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What Good is a Garden?
Home garden harvest. Photo courtesy ariadna de raadt/shutterstock.com
While relaxing on a friend’s back porch over a spicy vegetarian stew and homemade bread, the conversation turned, naturally, to food. Everyone around the table expressed concern over how much junk food kids eat and how little time children spend outdoors. Our host said that she watches every afternoon as a group of elementary schoolchildren head to the corner market to purchase their after-school snack. Each child comes out with a supersized soda and a bag of potato chips. Not a small bag — the family size, for each child, every day.
40 Ways to Live Simply for 40 Days of Lent
Leaf detail, alexskopje / Shutterstock.com
Use this Lenten season as a time to grow closer to God and simplify your life. Try a new suggestion from this list each day and experience the stronger relationships and calmer pace of an (almost) Amish lifestyle!
1. Start a giveaway box and add at least three items of clothes you have not worn in the last year.
2. Is there a form of technology that is ruling you like a master rather than serving you like a tool? Unplug for 24 hours and rediscover the peace that passes all understanding.
Tips for Achieving an 'Almost Amish' Lifestyle
Organization illustration, marekuliasz / Shutterstock.com
Editor's Note: This post is a follow-up to yesterday's Ten Ways to Live "Almost Amish.' Author Nancy Sleeth offers tips for achieving each of her principles for "almost Amish" living.
1. Homes are simple, uncluttered, and clean; the outside reflects the inside.
Almost Amish Decluttering Tips:
- Start small: Clean one shelf of a closet, once corner of the basement, or one drawer of your desk each Saturday; by the end of the year, your house (and heart) will be much lighter.
- For each item you bring into the home, give (at least) one away one.
- Limit temptation by reducing catalogs and junk mail: visit www.dmachoice.org and www.catalogchoice.org to remove your name from mailing list.
Ten Ways to Live 'Almost Amish'
Almost Amish by Nancy Sleeth
The Amish are by no means a perfect people, and there are dark sides to their history. Their example, however, does have much to teach us. How can we incorporate the best of Amish principles into our modern lives? To answer this, I did some reading. And some visiting. And some listening. I in no way pretend to be an expert on the Amish, but the more I read and visited and listened, the more I found to admire. The Amish are islands of sanity in a whirlpool of change.
Along the way, I discovered some Amish principles that we can all try to emulate. These principles (similar to the list that Wendell Berry laid out more than two decades ago in Home Economics) provide guidelines for a simpler, slower, more sustainable life. They offer me hope.