Lifestyle
You Are What You Reflect
It is odd at times how life can take you down turns you would not expect…
By: Ukrainian Bear
This article was first printed in our very first issue of The Beartaria Times Magazine, Origins, A Revealing of Legends
Ever since I was a little boy, I had been a curious little hobbit. Always getting lost trying to find something, whether it’s a wooden sword at a toy shop or a game of chess played by a couple old guys at the beach while my family frantically searches for me. I’ve always been searching, curious to look farther, and walk further. I think we all do this, to one degree or another.
Growing up as a child in Ukraine it seemed that everyone could do everything.
My grandfather worked in a chemical factory, served in the Soviet Army, learned to fix elevators to get cheaper rent, ongoing he fixed his own van to transport church goers from village to village, put in plumbing and radiant heating in the church that he had built from the ground up. My father is a musician by trade, fixes instruments of all sorts, knows how to work with sheetrock, independently learned 3 languages apart from Russian and Ukrainian which he fluently knew, repairs tiny electrical work found in most audio and video instrumentation, alongside my grandfather built up the same church they had been working on for 20+ years.
All the other members of the church I attended in Ukraine were just as talented. I guess I didn’t fall too far from the tree knowing how to use a medical ultrasound machine, take care of the handicapped, drive a tractor trailer, climb and take down trees with a chainsaw attached to my hip, learning to fix my chainsaws, tuning my own piano, and carving wooden bowls and little sculptures. The list will probably continue to grow, but I think my curiosity does have its limits. Even so, I didn’t come by my skills in one day and not without help.
Due to varying circumstances I had been living between America and Ukraine for a majority of my life. As such, I was able to come to understand the subtle and not so subtle differences between the cultures, as well as what makes its people what they are. In a high trust society, you can be certain a man will properly perform for a hired task, but in a low trust society you can only trust yourself to fix something, because someone is always looking to cheat you out of something, somehow.
Fundamentally, Ukraine is a low trust society where the people seem to have a wide range of skills. While they are poor, the low income breeds creativity with available tools. Low trust is created by the level of sin acceptance, which in turn creates struggle that is fertile ground for skill growth. It’s almost like a sine wave. The more sin acceptance there is in a society there will also exist an equal or proportional counter wave of skill necessity.
To put it in other words, the more people give in to sin, the more there arises an equal need for those individuals who can compensate for the skills lost to indulgence. This is not to say that having an immoral society is a good thing because it breeds industriousness, but that there is simply a greater need for people to be able to survive in their created environment. The way I explain the difference in culture is this: if an American stops at a red light and no one is around, he will wait until it turns green to go, but a Ukrainian will keep driving through a red light even if there are cars around. Morality starts with daily small, insignificant decisions.
After my mother divorced my father for whatever her reasons may have been and then remarried an American, I went on to grow up in Virginia as an 8 year old boy. There I was taught that I should work for my money and not have it handed to me like the rest of my friends around me at the time. So, I decided to take my family’s push lawn mower around the neighborhood and cut people’s grass. I was fairly successful and the people I did the work for were happy. Nothing like the smell of fresh cut grass in the summer.
When a very large snow storm hit Virginia and we had the week off from school. I took the opportunity to take all the shovels I had and recruit my friends to shovel people’s driveways. I just wanted people to have a clean driveway and spend time with my friends. We made quite a bit of money that day, but what I remember the most, even to this day, was how I was treated by the very last family that let us shovel their driveway.
They were a very nice older couple and they had given both my friend and I a cup of hot chocolate. The steam coming from the cup on a background of white snow and shaky wet hands was the best time I ever had. Working with a purpose and being appreciated for it. It’s pure, simple, and true. Couldn’t hide or cheat your way out of a shoveled driveway.
My teenage years didn’t lend themselves to having an abundance of diverse practical skills. Due to difficult circumstances in my mother’s life, she decided to send me back to Ukraine to live with my father and grandparents. I effectively didn’t know Russian or Ukrainian at that point, so having to go to high school right away, I had a lot of catching up to do. This difficult circumstance was just another opportunity to grow, and I did.
In the Ukrainian high school I attended, I was taught to be a linguistics and history major focusing on the English language, Ukrainian history, and WWII. I went to school 6 days a week, had multiple college level courses in biology, physics, chemistry, and literature; and most of my nights were spent studying these subjects. Most if not all the people in my class would go on to be political analysts, working for embassies, or occupying some part of government. These are the things we were being trained for.
After 5 years invested in strenuous studying, this seemed fine to me. My grandfather said I would make a good ambassador someday, because of my character. Dealing with people, paperwork, and time constraints is all I had been doing, so it made sense to me at the time.
It was not until I returned to America, where I had spent a good portion of my preteen days, that I began to change my views on what I wanted to do with my life. While I wanted to make a positive difference in people’s lives, I found that working in politics was not the way I wanted to do it.
Having watched both of the important men in my life work with their hands, it did not seem foreign or beneath me to go work for a fence installation company to meet certain ends. I worked for the company for a brief 6 months, in which time I learned to install different kinds of fencing material. I’m certainly not a professional by any means, but I can put in a simple vinyl or wood fence post.
It is odd at times how life can take you down turns you would not expect. The very same man that hired me to install fences, guided me towards getting into the medical field. He told me that I should try it and that it would suit me, as it would have “been a shame to waste my intelligence” on simply putting up fences. After this I signed up for an EMT class at my local ambulance department where I eventually got my license. Having realized that I couldn’t earn much being an EMT, I decided to go to college and become an ultrasound technician (sonographer). Since I needed a steady job and wanted to pay for the program in full without incurring debt, I worked for a couple from my church that needed help with a family member that had several handicaps.
Thanks to the skills and license that I acquired prior as an EMT, I was able to get the job and have gained not only a steady income, but life-long friends, people that care and are good. To think back, it may have seemed that it was a waste of time to get my EMT license and I could have done something better with my time, but everything happens for a reason by God’s grace. As my grandfather would say, “There’s no such thing as just a coincidence”. Everything and everyone has their purpose.
I worked a full year while going to college taking my prerequisite classes. Earned all the money I needed for the program and was off to the races. I got accepted into a Diagnostic Medical Sonography program, which only accepted 12 students every year out of 100 applicants. I continued to work weekends at my job and went to school interning at various hospitals as part of the program. I was offered a job my first year in the 2 year medical program, which was unheard of. I told my program director that I had an interest in becoming a Surgical Physician Assistant. Per her recommendation, I spent a semester in a cadaver course, where I figured out that my skills with the scalpel were quite good. My program director was well connected in the medical field and desired to help me achieve my dream. She certainly had the means to make my aspirations come true having worked for Yale and being the top OB/GYN sonographer in the state, if not in the country. She had all the connections necessary and I had the drive, as well as the talent, to achieve this goal I had in mind.
The path seemed to be laid out before me. Go to college, study hard, preserver through late nights to come out the other end with a job that I could be proud of doing, because I knew that I was making a difference in people’s lives. Continue to work hard as a sonographer while saving money to pay for the next and final step, which would be the operating room, the pinnacle of American medicine. To be the man that could save another person’s life by sheer technique and comprehension of human anatomy. In my eyes this was a good path.
Around the year 2016, I had begun to notice subtle changes in American culture and attitude towards life. It appeared more indulgent, more accepting of sin, and less accepting of the truth. People seemed to complain more than they acted. Almost suddenly it became acceptable to go through a red light when no one was looking. But someone is always watching, even if you don’t see or acknowledge Him. The penalty for sin is death.
There had been many things that I encountered in the medical field that did not make sense to me. Why is it that even though America has the best healthcare system, the population is one of the unhealthiest? Why does a plastic (butt and cheeks) surgeon get paid more than a surgeon who can put together a leg that’s been ripped apart by a chainsaw? How can a doctor go from one room consoling a woman who just lost her 4th in vitro fertilization (IVF) baby, then go to another room where they plan the dismemberment of a healthy baby, as if the previous experience did not occur? The inconsistencies were all far too familiar. These things cannot last long under their own weight. I told several people whom I knew that there was a change coming to America. Most told me that I didn’t know what I was talking about, some just silently listened.
Around this time I found the comedian Owen Benjamin, who was talking about all the things I had been seeing, while no one else was. Interestingly, it was also around this time that I had a chainsaw accident that would propel me into a better future. I had to take 6 months off from my medical program and it was during this time that I intensely studied how to properly operate and fix chainsaws. I also learned how to climb trees and cut them down with various rigging equipment.
I thought I might want to go on to be a lineman as I learned to climb and found that I needed a commercial drivers license (CDL) to even be considered for an apprenticeship at a local union. I signed up with a local CDL school, paid in full to get into a fixed rate, because I saw the value in this and knew changes were coming. I don’t know why I did all these things at the time. It certainly seemed insane to my family at the time. I just had a feeling that this was important and the right thing to do.
Then 2019 hit everyone like a ton of bricks. I realized that I had to let go of my dream of becoming a surgeon. It was painful because I knew I could do it, but at what cost? Where do you stop and when? This was it for me. I knew now was the time to act, because the times are changing and so must I. All the hours spent on YouTube learning to climb, cut, and fix had finally begun to pay off. My medical program was following the lead of everyone else in the medical community, turning away from logic and reason. I knew there was no going back and that I couldn’t, with a clear conscience, work in the field.
I finished the program in 2020 and got that paper I had worked so hard for. But I was already looking towards where I was going next. I saw many streams of ideas, like streams of invisible ribbons laying above my head, which I could grab on to. All leading further ahead into an unknown future, but with faith I am less fragile and can stand against the persistent winds of trial. Now I have my class A CDL and am currently clearing 3 acres of land for a friend of mine who wants to build a farm. This same friend also got me in contact with his brother who works for a crane company and I am in the process of getting a job there. Drivers and climbers are needed everywhere. There are plenty of open positions for the taking. All most people ask for is that you be honest, not drink, not do drugs, and show up on time.
While I was able to attain these skills and walk these paths, they would not have been possible without the generosity of people like my father and grandmother who sacrificed much of their time and money to put me through high school, my grandfather who spent many late nights talking with me about life and how a man ought to be, and the kindness of many strangers whom never knew me, yet shared their life with me. In a like fashion, I deal generously with what I have to others. It is better to give than to receive and it is good to help those you do not know, because even some have catered to angels. These acts are pleasing to God and such sacrifice He enjoys.
For those seeking to find a skill or to grow, my advice would be to seek the truth. You will be provided the skills and tools necessary to walk further than those who are not. It is my sincerest hope to be a humble reflection of the light that is poured into me, for what is a man without God and Jesus Christ? I hope it is yours as well.
Lifestyle
Preppers Rarely Share These Invaluable Tips
When we think about prepping, images of stockpiled food, alternative energy sources, water filtration systems, and survival gear usually come to mind. These elements are vital for self-reliance and resilience in challenging times, and they form the backbone of material preparedness. Yet there are other equally essential, often-overlooked dimensions to preparedness, things that might not come up as frequently but are invaluable for long-term success.
In prepping circles, the conversations are rich in talk about physical and material assets, but there are hidden aspects, like mindset, personal character, and community bonds, that strengthen an individual and create a lasting foundation for true resilience. Here are the often-unspoken, but invaluable, elements that can make all the difference in facing an uncertain future.
- Personal Development: The Foundation of All Preparedness
Stockpiling resources only goes so far without a strong personal foundation. A prepper’s mindset often includes adaptability, problem-solving, and a deep commitment to learning. Developing these skills requires intentional growth in areas like self-discipline, critical thinking, and stress management. By expanding these strengths, you’re preparing yourself to adapt to new or unexpected situations, not just sticking to rigid plans.
Skills like cooking, first aid, or learning how to work with your hands are often emphasized, but underlying these is the ability to learn and grow as needed. Personal development is an unspoken but essential part of becoming truly self-sufficient.
- Mindset and Character: Building Inner Resilience
A survivalist’s mindset is more than just a belief in being prepared; it’s about the willingness to persevere through discomfort, loss, and setbacks. When challenges arise, mindset and character provide the fortitude to keep going. This includes developing patience, emotional regulation, and the ability to stay calm under pressure.
Character and integrity come into play when resources are limited and decisions get difficult. If a crisis tests the moral boundaries of a community or family, those with a foundation of integrity can navigate challenges without compromising their values or making decisions they’d later regret.
- Perseverance: Embracing the Long Game
One of the greatest assets in preparedness is perseverance. Often, those new to prepping go through cycles of enthusiasm followed by discouragement if they hit financial or logistical setbacks. The ones who truly make preparedness a lifestyle don’t approach it as a “project” but as a consistent, long-term journey.
Real resilience comes from the willingness to keep improving your situation, whether that means adding to your skill set, restocking your supplies, or staying physically and mentally fit. Perseverance is the unshakeable commitment to keep moving forward, even if progress feels slow.
- Relationships: Building Bonds that Sustain
Perhaps the most underappreciated asset in preparedness is relationships. It’s easy to imagine a “lone wolf” approach to survival, but the truth is that relationships can make or break one’s resilience. Whether it’s family, friends, or neighbors, people who are united in common values, trust, and mutual support can do far more than isolated individuals.
In a survival situation, each person’s strengths complement the others, and diverse skill sets increase a group’s chances of success. But this kind of unity doesn’t develop overnight; it requires cultivating trust and communication well in advance. Building relationships within your local community, especially those who share a preparedness mindset, is an often-overlooked part of self-reliance.
- Community Development: Creating a Network of Support
Beyond individual relationships, a resilient prepper looks to the wider community. When a crisis strikes, those with local allies and a network of like-minded individuals can respond faster and more effectively. This doesn’t mean compromising your privacy or security—it means seeking out genuine connections and nurturing a spirit of cooperation. Community development can be as simple as knowing who can help with specific tasks, organizing skills-sharing events, or supporting local businesses that align with your values.
Local communities can create networks for bartering, resource sharing, and security, all of which make the community stronger as a whole. Preppers who embrace community development can create systems that allow for interdependence, rather than total self-reliance, which, in the end, can be more effective and sustainable.
True preparedness goes beyond what we can store in our homes or grow in our gardens. It encompasses who we are, how we relate to others, and our capacity to continue growing, regardless of our circumstances. When preppers embrace personal development, mindset, character, perseverance, relationships, and community development, they lay a foundation that can weather any storm.
Join our community app today to meet old friends for the first time and have a community of over 15,000+ people to share your journey with!
Keep striving, keep growing, and never stop building your legendary life!
Lifestyle
The Negation Positions
The appropriate question in this moment is: What encodes the negativity to repel one thought or action and not another?
The night defines the day, the land defines the sea, the wall defines the room, thus, the negation defines the position.
By Moss Town Bear (aka Sam Daniel)
It is understood that one part is known due to the existence of its counterpart. We define the day by the nightly negation of light; the sea by the negation of fluidity; the room by the negation of space, but equally, one’s identity is known by the negation of indifference.
An infantile thought that takes residence in the mind of many informs the thinker that the positive is a good, right, and desirable thing; and the negative is a bad, left, and undesirable thing. Yet, position is born of apo- meaning “origin”; and site meaning “place”. Hence, positivity is the prenatal spirit that springs forth original thoughts and actions. Negation is born of ne- meaning “not”. Hence, negativity is the denial of an exogenous thought or action that possesses the potential to pervert one’s prenatal spirit. Thus, like a pond with fertile water that’s held by the fortified clay, positivity and negativity are interdependent forces that enable the human to animate in the world, but not be absorbed by the world.
Similar to the fertile water and our aquatic friends therein, the positivity within the human allows the trace of consciousness to swim without interruption. It houses the library of one’s history and the laboratory for one’s future; yet it is lighter than a feather and as empty as a desert. It is the undefinable, yet it is the source of all definitions; it can define all except itself – like the earthworm that cannot separate the earth from the worm. Positivity has the capacity to conjure all possibilities, of dreams and nightmares, of conscience and characteristics, of morals and dogmas; hence, the human possesses negativity to protect itself from total dissolution into the ocean of everything.
The negativity, like the fortified clay, defines one’s identity by deciding not only the thoughts and actions that enter, but also the thoughts and actions that exit. It has become obvious that the curse cast upon the notion of negativity has effected a perceptual error that illustrates negativity to be a monstrous thing that is bad, left, and undesirable. However, the perceptual error can be corrected by interpreting negativity as a motion rather than matter, a function rather than a form, and a verb rather than a noun. Thus, the negative is not a bad, left, and undesirable thing, instead it is a primordial force that repels the thoughts and actions that are bad; that ought to be left; and that are undesirable.
The appropriate question in this moment is: What encodes the negativity to repel one thought or action and not another? At the time that the spiders web is severed, the spider immediately re-imagines and re-creates its web by re-membering the prenatal template. This reveals the hypothesis that the human was posited with a prenatal identity. However, if the negativity of a human is corrupted by illogical thinking and unfelt feelings or punctured by poisonous interventions, the definition of one’s identity will begin to bleed like water through sand. The corrupted or punctured human will often utter responses that deny their differences, such as, “It’s fine”; “It doesn’t matter”; and, “I don’t mind”. These responses – aside from the speaker subliminally confessing that they must de-fine that which matters to their mind – are an example of positivity bleeding out of the human upon vocal waves. It is plausible to presume that, like the bleeding wound that becomes a stiff scab, the human that has abdicated their positivity will inevitably begin to form a calloused identity, and thus, affirming their indifference.
These final words intend to empower one to fortify their force of negation by reiterating that the human body is a Nation unto itself; its feelings are its culture; and its logic is its leader; but, its prenatal spirit is its judge. Thus, one ought to remember beyond the words they embody to begin to resurrect their original place. Upon recovery of this ancient template, may one cultivate the custom of declaring, without guilt, the differences that define their boundary and the Law within. With all words and actions said and done, let us stand upon the living constitution insofar that when a malevolent temptation presents itself, we may authorise, with humour and humility, “No”.
If you are interested in submitting an article for BeartariaTimes.com as a guest writer please email Editor@BeartariaTimes.com.
Lifestyle
Everyone Homeschools Their Children
The question isn’t whether you homeschool your child but how you homeschool them.
The idea of homeschooling often conjures images of structured lessons at home, textbooks on the kitchen table, and parents carefully guiding their children through a curriculum. But the truth is, whether we realize it or not, we all homeschool our children daily. From the moment they are born, children absorb the world around them and learn from every interaction, observation, and experience.
The question isn’t whether you homeschool your child but how you homeschool them. Are you intentional about what they learn from you? Or are they simply picking up lessons by accident through your behavior, words, and habits?
Children are like sponges. They absorb everything from their environment, and their first teachers are always their parents. This learning doesn’t only happen when you sit them down to teach a specific skill; it happens constantly. Every interaction, every conversation, and every action you take becomes a lesson in their eyes.
Think about how children pick up the language. They don’t learn to speak because we give them formal lessons in grammar. They learn by listening to how we talk, watching our facial expressions, and understanding the emotions behind our words. The same is true for other, less obvious lessons. They learn how to handle hard times by watching how we react to pressure. They learn how to communicate by observing how we speak to others. They learn our values through the choices we make every day.
Without even realizing it, parents are teaching their children all the time, whether through how they solve problems, treat people, or manage responsibilities. This is homeschooling in its purest form—teaching through example.
Given that our children are constantly learning from us, it becomes crucial that we are intentional about what we teach. If we ignore this responsibility, they will still learn but may learn lessons we didn’t mean to impart. They might pick up our bad habits, fears, or negative attitudes.
Intentional homeschooling means controlling the lessons your child absorbs. It involves being aware of how your actions and words affect them and consciously modeling the values, habits, and skills you want them to develop.
For example, if you want your children to value hard work, it’s not enough to tell them that hard work is important. They need to see you putting effort into your tasks, staying focused, and persevering through challenges. If you want them to learn kindness, they must see you treating others respectfully. Intentional homeschooling means leading by example and being mindful of the lessons you teach through your actions and words.
One of the most powerful aspects of homeschooling, intentional or otherwise, is that learning happens everywhere. Whether your children attend a formal school or not, many of their most important lessons take place in the home.
When you cook dinner, they can learn about nutrition, math (through measuring ingredients), following plans and responsibility of tasks. When you manage resources, they learn about budgeting and the value of money. When you repair something around the house, they see problem-solving in action. And when you make time to read, exercise, or work on a hobby, they learn the importance of personal growth and lifelong learning.
These moments are opportunities to shape who your children will become. Being intentional about these everyday lessons can help your children develop a variety of skills and values that will assist them throughout their lives.
While formal education plays an important role in a child’s education, it is not a substitute for the lessons learned at home. Schools provide knowledge and skills in subjects like math, science, and literature, but they cannot teach values, ethics, or character in the same way a parent can. How you handle conflict, how you talk about your work, and even how you treat yourself all contribute to your child’s education in ways no classroom can replicate.
By understanding that education starts at home, parents can take active roles in shaping their children’s education and emotional, social, and moral development.
Everyone homeschools their children, whether we recognize it or not. Children learn constantly from their parents, picking up lessons from every action, word, and decision. The key to effective homeschooling is intentionality—making sure the lessons we teach align with the values, skills, and behaviors we want to instill in our children.
By taking an active role in our children’s education inside and outside the home, we can help them grow into thoughtful, capable, and responsible individuals. The lessons they learn from us today will shape the adults they become tomorrow. So, the next time you think about homeschooling, remember: you’re already doing it—make it count.
-
Lifestyle3 weeks ago
Preppers Rarely Share These Invaluable Tips
-
Just Crushing2 months ago
Comedian Owen Benjamin Disrupts The Comedy Scene
-
Lifestyle2 months ago
Don’t Let the Internet Distract You From Real Life
-
Lifestyle2 months ago
Building a Sustainable Off-Grid Home: A Fundamental Guide
-
Lifestyle2 months ago
10 Essential Skills Every Homesteader Should Master
-
Lifestyle2 months ago
Everyone Homeschools Their Children
-
Wellness2 months ago
The Workout-Success Connection: How Physical Fitness Transforms Every Area of Life
-
Just Crushing4 weeks ago
Beartaria Ozark Campground Releases Stunning 2024 Campaign Video