Published by www.life-craft.org • Mar 20, 2024
‘Homesteading,’ whatever exactly it is, runs deep in the American psyche and history. Vast stretches of our nation were settled through it. A great number of our forebears—and here I do not mean only settlers or pioneers but people living for generations in one place—lived, worked, and passed on a holding that is rightly called a homestead.
Today homesteading is much talked of, and indeed we might even call it a movement. This, I think, is a very good and telling reality. Clearly, as a society we are realizing we have lost something we need to recover. The tricky thing is to discern just what it is we’ve lost and then how, and also why, to get it back. Here it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees; or perhaps rather, to miss a certain way of life for the field on which it was once lived, and might, just might, be lived again.
The best proximate reason to homestead is to save our families. I don’t use the word ‘save’ lightly. Yet the reality is that our family life is not just threatened, it’s on life-support or even hospice in many places where it hasn’t already perished. I have seen too much and spoken with too many people to doubt the seriousness of our situation. But there is always a way forward.
0 Comments