Drop Out Post Mortem and Next Steps

 I've recently been undergoing a type of dark night of the soul. In my experience these are brutal experiences of self doubt and reflection, often coupled with intense feelings of anxiety and failure, that preface an awakening into a deeper level of consciousness.

The short version is that I quit my job after my daughter was born. I wanted to stay home with the family and I was sick of working for somebody else. I intended to homestead our double lot, growing food, making crafts to sell at markets and online, and dabble at odd jobs to make our way. We're pretty frugal and our monthly expenses are around $600 a month. We wanted to take our lives into our own hands, develop skills, connect with others doing the same thing, and create a kind of mutual aid network. Largely I was inspired by anarchist, drop out, collapse, and early retirement trains of thought.

Rather than pulling it off, we floundered. The money we had put back evaporated into several unforeseen expenses. A combination of lack of self-motivation, poor planning, and interpersonal problems kept our business plans from taking off.

So now we're hitting a brick wall financially. I'm applying for temp jobs to get us an income stream. We're switching gears into flipping stuff on eBay. I'm looking at gigging apps like TaskRabbit and Text Broker.

Poor planning was the real killer. We didn't make a budget, plan our expenses, do research, or write up anything at all. We expected it to just work out on intuition and luck. You can't rely on those things. They're good skills to develop, but they don't replace hard work and good planning.

It also takes a completely different skill set to do this stuff than to just find a comfortable office job and coast. When I imagine primitive tribes I imagine people who are good at finding and exploiting opportunities, minimizing waste, and communicating and planning with each other. These are skills that have been crushed out of us during domestication, except in the very limited scope of what's important for capitalism.

The dark night part come in when you start asking yourself self-reflective questions like "where did I go wrong?" and "is it worth it?"

You can't lean away from the pain, then it makes the pain more intense. In a way it's like tightening your muscles in preparation for an impact. You body/soul knows what to do - you just open yourself to the fall and when you hit you bounce.

I think it is worth it. Because in the end we don't have a choice. You can't rely on the availability of jobs in the future. We're seeing that right now. The climate's getting worse and things will get tighter soon. Sooner than we think. It's best to start learning how to do it now. People who wait until it's too late will have a harder time making ends meet than those who have been practicing along the way. I'm thinking of a crash in our lifetimes maybe on the level of severity of the Great Depression.

I say crash but I really mean a lowering of altitude - a forced deceleration brought on by environmental factors and declining societal motivation and buy-in that will force even people in the first world to adapt and recognize the reality.

So that's why I'm doing it. Because I want my kids to have a future.

All About Fennel

Foeniculum vulgare
Family: Umbelliferae (carrots, celery, parsley)
Height: up to 6 ft.
Zone 5

Folk Names: Samar, Marathron, Sheeh
Gender: Masculine
Planet: Mercury
Element: Fire
Deities: Promethus, Dionysus
Uses: Protection, Healing, Purification

A tall, hardy perennial with only one species. Native to Europe and the Mediterranean where it enjoyed great fame as not just a flavoring, but also as versatile medicine. Fennel grows to 6 feet tall, with umbels of yellow flowers. It's fine feathery, needle-like leaves give it a similar appearance to dill, which is in the same family.

There's three varieties of fennel. Common, or wild, fennel is described above. Var. rubrum or bronze fennel, has beautiful purple-bronze foliage. Var. dulce, also known as sweet fennel, finocchio, or Florence fennel, is a cool weather annual, grown for its large flavorful bulb and thick celery-like stalks.

Fennel grows well is full sun, with ordinary soil and watering. In my experience, it's just about the easiest thing to grow. Since it's a perennial it comes back every year all on its own, and seems to thrive on just the nurturing nature gives it. The plants themselves only live a few years, but it self-seeds so readily that you'll never notice.

The pungent herb has a long history as a digestive aid and appetite suppressant. The seventeenth-century British herbalist Nicholas Culpepper recommended a tonic made from fennel stems, bulb, seeds, and flowers was recommended for weight loss. Such a tea, made from pouring a pint of boiling water over a teaspoon of bruised seeds, is also given to reduce colic in babies. In the medieval times people carried little satchels of fennel seeds to nibble at mass during fasting days. Others hung bunches of fennel from their cottage doorstep to ward off evil spirits and dark magic. One folk remedy is to place a piece of fennel stalk in your left shoe to ward off tick bites.

 
Recently I harvested fennel from my own garden and had the wherewithall to take some pictures to share. The best time to harvest is late August, when the head heads are mature and dry.

Here are my huge beautiful fennel bushes. I don't plant them, and I expend no effort tending to them. I let mother nature do her thang and she provides! Kids love to munch on it, and it attracts lots of helpful animal friends.

Such as this eastern black swallowtail caterpillar, which loves plants in the Umbelliferae family, such as our friend fennel. I also saw four varieties of spider, and two varieties of solitary wasp while harvesting fennel. I didn't get pictures of them because they were too small or fast for my camera.

To harvest fennel seeds you need pair of scissors to cut the seed heads and a bag to collect them in.

 

Here is a close-up of the fennel leaves, demonstrating its similarity to dill. Also pictured: a spider nest! 

 

 

 The seed heads are ready to harvest when the seeds are mature and the head is brittle and dried brown.

 

 

The seeds are mature when they're dried hard and have a strong licorice flavor.

 

Simply snip off the seed head and collect it in a bag. Be careful, because rough handling or a strong breeze can shatter the seed head and scatter those precious seeds.

 

Fifteen minutes later my bag is full. There's thousands of seeds in here, enough for a whole year of licorice candy and digestive tonics.

 

 To finish the seeds need to sit in a warm area to finish drying for a few weeks. Then, you can insert your hand and crumple up the seed heads to encourage them to release their seeds.

 The chaff and seeds can be separated by winnowing between two containers in a gentle breeze.

Hide Tanning the Woods Cree Way

Low-tech method of brain tanning. All you need is a knife.