At the end of my day, when all side hustles are reined in, all projects cleaned up, and communal karmas are fed, eye can truly sigh a breath of contentment and rest with crossed arms behind my head in the space of knowing eye did what eye did with integrity and passion, and infused the living moment with an affect of intimacy into the satisfaction of doing those things. Then, when there was nothing left to do, eye be. Eye think about the return of the seeds eye have sown, and the nexus of interpersonal relationships that have played out during the course of a wane and wax of a day and night. My mind is allowed to steep and brew a stronger dose of the philosophic spirit that is then distilled into the rich memories extracted from my lot. If there were things to complain about, they simply get filtered out through the purification process that comes in the gloaming hours before sleep. Eye am still here in my own bed, have worked in right ways, appropriate with the Dao of my own energy, and shared inspiring words with those who are other than me. Eye am rich in the private abundance of my soul, to be here, and be with here.
Doing without:
One common denominator of living the homesteader’s bushman existence, the country life, and that of nomadic global travel is the ability to do without. Going without the luxuries of what is considered “human rights” in modern first world countries is to me the root of what supports a personal gain in one’s self-accountability, bravery, resilience, and inner strength. It is also a lowering of one’s threshold for what one requires to be completely fulfilled and content. From my view through the trees, eye can say a life lived this way, and un:learning what it means to be a civil being in the twenty-first century, actually amplifies what it means to me to be more fully human, capable, and aware. Taking stock of what you choose to live without is a liberating routine to rigorously examine your creature comforts and in raw fashion to attempt happiness with a minimal set of those itemaries. This may seem archaic, eclectic, or a willfully desperate struggle to those with an outsiders view, but eye concur that the room inside such a life is filled with a buoyant sense of ease, graceful domestic rituals, leisure, craft, beauty and a sense of humility. A minimal inventory of the things eye have adapted to or choose to live without are;
:plumbing/running water, on-demand hot showers, flush toilet, electric heaters, fridge, on-grid electricity, television, radio, a college education, modern shoes, guns, power tools, public transportation, an insured vehicle, plastic, internet/wifi, tablet, netflix, credit cards, loans and debt, phone plan, gyms, bars, restaurants, social media, mortgage, bills, mainstream jobs, social media and service subscriptions etc.
If eye were to mine a little deeper, it would be easy enough to find several more, but the landscape looks the same. There are still elements of my life where eye feel they could be simplified, refined and worked on, and that is as good a personal testimony to my existence as any. The truth is, eye have no desire for these things, in three months of the year, eye often go places without shoes, bathe in wild waters of nature, find entertainment in watching the bonfire with my kindred, and foraging forest food to cut the fat of expenses. In winter, the fire is moved inside, eye write more in my leather journal, and my imagination is vivid, so there is no need for movies, series, and newsfeeds on social media with a world of distractions. Eye settle into the monochromatic existence of cold white snow, the deep green woods, and the warm amber light of the hearth, finding contentment in books, silence, solitude, and a slow cooked supper. In life, eye yearn to be happier with less, while not depriving myself of the utmost needs. If one were to read the list above and guess which country eye belonged to, perhaps Namibia, Guatemala or New Guinea may be a likely answer, but the truth is eye live surrounded by the palace of the new world all around me, dominated by big corporations like Irving, McCains and Crabbe, and eye have access to all the pleasure pursuits, trappings, and social media webs of the metropolis, only in my eyes it is more of a necropolis. A mundane and flattened way of experiencing the gifts and loaded opportunities this world has to offer. Eye am seeking the raw food and fresh fruit of the world, the heart of real living, where my days are spent worshiping the dirt with foot to earth, bathing in wild waters, mingling with a network of souls in the flesh, tasting the land, listening to no music except that of the soundtrack of my labors and environment, where life comes for free, unpackaged, and unbridled.
Preserving a Season
One of the most integral ways to thrive in a homestead is to preserve food for the hyperborean nights of winter, when nothing grows except your beard, and besides reindeer moss under the snow, and tree bark or chaga, there is not much to harvest from the landscape, unless you are lucky with the beasties. As the sower saves the seed to grow his fond fruit again, the homesteader saves the taste of the land, the colors of the summer, and the calories of a season. Eye have been able to ‘put in my time’ this year carefully balanced around other fixer projects, yurt upgrades, cabin renovations, and peasant chores to preserve some food for all those that will eat in my hall with me. Mushrooms made an early gleaning in July, and several species have made their way through dehydrators, solar or otherwise and into jars like looking glass windows displaying their ornate and extra terrestrial shriveled forms. Horse mushrooms, Morels, half a dozen varieties of Bolete, Giant Puffball, Sidewalk mushrooms, and Turkey Tail. Others went straight into the pan; Lactarius, Lobters, Porcini, Hedgehogs, and Shaggy mane’s. Sedative herbs like bog myrtle and Labrador tea were pinched on hot and hazy afternoons in the Quebec nordiques, and an eclectric array of Rose family members were consumed along the way or saved for later; Rosehips, Hawthorn haws, Apples for rings, sauce and cider, and those that fall on my head when eye scrump a tree. Two bottles of choke cherry cordial, some Halloween green masala beans (basically snap beans in curry spices), jalapenos dried on the bush hung next to my hearth, and a whole day spent pickling beets at the school. Eye also tried a small batch of special jam using blackberries, baobab fruit powder and maple sugar, the result was seedy but satiable. A potato barrel sits in my pantry holding the pride of Ireland, none other than some white lumpers, and some fancy purple spuds, red fingerlings layered with some handsome carrots in between layers of sawdust. In barrel number two, filled similar fashion with some zucchini that bred with some indigenous squash from my garden, the odd pumpkin and others of the squash family. A pail of apples remains unprocessed, as eye bring home yet another container of free fruit from a local riverbank, the highbush cranberry, boiled down into a sour sauce, which eye looked forward to pouring over dark meat or a mound of mashed potatoes. A mushroom flour was even made by my sister by drying the giant puffballs in small pieces, then grinding them in a ninja blender. Eye can not say eye have experienced eating pancakes or bread made from mushroom flour but the world of food is weirder than we can suppose. A humble forage of unmolested acorns in my packbasket still need pounding, leaching, drying and grinding before being turned into nutritive flour, gravy and coffee alternative. Fresh herbs of thyme, rosemary and other culinaries dry in a refurbished solar dehydrator in a warm spell of these early autumn days.
What eye could not make by myself was easy enough to obtain from the Annabaptist community, and allowed me to fill the shelves with cottage pickles, sweets and hots, jellies, jams, and raw honey. A few ruffed grouse have been revealing their presence and offering around the homestead woodlands, as my arrow nearly made dinner of this wild chicken like avian. A few cuts of bear fat gleaned from a neglected hide were scavenged to make cracklings, and half a liter of rendered bear grease. Some for the husky, and some for me. My fishing rod has been on the other end of dinner, where eye caught three bass in an afternoon on the meduxnekeag river. Eye feel a deep ancestral call to make my first hunt, to learn the savage beauty of the essential kill. The ancient archetypal provider bore protein rich meat, not only vegetables and nuts. Tonight we dined around long tables in the forest of the years abundance larder; seafood and meat from land, a diversity of apple based deserts, lentil dahls and naan bread, vegetable gravies and autumn salads. It was truly a blessing to come to the table with my community and feed each other, give gratitude, share space and a speak a modified version of the Thanksgiving address.
Wolf Age: Axe Age
To turn a third eye on the ways of the world right now could be seen quite grim and overwhelming, for a Canadian. All manner of cosmic f**kery is in the pipeline, remodeled civilization systems being manufactured without consent of their denizens, qr codes of human-techno i.d.’s, beauracratic spiderwebs being spun over constitutions, rights and codes of freedoms, drafts of new laws as frequent as the moon’s swollen tides, social media breakdowns, and the division of humanity into classes based on medical status, instead of medicine for the people. Eye have been making a maneuver on a foray out from this country for a minute to Mother Africa, back to the source. Eye feel that it may the last time to visit a country freely with this current passbook of mine, and feel some unfulfilled karma in Africa to live with the original peoples of earth, to know something of what they know; bow hunting and construction from raw natural materials, prey tracking, foraging medicinal and edible plants, making primitive footwear to walk for days in the desert, processing and animal in the bush, natural pigment use, earth home building, and on and on. Their knowledge is vast, they are all our family, and eye need to see my original homeland before the world is closed to travelers, partitioned and off limits. As of this writing, eye fly in under a fortnight, and it is all terribly exciting, dreadfully awesome, bittersweet and about time! My homestead is stocked to the tits, and a chum of mine will look after the place, living in the yurt while my husky hero will head north for the winter into early spring to run with the pack and follow the sled!
Companionship
The Mongolian ger has attracted a few souls to its hearth and inside its yak felted walls. Two friends from the Rainbow gathering traveled from Quebec side to visit, and together we surrendered into the flow of the days without a care or touch of stress. Hurtling our naked bodies into the cold rushing waters on more than one occasion of the maritime flood of rain that swelled the banks of all the watersheds here in the St. John valley. We gathered elderberries, blackberries and apples from the richly endowed trees of the countryside, picked bullrush grasses to weave mats, nipped some culinary herbs from an abandoned castle garden, bumbled around the backroads listening to roots reggae, shared stories, a load of laughs and cooked up a storm. Xavier stayed a week longer and we began ritual baths in the Fallsbrook waterfall, running barefoot over root and rock to reach the pools, and once encountering a Mother Bear and her two cubs which Tradition chased off. Sometime after my company eye was offered a moose hide, and then a bear hide. The Moose was unfortunately left out in the rain in my absence and the hair sloughed away and was destroyed, but eye was able to render the last of the fat, and make cracklings as treats for my husky while eye sampled one or two myself.
Xavier and Joanie also agree to dread my hair, and eye am liking the change, it feels natural and comfortable. A crafted antler bead with the rune of Man burned into its creamy keratin surface is carefully holding one of the dreads now nested on my crown. Eye have turned an ear to some of the uplifting vibes of Jamaican reggae music, especially that of Jah9, who among other talents also leads yoga and makes dub remixes of her music to flow with the sequences. This is a nice change from the Ashtanga sequences for now. Another friend Stu from Shediac led some acro yoga in my longhall, so thence we flew into the afternoon in all manner of aerial maneuvers like our birdy cousins. My psychedelic brother Jeremie also made a placeholding with me and was the first in the yurt since its puzzling assemblage. We held medicine ceremony, danced in the Pilick first nations pow wow ring, and lingered many an evening around the stereo, the world music connoisseurs that we are, trading tunes into the twilight.
Some say about these times that it is the apocalypse, but eye am a solution minded man and see a lot of the positive unfurling through the world. Eye keep a positive attitude, and balanced mood even in the worst of time, so eye am pretty much at least 80% even when the world is more like %20. My bonds with this commune are stronger through knowing who my tribe is, there is less consumerism rampart in the urban centers, and folks are tuning into what is actually important in this life, putting down what they have been carrying for so long. Of course others still choose to follow the herd (but is it not the herding behavior which creates disease in the first place). In the meantime, a whole gamut of triggers are awakening people to their subjective truths, and eye think only when we can be right with ourselves, can we be right with our relationship this world and all the inhabitants.
:aferalspirit: 