Continuing Good Life

by Helen Nearing

This one volume edition of Living the Good Life and Continuing the Good Life brings these classics on rural homesteading together. This couple abandoned the city for a rural life with minimal cash and the knowledge of self reliance and good health.

Genres: Gardening

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Helen Knothe Nearing was an American author and advocate of simple living. She and Scott Nearing started a relationship in 1928 and married nearly 20 years later, on December 12, 1947.[3][3] The couple lived in rural Vermont where they grew much of their food and erected nine stone buildings over the course of two decades. They earned money by producing maple syrup and sugar from the trees on their land and from Scott Nearing's occasional paid lectures. (from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

I again learned so much from Helen and Scott Nearing from this book. I appreciate all they did for the world, and I hope that I take many of the ideas and practices contained in here and use them to build a full and helpful life based in service, Oneness, and community.

[John Monti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic! Get back to the land.

[Adrian Wade · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of our sophisticated city visitors asked us: "What do you do with your spare time?"
"We have no spare time; we keep busy," was the answer. "As a matter of fact, the days are so short that we run out of time constantly."
"But what do you do for pleasure?" our visitor persisted.
"Anything and everything we do yields satisfaction. If we didn't enjoy it, we would do something else, or approach our jobs in a way that made mroe sense." pg 2

Our lives are not loaded down with sterile repetition or barren routine. Each new project and each new day is a fresh challenge and an exploratory experience, unless we make some stupid blinder and are compelled to rip out the faulty construction and improve on it. If you identify the mistake and find out how and why it was made, you have the satisfaction of doing the job to the best of your ability and avoiding a life mistake in the future. pg 3

"I have been asked sometimes how I could perform so large an amount of work with apparently so little diminution of strength. I attribute my power of endurance to a long-formed habit of observing, every day of my life, the simple laws of health, and none more than the laws of eating. It ceases any longer to be a matter of self-denial. It is almost like an instinct. I have made eating wtih regularity and with a reference to what I have to do, a habit so long that it ceases any longer to be a subject of thought. It almost takes care of itself. I attribute much of my ability to endure work to good habits of eating, constant attention to the laws of sleep, physical exercise, and cheerfulness."
-p169

Hundreds of people came to see us and our farm in Vermont. The thousands fo young people who now come to oru farm in Maine are the same type of seekers. They have heard or read about our Forest Farm and are curious to learn what it has to show or teach. They are ready for anyting that makes an idealistic appeal and that is fairly far from standard community practice. They are unattached except in the very limited sense of selective mating. They are apolitical, impatient of restraints--especially when governmentally imposed.

Increasingly they are turning their backs on a world community that has tolerated war and is preparing for the contingency of one in the future. They are ardently in favor of peace in a broad sense, but are not ready to accept a committment to any organization that works collectively for the cause. Almost universally they favor "freedom": that is, the pursuit of their personal goals and fancies. They are not joiners and generally not members of any group mroe specific than is implied by the adoption of a specific diet or the practice of some yoga exercises.

They are wanderers and seekers, feeling their way toward an escape from orthodoxy and superficiality, with the nervous dissatisfaction that characterizes people who do not have a home base in any real sense. Perhaps they can best be described as unsettled. Never before in our lives have we met so many unattached, uncommitted, insecure, uncertain human beings.

There are, of course, those serious few who are consciously and conceintiously working toward an ideal in which they believe and to which they attach themselves. They are definitely looking for a niche in which they might play a more effective part in helping to develope a new and better life style. - pg 150-151

There is a tendency nowadays to elbow a way through the mazes of a complicated life. Wisely and slowly is good advice. If you are running a relay race, it is not decided in the first few laps. Take your time. Ration your energies. Plan your operation carefully. Take one step at a time. Then prepare carefully for the next step. It pays in the long run. - pg 3

"Nothing can be more abounding in usefullness or more attractive in appearance than a well-tilled farm." Cicero; De Senectute, 45 B.C.

"He who digs a well, constructs a stone fountain, plants a grove of trees by the roadside, plants an orchard, builds a durable house, reclaims a swamp, or so much as puts a stone seat by the wayside, makes the land so far lovely and desirable, makes a fortune which he cannot carry away with him, but which is useful to his country long afterwards." Ralph Waldo Emberson, "Farming" 1858

Chapter 17 We Practice Health Pg 170-176 The 7 top points of staying healthy. (preventing sickness by being healthy)

[Jackie · Rating 4 out of 5]

50 years of homesteading and they were still going strong when this book was written. Some useful information and just a joy to read about their philosophy and how hard they worked. This book is about their second homestead when they were a bit older.

[Kasey · Rating 4 out of 5]

So far - I love it. There is a marked difference in writing styles from The Good Life to this - a seasoning from age.