A Little Note

Autumn is here, at long last. Instead of days indoors hiding from the 100F+ heat, we can spend the days outside, and air the house for long periods each day (very important to me and my semi-Victorian notions about health and housekeeping).We began our "school year" two weeks ago (in quotation because it's not drastically different from our daily life during other seasons), and are hoping to squeeze in a camping trip sometime between now and the holiday roller coaster that is so swiftly approaching. Our hands and minds are busy with many things, but now I finally think I can handle posting here regularly again.My thoughts may be brief, and my grammar unpolished, but we will see what I can manage. I hope you'll visit again!

Back!

At long last, we have (somewhat) settled into a new rhythm and have internet. Currently, it turns out we are almost living in two different locations -- our former small home in the country, and our "new" (to us) house in a quiet neighborhood in our new town. There are many reasons for this, and I will write about them soon. I only bring it up at this point because for the foreseeable future we will only have an internet connection at the house we spend most of our weekdays in, so in effect I will still only have access to this blog and any messages about 50-60% of the time. Eventually, this may change, but for now, I will try to be disciplined about posting when I do have the ability. Please still leave your comments and send your messages! Just do not be alarmed if it takes me a few days to get back to you (and I will get back to everyone who emails me if at all possible).

Waiting

Friends,

In previous posts I've mentioned some upheavals in our family life, and earlier this month we finally began the transition to the next phase: a new town, a new house, and a new way of living (at least for a while). We don't yet have internet in our new home so I do not have much opportunity to update, but as soon as that is remedied I'll be back to posting. I wish you all the enjoyment of the newly-arrived autumn!

What We're Doing Now

When I began this blog several months (although only a handful of posts) ago, our little family was in a state of complete turmoil. In the last year we'd welcomed a newborn, I'd suffered a major injury - with the attendant recovery time and upheaval for all involved - and my husband was spending many all-nighters completing his degree at last. The four of us barely held it together through this; literally my goal each morning was "make it through today." It was doubly difficult because we couldn't clearly see what would come after... a good job? A poor offer? A move to be nearer friends? Staying where we were? Moving somewhere completely unknown to us? An offer we couldn't refuse? We just didn't know. We lived generally frugally out of complete necessity if nothing else, but we were skittish about committing to any sort of Plan, or any significant hopes about what the summer would bring to us.

Now, at last, the smoke is beginning to clear, and the framework of A Plan emerges.

Since this blog will be, in large part, a chronicle of that Plan played out in our lives, I will give at least a rough outline of it for now. As I mentioned in this post, we truly believe that rural life is the best place for us to be. For us as adults, for our growing children, for our future security. My husband and I grew up mostly rural, and since we were wed almost a decade ago we have kept that lifestyle. In fact, we've learned and practiced much more than we had grown up with, as well... I taught myself to can, we've gathered wild edibles and medicinal herbs, my husband is a self-taught blacksmith who makes beautiful products and loves every minute of it. We have come a long way, but for most of this decade we've been scraping along in various scenarios: somehow saving enough on one modest income to pay for a small house we could live in without rent draining us monthly; then welcoming our first child into the world (and paying out of pocket for our birth attendant when the insurance gave us the run-around); sending my husband back to university; giving birth to a second daughter. By the grace of God and some grim determination we managed to stay out of debt, but often we were on the knife's edge before we managed to save up more emergency funds.

Now, with an in-demand degree under his belt (this post is one long reminder I need to come up with some nicknames for our little family!), we're set to have a significantly higher income, and at last find ourselves faced with many choices. For many people, it's a no-brainer: take the new job and upgrade, upgrade, upgrade: house, phones, cars, furniture, clothes, restaurants. Enjoy life; finally live a little! It's an understandable impulse, but truthfully? We like the way we have been living. Freed from the headache of hovering a little too close to the debt line, there are very few extra things we want.

So as we enter this new phase of our lives - encompassing the next couple of years or so - we are combining several dreams and goals (effectively, we hope!). They include:

1: Determining where our next move will take us: If all goes well, our hope is that, sometime in 2017 or so, we will make another move and ideally set down roots in our basically-forever home. The exact details of this will have to be pondered and explored during this current phase, as we try to decide whether to move near our aging families, move near friends and the mountains, or whatever else. With no desire to job-hop or uproot our children any more than is absolutely necessary, this will be a very deliberate a prayerful decision, and should be for the long-haul.

2: Pursuing and preparing for a more agrarian life: Although the house we are (probably) about to move in to is more "in town" than we have ever lived in our adult lives - which will prevent certain activities like getting a new goat, extensive planting, and the like - there are still plenty of skills to cultivate and goals to pursue. When we are able (on long weekends) to visit with our extended families, we will have the opportunity to camp, gather wild edibles, possibly hunt, and other activities. Since this is one of the areas where we might choose to make our basically-forever home, we can also begin to do things like plant fruit trees and undertake other similar projects as soon as that decision is solidified. And even in our "town house" (ha!), there will be plenty of work to which we may turn our hands.

3: Building up alternative income: More on this later, but this has to do with polishing some skill sets and marketing some pre-existing skills to a degree that might allow us to live safely on far less income (and more time at home) when we make our next move. (In certain circles, these are popularly known as "side hustles.") Most notable is my husband's blacksmithing shop, which saw modest success last year and has (I believe) great potential if we approach it correctly.

4: Saving, saving, saving: Now, we're used to saving. We're used to making do with very little, but there are plenty of things we have spent needlessly on in recent years, even when income was very low. I am, for example, kind of glad we didn't keep close records to know how much money we wasted on going out to eat and take out food, but I can make an educated guess and even that's enough to make me feel a little sick. Dining out isn't always a waste, of course, but most of the time it can be avoided and replaced with a better (financially, heathfully, socially) alternative, and, face it, I don't know of anyone who never ends up dropping cash on restaurant food sometimes as the pure result of poor (no!) planning. The idea now is to spend only what is necessary to keep us healthy and happy, not out of miserliness, but out of a true love for the life we want to live. Every dollar rescued from needless spending is another dollar to pad our safety net in a few years, or an investment that will give returns indefinitely. It's less the Dave Ramsey mindset, and more the Mustachian mindset. Take the money you earn, and use it to set yourself free.

I think that basically covers The Plan for our upcoming months. I haven't included things like spending time together, learning/teaching, or anything like that, because those types of things have been the heart of our home since the beginning, and will be until the end, so they are not unique to The (Current) Plan. I am personally hugely anxious about our current relocation, but it's in God's hands, so we will see what comes of it in the end.

Returning

We have had many upheavals (good and bad... mostly good, though!) in our little family since last I posted, and without a functioning camera to make any photo posts, as you can see there have been no entries here. I am hoping to change that as we move into a new phase of our lives, though, so do drop in again when you can!

Right now I'm in the midst of reading a book called Surviving Off Off-Grid: Decolonizing the Industrial Mind. Perhaps I should hold off making any pronouncements about its value until I have completed it, but for now I will say I am finding myself somewhat disappointed. It has great reviews on Amazon, and -- more importantly -- it has been promoted by some bloggers I like very much. I was very excited about finally getting my hands on a copy and plowing through it. Yet, so far, I can't say I would recommend it. The author, Mr Bunker, is quick to make sweeping pronouncements about what all Christians must do, and more than merely conflicting in many places with Eastern Orthodox theology (of which I am sure he would be proud, actually), much of what he writes would have a great percentage of Christians throughout Christian history condemned. I hesitate about these things. Yes, there is value in the agrarian life, a life in which we can serve no lord -- no boss, no banker, no salesman -- but only God. I believe this deeply. I find myself nodding along with many of his arguments. But to make that extra step and insist that the agrarian life is somehow required of all those who follow Christ... that's a step I cannot take. I wonder what he would say about St Maria Skobtsova who lived in Paris -- and poured herself out for others. (There is no doubt what he thinks about St Constantine!)

Oh, well. I will be finishing this book soon and will save my thoughts for a more thorough review. Since my last review I've also read Almost Amish by Nancy Sleeth (a light and easy read that might be good for someone who has never before considered spending less money or building community, but nothing beyond that, I'm afraid), Girl at the End of the World by Elizabeth Esther (interesting but poorly paced... empty and rushed at the end), and When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible by Timothy Michael Law (which I would highly recommend to all). I may or may not write a more thorough review of them, also.

In any case, until then, enjoy these last burning days of summer (and be blessed as we approach and enter the Dormition Fast if you are Orthodox!).

In Which My Extremism Makes An Appearance

As I write these entries, I imagine many different people potentially reading them someday. After all, nothing on the internet can really be reclaimed, can it? So I imagine sometimes how these posts would sound to people like, for example, my mother. Perhaps an in-law. My priest. Someone from my church. Someone from my childhood church. Or, perhaps, one of my close friends.

Of course, when I think of many of those categories, there are many things I imagine they wouldn't already know about me. An in-law may know certain things about me but be totally in the dark about others. Someone from my church might only know that I am an Orthodox Christian and nothing more. Someone I attended church with in childhood would likely not even know that, though they would probably be able to tell you who my grandparents were. Of all of these possibilities, the people for whom the fewest of my scribbles here might be surprising are my close friends, particularly those I have known since my teenage years.

I'll be quick to admit that I don't have very many close friends anymore. There are many reasons for this: growing apart from former companions as we choose to form a family and they do not. Becoming Christians, which some friends would not take seriously. Moves across the country. Little spare time to spend together, especially when both parties are in college at once. Add to that the difficulty of making intimate friends as adults -- with all of the forces that either actively pull us apart or passively encourage us to keep polite distance -- and there are only a precious few left who seem to know much about us at all. This is ok... we do not have to be intimately close to other people necessarily to love them!

But for the few who have hung on, I thank God and love very much. Between them they very well may know more about me than I know about myself! That is a beautiful gift. But as I began to think of writing this entry, I realized how strange it is that -- while this topic is SO dear to my heart and shapes so many of my thoughts -- even many of my dearest friends probably don't know this about me.

It's not a deep, dark secret, I promise. Nothing scandalous. But it's deeply counter cultural, and maybe this is why I tend to glide over it without mention, as I don't want to alienate anyone, or make them think I am judging them. You see, it's common knowledge among the people who know me (love me or hate me!) that I am "a bit of a hippie." This is said with a smile and a nod and is quite a charming and acceptable quirk overall in our society. (Some people do say it with more of a grunt and grumble, I admit!) Being "green" is "in" these days, "hip," whatever. I recycle, I like to go barefoot, I know how to can jelly, and my husband and I are known to drag our babies out to tent camp for a week at a time. People know this, and whether they themselves think these things are fun or important or foolish or strange, they at least have a nice and inoffensive file in which to place us:

        Hippies. Green. Hipsters? Young.
But, in this blog I'm going to go where I rarely go in general conversation, and say that those things may point to certain surface features of our life choices, but they really miss the point.

We have a hundred reasons for all of these seemingly strange choices we make, but the deepest, most abiding reason beneath it all is that we... well, for lack of a more precise term, I guess we have found ourselves here as 20-something agrarians. What does that mean? There's the rub, and one of the reasons why we tend to shy away from revealing this part of ourselves. Speaking broadly, those who identify as agrarians tend to feel that living on the land is the only way to be truly free in society. They feel that the work and cooperation characteristic of rural society are ideal for mankind, and that through interaction with and dependence on the soil which God created, we may become closer to God.

It all starts to sound a bit judgy, doesn't it?

But at least for us, that's not the point. Our place is not to judge. As Orthodox Christians, we have the lives of many urban saints to show us beyond doubt that God can make us holy in any place and society, whether in the deserts of Egypt or the intrigue-ridden city of Constantinople. We cannot claim that this is the One Right Way to Live. If God wants to hand that mandate down from heaven, that would be His privilege, but we will not. If the circumstances of our lives required that we live in a studio apartment in the vilest city on earth, we could make good and do good in that place. These things are not in question.

But there is a certain truth, we feel, that God reveals Himself in unique ways through life lived near the land. God Himself has tied our bodies to the fruitful earth, no matter where we make our home: we cannot escape the need to eat or the need to breathe, and both needs are met by the soil and sun on the physical side. Many great saints teach the importance of working with our hands, which is almost entirely lost in the average urban (or suburban, or in many examples even geographically rural) lifestyle. Within agrarian life there is much more space, more space in time and within our minds for the stillness in which we can hear God speaking. It is harder to fall into patterns of consuming, choosing, taking, that dominate so much of modern life, in which everything -- and I do mean everything, right down to the lives of children and the dignity of living human beings -- is for sale. Sometimes I wonder if agrarian life is to modern urban society what the monasteries are to the wider Church: not a choice everyone can make, or that everyone should make, and not a place that guarantees any degree of sainthood in itself, but even so, a pattern to which those "outside" can look for a certain guidance, and a place to which they can retire to refresh and reframe their own lives.

So there you have it. I'm not hip. I'm extreme (I guess... at least in this age). I really believe there is something valuable in a life of "rural ideals" that extends deeper and beyond mere personal preference. I truly do. I do not wish anyone to feel I think THEY need to stake out a homeplace in the country, though I would be glad to share in their joy if they do. We do not wish anyone to think that we feel they are somehow lesser for choosing (or in many cases having to choose) a more urban life, any more than I should want to be thought of as "lesser" for choosing to live in marriage than in a monastery. As for ourselves, our time living in the joyful silence of the woods may itself soon be at an end, and I pray that God will lead us where we need to be -- understanding that it may even be a city, and that we would be okay. But all of this would never stop me from believing that there by the quiet pond are the songs of the frogs and the calls of the geese and the Voice of God.

Holding Our Breath

On Holy Saturday (April 11 for us Eastern Orthodox this year), every member of our little family began to cough. Oh, it was that dusty fan we turned on for the first time this spring, we said, and since only confirmed flu or vomiting would keep us from Pascha services after all the trial of Lent and Holy Week (the spiritual trials built into these seasons and more besides for us this year), we carried on: dyeing the eggs rusty bloody red, packing the Pascha basket with prosciutto and chocolate, gathering cameras and candles and our two daughters in beautiful dresses, and packing all of this -- plus blankets for the sleeping girls and plates of food for breaking the fast in the middle of the night -- into our tiny car. I remember we hardly fit everything in, shoved in between my husband's giant textbooks and strange chunks of metal for his senior design project, and rode through the darkness so excited. (Well, we did. The girls were fast asleep within 5 minutes of pulling out onto the road.) We sang "Christ is Risen" and shouted "Christ is risen!" and the children of our parish slept on the floor like piles of puppies. We were in an empty storefront building for that week, and our procession took us at midnight before the garish neon sign of the tanning salon next door, and we ate obscene amounts of bacon and cheese and ice cream on paper plates in the back of the otherwise silent building at 2am.

It was beautiful, as Pascha always is. But the coughing...

I think everyone feels like they've been in a train wreck when they wake up on Pascha morning. Most of us get only 4 or 5 hours of sleep, those of us who are parents have probably spent hours wrangling kids full of excitement and lack of rest, and nearly everyone has made at least one regrettable decision when breaking their fast with their friends and church family in the midst of the night. (Bacon, cheese, ice cream, remember? And sticky bun cake. And sausage. And...)

But this was something else. A cold had hit us all so bad it was difficult to lift our heads from our pillows, and every one of us was suffering to a greater or lesser degree. That day the baby and my husband had the worst of it, and as the week went on we all cycled in and out of feeling like death and simply feeling puny. We missed the Pascha picnic with the barbecue and bounce house... we missed all sorts of things. Nearly two weeks have passed and while we're all well into recovery, it really feels like life has just passed us by for all of this time. Add in my husband pulling some all-nighters to work on a group design project (we're too old for that these days, I have decided), and family life has been very much on its head. Instead of the rich delicious dishes I'd planned for Bright Week (the week following Pascha), we ate convenience items and frozen juice bars to scrape by each day. Instead of reading through all of our books on Easter and the Resurrection accounts, we lay in the bed watching Edwardian Farm while I begged my brain to stay in my poor throbbing head. (My 4 year old wants to go to England and meet Ruth, Alex, and Peter now.) Instead of picnics we gathered under the blankets in the bed fighting various stages of fever for days on end.

So, this is how life is. We have the best of intentions, and they come to nothing (or at least not much). We think the joy of the Resurrection is reliant on steak pies and Scotch eggs and wonder what it will be without them. And to be honest, it hasn't felt like much of a celebration, and I regret that, but at the same time we know -- we have to know -- that this joy is not reliant on us. We didn't call the dead out of the grave, and we never could have, and we never will. We don't even have control over a tiny virus, too small even to see invading our entire family at once, just in time for the holiest days of our year. All of this control we think we have is fleeting and feeble and not worth very much, when it comes down to it. And yes I feel this is deeply a spiritual message, about trust in God and confidence in His plans for us and for this earth, but it's not only that. Even if you don't feel there is a God who is in control, or do not know Him, eventually you have to realize that, at least, you are not the one in control of it all. Nor I.

And learn how to fill your lungs, and hold your breath, and move through it.