tectonics

December and being snowed in by the snow storm for so long highlighted a couple of things.

One is that we had a gosh darn lot of fun jousting with the being snowed in. I mean, it was four days after it snowed before the sun shone and the temperature went above freezing and we began in earnest to get the vehicle out of the place. It took quite a bit of effort over two days, shoveling deep and heavy snow off the steep parts of our road and cutting snow covered bent sapling trees loose (“plop plop” on our heads went the icy snow) and wresting their heavy snow embedded selves out of the road. Not to mention the white knuckle driving to actually get it out.

But when the vehicle and all of us were on the bridge there arose a mighty victory whoop! We had worked very hard, together, and it had been a lot of fun.

If we had not had off the farm Christmas preparations to make, I do not know how long we would just allow ourselves to be snowed in. Perhaps, probably, until it melted.

And I have my off the farm part-time employment. Which I love. And that taught me something too. My off the farm employment is pretty much firmly in the mainstream paradigm, not the homesteading paradigm. Said employment could and probably will morph as times change, and almost certainly the skills and contacts will be helpful no matter what, but it is the modern world that trots endless circles, not the homesteading world. And on the day I was actually certain that I would not be able to get out of this farm to feed horses on that farm, I also did not have a phone. The stress of being unable to let my boss know that I couldn’t get there was very traumatic.

Now, juxtapose those two things -- the stress was only, I repeat only, in the place where the homesteading paradigm meets the modern paradigm. It felt like tectonic plates grinding over each other creating earthquakes and volcanoes and deep ocean trenches. Being inside the homesteading paradigm, with all the things that might be hard or unpleasant about it, is not hard or unpleasant in itself. It is only in the overlap.

The sheer joy in the snow was personified by a giantess snow woman with baling twine hair, a cranberry necklace and pine cone belt who looked in my kitchen window for a few days, arms akimbo. And the many fastfastfast sledding trips down the various hills. She didn’t get a photo taken of her because the camera batteries had not been recharged and even at 7’ tall, she melted before the power came back on (although there is still a lump of her snow out there!).

Morality Lost

“I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.” Philippians 4:12

I do not think that life is whole without a spiritual aspect to it. I think one of the most useful spiritual views is that of self-actualization, which is basically when what you want to do and what you ought to do are the same thing.

Abraham Maslow was the psychological theorist who came up with the idea of a hierarchy of needs as it related to human motivation. Most importantly, he was the first to look at exemplary humans rather than mentally ill or neurotic people; to look at what is going on inside of extraordinary people. (In fact he wrote: "the study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy.” This is an idea I extrapolate to a whole lot of areas.)

It starts with the physiological. You need to breathe to be alive, eat, be warm (shelter, clothing), sleep, have water, pee, and have sex. Homeostasis. One might be concerned about what one eats after one has enough to eat. Then there are the safety needs -- a world that is predictable and orderly and where those basic physiological needs have the likelihood of being met continually. Owning a house and having some established food production are key here if you ask me.

The next level are the social needs, belonging and acceptance. Some people go so far as to form cults or gangs to satisfy these needs but most of us suffice with family and friends. Esteem is the next level, and if you don’t know how to esteem yourself, here you will seek the esteem of others by external means. Self-esteem is always an internal phenomenon, manifested most usually as confidence and self-respect. It isn’t something that can be taught, or given, or learned, or earned but is far more of a decision of independence.

And then, finally, there is self-actualization wherein lies morality, creativity, acceptance,
the ability to solve problems -- and while Maslow didn’t put it in here, to my mind, spirituality. Peak experiences is the catchphrase that comes to mind.

Maslow was not without his detractors, mostly people who dispute how strict the hierarchical nature of the needs is. It makes some sense that one cannot really think that deeply about morality when one is trying to figure out, from scratch, where one’s next meal is coming from. At the same time, creativity can be all the more important if what one has to eat is some form of beans and corn every day. And that is sort of where I am coming down in this exploration.

I think people are shortsighted and foolish to not consider their physiological and safety needs beyond “I can make the payment this month” and that any exploration of kinship or morality or creativity in the absence of taking care of the physiological and safety needs is a pretense. It is the sort of pretense that costuming serves when one lacks real self-esteem -- one pretends as a character instead of being a character.

But at the same time, and this is the key I think, one cannot surpass the physiological and safety and social needs to reach esteem and spirituality. It would be my posit that the only real way to explore, say, morality would be to grow one’s own food and build one’s own house because only in that way does one understand the labor and resource cost of such and take that into the moral consideration. I think that is why most monastics lead a simple life -- to stay in touch with the physical realities.

In a sort of “hither world, thither world, all worlds are one” way, there is no spiritual reality without the physical, nor any physical without the spiritual, and there is a great deal of suffering that results from the illusion of one separated from the other. It is why what you choose to eat matters to a small girl in Tahiti; it is why where you chose to drive today matters to a Inuit; it is why what you chose to speak to your friend matters even to someone you have yet to meet, and how you choose to conduct your business and the example you weave for your children matters. It all matters. To everyone and everything.

You only know the price and the gift of the chicken if you hatched it, raised it, looked it in the eye, fed it, worried over it, then chopped its head off and cleaned it and examined its bowels and aged it and cooked it and ate it. It isn’t awful or grand; it just is. But it is something that almost no one has experienced anymore. And it is in that that we have lost our morality.


thanks to Madcap and to Penelope

What Are We Doing With So Much Cargo?

oh looklooklook! I'm not old blogger anymore! I finally got migrated! Was I the very last person? I'll never actually go back over 400+ posts and tag them all, but it could be a fun exercise in categorizing my mind!

Anyway, I finished it! You don’t know how many nights this book has put me to sleep. It has been on the top of my All Consuming list for so long that I thought it deserved its own blog post.

Jared Diamond is one fascinating thinker. He teaches in a medical school, has done biological research for as long as I've been alive, and yet his best known books, this one and Collapse, are really history. And anthropology. And a lot of other disciplines all combined into something new. He calls it “history’s broadest pattern” and I get that as I am a person who sees patterns and connections that other people too often (according to me) overlook.

Guns, Germs and Steel looks at the last 13,000 or so years of human history and asks why it has been dominated by Europeans. Diamond doesn’t believe it is because of any innate ability or intelligence. The title of the book comes from the proximate causes of the domination but what Diamond is looking for, arguing for, is what is the ultimate cause. And that is fascinatingly environment. Put in way too simple of terms, environment enhanced agriculture which increased population which increased invention which increased the engulfment of the rest of the world.

The lessons from that are fascinating when applied to the modern world and even to the world of our own making. I looked at the old husband and said, you know, we're just iron age farmers. And we could easily enough be stone age farmers. And a huge large part of what we've done with our lives is try to withdraw our support from the kleptocracy.

My favorite quote from this book is, well, I can't find it right now so I'll paraphrase: "Invention is the mother of necessity." Think about it. Gasoline was a dangerous by-product . . . until someone came up for a use for it in the IC engine. And this computer, necessity? Naw.

This book did take me forever to finish because it is like a text book. Diamond does not write in a fluid, organic way, but in an overly academic way. You know, he says, "In this chapter we will look at blah blah blah." Couldn't we just go ahead and look at it without the preamble and the summation and the redundancy in later chapters too? Ok, the style has its uses but I wish the man had a touch of the storyteller in him.

So now, maybe I'm on to read Collapse. Or maybe not quite yet.

On Diversity & Community

In the mid-70s, when I was a teenager, I traveled a couple times a year from my mountain home to my cousin’s home near Atlanta. Being a year older than she, I could drive when she couldn’t. What I remember is driving all around and never knowing where I was. Everything looked the same. Big intersections, big roads, lots of traffic, this shopping area and that one. It didn’t seem to matter to my normally good sense of direction that a Bennigan’s was on this corner and something else on that one, I’d still end up at the Big Chicken suddenly not knowing quite how I got us there.

I’ve been reminded of this every time I’ve been out lately by the ultra-sameness of everything, the overriding consuming restless sameness. Of everything. The endless cars after cars after cars, ceaselessly moving to nowhere. It isn’t just metro-Atlanta, or metro-Knoxville, or metro-Richmond. It isn’t just college-town Blacksburg, or college-town Boone, or college-town Asheville. It is everywhere. College town Wise for the Gods’ sakes. Metro-Bristol for the Gods’ sakes. No matter where you are going, the road goes around, avoiding any possible place of interest for the easy-on, easy-off safe sameness. The Mexican restaurants are all the same, and you can’t find a bowl of beans outside a Cracker Barrel. The hardware stores don’t actually have hardware anymore, few nails or brads or bearings and barely any saw blades -- they have flooring and appliances and guaranteed installers.

I’m always glad to get back to my little holler where every little house, every little curve in the road, every little holler, has its own story to tell. And every person who lives here too. My little holler, where a septuagenarian half-blind gay man can live on one corner, a racist homophobe on the next, with a Baptist Chapel and a moonshiner in between them. All peaceably. Where the two chicken breeders, one Mexican and one not, both raise fighting cocks, and where that sport bridges the racial divides that otherwise are not broached, just as in Chicken George’s time. Where the slightly retarded twins up the road can live their lives pretty much as they see fit, along with all us other misfits either born to this place, or come to adopt it.

It seems easy for people not from around here to label us hillbillies as closed-minded. They seem to think diversity is people of all different colors and different religions and different socio-economic levels who all believe exactly the same things, who all have exactly the same values. What passes as diversity with those people is exactly what passes as diversity in the urban sprawl -- differences that are without distinctions.

Yep, when I look around this holler, I don’t really have a thing in common with anyone. Except of course, me and Noad can talk horses from daylight to dark. And Theron has always read the latest book that I’m always interested in. And Cal knows the latest goings on. And Tim and Sarah are great to do business with. And about 5 families go in together on the pig killing every year with Dwayne’s extended clan. And if you need a tree down, call Garnett. Or a part for your car, call Stewart and see if he has it. There’s Doug and Bessie who are just the finest people. And Clay who has a fine jack and a fine garden too.

I don’t go to the same church, or hold the same political beliefs, or raise my children the same way, or live the same way, or think the same things are important, as any of these people. Except that it is important to all of us to live together in this holler in peace, to work together when we can, to help each other out, to find our differences amusing or confusing rather than infuriating or threatening. Not to create an artificial atmosphere of tolerance, but to create, by actions and in reality, a common community.

Living at the Foot of the Cross

Ya know, sometimes you just have to quit hitting your toe with a hammer. Quit, in fact, hitting your toe with anything at all. If it hurts, move away from it, clear it out.

This is not to say that some things aren't worth some pain. Most mothers know this intimately. There are things worth standing up for, worth enduring something for. Of course most of those things aren't things, but I digress.

One of our neighbors, when asked how he is doing, as often as not answers with "Living at the foot of the cross, just a livin' at the foot of the cross." That means everything is going really well. My favorite self-improvement author, Deepak Chopra, talks about synchronicity, about when life tells you how it is going, how it is thinking about itself. There are no coincidences -- life tells you when you are doing well and when you are messing yourself up. So do your dreams. The most useful dream interpretation book ever, Every Dreamer's Handbook (by Will Phillips) , talks about how your dreams (be that your subconscious, your conscience, or your Gods) will start trying to tell you something in a subtle way but will get louder and more insistent if you don't listen. Life is like that too. It tells you. Ye with ears to hear. Because if you don't listen, it will crush you.

So my neighbor fired me from my mowing job. But she forgot to tell me. So, the week she got someone else to mow, another neighbor called and asked me to mow his yard. With his tractor. Freeing me to sell mine, which had not really worked out on our farm the way I hoped it would anyway. Back to the scythe yet still with a mowing income. That's living at the foot of the cross.

Anyone in the market for a really nice used lawn tractor? With a sweeper and a spreader. Bargain priced.