Life Goals

Where do you see yourself in 25 years? What are your definite hopes and dreams? I have a couple goals that have held in my mind for many years now. I'm not there yet with them but with each year I get a little bit closer.
One fanciful goal or ambition of mine is to live off the grid. I'd like to build a cabin or cottage home somewhere in a wide open space or nestled into a mountain side with a decent plot of land around it. I want it to be built in such a way that if need be I could operate all of my utilities without paying the public works for the service. I imagine such a space wouldn't be too close to cities or grocery stores so I also want to know how to be self sufficient.
Each year I work to learn more about being self sufficient. I'd like to learn all of the old skills that skipped my generation completely. My mother grew up on a farm and got to experience self sufficiency first hand. While raising her family she tried to avoid many of the childhood chores she grew up with. So I never learned how to garden, bottle and can food, milk cows, cook from scratch or really sew while growing up. I did convince my parents to let me have chickens growing up, we did have cows but they were always just for meat or showing, we also had pigs and some sheep once too. They raised alfalfa that a neighbor would come cut and bale for us. I tried growing a garden when I was in my teens and failed miserably, as in nothing grew, one plant I thought was a carrot was actually a weed. Still I always wished for more animals and more plants to harvest. Even though she didn't teach her kids any of those things growing up she is still the first one I call when I have a question on anything relating to bottling food and every once in a while I can pick her brain about other things she grew up doing. When it comes to gardening she sends me on to call my aunt or my nana. I've read and own several books on gardening that I reference, I think with each year I've gotten a tiny bit better at it.
One of the things I've always wanted is to have my own personal produce stand in my backyard. I love fruits, they are so much less picky than the vegetables that have to be re-done each year. In the past year and a half that we have lived in our new place I have added just about any fruit I can get my hands on. We planted apple trees, a peach tree, cherry tree, grape vines, strawberry plants, raspberry canes and two blueberry bushes. Fruit does take some time before it begins producing much but last year we had two apples, a bunch of peaches, a handful of cherries, raspberries, and a small amount of strawberries. I don't know that we will have grapes for at least another year, but hopefully we will get some blueberries before the chickens pick off the first fruits they spy.
I think we plan on living here for several years so in that time I will try to learn the skills it takes to manage a wide variety of fruits as well as learn all the ways to use them. It helps to have neighbors who are so smart with gardening too. In time I do want to take what I have learned and use it on a homestead somewhere.

Peace

Church began later today than its 9:00 time we had all of last year. It was a change that I have been looking forward to for quite sometime, getting a family of 5 up and ready for a 3 hour block of church is a challenge when you have to be there so early. Even though we didn't need to be there till 11:30 my morning was far from ideal. I bit my bottom lip twice in the same spot when trying to eat breakfast and then stepped into an argument with Jared that keeps finding its way back to the surface. When we were finally off to church I was emotional and distressed, far from the stress free that I had imagined I was going to be that morning. I pleaded heavenward for peace from what seems like so much useless turmoil in my life. I know what I want but when your a female you just have a hard time turning off the emotional feeling of it all. In my last class of the block my neighbor gave a lesson on a book that John Bytheway had written and I immediately was able to calm my distress and find a solution to how I can become more balanced in my expectations and life in general.
The lesson began with the discussion of contentment. In January it seems that everyone's focus is far off the mark of contentment because we all choose to add goals and a healthy (or unhealthy) dose of ambition to your expectations of the New Year. While its disguised as a great thing, and in some instances I guess it could be but it doesn't encourage contentment. When things are working great with me and Jared it is because of contentment. Peace prevails when we are happy with what we have and we aren't competing with the "Jones". When we are content with our own lives we have no desire to judge others and their life choices. I've been distressed because I wasn't recognizing what makes my life ideal for me and my family. We haven't happened upon our situation because this is just where we have ended up, we've made conscious choices that best fit our family framework to be where we are now. Today I re-found my appreciation for that reality and now I am working on remembering to be content with all that I have been truly blessed with. My life is exactly how I can handle it right now, all that I have deeply wanted to be, is; and if I can't find peace in that knowledge then I'm not going to find it anywhere else. So you can either be unsatisfied with what you have and miserable or  you can see the good and find contentment. I plan on choosing contentment this year and loving what I've got.