Money Matters.

In the city of Athens, Greece, there are people hungry in the streets. The PhDs are fleeing the country, the pharmacies are shutting down, and people’s entire livelihoods have been lost. When you hear talk about the “Euro Zone Crisis” it may sound abstract and boring, but the truth is, it matters a lot. It matters a lot to the people living in Europe, it matters to the children who are being orphaned, it matters to the 30% of Spanish people who no longer have jobs or a way to feed their families. And it also matters to us. In terms of our relative debt to GDP ratio, we are not far behind Greece. In such a globalized monetary market system, we also are completely dependent upon the health of the global economy in order to survive the coming economic and energy turmoil. Something that the “powers that be” have done is made our economic system seem too complex to even try to understand. 

I’m going to try to break down what I’ve learned, and what I think is important. This is my understanding of it. I am by no means an expert. Please contribute to this: discuss, correct me, anything. I am by no means an expert and would love input on what I have wrong. 

1. Why are things getting more expensive?

Oil, Climate Change, & Inflation. 

The price of oil directly affects the prices of your goods. When your strawberries come from Ecuador, they must be shipped to your local big box grocery overseas, and then trucked directly to you. Cheap oil = Cheap goods. Our current food system depends on cheap oil. This is why the Middle East is so important to us. Peak oil (a hypothesis that states that the world’s cheap oil resources are declining) is another hot topic item here.

Climate Change. Or, for the climate change naysayers, we’ll just say “weird weather”. Climate change affects prices because it has created, for instance, a shortage of corn. Since corn is in everything we consume, including the grain that feeds livestock, the price of everything goes up.

Inflation. When the Federal Reserve (the US central banking system) prints money that was not actually created via real resources (i.e. prints money to bail banks out, or fund wars) the dollar automatically loses value. This is actually a really simple concept. Like anything, this can get much more complex, but you can think quite simply about it and understand it for what it is. Ron Paul supporters see the Federal Reserve as a corrupt institution which steals from your hard earned money (as your wages do not increase with inflation, but the price of goods does).

2. How does wall street affect me?

When Wall Street fails, the Federal Reserve prints more money in order to bail them out. Thus, inflation occurs. See above.

3. Where does money come from?

• We have a fiat currency. What this means is that your dollar bill does not represent anything, such as gold or silver. A dollar is not worth anything in a world where there is not enough products or energy to back it up.
• Fractional Reserve Banking. When someone puts money in the bank, the bank lends out more money than has been deposited. When a bank lends $100 based on a $10 deposit. As Michael Ruppert explains, “that means that in order to pay off whoever gets that money has to make more money still to feed in at the bottom to create more money so that the bank can create still more money. 
• Compound Interest Rates. When someone takes out a loan, they have to create more money than what they  originally paid for something.  This also depends on making more money than something is actually worth. 

When you consider the housing bubble, these concepts are all easily understood. Fiat money was lent in order to pay for something that Joe could not afford. Joe and all of his friends borrowed money all at the same time without having the security to back it up (fractional reserve banking), owing more money on it than they actually had (compound interest rate). The bank has weighed the odds, the way that a Vegas gambler does, and decided that the risk is worth the profit. When the housing bubble burst, both Joe, his friends, and the bank lost money. But here’s the thing. It was money that never actually existed.

The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Raising Children in the Faith

A question that my husband and I wrestle with a great deal is a very simple question: How ever will we take on the enormous task of raising children up in the Christian faith? I think that one of the biggest struggles that Christian parents face is the lack of alternative culture that we are provided with in order to take on this task. Secular culture offers us a plethora of answers and cultural practices in which to raise children, (certainly not all are evil or bad), but when it comes to Christian traditions, I myself feel incredibly ill equipped to pass on cultural practices.

Don’t get me wrong. I know the gospel, I understand the message of Jesus’ life and death, God’s love for us, the fallen nature of humans, like the back of my hand. But this knowledge seems inadequate when I want to provide for my children not just a theoretical worldview, but a true culture of faith: in home, community, and Church.

Someone who has inspired me in this way is Maria Von Trapp. Yes, the same Maria Von Trapp that sings Do-Re-Mi and sews clothing out of curtains. The real Maria Von Trapp was a woman of SERIOUS intensity (she makes me feel better about my own intensity). She was a devout Catholic, and even more inspiring were the traditions that she raised the Von Trapp family in. In her beautiful book Around the Year with the Trapp Family, Maria provides a detailed account of the way in which she brought the Church year into the home. Every season is marked with recipes, stories, hymns, prayers, traditions, which engage the mind, heart, and imagination. Maria brings to light the natural beauty within the Church year: it isn’t boring or mundane, and Santa Claus is not the only way to get your children excited about the birth of Christ. She brings to light the truth that Christ’s life begs that we celebrate, mourn, abstain, feast, and study, all around the year. 

The Von Trapp family moved to Stowe, Vermont when they were forced to flee Austria during World War II. Upon her arrival, Maria observes America as a culture entirely too caught up in the rat race of life, always racing somewhere, trying to save time, and never savoring the love of Jesus and engaging in the Church year. She mourns for a culture that she sees as headed for paganism, and losing touch with their own religious roots. She writes:

“This atmosphere of “hurry up, let’s go” does not provide the necessary leisure in which to anticipate and celebrate a feast. But as soon as people stop celebrating they really do not live any more–they are being lived, as it were. The alarming question arises: what is being done with all the time that is constantly being saved? We invent more machines and more gadgets, which will relieve us more and more from the work formerly done by our hands, our feet, our brain, and which will carry us in feverishly increasing speed–where? Perhaps to the moon and other planets, but more probably to our final destruction.

Only the Church throws light onto the gloomy prospects of modern man–Holy Mother Church–for she belongs, herself, to a realm that has its past and present in Time, but its future in the World Without End.”

From really reflecting on where my own heart and mind are these days, I have been really trying to come up with some sort of focus for this blog, and I hope to be able to share specifically with you my own attempt to implement Maria Von Trapp’s help with living the liturgical year at home in my own home.  This is a HUGE task.  Girlfriend was serious about this stuff. So I have been putting this off, saving it for another day, even though I read the book pre-Easter season, I hope that this blog can help keep me a bit more accountable for doing these things at home.

And although our child is still a baby, I think that it will be much easier to start while she is so small, so that it is a more natural way of existing and living for our family as she begins to understand what is going on.

How do you handle this issue of raising your children in a faith based context?

Here is a link to Maria Von Trapp’s book online:

http://www.ewtn.com/library/FAMILY/TRAPP.TXT

She breaks it up into the different season and gives a beautifully written account of her own family’s customs of traditions. May we all pray for each other, support each other, and love each other as we all try our best to raise children, find meaning, and seek God in a harsh and bankrupt world.

Wendell Berry on how to live life. Sanely.

Commencement Address by Wendell Berry

In all the history of teaching and learning, our own time may be the oddest. We seem to be obsessed with education. Newspapers spend an enormous flow of ink on articles, editorials, and letters about education. Presidents of public universities appear on the op-ed pages, prophesying the death of American civilization as the inevitable result of fiscal caution. Our governmental hallways are hardly passable because of university lobbyists kneeling and pleading for public dollars. One might conclude that we are panic-stricken at the thought of any educational inadequacy measurable in unappropriated funds.

And yet by all this fuss we are promoting a debased commodity paid for by the people, sanctioned by the government, for the benefit of the corporations. For the most part, its purpose is now defined by the great and the would-be-great “research universities.” These gigantic institutions, increasingly formed upon the “industrial model,” no longer make even the pretense of preparing their students for responsible membership in a family, a community, or a polity. They have repudiated their old obligation to pass on to students at least something of their cultural inheritance. The ideal graduate no longer is to have a mind well-equipped to serve others, or to judge competently the purposes for which it may be used.

Now, according to those institutions of the “cutting edge,” the purpose of education is unabashedly utilitarian. Their interest is almost exclusively centered in the technical courses called, with typical ostentation of corporate jargon, STEM: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The American civilization so ardently promoted by these institutions is to be a civilization entirety determined by technology, and not encumbered by any thought of what is good or worthy or neighborly or humane.

The course of study called STEM is in reality only a sort of job training for upward (and lateral) mobility. It is also a subsidy granted to the corporations, which in a system of free enterprise might reasonably be expected to do their own job training. And in the great universities even this higher job training is obstructed by the hustle and anxiety of “research,” often involving yet another corporate raid on the public domain.

I do not mean to say that it is impossible to get something like an education in even the most ambitious university. After all, if you have a library, classrooms, laboratories, and an assemblage of doctors diversely learned, you have the makings of an actual school. And in such a place a young person might still pursue a respectable course of study. But that possibility seems less and less probable.

Actual education seems now to be far more probable in the smaller schools, and I think you graduates are fortunate to have been students at Bellarmine. A school the size of this one still can function as a community of teachers and students, with responsible community life as its unifying aim. But you must not forget that the purposes and standards of the world into which you are graduating have not been set by institutions such as this one, but rather by the proponents of STEM, who would like you to have a well-paying job as an unconscious expert with Jesus Christ Munitions Incorporated, or Cleanstream Water Polluters, or the Henry Thoreau Noise Factory, or the John Muir Forest Reduction Corporation, or the Promised Land Mountain Removal Service.

You are not going to discover that the STEM project recognizes the standards of ecological and community health, or that it proposes the real national security of coherent local economies or sustainable methods of land use. You will be told instead that you and your community are now ruled by a global corporate empire, to which all the earth is a “third world,” against which you have no power of resistance or self-determination, and within which you have no vocational choice except a technical and servile job which will give you a small share of the plunder.

You will be told also – ignoring our permanent dependence on food, clothing, and shelter – that you live in a “knowledge-based economy,” which in fact is deeply prejudiced against all knowledge that does not produce the quickest possible return on investment. Even as the ecologists (who manifestly are excluded from STEM) have greatly enlarged our knowledge of ecosystems, their complexity and fragility and their need for care, our knowledge of our own species has been radically simplified. STEM’s definition of humanity includes no suggestion of reverence or neighborliness or stewardship. Instead, people are encouraged to think of themselves as individuals, self-interested and greedy by nature, violent by economic predestination, and members of nothing except their careers. The lives of these “autonomous” individuals will be “successful” insofar as they subserve the purposes of the corporate-political powers, who will regard them merely as consumers, votes, and units of “human capital.”

At commencement exercises it is customary to invite a speaker to exhort the graduates not to think of the end of their formal education as the end of their education, but rather to continue to learn and to grow in consciousness as they go forth to the duties and trials of responsible citizenship. As the designated speaker of this ceremony, I am serious about this duty. I do hereby exhort the graduates to continue to learn and to grow in consciousness as responsible citizens. And I do so knowing that no exhortation could be more subversive in the world as defined by the proponents of STEM.

To urge you toward responsible citizenship is to say that I do not accept either the technological determinism or the conventional greed or the thoughtless individualism of that world. Nor do I accept the global corporate empire and its economic totalitarianism as an irresistible force. I am here to say that if you love your family, your neighbors, your community, and your place, you are going to have to resist. Or I should say instead that you are going to have to join the many others, all over our country and the world, who already are resisting – those who believe, in spite of the obstacles and the odds, that a reasonable measure of self-determination, for persons and communities, is both desirable and necessary. Of the possibility of effective resistance there is a large, ever-growing catalogue of proofs: of projects undertaken by local people, without official permission or instruction, that work to reduce the toxicity, the violence, and the self-destructiveness of our present civilization. The resistance I am recommending will involve you endlessly in out-of-school learning, the curriculum of which will be defined by questions such as these:

What more than you have so far learned will you need to know in order to live at home? (I don’t mean “home” as a house for sale.) If you decide, or if you are required by circumstances, to live all your life in one place, what will you need to know about it and about yourself? At present our economy and society are founded on the assumption that energy will always be unlimited and cheap; but what will you have to learn to live in a world in which energy is limited and expensive? What will you have to know – and know how to do – when your community can no longer be supplied by cheap transportation? Will you be satisfied to live in a world owned or controlled by a few great corporations? If not, would you consider the alternative: self-employment in a small local enterprise owned by you, offering honest goods or services to your neighbors and responsible stewardship to your community?

Even to ask such questions, let alone answer them, you will have to refuse certain assumptions that the proponents of STEM and the predestinarians of the global economy wish you to take for granted.

You will have to avoid thinking of yourselves as employable minds equipped with a few digits useful for pushing buttons. You will have to recover for yourselves the old understanding that you are whole beings inextricably and mysteriously compounded of minds and bodies.

You will have to understand that the logic of success is radically different from the logic of vocation. The logic of what our society means by “success” supposedly leads you ever upward to any higher-paying job that can be done sitting down. The logic of vocation holds that there is an indispensable justice, to yourself and to others, in doing well the work that you are “called” or prepared by your talents to do.

And so you must refuse to accept the common delusion that a career is an adequate context for a life. The logic of success insinuates that self-enlargement is your only responsibility, and that any job, any career will be satisfying if you succeed in it. But I can tell you, on the authority of much evidence, that a lot of people highly successful by that logic are painfully dissatisfied. I can tell you further that you cannot live in a career, and that satisfaction can come only from your life. To give satisfaction, your life will have to be lived in a family, a neighborhood, a community, an ecosystem, a watershed, a place, meeting your responsibilities to all those things to which you belong.

I am sure that you are going to come face to face with the questions and issues I have mentioned, and I am sure that I don’t know how you will answer. People who speak at commencements speak in hope, but also in ignorance. However you may answer, I join the rest of your elders in worrying about you and in wishing you well.

Farming on Main Street

My husband and I recently started reading the excellent book You Can Farm by Joel Salatin. IT’S AWESOME.

Here’s an excerpt: 

All the while we’ve been pursuing this path, friends and family have told us we’re crazy. Other farmers think we’re lunatics for farming the way we do. Friends who mean well expressed heartfelt concern about throwing away our lives. College friends wondered why we would squander our education to do something as menial as farming. While our friends were building houses, accumulating mortgages and buying shiny cars we wore ragged blue jeans, shopped at a thrift store and drove clunkers. In fact, we’ve never yet owned a car in the same decade which it was built. 

I want to know where the people are who will set their eyes on a goal and go for it in the face of opposition. Where are the folks who will dedicate themselves to pursuing a dream, regardless of what others will say? Where are the young people who will limp along on one salary, drive one automobile, live in a tent or used mobile home in order to stay financially solvent and flexible? Where are the parents who will toss out the TV and homeschool their children, or encourage them in debate, drama, and forensics instead of jockey sports? 

As inspired by Joel, we have been pursuing alternative ways to begin farming rather than making a big ticket item purchase such as a farm. Aside from gardening our backyard, we will also begin raising meat rabbits and are looking for places to keep both meat and laying chickens which is close to home but not in our backyard (unfortunate zoning laws prevent us from having chickens). By spring, we are hoping to have 4 White Zealand rabbit does and one buck and meat chickens. We are also interested in finding a place to keep sheep which we could also easily commute to. 

Salatin says that frequently people approach him asking him, “How do I start farming?” and he answers, “What are you doing right now?” From reading his stories of ingenuity and encouragement of alternative ways of beginning to gain the skills and land necessary to farm the way that we want to (becoming self sufficient), a new wave of enthusiasm has been sparked within us to start exactly where we are.

We have started about 100 onions from seed, about a dozen tomato plants (more to come), and 25 brocilli plants. Our seeds have been very appropriately started in red solo cups, which were given to us. We have chopped them, poked them, and placed soil and seeds in them. 

It’s nice to use such a funny thing as a disposable cup for something so productive. 

What is time for, anyway, if not to walk great distances to your chickens and sheep? Pray for us as we embark on the adventure of “farming on Main Street”.

 

In honor of Carl Stine, 1929-2012.

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”-GK Chesterton

My Pappy died a week ago.  Like Jesus, he worked with wood. He had a second generation antique business, and also built furniture. He had two beautiful shops full of his beautiful work and antiques that he had restored. He had lost a lot of things in his life, including his daughter when she was only 12 years old.

But he stayed faithful, on the same hill in Coburn, PA, year after year, day in and day out. He built and he sanded. He was the gentlest, kindest, most humble man I have ever been privileged to know, let alone call him my grandfather. There are really no words that I can piece together to do his person justice. In my own time of grief, I wish I could somehow capture the beauty of his personhood, so I decided to try my hand at poetry. It’s the best solution I could come up with.

My grandfather is, hands down, my greatest hero. And it is fitting to place this poem on my blog, because whenever I felt as though I was getting a little “crazy”….that my counter-cultural leanings were perhaps a little too “fringe” (as my mother lovingly put it the other day), I remember my Pappy smiling at me one of the last times I saw him, and saying in his sweet voice, ”Now you listen here, I know what you’re saying, and you’re right about all of it. All you need is a little bit of land–not a lot–and your family, and you’ll be alright. You’ll be alright.”

The Carpenter

The carpenter’s hand moves over the wood,

to find the flaw:

Like a blind man, he perceives it all.

His fingers work within a cloud of dust, they polish and saw,

to smooth the pine that was once splintered and raw.

He builds and he sands,

He answers to the Lord’s commands.

He bends over the pine in a time which he grieves.

And then gazes at the tree which bears its changing leaves.

He must harvest the wood despite all its flaws,

He must live within the confines of the tree’s natural laws.

The Lord has called the carpenter to be a faithful servant;

To build something true in an age of digital unbelief.

We are all bound by the flaws of the wood and its natural laws.

But we are being sanded and smoothed,

Worked on and used,

And our pine will someday be restored and renewed.

The carpenter too, has been called to be with the Lord,

He has given more of himself than most of us believe we can afford.

We honor the carpenter, the man with the saw,

The one who can smooth the wood, despite its flaws.

Rest in Peace, Pappy. You’re home now.

pictured: Carl Stine & his great-granddaughter

Stretch Marks and Motherhood

I’m embarrassed to admit, because I wish that I could say I was less vain than this. But when I was pregnant, I was absolutely neurotic about stretch marks. I know not all women get like this, but I felt utterly prepared for all of the changes that my life would undergo when having a child: just not stretch marks.

I slathered coconut oil on my stomach every time I went to the bathroom, every time my skin itched, every time I felt remotely insecure about my rapidly changing body, and for the most part, every time the fear of stretch marks crossed my mind.

Of all of the things to be fearful of, why stretch marks? There’s a lot of reasons, I think, to explain this delusional fear, which I know from speaking with other mothers and mothers-to-be, infects us like a disease. Media which pounds smooth skin and 20 inch waists into our brains from the time that we are little girls, insecurities, fear about the changes that a child brings, and stretch marks represent those changes.

I think that these are all valid reasons, worthy of being dissected, but the one that I want to propose is this: We fear losing our “identities” as women in the drudgery of motherhood. We fear aging. We fear dying. We fear waking up one day and just being another fuddy duddy middle aged woman with a mini van and no individuality or spark. Ultimately, we fear selflessness. We fear being forced out of our selfish lives and into a life that is inherently selfless, whether we like it or not.

As you can see, this vein of thinking implies that any sort of bodily change and sacrifice of one’s own vanity should not be at the cost of another human being. It puts “I” first, and not just “I” as in career goals, relationships, material possessions, but I as in, something so silly as: the texture of your abdominal skin.

About halfway through my pregnancy, I had a change of heart. My husband and I went to a theatrical version of “The Velveteen Rabbit”, the well loved children’s story by Margery Williams. I will never forget hearing the dialogue between the Skin Horse and the Velveteen Rabbit:

“What is REAL?” asked the Velveteen Rabbit one day… “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When someone loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.

“Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand… once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”

When I was sitting in the audience and heard these lines, it hit me like a ton of bricks: I am becoming real. This doesn’t mean that the wear and tear doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t mean that it’s not worth grieving over, it doesn’t mean that it won’t take time to accept. It doesn’t mean that the rest of the world won’t actually see me as being a little less sparkly, as the Skin Horse had come to accept. But it does mean that your physical body becomes less important than your Love. Moreover, your physical body becomes a reminder of that love.

Just as Jesus’ body was resurrected three days after his crucifixion and walked around with physical holes in his hands, a mother bears the marks of love. The story of a birth that is marked with incredible strength and endurance, enormous courage, and the hand of a force greater than yourself which pulls the child out of you in a way that you had no inkling that you had the capability to do. Love pulls the baby out of you, just as Love pulled Jesus from the tomb, and left marks and scars on his body as a testimony to God’s love for us.

So my message is this: do not fear stretch marks, wrinkles, balding, saggy thighs, or a drooping butt. These things are all going to happen someday, regardless of how many children you have. Rather, fear the life which does not speak to the Love of Jesus, the Love of people, the Love that multiplies itself in relationships with the Other. Fear the life which you are kept insulated from the trials of the body, the life which does not bleed, stretch, bend, or wrinkle. Embrace all that which gives way to the kind of life which stretches both your skin and your heart. Embrace the cross.

“I’ve got highways for stretch marks

See how I’ve grown.”

-ani difranco

An introduction

Hello, friends.

A few days ago I made a pilgrimage to a coffee shop that I frequented while I was in college at Eastern University in Wayne, PA. I had walked a relatively long walk, baby on back, diaper bag on shoulder, a little sore and a little sweaty, to reach my destination of the Gryphon. I was delighted to purchase my overpriced cup of chai goodness upstairs, to a quiet place where Clara would not be overly stimulated and I could breastfeed without any  need for trying to be discrete. (It is true that, without fail, breastfeeding is about 3 times more exhausting in public, as it is always in public that Clara insists to be entirely sprawled on my entire upper body with my breast completely exposed).

After having some quiet time on this Sunday morning at the Gryphon, a trickling in of 25-30 year olds began to collect around me, and I realized that I was in the midst of a Presbyterian Bible study which regularly meets at the Gryphon. They kindly extended an invitation to me, and I decided to stay. After all, I frequently long for a cluster of young adult Christians. We began the discussion by introducing ourselves by name and identifying our “greatest success”. The leader of the group, a nicely dressed hipster with a great big smile, asked that we please not use any “faux humility” when discussing our successes.

What were these 25-30 year old individuals’ perceived greatest successes?

A few examples:

“I feel that I’m really good at prioritizing my relationships over my career, which makes me a really good career person, because my career revolves around relationships.” (She was an admissions counselor)

“I am fluent in a second language, which is what has inspired my career as an immigration lawyer.”

“I am called to Seminary, and I feel that my greatest success is realizing what my career path will be this year.”

And my favorite: “I interviewed with Google.”

While all of these things are well and good, this group was also filled with unemployed people who were baffled by what their “calling” is, as they tried to discern what career path they wanted, versus what careers are actually available. As the study began to evolve, it became clear that these 25-30 year olds were clearly confused about what a “calling” is. Because if God calls us to a specific career path, then why wouldn’t there be a job in line right along with it? And what does that mean for people who don’t ever achieve successful careers? Many expressed true frustration over not being able to “see how it will eventually all come together”. Where is this all headed? How will my dreams be fulfilled? I want to be a business person, a teacher, and maybe have a family on the side? I watched with horror as a well meaning bible study was turned into a quarter life crisis meltdown support group.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches the following about vocation:

“Love is the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being” (CCC 2392).

Unfortunately, we have put a lot more pressure on ourselves to broaden our “calling” to an abstract idea that is completely dependent upon a failing and crumbling economy. We are scared, frustrated, and have been taught falsehoods about what it means to have a vocation.

I am writing this blog as a woman who has been called to the Vocation of Marriage and Family. I have decided to stay at home with my child after several years of higher education, taking out loans, and “specializing” my career path. While I do not want to undermine those who have not chosen this path of what I call “domestic anarchy”, I am seeking to discuss and affirm those who have chosen this path. My aim is to discuss the ways in which families can continue to live as healthy organisms in a society that is consistently undermining the importance of children and families.

I am a 24 year old (new) mother and wife, social worker, birth doula, and wannabe homesteader living in Vermont. In this tiny and strange corner of internet domain, I hope to share the joys and trials of the everyday, but not so mundane, lives of a family just starting to navigate this decaying society. I claim no particular expertise in the area of domesticity–in fact, given the title of this blog, I will likely be shockingly mute on issues such as how to get poop stains out of diapers, or how to boil the potatoes to just the right degree of softness. I know very little of what is considered traditional “domestic intelligence”. I am a student of these things, without a doubt, and hope to someday be able to pass on this knowledge to my daughter.

The intention of this blog, more specifically, is to discuss the importance of working faithfully within our family unit in a society that consistently tells women and men that they are inadequate should they not make money or climbing the illusive ladder of professional success. 

Wendell Berry writes:

“Young people are told, ‘You can be anything you want to be.’Every student is given to understand that he or she is being prepared for ‘leadership.’All of this is a lie.…You can’t be everything you want to be; nobody can.Everybody can’t be a leader; not everybody even wants to be.And these lies are not innocent. They lead to disappointment.They lead good young people to think that if they have an ordinary job, if they work with their hands, if they are farmers of housewives or mechanics or carpenters, they are no good.”

Thanks for reading, and would love to hear from any single person who may be reading this.