I have a confession: I’m not a very good homesteader.
My wife and I moved to a small acreage with dreams of an idyllic existence among the vegetables and animals: a simpler, more traditional life, gathering most of our food from outside our front door. The back-to-the-land movement that has swelled in this country, particularly among people of my generation, caught hold of us too. More and more, in our techno-industrial society, people grow nostalgic for a natural and traditional way of life—and not without reason. We couldn’t resist the poetic appeal of growing our own food, living close to the rhythms of the natural world, and practicing time-enshrined skills—canning, butchering, milking, and the like.
We’re now approaching the end of our second year here, and I find that the reality has been somewhat different from the dream. When you envision homesteading, you don’t picture the difficulty of watering cows in the recesses of a bitterly cold winter when your hose keeps freezing up. Or the unpleasantness of wading through six inches of liquid manure while trying to castrate a calf who probably should have been castrated a lot sooner. Or the exhaustion and dehydration that comes after a nine-hour day of fencing. Or the infestation of Japanese beetles devouring your ripening orchard. Or the panic when the steer makes a show of charging you (he really should have been castrated sooner).
These realities don’t appear in the mind when you imagine your peaceful life in the country. The truth is, such difficulties, frustrations, failures, and exhaustions aren’t uncommon. And this kind of work just doesn’t come naturally to me. I’ve never liked dirty hands. I get headaches from the hot sun. I have to rely on outside help more than I would like to admit.
And, most of the time, I’m inside at my keyboard or reading a book, hiding from the homestead and its demands, especially when it’s very hot or very cold. I’m not a very good homesteader.
Living Up to Reality
It’s easy to idealize. It’s easy to romanticize. But then the reality strikes me across the face, and I stand there, stunned. At this point, I have a choice. I can either reject the ideal as illusory, a cruel trick. Or I can adjust my ideal to align with the reality, seeking to find the ideal in the real.If I choose the former, I‘ll likely become more bitter, more disappointed. I’ll have reinforced the idea that life lets you down and that dreams can never be fully realized.
If I choose the latter, I have a chance to learn, to appreciate, to see things anew. And I can fulfill my ideal by bringing it into accordance with what’s real.
We often hear the terms “realist” and “idealist” as if they were opposites, mutually exclusive. But I propose that this is a false dichotomy. It isn’t that reality lacks richness, meaning, and fulfillment—the ability to coincide with the dreamer’s vision. The problem is that our ideals are so shallow.
We don’t include suffering in our ideals. But maybe we should. Why not? What’s life without worthwhile pain? What is victory without struggle? The hardship provides the shadows that give life depth and realism and make the joys stand out in greater relief.
Is there not something more romantic about a fence that cost you in blood, that wrought a toll on your body, than a fence that went in as smoothly as a well-oiled sales pitch?
We struggle with the earth, we coax, plead, beg, threaten, and grapple with it to make it yield its fruits. We wrestle with reality because it’s firm, hard, striking, and unyielding to our whims—because it’s real. And that’s a good thing.
The Simple Stuff of Legend
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Two Towers,” Aragorn is asked, “Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?”
Aragorn answers, “A man may do both. For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day!”
It’s possible that our simple, daily activities—particularly the frustrating ones—are indeed part of an ideal far beyond our reckoning. The grass, the trees, and mending broken fences—these are the stuff of legend.
I still believe in everything I wrote in the introduction regarding the value of homesteading—maybe now more than ever. It isn’t that my romanticized vision of country life was false, exactly. Just immature. A seedling. The ideal wasn’t a lie, it just needed refinement, growth. It needed to be tempered by reality, like a good steel. Or aged like a good wine.
I look out at the pasture—the one I enclosed with my own hands, the one I watered with blood and sweat—and I see those cows being what they’re meant to be, doing what they’re meant to do, peacefully wandering the hillside while the great stand of pines sways and murmurs behind them and a royal sky blooms overhead, and I think, there’s something deeply, integrally good here. Something ideal. And all the more so because it’s real and not merely my romanticized version.
When I pause to reflect instead of growing irritated at the inconvenience of an overturned water barrel or an overgrown garden, I can enter into unity with these remarkable living things that I’m trying, haphazardly, a bit lazily, to care for. I enter into unity with the epochs-old tradition of farming, so entwined with the human experience. And I’m left with a feeling of gratitude—gratitude that I can be a part of this reality, however poorly I fulfill my role.
