OK, I made that name up, let’s talk about what it means…
First, let’s take inventory. I was going to post once a week, do all these things and keep this thing active, blah blah blah because that’s what they tell you to do to get traffic and be successful and some more blah blah blah. Umm, didn’t happen. Probably wont happen, oh well. At least right now 
I had partially devised a complicated plan to achieve all these wonderful things and it just wasn’t working, it never worked. I have come to a point where what makes me a little more settled is the thought of simplicity. Reducing all the things I am trying to do, reducing all the clutter, reducing all the lists and plans and everything else is becoming more attractive. With a 6 month old and a 4 year old, complexity is not a good bedfellow. And it’s stressful.
I was going to become a theologian, small scale organic farmer, survival guru and instructor, master naturalist and bonified woodsman. Oh, and I was going to maintain my IT job (notice I didn’t say career), and give appropriate attention to my wife and two daughters and the church. Riiiiight. One of the hard pills I am having to swallow is that I cannot make a seismic and drastic shift in what I do and how we live all at once and right now. Maybe not at all. Every rerun of Survivorman (he’s returning by the way) and Good Neighbors I watch makes me want to do it all even more. Every edition of Acres magazine has the same effect.
Usually what happens is I get stressed out, things fall behind or remain undone, the unpredictability of life springs up, so on and so forth. I also at times would take off the rose colored glasses and wonder about the feasibility of it all. We, as many others, are heavy laden with an obese mortgage and what might as well be two more kids, Visa and Mastercard, they cost as much anyways. How can I transition careers and roll the dice and start over when we’re in no position to do so.
Other times I would consider our temporary temporal nature and wonder if what I was engaging in was the best use of time. Come judgment day how much weight would an organic garden and survival instruction and a Linux OS matter? Often tending to the soul and sanctification is what fell behind.
It is at this point that I would decide to focus on the things that had eternal importance. Studying the Word of God, taking care of the family and providing, and leaving all else to God’s will in my prayers. That is where I am now. I have been here before. Enter the cyclic amnesia.
What normally happens is I will go for a while content and then will become highly discontent at work and wonder about the eternal importance of that choice. I will tire of living life on someone elses terms and hours and goals and so forth. I will wonder if I am teaching my children to just be sheep and dutifully fall in line with the world. I will look at my 40 hour week of drudgery and wonder why I am spending my life that way. At this point I will start to think about the things we could do for the Kingdom if we were on our own terms, the freedom we would have in our vocation, limited only by our creativity and our ability to find niches in the market. And it is here that I will return to the former paradigm.
Ideas start to blossom, editions of Acres magazine come back out, Survivorman comes on, and though it pains me to admit that I read it even only occasionally, I see off grid homes and awesome gardens in a magazine that goes by the name M.E. News (I refuse to spell out the name, figure it out). I start to realize that we are talking about a big paradigm shift and this is not something to pursue haphazardly so I start laying out goals and creating lists, and doing all these things. Cyclical.
So I tend to go back and forth between eschewing the whole complicated idea and choosing to focus on a few small things to committing to struggle if I have to in order to chart a new path for us because we just do not like the one we are on. Round and round, round and round.
That’s inventory. That is the struggle that has been going on, that should explain the lack of posts. All the options at times look attractive to me and at times they all stink. I honestly do not know which way to go. So essentially Cyclical Bitopic Amnesia and Compulsion Disorder means I go back and forth between two paradigms and forget why I left the other paradigm behind and discontent with factors affiliated with the current paradigm compel me to return to the previous one, and then the process repeats itself. A cycle between two ideas that is driven by forgetfulness, and perhaps idealism.
That all explained I have returned to simplicity mode.
Gardening is still a go
Reduction of clutter and junk, go.
Growing in my faith, go
Family, go
That’s the foundation at the moment. I will still tinker with survival stuff, some hiking and camping when possible and feasible. I will try to swallow the vocational discontent as much as possible.
As a sidenote I have let the domain mapping on this domain and wonderfulwild.com expire, they will go back to their WordPress names. The mapping was a 12 dollar renewal, and the domains are coming up for renewal on the 28th, that has to be around 50 bucks or so for the two of them. Basically I don’t have 75 bucks to throw at blog sites that I am not keeping up right now. Maybe I’ll wrap it all in to redeemerfarm.com one day, who knows.
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