Its been a long, strange trip. We didn’t grow up on a farm. We grew up in the city, a walk away from the grocery store, schools and friends. Our only training about self-reliance was that we were self-employed, but the business world was and is very different from knowing how to plant, how to cook with wood, how to milk and butcher a goat, or how to build a house.
We’ve come a looooong way from those days. We’ve been counting only on ourselves for the last few years and we’ve learned so much in that time – mostly through trial and error. We’ve built four houses, made a composting toilet, fixed trucks, harvested local edible plants, stayed up nights keeping the stove going so we didn’t freeze. We learned to do without when we couldn’t get to town when something got used up, we learned to wash the dishes with only 2 gallons of water when the water delivery man couldn’t get up our road. We learned that even without “much o’ nothin’”, nobody ever took away our birthday, nor did we ever starve. It’s been wonderful. We learned, first-hand, that “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
Continue reading “Self-Reliance Doesn’t Have to Mean Being By Your Self”