Am I really going native?

So, the question should be addressed right off: how can one go native if one started out that way? If I grew up living in the country on a farm, doesn't that mean I should have the simplicity thing down by now? Well, one would think the answer to that question would be yes, but in my case, that is not true. I did, in fact, grow up with a deep and seemingly genetically-based love of nature and agriculture. But ours was not a working farm per se, in the classic model of being a hub of fruitfulness that would provide for most of our felt needs. I also was also part of the "recovering" generation of a family long tied to the difficulties and anxieties of farming in an age where small farms were (and are!) increasingly becoming an endangered species. As such, many of the inherent pleasures and joys of farming and "living close to the land" were overshadowed by the harsh realities of eking it out trying to make a living as a dairy farmer and the marks those realities left on my dad and his siblings. I never minded helping out around the farm and often had an itch to explore some kind of agriculture my family no longer worked, but it almost seemed that my dad felt, "If I don't have to do that anymore to survive, then I'm not going to." If he could buy eggs instead of going through the hassle of raising chickens to provide them, great! If he could buy hamburger instead of eating every last bit of food they could get out of a slaughtered milking cow because they couldn't afford to waste the food, that would be just fine, too. I was, at the same time, saved from the pain and responsibility of being made to live close to my food source and denied from the joys of being a more dynamic part of that process.

I went away to college, stayed in my college town to live, proceeded to work for a couple years, started back to grad school, got married, finished grad school, had a kid, and then moved back to my small hometown area with my husband and my toddler daughter. Okay, so that was about 10 years in one sentence. Let me expound a little... my college town was in many ways the polar opposite of my little country hometown. Collegetown was sophisticated, fast-paced, subtle, and metropolitan. That never changed in the whole time I lived there and I always have and always will appreciate those things about it. Then there's Hometown. Hometown didn't change much, really. It was me that changed. What I used to think of as boring became calming and what I used to think of as provincial became connected. A major transformation took place over those ten years.

A lot of things contributed to that change in me. My parents prepared the way for that change to take place by teaching me to be open-minded, curious in all things, and passionate about loving God and His creation- human and otherwise, in all shapes and forms. My undergraduate studies opened my eyes to an ever expanding array of knowledge about different people, places, and topics and gave me a chance to explore those new ideas first hand through traveling and internships. My job experience introduced me individually to the idea of a professional drive motivated not by a desire for monetary gain but by a pursuit of my career as something that would leave a positive lasting legacy for the kindom of Jesus. My graduate studies ironically acted to cement my long-standing passion for holistic health and wellness grounded in a Christian ideal while simultaneously training me most rigorously in one facet of that whole.

My husband taught me to slow down and begin the process of seeing lack of excessive intensity in others not as a character flaw but as a goal to strive for. He shared with me a love of physical activity in different forms, including that which many people would call "work." Such a foreign concept to so many young people our age or younger, we both thought going out to work on a car or chop wood was a great physical project that could be seen as interesting, educational, and maybe even fun, whereas so many other young people had developed an antipathy to physical labor as something that was foreign and distasteful. Through these shared interests and a relationship built around our mutual love of many things natural and simple, we began a family. Our family has been and remains based on these concepts and how they stem directly from, or at least are connected to, our faith.

Then along came our little girl. She's the reason I use the name Petra's Mama. She's so interested in rocks that I call her Petra for a nickname. In case you don't already know this from your own life, having a child changes your life like nothing else I've ever experienced or anticipate experiencing. Suddenly your legacy in the world goes from a hypothetical topic you discuss over drinks with friends to a little person with arms and legs who is wholly dependent on you and who will be shaped more by you than by any other person for the next 18 years or so. As I think about it, though, it isn't really all that sudden, is it, especially when your a mom? You go through roughly nine months of slowly coming to grips with this transition. You think you're ready until you actually have the baby, and then your level of readiness becomes a moot point as you are thrust into the realities of parenthood ready or not. One of those realities for me was the that a medical decision I made- to the very best of my ability and with the best information I could gather at the time, I should add- may have contributed to my daughter's health problems during the first few weeks of life. Suddenly a lot of things that I had only studied from books or learned about in the professional world became intimately and frighteningly personal. I went quickly from being able to say honestly and compassionately to those I worked with, "I can sympathize," to being able to say even more honestly and more compassionately, "I can empathize."

Thus began my long journey of motherhood, one of the ongoing threads of which has become my husband's and my very real commitment to "investing" the healthiest and most wholesome elements of life into our little girl. We have become more and more aware of the dangers and harsh realities that lie behind the gilded exterior of many parts of our modern day culture and we reject the premise that they must be part of our life. Now, don't get me wrong... we're not becoming Amish or anything (I am, after all, blogging, am I not?). I'm just saying we are learning to be real with our society and take the good with the bad; to assess honestly what is beneficial and what is detrimental and speak more truthfully about what falls into what category.

One of the ways in which our family's life now reflects this belief was our move last fall back to Hometown. We both now live and work within 10 miles of my childhood home and I must say, I'm loving it. I have come to realize over the last six months that so many things I took for granted as a child are things that are precious treasures that make up for the things I found annoying. Let's be honest- it's not that all those things have ceased to exist (believe me, they haven't!), it's just that I now see them in a different light and they are far less important than the positive elements. I now see being in this area is setting the stage for a lot of the goals and ambitions my husband and I have shared throughout our relationship, including spending time in nature as an integral part of life, being as close as possible to our food supply, and living as low as possible on the ecological impact ladder- in general, having a simpler life.

I dawned on me the other day that this transition back to my old stomping grounds geographically and into a new chapter of defining our priorities and activities might be interesting to other people as well. If no one else, I'm pretty sure there are a few poor sods back in the Collegetown area who care enough about us to read this just to find out what we're up to. Maybe, if I'm lucky and write well enough, I might attract a few other internet junkies like me to reflect on what one family's journey to simplicity looks like in hopes that such reflection might trigger a similar transformation in their own.