I don't actually want to have a homestead....

Oh man I love modern/urban homesteading blogs, books, discussions etc.
I love to fantasize about getting chickens, goats, pigs, bees, ducks, etc.
I want to grow, can, and preserve our own food.
I want to get solar panels, and cut down our own wood for heat, and hang dry all of our laundry.
I want to tap the trees for maple syrup and sit in down each evening and be totally present with our children and play a game.
I want to brew beer,  and sew our clothes, and homeschool and live in this way.



Except that I don't.
I actually want to enjoy the simple life that we have.
To enjoy the ways that we are deeply connected to our land our environment our air.
We also want to enjoy the wonder that electricity, heat, washers and dryers, and grocery story have given us.

I want to go to work and live into the ministry I am called to, and not be a farmer.
I want to have a garden, and even though I want it too look perfectly weeded and perfectly everything- that is just because I care about what people think- I actually want a garden that is functional but human.

This garden is, in fact, a metaphor for the life I really want.
I don't want to be perfect. I want to be real.
I want the weeds to be honest, the dreams to be present, and their always to be some fruit rotten on the vine, some potatoes to dig, and some produce that is better than anything you could have imagined.

So even though I am a hippy dippy homesteader in my fantasy life, my deepest self will keep one hand in the urban and real life of cell phones, ministry, buses, cities, diversity, grocery stores etc.  And the other hand, I hope will be inmeshed somewhere in a sewing machine, or a pile of dirt, or a woodstove, or just in a snuggly evening on the couch...




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