The Big White Farmhouse

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The decluttering adventure continues.  This week, I discovered a computer print-out from 2009!  The blog post described “Granny Day,” a day set aside each year to live life like Granny did.  At the end of the post, the author shared The Granny Creed and I’ll rewrite it here:

Make food for the soul with love in your hands; traverse daily to the well and draw from the living waters of creativity; from a generous heart give something away.  Rise early, stay late; call or write to one held dear, whether far or near.  Work until it’s done.  See to the needs of those around you, but never lose sight of your own.  Live each day with reverence and joy.

The timing of this little discovery was a little uncanny because the week took a very Granny-like turn!  Our dryer – only a year old – started making terrible grinding sounds so I was left to air-drying clothing all over the house while we tried to diagnose the problem.  I made a loaf of homemade bread in the bread machine almost every day.  I woke up with the sun, worked the garden and moved the animals before it got too hot.  It was a good, life-giving week.

Hoping to document the abundance around me all year long!

Around here, abundance looks like…

+ finishing up the Four Weeks to a More Organized Home challenge but forgetting to photograph the process!  Oh well.

+ returning to carnivore(ish) eating after a month of treats.  I enjoyed many of my old favorites, but I quickly went back to emotional/stress eating, my skin looks terrible (like I’m back in high school!) and my stomach issues have come back.  I know I can’t sustain any of those things, so back to the strict diet I go.

+ finding wild berries growing over our property fence.  I think they’re blackberries?

+ selling seven unneeded items for the Farm Sitter Vacation Fund: a stylus pen, two books, a homeschool curriculum, and three pieces of clothing.  After shipping and fees, I made $65.50!

Reading //

• Grandmother’s Wisdom from Andrew Skabelund at Front Porch Republic
• Housework from Mary Townsend at The Hedgehog Review // “To clean the thing is to care for the thing; to clean well is neither giving it a flick that leaves the edges obscured in dirt, nor scrubbing the thing away into nothing. All of this work raises up the house out of the confusion of its strands back into one single thing, the bulwark, the thing that makes the rest possible, both leaving and coming back; the sort of place where you could consider resting your head. Housekeeping doesn’t just enable us to dwell; housekeeping is dwelling, and also it is thought.”
• Paper Routes: Working Hard & Humanely from Paul Schweigl at Hearth and Field // “I think what I am really hoping for is that the lad’s first job will teach him everything that my paper routes taught me. Work ought to help reveal the dignity of the worker, while enmeshing him in a community where he can learn to be a stronger but also more compassionate man.”

New Additions to The List // 

• Chasing the Thrill: Obsession, Death, and Glory in America’s Most Extraordinary Treasure Hunt by Daniel Barbarisi
• American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales

Loving //

• a new bread machine recipe // I omit the sugar and the kids don’t seem to notice.

This post contains affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission of any sale made at no extra cost to you.

It’s been a few weeks, so I’m returning to this prompt again.  (Here’s part one and part two.)  Highly recommend the practice, especially if you’re going through a hard week or month or season.  Here’s my list:

Waking up with the sunrise.  A stack of packages sold during the long weekend.  An afternoon nap, just because.  A bluebird sitting on the fence post.  Listening to little boy giggles while they’re watching a movie.  Filling the trunk with donations.  Twenty new laying hens for the barnyard.  A drive alone with my husband, even if it was just to the dump, ha!

Hoping to document the abundance around me all year long!

Around here, abundance looks like…

+ rest after a super busy, stressful, productive spring.  We made it!  I definitely needed a recovery week before the next big projects begin.

+ finding some unclaimed property after coming across this post from Six Figures Under.  It never hurts to check and we were thrilled to see our name on the list!

+ not paying full price for a high school literature curriculum.  I received a $10 coupon from Memoria Press last December and have held onto it ever since.  I wasn’t prepared to start buying next year’s books quite so early, but when I noticed that the coupon expired on 5/31 (and it was 5/31!) I snatched up the teacher and student guides.  Good deals seem to hard to come by these days, so this was exciting.

+ selling nine unneeded items for the Farm Sitter Vacation Fund: six pieces of clothing, two books and a pair of slippers.  After shipping and fees, I made $60.26!

Reading //

• On The Degrading Effects of Life Online: How social media makes us worse people from Jon Haidt and Freya India at After Babel // Thought provoking.

And actually, I’m losing hope for people taking accountability because all this has accelerated so much and so fast that we can’t seem to see what it’s doing to us, let alone make better choices. Having a camera roll full of thousands of selfies is now completely normal. So is checking how many likes your tweet has while someone is talking to you. So is swiping through human beings like you’re on Amazon. Most of us do things like this sometimes and we feel that it’s weird, we know it’s a bit bleak, but more and more people don’t seem to even see a problem. They spend five hours a week taking selfies and don’t see it as vanity. They talk about people’s follower counts like it’s a measure of worth without a thought of what’s becoming of them. They are so obsessed with their digital reputation they can’t see how they are degrading their real life one for it. They can point to all the ways social media is killing their mental health but never their humility. And so many of us delude ourselves that these platforms are harmless and light-hearted, all while we can feel them destroying us on the inside. All while we are becoming steadily more self-absorbed, in ways that play out in our real relationships and I think eat away at us and our respect for ourselves. Maybe that funny feeling we get from social media isn’t always anxiety. Maybe sometimes that feeling is shame.

• A Nightmare Dressed Like a Daydream: Apple’s new ad and the limits of disembodied creativity from Nate Marshall at The Blue Scholar
• Beyond the practical: The value of “useless” knowledge from Daniel Esparza at Aleteia // “Philosophy is not a job skill, but a lens through which we can approach life’s big questions and appreciate the world around us with a deeper understanding. It’s a pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, a reflection of our inherent human curiosity and desire to understand.”

New Additions to The List // 

A commenter from the Apple post above shared a booklist for the Philosophy of Technology course he created.  Added a handful to my ever-growing list!

• The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt
• The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America by Leo Marx
• Technology Matters: Questions to Live With by David E. Nye
• Erewhon by Samuel Butler

Watching/Listening //

• Why Mental Health Is Getting Worse – Jonathan Haidt from Chris Williamson // I’m anxious to read Jon Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness now.
• Nuclear War Expert: 72 Minutes To Wipe Out 60% Of Humans, In The Hands Of 1 Person! – Annie Jacobsen from The Diary of a CEO // Absolutely terrifying.  I’ve read one of Jacobsen’s books before (Operation Paperclip) and will definitely be reading this newest one.

This post contains affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission of any sale made at no extra cost to you.

It was a big, big week on the farm – the preparation and execution of our first broiler processing of the year!  Spread over two days, this was the culmination of twelve weeks of focused tending.  We worked hard, invited friends to help/learn the process and enjoyed the sweet satisfaction of a job well done.  I can never adequately express how farming has changed my life for the better, but this section from Wendell Berry’s essay, “A Defense of the Family Farm” shares a glimpse:

…By the dismemberment of work, by the degradation of our minds as workers, we are denied our highest calling, for, as Gill says, “every man is called to give love to the work of his hands.  Every man is called to be an artist.”  The small family farm is one of the last places – they are getting rarer every day – where men and women (and girls and boys, too) can answer that call to be an artist, to learn to give love to the work of their hands.  It is one of the last places where the maker – and some farmers still do talk about “making the crops” – is responsible, from start to finish, for the thing made.  This certainly is a spiritual value, but it is not for that reason an impractical or uneconomic one.  In fact, from the exercise of this responsibility, this giving of love to the work of the hands, the farmer, the farm, the consumer, and the nation all stand to gain in the most practical ways: They gain the means of life, the goodness of food, both natural and cultural.  The proper answer to the spiritual calling becomes, in turn, the proper fulfillment of physical need.  (p.166-167)

Hoping to document the abundance around me all year long!

Around here, abundance looks like…

+ cutting up old greeting cards.  I’ve been on a decluttering spree this month and I finally tackled my pile of cards.  I keep everything sent to me…and it’s getting a little unruly at this point, ha!  Anyway, I kept a few of my favorites (especially from my deceased grandmothers) but got rid of a ton.  I also cut down the fronts of some to make tags for gifts and/or reselling thank you notes.

+ a blooming peace lily!  I got this plant as a free gift from Fast Growing Trees years ago and have narrowly killed it multiple times.  This is the first time she’s bloomed and I’m so excited.

+ selling 25 unneeded items for the Farm Sitter Vacation Fund: fifteen books, four pieces of clothing, four cloth napkins, a DVD, and a piece of curriculum.  After shipping and fees, I made $101.27!

Reading //

•  this quote from my Abraham Lincoln biography, With Malice Toward None:

Yes, Lincoln warned, the spirit of the mob was abroad in the land; and once murderous passions were unleashed, mobs were apt to terrorize the entire country, burning innocent and guilty alike, until all the walls erected to defend the people were obliterated.  When that happened, when “the vicious portion of the population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity; depend on it, this Government cannot last.” (p.47)

Mob thinking/mob rule/mob violence came up on more than occasion in my reading this week!  The more history I read, the more I see how human nature is the same throughout the ages.

• Toward a Politics of Beauty from John de Graaf at Front Porch Republic
• On the Texture of Things Past from Daxxton McGee at Circe Institute // “If the world is pretty, it tells man something about the world and his place in it; it confers a hopeful and reverent tone and demands that he do well to guard against decay, disorder, or pure industrialized pragmatism. However, if the world is ugly, it tells a man that he ought not even notice; he ought not bother to care; there’s nothing worth saving anyway.”
• Making the Long Haul, like a Tree from John Cuddeback at Life Craft
• Towards an Economy of Love from Patrick M. Fleming at Humanum // A review of Wendell Berry’s Home Economics. (I finally finished!)

New Additions to The List // 

The focus seemed to be different ways of looking at war this week.

• On The Psychology Of Military Incompetence by Norman F. Dixon
• Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare by Paul Lockhart
• The Button Box: A Daughter’s Loving Memoir of Mrs. George S. Patton by Ruth Ellen Patton Totten

Watching/Listening //

• INFLUENCER INSANITY EP 6 | “Sharenting” – Oversharing parents will post ANYTHING for views from Hannah Alonzo // I’m not on social media anymore and was unaware of most of this.  I find it so sad.
• The Battle for Your Time: Exposing the Costs of Social Media from Dino Ambrosi’s TEDx Talk // Really important for teens and adults alike.

Loving //

• the brownie cookie recipe from 100 Cookies cookbook // I allowed myself a little treat after my daughter made them and they were delicious.