land search--documentation of my process, lessons learned, emotions felt, values lived up to or not

I'm trying to figure out how to upload it stil, but for now if you want to listen I'll just give you a link privately.  Send a purple moosage.

My goal was initially to get an acre and live more self-sufficiently.  Then it was to get 30 acres and build a home for $50 and live self sufficiently.  Then it was to get a house 30 acres.  Then a house with 1 acre.  Now anything with a roof and walls, and the possibility of heating without fossil fuels.  in New England still.  Have I lost my way? gone completely bonkers? become part of the system?  Find out in the exciting installments of

Joshua's Home Search Soil-less Garden

I'm giving an update.

I got land.  It's been glorious, and recently meh.  And I realized today that I was subtly pressuring myself to enjoy it more than I actually could, so that I could have my lifestyle appeal to others, in order to influence them to join the permaculture bandwagon in some form.  Specifically, banging T-posts, a chore I really don't like much, into New England soil (what you non-New-Englanders call "rocks" or something, here we just call it "soil").  

If I step back and look at what I have, though, I do have an amazing life.

The most important thing is I can heat my home with wood, burning off the smoke to make much less toxic input to my neighbors' and my own lungs, thanks to a rocket mass heater (and Mud and Christina helping, couldn't have done it without them and a few others!).  I have space to grow a garden and the health dept. has not had anything to say to me once.  I have 3 hugelbeds and am starting a fourth, bigger one.  I have 2 pond pits.  I have pigs, ducks, a few geese, Guineas, and a livestock guardian dog.  We have a love-hate relationship, but the love is definitely stronger even than his nippy, nippy bite.  

I do wish I had more community around me, for during tasks, whether in-person or over audio communications.  I've gotten to connect with neighbors and they are all lovely people who at least have some kind of a garden going, most of them, and have offered various kinds of help, but I am a community hog and would love to have more community!  I wish my pigs would work more at wallowing and less at swallowing, more grazing and less lazing, I wish my ducks would forage more and require storage less, and I wish my dog would deter predators more rather than just furniture.  But I have a lot of good in my life.

So why have I been grumpy a bunch of the time?  why has my appetite seemed to change so much?

It's like dreaming about something from afar for so many years and then suddenly getting a huge dose of it 24/7, it feels like the romance has been sucked out of it in many ways.  But I have time to focus on my teaching and art, and given how rough what the rest of the world is going through, I really have to acknowledge I'm fine and it would not make sense to change this life.

Changing my attitude, and connecting/reconnecting with more community in some form would be really nice.

I guess I have also felt inadequate in my capacity to take in the beauty and the information from the land.  I can relax about that and go at the pace I can actually manage.

For anyone attempting to make the change, if you're doubting your choice I encourage you to follow your gut.  The voices that say "you're dreaming to big" aren't demonstrably accurate.  The urgency voices aren't either--"I came to the woods because I wante d to make sure, when it came time to die, that I had truly lived" is one person's experience, it doesn't have to be anyone else's.  There are infinite ways to do permaculture, to move the needle forward, in any location.  

I've wasted or bungled a lot of opportunities, to be sure, but I've gotten some things right too.  So that's where I'm at today.

Joshua said, "The most important thing is I can heat my home with wood, burning off the smoke to make much less toxic input to my neighbors' and my own lungs, thanks to a rocket mass heater (and Mud and Christina helping, couldn't have done it without them and a few others!).

Congratulations on the land purchase and the rocket mass heater build!