luna acres

heirloom ballerina ornament - my very favorite Christmas is just a few days away!  It's always a stressful time of year,  but this year has been a real struggle for me.  Jonathan and me are both in the middle of changing jobs, which comes with it's own set of challenges trying not to get behind financially. We are doing okay, but there was no extra money to spend on gifts, and while our families are loving and supportive and insist that it's fine- it is very hard not to feel guilty when listening to the lists of everything they have bought. Society has made the holiday so materialized; tainted it with piles of stuff and wishlists and somehow the love of family and friends and being grateful for what we already have gets lost in the chaos. I see it most in kids, spoiled to the point of being upset because they were given the wrong version of a toy, the wrong barbie, the wrong game system, and throw a tantrum despite the Mount Everest size pile of expens...

our adorable kittens, completely unrelated to the following post  I have found myself thinking about society quite often lately. The expectations we have for ourselves and everyone else we interact with. From preschool we are taught to color inside the lines, follow the leader, sit still. Study hard in school, get good grades so that you get into a good college, so you can study hard so that you get a good job, so you can work really hard to buy a good car, and a nice house, and then you can keep working hard to pay that mortgage, and scrimp and save money so that one day you can retire and then  maybe, just maybe, you can live the life you wanted to live all along. Well, I'm not drinking the cool-aid anymore. We want a different kind of life. Where our time spent together on our land is more valuable than the same time being spent in town, in jobs we hate, so we can pay our expensive mortgages and car payments and childcare, which we have to pay for because o...