Where Simplicity Leads

Some Background Writings About Place

2011-09-04T02:44:00.000-06:00

Before I get into my newest reflections on place and human potential I thought I'd re-post this entry from my simplicity journal as background food-for-thought:

September 7, 2008

In one of Paul Shepard’s essays he talks about the research of a woman named Edith Cobb. She believed that the external terrain of childhood forms a model for internal cognitive development.

Perhaps the most remarkable document on childhood in this century is Edith Cobb’s Ecology of Imagination in Childhood. Surveying the lives of geniuses, she noticed a common thread—the return in moments of creative meditation to the place of childhood in imagination or sometimes physically, a trip that helped toward a solution to a problem. The original meaning of the term genius loci referred to a unique sacred power. What was it, Cobb asked, about the original experience that made it useful to the psyche in a recapitulated travel across the juvenile home range; in what sense was it an organizing force?

She concluded that the adult faith and intuition that order permeates the cosmos, that no bit of data or bizarre idea was truly disparate, that searching would be rewarded, extends from the singular imprint of an intensely inhabited space about thirty-five acres at a crucial time of life. Played through, the child’s transit, time and again, locked this literal, objective reality into an unforgettable screen, through which other, novel objects of the mind would be envisioned by the questing adult as though they were details of a landscape. Just as the mnemonist studied for thirty years by A.R. Luria ‘placed’ images for later retrieval along a path in the mind’s eye, at some less conscious level a holding ground is absorbed. The juvenile home range is a tiny universe, whose trees, rabbits, culverts, and fences probably register some kind of metaphorical series whose branching, skittering fleetness, subterranean connecting, and boundary-marking function in relation to a speculative field of half-formed and elusive ideas follows a paradigmatic system of relationships. An anatomical model for this unlikely neural representation of place is seen in the fundus of the eyes of vertebrates, where the colored oil droplets in the cells of the retina, differing according to the frequencies of light in different parts of the visual field, form an eerie landscape that can be seen with an ophthalmoscope. Edith Cobb’s own genius has given us insight into the primordial meaning of coherence as a function of a specific, tangible, ecology, swallowed by the nine-year-old in repeated excursions.

What excites me about this line of thought is the possibility that part of our minds exists outside of us, in the landscape. While it seems that Cobb was saying we build up internal neural networks in childhood that replicate the external environment, to me it almost seems like our neural networks extend out from us into the environment. It is as though the whole earth were brain, or mind. I find it especially interesting that Cobb found geniuses to frequently use landscape as a means of gaining knowledge or insight. They’re tapping into the larger mind we’re all part of. I’ve said before, I believe that tapping into our full human potential means tapping into our larger identities--identities that extend out beyond the boundaries of our skin.

Cobb talked about geniuses who returned to the landscape of their childhood. This implies that they left that land at some point. But what if you stayed put? What might be possible in a lifetime of building up internal and external neural networks? Of enlarging the self, extending more and more deeply into the environment? Until we become rooted in the land once again I don’t think it will be possible to reach our full human potential.

Shepard, in a related essay, mentioned that the classical definition of genius was “the spirit of place”. It’s by tapping into the spirit of place, the larger mind, that we can achieve “personal” genius. All knowledge is out there. None of it is personal. It simply waits to be located. When I’ve said “Place holds potential”, I mean that very literally. There’s a very visceral way I’m sensing that place holds unique knowledge. We become who we are by our unique interactions with the land. We can’t become the same person in a different locale. We don’t gain the same knowledge.

These days the line between nature and nurture have blurred for me. It’s all one seamless experience of responding to nature. I think I can begin to see the next phase of our evolution. Instead of consuming matter in the childish way that we do, we will begin to convert matter into spirit. By knowing the land we will expand Mind and eventually begin to know who we are--Gaia. And once we recognize ourselves to be this entity, Gaia, then maybe we will shed the idea that Gaia is an isolated dot in the universe, and begin to extend our identity and mind out into the cosmos. Eventually we will recognize that we have always been the Mind of God.

But if we can just reach Gaia-Mind, that would be hugely transformative. Our human potential could begin to unfold and it surely wouldn’t be tied to consumption. We would stop trying to make the ego look bigger. Instead we would grow our Mind.

I think we would regain a more fluid way of being and perceiving, as in our primordial days only with deep conscious awareness. The egoic, rational brain which is so clumsy and a hindrance, could recede in importance. Direct experience would again be primary.

I’ve often found the rational brain gets in the way. I hate the fact that I always have maps in my head; always have a name for the place I’m in or the place I’m going. I don’t want a representation of place. It interferes with my ability to know a place. I have enough “past life memories” to remember the older, more fluid and direct way of experiencing. The rational mind, while so important for building consciousness, really dumbs down reality.

Intuitive, fluid, spiritual beings--that’s our destiny if we don’t kill ourselves off first.

I’ve been trying to encourage a more fluid way of being to take hold in me. For one thing, since reading the Temple Grandin book, I’ve been trying not to censor my imagery. I’m becoming aware just how ever-present my imagery is. It is always flashing up, probably in every moment, if I was just aware enough. My “haunting” may just have been me moving into that more fluid way of seeing. There are layers of reality here, always. I want to get a handle on what I’m seeing, why certain imagery wants to be connected with certain thoughts, actions, or places.

One example (I know this sounds bizarre and psychotic but I think there’s legitimate knowledge here): lately when I look in the mirror I see a flash of an image overlaying my reflection. It’s a bird, probably an eagle, but maybe a hawk, with its wings outstretched in flight.

I’ve also had tons of "past life" images arising as I read and write and think. I see the land before all this manic human destructiveness and development took place and it makes me so sad.

Going Home Again

2011-09-03T07:10:00.000-06:00

You can go home again, apparently, because I've done it. I came to my parents house in Pennsylvania in June for an extended visit (extended meaning--to me--about two months) and I'm still here. Events have been conspiring against me (or with me--I'm still not sure) to keep me here. Almost as soon as I got here both my mom and my dad were diagnosed with cancer. My dad's is a slow growing cancer of the prostate which only needs to be watched at this point. My mom has cancer in both breasts and she has opted for chemo followed by surgery. All of that has been put off until after my mom and dad go to Ireland for a week next month. Meanwhile Mom is taking what amounts to mini-chemo in a pill. My gut sense is that she doesn't have an aggressive form of cancer and will be just fine, but I will be sticking around to see how the chemo goes next month. And as if all of this weren't enough, in the past two weeks my mom managed to amputate part of her index finger. *Sigh.*

So I am here in Pennsylvania after a fourteen year absence (aside from a few very short visits) and back in my home town after a twenty-four year absence. In other words it's the first substantial amount of time I've spent here since I left when I was seventeen. And wow what a time I'm having! I've stated previously on this blog that I believe human potential is tied to the land and that place holds potential. Much as we pretend to be creatures divorced from the land we're really created by the environment that surrounds us. So it's been a fascinating journey to revisit the landscape that created me.

I'm going to get into all of this in more detail in my next few posts, but for today I just need to ease back into writing. For some reason I haven't been able to write at all this year. It's like I can't string two sentences together, can't form coherent paragraphs. Instead of fighting it I've taken it as a sign that something else is needed, some other way of making sense of the world, something other than words--and so I've written next to nothing all year. But I think I feel a shift happening now and perhaps I'll be able to string some posts together in the next few days and weeks. I miss blogging.

Here's a photo of me with all of my siblings and my parents, taken over the 4th of July weekend. I'm the one on the left.

From Where Simplicity Leads

A Moneyless World?

2011-03-06T07:22:00.007-07:00

Moneyless World--Free World--Priceless World is a blog I've had listed in my blogroll since back when I first started this blog. It's one man's account of living without money (since 2000, I think). Suelo is not a very active blogger--partly because he doesn't often have access to a computer--but when he does post, his accounts are always interesting. Mostly his posts stress me out, but that's just me. I'm not a nomad or a gypsy; I like to be rooted to a place. So his accounts of standing by countless roadsides with his thumb to the wind, or sneaking into and out of rail yards (and sometimes getting caught) I find exhausting even to read. It's not my idea of a life!

But I don't say that to be critical. I hugely admire what Suelo is doing and his efforts to document his lifestyle. His philosophy is beautiful and right-on in my opinion. Nature operates as a gift economy and we humans should be able to as well. If you've got some time, check out his website (in addition to his blog)--he's got some great essays there that delve into the philosophy behind his lifestyle.

I admire Suelo for living his convictions, for modelling a different (and healthier) philosophy of life. Many of us have noble convictions, but how many of us get out there and actually live them? Suelo is following the path he was put here on earth to follow. That earns him hero status in my book.

I hope to soon (and finally) be living my convictions as well. And when I do, the new world I'll inhabit will be largely moneyless too. It won't look the same as Suelo's world, but that's because it'll be my unique path and not his. My unique path involves becoming rooted to a place, becoming an inhabitant, part of an ecosystem, a participant.

Money has been a huge obstacle for me all my life. I'm missing what other people seem to have--a link between money and the reward centers in the brain. Money just doesn't do anything for me. The prospect of acquiring money doesn't motivate me. I can't make myself care enough to do whatever it takes to earn wads of cash. Intellectually I understand that to make it in our current society, to be functional here, you have to know how to earn money. And I most decidedly am lacking in that skill. I am most decidedly dysfunctional in this society. But, it was Krishnamurti who said:

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

What I am adapted to is the way we lived in earlier times. What I am adapted to is the way we will live in future times, in all likelihood. I am not adapted to living in this sick society.

The economy I participate well in is not the global economy. The economy I participate well in is very tiny--it's a single ecosystem, a single homestead integrated with the surrounding landscape, where a human gives and takes and participates and interacts. There are many, many exchanges, but no money changing hands. There's value created. There's abundance. There's reciprocity. There's balance. There's health. This economy is centered around a single spot, yet it has tendrils that reach out and connect it to other economies and to the larger whole. Most of the exchanges happen on that one spot; fewer and fewer exchanges happen the farther out you go on a tendril. It's a place-centered, intensively local economy.

On that one spot, all exchanges operate on the gift economy. All is freely given and received. A little farther out into the neighboring economies and exchanges are more likely to involve bartering, and farther out still they are likely to require some form of money. I don't believe money is evil or unnecessary. It serves a genuine purpose--facilitating transactions that occur at a distance. At a local level, however, money is unnecessary, perhaps even a hindrance.

I've stated before on this blog that there's a big difference between transactions and interactions. Transactions are distancing and de-humanizing while interactions create bonds, trust, and accountability. Historically, transactions occurred at a distance. They were exchanges with people you didn't know, people you rarely encountered, people with whom you had no opportunity to build trust. Money was the perfect way to exchange goods in those circumstances--it had a very well-defined value so it prevented conflict between strangers. Among your own clan however, transactions were never needed. Your clan was its own ecosystem, with all parts (you and your kinspeople) freely contributing to the healthy functioning of the whole. No one kept tabs--that would be like your heart keeping tabs on how much oxygen your lungs are contributing.

In between these distant transactions and these local interactions was a fuzzy middle ground. Here is where barter took place, or elaborate and often ritualized gift-giving traditions. These were your distant neighbors. You were probably remotely related to them, so there was an accountability to them but it was a bit tenuous. Bartering ensured fair trade practices. Because you might not see these people again for years, an immediate reciprocal exchange made sense. Or, in some cultures there were elaborate and lop-sided gift-giving rituals among distant tribes. If you were the visiting tribe, you flooded your hosts with gifts. That tribe would do the same whenever it visited other neighboring tribes, and whoever visited your tribe would do the same. Thus bonds were maintained, even though it was never immediately reciprocal.

Do you notice something here? The gift economy and to some extent the bartering economy are both based on trust and the building and maintaining of bonds. They build cohesion and harmony. The money economy on the other hand is based on distance and distrust; it's based on remaining at arm's length from potentially dangerous strangers--those mysterious "others". A major part of the sickness of our society today is the fact that we've forgotten how to do anything other than transacting. We've turned everyone into a stranger. No one is worthy of our trust. And so we become these islands, in the process losing community and connection and robbing ourselves of a whole bunch of love, laughter, and joy.

I'm naturally gifted at interacting. I suck at transacting. For me immediacy is what counts, what's right in front of me. That's why I'm so perfectly geared towards living an intensively local existence. I can't handle abstractions, especially that one called money, but I can handle what I can verify with my senses: what's under my nose, what's under my toes, the people, plants, and animals that surround me, the wind and rain, stars and sunshine, rocks and rivers, clouds and sunshine. And those things fill me up in a way that money never will.

Edited to add: My apologies if this post is impossible to read. There's some kind of blogger glitch whenever I use the "blockquote" feature--it screws up the line spacing from that point on. Since it doesn't show up in the html, there's nothing I can do to fix it. :(

AmeriCorps on the Chopping Block

2011-02-26T06:20:00.002-07:00

AmeriCorps and its umbrella agency, the Corporation for National and Community Service, might soon be no more, and that would be a very sad way for the program to end. Now more than ever we need this sort of program. Americorps was originally VISTA--Volunteers in Service to America--a program first envisioned by JFK as a domestic version of the Peace Corps. Back in the early 90s I served as a VISTA volunteer for a year at a non-profit in my college town. We ran a mental health hotline and offered short-term walk-in counseling for mental health and drug and alcohol issues. Like most AmeriCorps projects, our clientele were among the neediest and most underserved in our community. In fact, the overarching mission of the VISTA program was to alleviate poverty. Today AmeriCorps volunteers serve in many capacities--helping to rebuild New Orleans after Katrina, serving in inner city schools, teaching English and literacy, working on infrastructure improvement projects, cleaning up streams, building low-cost housing, etc.

AmeriCorps is a brilliant program, especially in our current economy. It gives people jobs while costing very little. The pay might sound insulting--it's sub-minimum wage--but there are plenty of people who would jump at the chance to have some income rather than no income at all, and have a chance to do something truly useful, and gain real skills. In fact, there are always more applicants than there are spaces to fill. If anything, this sort of program needs to be expanded.

I'm convinced our economy is not going to recover--not in a time frame that's meaningful, anyway--and inevitably we all will have to adapt to fewer hours of work and less pay. AmeriCorps could be the poster child for this new reality. Earning $5.80 an hour is going to sound more and more appealing to people as time goes on. As I said, some income is better than none at all.

Winds of Change

2010-12-04T08:43:00.002-07:00

I've decided I need to retire this blog and start a new one. The things I want to write about are actually in perfect alignment with the intent of this blog, and yet it just doesn't feel quite right to continue here. This journey of voluntary simplicity has taken me to unexpected places, and though I want to share that journey, if I do so here I fear that some of you may feel it's really not what you signed up for. That shouldn't really matter to me--after all, you're free to move on--but nevertheless it is crimping my style here. I'm finding I'm afraid or reluctant to write about the topics that are really compelling to me now. A new blog, with a revised focus, will give me a fresh start.

The big thing that's happened lately for me is that my path has morphed into the shamanic journey. I've said before I believe the path to being fully human is equivalent to the shamanic journey--now I'm starting to live it.

The new blog is called desert madwoman--since that's what I'm aspiring to become (actually some might argue I'm already there :) ). The title alone gives me so much freedom. There's no reason to feel I have to censor anything, no matter how unusual. My health has been really lousy lately, and frankly I don't know how much longer I'll be here. I want to use what time remains to live absolutely authentically, and that means not suppressing all of the weird stuff--and there's a lot of weird stuff. :)

So, if you're into weird stuff, join me there (I haven't posted anything yet, but probably will get my first post up this weekend). If not, thanks for reading and commenting here and good luck on your own journey, wherever it takes you.

http://desertmadwoman.blogspot.com/

Off On Strange Tangents

2010-10-26T10:40:00.005-06:00

This is such an interesting time in my life. I haven't been posting much lately and the problem isn't having too little I want to say, but entirely too much. I never know where to start. But today I'm going to start with a few intriguing things.

Several of you may have caught the post I briefly had up in June about an unusual artifact I found. I deleted that post within a day of writing it because I felt I had been hasty in writing about something that perhaps had been quite a powerful and/or sacred object to someone in the past. I'm ready to re-visit the topic now, at least in part.

In June when a robin taught me to dig lawn grubs for him, I happened to dig up a stone spear point in the garden. My curiousity about the spearpoint also led me to wonder about another artifact I've had for about eight years. When I lived in Longmont, Colorado and had been replacing the landscaping cloth under the xeriscaping in my front yard, I found the artifact lying in among the small river rocks. Right away it seemed apparent that the rock had been worked by humans. There was a blackened indentation that seemed like it must have been used for firestarting, and with the bowl facing up the rock fit very ergonomically in my left hand, snugged up nicely against my thumb. When I oriented the rock another way and moved it to my right hand, it ergonomically became a pestle. You could see how the face of the pestle had been worn very smooth with use. About a quarter of the face of the pestle had chipped out at some point, but by the wear-markings it was obvious the pestle had continued to be used long after the break took place. There were also places on the rock that seemed to have clearly been flaked by humans.

In June I studied the rock more intently than before and noticed something else. The most heavily flaked area formed the mouth and snout of a snake, with the blackened bowl becoming an eye. How I had never noticed that before I don't know, because once I saw it it was unmistakable. My curiousity and fascination was growing and one day I sat down with it and decided to meditate on it, just to see what kind of impressions would come, if any. Immediately upon closing my eyes I began to see imagery. Not snake images at all. What I kept seeing were representations of birds--numerous petroglyphs and pictographs of the thunderbird. How odd that a snake-shaped rocked would elicit bird imagery! I delved into research online and found a lot of Native American myths linking the snake and the thunderbird, so it really wasn't that odd after all.

A few days later I tried blowing on the rock and discovered it whistled. Not only did it whistle, but it made the distinct cry of a bird, with interesting modulations and sometimes a bit of a warble to it. The cry was created by blowing into the bowl or eye of the snake. I began to think perhaps what I had was a shaman's power object. It could have been used to grind healing preparations; to start ceremonial fires or to carry an ember from one fire to another or perhaps to place a glowing ember in the eye to ceremonially/symbolically represent aspects of the snake/thunderbird mythology; and by whistling to call the thunderbird in order to bring rain. Perhaps it had even more functions I couldn't yet conceive.

If you'd like to see pictures of the rock I've got some posted here. You can click on the individual pictures to see closeups and zoom in.

Since June I've been researching and trying to learn more about the rock and about Native American myths that might pertain to it. I haven't had luck in finding an anthropologist or archaeologist willing to look at it, and from what I've learned that seems to be the norm for this sort of thing. I suspect it's like any other area of academia--it's all become a bit machine-like. There's no pay-off for straying from the area of expertise that will win you your tenure, and there's certainly no payoff for exploring anything that will challenge the established beliefs (excuse me, that will challenge the irrefutable science which has already been carved in stone for all of eternity, never to be altered). Some of the most interesting things I've come across have been on websites of intelligent amateurs--people like me who have just stumbled upon artifacts and gotten curious. I'm starting to prefer amateurs over professionals. Amateurs aren't wearing blinders so they can come up with wild theories and think outside of the box. They don't have a narrow focus of interest, but can take in the whole gestalt and see patterns that a professional quite likely will miss. It's not just with anthropologists and archaeologists, either--so much of modern culture has become a machine. People have quit being curious and seem to have an aversion to open-endedness and possibilities and novelties. I much prefer the people who entertain wild imaginings, who don't necessarily believe science has gotten everything all figured out. I love crazy theories and prefer to say, Why not?

The first site I came across that intrigued me was from the Spoon River Valley in Illinois. These artifacts are the most similar to mine of anything I've come across. My rock even has a strange balancing point like many of this guy's artifacts. If this is where my artifact originated, it would imply that it once also had a snake body made up of other rocks that stacked together.

Then in Ohio, there's Day's Knob--cruder stones carved to resemble various figures. I spent the afternoon Sunday looking at the artifacts on this site and some of the others he links to. Some of the figures you have to stare at quite awhile before you "get it"--partly because it's tough to photograph the detail well, and partly because the figures can be rather ambiguous. After immersing myself in all of these photos, I picked up my snake rock again. Now instead of just seeing my snake, I was seeing all sorts of figures all over the rock! My mind had gone into "facial recognition" overdrive. I saw the head of a ram, the head of a burro, various human faces, a young buck just getting the first nubs of horns, the backside of a bear, a bear pawprint, a mammoth with its trunk curled into its mouth. Were any of these figures intentionally put there, or was my mind just playing tricks on me because I had over-immersed myself in Day's figure stones? Hard to say. In August I had shared pictures of the artifact with my friend Khrystle and she commented then that she could see a human face in the bottommost picture (in the first link I gave up above). I hadn't noticed it until then, but she was right. It's subtle, but I definitely see it--almost like the profile of an Egyptian sarcophagus--just left of the center line. So, perhaps it's not just me and an overactive imagination. The interesting thing is that the eye of each figure is what I had previously taken to be just a random human-made mark. None of the eyes seem to be natural formations of the rocks--they all were put there--whereas noses and mouths (except for the snake) all seem to be natural formations.

So, in August in my backyard I found two more artifacts. The funny thing is, I found them both on the same day, in different places, and yet they actually belong together! One is a stone drill bit, the other is a rather ordinary rock with a bunch of what seem to be practice drill holes in it (over a dozen). Now, when I first found the spear point in June, my friend John and I both thought it might have been made for a kid. The tip was rather blunt. It actually seems like the original point may have broken off, and then a new tip was knapped on. It would have made a nice practice spear for a young boy who was just learning. So when I found the drill bit and the rock with holes in it, I also thought of a child. The holes seemed random, and what adult is going to waste all that time making random holes? But a kid just learning to drill might spend some winter nights practicing randomly all over a rock. And perhaps he had just learned to make his first drill bit too and was trying it out. The rock with the holes actually seems like quite a poor choice for practice. It's very hard, and by the last hole the drill bit had worn down to near uselessness. Plus the rock has inclusions of what seem to be very hard carbon and several of the holes hit those and came to a grinding halt.

When I found these latest two artifacts, I thought they were interesting, but didn't really spend that much time with them. Yesterday, I picked up the rock and took a closer look. And this time, "facial recognition" still in high gear, I noticed some things. There's a nose! And I mean, a big nose, life-sized. And if you turn the nose upside-down there's a face carved into the rock, and there's a protuberance coming off of the upside-down big nose connecting it to the little nose on the face. Very strange! There's also the remnants of a painted line encircling the face. Actually it kind of looks like someone took a dark crayon and drew a circle, except it's not waxy like a crayon would be. You can see parts of the line in the pictures.

And after all of this, the crazy amateur in me comes up with a crazy theory. Maybe in oral cultures these rocks were like books--places to hold vast amounts of information. In David Abram's book The Spell of the Sensuous, he talked about songlines and other ways that information was held in the landscape by indigenous peoples. Perhaps information was also placed in figure stones that could be carried with you wherever you went. The bear paw I see in my rock could encode a story or myth about the bear, or a healing technique using part of the bear, or some moral teaching, or whatever. Whenever something significant needed to be remembered it would be linked to a feature in the rock, which then became a mnemonic device to aid in recall. And details could be added to the rocks as needed, so that eventually they might hold layers and layers of meaning. And the rocks could be passed on from generation to generation, each generation being taught the meanings and stories behind each figure. So finding a cache of figure stones would be the equivalent of finding a library, only the language has been lost and we can't read them.

Perhaps the rock I have with the drill holes in it isn't the work of a child after all. Maybe the holes aren't random, but instead encode information--distances or travel times or events or stories. The more I look at this rock the more interesting it becomes. I had initially characterized it as rather plain, but the more I look at it, the more I see. It has complex coloration when you look closely, and faint lines that suggest shapes. It's kind of like a scrying glass--you begin to see all sorts of things.

A funny thing happened as I was writing this. I was sitting at the computer eating my lunch, which was a bowl of chicken soup. When I make soup, I always crack some of the bones and add a little vinegar to help extract more of the calcium (and some marrow). I guess I missed one of the bones because as I sat here eating I found one in my bowl. Check out the picture. I wonder where the inspiration for the shape of the drill bit came from? I guess that's pretty obvious--we know bones were used as awls, so it would make sense to make the same shape in a harder material if you needed to make holes in rocks, right? I just thought it was ironic that my soup bone was so nearly identical in shape to the drill bit, and I saw it just as I was writing about these artifacts.

The last picture just shows there are multiple layers of history in my yard. It's a scary clown head made out of an early plastic, probably from the 1940s or '50s. I'm always digging up interesting things.

Perhaps My Reel Mower Isn't "Real" Enough

2010-09-02T07:20:00.003-06:00

Yesterday a woman on the next street shouted down the alley to me. Her son-in-law wanted to know if I wanted a mower! Uh, well, uh, that's awfully nice, but I'm good here. Thanks, but no thanks! I wasn't going to launch into a whole long explanation, especially since we were shouting at each other from so far away. But her offer caught me off guard. I'm sure it looks odd having someone in the neighborhood doing all their yard work with handtools and non-motorized contraptions, but until now I had no idea I was the object of pity. How inconceivable that someone might use a reel mower by choice! I bet my response has that woman really scratching her head now. She's probably thinking, Why that ungrateful little thing! We're just trying to help.

New Paradigm Series, Part 1

2010-08-30T12:01:00.003-06:00

This is going to be harder than I thought. I tried offline today to get my first post on this topic written, but I ended up bogging down. So instead perhaps what I need to do is write around this issue for awhile and see what eeks out. I won't stop trying to write about it directly, but until that works for me I've got ways I can still explore this indirectly.

One night this summer I had a dream in which I was being shown that the bow and arrow were invented when someone recognized that if bird and snake were conjoined they could be sent together into the future to retrieve bounty for the tribe. It was obvious to me in the dream that the head and shaft of the arrow represented the snake and the feathered fletching represented the bird. The feathers brought flight to the snake and the snake provided the biting ability lacking in the bird. Together they became a powerful object capable of providing sustenance to the tribes.

What a neat way to invent something! So different from how we invent things in the Mental phase--where the natural world has no meaning and invention is a purely rational exercise. In the Mythic phase everything in the natural world had meaning and significance, and we could take on the attributes of those natural objects and beings ourselves, or place them in the objects we created. Our inventions weren't just lifeless mechanistic objects, they were living embodiments of various aspects of the natural world.

With all the converging catastrophes we're facing today, one thing that's clear to me is how grossly inadequate our current way of problem-solving is. We can't solve our problems from within the current Mental paradigm--we will only be using the same inadequate and now dysfunctional set of skills that got us into this mess in the first place. But if we can move along to the next paradigm, we will have a much broader repertoire of problem-solving skills at our disposal. We will have access again to magical and mythical solutions, as well as mental solutions--but actually I believe it will be a mingling of all three approaches and something greater than the sum of the parts. Solutions will arise out of the earth and flow through us. What wants to manifest will manifest. We'll be led to meaningful actions through instinct, synchronicities, mythical symbolism, and the mental 2+2ing we're so good at currently--all rolled into one fluid, fused experience.

Nearly impossible to describe! That's why I'm bogging down in writing my personal account. All of these ways of being are beginning to co-exist and co-express themselves in me. Instinct, magic, myth, and reason all informing one another within me and sending me down a most fascinating path. It sounds crazy, I know!

Here's a Mental exercise for you. Yes, I realize a Mental exercise is kind of at cross-purposes with what I'm trying to get at, but...

Let's take the end of the carbon era--this crisis of what to do to fuel our human endeavors down the road. Imagine you are an Archaic human plunked down here--what would be your solution to the problem, how would you advise the powers that be (ignoring for our purposes the fact that you haven't acquired speech yet)? Now imagine you are a Magical human--how would you solve our energy problems? And what if you were a Mythical human? Now how about if you were Archaic, Magical, Mythical, and Mental all rolled into one?

New Human/New Paradigm Preliminaries

2010-08-29T10:44:00.003-06:00

Okay, I've got to get this post out of the way before I get into the nitty gritty of describing my personal forays into the new paradigm. Maybe I'm just stalling here since I sense I will be challenged to the limit trying to describe/paint a picture of a way of seeing and being that stands so far outside our normal modes of perception.

So this post is strictly a Mental post (see Envisioning the New Human if I'm losing you). My more Integral posts will follow soon (I hope).

The first preliminary is explaining why I think all of this new paradigm stuff is so important. It's important because we've already extracted all the benefits the current Mental phase of our evolution can provide, and staying here any longer becomes dysfunctional. We've exceeded our stay--we should have moved on long ago--but we've become entrapped by the flashy constructs and technologies this phase has given rise to. According to Gebser, each phase contains all previous phases, but the curious thing about the Mental phase is its vehement denial of the preceding phases. Not that the realities of those other phases don't live on in us, rather here in the Mental phase we've repressed and denigrated them, and in the process distorted their truths. All we acknowledge as "real" is what can rationally be perceived. Myth, magic, and instinct are beneath us, irrelevant in this world of superhighways and cyberspace and resource extraction and stock markets. Our richly nuanced world has been dumbed-down and we find ourselves asking, "Is this all there is?" No, it isn't, and it's time to move on because if we don't we're going to end up self-destructing.

The Mental phase is an extremely dangerous phase because in it we are (or perceive ourselves to be) completely separate from nature. As long as we stay in this phase we will continue to see the earth as a mere resource, something "out there" and "other", something to use and abuse without compunction.

Our only hope is to evolve into the next paradigm. And quickly. In the next phase, one of consciously reintegrating with all that's "out there" and "other", the earth will be recognized as the ground from which we spring, the matrix which births us and of which we are a part. We won't continue to rape and pillage the earth and those others who dwell here because it will be obvious we're not separate. To harm one part of the matrix is to bring harm to all, including ourselves. Obviously I'm stating this in a very Mental way--"the earth will be recognized as the ground from which we spring"--but understand that the lived experience is something else and something more entirely. To describe it in Mental terms is to miss the nuance, the richness, and the sheer beauty the next paradigm promises.

So we need to get there quickly. But is it overly idealistic for me to suggest such a feat might be possible? I'm not sure, but I know we need to try. I already see evidence that others are making forays into the new paradigm--it's something that seems to want to emerge--and I think there are developing conditions in our world that might help precipitate this change.

For me what has precipitated the change has been my deepening experience with voluntary simplicity. I've been giving up things, habits, and technologies--all of which were birthed in this Mental paradigm and all of which enforced a (false) sense of separation from the rest of creation. Freed from these flashy constructs and technologies I begin to live directly. Life is no longer mediated by these things--by machines, by bizarre mental constructs like the idea of perpetual growth, by office cubicles that shut out the natural world. Instead I start to have my own unmediated experiences. I act directly in the world, I interact directly in the world, I allow the world to directly act upon me. I give and receive in an unmediated fashion. And in this way I begin to have a direct perception of what Is. And that direct perception shows me a fluid, nuanced, unified world--one where it becomes difficult to discern where do I start and where do I leave off?

I think there's hope that many other people will have these experiences soon. Some voluntarily, like me, but more will be forced to adopt a simpler lifestyle--because of economic conditions, climate conditions, the end of the carbon era, etc. And whether by choice or by necessity, once people start to live more directly again, I believe they will begin to slip into the new paradigm (and out of, and into again, until it finally takes hold for good).

The other preliminary I want to cover is a distinction I need to make. In my upcoming posts I'll be making a case for a revival of myth and magic in the next paradigm. As Gebser states, each phase contains all previous phases. In the Mental phase, the previous phases were largely obscured. That won't be the case in the Integral phase. Myth and magic will live again. But I want to be clear, I won't be talking about mythical or magical thinking--all of that mythical, magical, religious explaining we did in earlier phases--I will be talking about real magic and real myth, underlying truths in this universe. Yes, myth and magic are real, just as reason is real too. We tend to think of these things as relics of our primitive past, misconceptions we've outgrown--and we're right if we're talking about mythical thinking, magical thinking, scientific thinking--but not if we're talking about myth, magic, and reason themselves. All of that thinking arose in our Conscious But Separate phase--when we were trying to make sense of what was "out there" and "other". But in the next phase we'll lose that sense of discreteness and so all of that theorizing and sense-making will be unnecessary. What we'll be left with is a direct, lived experience of the magical, mythical, mental creatures we are (and instinctual too--I tend to gloss over that).

We're evolving towards something fantastic. I don't believe we have the merest inkling of what powerful and marvelous beings we are--but we need to survive the death of the Mental phase first and that may prove to be an insurmountable challenge. I want to attempt to give voice to my experiences because I think we really need people to begin to paint a picture of what (potentially) lies ahead for us. The world needs my voice and countless other voices sharing our initial forays into this new realm. People need to know this isn't all there is!

Some Recent "Letting Go" Successes

2010-08-28T13:44:00.002-06:00

Before I launch into a series of posts about the New Paradigm, I wanted to get this more practical entry out. In the past few weeks I've given up three more things in my life--each of which at one point or another would have been nearly unthinkable--so I wanted to share my successes.

1. I went through my boxes of personal letters and mementos and tossed/recycled almost everything. Now you have to realize I have kept every single letter anyone has ever sent me my whole life (friends/family/co-workers that is--not, say, the electric company telling me they need my payment NOW). *ahem* I had all the letters my best friend sent me when she moved away, from 1978 up until our last contact in 1992. I had letters from my next best friend, which he sent me mostly in the summers when we didn't see each other (although we lived only 5 miles apart). I had letters/pictures/postcards/currency from a strange Egyptian pen pal who seemed to be stalking me--if that's possible from another continent. I had stacks of the most beautiful love letters from my college sweetheart and one other wonderful boyfriend (both stacks lovingly tied into bundles with ribbon) and a more troublesome stack of letters from my ex-husband. I had funny notes from my college roommate and other college acquaintances. There was a great big pile of letters from my friend Di, with whom I've shared so many major life events--we were co-workers, she was in my wedding (and even came to my divorce!) and I had the extreme privilege of holding her as she gave birth to her daughter. Letters from my lifelong friend Khrystle (since age 3) and from my brother. I had birthday cards from my grandparents from when I turned one and two. You get the picture. It all went, all except the letters from my mom--and those may go someday too. For now they seem like such an important part of my family history, containing all of those trivial little things you tend to forget but which really tell amazing stories collectively.

It was wonderful going through these boxes and being reminded just how loved I have been all my life. I feel so incredibly lucky. All of those letters represent time, energy, and love that others have directed at me throughout my life. I think I've held onto those letters precisely because it's such a tangible reminder of that. But I've also come to a point where I know the place to carry all of that is in my heart. (That's a lot easier than hefting those boxes around every time I move too!)

Another box contained ridiculous things like a Girl Scout uniform, high school sports trophies and ribbons, academic awards, and report cards from kindergarten through grade 12. Those went too. Seriously, why have I been lugging this stuff around for so long?

2. This will sound trivial, but my hairdryer broke. I seem to go through those things with absurd frequency and finally I realized I just don't even need one of those darn contraptions. As you probably know, my plan is to go off-off-grid in a few years, so I won't be using electrical contraptions of any sort then. It just makes sense to start weaning myself off of them now. I always considered the hairdryer necessary because my hair is so thick and takes forever to dry, plus I have this weird thing about going out in public with wet hair (to me it's like going out in a bathrobe and slippers), AND with my body's inability to stay warm in the winter I get too chilled with wet hair. BUT in my a-ha moment I realized I simply have to make sure I only wash my hair right before I go to bed. It has all night to dry and in the winter I can huddle under as many blankets as I need to stay warm while I sleep. How simple is that! It just requires a slight shift in habits--to showering at night instead of first thing in the morning.

3. When I'm off-off-grid I will be doing my laundry by hand. My intention is to get a hand-cranked wringer, some galvanized tubs, a washboard, and a tool to agitate the water. Well, what do you know--a few weeks ago my washer broke. Since I'm renting it's really a simple matter to call the landlord and have it fixed--and I think it's a very simple problem like a bad belt or coupler--but instead for the past few weeks I've been washing my clothes by hand. And it's the oddest thing, but I find it so immensely satisfying. Now I don't enjoy the wringing part (by hand, since I don't have the wringer yet) but I find I actually look forward to doing laundry! It gets to something I've repeatedly tried to articulate (and failed miserably at)--that something vital is lost when we let machines take over. What it is I regain when I do something myself rather than relegating the task to a machine is the thing I can't find words for--but I feel it, and it's good, and I'll have to leave it at that for now.

Envisioning the New Human

2010-08-27T06:07:00.001-06:00

When I created this blog it was with the intention of exploring how to live simply and sustainably, but more than that I wanted to explore who we might become as we made these outer changes. Our outer and inner worlds give us the illusion of being separate phenomenon. We think what exists beyond our skin is wholly Other and what is contained within it is this thing we call the Self. But really these two worlds are one, and changes to one of these worlds creates changes in the other. We’ve been in a phase of our evolution where it was necessary to harbor this illusion of separateness—but it’s a phase I believe we are about to leave behind.

In our earliest days (perhaps even before we could technically be called humans) we were unconscious beings, primally fused with the surrounding environment. There was no sense of self yet, just a fluid merging with all that was. Then as we developed tools and language and began to separate out from the environmental matrix, we began to develop a sense of self, of discreteness. We became conscious. It was a gradual process taking hundreds of thousands--if not millions--of years. Over time the sense of self became more and more defined, more self-reflecting, and more isolated. An internal world developed, something which could symbolically represent what was out there, or even grossly distort it. We began to think we were just these isolated dots of awareness, forgetting our true (huge) Identity. Everything that wasn't the self--this isolated dot--was Other. And we needed to create these false dichotomies in order to become conscious.

If one essay helped shaped my thinking more than any other, it was Jung's "Answer to Job". The gist of the essay was that God needed us in order to become conscious of Himself. When God existed alone he couldn't know Himself, as there were no points of reference. He created a physical universe so there could be Self and Other, so parts of Himself (including us) could look at other parts of Himself and compare and contrast and therefore wake up and become aware. It was a radical new way of thinking for me when I first read it (as a teenager), at a time when I was just starting to break away from traditional Christian thought. It seemed almost sacrilegious to speak of God as needing us. Nowadays couching the creative force or life force in such Christian terms doesn't really speak to me, yet it still helps me to envision the process--the evolution of consciousness. When we were unconscious we were essentially God--we were one with the whole universe, but we just couldn't know it. We lived it--that was all. Then we became conscious and separate--believing God was somewhere else and something Other. One day (hopefully soon) we will consciously fuse back with that fuller identity--becoming God aware of Himself.

The shorthand I like to use for our evolutionary trajectory is: from Unconscious Union to Conscious But Separate to Conscious Union. We can break it down further if we want. For instance, Jean Gebser saw five distinct phases in our evolution: Archaic, Magical, Mythical, Mental, Integral. The first phase, the Archaic, represents what I call our Unconscious Union while the last phase, the Integral, represents the Conscious Union we're evolving towards. The three middle phases represent distinct steps in our Conscious But Separate phase.

In the Magical phase we had only a very rudimentary sense of self. Language was developing, blossoming organically out of our interactions with nature. We had barely started to separate from nature and at this point words were magical and potent. We couldn't know that eventually words would alienate us from nature--at this point words still had the power to fuse us with the natural world. Also in this phase there was no individual ego and no differentiated sense of space or time.

In the Mythical phase we became tool-makers, language became more developed, and we began creating mythologies--stories to explain the natural world which now was something outside of ourselves. As self separated from nature and ego began to crystallize we developed a sense of space. A conception of linear time wouldn't appear until we entered the Mental phase.

In the Mental phase we completed our separation from nature and perfected abstraction. Causality could now exist because of our linear concept of time. The sciences were born and with them the Age of Reason. Ego reached its full development and nature became something entirely Other.

And that is where we now stand, as separate from nature as we possibly could be and facing all the horrible consequences which that entails--but finally, at long last, we are awake. We've achieved full consciousness--and our fullest sense of alienation from the more-than-human world.

And now we stand on the cusp of a new paradigm. What will that look like? How will it feel to be that new human? How will we perceive the world? How will we interact with it? Gebser saw the next phase, the Integral, as one that would include all previous phases but would be non-temporal and non-linear. He believed we were moving towards a global type of awareness that would be relational in nature--more about the connections and relationships between things over time rather than focused on the things themselves. And while the previous three phases have been about trying to create meaning (through magical thinking, religious mythologies, and scientific reason) the next phase won’t involve all of this explaining. Rather it will be about experiencing the living, embodied meaning of things and relationships. As we begin to fuse back with the natural world, there will be less and less need to explain and our lives will become more a form of performance art. Our actions will harmoniously arise as expressions of what wants to manifest—the earth (or the universe or God) expressing itself through us.

All of this becomes difficult to express in words. Words after all are products of our Conscious But Separate phase. They create Subject and Object as tools to help us See. But in the next phase—one of reintegration—they will lose much of their significance. Language will be important, but speech not so much. And it will be the language of being, the language of life as improv.

What I want to do in upcoming posts is try to express how this new paradigm is beginning to birth itself in me—a challenging thing to attempt with words! But I find myself more and more slipping into this new way of seeing and being, and the beauty of it so overwhelms me I feel the need to attempt to share what I’m experiencing. I don’t even know if it’s possible, but I feel like I’m finally getting at what this blog is meant to be about. Who might we become? <--I’m becoming that! Now how do I express it?

Who's Domesticating Whom?

2010-06-06T06:25:00.005-06:00

Yesterday I spent the day out in the garden, trying to get a few new beds dug. The first part of the project involved getting the grass out of there. I had already dug up the clods of grass a few days ago, so all I still had to do in order to finish de-sodding was to shake loose the soil clinging to each clod and toss the grass into the wheelbarrow. I got into a nice work rhythm and was enjoying the gorgeous day, but quickly hit a snag. The patch of lawn I was working on was full of lawn grubs, and as I worked the soil loose from the grass, grubs would fall out periodically. This was a huge problem.

[Warning: Creatures were harmed in the making of this garden.]

I don't like killing things. I don't like it, yet I understand this is the nature of life. It's all about eating or being eaten, killing or being killed. Life springs from death. Death keeps the cycle of life turning. Bodies get cycled through other bodies and we're all continually digesting each other.

I couldn't allow the grubs to live if I wanted to grow food for myself. Lawn grubs act as cutworms on tender new plantings, so getting them out of there was critical if I wanted to meet my own selfish need for food. And besides, I was destroying their habitat so they had little chance of survival anyway.

Last year I dealt with the grubs by gifting them to the red ant colony that lives in the alley next to my garden. My son however pointed out this was a very cruel way for the grubs to die--being bitten by thousands of red ants--and after all, the grubs were just innocent babies. He wasn't against killing the grubs, or giving them to the ants. He just thought it should be done more humanely. So his solution was to first behead the grubs with a shovel before giving them to the ants.

It was definitely more humane than my solution, but yesterday Collin was at his dad's house and I am no cutter-offer-of-heads--so what was I to do? If I just left the grubs exposed on the surface of the soil where they fell, they would slowly dehydrate and fry in the hot sun. Would that be any better than being bitten by a thousand red ants? I hardly think so. So my cowardly solution was to cover them with a thin layer of dirt. Just enough so I couldn't see them suffering. Not enough to save them from the sun. See, I have no problem being an accomplice in death. I'm just too cowardly to do the deed myself--so the end result is that I leave grubs to suffer needlessly.

All of this was adding an element of stress to what should have been a very enjoyable day in the garden.

Then something amazing happened.

A robin showed up. He was hopping around on the ground about ten feet away from me and seemed to be saying, Hey, I see you have a little problem here--I can help you with that! Thus began an afternoon of fun and games.

I started tossing grubs at him. I couldn't keep up. He would scoop up a grub, fly away to feed it to his kids, and be back for more before I could find the next one. Then he'd wait patiently on a branch or the back corner of my house until I found a new one, and the game would start all over again. He told his wife about me and she showed up--a far more reserved creature than he was. She'd sit on the fence and watch me, then flit away when I made a sudden move. By the end of the day however, she got over her fear enough to retrieve a grub I tossed to her. I watched her fly off to a tree in the opposite direction from the tree where her nestlings were tucked away. Then she waited half a minute or so before flying home, taking a path which looped far out beyond my yard.

I got so engrossed with feeding the robins I wasn't focused on getting my own work done. In fact, I think I've created more work for myself. I was randomly digging holes looking for grubs, but I'll still need to go back over it all to double-dig it. I didn't care. It was fun. I was engrossed in the neat new relationship I was building. I even gave the male robin two of my earthworms (which I'd really rather keep) in an effort to show my friendship and to further build trust.

So now I'm thinking about this--this amazing thing that happened in my yard yesterday. This connection which we forged between species. Can we say that I began taming the robins? Are they becoming domesticated?

Or are the robins taming me?

What is this thing that's happening between us?

I think "domestication" may be the wrong way to frame this. If there's one thing I've been learning about lately it's how we need to become participants again in our own ecosystems. When we participate and claim a niche, it's inevitable that we will form relationships with the other members of the ecosystem. We don't exist in isolation from other species. Our niches rub up against each other and we meet and we negotiate relationships. Each ecosystem evolves from countless negotiated relationships. We don't tame or domesticate each other but rather we relate and cooperate. We find what works between us. If there's an opportunity to forge a symbiotic relationship between species, you can bet that we'll do it. It just makes sense.

I love the Gaia hypothesis because it helps me see my local ecosystem as its own sort of organism. Together we members of this ecosystem create a functioning whole--we're like different organs of one body, dependent on one another's services to keep the whole body healthy.

When robins and humans cooperate we get healthier gardens and healthier birds. Both of our species benefit (the grubs...not so much). I'm sure the grubs have entered into symbiotic relationships of their own. We're all working together in one way or another.

A question I have is: when we enter into a relationship with another (be it another human or a member of some other species) do we automatically give up something of our own wildness? When we get tied down into relationships, however beneficial, aren't we giving up something of our own autonomy? Is all relationship a form of domestication? If so, I guess that's not a bad thing, is it? "Domestication" seems like such an evil word, but perhaps all species need a degree of domestication. Through domestication the individual self is subsumed by this larger entity which gets created through cooperation. What do you think? I'm still waffling back and forth on this. Would you call what's happening between me and the birds a form of domestication or would you call it something else?

Things I Don't Need

2010-05-23T06:22:00.002-06:00

When I was just getting serious about simple living a few years ago I read an article about self-reliance which really stuck with me. The author said that the biggest mistake people make when starting out is thinking that in order to become self-reliant they have to go out and buy a bunch of stuff. I remember thinking that was kind of funny--what kind of self-reliance is that? Self-reliance is really more about skill-building than it is about tool-getting, but in the early stages it's easy to believe all you need are the right tools (or at least to believe that the right tools will get you a very long way).

Tools of course are important, and when we're first adopting a simpler and more resilient lifestyle it might become very obvious, very quickly that all the tools and gadgets and gizmos we've acquired over the years are precisely all the wrong tools and gadgets and gizmos needed for self-reliance. Riding lawn mowers, microwave ovens, GPS navigation, bread machines, rototillers, dishwashers...not so important. Root cellars, chicken coops, grain mills, spades, shovels, buckets, jars...very important tools.

Part of the reason the article really stuck with me is that I've been guilty of this very thing (yeah, I know, I laughed but the joke was on me). All along I've maintained a long list of things I need to acquire in order to increase my self-reliance. Here's just the top part of my list: more canning jars and lids, grain mill, grain roller, auger juicer, meat grinder, pressure canner, carboys, herbal still, bottles, capper, bushel and peck baskets, sauerkraut and pickle crocks, jugs and gallon jars, food storage buckets, attachments for the food strainer (berry, salsa, pumpkin, and grape screens), more soaker hoses, camping stove and fuel, food dehydrator, yogurt maker, pasta roller...and the list goes on (and on). You may look at the list and think those are pretty reasonable needs. Few of us are interested in going back to a cave man existence and you have to admit many of the tools we've created over the ensuing millenia are legitimately very helpful. So what's the problem with me going out and getting all of this stuff in order to be more self-reliant?

It's not a problem as long as I don't just mindlessly run out and buy it all. Making the list and thinking about what I legitimately need is a great first step. But the next step isn't running out to the store or placing a huge online order. The next step is sitting with that list as I continue to learn and as I continue to evolve out of the consumer paradigm and into this more self-reliant paradigm. Shifting from one paradigm to another is a huge process. Until you really delve into the process you don't realize how absolutely insidious the consumer culture is or how it has subconsciously affected your thoughts and beliefs and perceived "needs". It takes quite a while to be able to one-by-one recognize the ways you've been indoctrinated into that culture and to slowly shed those erroneous beliefs.

I've been serious about this for five years now and it's still catching me by surprise when I realize--oh, I don't need this after all--about one thing or another. My real needs keep dwindling, and my real self-reliance keeps growing.

My self-reliance is growing not because I made a list and bought a bunch of tools. My self-reliance is growing because I've gotten out there and started doing the work. I've started acquiring the skills. It's one thing initially to think about what you might need in order to be self-reliant, but it's another thing entirely to learn-through-doing what you really need. By getting out there and doing all I can, I see what works and what doesn't and I see what tools would be legitimately useful.

For the longest time I've wanted a pressure canner, but now I've struck that off the list. Not necessary. How did I come to that realization? By growing a garden, by learning everything I could about food storage, by trying out different methods, and by figuring out that pressure canning is the most fuel-intensive, nutrient-destructive method of food preservation there is. It should be a technique of last resort, if even used at all. What can I do instead? Use the root cellar and in-ground storage for certain crops; extend the season in the garden using coldframes, hot beds, and rowcovers, so I can have fresh vegetables as long as possible each year; store dry beans and grains and only cook them as needed; use old-world techniques such as preserving with sugar, brines, alcohol, pickling, fermenting, dehydrating, etc. As a last resort I use my waterbath canner. It uses a lot of fuel and destroys nutrients but not to the extent that a pressure canner does. I find it indispensable for preserving the tomato harvest (although I do sun-dry some tomatoes as well).

Another silly idea of mine was a pasta roller. I thought it was a reasonable desire, especially since I didn't want one of those fancy electric gizmos, just a lowly hand-cranked one--and my son loves pasta--so why not? Why not? Because there's an even more elegant solution. It's called a rolling pin, and it works beautifully. The rolling pin is also a wonderful device for making flour and corn tortillas so I don't need one of those tortilla presses either (that made it onto my list at one point too).

And yogurt maker...what a ridiculous idea. Just pop it in a warm place...a preheated oven, a haybox, an insulated cooler. Why complicate life with all of these unnecessary gadgets? A camping stove? I wanted that in case the power goes out. But how about I build a rocket stove and a solar cooker instead? Then I won't be dependent on buying fuel canisters, but instead can rely on twigs and the sun, both of which are locally abundant. In my last post I mentioned that something as seemingly critical as a drilled well isn't even necessary--just catch and store rainwater.

So bit by bit my list is dwindling. It's to the point now where the only electrically-operated wishes on the wish list are tools I would need to eventually build my cabin (plugged into a gas-powered generator--another item on the list). Well, there is the small matter of the heat mat for starting my pepper seedlings--that's electric too. But if I hold off on that until I move to the desert it won't even be necessary.

I love this process. It's gratifying to find myself becoming increasingly skillful and at the same time less dependent on the system to provide for me. The gadgets I need from the system now are elegantly simple ones--a rolling pin, a shovel, a dutch oven, a jar, an ax. I love it.

Water, Deserts, and Homesteading

2010-05-18T08:46:00.006-06:00

Well, this post is going to be full of irony, considering that in my last post I talked about how humans don't really belong in drought-prone areas--and now I'm thinking I want to move to the desert. I've been doing a lot of research lately and I'm starting to believe we can actually live sustainably in desert regions and perhaps even have a restorative impact on the land. Not, obviously, the way we currently live in deserts--gobbling up fossil-water, overgrazing the land (and otherwise exacerbating erosion), and living far more densely than the land can support. To live sustainably in arid regions requires us to live simply--most would claim primitively--by first and foremost practicing extreme water conservation.

What do I mean by extreme? I mean not drilling wells. I mean surviving on rainfall--yes, in the desert, I know! All my calculations tell me this is actually quite reasonable as long as you build adequate water catchment systems. A 3000 square foot metal roof can capture almost 18,000 gallons of rain per year in a place where there's only 10 inches of annual precipitation. Okay, 18,000 gallons is nothing if you're living the standard resource-guzzling lifestyle. I'm sure there are families out there consuming 18,000 gallons of water a month, particularly if they have large lawns that are dependent on irrigation. But 18,000 gallons is a lot of water if you live simply. If you have a sawdust toilet. If you soap up before you turn on the water and (gasp!) if you don't necessarily shower everyday. If you drip irrigate and/or use dryland techniques on your gardens. If you only wash clothes when they're dirty. If you don't have a lawn. If you don't wash your car. If you filter your graywater to reuse on your orchard.

I really like the idea of being so dependent on Mother Nature. Sure, it's incredibly risky. What if you get two or three years of no rainfall whatsoever? Desert precipitation is notoriously unpredictable. My current home is in what's considered high desert. Our region averages about 12 inches of precipitation per year. Yet that's not a consistent 12 inches. Last year we had 17.42 inches of rain. In '02 we had 3.74 inches. In '97 we had 18.18 inches. In '06 we had 6.32 inches. Fortunately here the bad years have tended to be surrounded on both ends by good years, but that won't be the case everywhere or always. To successfully live in the desert you need to be able to store several years' worth of water and still be prepared to move on if the rains never come. I like that! Something about that extreme dependency on nature thrills me. How much respect and reverence we would have for the natural world if we lived so dependently. And the truth is, we are dependent anyway, even those of us totally immersed in resource-guzzling lifestyles. We just cling to our various life-support systems and never acknowledge that the natural world even exists--so we certainly don't acknowledge our dependence on it. To allow ourselves to be utterly dependent on nature to provide our water--think how attuned we would become to the natural world. We would learn to pay attention--to the shifting clouds and winds, to the building thunderheads, to the peculiar smell of water. We would regain a sense of reverence and respect for nature and understand our puny place in the scheme of life. There would be no more hubris, but humility and awe instead. That kind of visceral existence is what I desperately crave.

I'm not sure why I'm feeling so pulled to the desert lately (and by desert I mean true desert--like the Sonoran or Chihuahuan desert). I guess I'm sensing the desert would have a lot to teach me. It would keep me on my toes. But another realization I've had in exploring this is just how much more sustainably we could be living anywhere. Shouldn't we all be harvesting rainwater wherever we are--even where precipitation is abundant--instead of drawing down the aquifers? Shouldn't we all be treating water with reverence? One-third of the land mass worldwide is desert and it continues to spread. Water is increasingly a major concern worldwide, yet we continue to use water extravagantly and wastefully. There aren't many of us who couldn't dramatically reduce our water usage even without adopting the primitive lifestyle I'm envisioning.

Limits As Guidance

2010-04-04T07:32:00.004-06:00

What would it take to bring out the best in humans? Clearly what we're doing now is not working. We're on a path of self-destruction, and destruction of all that is good and beautiful. We can never live up to our full potential as a species as long as we live so destructively.

I think we need to take a few steps back. We need to recognize that as a species we're a bunch of out-of-control adolescents. Adolescents love to challenge limits and that's exactly what we've been doing, whole-hilt. We fail to understand that limits represent a form of guidance. They constrain behavior, but constrain it in a constructive way. There is always wisdom and information encoded in the limits our environment presents to us, but as unruly children we love to pretend those limits don't even exist.

The re-localization movement is on the right track. The problem with globalization is that all natural boundaries that should be constraining human affairs have been erased. We evolved in small tribes, in our own distinct ecological niches. We didn't evolve to conduct our affairs on a global scale. In our small niches we acted, and saw the results of our actions. If we over-hunted our favorite game, we had to live with the consequences--either by going hungry or having to move our community. If we located the village latrines above our drinking water, we experienced the dire consequences of disease. If we didn't live peacefully with our tribe members and were forced to leave, we learned a lesson about safety in numbers and the survival advantage that strong community bonds bestow. Our actions had tangible consequences. They gave immediate feedback, so we were able to learn from our mistakes and adjust our course of action.

Living globally we don't see the results of our actions. And because our society is so over-sized and out-of-control we take lots and lots of actions each day, feeling absolutely none of the consequences of any of them.

You're in a rush and stop at the closest grocery store, a Super Walmart, for milk. You don't have time to drive out to a dairy that will sell you raw milk. So you buy antibiotic-laced, pus-filled, dead milk from genetically weakened cows. All you see is a way to quench the thirst of your little ones and something to float your cereal in. You don't see the horrific conditions of the cows, you don't see what happens to their calves, you don't see what happens to the land and the water table.

You check on how your mutual funds are doing, thinking only about the happy retirement you hope to enjoy one day. But you don't see that your investment profits are being formed out of the blood, sweat, and tears of men, women, and children who have hopes and dreams just like you do. You don't see the mountains of earth being ripped apart to create the products that will create the profits that fund your retirement.

You leave your porch light on every night to discourage burglars and present a welcoming face to your community. You don't see the piles of coal, the oil, the refineries, the pollution, which fossil fuel-based energy production requires.

Re-localization is necessary so we can begin to see the results of our actions again. We desperately need that kind of feedback. We need to live at a human-scale again. That means inhabiting a small patch of earth, forming tight communities able to meet the majority of their own needs, and never growing beyond what the land can sustain. It means not forming communities in places inhospitable to human affairs--where it's too hot, too cold, too drought-ridden. If you're dependent on air-conditioning or on water piped in from hundreds of miles away, you're not honoring the limits of the land. The land is saying, This is not a place for human settlement, you don't belong here.

The land provides much guidance if we would only learn to listen again. A poisoned land creates fertility problems for the creatures living there. The message: This is no place for life. But what do we humans do? We stay there and have fertility treatments!

We need to get back into our niches. This will only be possible if our population is drastically reduced. We've already exceeded the carrying capacity of the earth. We've infringed on the niches of too many Others. In a world so out of balance, I think the inevitable correction is coming. Whoever remains will hopefully be able to comprehend the implications of that huge correction: stay small, stay local, honor the guidance held here in the land.

Still Paring Down After Five Years

2010-03-20T13:48:00.003-06:00

A tourist from America paid a visit to a renowned Polish rabbi, Hafetz Chaim. He was astonished to see the rabbi's home was only a simple room filled with books, plus a table and bench.
"Rabbi," asked the tourist, "Where is your furniture?"
"Where is yours?" replied Hafetz Chaim.
"Mine?" asked the puzzled American. "But I'm only passing through."
"So am I," said the rabbi.

(Martin Buber, Tales of the Hassidim)

There's not much that we really need when it comes to belongings. We can live perfectly rich and satisfying lives with remarkably few material possessions. I know this because more and more I live it. For the past five years I've been in the process of paring my life down to essentials. I'm still working at it, but one thing is clear to me--the less cluttered my life becomes materially, the richer it becomes in other ways.

On the other hand, the more cluttered it becomes, the more unsettled and unfocused I become. This became painfully obvious to me in recent weeks when a problem with my water heater in the storm cellar beneath the house forced me to move all the contents of the cellar upstairs. The storm cellar is narrow, about three feet wide, and over time I had filled the space with boxes and bins of my belongings, stacked many high. There was nowhere else to put everything but up in the house while the water heater was being repaired.

Now the house itself is very tiny, about 485 square feet, so there was not much space to absorb such a huge influx of stuff. It took over the living room. There was only a path from the front door leading into the other rooms. The sofa and chairs were completely covered--there was nowhere to sit. Every time you had to pass through the room it took effort to navigate the pathways without crashing into things. It's the sort of environment that makes me more than a little crazy. I could feel my nerves jangling and my ability to concentrate and focus seemed to evaporate into thin air.

It was good however because I've been meaning to clean out the storm cellar. I had envisioned doing so on a bright sunny warm spring day, not tackling it in the snowy gloomy damp cold--but oh well. I've worked over the past five years to streamline my living space but this stuff stashed beneath the house was like a skeleton in my closet and the remnants of a former way of life. Laying it all out in the light of day was startling. Still so much work to do, obviously. More letting go. Will this process never end?

Confronting all of this stuff I find find there are still things I'm not quite willing to surrender yet. I've let go of so much already, physically and emotionally...and yet I still cling to things. Why is that? Some of these things are sentimental--like old letters and mementos. Some seem like they could be useful some way, some how if only I could figure that out. None of these things would actually be missed if I lost them in a sudden way, like in a fire or a tornado. So why do I still hold onto them?

My goal is to be completely done with this process by the time my son leaves home in little over four years--when my nest is empty and I prepare to embark on a new adventure. I want to leave here cleanly, streamlined, with next to nothing to carry. I know I have to be patient with myself. It takes time to let go. Things aren't just things after all, they represent aspects of ourselves--who we are or were or would like to have been. They hold memories and hopes. Letting go of stuff is quite a process. I would love to come out of this process knowing how to carry my identity, memories, hopes, etc fully inside of myself, not projected "out there" onto a bunch of lifeless things. Without so much clutter I would be freer, lighter, more fluid. What kind of life could I craft for myself, living so lightly? That's what I want to discover.

Of Microbes, Meals, and Minds

2010-03-02T10:08:00.006-07:00

Ninety percent of the cells in our bodies are microbes. That amounts to about 50 percent of each of us by dry weight measure. And about 8 percent of our DNA actually belongs to foreign viruses, which inserted themselves into our DNA strands deep in our evolutionary past. Even the mitochondria inside each of our cells were once independent beings. So my question is, Who are we? Who am I? Who is it who thinks these thoughts and writes these words? Is it "me"--this seemingly autonomous being--or are my microbes writing this? If 90 percent of me isn't me then am I not actually writing this by committee?

So little is understood about the nature of consciousness. Out of this improbable assortment of cells and genetic information arises thought and awareness...how? What I find tantalizing are various studies indicating that certain microbes inside of us can affect our moods, our health, whether we develop obesity or diabetes, etc. If microbes are so influential, couldn't it be possible that they might collectively be giving rise to this thing we call Mind, or consciousness?

Last month I had a bout of food poisoning after eating some bad sushi. The first night, along with the usual misery, I had a really good fever going (I was not too happy to learn that fevers don't usually accompany food poisoning unless it's an issue of fecal contamination, but let's not dwell on that...). I poured buckets of sweat and had weird dreams all night long--dreams of places and events in my early childhood that I had forgotten, dreams containing bits of insight and advice, and many more that I couldn't remember but that left me feeling very positive and upbeat. For the next two nights, even though the fever had broken, I continued to have night sweats and vivid and very positive dreams. During the days I felt wonderfully renewed, like the world was brand new and anything was possible.

Lynn Margulis, in her book Symbiotic Planet, mentioned that once foreign microbes are incorporated into cells or bodies they behave symbiotically, but initially it's a brutal war for survival and domination. The food poisoning virus or bacteria that I tussled with wasn't entering into a symbiotic relationship with me--it sought to use me to reproduce itself and then move on. If it had become lodged in my body like the microbes I permanently host, it would have traded its mobility for a guarantee of continued existence within me. While it was with me though it seemed to be sharing it's unique personality. I got the distinct feeling that my unusual state of consciousness was not merely the fever talking, but actually the microbe talking. Whatever it was doing chemically inside of me was affecting my consciousness. And the weirdest thing of all was that it seemed to be a good microbe--it was contributing in a positive way to my state of mind. Of course it was also making me very sick, but that was only because our two species hadn't evolved a way to exist symbiotically. My body rejected it. All of the nasty symptoms were ways in which my body was trying to expel it. But that odd subtle shift in my consciousness, the upbeat mood, the access to long forgotten memories--I just have a feeling that was the microbe's contribution. If the human body ever enters into a symbiotic relationship with that particular microbe I bet it would result in an enhancement of human consciousness (regardless of its lowly, possibly fecal, origins).

We have all of these different species of microbes comprising us, each one subtly shifting our body's chemistry. Could the sum total of all of that chemistry be Mind? But of course it's not only microbes that shift chemistry--it's what we eat, what we inhale, what our senses draw in. Ultimately we are our environment.

I've noticed as I've gotten more serious about growing things that each plant has its own unique energy. Herbs seem to have the most pronounced "personalities", but I even had an interesting experience with tomatoes.

Last fall I grew 241 pounds of tomatoes. I had been busy for weeks canning tomato sauces, tomato pastes, tomato juices, etc., but hadn't eaten an exorbitant amount of them raw yet. Then one day, when they were really piling up on the counters and threatening to spoil, I ate like three or four gigantic tomatoes in one evening. That night, for the first 2/3 of the night, literally all I dreamed about were tomatoes. Tomatoes were behind my eyelids. Streams of red-gold tomatoey light were flowing through my veins, like rivers of sunlight. Tomatoes were the only reality. What I find interesting is I had been dealing with tomatoes for weeks, but it wasn't their overwhelming presence in my life "out there" that impacted my consciousness. I had to literally incorporate them into me first, as food. Then they spoke loud and clear.

I'm beginning to believe everything we take into us shapes our consciousness. If true, then it becomes essential that we are mindful of what we allow in, especially if we care at all about our human potential. Having healthy microbes might be critical, so we should avoid all of the antimicrobial products now available. Herbs might have important things to contribute to consciousness, so we should incorporate them into our diets. Chemicals and preservatives might kill and distort microbes and beneficial enzymes, so we should seek only organic foods. And what about animals raised in horrific conditions, never able to reach their full genetic potentials? How might that kind of chemistry affect human consciousness if we ingest it? This is such an interesting line of inquiry. This year I'll be growing over fifty types of fruits, veggies, herbs, and grains, so I'm going to do some experiments. I particularly want to get acquainted with the properties and personalities of the herbs that I'll be growing since, as I've noticed, they seem to speak the loudest.

Death Will Come Knocking, So How Shall We Live?

2010-02-22T07:43:00.003-07:00

With all the dire situations facing us, I'm in the camp that believes we're about to face a massive human die-off. The earth can't sustain the numbers we have, particularly at our destructive level of consumption, so she'll restore balance--at the expense of many individual lives. If it happens or starts to happen this century, do you believe your life be spared? Will you be among the chosen few?

I think we all tend to believe, automatically, that catastrophe will only strike someone else. We're so geared for survival we think we're invincible, so while we may accept there will be a massive die-off, we just assume we won't be among the dead. That's awfully presumptuous of us, isn't it?

I decided a long time ago, when I first looked at this issue, that my survival just doesn't even matter. I guess I've always been able to see the bigger picture--that we're all part of a process of creation and unfolding, that consciousness is a collective phenomenon. My individual life doesn't matter except for the fact that it's part of an unfolding, evolving pattern. I participate in that process while I'm here in this particular form and then I surrender gracefully. When my life ends the process of creation continues. All of the elements of my body get returned to the larger community and continue to participate in the process of unfolding. Beyond the physical aspects of it, I believe that energetically I go on as well. Not me in this persona, but me nonetheless. Does it matter how long I wear this particular persona, this cloak that is and isn't me? Why is 78 years preferable to 40 years if I'm indestructible anyway? Why cling to this form so desperately when I know it's ephemeral--a blossoming forth from the greater matrix which is here today and gone tomorrow? The question is really, how do we live knowing that we'll die?

This past week I've had to come face to face with the issue of my own mortality. Fourteen years ago, when I was pregnant with my son, I was diagnosed with a congenital defect of the aortic valve, what's called a bicuspid valve. A normal aorta has a three-leafed or tricuspid valve and those flaps open and close to let the blood through. A bicuspid valve has only two flaps, creating more of a slit instead. I was told at the time that this wouldn't become an issue until old age, when in all likelihood I'd have to have the valve replaced because of a greater chance of calcification. But lately I've had more and more serious heart-related symptoms, so I figured it was time to do some research. Apparently, since '96 they've learned a lot more about this. It's not just a defect of the aortic valve, but a whole connective tissue disorder that affects many parts of the body. People with the disorder typically have hyper-flexible joints, flat feet, scoliosis, issues with the spinal discs, an increased risk of hernias and a host of other problems. The most serious issue is a weakness of the aorta and the arteries of the head (they form from the same tissue) leading to a high risk of aneurysms and dissections. If you remember a few years back, this is what caused the death of actor John Ritter. And then also, there's an increased likelihood of damage to the heart itself.

I had decided years ago that I would forgo the valve surgery, for a host of reasons. For one I just despise hospitals. I would rather live fully out here and drop dead then spend any amount of time in there. Another thing is that I have no desire to be dependent on medications for the rest of my life. But beyond those reasons, I just frankly don't believe we should be going to crazy measures to extend human life. This isn't a belief I would ever impose on anyone else, but it's something I hold to sincerely. We've gone about eradicating all the ways that Mother Nature can control population growth. I was born with a genetic defect--how more clearly could Mother Nature speak? She was gracious enough to allow me to reproduce, but now she's saying, clear out. I designed your body to wear out early, now move along, transform into something else. And I accept that totally.

Knowing that you will die--and I mean knowing it--is an enormous gift. If you know you will die then you can really live. You've got absolutely nothing to lose, so anything becomes possible. There's nothing to fear and nothing to lose, so you can live radically. Shouldn't we all be living that way? Shouldn't we all step out of our little personae and live largely? When you accept your own mortality, then you open up a world of possibilities for how to live. In these times, if more and more of us could get to that point of acceptance, I think we could transform the world. We'd be setting our egos and personae aside and acting from a higher place. We could reshape human culture and help to return the earth to balance.

Why Shorter Showers Matter

2010-01-31T08:42:00.005-07:00

I love to read anything that Derrick Jensen writes. The fact that he is so controversial is all the better. His Orion articles typically generate hundreds of comments ("Forget Shorter Showers" has over 300 comments now) and they end up being as interesting to read as the articles themselves. He gets people riled up and thinking, and I like that.

This past week I read Jensen's book, What We Leave Behind (co-authored with Aric McBay). The main premise running through the book is the same as the one in the essay "Forget Shorter Showers"--that our personal actions are inconsequential. We can take shorter showers and switch to compact fluorescent bulbs but we shouldn't deceive ourselves into thinking we've done anything of consequence for the planet. I wholeheartedly disagree. I believe our personal actions represent the single most effective means we have available for bringing about societal change.

In What We Leave Behind, Jensen points out that even if we (in the US) were to reduce our personal waste to zero, we would each only be eliminating 1660 pounds per year. And meanwhile, our per capita share of industrial waste, nearly 26 tons, would be unchanged. So what would our personal actions have accomplished? Virtually nothing. The system would still be churning out literally tons upon tons of waste.

However, there seems to be a naivete on Jensen's part in believing that the individual is not connected to the industrial system that churns out these monumental piles of waste. It's as if for Jensen, the personal is the personal and the industrial is the industrial and never the twain shall meet. But as I've pointed out previously, we are the Machine. There's no separation between us and the Machine.

If Company A manufactures a part for Company B, and Company B uses that part in a machine that it sells to Company C, and Company C uses that machine to make a product that it sells to us "consumers", then what happens when we stop buying that product? There's no demand for the product, therefore no demand for the machine, therefore no need for the parts. The industrial waste generated from that whole stream of manufacturing is eliminated because of the actions of the "consumers".

Now, instead of talking about this in terms of waste, let's talk about it in terms of money. Why does industry exist in the first place? The fundamental reason is obviously the profit motive. Industry exists in order to profit.

How best can we influence the actions of industry? Yes, we can stage protests and sit-ins and chain ourselves to trees, but wouldn't the more logical approach be attacking the very lifeblood of the industry--its profits? If it can't profit from what it does then it can't exist (I'm consciously choosing to ignore, for this post, the whole war machine as well as the current strategy of our government and the Fed to create money out of thin air). If we as "consumers" change our behaviors and stop consuming we destroy profits and an industry's viability. It filters all the way up.

Now maybe shorter showers and compact fluorescents don't represent the best examples of this. How about we take some of the things from my list "Personal Ways to Disengage from the System": sell your car, don't buy processed foods, build passive solar homes, give up gadgets, use a clothesline, don't use airplanes, stay where you are. If you do any of those things you affect a whole stream of manufacturing practices. Granted, "you" the mere individual aren't going to make much of an impact, but collectively we can have an enormous impact.

I find it so ironic that Jensen believes his fight for the neighborhood patch of rainforest is more significant that the "shorter showers" approach, when he makes it very clear that so far their fight has been in vain. The only thing that has stopped the developer is, you guessed it, the economy. Nothing they have done (he and his neighbors) has stopped the guy. The only thing that has stopped him is that the venture has suddenly turned unprofitable. I'm not implying that activism is pointless--of course we have to stand up to these people. We have to try everything in our power to stop them. But perhaps the shorter showers approach is actually the more effective one. The developer stopped because consumers weren't buying.

Maybe even two or three years ago the shorter showers approach didn't seem like a particularly viable one. But now, with the economy teetering on the brink, it should become apparent just how much power we "consumers" have. The power not to buy. The power not to consume. It doesn't sound like much at first blush, but seriously look around at what's happening as the economy continues down this slippery slope. "Not buying" is starting to reshape the world.

Is the Simple Life "Too Much Work"?

2010-01-24T07:52:00.002-07:00

This has been bugging me lately. I can't tell you the number of times I've gotten "Oh, but that sounds like so much work!" when I describe something I do to take back responsibility for my own affairs. And it happens when I'm talking about the simplest of things, like making my own laundry detergent or brewing a batch of chai tea.

Chai involves peeling and chopping some ginger and dumping it in a pot of simmering water along with whole cloves, cardamom seeds, and crushed cinnamon bark. You walk away for 15 minutes, come back and take it off the heat, add the tea, let it steep for five minutes. Add milk, add sugar, gently heat. That's it.

Laundry detergent involves melting a bar of laundry soap in water on the stove, adding it to a five-gallon bucket, adding borax, washing soda, and water and stirring. That's it.

For these people, apparently, it's far less "work" to hop in their cars, drive themselves to a coffee shop, find a spot, go in, stand in line and order their drink, forking over their four dollars in the process. Or to get in their car, drive to the store, find a spot, go in, grab a jug of detergent, pay, leave and drive back home. I don't get it.

So I've been thinking about this. When people say "That sounds like so much work" what's really going on? What's really meant by that? Are people so averse to work that even the tiniest effort is seen as "too much"? Have people just become lazy? Or is something else going on?

I suspect it's less about effort and laziness than it is about perceived time pressures and the fact that for most people for most of each day they don't actually own their own time. They spend their days working for "The Man" and only have a few hours left at the end of the day that they can call their own. Who would want to spend that precious time working to make a pot of tea? Why not just hit the drive-through so you can flop on the couch and enjoy your own time?

When you don't work for "The Man" and you take responsibility for your own time then work becomes not work, but living. None of the things I do to be self-reliant ever feels like work to me. Yet all of the things I do for myself have economic value. They save me money that I don't need to go out and earn in the larger economy. The services I provide for myself represent thousands of hours per year that I don't need to spend working for someone else. And when I do those things for myself they just don't feel like work at all.

It's the "chop wood, carry water" thing. When I do the work myself I am present and involved, actively and reciprocally engaged. That's called "living". When I leave it to someone else (or to a machine) the thing, whatever it is, becomes just a commodity and I not only fail to appreciate it but I become diminished as well. Growing my own food or brewing tea involves me in the material world. I get such pleasure when I make chai, combining roots, seeds, buds, bark, leaves and sometimes twigs to make a delicious drink. I appreciate the amazing gifts of nature and the synergy that results from this particular combination of plants and plant parts. I even get emotional sometimes when I'm making chai. Would that ever happen in the Starbucks drive-through? I don't think so.

When people think that the simple life would be too much work, they're thinking from within a dysfunctional paradigm. I doubt that for much of our long history we even had a concept of "work". We simply lived. It's only in our recent history, once we created these things called "jobs", that life became oddly compartmentalized and we created the idea of "work". Work separated from the rest of life. How messed up is that?

If people were relieved of their time pressures and owned their own time again I don't think I'd be hearing "That's too much work" anymore. And if people quit working and began living again, I have a feeling there would actually be far more innovation, inspiration, and creativity being expressed. So much of our human potential seems to get wasted these days, but I believe human culture can flourish again if we can just, once and for all, break out of this mad consumer paradigm.

Personal Ways to Disengage from the System

2010-01-12T13:23:00.003-07:00

I believe our personal actions matter more now than at any other point in history. I've become disillusioned with activism that aims a direct assault on the system. Rather I think it's the million and one little things we each can do that will play a significant role in toppling the system.

I sat down and brainstormed a list of little things we could each do. This was a quick exercise and one that stems from my own limited vantage point. I'd love to see what others would add to the list.

Grow your own fruits, veggies, beans, nuts, and seeds.
Grow herbs for medicinal, culinary, and cosmetic purposes.
Raise chickens, rabbits, bees, goats, sheep, etc. for fur, fiber, meat, eggs, dairy and honey.
Cook from scratch.
Don't buy processed foods.
Eat at home.
Buy from local growers what you can't grow yourself.
Join an organic CSA.
Buy grass-fed meats.
Reduce meat consumption.
Shop second-hand stores, flea markets, etc.
Barter, use free-cycle.
Become self-employed.
Don't invest in the market.
Loan within your community to support positive enterprises.
Don't charge interest except to cover inflation, if any.
Build passive-solar homes.
Heat with locally available fuels.
Swap seeds with neighbors, friends, family.
Compost.
Use humanure.
Use graywater systems.
Collect rainwater. (Illegal where I live!)
Own your own water.
Sell your car.
Build with locally available materials (adobe, strawbales, stone, logs, etc.)
Salvage materials.
Give up gadgets (tv's, microwave ovens, dishwashers, cellphones, etc.)
Do it by hand (garden, kitchen, house, etc.).
Build a root cellar.
Learn to preserve foods.
Share excess produce.
Learn to build, repair and tinker.
Insist on home funerals and burials where legal.
Self-insure.
Exercise and eat right.
Ferment foods.
Learn how to safely store drinking water.
Drip irrigate.
Conserve water.
Learn how to find water.
Go off grid.
Use permaculture principles, esp. create no waste.
Live in the smallest shelter that's practical.
Buy bulk grains, beans, spices, salt, etc. if they can't be grown or found locally.
Figure out what you can do without.
Learn how to make cheese, yogurt, soap, wine, herbal distillations, etc.
Raise your own sweeteners (honey, maple syrup, sorghum).
Plant for genetic diversity.
Learn how to build and maintain healthy soils.
Use a clothesline.
Learn how to identify wild edibles and incorporate into your diet, sustainably.
Forgo air conditioning.
Choose a climate suitable for human endeavors, one that doesn't require much artificial heating or cooling.
Learn to hunt, track, trap, and fish.
Learn to co-exist with the local critters (including the human ones).
Don't use airplanes.
Stay where you are.
Build strong communities.
Re-invent community canning kitchens, community grain mills, etc.
Finance nothing--no mortgages, no car loans, no lines of credit.
Don't use banks.
Help your neighbors.

The list could go on and on. Anything you do to take back responsibility for your own well-being and the well-being of your community is a step in the right direction. Small steps such as these may seem insignificant, but if you poke around the internet a bit, you'll see just how many people are waking up to the importance of these sorts of changes. Soon enough all of these little changes are going to add up and have an enormous impact. Just watch.

Can We Create a New Mythology?

2010-01-01T09:28:00.003-07:00

Over the holiday break my son was re-watching the Lord of the Rings movies. I popped in at one point when he was watching the commentaries, and the director was mentioning that for Tolkien the ring symbolized the Machine. I don't think it accurately does however. In the Lord of the Rings you have the classic myth of the hero's quest, and the ultimate battle of good over evil. Even though the ring has the power to corrupt those who possess it, you still have a very clean dividing line between good and evil.

In the real world however, there is no clean dividing line between good and evil. There isn't an Us vs. the Machine. We are the Machine. The myth of the hero's quest doesn't apply to us any more. How can we go up against the Machine and seek to destroy it when we are totally enmeshed with it? To destroy it is to destroy ourselves. That's why I think so much of the activism of today has been futile. Real activism, in the form of the hero's quest, would lead to destruction of ourselves along with destruction of the Machine.

The Machine was cleverly built out of our own bodies and souls. Pick a part of the Machine you don't like and try to bring it down. What are the consequences? Suffering for you and me and all of our neighbors and friends and family members. That's because we are totally enmeshed in the Machine. Not happy with Wall Street? Bring down Wall Street and you may not have a job, or food may not be on the shelves at the store, or your dollars may be worthless to buy anything. Don't like oil and our dependence on carbon? Cut off our supplies of carbon fuels and transportation grinds to a halt, farming stops, people start chopping down every tree in sight to heat their homes, trade ceases and we all suffer. How about bringing down the pharmaceutical companies and the health care industry? Don't you know that sickness is big business? It's a truly sad state of affairs when the business of sickness is one of the healthiest parts of the economy. Knock out big pharma and all the companies that profit from sickness and the whole economy gets thrown off kilter, perhaps catastrophically. A hero's quest to bring down the Machine brings it down on our heads. It's not a myth that applies to us anymore. It can't be employed successfully.

But is there a new myth to replace it? The sad truth is we've been without a defining myth for quite some time. There is no deeper layer guiding our actions anymore. We have become automatons, mere cogs in the machine. We are deceived by the illusion of individual autonomy, thinking the million little decisions we make each day make us free. Those decisions are almost all in service to the Machine. We are decision-making cogs, decision-making consumers. But we're not free, and most decidedly not separate from the Machine.

A new myth would require true freedom. We have to become human again, thinking and acting with autonomy. A new myth would also bring back true connection. We've lost our ability to connect with anything beyond our immediate concerns. We need to connect with nature, with the larger rhythms of time, with the cycles of creation, with the cosmos, with other living beings.

A first step in evolving a new mythology has to be disengaging from the Machine. We can't bring it down. We can't toss it into Mount Doom. But we can begin to free ourselves. If we detach from the machine we can reclaim our autonomy, bit by bit. And eventually we won't be muddle-headed robots any more, but deeply aware free beings, full of dreams and visions, inspiration, artistry, love, creativity, hope, sincerity. As authentic beings we will be able to evolve a new myth. We can't do that enslaved as we are.

Getting Mystical About Minerals

2009-12-23T08:04:00.006-07:00

As I've gotten more serious about gardening in the past few years, I've been trying to learn everything I can about growing healthy crops. Inevitably, it gets back to the soil. Without healthy soil, plants will struggle (or not grow at all) and those that do survive to bear fruit or other edible parts will be deficient in elements that are crucial for human health.

I've had a wonderful time studying the writings of William Albrecht, a soil scientist whose career spanned the middle part of the 20th century. A lot of what he wrote has been earth-shattering for me. The main focus of his work was on the importance of soil minerals for plant health. We hear a lot about the declining mineral content of our food crops and how our soils are becoming more and more depleted, yet if you study most organic gardening manuals you'll find they almost totally neglect to mention the importance of minerals. In most organic gardening books, the advice is to build organic matter into the soil, as if that's all that's needed to grow nutritious crops. Worse are the claims that organic food is naturally higher in vitamins and minerals than conventionally grown crops. There is a grain of truth here, but the most significant fact is that any food grown on minerally-deficient soil will itself be deficient in minerals. It doesn't matter whether it was grown organically or conventionally, if it's absent in the soil it will be absent in the plant.

While much of the focus of Albrecht's work was on growing healthy feed for livestock, the implications extend to humans as well. Albrecht studied the soils across the entire US and found most to be extremely deficient, except for the nation's breadbasket. The southeastern US has the worst soils, a result of the fact that high heat and high rainfall are two very significant factors in soil depletion. Basically, anywhere you find forests growing you will find minerally deficient soils.

Here's why. Albrecht taught that there are two types of foods, what he called "Go foods" and "Grow foods". "Go foods" are made essentially from the atmospheric elements, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. These "Go foods" give us energy--they're carbohydrates after all, all starches and sugars. "Grow foods" require the elements in the earth, the soil minerals, and these "Grow foods" are necessary for growing healthy bodies capable of reaching their full genetic potential. In deficient soils, you get "Go foods" or a lot of starchy, sugary things, or rampant growth (think kudzu vines) or lots of cellulose (think forests).

Carbohydrates are precursors for amino acids and proteins. They're useful as they are, for immediate energy and stored energy (fat), but to contribute their most important benefits, they must interact with the soil minerals in order to construct proteins. Without those soil minerals, we'll eat foods that concentrate mainly starches, instead of a full range of starches, proteins and minerals. Humans (and livestock) eating from deficient soils get fat because they're eating too many carbs. Albrecht noted that those eastern soils were great for fattening cattle. They weren't so great for raising healthy cows who could reproduce with ease and maintain genetic health over generations.

In Albrecht's book, Soil Fertility and Animal Health, he showed a bunch of maps of the US, charting various aspects of soil fertility. They all show that same swath through the nation's midsection, and they all show the poor condition of the soils in the southeast.

Out of curiosity, I decided to look online to see if I could find a map of the US showing the distribution of diabetes. I was curious whether there would be any correlation between diabetes and soil health. On the one hand, this makes little sense, considering that we now bring in food from all over the country and the world. People just aren't eating all that much from their own soils. But I remember reading that diabetes rates are at their highest in the southeast. And of course, we know that diabetes results from consuming too many starches and sugars. It would be kind of wild to find a correlation.

I found this map, and good grief, it looks just like Albrecht's maps!

How can this be? Is it just a coincidence? Are we still eating enough local or regional foods so that if our soils are deficient we'll be more likely to become diabetic? Maybe so. Or maybe it's the water supply that matters more--water tends to be local, so maybe it's a factor of how mineralized the water is. Milk and dairy products probably tend to be somewhat regional, and I'm sure there are other regional products as well. Maybe it's enough.

I've only included one of Albrecht's maps because they're all of very poor quality for capturing screen shots, but if you want to check them out, go here, agree to the terms of use, then click on Albrecht, William A., Soil Fertility and Animal Health (it's the third item down the list). The maps are scattered throughout the first two chapters of the book.

All of this is so interesting to me because for the past year or two I've been having a somewhat mystical experience with minerals. Before I came across Albrecht's work, I was having weird intuitions leading to the same knowledge.

As I've deepened my experience with voluntary simplicity, I've begun to learn about the importance of place. As I've mentioned before, this is why I'm so interested in the topic of environmental determinism. On an intuitive level, I've experienced how place creates us, how we're not these isolated entities but rather expressions of the earth.

I've looked at the places I've lived, and tried to assign personalities to them. For instance, this place on the high desert plains seems to have a very practical, grounded, conservative personality. It's an understated place, not wildly exuberant, yet it's solid and healthy. Pennsylvania on the other hand (where I was raised) is exuberant, creative, and expressive. Nothing is understated there. And it's a fast-paced place.

The people in each of these two places seem to share the personality of the land. Here, people are very practical and understated. In Pennsylvania, they're artsy and expressive. Here you don't have the folk artists that you do back there. Appalachia has an energy that makes people creative. Colorado's eastern plains do not.

When we become truly naturalized to a place, I believe we begin to express the personality of the land around us. And the more naturalized we become, the stronger we express what the earth wants to express.

I intuited that each place has varying concentrations of what I call "sky energy" and "earth energy". Sky is about the mental sphere, it's about creativity and innovation, it's about doing. Earth is grounded, it's about practicalities, it's about being rather than doing. This part of Colorado seems to have an abundance of earth energy, whereas Pennsylvania has an abundance of sky energy.

After exploring these kinds of thoughts, Albrecht's writings take on incredible significance. My "sky energy" is the same thing as his designation of "Go Foods". They refer to carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Likewise, my "earth energy" is the same as his "Grow Foods".

The problems our society is having seem to be caused by too much sky energy. We are too busy doing, innovating, rationalizing--all of these sky-type activities, and we're not grounded anymore. Our actions are disconnected from the earth, so we rape and pillage the earth. We need to bring back more earth energy.

In order for us to be healthy and in order for the planet to be healthy, we need to eat from mineralized soils. It sounds kind of crazy. But think about it. We are getting physically weaker, generation by generation. We have this worldwide epidemic of obesity and diabetes. That's a sign that something is seriously wrong. I don't think it's any coincidence that we also are suffering from all these other societal woes: overpopulation, climate change (how about that sky energy!), environmental destruction, peak oil (love that carbon) and so on. It all makes a crazy kind of sense to me.

In order for us to reach our full human potential, we need first and foremost to be healthy. Health comes from eating from mineralized soils, so that our foods will concentrate the full range of vitamins, minerals, starches, and proteins, and so that earth and sky energy will be balanced within us. In mineralized soils, plants can express their full genetic potential. When we eat from mineralized soils, we will be able to reach our full genetic potential.

My theory is that we can't fully attune to the energy of our spot on earth until we achieve a balance between earth and sky energy/go and grow food energy. When we achieve that balance by remineralizing our soils and eating locally, we will be able to reach our full potential. We will be healthy in body, mind and spirit, and our actions will be in alignment with the intentions of the earth around us. We need to take in the earth (and sky) literally through the local plants, animals, yeasts, honey, bacteria and minerals that we eat. If we fuse in this way with our environment by literally internalizing it, we will be complete expressions of Gaia. I can't imagine anything but harmonious actions flowing out of us if we were so healthily fused with Gaia.

Without Predators...

2009-11-17T09:16:00.004-07:00

Over the weekend I read the most important book I've come across all year, Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators, by William Stolzenburg. I've read hundreds of environmental books over the years and certainly had a degree of awareness about how critical predators are for ecosystem health, but this book shot home that truth in a most brutal way.

Without predators it all collapses. Without predators we enter a cascading spiral of extinctions, an extreme loss of biodiversity, a dumbing down of life. It's clear we've doomed ourselves in so many other ways already, but this is one of the biggest nails in the coffin. Where does the spiral end, if not in the extinction of virtually all higher lifeforms? Sure, things will survive, but we're not likely to be among the living, and the world left behind will be a very sorry place for a very long time.

The book documented many examples of these cascading spirals of loss, what are called "trophic cascades", brought about by the loss of top predators.

For instance, when we eradicated the deer's predators we created a cascade leading to the loss of countless other species in those habitats: songbirds, bears, orchids, trillium lilies, pollinating insects, cedars, whole forests, etc. In some places that have been studied, up to 80% of species have been lost due to the overpopulation of deer. I'm oversimplifying a bit--the deer cause the brunt of the damage, but certainly not all of it. Surging populations of raccoons, skunks, and weasels, for instance, are probably more direct culprits for the loss of songbirds (at least the ground-nesting and understory-nesting birds) than deer, although the deer are responsible for clearing out the understory.

The most interesting thing I learned from this book is that fear creates diversity. The author described what happened when wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone. In the seventy years the park had been wolfless, the burgeoning elk population had decimated the park ecosystem. Even the rivers were in horrible shape because no vegetation was able to grow to hold the banks in place. Once wolves were reintroduced, scientists noticed thickets of willows beginning to spring up, mostly in the river bottoms. This was unexpected because there were still far too few wolves to have any serious impact on elk numbers. The elk should still have been browsing down any new willow shoots that sprang up.

What the researchers eventually realized was that the willows were coming back because of fear. When the elk had no enemies, they browsed indiscriminately, everywhere. But once they had an enemy again, their old survival instincts reawakened. They recognized certain types of terrain to be dangerous and thus began avoiding them. Mostly these places were river bottoms, stream courses, and other incongruities in the land that would cause them to slow down during a chase. A wolf, who is so much lighter and more agile than an elk, doesn't need to slow down nearly as much to accommodate changing terrain and can catch up with an elk more readily in such places. So when the fear returned, the willows also returned--in river bottoms and other places that posed a hazard to the elk. Once the river bottoms repopulate with willows, it's expected to have a (positively) cascading effect--halting erosion, bringing back songbirds and beavers, fish and amphibians, aquatic insects, etc.

In another part of the book a French ecologist, Jean-Louis Martin, studying an archipelago in which some of the islands were free of deer and others overrun by them, said, "For me it was sort of a major lightbulb which came on. [...] Suddenly what I realized working there [is] that carnivores are mainly not animals which eat prey, but which change the behavior of prey."

It's this changed behavior, caused by fear, which holds the world together. And we've largely wiped out the predators, thus changing the behavior of vast numbers of species. We need to occupy niches constrained by fear. Fear is what creates diversity. An elk-free thicket of willows is a pocket-sized niche--a diminutive ecosystem which evolves its own flora and fauna. Humans on the savannas of Africa knew to avoid thickets, which might be hiding lions, so those were human-free thickets. What evolved in those thickets was surely different than what evolved in the surrounding open land where humans modified the environment with their hunting and gathering activities and their mere presence.

When you think about this fear-effect, and multiply it by all the many species and all their different fears, you have millions or billions of niches and microniches (probably an infinite number of niches)--the very richness needed for innovation and speciation.

But eradicate fear and you erase diversity. It all falls apart.

Simply by virtue of being born a living being on this planet, we enter a compact that requires us to participate in the intricate dance of eating and being eaten, and that means dancing with fear. All of the diversity here comes from this dance of life and death. Life is the process of energy being transformed by death. As we feast on death and try to avoid being feasted on for as long as possible we create an environment primed for diversity.

Humans are the only animals with the power, on a large scale, to eradicate fear. You can look at at least the last ten thousand years of our history and see it as nothing more than an all out war against fear. And we've done a damn good job of eradicating fear, haven't we? We don't worry about being ambushed by a lion when we hang out the wash, or warily watch the skies so that a black eagle might not carry off one of our toddlers, or pay any attention to our surroundings when we're on our ski vacations to make sure we don't find ourselves surrounded by a pack of wolves. It's a nice world isn't it?

But by denying fear, by trying to make life pretty and serene and safe at all times, we are in fact denying life.

Stop Doing And Allow

2009-11-02T09:55:00.003-07:00

Those of us who are awake have been trying frantically to save the world, trying this, trying that, organizing, protesting, raising awareness...all to no avail. The solution, however, may be much simpler:

Stop doing and allow.

Human culture is an organic expression of the earth. When that expression becomes unbalanced it simply will evolve into something else. The current paradigm is untenable and it naturally is about to fail. It's already cracking. We scratch our heads, trying to figure out how to dismantle the system. But the system is already dismantling itself! We are on the brink of total, worldwide economic collapse. Are activists required here? Nope. Just sit back and watch the machine dismantle itself. It's an organic process that will unfold without our help. Gaia seeks balance and balance will be restored without us skittering about the surface consumed with our manic activist "doings".

"Doings" come about within the current paradigm and remain largely ineffective. Birthing a new paradigm requires "being", allowing, and emerging. A different, and much simpler, thing altogether.

Where Are The Solutions?

2009-10-26T10:27:00.002-06:00

I had an interesting thought last night. I haven't had time to work with it, so I'm not even sure it makes sense, but let me try to flesh it out a little bit here.

As should be obvious from my other posts, I've been learning a lot about the power of place. This is something that seems to be virtually ignored in our time, but an idea that has kept popping up over and over again throughout the ages. Most recently, in the 20th century, it went by the name of environmental determinism. Environmental determinism got a very bad reputation (and rightly so because it was often used to justify racism) and the whole concept of environmental determinism was just dismissed, which was really tossing the baby out with the bath water.

Now, I don't like the term "environmental determinism". I think the land influences us (and dramatically so) but not in a deterministic fashion. I prefer to think instead about propensities or potentialities held in the land, or even personality held in the land. What wants to express itself in one locale is different from what wants to express itself in a different locale. And what gets expressed is not only a region's unique flora and fauna and weather patterns and geological features, but also human culture, the collective "personality" of a local population, its unique cuisine, dialect, art, technology, products, wisdom, etc. The collective human "personality" of a region is just as much a product of the land as is its plantlife and wildlife. It springs forth from the local conditions.

A few years back I read Jared Diamond's book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. While Diamond seemed very concerned he might be accused of environmental determinism, what he proposed was really just that. His thesis was that specific geographical features of the land, in specific places in the world, gave rise to the domestication of animals, the rise of agriculture and settlements, the first city-states, etc. The lands which were conducive to the development of these things gave rise to successful empires which could then raid and maraud and colonize those other lands which were at a disadvantage. Those disadvantaged lands lacked many of the necessary features that Diamond believes gave rise to modern culture; they may have lacked domesticable species of animals, or lacked annual grains, or had geological barriers that prevented the spread of new technologies, etc.

So the spread of Western culture and the destruction of so many non-Western cultures, languages, histories, environmental resources, etc.--essentially the plundering of the rest of the world--looks like a natural process of the earth. The land gave rise to this sorry phenomenon. That's basically the take-away message from this book. Not a happy message at all, yet I absolutely believe it.

This of course gets me into hot water, and here the subject of environmental determinism becomes a very dangerous one again. So, the implication is that all of this decimation is okay because it's just a natural process of the earth?

It's not okay with me, let me make that clear. If we could have travelled down some different and more harmonious path I dearly wish we would have. And I understand how obnoxious an idea it might be at first blush to claim that all of this human folly and madness is really not our fault at all because it's simply a process of the earth. What a convenient way to absolve ourselves of responsibility!

But let's look at this as broadly as we can. First, let's realize that we're not at the end point of history (or let's assume, at least, that we're not). What seems like a cancerous spread of Western destructiveness is a process, and that process is ongoing and may yet turn around into something constructive. Maybe this destructiveness has swept across the globe in preparation for something constructive to sweep back over it.

This period of time in which we've been globalizing and destroying is also the same period of time in which we've been evolving our consciousness and also evolving our individual egos. It's a terribly dangerous time. Once you separate out from your unconscious fusion with the environment into an isolated dot of awareness you begin to objectify all that is outside of yourself. You can't recognize that all that is seemingly Other is really a part of you, so you maraud and plunder and conquer and decimate. And it's all quite inevitable. Ego means believing the self is discrete, not connected with the rest of creation. This phase of human evolution--when we've just woken up and we still believe we are only isolated dots--is so dangerous and destructive because it's literally every man for himself. We can't yet focus on the collective, only on our individual survival and comfort, so we maraud and pillage in order to gain individual advantage.

But simultaneously as we've been awakening and marauding our way around the globe, a positive trend has developed. We've connected. We've manifested technology that can help us evolve to the next phase, a phase of conscious reintegration back into Oneness. Globalization has been horrible in so many ways, but the rise of the internet and other technologies that connect us couldn't have come about otherwise.

So here we stand at a point of transition. We've been Self and Other for so long that some of us have actually begun to see through it. When everything outside of us is Other, there are infinite opportunities for us to See. We can see the devastation our sense of separateness causes (and now on a global scale) and we can begin to see how everything is interconnected. The damage we cause to one part of the earth causes a huge web of effects. It becomes more and more obvious the more dire our situation gets.

So now I finally get to the thought that occurred to me last night. What if just as there were places on this earth which possessed the unique properties which gave rise to our destructive modern world, might there not also be places out there now ready to birth the next paradigm? I titled this post "Where Are The Solutions?" because I think the solutions are literally out there. One thing I've been discovering lately is that there's no such thing as metaphor. We talk about finding solutions, looking for solutions, locating solutions--all these metaphors that suggest solutions are out there in some physical place. Maybe they really are!

Are there geographical locales with the right set of properties to birth a new paradigm? A post-consumer, post-ego paradigm? How would we find those places and how would we work with them to encourage their solutions to spread? The first thing would be to take an inventory of the places where viable solutions are arising.

For some reason Curitiba came to mind, although I don't really believe that Curitiba's solutions are enough. But anyway, let's use that as an example. We would want to examine everything about that locale to try to figure out what unique qualities of that locale allowed these solutions to arise. And from there, maybe we would try to identify other locations possessing similar features as likely places to further incubate and spread the solutions.

With technology that connects us globally now, once we have a few of these prime new-paradigm incubator places the changes could spread contagiously even to less-ideal locales.

An additional way to approach this would be to have everyone inventory their own locale for its strengths and weaknesses and then try to figure out what part of the solution could be birthed in that spot. A global solution will be made up of millions or billions of local solutions. We could each ask ourselves, "What solution wants to be birthed here through me?"

Wouldn't it be great to see a wave of change sweeping over the globe, as the gift of each locale is discovered and offered up?

Power-Hungry

2009-10-25T10:00:00.004-06:00

I admit it, I'm power-hungry. I want to learn everything I can about power, I want to acquire power, I want to wield power in this world. I want to become more powerful than the top CEOs and all the world's political leaders and the wealthiest men in the world. Not only do I want to do it, but I'm convinced I can succeed.

What's this? So I've become a megalomaniacal hermit now? Hardly.

It's just that in the past few years I've been learning a lot about power. What I've discovered is that there's a total disconnect between how the world at-large defines power, and real power. What passes as power is a total sham. In fact, those in positions of so-called power tend to be the weakest and most vulnerable among us.

What it gets back to (and I'm sorry I keep posting about this over and over) is the link between ego and materialism. Ego is about making yourself look bigger than you really are. People who grow ego do so by heaping up stuff around them to make themselves look bigger. Without their piles of glittery gold, their timber and mines and dams and enslaved minions, they're the same size as you and me. We confer power on them (and it's a choice we make) because they look so much bigger than us. But all their piles of glittery crap are not them and do not confer any real advantage.

What it is, is that we're stuck in a very adolescent stage of our human evolution. We think all of this external stuff gives us power. If we just have more money, more piles of glittery crap, we can be powerful! But if you have piles of glittery crap, all you end up doing is defending your crap, acquiring more crap, scheming about crap, identifying with your crap, destroying other people's crap, controlling crap. All to look big. That's power? Excuse me, but No!

Those with that kind of power are the very weakest among us, because all you have to do is take away their glittery piles of crap and look at what's left. Poof. Hey, where did the power go? Seems to have vanished into thin air.

Was it ever real? Heck no.

So let's talk about real power. Awhile back, one night while meditating, I had a vision. I was looking at a man. He was standing in the middle of rolling open range with his back to me, under an immense sky. He had his head tilted upwards and with his arms was making a kind of beckoning motion. On the horizon, clouds were building and roiling and I understood that the man was calling up the weather. I could feel an almost tangible link between the man and the sky and there was a sense of immense power both in the sky and flowing through the man.

I understood that the man and the weather were not separate. They were the same phenomenon. It's not that the persona of the man, this individual ego, by some act of will was actually calling up the weather. He and the weather were coexpressions of the earth. They were what wanted to manifest right there at that moment. That expression blossomed from the land in perfect harmony.

When we as individuals are present, when we live directly and are attuned to what IS, then what manifests through us will be a harmonious and life-sustaining expression of Gaia. We are nodes of Gaia, unique expressions of our little place in the matrix. Each individual represents a confluence of personal and ancestral history intersecting with place and time--a unique node yet tied into a greater identity. Ultimately we are Gaia. Our experiences are personal and unique at the tips of our nodes, yet collective when we slip down a little. I often call our egoic selves "isolated dots" of awareness. But we only seem to be isolated dots, because those dots are actually the very tips of Gaia's nodes. I know my language is getting a bit ludicrous here, but I hope you can catch the gist of what I'm trying to say.

The man who was calling up the weather was actually simply being present. He slipped from his identification with isolated dotness down into his fuller identity. Of course this isn't really simple at all. For the vast majority of humanity isolated dotness is all that exists. As long as we identify with ego we can't touch a larger identity. We can't tap into Power. The man in my vision tapped into Power. He harmonized with his greater identity and by doing so stitched together earth and sky.

Power as I understand it is Gaia/God-consciousness/Divinity (whatever you want to call it), coursing through us and finding expression. When we are attuned to this greater identity we manifest what wants to manifest. With this kind of Power, the earth cannot be raped and pillaged. With this kind of Power there is no war or genocide. With this kind of Power there is healing and harmony, there is right-livelihood for everyone. Power is about attuning to what wants to manifest here through me.

When you possess that kind of Power, you become a person of influence. Your actions have integrity--and far more than personal integrity--the deepest integrity possible. Get good at tapping into that kind of Power and you'll tap into solutions and new paradigms and harmonious actions. With that kind of Power the other kind of power could be dismantled.

Shamans and healers tap into Power all the time, but Power is available to all of us. To be the fullest expression of who we're meant to be, we have to learn to tap into Power. To heal the earth, we have to learn how to do this. Shed ego, slip into a larger identity. A new paradigm is waiting.

Slowing Down

2009-10-12T08:33:00.009-06:00

Adopt the practice of voluntary simplicity and you'll drop the manic aspects of modern life. Sanity will return as you seek and eventually find a more natural rhythm to your daily activities. Humans were designed for the slow life, we've just forgotten that little kernel of wisdom. We need time to acclimate and adjust to shifting rhythms and energies.

When the price of gasoline began climbing upwards a year or two ago, I learned to slow my driving way down. The speedometer usually stays around 60 now (sometimes as low as 55 or as high as 65) while I'm on the interstate, instead of my old 75, 85 and beyond.

Because of an odd time-sharing arrangement with my ex-husband I'm on the interstate a lot, driving my son back and forth to and from his school which is 92 miles away from the end of my driveway (don't ask, please). So for over four years I've been able to experience the shifting energies as I travel back and forth between these two geographic points.

The first few years were rough. I was always drained and often had awful headaches after making the trips. At the same time I began to notice things. Each place I travelled through had a distinct energy, even a personality. Wiggins hill (a ten or fifteen mile stretch over rolling rangeland) had a downright spiritual energy. Insights would come to me there. I noticed the effect that hill had on other drivers--hypnotic, sleep-inducing apparently. I once watched a guy dream himself an exit ramp and very gracefully exit off into the grassland. (He was okay, and the idiot was back on the highway again in a minute or two.)

But it's only been since I've slowed down that I've begun to understand the impact the land has on me. Once I slowed down, the fatigue diminished and the headaches became fewer and far-er between. I realized that 75 mph is not a human pace. We need to arrive in each place, acclimate to the shifting energies before we move on. You can't do that at highway speeds. Even my 60 mph is too fast, but it's a heck of an improvement over 80.

We were designed to engage with our environment at a walking pace, adjusting to shifting energies with each footfall. In my favorite book of all times (David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous) Abram quotes stories from both Gary Snyder and Bruce Chatwin that illustrate what happens when indigenous culture meets up with the fast-paced automobile.

In Snyder's account he was travelling in the Australian Outback with a Pintupi elder and the man suddenly began to talk to him very rapidly, telling a Dreamtime story. As soon as that story ended he rapidly began telling

another story about another hill over here and another story over there. I couldn't keep up. I realized after about a half an hour of this that these were meant to be told while walking, and that I was experiencing a speeded-up version of what might be leisurely told over several days of foot travel.
Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), p. 82

Bruce Chatwin's account tells how he was travelling in a Land Cruiser with an aboriginal man who sat motionless in the front seat until he crossed parts of his songline, at which point he'd launch into frantic action.

As Arkady turned the wheel to the left, Limpy bounced into action. Again he shoved his head through both windows. His eyes rolled wildly over the rocks, the cliffs, the palms, the water. His lips moved at the speed of a ventriloquist's and, through them, came a rustle: the sound of wind through branches.
Arkady knew at once what was happening. Limpy had learned his Native Cat couplets for walking pace, at four miles per hour, and we were travelling at twenty-five.
Arkady shifted into bottom gear, and we crawled along no faster than a walker. Instantly, Limpy matched his tempo to the new speed. He was smiling. His head swayed to and fro. The sound became a lovely melodious swishing; and you knew that, as far as he was concerned, he was the Native Cat.
Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (London:Penguin Books, 1987), pp. 293-294.

You might be thinking, So what? We don't have stories and songs embedded in the landscape. We don't need to slow down because we don't have parts of ourselves embedded in the landscape. It's not like we need to retrieve something there. We can just skim the surface, get from point A to point B (as quickly as possible). After all, the land is only a backdrop for our human activities. It's not as if it actually pertains to us.

But we've forgotten something. The land creates us. We've only to look at cases of environmental deprivation (like the horrific case of little Dani in Florida a few years ago) to see how true this is. The mind we create in here, behind the sheltering encasement of our skulls, is really just environment that we've internalized. Without the environment, the land, we literally would have nothing to know.

I've started to think of the land as our true mind. What's inside our skulls is simply a storage and retrieval device. It's not mind itself. David Abram, in reflecting on the anecdotes I quoted above, said it's as though

at such times, it is not the native person who speaks, but rather the land that speaks through him as he journeys across it.
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), p. 174.

What are we? Nothing but globules of land that grew feet and consciousness. Look at evolution in high-speed. Watch the earth begin to excrete life. Watch those globules of life organize themselves and coagulate and complexify, watch some of them crawl ashore, grow legs, grow consciousness. And here we are, globules of earth and we think we're separate from the earth? We think our consciousness is not the consciousness of the earth? What is it then?

If we were disembodied spirits floating in the ether, what could we know? With no points of reference, how could we even know we were? Consciousness requires physicality. With no physicality, no Self and Other, no Point A and Point B, there can be no knowing.

My favorite definition of genius is the keen ability to make novel associations. And what is an association? It's comparing A to B and seeing similarities. Could we do that in the rarefied ether? No, we need the land. The land provides all points of reference. Genius, knowledge, information, consciousness--those things reside in the land. Gaia and Mind, they're one and the same.

I still need to get a hold of Edith Cobb's book, The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood. She studied the lives of geniuses and found that insights often came to them when they returned physically or mentally to the landscapes of their childhood. It's as if that land was an extended neural network--knowledge and wisdom existed out there and these geniuses returned to retrieve it.

Why is it important for us to slow down and let the land begin to speak through us again? Because that's where wisdom resides. When we live in our puny little egoic minds, skimming over the surface, riding fast, guess what we do? We abuse the surface, we destroy countless aspects of Mind, we diminish the ways in which we can know ourselves, we limit possibilities and we ignore all of the harmonious solutions that want to rise through us out of the land.

We are globules of land and the land will speak through us if we slow down and let it.

Just Keep Your Head in the Sand

2009-07-04T07:14:00.000-06:00

Tell me, why do we do these nonsensical things:

Come up with plans to geo-engineer a solution to global climate change, rather than changing our ways.

Come up with health care reform schemes that will still allow vast fortunes to be funnelled into the dysfunctional and corrupt pharmaceutical, medical and insurance industries, rather than changing our ways.

Continue to seek pharmaceutical treatments for the symptoms of our unhealthy lifestyle choices, rather than changing our ways.

Try to mend the economy by returning to business-as-usual, rather than changing our ways.

Are we so undisciplined now that it's impossible to take responsibility for the messes we have made? Must we always be engineering solutions that allow us to continue along just as before, as dysfunctionally as ever? Have we gone so soft we always expect to be bailed out of the scrapes we get ourselves into? Whatever happened to discipline, sacrifice, and a willingness to put the greater good ahead of immediate gratification? Nobody seems to want to do the work involved in creating a healthier paradigm. It's just business as usual. Keep your head in the sand. Keep doing what you've always done.

What's going on with that? Why can't we immediately and drastically curtail greenhouse gas emissions, fix the healthcare system (not access to it--first we have to fix the medical system so that medicine is about healing again, not about profits and drug-pushing--then we can worry about access), take responsibility for our health by living well in the first place, and begin the transition to a steady-state economy. But no, all of that requires work, discipline and sacrifice. And you can't ask that of anyone these days, it seems.

Geo-Engineering Hubris

2009-07-03T10:53:00.003-06:00

Last month the Washington Post published an article by Samuel Thernstrom entitled "Could We Engineer A Cooler Planet?", which argues that geo-engineering may be the most sensible approach to handling climate change.

Herman Daly very eloquently argues against such madness in a brief response that, unfortunately, was not published. It's available for viewing on the steadystate.org website: "Geo-Engineering the World for Candles".

Moving Beyond Belief

2009-07-01T08:21:00.005-06:00

The amazing capacity of the human mind is what distinguishes us from all the other critters on the planet. The refined ability to reason and make complex plans, to postulate, to question, to debate--these are skills that set us apart. (Not to imply that other animals don't have amazing mental skills, some of which are comparable or perhaps even more advanced than our own.)

It amazes me that we don't use our mental skills more mindfully. It seems these are our greatest gifts and yet we most frequently use the powers of the mind to alienate, destroy and degrade. We create mental constructs, like "consumerism", " partisanship", "economic growth", "us versus them" in all of its forms--all kinds of destructive belief systems that bear little resemblance to reality.

As I enter my fifth year of seriously practicing voluntary simplicity I notice that beliefs are becoming less and less important to me. What people think, all the mental gyrations they go through in response to something--that really doesn't matter much to me anymore. What matters is what IS. I'm trying to learn to experience just that, without turning on that machine in my head that wants to spin and spin each experience, turning it into fixed belief. I waste much less time lost in my head and I spend much less time worrying or caring about what other people believe.

My greatest teacher on this subject has been my buddy John. I met him when I first moved out here four years ago and we've been great friends ever since. But the thing is, belief-wise we couldn't be farther apart. If beliefs were all that mattered we should be constantly at odds if not at each others throats. But we just never go there. We've never argued or debated our beliefs. And you know what, it's made for a very pleasant relationship. Ignoring beliefs lets me just experience this guy directly--his kindness, humor, generosity, helpfulness and his thoughtful ways. Focusing on our beliefs and our differences would blind me to what really is. So tell me, what actually matters--what he thinks about an issue, or how he actually lives in each moment?

I think we could all live more graciously with each other if we quit focusing on beliefs and paid more attention to what IS. Couldn't we all benefit from learning (or re-learning) to live directly, without creating all this spin in our heads? Wouldn't the world be a happier and healthier place? Wouldn't we move a step or two closer to harmony and peace?

The Problem with Our Way of Defining Success

2009-04-21T12:06:00.007-06:00

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers: The Story of Success. Although I enjoyed it immensely, there have been a few thoughts niggling in the back of my mind--a few things that don't quite add up for me. One of those involves the way that Gladwell defines success. Well, no, it's not the way he defines success--because he never actually defines it--it's the underlying assumption that in our society everyone already knows what success is, and therefore it's not even open for debate.

But I think it should be open for debate.

There were several points in the book where I became uncomfortable. One point was in the chapter, "The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 2", where he was comparing the way wealthy parents raise their children to that of poor parents. He referred to a study conducted by sociologist Annette Lareau on a group of third graders. She found there were only two identifiable parenting styles: one which was employed by the wealthy parents and the other by the poor parents. The wealthy parents were deeply involved in their children's lives, shuttling them to and from lessons and practices, asking questions about their playmates and school, scheduling an endless array of activities, and constantly processing and talking things through with their kids. The poor parents, on the other hand, took a laissez-faire approach to child rearing. There were no scheduled practices. Instead, the kids were sent outdoors to play with the other kids in the neighborhood. There was no advocating for the needs of their children at school, and generally the kids were simply left to fend for themselves.

Lareau called the strategy of the wealthy parents "concerted cultivation" and the strategy of the poor parents "natural growth." The "concerted cultivation" strategy created youngsters who knew how to take initiative and act on behalf of their own needs and interests. They knew how to "gain advantage". The "natural growth" strategy created youngsters who were"often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and had a well-developed sense of independence" but they also had "an emerging sense of distance, distrust, and constraint." [The words and phrases in quotation marks in this paragraph are Lareau's words, not Gladwell's.]

It's clear to me that the children of the wealthy parents were being shaped for success in our society, and the poor children simply weren't. But this gets me to the heart of the matter. Gladwell notes, "Lareau stresses that one style isn't morally better than the other." Morally better, no. But scratch out that word--morally--and you can be sure almost everyone will think that one of those styles is heck of a lot better--generally--than the other, and I think you know which one.

Why is it better? Because that style of parenting churns out youth indoctrinated into the western model of success. These kids have learned how to push their way to the top, they know how to work the system, they can get what they want. It's a system based on self-absorption and self-promotion and I believe frankly that it's unhealthy, not only for individuals, but also for the planet.

What initially caused me to think there might be a problem with our definition of success was my reading last year of Amy Chua's book World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (see my earlier post "Infiltration and Naturalization, Part 1"). When outsiders strode into a country--outsiders who shared our Western model of success--and it was a country that didn't share that model, the outsiders were able to essentially snatch control of that country's markets and resources. As I said in my earlier post, outsiders are like invasive weed seeds--entering an ecosystem that has never had the opportunity to evolve a line of defense against it. "They ride in with their wads of cash, and what human ecosystem has yet evolved a defense against that?"

An undeveloped country develops through "natural growth" in the same way that poor children develop through "natural growth". It seems to me that a philosophy of "concerted cultivation" only begins to happen when people, countries, or the corporations that spring from them, lose their connection with the land and a more natural way of being. When you are connected to the land and you are living small (i.e. living within the confines of your own ecosystem, and living sustainably) there is no need for extreme self-promotion, expansion, extraction, growth, profits and transactions. There is no need for manic doing. People who have lost their connection with the land become those who are likely to exploit the land, particularly on foreign soils, where they don't have to see the damage they do.

Amy Chua found that when market-dominant minorities were driven out of a country, that country often collapsed economically. The citizens who remained usually didn't possess the business skills and financial acumen to keep the country going. What occurred to me was that this was not a failing of the native people; it simply demonstrates a very core difference in cultural values. Business skills, financial acumen--those are skills valuable to people who have no connection with the land. They don't possess the land in their hearts or their souls, so they seek through transacting and exploiting to possess the earth physically. Indigenous people, however, still at least to some extent are part of the land, inseparable from it. Capitalism has little appeal to them. There is not much motivation to become materialists, brilliant entrepreneurs, leaders of industry. They still remember how to live in harmony with the earth.

What our world suffers from right now is way too much doing. We've been way too busy, way too "productive" (i.e. destructive). Manic soccer practices are the precursor of manic gold mining, manic coal burning, manic rainforest-chopping-down, manic suck-every-drop-of-oil-out-of-the-ground. This is success??

It's only been in the past century that we've begun in earnest to move off the land (of course the roots of this go back to the industrial revolution and--before that--to our first city-states thousands of years ago). This exodus from the land which was once a trickle is now a torrent, and the implications are enormous. Over half the world's population now live in cities. It's an unprecedented situation. Our current ideas about success have been birthed in the urban landscape. This is not what we need. It leads to exploitation. What we need is to redefine success from a global perspective. We don't need to go back to the land, necessarily, but we need to take into account the land and its limits.

If we got back to living locally (in the cities as well as the countryside), and if we worked to create a steady-state economy, we could achieve a model of success that would be far less manic, much more satisfying for everybody, and sustainable. What we need is to work towards balance. Balance in the lives of our children, balance in our own lives, and balance in the world. To me, success is not success if it's exploitative. And most of what passes as success today rests on exploitative practices.

There's more I want to get to on this subject. Richard Louv's book Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder would tie in very nicely here, but it will have to wait for another day.

Some Reflections on Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers

2009-04-21T08:15:00.003-06:00

If you haven't had a chance to read Malcolm Gladwell's newest book Outliers: The Story of Success, get busy. It's number three on the NYT bestseller list, so I know a lot of you have already read it, but if you haven't I'll tell you it provides a lot of food for thought in a quick little package.

(My library only had the large print version--and I am getting near that age for reading glasses--so maybe that's why I seemed to fly right through it. Maybe I need to get all of my books in LARGE PRINT.)

There were a few interesting premises:

1. That invariably we need to devote at least 10,000 hours of practice to our area of interest in order to achieve mastery.

2. That no one achieves success in a vacuum and that many of the most successful people in society, while extremely talented to begin with, benefited from a lot of lucky breaks and fortuitous situations. Fortune smiled on them.

3. That we underestimate the effects of our cultural heritage, which can persist for many, many generations. He used the example of the feuding Scotch-Irish settlers in Appalachia (the Hatfields and McCoys and their ilk). He believes their tendency towards violence is a result of the "culture of honor" of their herding highland ancestors back in Ireland and Scotland. Herders, Gladwell points out, are always vulnerable to raiders, so they must fiercely defend what's theirs, unlike the settled farmers who didn't run the risk of having their entire livelihood snatched in the dead of night. The herder needed to show he was tough and prove that it wasn't worth the risk to provoke him. But, of course, there always were provocations and when there was, the herder (or Appalachian descendent) would often defend his honor to the death. Gladwell also cited recent studies that showed current subjects from Appalachia are far more twitchy and likely to take insult than people from other regions. So the vestiges of an old culture are still affecting behavior today.

Gladwell gives many other examples--the rise of a group of Jewish lawyers in New York, the superior math skills of the Chinese, the story of Gladwell's mother...all of them show what happens when you have a fortuitous mixing of chance, a positive cultural legacy, the right timing and determination. He also gives a number of tragic counter-examples.

Outliers provided me with food for thought concerning two different issues I've been grappling with in recent years. Those issues are: the importance of place in shaping culture (hence the reason I've been researching environmental determinism of late), and the way modern society defines success. I think each of these issues deserves its own post, so I will be working on those today.

Krikorian, Immigration and Racist Subtleties

2009-04-20T10:20:00.010-06:00

Yesterday I talked about the subtle biases of each age and how we often can't identify them until we've evolved into a new paradigm. I mentioned the racism underlying Ellsworth Huntington's idea of environmental determinism early in the twentieth century and how glaringly obvious it is today.

My thought was to write a post that would compare the subtlety of Huntington's racism to the subtlety of Mark Krikorian's attitude toward immigrants. However, in looking back over Huntington's book I realize that most of his comments were anything but subtle. Sure, he didn't own his racism--he presented everything he said as the findings of scientific research by others (i.e., the "studies have shown" defense).

Krikorian's attitude toward immigrants is subtle, though, and harder to tease out. Like Huntington, he is trying to sound fair and unbiased. But what are we to make of a sentence like this one:

The possibility, then, is that immigrants will assimilate into this new people, forming, in the extreme case, not an ethnic subculture like so many others (which will fade in importance over time) but instead a separate national community, a Hispanic Volk, demanding recognition on par with Anglos.
(p. 19, The New Case Against Immigration)

A Hispanic Volk?? He's comparing the Hispanic community in the U.S. with Nazi Germany. Of all the analogies he could have made, why this one, you have to ask?

Which reminds me of something Srinivasan Pillay said in his post "Why Rational Thinking Is Not All It's Cracked Up To Be":

Another reason that I think that "surface rationality" is questionable is that we often make decisions based on how options are presented to us. This has been called the "framing effect".

Krikorian's use of the word Volk is a clever way to subtly frame the issue if you want to shape the perceptions of your readers. If Krikorian understands, like Srinivasan Pillay, that emotion underlies what seems to be rational thought, it would make sense that he would want to elicit a strong emotional reaction from his readers. If the readers fear that Hispanic immigrants are threatening to be the next Third Reich (however subconsciously that might register), that fear is going to make them more likely to take Krikorian's additional "rational" arguments as Truth.

In a future post I'll be looking more broadly at Krikorian's ideas about assimilation.

Magical versus Rational Thinking

2009-04-19T10:48:00.005-06:00

I've been on a bit of a reading binge the past week, completing a total of six nonfiction books and having three more underway. Whenever I do this, interesting things begin to happen (like not getting anything else accomplished??)...ahem...like the way the juxtaposition of so many ideas and perspectives leads me to novel thoughts or insights. The topics may be wildly different, and yet my mind works in the background to synthesize what can be synthesized, always on the lookout for some grand unifying theory, I guess.

Here are the six books I read this week:

Woman Who Glows in the Dark: A Curandera Reveals Traditional Aztec Secrets of Physical and Spiritual Health, Elena Avila with Joy Parker

The Time Before History: 5 Million Years of Human Impact, Colin Tudge

Race: A History Beyond Black and White, Marc Aronsen

The Tribe of Tiger: Cats and Their Culture, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony, Robert B. Edgerton

Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell

The three other books I'm reading are:

The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, Christine Kenneally

The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal, Mark Krikorian

Civilization and Climate, Ellsworth Huntington

Quite a mix, isn't it? In the next few days I hope to make several posts on the thoughts that have arisen as a result of absorbing this massive jumble of words. But today I want to focus on just one line of thought and that concerns magical and rational modes of thinking.

The Time Before History had me taking in the whole sweeping span of our evolution, so the events of the past few centuries (or even millennia) seemed to all be part of the same modern moment, just a blip in time.

Woman Who Glows in the Dark, and Sick Societies both made me realize magical thinking is not something far off in our past. European cultures believed in witchcraft in recent centuries (i.e. right now, modern times, if we take into account our long history) and many indigenous people still believe to varying extents in witchcraft.

Race, an excellent young-adult book by Marc Aronson (and by no means beneath an adult readership), traced the evolution of various forms of discrimination from ancient times up to our present-day racist notions.

Civilization and Climate was written in 1915 by Yale geographer Ellsworth Huntington. I'm reading it as part of my research into the subject of environmental determinism. Huntington was one of the biggest proponents in modern times of the idea that climate is a major determinant of human behavior. Environmental determinism eventually became passe because it was frequently used to further various racist agenda, and I didn't have to get very far into Civilization and Climate to see the glaring racial bias. Although Huntington was a scientist and was clearly trying to use a sound methodology that eliminated bias, the fact is he was a product of his times and his culture and was so totally immersed in the racist paradigms of his time that he couldn't begin to see his own biases. None of us can really comprehend the limits and biases of our own time and culture. We have to escape the paradigm before we can see it clearly.

So, all of these various ideas came together in my mind and I had a new insight: magical thinking is the same thing as rational thinking. Until now, I've always seen magical thinking as irrational, the opposite of rational. Yet these books all pointed to something different. In my post Tracing the Rise of Ego and Materialism I shared my ideas about our human evolution. It's my belief that we've evolved from unconscious fusion with our environment (our earliest tribal, pre-literate days) to a conscious but separate state of being (the present time) and that we're on a trajectory which will eventually bring us back into fusion with the larger environment, only then it will be a conscious fusion.

Magical thinking and rational thinking both have emerged in the current blip of history. They both emerged now as a result of us becoming conscious, separating out of the matrix that birthed us, developing egos and a sense of Self and Other, of subject and object. I can't emphasize enough how recent this has all been. As we developed consciousness and language and a sense of separateness, we began to try to make sense of everything. Before we separated out there was no way to make sense of anything. We just were. If you're fused with everything else there are no points of reference, but become a separate dot of awareness and suddenly you can start comparing everything and trying to make sense of everything. On top of direct perception we added this drive to make meaning. Magical thinking is an attempt to make meaning, to attribute causes to effects, to theorize about the way all of these separate things interact. It's a very rational thing to do. These theories may not be accurate, but then again neither may quite a few of our scientific theories be accurate either. Our scientific theories suffer from the unconscious biases of the day--we theorize from the current state of our knowledge, but that state of knowledge will always be incomplete and therefore erroneous. I don't mean to imply that I think science is bunk--I believe we get closer and closer to the truth as we evolve and as science evolves. What I want to point out is that magical thinking and rational thinking are not separate phenomena. They are the same phenomenon. It's the phenomenon of humans playing with metaphor, playing with consciousness, trying to make meaning.

All of this is necessary if we're ever to reach our next phase of evolution. By making meaning of things, consciously, what we are really doing is internalizing (or re-internalizing) everything that's out there. We're using mind to bring all the parts of the matrix back together. We separated from it in order to become conscious and we'll use our consciousness to join back with it. Our search for meaning is our search for oneness.

I still want to delve into this a bit more, but this post is getting a bit long. For today, I'll just close with a link to an article on huffingtonpost.com by Srinivasan Pillay: "Why Rational Thinking Is Not All It's Cracked Up To Be". He hits on the idea , which I've been encountering more and more frequently, that we use rational thinking to come up with reasons for what are ultimately emotional or gut-level decisions. We think we are being unbiased and using the most neutral higher-level cognitive functions of our minds, but really we are driven by emotions. My way of interpreting this is that we have a direct perception of reality--what IS--and our way of experiencing direct perception is through feelings. We want to make sense of our direct perceptions, so we start to layer meaning on top of them. That the meanings may not end up being accurate is beside the point. We can go along for long stretches of time applying inaccurate meanings to phenomena, but eventually we seem to break through to a new paradigm that allows more accurate meaning to be attributed to our direct perceptions. Inaccurate meaning inevitably gives us feedback--and not happy feedback--so we evolve a new paradigm of meaning. What was the feedback from our magical thinking about race? What is the feedback we're getting from our magical thinking about a growth economy? What is the feedback we're getting from our magical thinking about limitless resources, or pollution?

Anyway, I could go on. When I get back to this subject I want to include a quote from Ellsworth Huntington's Civilization and Climate (published 1915)where he is trying to show how very unbiased he is, but it's clear to us how very, very biased he is, and compare it with a very similar quote in Mark Krikorian's book The New Case Against Immigration (published 2008). Krikorian certainly doesn't believe he has a bias against any particular type of immigrant (Latinos), but to me it just glares off the page.

P.S. Ellsworth Huntington's book Civilization and Climate is in the public domain and is available free in digitized form at InternetArchive.org.

Too Much Information

2009-02-17T11:09:00.003-07:00

In my last post I talked about how I gave up the newspaper and let go of the part of my persona that needed to be an "informed citizen". I want to expand on that a little bit today.

I find that living simply involves so much more than physically simplifying my environment. The mental clutter has to go too. And, man, in our culture, with so much going on all the time and so much information available, it's easy to have a mind full of nonsense. Just crammed full.

I've always been an information junkie, but embracing simple living has forced me to take a good hard look at this "need to know" business. What do I really need to know? What kinds of information should I let in? Is it my job, as one measly individual, to be informed about every thing of significance in the world? And how could one measly individual possibly contain all of that? In our global society, there's just too much going on. Even the most informed citizen would have to be missing huge chunks of information and would never truly be able to see the big picture. We will always be acting from partial information.

When I accepted the impossibility of being truly well-informed, I changed directions. There are a few things I choose to study, and I prefer to be informed through books and longer treatments of these issues, rather than snippets on the Internet or in news reports. The things I want to know, I want to know as fully as I can. All the rest, I leave to others. I know that the knowledge others have gleaned is out there, should I ever need to tap into it. But I don't need to try to hold it all in my puny little head. What's the point of that anyway? To be able to contribute well to this world, I think we each need to focus on our own small part of it. We need to become experts in our own small patches of earth, not generalists. The wisdom we find in our own patch of earth will have practical applications. All that general knowledge is just wind, hot air.

True knowledge is derived from direct experience. The less we focus on the diffuse knowledge of the Internet and other media, and the more we turn to real knowledge birthed in the matrix of earth and sky around us, the more meaningful our actions will be. Our actions will spring from Truth which waits all around us if only we could be present. Truth waits to be apprehended--to be directly perceived. Can we adequately apprehend Truth from the news snippets we watch on t.v. or read on the Internet? Finding Truth (and the practical knowledge that derives from it), requires presence--to be right here, right now, in this moment.

The Art of Letting Go

2009-02-10T09:01:00.004-07:00

Learning to live simply is learning the art of letting go. There's irony here--to live simply, simply let go--it sounds easy until you try it. You quickly realize it's not such a simple thing at all. Not when our culture is prompting us constantly to accumulate and hoard, to fill our lives with stuff, information, and endless activity. And not when so much of our identities are wrapped up in those external things. Letting go, which should be the simplest of all tasks, can seem unbearably difficult.

What got me started on my journey towards simplicity was the inkling four or five years ago that I needed to give up the newspaper. Until then it had been a daily ritual dating back to my elementary years, and something I had never questioned. It's good to be informed, right? So, that's all there was to it. Good citizens are informed citizens. I'll never be sure why the urge to give it up awakened in me. I was wasting a full hour every morning reading the thing so maybe that's where the first hint of dissatisfaction crept in.

I remember when the urge first appeared, I experienced such a strong feeling of resistance to it. Not just resistance--when I took a good hard look I had to admit it was fear. Fear? How could I fear something so ridiculously inconsequential?

But I did. I feared it so much that I actually didn't cancel the paper, not then anyway. Only later, a year or two down the road, was I was finally ready. It had to incubate that long, the idea. I had to learn how to let go. When I was finally ready, it was absolutely painless but it wouldn't have been if I had forced the issue too soon.

I've found this to be true with everything I've subsequently surrendered. Always the fear and resistance initially, followed by a period of not taking action, just letting the idea incubate, followed finally by a very graceful act of letting go--painlessly.

I think what it boils down to gets back to my post about ego and materialism. These things that I give up aren't me, but I've so identified with them that my egoic self believes they are me. To give up these external things is very threatening to a self that believes they define its very essence. To lose the newspaper wasn't just about losing a thing, it was about losing the "informed citizen" part of my persona. And--ouch--that hurts. Or it did until the idea had gestated long enough for me to understand--informed citizen, no I'm not that.

Embracing simplicity is such a zen thing. Bit by bit you discover--no, I'm not this, no I'm not that. Eventually you let go of all the external things you've identified with and all the labels you've given yourself and guess what?--there you still are. You haven't been diminished. You aren't reduced to nothing. There you are. If anything a fuller embodiment of what it is to be human. Not identified with ego anymore. Swept clean of all that clutter. Like an empty vessel, but filled and overflowing with infinite nonstuff--the very finest stuff of all.

Awakening to the Power of Place

2009-02-09T08:07:00.011-07:00

My awakening to the power of place has taken many years. When I was a child I was held and formed by the power of my home territory
--the woods and fields, the rolling hills, the creek and the tiny streams that fed into it, the pond, the barns and farmyards. But I wasn't aware of it. Totally immersed in it, I had no perspective. I was the youngest of five kids and the only one to be born after my parents moved to Soap Hollow, so I was fortunate to spend my entire childhood blissfully fused with that particular landscape.

It was only once I left home that I began to get some perspective and realize how profoundly that terrain had influenced me. The first hint came when I would bring boyfriends home from college. They'd complain of this extreme sleepiness--it was almost a stupor they'd fall into. And it clicked that home always made me sleepy too. A hypnotic peaceful sleepiness. At first I tried to rationalize it. In the summers the buzzing drone of cicadas in the tulip tree weaved a hypnotic spell. And for years there was an old mine shaft up the back road on the opposing hill, whose huge fan was always humming in the background. I thought maybe its white noise was the culprit. But eventually the mine shut down and the fan was turned off, yet still the hypnotic energy of our place in the hollow remained.

I began noticing other things too when I went home. Not only sleepiness, but vivid dreams. And if I stayed more than a day or two, I'd fall into this deeply contemplative state. Always armed with a stack of books (some things never change) I'd delve into deep philosophical subjects and fill my journals with profound reflections. I'd take long strolls up the back road, into the woods, to all of my old haunts. I felt monk-ish--very spiritual, deeply contemplative, fused with nature. Intuitive too. And always there was a feeling of timelessness.

All of my life I've had what I tentatively label "past life" memories. I don't ultimately know what they are, and it doesn't really matter. But whenever I went home those memories would drift to the surface, fleetingly, but with much greater frequency than when I was anywhere else. They'd come to me, brief images, like a slide show set just a little too fast. I could just grasp the mood, the feeling sense, more than anything. The whole constellation of a different time, a different place, a different persona. A familiar feeling-sense--familiar yet different. Exactly like memory. And always an aching sadness, the feeling of loss and beauty. Blissful, but it hurt too.

As a child, I was a dreamer--in daylight and in sleeping hours. As a teenager, when I was obsessed with the works of Jung, I kept a dream journal for several years. Some mornings I would wake up recalling as many as seventeen dreams. A frequent dream motif was the black bear. Usually these were very pleasant dreams, but occasionally there was an ounce of healthy fear.

It occurred to me that the black bear is a perfect symbol for the energy of the landscape of my childhood. Sleepy, contemplative, dreamy, fused with the natural world. When I moved to Colorado the black bear dreams stopped, but they've been replaced by occasional mountain lion dreams. I can remember the exact night this change occurred.

It was when I had been living in Colorado for a year. I had just weaned my son and decided to go off into the mountains for my first weekend alone since his birth. The first night I was camping I was brought bolt upright in the tent twice with dreams of incredible realism. In the first dream, a black bear and her cub simply walked through my campsite and moved on. In the second dream, a mountain lion silently padded into camp on magnificent huge paws and flopped down. It seemed like something was trying to get my attention with these dreams--I can't remember another time I was brought bolt upright by a dream, let alone two in one night. I think all the dreams were saying was that the mountain lion somehow reflected my new life in the West, whereas the black bear had represented my life (and the energy of the land) back in Pennsylvania.

Today, though, I'm still a dreamy, contemplative person. Would I be who I am had I grown up immersed in a different sort of energy? I think not. The energy of this new place is certainly shaping me, but that specific terrain in Pennsylvania that held me for my first seventeen-and-a-half years really created me and defined me, and defines me still.

The Money Suicides

2009-01-29T11:43:00.004-07:00

I run the risk of sounding extremely flippant by posting this, but I'm having a hard time remaining silent. It's these "money suicides" I keep hearing about, an almost weekly occurrence. They're driving me crazy.

If I could just catch these guys by the lapels before they do the final deed, I'd have a few things to say (and by guys I do mean guys, as I haven't heard any women mentioned in the news reports yet--not that they aren't just as capable, I'm sure).

"Oh you silly little boy! You thought that money mattered? You thought that this game of yours was real? You thought your red hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place mattered? My dear child, let's fold up the board, there's a good boy, put on the lid, and let's take a little walk outside. Come with me, that's right, come along.

"Here, take off your shoes. Feel the grass beneath your feet, see the robin pulling worms, the grasshopper leaping from your path. Little boy, see the clouds moving in, roiling on the horizon and promising more rain.

"Crouch down on your knees here. Yes, get dirty. Here is where a mole has burrowed just below the surface and here is the hole where the cat tried to uncover him. Take hold of this earth in your hands. Scoop it up. Feel the heat and the warm moist breath of that soil on your skin, so sensuous!

"Roll on your back now and be held by this ground beneath you. Look to the skies above you. You are immersed in creation--yes! this living breathing conscious creation. It's below you, above you, inside of you, in your breath and your bones. The universe creates itself through you--can you feel it? What a miracle!

"Think of all the magnificent ways creation could revel in its aliveness, just through you, little one! What fun. How delicious. And not just through you, but through everyone and everything else. Can you see it all around you?

"This, now this, is the truly fun game. So. Let's forget about your little tantrum back in the house. Do those plastic hotels and that silly paper money matter so much now? See, isn't this much better?"

Now, I want to be clear, I don't mean to make light of suicide--but in these situations I do feel it's an extreme form of childishness. To end your life in a tantrum about stuff--stuff! Stuff isn't real. The people left behind to pick up the pieces are real.

Our materialistic culture is a very childish culture, and I mean that in every sense of the word. As a whole, our culture hasn't evolved beyond a very childlike way of expressing itself. Here and there we have a few adults, but barely a few.

My hope is that people will see the financial crisis for what it is--an opportunity to mature beyond materialism. To become the first adults.

Evaluating What Belongs

2009-01-27T17:50:00.002-07:00

I'm starting to acquire an intuitive sense of what belongs. Paring down my life to what matters most, and eliminating clutter, has opened up space for me to start recognizing what wants to manifest and what fits in here. I still have a long way to go in streamlining my physical surroundings, but I've also come an incredible distance already.

At times, I find myself slipping into that different set of eyes--the one that sees nuance and layers. It's when I look out of those eyes that it becomes glaringly obvious what doesn't fit. Recently it was the realization (I know how goofy and trivial this will sound) that my black bag--what I use to carry my books and notebooks and whatever else I need whenever I go out--just doesn't fit. It feels all wrong somehow--I can't explain. I could get all rational and come up with all sorts of explanations for why it might not be a good fit, but really all that matters is I know it doesn't fit. Not that I have anything to replace it with at present, but now at least I recognize that it ultimately doesn't belong.

This all presents a fascinating new approach. Imagine having this kind of radar on all of the time. Being able to feel the pull of objects that want to belong in my space and sensing when the energy is all wrong. Imagine if everyone had this radar--what kind of "consumers" would we become? Consumers of beauty and harmony, maybe?

I've noticed though, too, that even when I'm totally immersed in the perfection of my surroundings--even when everything belongs--there's always a sort of tension present. I might describe it as a yearning, or even a dissatisfaction. Here is utter perfection--how I revel in its bliss! And yet simultaneously there's this tension or yearning. What is that?

I think maybe it's just the pulse of creation. This blissful perfection of the moment is static, whereas life is ever-changing. The yearning, I think, is the universe pulsing through me, seeking the next moment, the next now. Reinventing and re-experiencing itself in each new now. The static present rubbing up against the forever-malleable future means there will always be a dynamic tension existing in even the most harmonious of nows.

When I experience bliss, and can't just be still with it--wanting to know what to do with it--that's the pulsing of creation. That's the dynamic tension of a conscious universe creating itself.

Simple Living Goals

2009-01-01T15:46:00.005-07:00

With the new year spreading out before me, I want to reflect a little on where I've been and where I intend to go from here.

This past year marked an incredible deepening of my experience with voluntary simplicity. I've felt the old paradigm finally cracking and falling off like the seed-coat on a sprout. I'm seeing with new eyes. More and more I'm convinced you can't go halfway with simplicity or any other sort of emptiness practice. Halfway gets you to individual discrete changes, good in and of themselves, of course--but only a full immersion in emptiness can shatter the old way of seeing.

So, what constitutes my emptiness practice--what does my "full immersion" look like? For one thing, I've tried to minimize outside distractions. This has been an ongoing project for several years, which continues to broaden. It means no newspaper or periodical subscriptions, no catalogs (except seed catalogs for now), no watches, no cell phone, no GPS or other techno-gadgets except the computer, and no television. For certain spells I've also avoided the Internet and telephone, although never entirely, and I'm still trying to figure out where these two things fit into my life.

I also do without many other comforts of consumer culture. I don't have a microwave, I won't use a dishwasher, and I use a reel mower to mow the lawn. I cut my own hair, brew my own coffee, knead my own bread, and grow at least some of my own food. I don't believe that fingernails or toenails should ever cost money to maintain (beyond the cost of a set of nail clippers), or that straight hair should be curly, or that brown hair should be blond or black or red. I don't exercise in a gym (what a contrivance!)--never have, never will , as long as there's the great outdoors. Therefore, I'm not constantly scooting around from nail salon to gym to beauty shop to coffee shop to bakery to...you name it. Grocery store, yes. Bank. School. Library. Post office, occasionally. Recycling center and landfill every few months. That's usually about it.

Spending. For 2008, my conspicuous consumption, excluding food and household supplies (like toilet paper) can be itemized as follows: a waterbath canner and some more canning jars, one soaker hose, a faucet V thingy, a fan-type sprayer attachment, hose washers, some clay pots, three Pyrex dishes with lids, a five-gallon bucket to hold my homemade laundry detergent, a five-gallon bucket to use this coming year for making compost tea, a deep-socket set which was needed for disassembling something, a coil brush for the fridge, a set of twin sheets, a few items of clothing for my son. All of which amounted to roughly $150 in costs and very little of my time.

I've still been in the process of physically downsizing. This past year I sold off two more big pieces of equipment from my old business, and continued to sell off, recycle, donate or trash things I no longer needed or wanted. The house feels more and more tranquil and supportive the more stuff I manage to clear out.

I rarely have any background noises in my house, except for the hum of the fridge, the computer fans, and the washer and dryer. Well, when I'm alone that is--it's all a bit different when Collin's here! Long stretches of serenity and silence have been crucial for me in my deepening experience with simplicity.

The first hours of the day have always seemed to hold a sacred power. I make sure I'm present and receptive at that time of day. It's when the more profound insights seem to want to play peekaboo--I get glimpses of what is trying to awaken in me. Sometimes I can even catch hold. The evening hours, too, can hold a bit of magic, so when I'm able I set aside some evening time. The middle of the day tends to be mucky for me, energetically-- that's the time for grounding, practical work.

The biggest insight in the past year has been a deepening understanding of the power of place. I will be working hard in the next year to try to convey the new ideas that have evolved. Because I have to do a lot of travelling, I've had a lot of time to explore the power of place. My alone time in the car, experiencing shifting energies as I pass from place to place has been an enormous gift. Without those countless hours behind the wheel (and in spite of my grumbling about them) I would not know what I know now.

In the next year, I will be continuing the process of downsizing. I will be growing even more of my own food, which can only help to firm up my renewed relationship with the land. I will be spending a lot more of my time writing. Beyond that, I will be living in my new paradigm and trying to uncover its possibilities. I will strive to live directly, not vicariously through anyone else, nor vicariously through any machines or gadgets or contrivances. I will seek to have only immediate experiences with what truly IS.

I wish you a very joyful New Year and success with whatever goals you have set for yourself this year.

Potential, Evolution and Labelling

2008-12-10T08:12:00.009-07:00

It was with a jolt that I realized in recent months that I meet many of the criteria for Asperger's Syndrome, the high-functioning form of autism. I went so far as to take an online test, the result of which said it was "highly likely". Bah!

I did some research online and found that virtually all geniuses and high achievers throughout history are now considered to have suffered from this condition. Doesn't that seem a little odd, a little curious? We want to label these people, who have contributed so much to human society, as somehow deficient??

I started to get really mad, especially when these sites talked about curing Aspergers or at least medicating it into submission. Medicating personality?

Now don't get me wrong, I understand that autism is real and can be extremely debilitating, especially at the lower end of the spectrum. Rates of autism have skyrocketed in recent years and it's a huge problem. We need to find out what's causing it--be it vaccines, environmental toxins, or something else--and fix it.

What I'm griping about is the general attitude towards the high-functioning end of this spectrum, which some people believe is not the same syndrome at all. Some are suggesting it's actually an evolutionary adaption. I tend to agree.

In one of her books, Temple Grandin talked about the differences in brain functioning between autistic people and "normals". There seems to be somewhat less activity in the frontal lobes of autistics. This makes sense as these areas affect such things as speech, socialization and mental flexibility/spontaneity--typical problem areas for autistics. Grandin, a highly accomplished autistic herself, believes that the autistic person is sort of half-animal, half-human in the way in which he or she perceives and responds to the world. And this makes sense too--our frontal lobes pretty much define us as humans. Her descriptions of her fluid, visual way of perceiving the world does seem to express a more primordial, animal orientation.

Here's what I think (bear with me):

Simply because a brain differs in function from the norm, doesn't make it a deficient brain. The brain is a fluid evolving structure, so you would hope there would be changes and adaptations over time.

It's easy to interpret a lessened reliance on the frontal lobes as a regression, and therefore undesirable. But what has occurred to me is that perhaps we're evolving to a more fluid way of being in the world and that new way of being will be much less reliant on the frontal lobes. Maybe in the course of our evolution highly developed frontal lobes were crucial, but once they serve their purpose, they will recede in importance.

I suspect that they were important for the development of ego. Speech helped us to name and label, creating subject and object--no longer a unified world, but us and them, self and other. No longer a fluid state of being, but clunky self-awareness. The need to belong to a group, to protect the isolated dot that you were.

One thing about Aspies (that's what they call themselves)--they have no need to belong. If the world were inhabited only by Aspies there would be no war or conflict, because they're just not concerned with those petty needs of the ego.

As I've said before (in Tracing the The Rise of Ego and Materialism), I think we're evolving from unconscious unity to conscious separateness (and ego) to, eventually, conscious unity. We are one with Gaia and with the cosmos, but we have yet to fully awaken to that. I believe that Aspies are at the cusp of this awakening.

The new human will live fluidly again with the world around him, in a state of unity and egolessness. In a sense he will be more animal-like again, with the only exception being that he will be fully awake--an enlightened, conscious being.

Check out this excerpt from Temple Grandin's book Animals in Translation:
http://www.grandin.com/inc/animals.in.translation.ch3.html

And this is a very beautiful myth about Aspies--it is a masterpiece:
http://www.aspergianpride.com/blog/aspergian-heritage/

Infiltration and Naturalization (Part 1)

2008-11-30T21:25:00.005-07:00

In my post titled Putting Down Roots I suggested that in order for us to live sustainably on this planet we must learn anew how to inhabit our ecosystems, becoming full participants again.

But how is that to be done? I surely can't be suggesting we return to hunting and gathering and sleeping in little grass nests like the !Kung once did. We must go forward from where we are, but what exactly does the way forward look like?

I don't pretend to have the answers, but I'd like to share the train of thought I've been following recently. As I've pointed out before, I want to use my practice of voluntary simplicity as a tool for exploring the many issues we face. From the clarity I gain by living without unnecessary distractions, I hope to be able to see things in novel ways. I don't expect to find the right answers, necessarily, but I wish to escape from bland, homogenized groupthink. I want to entertain possibilities.

The one question I've been turning over in my head for awhile is--Just how exactly do we become naturalized to our place in the ecosystem? When we move and enter a new locale--a new country perhaps--how do we become truly naturalized citizens of that place? We don't simply take a multiple choice test and consider ourselves naturalized. There's far more to it than that, of course.

About a year ago I read Amy Chua's very thought-provoking book World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability. It was about the way in which global free markets have created elite minority groups, what she calls "market-dominant minorities"--those groups (usually outsiders) who come to control the bulk of a country's wealth and natural resources. The Chinese in the Philippines, the Jews of post-communist Russia, whites in Latin America--these are a few examples. Then, if universal suffrage is granted to the citizens of these places, more or less overnight, it creates a situation primed for violence and turmoil. The indigenous people of a country, who have been so poorly treated and who have seen their land around them abused and despoiled by the market-dominant minority, suddenly have power. Not only to elect their own, and thus peacefully oust the interlopers, but also to seize property and assets from those they've ousted. Often things have turned even more dangerous, escalating to violence and genocide.

This post isn't about free-markets and democracy, though--it's just that this book got me thinking about the way in which outsiders can really screw things up (all in the name of progress, of course). An outsider comes in and sees cheap labor, cheap resources, opportunities for exaggerated profits. For them, it's about money, success, business. Extracting and transacting. As a result, culture and environment are decimated, the people left impoverished.

I've decided that market-dominant minorities (and multinational corporations) are like invasive weed seeds. In a healthy ecosystem, plants and animals evolve together over thousands or millions of years. Over time they create defenses to protect themselves from each other. There are checks and balances established that create a healthy balance. But if a foreign weed is introduced into that ecosystem--a totally alien seed that the local flora and fauna have never encountered-- it can grow unchecked. There are no defenses present in the environment to stop it. It can take over, smothering out the native vegetation (as the russian olive tree does around here and the kudzu vine does so well in the southeastern US). Market-dominant minorities and global corporations behave similarly. They ride in with their wads of cash, and what human ecosystem has yet evolved a defense against that? Land can be grabbed with wads of cash, metals, ores, timber can be grabbed, whole industries can be grabbed.

On a smaller scale, when we as individuals move about on this planet we run the risk of acting like evil weed seeds in our new landing places. We arrive unnaturalized to the local conditions. This is a dangerous state to be in. We want to be secure in our new place, so we start doing things to stake our claim. We build a house maybe (is the design in alignment with the local environment, or is it more a reflection of the architecture in the place we left?), we attend town hall meetings, city council meetings (do we try to impose our ideas right away, try to outlaw certain "backward" practices we find here?), attend school board meetings, find a church. All of these are ways we're trying to fit in and become naturalized, yet if we don't take the time to acclimate and to really get a sense of the community and all of its intricacies, we run the risk of introducing damaging practices.

In my community there's been uproar over a new school superintendent who arrived from California with his own ideas of how things should be done. The entire community has been up in arms about his crackpot ideas, which probably worked beautifully for him in his old district. He didn't take the time to acclimate to his new locale and find effective solutions that the community could back.

In Denver recently the city chopped down a beloved willow tree without realizing the importance of it to generations of people in the community.

I've heard of monstrous subdivisions going in on formerly agricultural land and the newcomers trying to outlaw livestock from adjacent farms because they object to the smell.

I could create a list a mile long with other examples and I'm sure you could too, but my point is we must take the time to acclimate to our new surroundings before we act. We have a responsibility to become naturalized citizens of whatever place on earth we happen to inhabit. It takes time to become naturalized--it doesn't happen overnight--so we must be careful in the interim, while we still have weed seed potential, to act with great care in our new environment.

Look for future posts expanding on this topic.

The Folly of the Growth Economy

2008-10-09T11:09:00.014-06:00

Is it reasonable to expect our economy to have continual growth? What does economic growth really mean, anyway, and how is it tied to our well-being? Are there better models of well-being we should be using instead?

To begin to explore this, let's first look at the word "economy". It comes from the Greek word oikonomia, which means household management. Oikonomia is related to the word oikos, which we translate as "ecology" but which originally meant house or dwelling place. So oikonomia is, fundamentally, how we manage the place where we live, whether it be our home, our community, or the whole earth. In it's basic definition, it is not concerned with money at all. It is concerned with managing resources, however.

To illustrate this, I'm going to tell the tale of two different "oikonomias". And to keep it simple, these two "oikonomias" are going to be small farms. I'll call it:

The Parable of the Two Farms

The first farm is self-sufficient. It reinvests its resources back into the land by various methods of sound stewardship. Kitchen and yard waste, as well as animal manures, are composted and spread on the fields; crops are rotated; cover crops are used in the off-seasons to protect and amend the soils; beneficial insects are encouraged and symbiotic relationships form among plants and animals, enhancing the well-being of flora, fauna, and soils alike; diversity is a priority. The soil is seen as the ground from which all life springs, so it is treated with great reverence. Care is taken to preserve topsoil and good tilth. Sound land management protects against unnatural erosion and any unnecessary disturbance of the soil structure. Water resources are used judiciously.

This complex and diverse oikos provides everything needed for the survival and health of its inhabitants. And, in most years, enough of a surplus exists to allow for bartering with other places for more "exotic" goods.

The second farm is a little different. It espouses a strange philosophy which it calls oikonomic growth. The goal is not health or well-being. Instead, the goal is to be manically busy and focused on producing more and more stuff. This requires each year to be more productive than the last. They must be able to export more each year. Numbers have to go up, always.

They plant every tillable acre and harvest all of the mature timber. The next year, in order for their oikonomia to show growth, they need to increase their yields. So, they spread chemical fertilizers on the fields and pesticides to limit insect damage. They begin to clearcut their remaining stands of timber. They move their livestock into pens and feed them grain instead of grass, for the sake of efficiency. The soil begins to erode in the clearcuts, the fields demand more and more chemical inputs just to maintain their current yields. Concentrated animal wastes from the pens seep down into the water table and the well.

Eventually, the farm's assets are depleted. The topsoil is gone. The land is sterile. The water is poisoned. The inhabitants are sick. The farm is no longer able to produce.

So how did these two farms fare in managing their households? Which of the two had a sound oikonomia? Is it the one that showed growth for a number of years? Or could it be the one that never showed any growth?

Leaving the parable behind, I'll end with one more question. Can there be such a thing as a steady-state economy--one based on sustainability instead of robbing from the future?

Read what others are saying about the concept of the steady-state economy:

http://www.meander.ca/?p=112

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3941

http://sinkinglifeboat.blogspot.com/2008/10/facts-are-in-folks-we-dont-need-growth.html

http://robertkyriakides.wordpress.com/2008/09/21/economic-growth-and-a-steady-state-
for-the-planet/

http://www.culturequake.org/Home/Blog/Entries/2008/9/21_Call_for_a_Steady-State_Economy.html

http://tipggita32.wordpress.com/2008/10/08/herman-daly-on-the-credit-crisis-financial-assets-and-real-wealth/

http://sunhomedesign.wordpress.com/2008/08/13/adam-smith-and-a-steady-state-economy/

http://thingsbreak.wordpress.com/2008/10/02/the-conversation-we-should-be-having/

http://www.steadystate.org/

Meditations on Peace: One Heart's Lament

2008-10-08T10:16:00.003-06:00

"Meditations on Peace" will be a recurring feature here.

Today it is the impassioned cry of an American soldier in Iraq. Please read his post here on iPeace and hold him in your heart today. Hold all those who are suffering the ravages of war in your heart.

Forget the Global Economy

2008-10-05T08:49:00.004-06:00

Let's step out of the mainstream for a minute and let go of some cherished notions. I'm about to propose a radical economic plan for the little guy. Hold onto your hats.

Here it is, in summary:

Live like your great-grandparents--or maybe better still, your great-great-grandparents.

But say no to indentured servitude. Some of our ancestors found their way here on a wish. It went by the name of indentured servitude and it robbed them of the very thing they most desired--their freedom. Today, we've wished our way into many things: houses, cars, cell phones, plasma t.v.'s. Those wishes are called mortgages, loans, lines of credit and service contracts. All forms of indentured servitude.

In a news article I read today, an economics professor referred to credit as nothing more than trust and faith. Trust and faith from the perspective of the issuer of the credit. Merely a wish from the perspective of the borrower.

It's a wish for future prosperity. Or a wish that things will continue to go as they have. Certainly it's a wish that things won't get worse.

In a lot of cases it's a wish to make yourself look bigger than you really are (see my post The Rise of Ego and Materialism). To live grandly in the moment, instead of sustainably over a lifetime. To look big now and maintain the wish that you will always be able to look big.

But we know you can't. As little children we're taught to recognize and respect limits, but as adults there seems to be absolutely no honoring of limits. The earth is finite. We can't all have more and more and more. That should be obvious.

If we lived like our ancestors and only bought what we could afford now, if we didn't borrow from the future and didn't take from the earth more than could easily be replenished, we could have economic security. We would recession- and depression- proof ourselves.

I know what you're thinking: our ancestors had credit, they had mortgages. Yes, you're right. They had credit at the general store. They had loans from the local bank. But they went to church with the store owner and the banker, they grew up together, they helped bring in each other's crops, often they were even related. In other words, they had trust and faith in each other. They depended on each other. These were real people having face-to-face interactions with each other on a daily basis.

Note that I didn't say they had transactions on a daily basis. There's a huge difference between interacting and transacting. Transacting is a fallen state, an abstraction--it's what we do now and what has gotten us into so much trouble.

Interacting is what we need to return to. It implies true human relationship, honoring each other and honoring the limits of the immediate situation. If there were still local banks where you personally knew the banker and he or she personally knew you and the bank's money came from and was invested in the immediate community, you wouldn't go in asking for a $700,000 mortgage. You'd be laughed out of town.

Instead, you'd ask for a loan that both you and your community could support. You'd build a house only big enough to meet your needs, without taking any more physical resources from the community than necessary.

My economic plan involves, as largely as possible, stepping out of the global economy and returning to a local one. The lesson from all of this recent madness is that we don't deal with abstraction very well. We can be responsible citizens on a small local scale, but it all falls apart when we increase the magnitude. In the global economy, we can't see the results of our actions anymore--they're spread so widely--so we lose accountability. When we participate in the global economy we inevitably cause suffering and damage.

We need to see the results of our actions. We need to live with the results of our actions. That's why our actions need to be on a local scale.

The Next Great Depression: When, Not If

2008-10-03T14:25:00.006-06:00

Is anyone letting out a big sigh of relief now that the $700 billion bailout has passed?

I didn't think so.

And why should we be relieved? Has anything actually been accomplished? Debt has been shifted around but it's still there. The underlying issues that created the problem in the first place haven't been resolved. We're still operating from within the same totally dysfunctional paradigm.

The goal of the bailout, they're saying, is to free up credit. That is the last thing we need. To go back to business as usual? Come on.

I would much rather have our day of reckoning right now, for believe me it's coming. I would almost wish a depression on us, if it weren't for the magnitude of suffering that will inevitably result. A depression would be nothing more than a true reckoning of our situation. The fact is we are a debtor nation. The greatest debtor nation in the world. Americans now owe more on their mortgages than their houses are worth. We don't own so much as our own front doors. We have nothing. Why can't we face that now and begin to build true wealth?

I believe this bailout solves absolutely nothing. As individuals and families we need to prepare for the absolute worst. The dollar is going to fail. We are going to suffer from hyper-inflation. Savings, retirement accounts will be totally wiped out. Just forget that you even have them.

Focus on the real, tangible things. Your house, your land, your local community, your food supply, your water supply, how to stay warm, how to stay healthy, how to get along with people. The only capital that matters is our human and environmental capital. You know, the real stuff. Credit isn't real. Mortgages aren't real. Money isn't even real--we just use it symbolically to create the life we want.

But we can create good, meaningful, balanced lives without Wall Street.

That's the good thing that could potentially come out of all of this. Once people get over the shock of it all, and begin to let go of their idea that money ever meant anything in the first place, we might evolve into a whole new way of thinking and being.

We will return to living locally. Resources for the most part will remain within our communities and our communities will once more be strong vibrant places. We will no longer exploit the environment because it will be our environment--what we can see with our own two eyes. We will have to care because our well-being will depend on it. We will no longer have the luxury of robbing from future generations to finance our excesses. We will learn to live within our means and the means of this planet.

I know I sound like some doomsday extremist, but these are very extreme times. You have to know our economy can't continue growing indefinitely. This world has limits and we are already rubbing up against many of them. Sooner or later this system will fail. My prediction is that the time is nearly at hand. So, maybe the bailout buys us a little time. My advice--use that time very wisely.

iPeace: New International Peace Initiative Gaining Momentum

2008-09-24T03:00:00.001-06:00

On Monday the new international web portal, iPeace, officially launched. It aims to become the world's largest peace portal and has set the goal of reaching a membership of 1 million people by the end of the year. Built like other social networking sites, iPeace seeks to unite people around the world who are committed to working for peace.

Just to look at the beautiful faces of iPeace members from countries all over the world gave me goosebumps. All of these people are seeking true change. All of these people wish to create a better world. And the internet allows us to dialogue with them, to exchange ideas, to create allies for change, to initiate far-reaching programs and know that we will have support. We do have the power to create positive change and groups like this may go a very long way in helping us get there.

I encourage you to visit the site, become a member, and tell your friends about it. Think what might be possible if this global movement is able to reach critical mass. The power to change the world belongs to us. Let's grab this opportunity.

The "100 Things" Guy

2008-09-23T09:49:00.007-06:00

I keep seeing references on the internet to David Michael Bruno, the man who is trying to pare his belongings down to just 100 things. His blog, guynameddave, is some good reading and it got me thinking.

Owning just one hundred things--what an elegantly simple solution. What a clean, structured way to break free of our hoarding fetish. What an awesome tool for gaining clarity and breaking free of the consumer paradigm.

I've often thought that when my son is grown I'd like to live in a little hermit hut with just the essentials for survival. So I have to ask myself, if I were totally self-sufficient, i.e. off the grid and growing and raising my own food, would it be possible to do so with just one hundred things?

What do humans really need?

Here's what I would need. A shack for shelter, mattress and bedding, chair, table, woodstove, sink, toilet or outhouse, tub or shower (maybe), lights (solar, kerosene, candles...), pots, pans, jars, silverware and utensils, plates, bowls, mugs, canning equipment, grain mill, meat grinder (maybe), fridge (maybe), clothing, soap, hairbrush, t.p., and tools...lots and lots of tools.

Garden tools: shovels, spades, hoe, wheelbarrow, buckets, pots, hoses, watering can, rakes, trowels, pruners, scythe, and shears to name a few.

General homesteading tools and supplies: Post hole digger, ladders, fencing pliers, saws, a chainsaw (maybe), a mower (probably just my handy-dandy reel mower), handtools (now that could be a very long list!), clothesline, wash tubs and washboard, soap molds, brooms, scrub brushes, an ax, fencing, chicken wire, lumber, paint, watering troughs, feed bins, animal shelter, bee hives, root cellar, shelving, drying racks, barrels.

Luxury items: Writing desk, paper, pens, books.

So, that would all easily exceed one hundred things. But would it be excessive? I don't think so. Granted, hunter-gatherer societies have survived for aeons with just a few belongings, so I know we don't ultimately need much. We are animals afterall, and animals are innately geared to surviving in their environments without gadgets. But of course we have so degraded and distorted our environment, survival for us today is a more challenging affair.

A back-to-the-basics lifestyle, such as I dream of with my hermit hut, would for me represent a balanced lifestyle. Just enough, but not too much. A little impact on the environment, but a fair impact. And being free of excessive clutter would help me to blend in with my environment and become again a participant in my ecosystem, rather than something alien plunked down on top of it.

I have been in the process of paring down my life for several years and will continue to do so even after I'm in my hermit hut, I'm sure. But David Bruno has given me an interesting goal to shoot for. Apparently a lot of other people are taking up his challenge as well. There is now a group on FriendFeed for people who want to join the 100 Thing Challenge.

Beyond Materialism

2008-09-19T10:16:00.016-06:00

In my last two posts, I discussed some of the practical benefits of downsizing and living a simple life. But I want to point out that the majority of my posts won't be about the practical side of voluntary simplicity.

I want to use simplicity as a jumping-off point to explore the larger issues facing humanity and also to use it as a tool for exploring human potential. I don't think of voluntary simplicity as an end state
--something to be achieved. Rather, I think of it as a door opening up to a larger reality. I want to document my tentative steps into that new reality here, because I suspect that amazing things will begin to happen. Where will this journey take me? Will I come up with any novel insights into the human dilemma? Will I create positive change in the world? I want to document this process mainly because no one else is doing that yet. All the other voluntary simplicity blogs and websites are still talking about the basics, the how-to's. But that's only the very beginning. I think a new paradigm is waiting to emerge and I would like to play a part in birthing that. I hope in the future that other people will begin to share their journeys into the new paradigm as well. We need many different voices showing the way.

For now, I'll leave you with some random questions, which I'll be delving into down the road:

If you step out of the consumer paradigm--what's left?

How does the land, the Earth, relate to our human potential?

What if we honored limits, confined our creative expressions within the limits of the local ecosystem? Are those limits annoying constraints, or are they forms of profound guidance held in the land?

Why is economic growth used as an indicator of well-being? What other models of societal well-being are possible?

Does the human being only exist to possess and control matter? Where else could life energy be going?

Why do humans seek novelty?

Are we going soft?

What core knowledge, what vital skills, are being lost?

How do my choices impact future generations, the health of the earth, all living beings, my local community? What's my larger responsibility here?

How can I help my children develop a more encompassing philosophy toward life than that which the consumer paradigm promotes?

If it saves me time, does it cost me something else?

What percentage of my time goes toward spending, earning, consuming, protecting and planning for--THINGS?

What am I trying to buy with money?

What percentage of my time goes towards mindless distractions? Where could my time be going?

When considering purchases (beyond the necessities) what if I asked: "Will this help me become the person I'm meant to be?"

What opportunities does the practice of voluntary simplicity create for me?

My Best Move Ever (Part 2)

2008-09-17T10:14:00.005-06:00

In Part 1, I talked about the financial benefits of simplifying my living situation. Today, I'll talk about the other benefits.

Less stuff generally translates into more time. With less clutter, there's less time spent cleaning, rearranging, and searching for stuff. Shopping is streamlined --I know I don't have space for anything but the necessities, so I don't waste time window shopping for things I can't have. I try to do one major shopping trip per month (mainly for groceries) and stay out of the stores as much as possible the rest of the month. I'll still need milk and eggs, cat food and a few other incidentals, but I keep those trips quick and to the point. I also don't waste time with maintenance issues since I rent. There have been very few of those anyway, but at least when they do happen, I'm not the one to waste time arranging for contractors or shopping for parts.

I enjoy a slower pace of life here. It's like I've stepped back in time a generation or two. I love the fact that I can let my son run around and enjoy purely unstructured play time here. And the innocence of play is refreshing. In the past weeks it's been Fun With Vegetables. Most everyone here has a garden, so the kids have been entertaining themselves in creative ways with veggies (and fruits). One night it was eating a watermelon they had just picked in the one yard and making a game of chucking the rinds. Another day they carved a jack-o-lantern. A woman down the street gave them a round melon or winter squash that had split open and they were kicking it around and tossing it. My son created a pulley in the back yard and was hoisting and then smashing over-ripe zucchinis (great fun, let me tell you!) which broke them up into better sizes for composting. He came home with a cute gourd that someone else had given him.... I could go on, just talking about vegetables but you get the point. Families don't seem to be so over-scheduled and harried in my town. There's a lot of just families being families and kids being kids. I love that.

And that reminds me of another benefit. There seems to be more neighborliness here than in the suburbs. When I first moved in, I can't tell you the number of people who stopped by to introduce themselves to me. I had never had anything like that happen anywhere else I've lived. People still wave to you on the roads as they pass, whether they know you or not. Such a civil gesture. In the cities, you're likely to see hand gestures but of a much different variety.

There are fewer distractions and annoying interruptions. I've had two door-to-door sales people since I've been here, maybe five or six brochures (mostly the Schwan's guy, who never stops by when I'm home so I can't put an end to it), and two or three visits from the Jehovah's Witnesses. Not too bad after nearly three-and-a-half years in this place. Since I don't buy much anymore and never order from catalogs, I'm not on any mailing lists either. My mailbox is gloriously empty most of the time (it helps that we only have P.O. boxes here --I don't think bulk mailers send as much junk to them as they do to street addresses).

A smaller house also means a smaller environmental footprint and that feels really good. It takes less carbon to heat and light a smaller house and fewer materials to furnish and maintain it. And the actual footprint (square footage-wise) of the house means that less impermeable surface area has been created, leaving more land to absorb rainfall and replenish the water table instead of running off into storm drains and out to sea.

And finally, a simpler lifestyle has brought me much greater satisfaction. I'm satisfied with what I have and where I am and how I'm living. I have all I need--really far more than I need--and I feel incredibly blessed.

My Best Move Ever (Part 1)

2008-08-11T10:07:00.009-06:00

My best move ever was moving to a smaller house. Actually, it was more than just that. It was simultaneously moving to a smaller house, moving out of the suburbs into the country, and switching from owning to renting. Those three factors have combined to give me more benefits than I could probably list...but I will try.

First, the financial benefits. My mortgage for the old house was $1492/month. Rent for the new house is $340/month. My car insurance dropped by more than a third because I moved out of a major metropolitan area. I pay no property taxes and have no maintenance costs.

Aren't I tossing money away by renting? Not necessarily. When I owned, I was tossing away nearly $10,000/year in interest (after you deduct what I saved in taxes). Now granted, over the course of 30 years, my interest payments would have gone down, IF I actually stayed put--but being a rather typical American, I move every few years. And IF I stayed put, the house would likely have built equity to at least counteract some of my interest payments. Maybe...but just because markets have performed in a particular way in the past is no promise that they will continue to do so. So you never know.

What I do know is that so far, given the current housing slump, renting has been the better deal for me. The timing was just right and the fact that I was simultaneously downsizing has made it work for me.

The other financial plus is that renting has broken me of thinking like a homeowner. As in: Gosh, wouldn't the kitchen look better with a tile floor, or new white cabinets with glass fronts? We really need a new front door. Why'd the old owner's ever put carpet in the bathroom? A shed would sure be nice out back. And a deck. With a pergola. I never cared for rosebushes much, let's put something else in. It's never-ending when you own a home. There's always some project lined up.

Renting breaks you of that. Sure, I can think of things that would improve my little house, but the fact is it's incredibly charming just the way it is. I don't need to make any changes. Renting has helped me appreciate things as they are, has got me to stop fiddling and fidgeting with everything and just leave them be. Which is ultimately very nice on the wallet.

Then there are the utility bills. My old house was 2440 sq. ft. with an additional unheated 900 sq. ft. attached garage/workshop. My new house is 485 sq. ft. Which do you think costs more to operate? Here, I spend about $500/year for heat and about $400/year for electricity for everything else. Trash service is not mandatory (okay, that has its downside, i.e. neighbors burning noxious crap!) But, I take my own trash to the landfill and since I compost and recycle and don't buy much in the first place I go about once every 2 months. It generally costs me between $3.50 and $5.00 per visit. (In the metro area, trash service was mandatory and if you wanted to take a special load to the landfill it cost $20-something per car-load.)

Being 90 miles from the metro area has other financial benefits as well. Dinner at a restaurant in town costs around $5.50 or $6.50. The one time I went out for breakfast my total bill was $1.75. I can see a $3.00 movie in a neat old theater that still has its original stage curtains and is full of rich architectural detail. And vet bills are extremely low. A visit for a kitten's first shots was $10; for a cat with an infected wound $30, including meds. The most I've ever paid was $38.50, and that was a very dire situation. Back in the city, it seemed like every visit was at minimum $300. They always wanted to run every test under the sun when something was wrong. It's refreshing here to see these country vets taking a very no-nonsense, down-to-business approach to their work.

In the three years I've lived here I've saved thousands of dollars.

In Part 2, I'll get to the other benefits beyond money.

Putting Down Roots

2008-06-15T10:07:00.009-06:00

There is a missing piece in the discussion about sustainability. It is the significance of place and rootedness. Of humans putting down roots by once again becoming literal parts of their ecosystems. As long as we remain divorced from the land, above it and separate from it we will not live harmoniously with it.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, in her wonderful book about her experiences with the !Kung bushmen in Africa (The Old Way), depicts a society of humans who were beautifully interwoven into their ecosystem, as full participants in a complex and healthy web of life. Particularly striking to me was her discussion of the relationship between humans and lions; how they co-evolved and lived harmoniously together over the ages (only to have that balance finally destroyed in recent times by the arrival of pastoralists). The Old Way is now gone for the !Kung, as Thomas made depressingly clear in her final chapters, and today you'd be hard-pressed to find even a few examples of societies which still fully participate in their ecosystems. But for the bulk of human history we all lived immersed in an ecosystem, coevolving with the plants and the other animals, adapting to local conditions and occupying vital niches.

As we developed culture and especially as we moved off the land into cities, we stepped out of our niches. We stepped out of nature and placed ourselves above it. Culture has been plunked down on top of nature, completely out of context. Nature gets squeezed to the outskirts of culture, for the most part. Out of sight and out of mind for a lot of people.

The fact is however that we are embedded in nature. We are shaped by the land around us. Our every move is embedded in the matrix of earth and atmosphere. As we move we set off eddies of air currents, our heat rises, we are exchanging gases with the atmosphere. The plants around us share with us their breath and we share with them our own. When we eat their fruits, we transmute their plant flesh into our own flesh. We feed on our soils as well, indirectly for the most part, but nevertheless. The smells, the sounds, the landscapes of nature are internalized, laid down as neural passages in our heads, becoming literally part of us.

A return to balance here on earth will require us to recognize and re-embrace our place within the larger ecosystem. But first we must merely remember. So much has already been forgotten.

In future posts, I will explore the subject of place and rootedness in depth. My next installment will cover the process of "naturalization" from a unique slant.

Book Recommendations: Immigration and Population Issues

2008-06-14T08:43:00.019-06:00

I've added a list of book recommendations in the sidebar. The only one I need to qualify is How Many Americans?: Population, Immigration, and the Environment, by Leon F. Bouvier and Lindsey Grant.

I'm not sure how many times I picked this book up and set it back down before committing to reading it. The title alone made me feel defensive. If it was going to be bashing immigrants, I had no stomach for it. Simply put, I don't recognize borders. They are imaginary, divisive things. We are one species and I don't believe that any individual has more of a right to occupy a particular place on this planet than anyone else. So if this book was going to be saying, "Keep out all those d*** foreigners", it wasn't going to be worth my time.

Well, I'm glad I gave this book a chance, because it ended up being very thought-provoking and fairly persuasive in its argument. And it served as a good reminder to me not just to read things I know I already agree with, but to lend an ear (or eyeball) to opposing viewpoints as well.

I've been keenly interested in population issues and believe overpopulation to be the No. 1 critical issue we face. All of our other problems are stemming from too many people on too small a planet. Until I read this book, though, I had never considered that the U.S. might be suffering from overpopulation. What's a measly 304 million people in this vast land compared to the populations of India and China? It hardly seems significant.

Yet, the authors' projections for population growth here in the U.S. were alarming. They could be way off-base--projections are notorious for that. But the book was first published in 1994 and here fourteen years later it turns out their projections so far were actually conservative. (I wish I had the book handy right now so I could share the figures, which we could then compare with these: Population Clock. Darn it! I'll edit in the figures as soon as I can.) [Okay, here they are: the authors estimated that we would reach 300 million people in 2012. We actually hit that mark in October of 2006, which means the curve is much steeper than even the authors had predicted.]

The book got me thinking about immigration in new ways. I'm not sure what I believe, but at least this book challenged me to think in new ways. Here are some things I wrote in my journal right after I finished the book (don't hold me to any of my crackpot ideas, please):

Regarding borders...

If there were no borders of course people in marginal lands would move in droves to more productive places, which would then in time become over-exploited until people moved on to the next best place and so on. There would still be suffering but (if I can claim such a thing) more equitable suffering.

Regarding immigration...

What I had never really thought through until now is this: in these extremely dire times, closed borders (which is not at all what the authors were proposing--they were proposing serious limits, but not outright restrictions) might be our only hope. Not just for the U.S. but for the planet. If we stop immigration and lower fertility, ultimately decreasing our population, we will be able to preserve groundwater, forests and other vital environmental resources, prevent more species from going extinct, and perhaps a still (relatively) green America might offset some of the massive environmental degradation elsewhere. A green America, in a world out of ecological balance, could potentially be the thing that staves off total environmental collapse worldwide. Who knows? After all, Americans consume something like 20-40 times more resources than people in third world countries, so each person you add to the population here in the U.S. has a huge negative global impact.

Here, Jared Diamond, one of my favorite "big-picture" people, talks about population and consumption. He states that individuals in first-world countries consume 32 times more resources and produce 32 times more waste than individuals in third-world countries, and that it is consumption that matters far more than sheer population numbers. The problem, he says, is not merely how many people are crowding the planet, but how many times how much. Six, seven, or eight billion people, if they've all acquired the American lifestyle, would create quite a different world than the one we have now (or quite possibly no world at all).

Fear-Based Living

2008-06-13T11:24:00.004-06:00

When you explore voluntary simplicity in earnest it seems inevitable that, somewhere along the way, you will confront the big existential issues: who am I, why am I here, where am I going?

Simplicity creates emptiness, something that so many people fear. The frantic quality of modern life seems to be an attempt to run away from the big and meaningful issues, to never confront the cause of our fears and insecurities, to never be still long enough to do so. Emptiness is frightening. Stillness and silence are intimidating.

Simplicity opens up space--physical space, mental space, spiritual space. What is going to fill that? The beautiful thing is that something always does fill it. Not knick-knacks, not staff meetings, not baseball practice, or workouts, or appointments with the chiropractor, or lunch dates or trips to the mall. Something else. Spirit, you might call it. States of bliss. Serenity. Radical fearlessness. Radical freedom. And a safe context in which to confront the big questions.

At first though, what might want to fill the empty space is dread. That's okay. That means the bigger questions are starting to surface. That's why we're here, to confront those bigger questions. How will you ever live up to your fullest potential if you never confront the big questions? Manic, fear-based living is not conducive to you becoming fully who you are meant to be in this life. But it takes some courage to cultivate emptiness. You must be willing to pass the edge of the frontier and step into the unknown. You have to confront the demons waiting there.

Voluntary simplicity isn't the only way to create emptiness, of course. There are many different forms of what I call "emptiness practice": silence, solitude, fasting, meditation, celibacy, yoga, even the down-time when you're recovering from a prolonged illness. All of these things can get you to the same place, to the same lessons, to the same revelations. Telling, isn't it, that most of these practices come out of our spiritual traditions? Even voluntary simplicity itself, which now has such a secular flavor, originated in the "vows of poverty" and similar practices found in the early histories of our great religious traditions. Think of the Buddhist monks with their begging bowls, and Christ with his injunction to the wealthy young man, "Go, sell what thou hast."

Emptiness must come first. Fearlessness follows. Radical freedom follows that.

Fearlessly embracing your radical freedom means you can do anything. You can be a Gandhi or a Mother Teresa. You can change the world. You will be acting from your highest potential and from that place anything is possible.

Economic Woes--Could This Be The Best Thing Ever?

2008-06-12T13:15:00.004-06:00

A worsening economy, rising gas prices, the mortgage fiasco, the weakening dollar. It all sounds so ominous and frightening. I'm being seriously impacted by it and I'm sure you are too. But as ever-the-optimist I see the silver lining here as well.

We are being forced to change our ways. We are being forced to adopt better ways. The price of gas has us thinking about energy conservation and shopping locally and living within our means. The housing crisis may help people more wisely evaluate their living situations and their true needs before jumping into supersized mortgages. The weakening dollar may help us to rein in our focus, away from the global economy to local economies, to re-building community, to creating bartering networks and to re-embracing our specific place in the ecosystem.

But beyond all of these personal things, the economic crisis could help reform what is a broken, dysfunctional free-market system. We may personally be suffering now, but the corporate world is really going to be reeling. This situation is our way in. We may complain about how corporations are desecrating the earth, damaging human health and exploiting billions of people, but most of us feel powerless to do anything about it. Corporations wield absurd power.

The economic disaster looming before us is our chance to challenge the corporations. We can say no to cheap crap from overseas and buy locally, and it will get easier and easier to do because cheap crap from overseas is soon going to be expensive cheap crap. At some point it's not going to make sense for corporations to outsource to the cheapest country because the fuel costs involved in shipping will wipe out any savings. The same applies to industrial agriculture. People will increasingly support local farmer's markets, sign up for CSA shares, and plant their own gardens. They will no longer be willing to bear the costs involved in industrial farming, especially not the transportation costs. Why pay extra for bland Mexican-grown tomatoes, when backyard tomatoes or farmer's market tomatoes are juicier, healthier, cheaper, and don't taste like cardboard.

Imagine recreating healthy local food systems, vibrant local economies, and sustainable practices all around. Change is possible, and before us right now lies a huge opportunity.

One Guy's Tips for Reducing Home Energy Consumption

2008-05-24T09:53:00.006-06:00

I came across this article recently in Mother Earth News: "Easy Projects for Instant Energy Savings". In it the author, Gary Reysa, offers the eight best projects you can do around the home to increase your energy savings. Using just these eight tips, his family was able to reduce their electric usage by more than half. It would be well worth your time to check out the article, as well as Gary's own website builditsolar.com, for lots of useful information.

But something about the article rubbed me the wrong way. It was the fact that he was missing the Number 1 Tip for Reducing Home Energy Use: MOVE TO A SMALLER HOUSE. (If it seems like I'm shouting that's because I am.) Let's look at his numbers. In the article he states that he was able to reduce his household energy use from 93,000 kWh per year to just 38,000 kWh. Quite a reduction, but I'm distracted by his numbers more than anything. Ninety-three thousand kilowatts! How is that even possible? I added up my electric usage for the past twelve months and it was 9,305 kWh. And I have electric heat. He never states anywhere in his article the square footage of his house, but I have to imagine that it's at least ten times the size of mine. How else do you get an electric bill of that magnitude?

Who needs a house that's ten times bigger than mine? A polygamous sect, maybe, but not the average family.

And even his reduced energy usage (38,000 kWh) sounds obscene to me. In the article he boasts about how he's reducing the emission of greenhouse gases (two pounds of carbon dioxide for every one kWh). That's 55 tons of CO2 emissions he's keeping out of the atmosphere every year (see footnote). Bravo, of course. But on the flip-side, he's still contributing 38 tons of CO2 per year. How can that be a good thing?

My intention is not to make Mr. Reysa look like a bad guy. He obviously wants to make a difference. It's commendable that he is sharing what he's learned with so many others, through this article and through all of the information available on his website. I sincerely applaud what he's doing. But I want to ensure that the bigger picture doesn't get lost.

House sizes in the U.S. have increased dramatically since the 1970s. According to the Census Bureau, the average new home in 2005 was 2434 square feet, up 46.6% from 1660 square feet in 1973. Even if you want to buy a smaller home, they're getting harder and harder to find. Builders aren't building small homes anymore. And in the old town centers around here, the cute old cottages are being scraped off and replaced by oversized monstrosities that look ridiculous on their tiny lots.

Perhaps our current economic woes and the mortgage fiasco will help reverse the trend towards larger and larger houses, but don't count on it. The building industry has convinced us we need: a living room and a family room and a game room; an eat-in kitchen and a formal dining room and maybe throw in a breakfast nook; four or five bedrooms for a family of four; a home office; a home-theater room; and a five-piece master bath with walk-in closets. Until we let go of the kind of thinking that has us saying "Okay" to all of this nonsense, builders will keep producing it. It's up to us as individuals to demand responsible housing options and persevere until we get them.

Footnote: After writing this I noticed some inconsistencies with the figures. In the Mother Earth News article the author claims only to have reduced his CO2 emissions by 17 tons (on his website he says 18 tons and his other figures are a little different too). Yet by my calculations based on 2 pounds of CO2 for every one kWh (a figure he cites in his article and which I confirmed to be true, albeit as a rough estimate since it varies from power plant to power plant) he should have reduced his emissions by 55 tons.

Tracing the Rise of Ego and Materialism

2008-05-20T09:06:00.005-06:00

I want to gain an understanding of the history of ego. My guess is that ego didn't exist, or only barely existed, in hunter-gatherer and tribal groups. The more egalitarian and interdependent a group, the less need for individual ego. With the rise of agriculture and permanent settlements, we started to have specialists and an elite caste. That's probably where ego first began to evolve significantly, especially among the kings and pharaohs. The commoners likely still lived in a collective mindset, but the elite were beginning to individuate and thereby develop egos. They were the first to have the luxury to do so.

The pyramids and other monuments to the elite were massive structures of self-edification. The pharaohs were announcing, "Look, I'm somebody!" Eventually, ego (and a sense of self) spread from the elite to, well, just about everybody nowadays. Today, we're all building massive structures to the self --what else do you call these hideous gargantuan things we're filling our suburbs with? "Hey, look at me, I'm somebody" we all seem to be announcing.

James Howard Kunstler, in his book about peak oil and other imminent catastrophes (The Long Emergency) said something that got my attention. He was talking about how fossil fuels allow each of us (in the West) to live as if we had hundreds of slaves at our beck and call. In other words, we live today like little pharaohs. Fossil fuels elevate all of us into significant somebodies (or so it would seem).

But what exactly is this connection between ego and materialism? As you become a separate somebody, what happens that makes you start grabbing for things? As you're separating from a tribal identity, you're also separating from Nature. Where once you were an interconnected part of the whole, now you are separate and just an insignificant dot. You can't go back to the old way once you have an awareness of self, yet there must remain in you some glimmer of tribal memory and a yearning for that kind of connection and belonging. Grabbing at stuff --it's really an infantile maneuver. We heap up all of this stuff around us as if to reassure ourselves that we're really somebodies, not insignificant dots afterall. We want to stand out and be noticed because ultimately we want to belong again. We can't fuse back into our collective unconscious; we know too much. We're human sapiens sapiens after all --we "know that we know". There's no going back.

Stuff becomes an extension of self. It makes us look bigger. It makes us seem powerful. Think about what happened when the horse was first domesticated. A warrior on horseback was "bigger", he was more powerful. His self expanded to include self+horse+(usually) bronze weaponry. That bigger self could command far more resources than those smaller selves who didn't have horses. The horsemen could dominate and thereby control more wealth and resources. Obviously as individuals they were no more special or powerful than anyone else, but by using things outside of themselves as artificial extensions of themselves (horses and weapons) they made themselves look bigger than they were.

And, in a nutshell, isn't that what ego is? Simply making yourself look bigger than you really are? It starts to seem really ridiculous that after all these thousands of years, we're still doing the same childish thing. I guess in the whole sweeping span of our evolution, a few thousand years is nothing, though, so long as we're not stuck here forever.

Why should we want to look bigger than we really are? Here's the trajectory I think we're on: as we've moved from tribes to city-states to global civilization, we've been moving from a mythic collective identification with the cosmos to the individual isolated dots we now are to (our next step) a supraconscious return to Oneness. This is a theme I'll be returning to in greater depth as this blog evolves because it's so important. This egoic stage, this grossly materialistic stage, while very dangerous is also vital and necessary. We needed to become isolated dots in order to recognize what we had always been immersed in. We needed to become Subject and Object, Self and Other ...to condense into separate dots out of the collective soup from which we were born in order to see ourselves and to know ourselves for the first time.

Making ourselves look bigger is our childish attempt to get at our True Identity. Our True Identity is huge; I think we know that intuitively. But we make the mistake of thinking that our identity is only a physical one, so we heap up physical stuff. These external things are not us, unless you look at it all spiritually and then everything is us. But that makes us all one being , all equally powerful. And then there is no point in egotism because who are you going to boast to, and about what? Once we evolve into the next paradigm, we will have shed that childishness.

Are We Going Soft?

2008-05-19T10:08:00.006-06:00

I got to thinking about this question earlier in the month. On the 1st of the month I was driving my son to school. Out of the blue he said, "Yeah, we get to turn on the air conditioner today!" What made it odd was the fact that it was 4o degrees and snowing, with a coat of ice and slush building up on the windshield and visibility down to a few car-lengths.

My son claimed that (on a very muggy day back in February) I had promised him we could turn on the car AC on May 1st. My vague recollection is that I said June 1st, and only maybe June 1st.

What I know is that we humans love comfort. We seek it everywhere. So much of our materialistic urges seem to be centered around procuring comfort (and security, probably in equal measure--an issue I'll get to another day). Climate-control, the ability to adjust our living environment to a narrow range of comfort, is just one example. We spend now such a large proportion of our days indoors (is it 90%?--I need to check the statistics). We go from our climate-controlled homes, into our climate-controlled cars, then to our climate-controlled workplaces, malls, gyms, churches, etc. So the bulk of our lives are spent in a very comfortable, but narrow temperature range, maybe roughly 68-74 degrees Fahrenheit.

My question is, over the long term, what might this do to the viability of our species? One thing is for certain, over our long history we have shown ourselves to be creatures of extreme adaptability. We can be found on the coldest tundras, in the hottest deserts, in humid rainforests, temperate regions, on mountain heights --pretty much in every climatic zone. There may be no other species on earth as climatically adaptable as us humans.

Now, obviously if we looked at individual cases within our species we wouldn't seem quite as adaptable. You couldn't take someone from the Amazonian rainforest and transplant them onto the Canadian tundra, or vice versa, without causing those individuals significant physical stress. As individuals we are adapted to our local conditions. But even those conditions, minus central heating and air conditioning fluctuate quite widely. Where I live, over the course of the seasons and years and decades, I can experience -20 degree temperatures and 105 degree temperatures. In the tropical rainforests even, between daytime highs and nighttime lows, there can be significant variability, far more than in our climate-controlled world where we might only experience a range of less than 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

If we continue over many generations to live in air-conditioned comfort, might we eventually begin to lose the higher and lower ranges of our climatic adaptability? And if so, then what happens at the end of the carbon era if we haven't found adequate energy substitutes? Or what happens if war, or an asteroid or any other circumstance destroys our ability to artificially heat and cool our environment? There is no promise that our civilization will always continue in its present form. In fact it's a given that it won't. (For an interesting look at the fleeting nature of societies read Jared Diamond's book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed) So, what might happen to a species adapted only to a very narrow temperature range when it is suddenly forced to face extreme temperatures? I admit I don't know a whole lot about human physiology, but I do know that temperature extremes stress the heart at the very least. And obviously there's heat stroke and hypothermia. What other effects there might be I simply don't know.

I'm just speculating, and I think it's important that we all begin speculating about the ways our lifestyle choices now impact not just the present but the far reaches of the future. It's so easy to grab for comfort without thinking about anything other than our immediate desires, but responsible and mature humans must think through the far-reaching implications of all of our choices. If we choose to remain adaptable (by spending far more of our time outdoors, or by foregoing air-conditioning, or setting the thermostat far lower in the winter) we may sweat and we may shiver, but we may be doing a very great service to humanity in the process.

What are other ways in which humans may be going soft?

Father Christmas

2008-04-21T16:03:00.009-06:00

Two nights ago I had a dream. There was a wide dirt path (or a narrow dirt road for foot traffic) that was going straight through a young forest. A boy of about eight or nine was walking along the path. To one side of the path and parallel to it ran an embankment --it was like the abandoned railroad grades you see around here. A tangle of young trees and bramble grew on it, creating almost a tunnel effect on top. I was walking along the top of it, following the boy secretly from several paces behind, and partly obscured by the brambles. The boy turned in my direction at one point and I instantly froze to the spot so he wouldn't notice me, but as I froze I had also swivelled my body to look behind me. There on the embankment about ten or fifteen paces behind me was a man, who also was instantly freezing to the spot as the boy turned in our direction.

I recognized the man immediately; it was Father Christmas. But he wasn't round and jolly and he didn't wear a red suit. Instead he was tall and lean, with white hair and a white beard. He wore a long robe that was trimmed all around in white fur, but the robe itself was tan, like deerskin (reindeer skin?) or suede. I realized in an instant what should have always been completely obvious (but wasn't) --Father Christmas is a wizard! He gave a subtle nod to me, with maybe the merest hint of a smile. We were both up to the same thing --stalking the boy.

And that was it, the whole dream. What on earth am I to make of it? I was not working with Father Christmas. I had never seen him before (I don't think anyone is supposed to see him) and I had no idea he was following right behind me until I turned. Yet we were up to the same thing and I get the sense that I was up to something rather wizard-ish myself. I was stalking the boy, wishing to evade his detection, but I think there was more to it than just freezing to the spot and blending in. I think I was actively, maybe mentally, practicing some invisibility technique. It wasn't the freezing to the spot alone that prevented the boy from noticing me --there was some technique I was using that made it far less likely he would see me.

Let me add that there was nothing sinister in me stalking the kid. I meant no harm. I never intended to interact with him at all. It seems more like I was practicing on him.

So, where on earth did this dream come from? The only thing reminding me of Christmas in the past few days was a book I read about a family who boycotted Chinese products for a year (A Year Without "Made in China": One Family's True Life Adventure in the Global Economy, by Sara Bongiorni). Christmas was very trying for them since they had small children and virtually all toys are now made in China. The four-year old boy started making his list for Santa in August and kept adding and adding to it --and everything he added, the mom felt certain, was made in China.

But how did my mind make the leap from this mere mention of our traditional American Santa to a dream about a wizard in animal skins stalking a boy? It seems very unusual. But it sure has a neat mythic feel to it; it feels like for the first time I've gotten a glimpse of the real Santa. And I mean that, too, as ridiculous as it sounds. Over the past few centuries, as we've embraced materialism more and more extensively, Father Christmas --this wise, sacred being who I'm convinced has some mythic reality-- has been transformed (and dumbed-down) into this goofy, jolly, gauche caricature.

Maybe all this dream is demonstrating is my new way of seeing. After all, how can Santa Claus still be Santa Claus (in our twenty-first century American conception of him) once you've transcended the consumer paradigm?

And the wizard aspect of this is very fascinating. I did a brief Internet search to see if there actually have been traditions that believed Father Christmas possessed a sorcerous side to his personality. I didn't really turn up any solid evidence (but how does he get all those toys to all those boys and girls in one night?), except for some kind of dubious link to the germanic god Wotan (Odin, Woden). I will have to look into this further.

Probably, the dream isn't referring to historically accurate conceptions of St. Nick anyway. If this dream is representing my transformation into a new paradigm, then wizardry probably symbolizes my new perceptions and a more nuanced way of interacting with the world.

Hope

2008-04-20T12:28:00.005-06:00

So many neat things have happened to me since I first began to explore voluntary simplicity in earnest. Things I never could have anticipated. The coolest thing so far is that as I've meandered along, my focus has shifted away from the personal and more and more towards the global. Some kind of global citizen has awakened in me as I continue to be transformed by this process.

As personal as this process is (and surely different for everyone), I can't help but wonder if there aren't certain universal guideposts along the way. Maybe everyone who commits to a deepening experience with simplicity will go through certain unavoidable stages. Maybe everyone will eventually evolve towards the bigger picture; away from the small self, the egoic self, towards something grander and more all-encompassing.

This inkling is a fairly new one for me. Sometime in the past year I crossed a threshold; I reached a point in my explorations where the old consumer paradigm (well, hardly old, since most of the world is still firmly enmeshed in it) totally shattered. To see the world from outside the current paradigm has been utterly transformative for me.

The oddest outcome of all of this is that I begin to have hope. We live in such dire times; we're faced with so many compounding issues (over-population, loss of biodiversity, climate change, issues of food security and declining water tables, topsoil losses and desertification, the exploitation and suffering of billions of people because of the greed of the few, the end of the carbon era,...and the list goes on). Take a close-up look at any one of these issues and you're bound to feel at least a little bleak. Study them all in-depth for several years as I've been doing and it will be amazing that you can still pull your head out from under the covers every morning. It's depressing stuff. There's not a whole lot of reason for hope. At least not on the surface.

But, through this whole process, I've found hope. I'm still alarmed, but I'm excited now too. I've found a way to think about the future that is positive and life-affirming. It involves us, as a species (but person by person) waking up, busting out of the current paradigm and embracing our full human potential.

I believe that the practice of voluntary simplicity is one of the most powerful tools we have for busting through to the next paradigm. Maybe it will turn out to be the crucial one as well. It's not only a tool for personal transformation, but in a very practical way it brings us into right relationship with the earth. More important than anything else is that we survive this transition and to do that, as a species, we have to live lightly on this earth. Our practical, real actions matter more now than at any other point in our long history. Embracing simplicity is a very noble act, given our current circumstances.

I look forward to sharing my thoughts with you through this blog, and I welcome your wisdom and the tales of your journeys as well.