where do we go now?

In the words of The Poet..

Where do we go? ..where do we go now?
Where do we go-o? ..where do we go now?
Where do we go now?

I-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-wheredo we go now!?

N-I-yi-I-yi-I-yi-ow I-yi-I-yi-I-iyow!!...

Ok. So those aren't the words of The Poet. It's just Axl Rose. What can I say? I was not raised on the classics.

But the question, regardless of its source, is still valid. Where do we go now?

Now, in these uncertain times. Times when Greg packs it up and heads to the big El P.. times when our children are seperated, 3 hours, from grandparents who--in a word--rock (HARDER THAN OZZY!!!). (it doesn't count as words if it's parenthetical)

Times when Brant has gone off the spool and started living a lifestyle that is even more consistent with his convictions than it was before.. with the home churching and the home schooling and the other home-things of that nature...

Times when fair-trade coffee and free-range chicken and a host of other nouns with hypenated adjective qualifiers begin to surround our heads like a swarm of buzzing bees.. when social conciousness and personal faith and the general conviction that life, as we know it, as we live it, is not being lived right.. where do we go now!?

I-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-etc...!

(man, would that be a good band name!)

Well.. I'm not exactly sure. I think that I would like to buy some land, get a few chickens, a big vegetable garden... perhaps some minnow ponds.. set up a little goat and sheep farming operation. Maybe have some calves. I would like to engage in a little lifestyle that I call "Subsistence + 1 (or possibly + 2)." ... where we raise quite a bit of our own food, and then add in just enough to sell a little, off the farm. Which, in combination with my copywriting, and music playing, and painting jobs, and maybe still a "regular" part-time job, and Deb doing some CPA-ing out of the house or whatever.. yields enough income, from diverse enough sources, that we're just like.. you know.. hangin' out and chillin' and livin' the life and whatnot.

I would also like to be able to set up a duck decoy making operation with my dad. And possibly run a weekend freshwater fish restaurant.

These are just some things that could be the answer to "where do we go now?"

Or, alternatively, we could jump the CU ship and head down to WPB with the Brantster. Since we can't comment on his blog anymore, maybe we could just pop over to his house occassionally for BLT's or sumthin'.

We could go with Greg, and bust out the New Church thingy with his family .. Out in the West Texas town of El Paso... Marty Robbins, eat your heart out.

Or maybe, as my dad said this weekend, his home congregation will get too big to expand anymore, and instead of dumping a bunch of precious resources into some stupid building (my words, not his), they'll just take a bunch of people, drive over to Nauvoo, and set up a new shop--as close as possible to the foot of the behemouth Mormon temple. And maybe we'll go help. That'd be kind of cool, wouldn't it?

You know what else? Dad & the elders (at that church.. this is not another band name) are reading through "They Smell Like Sheep", and dad is really digging it. He tells me that this shepherd model really seems like the way to go. Sure, it's great to have a building, an organization, a "program".. but, you know, their benevolence ministry just put tires on some family's van so that they could take their kid to Iowa City for an operation. They're helping people they don't even know! And it's awesome. He's on a one-man subversive mission to slowly turn their entire congregation into contributing members of society. It's so cool.
: ] It's so cool, it almost makes me want to go join him! Be subversive alongside my dad. That would be so cool.

So.. anyway.. sorry to string you along (that is, if you thought there was going to be an answer to that question). I don't have an answer. But I can't help but feel that we are going to "go" somewhere--even if we don't really go anywhere.

But hey.. isn't that what we were asked to do in the first place?