Rallying Cry!

I have been re-reading one of my favorite books, The Urban Homestead: Your guide to Self-Suffiicient Living in the Heart of the City by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen. This book is amazing for so many reasons. There is great information on everything from making sourdough bread, to growing veggies, to raising chickens. Even if you are not interested in everything discussed in the book (dumpster diving, and foraging for edible weeds was a little extreme for me) it will spark interest in so many things you never thought about doing! There are a few paragraphs in this book I find incredibly inspiring. I, of course, find meaning in my life through domesticity, but this is a much better way to put it:

We've lost our knowledge of farming and animal husbandry, and more recently, we've lost most of our practical knowledge regarding housekeeping. Housekeeping is no longer considered an art. If we have the money, we outsource it. We earn money so we can buy prepared food and pay someone else to clean our home. The home is little more than a crash pad where we watch TV and a storage unit where we keep the things we buy when we are not working.

The home used to be a place where we made things. We made the things we used, and the things we ate, and we made them with pride. With generations of experience guiding their hands, homesteaders transformed the harvest into usable goods. They could make almost everything they needed. There is power in that, power that we've exchanged for convenience.

This exchange is often celebrated as a liberation from drudgery, but art is never drudgery, even if it is hard work. The practice of art is profoundly satisfying, precisely because it is challenging, and when it comes off well, you know you've created something of real value. Drudgery is not about hard work, rather, it is a condition of skilless work. One of the big lies of the last century was that the home arts were drudgery that needed to be abandoned in favor of commerce. We gave them up, just as we ceded farming to factories.

Now the tide is turning. Just as there is growing interest in growing food and raising livestock among people who were not raised up with these skills, there is also a resurgence of interest in the indoor arts. If we take the kitchen back from the microwave, we discover a whole new world of flavor, a world of living, healthy, nutritionally complex foods. The kitchen becomes an arena where you, the domestic artist, learn to harness the forces of life. It is time to resurrect the lost domestic arts before they are lost for good.

You should get this book! Or if you live in Austin, you can check it out from the library. You will probably buy it after you check it out since you will want to reference it all the time!!