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THE RIVER Growing Flowing down to THE SEA
Page 10 by Elizabeth Abraham

('where the heart is'), family and community are based on blood ties or on other bases of familiarity: there are families by adoption and by choice, and ultimately there is the human family.

Suppose you grow your own vegetables. To find if this is 'ECONOMIC', the cost of land, labour and materials has to be set against the 'market value' of the product.

But suppose the labour is to you rest and refreshment, the input is mostly organic waste and the land is your own garden, that would never be available for the agricultural industry, being as much your amenity or pleasure and recreation as for food. How do you assess this in 'ECONOMIC' balance?

In other words this is an essential part of your chosen way of life. You may seek to enrich your self within it, but to sacrifice your ease and development and delight- the wealth/well-th you measure in your own well being, for a style of wealth/wellth dictated by someone else, is not for you development and progress but permanent impoverishment.

The point is that 'ECONOMIC' measurements are marginal in so far as you live a life of natural fulfillment. For centuries people struggled to have their own independent homesteads beyond slavery and serfdom, and they called this FREEDOM. Till this ideal was overwhelmed in profiteering by the powerful few in the industrial revolution, and we hardly know any longer what FREEDOM means.

But to grow your own food and live in your own homestead is not tar removed from the possibilities of our modern riches, and from the CULTURE and way of life that many people seek today.

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