So Ellsworth Huntington had a piece of the puzzle that Jared Diamond (in Guns, Germs, and Steel) left out. I guess in a roundabout way Diamond addressed climate when he talked about east-west versus north-south axes, but he never directly addressed it. Of course the personality of the land is shaped by its climate! Of course the human civilization that arises in a locale represents the confluence of land and sky influences. Of course each one of us individually is made from our environment--we are local phenomenon created by local conditions.

What the implications of our increasing rootlessness are, I’m not entirely sure, but it can’t be healthy. True health can only come from being part of our ecosystems again--full participants in the world that birthed us.

I’m getting close to another insight now. Sometimes it’s just a sentence or two here and a sentence or two there in different books I’m reading that triggers some new association. I think I’ve told you before about my favorite definition of genius: simply a keen ability to make novel associations. All learning is really about making connections you’ve never made before. Again it brings me back to the image of the matrix--everything is already here, already intricately interconnected; we are merely becoming aware of the connections. Learning (and genius) is simply making novel associations.

In one book I read (Rooted in the Land--a collection of essays by various people) there was an essay called “Coming into the Foodshed” by Jack Kloppenburg, Jr; John Hendrickson; and G. W. Stevenson. The following paragraph lodged somewhere in the recesses of my brain:

We understand the foodshed to be a sociogeographic space--human activity embedded in the natural integument of a particular place. That human activity is necessarily constrained in various ways by the characteristics of the place in question. Ignoring those natural constraints or overriding them with technology is one of the besetting sins of the global food system, the ecological destructiveness of which is now unambiguously apparent even to its apologists. In the foodshed, natural conditions would be taken not as an obstacle to be overcome but as a measure of limits to be respected.

Then yesterday I started a biography on Aldo Leopold (Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey: Rediscovering the Author of the Sand County Almanac, by Julianne Lutz Newton) and I read this paragraph:

Leopold listened in the night air to the quiet rustle of leaves and the rippling waters. Here was a river that had not yet witnessed the American ideal of progress in action--the ideas, as Leopold later expressed it, ‘that every river needs more people, and all people need more inventions’ and that ‘the good life depends on the indefinite extension of this chain of logic.’ What did the ‘good’ in good life mean, Leopold wondered. And where did human inventiveness and power cross the line between positive creativity and destructiveness? Progress to most Americans was defined in a way quite different from the vision slowly developing and gathering cohesion in Leopold’s mind.

From these two paragraphs I’m turning over some ideas pertaining to: “human activity embedded in the natural integument of a particular place”; limits; and creativity.

At this adolescent stage of our human evolution we don’t respect or even seem to recognize limits. As separate, egoic individuals, we don’t recognize our embeddedness. We’ve become conscious of self but not yet of Self. We don’t yet comprehend our greater identity as a pattern in the greater matrix. We don’t even recognize ourselves as part of the pattern of our local ecosystem. If we did we would honor limits.

How does creativity bear on this? Creativity has always been quite a puzzle to me. Why as humans do we have such an insatiable need to create? Why are we constantly converting nature into “stuff”--taking, taking, taking along the way? But I’m trying to look now at creativity as a natural phenomenon; human creativity as a process of the matrix. Stuff blossoms in the same way as people, plants, animals, and weather blossom forth from the matrix. The problem with human creativity is simply that we aren’t yet aware enough to honor the limits of our ecosystems or the matrix.

As the foodshed article implied, limits are not obstacles to be overcome. Limits create the framework in each ecosystem for the blossoming of unique creations. What unique forms of expression might blossom from the matrix here through me? Honorable creativity is truly a product of the land and sky.

This helps me look at right livelihood more clearly. Simply manufacturing stuff to meet demand in a particular consumer markets does not respect the matrix or its limits. In order for me to find right livelihood, I must attune to my local ecosystem and try to figure out what wants to be birthed through me in this place (while honoring its limits).

Now this doesn’t answer my question about rootlessness. Here in Colorado I’m an invasive Pennsylvanian weed seed. I’m not a natural product of this ecosystem. Can I in my un-naturalized condition here positively contribute to this ecosystem?

In talking about my homesickness for Pennsylvania, I’ve described it as the place where I can most be who I meant to be in this lifetime. My understanding of that truth continues to deepen. That ecosystem birthed me. That’s where I’m in my most natural state and where I can function optimally.

But, being that I’m here, for at least another six years, how do I attune with and interact with this ecosystem? I don’t know yet, but I suspect that my “haunting” by the Native American spirits is a product of this ecosystem. I don’t think that I necessarily would’ve had that experience in Pennsylvania. Maybe all of the insights I’ve had in the past year are blossoming from this unique part of the matrix. Definitely there’s been a deepening of my thought processes since I moved out here from Boulder county three years ago. This area is more supportive for me than suburbia was, for sure. The suburbs were so unbalanced, and even with all of the destructive agricultural practices around here this feels like a healthier place.

I keep trying to reason my way through this weather puzzle, even though I know what I’m getting at can’t be arrived at through rational means. But maybe my reasoning will get me closer to the insight.

So, just as the earth is literally a part of us (since we eat it through the food we consume), the atmosphere is a part of us because we breathe it in. But the atmosphere isn’t the weather per se--so we don’t really take the weather into us. The atmosphere (and its weather) is a matrix we move through. On a microcosmic scale, as we move we create subtle winds and currents, our body heat rises, we contribute gases to the atmosphere; in a sense, doesn’t that make us subtle weather-makers?

If all 6.6 billion of us gathered in one place, would our collective body heat and off-gassing create measurable weather? I think quite possibly yes. Metropolises change weather patterns--couldn’t human bodies do the same thing on a noticeable scale?

But again, participating in weather-making is not the same thing as being the weather. I think the insight has something to do with the emanation of life forms and weather from the earth. They’re part of the same phenomenon. Conditions were right for me to blossom out here in America for a number of decades before I’ll eventually fade, other conditions allow weather patterns to blossom briefly and fade. Is all I’m getting at simply the ephemeral nature of physical reality? That’s hardly a new insight! But no, that’s not what I’m getting it. Maybe matrix is a good word to describe all of the emanations of the earth, all life forms, and all patterns that arise. The atmosphere and its weather I move through (as well as the earth I move upon) is always touching me. We’re always linked and so as emanations, aren’t we really one? There’s no stepping out of the matrix, no opting out. We’re always contributing to it, making exchanges with parts of it. Just as the cells in our body constantly make exchanges. I am one with the weather (and everything else).

It’s funny how I’m being taught lessons with no teachers. Last spring I mentioned wanting to learn how to resonate with the vibration of the whole earth. I think that’s what I’m slowly being taught to do. There’s something lurking here in this insight about me being a global pattern (or part of one). More than anything I feel this intuition--this deep interconnectivity. There is such a sensuousness and fluidity when I allow myself to merge with the weather around me. To allow myself to feel, deeply in my body, this larger identity is incredible.

I don’t know exactly why weather is the focus of this insight, but it seems really important. I think there will be a lot here for me to learn. For now I’ll just stay receptive and see what happens.

Hm. Between the last paragraph and this one I found a book at the library that’s about the connection between human health and climate and weather. A few pages in I read this:

In the early 1900s, American geographer Ellsworth Huntington published his book, Civilization and Climate. Huntington believed that the way that human progress ebbed and surged forward in waves was the result of an interaction between climate, quality of people and culture. His beliefs culminated in his own magnum opus Mainsprings of Civilization, which contended (based on his own extensive studies of various populations across the US) that our intellectual and physical vigour depended to a large extent on being exposed to a climatic optima where temperature and humidity were concerned. Taking a worldwide view, he believed that place was more influential than race when it came to differences between cultures.

Under the Weather: How the Weather and Climate Affect Our Health, Pat Thomas, 2004

I have no idea why I keep coming back to my vision of the man calling up the weather. It seems irrelevant, yet I keep coming back to it, keep feeling like I’m getting closer to something really important.

Today it’s been this recognition that the weather and myself are one and the same thing. Can I explain that yet? Not really. It has something to do with my imagery of the earth’s patterns (from a few months back)--the way we emanate from the land in almost the same way as the weather. We’re natural phenomena that blossom when conditions are right and die back when they’re not, just as weather “blossoms” when conditions are right. But how can I be saying we’re the same thing? Aren’t I just saying we’re two different phenomenon the earth produces? No, I know what I mean is that we’re the same--it’s just that the words that could explain it are still eluding me. What is the man doing when he calls up the weather? He’s not controlling it. He’s not an agent acting on it. Somehow he is it. I’ll have to leave it at that for now—it’s just too tenuous for me to fully grasp.

Then the other connection I’ve made goes back to Amy Chua’s book on free-market democracy. I was thinking about the way in which we’re no longer participants in our local ecosystems, and it dawned on me that Chua’s market-dominant minorities are exactly like nonnative, invasive weed seeds. Once they leave the culture they were hatched in and “invade” a new country, all checks and balances are gone. They grow rampant in the foreign soil because the foreign soil didn’t co-evolve with the newcomer, and couldn’t evolve defenses to it. The same is true now for corporations who have globalized—they are evil weed seeds that native populations can’t defend themselves against.

I’m an invasive weed seed here in America, but I’m at least a tenth or eleventh generation weed seed, so maybe I’m starting to become naturalized to the conditions here. Funny how newcomers can become naturalized citizens just by taking a little pen and paper test. I think the actual process is just a bit more involved than that.

Eventually, if newcomers stay put they do become naturalized, and checks and balances evolve. But the dangerous stage is while they’re still foreign, invasive, and unnaturalized.

So, what about corporations which are run from afar? With no real soul, can they ever become naturalized? They can’t co-evolve, or not easily, at any rate. Won’t they always be in the invasive weed seed category, always be destructive interlopers? How can we control invasive species such as corporations so as to minimize their damage?

It’s funny, the clouds today have been exactly like the clouds in my vision. I sure wish I could grab hold of this insight completely.

I read a blurb on the Internet the other day that was intriguing. It was about a study that found that mothers who ate a more nutritious diet during pregnancy had a higher likelihood of having a boy (56/100 as opposed to 50/100). I didn’t read the actual study, so some of my inferences and information may be off-base. The article noted that in the US, the birth rate for girls has been going up, so this study may be implying a growing nutritional deficiency in women. Which makes a kind of sense. Despite the fact that we have an obesity epidemic, people are eating crap (I think it’s now around 50 percent of calories in the average American’s diet coming from high fructose corn syrup!) and since the Green Revolution, as our soils have become more and more depleted and sterile, the actual nutritional value of foods has dropped dramatically. It’s sad that in a land of so-called plenty we could actually be malnourished (yet fat). The article suggested this male/female fluctuation serves a biological function in times of famine. I forget what their theory was, but mine was slightly different from theirs. In a time of famine, more children will die before reaching reproductive age. Therefore you want to produce a surplus of girls to ensure an adequate base of surviving adults to bear a new generation. The boys don’t matter as much because they can impregnant many women, even if they are few in number. In times of plenty, more boys mean fewer available wombs, which helps to keep the population from exploding (and thence creating a new famine cycle). It’s all very fascinating stuff.

I find it so astounding that people mindlessly put so much crap into their bodies. All of these chemicals (aspartame!) and manufactured food products, instead of basic, real food.

I’m still trying to grow mold on my piece of commercial bread. I left the ziplock bag open for a day to give the moldies a chance to move in, but they didn’t take the bait. I’ll leave it open for another day, then add a little bit of water and see if that’ll produce any mold. If this bread is not even life-sustaining for mold, how can it possibly even be considered a food?

In my opinion, shelf life is a thing to avoid. If the food doesn’t spoil, it’s probably not a food anymore. If the little critters that make food spoil aren’t willing to touch it or digest it, it probably has no life-giving value. Why waste the energy to send it through your digestive tract? And not only may it have no life-giving value, it may possess life-destroying properties--chemicals, pesticides and preservatives that do real harm to your body.

The diet I’m striving for is closer to a hunter-gatherer diet than anything else. I doubt I will ever completely wean myself from grains, but at least I’ll continue to incorporate more kinds of whole grains. My meat consumption is kind of hunter-gatherer in style, not what I’m eating but how I eat it. Meat is occasional, as if the men had just come back from a successful hunt. Most days are vegetarian days, but here and there are meat days. I think that’s a good way to do it. My body isn’t constantly being taxed, every day, by having to digest meat, but I still get the nutritional benefits that meat provides.

I still find myself breaking out of the consumer mind-set, and it’s often surprising to see the ways I’ve been caught up in nonsensical ideas, once I escape them. These beliefs that you need certain paraphernalia in order to participate in activities are often a real load of crap. When I decided to start growing sprouts I went to all of these websites to find sprouting guides (how long each type of seed needs to soak and how long they take to sprout). It was amazing to see all of the specialized sprouting equipment they had for sale! All you need is a Mason jar and some kind of mesh (cheesecloth or window screen). But I’m sure there are plenty of people gullible enough to think they need special equipment to grow sprouts.

But then, I find that I’ve been gullible in thinking about something else. For the longest time I’ve wanted to get a hand-cranked pasta roller so I can make my own homemade pasta. Collin eats so much pasta, and the store-bought pasta is probably as much of a health disaster as the white bread. Now of couse I didn’t want a motorized pasta machine—I like simplicity, after all. But even the mere $30 price tag on a hand-cranked model has stood in the way, given my budget constraints. So we’ve continued to eat store-bought pasta. The other day I was browsing through my favorite cookbook and there was a section on homemade pasta. It listed the various methods: hand-kneading and machine-kneading, hand-rolling and machine-rolling, hand-cutting and machine-cutting. And Mel’s very sluggish light bulb finally went off--oh, you can make pasta by hand! Well, who knew! The ridiculous thing is that I’ve been making my own egg noodles for several years now for my chicken noodle soup. It never occurred to me that I can also use the same old rolling pin to roll out dough for spaghetti, and ravioli, and tortellini, and fettuccine….

How do these silly blind spots persist for so long?

I still think a pasta roller would be a nice gadget to have, but at least now I know I don’t need it and I can start making pasta now. In fact the other day I made a small batch of ravioli and they turned out beautifully.

A good practice for me would be to ask myself, whenever I start to think I need a gadget: how was this task performed before this was invented? Is there a simpler, less contrived way?

As a species, I think we’re going really soft. Basic skills around food especially are being lost, and food after all is the main reason we’re able to be here at all. Why are we allowing ourselves to lose such core knowledge?

When I move back to Pennsylvania, I want to achieve food self-sufficiency. I want to grow and raise all of my food, the food for the animals, my green cover crops, and I want to create my own seed bank. I want to use a combination of canning, drying, a little bit of freezing if I have a freezer, root cellaring, and solar and cold frame gardening to get me through the winters.

I may still buy exotic things I can’t grow myself, like bananas, coffee, sugar (although I may try to grow sourghum), avocados, and mangoes, but I won’t need any of those things nutritionally.

My goal for the rest of my life is to earn enough money to buy land and build my modest off-the-grid house, without ever having a mortgage again, and to become as totally self-sufficient as possible. If I can save enough to pay for my house and land up front, after that I will need very little cash, and will largely be able to escape the cash economy that I so despise.

There will still be things like property taxes and I’ll probably still need a car, unless I live close enough to a town, in which case a bike would do. I’ll need new tools periodically and incidental things, like toilet paper.

(Oh, by the way, my experiment with no-deodorant/no-shampoo has more or less fallen by the wayside. As far as the deodorant, yes I will definitely need something, although not necessarily a commercial product. For now, I’m finishing up my stick of aluminum-laced stuff. As for the shampoo, I’m back to using up my chemicals-soup shampoo and will try to find a good homemade recipe for when that runs out.)

Yesterday I started a new blog on the Internet. It’s about voluntary simplicity like my old one, but more focused. My old one (which I haven’t written on for over year) was about voluntary simplicity in the context of my small quirky town. It was more bounded by concrete, day-to-day reality. My new one doesn’t include the small town aspect, so it can more easily go off into the realm of ideas. I want to be able to explore my vision for a new paradigm and other more ethereal things. I’ll still include practical and grounding entries too--tales of my journey or concrete things I’ve learned from all of my research.

The blog is part of my master plan for building a life as a writer. It’ll be useful in a number of ways. For one, it gets me writing every day (okay, maybe that’s not totally realistic, but it’s something to shoot for). For another, it encourages a more relaxed writing style than what I’ve been able to produce so far in working on my book. I think it will help me find and get comfortable with the right voice. For another, it’ll be an asset when I go looking for a publisher for the book, especially if I can drum up a decent following.

 

 

Yesterday I brainstormed a list of blog topics and came up with roughly 90, so I’ve got plenty to say, and the ideas just keep coming.

At some point I might also try to come up with a workbook that I could self-publish and offer through the blog. Of course, that won’t be feasible unless I can create some amount of traffic to the site.

And the blog I think is really going to help me figure out my organizational issues with the book. It still doesn’t feel right. I still struggle with whether to include pieces of my personal story or not, interspersed with the more scholarly stuff. My gut says it will make the book much more engaging, but I haven’t figured out a smooth way to do it.

The blog structure makes it very easy to do just that. One day’s entry can be scholarly, another day’s personal. It can very naturally shift focus and still seem relatively coherent. I think (or hope) that it will offer up some clue on how to organize the book.

Then, lately, I’ve been thinking that maybe I’m even writing the wrong book. It may be this book is too ambitious for a first book. Maybe I need to write something that’s almost a self-help book, very practical for the most part. And then later I can write this book. Again, I think the blog is going to help me clarify what the best direction to pursue now would be.

Two nights ago I had an odd little dream. I’m still trying to decipher its meaning. There was a wide dirt path (or a narrow dirt road and this may have been back in time several centuries so there were no cars). It was going straight through a young forest. There was a boy of about eight or nine walking along the path. Along one side of the path ran an embankment. It was like the abandoned railroad grades you see around here. A tangle of young trees and bramble grew on it, creating almost a tunnel-effect on top of it. I was walking along the top of the embankment, following the boy secretly from several paces behind, and partly obscured by the brambles. The boy turned at one point in my direction and I instantly froze to the spot so he wouldn’t notice me, but as I froze I also swiveled my body to look behind me. There on the embankment about ten or fifteen paces behind me was a man, who also was instantly freezing to the spot as the boy turned in our direction.

I recognized the man instantly--it was Father Christmas! But he wasn’t round and jolly and he didn’t wear red suit. Instead, he was tall and lean, with white hair and a white beard. He wore a long robe that was trimmed all around in white fur, but the robe itself was tan, like deerskin (reindeer skin??) or suede. I realized in an instant what should always have been completely obvious (but wasn’t)--Father Christmas is a wizard! He gave a subtle nod to me, with maybe the merest hint of a smile. We were both up to the same thing--stalking the boy.

And that was it, the whole dream. What on earth am I to make of it? I was not working with Father Christmas. I had never seen him before (I don’t think anyone is supposed to see him) and I had no idea he was following right behind me until I turned. Yet we were up to the same thing, and I get the sense that I was up to something rather wizard-ish myself. I was stalking the boy, wishing to evade detection, but I think there was more to it than just freezing to the spot and blending in. I think I was actively, maybe mentally, practicing an invisibility technique. It wasn’t the freezing to the spot alone that prevented the boy from noticing me--there was some technique I was using that made it far less likely he would see me.

Let me add that there was nothing sinister in me stalking the kid. I meant him no harm. I never intended to interact with him at all. It seems more like I was practicing on him.

Where on earth did this dream come from? The only thing reminding me of Christmas in the past few days was a book I read about a family who boycotted all Chinese products for a year. Christmas was very trying since they had small children and virtually all toys are now made in China. The four year old boy started making his list for Santa in August and kept adding and adding to it, and everything he added the mom knew was made in China.

But how did my mind make the leap from our traditional American Santa to a wizard in animal skins stalking a boy? Very unusual! But it sure has a neat, mythic feel to it. It feels like for the first time I’ve gotten a glimpse of the real Santa. And I mean that, too, as ridiculous as it sounds.

Okay, so what could this mean? Am I only able to see the truth about Father Christmas because I’ve transcended the consumer paradigm? We’ve taken this wise, sacred being who I’m convinced has some sort of mythic reality, and dumbed him down, made him into some goofy, jolly, materialistic caricature. Gosh, now I’m going to have to do some research on Father Christmas. (Hey, it might make an interesting blog entry.) Father Christmas was a powerful but benevolent wizard and I was teaching myself to be a wizard too, it seems. His subtle nod showed me he was pleased.

It’s a beautiful morning and it’s supposed to get up near 80 degrees today. I’m planning to double-dig the garden once it warms up a bit, and spend as much time outside as I can.

For now though I’m sitting at my desk at the front window, looking out at the bright green grass, blue skies, and sunshine. It’s already 44 degrees at 7:30.

I just came across a quote I had copied down from the book, Beyond Beef, which talks about eating as a way of connecting with nature. I must have unconsciously absorbed the message without realizing it:

Eating, more than any other single experience, brings us into a full relationship to the natural world. The act itself calls forth the full embodiment of our senses—taste, smell, touch, hearing, and sight. We know nature largely by the various ways we consume it. Eating establishes the most primordial of all human bonds with the environment, and that is why in most cultures the experience is celebrated as a sacred act and a communion as well as an act of survival and replenishment. Eating, then, is the bridge that connects culture with nature, the social order with the natural order.

I’m starting to read a book called The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, by Karen Armstrong. I think her general thesis is going to be that we have never evolved beyond the religious traditions that began thousands of years ago and there is much that they can say to us in these desperate times.

It does make sense that we have not taken to heart the core messages of the great traditions, because we’re still in the egoic age. But we are on the cusp of a new age, so of course these great teachings are extremely relevant today.

I’m still trying to gain a more in-depth understanding of the rise of ego. This book is perhaps delivering a few more clues. As with Jared Diamond, the author points to the domestication of the horse as being a pivotal moment (along with the development of bronze weaponry).

Before horses, tribes were relatively isolated, peaceful pastoralists. But horses brought mobility which brought strangers into contact, and the combination of horses and weapons gave rise to looting, raiding, and the acquisition of “stuff”. The horsemen had power and by looting they had wealth. They developed a belief system that only the wealthy and powerful would have eternal life. In a sense they were becoming gods themselves as they commanded more resources and became more and more powerful and dominant.

The horse artificially gave individuals a boost up—from nobodies to persons of wealth and wicked power. Obviously, as individuals they were no more special than anyone else, but by using things outside of themselves (horses and weapons) they made themselves look bigger than they really were.

And in a nutshell, isn’t that what ego is? Simply making yourself look bigger than you really are? It starts to seem ridiculous that after all these thousands of years we’re still doing the same childish thing. I guess in the whole sweeping span of our evolution, a few thousand years is nothing, though. So long as we’re not stuck here forever! And there does seem to be more and more evidence of our readiness for the next paradigm.

I read something in a newspaper the other day about scientific estimates of the fate of the earth. I think it said the sun will become a red giant in another seven-point-something billion years, but in only a billion more years the earth will no longer be habitable because of the sun’s rising temperature. Material life is so temporary, no matter if you look at it in planetary terms or in terms of an individual’s lifespan. How comical it seems that we still cling to the material when it is the ultimate illusion. The paradox is that as wispy spiritual beings we are actually far more real and durable than matter and ego.

In the material world, what are the ways we assert our egos? By boasting about our achievements—actions taken on the physical plane for the most part; by boasting about or flaunting our acquisitions—money, things, trophy wives, landholdings, etc; by gaining status—that is, by gaining the consensus of others that our interactions with the material world have been more persuasive or of greater value than other people’s interactions; and by gaining power, which requires that other people value ego in order for that to be conferred on us.

Where I’m heading with this I don’t know. I’m groping around since there’s something here I’m trying to understand….

So all of these ways we assert ego—they’re all artificial extensions of the self. Self plus fast horse plus bronze weapons equals ego. We’re not the horse, or its speed, we’re not the weapon or its honed edge, but we expand our egos to encompass those things as if we could take credit for them. As if they were parts of ourselves. So we childishly think we’re bigger. We allow these external things to define who we are.

And these external things are not us, unless you look at it all spiritually and then everything is us, but that makes us all one being, all equally powerful. And then there’s no point in egotism because who are you going to boast to, and about what?

What keeps coming to mind is my vision a few weeks back of the man who was calling up the weather. In that moment he was egoless, fused with the Divine. He was one with Nature, or Gaia, or the Universe, or God—however you want to look at it. Self has to completely recede in order to so merge with nature that the rain clouds will roil and churn towards you.

I’m trying to piece together several different strands of my recent thinking.

Of all the most recent thoughts, the most important one seems to be the connection between being alienated from the land, and materialism. People have no qualms about exploiting the land when they no longer have a connection to it.

In the last hundred years or so we’ve been moving off the land in droves and often in only a generation or so losing all of our ancient, traditional knowledge. In urban centers and suburbia we don’t ever see the effects our consumption habits have on the body of the earth. There can be no system of checks and balances without the direct feedback you get by living on the land. What we don’t see essentially doesn’t exist.

I’m suspecting that this recent trend of moving off the land is the culmination of our individuation process. The development of ego and the individual self surely started thousands of years ago, but so long as we maintained a connection to the land it could never be complete. We were still a part of nature, a participant in a richly interconnected web.

Moving off the land is the last step in separating and becoming aware of ourselves as discrete beings. It’s a sad state of affairs as we seem to be isolated dots, separate from everything else. Until this historical moment we’ve been connected to the whole, albeit unconsciously for the most part. But moving off the land has to be the last straw. As we see the devastation our sense of separateness causes (and now on a global scale) we can also begin to see how everything is interconnected. The damage we cause to one part of the earth causes a whole web of effects. It’s becoming more and more obvious the more dire our situation gets. But what an opportunity to wake up and see! We evolved out of our unconscious wholeness into isolated selves, selfish egotistical selves. Now we stand at the cusp of a higher state of awareness—a supraconsciousness, of knowing for the first time that we are an inseparable part of the whole. No longer mythically being part of the whole, without awareness, as our primitive ancestors were, but now awake at last to our reality.

When we’re all awake to that knowledge—imagine the beautiful world we could inhabit (if we don’t destroy it in the meantime)! When I think along these lines, it’s an exciting time for the earth. I just pray we can make it through the transition.

This process of even just beginning to think about taking responsibility for my food supply is fascinating.

Something clicked in my mind last night while I was reading a book, Blessed Unrest, by Paul Hawkins. The author was talking about food and regional cultural identities:

Food has always been at the heart of cultural identity. The loss of its traditional foods is just as devastating to a culture as the loss of its language. Although globalization has caused havoc in all areas in every country, slow movements are not anti-globalization; they are pro-localization. Savoring something--a spice, a radish, a piece of cheese—brings us back home to the world in which we walk and breathe. It slows us down. Taste is social. We come together, sit and talk together around food; we clink glasses and laugh and engage in small gossips and whispers in the presence of local beers or wines, tisanes and small cakes with gooseberry preserves and clotted creams, or thin wafers bearing full-fatted cheeses daubed with slices of purple figs. It is how we share being alive. We can engage in the virtual world of iPod music and TV drama, but there is no virtual world of taste. It is in our mouth, and everyday our mouth connects us to place.

My connection to the land has always been so important to me. We literally are one with the land and the land shapes us. What clicked for me is that until now I’ve been missing a very vital aspect of this connection: food! When we lived close to nature and experienced oneness and rootedness and a sense of place, we were literally being sustained by the land. We were becoming one with the land by eating it, bringing it into our bodies, turning it into our flesh!

 

 

The earth fed itself to the plants and we fed on the plants. By eating locally, our place became literally a part of us. How beautifully grounding!

Nowadays, we rootless nomads eat foods from thousands of miles away, from sterile soils in hundreds of different places. We’re not products of our local ecosystems, we’re foreign invaders who remain separate and uninvolved.

I became really moved last night thinking about growing my own food. It’s a way to honor the earth and this place, to be a part of nature again. And I was moved just thinking about my first batch sprouts—how miraculous new life is!

I felt such an overwhelming love for the land and again, like when I was a teenager, I felt the urge to hug the earth. A really deep feeling of peace and contentment washed over me, as if my whole body and soul let out the deepest sigh. I keep getting closer and closer to the real essence of life! I love this process.

Still I feel like I’m being remade. Each passing month brings new realizations and new subtle changes. Bit by bit it’s all adding up (to what I don’t know).

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.