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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.