For approximately the last two years, a great deal of my time has been spent not just dreaming of building a healthier more responsible life for my family, but actually planning it. The difficulty in that isn't the hard work it takes or the commitment or anything like that. The difficulty is in the fact that the way of life I'm dreaming of doesn't fit the American mold. In fact, it's not being done, (to this extent) at least based on my numerous internet searches which have many times come up empty no matter how I phrase the keywords. The only relevant label you could put on the idea would be "Homesteading" but that doesn't come close to hitting the mark. The only way I can summarize it is that my vision merges the utilization of technology, innovation and old time values, skills and knowledge to "reboot" the way we live our lives. Before I get into any details on the how...let me explain the why!
The Why.
About two years ago, my wife Melissa and I were living in Rock Hill, SC. We owned a small print shop and we were doing well. The economy was horrible but we built our business around the idea that, like we do, people work hard for their money and are should get an honest price on the stuff they ordered from us without sacrificing quality or service. For that reason we grew rapidly. Things were good. Some months later we found out we were going to have a baby! It's an unbelievable feeling, I was on top of the world. Everything went well with the pregnancy and 9 months later little Abigail Juliet was born. After all of the craziness settled down we returned to our normal lives with no indication of the storm looming on the horizon. After a couple months Melissa began to have some numbness and tingling in her arms. She said that she had noticed it early on in her pregnancy so we kind of dismissed it as something due to the healing process. In the days that followed it got worse, when finally one morning she got out of bed and could hardly make her legs move! This was bad. After going to the ER we still didn't know anything but they released her because whatever it was wasn't life threatening and they referred her to a neurologist. We went to see the neurologist eager to get some answers. Without much deliberation he told us that she has Multiple Sclerosis and it was the worst case he had ever seen in someone her age! Then came the medical bills with no insurance and there went the savings...in about a week, every penny gone. Every step we had gained in our business was in serious jeopardy, to make matters worse, we now had this little girl to take care of! It was a scary time for us but things got better, sort of. We ended up losing our business and home but the treatments were working and Melissa was regaining her strength. We moved back home to MA penniless and ready for a new start. In the meantime I started reading about the cause of MS and ways to naturally mitigate the symptoms and I discovered that the cause of MS is unknown. The more I read the more I became convinced that MS is a man made disease and so are several other diseases. The way we live our lives in this modern society could very well be killing us! Think about it, the preservatives in EVERYTHING we eat, the pollution in the air, Fluoride (which is a toxic byproduct of metal production, look it up!) in our water and toothpaste, radio waves, microwaves the list is a mile long. I read for hours and hours on the subject and I became dead set on finding a solution, not only for my wife but maybe for other people too! That brings me to explaining how I intend on doing it.
The How:
Since I felt like the numerous pitfalls of modern society were a major contributing factor to my wife's illness the solution was clear. Get back to basics. Recapture some of the old ways of doing things but without living in a hut in the woods. I didn't want to completely abandon society, just take the good and leave the bad. Raise and grow your own food, heat your home, generate your own clean power, utilize herbs and nutrition to heal. I also found out that, if done right, this lifestyle can be much more financially stable. You can eliminate many of the expenses you would ordinarily incur in a typical living situation. Obviously, you can't just stop working and retire early but you can certainly live off of a much smaller income. In fact, there is a gentleman on YouTube who has reduced his household expenses to nearly $300 a year! That figure doesn't include certain luxuries like internet and car insurance but it keeps him housed, warm and fed. These are all things a quick YouTube search will reveal that people are doing, with success! After like a million hours of research, I began to formulate an ambitious plan. I tweaked the idea in ways I thought would add benefits to create something that, really, nobody else is doing. I want to create a complete self sustaining living system that doesn't doom people to isolation like so many other alternative living ideas do mostly because of cost and bureaucratic red tape. There were many challenges but I found out that if you are in the right place it all becomes possible, still tough but possible. My research led me to New Hampshire as the option and since I live just an hour from there it made it even better in many ways. I found out that many towns in NH have no or very lenient zoning and building codes. This was perfect because the design for our home, while safe and practical, would not appease the powers that be in Massachusetts. Since I was a building contractor for many years I knew I had the skills to design and build the perfect home to suit these goals. The entire scope of my project is far too massive in detail to elaborate on in this site so I am creating a blog to store much of this information for my own use and anybody else who is interested to learn more about it. That is another goal of mine. My family and I have committed ourselves to laying the groundwork so that other people can benefit from our experiences. I truly believe that we as a society have strayed onto a self destructive path and are just beginning to see the effects of that.
-Keller
