Quote of the Week

"The ambition for broad acres leads to poor farming, even with men of energy. I scarcely ever knew a mammoth farm to sustain itself; much less to return a profit upon the outlay. I have more than once known a man to spend a respectable fortune upon one; fail and leave it; and then some man of more modest aims, get a small fraction of the ground, and make a good living upon it. Mammoth farms are like tools or weapons, which are too heavy to be handled. Ere long they are thrown aside, at a great loss."

Source: Abraham Lincoln, Sept 30, 1859, Wisconsin State Fair

HARC

How about an ARC made with Heart? An ARC that you do most of the work on yourself?

SO you understand how everything works and feel confident fixing or changing it? An ARC that those with more human then cash capital to invest. Our inputs of time, energy, heart and mind will truly make the arc ours not only in the legal and physical sense but in the spiritual and emotional sense as well.

A HARC has 4 stages of development.

Stage 1: Foreplay- the arrangements of legal, financial and construction plans. This the stage were everything from location to building details get assessed and planned. All needed permits are acquired and so on.

Stage 2: The opening ceremonies- the actual ground breaking and frame building. This is the erection of the shell. When done it has running water (maybe just to 1 area), heat (can be done as part of stage 3, depending on when and how the ARC owners plan to move in), floor and roof. This stage is done mostly by professionals- under watchful care of the HARC owners.

The HARC is now in habitable at any time.

Stage 3: Let the games begin- the family takes over the HARC and with an average of 2-4 days of hands on learning time per specialty (plumbing, wiring, indoor wall building, ect), that is working as apprentice laborers, the HARC owners learn all the skills and then do all the work (assuming of course that the specialists are on call for questions). This phase is rapid at first- getting to a stage of easy living and then diminishes as the immediate need to get things done decreases.

In this stage we add wiring, plumbing, kitchen, and all other utilities. We also add walls and basic floor and wall coverings. The emphasis is on what works and what is easily maintainable.

Stage 4: Finishing- this is longest and most drawn out stage. I don't ever really expect this stage to be over until someone wants to sell the HARC to another party. But finishing means adding things that make it pretty or things seen as "necessary" by those in the house selling business. It can also mean making improvements of any and all details in the arc. More accurately this stage should be called "the detail work."

Ideally the HARC will be inhabitable with about $100,000 investment in cash, verses the prefinished ARCs going for $300,000. And of course, it will not only shelter you, feed you, recycle your water, but also teach you (and your children) many useful and needed skills.

Moo

I have been interested lately in having a cow, that I can pasture feed and get great, wholesome - unadulterated milk from for making into things like butter and yogurt. The butter I want is available in my state- it retails for $7/pound.

I also would like a few chickens- so I can have fresh eggs. The chickens will eat our bugs- especially our ticks and their eggs will be high in omega 3s because of it. And if I plan it right, they will be able to eat the fly larva that would normally grow in the cow dung.

But besides what I can get from my animals- it is the process of working with them hands on that appeals to me. Getting up at dawn, having to venture outside- and being swept away by the pink sunrise filtering through the winter trees. And then staying outside and breathing in the life of a new day, the crispness of the cooler air, the crunch of frost underneath my feet.

I will probably have a milking song. A song that I will sing that will help me express the swelling joy and gladness in my heart for being alive that day. A song of gratitude, glory and thankfulness- and one of humility and trust in the God that made that day.

changing businesses

I feel there is a glut of clothing in America. Most of us have closets full. So in a depressed economy one thing we will be fairly quick to cut back on is clothing consumption. And if we need to find clothing, we have a nice variety of hand me down and remaking and even homemade to turn to before we have to spend money. So I have decided that it is time to get out of the clothing business. Since, I personally do not see that the economy will recover for years, adn even then, I expect it to be in a different form when it does.

So I am going to focus my work in our local area and service a basic need, everyone has at least once in their life. I am going into the business of birth.

I plan to become a midwife and help empower women through their reproductive years. I plan to help bring "natural" as an encouraged option for all aspects of reproduction. I want to provide a service that is badly needed and missing in our small community. Right now there is no help here to have a baby. A women can't even get prenatal care without a 2 hours of driving for a 15 minute visit (and 30 minutes in the waiting room). The only option is Doctors and hospitals that are an hour's drive away. I don't know about you, but I feel the current offerings leave something to be desired.

Personally I feel a birth attendant should be more experienced then I, should be calm and be calming. Should trust in mother nature and birth as a natural experience. She should also have a nice bag of tricks up her sleeve to make labor more comfortable and also be able to prevent or deal with obstacles, when they arrive. She should be quiet and watchfully aware, but out of the way unless needed. She should also be local, and not a long way away. She should put the family's needs first and trust in the power and will of God.

So I have often measured if I can measure up to my own standard for a midwife... I am getting much closer. Because there are no local apprentice opportunities for this, schooling is the next step.

As far back as 1835, Boston workingmen striking for shorter hours declared that they needed time away from work to be good citizens: “We have rights, and we have duties to perform as American citizens and members of society.” As those workers well understood, any meaningful democracy requires citizens who are empowered to create and re-create their government, rather than a mass of marginalized voters who merely choose from what is offered by an “invisible” government. Citizenship requires a commitment of time and attention, a commitment people cannot make if they are lost to themselves in an ever-accelerating cycle of work and consumption.

explains the state of the American Soul

FROM THE EARLIEST DAYS of the Age of Consumerism there were critics. One of the most influential was Arthur Dahlberg, whose 1932 book Jobs, Machines, and Capitalism was well known to policymakers and elected officials in Washington. Dahlberg declared that “failure to shorten the length of the working day . . . is the primary cause of our rationing of opportunity, our excess industrial plant, our enormous wastes of competition, our high pressure advertising, [and] our economic imperialism.” Since much of what industry produced was no longer aimed at satisfying human physical needs, a four-hour workday, he claimed, was necessary to prevent society from becoming disastrously materialistic. “By not shortening the working day when all the wood is in,” he suggested, the profit motive becomes “both the creator and satisfier of spiritual needs.” For when the profit motive can turn nowhere else, “it wraps our soap in pretty boxes and tries to convince us that that is solace to our souls.”

Is that our Problem?

"Business leaders were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a society no longer centered on the production of goods. For them, the new “labor-saving” machinery presented not a vision of liberation but a threat to their position at the center of power. John E. Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, typified their response when he declared: “I am for everything that will make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its importance. The emphasis should be put on work—more work and better work.” “Nothing,” he claimed, “breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure.”

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2962