It Isn't Really Hard

Sometimes we are on water rations. Sometimes the road is rough and we park in the front and walk the quarter mile or so on up to the house. We cut wood and do most everything else with hand tools instead of engines. We raise a lot of our own food. We put up a lot of our own food. Vegetables and meat and eggs. We cook from scratch. We milk a cow, make butter and cheese for ourselves. Although we don’t grow our own wheat, we buy wheat in bulk and grind it fresh. If something happens in the house or on the farm, we aren’t jumping in the driver’s seat and on our way to town to buy a solution.

And most people think all that stuff is very inconvenient. Or that we are some sort of noble savages to choose to live like this. Or something. Anyway, whatever it is that other people might or might not think, I figured out at least part of what it really is. Any of that stuff is “hard” or “inconvenient” ONLY to the extent that we have truck with the conventional world.

Take my stint at jury duty for instance. It wasn’t hard or even all that early, but it did so happen that every day I had to go in was cold and one day it snowed. On the inconvenient side, I had to milk the cow before I could go, and since the road is its typical winter mucked up self, I had to walk the quarter mile to the car then get the frost and ice off and only then get on the road to go. But if jury duty hadn’t called me out, I wouldn’t have had to milk so early or any of the rest of that. If I don’t have to go anywhere, who cares that the car is a quarter mile away?

During my year spent working for wages, it affected farm life in that same way. What is easy when we are here and in control of our own schedule becomes more difficult when we have to meet someone else’s schedule. No matter how nice they are about it.

And I’ll tell you, even if it were more inconvenient or harder, I still would rather live on the farm. I would rather struggle and slog and have to try so hard that I don’t feel like I’m going to live through it and stay on the farm. I have no words other than it is a place that makes my heart sing.

But the thing is, I get to eat the most wonderful food, be in really good physical shape without really trying, be with people I really enjoy, do things that are productive, useful and enjoyable in themselves and that are often meditations in themselves, engage in art for life’s sake, help out neighbors, and more stuff along those lines. All the stuff that life really is about.