Why Self-Sufficiency Is a Worthy Goal & Why It Doesn’t Mean What You Think

Both my wife Laura and I will be turning 30 within the next year, and we have a little girl who will be two years old very very soon.  These kind of impending events tend to provoke introspection–we’ve definitely been thinking a lot lately about what we want from our lives and how we want our daughter to be raised.  Should we stay where we are, which is in a 1200 square foot house (plenty plenty big for 3 people) in a rural town of about 9,000 people?  Should we move further out to a farm-type place, about 30 minutes away (with acres and barns and a farmhouse to rehabilitate)?  Do we want to leave open the possibility of moving to an urban place, where our academic opportunities would certainly be more varied?

Self-Sufficiency Defined, Take 1:

Self-sufficiency is a (hyphenated) word that comes up over and over again in our discussions: we want to grow and preserve more of our own food and live increasingly off-the-grid as we go.  I want to teach people my age and younger the general agricultural and kitchen-related skills that used to be passed down from grandmothers to mothers to sons and daughters, both with this blog and in person–because seeing 7-foot tomato vines grow from a seed you planted and scraping the dirt from under your own fingernails is really believing.

We want our daughter to be included in that younger generation that knows how to help food appear from soil, sun, and water, but neither of us are really sure how to most efficiently accomplish that goal.

At the place we currently live, we have too much shade for too much of the day to successfully grow a significant amount of produce.  I guess you could call what we have here a “kitchen garden,” in which we can grow enough to put on the table a few days a week during the summer, but not enough to put any away for the fall/winter/spring.  There’s not enough space to grow any staple-type foods like corn or potatoes in enough volume to make hassling with it worthwhile.

But the house here is in great shape, and it’s in a great location–biking distance from lots of places, including my work, which is about a mile and a half away.

In contrast, the farmhouse is in a serious state of (water-damaged) disrepair, and may need to be demolished and rebuilt, so moving immediately (or any time in the next few years) isn’t feasible, and it is 20 minutes away from most businesses.  However, growing enough food to provide for our family (and probably several others) is certainly possible there, the countryside is spectacularly beautiful, and it’s also much closer to family.

Urban Gardening Versus Rural Gardening (or, Letting the Argument Get Away From Me)

And then I get into how I want to teach my daughter and the world about gardening.  Do I want to pack as many food-bearing plants into our small space as I can to show her and everyone else that you, too, can eat well from even the tiniest of lots?  Or do I want to create a rural oasis, a huge farm where I can invite people over to show them how to grow things for themselves in person, but risk people saying, “Oh, I could only do that if I had — acres; I can’t do it at my house…”

And then and then and then…

And then I just have to stop.

I have to stop and think about how, well, manic I sound, and how lucky we are to even be in the position to have this conversation.

Self-Sufficiency Defined, Take 2:

I’m (slowly) coming to the realization that I need to rethink my definition of self-sufficiency.

In a much broader sense, self-sufficiency is about the recognition that we have enough, no matter what we decide to do with our lives; that in this time of economic crisis, we still live at a time in history where we can see abundance all around us; that all the shifting of houses or potential life-paths amounts to shuffling animals to different stalls on Noah’s Ark–we’re going to ride out whatever storms come our way, no matter what.

In short, self-sufficiency is a psychological state of grace and of gratefulness.   Self-sufficiency isn’t an end unto itself; it’s a means to happiness, fulfillment, and contentment.  Sometimes that’s hard to remember.

And wherever any of us end up, whether completely off-grid or not, I know we’ll all be pretty much OK.

How to Not Self-Sabotage and Get to the Heart of Things All in One Day

(This post, and whole train of thought, was inspired/begotten by Lisa Sonora Beam’s post here. You probably ought to check it out before reading this.  It’s incredibly brave. And thanks to Karol for linking it in, or I would have completely missed it.)

This blog was about to disappear forever.  Here’s why.

1. I am incredibly uncomfortable with promoting myself or my work.  I guess that’s as good a place as any to start. Parts of me don’t want to be popular, or famous, or they want to keep my street cred, whatever that means, or stay “indie.”
2. I am guilty of allowing “self-awareness” to deteriorate into “navel-gazing” more times than I care to admit. It might be what I’m doing here, except that I’m recognizing it in myself and trying to help other people notice it in themselves and take action.
3. I’ve always been a writer.  Which means I have sort of a love-hate relationship with the written word.  It means I’ve got a lot of ego tied up in what I write, and what other people think of it.  It means that I have traditionally spent a lot of time working with how I say something and much less on what I’m trying to say.
4. I am tremendously uncomfortable in social settings, around any large groups of people.  Which is ironic, because I spend my workdays in a big room with a bunch of teenagers.
5. This makes me socially awkward and an introvert and uncomfortable self-promoting.  And the circle starts again.
6. (Not a big secret: In order to have a successful blog, you have to self-promote.  Therein lies the quandary.)
7. (Also not a big secret: This is really scary to write.)

Here’s a list of the projects I have started in the last 5 years, probably were worth finishing, that never got done:

1. At least 3 novels.  That I can remember.
2. Never submitted a poem to any peer-reviewed journal, even though it’s probably what I’m best at writing.
3. 4 or 5 albums worth of songs, recorded on my laptop mic, but never pushed further.
4. An e-book.  A family cookbook.
5. Re-learning the violin.
6. Who knows how many gardening improvements.  Self-watering containers.  Irrigation systems.  Mulching.
7. Training for a triathlon.

And I almost added this blog to that list.

Here’s a bigger secret: I can be marginally successful (and almost always have been) without trying very hard.  With many things in my life, especially the art-related ones, I’ve operated around 65-70% of my capacity. And that’s been good enough.  I’ve impressed some people, tossed some sparklers up in the air, you know, really basic stuff.  (I don’t mean that to make me sound all super-talented or smug or whatever.  I mean that I’ve been wasting a lot of my life playing Wii.)

And I realized something about 2 weeks ago: this blogging thing, if I want lots of people to read and care and pay attention, is going to take more than 65%. I don’t define success as being a millionaire (how minimalist would that be, anyway?), but I would like to make some money off my writing. More than that, I want to write for reasons other than inflating my ego.

I want to help people.

You can call what happened to me the “attack of the lizard brain” or the onset of “the resistance” or however you want to dress it up.  But it stopped me cold.

Whatever you call it, I was repeating the same cycle: lots of momentum to start with on a project that couldn’t possibly be completed in a sitting or two, fizzling out, and quitting once I got to my 65% “max.”

Here’s why I’m not quitting:

1. I like writing.  Most days.
2. I like helping people realize they can do more than they think they can.  And that involves me doing more that I thought I could.
3. I want to prove that I can sustain something majorly big and artistic.
4. I need to stretch my limits, especially with respect to self-promotion and interacting with other people.  I realized this week how many of the big bloggers I spend time reading are socially anxious or introverted or feel uncomfortable putting themselves out there. If they can, so can I.
5. 65% isn’t good enough.  Especially if I want to tell a bunch of teenagers to give me their best every day.

I wish there was some forthcoming pronouncement about how to stop self-sabotaging  (i.e. quitting just when you’re starting to make some progress).  But I don’t know that there’s a way to stop except

1. Recognize that’s what you’re doing,
2. Ignore the voice in your head that’s trying to get you to stop, and
3. Keep moving forward.

So that’s what I’m going to do.  I’ll write more about peaches later this week.  :)

If you love what you’re reading here, Facebook it, tweet it, or whatever makes you happy.  If you’ve fallen victim to the self-sabotage monster, I want to hear about that, too.  Maybe we can help each other.

photo by Cl@re Bear

How to Put Down Roots & Still Live the Life You Love

Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made.  (Wendell Berry)

To be an effective gardener, you have to pay attention to the roots of your plants.  Roots deliver nutrients and water to the growing plant, and if they are shallow, constricted, or otherwise deprived, then the food you were hoping to grow will simply not come to fruition.  And if you pull a plant up by the roots without providing some quick source of water (and eventually soil), the plant will die.  That’s why all the commercials for Roundup and other weed killers preach that they “kill the roots, so the weeds won’t come back.”  If you kill the roots, you kill the whole plant.

But here’s the thing:

Humans have the same needs. If you have no roots or poorly tended roots, it’s very difficult to thrive.

Human beings crave “home,” a place where they can set down roots.  Obviously, there are as many definitions of “home” as there are people in the world, but I see a few elements in common:

• We need a place to belong.
• We want a place where others will look out for us.
• We need a place to rest and recharge.

Lest this be dismissed as ramblings of a Southern non-city dweller with a pastoral world-view who still gets his milk delivered to his front door by a man toting glass bottles in a wire crate (no, I don’t), let’s examine the proposition a bit more closely.

We need a place to belong.

In the garden, certain plants grow better beside certain others. The fancy name for this is “companion planting,” and I think that’s apropos for the human part of the discussion.  Like cucumbers and dill, or tomatoes and basil, or the aptly named “Three Sisters” (corn, pole beans, and squash), humans tend to thrive when they are in the place they belong–a place where they get the right amounts of sun and shade and, yes, companionship.  Which leads us to…

We want a place where others will look out for us.

Good companions serve many purposes.  They laugh with us when we’re happy.  They defend us when we’re under attack.  They attract beneficial predatory insects that will suck the life force out of Mexican Bean Beetle larvae.  They provide a living mulch to protect our roots from the hot sun.

We need a place to rest and recharge.

The plant corollary here is night and day (I mean that literally, not metaphorically).  Most vegetable plants need around eight hours of sunlight a day to produce at optimum levels.  However, what is often ignored is that plants need the night as well–to cool off, to “recharge.”  Think about it like this: we all know that exercising is good for us, but what if we exercised for twenty hours a day?  We couldn’t keep up that pace for very long–we’d go from “in shape” to “unhealthy and sleep deprived and probably malnourished” in a matter of a couple days.

Home–where our roots/family/favorite chairs are–gives us all these things.  And the less crap we have in our living spaces, the more restful and peaceful it feels.

So many of the minimalist writers write about being able to move anywhere in the world with just a bag on their back full of everything they own.  I have talked to a few of them, and am convinced that the most awesome minimalists in the “live anywhere” vein don’t really believe that because you can live anywhere necessarily means you have to change locations with the seasons (even if they do).

Unfortunately, many readers misinterpret the word “minimalist” to mean “ascetic” or “itinerant traveler.”  Which is not necessarily a bad thing, if that’s the life you want to live.  But that’s not my life, and it’s not my minimalism.

At its heart, minimalist living is about living the life you love and not letting possessions get in the way of your happiness.  The life I love is a rooted one: rooted in family, place, garden, and home.

Further Reading:

Tammy did a post on community building last week.

Adam Baker wrote about coming home from a very long time in Thailand with a 2-year-old (I can’t imagine!).

Karol Gadja is a world traveling minimalist who is currently residing in Wroclaw, Poland (until it gets cold; I can’t blame him there), because it is/was the home of his ancestors.  He wrote a great post about a bike ride to find the cemetery where 2 of his grandparents are buried.

Leo Babauta had a recent blog post at mnmlist.com about selecting a new neighborhood that “felt right” to him and his family.

All these people were and are responding to the same urge: if you can’t have a small town, then you find a “town” within a city, a place that makes you feel like home.

So now, it’s your turn: What makes you feel like “home”? Let me know.  I’d love to hear from you.

(And share via FB or twitter if you think this is worth sharing.  Thanks!)