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When Woody Allen commented on the “twoness” of his relationship with nature , his quip was intended to sum up the attitude one would expect from an angst-ridden, lifelong New Yorker. But a move to the country does not guarantee that this twoness will go away. Such twoness belongs to the human condition . We long to break down the boundaries of artifice and culture that separate us from nature, and, alternately, we celebrate the consciousness and creativity that enable us to erect these boundaries in the first place. In the exploration of modern homesteading conducted so far, we have visited gardens, homes, and saunas. We have encountered testimonies of personal transformation both from those whose lives have changed in response to a deeply felt connection with nature and from those (sometimes the same individuals ) who sometimes pursue a kind of transcendence of nature’s limits. We also have contemplated the extent to which homesteaders are what they eat (and what they grow) and have considered how they may be bound together, or divided , by these acts of production, consumption, and communion. In all of these practices, oneness with nature is sought, but twoness also persists. The work of homesteading, what homesteading does, is a response to culture and also a remaking of it. Certainly, the work of homesteading is utilitarian, but it is also a highly symbolic practice. Whether examining gardening or eating, work or play, it becomes clear that the daily practices of homesteading involve certain kinds of spiritual and cultural work. The processes of sacralizing nature, constructing the self anew, and embodying a sustainable future (sustainable 102 INTERLUDE: INTERPRETING AMBIVALENCE Homesteading as Spiritual and Cultural Work I am two with nature. Woody Allen spiritually, economically, and ecologically) have emerged as particularly significant themes. The realm of everyday action, then, is also the “extraordinary” realm of ritual , a realm in which embodied action on and in nature enacts a vision of what the world should look like and how it ought to function.1 Culture provides the means and vocabularies, the stage on which the symbolic work of homesteading can take place. The symbolic work of homesteading expresses itself in terms of inherited understandings of what nature, the self, spirituality, and the Good Life have meant and in terms of what these concepts might mean in the future. In some cases, this symbolic work is expressed (or interpreted) in the language of the therapeutic. More often, or simultaneously, this work engages “the religious .” Homesteaders may describe themselves as experiencing a connection with nature that they (or we) might call mystical. Or they discover, through daily contact with nature, a sense of grace or holiness. Some use less explicitly spiritual language but perceive in the pattern of nature a cosmology that fits into the accepted world of science yet fills that seemingly disenchanted world with new meaning. Because homesteading is both practical work and symbolic work, both cultural and religious, it is also, at times, deeply ambivalent. The ambivalences of homesteading, once seen, have a kind of chaotic quality . They seem to be endlessly replicating, overlapping, mutually defining one another, and deferring to one another. Ambivalence about how to spend time, for instance, involves ambivalence about work and play, about freedom and control , about order and chaos, about rigor and pleasure. Although these various ambivalences may be scattered about like so many musical notes on a composer ’s page, notions of maturity and spiritual development run through these notes of ambivalence like the lines of a staff. But these seemingly solid lines are also occasions of ambivalence. Is progress being desired or resisted here? Is homesteading a “mature” response to certain cultural norms or a regressive, self-protective means of escape? Is homesteading a rejection of “outmoded” religious behavior or traditional institutions or a relocation of persistent religious activity (the quest for connection, transcendence, and immortality) to an extraecclesial world? Or both? While recognizing the dangers of oversimplification, I think it is helpful to group these ambivalences into more manageable categories. The categories I am proposing, however, are not those of what these ambivalences are but, rather, why these ambivalences persist. Proposing some tentative explanations here is not only a way of interpreting the recent and contemporary practices of homesteading presented in the preceding chapters but also a way of anticipating how to put the work of homesteading into historical perspective—the task of the remaining chapters. Interlude 103 [3.22.70.9] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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