Communal Living, Back to School
One of the slower weeks we’ve had in some time. No chicken processing. No cows or pigs to the processor. No meat back from the processor. No hay making. No meat deliveries this week.
Still plenty to do. Amy and the kids are easing back into their home school groove. More of a slow start focusing on reading, exercise, music, and keyboarding. Math, writing, and history will be added to their day in the next couple weeks.
Amy hasn’t had much down time this summer. As you know, she does most of the admin side of our farming business, the communicating and book keeping. Also, meat deliveries throughout the month, the Abingdon Farmers Market on Saturdays, chicken chores in the mornings, and chicken processings throughout the harvest season. With Hallie and Hasten’s education becoming more involved and Wren’s reading requiring more time and attention, Amy is nervous about how everything is going to fit into a day. Or a week. Add to that baby Leon beginning to crawl and developing his lungs. This school year will assuredly be chaotic and most certainly fall short of our hopes and expectations, but we are grateful for these precious years we have with our kids.
Aside from schooling, Amy kept the broth simmering in the on-farm kitchen. We did a fair amount of freezer work sorting chicken and evaluating our inventory as the end of season draws nearer. Though our chicken production is seasonal, we offer whole chicken and cut-up chicken shares throughout the whole year, so we need to make sure we have herd share chicken in stock for the winter months.
We filled this month’s beef and pork herd shares. Amy trimmed and season four big ORVF Boston Butts. I put them on the smoker last night. She’ll pull and package it as it’s ready this afternoon.
Thankful for more good rain showers. Over an inch this week. Lots of bush hogging and trying to catch up on cabin and barnyard mowing.
A busy week ahead with meat deliveries and chicken processing. Maybe even some hay making depending on the weather.
While bush hogging on the tractor I’ve mostly been listening to podcasts. One I was most engaged in was “How We Forgot to Be Human” with Chadd Wright on The John Lovell Show. They cover a wide range of topics including homesteading and the importance of community.
Chadd: “Look at human history. You and your people who you did life with, you worked together to feed yourselves. It’s an essential part of human life… There’s going to be a day… at some point, if the Lord allows me to live another 20-30 years, I’d be real surprised if there ain’t going to be a day when you go down there to that grocery store, and you can’t get what you want to get.”
John: “Another piece of that is the food that we’re buying there is all trash. It’s all fake food.”
Chadd: “And most people want to kinda be angry about that, ‘All the food we eat is trash.’ They don’t want to do anything about it. Like, you understand we can do something about that.”
What was their call to action? More than a call to be totally self-sufficient and grow all your own food, it was a call for communal living. Yes, be more connected to and involved with the reality of the food that sustains you, but more so, to lean on those around you for what you can’t produce yourself. I’d rather rely on those around me that I know and trust than to be increasingly dependent on these worldwide systems that I don’t know and don’t trust.
Chadd: “I don’t even believe in self-sufficiency. I don’t think that self-sufficiency is a thing. I think… no, I know, when you look back on how humans have survived over the course of time, it is through relationship and alliance with your neighbors.”
John: “I’d say self-sufficiency through communal living.”
Chadd: “That’s it.”
From food, the conversation makes a more religious shift. From the importance of the church to the problems that come with it. We need relationships and accountability from those around us who share like-minded values. That being said, how do we navigate through a culture of tribalism and seek unity with those holding to differing values. What are the non-negotiables? And how can we lean on grace to bridge the gap of differences on matters of lesser importance?
John: “We are called to be part of a greater congregation and belong to each other. And that’s the church. We all got different strengths and different weaknesses…”
Chadd: “I still haven’t learned how to fit into… it still hasn’t been revealed to me clearly how to fit into the body of Christ and how to interact and be a part of the body of Christ.”
John: “This is what I believe. I believe Jesus wants us to hold sacred a few close-handed issues, non-negotibles… and the goal here is to have as few in that little hand as I can, a very few close-handed issues… And then everything else, we have open-handed issues. And it doesn’t mean we can’t have strong opinions. It’s this: for the open-handed issues, Jesus would rather us have unity than theological accuracy… I think that Jesus is great in mercy, and he can forgive us and meet us where we’re at, and he would like us to extend that same grace to other people even when they are brothers who are misunderstanding greatly eschatological nuance. He’d rather us have unity than be hypercritical, because it’s so easy to bite and devour each other when really, having grace and exercising forgiveness is a means of sanctification that is better than the theological accuracy…”
Have a good week.
Will