pieces and squashes

Some days ago Jimmy, I mean, Warren Buffett wrote a piece about how the rich in the US should not be "coddled", meaning they should be taxed more. While I know both sides of that argument, that's not what interests me about it.

The real strength of that article, the real strength of what he was saying was that he was talking about himself: Today's problems and what he himself could do to help.

Almost no one does this. Go listen to people asking for stuff from the government (legislative hearings). The only people there are people who are going to be directly affected -- the people working for the programs and the people benefiting from the programs. There is no generally recognized "need", not really. Milk and midwifery are not outlawed because they are dangerous but because someone (some group of someones) wants to keep those profits for themselves. The NEA isn't against school choice because it really thinks choice is bad but because choice takes money away from the schools that employ the NEA teachers who want pay raises. People who are for drug testing welfare & food stamp recipients mostly just think they themselves would never be be a welfare or food stamp recipient themselves -- and they don't even bother to think through the cost of doing that testing.

And I'm not saying that whatever it is that I'm doing is what needs to be done. Or even that I'm doing everything that I could do. But I hope that my thinking is on the level of what I can do. Of course, a lot of what we're doing is living at a level diametrically opposed to Warren Buffett. I do not find that sort of wealth enviable nor in fact do I think it is moral. But hey, at least Warren Buffett is talking about what he can do. I don't know many other people who are doing anything other than waiting for "the economy to come back", or to vote some some lying politician who promises to bring "good jobs", or for some state to drug test welfare and food stamp recipients.

Ok, so Buffett's point was weakened by the fact that he could go ahead and do it and not wait until the government forced said payment. It may well be for him, as many choices are for me, that there isn't a "win" choice to be made -- I can see a new paradigm coming and that needs to come, and I try to help it, but we ain't there yet and I still have to find a way to live in this current paradigm. Still, would that Warren Buffett and Jimmy Buffett and all of us would engage in a bit of bread labor every day.

Well, anyway. Here are some photos of some things to do with your summer squash.

This is an experiment this year. On the high recommendations of other bloggers, I got the library to get The Resilient Gardner by Carole Depp. I must admit, I'm a tough sell on gardening books anymore: it's hard for a normal gardening book to be interesting and informative to folks who have been gardening forever. Carole at least had an interesting concept -- what would you concentrate on to be resilient, which is her version of self-sufficient. And she picks, in my opinion, the right stuff mostly. But I still didn't find anything really that I liked about the book. And as hard as I looked, the only new idea I got was about summer squash.

When she mentioned squash as one of the resilient foods, I knew she was talking about winter squash. A good winter squash year is a thing of beauty and deliciousness. But summer squash? They're really just a summer treat, aren't they? She promotes the idea of drying them and says that, not unlike green beans which when dried become a thing that is an entirely new vegetable -- shucky beans, dried summer squash becomes an entirely new and different winter veggie. So we're experimenting. She had a lot of blather about varieties and tastes but not a lot on how to use them except in winter soups, and honestly I'm just drying whatever we've got and we'll see if they become a staple or not.

This is another way to enjoy them, even a little larger than usual -- skewer them and roast them after the chicken on a spit!

Houses

I have this friend. He is my favorite former boyfriend (ok, actually, I have a few favorites). And, you know, various and sundry things have happened in his life and it ends up that he has this house/farm that is for sale and he sent me a link to the online slide show for this property. A.m.a.z.i.n.g. Beautiful. (if you know me for real and want it, I just might send you the link)

And I am so incredibly and entirely and completely unattracted to it. I appreciate it. I realize that it is shown in its best Southern Beautiful light. But it leaves me cold. Not the garden, not the barn, not the land, not the pond, but the house. I can almost always imagine living in any space. I do this quite a bit because I do think who we are and what we choose is influenced by our environment and so I imagine what living in this or that space would actually live like. And it seems very clear to me that changing your life changes your environment, isn’t that right Halcyon? I mean, have you seen her back yard? And I’m pretty sure that her attempts to change her life while maintaining a more mainstream home environment weren’t conducive to her mental health. So maybe you can see what I mean.

John Lennon had his piano pretty much right there, didn’t he? Hey Cielo, I dare you to take your piano and put it where your TV is. I love it when I can drive by and see people’s gardens, and I bet the real underlying reason for the objection to front yard food growing is about the example it sets, and the independent mindset that grows out of that. Do you really want some crappy little knick knack to be the centerpiece focus of your life? Or would you prefer to know the story of the bottles that sit in the windowsill, because there is a story even though that is obviously a screw top Miller bottle of no import.

Most houses, and all show houses, are designed to sell, not to live in. The house I grew up in was a great house in which to have guests or to throw parties, which is probably why now it is a group home. My grandparents’ house, which I LOVE – they lived in essentially two rooms of it, plus an excursion at night to the bedrooms upstairs.

So why not boil the whole thing down to really living? It makes houses a lot simpler, and a lot smaller. If I could design any house, I'd have a pitcher pump for water and a bucket toilet for that. No bedrooms per se, but sleeping areas. I have a daughter who calls one area of our house, where there are harp parts and a sewing table and horse tack and a computer for learning Japanese and this computer too and the cardboard for making shipping boxes for what we sell "the creative zone". We are not mowing maniacs. Things here are not perfect. Or neat. And perfect and neat is what everyone has in their heads.

That isn't "it". What you love is it.

Does that dog hunt?

Our life on the farm follows a rhythm, and yet it is a rhythm that changes all the time. Tomorrow I will take the kids who want to go to the Yu-Gi-Oh tournament, and take care of my friends at a horse show. Yesterday husband took off to have lunch with some folks who have been his friends for longer than he’s known me, and to make a new friend too it turns out. He came home with some walker onions as well as barrels and the possibility of mule training and walnut wood. Three days a week I work off the farm. Husband tries to work in his cottage industry at least some every day. I try to train my horse who will be for sale some every day that I’m not working, and some days that I am. We try to work in the garden most days. And eating and cleaning milking is daily. So is play and reading (at least when I can find my reading glasses) and writing and then the other stuff that interests us.

With the hot weather we tend to get to the garden before breakfast . . . but for me it is after coffee. This morning husband transplanted plants, older kids cleaned off a couple of beds readying them for planting. The youngest child and I planted melons. He’s a lot of fun to work with. And it is fun to just be there and listen to the conversations they all get in to.

I scored big bags of broccoli the hay guy at work grew, so this afternoon we froze three steamers full of broccoli. We blanch it, cool it, freeze it, glaze it, freeze it, bag it. We also got our sweet potato slips from him. And we had broccoli salad for lunch and will have steamed broccoli with our smoked chicken for supper.

I am reading William Coperwaite’s A Handmade Life. We got it from the library but we need to own it I think. I think it will be a lot like The Good Life has been, something to dig in to, be inspired by, riff off of. When I get to thinking about the politics and morality of our life, I can get bogged down in the conservative/liberal dichotomy. They are both so wrong. Criticizers criticize, that’s what I’ve been told. I rather think it is the ability, and the willingness, to call a spade a spade. But when it comes down to beauty and simplicity and living a rightful life, well, eyes must be open, and hearts and minds and souls too, and open enough to change, for real (RRR tm). Step outside of the affective world.

People must be independent, doggedly independent. But the fruit of that independence is cooperation. The seed of cooperation is independence. External validation is the thing that gets in the way -- trying to please someone else, or needing someone else to please you. The other side of admiration and respect is fear and loathing and it always gets to the other side. Independence is the antidote. What externally is seen as ego but internally is purpose and knowledge is what keeps one from needing massive amounts of external validation. The validation that is valid is the rather worn Native American saying, “Does it grow corn?” In hillbilly that is, “Does that dog hunt?”

Well, I don’t know quite how I got off on all that. Just the sort of things I think about I guess -- how to live without exploitation, with beauty, with love and all that jazz. Ornamentation is not beauty. But life is.

And life has rhythm. It is a dance.

RRR (tm)

Anything Really Really Real (RRR) (tm) has a chance of utter failure. A garden is the easiest example of this: You plant a seed and it grows or it does not grow; it produces food or it does not.

It seems as though there are a thousand ways to fail and only one way to succeed but, really, there are a hundred thousand ways to fail and at least a thousand and maybe ten thousand ways to succeed.

Ah, but all successes are not the same. One might "succeed" by having 1# of potatoes produce 10# of potatoes, while someone else might succeed by having 1# of potatoes produce 100# of potatoes. Significant difference. If the 10# gets you through the winter, great, but if you starve to death in March instead of November, I'd have trouble labeling that "success".

Likewise, all failures are not the same. Failure that you learn from and that doesn't kill you is good. But learning means that you actually change your behavior. People seem to have a great deal of trouble doing this, being far more prone to doing the same thing and just painting it a different color. This is a little like eating your seed potatoes.

Failure could, of course, make you give up. Which would be bad.

But the worst kind of faulure is the one that doesn't risk.

So here I have this horse. This is not a story I'm telling, a tale I'm making up. This is not my fantasy. And either I can do it or I can't. I don't have facilities or equipment or even mentors who could make it easier. Not reasons for excuses but causes for more creativity.

Creativity lives in the really really real.

in the fullness of being

Except for the youngest, the kids are, by and large and for all intents and purposes, grown. They are their own people, and while that's been true since they were born, it is true in a different way now. And it is always possible that some big intervention of some sort would be needed, but not likely at this point given who they are.

It was very easy to be a natural, attachment parenting parent when the kids were really little and the biggest question was whether or not to vaccinate. There was no way I was going to ever let them cry it out. Ever. Or not let them nurse on demand. But when my nipple started dissolving in one's saliva, I did say to the child, I can't do this -- and she did cry -- and that, people, is why it takes two parents (ideally one of whom has boobs and one of whom does not). So yeah, if warranted I would get their attention in a parental, introductory-guide-to-this-life, manner.

As they grew, they ate what and how much they wanted to, within the fact that we have three meals a day and that comes first. So, if your snacking interfered with meals, the snacking stopped. If you didn't like something, we made sure that there was something that you did like but mostly expected a bite of whatever it is that was for supper . . . most of the time. But when one doesn't like cheese grits for breakfast, a small pot of oatmeal is prepared. That is no sweat off anyone's nose, and not nutritionally compromising either. There was one child who just didn't, for the longest, like any veggies cooked -- he always had them raw. He also didn't like things touching. Or mixed together.

But anyway, even with all the nuances, the things that are reasonable requirements (eating, brushing teeth) tempered with compassionate self-direction, attachment parenting and unschooling were easy choices early on. Then came the middle years, and late reading, and odd interests, and sometimes defiance, or moodiness, or somewhat persistent fantasy worlds, or whatever. It was somewhat harder then but only in the sense of questioning "Am I ruining their lives?" But all it took was one look around at the "normally parented" kids to decide, nope, we're fine thanks. Likewise, I look at kids who've had no direction and can plainly see that kids do indeed need parents, not reliving-their-childhood abdicators. Time and again, we shuffled through the choices and came to the same conclusions -- whoever they are on their own, with our love and guardrails, is better than anyone we can make them into. Heck, one look at us proves that it doesn't work out that you are who you "get raised" to be anyway . . . and not engaging in that sort of power trip is, we hope, far less fraught with useless baggage for the kids to carry.

And now, for the most part, here they are, emerging into another fullness. They have a solidity, a groundedness, and yet an ability to fly, take off, dream. They know stuff, a lot of stuff, but what I value most is their knowledge of themselves, and their inability to be swayed, their unwillingness to doubt that knowledge. They haven't been raised in boxes that can be replaced with other boxes. They don't need people's stares in order to feel better about themselves, nor do they wear masks or costumes. They aren't performing their lives, they are living them.

I don't know. I never feel like I have words enough for the family, for unschooling, for our adventures whole. It is easy to explain how we planted this or that, or how to make a loaf of bread, but a lifetime relationship with family that is full and growing and reciprocal -- you can't explain that.

The girls and I very often have nighttime giggle sessions. I go to bed and somehow, they end up on the bed with me and we talk about anything and everything and I can usually be counted on to say something that makes one of them say, "You are not the typical Mother."

And I laugh and get that fire in my eyes, and say, "No, I am not bwahahahaha!" or, if I'm feeling more tame, "Thank your lucky stars honey."

And each night the youngest tells a goodnight story of his own invention to his dad. And the older three have their own business ventures and we all have chores and work together in the garden and, well, just so many things.

I am comfortable that they do know stuff. And that starts with how to read, how to find stuff out, how to grow stuff, how to eat, how to stay warm, how to figure out what they don't know about any of that stuff. And I think they will be able to find their own place in the world, their own place, their own way, with a superego that is their own voice, not Eisenhower's, or even the Capt'n Crunch Kids. I believe we have worked out relationships that can always be worked out, developed; relationships that are rich and fertile. Everyone is a resource for everyone else, so that it truly is, one for all, all for one.

urban homestead urban homestead urban homestead

Yes, we are in no way urban. And I am, in general, in no way sympathetic to protests. But is calling attention to something that is outrageous a protest? It is probably part of it.
Anyway, it doesn't matter. Here is what I want to say:

If you care about ANYTHING, anything at all, be it your health, your kids & family, your community, your country, your planet, spirituality, loving kindness, anything, you need to be growing food where ever you are and whatever else you are doing. You need to consume less (of everything). You cannot buy your way to being green, or being an involved parent, or being healthy, or being spiritual, or any of the rest of it. You have to work that out every day. You need to cook your own food, wipe your own a**. You need to spend your time, your actual time, with those who are most important to you, not off somewhere else saying it is really "for them".

It isn't.

It doesn't matter what you call yourself, or what anyone else calls you. If you are looking to be admired, you are already lost. Go back, take down your mirrors, and start again.

You will fail. You will succeed. You will laugh (mostly at your mistakes) and you will cry (also mostly at your mistakes). This is called life. This is called living.

Pay little to no heed to institutions, and less to anyone trying to sell you anything. Learn to be quiet enough to hear all the help the universe offers to you.

Do it where you are right now. No waiting until anything. There is always a way. Find it.

Be good to yourself, and to those around you, and let no one abuse you or abuse those around
you.

Love.

Have fun.

And dance to the tune of urban homestead urban homestead urban homestead.

No organization, no institute, no trade marks, no nothin' needed -- except folks doing their really real concrete productive things of course.

Dare to be nobody. Aspire to be small. See what you can give without anybody even noticing.

Etc.

Open Gates

My daughters and I finally opened up the "January Field" today. We're a little late. And it has been a rough winter. All of our old animals know the January field. The new cow and her calf, however, didn't.

We had to stretch a little hot wire but first we called the animals over and opened the gate. Old cow said, "Yes," and went straight for it and buried her head in the standing mostly dead but green at the bottom grass. Donkey came and guarded the threshold until Duke made it that far. Duke moves more slowly but once he figured out why we were hollering for him, he was on his lumbering way. Donkey followed him through the gate. The calf had been hanging out behind the now open gate. She pushed it as though she was pushing it shut. New cow didn't move from where she'd been all along.

I first got in the field behind the calf and asked the calf to come out. She came around the gate but would not go through. I went to get her mom thinking the two of them together might go. I've been around cows before enough to know that when going over a threshhold, well, I've seen them all balk and balk and balk until finally one goes and then they all go like they are water flowing. These two just balked. Uh huh, no way Jose, I'm not going over there. Nothing is in their way and there is grass on the other side and also all of their field-mates are on the other side too but no.

Eventually the calf did come, at least partly because old cow is as much mother to her as new cow. Calf, by the way, is just as big as the other two now.

And to be honest, new cow probably didn't cross the threshold as much because she was born and raised on a dairy farm. Until she came here, she'd always had the same herd, always on the same farm. She's done really well but she isn't as wily as old cow who's been a homesteader all along.

As the girls and I were stretching that bit of fence and we were talking about how stupid those cows were to be doing that, I said to them, "You know girls, we can be exactly that way. We get used to an obstacle being in our way, we get used to one way of how to do things, and we'll stand at an open gate with a whole field of grass on the other side exactly like that."

We stood there a moment, taking it in and wondering what open gates we just might not be seeing.

like coin

What could you do for, have that you could give, trade with or provide for a farmer that would convince him to let go of some of his potatoes and give them to you?

For me, that is the question in its essence. I have engaged in that question with both things I was willing to trade relatively easily (I'll bake bread for you, or make jam, or milk a cow), and things that I am willing to do to provide for me and my family (or as a gift) that I am simply not willing to do in exchange for anything or anyone (making cheese, canning).

Rather than thinking about this from the point of view of one who wants the food, think about it from the point of view of one who grew the food. Did you spend ten years increasing the fertility of that potato patch? Did you cut the seed potatoes, hill them, squash the bugs off them? Dig them. Do you have just enough potatoes that you know, no matter what happens, your family would not starve through the winter?

Does that give you some sense of what "like coin" is?

With $3/gallon gasoline as a New Year's present, I thought it worth bringing up for you to think about.

and then the stars align and the dam breaks

it being about movement

So in living on and “managing” a farm one knows, that is one is aware for the longest time before one takes any action at all, that the goat herd sire needs to be traded off, a new one procured, the cows need to be bred, and all the rest. And things accumulate – you get a phone number for someone who owns a Jersey bull locally and post it on your refrigerator, the person who you usually get the new herd sires from has one ready for you, things like that.

Then suddenly something totally unrelated happens. In this case it was the death of a friend. Now, remember, I said this death was totally unrelated, and it was. Totally. This guy was not a part of any of this, but the new herd sire came to his funeral with his old mom and came home with his new dad. At the same time the Jersey guy contacted us. Turns out he has some goats too and is interested in our old herd sire. Old billy exchanged for transportation and exposure to bull for three+ months for old cow. Also updated vaccinations on all bovines since old cow will be visiting that bull and his herd.

At the same time, the peaches are ripe and the very last of the blackberries are fermenting in the back of the fridge (alcoholic jelly is some of the best) and, well, more stuff that I can even think about in the garden that all needs to be eaten first and preserved second.

Which, one of the huge lessons of homesteading is never preserve first and eat second. Always eat first. Always always always. If you do not eat it fresh, it will not be valuable to you preserved. Plus there is that if you grew it, you deserve it at its very best, which is fresh. Eat first.

Another lesson is this: the monoculture agribusiness model is always inferior. The cow guy was amazed at how good our cows look, much better than his he said, and ours are just out there, cowing around. The baby goat (new herd sire) got here in pretty pitiful shape (pot bellied, shaggy coated, bad feet, small). The strongest, most direct evidence, however, is the paddocks of newly planted grass at the work barn. Plowed, disked, fertilized and seeded following exactly the agribusiness model, every speck of that planted grass is now dead and the only things growing there are spiny amaranth and jimson weed. The field next to it, however, is green. It doesn’t have much food value, true, but it does have some, and at least the ground is covered. I know why people plant agribusiness fescue but I pretty much never think it is a good idea. Meanwhile, on this farm, the baby goat is already looking better in less than a week, and he hasn’t even been turned loose yet which is when he will really thrive.

When new cow came here, she came from a small dairy where she had access to plenty of grass and was fed while being milked. And she was skinny. When we picked her up, my boss asked if she wasn’t thin but the truth is, that’s how dairy animals often look. And when she got here, she looked so much smaller than old cow. She doesn’t look smaller anymore. I think it has to do with the fact that here she has a broader choice of what to eat, and a less stressful, more cowful life. In other words, a real homestead, free, life is flat out better for animals, pastures, mankind. We look better, are healthier, happier, last longer.

Now, concerning movement. I follow, for years at a time, people who I find to be good examples as well as horrible warnings. The guy who died, for example, was a horrible warning of how not to turn out to be. The difference between the good examples and the horrible warnings is movement. The horrible warnings do the same things over and over. Oh, most times they think they are doing different things, but when you look at their lives it is like they burn supper on the stove one day and burn it in the oven the next day. It is the same thing with a different color hair. They have the same epiphanies over and over, essentially go around the same circle again and again.

The good examples have a direction. They move not randomly but with purpose. The movement may be somewhat butterfly-ish in that the purposefulness may not be immediately evident but monarchs do wind up on milkweed and cabbage moths do inevitably find some plant in the cole-ish family. People will say of the good examples, they are exactly the same people they were when I met them years ago and yet, a look at their lives reveals that they have moved, have refined, have advanced, are flat out further along. They don’t flounder a whole lot. They build. Good examples don’t hide, don’t bully, don’t perform for the audience.

They do, however, fry fresh peach pies, which is what I’m going off to do right now.

milking from the POV of a stranger and the story of Anastasia

We entertained unexpected guests last week, unexpected to me at least. Let us just say that the newness of their eyes looking upon our doings gave me the gift of some fresh perspective.

We'd been sitting in the kitchen for some time, sharing some food and tea. The boys were in the living room immersed in their common interest and the rest of us were just trying to pass the time politely if a little stiffly. But finally it came time to milk. There is no getting past that.

"Ok, let's milk," I said to the gang. "You all come on and watch," I encouraged her and her daughter. And then I saw with what fluency we did so. Four of us go milking together, and each of us has a job, and each of us knows what the other jobs are and how to fill in if need be. We check what is going on with each other in undetectable ways, silently, with looks or code words or body language. I go in the field to get the cows and the other people are posted where they will be needed. Then everything moves over to the milking stand. And then we milk.

The most interesting thing about milking is the conversations we can have. Mostly it is silence; everyone sort of in his or her own thoughts, but we'll also talk about stuff. I couldn't really tell you what, but I do know it is this sort of time when things really get shared, when the temperature gets taken, when you have some real idea of what is really going on inside others. Real intimacy. It is quantity time plus having constructive endeavors wherein we rely upon each other.

And then, rather suddenly, milking is over and one child takes the milk and the rest of us fall into places for putting the animals up for the night, and the milk disappears into the house and the animals are put up and given hay and water, and that flows into getting the goats and feeding the horse, and then the milking stuff gets washed.

My point is, I guess, that my kids know how to do all this stuff, and that we also know how to work together to get it done, and that such knowledge is an unusual, even a remarkable thing. And yet even this visitor, who watched us do this, quizzed us about the whole homeschooling thing.

It isn't that I mind. The quizzings don't, by and large, come from a place of suspicion but of honest curiosity. And honest concern too when people find out we don't do formal music or algebra or anything else. What about holes? The conventionally schooling don't always know to put it in so few words, but almost always one of their concerns (once you get past socialization) is what if they (our kids) don't learn all the stuff everyone else does.

Of course, my first external, verbalized response to that is that everyone else doesn't learn it either! I mean, really, how many people do you know who don't know who Odysseus is, or where Japan is, or how to solve a quadratic equation? I was surprised at how many people I knew who didn't know these things, people who have been to college or sent kids to college.

My first internal, never verbalized, response is, 'Did you notice that your kid doesn't know how to milk a cow? Now that's a hole?' But I don't say that, of course. I'm comfortable that our kids could raise a garden, care for animals, manage to get food from both those things, build a passable shelter, and stay warm in the winter without much infrastructure, if it came to that. May it never come to that.

But this time, this time when asked about holes, I had a story to tell. The kids recently saw a nondescript animated version of the story of Anastasia. It wasn't well done in any sense of the word. And yet.

And yet it started a discussion that, yes, indeed, there had been a real Anastasia, and when I was a child myself, there were still old women in the world claiming to have been her. It led to discussions of Russian history, intermarriage in the Courts, and hemophilia. And so many other things (how did people live, what views did they have of their world, why was Rasputin loved . . . and hated?).

One of the things that occurs to me when I think about this is how our children gain perspective with facts. What I remember most about school, all school, was regurgitating facts for tests without having any real perspective about it or what it all meant. And I had very involved parents. But I had, basically, no perspective and I rather hope that my kids do.

And since perspective is the place where you look from, I'm thinking the place of milking and gardening provides a really useful view.

Mortality

February has been rather quiet I suppose. Frozen, snowy, and when not frozen, muddy. Hard to get much done except the stuff required to stay warm. Oh, we did have two nice days -- they were so welcome. I've thought a lot of thoughts, of course, always do, and continued to watch the economy and the country collapse and be amazed by the denial involved in that.

A girlfriend that I grew up with was found dead in bed the other day. My age. No pre-existing conditions, just had had some stomach flu for a couple days. And not that I'd seen her in 30 years. But still.

Both of my parents died in the last decade, my dad ten years ago this year, my mom two and a half years ago.

So you pull a carrot from the ground, or you chop the head off a cabbage, or you hold a chicken in your arms and it is warm and breathing and then you chop its head off and pluck it and turn it all into dinner: That's how mortality is. Not dramatic. Death scenes are not romantic or heroic; they might be rattling or they might catch you off-guard but they are really daily, like what's-for-supper.

So we die.

But how do we live?

That's the question that I keep coming back to again and again. It isn't a mortality dependent thing. There is no bucket list to complete. But there are questions that include -- are you honorable? and, well, are you honorable. I mean, it is such a trick question, isn't it? I'm not much of a one for dichotomies, but is one more concerned with superficialities or depth? Has one, in one's life, produced more useful stuff than he has consumed? Has one kept one's promises? Done what he has said he would do?

When I think of my children, what do I want for them and how am I providing that? I want them to know how to live with a sense of abundance, but also know how to live small, where abundance is easier. I want them to be able to pursue whatever it is they are interested in, but also be able to support themselves. I want them to know that the secrets of life include butter and not being suckered into debt. I want them to know they are loved beyond any doubting and that they always have each other.

We provide that by, hopefully, living that.

Just Because

Because she is beautiful

Because they are cute.

And just because.

And a note about the baby goats because of the earlier post against intervention. They are two of triplets. Their mom is eleven years old, rather ancient for a goat. And at the beginning of December, she looked to be near her due date -- she was HUGE, basketball bag, the works. You know our goats are rather au naturel and so the billy just runs with them and we have an idea of when they were bred but not an exact date. Which is real good as far as not making unnecessary inventions is concerned.

Far more than just her hugeness though, she started acting different. Uncomfortable. I'd never really seen her act like that before. She sat a lot -- sat like a dog. One day it seemed as though she couldn't really walk and I was truly afraid a kid was stuck sideways in her pelvis. One day she sat in one spot for 12 hours. I actually worried and fretted some. A lot. I considered what interventions could be made.

BUT she wasn't sick and so I just made sure she was eating and drinking and peeing and pooping and left her alone. And sure enough, the day after Christmas, she popped out three beautiful babies who are all doing well and being very capricious.

Banking

Not as in bailouts, but rather the little day to day things we do that end up being banking, as in banking a fire to save it for the morning.

I think first of all the manure I bring home. We were talking with some chemical farming types lately and they would talk about how much nitrogen this or that amendment had and how manure doesn’t have that. They are right in a way, manure has a certain amount of free nitrogen and that is usually less than your other nitrogen amendments. But manure has more in there that it releases over time. And not just nitrogen, of course. No matter how clever people think they are, they are not so clever as nature, and if a garden (or pasture) is full of organic matter, it has a tendency to balance itself out and become more and more fertile.

Ah, but people are almost always sure that they are more clever than nature, and that something depends on them doing something that nature can’t do. Well, there is a place in the world for round-up, but there’s a place in the pasture for weeds too.

Back to banking. A couple of years ago I blogged about getting a pair of work boots. Well, they wore out, what are the odds, being worn every.single.workday and then standing in urine and manure and getting me around miles and miles of walking and getting torqued pretty good sometimes too. But cash money is scarce right now. Not as scarce as it has been, say, last winter, but still. When it became obvious that I was going to need new boots soon, I started a “jar”. That is just some sort of place to stash a little money as I come into it. We’ve had “jars” for all sorts of things . . . like for the Wii for the kids (that took a couple years to fully fund), like for the extra freezer, all sorts of things. So I started this jar, and when I got a little extra money for some extra horse job (like feeding at someone else’s farm), or when I had a few extra dollars that I could purloin from myself, it would go in there. And by the time I actually found boots that fit and felt good, I had almost as much money as they cost in that jar. It is a lot easier to come up with an extra $20 than an extra $120.

Today I’m selling a goat, and that money will go into a jar of its own. It is a long term thing for it. It might be needed for some farmstead milking expense (a new cow (which has its own jar actually) or a new billy goat, for example), or if we don’t end up needing it for that, it might be used to take the family out to eat or to the movies. But the goat has been a family endeavor and so the produce of it will go to the family, not to bills, and not to any one person, or not even divided up. It will be there to fund something that we don’t know quite what it is yet but it will be there.

We bank partly by not having many bills. This starts, I believe, with the security of owning our own land and house, and that is probably the one thing I would go into debt for. Instead of doing that, though, we spent a decade, and a lot of our time and energy, and most of our financial resources during those years, building it. It was hard but it was better than 30 years of debt or the possibility of being homeless in month's time.

But there was also the time when my mother thought we just needed TV. We got one channel at the time, and had videos, but she thought we just needed more than that. I cannot relate at all to *needing* TV. So anyway, my mother bought for us this expensive satellite system . . . and I took it back. Thanks but no thanks. It was the $40 per month bill for the minimum service. No thanks. Don’t need to worry about having to meet that, not for TV. I’d love to have Netflix even now but I’m not up for the monthly expense -- instead during the winter when it is dark in the evening and we have time to watch DVDs, we go rent the 5 for 5 for $5’s. Everything we see is a few years old. But we either have that extra $5 in our pocket or we don’t, and if we don’t, we don’t get them and that’s fine. A monthly bill is just totally something else again.

Another way we bank is that we don’t borrow. Not that we never have, or never would, just that it is something to avoid if at ALL possible. And if it wasn’t possible to avoid it, then it is something to pay off ASAP period. And doing that is just like having a jar for savings . . . when I was paying off my student loan, every time I had an extra $20 or $40, I put it toward that so that the load was paid off in about half the time allowed. And if we borrow, we have a plan as to how we’ll pay it off, and when, which is always early.

I knew a person once who borrowed money to take her family on a vacation to Scotland. She jokingly said that it would take 20 years or something to pay that off, which horrified me. So what she said to me was this (I’ll always remember): “I admire you not borrowing money, not being in debt, living the way you do. But you give up an awful lot to do that, like this trip to Scotland.” To which I say now, you do not give up anything except debt to be out of debt. If we wanted to go to Scotland, we’d have a jar for it, and when it was a fully funded trip, we’d go. Doing it that way tells you a lot more about what is really important to you. If you are borrowing from the future, a thousand here and a thousand there doesn’t seem so bad because it isn’t real. If the choice is, I could have this shot of single malt Scotch tonight or I could put that money in the jar, it becomes real clear what is important to you. I’ve found out that most people think that their debt will somehow magically disappear -- maybe they’ll die and not have to pay it, or win the lottery, or something. When they end up homeless and eating cat food, I find it very difficult to feel sorry for them. They made their choices.

We bank by filling up the freezers and canning shelves and having a few barrels of wheat and corn and caches of potatoes. What of that is boughten we buy when we are feeling a little flush. It gives us a thrill to put by: it gives us a thrill to eat from what we’ve put by.

If you don’t have debt or many bills, it doesn’t take much money to get by. If you have a place to live and food, then even if you don’t have money, your children aren’t cold and hungry.

How do I keep myself from wanting so much stuff? Well, not having the TV is a start. It is certainly possible to see through the manipulation of advertising, but it is still seductive to see so much. Another way is to simply not go shopping. When I stay home, I don’t spend much money, but what is more, I don’t see things that I then think I can’t live without. What ends up happening here is that we find that we actually need a new sifter, that the old one is kaput, and so we go and find out what is available in sifters. During that process I also see other things, things I might drool over but don’t truly need, like those nice bamboo spoons (I love kitchen stuff). Still, I find when I get home, my old wooden spoons work just fine, and the new sifter is all we bought. I know I need towels at some point, but if I don’t have the money for them, then no use deciding which of this year’s colors I would buy if I did have the money. In fact, it is worse than “no use” because it plants that seed of discontent with what you already have.

And perhaps most important, if you live this way, if you don’t borrow from the future, then hopefully you’re children will know not to borrow from the future too. Pouring money onto discontent does not really do anything about that discontent -- if you learn contentment, perhaps your children will have the chance to learn contentment also.

And then too, not to be forgotten, is the fact that every war that ever was, every exploitation of people and the environment was and is caused by money or the love and seeking thereof. So if you can control your own grasping, your own consumption, then and only then can you contribute to things like world peace and non-exploitation and environmental integrity. If it doesn’t actually inconvenience you in some way then it is all just gnashing teeth and sounding brass and tinkling cymbals -- and without love that is a verb.

enter into thy closet

Really, I was thinking of a different post. And really, I hope someone doesn’t mind me using this real story but this is the deepest thing.

See, there is a psychologist I know, dignified, professional, credentialed, experienced, who is going to this mandatory week-long government training session. Who could blame the psychologists that a lot of them like to leave these “training sessions” a bit early to get on home (have you ever been to something so boring you’d rather go to get your wisdom teeth out? that’s what those things are like) . So this time they’ve all received a memo that the very last thing that they all have to stay for is a test! “There will be a quiz!”

Why the h*ll do people do this? Who would allow themselves to be treated like that? Degraded rabble? Evidently dignified, professional, credentialed, experienced psychologists would. Every day on facebook folks comment bluely, “oh gosh darn, another Monday”, or more cheerfully, “TGIF.” School starts teaching that in pre-school and so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that well-schooled psychologists have been trained to be that docile, that obedient, that subservient to the system which sucks them dry.

Maybe it’s a character fault in me but I never could do that. Try as I might, I could not put up with the slow death. In high school we got a new principal who decided that we needed a dress code to include no spaghetti strap tops. Me? I wore one, then called him a dirty old man to be so distracted by high school girls in spaghetti strap tops. I got sent home anyway but I still just have that you aren’t going to tell me what to do, not without some reason anyway, attitude. I learned the futility of trying to “change” the system. The system serves its real purposes quite well, despite what they say.

I learned to live largely outside the system. I touch the system in various places, I use it to my own ends often enough, but neither my well-being nor my self-image depends upon it. It is a really nice thing because I am not diminished by other people. I am, in fact, brightened by other people shining. A rising tide and all that.

The truth of the matter is, when you figure this out, it will be like praying in your closet instead of for show. What is for show ends with the show; what is real reverberates, grows, changes, effects for years and lifetimes and outside of time itself.

(thanks Matthew 6:5-6 -- the title should link you to this chapter)

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.

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

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, . . . .

Jesus was a farmer

Someone mentioned that they might know of a cow for sale, a heifer so I’d have to be training her to be hand milked, but a full blooded Jersey and expecting a Jersey calf too. I sure would like to have a look at her.

And then my husband asked a question, something like “if you had two what would you do with them,” and I misunderstood what he meant because I answered that I’d make sure I could get the new one in milk and then I’d beef our old one (after her due date although I’m very sure she is not with calf -- I’m totally willing to be surprised however). No, what he was asking, he said, was what if I bought this new cow and she had a calf and then my old cow had a calf too?

I’d feel very wealthy, I said.

In school I remember learning about different number bases, like ours is base ten but you can have base eight or base twelve. I had a knack for being able to do this, to throw a switch in my mind and think mathematically in a different base. It was just a trick as far as I was concerned and I didn’t much understand why other people struggled with it.

I also took two years of Spanish in school. I didn’t learn all that much but I did learn that I could only really understand the stuff when something in my brain switched. With the language I couldn’t make it switch like I could with the math but still to this day although I don’t speak Spanish at all really, I can very often understand what is being said (in a general way).

That switch thing is one of the things I think is happening now. The paradigm is changing, is in the middle of a switch, and no one knows the language of the new paradigm. A lot of us are making good guesses I think, but all of us are making mistakes to go with it, dragging along parts of the old paradigm that we can’t even imagine not being there. Take the Lynn Miller essay that I referenced in the last post. I think Mr. Miller is brilliant but later in that essay he tells about a new endeavor he has taken on in order to help farmers keep their insurance paid (among other things). I happen to think that this particular idea is asinine and that the new paradigm is unlikely to have insurances to pay, and particularly not what we know as health insurance because third party health insurance is one of the reasons people are so dang unhealthy today.

Anyway, I don’t want to talk about insurance, or health, or even SFJ. What I want to highlight is the new paradigm, and our blindness to spots of it. Ah, but who knows where my own blind spots are?

I'm sure a new paradigm will have to incorporate that wealth is not money but is production, and that everyone will have useful things to do. I think those refusing to do this will be hungry. I think health by way of a decent (not a restricted) diet and lots of work will largely replace what we've come to know as "health care". "Education" as we know it will be a welcome victim. Energy is the biggest change and is what will lead the change in everything else. I think people will resist these until they are dead. They will refuse to learn the language. They are covering their ears even now and singing "lalalala" to themselves.

I think having two cows in milk, one to sell, a couple calves to raise for future milkers and beef, thus being able to also fatten pigs with the extra milk, not to mention butter and lard and all the other things that come from such adventures, I think all of that is real wealth. I still don't think the current cow is pregnant. But I would be very tickled to be wrong.

One more point: I think there is a real difference in having a blind spot and a refusal to speak the new language. As far as I can tell, our government is in massive refusal mode. But then our government *follows* her people by and large -- our government had a reserve of food when people thought that was important but when people started mortgaging their houses for a vacation, the government wondered what it was doing with these stockpiles and got rid of them. I know people who KNOW what is happening (as surely Obama must) but who insist that there is no higher calling that having a good time now, blast the future or some poor chap starving somewhere -- I have to have my tea and oranges from China now.

I think of the line in the song, "and when he knew for certain/only drowning men could see him/he said all men shall be sailors then/until the sea shall free them."

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.

Imagine

Imagine that you provided (you and your family), not bought, everything you need. That is, everything you really need. For you and your family.

So, you need some shelter, a house. Now see that house as trees standing, or rocks lying, or sod growing, or a shovel waiting to dig into the earth. Imagine taking those things and with only simple tools (like that shovel) turning them into a snug enough house. One that isn’t going to bake you out of it in the summer or freeze you during the winter.

It is awfully nice when that house has some heat, but if you are providing that with your own efforts, well, that involves more than just turning up that thermostat. Most likely it is fire. And that can also cook your meals. But it would also involve, perhaps, making warm, usually woolen, clothing, which would involve sheep and washing and carding and spinning and knitting or weaving or the like.

Imagine that food didn’t come from the grocery store, or from halfway around the world out of season. What would you eat? What would you concentrate on growing? What would you learn about nature and wild foods in your area? What animals would you keep? How would you feed them? And how would you prepare the food, considering that you can’t just turn the stove on and (poof) it is hot? How would you chill the milk, preserve the meat, keep greens and fruit on the table in the dead of winter?

Now, look at what you do “for a living”, what you do for money. Or if you are a SAHM, what you do for your family. And ask yourself this: Is anything I do worth what it takes to meet my basic needs? Is anything I do really worth what it would take for me and my family to make a house, a warm home, clothing, food?

The answer is, No, it isn’t.

And that’s what I’m talking about with material participation.