The Simple Life

I like Bluegrass music.  Ricky Skaggs sings a song called Simple Life.  Turn up the sound on your computer and click below to listen to some good music while you read today's posting:

Simple Life by Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder Live at Charleston Music Hall

I think about the simple life a lot.  Have I sucked out all the marrow of life today or did I get sucked in to the world's system?  Did I live deep today or was my existence shallow?  How many days do we go through the motions of life, confusing busy-ness with purpose, money with success, activity with happiness.  Sometimes we make things so complicated.  In our blitz of activity, we miss out on the simple pleasures of life. 


Banana spider I saw by the barn that had captured a cicada in its web for its breakfast this morning. He must have a big appetite! 

 One of the things that attracted Tricia and I to operating a small homestead farm was simplicity.  In the Apostle Paul's letter to the Thessalonians he states,

"make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands, just as we commanded you" 1 Thessalonians 4:11

That's some good stuff, right there!  Living a quiet life, minding your own business and working with your hands...  There's something in that lifestyle that exudes humility, honesty, integrity and is very appealing.  The Bible has countless agricultural references beginning with the Garden of Eden and on through the Gospels as Jesus used agricultural parables to teach about the Kingdom of God.

Shots of the full moon as we walked out to the barn to milk Daisy and Rosie a couple mornings ago

The other thing that attracted us to homestead farming was the ability to grow our own food and being able to sit down to a meal that came from your land.  Food for which you knew with certainty that it came from animals that were treated humanely and crops that were grown and harvested without the use of herbicides, pesticides or synthetic fertilizers.  We wanted foods that were more nutrient-dense and healthy.  Hippocrates summed it up nicely when he said, "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food."

The "simple life" we soon learned, wasn't so simple.  Things aren't easy.  Sometimes animals get sick or predators get them.  Sometimes a beautiful crop can succumb to insect pressure or disease.  Often, it is expensive to be a good steward to the land and animals on it - expensive in both capital and effort.  God takes care of us and we look at each day with gratitude for what we've been given.  We learn new things each and every day.

When we got our first Jersey cow, Buttercup, we purchased the book, Keeping a Family Cow by Joann S. Grohman.  This book contains very practical advice and the book has been used heavily for reference.  I especially like what she says on the last page:

"Advocates of restricted diets foster the impression that if you will cut out enough good food and take enough of the vitamin-of-the-week you'll live forever.  So far this has not occurred.  Even increased longevity is largely a myth created by a reduction in infant mortality.  What we have achieved is sickly old people and fat youth.  This outcome has not derived from a diet of milk, cream, butter, eggs and meat, consumption of which has been declining steadily since around 1880.  What has increased is consumption of manufactured fats, sugar, and refined carbohydrates such as bread and pasta.  The people who built the stone walls and huge walls of America's farms did not do it on white bread and margarine.  Nor were they assisted by vitamin tablets and fatty acid capsules.  Those constituents were found in their food and they remain in the food of people who produce their own.

I can not discuss the cost and work of keeping a cow without also considering the true long term investment in the health and appearance of my family.  The cost of my labor cannot be counted in this domestic economy.  Nothing else I might have done with my time could have matched these rewards.

Cows and grass are recession proof and inflation proof.  In difficult times, the family with a cow is not poor."



Tricia and Benjamin bottle feeding Blackberry with Daisy's milk so that Daisy would adopt her (April 2012)

  Faith, Family, Food, Fun...  The Simple Life - simply amazing!