Archive for the ‘Meta’ Category
Well folks, my time here on this blog is looking limited, at least for the immediate future.
As noted in my previous post, I’m currently computer- and internet-free in my daily life. Of late, I’ve been finding my way to the library a couple times a week, on average, for one hour or less sessions online. This is perhaps just enough time to keep up on email and a few other things I need to take care of via the internet. It’s not, as it turns out, enough time to type up and post blog entries. I had one entry that I attempted to type up and, even with it not quite containing my usual wordiness, it took me over a half hour just to type it. And it was only partly done. So this won’t work for the time being.
Further, it’s that busy time of year again. Two farm hand jobs, the summer markets starting up, and the garden constantly calling me. The weather has been gorgeous here, sunny and warm, essentially the antithesis of the previous two springs I’ve experienced here on the North Oregon coast. It’s making me feel behind. I feel like I should have everything planted already. That’s a bit silly, of course. I just put thirty tomato plants in the hoop house, have little peppers growing every day that will hopefully be ready for transplant soon, various greens and roots in, brassicas transplanted, and the other day I seeded down a couple small beds of quinoa. This is one of my experiments for the year. I’m curious to attempt to grow a grain out here and quinoa seems like it just might work. We’ll see. My other two experiments are Painted Mountain flour corn and Rockwell dry beans. I haven’t planted either of those yet. I need to get on that soon—they may be a stretch as it is.
I’ve lost my point, though. Not having the internet has, for the most part, been glorious. I think I’m getting more done (if nothing else, I’m working my two jobs, gardening, and still getting a ton of reading done) and I feel less stressed and crazy. I’m getting better sleep. I am, in other words, less distracted. This is good, and I think I’ll stick with it for the time being. Unfortunately, the blog doesn’t currently fit into all that.
I’m not shutting this down. It will stay here, the archives available, and I’ll continue to look in on and respond to any comments. I may yet even post on occasion this summer, if I come up with short musings I feel are worth putting up. Or even quick life updates, like this. And once fall and winter rolls back around, it’s entirely possible I’ll begin spouting off here again. You know how it goes, those of you who have been here awhile. When the rain and cold comes, I get back to the internal realm, and the writing calls me again. Summertime? It’s just that external part of the year. The outside world beckons. You can’t ignore the sun—not out here.
Hope you all are well. Comment and talk to me below. I’ll answer. Check in on occasion. At some point I’ll say more. And go plant something. As always, it’ll make the world a touch better.
Like this:
Like Loading...
Well, that post title is far too bombastic for such a small update, but I thought I might snag your attention. I apologize for the intense quiet of the last some odd weeks. I thought I might get a new post written while essentially vacationing in Portland; as it turns out, Portland is terribly and wonderfully distracting. No post. And then, as my time there came to an end, my laptop up and died. I had wondered when that might happen. The answer is now. (Or then, I suppose.)
This is all good, though. I’m in the midst of some life changes. Spring is here, summer advances quickly, my laptop is dead, I have a new bike. I am thinking about the future. I am staring cock-headed and inquisitive at the recent past. I am recognizing how terribly much time I have lost to the internet of late and I don’t want to continue that trend. A day or two before my laptop died, I had been considering giving it up, destroying my daily access to the internet and the intense distraction it foments in me. I am not above recognizing signs.
The current plan is no replacement for the laptop. At this moment, I type on a friend’s. I will post this, because I’m sad that I’ve been so quiet with no explanation. However, despite how the preceding sentences may sound, I don’t intend to abandon this blog. I intend, instead, to alter the logistics of running it.
My current plan is to bike into town a time or two a week to use the internet at the library. This will significantly curtail its distractive (screw it, I’m making that a word) possibilities while still allowing me access to the glories and convenience of email, research ability, The Archdruid Report, and the sporadically successful world of online dating. But I will not spend hours reading basketball articles, clicking around aimlessly to stay distracted, and spending more time with virtual cats in the form of videos and hilariously idiotic memes than the real cat that lives in my house. In general, life will be better.
I also suspect I will stay more on top of my burgeoning garden, my never-ending to-read list, my socializing, and very likely even my writing. If anything, I suspect this might make it more likely that I’ll be able to keep this blog going during the craziness of summer. We’ll see, though—I may be being wildly optimistic.
Either way, I am alive, I have not yet abandoned you, I’m reading a fantastic and 1,080 page book, I’m scheming about new blog posts, and I’m enjoying the hell out of my new bike. I am thinking of how to go about finding a farm of my own, or some sort of kind-of-but-not-really equivalent arrangement. I am imagining a life more fulfilled, less distracted, filled with food and fun and friends and . . . fungi? I don’t know, it starts with an “f.”
I am well, in other words, and slightly exhilarated at new possibilities, and I hope you are well and exhilarated, too.
Soon I’ll have more. For now, take care, all of you.
Like this:
Like Loading...
I’ve always enjoyed New Year’s Eve and the ensuing New Year’s Day. The midnight celebrations of the new year strike me as somewhat magical moments, with a fresh year stretched out before me and all its promises of bad habits eliminated, mistakes corrected, good habits established, a fresh sense of proper living beckoning. I’m a sucker for this arbitrary moment so embraced by our culture. I feel as though I should transition that moment of renewal to the Winter Solstice—to synchronize personal and natural transitions—but New Year’s Eve was always the celebration in my life growing up and so that tradition still has its hold upon me.
Sometimes I make resolutions and sometimes I don’t. But I never fail to attempt to regroup in the early days of January. I begin a new year of reading with a new reading list. I think about the bad habits I want to leave behind and the productive habits I want to establish. I take stock of the ways I’ve gone astray from my life goals and look to recenter and refocus myself. This year is no exception.
In fact, this year offers even more of an opportunity for a fresh start than normal. On January 1st, I took up a new residence. For the first time in over two years, I’m not living on a farm. This isn’t as drastic a change as it might seem, though. I continue to work the same two farm hand jobs that I’ve been working for the last year and my move was only about a mile down the road from where I was before. My life is changing, but it’s not a complete overhaul.
I moved to a new place, about a mile down the road. This is the view out my bedroom window, looking out on the North Fork of the Nehalem River. As you can see, we had a dusting of snow this morning.
I’ve moved in with a couple, Anthony and Victoria, living in their house on nine acres along the North Fork of the Nehalem River. I have a decent sized room, my own bathroom, and a walk in closet. The house is a manufactured home that’s been altered and retrofitted. Anthony is an architect who focuses on sustainable design, so this home has been updated to at least somewhat take advantage of solar energy. It’s very well insulated. A number of windows were added to let in natural light and a few solar tubes were installed in the bathrooms for daytime lighting. The home is outfitted with a solar hot water heater which assists the electric water heater. It also is equipped with a highly efficient Sun Frost refrigerator. A wood stove sits in the living room and provides much of the heating during the winter. The furnace rarely turns on.
There is a large gardening space, as well, a green house, a compost system, and a wood-fired sauna that sees occasional use. A stream cuts through the property on its way down the hill to the river, though the drinking water comes from a well. This is perhaps the worst aspect of living here: the water has a strong sulfur taste and smell. After living on two farms with incredible water from above ground creeks, I was spoiled. The water doesn’t too much bother me, though. If that’s the worst part of being here, then I can hardly complain.
Over the last few months of 2012, I slipped into bad habits. I was distracted, spending too much time on the internet, and had allowed my living space to devolve to the point of messiness that it left me unmotivated to engage in productive activities. During the summer, my lovely roommates Kayleigh and Lily kept me socially engaged and my garden—in addition to my work, of course—kept me physically busy with productive tasks. Once winter rolled around, the roommates left, and my garden died back, I took all that extra time available to me and sunk it into bad habits of distraction. I wasn’t cleaning up after myself regularly and would far too often choose the distraction of the internet and movies over good work.
This was my own fault, the result of allowing bad habits to take over. One thing I’ve learned about myself is that I’m very susceptible to patterns and habits. The bad ones put me into a negative feedback loop and the good ones put me into a positive feedback loop. But my self control is something that I’m still working on and leaves much to be desired; even when I know I’m engaging in bad habits and understand what I need to do to transition myself to productive work, I too often don’t do it. I allow myself to fall into distraction even though it depresses me and reduces my quality of life.
This happens most often when I spend a lot of time alone. At my previous place, I was alone more often than not the last few months. The farm owners also live on the property and I still was working, so it wasn’t a constant solitude, but the farm owners live in a separate house and we didn’t spend significant amounts of time together. The other social outlets in the area largely clear out in the winter. There are a good number of people around in the summer but far less in the winter, and many of those who do stay here through the winter time are people in town whom I haven’t made friends with.
Much of my socializing, in fact, has been happening in Portland, where I’ve been dating a woman now for a couple months. She’s fantastic and has made my life quite a bit better, but she’s 80 miles away. She’s not integrated into my day-to-day life. I go into town to see her, have a grand time, feel good about life, then I come back here to the coast and to a certain amount of solitude and my bad habits. It’s been unsustainable and it’s knocked me off the path I’ve been talking about here at this blog, upon which I place such high value.
Another angle of the view out my bedroom window.
I believe it’s important that I be able to change bad habits and unproductive patterns without having to make large physical changes in my life, such as moving to a new location. One of the downfalls of our modern society, I believe, is something of which Wendell Berry has written of extensively: the migratory nature of our culture. Many of us here in America have an expansionary frame of mind stemming out of the westward migration of the past and the availability of cheap energy and resources. As such, we feel we can use up a place because there’s always somewhere new and fresh to move to and begin anew. Sometimes this is conscious activity, sometimes not. Cautious and thoughtful husbandry, within this frame of mind, is not required. But, of course, this is a destructive and false belief and one that contributes to many of the ways in which we live poorly and destructively. And so I fight to eliminate this way of thinking from myself and to reorient myself toward the ideal of staying in place and of caring properly for my home.
Yet, in recent years, I have moved continuously. In the last four years, I’ve lived in six places, including my new residence. This has been the result of multiple farm internships and of the way I’ve chosen to live my life in recent years, with far fewer resources. It means that my homes have often been temporary, either of necessity (a set-period internship) or of likelihood (living situations that are expected to be temporary but with no set expiration date.) In some ways, this can be frustrating. In other ways, it’s one of the costs of how I want to live. But ultimately, I want to settle into a particular place, learn it well, care for it, and establish the patterns and habits that will allow me to live more sustainably, on less, with a small amount of money and resources and energy. Familiarity of place is one of the most critical elements of such a way of living.
In my small defense, the last three places I’ve lived have been within a few miles of each other rather than spread across different geographical areas. I am closer to settling, and I would be happy to live in this area here on the north Oregon coast for the rest of my life. I like the community, I love the land, and I continuously feel blessed to now be making a living farming, outside of internships. As others might feel about landing a powerful and high-paying job, I feel about finding good farms to work on for a small but sustaining hourly wage: it is a grace. Here is home for now, and hopefully a good ways into the future.
But once again, I have moved, and I must admit that this move feels like a fresh start and an opportunity to limit my bad habits and reinstate good ones. I had fallen into a funk at my previous residence, through no fault of the place itself but only of my own shortcomings. This move has given me a psychological boost to changing my behavior. It’s a small condemnation of myself that I felt a need for such a physical move to make psychological and emotional changes, but it’s just the place where I’m at for the moment as a flawed human on this chaotically beautiful world. I’ll continue to work on making myself better, on gaining a greater control over my habits and patterns.
There is an element to my new home that is specific to this place, though, which is the people I now live with. I’ve only been here ten days, so there no doubt will be continual learning of how to live with my new roommates and continual adjustments for all of us, but I must say that it’s a joy to be living with people again after a few months of residentiary solitude. Particularly in the winter, I think it’s important for me to be a part of daily community. I’ve enjoyed sharing meals again, having casual evening conversation, having new perspectives and ideas introduced into my thought processes. Similarly, my roommates are older than me and are conservationists—they have designed habits of living rooted in an attempted sustainability and lighter living. They have established patterns and habits that support these ideals as well as a seemingly settled way of day-to-day living. This, I have to say, is a godsend for me at the moment.
As mentioned earlier, I have been scattered and at the mercy of my own bad habits of late. I haven’t been living particularly well, though I can’t say I’ve been living horribly, either. But I have been undisciplined and that lack of discipline has pushed me from my stated goals, which has been painful for me. Through their behaviors, Anthony and Victoria are reminding me of the value of good habits and patterns of living, and of how simple it can be to integrate tasks and ideals into my day-to-day life. They are reminding me how to live well, which is something I had half forgotten the last few months. That, too, is a basis for a fresh start—the modeling of good behavior in my small community of residence.
So 2013 is bringing a particularly fresh start for me this year. I have new residence in a beautiful and settled place, with good people providing good conversation, and who model excellent patterns of behavior for me. I am reminded of good ways of living and of the simplicity of it, given the right frame of mind and a deterrence from self-defeating thought patterns. Much as with the good work I have found, this is a grace.
With this fresh start, I have fresh goals. First of all, I plan to refocus on my reading and study this year. Last year, I only read 17 books. I imagine this will seem a lot to some people here and not a lot to others. For me, it’s a small amount. I normally read closer to 50 books in a year and I like that level of reading. I plan to get back to it in 2013, assuming I don’t run myself too ragged in the summer (though much of my reading takes place during the year’s shoulders, anyway.) Second of all, I plan to get back into various homesteading projects. I haven’t made butter in a number of months; I want to resume that habit. I have some cabbage in the mudroom that will make some fine sauerkraut, as well as providing fresh eating. Fermented ginger carrots would be excellent, as well. I’ve been meaning to make my own enzyme cleaner for months. I finally am going to do that. I’ll attempt to bake a homemade loaf of sandwich bread that will reduce or eliminate my desire to keep buying Gabriel’s bread, a Portland bakery whose sandwich bread I adore. I haven’t made ginger ale in a long time—add it to the list. Homemade pasta on the simple, hand-powered pasta machine I received for Christmas over a year ago? Absolutely, it’s time to give it a try.
When I step away from the computer and engage in a productive activity in the home, I feel infinitely better than if I had just spent that time continuing to stare at a health-sapping screen. And yet, the screen beckons me constantly. It’s a weakness, the amount of time I give to it doing unproductive things. Turning it off and engaging myself in the kitchen, rediscovering the earth through my food, reading a good book or watching the birds on the back porch, considering the world, writing a letter to a friend, taking a bit of time to listen to good music and watch the flames in the wood stove—all this brings me a happiness the screen often can’t. And so, in this new year, I am recommitting myself to stepping away from the screen and putting my time and effort into quality activities, into connection and good health and happiness. I’ve noted this quote before, but Peter Berg once relayed these words of a woman from Mexico City: “The kitchen is the place where you worship the earth.” I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment and, further, think screens are often where we lose touch with the earth—one of the primary places where we learn to degrade the earth. I want to worship the earth instead, which means more time in the kitchen and less time on the internet.
That said, I am keeping my commitment—sporadic as it’s been of late—to this blog. There is still much I want to say and much conversation I want to have with all of you, those who take the time to read my thoughts. I know I’ve been largely absent for many months now and that I’ve made false promises in recent times. All I’ll say at this point is that I intend to write more regularly here going forward. I don’t yet know how regularly that will be, but I enjoy writing for this blog quite a bit when I actually sit down and do it and I want to resume that habit in the new year. The screen is not so bad in this regard.
I expect I’ll continue to add to The Household Economy as I recommit myself to kitchen projects and other homesteading activities. I also intend to write more entries in the Encounters series. I have a number of encounters I still want to write about. The How To Be Poor series on voluntary poverty is a different beast. I have not felt happy with it of late. It’s not that I don’t still have a commitment to voluntary poverty, but I don’t like what I attempted to do in that series of writings. I knew too little. I portrayed the series as one of instruction when, in reality, I am far more a student than a teacher when it comes to such a way of living. I tried to avoid being too preachy, but it came through anyway. It’s not that I don’t think I should write about voluntary poverty, it’s that I think I should have been writing about it in a different way, with more humility, more openness, and more a sense of imparting my own experiences rather than attempting to give people advice, which was one of the ideas behind the series. I made a mistake. I got ahead of myself. I do that sometimes.
I’ll have to think more about How To Be Poor before I decide what to do with that. I may just put it to bed with a final post in which I express some of the thoughts above. Or I may try to take it in a new direction. I’ll decide soon enough and then put up a new entry in the series. (I’m open to suggestions, too, if anyone wants to provide some feedback in the comments.) Whatever I do with it, though, expect thoughts on voluntary poverty and simple living to remain a part of this blog. After all, it’s a major component of what I’m trying to do with my life.
Finally, I may yet start the Considerations of Death series that I anticipated almost exactly a year ago. I still think about it at times and have a few entries in the mental queue that I would like to write at some point. I’ll leave it up to whim for the time being.
Yesterday, after doing a couple hours of work over at the farm I lived at until just a couple weeks ago, I wandered over to my garden there and began the long-neglected work of harvesting out some of the remaining food. I filled a 14-gallon plastic trash bag with multiple heads of cabbage, a few pounds of frost-sweetened carrots and parsnips, an oversize bunch of kale, and a few stray beets. I brought them home, cleaned them, ate a bit and packed the rest away in the fridge and the mud room. There is still a bounty of food out there: more carrots in the grounds, lots of parsnips, probably at least a hundred pounds of potatoes that I really need to retrieve. Still more kale, as well. It’s the remaining legacy of this summer’s good work, of the fulfillment of ideals and the result of good habits, of sustaining patterns. It was a reminder, as well, of the importance of working against distraction and malaise and of finding a constant renewal within an engagement of the earth. That can happen out in the garden, in the kitchen, at either of the two farms I work for, or even on the back porch, the back yard, in the fire in the wood stove, in all the abundant places in which the natural world asserts itself and recaptures my attention.
I intend to cultivate that capturing. I intend to worship the earth—and to let it revive me in this new year.
Like this:
Like Loading...
I apologize for the radio silence of late. I’ve been in the midst of some changing circumstances, looking for a new place to live and making trips into Portland. Coupled with that activity has been a distinct lack of urgent or well-formed ideas for posts, which has led to a distinct lack of updates for the last month or so.
So instead of something thoughtful and considered, here are the quick life updates:
- I’ll be moving, literally, a bit further down the road at the beginning of the new year. I will continue the same work I’ve been doing and am simply changing my living arrangements. My current residence has been great for me the last nine months or so, but it’s time for a shift.
- My new living quarters will see me living with a couple. I’ve gone back and forth on my thoughts about an ideal living arrangement, but I’ve been swinging back toward community of late. I think it will be good to live with others. The isolation of living alone is challenging at times, in a variety of ways.
- I have picked up a number of interesting books of late: Sandor Ellix Katz’s The Art of Fermentation, Wendell Berry’s New Collected Poems and his new essay collection It All Turns on Affection, John Michael Greer’s Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth, Rick Bass’s novel Where the Sea Used to Be, and the 1972 illustrated abridgement of Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History. I think these all will lead to much good thought.
- I already have devoured Greer’s Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth. It leaves me yet more interested in studying within one of the mystery schools, as I continue to feel the draw of some kind of spiritual ecology. Early this year, I had designs on druidry, but I never followed through on that. We’ll see where this current desire goes; I need to study more on the subject.
- Finally, this blog continues to marinate in the back of my mind. I have thoughts about where it might go as well of thoughts of shutting it down. Yet there still is plenty I would like to write about. I plan to reevaluate once I’ve made my new year’s move and am figuring out my new patterns of living. There may be one or more updates before then, but it also may stay quiet here until then.
I’m always interested in what my visitors are up to, so please provide me some life updates of your own in the comments, should you feel so compelled. As a small apology for the quiet of late, I’ll leave you with two Wendell Berry poems. First, “The Reassurer.” Following that, an actual—small, but yet large—reassurance.
— ∞ —
THE REASSURER
A people in the throes of national prosperity, who
breathe poisoned air, drink poisoned water, eat
poisoned food,
who take poisoned medicines to heal them of the poisons
that they breathe, drink, and eat,
such a people crave the further poison of official
reassurance. It is not logical,
but it is understandable, perhaps, that they adore
their President who tells them that all is well,
all is better than ever.
The President reassures the farmer and his wife who
have exhausted their farm to pay for it, and have
exhausted themselves to pay for it,
and have not paid for it, and have gone bankrupt for
the sake of the free market, foreign trade, and the
prosperity of corporations;
he consoles the Navahos, who have been exiled from their
place of exile, because the poor land contained
something required for the national prosperity,
after all;
he consoles the young woman dying of cancer caused by a
substance used in the normal course of national
prosperity to make red apples redder;
he consoles the couple in the Kentucky coalfields, who
sit watching TV in their mobile home on the mud of
the floor of a mined-out stripmine;
from his smile they understand that the fortunate have
a right to their fortunes, that the unfortunate have
a right to their misfortunes, and that these are
equal rights.
The President smiles with the disarming smile of a man
who has seen God, and found Him a true American,
not overbearingly smart.
The President reassures the Chairman of the Board of the
Humane Health for Profit Corporation of America,
who knows in his replaceable heart that health, if
it came, would bring financial ruin;
he reassures the Chairman of the Board of the Victory
and Honor for Profit Corporation of America, who
has been wakened in the night by a dream of the
calamity of peace.
—
THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Like this:
Like Loading...
Monday, I went to Soapstone Lake, hiked around, startled a couple elk having an afternoon drink, laid down in the moss and shade, trees above me and a fern dangling inches from my face, and briefly napped. I sat by the lake and finished Dave Eggers’ A Hologram For The King, which is a beautiful and sad novel. On the way to work Tuesday, I saw two deer off in the distance fording the Miami River and then shortly after that a bird began to fly diagonally toward and away from my car, somewhat mesmerizing me as I very slowly grew closer and closer to it—at a high speed—before it disappeared from my view, only to reappear a few moments later in my rear view mirror, tumbling in the road and surely dead or dying. I didn’t mean to hit it; I hardly even thought about it as it was happening. The moment hypnotized me.
I’ve been trying to hold onto this magic the last few days, as the human world hasn’t quite been so lovely or magical, though it’s had a sadness I was thinking of even as I accidentally killed that bird. The days keep being beautiful and my work outside invigorates me even while I fight melancholy in my quieter, less engaged moments. At some point nearly every day of late, I feel overwhelmed, seemingly always in different ways.
I need to be writing stories.
— ∞ —
I wrote the above almost two weeks ago. I meant it to be part of an entry here on the blog, but it’s only now making it to this venue. As I imagine most of my regular readers have noticed by now, I’ve been missing for about a month. As you might also have inferred, it’s as much as anything because of the subject of my previous post: the current busyness of my life. I already catalogued much of that, so I won’t recount the details. Suffice it to say, I haven’t managed to set up a system for myself to get my writing done despite my work. Hence the quiet around here.
However, there’s a bit more to it than that, and it’s something I realized a couple weeks ago while working out in the garden. It’s a realization summed up in the last sentence of the above writing. While I’ve been so busy this summer with the actual work of growing and raising and selling food, I’ve become more interested in focusing on and writing about the abstract during my down time. I’ve been reading fiction rather than nonfiction and have felt a strong urge to write fiction rather than essays.
Throughout the winter, I rambled on and on here about homesteading and voluntary poverty and simplistic living and connections to nature. Now that much of those ramblings have manifested themselves in the messy, imperfect ways that the real world tends to deal in, and now that these manifestations are taking up a good deal of my time, I find myself not particularly motivated to continue to explore them in my writing. I honestly want to deal more in the abstract in that part of my life. It’s not that I’m not still thinking of all these things, of course—it’s that I’m a bit sick of constantly thinking of them in concrete terms and am interested in trying to hash out some of the emotional reality of all this floating under the surface. And I want to do it in an under the surface sort of way.
I feel the need for some metaphors, in other words.
That’s why I wrote that I need to be writing stories above. Writing stories is therapy for me. I could use a little therapy at the moment, and I could stand to tackle some of these issues from a different direction.
— ∞ —
Thus, much as I took a hiatus last August after starting this blog to get through the busy season, I’m taking something of a hiatus again. I hate to do it, but it’s simply what I need. I want to keep writing, but I don’t want to, for the moment, do the sort of writing I’ve been doing here.
Earlier this week, in fact, as I pondered a complete rewrite of a short story I wrote years ago, something more ambitious and perhaps nearing the state of a novel came to mind, and I’m excited to dive into writing that. So that’s where my writing energy is going to be going for at least the next few months. However, I also hope to write some smaller pieces, perhaps some flash fiction even, and to just dabble with whatever comes to me.
With that in mind, I’ve been considering how to handle this hiatus. I may not post much of anything here until the fall, but that’s not what I’d prefer. I hate to shut the blog down completely. So, rather than going entirely quiet, I’ll look to perhaps post some small writings like what I wrote at the beginning of this post. I may put some kind of flash fiction up, or just some small recounting of something that happened to me written in a bit more of a literary style. I don’t know if any of my readers are really interested in that; please feel free to chime in in the comments, and don’t hesitate to let me know if you’re not interested.
It’s entirely possible, too, that none of those plans will manifest here on the blog and that I won’t really start writing again until after the summer passes. Either way, you can expect much less frequent postings here than was common before the last month.
I do plan to get back to the blog’s regular tone once the fall and winter roll back around. I have little doubt that I’ll find myself quite preoccupied with this blog’s themes in the quiet dark of the winter season, and I imagine I’ll be a bit recharged and refreshed in that regard. I’m hoping not to lose what readers I do have, so please don’t never come back. If you want, you can always sign up on the left hand side of the page to get emailed new posts as they’re published.
— ∞ —
I’ll end this with a small garden update.
There’s one red Stupice tomato just about fully ripe in the hoop house; many other tomatoes—a wide variety—will follow on its heels. The squash, summer and winter alike, is suddenly growing like crazy. A deer got into the garden about a week ago, but the beans and peas it munched on seem to have survived and are coming back. The deer ate selectively, so really it just provided me a bit of unexpected succession planting. I can’t be too unhappy. The potatoes are in bloom, eggplant and peppers are coming on, the summer salad mix is about ready for a harvest and soon I’m going to have far more kale than I know what to do with. My first broccoli head is almost ready and I have a few hundred fall crops seeded in trays, just starting to sprout. The work is never ending, but it’s also a nice level of casual—I can find time for other things if I need it. And I will—for writing, for play, for sanity, for contemplation. But it’s the work that keeps me going, that keeps each day moving into the next.
I hope it’s much the same for everyone else here. No matter how much I find myself yearning for the abstract of late, it’s the work that creates that yearning. It’s the base. It’s the sustenance. I try always to keep that in mind.
That’s the update. I hope everyone is having a more or less good summer. (As for you, Chris—and any other southern hemisphere readers—I hope you’re having a fine winter.) I’d love some updates in the comments. Don’t take my hiatus as a lack of interest. Without the small community that’s formed here, I may have run out of steam long ago.
— ∞ —
In other words, thank you.
Like this:
Like Loading...
It’s amazing what the summer brings. Over the last couple weeks, I’ve found myself without a single day that I haven’t been doing at least some work for one of my two farmhand jobs or working on the garden. That doesn’t mean life has been crushing or brutal—some of those days have only involved a bit of work and others have involved quite a bit of gardening that proved enjoyable and invigorating as much as anything. But it has kept me busy and pretty consistently feeling in service of a never ending to do list, even in the moments when I’m not working on one of the tasks.
On that to do list for awhile now has been to write a new blog post. As I imagine is obvious, that keeps slipping further down the list. I’ll hope that most of my readers understand that sort of prioritizing. My jobs take precedent over the blog and my garden screams a bit more loudly than this blog does. When I’m looking to get some seeding done before the end of the day to hopefully have some home grown salad on the table in a few weeks or taking advantage of cool and cloudy weather to trellis tomatoes in the hoop house, I have to prioritize the actual work of this life over the writing about the work of this life.
Furthermore, when a long day of work is followed up by some evening gardening, dinner and zoning out (or reading, or getting to bed early) is much easier than writing a blog post. Simply put, I’ve been a bit too fried of late to get a good post written. I’ve sat down with the intent to write just such a post a few times, but it hasn’t quite come together. The inspiration has been lost in exhaustion.
So here I am writing something easier, so that I can get something written and posted and let you all know that I haven’t entirely disappeared or lost myself in more basketball (though I am watching the NBA Finals.) This is my meta update. And there are updates to my life, beyond what I’ve just written.
Aside from the work I’m doing—or as an element of all this work—is the fact that two WWOOFers, Lily and Kayleigh, are now living with me and helping out on the farm and with my garden. They worked at Ginger’s place—the farm I interned on last year—for six weeks and decided they didn’t want to leave the Oregon coast. So they’re staying the rest of the summer. After a bit of checking around, talking, debating, thinking about it, and making arrangements, it worked out for them to move into the house I’m living in now—staying in the second bedroom I hadn’t been using. So now I have helpers, roommates, friends, companions, dare I even say students. They play a wide variety of roles and so far it’s been a great arrangement.
One of the consequences of their arrival, though, has been an increased workload. It’s ironic that help can add to the work, but so be it. I’m not complaining about that; the workload has increased because I’m now getting more done with the motivation of having others around to help out. I even am attempting to teach a bit, though I still feel a far way from being a truly knowledgeable teacher. The garden keeps expanding, though it also still seems so far from complete. The hoop house is getting filled out with tomatoes and eggplants and peppers. New beds are being worked up and seeded outside and I’m seeding trays and pots to eventually be transplanted. There’s a lot going on and if much of this comes through, I’ll eventually be swimming in more food than the three of us likely can eat.
Not a bad problem to have.
I also have been working more for the farm here, both in helping to lead Lily and Kayleigh when they’re working and also in doing other tasks without them that seem to be cropping up as the season wears on. I’m now working two full days for Lance and Tammi, in addition, and this week I start working a second farmer’s market on Thursdays. So that leaves me working full days for Lance and Tammi on Tuesday and Friday, working markets on Thursday and Sunday, and fitting in other work here around the farm and gardening on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. And I try to get in some socializing and down time, as well. The season is in full swing indeed.
This isn’t to complain, I want to be clear. It’s been really inspiring having such purpose and feeling so in service to a wide variety of people, animals, land, and personal goals. After my stretch of distraction and lack of accomplishment, I feel like I’m making up for that down time with a flurry of activity and good work. But it’s also been tiring and I’m still trying to find my feet; to find a pace that’s effective and sustainable. I think it’s going to take a bit more thought and experimentation.
I feel, though, that all this is moving me toward something. I have vague thoughts and ideas and schemings about what that may be. Suddenly living and working with two women who I also am, in a few small ways, teaching and leading has helped to affirm for me that I could manage and lead WWOOFers in other capacities. Gardening and growing my own food is helping to affirm that I could run some kind of farm or homestead of my own. Figuring out what tasks need to be done, prioritizing and accomplishing those tasks, and just generally being in the mode of management is also helping to affirm that I could manage my own place. None of it would be easy—and we’ll see where I am with all this in a few months—but all this good work is reminding me that I’m capable and that there are opportunities out there, so long as I’m open to them, willing to be creative and flexible, and willing to take a few risks.
I’m not sure exactly where all this is leading, but it feels like it may be somewhere good. The future suddenly feels a bit more close to the present.
We’ll see. In the meantime, forgive me my lingering silences and know that this blog still is important and still remains on my to do list. It’s just that there are plants and animals and people depending on me and they have to take a bit more priority at the moment, while the sun’s (occasionally) shining and the days are (somewhat) warm. Sometimes the season calls for contemplation and sometimes it calls for work. It’s calling for work at the moment. The contemplation will be back, and I’ll no doubt manage to sneak it in, at times, amongst the work over the next couple months, but for now the work calls a bit more insistently.
I hope to get something up later this week. We’ll see if the garden and my sanity allows it.
Like this:
Like Loading...
Tomorrow morning, I’m taking a road trip up to Whidbey Island in the Puget Sound to visit the first farm I worked on. I started working there back in the summer of 2009 and have been farming in some capacity or another ever since, though with a couple winter breaks. It’s a bit amazing to think that I’m going into my fourth season of farming, and amazing yet to think of how much I still have left to learn—how very little, to be blunt, that I know. I should have been farming for the last twenty years, not just the last three.
But while I started farming later than I wish, I’m immensely happy to have found such a satisfying way of life. It’s humbling to think of how much farming has changed my life and how different a path I now find myself on. It’s also humbling to think of how happy I am in comparison to a former life lived not farming, lost amid a panoply of questions about how best to live my life. While I’m far from having figured everything out and I still am living a life that’s far from settled, I don’t doubt for a moment that I’m on the right track. I know the general path I need to follow, even if I have no idea the curves that path will take.
One of those curves has taken place over the last few months. As I transferred from a focus on vegetable farming to animal husbandry, I started to wonder if perhaps animals were more where my farming passion lay. While I always enjoyed vegetable farming, the pace of it, to be perfectly honest, never seemed to fit me quite right. The pace of animal husbandry—at least in my experience so far, which is admittedly limited—seemed to be a better match. My initial intimidation at working with animals lessened considerably and now navigating my way around sheep, cows, pigs, chickens and other animals feels almost like second nature. There are still moments of surprise, moments of disquiet, moments of disgust, moments of uncertain consideration, but there are still more moments of joy, amusement, beauty, contemplation and connection. I like working with animals.
Something happened about a week ago, however, that suddenly pushed me back into the realm of growing vegetables. A 90′ by 40′ plot of sod was tilled up for me to make a large garden out of. It happened unexpectedly, while I was futzing around in the hoop house in which I had planted a bed of tomatoes a little over a week ago. A family member of the owners of the farm I’m living at showed up with his tractor to plow a plot that he has there and then offered to till up the area I was looking to put in a garden. I happily accepted his offer, being not too eager to try to rip up all that sod by hand—which I had actually just started to do so I could get some potatoes in the ground. With his tractor, a very long job happened very fast, and it wasn’t long before I had a glorious rectangle of fresh dirt staring back at me.
Looking at that soil, the last three years of vegetable farming came roaring back and my inner farmer decided to reassert himself with a vengeance. I stared at that fresh plot, knowing that while the land was not mine, this plot was mine to use as I please, as I saw fit. I imagined rows of veggies growing, of the abundance of late summer and early fall harvests, and of the sweat and labor of working up beds and weeding and harvesting. I imagined the ownership of it, the physical labor of it, the payoff of fresh vegetables, the magic of watching plants grow at my personal, humble bequest. (Though on the plants’ terms—always.) I felt a surge of joy and excitement and possibility that simply overwhelmed me.
I hadn’t expected that, to say the least. I’ve been excited about gardening, but I didn’t expect anything so powerful.
In that moment, I understood the beauty of the Homestead Act. I understood the importance of ownership. And I realized that, damn, I was a farmer. I’m not saying I’m destined to grow vegetables for the rest of my life, though that’s certainly one of the possible paths I could take. I’m not saying I don’t want to raise animals, because I think I do, at least on a small and personal scale if nothing else. I’m not saying I’ll have my own farm, as I have no idea if I ever will own land. But what I realized while staring at that fresh soil and the possibilities it evoked was that farming, over the last three years, had crept under my skin and burrowed deep into my being, had laid down its roots and overtaken me. I was lost to it, even if I hadn’t fully realized. The joy in me spoke to that reality.
Looking at that plot, putting my hands in the dirt, flipping through possibilities in my mind and imagining the glorious results, anticipating putting rakes in that dirt, incorporating fertilizer, working up a sweat—I longed for all of it. I wanted to do it all, right then, at that very moment, even though it was impossible. Even though it was already evening and I had other tasks to get done, I wanted nothing more than to lose myself in that plot of earth. And that instantly rejuvenated me. It lifted me back to a place I had tumbled away from.
There’s a reason this blog has been mostly dead the last three weeks. I fell into a funk of my own making, spurred on by bad habits. I’m going to write about that soon, and I originally meant to write about it today. But I still am figuring out that post. For the moment, though, just know that I had slipped into a state of bad habits, lack of motivation and distraction, and as such I was failing to accomplish some of my goals. But seeing that tilled earth somehow brought me out of that funk. The soil rebirthed me. It brought me back to the life I need to be living.
I’ve since planted sixty row feet of potatoes, some lettuce and chard and kale, and another row of tomatoes in the hoop house. It’s not much, and far more will come, but I’m still getting together seed and supplies, not having really been prepared to garden. My road trip up to Whidbey will take me through Portland on the way back this weekend, where I’ll pick up more supplies. And when I get back, the gardening will continue. But also, this blog will be back on track. Granted, June is going to be the start of what is looking like a very busy season for me. I’ll be working two or three farmers markets, plus doing farm work and taking care of my own garden. Throw in socializing and outdoor activities in the nice summer weather and there may be limited time for blogging. But I intend to keep this site going through the season and am feeling reinvigorated as to what I’ll be writing. The How To Be Poor series of posts fell off, but it’s about to come back. Encounters and The Household Economy will continue, as well, along with stand alone posts. I have plenty to say.
Expect a new How To Be Poor post soon. I’ll write about the distractions and bad habits that took hold of me, explaining my absence, and then explore how that dovetails with voluntary poverty and living a life within constrained resources. As has been the case of late, I’ll be talking also about patterns and cycles, with further words on the plot of earth that helped bring me back into my life and push me full bore into the summer season.
It’s going to be a busy couple of months, but with dirt under my finger nails, the emergence of the farmer within, new experiences, fresh vegetables and the ever-entertaining animals, I think this will be a fantastic summer. With luck—not to mention focus and discipline—I’ll be able to share a good amount of it with you guys.
Like this:
Like Loading...
I suppose it’s inevitable, but there are times when you hurt people you care about. I did that recently with a post that was on this blog for a few days before being taken down.
I didn’t mean to hurt those whom I did with that post. But I should have had a better sense of its ramifications. Sometimes—and it has happened multiple times, I suspect, in the course of writing this blog—I get so caught up in the theory and philosophy about which I’m writing that I lose sight of the personal element to many of these posts. I am someone who uses personal experiences to illustrate the philosophy and ideas that I write about. It’s simply the way I make my arguments—there’s no changing it and I have no desire to change it. Yet, such a method requires a certain degree of thought, consideration and caution. I failed on all three counts with my previous entry.
To the people I hurt, I’m sorry. I care about them, they’ve treated me well, and I screwed up in offending them. I hope they’ll forgive me.
Those readers who saw the post will likely have noticed by now that it disappeared. I apologize, as well, to those who had commented on the post and on the disappearance of those comments. Those who didn’t read the last post but are otherwise regular readers have probably noticed the absence of any new content. What happened with the last entry is part of the reason for that. I’ve been thinking a bit about this blog, the way I write it, what I want to say and how to say it. I’ve been considering whether or not I need to change my approach and reevaluating ideas for posts. However, I also have been busy and in a period of transition, and that’s played a part in my relative silence here. I haven’t minded giving myself some time off from this blog, even though it has continued to call for my attention during the break.
I feel ready to resume my writing here, though. I may need another week or two before I get the How To Be Poor series going again, but I have some other posts I want to write. New content is on the way.
Like this:
Like Loading...
Predicting the Future
As we move into 2012, my plans both for my life and this blog are beginning to take better form. As I wrote in my post on returning home, I am settling into this area—Nehalem, on the northern Oregon coast—and, for the first time since 2009, staying in a particular place for a second year. While I’ll have to leave the farm I’m on now in a few months, I hope to simply move a short way down the road. Either way, I’ll be in the area. I have work on two local farms now and have a third farm offering a significant social scene, all three of which are nothing to be dismissed. I’m beginning to integrate into the community and finding that there are many opportunities here. It doesn’t hurt, either, that this is a particularly beautiful part of the northwest, with the sort of forested landscape that holds a great draw for me, along with quick access to incredible coastal environments.
So what specifically does the new year hold for myself and this blog? Well, as I’ve been making clear, I believe that we’re a country in decline. We’re in the early stages of peak energy and face a future in which fossil fuels—the primary fuels behind our economy, behind the entire way we run our country and other industrialized nations run theirs—become more expensive and more scarce, even as worldwide demand continues to grow. This will put significant pressure on our economy, our infrastructure, our political system, on the ways in which we organize our lives, on everything. You know how most of us in recent times have been slowly ground down under the pressure of a dysfunctional economic and political system, particularly since 2008? Well, we’re not in an anomaly. We’re experiencing what is now normal in this country. We are in decline—pretty much all industrialized nations are now, but America is particularly due to its empire status—and so we need to rework our expectations and rethink how we are going to live our lives.
This isn’t just about peak energy, either. This is also about ecological catastrophe, climate change, a collapsing financial system and, I would argue, a spiritual crisis. These are all interconnected and they all work together to make one hell of a mess. Governments and municipalities are going bankrupt, families are losing their purchasing power, ecosystems are exhibiting signs of incredible strain and we have a culture that is utterly failing us, focusing more on the Kardashians and fleeting memes than these very serious problems—or even thoughtful philosophy, affecting art or explorations of religion, spirituality and nature. We no longer know our way, and many of us know we’re lost.
The way we’ve come to expect life to be is not how it’s going to be in the future. Unfortunately, most are still living as if it is. But instead of an economic correction and a return to the comfortable living most Americans expect as something of a birthright, we’re going to, in general, become poorer every year, less materially rich and comfortable, and are going to find many of our foundational supports crumbling. It’s likely to be a rough road ahead. Yet, we can prepare for it and there’s no reason not to. We need to begin to learn how to be poor, and we need to begin now.
I realize that’s not going to be a popular sentiment and I’m sure there’s a contingent reading this who might think me a bit crazy. But I really do foresee this future, and there’s a lot of science and literature out there to support it. We are coming up against some hard ecological and physical limits as a species and there’s no getting around it. For all the talk of human ingenuity and endless progress, the reality is that human history is the story of cycles and patterns, of rising and falling civilizations, of a multitude of different ways of experiencing and living within the world, and this particular way that we’re in now—industrial civilization, for everyone reading this—is starting to come apart. We’ve had our time, and that time brought us a standard of living and a level of wealth unknown throughout the history of humanity. That makes us unique, yes—but no more unique than thousands of other civilizations and no less vulnerable, either. We’ve mistaken wealth and comfort for permanence and immortality. Wealth provides neither. It’s just a different mode of living. And it’s a mode of living that’s particularly ill-suited for our future.
The basis of our wealth and comfort—the burning of fossil fuels, which provide a level and accessibility of energy unlike anything else on this planet, and certainly unlike anything renewable, as well as the intensive exploitation of this planet’s resources—is coming to an end. It won’t all be gone in our lifetime, but we will certainly see shortages and most people alive today are going to be seeing the chaos that will result in those shortages. We’re seeing it already, in fact. The financial collapse of 2008 was a necessity, not an anomaly, and there are further corrections that will have to be had simply because we chose to address that collapse with attempts at propping up an unsustainable system. The lack of rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina is another indication; a society in collapse simply doesn’t have the resources to rebuild itself after major disasters the way a society on the ascent does. The gridlocked political system and vapid culture are indications, too. The keystones in declining civilizations commonly cease to provide value to that civilization’s citizens. The collapse is not on its way. It’s here now. We’re already in it.
What’s important to note is that this collapse is very unlikely to turn into an apocalypse. It will happen gradually, which is the course that collapsing civilizations typically take. The exact details and timelines are unknown, but the full process of collapse generally takes a couple centuries. That means that we will not see it through its completion. We’ve had the fine luck of drawing the straw that put us at the beginning of the collapse. We get to deal with the initial stages, which are unlikely to be too fun, and it’s entirely possible that few people of consequence will ever acknowledge this collapse during our lifetime. Again, this is because it’s unlikely that there will ever be an event so undeniable and of such magnitude that everyone will point to it and say, “Aha! Here is the collapse.” Instead, it’s just going to be a slow grind. We’ll get shocks to the system, then stabilization and a period of reduced standards of living, and then another shock, another stabilization, and another period of yet-more-reduced standards of living. We had one of those shocks in 2008 and we’re living right now in the stabilized period with a lower standard of living. How quickly is unemployment recovering? How many people have fallen off the rolls? What’s the real unemployment rate? What’s the economy like now compared to the 90s?
So, then, our future holds further monetary and material impoverishment. It holds access to less energy and less resources. And it holds the promise that if we do not start to learn how to live under these new realities, we are going to be a lot worse off than if we do. You know how every few years we hear news stories about the hot new career track? It’s the career that forward-looking people are training for so that they’ll have a place in the economy of the future. Well, I’m here to tell you that the hot new career going forward is living in poverty. Learn to do it well and you’ll be in good shape. Ignore the coming reality and cling to the hope that all the same activities that have supported people over the last couple decades in this country will continue to support them and you’re likely to have a harsh time of it.
Living in Poverty
With that mindset, I’m planning on diving full bore into voluntary poverty in 2012. Not that I’m not already there to a large degree, but there’s plenty more I could do. Luckily, I have a couple sources of work lined up, so I’m not going into a completely income-less poverty. But my cash flow will be small anyway, far below the official poverty line in this country.
My plan for voluntary poverty has a few different elements to it. Aside from working at two farms, I plan to do some serious gardening this year. Coming off three seasons of veggie farming, this should be something I can do. But I have to admit I still don’t feel fully prepared to supply myself with homegrown vegetables all through the season. I expect I’ll do fine, but imagine it will be a bit more of a challenge than it should considering my experience. Still, this is the exact experience I really do need—a situation in which I’m fully in charge, which will burn quite a bit of knowledge and experience into my brain. When working for others, I too often do the work without paying full attention to the reasoning behind it. When I have to understand the reasoning—to figure out the work myself—I learn much better.
This gardening I’m hoping to do may actually take place on the property of one of the farms I’ll be working for. If this is the case, then I’ll be doing a work-trade with them for rent and gardening space. That would leave the other farm to provide most of my cash flow. However, with my rent and food taken care of, I won’t need a significant amount of money. This is another element of my poverty: getting out of the formal economy as much as possible and working within the informal economy of barter, work-trade and so on. This is fantastic preparation for the future because it’s the formal economy which will be failing us. The informal economy should be trucking along quite well. In fact, it should be growing quite a bit in the near future, and undoubtedly already is. This is a reality simply because as the formal economy fails to provide the living of more and more people, most of those people aren’t going to just lay down and die. They’re going to find some way to make ends meet. And if the formal economy isn’t capable or willing, then they’ll turn to the informal economy.
The Household Economy
Part of that informal economy is also the household economy. These are the things you do for yourself at home, using your own labor, rather than paying someone else to do them. Cooking, for instance, is a big part of the household economy. Various food processing you do at home is part of that economy, too. In 2011, I lacto-fermented a variety of veggies, made traditional pickles, made ginger ale and blackberry soda, made butter from cream, made mayonnaise, helped Ginger can tuna fresh off the boat, made pesto, made my own pizza dough, roasted and froze tomatoes and did many other things, all of which were part of the farm’s household economy.
As part of my household economy in 2012, I plan to regularize a series of homesteading activities. I don’t know for sure which ones it will be yet, but I suspect butter making will be there, as well as condiments, and I want to start making my own bread. I would love to begin making cheese and I’ll continue to brew sodas. I’ll certainly be preserving vegetables and probably canning some fish. I also would like to learn how to mend clothes. And I really would like to better learn beer brewing. I’ve brewed four times, once alone, and I have the basic process down. I need to figure out my equipment situation and then start brewing beer as a matter of course.
All of these activities will save me money by transferring the processing and packaging of food from a factory to my kitchen. By saving that money, I can live richer while being poorer. This is the point of learning how to live in poverty. It’s not about learning how to survive a cold night in a cardboard box in an alley—it’s about how to make your life as comfortable and rich as possible (in both a material and non-material sense) with very little money. Most of us will likely have access to less money in the future, or more money that will buy less due to inflation. The more we figure out how to make our lives without money—with thrift and cleverness and our own labor, as well as simple pleasures—the easier it will be to maintain comfort, happiness and a decent standard of living in the midst of a crumbling formal economy.
And if I should prove to be wrong about the economy, then you’re still in a better situation, with access to far more money now that you can use to do whatever you would most want to do with money, such as buy land or travel or start your own business.
Study, Meditation and Death
While I have plenty of physical plans, I also plan to focus on the mental and spiritual in the new year. Part of this will take the form of new avenues of study, with a likely focus on history in the broad sense, history in the very local sense, and my local ecology. Part of it will also be the consideration and possible engagement with a nature-based spiritual study. Part of it, as well, will be a meditation practice, likely involving quiet sits in and observation of the local land. All of these plans are still somewhat tentative and less planned out than what I wrote about above. They also are very personal and less applicable on a broad scale. As such, I won’t get into great detail here, though I’m sure these aspects of my new year will be commented upon and documented to some degree here on this blog.
However, I think consideration of a spiritual element is important for us, especially when dealing with collapse. I believe as a society, we’ve allowed ourselves to become too cut off from the natural world. As we live in an economy and society that is predicated on the use and destruction of the natural world, being cut off from that destruction is necessary for us to not be driven insane at the death constantly perpetrated around us. But as our material society begins to fall apart and offer far less material comforts, many of us are going to need some kind of spirituality to turn to. We won’t be able to fix these problems by buying a new tablet computer or paying someone to fix us a nice meal. New clothes or the smartest smart phone won’t make these issues go away and neither will trivial obsessions with celebrities or fleeting trends. We’ve elevated shopping and electronic distractions to the level of spirituality in this country; as those go away, we’ll need something else, both to provide comfort and to provide new myths for us to use in learning how to live well in a changed world.
With that in mind, I plan to explore some spiritual aspects on the blog this year. One of those will be a series of posts on death. Many of us need to think more about death, become more acquainted with it, and better accept it. Death is something we tend to shy away from in our society and I honestly think we’ll be forced to confront it more directly in the near future. As our economy and infrastructure continues to worsen, public health will, as well. The death rate will rise and we ourselves will be more likely to die earlier. We may be caught in one of the many coming shocks I spoke about earlier. This is life; we just as well could be killed tomorrow in a car crash or die of cancer brought on by the extreme toxicity of our environment, the horrid slop we call food. Death is around us now but as the forms we’re familiar with and have normalized begin to give way more to new forms—failing public health and the occasional dramatic catastrophe, for instance—we may find ourselves forced to confront death in a more direct way than is considered normal.
As such, we need to think about death. We need to better understand it and make our peace with it as much as we can. We need to actually acknowledge it. Therefore, I’ll be writing a series of posts that will recount experiences I’ve had with death. I don’t expect to make too many grand, sweeping statements about those experiences. I imagine I’ll let them more speak for themselves—will simply try to capture some of the emotions and sensations I’ve felt and pass them on to you, for your consideration. I find death somewhat unfathomable and fascinating and frightening. I suspect many have similar feelings about it. But the more we deal with and think about it, the less frightening it becomes and the more it begins to take the shape of something recognizable, of something that is both a necessary and profound part of what it is to be here on this earth.
I, finally, plan to focus more on the Encounters category on this site, which has been neglected up to this point. These posts will deal with encounters with the natural world and its inhabitants. We are a species on this planet, as every other living thing is. We are different, yes, but I don’t believe we are inherently better than other animals or plants, or even the dirt beneath our feet. I also believe we have quite a bit to learn from the other species we share this planet with. We have proved in recent times particularly destructive, particularly hubristic, particularly immature and particularly cruel. As we necessarily transition into a less dominant and more reciprocal relationship with this planet and our local ecosystems, we would do well to observe and learn from the other species around us. They have a lot to teach us, a lot to remind us of, and much joy to impart to us. We would be wise to receive it.
A Plan, Then
In conclusion, there are four main elements of my plan for Of The Hands in the new year.
- How To Be Poor — This will include a variety of posts, from projects I’ve done that I think are helpful for living in voluntary poverty, to thoughts I have, to posts on certain subjects and themes, to ventings about the trials and tribulations of being poor. This won’t be as structured a category, but there should be much there and I think it will prove helpful for those who are interested.
- The Household Economy — This will be a series of documentations of my household economic activity. There will also be some theory and philosophy, I imagine, but the focus will be on actual activities that constitute a part of my household economy.
- Considerations of Death — This will be a series of posts detailing different experiences I’ve had with death, in an effort to better understand and become familiar with it. Most of these will simply be stories rather than long pontifications, but I imagine it will trace my own evolving attitudes and thoughts toward death, as well.
- Encounters — This will be a documentation of encounters with other species. Much as with Considerations of Death, many of these will simply be small stories or anecdotes, but hopefully they will prove helpful. Where I think I’ve gathered some wisdom from another species, I’ll share it here.
In the coming days, I’ll be doing a bit of redesign of the site’s navigation bar, making these sections easily accessible. These are the main focuses I have for the blog going forward, but I don’t intend them to be the only writings I’ll share. If I ever get my camera working again, I’ll still put up the occasional photo posts and there will be other random thoughts and musings, documentations and stories. In fact, I plan to make one of my next posts a review of some of my reading in 2011.
I also, over the next week or two, will be putting up introductory posts for each of these categories. And, of course, I reserve the right to grow bored with these plans and change the blog’s direction. But for now, I like this path and am excited to delve more deeply into these topics. Here’s to hoping you’ll join me, or at least peer quizzically from the other side of the screen.
Like this:
Like Loading...
I made a mistake.
I started a blog in the midst of summer, while farming, and while perilously close to–at least temporarily–hitting a physical and emotional wall. Surveying my life, I’m now realizing that I can’t keep updating this blog for the moment. Life is a bit busy and stressful at the moment, both with work and personal issues, so this blog will have to wait.
It seems odd to write that only two weeks into the blog’s life, but this is the reality. I do intend to return to Of The Hands, though–likely in a few months, once fall has arrived and the farming life has slowed down a bit.
I apologize for the false start. I will be back, and if you’re curious enough to know when, feel free to sign up for the email list to the left. You’ll receive an email the next time I post.
You can also keep track of me through Twitter and Facebook. I’ll still post occasional updates via those venues during the hiatus.
Like this:
Like Loading...
