…Or something like that.

A couple years ago, my mom got me started reading a series of books by Beverly Lewis about the Amish. Despite the books being a little slower-paced than I’m used to, I quickly found myself hooked, looking for more and more of the books at my local library. There was something appealing about their way of life in those books. They had real, close relationships with each other, and they did work that bettered lives and fulfilled them. They worked together, studied together, lived together. I don’t know about you (though I can guess), but I often feel disconnected. I talk to my family on the phone sometimes, I email my friends, I work with near-strangers, and I shop at a huge supermarket with other strangers. It was during this time frame, while I was reading all these books, that I started talking to a few of my friends about my plan: I wanted to be Amish. Or something. Why not have a few of us move off to the middle of nowhere and live as a community. Grow our own food, build our own homes, sew our own clothes.

Well, life goes on, and we do what we must, and I read other books and forgot about the whole thing – until I was recently reminded of that desire. It’s an attractive idea to me, still! My husband and I watched a movie with our friends called Food, Inc, a documentary about where the majority of our food comes from. If you’re anything like me and wary of sitting down to watch a documentary, I promise this one shouldn’t put you to sleep. It had us riveted. It’s scary, too! It’ll almost scare you into growing your own food. Do you know about how they raise the chickens we eat, how many of them grow so fat, so fast, that they can only take a few steps before falling down? Their legs are too under-developed to hold up all the weight. Did you know that we’re feeding our cows massive amounts of corn, because it’s cheap, rather than the grass diets their bodies need, and that this is a huge factor in the outbreaks of E. coli we’ve seen lately? Did you know that a small handful of companies manage a huge majority of all of the meat sold and used in restaurants and grocery stores?

Sound related to Amish? Well, no, not directly. But it provoked one of our friends to say that she and her fiancé, my husband and I, and a couple other friends of ours should go live on a farm and homeschool our kids. And suddenly I was reminded of my idea.

And I still can’t say I think it’s a horrible idea. (Only – what would we do without the internet?)

While it may be a bit extreme to think that I’ll really go live on a farm and leave society completely, there are some aspects of a simpler, more natural lifestyle that I try to incorporate into my own life. We eat less fast food and frozen pre-prepared foods and instead try to cook our own meals more often. We try to DIY, when possible. (My husband just completed a new set of shelves for our bedroom on Monday!) And I’m starting to look for more organic produce at the grocery store.

But I want to do more.

And I can’t shake this feeling that maybe the Amish are doing it way better than the rest of us.

Have you ever been attracted to running away to a simpler life? What would you miss about your life if you did?