Never relinquish your most private dreams because even if they never play out in your life they will inform your hope, your ability to move forward, and your  belief that you deserve every scrap of love you have.  Never stop believing in the power of the small voice, the sliver of light in the dark, or in the regenerative power of the earth beneath your feet.

I don’t care what your creed is, what your political views are, or what your country of origin is.  There is a universal truth to recognize.  It isn’t weakness to love.  It isn’t weakness to want peace.  It isn’t weakness to want to help your neighbor.  It isn’t weakness to listen to the early spring white violets call out for pale sunshine.  It isn’t weakness to stop to listen to them.

What’s important in life is elemental and not the least bit complicated.  Don’t be afraid to love without sophistication.  Just love.  It isn’t all you need but it’s the best foundation on which to build a rich life.

Love.

And bury your hands in soil once in a while.

I have been calling myself an urban homesteader for years.  I knew
it was a movement a decade ago.  In fact, it was a movement started in
the sixties with my mom’s generation of people “getting back to the
earth”. 

Urban homesteading is a growing movement of people re-learning
homesteading skills on a city-scale.  There is a fairly well known
website of a family who’s also been a part of this movement who believe
they are solely responsible for coining the name of this movement, so
much so that they have trademarked the term “Urban Homesteading”.

I have never personally liked the “Path to Freedom” website run by the
Dervaes family but I was happy enough to see another website
where people could get information about growing food on small
city lots.  I have always thought that the more people talking about urban homesteading and sharing ideas the better.

Now I’m angry. 

The Dervaes family is trying to enforce their dubious trademark on the term “Urban
Homesteading” (and “urban homestead” too, I believe).  I don’t know all the
details but I don’t need to know much more than that it is a betrayal of
this movement to try to own its name and control its use. 

The spirit
of the urban homesteading movement is a non-commercial, non-corporate
approach to self sufficiency on a small scale.  What part of this
movement is about ownership of its name?  What part of this movement is about owning what and who other people are?  None of it.  What I have loved about urban homesteaders across the board is their willingness to share information for free, their encouragement to others to come join the fun, to explore self sufficiency with the goal of becoming less dependent on corporate America.

Supposedly all of us who have been calling ourselves urban homesteaders for years must no longer use that term.

Trademarking the term urban homesteader and urban homesteading is no
different than trademarking these terms: housewife, animal husbandry,
homesteader, farmer, plant conservationist, home gardener, city dweller,
marathon runner, anarchist, American citizen, nurseryman, self
sufficiency, dairy farmer… and this list is infinite.

You can’t own me.  You can’t own who I am.  You can’t own the life I lead and my ability to succinctly describe it to others.  You can’t own a grassroots movement.  If a movement can be owned at all (which I don’t believe it can) the minute someone owns any part of it it is no longer a grassroots movement but a business.  You can’t own what people call themselves.  You can’t own the words that describe what a person does and what they believe in.

Trying to own the term “urban homestead” in any of its forms is like trying to own the term “Christian” and then forcing all Christians to come up with some other way to identify themselves and what person on earth is arrogant enough to try to own the faith of others?

Urban homesteading is my faith.  It’s my spirit.  Growing my own food and herbs, raising chickens, sewing my own clothes, recycling, composting, choosing open pollinated plants, building raised beds and coops, making my own medicines… this is who I am.  It’s what I believe is more important than anything else.  Even when I’m not able to work on all the projects I want, even when all I can do is dry some of my own thyme and cook great food for my family, I am still an urban homesteader and no one can take that away from me.

No one can own me.

No one can own you either.

Please read about this and if you can donate to the Electronic Frontier Foundation who is helping to fight this issue, please do.  If you have a blog or a website and can write about it- please do.  Everyone who has ever considered themselves an urban homesteader should speak up and shout out. 

Riding the Fences of the “Urban Homestead”: Trademark Complaints and Misinformation Lead to Improper Takedowns 

Urban Homesteading

Take Back Urban Homesteading

This is my latest baked bean batch.  I’ve been working on developing a good vegetarian baked bean dish for ages.  I’m closer now than I’ve ever been.  Philip and my mother loved this version.  It’s almost ready to share.

A lot has been going on around my farmhouse.  We still don’t know if the bank will refinance and we’re at nine months of not knowing now.  My campaign to unload a lot of junk was going well (did I already mention I got rid of 6 boxes of craft stuff from my office alone?) and then my mother moved in with us permanently. 

Her moving in was a decision we reached mutually for a lot of different reasons.  The number one reason is that she couldn’t afford to live in Portland any more.  She loves it there but it’s just too expensive.  Another reason is that if the bank refinances our loan she can contribute to our mortgage.

The less official reasons are that her health isn’t great and neither of us wanted her to be so far away that if anything happened I wouldn’t be able to help out.  She’s had bronchitis for a month and has been experiencing vertigo and has been ordered by her doctor not to drive.  So now she’s on a leave of absence from work. 

The minute she moved in it’s been complete chaos.  Not because of her.  My mom is pretty easy to live with now, something I never thought I’d say ten years ago, and she has a magic way of arranging and organizing things that I was not blessed with.  So she moves in and suddenly we have an amazing living room.  No dead space.  It’s wonderful!  What’s chaotic is how we’ve all been getting sick for a month and the pet situation is complicated and extremely stressful.

We love pets.  We are all animal people.  By animal people I mean to say that we aren’t people who feel life is complete without animals being part of our family.  My mom arrived with two cats and two huge dogs.  My dog who has never chased her own kitties is suddenly responding to a cat-hunt vibe with the youngest of my mother’s two dogs (a big boy named Angus) and our cat Penny is really upset and is now peeing on things. 

Angus is really the apex of all the trouble.  He can reach anything at all and is constantly chewing on whatever he can get his maw around.  Any boots or shoes left around are decimated in minutes.  He’ll eat everything in the kitchen.  I roasted a very expensive baking sheet of organic fennel and turned my back for less than three minutes and he had licked over it all and already eaten half of them.

On the plus side my mom got our dishwasher fixed.  I don’t mind hand washing dishes but I confess that it gets overwhelming doing dishes here and never more so than with one more person living here.  Not only did she get our dishwasher fixed (it’s been broken for over a year) she actually cleans the kitchen every couple of days! 

Stitch and Boots is meant to be my homesteading blog but lately I realize it’s mostly been my cooking blog.   I am not going to officially change the focus because I keep hoping to do some other household projects to share here.  I’m using this place as my flame of hope, if you don’t mind me saying such a silly thing.  I have not really done any garden planning for a year while writing my novel and working and trying very hard to hold everything together with thin threads. 

I was reinspired the other day by a talk I had with my Kung Fu teacher and a couple of other students at our school about GMOs and though our talk was angry (not with each other- with the situation of not being able to keep GMOs from our own diet due to no labeling and contamination of non-GMO crops by a growing number of GMO crops) out of the anger I remembered something fundamental: growing your own food matters.  Growing my own food matters. 

Even though I might have to leave this house mid-season, it’s also true that I might be here (in limbo) for as long as another year and in that time I can grow at least two crops in my garden.  I already have the beds, they just have to be cleared of quack grass (“just” is not doing justice to the problem- remember I broke a shovel on that stuff?!).  So I talked to my mother who is largely responsible for having given me a passion for gardening in the first place and she’s going to help me.  We’re going to do a small vegetable garden. 

It will be an act of good faith that we’ll hopefully still be here a year from now.  Two years from now.  A decade from now.

She has requested one whole bed for her own experimentation with square foot gardening.

There is nothing more important than for all of us with yards and balconies to grow open pollinated food.  With all my house and life turmoil I lost sight of that.  I’m watching the spring bulbs surface and though I’m sad to see winter winding down I am feeling the excitement of spring and all the new growth it brings with it.  I’m excited to clean out the dead growth from my strawberries and let the new leaves up into the light.  Snow watch 2011 is over. 

It’s time to plan the only part of my future I can be sure of which is that no matter where I live I will always grow food.  It’s the best offering of hope I can make.  It’s the grandest gesture of love I can share.

I have taken a break from writing my novel to create a book of my photos with some of my very best observations, meditations, and advice from my years of writing Dustpan Alley.  Please come take a look inside:

I have had this hunger to “settle” for as long as I can remember because I resented moving so much as a kid.  I hated it.  My son is learning to hate it too.  I kept thinking that the best thing in life is to have a little plot of land of your own to grow food on and a house you love and will grow old and die in.  It’s a combination of an American myth and my own fairytale.  It’s what we’re supposed to want.  It’s what we’re supposed to work ourselves stiff for.

I had the house I never wanted to leave.  I had the house I wanted to die in.  I had it all.  I had every bit of that dream and life carried it away from me on a foul wind.  Ever since losing the house of my dreams I’ve clung to the same ideal, trying to recreate what I had.  Every time I try to recreate it rips right out of my hands and leaves me with a wrecked foundation and a bunch of matchsticks to start over with.

I knew there had to be a message in there somewhere.

Sometimes life has to kick you in the head until you learn to duck and cover.  Sometimes you have to stop trying to rebuild the same thing over and over again.  Sometimes you have to look at everything differently and under the bare-bulb light of raw interrogation.  What if what you think you want so bad isn’t what you need and what if creating the life you need leads to to a life you really want?

Home is not about ownership of property.  Home is not about owning anything at all.  Home is about what kind of a life you can make with the materials you are given and that you are able to find.  Home is about nourishment.  It’s about self sufficiency.  Self sufficiency isn’t just about having a garage full of tools or a field of wheat, though those things are good if you have them and can keep them.  Self sufficiency is about rolling your sleeves up no matter where you are or what you’re doing and asking what you can do to improve a situation, a person, or a place.  It’s about rolling up your sleeves to make things with your own two hands.  You don’t have to own a house to make things with your hands or to fix situations, places, or people.

I despise the old saying “Home is where the heart is” because it’s such a shameless oversimplification and meant to provoke a warm (predictable) emotional response from people and the people who say it usually aren’t homeless or heartbroken.

Home is where you nourish yourself and your family.  Whether you do that in a house you own, or a rental, in an apartment, or in a commune.  Home can be the shelter you took your kids to to be safe and warm.  Home isn’t anything as simple as your heart. It’s earthier, harder, and primal.

As we’ve been waiting and waiting for the bank to answer our plea for assistance I’ve had a lot of time to ask myself what I need and whether what I need is what I want.  They aren’t necessarily the same thing.  What I need, and what my family needs, is to reduce our responsibilities and burdens.  We need to cut out about fifty percent of our belongings.  We need to pare down, lighten up, get back to the core things we need in order to take care of ourselves.  We need a living space that’s half the size of what we have because we can’t take care of what we’ve got with our limited time and income.  We need to either have a postage stamp yard or no yard because as passionate as I am about gardening, that’s not what I need right now.

We need to have time to enjoy each other’s company without constantly dealing with all the little/big things that are falling apart right now or the things we’ve obligated ourselves to do or the things we should be doing as homeowners and can’t and are therefore constantly stressed out about.

The decision to let the house go into foreclosure hasn’t been an easy one and though I have to admit that it’s making me more emotional than I like being, it already feels like a tremendous load is about to lift from my life.  It feels as though this is the first right decision I’ve made in five years.  It isn’t easy to pry my fingers from the ghost of the dream I spent ten years fixated on.  It’s hard to let go of something everyone else thinks you should die trying to hang onto.

A house is just a house.  I can’t live my life as though an apocalypse is about to render all people without acreage into starving vagabonds.  A house isn’t a home if it keeps you from doing what you’re really supposed to be doing.  A house isn’t a home if it drains more from you than it fills you with.

The only truly sad thing about this decision is that I must find a home for my 9 loved hens.  The oldest three, Dot, Flower-bud, and Pinny are my sweet old biddies who have served me so well and who will take hens that are at the end of their laying cycles to let them retire in comfort?  I’m heavy with the need to relocate them but there’s no question about it and there’s so much to do to prepare for the future move, the sooner they get settled somewhere safe and good, the sooner I can deal with the change ahead.

My life has never been settled and I see now that
it doesn’t matter.  What matters is that the best day of every week is when Philip, Max, and I go out to dinner together.  What matters is that I can cook amazing food and support local growers and sew and nourish my family in any shelter.  What matters is that I finish writing my book and get it published.  What matters is that I teach my son not to dogmatically hang onto ideals that don’t work for him as an individual. 

What I hope for is a cottage no bigger than one thousand square feet, a tiny yard for my pets to enjoy, a good kitchen, and a corner to write in.  Or perhaps we’ll find a cool old apartment downtown above the stores.

We won’t likely move until late spring so I have time to weed through and curate my belongings down to an essential collection.

Yesterday Max asked me what I most want.  What thing do I really really want the most?  I couldn’t think of anything I want.  I need some new sheets but that’s not what he meant.  I don’t want anything.  I haven’t got an appetite for things the way I used to and it reminds me of when I was first married and I was filled with earthly wants and desires.  I remember burning with the desire to own a home when I was living in our sweet old apartment in San Francisco and here I am, seventeen years later, on the other side of it all.  What I’m remembering is how amazing my apple green vintage kitchen was. 

I’ve been in a lot of different kitchens and I expect I’ll cook in a lot more before I die.

Home is wherever my two hardworking do-it-yourself hands dig in and get dirty.

The pickles.  This was not my year for pickles.  There weren’t any pickling cucumbers available for upick so I decided I’d make dilled beans.  When I tried picking at the farm it was not a great moment for them either.  So I resolved to just make extra cauliflower pickles.  I love dill cauliflower pickles so I figured I’d be just as happy eating these as the usual cucumber dills.

*Possibly an overstatement.