A Natural and Unplugged Home

I’m obsessed with the environment and I get so upset with how we trash and abuse the Great Mother. I have decided to not think about it anymore. I’ll just do what I can to have my family live more naturally and with more respect and kindness to the planet and all the humans and creatures on this planet.

I am no longer checking YouTube. I am no longer on social media and haven’t been for years. It was a wonderful thing to delete all my accounts and be free of all that comparing and judging, gossip and dramas, my own jealousies or seeing the false lives people would put up on their Facebook and Instagram. I can just mind my own business and be happy and a nicer person.

Recently, I left my channel and I try not to go on YT at all because there is always some upsetting thing in my feed. I do like watching vegan or plant based cooking and I watch new age New World videos. I’m fascinated with Dolores Cannon and other Universes and a coming new age. But when I go on YouTube, I have to know exactly what I’m getting on their for so I don’t get led down a dark alley and emotionally stabbed a few times.

I don’t watch news or read it, I’ve made my email into an app so I can get straight on there and skip the articles and all that click bate. I use Ecosia as a search engine, because it plants trees and doesn’t do the gossip sites. I have built a bubble around my life. My kids step out of it all the time and they are young and into this worldly stuff. I tune it out.

The other night I had some insight. We are all here to accomplish something. We come with our karma and our chosen destinies. I worry about everything, thus I have to create some isolation for my sanity. But I realized, we are like individual movies or sets in Hollywood. Each set has a story they are filming. There are actors and they have their lines and roles, the story unfolds accordingly. I am on my own set and have my role and my lines. I wouldn’t run from set to set and try to be all those actors and learn all the lines, right? I need to stay on my set and just focus on my role in my story. That way I can be a good leading lady in my movie.

This helped me stay in my own lane.

We can do so much as individuals to create a better life and serve the Earth and others. We don’t think we make an impact but think of all the great hero’s and heroines that made big changes in history; Rosa Parks, Joan of Arc, Mother Teresa, Lao Tzu. And what is that saying by the Dalai Lama, “if you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.”

We have planted so many trees and flowers in our yard. We have Holly trees and Trees Of Heaven that have berries for the birds in the Winter and blossoms in Summer for the bees and dragon flies. We have bird baths and feeders to support the birds and I planted extra nut trees for my sweet squirrels. We don’t use any chemicals or pesticides so the birds can feast on the bad bugs in the garden and not be harmed. The soil has become rich and alive over the years of amending and healing it.

I bought my first bar of shampoo wrapped in paper at the health food store the other day. I love this shampoo bar! It suds better than the liquid shampoo and my hair still smells great days later. I’m quickly switching out the plastic containers of everything I buy to glass, paper or cloth and reusable. I will be getting conditioner bars soon as I use up the supply I have. I now buy sheets or powder laundry soap in cardboard boxes or paper containers. Today I found a mascara cake, like the stuff our grandmothers used in the 1930’s. You can use it for mascara, liner and eyebrow filler and the wand is reusable, the cake refillable.

I walk through my kitchen, laundry and bathroom and look at each item and look for replacements. We have a Berkey water filter so we haven’t bought bottled water in years and have saved up to $5,000 a year on bottled water and saved on hundreds of pounds of plastic. I will be buying Calgon in a cardboard box from now on to replace my bubble bath and if I shop at the natural food stores, I can buy the produce in my cotton bags.

It’s something I think about and have to make decisions every time I shop. It takes time and patience. I’ve been raised in a plastic, fast food era. Now I age in an internet, social media era. The struggle is daily and real.

I unplugged the internet for a couple years. We would check out a Hot Spot from the library now and then. A Hot Spot is a small modem that plugs into the wall and you have wireless. We would check it out for two weeks at a time. But other than that, we were free of all the noise and bombardment of information. I played musicals and Opera, the local radio station that would grace us with some Mountain Blue Grass. We watched DVD’s I would find at the thrift store for a dollar or the library. We spent more time reading, swimming, walking to town, talking, and cooking. It seemed we did so much when we didn’t have internet.

Now we have internet again and we watch TV. And more TV.

However, now that I have a writing schedule and I stay off my phone, off YT, I’m returning to that old fashioned world when we did stuff instead of watched stuff. We turned to books for information instead of scrolling videos. I have SO many books on everything from gardening, cooking, homemaking, biographies of interesting characters such as Samuel Pepys and Jane Austin, and Spiritual books. I truly don’t need to be on the internet for anything at this time.

To encourage my shift away from the internet, I invested in packs of highlighters and book tabs so I can annotate books like a true mad scholar. I have become a tad addicted to annotating since discovering it a few seasons back. I annotate cookbooks, my history books, my book by Wayne Dyer on the Tao Te Ching, even my chakra cards. I have taken to annotating in the tub or going to bed early to tab away.

Cooking from scratch saves on plastic. Saves a ton of money. Our grocery bill could get up to a $1,000 or more when we were making more money and I would buy many premade and packaged meals and snacks. Now It’s half that and going down. Yes, our pantry is boring as all get out, but I can make magic with some flour and seasoning. I can make milks and sauteed gluten steaks, vegan cakes, vegan cheese sauces, and perogies from beans and potatoes, bouillons and cashews.

If you want the house to smell good, simmer a pan of water with cinnamon sticks and cloves.

Alright, well, off to bed with a book and highlighter.