Simple Life in the City

If you were to peek into my Google Reader right now and scroll down to the "Lifestyle" category, you would find subscriptions to a host of homesteading and gardening blogs that tout a simple, self-sufficient and sustainable lifestyle.  I gravitate there, I dream there, I follow a couple of idealistic 'train wrecks' there. 

Or you could peruse my Pinterest boards about gardening and the home, where I lovingly post pictures of rustic and rural and simple style.


Copyright What's in A Home?

But that isn't where I really live.

Why is it that I am of "two minds" about my actual choice of lifestyle and the lifestyles that absorb my online attention? Am I foolishly living in the wrong place? Or do those minds meet somewhere hopeful and helpful?

I love the pictures of harvests, the stories of livestock and sustainable home improvements in the homesteading blogs.  Yet the world of the homestead in the blogger universe sometimes seems uniform and isolated; a community that is generally one color and one persepective.  I connect with the descriptions of hard work, homemade bread on the counter, laundry on the line,  and dirt under the fingernails. But not with the sense I get sometimes that the ultimate goal is to get away from all the trouble in the world and take care of yourself.

The view from my front porch is rich and diverse.  My relationships with my neighbors definitely offer many different perspectives.  It inspires me. And it exhausts me. 

In the very same place I'm trying to grow my own food in raised beds around the yard, I'm also trying to figure out how to keep out whoever keeps breaking into my house and stealing food from my freezer.

So I run away to the blogs about the "simple" life and long for a change.

What exactly do I think "simple" means? Easy? Undistracted and serene?

Well, not exactly.  Here are some definitions I found:
Not involved or complicated; easy to understand
Unadorned
Consisting of one part only, not combined or complex
Modest
Sincere
Frank

(Granted, it also means weak in intelligence or feeble-minded.)



Copyright What's in A Home?  Lyrics from GoodieMOB

Let me be frank.  The question that is eating away at me is whether there is a way to embrace the things that I so naturally enjoy and am interested in (including a garden and a creative outlet in my home) and all the while live an easy-to-understand, unadorned, unadulterated, and sincere life that is rich in relationships, invested in others and in community, and, most importantly, connected vibrantly to the very heart of Jesus.  Can I live this way in this city?  I don't know. 

It isn't easy.  It isn't serene and undistracted.  In short, it isn't MY definition of "simple".

"Love must be sincere.  Hate what is evil; cling to what is good."  Romans 12:9