A Return to Normal: Thoughts on Homesteading, Technology, and Life Online

I'm in search of humans. Anyone else?

Perhaps it’s just February, cold and dark as she is. Even though there are flames popping and dancing in the fireplace nearby, the freezing air has a way of finding its way through the drafty, century old walls. My feet are freezing.

But perhaps, also, it’s not just February. Perhaps it’s a call of the heart… painfully being tugged at to go back. A siren song luring me into the depths and unknowns of the waters ahead. I know this song - she’s sung to me before.

We began our blog fifteen years, when life looked exponentially different for Stuart and I. Newly married, we bounced around to various rental houses, trying to make them home, while navigating the reality of life-unknown. Those early years involved becoming parents, navigating college (and student debt), frantically looking for work to support ourselves, and exploring our desires for the future.

We’re not guaranteed that our hopes and dreams will come true. But sometimes, they do. In our case, what began as a vision for a homestead bursting with babies and gardens came to pass in reality. Many of you have been witness to that in our journey. My God, what a gift! The fire I held for this lifestyle spurred me on in endless moments of defeat and frustration. From cows that couldn’t be bred, to escaped pigs, to predator attacks, to poachers, to broken freezers, to injured bodies, to wasted harvests, to more hours spent weeding than you can even imagine.

Yet somehow, in the homestead economy, the blessings and gifts of the land outweighed the disasters, unpredictability, and hardships we found ourselves in.

I still would, and do, choose this life.

When I began homesteading, the internet as-it-is didn’t exist. Aside from Facebook, social media had yet to take hold of our lives, so those of us looking to learn in any given field had to look to each other. Back then, this looked like checking out books from the local library and digging deep into Google-land to find others who were focusing on the same. We could know each other by name. In this short-lived-season of the internet, we were connected and yet fully engaged with our life at hand. We didn’t hold smart phones or bow to algorithms. It was a brief, but beautiful, period.

Homesteading was fringe then, but that was okay. We all shared desires to quiet the world around us, to fill the pockets of our homes with nature and nourishment. Many of us felt called to break away from the norm, to bring our kids to the table, and to keep skills alive (typically focused around food) that we found valuable enough to keep. We wanted to get our hands dirty.

So how did we get from that to this?

AI can now answer any question we have about our garden troubles, there are millions of influencers setting unrealistic (fill in the blank) goals, and government drama seems to be soul topic of conversation around the supper table.

The noise of culture as it stands now is strong and invasive. It’s snaked deeply into the homes that we found so hard to create and keep safe.

Does anyone else find it difficult to breathe?

If I close my eyes and focus, I can transport my mind back to a time that was peaceful. Even though we had no money and loads of babies, it was a time alive with growth and hope. I would write as I nursed my babies, finding my voice amongst the keyboard and kindred online spirits. Pinterest hadn’t caught on yet, so instead I looked to organizational blogs for inspiration on keeping a tidy home. I still needed to be shown how to make bread by hand - there weren’t videos or classes online for such things. But I was discovering new varieties of vegetables and learning how to store and grow our food. It was a time alive with rich content and intimate (all-be-it online) fellowship. This technology was a gift.

At the risk of sounding irrelevant and regressive: What happened?

Okay now I’ll sound irrelevant and regressive: I hate it.

Here’s what I hate: the gamification, strip-mall, click-bait, follower-count, viral, exploitation, numbing, hand-held, anxiety-inducing, culturally-repugnant-other, garbage-can that is the online world.

Being grouchy and snarky isn’t the goal here. Sorry - I had to get it out. As Stuart often reminds me, the world’s gunna world. It will march on its mind-numbing path regardless. Studying history (and holding a religious conviction about the heart of man), we shouldn’t be surprised. Rather, we take our observations, knowledge, experience, wisdom, convictions, and perhaps a dash of nostalgia and apply it to our daily-life and decisions. Cliché as it may sound, it is the only piece you have some control over.

Some of these decisions are direct. For example, we’ve opted out of traditional jobs and standardized schooling for our children. We catechize them and live intimately alongside them. We are intentionally present and screens are intentionally not. We also continue to grow much of our food, harvesting nourishment and sharpening skills on our small little piece of land. We delight in quiet moments spent around the fire (my feet are still cold) and choose to often pass our free time in the garden. We intentionally connect with the bees and birds and eat the seasons. We still delight in getting our hands dirty, in filling our milk pails, in feeling the frustrations and victories of a life often dictated by weather. We break bread with people, inviting real humans to our table. We laugh with them, cry with them, pray with them. We listen to their stories and share our broken imperfections with them. There are no filters in-real-life.

Yet the sting remains.

To go back to the beginning, that’s where my February-brain has become clogged. At the ripe age of 38, I feel like my soul is 100. I’m trying to navigate a world where women are not supposed to age, banana-flavored vape pens are all the rage, influencers make millions of dollars posting fake content, and the majority of the food on the grocery store shelves resemble something closer to a science-experiment than actual food. To name a few.

As the great Joel Salatin coined: “Folks, this ain’t normal.”

The most ‘normal’ I’ve seen (and felt) in the past few years was over the days I spent in Spain this past November. Phones were few and far between. Friends and colleagues spent hours at local cafes and bars, sharing drinks and dishes. The streets were filled with friends and families, even the low-mobility elderly folks were taken to the restaurants, markets, and plazas with their family. They took care to move slow. Kids were loud, active, playful and everywhere! A coffee cost a few euro.

There’s not a perfect place on earth, the world’s gunna world. But it is a relief to know there are pockets of life out there that remain… more normal? (At least by my aging 38 year old standards…).

For the record, I am pro-technology. To think of a world where this technology is put to good uses (less chemically-dependent farming and modern dentistry come to mind), is a blessing indeed!

But can we still, like, just be normal humans too?

Here are the pieces I can control. Consider them my promises to you. As a fellow human:

The words you read from me will always be my own.

The images I share will always be authentic.

My words will always be honest.

As it all goes full circle, we look forward to writing a new cookbook that will be physically printed, as well as meeting up with ten of you physically in Italy on the first Che Vita Getaway this coming October.

As good as digital, online life can be… it always falls short of real things, real places, and real people.

I’ll see you there.

Love,