The Spark
Before the Flame
Welcome to Anarchy Ranch’s blog. If you haven’t already, please take time to check out our homepage at An-Archy-Ranch.com, which briefly goes over the mission at large. Hopefully that will provide a little more context for this blog, specifically.
Anarchy Ranch was conceived at 10,000 feet elevation in a tiny, rural area tucked away in the Front Range of Colorado during the COVID-19 outbreak. I’d been laid off from the job that afforded me the ability to purchase such an awesome place of refuge in the mountains. However, the owner of the company I’d spent four years helping achieve tremendous growth brought me on as a contractor to continue maintaining the website, creating marketing campaigns, and generating social media content. I would later learn there were some serious problems with that arrangement, and I probably should have sued his ass. I digress…
I was now working for myself as a sole proprietor, which gave me more time to read, learn, reflect, and ultimately decide to change my life in a drastic and meaningful way.
First, Pour-over Coffee
Next, Anarchy Ranch
Sometimes, it’s a random occurrence that initiates a shift in mindset. For me, that random occurrence was an expensive, plastic-ridden coffee maker that would malfunction once or twice a month. Was it user error and not a malfunction? I don’t even know, but regardless, it left my countertop covered with a half-brewed pot of coffee and grounds more often than I found acceptable.
At the time, I was new to meditation, and no amount of meditation was making this conundrum any less irritating. One morning, after a solid 21 minutes of thoughts arising and letting them go, my coffee maker did its trick once again, all over the recently cleaned granite countertop and down the cabinet doors.
And I thought to myself, “Bro, you’re just running hot-ass water over ground-up beans. Why are you complicating it so much?”
I went online and purchased a pour-over coffee carafe.
After a month or so of preparing my coffee in the simplest way possible, pouring boiling water over beans, with no hiccups, I recognized that a lot of my life had similar spillovers and complications I seemed to have no control over. Much like the frustrating nature of my prior coffee incidents, these mishaps tended to affect not only how I felt about myself, but also how I was able to show up for the world.
A shift was occurring.
The Sustanance
What do we need
What started as a new way to prepare my second favorite morning attachment got me on a path to simplify the rest of my life in a similar manner. However, this seemed to be at odds with what everyone around me was doing.
We live in a hyper-consumerist economy filled with all the bread and circuses a mind looking for distraction could ever consume in a lifetime. Being the dominant global empire has afforded us a level of comfort and complacency that will one day be studied, I’m convinced.
I began canceling subscriptions and shopping with more intention, questioning every purchase.
Similarly to how I approached my coffee, I had begun to ask myself, “What is it I’m really trying to do here?”
My answer was very basic: stay housed, fed, and clothed.
There I was, three years into a 30-year mortgage, up in a satellite community of a satellite community of Denver, where neighbors hardly knew each other and nobody was growing food. The peace, the quiet was telling me something, and I was listening. It was beginning to feel as if my time on the mountain, although so beautiful, was coming to an end, though I didn’t know how or when.
Growing Community
Feeding Resilience
Fast forward to 2022, and I saw my opportunity to do something different. That was, to escape the trappings most people, myself included, have come to consider “the norm.”
People around me thought I was crazy. I didn’t argue, ha!
I’d purchased five acres in southern Colorado as a “bug-out” spot. It was in an agricultural community, only 10 minutes from a town of a few thousand residents.
The community was not only agricultural but also economically challenged compared to the rest of the state, which meant it was cheap land, but more importantly made me feel like it might actually hold up better under the pressure of systemic disruptions. They seemed to be doing it without much help from the outside anyway. There were small local shops stocking locally produced goods on their shelves, something I rarely saw in or around the satellite communities of Denver.
I put the house up for sale, and in less than two months I had a full-price offer. Less than a month after that, the deed was done. My place of refuge for the past 5 years was a closed chapter.
Finding the Land
The Idea Taking Root
Before purchasing an Arched Cabin kit home from an outfit out of Texas, I took one last look at the land for sale in the area, now with a substantially larger budget than when I bought the five-acre “bug-out” spot.
I found 35 acres that had previously been a weed farm, with a domestic well and land permitted for agriculture, greenhouses, and livestock. I was fortunate enough to purchase it without much hassle and, more importantly, mortgage-free.
Anarchy Ranch finally had a home.
Build Our Own
Grow Our Own
The goal here at Anarchy Ranch, simply stated, is practicing and teaching community sovereignty.
I’d never built a house, but now I have. I’d never grown my own food. Now, I’ve seen firsthand what that entails while learning from those who grow around me.
And something that became blatantly obvious throughout this project is that, it can’t be done alone. Friends and family showed up, and without them, I really can’t say how far along I’d be. I’m beyond grateful for those who helped get a roof over my head.
I could never have built this home alone. And much like this cabin, the land will be far more productive and efficient with other’s involved. Ironically, I came here looking for independence, but what I found was interdependence.
The hyper-individuality they sell us is bullshit. It’s good for the bottom lines of far-off corporations, but we’re approaching rock bottom. Something needs to give.
For me, Anarchy Ranch has become an attempt to get back to what’s real: growing food, building things, producing what we can, sharing what we know, supporting the people around us, and understanding just how connected we actually are to create a world we would all rather be living in.
It’s about questioning how much convenience we’re willing to pay for, and what we’ve given up in exchange for it. It’s about relying less on systems and institutions that rarely, if ever, have our best interests at heart and relying more on ourselves and one another.
I started down this path trying to figure out how to need less and do more for myself. But the further I’ve gone, the clearer it’s become that doing everything for yourself isn’t really the answer either.
Community sovereignty isn’t about everybody retreating to their own 35 acres and figuring it out.
It’s about building the knowledge, relationships, skills, businesses, food systems, and communities that allow us to depend on each other instead of being completely dependent on systems we have little control over.
Because everybody does better when everybody does better.
