Our Right to Self Reliance

I was actually going to blog on a different topic tonight, but I ran across an interesting phenomena and decided tonight’s proposed topic would work just as well tomorrow.  I would have thought that blogging on self reliance would be a fairly hopping arena of the blogosphere, that there would be self reliance blogs all over the place.  That turns out to not be the case.

While looking through my traffic stats for this blog, I discovered that someone had found their way here by Googling for ’self reliance blogs’, so I did the same.  I must say I’m kind of chagrined at what I found.  There are apparently lots of blogs about self reliance rattling around out there on the net—Google said 673,000 responses!  Well, thought I, this will be engaging…and I started clicking through on them.   I found a couple of blog directories that listed several blogs supposedly on self reliance; the list at blogtoplist.com was not only misleading, but the only blog that looked like it might be applicable (Brigid’s Blog) turned out to be nearly impossible to get to from that list, at least on dial-up…and when I finally got there, it had last been updated on June 23, 2008.  The three blogs listed on Blog Flux were much more applicable, a couple of them I even recognized; The Good Life is a fairly good read that James updates with some regularity, and Beth Molaro on An Urban Plot has some very pertinent posts on the concept of self reliance.  But the blog that came up first, Going backward, moving forward has only sixteen posts total and was last updated the middle of July of last year and while the blogger states that he intends to use the blog to document his resolve to become more self reliant, I guess I’m not sure what sarongs might have to do with that.  Straight from the Google list was the Water Self-Reliance blog, with exactly one post early last August; The Self Reliance Blog with exactly one post put up last July; and, sadly enough, the Countryside Living Blog with two posts, both months ago. That made me sad; that’s such an excellent magazine and I got pretty excited when I saw a link for a blog!

Angela over at Adventures in Self Reliance is a busy, busy woman! and her blog is definitley worth a read.   And the blogs over at Backwoods Home Magazine are, of course, busy and informative.  Other than those, and the ones in my blog roll here, it kind of looks like the topic of self reliance somehow does not lend itself to blogging.  I’d like to think that people aren’t blogging about, or following through on blogging about, self reliance because they’re busy out there doing it…planting, growing things, stewarding animals, putting things by, all that satisfying, good stuff.  But I don’t know.

I did mean for this blog to be kind of ’self reliance lite’; a starting place for folks who had heard the term but thought it would be a huge undertaking to heel the ship of their lifestyle over to something simpler, something more sustainable.  I try to intersperse some how-to, some DIY or do-it-yourself, with some basic philosphy and present it all in small pieces so it is assimilable.  I look at the news and worry about what’s coming down the pike and how folks will deal with it if they don’t know how to make a pot of soup without a can opener, have no idea how long it takes to grow a carrot or a chicken for that matter—and I know a frightening number of people like that.

Do you think this blog is sufficiently covering the topic of self reliance?  Are there topics you’d like to see me dig into?  Does reading this blog make self reliance seem achievable?  I’d really love to read your comments!