agrarians anonymous
Between my intrinsic hippy tendencies, childhood during the late 80s/early 90s, time spent in college in the Northwest, and a recent trip to North Carolina... I've realized something that's been a long time coming. It's embarrassing and shameful and blatantly hypocritical, but despite years of fighting it, I can't any more. I've got to admit it, even if only to myself.
I want to live and work on a farmstead.
I fear it's because I've only ever known farms and the like as this mystical magical happy land of hard work and simple living, and I also fear it's because I am secretly a 60 year old man whom that appeals to. I know intellectually that rural life is hard and unstable... there's no medical insurance, no money, and no free time. There's a reason why there's so few farmers left in this country. It sucks.
But there's still this nagging notion in the back of my mind that whispers temptingly: subsistence farming is entirely possible, even relaxing, if you just try it. Become an architect, buy a plot of rural land, retire and live easily off your savings. It can happen. It's possible.
Because see, I want to be a hippy. God help me, I want to be an organic, synthetic-chemical-free raw food make-your-own-soap living-off-the-land hippy and I want it bad. I can taste it like patchouli. I don't even like patchouli.
I want to move back to the Northwest and build a zero-energy house that has solar panels and solar heating and well water - maybe on a few acres that has a creek running through it and a pasture for a couple of rescued horses and an alpaca and a goat and a small orchard and organic vegetable garden and some chickens. There'll be a shed for work tools, and another shed for making soap and whatnot and for Juu's more chemically involved art projects.
There. It's out.
I want to live and work on a farmstead.
I fear it's because I've only ever known farms and the like as this mystical magical happy land of hard work and simple living, and I also fear it's because I am secretly a 60 year old man whom that appeals to. I know intellectually that rural life is hard and unstable... there's no medical insurance, no money, and no free time. There's a reason why there's so few farmers left in this country. It sucks.
But there's still this nagging notion in the back of my mind that whispers temptingly: subsistence farming is entirely possible, even relaxing, if you just try it. Become an architect, buy a plot of rural land, retire and live easily off your savings. It can happen. It's possible.
Because see, I want to be a hippy. God help me, I want to be an organic, synthetic-chemical-free raw food make-your-own-soap living-off-the-land hippy and I want it bad. I can taste it like patchouli. I don't even like patchouli.
I want to move back to the Northwest and build a zero-energy house that has solar panels and solar heating and well water - maybe on a few acres that has a creek running through it and a pasture for a couple of rescued horses and an alpaca and a goat and a small orchard and organic vegetable garden and some chickens. There'll be a shed for work tools, and another shed for making soap and whatnot and for Juu's more chemically involved art projects.
There. It's out.