Home

This is the road to Wildflower Farm. It is my road home. For how long is anyone’s guess. It has been 11 years thus far. Home, is a strange thing… Never quite what you want it to be or dream of it being. I can imagine 50 acres and a wood burning cook stove… But the reality of my home, is that it is has a wood stove for heating. It has three. But none for cooking. I don’t have 50 acres. I am scraping against 5…

This old fashioned house, has become over time, my best friend. I am a homesteader, so my whole life and world is right here in this spot. I have decorated this little rustic farmhouse, and modified her to my needs. She has worked with me every step of the way. Short term loneliness is unknown for me here, because this lovely old wood beam structure is always here with me, both of us rooted to this spot. We have learned to work together to function as a unit. She was as excited as I was when we added the greenhouse. I could feel it radiating from every wood beam, like the cooking fragrances of fresh bread baking, and the fragrances of the fragrance pot on old rusty that get stuck in the pores of her wood beams… Vanilla, cinnamon, cardamom in winter, in spring, fresh herb aromas, summer florals, autumn apple and cinnamon. In a nation, where homelessness is at alarming and record highs, I feel, perfect dream of my heart or not, as if I am amazingly lucky to have her. She may not give me everything I dream of, but she gives me more than enough. Not everyone in this world gets that in this life. There is something deeply disturbing about this fact. I will never understand what makes it ok for some to have so much more than they need and to have others, hungry, cold and without shelter. What kind of people allow this? The answer is all of us. Some do what they can to help, but most just look the other way.

Wildflower, isn’t my first home. My first home  was a commune full of international Buddhist hippies. The kitchen and Dharma room were the 2 main gatherings points. You could find gossip in the kitchen and others to laugh with and companionship. In the Dharma room, you gathered to commune with yourself. To watch your own thoughts pass through your mind. People came stayed for a time and left. They became family, and then they were gone. I still look for many of them in passing crowds out on the street. Wondering what happened to them and hoping they are healthy and happy somewhere. Home can be the people that surround you. So I know what it is to lose your home. Before the age of 10 I lost mine more times than I can count with the people who passed through because for them, it was a stop on the way while for me, it was the only home I had ever known.

In my teens, I lived in a suburb, my home had shrunk to 3 of the at least 20 people I was used to living with that made up the structure I viewed as home as a child. It was a culture shock going from a hippy commune to a ritzy elitist town full of white people. Sometimes you live in a place…. But, it never becomes home. Doesn’t seem to matter how nice it is. There is just something that doesn’t fit who you are. So you never truly make a home there. You pass through. If you are lucky it is a place you learn something and do some important growing. If you are unlucky, it is a waste of years of your life and oodles of unhappiness as you hold onto the warmth of your previous home as the new home just doesn’t fit. You mourn what was. For a long time. Still, though you don’t feel it, you are so lucky. You have a roof over your head. Food to eat. And while you are cold because the thermostat is kept alarmingly low so as bills don’t get high and a future early retirement isn’t threatened… Still, you are not out freezing unsheltered.

Then life continues and you can finally wander off on your own exploration of the world, away from the place that never felt like home. You find homes in subject matter of study, in places across the ocean, in new people… Every stop a temporary home. But always temporary. You tie yourself to another person create a partnership and face the world together. He becomes part of your home. You long for somewhere warm, private… A sanctuary of your very own… So you return to the place you called home when you left to travel and explore. You try to live there as you had before… But then the allergies set in. Your dreams too have shifted. Because while the first major stop after the commune may have been a poor fit, out in the world you found better ones. You discovered places that have functional social systems. Where a group of people says to each other, “there is only so far we will let you fall.” A part of you finds a home there. But to eat you must do food yourself. While traveling you read and learn about the dying planet. Can home be a place that strives for a healthy balance that provides what you need while offering sanctuary for far more than just you?

That is what a homestead is. A place that offers sanctuary to living animals and plants, to principles of permaculture and systems that fight the back against the destruction of the planet. It is so much more than a shelter or a place where human beings eat and sleep. It is truly such a gift to make my home and my life on one. Which isn’t to say it is easy. It isn’t. But compared to the lives so many live now… I am grateful for the hard and a place of my own. I hope we can learn to be a place that adopts this attitude towards each other that I have seen in other places where we step up and set a limit to how far we will allow each other to fall. Because what we are doing, it isn’t working. More importantly, our communal home the one that we share together all of us, is only as strong as our weakest member. We can be a home together for anyone that needs one. We can and we need to. Now more than ever. Because home is everything. It is what defines and shapes each of us. I know I have been hugely changed and shaped by each place I called home. Home is after all where the heart is.

Let’s all have some gratitude for the imperfect sanctuaries we have.
Let’s stop and consider how we can help those without any sanctuary at all.
We are only as strong as our weakest member.
Thank you for reading
Amanda Of Wildflower Farm