Here we go again

Y'all, I loved LiveJournal. It has been nearly 20 years, and here we go again, starting a blog.

I'm not 100% certain how this will shape up. My current projects / things I'm thinking about are:

• What does self-sufficiency really look like in the United States in 2024, and why does that matter?
• How is self-sufficiency related to community resiliency?
• What are the things that connect us, as local and larger communities?  How can I support those things?
• Do we have shared stories, what are they, and what do they tell us about ourselves?
• Can I have chickens?

I don't know how blogs work anymore, since The Great Monetization changed things, but I expect this is going to be more old-school (?), thinking through things out loud -- rather than performing expertise, which I won't pretend to have -- and desiring feedback and conversation. 

A bunch of stuff will inform this.  I'm an Episcopal priest, I'm queer, I'm in my 40s, and I'm married.  I live in a city, and I do a lot of work in rural and small-town areas in the Upper Midwest.  I want to get real about growing food and exploring homesteading.  I'm terminally reflective by nature.

If you've found this and you're interested in this stuff, say hi!  I want to meet you!  And I don't really know yet how Dreamwidth works!

Back to The Theory of Anyway

I'm trying to trace how I got to where I am right now.  Part of that has been books, where I've encountered... I wanted to say "ideas," but I think it's more like "worldviews" that have progressively opened up or changed or whatever my own understanding of the world.  Here are some of them, read over the past 20 years, in no particular order.

Books

• The Craftsman, by Richard Sennet
• Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, by Matthew Crawford
• The Anarchist's Tool Chest, by Christopher Schwartz
• The Case for God and A Short History of Myth, by Karen Armstrong
• The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin
• The Cloister Walk, by Kathleen Norris
• In This House of Brede, by Rummer Godden
• Independence Days, by Sharon Astyk
• Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living, by Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn

This is so far from being an exhaustive list.  But each of these books presented a different way of seeing the world, and each of these books made me feel hopeful. 

There was that big Prepper push in the mid/late 00s, when we were worried about Peak Oil and before fracking took off; those of us in the privileged realm were suddenly confronted with the notion that business-as-usual wasn't going to work for us anymore, and we'd have to actually pay attention and look beyond our own selves.  It was a good wake-up call, even if it did remain in the realm of subculture.  Reading that literature now, it sounds alarmist, but also still relevant. "The Theory of Anyway" sticks out to me, which holds that the stuff we'd do to overcome or live in a crisis is largely the stuff we should be doing anyway.  The Internet tells me that this was Pat Meadows' phrase, popularized by a blog post from Sharon Astyk (which is still very much worth reading).

It feels like it's time for this question to come back for me.  What should we be doing anyway?  What should I and my household be doing anyway?  And why?