Make Your Life Your Vacation podcast

 

So very many people (most probably) look at their periodic vacations as being the  most valued part of their life.  The ONE thing that they focus on, and that is the most valuable part of their lives!

They travel overseas, they go to white sand beaches and stay in fancy hotels and dine in amazing restaurants.  They may even do a little ‘Zumba’ or other hotel-sanctioned quasi-fitness activities to give the illusion of becoming healthy…

Here is what I believe we should do instead:

Strive to build a life that is sustainable, and something that you can do happily for the rest of your life.  “Simplify, simplify…” as Henry Thoreau said.  True contentment and happiness does not mean transitory situations that will impress your vapid friends on Facebook and cost lots of money and time.  Really think it through, and figure out what will really make you content and happy, without being concerned about the opinions of others.

Long term, if we are looking back at our lives, what would pretty much ALL of us want to see as accomplishments?  

A satisfying work life, that includes winding up with a happy spouse and children, and resulting in similar grandchildren.  And hopefully, all would be living nearby, in an area that we all loved, and felt a part of.  A kind of an ethnic homeland, in which we all were valued and were a vital part of.

A modest, yet comfortable home, with surrounding acreage and woodlands, to both sustain and nourish us in work and in play.  A small community, of which we are a vital part, and which we contribute to both in local government and the schools.  A community that relies on local government, not state or federal to sustain it- one in which the ordinary citizen is in control!

We would all want to have interests; hobbies if you will, that are consuming passions.  Writing, music, art, woodworking or gardening- it really doesn’t matter, just so long as you find it absorbing and interesting!  I think most people, after working for long years, have discarded their true interests and just gone with what is practical for making money…

This is why they focus on the Vacation Illusion!

It’s kind of as if you are wandering through an oppressive desert, and you are constantly scanning the horizon for something better- anything really-

And then, a mirage appears: a vision of the Wonderful Vacation; something that is almost too good to be true: you in a paradise of travel agent utopia, lying on a beach, somehow totally fit and healthy, and fulfilled in every way!

But trust me, this mirage vacation is too good to be true. Even if your 2 week or so paradise is fun, it is all too fleeting.  What we all truly desire is a permanent paradise- and it is not that hard to achieve!

A simple job, one that sustains you and your family in a rural, red area of America.  A small town oriented type of place, where the local people control the schools and government.  A place where federal and state governmental mandates are hopefully small and inconsequential.  A small enough place for your voice to be heard!

A place where taxes are not oppressive, and your children can grow and be educated without horrors like busing, quotas, or multi-cultural racist nonsense.  The west and the midwest are the best bets for Americans nowadays.  Far from big blue cities and their Democrat rulers.

A smaller kind of place where medical clinics and hospitals are confined to simple things, like broken bones, infectious diseases, and the like.  Not politically based hoaxes and scams, and scaremongering.  Just real health things.

But this requires that you yourself acquire real value.  You need to go to a technical college or somewhere else, where you acquire real life skills that are valuable to others!  Things like electrical, plumbing, welding, mechanical, or other real skills that are nowadays so denigrated as so lowly.  They are NOT.  

You really have to educate yourself to be worthy of living in a modern, small town paradise.  Real skills are necessary; in such a place you will be required to earn your own way!  It’s a return to the basic ideals of now only small town America and Europe, but of western civilization itself.

You will (and should desire) to be someone who is a valuable, working member of your community, not just some big city suburbanite with a made-up fake job of paper shuffling and no actual abilities.  

And don’t mis-prioritize things in your real life paradise after you get there: don’t try to make your rural land into an “estate”, without trees or woods, and substitute a glyphosate soaked fake turf that invisibly poisons your groundwater, children, and all about you…

Just so you don’t have to see a hideous dandelion!

Leave the many poisons back in the real suburbia and the cities that surround them.  Let them keep their out of control crime, horrible schools, racial quotas, and bad, plant-based fast foods and such, along with their leaking sewage and water systems, failing infrastructure, and collapsing buildings and rampant immigration.  It is all totally unsustainable, and will become apparently more so as time goes on.  

You and your family can simply concentrate on improving things in the rural environment you have chosen, both for yourself and other like-minded folks in your community.  Think locally, but vote on a federal and state level for laws that allow us all to stay separate and independent as much as possible from the evil agenda of the Leftists!

Then you, (and I) can continue living in our own little, everyday-of-our-lives: 

Paradises!

Natural Hobbies for Natural Health

Let’s say you want to be healthy- a healthy, paleo type of a person!  You clean up your diet, substituting good fats and pastured proteins for your processed carbs and sugary stuff.  You start to exercise, and use body weight movements instead of machines and weights, and start walking and sprinting barefoot instead of jogging long, slow distances in heavily cushioned running shoes. 

If you are doing these things, I guarantee you are now far more fit and healthy than before- congratulations!  If you also meditate or pray on a daily basis, and drink a paleo green smoothie as well; why, you are not only healthy, you are (or are becoming) one of the most healthy and fit people on the planet!  Congratulations!!

Now, you can just watch televisions endlessly in your free time, or perhaps crochet and start concentrating on your collection of Hummel figurines…

Well, NO.  Your total lifestyle needs to be in sync; that is, to be a lifestyle that makes sense, a way of living that embodies the real values of a person grounded in the reality of the paleolithic, or at least in the real values of necessary and desirable things, not just trivialities. 

What brought this to mind it the time of year: tomorrow, I will start my maple sap collecting, and then boiling down into syrup!  Each phase of life should be centered around what is truly important, and necessary for life.  This week, the snow is almost gone, and though the wet mud is still all to prevalent, it must be braved!  For the maple trees are ready- they cannot wait.  When it is still below freezing at night, and gets into the high 30’s and 40’s in the daytime; why, that is when the syrup runs.  And so, it means I need to run as well, through the mud and back again, drilling small holes into my trees, putting in the spiles, connecting the tubing, and otherwise setting the stage for the sap to run into collection buckets. 

After a bit, I’ll need to start a wood fire, upon which I place a big pot or two of sap, which I keep filled as it boils down, lower and lower as the water vapor boils away, and the sap gradually thickens more and more into the dark, potent brew we call maple syrup.  A sweetener, like raw honey, that is far from just a sugar- it is a sweetener with many other compounds within it that benefit our health.  For instance- did you realize that maple syrup has an anti-oxidant cocktail of beneficial compounds: it has some that are found in tea, and some that are found in flaxseed?  For a sweetener, it is very healthy indeed.

For me, maple tapping not only gets me out into the early sunlight of spring (at last!), and into building a big fire to keep going all day long; it also gets me out into the woods, back in touch with nature!  For, although I walk in the woods all winter long, even when ski poles are the only thing that help me to stay upright on the ice, when I’m out in the spring I hear the awakening sounds of nature all about me.  Birds, small animals, deer, and even carnivores are stirring all around, reminding me that I am but a part of all of them. 

Often, I will find myself automatically feeding sticks and logs beneath my fire, while replenishing the sap in the cook pot- but my main attention is on the woods and environment around me.  The tending of the roaring fire, and the continual pouring of sap and then replacement of the buckets is automatic.  A background activity that keeps me in place in the woods.  It makes me a part of nature itself.

Before I know it, it will be time for lunch, and I will go up to the house to eat.  But all too soon, I will know the drip buckets are full, and the fire is getting low- so I will add more sap to the cook pot, and add more logs to the fire.  The process is not too arduous- it is all just about right- enough to keep me working and busy, but not so much that I can’t stop often to appreciate all that is about me.  This will go on all day…

And for the next few days, probably all week.  And I realize now, as I write this, that although it takes up my days at this time of year, that I look forward to it all winter long!  The first sign of spring!  A moment when I can get outside without being burdened by heavy clothing, when I can smell the vegetation once again in the mud, as the soil reawakens once again with LIFE.  When life once again becomes infused with something fecund, something sweet, not just the endless sterility of winter.

Just as gardening is rejuvenative later on; maple sapping gives me a jump start!  These natural hobbies are as important to me, and my sense of place in the world, as my very health.  And, quite honestly: without them- I would have no true health- not at all!  I would be cut off from nature, purposeless, like a nursing home resident confined to a bed, or an office worker who only watched TV after work and ate TV dinners. 

Thank God for the work of tapping trees outside tomorrow!

Check out this episode!