Prepare!
Like so many of you, I set weekly, monthly, and annual goals, put some thought into moving my life forward with New Year’s resolutions, and have a word of the year to serve as my north star throughout the year.
In December of 2019, as I sat in prayer and meditation asking my beloved Creator for guidance in setting goals for the year to come, the singular word - PREPARE - drifted through my consciousness.
While, at the time, I didn’t know our lives would soon be turned upside down, and flipped inside out by a global pandemic, I knew the voice well - that still small voice that whispers the Truth to me - and trusted the messenger implicitly.
Some call it intuition, I once called it an inner guide, but now know it as the Holy Spirit. Where my ego is verbose to the point of nausea, sweet Spirit is cryptic and concise. No fluffy, ego inflating language from Him whatsoever, just simple, direct instruction.
Prepare for…
Even without further elaboration, I knew what He meant.
As a little girl, my favorite books were “The Little House on the Prairie” series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. My parents gardened, and canned and preserved the fruits of their labor. I grew up helping my mother make jelly, and my grandmothers taught me how to cook and sew. There was something about those books that helped me to see the beauty of living simply.
A child of the 60s and 70s, I could see that other people didn’t live like us, and I rather liked that.
Did I carry those traditions into my own family? Only somewhat. I cooked from scratch, was a stay-at-home mom while my children were small, did lots of sewing, but while my husband was building his career, we never lived in one place long enough to start a garden. And even when we did settle down a bit, we were busy professionals leading busy lives, and had no time for homecooking more than once a week, much less growing our own food.
No time to dig in the dirt. Just go, go, go…
We went from eating like this, to eating junk. And lots of it too.
We got fat. We got tired. And, after a couple of decades of eating from a drive-thru, we got sick. Scott, my husband got type 2 diabetes (I refuse to capitalize it!), a host of complications that come from that, and eventually kidney cancer. I got degenerative arthritis that resulted in a spinal cord injury, am pre-type 2 diabetic, and chronically tired.
After Scott recovered from cancer, we’ve spent the past 7 years drastically changing our diet from junk to whole foods-based one bad habit at a time.
First, we cut out soda, then started eating out less.
My little girl’s fascination with all things Laura Ingalls Wilder’s lifestyle always tickled at the back of mind. Over the decades, while munching on a big mac and drinking a coke, I’d read books on homesteading, making butter and cheese, scratch cooking, farming, ranching, and regenerative agriculture.
So, when I heard the word “PREPARE” I knew immediately it was time to get serious about putting things I’d read about into action.
Fortunately, I had a foundation of canning, sewing, and gardening in my childhood to stand on, and I dove into homesteading videos on YouTube (thank you YouTube University!), took canning classes to remind me of the things I’d once known, but forgotten, and rolled up my sleeves to get my hands dirty!
Once the pandemic hit, it became obvious that I wasn’t the only one who got that message. It went out en masse, as was evidenced by the explosion of folks growing a garden, and getting backyard chickens for the first time in their lives.
But it’s not over. Not by a long shot. Something BIG is coming, folks - much bigger than a pandemic - and the wise have gotten the message loud and clear and are preparing for whatever may come.
We are answering the call, and this blog and YouTube channel, “The Scratch Life” are a chronicle of our move back to living a wholly sustainable lifestyle.
