What is planting time if not thinking ahead? Maybe the garden teaches us that the “live for now” mantra isn’t all that healthy. Maybe learning to think about what we can’t see matters hugely. Time and time again I look to the garden for wisdom. It has undone so much propaganda in my brain around so many topics about which we are fed simplified reductions. Planting season is but one example: the idea that we must act now on what we envision. The concept of delayed gratification is almost obsolete in the corporate world, yet we homesteaders understand that to realize beauty we must imagine. This is in direct opposition to corporate culture intent on getting one to simplify every moment, to wrench dopamine out of every moment. We homesteaders imagine fruit and vegetables we wish to eat. We wonder if the soil has been fed enough and loved enough to make offerings of reciprocity to us in the form of bountiful harvest. This cradling, see-sawing, sharing weight and space: that beautiful give and take – will it make health? Well, so often – it does! That is homestead healing.
There may be a point, when you are getting started, where a homestead simply means staying home. Maybe, in some stay-home houses a majority of time is spent online, or in our own stubborn sluggish gravitational morass. But, when we begin to craft and shape and love that home space, suddenly we are homesteading!
Stead means the place or role that someone or something should have or fill, and it is from the indo-european root shared by the word stand. Maybe that’s part of how homesteads manifest, by making the home the place of creation, income, safety, morality: instead of the bigger wider corporate world out there. For me, the homestead is a place to make things right, or at least more right. Off the homestead, things are just so dysfunctional, and lacking compassion and kindness which are tenets of how I wish to live and be in this world. A homestead is a place to find yourself, be yourself, love yourself, and think for yourself: so that you can find others, love others, and accept disparate ways of thinking outside yourself. A healthy homestead gives me the ability to be inspired by others, and connect meaningfully with others, even as their “way” may be radically different than mine. Homesteads are very much about reclaiming healing space by prioritizing the ecosystems in which they reside, as a basic starting place for engaging with the rest of the world. They are varied, as varied as the people who inhabit them, but they each are held by a pact the homesteader makes with the earth from which they seek sustenance. That pact must be centered in reciprocity for success. That pact, well held and loved and tended, will provide in a way corporate reality never will.
As the homesteading women of the Illinois Valley rise, hands held in a Motherline stronger than spider silk, we now offer our skills outward. This is how we will provide for the youth and elders in our Illinois Valley home. Your subscription to The Motherline online is how we are creating sustainability for the arts and agriculture programs we love. These programs transform and strengthen our youth. They help us regain health from generational boom and bust economies, rural isolation, and entrenched “poverty”. But we are not poor. Our connection to our earth and our growing skills toward creating an economy of repair make us wealthy. It’s a kind of wealth that doesn’t extract, because never was there a more true phrase than “All flourishing is mutual.” Please consider helping yourself by helping the Illinois Valley rise and re-create what is possible in rural places. Plus, you won’t want to miss all the Homestead Help videos, as they become available for our subscribers! Join the line at www.themotherline.org!