“Rural people are irrelevant,” he quipped.  A good friend was explaining to me how inconsequential he viewed rural America to be with regard to the greater world order and the impending wars festering in so many regions.  I took a long deep internal breath contemplating the most impactful way to respond, and have been thinking about that statement ever since.  

Actually, rural spaces are where innovation has the time and space to happen.  It is where people with real, incredible skill sets live.  It is where the new frontier of thriving in the age of climate precarity is being born.  It is where free speech and thought between differing viewpoints is still allowed.  The Motherline is intentionally and determinedly non political.  We unite around a singular intention: planet protection.  That is by design.  Because, in rural places we are less, and sometimes more, vulnerable to propaganda, but we are also connected by a tenet at least as strong as the religious/ political one: our effort and desire to live outside of dysfunctional systems.  We all come from different places, with different goals, but a deep desire to ‘live away from it all’ is prevalent.  This reality results in some benefits and some challenges.  The space can open up potential for dysfunctional family systems, addiction, and abuse.  Conversely, the space can open up potential for reflection, improvement, and more conscious living.

We at The Motherline are determined to use the gifts of rural space and time to re-create our culture.  We aren’t co-opting indigenous ways of living.  We aren’t hating on one system over another.  We want to render dysfunctional systems obsolete by creating ways of thriving that don’t depend on extracting from the earth.  That’s because a healthy earth is the great equalize: it is the fair and even ground we all must have to thrive.  Clean air, water and soil give us all the chance to have meaningful lives, no matter what traumas or challenges we will deal with in our lifetimes.

The Pioneering Women of the Illinois Valley believe homesteading is an antidote, a potion of sorts for living more in alignment with our values.  We also happen to think that homesteading, even in a city apartment, has a huge potential to impact the fate of this earth on which we depend.  And because our children are so important to us, as is our flora and fauna, we care deeply about proliferating homesteading wisdoms out into the world.  

I type  this with swollen hands, having battled crabgrass for much of the day yesterday.  I am grateful for that work, and the metaphors that run through my head as I tackle a seemingly insurmountable problem.  There is art to gardening in relationship with crabgrass that the world would do well to understand.  One of the most important tenets is that yanking violently is never a good idea.  Hacking makes it worse.  But slow, gentle pulling can be effective.  Building beautiful soil upward that it seeks to inhabit and luring it toward a softer surface  makes a dent.  

The homestead has much to teach us about social predicaments.  But perhaps the greatest opportunity homesteading extends is offering the time and space for personal growth. We welcome you to join us!   We are releasing new films every week to help you on your journey.  Mamas together can rise and re-assert a way forward.  We can do this by creating cultures, or soils of repair: softer gentler ground from which we can pull at noxious grasses that seek to destroy and hoard.  That is a soil that will bear bountiful harvests even in these precarious times.