A Look Back on the Day

Today's efforts have been spent writing.  Whether this was a true creative and inspired day, or a subconscious procrastination to avoid some household chores, who can say?  (None of those chores were crucial, and they will all still be there tomorrow, so does it really matter?) 

I'm currently working on four projects:

• the companion podcast to this blog
• a web site for our beekeeping operation
• a cookbook dedicated to cooking with honey
• a practical guide to personal sovereignty 

First, I'm shooting for publishing the daily podcast beginning this Friday morning.  There will be a few episodes dedicated to the holiday season, as well as mapping out your plans to increase your personal levels of self-sufficiency in 2010.  There are already two episodes published from prior to losing our internet signal.  I am still finding my voice as a podcaster, but please check them out at http://betterlivingdaily.podbean.com/. 

Second, we're taking our beekeeping to a new level this year.  And, as every business needs a web site, we're putting one together.  The site is not up yet, but the future internet home of Ellis Apiary will be www.NewEnglandBeekeeper.com.  When it is up and running, I will repost the link.  The site will contain infomation on sustainable beekeeping, the importance of strengthening the local honeybee population, the truth about the commercial honey you buy at the supermarket, honey-based recipes for food, mead, home remedies, and at-home spa treatments.  Of course, there will be a sales page with our honey, beeswax, candles, and any other bee-related product we may offer in the future.

Third, one of the things we learned from meeting honey consumers at farmers' markets was that most people seemed to think of honey as a sweetner only for their tea.  While planning our participation in this year's markets, we tossed around the idea of handing out new recipes each week.  Ultimately, that would lead to a lot of wasted paper, ink, and a lot more time and effort.  Instead, I'm putting together all the honey recipes I have into one publication that we can display along with our honey, that customers can look through, and hopefully purchase.  The cost will be minimal- I'm not looking to make a living writing cookbooks.  It's all about promoting the honey!

Fourth, and finally, I've been writing little bits and pieces here and there, more like opinionated essays, and just saving them on my lap top.  They have started to take a larger, more cohesive shape into a guidebook for opting out of the various broken systems upon which most of our nation currently is dependent.  It is about cultivating the highest degree of freedom that is afforded to us under the law, and how to keep these freedoms from being erroded any further.  I have no idea when this project will be done, just that I'm working on it. 

How do these projects help us live a little better?  Well, the beekeeping related stuff should be obvious in that they will be tools to help us make our own way and provide our own income.  The podcast and the guidebook to creating more freedom will help in a different way.  These projects will become part of a growing movement happening all across the nation.  More and more people are bringing homesteading and survivalism into the mainstream.  People are fed up with being slaves to their debt, McMansions, and jobs that they hate, and they are looking for a way out.  It is my position that self-sufficiency through homesteading is the most direct and accessable way to achieve those goals.

Of course, some people have careers that they love, but many people are just working for a paycheck to keep themselves and their families afloat.  Meanwhile, our government ignores our protests, and instead continues to support the interests of Big Business and Big Banks. 

People are starting to look for alternatives, like preparedness, homesteading, survivalism, gardening, and producing their own energy.  Just search online and you will find hundreds, if not thousands of people, just like me, blogging and podcasting about their efforts to better their circumstances, increase their self-sufficiency and their freedoms, and hoping to inspire others.  People are writing books and publishing YouTube videos teaching self-sufficiency skills.  Most importantly, people are tuning in, listening, reading, watching, and learning. 

If the podcast and the book help people to become more self-sufficient, it absolutely betters our family's situation because it improves everyone's situation.  If you don't understand what I mean by that, well, hopefully you'll tune into the podcasts and check out the book when it eventually becomes available.  (wink)

On an individual level, spending so much time writing today has been almost meditative, and certainly helped me to refocus on my own personal goals.  It just helped to gel and crystalize certain concepts and information that have been rattling around in my noggin for a while.

Live better, a little every day.

Let's Start a Food Fight

Warning: Post contains political opinions.

As we prepare our Fall garden, I've been mulling over how far-reaching the ability to produce one's own food truly is. Growing your own food may be the single most important thing that one can do to promote freedom. By growing your own food, you:

1. Take control over the quality, variety, nutritional value, and safety of your food supply.
2. Reduce the amount of fuel spent transporting, cooling, and warehousing food.
3. Save money that can be reallocated to debt reduction, investing in land, equipment for off-grid living, homeschooling supplies, or to simply hold in savings.
4. Reduces the amount of money being fed into the Broken System.

The first three items are reason enough to grow a least a portion of your food. But, you may not have heard about the fouth. The Broken System is actually a network of systems. This network includes entities like the government, as well as health care, financial and food industries, and so on. Each of these entities share two things

1. a gross lack of accountability to the American public,
2. are wasteful, and operate in an unsustainable manner.

Considering the size to which these entites and industries have been permitted to grow, we are left with few real options with which to reign them in. The most powerful tool we have to take back control is through individual spending habits.

Career politicians, lending institutions, and giant manufacturers try desperately to get us to spend money. It keeps them strong, while keeping the general population weak with debt. But we have a choice whether to listen to them, or to listen to our common sense.

What we need to do is stop spending! Stop listening to the nonsense that it is supposedly patriotic to spend money you can't afford to spend. According to who? Here's the truth: it's patriotic to create strong, debt-free, American families. We can reduce our spending by growing some or all of our own food. You end up with more money in your pocket and better quality food at the same time.

There is a tremendous amount of waste of fuel and energy to grow food on large Agri-business farms, and especially on imported food from foreign countries. More fuel and energy is then wasted in the packaging, shipping, and warehousing of food. All of the fuel and utilities necessary to keep this process afloat is taxed and a source of government income. Considering that most produce travels an average of 1500 miles from farm to store shelves, that's a lot of tax revenue.

I do not know anyone who thinks the government has spent our tax dollars wisely. Yet, even with a completely different party in control of both congress and the White House, we are still subjected to the Patriot Act, paying for a horrendously expensive war, and bailing out companies and banks as a reward for mismanagement. Voting differently certainly didn't do much to help us.

The most effective way to create change is to change our spending habits. By growing our own food, we are refusing to feed into the Broken System. Growing our own food reduces our dependence on foreign oil. Growing our own food is an act of patriotism.

Live better, a little every day.