Well, I decided I am going to have a garden this year. Just a small plot—4’ by 25’--but I’m going to try bio-intensive gardening, so I may be able to produce quite a lot from it. And if that goes well, next year I’ll make it even bigger. I spread my three years worth of compost on it, and then a good layer of aged manure that John brought over. Next I need to double-dig it to loosen the deeper soil, and then it should be ready. I’m doing a simple mounded bed (without wood sides, so no expense there) and I’m going to interplant my beans with the corn, so I won’t need trellises for them. I’ll need to stake or cage the tomatoes, but that’s probably it. Peas can climb up the outside of the compost. So, I got around my ridiculous idea that having a garden required the outlay of too much cash up front.

I did buy a fan type sprayer for the garden hose, a V for the outdoor faucet so I can have the sprinklers on one and the garden hose on the other. I need to buy one more length of hose still, plus probably some garden fencing to keep the cat population out. I’ve got most of the seeds already and I’m building seed flats this weekend from lumber scraps. I also got a few clay pots to start some indoor herbs (but I’m also doing an outdoor herb garden as well).

Yesterday I started my first batch of sprouts (for eating, not growing). I’m eager to add them to my regular diet since they’re so full of enzymes and nutrients.

This is one more step towards becoming self-sufficient that I can be doing right now--raising at least some of my own food. I’ve gotten beyond the idea that it all has to wait until I move back to Pennsylvania. I’ve been reading up on bio-intensive methods and it’s so exciting to realize just how much food can be raised in a very small area.

I also took a book out of the library on solar gardening. It combines intensive gardening with solar aids to extend the harvest. It’s cool to know I can have at least some kinds of fresh vegetables virtually year round.

It’s funny how voluntary simplicity reaches into every aspect of life. Food is definitely one of the most vital aspects and it’s so much fun to be delving into it now. Gardening is just the next logical step. I already cook everything from scratch from whole foods, but to be able to grow it too will be awesome.

I’m trying to envision exactly what a post-consumer, post-ego, internal-locus-of-control, adult society would look like. It would mean the end of a focus on things, the beginning of a focus on the immaterial--really the beginnings of moving from an emphasis on matter to spirit.

Community, family, and relationship would be important. Cooperation and selfless service would become the norm. People would let go of their need to live safe lives, and would wholly embrace their radical freedom.

The exploitation of the earth would end, gargantuan houses would go away, megastores would be gone, Hollywood would be a relic. The earth might still be vastly overpopulated--if we managed this shift without all of the pending catastrophes I see looming on the horizon--but eventually population would come down. We would return to organic farming and sustainable gathering of foodstuffs and medicines from the land. Who would be wholly or very largely vegetarian, so the beef industry would go way, and all the land devoted to feeding livestock could be given over to directly feeding the hungry. We would go local as much as possible. I envision localities trying to reach the goal of producing 90 percent of their needs locally, importing the remainder, and exporting their (what should be modest) surpluses.

Imagine if we could only eat bananas once every several years--what a delicacy they would become! Or mangoes! Each import would be special, a cause for celebration.

Now we totally take for granted all the goods that are available from all corners of the globe, and I’m not just talking about the cheap mass-produced crap, but all of the foodstuffs and products that are indigenous and unique to each area. If only a small fraction of what we needed was imported we would learn to appreciate the diversity we have on this planet; each gift from each part of the globe would be a celebration of abundance and diversity. How we would treasury those gifts.

I want to gain an understanding of the history of ego. My guess is that ego didn’t exist or only barely existed in hunter-gatherer and tribal groups. The more egalitarian and interdependent a group, the less need for individual ego. With the rise of agriculture and permanent settlement, we started having specialists and an elite caste. That’s probably where ego first began to evolve significantly, especially among the kings and pharaohs. The commoners likely still lived in a collective mindset, but the elite were beginning to individuate and thereby develop egos.

There was a quote in one of the books I read recently (World War III) that got me thinking about the history of ego:

In Mesopotamia, Mexico, Java, Egypt, Angkor, countless generations of indentured slaves worked hundreds of millions of cubic feet of brick into colossal gestures of self-edification, the precursors of today’s mammoth urban landscapes.

I would say, even more so, the precursors of today’s suburban landscapes. In ancient times only the emperors built massive structures to the self, now everyone is a pharaoh in suburbia. I was thinking of this quote when I wrote a few entries back, “we don’t need more monuments and mansions to the self.” Everyone is now a pharaoh.

Take a look at this quote from The Long Emergency (James Howard Kunstler):

The fossil fuel bonanza was a one time deal, and the interval we’ve enjoyed it in has been an anomalous period of human history. It has lasted long enough for the people now living in the advanced industrialized nations to consider it absolutely normative. Fossil fuels provided for each person in an industrialized country the equivalent of having hundreds of slaves constantly at his or her disposal.

The average individual now commands resources in equivalent measure to the rulers of old. Well maybe not quite, but close!

And then there’s the connection between ego and materialism I want to understand. They seem to go hand in hand; we don’t have one without the other. As you become somebody separate, what happens that makes you start grabbing for things? As you’re separating from a tribal identity, you’re also separating from Nature. Where once you were an interconnected part of the whole, now you are separate and just an insignificant dot. You can’t go back to the old way once you have an awareness of self, yet there must remain in you some glimmer of tribal memory and a yearning for that kind of connection and belonging. Grabbing at stuff--it’s really a laughable, infantile maneuver. We heap up all of this stuff around us—Hey, look at me, I’m so special and fascinating, don’t you just love me! We want to be popular, to fit in, to be esteemed because we still deeply crave belonging. If our infantile way, maybe we think stuff can bring us that unity we long for.

As I write this I keep seeing the ridiculous image in my head of these great machines tearing big holes in the earth, translating the body of the earth into piles of glittery, cheesy crap—little mountains of crap around proud, smiling people, all with cheesy crowns on their heads. It is so absurd. How do we not see right through the absurdity of ego and evolve beyond it?

The post-consumer paradigm has to also be the post-ego paradigm. Gosh, that makes it seem almost unattainable. When I look at the issue as one of simply moving from an orientation of consumption to one of simplicity, it seems like a big shift, but a reasonable one. If that shift can only really take place by people transcending their egos, it sounds like a pipe dream.

But isn’t that what’s happening with me? As I get further and further into this process, aren’t I simultaneously shedding things and ego?

I think I’m getting at something really important here. Our culture is really geared towards not only creating materialists but also generating ego.

We’re raising kids to have egos. There’s this giant machinery in place churning out more and more ego. How about we just stop?

Yesterday I went through my notes and made a lot of headway with my note cards. There’s still a lot I haven’t even gotten down into my notes yet. When I look at all the headings I have, it still doesn’t feel like I’ve quite gotten into the meat of the matter.

My main thesis is that voluntary simplicity (and other movements such as alternative healing) are cutting-edge movements leading us into a new post-consumer paradigm. It’s not a counter-cultural fringe movement--it is the way of the future if we’re to survive. And while many parts of the world are still just coming on board to the western model of consumption, it’s imperative that we move society on to the next paradigm as rapidly as possible. Americans especially can make a huge difference since our consumption habits are so extreme.

And I want to talk about human potential. Simplicity is not about austerity, it’s about the richness of life. Opening up to the richness and nuance in life opens up channels to our own genius. Once that happens all kinds of miraculous, synergistic things could happen that we can’t even envision from where we are now.

Also, yesterday I went off on a new tangent in my thinking. I had copied down somewhere in my notes a quote about studies that have been done on the connection between materialism and various measures of psychological health. They found that people (across all age, income, and gender variables and across nations) who had a greater orientation towards materialism scored lower on measures of self actualization, vitality, self esteem and community affiliation. They had more physical complaints and higher rates of depression and anxiety. They were less likely to experience happy emotions, more likely to experience anger and unhappiness. The list goes on….

It reminded me of my college term paper on internal versus external locus of control. I remember uncovering paper after paper on the negative effects of having an external locus of control, very similar to the list in the above paragraph.

I should go into the library at CU and see if there any papers linking a materialistic orientation with an external locus of control, because I suspect there is an extremely strong correlation.

This got me thinking about Ken Wilber’s theories about human evolution and how as a society we are at an adolescent stage in our evolution. And among all the age groups who is most likely to have an external locus of control—adolescents! Adolescents are developing their egos and their independence, they want to impress and show off. They need validation and approval from their peers. They like to have cool things because cool things make you somebody. Popularity matters. Money matters. Stuff matters.

Doesn’t that all sound like American society as a whole? Of course society is made up of individuals, so does that mean most Americans’ development somehow was arrested at the adolescent stage? Um, yeah, I think so. The structure of our society is not conducive to post-adolescence. Healthy adulthood is not modeled. Healthy adulthood is equivalent to a post-consumer paradigm. Shifting to that is a radical move!

We idolize the rich and famous, not valuing our own talents and unique abilities. To be a singer, you have to be the cream of the crop, which means a bland homogenized consensus of what a singer should be. We used to all raise our voices in song, millions of wonderful, diverse, quirky voices. But now in our society 99.99 percent of us don’t pass muster. Could there be a Woody Guthrie today?

We’ve created experts and specialists, people “out there” directing us, telling us what we should and shouldn’t do. Doing our thinking for us. By turning to the experts, we absolve ourselves of responsibility, never needing to do our own original thinking.

Builders put out only monstrous houses. We assume there must be some consensus that that’s what we need. At any rate, we go right along with it. Nobody steps up to say, Hey, wait a minute, I never said I wanted a big house, why is it so hard to find a small house?

Advertising brainwashes us, creating artificial needs. We rely on those external cues, finding it virtually impossible to turn quietly inward to assess our true needs. It’s almost impossible to turn off the stream of outside influences.

Maturing into the post-consumer paradigm means among other things becoming inner-directed, in spite of society. It’s recognizing that we live in an immature society, but that we can choose to be the first adults.

If the earth can survive our adolescence, imagine all that could possibly lie ahead for us. A world filled with adults. A society functioning from maturity.

I’m still in the process of maturing myself. I’m still finding ways I let external factors influence what should be my own pure decisions. I really love this new clarity I have with John, and how clear I am with myself that I’m not going to get involved in any other relationships at least as long as I’m here in Colorado. It has made it clear to me that even recently I’ve been making decisions based at least in part on what other people might think. The no-deodorant and no-shampoo experiment would never have come about if I were in a relationship, that’s for sure.

I feel like things are continuing to shift for me, although I can quite put my finger on it.

Overhearing snatches of conversation—how self-important and self-absorbed people are, and so identified with their jobs. I heard a guy at the library on his cell phone—I think he was fishing for a new job so he was really trying to sell himself—and I got really sad. I thought, when your mama had you, is this what she hoped your life would become? It just all seemed so trivial, so cut off from the real essence of life.

In a Mother Earth News magazine some guy proudly wrote an article about how his family reduced their electric usage roughly by half, I believe. But their annual electric usage had been over 93,000 kWh!! I added up my usage for the past twelve months and it was 9,305 kWh. For all of his tips, he certainly missed out on the big one—move to a smaller house! Even his new, reduced energy usage is obscene.

I get so disturbed by the blight of suburban sprawl. That area where I had originally looked for places to live three years ago, between Highway 287 and I-25, continues to be massively developed. Every time I drive through there, another development is going up. I can’t understand the madness. Surely not everyone wants a massive house, but where are the other options? In the old town centers the small cottages are being scraped off for gargantuan replacements. Why are we allowing this?

I’m moved by how deeply Collin appreciates our life here in the country. I don’t often talk with him about my beliefs, I simply live them and experience them, and Collin lives and experiences this reality too. He sees beauty everywhere. He grumbles about going back to suburbia when he has to go to his dad’s. I’m so deeply grateful I’ve been able to give him this life.

I’ve been trying to avoid the radio, but Collin has suddenly developed an interest in it, so when he’s in the car we often have it turned on. I can’t bear to listen to the commercials. I can’t bear to hear anyone hawking anything. We need food, shelter, and clothing. Beyond that it’s about wants, desires, greed and egotism.

We stopped at the dollar store on Thursday because Collin wanted to get something for P. and C. for Easter. I saw a little booklet there with tips on how to spend less. All of the tips involved buying something, not avoiding the need to buy in the first place. Why does this rub me the wrong way? I’m escaping the consumer paradigm. I can’t expect society to be right there with me, evolving at the same pace.

I’m really moving away from the need for many products that I formerly believed to be necessities. I’m realizing how deeply I’ve been brainwashed.

I gave up deodorant about two weeks ago, something that would’ve been utterly unthinkable even recently. I’ve been meaning to switch to a non-aluminum deodorant for a long time, since aluminum is linked to Alzheimer’s disease and other health problems, but I had never considered that deodorant (antiperspirant actually) might never have been necessary in the first place. Sweating helps us excete toxins-- why would we want to interfere with that process? And if you eat a healthy diet and bathe or shower daily you’re not going to stink unless it’s really hot or you’re exerting yourself. I first tried swabbing with witch hazel and then dusting with baking soda, but the witch hazel contains fourteen percent alcohol and the baking soda is irritating, so now I’m not using anything. And guess what? No odor so far. I’m sure when the summer heat hits I’ll have to do something--maybe just wash by underarms mid-day, but I don’t think I’ll ever be using a commercial product again.

Then last night I was online looking for a laundry detergent recipe that I had previously written down but lost. I just finished my last load of laundry with my commercial detergent and am ready to mix up my first batch of homemade stuff. I had bought the ingredients last month--just washing soda, borax, and Fels Naptha laundry soap. The Fels Naptha has a really strong chemical scent, so I think I will skip that and use Ivory soap (which is what I’ve always used for bathing).

Anyway, while looking for that recipe I stumbled upon a discussion about shampoo, or rather it was about not using shampoo. Now here’s something I would’ve thought was just totally, wickedly gross in the past. But now? I just might give it a try. It sounds like a long process—many months until your hair’s oil production normalizes. But the no-shampoo proponents have a lot of good points. Here our body performs this natural function—for free—but we go undoing it, stripping our hair of its natural organic oils, then replacing them with chemical-laden shampoos and conditioners. I’ve wondered for awhile if my ear problems aren’t due to the chemicals in my shampoo. Other people who were considering the no-shampoo route mentioned ear problems too. It makes you wonder. So I may try this, just water rinses and maybe occasional treatments with some things suggested on the site (baking soda for one).

Last month I finally got around to making a bunch of cloth menstrual pads (felted wool with flannel covers). I made a sample last summer and absolutely loved it, but could never quite get around to felting a batch of wool. I’ve been trying to get off tampons for years since I know the bleached tampons release dioxins. When I lived in Longmont I bought a menstrual cup, thinking that would be THE answer, but it ended up being only a partial solution. Now, with the combination of the cup and the cloth pads I think I’ve found the solution. I always hated pads—paper and plastic they can’t breathe, are uncomfortable, feel like they crinkle when you walk, and the fluids tend to disperse through the cellulose too, and want to leak out the sides (although this was when I was a teenager—supposedly there have been improvements, but I wouldn’t know). Cloth is deliciously comfortable, it breathes, fluids are absorbed and don’t spread out. It costs nothing, contains no chemicals, and is reusable. I may never buy another box of tampons again in my life. And laundering the cloth pads is not the big deal people think it would be. I just rinse the blood out immediately when I change the pad, in hot water, then wash in the next load of laundry. Other women just toss the pads in a bucket of cold water until they’re ready to do laundry, and use the bloody water to water plants.

I love the fact that with each of these small changes I’m incrementally becoming more and more self-sufficient. By the time I move back to Pennsylvania and build my off-the-grid cabin I will have already largely adopted the lifestyle.

The next thing on my list is to start growing my own sprouts, herbs, baby greens, and wheatgrass in the house. I want to get a wheatgrass juicer too. When I first looked for them online the only ones I found were really expensive. Now I’ve found some manual all-stainless steel ones for less than $100. I prefer manual things anyway, so that’s good.

I’d also like to have a garden, but I’m not sure I can afford it this year (I want to build some raised beds, trellises and so forth). I’ll at least start some perennial herbs outside though.

If I owned this property and could turn most of it into a garden, I could actually raise the bulk of our food. It’s comforting to know how little space is really necessary for food security.

The book I read about the Kalahari Bushmen back in January has brought about another change. The Bushmen’s diet regularly included foods from 85 different plant species, and ancient hunter-gatherer tribes also had similarly diverse diets. Today, the bulk of our diets come from just a handful of plant foods. So, starting last month I made a resolution that I would eat at least 30 different types of fruits and vegetables each month, and over the course of the year eat from at least 100 different plant species (that 100 includes not only fruits and vegetables but nuts, seeds, beans, grains, and fresh herbs). The ancient hunter-gatherers were actually taller than we are today (indicating better nutrition) and the introduction of agriculture caused height to plummet. I want to have as much variety in my diet to ensure optimal health and nutrition.

I have an idea for an article but I have to do an experiment first. The article would be about the presence of preservatives and pesticides in food. The experiment would be to take a slice of store bought bread and homemade bread, place each in a sealed ziplock and document how long each takes to grow mold.

Now, I bake most of our bread products, but buy occasional loaves of white bread here and there. Last Thursday (two Thursday’s ago actually) I took some store bought bread up to Boulder county for sandwiches. There was one piece I didn’t use and it stayed forgotten, locked in its ziplock since then. I discovered it yesterday and was shocked to see that it still looked perfectly fresh, without the slightest hint of mold. That’s just not natural! And shouldn’t that scare the living daylights out of us? I’ve heard that dead bodies are taking longer to decay because we’re so pumped full of preservatives. And this particular loaf is marketed as a kids’ loaf—fortified with extra nutrition for kids—so moms are deceived into thinking they’re buying something healthy.

In a book I just finished, there was a story about an organic farmer who compared a stalk of his corn with a stalk from his neighbor’s conventionally grown corn. Not only did his have more extensive roots, but when he left the two stalks out in the yard, mice devoured the organic corn, but wouldn’t even touch the conventionally grown corn.

And a law passed last fall requires almonds now to be irradiated or flash-pasteurized. Almonds! More and more, unless you grow your own food, you’re eating dead, damaged, and dangerous foods.

On all fronts we seem to be on a suicidal mission. It just defies all logic.

Last night before falling asleep I had a vision which I can only very partially remember. Lately I’ve been having a problem with ringing in my ears. When I went to bed I focused on the ringing in a meditative way--attending to it as it went to higher and higher frequencies and then became discrete pulses of sound. Simultaneously I also was focusing on my third eye. All of this took far less than a minute and by then I was seeing imagery. All that I remember now is seeing a Native American man standing with his back to me looking out on miles and miles of gently rolling open range. His arms were motioning to the skies and his head was tilted upwards. There were roiling clouds on the horizon--it seemed to almost be in fast-motion. It was obvious that the man was calling up the weather and, in a way that felt almost tangible, was connected or linked with the sky. I was left with the impression of immense power, both in the sky and flowing through the man. This is all I remember although there was much more. I almost think there was a narrative running along with the imagery and it was meant to be an instructive story. It reminded me of my experience last summer where I felt like I merged with the thunderstorm.

There must be some teaching here that I’m not quite getting yet.

I’ve just finished reading two books on population issues. Overpopulation is what I see as the number one issue we face, since virtually all of our dire problems stem from the issue of too many people on too small a planet.

The second of the two books focused on overpopulation in the US—a problem I have to admit was barely on my radar screen before. After all, 300 million sounds puny when you compare it to population issues in other countries, especially China and India. And I was really skeptical of the authors’ thesis that we not only need to reign in fertility rates here, but we also need to drastically limit immigration.

That raised my hackles right off the bat because I’ve always been pro-immigration on humanitarian grounds. What right do we have to close our borders and insulate ourselves from the suffering in the rest of the world? After all, borders are ultimately imaginary. We are a globally-dispersed species and how can anyone be more deserving to occupy a certain place on the planet than anyone else? If there were no borders, of course people in marginal lands would move in droves to more productive places, which would then in time become over-exploited until people moved on to the next best place and so on. There would still be suffering but (if I can claim such a thing) more equitable suffering.

What I had never really thought through until now is this: in these extremely dire times, closed borders (which is not at all what the authors were proposing) might be our only hope, not just for the US, but for the planet. If we stop immigration and lower fertility, ultimately decreasing our population, we will be able to preserve groundwater, forests and other vital environmental resources, keep more species from going extinct and perhaps a still green America (relatively) might offset some of the massive environmental degradation elsewhere. A green America could potentially stave off a total environmental collapse worldwide—maybe. After all, Americans consume something like twenty to forty times more resources than people in third world countries so each person you add to our population in the US has a huge negative global impact. Limiting our numbers could be doing a great service to humanity.

Maybe every country everywhere should close its borders temporarily until population growth is stopped. Of course that would mean very intense concentrated suffering in certain places. The thing that’s clear is there’s no happy solution left at this point.

If we don’t ourselves come (at the very least) to the brink of extinction it will be utterly miraculous. What is going to happen this century seems poised to be nothing short of cataclysmic.

How is a person supposed to live in times like these? That’s the question I keep coming back to. Our situation is totally unprecedented. It seems to me what’s required is an extreme maturity in the individual, so that he or she can freely sacrifice the majority of his or her personal desires and ego-gratifying whims. We don’t need more monuments and mansions to the self.

I have a very strong fantasy of the life I want to live when I move back to Pennsylvania. Every now and then this fantasy gets particularly strong and I spend a lot of time lost in daydreams about it—like now.

The fantasy is to own some land—a mix of woods and open meadow and to build a small house that’s completely off-the-grid and self-sufficient. I’d like to raise all of my own food—a mixture of fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, grains, eggs, chickens, rabbits, bees and goats. I see all of this vividly. I see the lay of the land, the house, the small barn and chicken coop, the orchard, the woods, all of it as if it were real. The house especially I see a minute detail. What bothers me is that while the house is small, it’s not as small as it could be. I have the house designed in a way that’s very pleasing to me, and yet somewhat wasteful of space. I’ve been trying to see if I can design something smaller that would still feel as much like “home” as this one does in my mind. I could certainly live in a one room cabin—I don’t require a lot of space—but it has to feel right.

The other thing that bothers me is—why do I feel the need to build something? Shouldn’t I find an existing structure and just upgrade it to be super-insulated and off-the-grid? Why disturb a relatively pristine environment to put in something new? Part of the original plan included a partial basement to use as a root cellar, but I think I’ve finally convinced myself that it’s excessive and unnecessary. I do have a pantry planned on the north side of the house—windowless and with exterior walls either of thick stone or straw bales. It should stay cool enough for storing most things, I would think.

I want it to be a place I could live out the rest of my life, so while I could strictly heat it with wood I think it should have some backup system for when I’m older and not able to chop wood and tend fires so well. I’m not sure what that would be. Maybe a radiant floor system that uses solar hot water. Or some geothermal heat pump system (I don’t know too much about that one yet). And a backup electric stove (or propane, or animal-generated methane, or….) and a small fridge. So I’ll need an active solar system in addition to my passive solar design, but it won’t have to be a big system, especially with no washer or dryer, computer, microwave, TV, VCR, DVD player, phone, answering machine, clocks, etc. Just heat, hot water, fridge, stove, and maybe some lights.

As far as I’ve come in my quest for simplicity, why is there still this need to have? Renting this house in Snyder has been such a godsend to me because it has helped to break the acquisitive pattern that homeownership created. My landlord once told me if I ever wanted to buy the house he would be willing to sell it to me. Almost immediately I began to fantasize about all the things I would do to the house if I owned it. Tile in the kitchen and bathroom, a new front door, new kitchen cabinets, bumping out the bedroom closets, a tool shed against the side of the house, a white picket fence, a big herb and flower garden out front…! Meanwhile, the house is perfectly adequate just the way it is. I don’t need any of those things I dreamed of.

Why couldn’t I live (once Collin’s grown) in a simple hermit’s hut, spending most of my time outdoors? Why need such an elaborate shelter (even if only 500 or 800 square feet) for just one person? A bed, a seat, a table, a stove, a place to store food and dishes, a toilet, sink and tub—that’s all I would need.

I struggle with the “do no harm” philosophy. In these times it’s more critical than ever, yet it’s so ridiculously hard to even approach that. I justify the idea of this house in numerous ways to myself. I would harvest dead or dying trees from the property and mill them myself to build the timber frame and then use straw bales (which are renewable) as infill. I would build a masonry fireplace that would require less wood than regular fireplaces and wood stoves and that puts, I believe, fewer particulates into the atmosphere. I would buy property that is wooded enough for me to harvest only dead wood for firewood (and still leave enough dead wood behind to decay naturally). I have so many ideas for how I would minimize my impact.

But what about staying right where I am as an option (assuming I could and the landlord wouldn’t want to sell it before I could buy it)? I could turn most of the yard into a garden and raise the majority of my food (a vegetarian diet of course would be the most feasible, but I could probably manage some chickens and/or bunnies. I long to return to Pennsylvania and would prefer not to live in a town (even a redneck town like Snyder), but from a responsibility standpoint staying put probably makes a whole lot of sense.

But then I argue, part of my desire to own land back east is the stewardship factor—snatch up some land and use it more wisely than some other sap might (but how wisely, really). I just don’t know anymore. I don’t know a lot of things.

A few weeks ago I checked out a book called Less is More: An Anthology of Ancient and Modern Voices Raised in Praise of Simplicity. I’ve been flipping through it now and finding it chock-full of amazing and thought provoking quotes.

It is due to the greed of the soul that it wants to grasp and possess many things, and thus it lays hold of time and corporeality and multiplicity and loses precisely what it possesses. For as long as more and more is in you, God can never dwell and act in you. These things must always come out if God is to enter, unless you possess them in a higher and better way, namely, if multiplicity has become one in you. Then, the more multiplicity is in you, the more unity there will be, for the one has been changed into the other.

Saint Augustine 354-430 AD, Confessions

I wish I could know why Augustine thought the soul becomes greedy. I wonder if that is addressed anywhere in his writings? The statement above seems to hint at some of the things I was writing about a few entries back—when people have lost their connection with the land and nature they then try to possess it materially. I’m still suspecting it has something to do with the process of individuation. When we lose our identification with nature and begin contracting down into individual dots we forget about Oneness. We see multiplicity and otherness everywhere. The need to possess and control it all is our childish attempt to experience Unity again.

But it is as Augustine implies—when you empty yourself, cling to nothing, possess nothing, then you truly possess everything. When you’ve emptied yourself, God enters and you experience reality through God-eyes. The multiplicity becomes Unity. No need to materially possess anything because spiritually it is already part of you. The supraconsciousness we are evolving towards is pure God consciousness.

Writing is such a magnificent tool! I’ve begun the process of writing down each discrete idea for my book on separate note cards. I need to be able to shuffle around the ideas so they can start falling into place in some logical order. It’s all too much to hold in my mind at one time, without the assistance of the note cards. The process of doing so has made me appreciate how powerful writing is as a tool.

When I used to read Ken Wilber’s works I was always so impressed by the astuteness of his mind—how he could seemingly hold so much in his mind at once and make associations no one else had made. I’ve always envied his keen mind. Mine seems so inept compared with his. But now I’m beginning to think maybe he’s just a very organized writer; maybe he can’t hold it all in his mind at once anymore than I can. Maybe I’m not such a dolt after all! Writing begins to feel almost like cheating—it makes me look far more intelligent than I actually am.

But that’s a wonderful thing. Writing is kind of like an amplifier of human thought. It takes you places you couldn’t have gotten to otherwise.

I’m not progressing as quickly as I’d like with my writing, but I guess that’s OK. It’s hard to commit my thoughts to writing when they keep evolving. As I get deeper and deeper into the process my understanding continues to evolve. But at some point, don’t I have freeze-frame everything I’ve learned up until that point, and commit that to paper? Otherwise my work will never be finished. But I do have a degree of patience for this process. I can work on what I know and at the same time allow my knowledge to evolve. There’s still plenty of my book I can commit to writing without yet understanding what the final scope of it will be. I really love this process.

So the thesis of my book is maybe that voluntary simplicity is one of the most important movements of our time. Westerners have had plenty of time to enjoy the excesses of materialism. Now it’s time to mature into a new paradigm.

In most cultures that have Westernized there does seem to eventually be a backlash against at least some aspects of the Western lifestyle. Indigenous people initially want all the Western goods and comforts and are eager to leave their traditional lifestyles behind, but eventually they start to realize that something great has been lost...e.g. the Indian Pride movements that have emerged in South America, after quite a spell where people would deny their own origins, embarrassed by their “backward” heritage; returning to the old traditions and rituals; trying to preserve nearly extinct languages and lore; taking a keen interest in protecting their traditional lands from further exploitation by outsiders. All of these things seem to re-awaken eventually.

And among those of us mostly-Europeans, who were indoctrinated into the paradigm of progress and materialism longest ago and have therefore forgotten the most, even some of us are awakening from the dream.

Returning to simplicity and harmony as supraconscious beings--what a beautiful thing! And yet I still can’t get around the twin issues of overpopulation and urbanization. If everyone got the urge to simplify and return to the land, there just would be no room. The impact of people scattered and dispersed everywhere would be so much worse than their concentration in cities.

Population growth needs to be stopped and even reversed. Empowering women is the key to that—they automatically tend to limit family size as their opportunities improve. As they escape from grinding poverty too and become somewhat educated and self-aware they’ll be better able to reflect on what’s truly important in their lives and in their communities and hopefully one day return to simplicity. It’s bound to be a long slow process if we can even pull it off at all—if we don’t destroy ourselves in the meantime.

But even if the most affluent third of humanity could re-awaken now, or very soon, it would have a huge impact on the environment and it would set an example for the rest of the world, so that maybe the pace of transformation could be quickened.

Somehow this line of thinking has me feeling a little more hopeful today.

Yesterday on the drive to school just west of Brighton we saw a pair of bald eagles in a tree alongside the road. This is now the third January I’ve seen bald eagles here in Colorado. I know there are nesting pairs around here now, but my guess is these January sightings are birds who are just passing through. It’s awfully neat that they’re making a comeback.

So I finished reading Guns, Germs, and Steel. It has only served to raise more questions. In a nutshell, he said that certain features of the land, in certain places of the world, gave rise to food production, sedentary lifestyles, city-states, advanced weapons, etc—all of which proved advantageous for conquering other peoples who lived in lands that didn’t possess these unique features. The rise of culture seems in this context to be an inevitable process of the earth, as does the conquest of less “advanced” indigenous peoples by more advanced ones. Yet, it’s so obvious to me that advanced people’s pillaging is not a productive trend; it only leads to destruction. So what are we to make of all of this? Where is this leading if not to extinction?

I guess maybe it all gets back to Jung and Wilber and our spiritual evolution. As we moved from clans and tribes to city-states to globalization and urbanization, we’ve also moved from unconscious mythic identification with the cosmos to becoming conscious and separate egoic individuals. Our concept of the Divine shifted from it being immanent in all things when we were hunter-gatherers to now (as we’ve urbanized and separated from nature) being an abstract concept—God as Other. The next step in our evolution ought to be a return to Oneness, as supraconscious beings. We needed this period of abstraction to be able to see what we had always been immersed in. Now we “know that we know” and can return in a state of supraconsciousness.

What will that look like here on earth? Consumerism must die. We must stop killing the earth. We desperately need a post-consumer paradigm.

A supraconscious individual—what does that person look like? He or she would not identify with the ego, not be interested in power, prestige, money, or material things, would base all of his or her actions on preserving the health of the earth and all of its inhabitants, would not recognize political boundaries as having any intrinsic meaning, but would recognize the equality of all people. He or she would live simply and focus on the nonmaterial side of life (beyond those things required for survival).

My crazy reading binge continues. Since I moved to Snyder two and a half years ago I’ve read one hundred eleven books, not counting children’s books—eighty-six of those just last year! I’ve just now finished my seventh book of 2008.

It was called World On Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred And Global Instability, by Amy Chua. Her point was that when there is a market-dominant minority (especially of foreign ethnicity, such as the Chinese in the Philippines, or the Jews in Russia, or whites in many African countries) who represent only a tiny percentage of the population but control the bulk of the nation’s wealth and resources, and then democracy and universal suffrage is introduced more or less overnight, it is a recipe for disaster. The angry, disenfranchised majority, whose hatred has been seething for a very long time, suddenly find themselves politically empowered, able to elect one of their own, thus turning the tables on the market-dominant minority. In many places this has led to violence, outright genocide, atrocious human rights violation, forced expulsions, seizures of land and assets, and so on.

I feel like the universe wants me to figure something out. All of these books seem to be leading me somewhere, trying to guide me to make some kind of novel connection. Amy Chua’s book is just one among many that’s pushing buttons in the back of my mind, trying to help me grasp something, trying to get me to the insight.

I think it centers around my need to understand if there’s a way the human race can save itself at this point. Our problems seem so enormous and intractable—yet is there a way to evolve through this successfully?

Another book I read this week annoyed me from almost the first page. I was having a hard time figuring out what exactly was rubbing me the wrong way—after all, here was a woman discussing how to empower ourselves both individually and societally, to explore our full human potential—an issue I believe is being sorely neglected in these times. It should have been refreshing to read a book on this subject. I think what bothered me was her oversimplistic optimism. She would only mention our global problems in passing, hardly giving them any attention because in her belief instantaneous change is possible. She has the New Age belief that if enough people are doing their own private inner work we’ll soon reach critical mass and the whole world will suddenly be transformed. She cited all of these rapid shifts that have occurred evolutionarily in the past, and yes, of course she’s right. I don’t deny that it often works that way or that it could work that way this time. I just also believe there’s likely to be death (maybe a massive die-off) and anarchy as well as, and in advance of, a full transformation.

She was ignoring the major issues and problems—Amy Chua’s example being one of them—that make her utopian transformation laughable. It seems like she is too immersed in our elite American culture to grasp what we are actually facing, globally, as a species.

Let me try to put down some of my thought as to what’s bothering me, what I’m trying to sort out. My thinking is kind of cloudy today, so I don’t know how helpful this will be.

This consumer paradigm bothers me. Globalization bothers me—corporations going into foreign countries, raping the land, destroying what should be left to sustain the people. Huge profits made by the elite few—an instant gratification that pillages the future. Indigenous people are rightly angry. Outsiders do not have respect for local lands, people, and resources.

The whole concept of profit and acquisitiveness feels like a totally off-base paradigm. I think it is evidence of a deep insecurity in the human psyche. It is that urge to hoard—that deep survival instinct, the self-preservation instinct of the ego. We think of ourselves as so civilized, but I see us as still caught up in a barbaric quest for individual survival at the expense of all that is Other.

I am about to start Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel, which I’m hoping will help me sift through my thoughts more thoroughly. I believe that his premise in this book is that geology, and the unique features of a region, help to shape culture and explains the vast cultural differences throughout the world. I don’t expect he will go into the spiritual dimension of the land, but I’m thrilled to at least have found a Westerner willing to address the issue of the effects of land on culture, however superficially.

See, the land is actually what I’m suspecting underlies consumerism and the exploitation of third world countries and Amy Chua’s whole discussion about the rise of market-dominant minorities. People who have lost their connection to the land become those who are obsessed with materialism and those who are likely to exploit the land, particularly on foreign soils where they don’t have to see the damage they do. Amy Chua found that when market-dominant minorities were driven out of a country the countries often collapsed economically because the majority who remained didn’t possess the business skills and financial acumen necessary to keep the country going. What occurred to me was that this was not a failing of the native people but simply demonstrates a very core difference in cultural values. Business skills, financial acumen—those are skills valuable to people who have no connection to the land. They don’t possess the land in their hearts or their souls, so they seek through transacting and exploiting to possess the earth physically. Indigenous people, however, still at least to some extent are part of the land, inseparable from it. Capitalism has little appeal to them. There is not motivation to become materialists, brilliant entrepreneurs, leaders of industry. Manic capitalism, manic materialism, represents alienation from our true identity. Indigenous people are often thought of as lacking in intelligence to succeed in business, or as plain unmotivated and lazy, when in fact they still remember how to live in harmony with the earth.

Harmony might be possible on this earth if everyone reconnected with the land. But in this global society where people have become so rootless, how is that possible?

The other day I read the quirkiest book. It was called Washed Up: The Curious Journeys of Flotsam and Jetsam, by Skye Moody. It was so fascinating, filled with stories of messages in bottles, sunken treasures, ambergris (expensive whale vomit used in perfumerie), cargo containers ejecting Nikes and BMWs into the ocean…. But it was also really disturbing. The picture on the cover of the book is of a Hawaiian beach completely covered in plastic jetsam. One story was about a shipment of rubber bath toys (28,000 ducks, frogs, turtles, and beavers packaged for The First Years company) that washed overboard somewhere near the international dateline while enroute from China to the US. The first toys washed ashore late that year (1992) in Alaska. They continued washing ashore there for many months. Computer models predicted that currents would take them through iceberg-infested waters to Greenland and then to the Atlantic Ocean. To date they’ve been found in Washington state (meaning some went south), but also in Maine and Scotland. The problem with plastics is that they never biodegrade. They crumble into smaller and smaller bits, are ingested by sea critters, release dioxins into the body and move up and up the food chain.

I think the most disturbing (but fascinating) part of the book was the description of gyres, the great big circular ocean currents in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans which are like “toilets in which the water constantly whirls but never flushes”. The centers of the gyres have virtually no wind, so they are a sailor’s worst nightmare. One guy, with a diesel-powered catamaran, intentionally sailed through the North Pacific subtropical gyre, which is about the size of Africa—empty of islands and other boats. He discovered in the center (actually it has two centers) what is now called The Great Garbage Patch. The gyres suck in garbage and hold it there for hundreds of years, the garbage circling around and around, with each circuit taking several years. Eventually each piece of garbage might be spit back out into the current again, but not for a very long time. The guy (Charles Moore) calculated the garbage to weigh roughly three million tons. And that’s just in one of the world’s gyres!

On the drive to school yesterday (going over Wiggins hill, of course—where I always do my most insightful thinking) I began to imagine watching the earth and its processes from outer space, as if time were condensed and I could see air and water currents that wouldn’t actually be visible to the eye. I saw how the air currents created and interacted with the ocean currents, how the ocean currents influenced the air and therefore the weather patterns on land, how when weather patterns shifted, places like the Sahara dried out. I saw the dust of the Sahara moving on air currents to the Amazon where the minerals and micronutrients nourished the rainforest. In places where I saw green turning to brown I saw war and conflict almost like an infection, particularly around the edges of the brown. I got impressions of initially vast migrations of species, wide distributions of animals, that eventually shriveled up and became small pockets here and there, very isolated.

I’ve always known that most wars are about scarce resources (even when they may seem to be about religious or ideological differences). But this meditation tweaked my understanding. In another fascinating book I’m reading (The Others: How Animals Made Us Human, by Paul Shepard) there was one sentence talking about sky gods and how in ancient times the skies ruled human destiny. Reading that sentence following the earth meditation it flashed in my mind: the seas, the skies, and the land rule human destiny.

Culture rises and declines in response to the confluence of sea, sky, and land—how they interact and cause shifting conditions. To that you could also add the geophysical forces, earth’s magnetic field, its molten core, its plate tectonics and volcanism. This image in my mind could not make it any clearer to me that we are products of all of these forces, that we appear and disappear in exactly the same manner as the Sahara blossoms in green abundance and then browns. Wars and suffering in the brown spots—that’s an organic process, a part of desertification, inseparable from it so long as humans are part of that ecosystem.

Indigenous cultures that honor the wind really understand that the wind gives us life. As weather patterns change, life can dry up in places that were formerly lush and abundant. The earth, the sky, the wind, and the water have given us life.

The horror of being alive in this moment is watching everyone behave as if we’re independent of these things. As if we’re immune to withering and drying up. We act as if we have the option of divorcing ourselves from the land—what a ludicrous notion! We are emanations of the land, a phenomenon of the land. The land houses our soul.

I finished a book the other day about the Kalahari Bushmen (The Old Way, by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas). It has left me sadder than ever about the current state of affairs here on earth. The author lived among the Bushmen with her family in the 1950’s, when they were still purely living the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, in the same way they had for thirty-five thousand years. The last section of the book showed how all of that has changed in the mere fifty years since the author first visited.

The “Old Way” is how we all once lived, as full, integrated participants in the local ecosystem. It was beautiful in the book to see how the people had co-evolved with all the other creatures in the ecosystem and therefore filled a vital but intimately interconnected niche. Her description of the co-evolution of the humans and lions was particularly interesting. Because they evolved together, humans were not typically prey for the lions. Only with the advent of farming was that balance destroyed, and then with a vengeance. Then, humans killed lions, and lions became man-eaters.

The exquisiteness of a balanced ecosystem is what moved me, especially because I had never seen an example of a balanced ecosystem that included humans. Once upon a time we all lived in that kind of harmony, fully integrated into the natural world. But not anymore.

Everything has gone downhill since we stepped outside of our niche and began to dominate and control everything. Is culture a blessing or a curse? At this point I’d have to call it a curse since unbelievable damage and desecration has occurred as a result. Maybe ultimately there will be a bigger picture and this will just have been a necessary evil to get us to some enlightened way of being. But I have some serious doubts.

Maybe the development of culture is ultimately a blind alley—an evolutionary dead-end. I find our survival as a species less and less probable these days. I truly think we’re headed towards a very massive die-off.

Again I reach the question—does our survival matter? Really I doubt that it does.

I’ve already reached the conclusion that my own life, personally, doesn’t matter. Whether I live or die is insignificant. It’s just an extension of that thinking to conclude that the survival of our species doesn’t matter.

Some months back I was doing a little mental exercise pertaining to the end-of-oil scenario. If society collapsed, what would I do? I had come across a prophecy given by a Native American elder to Tom Brown, Jr. about the collapse of civilization. It said that when the sky turns blood red you’ll have one year to flee to the wilderness, and once there you must stay for ten years before coming out again. If you came out any sooner you would die. In the course of that time society would largely be destroyed.

I imagined myself fleeing to the wilderness and surviving there. I asked myself, if I were threatened by other humans, would I defend myself? Would I kill other people simply to ensure my own survival? Why would my survival matter, and how could my life possibly have more value than anyone else’s? I’m not going to have any more children, so I don’t need to survive to propagate the species or carry on my bloodline. So, why would my survival matter?

I concluded it just wouldn’t. I would want to survive because it sounds like an adventure, an interesting test, but it wouldn’t matter.

Why do we fight so desperately for survival? That’s something I will never quite understand. I know it’s instinctive, maybe even the will of the species to survive that manifests through us. But man killing man can never make any sense, especially with modern weapons, since the weak genetically can kill the strong and it’s not a matter of the fittest of the species surviving necessarily.

The rules of the physical world say dog-eat-dog. I for one would rather be eaten. As Spirit we live on forever. So why does this world matter? It’s a manifestation of the Divine, but when we’ve so defiled and diminished it, it’s lost so much of its glory.

My survival doesn’t matter. When I leave this world—today, tomorrow, next Wednesday, in fifty years—it doesn’t make a difference. But while I’m here my duty is to honor the Divine and the natural world and to maybe fight for it, to protect what is still intact and to try to re-awaken others.