Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

One of my favorite authors is Barbara Kingsolver.  My uncle gave me my first fictional book by her called The Poisonwood Bible.  As I was working as a missionary at the time it really caught me up short in some not so pleasant ways and challenge how I viewed my “call”.  Since that time I’ve read virtually all of her fiction and non-fiction works and I find something in each one to challenge me to live deeper.

My most recent read of hers was a book called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:  A Year of Food Life.  I loved it.  An excerpt from the dust jacket sums up the premise of the book better than I could:

“This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew…and of how our family was changed by our first year of deliberately eating food produced from the same place where we worked, went to school, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air.”

So they worked as a family not only to endeavor to eat locally but mostly by their own hands.  Their successes and failures are interesting and at times comical to read and the contributions about the world issues affecting food provided by her husband, Steven L. Hopp, a teacher of environmental studies, and the essays and recipes provided by her her daughter, Camille Kingsolver, really reflect the family nature of the project.  The website for the book gives a lot of good resources and information and I’d advise checking it out!  

 

The question I always find myself asking when I read a book that challenges me is how will it change my life and that of my family?  So am I growing all my own vegetables and making all my own bread and cheese? Do I keep chickens and kill the turkey I eat for Thanksgiving?  Well, no, not exactly.  But here’s a few projects our family has started with to eat more locally and sustainably.

 

• Some friends gave us a hand-me-down breadmaker.  As part of our community we buy our flour in 50lb. bags.  So making bread for me has become a routine.  I don’t get into any exotic bread very often, but our daily bread cost me a whole lot less to bake, has no high fructose corn syrup and with a 5 minute prep time and a one hour express bake can be ready for any meal within the time it takes me to make dinner.
• Yes, I do organic garden but only by the luck of community.  I consider myself an apprentice to Christine Sine, another member of our community, and will probably stay in that role for many years to come.  To be honest I find the preparing the garden, the clearing and weeding, when everything is empty, more fun in many ways than the actual growing of the vegetable, which in my mind seems extremely backwards.  I do have to admit, though, that having an unlimited number of fresh tomatoes exhilarates me.  I vary rarely buy tomatoes out of season anymore because they just aren’t the same.
• Yogurt is something else that we make in the house.  If that sounds hard it isn’t, you just need to be in the house for a good part of the day.  All it takes is milk, old yogurt to get the culture or a yogurt starter, a thickener (like gelatin) if you don’t like it thin, a thermometer, some old glass jars and your oven.  I actually make it a gallon at a time, and to give it that fruity flavor, if your family doesn’t like it plain, I just add in a bit of homemade jelly and stir.

Lumped together, this sounds like a lot, but writing always makes things look more gloried than they really are.  For me doing these things on a regular basis has been a process of three years.  I figured out long ago that trying to change it all at once didn’t work for me and as long as I take it in small bites I can really begin to change the way we live.

 

 

Simple Living

People dive into the world of simplicity for many reasons and mean many different things by it.  So here’s a little of what it means for me and my family.

•  Simplicity is a means of identifying ourselves with our sisters and brothers around the world. (A story told to me by a college student returning from a short-term mission to Africa probably explains it best. In talking with the people where they were serving and building homes the Americans were telling about what their own homes were like.  When it came to explain the purpose of the garage the Africans were incredulous, “You have a house for your car??? Many in our area have no houses at all!”)
• Simplicity it a way to live lightly on the earth.
• Simplicity is usually a slower-paced way of living day-to-day.
• Simplicity can usually allow you to live with less expense and therefore opens up many choices you might not otherwise have (such as living on a single income.)
• Simplicity allows you to have more to share with others, either of time or money.

I grew up in the United States and the story society gave me to live out was one of individuality, personal identity, personal acheivement, and accumulation of wealth.  More, more, more seems to be the eternal goal.

The story our family buys into is the one shared in the gospels.  Community, hospitality, sharing of wealth, sharing of our lives, sharing of our selves.  We have no set blueprint of what this looks like, but I will share some of our successes and failures as we try to live it out.  

The Summer Laundry Challenge

One of the intersections of active spirituality and practical faith for me has been to see in which ways I can be more environmentally aware.  My current challenge for the summer was to hang as much laundry outside as possible from May through October.  It’d be no problem of course, right?  Just let the kids play outside for the day while I ran in and out of the laundry room to hang up the clothes on the line.  I even convinced Anneke, another member of my community, to try this with me.  We both set a goal.  Mine was 60% and hers was 33% of washed clothes hung on the line.  I work at home and have a family of 4 and she and her husband both work so we thought these were realistic goals.

Anneke met her goal plus some, and until she moved was acheiving around 50%.  For me it hasn’t worked out exactly how I’d planned.

I wash about ten loads a week including diapers and in our community we all share the washer so to make it easier we have assigned days.  Would you believe its rained on every one of my wash days?  Well it hasn’t but it sure feels like it.  And when it hasn’t I’ve had to have a day of running errands.  Nothing is working as easy and as idyllic as I’d hoped.  I’ve had months as high as 50% and my lowest was around 23%.

I haven’t given up in frustration but I am cutting myself some slack. Life is complex.  A goal like this assumes a sense of great scheduling and organization and to be honest I don’t think I every quite get there. And I think I’m getting to that point in my life where I can say that’s OK (and really believe it most of the time.)

The Revolution Starts at Home

Making coffee to open our eyes in the morning, food preparation to sustain our bodies, washing clothes, cleaning our homes, nurturing our children, sleeping (maybe?). The list goes on. These activities and hundreds more like them take significant blocks of time out of our days and weeks. In our society which tries to “box” everything into neat little categories, these things are in the, “Ugh, Do I have to do that again?” category. Which in my mind brings up several questions:

• How many hours do we really spend on this stuff each week?
• Are these sacred or secular activities?
• If secular, does that mean that much of our lives are godless?
• If spiritual, WHAT ARE WE DOING ABOUT IT!?

That’s what this blog is about. Reclaiming those areas of our lives, by many viewed as boring and dull, to be sacred and taking small steps each day to bring them back into the spiritual realm of our lives; or better yet, expanding the spiritual to leave nothing out.

The Laundry Monster

Laundry is one of those chores that people either love or hate. When I talk to people who do a lot of housework laundry and dishes come up as the top two in the Ugh! factor. For me I actually quite enjoy it. Eliacin and I started our married life in Puerto Rico; we lived in a cement duplex about fifty feet from the Caribbean Sea. With just the two of us the laundry didn’t add up that fast. And with minimal days of rain and no dryer I hung it up in the back yard. I’d wash it up in the morning and throughout the morning I’d go out into the beautiful sunshine look at the sea and hang it while enjoying the fresh breeze. Ahhhh! The I’d put on a good movie in the evenings and fold it all up and put it away. It was one of my most relaxing chores.

Things have changed a bit. I live in a community house with three floors. I’m on the top floor, laundry is in the basement. My husband and I now have two kids with one in cloth diaper that we wash ourselves. Needless to say the laundry can really pile up! (I average about ten loads a week.) A member of our community calls the dry laundry that I gather throughout the day on my couch my laundry monster.

Looking back on my laundry experience in Puerto Rico I was recently trying to figure out what it was I enjoyed so much. Was it the sun, the sea, the breeze, watching my daughter playing in the yard? And I came to realize that it was a combination of all these things. A sense of all things fitting together. A joyfulness in daily tasks. A deep sense of prayer without words.