Villaging, Not Homesteading: We're Not Doing This Alone

Interdependence, the regeneration of the commons, and the work of building life-affirming futures.

Welcome, this essay has gone farther and reached more people than anything else I’ve ever written, which tells me something about the powerful longing that so many of us have to find our way home to the village, to make good food and good friendships out of the common ground beneath our feet even with those we have significant differences with. The way I am approaching this is not the only way, there are as many ways as there are people who long to create a more interdependent, truly connected way of being.

So I’ve created a new publication specifically focused on this topic.
It’s called Neighborhood Produce and I warmly welcome you to join me there. We’ll have a wide range of contributors and really explore the stories, strategies, and frameworks through which we can all grow more connected in place.

I love wearing linen. I love cooking things from scratch. I love that most days, my work and my life don’t require me to leave the hundred-yard radius around my home. By mid-afternoon, my day is focused on quality time with my kid and making dinner. I keep a sourdough starter alive and it keeps my family fed.

I’ve often dreamed of living in or near an orchard, of waking up to the slow rhythms of a place where chickens and goats and cows are part of the fabric of daily life. I don’t just want them for their eggs, milk, or manure—I want to be in relationship with them, to care for them as they care for me, my family, and the land.

My home is full of anything and everything my husband and I have from our ancestors, and we use them all the time. Old wooden kitchen tools from my grandmothers, fine china my great grandfather bought just before the depression, textiles from the old country, really old books.

And yet, I know there’s an entire world of people who, upon hearing these things, would assume I’m part of the Christian tradwife homesteading movement that’s been sweeping the internet in recent years.

But that’s not me, and it’s not a lot of other people I know who have a deep longing to live slowly, close to the earth, deeply rooted in relationship with more than just humans. In this distorted media climate, I think a lot of us have gotten disoriented. Now that we’re facing an increasingly alarming authoritarian regime, and an anti-constitutional coup by billionare oligarchs, I think many of us are actually finding the ground again.

Some recent glimpses into my living world.

The Troubling Aesthetic of Homesteading

My friend

Julia Plevin Oliansky

recently wrote an essay asking: Do conservatives now own the back-to-the-land dream? In it, she wrestles with the realization that her own vision of pastoral life—one that includes gardens, fruit trees, and free-range children—mirrors the cottagecore aesthetics and tradwife fantasies being peddled on social media. She asked herself,

“Is this really my dream or have the conservative-infused social media tradwife and cottagecore trends infiltrated my brain and hijacked my psyche?

How and when did this become my fantasy? And why?

I’ve been obsessing about this. Is this “ideal life” truly mine or is it what the algorithm has served me? And is this a benign algorithm or is it the result media propaganda that wants to keep women stuck in the home.“

I feel that tension too—not so much in wondering whether my longing for land-based life is truly mine (it’s been so consistently present in my life that I don’t doubt that), but in recognizing how this longing has been commodified, politicized, and filtered through an Instagram-perfect, whitewashed, often very specifically Christian lens.

Beyond aesthetics, there’s the history of the word homesteading itself. The Homestead Act of 1862, which granted settlers land in exchange for “improving” it, was an explicit tool of Indigenous displacement and land theft. The homesteading ideal—this vision of an independent nuclear family staking out its own self-sufficient plot—was never about living in harmony with the land. It was about privatizing it.

That’s why I don’t resonate with homesteading as a concept. I’m not trying to carve out my own isolated, self-sufficient world. What I want is to village.

I want fresh eggs and veggies, and I want my child to grow up with relationships to many different species. I want the joy of gathering ingredients straight from the land. But I don’t have to do it all myself. I don’t want to wake up at 5 a.m. to take care of animals if I’m being totally honest. I’d rather wake up at 5 a.m. to write essays for my Substack, like I’m doing right now.

That’s the difference between homesteading and villaging.

We don’t all have to do everything. That’s the myth of self-sufficiency, and it’s one that homesteading often reinforces—the idea that resilience means being able to handle every single task alone (or within a family unit that only grows by endless sequential pregnancies).

Villaging, on the other hand, is about shared responsibility, about creating networks of reciprocity where we each contribute in ways that align with our gifts, needs, and rhythms.

And yet, in the curated world of social media homesteading, the reality of many different forms of labor is often erased.

We hear it all the time: It takes a village to raise a child. But where is the village?

Since becoming a mother, I have seen this question as an outcry—especially in online mothering spaces. There is real grief, real exhaustion, real rage. Because stewarding the lives of children is an impossible task to do alone, and yet, so many of us are expected to do exactly that. Even I, with an incredibly present partner, an intergenerational household, and deeply involved in-laws less than an hour away, have still felt lonely, depleted, and aching for deeper support in the more than two years since my child was born.

And yet, the women who are selling the tradwife homesteading fantasy online—the ones presenting an image of graceful, effortless motherhood on the land—are often the most exhausted of all. Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, the reigning tradwife queen (whose husband’s family is billionaires btw), has spoken about being bedridden for days with exhaustion. This is not normal. It is not okay. And it is not how things have to be.

And the reproductive rights being systematically stripped away in this country make this issue even more urgent as millions of people find themselves in forced pregnancies with ever diminishing social safety nets. Outrageously, the political implications of the tradwife influence machine contributes to the election of officials that support these policies, leaving the people they’ve influenced with fantasies, no real road map to fulfill them, and policies that directly undermine the viability of the lives that so many people understandably long for.

These women are not actually self-sufficient. They are not living off the land—they are living off their influence. They aren’t surviving by milking cows and churning butter; they are surviving by selling an image of milking cows and churning butter.

But this is where the real harm of the myth lies: there is no such thing as total self-sufficiency. There is only interdependence. And when that interdependence is denied or erased, it doesn’t disappear—it just becomes invisible labor, unpaid labor, exhausted labor. The labor of women, of mothers, of the land itself.

And this isn’t just about money. It’s about which labor is valued, and which labor is expected to be done for free. It’s something my husband

Seth Kaufmann

and I are actively working to address in how we structure our household and finances—something we’ll share more about in our joint publication,

Multidimensional Living

. Because if we want a regenerative future, we have to regenerate the way we value labor, care, and contribution.

This is why villaging matters. Not as a nostalgic dream, not as an aesthetic, but as a response to the real needs of our time. Because the truth is, no one can—or should—do this alone.

Villaging as an Ancestral Practice of Interdependence

Unlike homesteading, villaging is not about independence—it’s about interdependence. It’s about weaving networks of care, regenerating the commons, and recognizing that resilience doesn’t come from doing everything alone but from being in deep relationship with land and people.

A few years ago, my mother bought the lot next to our home—not to develop, but to prevent it from being overbuilt in a way that would have worsened neighborhood flooding for older homes, like ours, during hurricanes and the rainy season. It was going to become an apartment complex. Instead, it’s now a paradise for native species.

Over the last seven years, we’ve rewilded it, planting hundreds of native species and restoring habitat. What was once just an empty lot where people sometimes dumped old rugs and other trash has quietly become a commons for the living world. Neighbors find peace there. Birds and insects make homes. We’ve had many beloved friends contribute art made from the land. This weekend, it will begin to be the place where we gather for community meetings.

The tragedy of the commons was never that people shared resources—it was that the commons were systematically stolen. The real tragedy is enclosure: the privatization of land, water, and wealth that were once collectively held and tended. The commons didn’t collapse because communities mismanaged them; they were stripped from communities through force, law, and economic coercion. And yet, for most of human history, people have successfully managed commons—forests, fisheries, pastures, irrigation systems—through shared stewardship and mutual care. A return to the commons is not just a nostalgic ideal; it is a necessary, practical, and time-tested way forward.

In another part of our neighborhood, just a block away, we’re starting a chicken coop co-op. One of our neighbors has lifelong experience with animal care, and many of us are coming together—offering time, money, and energy—to support a shared flock. Yes, everyone is eager to have fresh, pastured eggs that don’t cost $16 a dozen (that’s a real thing and I do recommend reading

Drake James

’s publication for a recent essay on exactly this topic). But it’s more than the eggs. It’s about creating small, cooperative economies, about learning to share resources in a way that benefits everyone.

And this is just the beginning. Some neighbors have sun-drenched yards perfect for growing fruit trees and other produce; others (like me) have deep shade more accommodating to herbs. Some have well-established mango and papaya trees; others grow lush gardens of greens and cabbages and melons. Some bake, some make art, and some retired, trusted neighbors are happy to spend time with children so that we parents can work to pay our bills. Slowly, we’re going to learn to trade, to share, to build a decentralized food and care system that is rooted in place and reciprocity. Those who have the resources will help with startup costs of some of these projects. I intend to create business structures around this co-op so that we can truly effectively resource one another in all the ways that matter.

This is what villaging looks like. A well-being economy, woven from the gifts and capacities of the whole community.

Interdependent Solitude

Years ago, before I was married and before I had a child, someone asked me what I most wanted, if I could be given absolutely anything out of life.

“Interdependent solitude,” I answered.

That still feels like the heart of what I’m building.

In my marriage, my partner and I hold a vow inspired by Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet: to be guardians of each other’s solitude. It’s this foundation that allows us to write, to create, to build our own projects while raising a child and cultivating community.

This, to me, is a key dimension of villaging. The balance of interdependence and solitude. The ability to be alone without being isolated. The ability to belong without losing oneself. A village is not a codependent tangle, nor a collective where the individual disappears. It is a web of relationships that holds space for both togetherness and sovereignty.

Yesterday, I made little pots of tulsi and lemon balm—herbs that have saved my life this past year, steadying me through waves of anxiety, dread, and panic. They’re part of my personal medicine, and I potted them up as small mental health herbal growing care kits for my friends and neighbors. A few days ago, I was gifted a wild-crafted sourdough starter, alive with the yeasts of my own bioregion. If I am to keep it alive, I’ll produce more than my own family can eat, and therefore will have to give the excess to others. These small exchanges, these acts of tending and sharing, are a microcosm of what we all can create as we steadily build the world that is rising up from the soil as the towers of the toxic systems that “rule“ us crumble.

Bioregionalism: Belonging to Place

Just this week,

Julia Plevin Oliansky

wrote another essay, this one called Becoming Bioregional: The Only Way Forward. In it, she writes:

“Bioregionalism is the pathway towards becoming a place-based person like all our ancestors once were… It’s about feeling a sense of responsibility to that place—a place that scales from individual to family to neighborhood to community to ecoregion to the whole Planet and includes the more-than-human world.”

This is what I want. Not just to live somewhere, but to belong to it.

Bioregionalism is not just about knowing the names of plants and watersheds (though that’s part of it). It’s about living in a way that regenerates the relationships that sustain life.

Gary Snyder puts it simply:

“Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.”

I am digging in, here, in the place where I am. Restoring soil. Planting seeds. Learning the flows of water. Co-stewarding land, food, and care. Practicing the slow work of regenerating the commons.

(PS, check out The Great Simplification’s recent roundtable on the topic here.)

Villaging as a Path Forward

Villaging is not an aesthetic. It is not a nostalgic retreat. It is not about curating a perfect life.

It is a practice. A process. A lived commitment.

It is a radical assertion that we do not have to do this alone. That we can create economies of care instead of extraction. That we can regenerate the land rather than deplete it. That we can belong to place, and to each other, without losing ourselves.

So I ask you:

• What does villaging look like in your life?

• How are you weaving interdependence and solitude?

• How are you regenerating the commons where you are?

Let’s weave this conversation together. Let’s find ways—wherever we are—to village.