What this life is about.

One month of Winter is under our belts, with two more on the horizon. This is when the true cold of the Tennessee Valley is born. It starts of staggering about in fits and starts like a newborn calf. A little snow here, a heavy rain there. That calf grows quickly and by February, you get an idea that you might have the meteorological equivalent of Bodacious the Carbray Bull. We don't (usually) get storms as large as our neighbors in the northeast; Lord and Lady watch over all your farms as you weather the white north, my homestead brethren.

Homesteaders...we seem to be a wide and varied fraternity, a Clan like a quilt of many colors. Whether you are raising organic chickens and eggs, non-GMO grains, angora wool or fresh, hormone free milk, you are helping the Earth. Our lives were never meant to be lived in slave service to companies such as Monsanto or JBS. To each individual or couple, clan or community willing to break good, rich earth and bring back green life to our planet, I tip my hat.

Finding my homestead is more than just securing a house for my family where I will have the space to raise animals that please me. It is more than filling my freezer with goat, mutton, pork and chicken though that is certainly part of it. It's about freeing myself from the chains of a society that has dictated my life lived like food in a TV dinner. All prearranged in the proper order: Birth, School, Work, Marriage, Children, Death. Freeze dried corn, high fructose corn syrup sweetened GMO apples, something shaped like a chicken breast which is really factory feedlot chicken parts, hydrogenated vegetable solids and soy.

It is about finding the life that nourishes me with its sustainable bounty but also with its generous work. To nurture my spirituality with the tending of goats, bringing forth life and understanding death. My church is in the good, rich earth and I pray with dirty hands for gentle rain, bountiful harvest, good stock and a healthy Clan.

And I am grateful for the time I have been given.