This morning i went to feed our chickens in the usual manner. That is, i tried my best to scatter handfuls of feed around strategically, so that certain chickens could eat out of view of other chickens, surreptitiously. This never works. The feeding of the enemy chicken is always detected, and that chicken is chased off by its nemesis, who may well be chased off by another chicken who is the nemesis of the nemesis. It doesn't matter that there is plenty of feed for everyone, and that they have the run of a large garden, it's a dominance thing. The bad-ass chickens do their best to keep marginalized chickens away from all feed, but accept allies feeding along side them. Because we have two adolescent chickens trying to find a place in the pecking order, two hens who were introduced only a few months ago, and both the new hens have chicks just old enough to feed with the others, every feeding has become a chaos of posturing and charging at other chickens, interspersed with periods of eating.
Today i made the mistake of trying to hold back a particularly obnoxious mother hen from harassing the adolescent rooster, who gets the worst of it and i suspect often goes a little hungry. I know that rooster is likely not long for this world, as the ruling rooster has started to target him too, so we'll have to do something about him before the two roosters square off for real, which could lead to one or both of them getting seriously injured or possibly killed. The ruling rooster is doing his job just fine, so the other one is soup. There can be only one. He probably has no more than a month. There are always more roosters around than there are flocks needing roosters, such is the world. But i feel a little bad about it and would like him to enjoy the time he has.
Anyhow, when i shoved the obnoxious mother hen back from chasing him with my toe, the other mother hen, who has it in for the first mother hen, decided i was attacking that hen, and piled on. Then the ruling rooster got involved, although i'm not sure what he was thinking. He pinned down the hen i shoved, but that can be either a 'cool it, yo' gesture, or a 'hey baby, have i got a humpin' fer you' move. And it isn't beyond the rooster to turn the one into the other. But before that outcome was determined, the pinned hen had thrown him off in response to the continued pecking of the other hen, talons were slicing and beaks were jabbing. The adolescent rooster attacked whoever was closest in the fight at that moment, i can't remember who. My guess is his angle was 'see, i can be a rooster too'. The other rooster quickly put an end to that, but was distracted by the continued fight between the girls, who were taking pot-shots at the nosy punk roosters too. Basically, they were all shouting 'I'm the boss of you' and retorting 'Shut up' at the same time. It ended when the obnoxious hen got the other hen's comb in her beak and rag-dolled until it bled, which caused the other hen to flee. The two roosters faded into the background. Their rooster duties done for the moment, they knew their rivalry would pit them in the final conflict another day. I just looked at them all, having been defeated as soon as my annoyed shove triggered this chicken savagery.
So, anyone who claims animals are noble has not owned chickens. The chickens have their reasons, don't get me wrong. It's a system, and it works. The fit survive. Let's just not dress it up as anything else, okay? Chickens are generally pretty funny, i admit. And they can express a sort of affection, for instance to get you to flip over a rock so it can eat the bugs underneath, as several do to me. One will stand on my foot, crooning and pecking lightly at my shin until i provide the desired service. I choose to interpret this as affection, although it isn't in any but the most superficial sense. In reality chicken behaviour is honed to maximize odds of survival of the species in their native home, the jungles of South East Asia. (How about that huh? Jungle birds.) I'm a means to acquire tasty spiders, by pure trial and error she has developed a method to get me to function. I get to chuckle and point out the cuteness to my husband, the chicken gets a vital protein boost. Later i get the eggs, too. Plus when she's old we'll probably make soup out of her. She and her flock are still getting an excellent deal. If she was in her jungle home, getting old would probably mean some jungle cat clawing her open one day, maybe after younger hens had been drumming her out of the flock for months. She'll likely live longer, healthier, and less stressed than that with us.
Industrially farmed chickens have a bad deal. Constant stress and confusion. The comparison has to be made to the life of a chicken that has not been interfered with by humans, doesn't it? I don't know what the vagaries of living in the jungles of Laos are, but wild chickens must live a fuller life. 'Fuller' here meaning with all the trimmings, such as sex and offspring, the triumphs and failures of finding your place in the flock, lean days and days full of succulent berries in season.
A free range chicken on a decent farm has it pretty good, though. All the upside of a wild life but without the predators, the lean times, and probably fewer parasites too. Life span could be significantly shorter than that of the average wild bird. Fortunately chickens don't anticipate death. They don't worry about their legacy, their sins, their unfinished business, or wonder what happens afterward. They struggle not to be killed, sure, but good humans end that struggle very quickly, it is minimally unpleasant compared to many drawn-out deaths in the wild. So if the rest of their life was good, what is the problem? Believe me, the other chickens won't grieve. I've seen a mother hen call over her chicks to eat another chick dead no more than an hour or two - her own dead chick. Chickens live in the moment.
Friday, July 26, 2013
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Far Fetching
To me life is much fuller if you take time to remember the universe is humongous and impenetrably mysterious. Perhaps the most enriching route to that goal is to imagine the incredible things that might be out there. While the particular fantastic idea you dwell on will have a microscopic chance of being true, it is certain that countless things just as fantastic are. Also, countless things you aren't even capable of imagining are. Therefore, seek the calmness necessary to realize your imaginings are nothing more than that, and to realize that nonetheless they are bounties of inspiration and insight. They are for you, puny human, to use to better understand who you are and what it means to be human. For extra punch, extrapolate carefully from known facts into the boundlessness of time and space. In this way you can reasonably feel that however different the details might be, there is a meaningful chance that a strange sister to your idea exists out there.
So basically what i'm talking about is religion, without the pitiful blindness of the orthodox. It is currently known as science fiction, or more inclusively, as speculative fiction. I believe its role could become much more than a simple fiction genre. I believe it could become the narrative that walks alongside science and brings it alive in our minds, so that we can contemplate and shape our future with vigor and zest. In fact, i think it is destined to become thus. I point to the increasing dominance of speculative fiction among our biggest shows, and the devotion of fans.
Recall that for most of human history, all cultures had canons of traditional tales featuring their gods, spirits, and heroes. Over those thousands of years, those canons were the basis of decision-making. Everyone knew the stories by heart, everyone referred to them when in doubt, everyone adapted the stories in their minds to better fit their own lives and personal questions, and as time passed the stories morphed to fit the changing conditions of the people they nourished. Print froze the stories in place, sapping their ability to flow with time. Cultures became nations and then empires. Their authority structures stiffened into the machinery necessary to oversee vast populations. This too sapped our stories of life, especially once our sophistication lifted science into prominence. As science created industry, our cultures were shattered into a million pieces that rearranged themselves into entirely new systems that can no longer be nourished by the old stories. Cultures are still described as being Christian, but the label has become hollow and abstract, a fetter as often as a guide, divisive, increasingly irrelevant.
Now, Star Trek and Star Wars are not a new canon, but they are a glimmer. They represent the new canvas on which our whole lives can be illuminated, expanded upon, experimented with. They and their ilk can be filled out to become a framework that can usefully ponder the implications of whatever the future may hold. The Fukushima reactors fail and Christianity shrugs, maybe mutters something about the will of god. The Star Trek canon says Thou Shalt Always Build a Backup System, lest the Wrath of Murphy be visited upon you.
So basically what i'm talking about is religion, without the pitiful blindness of the orthodox. It is currently known as science fiction, or more inclusively, as speculative fiction. I believe its role could become much more than a simple fiction genre. I believe it could become the narrative that walks alongside science and brings it alive in our minds, so that we can contemplate and shape our future with vigor and zest. In fact, i think it is destined to become thus. I point to the increasing dominance of speculative fiction among our biggest shows, and the devotion of fans.
Recall that for most of human history, all cultures had canons of traditional tales featuring their gods, spirits, and heroes. Over those thousands of years, those canons were the basis of decision-making. Everyone knew the stories by heart, everyone referred to them when in doubt, everyone adapted the stories in their minds to better fit their own lives and personal questions, and as time passed the stories morphed to fit the changing conditions of the people they nourished. Print froze the stories in place, sapping their ability to flow with time. Cultures became nations and then empires. Their authority structures stiffened into the machinery necessary to oversee vast populations. This too sapped our stories of life, especially once our sophistication lifted science into prominence. As science created industry, our cultures were shattered into a million pieces that rearranged themselves into entirely new systems that can no longer be nourished by the old stories. Cultures are still described as being Christian, but the label has become hollow and abstract, a fetter as often as a guide, divisive, increasingly irrelevant.
Now, Star Trek and Star Wars are not a new canon, but they are a glimmer. They represent the new canvas on which our whole lives can be illuminated, expanded upon, experimented with. They and their ilk can be filled out to become a framework that can usefully ponder the implications of whatever the future may hold. The Fukushima reactors fail and Christianity shrugs, maybe mutters something about the will of god. The Star Trek canon says Thou Shalt Always Build a Backup System, lest the Wrath of Murphy be visited upon you.
Monday, April 8, 2013
At the Unconscious Ball
My dreams don't often make me laugh out loud. There i was last night giggling to myself in the dark, stifling it to not wake my husband. That was wee hour sleep brain, but i still find it amusing in the light of day. And just generally fascinating how complex dreams are, and how convoluted they get.
So i was on a spaceship on a mission to an alien star system. We had to fetch a special tool from the human colony there. This was a future with many populated worlds, the planet we were going to was one we'd never seen and knew nothing about. Heavy borrowing so far from my teen science fiction reading - i'd say a mix of Robert Heinlein and Arthur C Clarke. We were greeted by a small group of technicians when we arrived. A visit from off-worlders was a big enough deal to have a little reception with food. We especially liked the cheese and complimented it. Our hosts responded, 'well, better dance on its lungs, then'. What? At that point we had to stifle giggling as we realized these people had a culture so different as to be soundly weird to us, but that we really shouldn't offend them. And things are always so much funnier when you have to try not to laugh, of course. They said a couple more alien weird things i don't remember, which only made it worse.
Shortly after that i woke up. So now i was realizing this joke was manufactured by my unconscious for its own inscrutable purposes. A joke on me, by me. Now i had three layers of funny going on. The glory of an untameable inner mind methodically pulling the strings of my little ego always intrigues me, and its nice when it does so without subjecting me to fear, anger, embarrassment, or any of the other unpleasant options that regularly feature in memorable dreams. Alien cheese. That's pretty amusing just right there.
So i was on a spaceship on a mission to an alien star system. We had to fetch a special tool from the human colony there. This was a future with many populated worlds, the planet we were going to was one we'd never seen and knew nothing about. Heavy borrowing so far from my teen science fiction reading - i'd say a mix of Robert Heinlein and Arthur C Clarke. We were greeted by a small group of technicians when we arrived. A visit from off-worlders was a big enough deal to have a little reception with food. We especially liked the cheese and complimented it. Our hosts responded, 'well, better dance on its lungs, then'. What? At that point we had to stifle giggling as we realized these people had a culture so different as to be soundly weird to us, but that we really shouldn't offend them. And things are always so much funnier when you have to try not to laugh, of course. They said a couple more alien weird things i don't remember, which only made it worse.
Shortly after that i woke up. So now i was realizing this joke was manufactured by my unconscious for its own inscrutable purposes. A joke on me, by me. Now i had three layers of funny going on. The glory of an untameable inner mind methodically pulling the strings of my little ego always intrigues me, and its nice when it does so without subjecting me to fear, anger, embarrassment, or any of the other unpleasant options that regularly feature in memorable dreams. Alien cheese. That's pretty amusing just right there.
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Havens
There is an avocado tree in our yard. It's just small, we planted it as a large sapling a bit over a year ago. It has a number of flowers now that if protected could lead to a dozen or so avocados. I love avocados. This area of Mexico is the world's leading producer, and those in the north rarely have access to such fine avocados as we routinely enjoy. Rich satin mellowness.
Thus i enjoy calculating that in the passive solar greenhouse we plan to build in Canada, a tree several times its volume would fit. In its coddled clime, such a tree might produce more than a hundred avocados each year. Plus there would be room for as many as four other fruiting trees, as well as a wealth of veggies, herbs, and ornamentals, and some small grassy patches for the chickens who would winter inside it. It is a grand plan we've worked hard on. I dwell on it often in the free spaces in my day, as i miss Canada sharply.
I feel like a playing piece that has been plucked off a game board and set to the side, future deployment unknown. I watch the game continue from a suspended state that makes everything look very different. I came to Mexico with the idea that i could create here, maybe, the conditions i needed to be a working artist, living cheaply here and returning to Canada to sell pieces. I didn't expect to meet my husband. Now he makes the dough and i just help him out, as i can. I make artwork in fits and starts, and get into other projects as they move me. I'm damn lucky, because i certainly would not have been able to manage my fatigue enough to execute the plan i had. I was pretty deep in denial about that. Not that i had many options. I knew my energy was failing me ever more, i just didn't understand it wasn't going to be enough to get away from it all, eat better, exercise, and return to doing what i had once loved and done well. My husband Aldo is my saviour. He could see how tired i always was and accepted it. He was glad just to have me there to listen to him. That's my main job these days. The rest is hobbies.
Anyhow... Not having the energy to do much of anything much of the time leaves a lot of time to think. Rather slowly and foggily, often, but thinking still happens. As mentioned, one straightforward theme is our return to Canada. Being the chief proponent of that in this marriage, i have focused myself on planning a tempting future there to outshine the successful construction company Aldo has here in his home country. (Note: events over the past few years in Mexico have made that considerably easier. You may have read a few things in the news.) We'll build a passive solar house, and a similar but larger all-season greenhouse, out in the country near Niagara Falls. (Aldo loves Niagara Falls.) I was able to research the technique and build a spreadsheet to test the design.
So the fruits of this will be passing my all-open-ended lifestyle to my husband. Heating and cooling costs will be minimal to none, we'll be able to produce the majority of our food ourselves, we won't have a mortgage. Solar power generation systems are still mighty costly and inefficient, but there are so many people working on that now i expect the problem to be cracked in under a decade. With one installed we'd have no electricity bills either. With enough power generation installed, we could make our greenhouse(s) productive enough to pay for all our other needs. LED lights make that possible, once their price comes down. They require a fraction of the power of conventional grow-lights, and strings of tiny ones can be positioned so close to foliage as to ensure most of the light goes to leaves, not to lighting everything else too. Aldo will always build things, that's him, but he'll build what he wants. It's a lifestyle so different from everything i was prepared for growing up, it makes me question many of the underpinning assumptions of my culture. A happy society depends on people having the means of production themselves, but not in the Marxist sense. Big organizations aren't good for people, that's pretty clear to everyone except the people who run them. What will humanity become once most of us live the way Aldo and i will live? For us it will be a fortunate luxury, as time goes on it will be possible on ever less land for an ever cheaper price.
Maybe it's just a personal dream of the future. I'll be posting the many indications i see that we are heading inexorably down that path. 3D printers will be everywhere in a decade, and even now several firms are working on ways to 3D print entire houses. Home power generation is going to become a reality, and will soon be an effective option on rural properties. Self-driving cars will also be common in 15 years or maybe less. Sending high-speed internet over a long-range router for a number of miles is actually pretty easy and cheap. If you aren't concerned about power or communications infrastructure, and driving time becomes reading/surfing/chatting time, where then do you choose to make your home? If you can build a home in the countryside with all the infrastructure you need for less than the price of a condo, how does that change your life? Your relationships? The world?
Thus i enjoy calculating that in the passive solar greenhouse we plan to build in Canada, a tree several times its volume would fit. In its coddled clime, such a tree might produce more than a hundred avocados each year. Plus there would be room for as many as four other fruiting trees, as well as a wealth of veggies, herbs, and ornamentals, and some small grassy patches for the chickens who would winter inside it. It is a grand plan we've worked hard on. I dwell on it often in the free spaces in my day, as i miss Canada sharply.
I feel like a playing piece that has been plucked off a game board and set to the side, future deployment unknown. I watch the game continue from a suspended state that makes everything look very different. I came to Mexico with the idea that i could create here, maybe, the conditions i needed to be a working artist, living cheaply here and returning to Canada to sell pieces. I didn't expect to meet my husband. Now he makes the dough and i just help him out, as i can. I make artwork in fits and starts, and get into other projects as they move me. I'm damn lucky, because i certainly would not have been able to manage my fatigue enough to execute the plan i had. I was pretty deep in denial about that. Not that i had many options. I knew my energy was failing me ever more, i just didn't understand it wasn't going to be enough to get away from it all, eat better, exercise, and return to doing what i had once loved and done well. My husband Aldo is my saviour. He could see how tired i always was and accepted it. He was glad just to have me there to listen to him. That's my main job these days. The rest is hobbies.
Anyhow... Not having the energy to do much of anything much of the time leaves a lot of time to think. Rather slowly and foggily, often, but thinking still happens. As mentioned, one straightforward theme is our return to Canada. Being the chief proponent of that in this marriage, i have focused myself on planning a tempting future there to outshine the successful construction company Aldo has here in his home country. (Note: events over the past few years in Mexico have made that considerably easier. You may have read a few things in the news.) We'll build a passive solar house, and a similar but larger all-season greenhouse, out in the country near Niagara Falls. (Aldo loves Niagara Falls.) I was able to research the technique and build a spreadsheet to test the design.
So the fruits of this will be passing my all-open-ended lifestyle to my husband. Heating and cooling costs will be minimal to none, we'll be able to produce the majority of our food ourselves, we won't have a mortgage. Solar power generation systems are still mighty costly and inefficient, but there are so many people working on that now i expect the problem to be cracked in under a decade. With one installed we'd have no electricity bills either. With enough power generation installed, we could make our greenhouse(s) productive enough to pay for all our other needs. LED lights make that possible, once their price comes down. They require a fraction of the power of conventional grow-lights, and strings of tiny ones can be positioned so close to foliage as to ensure most of the light goes to leaves, not to lighting everything else too. Aldo will always build things, that's him, but he'll build what he wants. It's a lifestyle so different from everything i was prepared for growing up, it makes me question many of the underpinning assumptions of my culture. A happy society depends on people having the means of production themselves, but not in the Marxist sense. Big organizations aren't good for people, that's pretty clear to everyone except the people who run them. What will humanity become once most of us live the way Aldo and i will live? For us it will be a fortunate luxury, as time goes on it will be possible on ever less land for an ever cheaper price.
Maybe it's just a personal dream of the future. I'll be posting the many indications i see that we are heading inexorably down that path. 3D printers will be everywhere in a decade, and even now several firms are working on ways to 3D print entire houses. Home power generation is going to become a reality, and will soon be an effective option on rural properties. Self-driving cars will also be common in 15 years or maybe less. Sending high-speed internet over a long-range router for a number of miles is actually pretty easy and cheap. If you aren't concerned about power or communications infrastructure, and driving time becomes reading/surfing/chatting time, where then do you choose to make your home? If you can build a home in the countryside with all the infrastructure you need for less than the price of a condo, how does that change your life? Your relationships? The world?
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Meditation is Easy
Sometimes i meditate, something i highly recommend. I have a fatigue problem and only meditate on days when i have enough energy for it to be worthwhile. On my many tired days there is a fog in my brain that prevents me from concentrating enough for meditation to be worthwhile. It's like when you have the flu, i just can't direct my mind in any way. Not even enough for the open awareness of meditation.
I stopped using the pretzel postures that are traditional years ago. Shortly after doing so i realized the pain and tension they caused had only been distracting me, preventing me from really engaging in the activity. People who are extremely flexible maybe enjoy those postures, the other 99% of us are far better off just sitting on a chair. Lift its back legs a couple of inches with books or whatever, and it is a fine meditation platform. Just put a bit of padding on it so you are comfortable even though your weight will be centered over your butt's bony bits. Then you close your eyes and balance your torso such that you can sit upright with a minimum of effort, so little that it feels like you aren't even trying. That takes a lot of practice, you have to feel out the posture bit by bit by noticing where you are tense, and finding how you can adjust your posture so that the tension can be relaxed. Eventually you end up sitting nice and tall, your spine carrying your weight, your chest open for easy breathing, feeling light and deeply relaxed.
The particulars of what you do with your arms and legs really don't matter, as long as they are relaxed. In the Zen center where i was taught to meditate closing your eyes was a no-no because they said it would make you sleepy, but it doesn't at all. There were a lot of rules there. Special hand postures, and robes, and ways of bowing, and all sorts of routines. Traditions handed down from Japan they dared not modify because that would be 'egotistical'. I doubt the people who ran the center have ever really tried meditating in anything but the prescribed way. The small handful of people for whom that format works well enough continue at the center, and the vast majority who abandon it after a short while are judged to have not been ready for meditation.
Meditation is natural and there is no secret to it. There is no need for pain and suffering, you don't need to be taught a mantra, or work on a koan, or visualize anything. You just need to find the posture and relax. The rest will happen by itself. Let your mind relax like your body is relaxed, let it be open and aware like your body is open and alert. Don't worry that it takes time for that to happen, that is natural. The whole thing is natural. No religious framework is necessary. That's why different traditions in different parts of the world have developed varieties of meditation while standing, walking, lying down, or doing any repetitive activity that is doable while using that long, relaxed spinal posture that is central to getting into the mind-state.
I stopped using the pretzel postures that are traditional years ago. Shortly after doing so i realized the pain and tension they caused had only been distracting me, preventing me from really engaging in the activity. People who are extremely flexible maybe enjoy those postures, the other 99% of us are far better off just sitting on a chair. Lift its back legs a couple of inches with books or whatever, and it is a fine meditation platform. Just put a bit of padding on it so you are comfortable even though your weight will be centered over your butt's bony bits. Then you close your eyes and balance your torso such that you can sit upright with a minimum of effort, so little that it feels like you aren't even trying. That takes a lot of practice, you have to feel out the posture bit by bit by noticing where you are tense, and finding how you can adjust your posture so that the tension can be relaxed. Eventually you end up sitting nice and tall, your spine carrying your weight, your chest open for easy breathing, feeling light and deeply relaxed.
The particulars of what you do with your arms and legs really don't matter, as long as they are relaxed. In the Zen center where i was taught to meditate closing your eyes was a no-no because they said it would make you sleepy, but it doesn't at all. There were a lot of rules there. Special hand postures, and robes, and ways of bowing, and all sorts of routines. Traditions handed down from Japan they dared not modify because that would be 'egotistical'. I doubt the people who ran the center have ever really tried meditating in anything but the prescribed way. The small handful of people for whom that format works well enough continue at the center, and the vast majority who abandon it after a short while are judged to have not been ready for meditation.
Meditation is natural and there is no secret to it. There is no need for pain and suffering, you don't need to be taught a mantra, or work on a koan, or visualize anything. You just need to find the posture and relax. The rest will happen by itself. Let your mind relax like your body is relaxed, let it be open and aware like your body is open and alert. Don't worry that it takes time for that to happen, that is natural. The whole thing is natural. No religious framework is necessary. That's why different traditions in different parts of the world have developed varieties of meditation while standing, walking, lying down, or doing any repetitive activity that is doable while using that long, relaxed spinal posture that is central to getting into the mind-state.
Thursday, February 28, 2013
The Thing is...
if human history was a pencil, the time we haven't been mostly hunter-gatherers would be the eraser. That eraser hasn't erased nearly all it likes to think. The pencil bit still writes the story, and we can start following it again. The tools are now appearing for modern living in harmony with ancient human values. Equipment making manufacture in the home competitive with factories. Internet markets that level the playing field. Ways to build a home yourself quite cheaply. Ways to grow very healthy food in a small space, enough to provide a basic diet. Ways to generate your energy needs on your own property cheaply, including heating and cooling.
This used to be a statement about the theme of this blog on the sidebar. After a bout of insomnia, which hopefully this time has turned out to be productive, in a way, i decided to remove it. I've been trying to be something i'm not, insomnia-mind said, and it felt true. So i've gotten up, now that my husband is up and me moving around thus isn't waking him, and i'm making changes to the blog setup so it is just a general thoughts blog. There was a subtitle: Producing what you need mostly yourself > gaining a wide open mind > enjoying being you. I removed that too. It's a nice idea pretty central too my general attitude, but still too limiting. I have this whole chronic fatigue thing happening in my life, and i'm thinking (still in semi-insomnia mode) that always trying to be productive according to the model i grew up with has been subtly contributing to that problem. Going against my own deeper grain saps my motivation, makes life feel a little gray. It robs me of my ability to tap all my resources, meaning i run out of them sooner and just feel tired and foggy. So in an attempt to right that, i'm just going to explore for a while and let the blog shape itself. I expect it will of itself acquire a form after a while, however amorphous and difficult to define. I always wanted to be an artist, you see. It's a natural fit for me, but my overlaid sense of practicality has been quite contrarian. Even now that i have reached a situation where i have great freedom to spend my time in pursuit of whatever project i wish, it harrumphs about things that don't have an easily definable social value, aren't sufficiently academic, and especially, which will make no money.
Therefore i must let things grow naturally for a while, let my innate mental ecosystem reassert itself. Once it has refilled all its niches and cycles, i can begin to groom it to maximize its lushness - 'i' being the organizing entity that is the ego, and the mental ecosystem being all which is always bubbling up in me in such a distracting and confounding way, since my ego has been farming up til now, not stewarding. That exhausts the soil. This will be a better way, and very much like what i've been going on about in the previous posts, but encompassing me, not simply projecting a narrow plan.
End result: Your time is your own. Real freedom. You acquire a sense of peace and confidence that makes you a better person. The world's problems become solvable. The awkward adolescence of the human race ends.
This used to be a statement about the theme of this blog on the sidebar. After a bout of insomnia, which hopefully this time has turned out to be productive, in a way, i decided to remove it. I've been trying to be something i'm not, insomnia-mind said, and it felt true. So i've gotten up, now that my husband is up and me moving around thus isn't waking him, and i'm making changes to the blog setup so it is just a general thoughts blog. There was a subtitle: Producing what you need mostly yourself > gaining a wide open mind > enjoying being you. I removed that too. It's a nice idea pretty central too my general attitude, but still too limiting. I have this whole chronic fatigue thing happening in my life, and i'm thinking (still in semi-insomnia mode) that always trying to be productive according to the model i grew up with has been subtly contributing to that problem. Going against my own deeper grain saps my motivation, makes life feel a little gray. It robs me of my ability to tap all my resources, meaning i run out of them sooner and just feel tired and foggy. So in an attempt to right that, i'm just going to explore for a while and let the blog shape itself. I expect it will of itself acquire a form after a while, however amorphous and difficult to define. I always wanted to be an artist, you see. It's a natural fit for me, but my overlaid sense of practicality has been quite contrarian. Even now that i have reached a situation where i have great freedom to spend my time in pursuit of whatever project i wish, it harrumphs about things that don't have an easily definable social value, aren't sufficiently academic, and especially, which will make no money.
Therefore i must let things grow naturally for a while, let my innate mental ecosystem reassert itself. Once it has refilled all its niches and cycles, i can begin to groom it to maximize its lushness - 'i' being the organizing entity that is the ego, and the mental ecosystem being all which is always bubbling up in me in such a distracting and confounding way, since my ego has been farming up til now, not stewarding. That exhausts the soil. This will be a better way, and very much like what i've been going on about in the previous posts, but encompassing me, not simply projecting a narrow plan.
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Turn your mind around
Mexican people from the low income class tend to regard ambition as a vice. They use the term the way English speakers would use 'greed' and 'vanity'. There are a number of reasons for this, one being the very low opinion they have of Mexican rich people, mostly for very good reason. Another is the value they place on free time. The Protestant industrial European values of their northern neighbours too often misinterprets this as simple laziness. What it really is, is a preference for more free time over more money, once they have enough income to get along. They might have to spend that time on fixing up broken stuff they can't afford to replace, or doing by hand what most of us do with fancy appliances, but so what? When friends and family are with you, and you make your own choices, is it really work?
What they are expressing are the innate values that lie deep within us, that for people in the rich world are plastered over by an industrial education within an industrial culture. For modern industrial cultures to work, it is necessary for the public to value hard work and strict schedules, and accept manufactured stuff as adequate compensation. But our species evolved in lush ecosystems where all our necessities were procured with 2 to 4 hours of 'work' per day, by which we meant wandering around with our tribe to all the spots where we knew good stuff could be gotten, gathering or catching enough for the day, and then wandering back to camp and cooking it up. We'd call that camping. Such behaviour is written so deeply into our genes that to this day it is a sought-after leisure activity. During the 195,000 years or so when most all of us lived that way, the 20 to 22 hours a day when we weren't working were filled with conversation, storytelling, crafts, music, dancing, and always enough sleep. Much of our time was spent in simple observation of our environment, which was critical to understanding it sufficiently to know where to find food, how to avoid predators, and what could be used as medicine. There are now so many humans that few places remain on the planet where such a life can be had. But there are some, and there were many more as little as 100 years ago. During the 1930s, when Weston Price traveled the world studying the people of such places, this is what he found:
Do you remember predictions that work weeks were going to get shorter as life became more automated? It may not feel like it, but in fact average weekly hours worked has been slooowly declining. Technology has also been shifting the ground under our feet, creating telecommuting and constant connection to work email. As long as we continue to organize ourselves into huge institutions where each of us works on tiny slivers of huge processes, progress like this will continue to be minimal and qualified. The unfortunate truth is that powerful people are obsessed with ever greater power and endless gigantic projects. If we leave it to them, we'll all be cogs in a machine forever. To get out, we have to not need the parceled labour they have designed everything around. Shift your mindset, and it can be done sooner. Go with the flow, and technology will eventually cause things to end up that way anyhow. It is what our deeper selves want, our actions are being steered that way by those instincts.
What they are expressing are the innate values that lie deep within us, that for people in the rich world are plastered over by an industrial education within an industrial culture. For modern industrial cultures to work, it is necessary for the public to value hard work and strict schedules, and accept manufactured stuff as adequate compensation. But our species evolved in lush ecosystems where all our necessities were procured with 2 to 4 hours of 'work' per day, by which we meant wandering around with our tribe to all the spots where we knew good stuff could be gotten, gathering or catching enough for the day, and then wandering back to camp and cooking it up. We'd call that camping. Such behaviour is written so deeply into our genes that to this day it is a sought-after leisure activity. During the 195,000 years or so when most all of us lived that way, the 20 to 22 hours a day when we weren't working were filled with conversation, storytelling, crafts, music, dancing, and always enough sleep. Much of our time was spent in simple observation of our environment, which was critical to understanding it sufficiently to know where to find food, how to avoid predators, and what could be used as medicine. There are now so many humans that few places remain on the planet where such a life can be had. But there are some, and there were many more as little as 100 years ago. During the 1930s, when Weston Price traveled the world studying the people of such places, this is what he found:
Price took photograph after photograph of beautiful smiles, and noted that the natives were invariably cheerful and optimistic. Such people were characterized by "splendid physical development" and an almost complete absence of disease, even those living in physical environments that were extremely harsh.Now, i like my cellphone. I don't plan to give it up, nor many other conveniences and toys of modern life i enjoy. But i'd gladly trade the superfluous modern trimmings for as much free time as my deep cellular makeup cries out for (and yours does too). I'd rather have a garden than a home theater. I'd rather bike and use shared transport, considering car ownership costs enough money in a decade to buy a small rural lot and build a cozy green home.
Do you remember predictions that work weeks were going to get shorter as life became more automated? It may not feel like it, but in fact average weekly hours worked has been slooowly declining. Technology has also been shifting the ground under our feet, creating telecommuting and constant connection to work email. As long as we continue to organize ourselves into huge institutions where each of us works on tiny slivers of huge processes, progress like this will continue to be minimal and qualified. The unfortunate truth is that powerful people are obsessed with ever greater power and endless gigantic projects. If we leave it to them, we'll all be cogs in a machine forever. To get out, we have to not need the parceled labour they have designed everything around. Shift your mindset, and it can be done sooner. Go with the flow, and technology will eventually cause things to end up that way anyhow. It is what our deeper selves want, our actions are being steered that way by those instincts.
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Some Ponderable Pages
I'm having a bad health day. My fatigue problem has flared up and even a cup of weak instant coffee hasn't helped. (I carefully avoid caffeine most of the time unless i'm really stuck in a drowsy fog, and then i try to take only just enough to perk up to normal. I used to be addicted and quitting was 10 weeks of hell because of how the fatigue issue deepened and extended the withdrawal.) So, i'm just going to post some links.
Keeping hens in the city
I want to talk about this another day. Free range hens are easy to keep, and most modern breeds lay an egg almost every day. Fresh grass is the key to healthy Omega-3 eggs. Make sure your hens get occasional bugs, and feed them a few choice scraps, and you will be rewarded with highly nutritious eggs - each one is a veritable vitamin pill. Look at this article - eggs are good for you!
100 lbs. of potatoes in 4 sq. feet
How about that, a year's worth of potatoes for one person from one teeny patch of land. That makes a mighty big contribution to feeding yourself from your yard. Plus, if you get a composter going so your soil is rich in nutrients, those potatoes will be way healthier than factory-farm store potatoes.
Eating Mealworms
Abigale's Edibles is a great blog about raising and eating mealworms, and why that is such a great idea. You will need to buy the oats or other grains they need for food, but compared to any kind of standard meat, you get way more protein for the food fed to them. Plus, it will give you the bug treats your chickens so love in the winter when there aren't other sources.
So, manage to keep a garden just with these three things, and you could provide yourself with all you need in terms of protein and starch for the price of only cheap bulk grains like oats, wheat berries, and corn. A bit more space for organic veggies, with their extra nutritional value, and you are most of the way to food self-sufficiency.
Kill and butcher a deer, and you are there - one adult buck or doe weighs at least 100 lbs (45 kg) 'field dressed', meaning the organs have been removed, and the typical calculation is that about half is meat. But those organs are good food! The most nutritious parts of the animal! Freeze the bones for making nutritious tasty stock, turn the organs and some fat into sausages that will store well, and keep the fat on those meat cuts, cuz it's good for ya - 100 lbs of meats, easy, without the hide and other bits that can't be used. That's how it was done in the good ol' days, meaning every day up to about 100 years ago. And remember, there are way too many deer out there, in North America. You'd be doing nature a service.
Keeping hens in the city
I want to talk about this another day. Free range hens are easy to keep, and most modern breeds lay an egg almost every day. Fresh grass is the key to healthy Omega-3 eggs. Make sure your hens get occasional bugs, and feed them a few choice scraps, and you will be rewarded with highly nutritious eggs - each one is a veritable vitamin pill. Look at this article - eggs are good for you!
100 lbs. of potatoes in 4 sq. feet
How about that, a year's worth of potatoes for one person from one teeny patch of land. That makes a mighty big contribution to feeding yourself from your yard. Plus, if you get a composter going so your soil is rich in nutrients, those potatoes will be way healthier than factory-farm store potatoes.
Eating Mealworms
Abigale's Edibles is a great blog about raising and eating mealworms, and why that is such a great idea. You will need to buy the oats or other grains they need for food, but compared to any kind of standard meat, you get way more protein for the food fed to them. Plus, it will give you the bug treats your chickens so love in the winter when there aren't other sources.
So, manage to keep a garden just with these three things, and you could provide yourself with all you need in terms of protein and starch for the price of only cheap bulk grains like oats, wheat berries, and corn. A bit more space for organic veggies, with their extra nutritional value, and you are most of the way to food self-sufficiency.
Kill and butcher a deer, and you are there - one adult buck or doe weighs at least 100 lbs (45 kg) 'field dressed', meaning the organs have been removed, and the typical calculation is that about half is meat. But those organs are good food! The most nutritious parts of the animal! Freeze the bones for making nutritious tasty stock, turn the organs and some fat into sausages that will store well, and keep the fat on those meat cuts, cuz it's good for ya - 100 lbs of meats, easy, without the hide and other bits that can't be used. That's how it was done in the good ol' days, meaning every day up to about 100 years ago. And remember, there are way too many deer out there, in North America. You'd be doing nature a service.
Saturday, February 16, 2013
What Mexico can Teach Us
I have lived for 10 years in the small town of Patzcuaro, in the central mountain highlands of Mexico. The population is about 50,000, about half of which are scattered in little satellite towns governed from the main town of Patzcuaro proper. There are certainly plenty of people without much money here, but most everyone gets by, even without much in the way of the government social services i was used to growing up in Canada. The land is fertile and most people have some, especially in the satellite towns dominated by native families, whose people have been here for many centuries. Even on small plots people have livestock, even in Patzcuaro itself. Outside of the centre of town plenty of people have a few chickens, or a couple of pigs, or a handful of goats or cows that are penned up in small quarters at night, and led out to the fields on the edge of town during the day. Now, that is a way of living i know most rich-world folk would not be comfortable with. In a future post we'll look at what kinds of limited livestock undertakings can work in urban settings, and why it would be a good idea. There are some things that can work, especially if you give the benefits the weight they deserve. Certainly the extra food and income it gives people here makes an important difference.
Patzcuaro definitely has a shortage of formal work, and what there is often doesn't pay an amount that is at all fair for the labour involved (there is a gaping vacuum between rich and poor in Mexico that leaves the poor very unprotected). So people have small informal businesses that provide enough to get by or to top up their day job income. They sell meals on the stoops of their houses, usually specializing in either breakfast, lunch, or dinner, or they have food carts they roll around, with snacks or drinks. They build tiny shops onto the fronts of their houses, no zoning required. Or, they rent a small stall in the market for cheap because it is government subsidized, or put a 'pirate' stall just outside the market for a small 'tip' to the local police. They put in hair and nail salons, or kiosks specializing in snack foods, or household goods, or fruits and veggies, or plastic items, or fresh meat or cheese, or plants. Signs are posted on telephone poles offering to repair your scooter, or wash your car, or fix anything electronic or mechanical. They have informal taxis or micro-buses. It is a chaotic commercial system, completely unregulated - reputation is everything. In the centre of town you will find more standard businesses like we're used to, owned by the rich and the growing middle class. Everywhere else there are tons of microbusinesses and people farming on the tiniest scraps of land.
I grew up partly in a small town in Canada. There, work was also hard to come by, but if you didn't find a formal job you were kind of screwed. Most of the stores in town were outlets of major chains. Their employees didn't earn much, the money mostly went to the local owner and the faceless owners of the chain or their shareholders far away. If you tried to start a small business, you had to rent an area in a commercial zone, which sucked up so much of your income your business was likely to fail in the first year. Selling meals or snacks without investing in a licensed commercial kitchen would get you shut down in no time. And having chickens in town? Are you kidding me?
Good regulation is a very good thing, but now i see that most of the small business regulation in Canada is bad. It mostly makes it hard to start a business, or to make enough money at it if you do, and rarely protects consumers from anything. Restaurant inspectors are supposed to protect you from food that's gone bad, but i haven't once gotten food poisoning from any of the small food stands here - and remember that this is the tropics. People keep clean kitchens because if word got out that their clients got food poisoning, their business would plummet. Anyhow, they cook the food right in front of you, you can see what's going on.
And really, why can't we have businesses in our homes? I would understand regulations requiring that they not be eyesores or noisy or hog all the parking, but aside from that, why not? Think of how much easier it would be to have a business if you didn't have commercial rent always hanging over your head. People think it would make their neighbourhood chaotic and maybe dangerous, but you know what? Actually you get to know your neighbours, and you start watching out for each other, helping each other out.
It is so much nicer to go get your hair cut with Martha over in #5 Yourstreet, and know you can catch up with neighbours on Fridays while you get that great homemade pizza Leslie makes on that day at #12. Maybe you'll buy a bottle of home-brew wine from Hank at #26 on Saturday when guests come unexpectedly. Too busy these days to do all your laundry and ironing? Cyril at #17 will take it in and you can pick it up the next day, plus he'll sew on any loose buttons and fix any open seams, and he's a wonder with stains. Tax season goes by easy with the help of Jackie at #33. You know your baby is in good hands at Barb's micro daycare at #8. In fact, everyone on the block helps keep an eye on everyone else's kids, which is much easier when there are always a few people home, because they work there. Break-ins? Forget about it on this block. There are too many eyes.
You know who is helped by countless regulations about where and how and when you can have a business? People who already have a successful business, especially the ones who have gotten rich at it. Not coincidentally, those are also exactly the people able to make big campaign contributions and pay for lobbyists. Instead of a few people making a lot at a business, it would be much better to have a lot of people making enough at smaller businesses to get along or top up, with job security, greater freedom, and the special satisfactions of having made something yourself, that is an expression of you.
And that doesn't just work in cities. It works just as well in small towns. In fact, now that the internet connects us all, it can even work in the countryside.
Patzcuaro definitely has a shortage of formal work, and what there is often doesn't pay an amount that is at all fair for the labour involved (there is a gaping vacuum between rich and poor in Mexico that leaves the poor very unprotected). So people have small informal businesses that provide enough to get by or to top up their day job income. They sell meals on the stoops of their houses, usually specializing in either breakfast, lunch, or dinner, or they have food carts they roll around, with snacks or drinks. They build tiny shops onto the fronts of their houses, no zoning required. Or, they rent a small stall in the market for cheap because it is government subsidized, or put a 'pirate' stall just outside the market for a small 'tip' to the local police. They put in hair and nail salons, or kiosks specializing in snack foods, or household goods, or fruits and veggies, or plastic items, or fresh meat or cheese, or plants. Signs are posted on telephone poles offering to repair your scooter, or wash your car, or fix anything electronic or mechanical. They have informal taxis or micro-buses. It is a chaotic commercial system, completely unregulated - reputation is everything. In the centre of town you will find more standard businesses like we're used to, owned by the rich and the growing middle class. Everywhere else there are tons of microbusinesses and people farming on the tiniest scraps of land.
I grew up partly in a small town in Canada. There, work was also hard to come by, but if you didn't find a formal job you were kind of screwed. Most of the stores in town were outlets of major chains. Their employees didn't earn much, the money mostly went to the local owner and the faceless owners of the chain or their shareholders far away. If you tried to start a small business, you had to rent an area in a commercial zone, which sucked up so much of your income your business was likely to fail in the first year. Selling meals or snacks without investing in a licensed commercial kitchen would get you shut down in no time. And having chickens in town? Are you kidding me?
Good regulation is a very good thing, but now i see that most of the small business regulation in Canada is bad. It mostly makes it hard to start a business, or to make enough money at it if you do, and rarely protects consumers from anything. Restaurant inspectors are supposed to protect you from food that's gone bad, but i haven't once gotten food poisoning from any of the small food stands here - and remember that this is the tropics. People keep clean kitchens because if word got out that their clients got food poisoning, their business would plummet. Anyhow, they cook the food right in front of you, you can see what's going on.
And really, why can't we have businesses in our homes? I would understand regulations requiring that they not be eyesores or noisy or hog all the parking, but aside from that, why not? Think of how much easier it would be to have a business if you didn't have commercial rent always hanging over your head. People think it would make their neighbourhood chaotic and maybe dangerous, but you know what? Actually you get to know your neighbours, and you start watching out for each other, helping each other out.
It is so much nicer to go get your hair cut with Martha over in #5 Yourstreet, and know you can catch up with neighbours on Fridays while you get that great homemade pizza Leslie makes on that day at #12. Maybe you'll buy a bottle of home-brew wine from Hank at #26 on Saturday when guests come unexpectedly. Too busy these days to do all your laundry and ironing? Cyril at #17 will take it in and you can pick it up the next day, plus he'll sew on any loose buttons and fix any open seams, and he's a wonder with stains. Tax season goes by easy with the help of Jackie at #33. You know your baby is in good hands at Barb's micro daycare at #8. In fact, everyone on the block helps keep an eye on everyone else's kids, which is much easier when there are always a few people home, because they work there. Break-ins? Forget about it on this block. There are too many eyes.
You know who is helped by countless regulations about where and how and when you can have a business? People who already have a successful business, especially the ones who have gotten rich at it. Not coincidentally, those are also exactly the people able to make big campaign contributions and pay for lobbyists. Instead of a few people making a lot at a business, it would be much better to have a lot of people making enough at smaller businesses to get along or top up, with job security, greater freedom, and the special satisfactions of having made something yourself, that is an expression of you.
And that doesn't just work in cities. It works just as well in small towns. In fact, now that the internet connects us all, it can even work in the countryside.
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