without words

almost


I've thought a lot of words but none have made it into computer blips. So it is just this image, which I laughed at that hen so much when I saw this.

But that isn't how it looks today. This is today:


Today is also comfort food (can you say, blueberry cobbler? So glad for the berries in the freezer!). Tomorrow is definitely insulated coveralls.

Which, one thing I notice, one thing that stands out like a sore thumb to me, is the expectation that people have that they should be able to go anywhere they want to anytime they want to. It is painfully cold? Snow? Dangerous road conditions, BE DAMNED! That's what I see as the prevalent attitude.

There was someplace I wanted to go yesterday, just for pleasure, and it had some elements of a commitment to it and I am loathe to break any commitment, but as the snow continued to come down, as we struggled to get the chores done (that all had to be done whether or not we were going to be gone for the afternoon), as we thought about coming home on questionable roads to a cold house, the decision to not go was not a difficult one. It is good at home. It is good with us.

Certainly, there is more than one way to live, but something is lacking when there is an overwhelming need to vacate one's life, or to involve others all the time, to have the psychological need to leave the house when all external factors would say to stay home.

Bourgeoisie: word for the year

I am no defender of Marx. In the parlance of “how’s that workin’ for ya,” it hasn’t worked anywhere. His overwhelming mistake was in the motivation of people -- from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs is not motivation to have more abilities than needs. And look at me even, and even in my state now which I think is a pretty productive, one of the reasons I was very opposed to the idea of Hillary becoming president was that I could see her coming to me and saying, hey, you have a degree in social work, you have to move to the city and use it, do the work of the state. Social work was dismal as it was and that would have only made it so much worse. No thanks.

The truth is, I’m not a student of Marx, or of economic theories in general. However, some of my thinking on the subject seems to be in line with some of Marx’s thinking. Like the alienation of the worker from his product. As a society now, we’re so far removed from our product that the whole d*mn country no longer produces anything real, and so almost no one is connected by work to his product because there isn’t a product to be connected to. Throwing bits and bytes around isn’t real, derivatives aren’t real, humanistic feel good groups are not real, even art is not real (more on that later). None of this “not-real-ness” means these things aren’t or can’t be valuable but they aren’t in the realm of “needs” and therefore also not in the realm of “abilities”.

Buying labor by the hour is simply another form of slavery. Marx talked about it in terms of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie had a very negative connotation in his thought, exploitative, but in the social structures he was familiar with, it was basically what we’d call the middle class today. In this country we’ve come to almost deify the middle class -- so much so that people who make $20K/yr and people who make $250K/yr all consider themselves to be “middle class”. But basically, if you are selling your labor, you are proletariat; and if you are buying someone else’s labor, you are bourgeoisie. In this country, there is pretty much no one who doesn’t do more buying of labor than selling of it (especially if you take into consideration the “real-ness” of the labor selling vs. the labor buying).

There is this thing, you see, the difference in value-in-use and value-in exchange -- that water is very valuable in use but not in exchange, and a diamond is not very useful but very valuable in exchange. I have chosen personally to deliberately place more value on things that are valuable-in-use and to largely disdain those things that are only valuable-in-exchange. Valuable-in-use essentially feeds people, keeps them warm, allows them their lives with which to do as they please. Valuable-in-exchange essentially exploits people, steals from them, asks them to look outside themselves and their own abilities for value. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I mean when I differentiate between real work from non-real work. And, as I said, it is even worse in the US because most people don’t even have a product to be alienated from.

Obama said in last night’s speech, and I quote: “As hard as it may be, as uncomfortable and contentious as the debates may become, it's time to get serious about fixing the problems that are hampering our growth.” He used some term that included “grow” eleven times, and at least six of those times he was talking about the economy or jobs growing. Jobs jobs jobs growth growth growth is all either side spouts.

Growth is the problem people. The jobs are slavery, the growth is cancer. Our standard of living is the problem. We have to get smaller, rein in our ambitions, learn contentment, the value of satiety, the meaning of enough; the environment needs that, social justice demands that, combating terrorism requires it. Do you fear mountain top removal or the possibility of another massive terrorist attack? Do you care about sweatshops in Indonesia or the children of Haiti? Then less consumption (that is, a lower standard of living, less traveling, doing without in general and reveling in the abundance of that) is the only thing that will help any of them.

So what then of art? What then of music, of fine food, of literature? There may be a few musicians and artists and authors who are so outstandingly good that, without coercion, with little exploitation of others, they might be fed and kept warm through the exchange of their art. But better is the tradition that we all materially support ourselves with our direct use of goods, and also all engage in our own form of artistry. When the artistry is not paid, it is not corrupted. When it is engaged in by everyone, it is appreciated by everyone.

It is hopeless of course because in the end it requires that people get really honest. Health care reform means many things but at bottom it does mean less health care. And it means financially poorer doctors. And fewer scans. And a LOT less drugs. Weird people are gonna have to be let be weird instead of being medicated into submission. Restless legs may have to remain restless. Many diseases will actually be cured by this, like MRSA. Ironically there will be a lot less anxiety when people have something real to worry about. People who are lazy, or unlucky, or stupid, may actually be hungry, and may actually see their children go hungry. People who would rather consume than secure for their family the means of production, well, I won’t cry for you Argentina.

We have to remember who we are. If we could do that as a country, we really could lead the world. To peace. To abundance. To cooperation.

where the longing for love beat out the struggle for the legal tender

I think I probably spend a lot of time on this blog extolling the pleasures of this lifestyle. So forgive me if I indulge in one quick moment of whining: I don’t believe the temperature here has been above freezing in 20 days at least. It has been three weeks now that the highs haven’t been out of the low twenties -- I know because highs in the twenties require insulated coveralls to work in and this is the third week I’ll be wearing them. With the highs in the twenties, the lows have been single digits. Every night they predict lows in the teens but every morning we wake up to single digits.

That much cold starts making things hard. Wood is frozen and sawing frozen wood is, well, imagine using a bread knife saw through frozen steak. When bucking up a big log with only a buck saw while snow’s on the ground , a chainsaw begins to look tempting even to us. The van’s fan belt broke and we can’t fix it until it warms up. The truck’s choke sticks. I’ve gotten the truck stuck twice on the steep part of the hill which has meant backing it down the steep part of the hill (and then all the way back out to the road) twice now -- once I was successful and once I needed a come along to finish turning the truck around after it slid exactly crossways in the road. There’s a valve in the water pressure tank that is protected in the basement and even it has frozen three times. The house is considered warm if it gets up to 60 degrees.

ENOUGH!

Here’s what I have to say. We could easily fix all those things and never ever have to put up with them again. We could have a four wheel drive vehicle that isn’t officially an antique. We could have a working chainsaw. We could have a damn tractor. We could have all the trappings of civilization. We could have all the thing’s everyone else has.

And here’s what we’d have to give up to have it. Everything. Because to have the chainsaw on the one day it would come in handy, we’d have to live to afford it every other day of the year. Likewise, in order to have the nice, nearly new family vehicle and 4WD truck and a tractor, we’d have to live to afford it every other day of the year.

And that living to afford it means not living like we do live, the personally, family, socially, globally, environmentally, spiritually (and every other way) responsible life we’ve grown together here on this mountain.

It is a privilege to huddle together over the fires sharing a cup of tea and figuring out how to get the minimum done while we enjoy each other and wait for it to warm up just a bit.

And even people who give up everything to have all the thing’s everyone else does have times that challenge them too. They don’t get out of that -- they just give up the possibility of everything else.

looking for the mustard seed amongst the blackberries

I don’t have photos, but it was 24 pints of blackberry jam, then the picking of eight gallons of blueberries. There will be more in the coming week. Plus the laying in of some hay.

While husband was picking the blackberries, there were canes that grew high, way over his head. Someone had been in this berry field before him and had not bent those canes down in order to pick the ripe berries but had bent them down and BROKEN them in order to pick the ripe ones. This leaves the unripe ones to rot, not ripen for the next person (or for the birds).

This is why I have so little faith in humanity.

Instead of asking ourselves how we’d live if we died tomorrow, it would be useful to ask ourselves how we’d live if we lived forever. Because we do. Through our children. It makes no sense to buy into artificial constraints (like those of schooling), but it makes even less sense to pretend there are no constraints at all.

This is the time of year for fruit. It is also the time of year to plant the fall/winter garden, to can, to preserve, to lay in, to provide for that time of constraint that is coming.

Life Ain't Always Beautiful

Warren Buffet tells a story of a woman who survived the Nazis. She was the only one in her family to survive. She told Mr. Buffet that every time she met someone she asked herself whether or not this was a person who would hide her from the Nazis.

Now, being the practical, funny, sideways sort of person that I am, I don’t think about who would hide me, I think about what sort of person I’d want to hide me. Because I don’t want a weak idiot who’s going to tell the first storm trooper to knock on the door exactly where I am hiding to hide me. Or someone without, say, food. Etc. I’m sure there were people like that who tried to hide people during the Holocaust but I’m sure we don’t have those stories because those people didn’t actually survive.

Only the smart, clever, tough as nails ones did. And many of those didn’t.

I happen to think that what is now happening in this country and in the world could be devastating, and people could be dying from what will happen, and likely not only in third world countries. Our family lives in a sustainable way, which means that we are not so affected by those vagaries of the wider world. We might be people that other people would wish to hide with. In fact, lots of people joke that way; “Oh, I know where to go” in case of this or that.

What I have thought about is what sort of people I would welcome in. Living sustainable is quite rewarding but it does require a few things -- hard work, hardiness, cheerfulness in the face of hardship, and pretty well all other things that have “hard” in them.

It is not an easy life. It is a worthy life.

So, will you be looking for someone to hide you? Or deciding who is worth hiding? Because doing for others is partly a matter of willingness, of kindness, of generosity, of morality. But it isn’t possible to do for others when you can’t even do for your own.

The woman who was hidden from the Nazis and survived, the woman who asked herself whether or not she thought a person would hide her should she need hiding, observed that she found it very difficult to make friends. You think? Real friends don’t come by the dozens. Real friends don’t just say the easy things. Real friends, well, . . . .

Visualize Worthiness

Milking this morning I saw the first hint of the mountains putting on her petticoats. The first green, after the crocus and daffodils and forsythia bloom, after the grass begins to grow, all the leaves beginning this year’s journey.

But this is also the time of year that the bones are most visible, noticeable, study-able. These mountains are old. Ancient. And they are not only my home but my genetic home. And they have bones. This time of year, with the leaf mold matted down by the snow and rain of winter, with only the trilliums and bloodroots breaking from the forest floor, all the fallen wood is visible. It is amazing, branches and whole trees nearly cover the floor in deadfall.

Below the deadfall are the rocks, sometimes forming what could be a dragon’s backbone. With the trees bare you can see small variances in the land, a little prominence there, a tiny dip over there, things that the green leaves will soon mask like a thick down comforter. The ridges. The hollers. The bottoms. Where the water flows sometimes. Where the water flows all the time.

It all means something. I don’t know exactly what it says but it speaks to me.

We have a new neighbor, new meaning he’s been there a couple of years. He’s an idiot, as are most new neighbors. It comes with it. Expect if you move anywhere at all to be a stupid new neighbor for at least awhile, and if you stay beyond that, your children might actually have a home because a sense of place is not an easy one to come by. This new neighbor overpopulated his pastures with ornaments and then underfed his hay. I expect he lives off investments whose value has been cut in half in the past year. So now he is logging his land. And not just logging it, as the land beside us was logged twenty years ago and all the trees over 16” diameter were taken, no. He’s stripping it. And it is steep. And he no doubt intends to expand his pastures. While he has them overpopulated. With pasture ornament long-horns.

And I watch. His bones are not from here and he will soon pass. When he cannot buy his life anymore, his destruction on this hollow will pass away. And this hollow will re-flesh itself. There will be some bones left to tell the tale but they will only whisper that something odd happened here while the riot of growth, cycled with rest, takes over.

Lynn Miller is editor of the Small Farmer’s Journal, and he’s written several of the most important books to have read if you are using draft horses, or horses to draft (which, frankly, after my big guy dies is the direction in which I think I will go). And with all his verbosity, he can be quite the poet. In the latest mailed issue, he wrote the following (long excerpt from much longer piece but really, it is worth it):

Then my brain goes meandering from location to person to people to these wholly predictable and largely lamentable times.

A few yesterdays ago we were set in a vulgar gaseous economy of absurd excess and biological disconnect, but it was OUR pattern. Want it or not, each of us owned some aspect. Maybe it was far distant and three times removed but it was there nonetheless. Now, as so many pieces, large and small, of our soured society and economy shrink and slough off, we are perhaps to be excused our apprehension and fear. We have been dependent on a vast, irresponsible ‘supply’ system and the presumption of unending growth. Now, where will we get this or that mechanical part? Or a gallon of milk? Or our heating oil? Or our prescriptions filled? Think I’m going too far with this? Think the system is “fundamentally” sound? Think that it will never breakdown that far? It already has.

Take as an example of our system’s collapse horses: first, artificial liquidity (borrowed money) made it possible for people to purchase lots of pet horses for their backyards. Second, fuel prices drove up the cost of feed. Then a curious mix of sentiment, political correctness and market realities did away with horse meat markets. Follow that with bank failures and the stock market crash which meant that now millions could no longer afford the yard ornament equine they owned. Now, we have a glut of unwanted horses (not speaking of our good work horses here) and no place for them to go. Out west, thousands of horses are being turned loose on public lands.

My point in this horse aside is that even here we are affected in ways few would have predicted just a couple of years ago. Where will we go with an unwanted horse? Sure, we may remind ourselves that not all horses are equal, yet in some final analysis they are all equal. Be it Seattle Slew, or old Dobbin, the beer company lead team or the three legged Shetland pony, if any of them show up at the local stockyards for sale, they will be turned away. And, then there is the likelihood they will be abandoned or neglected to their great discomfort. You can apply these sorts of concerns to a growing list of things in our lives. What is to be done with all of those over-priced super-sized vacant suburban homes? What is to be done with these millions of neighbors who are out of work? What will be facing our soldiers when they return from war zones overseas? What will become of all those unsold cars and trucks? How will folks get by when they can’t get heat and food? How will production agriculture get through a growing season without production credit? How and when will it hit those still standing?

He goes on to say that the world is in dire straights because it accepts the false premise of money as wealth, and that instead we must question and answer with what is actually worthy of our lives, work, dreams and prayers. Because of false abundance, because an entire life can be spent goofing off now, many have never really bothered taking a good measure of their values, determining what is truly worthy.

Thus the title of this post (also stolen from SFJ's cover). Visualize not world peace (because really, you are not willing to give up a single convenience for it). Not whirled peas. Imagine what it would be like to be worthy. Imagine what a life worth living would be.

Visualize worthiness.

Not Quite Life on the Farm

aka the Horse Show

There was a Pony Club Fun Show to be held at the barn. The owner of the barn offered my girls the use of a pony if they’d like, and the lady who ran the show this year heard this and offered her two minis for my girls’ use. The minis are too small for them to ride, but they had options to show them “in hand”.

The Pony Club is an organization to basically get kids “started right“ with horses -- you know, good, responsible, safe horsemanship -- and the fun show is an informal and fun and very inclusive fundraising sort of event. One of the classes is a costume class, and it being this close to Halloween, that class was an obvious place for the girls to start. They took their Halloween costumes and expanded them to have ponies as accessories: the witch sort of girl in a cloak brought her pet spider-pony with her, and the elfin huntress carried her bow and brought a pony with antlers who’d been shot through with a magical arrow.

The other class the girls entered was the in hand trail class. The lady who set up and judged trail loves trail and set up an obstacle coarse that was just beautiful. The local gun club donated their target animals and she used lots of brush and, well, let me just tell you about it. Trail is done one at a time. First you entered the arena, came to a halt, and checked your horse’s left front foot for a stone. Then you both walked up to an obstacle with an orange hunting vest and a foam target gun in holster hung on it. Lurking behind this in brush was a “fox”. You put the vest on and got the holster and attached it to your belt. Then you walked over a “bridge“ (raised wooden platform), then forded a “raging river” (a blue tarp with water on it). In the corner were two “turkeys” to investigate. Then you picked your way through a “downfall” (poles and brush set as low obstacles to walk through), then up to a water tub with “fish” in it. A “raccoon” was getting a drink of water from the “pond” but nonetheless, you had to fish until you caught a fish, then release it. The next obstacle was a lane to walk through that happened to have a herd of deer very near it. You walked your horse through the lane, then backed up the entire length of it (about ten feet), then continued through on the course. The next obstacle was tall brush that you had to walk through, and as you might imagine, a horse could feel trapped here, or squeezed. Especially since the first sight on the other side of the brush was two “bear”. The assignment here was to take out your foam target pistol and shoot the bear! Then trot back to the entrance in a controlled manner, halt, ground tie your horse (basically, drop the lead and have the horse stand as though you were holding him), and walk around your horse. After you were finished, you were to collect the “dart” from the bear and put it and the safety vest back in place for the next participant.

There were three divisions of trail; novice mounted, intermediate mounted, advanced mounted, and open in hand. This meant that my girls competed against everyone else who did in hand on a strictly equal basis, no matter age, experience, or anything. It is traditional that everyone in the costume class gets a ribbon, but the trail class is not so coddling.

Now, I’m not a big fan of competition, especially not for competition’s sake. I believe there are other far more useful ways to relate to the world. But many horse competitions started from things people did with horses because they were useful to do. This trail class really showed how “broke” a horse was, how trustful and responsive to his handler he was, how much he’d been exposed to before, how he had been handled and trained. My girls took ponies that they weren’t that familiar with (they worked with them on two different days before show day) into an event that they knew very little about and handled it all with aplomb. I couldn’t have been more proud of them.

And the rest of the family got as much a kick out of it. I wasn’t sure everyone would even want to go to the show. Shows drag on and on, the day was supposed to be cold and wet, and there were lots of things on our own farm to capture people. Yet elder child said when asked, “Of course I want to go! How often does a brother get a chance to watch his sisters compete in a horse show?” Younger was just as excited. Husband wisely took a book.

At the show, the girls and I were largely busy. The ponies were to be used by other children in a couple of classes so we wanted to make sure to get ours in, and have the ponies ready for the other classes on time too. And there was a silent auction to check out, and friends to talk to and cheer for, and noses to pet. The boys oriented quickly. We did the trail as soon as we could get ready for it and everyone watched. Then younger found another child with a Nintendo and watched over his shoulder. When he wasn’t doing that, he very uncharacteristically went around and talked to everyone. “Hi, what’s your name? My name is ____.” And when he’d see someone with a ribbon, he’d give them the thumbs up and say, “Good job!” with his infectious grin. Other child wandered amusing himself. Husband went back to the car to read.

Although they were entered as two separate entries, both the girls got a second in the costume class. No matter what the ribbons were, their costumes were the most creative and unusual there. I mean, a knight in shining armor and a princess on a unicorn are pretty common ideas, don’t you think? But a pony dressed as a spider or shot through with an arrow? How unusual! So it was a good opportunity to stress to all the kids that even when you compete, it is all about how YOU feel about it. Ah, but in the trail, one got a second and one got a fourth. In the OPEN class! It took me awhile to impress on them that they’d competed against every other horse they’d seen go in hand, and some they hadn’t seen, and they’d done that well! This wasn’t a costume, “let’s make sure everyone goes home with a ribbon” class. They’d really done well.

Now, some people have called me a hypocrite for participating in this, what with my ranting and railing against waste and falsity. Certainly, a horse show could be said to be a waste and a falsity but I do not determine that our participation in it was either. And I don’t allow other people’s judgments of my activities to be the measure that I use. I use my own measure. Which is the very thing I say other people should do when they accuse me of judging them.

And you should have seen the Divine Ms. D compete on her Adonis! And her husband with her ribbons across his chest hanging from the pockets of his shirt! Our barn’s own Mr. Ed won the beginner division championship. And there were so many more! Harley in dressage suitability, Gabby as a pumpkin with her scarecrow handler, Heather in the instructor’s class (“please reverse, drop your stirrups, then rising trot“), Zu getting thrown in warm up and coming back to place second in equitation, Charm showing her charming self.

'Tis a Gift to be Disillusioned

My intention with this blog has been to write about life on the farm, and so you’ve had tutorials on making cheese and butchering hogs, descriptions trying to capture what it is like to milk a cow every morning and every evening for five years, vignettes of what is happening at various times of the year, and a slew of whatever life on the farm had me thinking about that day. This still seems a little off subject but it is what I’m thinking about.

There is no green energy.

Ok. Get that? Energy is not green. None of it. Technologies that use energy are not green.

I first think of my midwife who not only protested nuclear energy when that was the popular thing to do, she got thrown in jail for it, and then wrote a book about being thrown in jail for it. But nuclear energy may come the closest to being green. Not that there aren’t serious drawbacks to it -- there are and they are obvious. We have NFS in these parts, having some pretty serious “hot” spills and keeping silent about it

Wind energy isn’t green, just ask the Kennedy’s. Or the folks fighting to keep turbines off the ridges of the mountains in NC. Seriously. Do you want it in your backyard, and do you know anything at all about the drawbacks of it? The noise? The death? What about the fact that a wind turbine doesn’t produce as much energy in its lifetime as it consumes in its birth?

They just flooded the Grand Canyon trying to mitigate a few of the deleterious effects of damming the great river to produce hydroelectric. I have a thing for the Grand Canyon. I hiked across her and rafted through her some years ago and it is was magnificent. Absolutely magnificent. Then, after I’d spent a month being in all these places, on the three day drive home I read Abby’s The Monkey Wrench Gang and knew something about what he was talking about.

I also live in a place with TVA dams, in a place where they confiscated people’s homes and farms and businesses and in one case an entire town and I’ll tell you, more than fifty years later people are still sore about it. And Aswan Dam in Egypt has just about killed the fertile Nile Valley.

I don’t want to go through every possible alternative energy, or all the boondoggles like ethanol and hybrids and hydrogen either. But I could.

And I live with coal and coal fired electric plants and strip mining and mountain top removal, so I know about that too. First hand, not in theory.

There is no green energy.

Except that of muscle and most efficiently of human muscle work. It is green to work, it is freeing to work, it is sustaining to work.

Yes, we have no bananas today

At the beginning of hay season, which was earlier than usual and harder than usual since no one had much hay or basically any pasture because of the drought (a word that does not conjure to mind the absolute horror that it was), I had husband call my usual hay supplier to inquire, would there be hay available from him. He assured me, through husband (this being Appalachian culture where man to man is a better way of dealing with some things -- man to man in this case being better because I would have cut this man’s balls off years ago although I don’t exactly dislike him) that as long as he had hay, I would have hay.

He operates on a totally industrial paradigm, raising cattle for the feedlots by the hundreds, and growing his own hay and corn for it. His hay business is a little side, almost like moonshine, because it is all small scale and in cash. I estimated that we could get by well on six bales. He thought they’d have that.

We got one. One. He asked us to be conservative with that and we were. I imagine that other people were not. At any rate, by the time we called to go get our second bale, which had my original estimate been correct should have been our fourth bale (that’s just how conservative we’d been), he wasn’t selling any at any price. Oh, hay is available. I can get for only $140 a smaller bale of worse hay than I got for $35 last year. Someone is selling square bales for $8 a bale. That should be $2.50. That’s gouging. That’s capitalism I guess. It certainly isn’t caring for one’s neighbor. Then again, I have had a lot of kindness shown toward me already and that is one reason I was just now calling him for my second bale.

To his credit, my hay guy, who didn’t gouge me but just ran out of hay, has his own cattle on half rations. That’s how tight it is. And my animals won’t starve. They may get skinnier. We’ve got to fence some more. We managed to open the January field back up again today. We’ll cut a pine tree down each day for the goats. The cow, being a Jersey, will eat some of that too.

To his debit, my hay guy had a hilariously pathetic tale of woe about his ex-girlfriend. As bummed as I am about the hay, as much as I was really counting on him to supply me, I’d rather be in my hay shoes than to be in his relationship shoes.

Through a Glass Darkly

I stopped by the local food store to pick up a pack of bologna. Ok, some beer too. Beer and bologna.

I was standing there in front of the selection of bolognas trying to discern the best buy, having waited for another working man to make his selection (I later met him again in the beer isle), when a old, scruffy man missing one foot (I couldn't tell how much of his leg was gone with it) rolled up to me in a wheelchair.

"A body can't afford to eat anymore, can they?" he said by way of introduction.

"Every time the dollar goes down, prices go up," I reply.

"It's gettin' bad, prices goin' up every day," he said.

"Yep," I said, "people are going to have to grow a garden if they want to eat. Like they used to."

"Lawd, people are too sorry to do that. I have children that are too sorry to pick a piece of bread up off the floor," he said.

"Well, your children and those other people are going to be hungry then, aren't they?"

"Huh, I guess they are. You've been working," he says as he eye's my muddy boots, my dirty jeans, "working in the mud. What do you do?"

"I've been working with a barn full of horses all day today," and I went on to explain my situation a bit -- a boarding barn, a mother, working part-time, milking a cow, growing most of our food.

"Your husband helps you, don't he?" he asked.

"We couldn't do any of what we do without all of us working at it," I answered. "But when I talk about people needing to grow some food, I know what that means. Corn and 'taters and meat and milk and hard work. And the occasional pack of bologna!"

"Ha, it's gettin' to where a body can't afford it," he says again.

"It sure is," I say, moving away after touching him on his shoulder first, a gesture of almost kinship, "so tell those kids of yours they better put in a garden!"

I'd been thinking about how energy intensive the horse business as I'm working in it is. It *could be all recycled and renewable and fertilizer, but as it is, the sawdust for the bedding is hauled from a couple hours away, and to get good sawdust is a four hour haul bill. Then the manure hauling away is more gas, although that is at least more local. We have a load of hay coming in from New York, but that is only because of the crop failure due to drought this year. A lot of our hay, even in this year, is local. But again, there's gas and oil in it, from tractors to hauling to the hay elevator (a device to put hay up into the loft with).

And yet, it wouldn't have to be. I guess recreationally it would have to be, but if we were talking practical horses, it would have to find its practical outlet. I think a lot about what transitions might look like. I think the people with the money to pay so much to keep a horse recreationally will continue to do it for a relatively long time -- to burn that oil until it is all gone. And then those horses will become draft horses again, or pack horses, or something. They could be put to hauling their own sawdust.

I would love to gallop a cross country course again. I would love to ride a dressage test. But today, I'm going out and walking my own big guy up a hill just to begin starting to put some muscle back on him because I've let him get way too out of shape. And doing that will put my own riding muscles to use so perhaps they won't be totally atrophied away.

I love my job. I love going there, I love taking care of the horses, talking to the people. I love my farm, milking my cow, doing the home economics of maintaining everything, finding the baby goats to cuddle. I have a lot of plans, I always do. A lot of hopes and dreams and schemes and readiness to see what might work. I am excited to look toward finding my way, and helping the others in our family find their way, in the post-oil world.

Because the answer is not to find alternative sources of energy, other ways to be industrial capitalistic consumers. It is to embrace the change. Because life will be different. Soon.

Life will be different. Is it climate change? Is it peak oil? To me, and I can get pretty passionate about this, it is neither. They are both convenient shorthands for talking about getting "right" with "livelihood".

Western civilization, industrialization, and probably right back to the agricultural revolution, has produced a way of living, a way of life, a way of death, that is exploitive. It is dependendent on exploitation of the earth and her people. Great works of art, great music, great achievements are not those that are dependent on patrons, on exploitation. Just like history isn't really the history of wars and conquests.

Really great works of art are those that have gone unremarked. Like history is really the story of hearths but no one has thought it remarkable enough to write much about it, or to call it history.

The way I read current events, life will be changing, in this direction, whether you make right livelihood changes or not. It is a time when having gone to the right schools won't matter. Growing a garden will matter.

And perhaps you understand that growing a garden is, for me, a shorthand. It also means being able to take what you get from the garden and make delicious meals from it. And it means being able to entertain yourself and not depend on your cellphone and ipod to do it for you. Play an instrument, tell a story, whatever. It is so much of everything. Grow a garden. Be independent in a real way. It is not only a non-exploitive way of life, it is not only salvation for yourself and your fellows and the world, it is fun. Sure it is hard, but it is rewarding too.

Oh, gawd, I feel like John the Baptist or one of the OT prophets. "LOOK PEOPLE. You can see it at the grocery store, yeah, in the bologna bin, repent of your evil exploitive ways, repent and sin no more. Grow a garden. Salvation does not lie in spending your money, in saving your standard of living, in making the world trade oil in dollars. Salvation depends on how you get your money, and not getting much of it to begin with because much money means much exploitation and this you cannot do. This is how you kill your fellow man and the world and call it giving back. As the prophet Eleutheros says, you break their legs and give them crutches and call that virtue. You must not break legs to begin with. You must not kill to begin with. You must repent and take a step back, one step at a time, step back to a real life, consuming only what you yourself produce. Consider a pack of bologna to be opulent, and consider ostentatiousness to be the worst of vulgarities."

And you know what I really like the most about this vision? That it doesn't matter if a person has both his feet or not, he can grow a garden. An old woman descending into Alzheimer's can be useful shelling the beans. There is a place for everyone, a real place, not a PC manufactured sheltered job sort of place. Not a "we'll send you a check every month so we really don't have to deal with you barking obscenities" sort of place. A real place. Useful. A retarded boy or girl can keep chickens, or raise goats, or get the kale through the winter. A teenage boy can find his balance chopping the wood and he won't need to shoot up a shopping mall because he won't be a burden and won't see himself that way. No matter what you can think of, that person can be productive, with the exception of the very few first years of a kid's life, and perhaps the very last few days or months of a person's life. What a joy that is!

It seems to me that this is love. We can love each other but only if we are not stockpiling stores.

But that is only possible outside of an industrial oil intensive consumerist paradigm. I think that paradigm is ending but you can step out of it anyway.

If you are strong and brave enough. To love.

And make no mistake, love will mean allowing someone who is too sorry to pick a piece of bread up off the floor to starve to death.

The Wisdom of Insecurity

Thank goodness for Zane over at Lichenology. He reminds us to look at what is worth keeping as well as what is worth getting rid of. That is also one of the most interesting things that Jared Diamond talked about in his books -- that the core values of a society were often the things that had helped them survive and to thrive, and then when something changed, most often the environment, some of those values were no longer appropriate. Some of those values, in fact, became the very things that led to the collapse of the societies.

I just about assume collapse. And what I look toward, and look for, is the worthy values, the worthy skills, the worthwhile modes of exchange. What is worthy, period. I often feel like there is this fine line in writing this blog to portray the bad and the good as it were: that work is hard but healthful, that food is slow but better, that I have relationship with a lot fewer people but a lot more of my life. Reduction is a by-product of a good life, not a worthy thing in and of itself necessarily.

So, what is valuable? Worthy? Worth holding on to, preserving, husbanding, propagating?

I’d have to start with freedom. Independence. Which then becomes individuality. Contrary to popular uber-liberal opinion, individuality is not a bad thing. A community can only start with strong individuals. If we are not independent, then we cannot depend upon one another. And freedom, well, we don’t as a society have it now. I think some individuals grasp a little more of it than others, because we’re willing to wrestle for it.

A long-term perspective is a worthy thing, and a short-term perspective is largely what is wrong with the world now. I think we have to think about how things impact today, and tomorrow, and next month, and next year, and 5 & 10 years out, and the next generation. And then think about the world of your grandchildren. And their children. I think of the changes in my grandfather’s lifetime, and the changes in mine, and I know I cannot imagine their world. But honestly, one really simple way to develop some long term perspective is to do some canning in July.

Family, clan, community -- these are vital. But these have to grow organically and cannot be artificially contrived anymore than a buffalo can be installed on a prairie. And another thought, they aren’t just one thing, a family, a clan, or a community. What I consider my “community” is different for everyone in it, and their “community” is different from mine. I think people’s ideas about this are way too static, fixed.

Almost but not quite synonymous with family is land. The land, and the land’s community, the flora and fauna, are worthy. There is no such thing as not impacting the earth, at least not while you are alive, but one can do it lightly, one can live without annihilating everything else. But if I understand that the nature of the skunk is to grab a chicken trying to go to roost, that old skunk is going to have to understand that it is my nature to not suffer him to live.

And then there are knowledge, skill & abilities. And tools. And this is where some degree of specialization makes sense. But not too much. Everyone should come close to knowing how to do everything else, but some people will be better at some things than others, that’s just natural. But which knowledge, skills & abilities? And tools? Everything and more. There’s the cooking and gardening, sure, but there’s also the engineering and physics and animal sciences. There’s bugs and soil to know, and healing arts, and how to just sit still and wait and do nothing. And tools and devices! As long as they are simple.

So much that I come to this -- the most important quality to foster in you and yours is the attitude that you can figure it out. You can do it, no question. If you don’t know how to make clothes, well, it might be harder for you if clothing becomes difficult to get, but don’t you think you could figure something out? If you do know how to make clothes, using a pattern and bought cloth, it still might be hard for you if you don’t have these things and can’t think of clothing outside of that paradigm. And you don’t always have to have everything figured out before you try to do it.

And very importantly, the conviction that you aren’t owed anything. Not a free lunch, not health care, not food, or water, a roof over your head, or a ride to town. No things, not the corn crop or the pumpkin crop or the health of the cow, are guaranteed. That’s why life is exciting. It is my personal belief that we need that insecurity, that challenge, and not having that insecurity explains football and nascar and the stock market and office politics and the neighbor who suddenly decides to not speak to you. It is my personal belief that we need that insecurity in order to have the room to be able to be kind to each other in ways that matter and are real, and having no consequences of not being kind explains road rage and conspicuous consumption and the you-owe-it-to-me mentality.

Cinco de Julio

After the revolution, then what? Good ole Ben said, "Gentlemen, we give you a republic -- if you can keep it."

I happened upon this concept, Riot for Austerity. Seems preposterous, doesn’t it, to riot for less. But in some ways, isn’t that what I’ve been doing? Role models really do help, and that’s one way I’ve seen this blog of my life on the farm, one way to do it, one way to have a good life, an example.

So, over at the Simple Living they have a goal to reduce consumption/emissions by 90% (from American average) within a year’s time. I’m not participating in that, but it has been a wonderful jumping off thinking point, and a way to see where I am, however imperfect the metrics.

What I am going to do here is to repost their rules for their 7 categories, along with my household’s current standing therein, perhaps comments about that standing, and perhaps comments about the metric itself. At the end, I’m also going to add a category.

1. Gasoline. Average American usage is 500 gallons PER PERSON, PER YEAR. A 90 percent reduction would be 50 gallons PER PERSON, PER YEAR.
No reduction in emissions for ethanol or biodiesel.
Public transportation and Waste Veggie Oil Fuel are deemed to get 100 mpg, and should be calculated accordingly.

This works out to 25/month for my family, and we use about 30-35/month on average from the past year.

We have reduced gasoline usage mostly by not going much. There is no possibility for us of public transit (at least, not yet -- within my lifetime there were buses that I could have caught within three miles or so of my extremely rural home). We would actually be game to bicycle or use a horse and wagon/buggy for the occasional 20 mile trip (wouldn’t it be great to not have a car at all?) but at this time that is waaay too dangerous. Driving is too dangerous too -- yet another reason to reduce doing it.

One way I’d tweak this metric is to add a penalty for newer cars. Maybe no penalty for cars over 10 or 15 years old, and then an ever increasing penalty for each more recent year. Why? Because of the consumption inherent in new goods. Hybrids are even worse, very high polluters in life-cycle terms and only economic if you take only the MPG and not the creation and waste (batteries in particular).

2. Electricity. Average US usage is 11,000 kwh PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR, or about 900 kwh PER HOUSEHOLD PER MONTH. A 90% reduction would mean using 1,100 PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR or 90 kwh PER HOUSEHOLD PER MONTH
Solar Renewables are deemed to have a 50% payback - that is, you get twice as many watts.
Hydro and Wind are deemed to have a 4 to 1 payback over other methods - you get 4 times as many.

This is my worst metric. We use the US average now. I do know lots of reasons why which are areas we could reduce. For example, our freezers are in another building. We wired florescent lights into that circuit and leave then turned on so we are alerted if the power goes out to them. We could use LEDs instead maybe. We have an electric hot water heater, one of the worst electric appliances you can have. Still, I’m not getting rid of it, at least not yet, and we don‘t even have hot water hooked up to the washing machine. I think/rationalize that my other metrics are so low that it makes up for this one.

Plus these other things. Most people go to work, ship their kids off to school, where they also use electricity. Other people buy food, even low processed foods, that nevertheless have some cost of electrical use priced in them. We stay home, so our “work” electricity is here. We run our business here, producing real (concrete) goods, which also consume electricity. So part of what I’m saying is that not all our electricity usage would be “household” to more average Americans.

To comply with this metric, I live in the TVA service area, so a lot of our electricity is hydro. Personally I don’t care. That type of hydro is just as destructive as the coal fired plants. I think probably all grid electricity (electricity that is distributed in its use and concentrated in its source) is equally destructive at this time so I wouldn't give the paybacks unless it is coming off your own solar or hydro/wind system (which may well be what she had in mind, I‘m just not sure).

I have to note that I do not believe this metric would be accurate for all electric households. Pretty much every household uses some electricity -- fewer than 100% would use any one of the other heating methods, so this metric is probably low for the all electric households. These households should probably be allowed the same amount of electric energy equivalent to therms or gallons of heating oil below.

3. Heating and Cooking Energy - this is divided into 3 categories, gas, wood and oil. Your household probably uses one of these, and they are not interchangeable. If you use an electric stove or electric heat, this goes under electric usage.
Natural Gas (this is used by the vast majority of US households as heating and cooking fuel). For this purpose, Propane will be calculated as the same as natural gas. Calculations in therms should be available from your gas provider. US Average Natural Gas usage is 1000 therms PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR. A 90% reduction would mean a reduction to 100 therms PER HOUSEHOLD PER YEAR
*Heating Oil (this is used by only about 8% of all US households, mostly in the Northeast, including mine). Average US usage is 750 Gallons PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR. A 90% cut would mean using 75 gallons PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR. Biodiesel is calculated as equivalent.
*Wood. This is a tough one. The conventional line is that wood is carbon neutral, but, of course, wood that is harvested would have otherwise been absorbing carbon and providing forest. There are good reasons to be skeptical about this. So I’ve divided wood into two categories.
*Locally and sustainably harvested, and either using deadwood, trees that had to come down anyway, coppiced or harvested by someone who replaces every lost tree. This is deemed carbon neutral, and you can use an unlimited supply. This would include street trees your town is taking down anyway, wood you cut on your property and replant, coppiced wood (that is, you cut down some part of the tree but leave it to grow), and standing and fallen deadwood. You can use as much of this as you like.
*Wood not sustainably harvested, or transported long distances, or you don’t know. 1 cord of this is equal to 15 gallons of oil or 20 therms of natural gas.

This might be the metric we’re best on. We use some propane to cook in the summer, I’m pretty sure under 50 therms/year (propane has 1.1 therm/gallon, a 20# tank is 5 gallons, to help others with the calculations). Should we get to building the patio area with its own wood cook stove and earth oven, we could do with a lot less propane. It’s in the plans but not on the horizon.

We heat and cook other times of the year with wood, mostly deadwood. Furthermore, and I think this is a BIGGIE, we do not use IC engines to do this harvest but saws, real saws. If it needs to be hauled, mostly we haul it by human or horse power. There is no power more efficient than human muscle power. To those who say they couldn’t do it, I say simply, it is like reducing your consumption by this much, it is just a matter of trying and isn’t nearly as hard as you think. Plus it has lots of personal benefits. Like health and safety. But also, a bow saw and a series of blades for the winter costs a lot less to buy than a chainsaw, and nothing at all to maintain. It weighs less, has a smaller footprint of manufacture, use and disposal, doesn’t produce any emissions.

4. Garbage - the average American generates about 4.5 lbs of garbage PER PERSON, PER DAY. A 90% reduction would mean .45 lbs of garbage PER PERSON, PER DAY.

Another good one for us. For my family, this works out to 19#/week. Last week, during which we forgot to put the can out so I can weigh it now, we generated 4# of garbage total. Our household trash is nearly always that low. If we’re cleaning some farm accumulation out, that is more.

I think trash is very much a measure of excess consumption.

5. Water. The Average American uses 100 Gallons of water PER PERSON, PER DAY. A 90% reduction would mean 10 gallons PER PERSON, PER DAY.

I understand why water is on this list, but I don’t think it applies to us at all. Water “pressure” is a function of living in high density and low rainfall areas. It might be appropriate to want to cut down treated water usage even when there is no water shortage just for the energy used, but to be obsessive about it if you don’t live in a water short area seems a . . . distraction at best. Of course, more and more areas are short on water, so there ya go.

Anyway, for us, our water is from a spring, and goes back into the same watershed after we use any amount we want to and doesn't pollute in any way. Our household water is currently pumped with an electric pump but the water we use on the garden does not consume any energy at all.

6. Consumer Goods. The best metric I could find for this is using money. A Professor at Syracuse University calculates that as an average, every consumer dollar we spend puts .5 lbs of carbon into the atmosphere. This isn’t perfect, of course, but it averages out pretty well.
The average American spends 10K PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR on consumer goods, not including things like mortgage, health care, debt service, car payments, etc… Obviously, we recommend you minimize those things to the extent you can, but what we’re mostly talking about is things like gifts, toys, music, books, tools, household goods, cosmetics, toiletries, paper goods, etc… A 90% cut would be 1,000 dollars PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR
*Used goods are deemed to have an energy cost of 10% of their actual purchase price. That is, if you buy a used sofa for $50, you just spent $5 of your allotment. The reason for this is that used goods bought from previous owners put money back into circulation that is then spent on new goods. This would apply to Craigslist, Yardsales, etc… but not goodwill and other charities, as noted below. This rule does not apply if you know that the item would otherwise be thrown out - that is, if someone says, “If you don’t buy it, I’m going to toss it.” Those items are unlimited as well, because they keep crap out of landfills.
*Goods that were donated are deemed to be unlimited, with no carbon cost. That is, you can spend all you want at Goodwill and the church rummage sale. Putting things back into use that would otherwise be tossed should be strongly encouraged.

I don’t disagree with this metric, I just find it difficult to calculate. I looked at everything I’d bought in conventional stores in the past month to get an idea, but this included “wet goods” in the food category, plus some bulk goods in the food category which is coming up next. I am glad consumer goods has a dollar amount, which I think is far more useful than the percentages used in the food category. Anyway, just based on our income (lowlowlow), I think we’d have to be close to being inside the $1K/year figure because our total income is so low.

We do save a lot of stuff from the landfill, like this computer I’m writing on, like the shirt I’m wearing. We’re in the beginning stages of experimenting with making our own wool socks because cheap socks suck and we can’t afford good ones, and I don’t know about you, but I just haven’t come across good socks on their way to the landfill. I don’t know when we’ve bought any clothing item new, even boots this past winter.

But I have to say, we do get some consumer goods without a hint of apology. We’ve saved almost enough for a Wii. I’d like to get a new camera. Etc.

I might add to this metric a penalty to any spending on credit. Or I might add another category to penalize credit. If you can’t pay cash for the car, or see your way to paying it off inside of one year at most, you can’t afford it. Nothingnothingnothing consumable on credit. A mortgage is ok only because most people have to have one but they should endeavor to pay that off early and never borrow against it.

7. Food. This was by far the hardest thing to come up with a simple metric for. Using food miles, or price gives what I believe is a radically inaccurate way of thinking about this. So here’s the best I can do. Food is divided into 3 categories.
#1 is food you grow, or which is produced *LOCALLY AND ORGANICALLY* (or mostly - it doesn’t have to be certified, but should be low input, because chemical fertilizers produce nitrous oxide which is a major greenhouse contributor). Local means within 100 miles to me. This includes all produce, grains, beans, and meats and dairy products that are mostly either *GRASSFED* or produced with *HOME GROWN OR LOCALLY GROWN, ORGANIC FEED.* That is, chicken meat produced with GM corn from IOWA in Florida is not local. A 90% reduction would involve this being AT LEAST cle70% of your diet, year round. Ideally, it would be even more. I also include locally produced things like soap in this category, if most of the ingredients are local.
#2 is *DRY, BULK* goods, transported from longer distances. That is, *whole, unprocessed* beans, grains, and small light things like tea, coffee, spices (fair trade and sustainably grown *ONLY*), or locally produced animal products partly raised on unprocessed but non-local grains, and locally produced wet products like oils. This is hard to calculate, because Americans spend very little on these things (except coffee) and whole grains don’t constitute a large portion of the diet. These are comparatively low carbon to transport and produce. Purchased in bulk, with minimal packaging (beans in 50lb paper sacks, pasta in bulk, tea loose, by the pound, rather than in little bags), this would also include things like recycled toilet paper, purchased garden seeds and other light, dry items. This should be no more than 25% of your total purchases.
# 3 is Wet goods - conventionally grown meat, fruits, vegetables, juices, oils, milk etc… transported long distances, and processed foods like chips, soda, potatoes. Also regular shampoo, dish soap, etc… And that no one should buy more than 5% of their food in this form. Right now, the above makes up more than 50% of everyone’s diet.

Thus, if you purchase 20 food items in a week, you’d use 14 home or locally produced items, 5 bulk dry items, and only 1 processed or out of season thing.

Well, I understand the difficulty of this metric because . . . there is no simple way to figure it, like there is for gasoline consumption per person. I really don’t know if wet goods constitute more than 5% of our diet. We splurge sometimes, and other times we will eat nothing off the place for a long time. We have a LOT of “dry bulk” because we do eat a lot of whole unprocessed grain -- that is, I process it. We have bulk wheat, rice, grits, oats, flax seed, popcorn, probably others. This metric would put my meat in this category, but I would put in the first category because we raise it and process it here. But it is fed some commercial feed. I did know some people who were driving 2.5 hours one way to pick up organic feed and that’s just not what I’d call sustainable myself. Or organic in the spirit of the term. I’d count what little animal feed we buy in the bulk category and the meat, milk, and eggs we consume in category one. They travel zero miles.

Although I still can’t believe she said “whole grains don’t constitute a large portion of the diet.” They are the base of the food pyramid. Bread, rice, potatoes, barley, wheat, oats -- what do people eat if not these things? I mean, it really does make me wonder what is the base of their diet. We also buy coffee, tea, spices, yeast, baking powder, salt, those sorts of ingredients, mostly in bulk.

Our own food is produced in quantity here, and very sustainably. We’ve husbanded our soil, our pastures, our water. We don’t use IC engines for anything (the last mower gave up the ghost and we sharpened the scythe, swearing off them forever). But our brooding of the chicks, and our canning/freezing of the food would increase our fuel consumption counted elsewhere.

Oh, and chocolate should have its own category.

Just kidding on that one, but I do have some very politically incorrect additions to this list.

Food has to, at some point, include calories, and there has to be a limit per person of caloric content of food. Fat/gluttony is yet another form of over consumption. With lots of consequences.

Another complete category that I think needs to be added is income. If you have the money, you spend it. And there is an energy cost to every dollar earned as well as to every dollar spent. I would personally add penalties for income from the government (whether job, grant, or handout) because of what that money cost someone else. I subscribe to the Nearing’s ideal of bread labor -- every person produces his own bread, and then does his “professional” work separate from that bread labor. Bread labor is direct and productive work.

Another I’d be tempted to add would be medical care/medicine. We could use a good 90% reduction in this, imo. I’m always amazed at how few un-drugged people there are in the world.

I would thank the folks who put this together because I think it is an excellent thinking tool. I acknowledge that my take on the whole thing comes from a slightly different corner -- I don’t think enough people will cut consumption, and I don’t think you can make ‘em (or that it is ethical to try to make them). My best hope is that the gas runs out and soon. Anyway, I encourage you to run through this with your figures and see what your consumption says to you. And to look toward reducing it. For a better life.

No, No, No, I Don't Smoke It No More

The phone rang. “Hey, CG,” she said, “I have a question about ethics for you. You seem up for questions on ethics.”

Sure enough, I’m always happy to consider such. In fact, I pretty much always am considering such. Is it right, or wrong, or does it depend; does it help or hinder or do nothing; are we going to have a party, a big party, or a really big party? In a life that depends on results and not just intentions, it is vital to be able to examine and question EVERYTHING. Sacred cows eat people out of house and home and bring them to their ends in ruin. Blind belief in anything kills.

My favorite quote from Wendell Berry (other than his mad farmer poems that is) is from Long-Legged House:

To make public protests against an evil, and yet live dependent on and in support of the way of life that is the source of the evil, is an obvious contradiction and a dangerous one.

Perhaps because of the constant questioning of everything, I have wondered if there is any right livelihood to be had.

When we made the bulk of our money working for a giant corporation, that wasn’t exactly right livelihood. But we understood that, and didn’t hide from it. The trade-offs, in that we could make enough money to live and invest (afford to build our house, pay our midwife, gather tools, not starve while we gathered skills) in our vision of our eventual life (which we are pretty much at now) and still have the time to do the work of that life too -- those were pretty good trade-offs.

So it seems to me that the real question is does what you are doing (or not doing) strengthen or weaken whatever you are wanting to strengthen or weaken. Well, that’s as clear as mud. But, for example, did our familial participation in a giant corporation further the corporation’s goals more, or our goals more? I’d vote for our goals, with the acknowledgement that it was a land of lotus eaters, seductive in its lucre.

There aren’t too many things in this world that I don’t consider corrupt, and I mostly exist outside of those structures. Money is essential to most of those structures. So spending, and earning, very little money is a form of protest, a form of being the change, a way to force the change. I happen to think marijuana should be legalized, should in fact be a major fiber plant, but to participate in marijuana culture would be to support the corrupt structures that have arisen from its being illegal. Thus the title of this post. I happen to think our tax structure of progressive taxation and hidden taxation and pork spending is corrupt, but if I don’t file my taxes and get that refund on my EIC, am I weakening the government? I think not, and quite likely the opposite.

I think you have to consider what your lifestyle supports, and what it doesn’t support. And also what supports it, and what doesn’t support it. At least if one is going to think of ethics, those things have to be considered. Upton Sinclair said “It is difficult for a man to understand something when his income depends on his not understanding it.“ Well, you can understand a whole lot more if you have very little income and you spend even less.

If I Were A Featherbed

If I were an evangelist of any sort, I’d be an evangelist that folks should grow some of their own food. No matter where they are, no matter who they are, no matter what, period. People would understand a whole lot more if they had just one row of beans. It doesn’t take much room, it can be decorative, it is certainly educational not to mention life altering.

I spent a large part of today getting things to not grow. People who don’t grow food probably don’t give much thought to how much a producer of food doesn’t want some stuff to grow, at least in certain places at certain times. And if soil is healthy and fertile, a lot of stuff is going to try to grow there. Stuff that will choke out your food and turn your orchard into an impenetrable thicket.

I spent a lot of time trying to kill stupid honeysuckle today. Now, I enjoy honeysuckle as much as anyone. I remember sucking the flowers as a kid and have done so as an adult, and the fragrance is intoxicating. But my stupid neighbor (we all have our moments, she just has more of them) planted honeysuckle on my fence near some fruit trees. So every year since then I’ve had to try to kill the damn stuff out. “You don’t like honeysuckle?” she asked in her little girl innocent voice when I mentioned I was trying to kill it one time a few years ago. That’s how I knew she’d planted it.

But that is how ignorant people are of growing food -- to plant an invasive climbing smothering vine near fruit trees. There was once a woman who blithely and condescendingly declared to us, “I know how to grow food,” as if growing food were an afterthought. One year she actually managed to plant a few beds. Beds that were quickly overrun with weeds. Months later she had no idea there were three carrots in the weeds -- because she didn’t know what carrots looked like even having seen them with their tops in the store. Yeah, she knows how to grow food, sure.

Of course, considering that most people can’t even cook a pea, planting one may seem quite the stretch. This is why I think people will starve to death with the end of the oil age. Not that they have to, but that if McD’s isn’t serving, they’ll stand at the drive-thru and wait, hoping.

Well, the wild mustard is coming on strong, and I noticed the fiddleheads up today so I should go pick some. The redbuds are blooming and waiting to be thrown into a salad. The other goats are getting their bags so there will be more babies this month. There’s lots and lots growing -- lettuce and radishes and spinach and kale and cabbage and lots of summer stuff too, still protected. The corn field has been glysophated in preparation to plowing, but the plow still needs a depth wheel (we‘ve been rehabbing an ancestral plow). The pear trees have been sprayed with teramycin against the fire blight. Maybe the honeysuckle has been checked a little in the front orchard, and maybe I’ll get that area “redone” this year -- tear the old fence (and roses) out, put a decorative split rail in (with perennials of my choosing), and make it more accessible to mowing which is the real answer to the honeysuckle anyway. Maybe.

But you can only do what you can do. Which isn’t everything that needs doing. And usually it isn't decorative.

the title is from a John McCutcheon song we had played at our wedding