The Homestead Cure
I’ve been reading a few historical biographies this winter and spring that have referenced the old “go west” cure from the mid-1800’s. Young men that were sickly, nervous or fatigued were encouraged by their doctors to “go west” with the underlying belief that immersion in an adventurous, pioneering lifestyle with clean air would restore their vitality and health. I’ve been thinking a lot about this approach to health. There are many aspects about it that appeal to me. It connotes adventure, freedom, fresh air and the ability to restart life on a clean sheet. An opportunity to cultivate grit. I also think that we’ve lost the essence of this cure and that there are ways that this approach was acted upon that were ultimately shallow and non-transformative: sort of like what the twelve step tradition calls “the geographic cure” where people transport and recreate their problems in a new circumstance rather than solving them. Or in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words: “No change in circumstances can repair a defect in character.” This type of thinking lives on in our culture’s modern day elevation of travel as a means of personal growth. As though shallow, fleeting, tourist-oriented experiences of other cultures have the capacity to positively shape us at any meaningful level. In this blog post I want to tinker with this idea of the “go west” cure, isolate what I think were the curative elements from my own experiences on the homestead, and then ultimately explore ways that they can be translated into modern lifestyles.
About 4 years ago, my family and I moved to Haines Alaska. I’m from this area, having grown up in Juneau, about 90 miles down Lynn Canal. For as long as I’ve been aware of Haines, I’ve felt a draw to live here. We bought a small cabin on 7.5 acres and started clearing the land to build our home. When I first got here, I had been living a much more sedentary existence as a counselor in community mental health. I had back problems from old injuries that were aggravated by atrophy and a poor sitting posture. I was bored, restless and caught in that state of dissatisfaction that our culture labels “living for the weekend.”
The change has been pretty dramatic. Logging, saw milling, timber framing, firewood, gardening and animal husbandry have moved out of the realm of YouTube binges into my everyday lexicon. My body feels stronger, my back pain is largely a thing of the past and I get the pleasure of watching my kids enjoy a truly one of a kind childhood. Over the winter, I spent a few months blogging about where anxiety comes from and particularly about existential sources of anxiety (See blogs about: Death, Freedom, Isolation and Meaninglessness). I think one of the beauties of homesteading is that it presents an organic way to have a daily or seasonal contact with these bedrock motifs of the human experience. Aldo Leopold in the Sand County Almanac has a wonderful quote that captures this well: “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery store, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.” There’s something salient in a first hand encounter with the procurement of our human needs for housing and food as well as our exposure to life and death.
On the homestead, I have to grapple with death regularly: midwifing birthing animals, butchering livestock for our larder, hunting, and bringing in the garden as the world of growing things dies or goes into hibernation. Chasing off bears that break into where we store the dog food. Cutting down high risk trees that are hung up, or hollow. Running up against problems that stretch me way out of my comfort zone. It’s hard and sometimes heart rending, but in a way that deepens me as a person. This type of exposure strips away my denials of mortality and forces me to grapple with what it means to have a fleeting existence on this earth. I’m intensely aware of how fragile my life is in the big scheme of things and the fact that I have limitations to the challenges I’m capable of facing. The flip side is also true, I have a deeper appreciation for life each time I watch a wet slippery bundle of fur slide into the world whether it’s a puppy, a goat, pig or poultry pecking it’s way from it’s shelly womb.
A big shift that occurred when I started my private practice and left community mental health took place in my renewed sense of owning my time. What would you do if your time was really your own after years of working for and under other people? If you haven’t experienced it, it’s both invigorating and humbling. All the successes are yours, but then again, so are all the failures and short-comings. It takes a different kind of courage to take hold of your time to use it wisely. Many projects I undertake: planting food-bearing trees, playing with my kids, building our home have potential to impact multiple generations. I like to meditate as I clear brush on the possibility that someday the jungle I am taming might host grandchildren or even great-grandchildren, become pasture for critters to graze, host an orchard or a spot for my kids to build a treehouse. While my lifestyle doesn’t make me immune to getting lost in trivial pursuits, I find that there is almost always a meaningful alternative at hand. There is also a built in feed-back mechanism to combat procrastination - If I don’t haul in wood, the cabin is cold and the waterlines freeze. If I don’t plow snow, we loose access to the road. If I don’t go fishing with the kids, they pester me until I do. I find that I drag my feet less about things that need to get done than I used to. We all have a tendency to put our heads in the sand when problems arise. Whether it’s a partner that is slowly developing an addiction, a strange rattle coming from under the hood of your car, or that funny cough that your milk goat develops - it’s a sign of growth to be able to press into new unknown problems rather than ignore them, hoping that they’ll go away.
In rural life, one area of tension can be in how one manages solitude. I often tell my clients that solitude freely chosen can be a gift and am not above prescribing it from time to time to facilitate introspection. To the extent we can sit with our loneliness for a moment and not numb it out we increase our motivation to cultivate greater authenticity in our relationships. It’s almost as though, the absence of connection makes the connections that are available that much more important. In rural life, I find that there are fewer options socially which means that the relationships at hand are the ones you have and it’s on you and the “other" to make them work. In cities or bigger towns sometimes people go on perpetual searches for that perfect friend, or partner, or boss or Church. When your options are limited, you’re less likely to view relationships as disposable and are more willing to dig in and do the work to make them work. There’s more utility in learning to tolerate differences of opinion and culture. In a rural setting there’s also a creative tension between self-reliance and interdependence that takes the form of a work-sharing economy built on mutual respect, trust and appreciation. Everyone drives their own bus, but there’s some comfort in knowing that there is usually a helping hand if your bus breaks down. My wife and I joke about other homesteaders “up the highway” as being our “comrades in farms.” We swap seeds, critters, labor, know-how and stories as we build connection and community.
All these lifestyle inputs weave together into a whole that is very satisfying and meaningful while also being more painful and challenging than the lifestyle I was used to pre-homestead. Sometimes we make the puzzle of building a meaningful life too complicated and grandiose and become discouraged and disillusioned with life. We wonder why we’re here or what our purpose is. What if a meaningful life is less about great achievements, notoriety, public accolades and more about living right? The humble pleasures of growing one’s food, animal husbandry, healthy relationships, spirituality and contact with the natural world meet my criteria for healthy meaning-making in their connectivity, durability and sustainability. I also have a private theory that it provides a rhythm of living much closer to how we evolved than the more typical western lifestyle. I remember as a kid feeling a mile high when I would shoot a grouse after school to add to the family fare. I still get that feeling whenever I sit down to a meal made up of things that my family and I have grown, raised, milked or hunted.
I could go on and on about other benefits of this lifestyle: built in exercise, nutrient dense healthy food, time to step back and reflect, opportunities for entrepreneurial skill development. I could also go on about the travails of frozen pipes, vehicle break downs, DIY repairs and livestock illnesses. Despite the difficulties, I would have to say that I’m sold on the homestead cure as a means of building sustainability, community, health and wellness. If you’re reading this and thinking it’s out of reach for your current lifestyle, take heart and stay with me for a few more sentences. Though I have chosen to build my life around this lifestyle, there are many ways to inject the curative elements of this system into your life. Here are a few ideas to get you started: Grow a herb garden in your windowsill, build some raised garden beds in your yard, have a backyard chicken flock, get some space in a community garden, plant a fruit or nut tree, recycle or repurpose your waste stream, meet and find ways to cherish your neighbors, swap skills helping friends with projects, make your “to-do” list prioritize your values and cross one thing off your list each week, buy local food and get to know the farmers, ranchers or fishermen, remove as many middle men in your food chain as possible. Do you hanker after a lifestyle in contact with the bedrock elements of the human experience?
