New Options

Today's weather were we live:
Temperature: 73, alternating sunny and big clouds
Wind: NW at 14 mph; it seems very cool and breezy
Humidity: 29%

As I consider various dissertation topics for the PhD program I'm currently working my way through (just now at the end of year 2 in a 5 year program), I'm giving serious thought to modern homesteading as a research topic. Rebecca Kneale Gould's book, At Home in Nature, offers some superb historical and theoretical resources, as she writes about "homesteading" from Thoreau to Wendel Berry, with special emphasis upon the Nearings.

More, a dissertation (basically, a book-length project that takes three-years to complete and that ideally becomes an actual book) focused, for instance, upon the writings of Scott and Helen Nearing and the ways in which these writings are selectively and creatively taken up, applied, argued with, rejected, and so forth, by later generations of homesteaders, would bring together personal and academic aspects of my own life, making room in my mind for a life that integrated homesteading and public intellectual practices.

So, this blog is back. I'll leave all of our previous posts up so that later readers might see clearly the crazy (and indeed embarrassing) ups and downs, in and utter outs, of homesteading we've been through. As read more in Gould's book, I see that we're hardly alone in this, and that the full, complete, and successful switch over to a homesteading life is a radical re-writing of our cultural programming affecting virtually every activity. In the entries that follow, I'll be writing about my research, our attempts to re-imagine "homesteading" in ways that allow us to do everything that we want to do (e.g., have a blog, which requires computers, electricity, an Internet connection), and our efforts aimed at re-creating some basic homesteading elements here at a suburban property we rent.

Thus far, we've been collecting our compostable garbage in a bowl each day and I'm taking it out to the old compost bin each evening. I'll need to do some work with leaves and soil and straw - adding them to the bin - here soon. It's not very ambitious, but with so much other work required of us, graduate programs and jobs, it's the best we can do toward a natural, organic (i.e., not forced) approach to re-beginning.