sufficiency

This is one of my most favorite books ever.

I’ve checked it out from the library so much that they ought to realize what’s going on and just give it to me. I suppose I could just buy it, but it’s a terrible enough temptation to me when I do have it around that it’s good that it’s out of my house some of the time.

I love to open this book up to the pages with the illustrations called “The One-Acre Farm” and “The Five-Acre Farm”. I pore over the labeled layouts of the tidy little farms, noting how they’ve stuck the beehives in right over here, put the hay storage right over there. I drool over the carefully drawn garden beds, with cryptic names like “root break” and “bean break”. The author gives advice on how to rotate your crops, how to maximize planting space on your property, how to slaughter and dress your animals, where to fit in your milk cow, how to make soap, how to grow wheat…

You begin to plumb the depth of the madness here.

The problem is, I believe all of it. I believe in the wisdom of raising your own food, knowing what went into it. I believe in the metaphysics of understanding the life journey of what goes on your plate. I believe in teaching my children the gritty details of what it means to be a consumer, that the toil and the joy of our hands’ work is more important than the ease of bought goods. I believe in the health benefits of it. I believe in the spiritual and mental benefits. I believe….well, see, I believe it all.

I can see my own smallholding laid out in just such a way, with my milk cow out there in the pasture, my garden laid out just so, my beehives, my wheat….

But honestly. I admit that I am a chronic dreamer. I admit to being a habitual more-than-I-could-ever-chew biter. But after reading the whole book through again this time even I began to hyperventilate. Who can do all this? Who on earth really has enough time, energy, and sheer maniacal drive to run “The One-Acre Farm”? Milk the cow, make all your dairy products. Grow the wheat, make all your bread. Grow all the vegetables, make all the clothes, feed all the animals, build all the buildings, BREW ALL THE BEER…

Okay, so that last one isn’t really a problem for us so much. It sounds like a lovely, idyllic sort of life, really, working hard and cutting loose from dependency on “the system”. It just bumps up hard against the brick wall of reality. There are, well, children. They need new clothes now, because the ones you made or bought ten minutes ago are suddenly above their ankles and wrists. They need to go to the library. They need a new box of crayons and more construction paper. They need a hamburger and French fries and the toy that comes with them. They need…they need…

And there is my husband. A good, hardworking man who comes home to a stack of wild, off-the-wall self-sufficiency projects so tall it could make Atlas feel like a lazy bum.

And there is the need for us to sit, at the end of the day, on the front porch steps and watch the lightning bugs come out, and talk about nothing and laugh with our children. At such times, I think wistfully of the cow I’m not running off to milk right now, and wonder what “self-sufficiency” is really worth.

In “The Wealth of Nations” Adam Smith argued that division of labor allows for more efficient use of time and resources by the people engaged in the divided labor. If you do one thing, he said, you can learn to do it smoking well, and spend less time doing it. The whole self-sufficiency bit is at the exact opposite end of that spectrum.

So what’s the answer? Maybe it’s the same answer as with almost every other choice between two extremes. Balance. To make your goal avoidance of ever going to the grocery or department store again would take every ounce of your time and energy for the rest of your life. To specialize so much that you turn one widget all day every day would make you go insane. But somewhere out there in the middle, I think, is where we want to be. We do want our children to learn these things, but we want to be able to spend some quiet time with them, too. We want to have the leisure to answer their questions, to do some dreaming ourselves, to enjoy the things we do choose to take on without rushing to the next thing. To read a book. To write.

So it seems that although we so often curse the pace of “modern life” and wish that we could bring back “the good old days” when everybody lived and worked on a farm, this may be a case of the green on the other side of the fence. I think the modern life gives us a lot that we don’t give it credit for.

In short, I heartily recommend this book to you, with a grain of salt. There are a lot of lovely fascinating things to be found in its pages. Just don’t feel like you have to take it all on. The author’s approach is so very...encouraging…that you feel like you need to do it all. Rotating my garden plantings I can do. Planting wheat is a no-go.

But I do think I have space for those beehives…