Home Free: A Home Based Revolution

Home: (Steading, Working, Schooling, Health, Birth, Church & More)

They say home is where the heart is. This is true for me.

Home is where my family is first and foremost. My immediate family in our house, and my extended family in our town. Beyond family, our dog and cats, chickens, pigs, rabbits and fish are all at home.

Our garden, our homestead, much of my work, and many dinners around the table are all at home. The trees, flowers, and small animals that call our yard home. It’s a tapestry.

However, the familiar concept of “home” being the beating heart of our personal lives has been eroding over the past decades for many people…

• Work for adults is in the big city at the end of a long commute.

• The kids leave for school, away from home, for much of the day.

• Dinner is eaten on the go from fast food or at a restaurant.

• Our healthcare is addressed with pills in big hospitals.

• Entertainment is outsourced to the movies and other corporate venues.

• Our food is grown thousands of miles away.

• Our energy and products are produced thousands of miles away.

• Home itself is now often 4 walls on a zero lot in a subdivision with no yard.

• …what is left for home other than beds to sleep in?

Home as a central part of our lives needs to be reclaimed. Thankfully, there are numerous movements leading to a revival of “home”.

In short order, here are the current “home” movements that are gaining steam:

• Homesteading - Growing produce, raising animals, harnessing clean energy building soil, capturing water, and meeting our physical needs more directly on a small piece of land. Homesteading is a path towards new skills, resilience, sustainability and new freedoms.

• Work from home - Working digitally, running short term rentals, market gardening, operating a small business, and running an online business can all allow for working from home. Working from home saves so much time and money from the car-centric commute. More than anything, it gives more time with family.

• Homeschooling - Teaching the kids at home. I was homeschooled, my wife was homeschooled, and now my wife and I are homeschooling our boys. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it. The ability to have this time with them, guide them, and explore with them is priceless. Combining working from home and homeschooling allows for a new type of freedom for the entire family.

• Home birth / healthcare - My wife is passionate about home birth. I took some convincing… However, I saw how amazing it could be during Covid with the right midwives. We had heard of hospitals preventing husbands from being in the delivery room during Covid, and that wasn’t an option for us. Home birth has so many benefits for the mother, baby and family. I’m a big supporter now!

• Home church / faith - While I don’t attend a home church personally, I’ve read more about this movement and it fits into this home “framework”. A faith based congregation staying small, intimate, saving resources, and building fellowship at a home seems very natural. Some home churches even garden together!

These home based movements send a powerful message. Normal people are reclaiming functions and systems that have always historically been at home. Modern society fragments things and spreads them apart: Parents at corporate work, kids at industrialized school, food on mega farms, ourselves and our needs are all spread out. It’s too easy for abuse and corruption to occur behind the abstractions of fragmentation. Keeping important things local keeps things more honest and true.

It’s time to stop being fragmented. When we’re divided and fragmented under the guise of convenience we lose so many of the good things about home & life.

I’m not saying we should all live 100% of our lives at home. Not at all.

However, we do need to restore balance to the equation of being home.

Corporate jobs in the city are not all bad, just like big schools are not all bad.

However, we have to reclaim some of these functions of home to preserve a place for family to grow and thrive. The family truly is the cornerstone of society. As the family breaks down, society breaks down. We’re seeing this today. The pain is real and the costs are high.

Strong families need healthy homes. Healthy homes need to have purpose as living places where we and our loved ones engage is real life together.

Let’s dig in deeper to each of these (home) movements.

Homesteading

We don’t grow all of our food, and we’re not 100% off-grid. However, we do grow more and more food every year, and we have many off-grid systems functioning. Our children love the chickens, pigs, rabbits and the gardens. All of this plant and animal life helps to promote biodiversity and restore the health of the soil over time. I love working in the garden and the yard — you will never see me in a gym :)

Building rainwater collections systems, setting up solar panels, maintaining methane digesters, creating biochar, composting, and gardening truly adds so much richness to life for the entire family. The wonder of mushrooms growing in the shade, to the orb weaver spider appearing in the Fall are truly magic.

This helps us slow down, consume less, and enjoy the little things more.

Work from Home

I don’t always work from home, sometimes it’s nice to visit a coffee shop to break things up. I do often work from home. It’s not always easy, especially with toddlers, but having the ability to work from home is something more of us need to push for and normalize.

The era of Covid made huge strides normalizing working from home for many of us. We need to keep that ability. Letting companies pull people back to the office (if working from home is better for you) is something people need to strongly push back against. The flexibility of working from home is foundational to homesteading and homeschooling.

Holistic Health / Home Birth

More people are realizing that modern medicine is all about treating and masking symptoms, not addressing root cause of sickness. The pharmaceutical industry does not exist to promote real health, it’s a profit machine. The modern hospital primarily dispenses pills to mask symptoms & make profit. To be fair, certain roles within hospitals are indispensable for human well being: trauma surgeons in particular. However, much of modern medicine has been warped to make money from people sickened by industrial food, inactive lifestyles, and other modern maladies.

A hospital full of germs is no place to have a baby. As I learned more about the need for mothers to give birth on their own timeline, the negative aspects of a rushed hospital environment, unnecessary C-sections, and high costs, I have become a bigger advocate of home birth. Being fair, sometimes you absolutely need a hospital’s facilities. Our first son was born at the hospital because the home birth did not progress, and we had an amazing team. There are so many great people at various hospitals. I need to stress that. It’s the current medical model that’s broken, particularly with the insurance companies. We’ve opted out of modern insurance and started using a Christian Health Cost Share program. This fits our values far better than modern insurance.

When our second son was born at home in a birthing pool, and my wife and our new baby were resting back in their bed (at home of course) within 20 minutes, I saw the tremendous benefit of home birth in reducing stress on both the mother and baby.

We had skilled midwives who delivered the baby, which is critical. Home birth is not for everyone, but it fits so well into this home-based movement.

Home schooling

My wife and I were both homeschooled. My parents are actually public educators, who eventually homeschooled us children. I care deeply about people in all forms of education systems: there are good educators in many public, private, charter and home schools. Ever since I was homeschooled I had made up my mind I wanted to homeschool our children as well. The freedom I had to pursue interests was incredible.

The sheer amount of time saved for the children, and the rich learning environment, make homeschooling such a powerful option for a vibrant education.

Industrial schools are geared to move children from silo to silo. The modern school system was built to train factory workers. John D Rockefeller helped to fund and build the public school model to provide a steady supply of workers for his industries and others. There are so many good people working in public schools, just like many of the wonderful folks working in hospitals. The similarity is that both institutions are monolithic now. Giant systems eventually start to become static, then enter stasis, and eventually start to crumble. We’re seeing this now.

Local schools need to become independent from the reach and control of distant authorities. This is why homeschooling is such a valuable path to take. You control your child’s education.

Not everyone should homeschool. Not everyone has the time, desire, patience, or ability. However, for those who feel the pull to homeschool, it’s a priceless gift for you and your children.

Home church

In my past, I have attended mega churches, and I have attended small churches. I much prefer the small churches. Small community is a beautiful thing.

A small group of like minds in a faith based environment is a special thing. While I don’t attend a home church, the more I’ve read about this model the more appealing it is. Home church replicates the early days of the Christian church. Regardless of ones faith, the ability to worship in small group in a location of your choosing represents a healthy freedom.

I have a theory that humans suffer when our systems become giant and outsized for our human scale. We can only maintain about 150 close relationships. This is a human limit. This issue with big systems becoming negative is a pattern: Big corporations, big state, big education, big agriculture, big healthcare, big insurance, big housing, big religion, big anything begins to grind people underfoot.

Big systems are able to lean on abstraction, brute force, and asymmetries of power to benefit a very few at the expense of many. I am pro small business, small government, small church, small farming, small healthcare, etc. You see the pattern here.

Home:Free

The (home) movement represents reclaiming freedom.

Homesteading, homeschooling, work from home, home birth, holistic home healthcare, and home church all represent increased freedom.

This helps to restore balance to a world where the functions of home have been fragmented and pulled apart.

Becoming “home free” is a process. Rebuilding home from the pieces is a process.

It’s a journey of making home, rather than a destination to home.

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