Skills I'd like to perfect
Everett posted over on Living
A Simple Life about the things
he wishes he could do (or at least do better.) He tagged me and Mark
to share our own lists of dream skills, and I got quite inspired by the
project. I'm a student at heart, and there's nothing I love more
than setting up my own lesson plans. So, here's my current course
of study:
- Learn all of the skills necessary to create a permaculture system that feeds us with few non-waste inputs from outside the farm. This set of skills is what the Walden Effect is all about, and includes lots of things I'm currently learning: propagating mushrooms, figuring out forest pastures, growing our own straw, pressing our own oil, and much more.
Learning to live in the moment.
Mark has helped me make enough progress on this step that I can see how
amazing it would be to be able to fully relax and self-indulge, to let
go of time completely and simply be
from time to time. I've got a lot more to learn, though.- Becoming fluent in Spanish. Ever since my family took me on a field trip to New York City and I heard some kids chattering away in Spanish on the subway, I've dreamed of being fully functional in another language. Despite four years of high school Spanish, though, I barely made any progress until I began studying the Platiquemos system on my own this year. Finally, I think I might be able to speak Spanish at the level of a two year old! Clearly, I have a ways to go.
Learning to create community. My
weakest point is my extreme introversion which makes it tough to make
new friends or hang out with strangers. But I dream of tempting
some of our blog readers and other like-minded folks to settle here in
our county where we can bandy ideas back and forth a little better than
we do over the internet. I'm not sure exactly what skills I would
need to make this happen, but it's a dream, so it goes on the list.- Learning to write fiction in a way that doesn't make me cringe. Non-fiction is easy for me to write, but I've always been drawn to a challenge, so I dream of one day writing a fiction piece that I can look at the next day without blushing.
Everett's list is 19
items long, so I feel a bit silly stopping at five, but I did include
about a dozen in the permaculture goal. I've never had a shortage
of skills I want to learn, so I'm sure that in a decade when I've
figured all of this out, I will have another five or ten items to teach
myself. What skills do you dream of perfecting?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Overcoming introversion is possible... it's breaking the comfortable inertia that hurts so much. I'd love to have a little community like you talk about and it's starting to come together a tiny bit.
I'd like to perfect the keep a tidy home while working a mini farm thing. I figure there are an hundred skills in that category. I'm also about to start learning Spanish. Never expected to need that here in Floyd County!
I wish you luck and great progress.
Great goals Anna! We too are interested in the community thing. Our hope is that someday we can talk our two friends from California into moving out here. I keep telling them: There's water here!
Oh and I really like your "stuck here?" banner for the microbusiness website.
Overcoming introversion is possible... it's breaking the comfortable inertia that hurts so much. I'd love to have a little community like you talk about and it's starting to come together a tiny bit.
I'd like to perfect the keep a tidy home while working a mini farm thing. I figure there are an hundred skills in that category. I'm also about to start learning Spanish. Never expected to need that here in Floyd County!
I wish you luck and great progress.
I'm stealing your goals! Seriously, reading your blog sometimes makes me feel like I'm reading my own thoughts. It really is strange to develop a kind of tangential relationship with someone almost exclusively through public blogging.
I've always loved the mountains of Virginia. That place is my heart and my home, but somehow it also gives me this strange, eternal sadness to think about. Maybe that is because I'm not there and I don't know when I will be back. I definitely yearn for the community thing. I am just getting to the point where I am comfortable with the level of isolation I have now. I don't feel like I NEED to be around people all the time like I used to (even though I was cynical and reserved going through public school and forced to be with all sorts of people all the time.) Even so, the idea of accomplishing good work and working on good projects with good people is very appealing.
If you haven't read it already, I recommend reading Diana Leafe Christian's "Creating a Life Together." She is from Earthaven Ecovillage near Asheville, NC and that community has really been the model for what I envision myself being a part of in the future. Her book goes through some of the really practical aspects of setting up a community, which as a Type A person, you'll surely enjoy! I loved it and it's a good foundation to start thinking about how even if the matter of when isn't very clear. It also happens to be really useful when it comes to single family situations and community organizations.
Sara
April --- Sounds like you've got good skills to learn too! I'm actually happy to have our area become a bit more diverse --- makes a great change from growing up in northeast Tennessee and never having met anyone with a non-Christian religion or recent family history from outside the U.S. until after elementary school.
Everett --- I hope you can tempt your friends to move here! That's actually where I'm probably going to go with my community goal --- tempting people I like to move closer. Thanks for mentioning the banner!
Debbie --- We live in Scott County, VA, and I highly recommend it for anyone who wants cheap land and who can telecommute or create their own microbusiness that they market over the internet. Lee County too, for that matter. It's great to live somewhere where you can get bare-bones land for $600 to $1,000 per acre, start very cheaply, and keep your living expenses extremely low.
Sara --- You can have all of my goals.
When you said that "it really is strange to develop a kind of tangential relationship with someone almost exclusively through blogging" --- that really speaks to what I was getting at with goal number 4. I've really enjoyed getting to know several of our regular readers, like you, both through your comments and through reading your blogs, and I wish I had a way to tempt you to settle close to us where we could be real friends instead of just e-friends. I'll definitely add the book you recommended to my reading list --- thanks!
@April: When you talk about "overcoming introversion", are you talking about your introvert nature or are you talking about things like shyness or assertiveness or lack of confidence?
Im my personal experience shyness and lack of confidence are afflictions of youth that deminish when experience grows. Experience is also a good cure for lack of confidence.
Speaking for myself, I don't want to change my introvert nature.
Try to make use of your introvert nature. My thirst for knowledge and my ingenuity has led me to an engineering career that suits me very well.