Pickin' Your Vibe
Picking the low-hanging fruit of family identity formation
The family which berries do pick
Is the family whose values will stick
This post is about building your family vibe. We could also call it your family aesthetic. Your family culture.
The family aesthetic makes people think of a presentation style your family has. How is your home decorated? How does your family dress? Good questions. But the answers tshould reflect your vibe, but not be the whole of it. The real source of beauty in your home is you and the people of your family. The aesthetic is what you do and who you are. It is your spirit. A horse in motion is more beautiful than a horse standing still and your family in motion is your realest beauty. Culture on the other hand is also a good word but has a little air of being abstract.
So think of it as your family vibe.
What is your family vibe? What is the feel of your family? Is it a vibe? Is it a family vibe? Is it your family vibe? Any family founder who is operating in deep time, who is wise to building a permafamily, who has a long-term and low time preference family model, has to be aware of the family vibe. It transmits the deep-time mindset from one generation to another. But the family vibe is also a big part of why you are trying to transmit a deep-time mindset—because you think there is something worth preserving there. The vibe preserves the family and if there is no vibe, what is there to preserve?
Building a great, lasting family vibe is what puts you onto your family Mount Rushmore.
Let’s admit that family vibe doesn’t come in options off a dropdown menu. You cannot just select it.
It is a healthy growing natural thing, and like any organic thing, it has to be grown. Who you are and what your inheritance is are going to shape the vibe in ways you cannot predict. Man proposes, God disposes. Yet like any growing thing, it can be pruned, nourished, shaped, and it responds to its environment.
You grow a flourishing family vibe by doing things as a family and highlighting to your children why your family did them. It's the show-and-tell method. For those who've ever gone to writing class they're always big on show but not tell.
Kyle’s face burned red.
They really get down on tell but do not show. In writing as in life that method doesn’t work.
Kyle was angry.
In life as in writing show-and-tell both is the more powerful method.
Kyle’s face burned red with anger.
We could write a book and probably will about catching the family vibe. There's so many different aspects to it and it is incredibly rewarding. People who are having trouble enjoying the family usually just aren't experiencing the vibe themselves or don't have a good one. It takes a lot of endurance to swim in dirty choppy waters. But when the waves come in regular and you know how to catch them you feel like you soar.
Berry Picking
Family excursions and family hobbies are a big part of the family vibe. An excursion by its nature creates a sense of occasion about it and things people do for fun (hobbies and excursions both are ‘for fun’) almost inherently have a kind of ritual, identify-forming quality about them. Homo ludens. In this transmission we are going to specifically hit on picking berries or gathering fruit. It is both an excursion and, if you do it right, a hobby.
U-Pick farms works, but best of all is the scavenger type where you are finding people and places with unwanted fruit or natural growing berries and going to retrieve them.
As always, the advice here is time-tested and experience-approved. We advise what we do.
Case study 1 - We pick plums from a tree that grows alongside a little public rose park. Sometimes we also stop by on the way home from church, eat a few plums, and admire the roses. Don’t worry, we always leave plenty for everyone else!
(Plums we picked at a park.)
What Makes for a Good Excursion or Hobby
Lets start out with the considerations that make for a good excursion or hobby for shaping the family vibe.
Not everybody does it. Identify formers cannot be things that everyone else does, not if you are trying to form a distinct identity. “Dad always put toilet paper in our bathrooms and that always meant something special to me,” said no one. When society is decaying you want your identify formers to create distance between you and the mass culture, but even in a healthy culture there has to be something at least a little different from time to time or you risk not forming a distinct family identity at all. Watching Disney movies is a bad family identity former, even if the movies themselves fit with your family themes, because everyone watches Disney movies.
Who does do it? Unless literally nobody in the world does this activity, doing it yourselves is going to form links between your vibe and those people in some way. The activity is not a blank slate, so part of the way the activity shapes your vibe will come from those people. Continuing our theme of ragging on Disney, what kind of people are really into Disney movies? Do you want your family vibe to echo those people?
Related, what is the activity’s vibe within the larger culture? There are no blank slates, the meaning and vibe just are shaped by what the culture in general thinks about it. You can’t wish that away. Look for things that the culture treats as good things but doesn’t do very much. You will already be facing down the general culture in some things, but pick your battles. Its advantageous if an activity already has the general culture lauding it in some way, that way they’ve already done half your work for you.
Related to the above two points, don’t forget that contemporaries in your neighborhood and on the media aren’t the only people and the only larger culture that counts. History and literature also get a vote. If your family excursion has historical associations and historical people who did it—if your kids can read about your family excursion in good ol’ books—you have vibrations growing. You are planting in already-prepared ground.
Go for activities with tangible, immediate rewards. People are bodies and live in the real world and learn from immediate rewards. This is a good thing. Use it to your benefit. Activities that accomplish something are better than activities that don’t, and activities that accomplish something in an obvious way right in front of you and your kids eyes are best of all.
Note: Periodic work activities can easily be made into hobbys or excursions. Annual or seasonal is best. No more than once a month or so. Have some special foods, special songs, unique clothing, anything that creates a sense of occasion. Some kind of ritual. “Hey, dad, remember when we were kids and you always used to make us Denver omelettes on the morning when waxed the floors.” Relax some rules. One of the huge benefits of having fairly rigid rules is your ability to instantly create a sense of occasion by relaxing them.
Go for activities where everyone contributes. Father, mother, children, relatives, everyone feels like everyone chipped in. Parents love their children more when they have good memories of children contributing to something special. Children love their parents more when they see the parents doing something that the child is trying to accomplish.
Note: its not just the children whose identity is being formed.
Look for activities that are seasonal or annual, that have a rhythm to them. This helps your children to cultivate that sense of deep time.
Look for activities that involve beauty.
Look for activities that involve being outside.
Very few activities will meet every criteria. Don’t sweat it. It’s better to have multiple activities forming your family identity than just one that was exquisitely selected. These are guidelines only.
Back to berries (and apples and plums and grapes and walnuts …)
Now lets talk about berry picking and fruit scavenging. Seasonal, outdoors, beautiful, everyone chips in. The rewards are tangible, just pop a raspberry in your mouth. Take a bite out of a peach still hot from the sun, feel the sweetness run down your chin.
These rewards work best if you are family doesn't do highly processed and over-sugared sweets. If you don't have desserts everyday. If you don’t have more candied snacks. That makes fruit seem like a treat and especially the very good tasting fruit or berries that you pick. (Keep in mind that if you spend quite a bit at the stores to get the fruits and berries without any damage or blemish, it might take you and your kids some time to adjust to natural fruit and berries. You will have to learn to see the beauty through the blemishes). Also keep in mind that if you're mindful of your family's nutrition and meals and have put them on a good basis, kids will really enjoy the occasional homemade dessert. Fruit pies with homemade crust. Or even simpler options like fruit crisp will still seem pretty fancy just because they're homemade and require a little preparation. Charlottes, creams, and puddings. Tarts. Icebox cakes and cheese cakes. Iced fruits. Creams and custards of various kinds. Preserves. Blend up fruit and pour it over French toast. Fruit salads, Parfaits.
When picking or fruit scavenging in the wild or in an orchard, bring a picnic lunch. It feels celebratory, it gives the whole thing a certain air.
The general culture respects picking berries and fruit, but people don’t often do it. Too much trouble, they don’t know how to preserve fruit, and they have diets that make it less rewarding.
History and literature? You bet.
What we like best about picking berries or scavenging fruit is the piratical feel it has. It feels like loot. Something deep in the human soul loves snapping up loose resources. It makes you feel bubbly like a champagne. Steader kids have their eyes out.
Berry and fruit picking also makes you more aware of your area, gives you a reason to be out of doors so a trip to the wild isn’t just a form of consumption, and gives you a reason to ring doorbells and meet people. Or to make your kids to ring doorbells and meet people. Going out to the wild or to a u-pick farm isn’t the only way. Look for that odd mulberry growing up in a vacant lot, that old fruit tree in the heritage park, the elderly couple with the nice apricot who would really appreciate a nice family picking up the spoiled fruit and picking the tree with some for them and some for the couple. It’s great when people start contacting you via facebook because they say a fruit tree you might like to hit or some grape vines or a plum thicket. It anchors the digital world back into what is real.
(Thrift stores, yard sales, and salvaging junk have a lot of the same advantages. We also recommend them. But its harder for the young ones to chip in and they lack the class. The also lack the visceral reward, from tongue to brain to soul.)
We hope this transmission has given you something to think about. If you are the kind of guy who adds up the time it takes to pick ‘em, and the gas money, plus wear and tear on the car, plus the potential for staining clothes, and decides it would be better to work more hours and buy fruit from the store, we hope this transmission has given you something to think about. Bricks are cheaper without mortar, but without the mortar they all fall down.
Remember to show and tell. “Yeah, lots of people like the idea of berry picking but we are actually doing it. Remember when we read this in Farmer Boy. I love this fresh air. These taste so good! Whoever picks the most gets two votes when we decide what kind of dessert we’ll make …”
Related concepts that could also work in the right areas include salmon fishing, mushroom gathering, tapping maple sap, hunting for clams, shooting passenger pigeons—well, maybe not that one.
Case study 2 — Two steader families and a brother’s family met at a pick your own orchard down in the valley this weekend, away from the heat and noise. We picked cherries and ate fried chicken under the trees. The kids ate so many they said they were sick of cherries on the drive back. The next day, they askwed when we could do it again.
Case study 3 - Grandpa and grandson found a mulberry tree growing on the outskirts of a trailer park. Early one morning dad and the kids went and picked it clean. One of the daughters then made a pie using the mulberries as one key ingredient.
