It was the morning of Christmas Eve 2014. I went to bed with a stomach ache and I woke at 5am writhing in pain. I complained and moaned to my husband. Our flight out for Christmas was in 6 hours. We never made that flight.
By 7 am I was vomiting from the pain. At the hospital tests were run. My kidney was failing!
But I’m healthy! I eat well! I exercise! None of that matters when a congenital issue is constricting the tiny passageway to your kidney, 27 years and I just found out about it. Three surgeries later and I found myself scarred in bed looking out my window at snow. And on top of that I had been fired.
Now I’m not complaining. Sometimes bad things bring the greatest goods. I’m only setting the scene for how this event altered the course of my life and helped me realize the path I wanted to take. I was stuck at home. My husband spent a couple weeks at my request, finishing up a greenhouse that we’d started. And over the next 4 months I healed. I did it with the help of the plants. I spent every day with them in the greenhouse watching seeds sprout, writing about them, learning about them, experiencing the way they subtly communicate with us. You’d be surprised how dramatic a plant can be and how human.
I read gobs of books including the inspirational Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemingway. By the time the snow was gone I was driven by forces beyond myself. I raised gardens, built paths, started vermiculture bins and had ordered chickens. And I’d found a new job on a small organic farm.
So I guess I began because the plants told me that they were my destiny. They helped me through a time of healing. A time I felt so ultimately vulnerable until I experienced their own fragility and how despite it all they survive, even flourish, display beauty, and bear fruit. I suppose the plants inspired me, whispered to me in the way they do only to those who truly spend the time to listen and learn their language, that homesteading is the point.
Why do I homestead? What goals do I have? These answers change from season to season and year to year. The more I do, the longer I stick with it the more my ideas change on these topics. Sometimes it’s because I have the dream to provide my family with all of our own food for all four seasons, independence from grocery stores. Other times it’s to stick it to the man. Sometimes it’s for health. Others it’s just because I can’t wait to relate to the seasons newest flowers.
But when the seeds all get winnowed out what’s left is why homesteading is important to me. Because it feels right, because it heals both us and the earth, because the plants once told me, “What else is the point than to help create more beautiful life.”
What do I hope to achieve? Everything I can and Nothing more than mother nature herself.
