We want to teach that to our kids. We want to be able to say that we really, really did something to make the world a better place...that we really, really did whatever we knew we could to increase the chances that they will inherit an earth and a life that is healthy and happy.
Life! Liberty! And the Pursuit of Happiness!!
That is what we're trying to teach our kids.
What does that mean??
Let's take a look at life...
Life-health "the general or universal condition of human existence".
What is it we believe to be the "general or universal condition of human existence"?
How many people do you know who are sick in some way? What are the current numbers of children with Autism spectrum disorders? MS? Fibromyalgia? Cancer? Heart Disease? I could go on, but I know I don't need to. We all know a great many people who are suffering illness in some form. How many ads do you see for drugs for the sick? The tired? The sad? The dying?
What if it could be different? Did you know that even the top hospitals in the country are now embracing, using and studying what they refer to as CAM; complementary and alternative medicine? What if true healing in the form of real, sustainable nutrition, herbs, accupuncture, massage, reiki, you name it, were available for free? What if every person with Fibromyalgia could utter the words, "I used to have Fibromyalgia"?
I say it now. I live it now! Others are doing it too, surviving and curing all manners of dis-ease with non-traditional therapies. What if healing were free?? What if every person had the right and the ability to acquire health?
I believe such a thing can exist. Deb Talan says that "Anything worth anything takes more than a few days and a long long night." What if it began with a handful of people and spread like a wildfire? What if someone built it? Would you come?
Then there's liberty...
Liberty-ib·er·ty -- freedom from arbitrary or despotic government or control.
| 2. | freedom from external or foreign rule; independence. |
| 3. | freedom from control, interference, obligation, restriction, hampering conditions, etc.; power or right of doing, thinking, speaking, etc., according to choice. |
What are we doing to ensure the continuation of the those freedoms and are we actually being granted those rights?
And who is it that is granting us rights/freedoms/liberties?
We used to have this bumper sticker that read I wasn't using my civil liberties anyway! It got a lot of chuckles and agreement. I used to think it was funny too. Now, I'm a bit concerned about truth behind that statement. Why is it funny? It's sarcastic comment to the unsaid... "Fine! Take them!"...I wasn't using them anyway...
How sad is that? I want to make sure that I'm exercising my rights, and I'm not just talking about our so called "God given rights" but about those rights that we believe that we have as free people, protected and served by the documents on which this Free Country are based.
I want my children to see the Constituition, the Bill of Rights....
I want my children to understand what they mean...what they promise...why they are so important!
I want my children to continue to have the rights that I didn't mean to take for granted.
I want my children to live in a country where those who abuse their power at the expense of others are held accountable for their actions!
I received an email the other day equating the process of capturing wild pigs to America.
I could write an entire book on examples of how our liberty is being lost. Can you?
Then there's the final one...seems simple...the pursuit of happiness....
And the Pursuit -
| 2. | an effort to secure or attain; quest: the pursuit of happiness. |
| 3. | any occupation, pastime, or the like, in which a person is engaged regularly or customarily: literary pursuits. |
What are you pursuing? We've spent an aweful lot of time pursuing income. To spend.
What is wrong with a country when our president suggests that in response to 9-11 we go shop?? Shop?
People, do we really need more stuff?
Then the kicker...Happiness...
Happiness- hap·pi·ness -- the quality or state of being happy.
| 2. | good fortune; pleasure; contentment; joy. |
I'm not going to ask if you're happy. Happiness is subjective, but let's take a look at something...
Google: number of americans diagnosed with depression...see what you get.
Google: incidence of childhood depression, number of americans being treated for depression, antidepressants in drinking water....
What was that I was asking about "the general or universal condition of human existence"?
Posts
18 comments:
Spot on!! You are speaking what I've been thinking for the last few years!
Enjoy your journey family! You are embarking on something that money can't buy you and material "things" can't provide you . . . as you have come to realize.
Enjoy the journey; forget about the destination. Drink your new found freedom and happiness and take note of its texture, taste and deliciousness!
Peace Family.
Ahh ....
We lived on a beautiful farm in the Pacific Northwest from the time we were 24 til 39 -- a farm we renovated, where one of our children was born, where eagles nest and salmon swim, where we grew food and loved dearly. But eight months ago we left the intense beauty and deep roots we made there for life in southwest England.
In many ways, our stories are similar (moving onto a new adventure) but different as well (we moved from rural > small city). My husband is a professor of geology and we needed to move on after graduate school and a position that offered security. We have a lot of struggles -- our 16 acre nature preserve/farm hasn't sold yet -- we are caught up in the credit crisis. We have had an offer but the buyer is waiting to sell her place. Another interesting change is where they're finding spirit and meaning and freedom: instead of the freedom of the land, our three kids (ages 10, 8 and 5) have different freedoms now offered through their British schools -- intellectual freedom and exploration offered by so many new challenges and activities. We do live up against a nature preserve filled with birds and badgers and bunnies in Exeter and they roam in the woods as much now as they did on the farm and that is helping me with the guilt I feel in moving them. Interestingly, their sense of this adventure is very different than that of we adults...who dearly miss the land. Kids are malleable and they haven't missed a beat, jumping right into their new lives. I suspect your children will do the same with your adventure as well. When we first moved here, our then four year old would ask, "Mommy, are we in Engwund or America right now?"
I turned 40 a couple of weeks ago and my gift -- to spend a week on the farm, 6000 miles away from my family. I just returned and it's both beneficial to still have our land but hard to be hemoraghing money during this major transition.
As a writer and photographer, I have a blog about the whole process of giving up one life in exchange for another: www.aaltotude.com "Deconstructing a Life in the American West, Rebuilding on an Island in the Atlantic."
Because my husband is a published academic, there is a privacy block on it -- I didn't want neighors to read about my initial grief and misgivings in moving. Filling out the readership form that pops up will let me know you're knocking on the door, and I'll readily letcha into the new pages of our European lives as Americans...
Hmmm: there are many different kinds of cages...financial, emotional, geographical. In our case, our land and farm were physical cages -- as beautiful and wild as they are -- to the greater world. We are in that greater world now but deeply miss the intimate relationship with the land.
Good luck Harris Family -- an adventure awaits you.
Eleven years ago we roamed the continent in a conversion van with all five kids aged two to twelve. From chilly June in Prince Edward Island to steaming summer in the heartland, through the yankee-hating Ozarks (an unfriendly place with Mass plates!) and ending up in NM and the continental divide. It was sheer hell - or so it seemed at the time - but I remember that summer more than any other. So anyway, two kids in a full-size bus should be pretty tolerable.
I find life is a rather finicky balance between reasonable comfort and sustainability (of health and sanity) on the one hand, and over-indulgence and ennui on the other. Emily Dickinson, it seems, found adult utopia in her childhood home. Not only did I not have any particular childhood home, but no place ever quite suits me. Here, my garden space is too small, my family requires too much cash, parents spoil their kids, no one pays any mind to the looming disasters that impend upon the Shire, and so forth. Perhaps those details would be different some other place but other things would fall short.
So we'll all just have to keep on truckin'.........
Hi!
I really wish you good luck... you deserve it all! Just read about you on an italian newspaper and got to give a look at your site. You're brave!
Silvia
Read about you all in the NYT. They did a pretty good job, I am sure it was just a slice, how could it be anything else :-)
I am sure that you have gotten endless similar comments but I just wanted to let you know that you are welcome to stop by any time (tho give us a heads up to clean just a bit)
We are building our own little sustainable homestead and we are learning to do things for ourselves, like you. We have young kids and we homeschool some of them. We have an organic garden which we are looking to go 4 seasons this year, we have natural pastured layer chickens, and we have a mess of dairy goats.
You can visit us online at http://www.humblegarden.com and if you would like to visit us on your way past us (we are in central rural MA) on your way to VT, just drop me a comment on that blog.
I know that your life is super full right now but I would like you to know that we absolutely understand where you are coming from, agree with you, and wish you all the best of luck.
Its easy to feel isolated in the vastness of the American Consumer Society. You are not alone and you are welcome to drop me a note any time if you need to talk.
Just read the story about you in the NYT and send you warmest good wishes and one additional thought: If you have something that causes you some heartbreak to give away, like your Christmas ornaments, please consider giving them to a friend for safekeeping. You can always let go of them later. The best way for this dramatic transition to work is to undertake it with the passion you already have plus some gentleness toward yourselves. You don't have to become Puritan or self-punishing about it. When you force a muscle, it reacts by tightening up. With a gentle stretch, it elongates naturally. From a middle-aged, simplicity-chasing Vermonter.
Hm... Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Gotta love it.
Much improvement on Locke's life, liberty, and the pursuit of property.
I can't remember where I read this, but found it interesting: "Freedom is not an ideal, it is not even a protection, if it means nothing more than freedom to stagnate, to live without dreams, to have no greater aim than a second car and another television."
im writing to you from Scotland.im italian and i had to leave my beautiful country because i coldn't get a job. i think you did somenthing that only rich and bored people can do. curing your self with herbs?? homeschool your kids??yes go ahed....
you re a disgusting fake hippies
Chica has a right to be pissed off -- the Italian economy is in shambles and the average Italian pays nearly $1500 per person per year just to finance their government's debt. Her government forced her out of her "beautiful" but financially chaotic country while you live in a big land that allows you to work from a laptop and grow chard on your bit of land. More power to ya.
Also: I can situate Chica's perspective in the sometimes suspicious European stance toward trends that are different. Here in England, for example, very few people homeschool and I was chastized by one of my children's schools for telling them that I was the child's first teacher (as I am a teacher and the parent). Sometimes we can speak the same language but that big old Atlantic Ocean can put barriers to decades of progressive thought. (The US is behind the UK in carbon emissions, etc., for example.)
Just don't pull a Chris McCandless sort of thing and burn your money! : )
We would love to have you over for dinner should your journey bring you through Chicago. (A Weston A. Price special perhaps? ... noticed your booklist).
I feel so lucky to have come across your blog today! I know some people's narrow views can be hurtful, but that's just lameness and fear speaking. Thank you for doing all you can to leave the world a better place and inspiring lots of others to do the same. I'm rooting for you all.
I just read the NYT article. wow, first off I can't believe someone would write such a nasty comment, anyway, me and my husband are fellow Texans and hope to do the same thing in the near future. I look forward to being inspired by your families journey. Thanks for sharing. The best of luck to you, and don't worry about what stupid people say...
what a mean thing to say, especially when you do not know the people that you are saying it about.
i know that there is something our mother taught us, and that is; if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all.
being critical of people is one thing, but a flat-out insult like that is wrong, and simply shows how closed minded that person is.
My sister is many many things, but a "disgusting fake hippy" is not one of them.
i love you guys! and i wish my family nothing but love and peace!
I completely love what you are doing. Don't listen to the naysayers - they are jealous! We are organic, homeschooling, homesteaders but with a husband in 'golden handcuffs', if you know what I mean. We would love nothing more than to break out of corporate america, but fear keeps him caged. I'm envious of your journey and if you are ever back in Wisconsin (northwestern), feel free to park your bus on our homestead and let's see what we can teach each other! Have a wonderful safe journey - you will be so happy you did this and you are giving your kids the best gift in the world.
It is inspiring to read about a couple who has it right in this consumer culture of ours. More people in our country need to divest themselves of all the garbage they have accumulated along the way to living the American "dream".
I would wish you PEACE, but I think you've already found it. Maybe not the peace of knowing what's ahead, or how it will work, and why people are rude about your choices, but rather the peace of following your hearts.
I'm envious. And will continue to follow your journey.
your journey is very inspiring. sadly i connect a bit with what chica said (though it was horrible). we're a low income family and we have lots of student loans and old debt that we can't touch for at least another year. we live as simply as we possibly can. i give birth at home, we eat a primarily raw diet, we take care of our health care at home, we grow what we can to eat, and my son attends school for free while my daughter stays home (we'd like to unschool in the future but for right now my son attends school at the waldorf school where my husband teaches, so i can study and work from home). our life is full and beautiful but more than anything, all we want is to build a tiny cob cottage and grow all of our own food on a small piece of land; i want to run a sliding-scale naturopathic clinic out of our home and my husband wants to have his own preschool situated on our land. that's all we want, and while it might sound complicated it will actually be very simple and lovely. but the chances of us affording such simplicity (ironic!) is a LONG way off. for a while we thought very intently about buying a bus or van and living in it - we could certainly do so, and truly enjoy it. but they are EXPENSIVE and because we live so simply, it's not like we own anything of value that we could sell to do what you're planning to do. it's depressing for me to read what you're doing because, honestly, i am terribly jealous. i think it's beautiful and awesome and i don't think you're "disgusting fake hippies" at all. but it does seem like there are an awful lot of specific extenuating circumstances that apply to people who do what you're doing, one of them being that you can AFFORD to give away everything you own and move away to live in a shack. i don't know anybody truly poor who was able to lay down anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 for a bus to convert and live in. so sometimes i feel like it's just never going to happen for us and that's devastating to me. it makes me sad to consider that it used to be that all anybody could hope for was a spot of land to grow food and a little house in which to raise children. and now if that's all you want, it can be incredibly difficult and impossibly expensive to do so. i really do think what you are doing is completely lovely; i am really enjoying following your story. i wish you all the best in this journey and i can't wait to hear how it turns out for you. and i know that SOMEDAY it will work for us as well.
as for everything you're getting rid of, why not use freecycle? we donate tons of stuff on a regular basis (we just purged most of what we own over the past week, which we do several times a year), and when i post anything at all on freecycle it is called for in less than an hour.
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