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.

High Summer

It is high summer. There have been times in years past when we hadn’t been able to get into the garden for weeks at this point, the weeds having overwhelmed us. We started out with ambitious plans when we marked the center of the universe all those years ago. One might say that they were too ambitious, or that we failed a lot, or were overwhelmed, or didn’t know enough. None of those explanations quite satisfies me though.

We had this idea of a life, and of what it would take to live it. And we embarked on that, all the while also living in the dominant paradigm, and that was what was too much but necessary. And we learned and we evolved. And we still participate in the dominant paradigm albeit differently.

We’re no spring chickens here but we can work more than most people half our age because we’re used to it and because we value it. Things do change some as we get older – we’re a bit more aware of our limits because we aren’t immune anymore if we happen to breeze right past them; there are some aches, some stiffness, some caution sometimes.

I run in to people who tell me about thinking about how they will garden as they get older. My mother’s husband did it by raising his beds, container gardening, and (mostly) paying slaves to work for him. A guy I knew on the internet was going to do much the same but the real estate market fell out from under him and he’s disappeared. A lady at the barn (hi Tess) was recently talking about it as we discussed us both having round gardens and what we did with paths between deep beds and the use of machinery and Gene Logsdon. I’ll give Tess this: she’s the only person I’ve ever met, ever, who was familiar with all the agricultural writing that I’m familiar with. It is pretty cool to be able to reference Fukuoka, Jeavons, and Berry (and even Gussow) without having to then try to explain what they were talking about.

I think this thinking about getting older is common because getting older is happening to every one of us. But I think it is a lot like when one is getting ready to have a child: There are a lot of assumptions made that turn out to just not be true, and if you raise your child (or age) according to your assumptions rather than in accordance with your experience and values, then you miss out and wonder what in the heck happened.

The truth is, I have no clue what getting older will look like for me/us. Just like 20 years ago, I didn’t know this house would look quite like it does. I can still see what I thought it would look like in my head though. We had a direction we were going in, and a vision, but the manifestation of that vision inevitably looks different from what you imagined it might. We have a cooperative family: It is my hope that that continues and evolves and serves us all but lawd knows there is no model for what that could look like.

One thing I’ve learned is that you don’t need a huge garden if you don’t have a lot of people to feed, and if you have a lot of people to feed, there are a lot of people to work a huge garden.

One thing I’ve learned is that nothing has to look any particular way – it just has to function.

One thing I’ve learned is that there are things you can’t control and even wanting to is a danger sign.

Danger Will Robinson. Danger.

the nerves they are a janglin'

I stood there in the road. He had plenty of space to just go on, but I stood boldly, camera around my neck. He stopped. I'm figuring, here we are, no beating around the bush.

I said something. Who knows quite what. Something like "Where are you taking that," referring to his pick up which was fully of siding. He said something back, something like, "What business is it of yours?" At some point I told him that I was a nosy neighbor and he said, squinting his eyes, that I sure was. I fingered the siding, bent it actually, and asked, "Is that aluminum, because if it is you can sell it for a pretty penny. If it isn't, and you are going up the road that way, you better not be dumping it illegally."

Well, it was longer, and more of a dance, there was a lot more all to it than that. But I freaked him out and made him mad. We've reported several illegal dumps, and to the county's credit, they've been cleaned up.

I'm very sorry, but people are just, by and large, stupid. This is why, sometimes, some of us lose hope. I'll stay in my neighborhood. And I'll preface it by saying that we've had three neighbors who have NOT been stupid, so they aren't all like this. One died, one sold at the height of the real estate run up and moved to town, and one lives here still albeit part time. Also, much to my relief, most stupid neighbors don't actually last all that long, so you won't hear about the doctor who moved out here only to decide he really didn't like the country, or the Raytheon yankee who couldn't live here without the overpaid job (or, worse, his mother-in-law).

And you know, I've thought about, what if you, stupid neighbors, actually see yourself in this post? In photos actually? Well, sorry.

So, first up is the neighbor who has never lived here but who periodically (sometimes only every three or four years) comes to mow, or cut something down, and put up some ribbon to hallucinate over a cabin. His latest stupid thing?
This. A fence around a thorn tree. Evidently he thinks some apple tree that he planted some time a long time ago has survived and that this thorn tree is it. I went and looked at this for a really long time. I imagined that, yes, maybe one could look at the bark down low and think maybe it looked like apple bark if one did the un-focus one's eyes bit, but how did he miss the thorns? Or the fact that it doesn't grow like an apple tree. Or that it has no apples, ever. Sigh. His strong point as a neighbor? We almost never see him.

Then there is this one.
Like that? The photos of course cannot do any of this justice. This house was once owned by our best neighbor ever. But he was getting older and his kids worried about him and he gave in and has regretted it ever since. Lawd, let me die here I say. Anyway, it went through several owners thereafter and these latest idiots have lasted longer than most. Long enough to do this:
Yes, that is right, they mowed down a steep hillside of trees. They didn't log it; there was no log-able timber there. They hired three different "guys" to do it, and the last guys left this equipment.
Want to bet it is stolen? The "logs" are, as you can see, stacked up and rotting. These people are paranoid about someone stealing from them, thus the equipment placed on top. Never mind the piles of them they burned. Ok, then they overstocked the cattle and didn't feed them and didn't seed the hillside and this is what they have created. When they finally do crap out (for eventually their source of money will run out and they will go -- unlike us, they cannot live here without an unending input of cash), this will grow up first in blackberries. Give it about a hundred years, maybe two, to recover the soil that used to be on it.

See why I get mad?

Of course, that's not all. There's the water slide (roughly the same angle as the night photo above).
Remember, a wonderful wild creek flows just outside their house and completely through their property. But that wasn't good enough. They cut down the big pretty maple in the front yard and then scalped it, covered it in black plastic, and put in what we call the water slide. Of course, they don't pump enough water to actually flow over the stones.
see the coyote? They did have a bear (a real one) but blamed the damage he caused on humans. If they saw a real Indian, they'd mess themselves in a stinky manner. I'm enough to drive them to distraction for goodness sakes. So, the creek isn't good enough, the wildlife isn't good enough, the stars themselves are not good enough but plastic (or concrete or nylon) crap is.

Sigh. Roll eyes. Say I'm sorry a million times to that hillside they raped.

Now we come to the most troublesome one. This house has only recently been sold and vacated. It is built on a cabin that is over 100 years old. It has been abused.

The guy who bought it didn't even know any of that. He just started cutting stuff down. To "clean out the creek" seems to be a major goal of stupid people. Creeks, people, need to grow up with stuff -- it protects the creek. Then he tore out all the fences. Then he said he wants to put horses there. Without fences. Yep. He lives away from here and hires people to do stuff when he is not here. Like clean out the fields.
See? Important work, yes. Getting rid of that fringe that again is so important to wildlife and that, if you kept livestock would be moved back naturally anyway.

The guy is a used car salesman and evidently doesn't plan on getting his fingernails dirty with work on the place. When did we, as a country, as a society, decide that everyone deserved opulence without having to do anything? This translates (by me) into, he's borrowing every penny he's paying people and I just hope he doesn't tear the place down before he declares bankruptcy. His FIL wants him to tear down the cabin and put in a doublewide. Yeah, a piece of plastic crap or a piece of americana? Whadayathink?
On the surface, he claims to be "just like us" -- a family wanting to live out. But he isn't just like us if he doesn't want to work, and I can assure you from having watched him sit on his duff, he doesn't. He isn't going to. You couldn't make him. He claims to want a place to raise his daughters but if they did get here, he'd be taking them here and there into town, or be horrified if he couldn't. He says he wants to raise stuff, improve the place.

Well, buddy (and everyone else in the whole and entire world), when you don't think that "cleaning the place up" is done by cutting nice alive stuff down, come talk to me. Until then, you are just another one of those horrible warnings.

All these stupid people have something in common: lives that require steady and substantial injections of cash. They aren't willing to do things for themselves, or live smaller. And there's a constant external viewpoint they have for themselves; a standard to maintain.

People can live however they want to. But some choices kill us. I have a friend dying of a rare form of leukemia most likely caused because she dyed her hair for years and years. Bad choice. The choice to cut things down and say that is cleaning up is just wrong. The sense of entitlement to a very opulent lifestyle is killing everything; it is killing us with maladies from obesity to purposelessness.

And every now and then I get mad at it. Generally I don't write about it. But at some point, people have to stop being stupid, making stupid choices.

Ok. Well. I want to sooth myself now, and maybe you too, with photos of good stuff.

This is how that mowed off hillside should look, grown up, protected.

This is an overnight piece of wood being sawed with the crosscut saw. The saw is four feet long, for perspective, and that kerf is really wide, but it cuts sweet. It is a piece of maple and it will last all night long.
Supper, the veggies (except for carrots) out of the garden (potatoes, turnips, squash).

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.

I couldn’t really tell you why I’ve had nothing to say. It isn’t that I haven’t thought things but I just haven’t thought them through to having something to say. I’ve been watching, observing but just haven’t seen things in the blog light.

Now, I have to tell you (and if you are a blogger, you no doubt already know this), often you can see things as a blog post as they happen. And artistry is really in the seeing. Only if you see it can you write it, or draw it, or paint it (or hire someone else to carry out your vision) – but vision is the key. Vision is also the key to a life – to have a vision of what your life can be and then live it toward that.

And so I saw how my back hurt and how I noticed that and figured out why it was and mitigated it through conscious living and thought, oh, that could be a blog post about how one creates health, even as one confronts the challenges of getting older. I saw how #1 daughter noticed that the birthday boy’s breakfast was going to be interrupted by something that couldn’t be helped and planned and created and carried out a magnificent birthday breakfast that his father and I couldn’t do for him, and thought, oh, that would be a magnificent blog post about the results of unschooling and living as an “all for one, one for all” farm family. And I saw us all tramping through the cold and snow and ice in the dark carrying everything with us only to get to a cold house without a fire and how rather than hardship this was the high life of adventure and togetherness and I thought, oh well, people never ever understand that. I have seen the changes we have made through the years and thought about how change, to be real, must be cumulative and not just a pose for show and thought about trying to write about that but . . . how?

I did see a drawing I want to draw. I don’t really draw, and I certainly don’t know how to draw but I do know what I saw and I’d like to see if I could capture it a little – those lines of the face that reveal the person and the beauty of life. This is the year, you know, that I will be fifty. And I don’t really have any expectations for that. It is a lot like how I came in to having a family – not having any idea what it would be like and so being open to how it was and all the possibilities of what it could be. I have found that I am essentially the same person that I was at 6 and at 13 and at 28 and 46 and every other age. I am ageless, timelessness, lace and fineness, I’m beauty and . . . wait, that’s a song lyric. I am privileged and blessed. My dimples are also turning to creases and that is part and parcel.

I may be quiet but I’m still here.

I see very clearly, very starkly, that what is known as “the economy” is built on oil, on transporting everything everywhere, and its keystone is what is known as “growth”, ever expansion because the present is only paid for by the future. It really doesn’t take a genius to figure out that that isn’t going to work forever, and isn’t going to work at all with expensive oil. It doesn’t take a genius to see that it really hasn’t ever worked at all and only the opiate of consumption, of appearances, has misled people to believe it works for them. But say things like that and people just blink and stare – they are rather addicted to their opiate of consumption.

Take instead the lesson of the service berries this year: food is hiding all around you.

and just to note, now all that ice just off the porch and on the paths right around the house? It melted then refroze into a very smooth sheet, and now it has about 8 inches of snow on top of that! There have been some pratfalls, and you should watch chickens when they slide! (and you thought the duck slide at the county fair was something)

love in falling

If you could see the pile of apples and pears in our floor! And the older cow came home after visiting with her bull for three months, and we're milking the newer cow, and the calf is almost as big as her mothers. The turnips that were seeded on the potato hills after the potato tops had died back have made themselves nicely. We had a great crop of winter squash this year, and also got the hard corn harvested (but not shucked or shelled yet).

I've decided to absolutely embrace this time of year again. As a child and young adult, fall was my favorite season. With age or with children or maybe with a house without central heat, when fall came I just started thinking of winter, and being cold. But winter is really just a different rhythm. Cold and snow and the like really can make everything much harder but then again, there is less to do too. Without a heated house, it is helpful if someone can stay home to keep it warm but then again, sometimes a day alone is a welcome thing for each of us . . . and we can take turns.

So this fall came and it has been beautiful. The color lasted a long time and while perhaps not a vibrant as some year, it was nonetheless wonderful. Today I was just taking note of how many trees were still holding on to their leaves, now various shades of brown from ochre to mahogany to dull. The pines have darkened. The mountains, although they really couldn't be seen today for the mist and low ceiling, have their "bones" visible now -- their ridges and lines, their sharpness and age. When you look through the woods, if there is a clearing on the other side, you can see it now. And to walk now is like being in a riot of noise from the leaves. This rain will make it a little quieter.

We have a fire. Chores have moved an hour earlier. The rhythm and steps of the dance change constantly. The apples and pears move in and out of the dehydrator.

On the practical side, we drive bottom feeder vehicles, a sort of protest of having to drive at all. And recently we've experienced all sorts of problems with them. Recently being since about April. But just take the most recent, last night, an axle going, and today, in the midst of trying to deal with that, a neighbor comes up and gives us 30 hens (he raises roosters, if'n you know what I mean). So right there, you have this abundance. There was abundance in me calling my boss and her saying, I can handle today, it's ok; abundance in the in-laws willingness to pick up the new axle and bring it out here; abundance in a new axle costing so little that we could afford it; abundance in that our family made it home safe and sound after a rare and exceptional night out before that axle went. And perhaps even grace in my husband not entirely forsaking me when all I could do was hold my head in my hands and try to breathe after the axle broke.

A Reed Shaken with the Wind

Matthew 11:7

We’ve been without power for 13 days in December . . . so far. Four different times the power has failed.

And here is why the electric power grid has failed so often this winter: The infrastructure is crumbling.

The thing about infrastructure is that you don’t think about it so much. Well, unless you are an industrial recruiter or a doomer/thrivalist . Infrastructure just is. It is what you take for granted and notice only if it isn't there and fuss about if it isn't perfect. I would say that many different sorts of infrastructures are crumbling right now; that the financial infrastructure, for instance, has already collapsed. The electric grid infrastructure is a favorite of many people -- those people who’s ideal is to live “off the grid” for instance -- and the reason people have the idea to live off the grid is because people are so dependent upon the grid. They cannot heat, they cannot cook, they cannot store food, they have no water to drink or flush with without electricity. And because the grid cannot even begin to “stay up” without coal fire generated electricity, and I don’t care where you think your personal electricity comes from, in reality the grid would not be there at all without coal. There is no solar grid or wind grid or hydro grid (and I have my environmental issues with each one of these alternatives -- they are not “clean” in reality) without dirty & dangerous, mercury laced, acid rain producing, mountain top removed coal fired power plants.

Anyway.

We are connected to the grid in some really vital ways. But we know how to live without it -- and we have the means to live without it. So the power failures are inconveniences to us, not tragedies. We can enjoy our freezers and our Wii, and we can do without them.

But these power failures are the canaries in the coal mines . . . the first signs of what is there already but not yet recognized.

The infrastructure is crumbling.

It is a simple thing to maintain power lines, and cheaper than fixing them four times in one month. But that hasn’t happened. Sure right now it is way out here in the boonies and on a power circuit that serves only a handful of customers. It is nothing big, certainly nothing that would affect people in the cities, nothing that will require a priority other than if it feels good, do it.

Except that it will. Just like bad (not poor but downright bad and evil) financial choices are catching up with the world. Just like peak oil will catch up (and did, in a small way, when prices peaked then demand fell).

Go ahead. Think that I'm crazy. The infrastructure is collapsing no matter what you think about it.

Go ahead. Read Kunstler's forecast.

And be brave in the new year.

There is this thing that is a given in my head but that other people don't seem to get is that TEOTWAWKI is an opportunity, a gift. Shiva's dance of destruction is also the dance of transformation. Think, What do you want your world to look like? and then create it. Of course, true creativity requires more than a dram of marrow.

wide sky visions and green tunnel joys

A month since I blogged? I don’t believe I’ve ever gone that long in the five years I’ve kept this blog.

The barn I work at is in the river’s valley, a very broad valley, and the sky there is a wide sky. Today it was too too blue dotted with the big fluffy clouds that look like you could bounce on them, and wide open. When I see that I always think that it looks like skies that are in paintings. My husband always says, “Yeah, wonder where they got that idea?” At least I am amused by him. At the barn you can often see what weather is coming if you know what direction it is coming from. I like the feeling of possibility there with that sky.

At home we more often hear and smell what weather is coming than see it. Our home is high up on the mountain and the vista here is more narrow, at times even acute. The mountains, the hollers and the draws are steep and the trees are tall. I like the feeling of being in the loving embrace of mother earth.

I had a friend who walked the entire Appalachian Trail, bottom to top in one fell swoop by himself, way back in 1981. He said most of it was like walking inside a very long green tunnel. Two or three times you would come out on a bald mountain top, like the Roan or Whitetop, but that's about it. In Pennsylvania the trail was for a time beside a road and that was a relief, but most of the time it was just one very long, very green tunnel. He was on Katahdin about a day’s hike from the end when three days of rain set in and he was stuck in his tent, sick, and with only corn meal to eat. He did not stop short but persevered to the end. Then hitchhiked home.

We’ve been homesteaders, or back-to-the-land-ers, or otherwise independent cusses for a long time now. That’s our big sky vision. We’ve spent time on it, developed skills, mapped out the cloud formations of it, and bounced on them to boot. We’ve done it long enough (and are competent enough at it) that maybe we don’t have to think every day about how and why and what to do anymore. In fact, we’re competent enough at it that we can branch off and explore other paths along the green tunnel, without getting lost because we have the big sky vision to guide us.

Without vision, all one has is the tunnel. If all one has is the tunnel of daily existence, one can mistake a smoother, level, sandy path as “the path I’ve always known I should be on”, and one can mistake a rocky outcropping that one slides down a bit painfully as some big setback or something other than just how life is sometimes. Without the vision, one is only wandering aimlessly calling random events epiphanies or tragedies.

Ah, but vision doesn’t guarantee that one will not end up sitting in a wet tent with a runny nose for three days eating only corn meal mush. Sh*t happens. But sh*t that happens in pursuit of vision is a good story, while sh*t that happens without vision is just whining. Vision gets you up the mountain, lack of it just thinks maybe it might be nice to do.

Husband was explaining to one of the kids the other day why time seemed to go slowly for kids and quickly for adults. He said that life changes a lot for kids, what with them growing, changing, developing but that adults tend to get stuck, doing the same old same old day after day after day, living for the weekend or vacation or retirement or otherwise some other day than today.

I’m still milking the cow and making the bread and washing dishes and pulling weeds and playing with the family. But I’m also working at the barn and riding more and daring to teach just a bit and even riding someone else’s horse in a horse show (to train the horse).

I have wide sky visions and green tunnel joys.

for Cathy.

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

The Last American Man

or maybe the next to last.

“Living on the road my friend, is gonna keep you free and clean
Now you wear your skin like iron,
Your breath as hard as kerosene.
You weren't your mama's only boy, but her favorite one it seems
She began to cry when you said goodbye,
And sank into your dreams.
Poncho was a bandit boys, his horse was fast as polished steel
He wore his gun outside his pants
For all the honest world to feel.”

When I heard these lines from the Townes VanZandt tune Poncho & Lefty after I’d finished the Elizabeth Gilbert book about Eustace Conway I thought, hmmm, those lines could be about him. Too early to tell whether the next couplet (about no one hearing his dying words) will be as true or not.

When Eustace showed up in NYC in his buckskins, he was called Daniel-f*cking-Boone. My mother used to say to us, “I don’t know why in the world you all want to live that Daniel Boone life.” You could say I felt a connection.

I guess if I just got down to it, I’d say that you have to read this book. Really. But it is complicated for me because the author is a bigot at the beginning of the book and that horribly irritates me. Examples? She describes Eustace’s neighbors as the “aptly named Hicks clan” and goes through this thing about red necks in SW Virginia not knowing where Maine is when clearly it is that they do not give a sh*t about a man walking from Maine but do care about a man walking to Georgia. I’ve read her other work and she does not engage in such bigotry about Italians, Indians, Balinese, the poverty stricken or uneducated of any area, hell, not even her fairly hated ex-husband . . . just about hillbillies. I am so sick of it being ok to malign hillbillies. Hillbillies are the very last niggers, or at least we are the very last people you can cop derogatory attitudes toward and still be pc and "inclusive". Then too, there are some simple mistakes that irritate me because they show her ignorance in ways that Eustace would understand -- a passive solar office building with room for two work spaces could not possibly be 20 sq. feet (this is like checking out in the supermarket with 3 items that sell for $1/each and the total coming to $13 and you not noticing that something didn’t add up right) but must be 20 feet square. Or that Eustace’s horse is not a Standard Breed but a Standardbred.

So there’s that. Which pretty much disappears after the first one-third of the book. But then in the last one-third of the book she takes on the doctor/counselor role to diagnose our beloved Eustace, to tell us what is wrong with him, when frankly what is wrong with his is just as obvious from his story as what is so right about him. Just tell his goddamn story already.

But, if you can read this book and get past the author, well, Mr. Eustace Conway is a character, a most admirable character. Both perfect and perfectly flawed.

What I really admire about Eustace is that he lives with reality. The author says he’s the only person she knows who doesn’t live in metaphor but is the real deal. Yeah, that. Nature doesn’t say, “let’s reach an agreement here.” With nature, it really is, lots of times, one way or the other. You screw up, you pay the price. I totally get Eustace’s hard-ass-ness. Because nature, and life really, is hard-ass. But life is also forgiving -- like the bread is edible even if it isn’t perfect and at least as this author portrays him, he doesn’t quite get that. You don’t want to try to fillet a squirrel but, you know, maybe you can relax on some of the other stuff.

And maybe there is some problem in talking more about your life than you live it. But considering that most people don’t even have a life, considering that most people pay lip service to tons of things without really living any of it, considering that people are not human if they are not in touch with the earth, I think Eustace’s life says quite a lot.

I am also amused that he seems to have quite the following who don’t like him. That in itself is a testament that he actually stands for something.

doing and being are one

When we were finishing up the planting of the corn, that old song “Family Affair” started playing in my head. Pretty much everything for us is a family affair.

The day finally came around to get the corn planted. First there were the plowing and the disking days, of course. Then the potatoes got planted, about 170# of them. Then it set in wet again, and busy-ness and commitments and things we had to do besides, and the corn was just a tad late for us. Not that it matters all that much. A lot of times stuff planted early sits there and doesn’t grow much while it is cool but when planted when it is warm it really takes off fast. This is why sometimes in the summer when we are trying to stagger things being ripe by planting things every two weeks, stuff not planted at the same time will mature at the same time anyway. Seeds don’t actually obey the seed packets you see. But still, it feels antsy when things are late getting planted.

The day to plant the corn had been anticipated; the “I think we’ll get to plant it on Thursday,” sort of anticipation. And the day before, “I think we’ll call all hands to the garden tomorrow for the corn.” And again the morning of, “If we thaw some chicken and make some deviled eggs, we can gather salad from the garden and have a big chef salad with grilled chicken after we plant the corn.” So everyone knows it. And everyone has seen it done and done it before so they know the work, know what to do.

Everyone made sure they ate something for lunch. Lunch for us usually isn’t very formal but a picking out of which leftovers you want so you don’t starve before supper. Breakfast and supper are more formal in that we make something and we eat together. Not that we don’t eat lunch together, we usually do. And not that in the hot part of summer, we don’t have dinner in the hot of the afternoon and snack for supper, we do. I guess maybe you have to be part of this family to understand how it flows and works like a well-oiled machine.

Husband went to the garden first to start the preparations. Before long the kids actually got antsy and said, “Isn’t it time to go down now?” Yeah, ok, let’s go. Boots on and bathing suits under clothes. A big jug of water. The big tomato plant we’d wintered in the window sills. A bucket and knife to graze for the rabbits. Food for the dog. Ready. Set. Go.

In the garden, husband had started laying off the rows. The girls placed the seed while eldest and I covered. I should have remembered my gloves because I got a blister on my palm from the rough handle of the shovel so I switched to the hoe. Youngest had a job but I was so busy with mine, I don’t remember what his was. I don’t know how many rows there were, each of two kinds of corn (bloody butcher and hickory king), but a lot. Because we grow a lot of corn. It takes about a pound of corn to make two big pones for our family for supper, and it takes about 2 ½ ears to make a pound which is a little over one corn stalk per meal and we’ll figure on eating it every day. That’s how we plan on feeding ourselves. And we’ll try to grow at least twice that much. We’ve had several good corn years but if there’s a failure we want to have enough in storage to see us through. Think of the seven fat cows and the seven lean cows.

We planted the sunflowers too, lots we hope (we have no idea what the germination will be). The potatoes are mostly up and it will soon be time to hill them. Before ten days or so we’ll need to make the thread net over the baby corn plants so the crows will leave them alone. We harvested lovely lettuce and spinach and garlic and onions for the salad, and I toured the rest of all that is growing. The kids swam in the creek.

I asked the kids at one point, “Did I make you come to the garden to do this, or did you choose to come to the garden to do this?” Because, you know, I hadn’t really asked, I’d just coordinated with “It‘s time to go to the garden now” thing. They looked at me like I was a crazy lady but then said, “Because we wanted to plant the corn.”

No doubt that it helps that they know where food comes from. And that isn’t the store.

And it rained on the just planted corn last night! Even now the thing-that-is is stirring, swelling, growing, moving from a kernel in an ear to making an entire plant with two more ears full of kernels. It produces something, is productive, and thus is a model for me in my own life, doing and being.

Oh, and desert was blueberries frozen from last year, and fresh cream whipped that was as yellow as the buttercups the cow lays down in.

on a recent sunny morning

hen laying in nest box

hens dusting and preening

grass growing
(my favorite)
(and see the cow way back there?)

coltsfoot

fiddleheads and jewel weed seedlets

spinach bed
(this will soon be harvest-able)

onions backed by heal all blooming

wise old sage plant

turnips backed by music garlic
(thanks to my friend who gave us that bulb those years ago)

seedling bed

blueberries mulched & peach trees blooming

Appalachian Blue and Green

Today, again

what I wish the President would say

I can always pick out a thing or two in his speeches that I really like, that I agree with, that I think the nation needs to hear. This last time, in the non-State of the Union speech, it was that this latest ‘crisis” was not unforeseen -- that we knew about the energy crisis in the 1970s and we as a nation did not respond in any responsible way to it.

I would continue that to say that we know and knew that not everyone can invest in the stock market and “make money” year after year because the stock market is basically a bet and you really cannot invest in it money that you cannot afford to lose. We know that when you buy a house, you should have 20% down payment at least and the payment should be less than 30% of your income. We know that more people cannot be consumers than are producers, takers than are leavers.

Yes, there is not any part of this crisis that sensible, sensitive, awake people did not foresee.

Here is what else, what else he didn't even come close to saying but needs to say. There is only so much sunlight that hits the earth and that is the maximum amount of energy that we can use. We’ve cheated with fossil fuels. We can cheat only so much longer.

The lifestyles that fossil fuel use has provided are as bankrupt as the housing market and as empty as the capped oil wells. We need to build new lifestyles, not attempt to resurrect dying industries and prop up ponzi scheme false ideas of security. We do not need the government to create “good paying jobs”. We need to see our way to a life that doesn’t take so much money and doesn’t involve so much fakery. Manual labor is not enslavement and abundance is not stuff. We need as humans the satisfaction of creating real things, and really useful things.

It is not a bad thing to live smaller, to let the world be a bigger place and to more fully inhabit our little piece of it. It is, in fact, a good thing, a thing to be embraced, celebrated even.

We no longer expect the free lunch or respect the workaholic. Rather we expect that all people will work, and work rather hard, all their lives . . . but they will always have the time to sit and have a piece of pie with a neighbor. We will not honor idleness and fakery or seek what is false.

Our hope is not the hope of seeking the status quo, is not the hope of the ever-expanding middle class, it not the hope of the growthgrowthgrowth (cancer) economy, is not the hope of what we have come to know and expect, but the hope of moving into a new paradigm: A paradigm where, simply, less is more.

I’d like him to acknowledge that real freedom, real liberty, begins with securing food because if you don’t have food, you are a slave. So the victory garden becomes the liberty garden. Arbor day becomes orchard day. Every household and every community ought be challenged to grow more and more if its own food.

Sustainability is about being willing, and being able, to do things every day, every year, forever. It isn’t about looking for retirement or living for “one day”. It isn’t about sacrificing for a bit now in order to get something in the future. It is about living now the way we can live forever. Embracing. What we need to do now is not to sacrifice but to embrace a way of being that we can keep up forever.

That’s some of what I with the President would articulate.

Sacred Sights

First of all, my
STUDIES OF DONKEY.

And the donkey himself. The equines got their feet done today so he had his halter on.
The cow. If I'd had someone with me to take the photo, I would have had one with the two of us lying there together. She's still full of piss and vinegar but she's also that docile too. Turned a lot like me I think.
The horse.
And the gang eating hay near sunset.

Hope ya'll had a Happy Yule, a Merry Christmas, and are looking forward to 2009. I think it shall be a watershed year.

Uphill Both Ways

We’ve been reminiscing lately about how our gonads must have been as big as the Mississippi is long for us to have come out here and done this. We had just gotten married when we bought this piece of land. We moved out here some months later, after having started the house and the garden and the chickens and learning that we just couldn’t get it all done not being here. We were pregnant for the first time when we moved out here and lived in a tiny and ancient unheated trailer (we heated with kerosene heaters those winters).

There was no bridge across the creek then -- we simply forded it. If water was high we parked on the other side and hiked home, or if we were caught with the vehicle on this side of the creek, we stayed home until it subsided. When we parked on the other side, which we had to most of every winter back then, every item was carried home, uphill -- children, laundry, groceries, every single thing, more than a quarter mile, often in really bad weather and in the dark.

It never crossed either of our minds that we could fail. It simply wasn’t a possibility. Yet lots of things did fail. Those first chickens were killed by a pack of dogs that then got themselves trapped in the chicken coop so that we not only found every single chicken dead, we then had to kill three dogs. And I can’t tell you how many times we planted apple trees and grape vines. Everything took longer than it took. Except the children. We kept having children. Until my mother called the last one “problem number four” although that wasn’t why we stopped.

We built a house that is truly home. It looks like some mushroom sprung up in the woods. It is not large but you can’t see it entire from any angle because it has so many corners. I remember when we had the roof on but the ceiling wasn’t in. We’d been working very hard and yet hadn’t yet reached that last year’s push yet. My dad came up, probably his last time up it turned out. My dad, bless him, was always proud of me and baffled by me both. I absolutely honored everything I ever learned from him yet always took off at some ninety degree angle that he couldn’t quite understand. He looked up at the timbers in the house and asked how we got them up there. My husband answered, “One at a time.” My dad still gazed. Husband expounded. “A good day was when I got one rafter put up.” All that wood, everything up there, everything all around him, my dad understood all at once that we had done all that with only our hands. I think he also grasped that the only other person he’d ever known who had done that had been his own grandfather.

It took two more years to actually get us in the house. That last winter husband simply made a point to work at it every. single. day. And except for the days I took the kids to a homeschool meeting or to see my mom, I worked at it every single day too. In the mornings he went off to town to work and I cooked and cleaned and did all the work of running a household full of kids and in the afternoons and evenings, often until midnight, in the cold dark wet winter, we worked on the house. The kids ate a large number of frozen burritos that winter. That was a trade off. That and that after we were in the house, we didn’t want to speak to each other for several months. Ah, but they still got homemade bread and jam and eggs and potatoes every day too, and eventually husband and I found we again had things to say to one another.

And we didn’t buy much of anything except building materials and sinks and toilets and such. And legos. I really like my kitchen sinks and my roof by the way. And the kids still play with the lego sets.

And all of that and ten times more is still not the half of it. It sure wasn’t easy. But you know what? It wasn’t hard either. Or rather, it was very hard but worth every drop of blood, sweat and every single tear. It was fun. It was fulfilling. It was challenging and provoking in the best of ways.

on a different note: I had three posts written on a different computer that went phftz. One of them, I can't even remember what it was really so no hope of re-writing that! (and you are no doubt better off without it) One is the very nice award Alecto has given me, and I will have that up before long, I promise, because I have a whole new idea for it. And the last was the story of the cow's artificial insemination which did happen this week and I really don't want to re-write that so maybe if we can find the NT disk around here somewhere, we can get it off and I can post it. In the meantime, its the meantime and life really is good.

Against Artifacture

The Contrary Goddess’ condensed version of a passage from Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire: a season in the wilderness, the chapter called “Cowboys and Indians Part II”:

There are lonely hours. How can I deny it? There are times when solitaire becomes solitary, an entirely different game. To escape I live more and more in the out-of-doors.

Strange as it might seem, I found that eating my supper out-of-doors made a difference. Inside the trailer, surrounded by the artifacture of America, I was reminded insistently of all that I had, for a season, left behind; the plywood walls and the dusty venetian blinds and the light bulbs and the smell of butane made me think of Albuquerque. But taking my meal outside by the burning juniper in the fireplace with more desert and mountains than I could explore in a lifetime open to view, I was invited to contemplate a far larger world, one which extends into a past and into a future without any limits known to the human kind. By taking off my shoes and digging my toes in the sand I made contact with that larger world -- an exhilarating feeling which leads to equanimity. In the midst of such a grand tableau it was impossible to give full and serious consideration to Albuquerque.

“Albuquerque” there obviously being a symbol for a more universal “civilized” human state of being. And I must say that I love that word, “artifacture”.

In another place, a different chapter called “Industrial Tourism and The National Parks”, Abbey says:

A venturesome minority will always be eager to set off on their own, and no obstacles should be placed in their path; let them take risks, for Godsake, let them get lost, sunburnt, stranded, drowned, eaten by bears, buried alive under avalanches -- that is the right and privilege of any free American.

“Free American”, that is me. It is not the western desert for me, but the wild southern highlands and the cussedly independent culture that this land requires. I resent the artifacture, I do, and the never relenting pressure to buy into it, even just some of it, a little of it. I don’t care if that artifacture is the corporate uniform or the make-up and blue hair and dog collar of the rebel against the corporate, I dislike them both equally for they are the same coin.

I look forward to the end of the world as we know it, I do. I do that without being a doomsdayer for I do not see it as doom or as salvation. I cannot look out into the broader world, off of my mountain here, without seeing the seed of destruction growing in the fertile ground of degradation. Rome is burning. It simply is.

But that does not equal unhappiness or destruction for me and mine and the things I hold as holy (family, community, earth/air/fire/water, spirit). I dig my toes into the manure and touch a much larger world, a non-artificial world, where community and hair color are not manufactured out of pretense but simply exist as they are; where getting together with others means that something is accomplished at the end of the day, something tangible, something additive, something like supper; where looking past what is easy to what is good is actually, really, truly valued; where if you are idle, or deliberately stupid, or too terribly hard to get along with, you are likely to be hungry and this is not a tragedy or something that anyone but you needs to do anything to fix. In other words, I choose not to fiddle while Rome is burning.

In another section of “Cowboys and Indians Part II”, Abbey says, “The Navajos are people, not personnel; nothing in their nature or tradition has prepared them to adapt to the regimentation of application forms and time clock. To force them into the machine would require a Procrustean mutilation of the basic humanity.” The adaptation to the machine has mutilated all of humanity.

There is no way out of the machine while you are in it. The only way out is to step out. There are steps to take to be ready (to think you are more ready), to get closer (to believe you are closer), but there is no way out but to step out. And there is no way back in except to fail. And there is no reason to fail except to not be free, and to not want to be free. The artifacture of symbolic Albuquerque is intoxicating and some people like being intoxicated but it is that world that is failing and that I do not mourn.

We stepped out, onto this farm on the side of this mountain. We stepped out and made our own ramada under which to eat our supper.

hey nineteen

Nineteen years is nothing to sneeze at. Nineteen years, four children, one farm, one hand built house, untold agricultural endeavors and unschooled adventures later and here we are. It is not by accident that we are here.

You see, falling in love is the easy part. You can do that with train wrecks. I certainly have. That was perhaps the one thing about my husband that told me he needed to be my husband -- he was different from all the rest of the people I’d ever loved. Although I couldn’t exactly define how he was different, but I knew it in that way you know things deep down.

And so he and I became us. Then there were more of us. And we knew from way back then the sorts of things that were important to us -- that we wanted land (although we seriously contemplated staying put in the city), we didn’t want debt , we wanted kids, we wanted independence, that we were about “natural” and “holistic” and stuff like that. And I wanted animals in general and horses specifically.

There has always been a direction we’ve been moving in. Sometimes we’ve moved more slowly and sometimes more quickly, but we’ve moved. When other people thought that perhaps we should be working on the house, or making more money, or otherwise being more socially acceptable, we just kept moving in our direction. Luck is when something bad happens and you face it down and simply don’t allow it turn out badly. When you refuse to be tossed by the storms of life.

There is in life a force of sheer will that does indeed move mountains.

Thunderdome or Eden?

Wendy over at Home is asks “What would you be willing to give up.” While I applaud what she’s doing, I think the question itself is telling. What would you be willing to give up? I’d ask, what are you willing to give up, today? and what have you given up already? That’s why I applaud the 90% folks in so far as they really reduce stuff, which can pretty much broadly be lumped into consumption. I prefer that the question be out of the hypothetical and about what you are willing to do right now to meet the challenges as you see them. Because for sure, we also see the challenges differently.

One thing I don’t see how people can not see is that there is a crash and it is going on now. So this isn’t going to remain an intellectual exercise even for people who think themselves very well off indeed.

What would I be willing to give up? In the hypothetical the thing I would most LIKE to give up would be cars. How would this happen? A Kunstler type crash, maybe. If there is no gas, there are no cars. But also, as prices rise, public transportation (private businesses that transport the public, not government boondoggles) should become feasible. I should be able to walk about three miles and catch a bus which would be totally cool by me. Also, there could be bulk delivery services for those of us in the boonies like this -- most probably someone who lives out here who goes to town every so often and brings back everything everyone needs for a little cut of it. Another favorite of mine is horses of course. I think with our geography, saddle and pack horses make more sense than buggies by and large. I am ready to be wrangler there. Trains could provide efficient transportation for places like Lowe's, Wal-Mart, and Southern States (feed store), all of which happen to be directly on railroad spurs already. Of course, just in time marketing wouldn't work anymore. And Wal-Mart might become a mom-&-pop again and storekeepers would live in their shops. Whatever it is, it certainly won’t be what it is now. But my point is there wouldn't have to be no gasoline for no personal passenger vehicles on the road to be a reality. As it is now, however, we must maintain a vehicle, and occasionally fuel it.

What I have given up, the one thing that I think makes absolutely the most difference in the most dimensions is personal income. Last year our income, for a family of six, was about $6K. That is very little, let me tell you, and hopefully this year it will be a bit more than that. At that level there simply isn’t even the temptation to consume. Still I’ve maintained a stockpile of food, and we’ve increased substantially our every day eating off the place. Money has had an artificially high value for far too long and in its devaluation we find that real skills really are valuable, far more valuable than cash.

There are, of course, tons of other things we’ve “given up” -- but the truth of it is that it is embracing a positive way of life rather than giving up a negative one.

Maybe I’m just the Klingon on board the ship that is disintegrating, saying, “Invigorating, isn‘t it?” Yes, that’s it, CG is a Klingon. It is like the Olympic games, except for real. The tsunami, the cyclone, is coming and what you choose right now will make a difference in how you make it through. Or don’t. If you are going to trust the government to look after you, you are going to end up in the Superdome. But for those who got themselves back to the garden, it could be a post-industrial utopia. Or something quite like it.