Introducing my favorite new word!

Yesterday I was washing dishes at my kitchen sink, which happens to be outdoors, and which doesn’t happen to have running water, and I was thinking of how grateful I was to be out in nature under the birds and the rustling leaves, even while getting a mundane chore done.  I could hear my younger kids working on their fort in the trees just uphill from my sink, and I enjoyed the evening sunshine that filtered through the woods and down to me.  I did a lot of dishes because I had gotten way behind, but it was no problem because it’s so easy to warm up a ton of hot water in the sun over, on these sunny summer days.  Even the cold water that I carried over in a bucket, to mix in with the overheated sun oven water, wasn’t very cold.

I have in the past struggled to find a word to capture this lifestyle.  It’s not quite that same as what most of my homesteading friends do, nor is it much like the primitive skills lifestyle that the kids and I had when we used to live in a tipi or later in a wall tent.  But I just found the word in an article that a friend shared with me: it’s neopeasantry!  That one word is a revelation!  This business of picking and choosing to reduce my footprint on the planet as much as possible, while still having some amount of efficiency and comfort in my life, is perfectly described by neopeasantry, and I’m adopting the word starting now!

At my “woodstead”, we have a modern, plastic water tank to store winter water in for use in the summer, and we run that water to the garden and to just outside the house using polypipe.  However, the pipe stops outside because I didn’t want the unthinking ease of indoor running water.  For 8 months out of the year, I cook/bake/toast/heat water exclusively on the woodstove, and then in summer generally choose to fall back to my small propane stove, and my sun oven.   We do have electricity available at one charging station in our house, but my solar system is less than 1 kW, and with 5 of us sharing, we sure have to be careful not to waste a single amp in the winter.  We don’t have a fridge, just a really good ice box, but we bring that ice up up here after it’s been frozen by on-grid electricity down in the valley.  We use an outdoor shower all year round, again with no running water, just using hot water from the woodstove or sun oven and a basin/scoop system.  If you haven’t tried an outdoor shower on a frigid day in January, then you are missing out, and I’m not joking; it’s wonderful.

Anyway, I love the idea of neopeasantry as a continuum of discarding modern things that can be done without, as much as possible in a given place and time.  Not only does each simplification make it easier to feel the connection to the fundamentals of being a human and a part of nature, but it also reduces the material needs for the endless consumption that is such a part of modern life.  And thinking of neopesantry as a spectrum means that you don’t suddenly succeed and become a certified NeoPeasant; you just do your best to make conscious choices and let go of conveniences that are wasteful, when you can spot them.  But I’ll tell you from experience, it’s a slippery slope: it feels good to make a choice to simplify one thing, and then one more choice feels even better, and then after a few years you may find that you have to move out to raw natural land so that you can more easily live with simplicity…  

Also to be clear, my choices are not without drawbacks and compromises.  I have a lot of friends who grow bigger gardens and preserve more food than I do, largely because they take advantage of systems that do include more resources, like running water and larger kitchens to work in.  I continue to work toward a bigger garden and less reliance on the grocery store, but some of my rustic choices do tend to make things harder.  Which is more important, keeping the homestead simple, or growing more food?  Here is the answer: neither.  The answer is, the important thing is to live a life of conscious choosing, so that it’s right for you, and the place that you are in, and the things you value the most.

I have been thinking about life choices a lot lately as we Motherliners join up to pick up all the trash in the woods.  How can people be consuming so much?  How can there be so much plastic – a material that will never, ever decompose in a good way and go “away”.  How do we move away from all that trash without making it overly difficult to be a functional person?

Cindy

PS. We have some Homestead Help videos of my water systems and cooking systems, in the Motherline Online membership.  If you’re curious how it all works, become a member and watch the videos!