The Good Life Lab
Wendy Jehanara Tremayne
sent me a copy of her beautiful and unconventional book, The
Good Life Lab a few weeks ago, and once I finally cracked
the cover, I swallowed the whole thing down in a few
sittings. The first two-thirds is a memoir/treatise on how
and why Wendy and Mikey quit the fast life in New York City for a
small-town homestead in New Mexico, and the last third is full of
useful tips such as using rainwater in place of distilled water in
batteries. I suspect that anyone who enjoys this blog would
love Wendy's book (and chances are you'd also enjoy the blog she shares
with her partner and the profile I included about Wendy and
Mikey in Trailersteading).
The book's spare,
easy-to-read prose has deep thought underneath, combined with just
the right level of mysticism to make me think without turning me
off. Wendy explains that people in Truth or Consequences,
New Mexico, barter everything...except the one thing that person
uses to make a living, which is always paid for. She writes
about turning online community into real
community with the addition of a week-long, in-person visit
of her favorite bloggers, and she walks you through her decision
to keep her businesses at the cottage level so that she and her
partner can do it all at home.
Wendy also has a
solution for one of the most thorny issues I see among
homesteaders --- they want to quit their jobs, but don't know how
they would fill their time instead. She wrote:
(Apparently, what I
most wished to do this weekend was to play in the rain, and a
storm obliged by raging through. If I had any doubt that I
live in paradise, a rainbow ending in the side of the barn helped
clear up that issue. Which is a long way of explaining that
the photos in this post have nothing to do with Wendy's book,
except for inspiration.)
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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