Making sense of it all
This week, @ecotrain asks us to list five covid19 consequences that were positive... What has come out of this thing I can deem good?
We sat down, together with family or maybe it was a zoom call... I can't remember but what matters is what we all had talked about. It was pretty much the same question! What kind of positivity had the virus brought us thus far.
With this exercise, we're asked to find five consequences. Here are mine:
Being home, not on a job. My biggest most positive thing during all this was being home every day. I am constantly trying to make my dreams come true so being forced to stay home helped me tremendously.
We were able to build a new shed, a bigger garden, and continue our barn raising.
Deeper understanding of owning my time. It kind of goes hand in hand with the previous consequence, but think about it for a moment... What does owning your time really mean? We're in a society that sees value in trading time for money. We're pretty much living in mental slavery... Working for the things we own is really an illusion, our possessions end up owning us.
I see a lot more people talking about self-reliance and that's what we're working on, here on the homestead.
Creating safe space. As our world started opening up again, I was happy to have created space for friends and family to come to when they needed to get out of their small city apartments!!!
While we weren't all entirely practicing safe guidelines all the time, those who wanted to were able to stay distanced, and still feel like the world was as before. We help birthday parties, watched movies on a big screen by the fire, ate like kings, and these became moments of pure freedom where everyone mostly forgot lockdowns had happened.
Growing our passive income. We had signed up to a website that is similar to airbnb but it's for camping. This year while people were in lock down and unable to go outside of the cities as freely as before, they grew a real need to get out to the woods. When the world around New York City started opening up again, but were still not allowed to go to work, people came in droves. The demands for breathing fresh air and being in large open spaces without a crowd grew, our campsites were booked almost seven days a week. This put us in a good position as far as Hipcamp goes, we're now what they call a star host which gives us a slight advantage in the site listings, we're more visible.
If you want to know more about this site you can read more about it here in a post I wrote just a couple days ago. Aslo by clicking on our referral link here you and I will make $100 each , after your first booking!
Starting a business. I have put in motion the necessary steps to start another business that I think fits the homestead lifestyle perfectly: Junk Removal.
There are more and more people moving to the country, new homes are being bought everyday around here, the rate of foreclosures and evictions will most likely rise come February. Due to covid-19 temporary laws and regulations, landlords and banks have not been allowed to force people out of their homes, which is very unfortunate for the families who have lost their income, but there are also those who decided to simply stop paying rent because of these laws only. Either way all of that means there will be quite a lot junk to be removed from new and old homes alike... it's just a prediction but I do believe this is our opportunity to get into a business that could benefit building our homestead on a couple different fronts.
- This side income should be enough for me to stay home more often instead of traveling two hours away from work and only coming home on the weekends (I hate that very much).
- Within the junk people want to remove, there are homestead treasures we'll want to keep and/or sell.
- We can grow our social capital, which is also important in building community. Check out this post to read more about the 8 forms of capital
