Month: February 2025

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Outline for Simplified Homeschooling

It is often over thought out or formalized when starting a home school, just like when you start a homestead…we buy pre-made everything, feed, structures, feeders, etc. In homeschooling we immediately go out and purchase expensive curriculum or enroll in some online tool that does all the work for us…or so we think.

The Learning Day – All Ages

  • Let your children see you reading, writing and discussing what you yourself are learning.

  • Read from the books you are reading to all your kids, and be sure to discuss what is learned, what is intriguing, and how it relates to your lives. Discussions are the primary tool of learning in the home. Include even the youngest who is capable of complete sentences.

  • Give your children active roles in the running of the home and business; these must be age appropriate. Every child is an apprentice from the day they are born, because they learn everything from you.

The Learning Day – Pre-Literacy Ages

  • Read to your younger children, ask them about the story. Let them read parts of it to you, even though they are only regurgitating what they have memorized from reading the book for the 30th evening in a row.

  • Sing the ABCs, or play songs that do so, but it is ideal if the songs have some fundamental phonics included (i.e. “The A says a”, “The B says buh,” etc.). Once they can sing the ABCs, start slowing down the reading time and show them how to sound out the letters. It is crucial for sanity’s sake to assign partners to read to the younger kids as well, as the skills to teach will be needed when they are parents.

  • Have the children begin to copy letters from handwriting booklets, you can make these with handwriting paper bought at the store, or get marker/chalk boards. When they can do this, have them copy words. After they can read the words they copy, then have them copy sentences from the books that are read to them. You can also have them begin to write stories of their own, using phonics rules…don’t fret misspelling so as to not discourage. The copying of sentences and words will fix this eventually.

  • Have the little ones, that are learning to count, keep track of how many eggs were collected, when they seem to have the one to one correspondence down, start asking them questions about how many eggs we need for everyone to have 1 egg today…then when they got that, ask how many we need for the whole week. Let them work it out for a while on their own with as little guidance as possible, perhaps keep cartons labeled with the days of the week, or in our case several cartons per day as we are a family of 16. Anytime you are working out numbers for feeding, harvesting, etc. include the “littles” in your process.

The Learning Day – Post Literacy Ages

It is at this time learning to read is coming to an end, and reading to learn is beginning.

  • This is when daily discussions about what the kids are reading is extremely important. When you have to explain what you read it enforces retention and comprehension.

  • It is also important that reading religion, philosophy, history, science and economics content to all your children occurs. Sit them all down in the living room or dinner table, read and discuss excerpts that you read out loud.

  • For the skill based content, like math, physics and chemistry, there are copious amounts of online resources to drill these concepts.

  • For your children learning arithmetic, simple drill of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing various types of numbers (i.e. decimals, integers, fractions, etc.) will be enough.

  • Include your children in construction projects and have them learn measurement of boards and angles of attachment.

  • Include them when you calculate feed macro-nutrient percentages, or scooping ratios for the feed.

  • Fractions, proportions and cooking are essential skills for all kids.

  • Let them build with building blocks, boards, pallets, etc. They will gain an intuition about Geometry and logic even from a very young age.

The Learning Day – Secondary School Ages

It is now that your children’s wisdom is really taking off.

  • You will really need to identify with them what their strengths and talents are, and let them take off with those.

  • The formal teaching of logic and rhetoric are very important at this time.

  • They can begin self teaching all the subjects and keeping common place journals where they put all the notes, concepts and definitions into them.

  • In these journals it is important they write mini essays where they follow the Feynman technique or an equivalent technique to self-assess their own understanding. All the reading and discussion up to this point in their life will make this much easier.

  • Mathematical Sciences and the Humanities will be enforced with the Feynman technique by its unique ability to develop rhetoric, the art of effective writing/speaking.

  • Logic will be foundational so that coherent, consistent thought will be produced.

  • The creative arts should be encouraged, and there are online resources for these (i.e. art, music, storytelling, etc.)

  • Basic statistics should be taught, but this is dependent on strong foundations in logic. This is just to prevent the lies and distortions in the media from being blindly believed.

  • Applied Geometry and Basic Algebra can enable critical thinking and life skills in managing a homestead…but if their is mathematical aptitude, it is highly encouraged to pursue mathematics as a philosophical way of thinking and approaching the world, so advanced mathematics can be taught for its own sake, just like philosophy or the natural sciences.

Key Take Aways

This broad outline is intentionally non-prescriptive, so you can buy the books you want your kids reading, and the books you wish to read and share with them. Also, for mathematics and science so much is available online. The New Peasantry is developing curriculum guidance and resources for the humanities, mathematics and natural sciences, that enable parents to guide their children’s learning.

  

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Homestead Home School Curriculum

Home-schooling and processing my own firewood are the very catalysts that led our family to homesteading. My wife and I had been teaching in the public school system for nearly 7 years before starting our home school. I had already been blocking and splitting our own firewood for heating our home. I followed You Tubers like Buckin’ Billy Ray and Farmhand’s Companion to learn about wood processing. From FHC, I discovered the beauty of having a milk cow. I wanted one. We were going to get one. Suffice it to say, the journey to homesteading began with homeschooling, and now it has led to home business. We are coming home.

There are so many things coming home has done, and continues to do, for our entire family. The lessons learned in homeschooling have been many. The most important lesson learned for educating our kids has been accepting that each child has unique gifts and abilities. We have spent lots of money purchasing different curriculum for everyone to do, only to quickly adapt and allow for a mixture of many resources to generate a love of learning for its own sake. In fact, the more rigid and scholastic the less the kids get from it. The deep and simple conversations we have as family about life, history, science, economics are what last in our children’s minds…not copious amounts of book reports that suck the life out of novels and history books.

The next would be that the homestead is rich with learning experiences, and must be central to a curriculum. Not everything has to be on paper with a letter grade…although having children write, draw, paint and sing about it, is excellent, and best done organically, not by rigid force, since the purpose of education is not found in utilitarian control. Not formalizing activities to death encourages love of learning. For example, on the homestead, the scientific method is learned quickly and intuitively through trying things out with an expectation of an outcome, only to learn that something else may work better, or not at all.

  • Like learning that red light spectrum does much more for winter egg laying than bright white lights;

  • A buck and two does in a rabbit colony doesn’t always work out;

  • Dairy cows give birth in 279 days and their belly’s drastically change shape right before calving;

  • Diet chemistry is extremely important before, during, and after calving.

There are so many more things to touch on that the traditional classroom cannot provide in the empirical sciences.

The last I will touch on, but by no means the end of the list for homesteading curricular resources, is the familial bonds and relationships grown in the home. The trials, tribulations, consolations, joys and losses are shared by a small community joined through deep love. This cannot be taught in public school. The reasons?

  • Not enough time,

  • Homogeneous group of individuals forced into rows and columns or small groups,

  • No allotment for free learning as recess is reduced more and more or its formalized and controlled,

  • Everything scheduled and focused on the clock, and finally

  • The kids go home to spend only a couple hours with family where there is very little structure for solving problems together…at least not without contrived and scheduled force.

Simply put, the home teaches compassion, generosity, and forgiveness like no other institution.

Subscribe and follow us as we guide other families through the great triad of subsistence life: home school, homesteading and home business . We will be providing curriculum guidance and teaching classical education courses to help you guide your children for very little cost.

Education can be free and public, it doesn’t have to come from a government or private school.

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The Age of the Autodidact – Self Learner

You are replaceable if all you ever do is learn a single skill for a single application. Machines do this, AI does this. You must actually be educated to adapt to this new digital age. Education is the knowledge of principles and potential applications of them, in all facets of human experience…

In order to learn anything, the skill or concept must have a bucket to be placed in…a place in your mind, in your experience. You could read 100 books and take copious notes, but if you do not have buckets to place the ideas into, you won’t remember a thing. It is when we make connections in the ideas we read about, and find connections to things we have already experienced that we actually retain what we have learned.

Science: Organized Body of Knowledge Developed to Understand a Given Subject

There are many sciences, but unless we actually know what science means in its original context, we begin to view science as an esoteric set of skills and knowledge that has gate keepers in white coats, whom we believe without question, because they are the clerics of the new religion. We never blink an eye when tomorrow they pronounce new dogmas that completely contradict the dogmas they pronounced yesterday. It is of great importance that we understand science as a means to understanding, not the definitive end to understanding.

Here are some buckets to place all you learn into, these are ancient buckets, developed by the Greeks and given a rebirth in the middle ages:

The Trivium and Quadrivium can be broken down further into new arts. These additional arts emerged since the time of St. Thomas Aquinas. None the less they are simply connections between the original arts or sub categories of them. For example, Arithmetic and Geometry are connected by Logic (Dialectic) and the mathematical sciences. Furthermore, Arithmetic, Astronomy and Geometry are necessary for Physics, which is the science of our shared experience in the natural world; this includes biology, chemistry, etc. Ethics (study of morality), and Metaphysics (study of being) are sciences heavily dependent on logic, grammar and rhetoric and inform our spirituality helping us know what is good. These are the arts that inform the science of the humanities. Finally music touches the soul with beauty as does the visual arts, which both can and do inform architecture, design and our experience in the natural world…thus they are understood through physics and experienced through creativity and spirituality. All is connected and none is mutually exclusive, therefore an educated person can never be specialized, unless this person be disintegrated…unbalanced…disconnected.

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Are Our Youth Capable of Recognizing Evil and Their Own Voluntary Enslavement?

The time is upon us when the truncated vocabularies we all have make it nearly impossible to recognize our own ignorance and lack of freedom due to it. In George Orwell’s 1984 in chapter ten, a scene expresses the very consequences of dumbing down a civilization.

During a film shown at a hate rally, a helicopter is shown firing on a lifeboat full of refugees. A woman in the audience begins to protest, but is quickly silenced by those around her.

She begins to yell amidst the audience:

“They didn’t ought to have showed it not in front of kids,’ she said. ‘They didn’t it ain’t right not in front of kids, it ain’t.'”

This scene is significant because it highlights the Party’s control over information and the suppression of dissent. Even though the woman is clearly upset by what she sees, she lacks the vocabulary and power to effectively express her feelings.

Today our schools create enemies and a false sense of oppression and victimhood to keep the children’s eyes focused anywhere but where the actual oppression finds its genesis. In the process less learning about how to think, write and speak is happening, and the only learning is telling students what to think, how to speak about it, and possibly write a semi-coherent explanation of, why they were born a boy and how society is keeping them from being the girl they have been convinced they are. These false narratives keep minds enslaved to the Party line…whatever it may be…today…tomorrow…or years from now. The only revolution for the Party is to maintain a constant revolution.

It is easy to pick on public schools today…I do not think free public education is bad, in fact I believe it is necessary…if it is actually free, and by that I do not only mean it costs the student nothing, but that it allows for dissenting opinions and views among the students and enables student’s to actually engage in debate to find Truth. This includes and depends on Teachers who teach socratically and demand students support their conclusions logically and coherently.

It is the goal of The New Peasantry to provide guidance on how to educate our children to be deep thinkers, impervious to vapid and shallow contradictory newspeak spewed from the Party….those who promote constant revolution and create oppressed classes from thin air.

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Education or Training? Your Child May Not be Getting Either of These

You walk up to your Child sitting on the couch with a school iPad, and ask, “What are you learning?” and the response most undoubtedly is, a shrug and head shake, or if you are lucky you may actually get a spoken word.

“I don’t know…ugh.”

Today’s schools, and for the large part of the past 20th century, had a singular goal of preparing your child for a career, in which they have to go to college to qualify for jobs they would need, in order to pay the debt they would most definitely accrue. This system has been very lucrative, as the schools get tremendous funding per enrollment, and they give the hope of a merit scholarship. The reality…after graduation, your child is sent with a federal aide application, and they get a large loan. The college gets the money, and it matters not if the child finishes, the money is already in the college coffers.

As I went through this system, as I am sure many of you did, and ultimately taught for six years in this system, a pattern emerged in what I saw. The content was not the actual goal of the school, it was teaching kids to complete tasks on time, following the directions as prescribed, and maintaining order…this became the most apparent when I began working in the corporate world. The corporate world is an extension of rows and columns, group think, group work, specialization, and never questioning the status quo…at least not in earnest. The rebellious urge is satisfied with pointing to anyone or anything other than the school system as the source of tyranny.

All this being the current state of free public education, I want you to know, there is a way out. There is a way to raise your child to be a free person with a creative and deep mind, who can adapt to the world, not be a victim of it.

The New Peasantry has a mission to rebuild families, to support going home, and building community, through: Subsistence Homesteading, Homeschooling, and Family Business. We provide guidance on educating your child, balancing the needs of a home and the ever necessary cash flow to fix and progress the home based business.

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We are all Peasants Now

Introduction

The yeomen of ancient times produced food on their own land, on a Lord’s land, traded labor or goods for food, or found themselves destitute simply begging and consuming what others produced. We are all farmers of content, or simply consumers of content, or both.

Digital Content Creation as Subsistence Farming

We, like these ancients, find ourselves in an analogous situation. We plant digital content, channel the waters of traffic to this content, the followers consume, and if they are grateful enough, they repay the growing tree with the compost of money. In this context, and if you ever grew anything, you know that compost, good compost, is GOLD.

I do not want to overstate the connection between digital subsistence and real subsistence. The two forms of sustaining ourselves are inseparable in my journey, which is the great marriage of digital farming and actually raising our own food. This has become my obsession to live a simple and sustainable life.

Sustainability

Sustainability has become a chronically under-appreciated concept in my life and “career.” As many who continue to experience job layoffs in the tech industry, egg shortages in the grocery stores, and the extraordinary instability in the economy, both globally and at home, we are faced with some choices to make.

  • Continue to go to work for an employer or start our own business

  • Continue to depend 100% on the grocery store or grow what we can and depend on community farmers

  • Continue to have our children trained to provide narrowly skilled labor to employers as wage slaves, or educate the whole person to be a free person, a free thinker, who adapts and thrives.

These choices are not comprehensive, as you will see in my future posts, because so many sacrifices and decisions make or break our journey to sustainability.

What Can We Do?

Ultimately, we are being called to produce fruit, whether that is actual, digital or both. The industrial age is gone, this new digital age does not have room for a career mentality as it is forcing us to engage with our own replace-ability. We are too expensive as senior employees to keep in the corporations, and only a small number are needed to guide and coach the much cheaper inexperienced hires, who also struggle to get work as the more experienced junior employee is sought after…so what are the too expensive, too old, or too new to do?

Join The New Peasantry…the New Digital Revolution

Join my family and I, as we discover the answer to this. We are farming our homestead, forming our children for entrepreneurship rather than a career, through homeschooling, and developing products and services to help those who join us on this path. There will be struggles, successes, losses, and failures…but I am certain joy and peace will be at the end of this. Blessings to my digital and local community who join us…and to all who are undecided.

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The Loneliness of Motherhood

I’ve read that the mental load a mom carries is quite heavy.  Perhaps this was just a way to accuse moms of being overly worried.  I’m not the chill mom, though I’m sure life would be much easier for everyone if I were.  I try to not be overbearing and controlling or a worry wart, but unfortunately these tendencies have been written into my being since childhood and removing them has been unsuccessful and exhausting.

Whatever the reasons of carrying a large mental load, I think it’s an unspoken and often lonely truth of motherhood; more accurately the spiritual or interior load of motherhood is what contributes to loneliness.  You see, even as much as we try to form friendships and community surrounding motherhood, our individual motherhood is unique and to a certain extent, purposely lonely.  We are our own worst enemy, it seems. 

It’s inevitable for me to compare, to feel defensive in my choices, to judge, or to distance myself from other mothers.  Is it a cultural issue?  I’m not sure, but if you experience similar sentiments and can relate, maybe it’s an unspoken issue we should confront and address.  I think the hidden problem costs many women sanity or sound mental health.   Woman are hormonal, some more than others, much of what I attribute to biology and epigenetics.  I am a hormonal, sensitive woman, it’s sort of a given having been through 14 pregnancies and postpartum periods, many of which were short.  Hormones can make a tremendous difference in motherhood especially when there is a lack of support. 

In addition, women in an age of feminism, I believe, try to temper or ignore a need of approval or praise from others, and when it’s lacking, or worse, confirmed that approval or praise is undeserved; it stings, it penetrates, it smolders.  And much like that smoldering quiet fire, one comment or disagreement can raise up a flame of panic and insecurity.  For mothers, I think that’s felt much deeper, as it informs our identity and worth. 

Who do women go to, to share that?  I suppose if they have healthy relationships with their mothers, aunts, grandmothers, sisters, or forever friends they may feel safe to be vulnerable.  Ask yourself, how safe do I feel being vulnerable?  For much of my life, I have not.  I’ve shared with my husband or close friend from time to time, but my innermost fears, traumas, and insecurities of motherhood I hold close to the chest.  How much could my husband understand?  He has his own experience in parenthood, hormones and biology influencing his experience.  Other woman may be more adept to empathizing, but only to the extent of their own experience of motherhood, which could differ drastically.  In addition, sharing those innermost thoughts makes them real, painful, and shameful.  And that is what’s wrong with modern motherhood.  We are shamed for being worried, shamed for our choices, shamed if we are too strict and shamed if we aren’t strict enough.   The frequency of shaming each other and even ourselves has grown exponentially, I think, leaving each of us to feel desperate and alone.  That loneliness can be so heavy sometimes, especially when consolations are few and far between. 

History often paints a rosier picture of mothers supporting mothers.  Mothers mothering their daughters into motherhood in a healthy, picturesque way.  Did that truly exist? Or is it inevitable to be pressured into choosing similar mothering patterns, at the expense of a new generation of children?  Were mothers humble and understanding if their daughter raised her children a bit differently?  It’s foolish to think we could all mother the same.  Some women face single motherhood, some have multiples, some have an only child, others like me have large families.  Some families face medical challenges or disabilities, others don’t. I think the unfortunate truth is that when our mothering experience, family circumstance, or values don’t match exactly to other mothers we encounter often, we compare and judge each other; thus, resulting in loneliness because we can’t relate or feel inferior to another. 

Does anyone else ponder these things?  Or am I alone in trying to wrap my mind around my motherhood?  Is there even the right way to mother?  I want to say no, but maybe someone out there has figured out the secret to perfect motherhood.  I find it hard to believe or accept that there is a one-way approach.  My identity as mother has evolved since its conception and it continues to evolve with each added cross, event, or trauma encountered in life.  I’ve in my 21 years of motherhood had to mother amidst a decline in health of myself and recently some children.  Illness definitely changes motherhood.  Loss changes motherhood.  Vulnerability changes motherhood.  I don’t know if the hard truth is that if we want to feel less lonely, we have to embrace vulnerability.  I really think that’s the game changer.  We can validate each other until we are blue in the face, but ultimately, we are only validating and being validated based on the facade of our motherhood, not the gritty or raw pieces that encompass who we are because we’ve learned to hide those.  As long as we stay in hiding, we’ll most likely remain lonely in our motherhood.

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Homeschooling: Consider the Whole Person

Continuing on the homeschool series, I want to address something I discovered later than I would have liked. How do you support and tailor learning to your child’s interests and strengths? Should we point out strengths and weaknesses?  

I would say I discovered this a bit late, but I have tried to remedy this with older children and begin this earlier with younger children. Right now, I have two graduates and eight children homeschooling. My older kids, I see, can be a little unsure or insecure about those niches that interest them. I attribute this to my lack of support and my closed-minded tendency to want to pump out well rounded upstanding students as was my goal in the public-school classroom. 

In all of that, the most striking piece you may be taking away is counting the children. My family size does color my perspective and experience as it relates to homeschooling, but I hope that the content I provide can be applied to a general audience. It will, however, perhaps benefit the large family mom who finds herself going a little bit crazy. Maybe it won’t? As large family moms may tell you, the dynamics of the family changes with each new child, as well as age gaps between siblings, gender of the children, and personalities. But, just to get it out of the way in case you are wondering just how large the family is… I’m expecting baby 14 in the summer. 

Now back on track, encouraging curiosity, independence, and self-awareness in building on child strengths is so important and underutilized as an approach in brick-and-mortar school. I’ve had children who absolutely love reading and creative writing and hate math. Most school years it was gritting teeth to just get through the harder, disliked subjects. Survival of requirements is something that’s been recurring in our homeschool. I’m bound by my state requirements, as many homeshoolers are. Some states have a larger freedom in homeschooling. I’ve had to find a balance to ensure my kids meet requirements, but can be creative and explorative in their own interests, which usually are extracurricular. I have some children who have a talent for music, some for handcrafted art, others for building, some farming. All of these interests are pathways for learning and building confidence in a skill or talent.  

When I began to ease up on academic expectations, I enabled my children to enjoy learning and it became meaningful; almost like play, not school. That’s not to say I want my children to be mediocre in core subjects, but I’m not gung-ho about having an academically rigorous exceptional child. I’m raising a whole person. The reality of adulthood is that there are successes, there is failure, there’s sacrifice and there is enjoyment. Focusing on academic excellence prepares them for a world that, by observation, may not be all that fulfilling. So if you have that academically robust mindset and goal for your homeschooled child, this likely is not the blog for you. This is raw, real, and unscripted. It’s self-reflective in nature, balancing and adapting to people not being solely dictated by a curriculum.  

Homeschooling has taken a different path from year one and that’s my message to you. Don’t be rigid in how you approach homeschooling. What works for one child, won’t for another. What worked one year, may not the next. One thing, though, that will be ever present and enduring is your child’s strengths and interests. Teaching them how to try again after a mistake or failure is equally important and that’s something I’m still learning how to do. I’ve been ingrained with the idea that failure is not an option and that bled into my expectation as a mom. Big mistake. I don’t want to get upset if they don’t get something right. Rather, I want to teach them healthy disappointment and build resiliency so they aren’t afraid to try because their attempt may end in failure. 

One of the largest benefits to homeschooling, in my observation, is to have the time and environment to encounter self-awareness and emotional intelligence. In a school environment there are too many eyes and stressed adults to hone in on the importance of a sound spirit. School is a hell-hole of bullies and judgement, pressure and scrutiny. That’s not a safe environment for forming a sound spirit and a healthy soul. Kindness, empathy, and many other virtues are seen and attributed to weakness. Survival of the fittest prevails. This can be true of a home environment too, but you can make the conscious choice to provide a safe space (yup, I used the woke word) to build up the person. I no longer believe in tough love. I don’t think breaking a person builds them up. That may work for muscles, but although my child’s heart is a muscle, it doesn’t work that way. Brokenness leads to problems in self-esteem and self-worth. The little voices in their head when they are young, become the loud negative screams that sabotage their future successes and relationships.  

If you take anything from this post, it’s that you’re forming a whole person…a mind, a heart, a soul. Math isn’t going to make my child a healthy and successful adult. It may be the means of their livelihood, but as most adults can attest; once you have long lasting relationships, your career has little to do with your core person, ability to resolve conflict in a marriage, or raise a child. In fact, careers often become stressors to family life, some companies touting that you should have work-life balance while demanding most of your time and loyalty. So, consider for yourself what kind of person you hope your child to be. That will be the largest influence in the approach you take as you homeshool. 

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A Broader View of Unlearning

 Unlearning Part 1

In the homeschool sphere there has been more and more attention given to unschooling. What is unschooling and why is it important, you make ask? I think the foundational reason many parents choose this approach is to help their kids unlearn bad habits of rote memorization and unmeaningful school habits. Instead, the unschooling approach becomes an attractive alternative in order to produce a holistic approach to learning, leaving children with the freedom to explore and find opportunities for learning that are organic. 

I’ve wrestled with this approach for my own children and while I love a Montessori approach to learning for primary grades, which tends to be more hands on, it’s not fully unschooling. I’ve not fully adopted the absolute unschooling approach in homeschooling, but it has permeated other aspects of life. Baby steps, people. I’m trying to get myself together, first.  

You see, unschooling would require much unlearning on my part. Redirecting my core beliefs, values, and approaches to life in all its complexities. I’ve been on quite a journey of unlearning and reforming pathways that I believe will serve me and my family well. Even with buy in, and support, it can be incredibly overwhelming and exhausting. As mentioned in previous posts, I’ve been homeschooling for about 12 years, having taught public school 7.5 years before that, in addition to college training to be an educator following a public school education K-12. That’s a lot of habit forming and much society pleasing routes to achieve “success” that I have to break down, unlearn and rebuild. 

There are questions I’ve had to consider in how to reroute my parenting approach, my own emotional healing, and holistic living which involves lots of toxic purging.  

Toxicity comes in many forms in life. The wakeup call usually comes in the form of illness, or a mental breakdown. For me, it became obvious postpartum right after we begin homeschooling. I don’t think I want to share the details of those moments, they are quite private and painful, even now. However, my diagnosis came as an autoimmune disease, which altered my ability to think and function. Everything was exhausting and humbling. In these moments I have to consider lifelong habits of eating, household purchases, and lifestyle. I had to grieve for a while. I grieved my health and the fact that my once comfortable daily normal was no more. Grief is a journey and in that journey my toxic purging began. 

I begin with what I thought would be the most obvious and quick, which was detoxing my physical environment. It took several years and many baby steps, but eventually I did a huge overhaul of purging toxic cookware, dishware, glassware, utensils, food storage containers, bedding, mattresses, cosmetics, cleaning products, laundry detergent, footwear, toiletries like shampoo, conditioner, lotions, deodorant, toothpaste, bar soaps, even to a certain extent linens for clothing and bathing. I hyper fixated on endocrine disruptors and arming myself with as much information as I could. The Wellness Mama podcast became a daily staple. My hyper fixation on detoxing the home became so prevalent that one of the toddler’s most common question was “Mama, is this toxic?” The word toxic was frequently and familiarly used.  

I then transitioned to trying to mitigate our toxic load in food. Through the years we’ve cut out and added back certain foods. Convenience and expense of food has played a significant part of our family menu and with a growing family, growing in age and size, along with economic fluctuations has made affording a healthier lifestyle challenging. Not impossible, but oh, so challenging. Enter homesteading. That’s become more of my husband’s realm. He loves homesteading. He’s craved the lifestyle for much of his adult life, but like me, was programmed to believe certain truths. One of those falsities was that homesteading wasn’t a viable or lucrative lifestyle to call yourself accomplished by society’s standards. Nowadays, it’s not easy to make it solely on homesteading or farming and many engage with the land and raising food as an additional job to a conventional career. Homesteading, no sugar coating it, comes with its stresses and hard work, but it’s healthier and gives peace of mind to know your food source. We’re still only a couple of years in, having overwhelmed ourselves with a little bit too much sometimes, but it’s become engraved into our family identity. 

These are some of the practical changes that we’ve made, most of which we all assume have an effect on our physical health. They have, but not fully. I still don’t feel amazing or healthy. Living with an autoimmune disease that cripples fertility, while being pregnant with baby 14, makes me think some of those changes have had an effect, but I still feel unwell. It’s become obvious however, that we are a whole person. Health comes from a sound and balanced mind, body, and soul. We’ve been on a spiritual roller-coaster, the most significant part of that so far has been in probably the last four years. Additionally, the journey of addressing mental health and unlearning unhealthy emotional approaches to interaction and relationships is part of our current journey, the next level of unlearning, detoxing, and healing. I’s like to continue this series touching on emotional intelligence, emotional trauma, and spiritual growing pains. For now, let’s recap.

If you are on your own health journey and want to start a natural living approach to life. One that values and promotes a whole food diet, farm fresh food, regenerative farming and ecological healing, low-waste living, functional medicine health approaches, and biohacking my recommendation is to delve into a couple overarching topics listed below. 

• Light Hygiene and Red Light Therapy

• Grounding/Earthing

• EMF exposure and how to mitigate it 

• Anti-Inflammatory diet

• Non-Toxic Household swaps (I will have a post on some ideas)

• Non-toxic cleaning products

• Natural Remedies 

Eventually, the goal of this blog is to provide consultation services. I’m not a medical professional, nor am I offering medical advice. This is my own journey and experience and what I have personally learned and implemented. Any consultation would be practical advice from my lens of experience. 

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We are Peasants…

Introduction

The yeomen of ancient times produced food on their own land, on a Lord’s land, traded labor or goods for food, or found themselves destitute simply begging and consuming what others produced. We are all farmers of content, or simply consumers of content, or both.

Digital Content Creation as Subsistence Farming

We, like these ancients, find ourselves in an analogous situation. We plant digital content, channel the waters of traffic to this content, the followers consume, and if they are grateful enough, they repay the growing tree with the compost of money. In this context, and if you ever grew anything, you know that compost, good compost, is GOLD.

I do not want to overstate the connection between digital subsistence and real subsistence. The two forms of sustaining ourselves are inseparable in my journey, which is the great marriage of digital farming and actually raising our own food. This has become my obsession to live a simple and sustainable life.

Sustainability

Sustainability has become a chronically under-appreciated concept in my life and “career.” As many who continue to experience job layoffs in the tech industry, egg shortages in the grocery stores, and the extraordinary instability in the economy, both globally and at home, we are faced with some choices to make.

  • Continue to go to work for an employer or start our own business
  • Continue to depend 100% on the grocery store or grow what we can and depend on community farmers

These choices are not comprehensive, as you will see in my future posts, because so many sacrifices and decisions make or break our journey to sustainability.

What Can We Do?

Ultimately, we are being called to produce fruit, whether that is actual, digital or both. The industrial age is gone, this new digital age does not have room for a career mentality as it is forcing us to engage with our own replace-ability. We are too expensive as senior employees to keep in the corporations, and only a small number are needed to guide and coach the much cheaper inexperienced hires…so what are the too expensive and too old to do?

Join The New Peasantry…the New Digital Revolution

Join my family and I, as we discover the answer to this. We are farming our homestead, forming our children for entrepreneurship rather than a career, through homeschooling, and developing products and services to help those who join us on this path. There will be struggles, successes, losses, and failures…but I am certain joy and peace will be at the end of this. Blessings to my digital and local community who join us…and to all who are undecided.