“A Day on Our Homestead”

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.

Cross Posted at Pockets of the Futureand Dkos.

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. We definitely needed a company like https://www.pestcontrolexperts.com/ to get rid of all the cockroaches, it was awful. There was no air conditioning so the heat from the laundry room in the summer was unbearable. I didn’t realize how much I took air conditioning for granted but I missed it so much! I thought the HVAC system was broken at first, so I contacted an AC Repair company and when they got there, they told me that there was no system! How could anyone live without a HVAC system? The heat was truly 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

A Day on our Homestead (Part 1) The Morning

A Day on our Homestead (Part 2) The Morning Milking

A Day on our Homestead (Part 3) Feeding and Watering

A Day on our Homestead (Part 4) Collecting Eggs

A Day on our Homestead (Part 5) Underlying Philosophy

A Day on our Homestead (Part 6) Strawbale and Homeschooling

A Day on our Homestead (Part 7) Evening Milking Part 1

A Day at our Homestead Part 8 Second Part of our Evening Milking

A Day at our Homestead Part 9 The end of the Day