My Why.

The biggest questions I get from friends and neighbors is “Why are you living this way? Don’t you know you can buy food at the grocery store and they sell socks nowadays?” And yes, I get asked about the socks.

I’m currently knitting a pair for my 85 year old neighbor, but I have some teal/green wool yarn sitting in the yarn basket waiting to knit me up a nice pair of boot socks for winter.

And I get how in our current world where everything is available at our convenience and it seems like time is the only thing we are running out of, that decisions to intentionally and sustainably live are crazy concepts. The thing is that even with time being short and everything easily available, we aren’t living. We are rushing from activity to activity, never really engaged with our family and community. Leaving us constantly trading our souls for dollar bills to feed into a system that is only going to tax us even after we are no longer present on this earth. And to be honest, I’m fucking over it. Which is how I arrived at knitting my own socks, raising rabbits for meat sources, hunting locally and sustainably, fishing for only what we need and slowly growing more and more of our food and herbal remedies.

It has had such an impact on my life that I’m overjoyed. While it makes for longer days, they are more fulfilled. While it makes for harder work, my body is getting stronger and I’m losing extra weight that I shouldn’t have carried around for this long. While it means eating less processed food, I’m finding that my body is healing in ways I never thought possible.

It feels good.

It feels good to know where you food comes from, to know you are getting stronger every time you work with your animals, or wield a hoe in the garden. It feels good to snuggle into some hand knit socks on a cold winter’s night. It feels good to know that I’m working proactively to combat the usage of fossil fuels for transportation and to teach my children how to be better stewards of the land, that our food comes at a great cost and that value isn’t measured in dollars. Which is why this is my goal. The giant goal to raise and grow my own foods. Learn to work with natural fibers to make into clothing for my family. To learn that the world isn’t going to survive unless we learn, and teach, that convenience comes with a cost. A cost that cannot be measured in dollar bills. That we have the power to live big while still living small.

Which, this is to say, is my “why?”.