Peaceful moments..

via creative urges.

This morning we read more of that book I wrote last June. It's been long enough that I had honestly forgotten most of it. It isn't bad. Once we've finished reading it I may just write a second draft. I owe it to the real bees that I neglected in my yard last summer to give them their voice in The O'Riley Bees.

The best part of reading out loud? I can't help but fall asleep. Neither can Fracas.It's the only way I allow myself to nap.

The kids seem to be following their creative urges so much more easily now that they can see all of the possibilities on the shelves:Gillen made window decals to keep the birds from flying into our new room's windows. Two birds have been stunned and today a Cardinal hit so hard that it died.

Jesse is working on a new set of cards to go with his Treno game.

Now, if I could just get excited about creating dinner.

If you are what you eat...

Then I wish I were more of this, more often.



I took this picture in July right before turning all of the above into Gazpacho. It was delicious.

Though we ate only local, farm friend raised meat and many vegetables from our farm all summer, we also reverted to eating lots of Kettle brand potato chips, Julie's organic ice cream, "healthy" root beer from the small health food aisle in our local grocery store and other processed quick fixes. Our nearest local organic dairy guy stopped delivering his raw milk near enough for me to get it regularly and back in June, our oven broke. And my third excuse is that I stopped driving into Atlanta regularly to shop at the natural grocery stores. We stayed closer to home this summer, using less gas and less energy. Thus began my downward slide (well, let's call it a vacation) away from weekly grain-grinding, Kefir fermenting, coconut oil infused smoothie making, sour dough pancake and bread making and many more chores that were once all part of my Weston-Price based traditional food preparation, done in the service of my family's health.

I keep waiting for my passion about cooking well to make itself known again. While writing this post the UPS guy arrived at the door with a big box of the high quality coconut oil that I ordered this week. It made me consider driving a ways to get the good milk to make that old smoothie. When the weather cools off, I'll be really hungry again. That will help.

In the meantime, it's been good to be less fanatical about food. We may have swung too far in the other direction, on this lazy food vacation, but I gained some perspective. I feel a lot better when I take the time to prepare our food from scratch. So that will help to inspire me to grind the grain and ferment the vegetables. At the same time, it isn't the end of the world when Gillen has blue Gatorade at a soccer game and goes a bit crazy, and it will forever be true that sometimes drinking a rootbeer float is worth the sugar reaction I have the next day.

Community

This morning, Gillen and Jesse shared tools to release the transformers that they had frozen in cups of water the day before. I shared this idea with them after reading Helen's blog. Who knew this was going to be so exciting for them.

My kids have been raised, much of the time, in a barn. We have been farming since before they were born. It goes with the territory. In addition, one could (one who is rude and hasn't spent enough time in the country - like my former self) even look at my children, when they are peeing outside or eating a piece of meat with ravenous gusto, and easily say,
"Boy, were you raised in a barn?"

These are not the reasons I named my blog "Barn-Raising." Though it's nice that the name does double-duty.

A barn-raising is about community. A big, supportive group of neighbors, both friends and family, jump in to lend a hand, or a meal or a strong back. It really would be so cool if we could all get together to help build one another's houses or take care of one another's children or meals or exhaustion when needed. I know this happens in many places still in the world, even in small rural places like mine. Since we aren't living in one of them, for now, I am talking about another kind of community. I get so much from you other bloggers who are also unschooling, or creating, or farming, or losing your mind, or just questioning. My kids get to see your kids' bird sightings or that you also have a boy who wants to sew or that there are kids just like them in far away places doing similar things but in a different climate.

We have really good local friends who home school,create and parent but they aren't a yell-for-unschooling-or-craft venture-help away, living as remotely as I do. Those on my block may not hear me if I yelled. They could have their hearing aids turned off. Plus, they can't show me what it's like to live in Maine, Boston, Minnesota or Zimbabwe or how they would take a picture of a leek after a rain.

Thanks to my semi-local, IRL community and to my on-line community.

Setting goals, briefly and then pondering them, at length.

We set goals this morning, filling up a few cool Lotta Jansdotter sticky note papers with our goals for the year and then other smaller Lotta sticky notes contained the steps we wanted to take this week towards those goals. The sticky notes are lining the side of the freezer. I found Gillen's in the dog's water bowl at one point but the ink hadn't run and it stuck really well once it was wet. Good thick Lotta paper! They came up with substantial goals. The notes will need to stick up there for awhile.

Gillen's are: to have his turkey business up and running; to cook more desserts; to have a _Farmer Boy_ day when we don't use electricity; to sew a quilt; to get on the best soccer team; and to sell out all of the plants in his new nursery (of course, first he'll have to stop giving them away, which would be sort of sad).

Jesse's are: to get first place in a yu gi oh tournament; to make enough money farming to buy his own laptop; to reread the 5th and 6th Harry Potter books to himself; to make a movie and a game; to learn French better, and to learn Chinese.

My sticky note had things like go to the bank and buy a clothesline. Clearly, I will be needed in my childrens' major creative and business pursuits so I'd better keep mine simple!

They succeeded in doing one thing, each, of the list they made for the next week. But after finishing these self-appointed tasks, they had more fun together, in a Harry Potter spell-off with their wands, than they have had, together I mean, in weeks. And this turning-to-unlikely-pursuits continued all day. Something got shaken by writing down these goals. They energetically pursued forgotten (or brand new) interests in order to temporarily move away from the lists! And, making the lists created new ideas that evolved later in the day.

I think some of the greatest bouts of creativity or productivity I have ever had happened when I was "supposed" to be doing something else. I wrote a screenplay in college when I should have been studying for exams. I took my best photos when I was supposed to be looking for a job while living at my mother's house, decades ago. There's nothing like blogging when I have beans to soak, tomatoes waiting to be made into sauce, and grain to grind. And creativity can be inspired by the boundaries placed when collaborating with others or when costs limit your possibilities. But I digress; back to the sticky notes and the boys moving away from them towards other possibility.

Freedom of choice can lead to freedom of fear-of-failure. If you have the feedom to pursue lots of ideas, you can always move on to the next thing when one doesn't work out. Barbara Sher (up there with Barbara Kingsolver in my "favorite authors who have my former name category") wrote a book called Refuse to Choose about "doing everything (in italics) that you love" rather than picking one path or career or interest and sticking to it. A friend lent it to me, but I'm kind of afraid of going even further that way. I have finally narrowed myself down to three passionate pursuits,peripheral passionate interest vision strictly hidden by blinders, and I'm feeling that this is a big step towards simplifying. Because my freedom to choose, so far, has maybe been a way to not finish and therefore not fail? Maybe I will bump that book up to the top of my pile of seven.

I don't know. I do know my main goal - no Lotta paper needs to be written to remind me - to be with my children as much as possible and to help them pursue their goals, while not losing complete sight of other creative goals of mine, and to only write long blog posts once a month.