Balancing Acts

My mom and dad, when they were first married, lived in a trailer home, and the place of course was small. Small enough that even though they were newlyweds, without much stuff, the living space quickly became cramped. So the two of them made up a rule: that whenever a new object came into the house, something already there of about equal size would have to come out first. 

I'm not really sure how strictly my folks kept the policy, or for how long; though my guess is that, given my mother's determination in practical matters, it probably really was kept strictly at least for a time. I also think it's safe to say that, at least on some occasions, following through with the policy must been pretty painful. How to weigh one item against the next? How to say whether a new pair of shoes was more important than a couple of good books? Or a foot stool more useful than an end table? Or a Monopoly game more fun than a Mah Jong set?

And yet the point of the rule was to keep themselves sane. Without it there would have been that ever-oppressive sense of clutter, especially for my mother who stayed at home much of the day. There would have been accidents: tripping over things, running bang into things with your shins. There would have been arguments between the newlyweds about just how messy it was and who ought to clean up. So they did this work of weeding their possessions before they brought in anything new. Or at least that's how I like to imagine it. Out on the prairie outskirts of a town called Cosmos. My mom and dad bravely banishing the demon of clutter.

I think of Mom and Dad's rule fairly often. I thought of it just this morning in fact, when I went to the basement to bring up a new batch of music CD's. Yes we Sunnysiders still listen to actual recordings that can be held in the hand. It's direct. It's easy. It's the whole album. But it's also, well, much more prone to cause clutter than streaming is. And so, in order to prevent clutter, we keep most of our recordings downstairs, and what we listen to, we listen to in sets. Every couple of weeks I venture down to pull up a new set that we might enjoy listening to. 

It's a fun thing to do--playing DJ for the next couple of weeks. Trying to anticipate what we might enjoy. Fitting the season of the year to the music. Fitting the music to whatever else we might be taking in as well. For instance just last month I read Styron's Sophie's Choice, which contains many references to music. I made it a project to listen to at least several of the works cited, and I found it quite meaningful. 

So the choosing out and the bringing up is the fun part. But there's a hard part to the task as well: it's to go to the cupboard where the current CD's are shelved, take them (with a little sigh) down from that shelf, bring them back downstairs and THEN and only then get down to choosing out the new ones. It's an essential step of course, to bring the current set down. Without following through on it, in no time at all the whole collection would migrate up to the living space. Guaranteed. 

You wouldn't think the act of bringing down the CD's should be so hard, but it is, or can be. In the first place, there are all those CD's you brought up a week or two ago, but didn't actually listen too. These CD's make you feel guilty! After all, like an inconsiderate impresario, you dangled the promise of performance in front of them, but then never followed through, and now they have to return to the frustrations of obscurity. Or maybe too, for me it's a bit like the feeling you get when you're traveling, and you pass through a town where some old friends of yours live, but you don't stop. You had planned to, but now you can't. Or just don't. 

Then too, among the CD's due for return, there's always a certain number that you've enjoyed and don't want to put away, at least not just yet. Of course there's no law that says these have to be returned just now, but then too, not all of them can stay! And do you really want to be cogitating and waffling about which ones stay and which ones go? I myself have found the best strategy is to return them all--ruthlessly. "There'll be other opportunities later," I say to myself. And so far there have been.

Here's the moral, or as preachers used to say, the application: We human beings display instincts for both novelty and continuity, and both instincts have their useful places in our lives. But these instincts also, often enough, conflict with one another. And part of living wisely and simply has to do with learning to allow the conflict between the old and the new to play out with some regularity, and then take care of it, re-balancing the equation. It's really best not to put that task of rebalancing off; otherwise, our lives can get pretty seriously cluttered up and complicated.

All this is just as true in the dimension of time, as it is in the dimension of space. Let's remember this! Schedules can get as cluttered as any room. So before we take up some new task, however novel and fun, or useful to the world, or genuinely altruistic, we ought to consider (first!) the need to make the space for it--by giving something that's already in the schedule up. There's only so much time in a day, and we want to use that (limited) gift of time intelligently, meaningfully, joyfully; nor do we want to suffer mission creep, which has such a way of overwhelming us with responsibility and stress. After all, it doesn't really matter if the tasks we do, in themselves, are dear to our hearts, if in sum they only make us miserable!

I offer this up as a meditation for the New Year. As something to think about as we all move forward across that arbitrary yet meaningful border in time. It's a good time to think about how to do better. How to impose some sanity in our lives. How to love what we do. How to enjoy ourselves. How to nurture our relationships. How to taste some sweet aspect of the elemental even within this brew of complexity that's modern life.

Happy New Year to all my readers! I enjoy writing for you! Your visits to this space are such an honor.

HB

Until Saturday the 4th! 

Love in the Here and Now

Every year around Christmas, I like to get out James Joyce's story The Dead, and re-read it. The tale is set on a snowy night in Ireland, and much of it takes place during a Christmas dinner/dance, which of course is why it feels so appropriate for this time of year, and for a holiday tradition. So it's just a custom of mine. One I especially relish. It's such a beautiful, powerful story. About married love. About first love. About what true love really is. Not, of course that the story has any final answers for us! Only that it explores the questions in a most beautiful and compelling way. 

I hope that it's apparent in these posts on 9-volt nomad, that I'm a big fan of married love. I'm a fan of of love in general, and generally find there's not enough of it around, but I also think that married love needs more of a booster club these days than most people recognize. I know that may sound silly and bourgeois to some, and for some it may even seem distasteful. We're so much in the habit of wanting to believe that any lifestyle choice is equal to every other, that we're afraid to cheer for any given script. And especially any supposedly boring, traditional script. 

I really do think that more people ought to get married than seem to want to get married these days. Partly because again, I think love in general ought to be more highly rated than it is, but also because I think that getting married is just a good way to get yourself to grow up and be adult; to learn that you're not the center of the universe, and that sacrifice is a part of life, and that it really is a meaningful act--to regularly put another human being's interests before your own. And to work out compromises. And to listen to advice. And to have someone who knows you deeply, always available for counsel. And to be able to serve your partner as counsel too. 

Of course I'm not claiming that there aren't other ways of learning how to become an adult. But getting married and staying married is a time-tested and very effective path. Surely it's one of the most effective ways devised. Plus, at least if you're willing to work at it, being married is a good way to stay happy. You have company. You have a means of facing up to hardship. It's my conviction in fact that, as circumstances in general over the next couple of decades become more and more difficult (as they will), the economic and psychological advantages to marriage will become more and more obvious and compelling. It's paradoxical that so many these days say they want a career first, and then they'll think about love. But why not the other way around? Especially if two are usually more effective at providing economic security than one? And again, especially when the future looks more and more difficult?

Of course there are downsides to being married. One of the hardest parts has to be this: facing up to the certainty of death, and more specifically, facing up to the fact that--since the two of you are unlikely to die at the same time--one of you is going to have to do without the other for a time. Maybe for years and years. This is a really hard thing to think about. In fact it's so hard to think about that I find very little actually written about it. Very few poems or songs for instance that contemplate it directly, I mean ahead of the fact. Yes there are umpteen laments. But what about proleptic laments? Laments ahead of the fact? 

All of which is to say, here's one such poem, on that theme, which I intend to use in my next play, and which I think is appropriate to this blog, because part of what 9-volt is about is the art of doing without, and the need to contemplate doing without, and finding that state of being in which transcendence is possible.

I'm sorry the music for the song is not available yet. The tune is set. It's simply not recorded. But when the soundtrack does become available (and it will be lovely I promise) I'll certainly let you all know. Then you'll be able to read the words married to their tune. 

  
Here, Now

(A song from the play "Myles to Go")

I had a dream, what can it mean?
You were transformed into an angel:
Wings bright and strong, but somehow wrong;
They're far too heavy for your shoulders.
Glimpsed from below, a shooting star
Tumbles through the heavens.
Two feathers fall, and then that's all;
Waking up, I reach for you.

Some say that death, one final breath,
Could disestablish our communion.
It's just not true, a clearer view
Says grief's an art that takes its time.
Would Keats have dared to write an ode
Requiring such revision?
All we've arranged is sure to change,
Whether death takes me or you.

But who goes first, and who's immersed
In melancholy of division,
Oh let that be love's mystery
That's to be answered in its time!
No earnest heart would make its love
Contingent on the future;
Love gives its all, come flight or fall,
Hazarding the here and now. 

HB

Until Tuesday the 31st!

Why We Might Not Need a Bedtime Story App

Of course I'm aware that there are smart phone apps these days for everything under the sun. I'm also aware that I wouldn't like most of them, and would consider a large portion of them dispensable and maybe even hostile to the project of genuine human flourishing. Still, when I heard about the bedtime-story app (this particular one is in the planning stages) it threw me for bit of a loop, and I want to set down a few words about it, to show why it marks a sort of limit for me. It may be that I'm over-reacting. It may also be that it's almost quaint of me, to be remarking on something that's so obviously a sign of the times. But here goes anyway.

To wit, the app would involve this: a collection of stories read by some pleasant-voiced expressive elder, to be punched up for the kid at bed-time (or I suppose whenever) and maybe spiffed up on the screen with the homey picture of a fireplace crackling and acoustically heck maybe with the sound of some crickets doing their summertime chirpy thing. "Snuggle down junior! I'm a bit busy for this kind of thing, so, hope the phone will do. Oh, and while you're at it, after you're done listening, could you tuck yourself in, too?"

Of course, it's true that recordings of good voices reading good stories have been around for a long time, and that listening to a fine book read beautifully is one of the great pleasures in life. The thing that I resist here is the invasion of the recorded and the technologized into the act of nurturing. Story-time for children (especially bedtime story-time) is about intimacy and imagination, reassurance and preparation, settling in and looking forward to rest. It's about recollection of the day's activities. It's about wishes and prayers and hopes. It's about the human body's warmth. It's about song and more songs. It's about voices tuned soft and low. And actually, as I recall, at least when my father was in charge of bedtime, it involved a fair bit of roughhousing and wrestling too!

In short, bedtime's pretty much about humanity. So taking the humanity out of bedtime, and asking what might be wrong with that, is well, like taking the three bears out of the Story of the Three Bears. Um, there's no bear there.

Now I'm sure that the potential creators of this app would never claim it's about replacing the parent at bedtime. "Hey, it's just an option, and isn't it better than watching TV?" Here's the thing though. That's what they all say; they always say it's not about replacement. And hey give them credit that's what they usually sincerely mean. But then somewhere, sometime, exactly the thing they didn't mean is exactly the thing that happens. So let it be said loud and clear from this little soapbox at 9-volt Nomad. At long last, let's stop giving people a chance to be lazy and half-hearted about living their lives and about raising their kids. At long last, let's learn some discipline so that, when and where our complex machines start acting as emotional wedges, separating human from human, we see that and set them aside. 

There's a wonderful book by the historian and singer-songwriter Tom Roznowski about Terra Haute, Indiana, in which he points out that around 1920 (just before radio really started to get big)  in every middle class household a piano, yes a piano, was just standard equipment, and if you didn't have one, why you were probably considering getting one. And folks really knew how to play. Whole families entertained themselves for hours every week, just listening to each other play or singing along. Sure, there were professionals who knew how to play better than the average Jack or Jill or Uncle Lou or Aunt Betty. Still, that wasn't the same thing, was it? It's clear from Rosnowski's writing that he doesn't consider the changes that came over the culture after that time (in terms of our ability to entertain ourselves) as an improvement. 

So, when the original production site of our entertainment becomes someplace other than home, what do we lose? Or when the ones who produce our entertainment are not in any way known to us personally, what do we lose? Or when our family members are no longer the ones we lean on for entertainment, what do we lose?

The simple answer is that we lose the opportunity to show love and to deepen our relationships. Consider first the 1920 parlor sing-along, in which family members made music communally, joining voice to voice, and telling stories and jokes between numbers. The scene isn't perfect of course. The singing is hardly professional. Disagreements break out. Maybe someone has a little too much to drink along with the songs, and ends up saying something a little too lusty to his sister-in-law. But look the scene is human. It's memorable. It's full of life and scenery. It's vivid and rich with experience and relationship.  

Now compare that with typical household today, where every member has his or her own separate device in hand as a means to pass the time, and one is playing video games, another is watching a movie, another is taking in some music, another is texting a friend. Maybe these people are all physically in the same room, but are they sharing anything? Are they showing love to one another? Are they doing anything that might deserve to be written down? That might be the stuff of a story someday at a funeral or a wedding or over a glass of beer? No, everyone is in an isolated space of consciousness. A cubicle. A cell. And there is no flow between one cell and the next. How can love build from this? What sense of shared experience can be made here? What common social identity? 

There's so much more to say about all this, that I have to trust to time, repetition and the ability to return to a theme which is so richly the gift of blogging, to supply me with opportunity to express what I find so wrong and dangerous about this invasion of devices into our communal lives, and with the professionalization of all our entertainment. But before I leave it for now, there's just a bit more to say.

We don't have to banish technology from our lives to be human; absolutely not. We do have to take real care though, that we do not let it intimidate us into believing:

1. That it can substitute for other people in our lives. 

2. That it can serve as a substitute for us, in the lives of others. 

In my opinion the best place to start practicing a skepticism of the machine, is in the area of entertainment. Never ever stop believing in your ability, dear reader, to enchant and entertain, no matter how modest you consider your abilities at the task. In the first place there are so many ways to entertain one another that involve no special skills. When we have no skills at the piano or at the bridge table, there's banter and there's craziness, and there's just plain pleasant conversation. Then too, particularly if it's family that's involved in the entertainment, there's just the simple joy of seeing those who look like you and sound like you (or who have just been given to you by circumstance and love!) doing the work of making you happy. No stranger-performer is ever going to have that power over us. And we can count on that same power when we ourselves are the ones telling the joke or telling the story or singing the song or throwing the monopoly dice in that weird spinny way we do.

Which--to bring this full circle--is why parents should never let themselves feel self-conscious about reading aloud to their children (many do!). Perfection in performance is never the goal. Sharing a story is. You're just born to be your childrens' storytellers, and your children recognize in your very face and voice, your right to enchant them. 

Long live the bedtime story, voiced by the ones we know and love!

HB

Until Saturday the 28th!

Investing in Beauty

The struggle to remake our civilization into something actually sustainable has begun, and in our homes is where the struggle will be centered. There's a lot that has to be jettisoned in the work: expectations for day to day novelty, for long-distance travel, for physical pampering, for plenty of cash on hand--all these. And these renunciations and goodbyes will be painful. They're guaranteed to be.

But this necessary change isn't just defined by subtraction. It's not JUST about paring down, giving away, and doing without! It's about addition too. It's about stronger muscles and greater physical health. It's about added pride in your home, because in many ways that home will be the work of your own hands. It's about the deepening of family and community relationships. Then too it's about beauty, and a surprising amount of beauty to be discovered; yes, there's a princely place in this direction for beauty.

It's time to invest more prolifically in beauty. Time to cultivate beauty in our lives and the lives of others. And I say this not only as a literary artist, who would naturally benefit if people cared more to invest in the beauty of books, theater, and poetry. I say it as a citizen of the earth who believes without hesitation that the pursuit of all kinds of beauty could serve as a substitute for owning stuff and consuming stuff; and a much superior substitute at that! After all, the main need in life, after basic needs have been minimally met, is for meaning. And since beauty and meaning are naturally allied, it makes sense to seek meaning by cultivating beauty. 

I have no means of proving this statistically--though I imagine the attempt has been made--but I wonder if there has ever been an era, when the gap between what might be spent on beauty and the amount actually spent on it has ever been so wide? We live in an age in many ways choking on its own abundance, and yet I think it's not an exaggeration to say that we're also choking on ugliness. Any glance into history will show that it has been different. In ancient times, cities vied with one another to build the most beautiful bath houses and temples and to claim the most beautiful harbors and markets and hilltop views. Today though, the cultivation of beauty in the urban landscape (especially if taxes are involved) is dismissed as a dispensable extra, and in our personal lives, it's generally treated that way as well. At least when push comes to shove. 

I'm thinking of a picture I saw once of the wardrobe of a nomadic woman in Mali. She owned only two garments--the garment she had on and the one that was packed away in a wooden chest. But both of these were intoxicatingly beautiful: hand woven, stunningly designed, colorful, exuberant, flaring with life. Of course we in the so called developed world could demand more beauty in our clothes. We could afford that beauty too, especially if we reduced the number of items in our wardrobe. But we don't. We prefer cheap and plenty to beautiful and few. Sad.

Some time ago, I was reading an article on life in post-crash Greece, and specifically life for young people, over half of whom are still unemployed. It was a sobering article. The young men and women interviewed expressed a sense of being cut off from the future, of having no prospects and no sense of personal agency anymore. Many of them described feeling depressed and bored. Time itself seemed to weigh heavy on their hands. They complained that, with no money, there was nothing to do. One woman said her brother stayed in his room most of his day, sleeping or trying to sleep. 

At one level I felt bad for these young folks; here, after all, were genuine victims of an economic system created for the profit of a few, and not designed for general human flourishing. A system based on speculation and the pretense of labor, not actual goods, and not active investment in the lives of living human beings. At a different level though, I felt impatient and angry at their complaints. None of those interviewed was going hungry. All of them had a home. Many of them had large families. So, what exactly was their problem again? Not enough money? Well any child playing a game of tag, knows that money isn't necessary to have fun. Too much time? Some people retire from work to have time!

Too little imagination--was that their problem? Too little insight to see the advantages of their situation? Well yes, that might be. Too small a thirst for beauty? Almost certainly. Honestly I wanted to wave my arms and tell them: plant flowers. Plant lots of them.Take a walk in the country. Play sports. Sports are beautiful. Read a bunch of good books (particularly some Thoreau). Clean up your streets. Learn to play the guitar or just sing a lot. Cook your next meal with attention to beauty. Bake your next loaf of bread with attention to beauty. Paint a mural on the walls of your room. Shine your shoes. Shine your furniture. Comb your dog. Arrange some of those flowers that you grew. Go to the museum and look at those Greek antiquities, or heck since you're in Greece dig in your back yard and see if you can find some yourself. Take a bus into the countryside some night with a blanket and a lover and look up at the stars. Let things progress from there.

Again, I don't consider myself unsympathetic toward the young; I have an eighteen year old myself. Nor am I blind to the fact that many of these young people honestly yearn for professions they will find meaningful. The prospect of not finding such work ready for you when you really would like it, is indeed a sad one; it shouldn't be wished on folks. Still, sometimes some things just don't happen, and so you have to look elsewhere for meaning. And if that's the case for you and everyone you know in Greece, well it's no good lying around complaining about it and pining for what's not going to happen. Much better to get out there and make something beautiful happen. Beauty is a wage as well. 

And of course I don't just mean beauty in art (though that's an obvious place to find it). I mean beauty in all the places that we can find it and put it: gardens and public spaces, homes and offices. Beauty in our clothes and our furnishings, in our books and meals. In our childrens' toys. In our theater and literature. We must banish the notion that beauty is an extra to be occasionally indulged in, and never taken too seriously. No, it's an instinct in all of us. It's our human birthright, and we ought to claim that birthright and insist on its presence in our lives, doubly so if things in general aren't going well. Furthermore, if the world around us will not give beauty freely to us, then we have to make the beauty ourselves. This can be done, often or very little cost at all.

Please consider, dear readers, the possibility of adding beauty to your own lives. Sit back and dream up a more beauty-rich existence. Write a few possible projects down that might bring that richness into being. Start humble and small. For instance I've always delighted in the custom the Japanese have of covering their books with colored paper. I've often wanted to do that, with at least a few of my books, and maybe I will. The point is this though: honestly, forthrightly let's all pursue the work of adding beauty to our lives. Most likely, with a little persistence, something significant will come of it. The muses reward sincerity.

Until Tuesday the 24th!


HB

Hand Work as a Way to Joy

A little boy's picture of a ladybug on the refrigerator door, the rough carving of a boat, a clay soap-dispenser, an exercise in Japanese flower arrangement, a bar of lavender soap crisply wrapped in brown paper, these are all proof: that whatever is done or made by hand, however imperfectly, has a natural dignity to it, and carries the signature of meaning. And that meaning is generally more intensely felt the closer the hands are to being your own hands or the hands of someone you deeply love. The bread you eat has more meaning to you if you baked it yourself or if someone you loved baked it. The music you hear has more meaning to you if you're playing it yourself with your own two hands, or if someone you love is making it. We can debate why all this is true--there are certainly many reasons for it--but there is I think almost no question that it is true. 

The fact that handwork feels so meaningful, has to be one of the biggest reasons why so many who adopt a lifestyle low on consumption and high in do-it-yourself activity find their lives more satisfying after they've shifted them that direction. Joy depends on meaning and since (to say it a different way) human meaning depends in a remarkable way on the sensed presence of human hand, then cultivating the domestic arts--cooking, gardening, carpentry, flower arrangement etc.--are an obvious place to start investing in that market of joy. Decorating our homes with things that we ourselves have made and designed may be one of the most straightforward ways of making ourselves feel at home. Again it's not so much a question of how perfect the work in question is; it's more a question of the source, of whose fingers shaped, assembled, or produced it. I have access to any number of recordings of the finest musicians in the world playing the finest work of the finest composers. But I would always prefer to hear my son improvise on his violin or my wife sing in her beautiful pure voice a simple folk tune at the piano. How could it be otherwise? Loved and live always beats even the best of what a recording can supply me with. 

Of course, it's only fair to admit that taking up the task of learning hand-skills guarantees some heartache and trouble as well and joy and satisfaction. What bakes can also burn. What's grown in the garden can also wither and die. What's smoothed by hand can also be gouged. And it's hard to get used to this truth, because of course every failure in handwork gestures embarrassingly toward our larger human fallibility, and makes us feel embarrassed and inadequate. My mother was a good cook, but I suppose some of my most painful memories as a child involve scenes at the dinner table, in which the family simply wasn't able to be polite about her more exceptional failures. In part this was our fault--we could be unforgivably frank--but in part it also had to do with her inability to let a disaster be a disaster, and just give up on the dish and throw it out. "It looks odd, but it tastes fine," she would assert, when in fact, it looked odd and tasted pretty odd as well! But you see, the thought of waste was so distasteful to her, and her wish for the dish to be perfect was so overwhelming, that on occasion she was just unable to admit defeat. So where our gustatory skepticism collided with her unwillingness to consign the dish to the compost--there at the intersection of six o'clock and the dinner table--we got these almost ecstatically tearful episodes. It was absolute misery. 

To say it again, it takes time and practice to acquire domestic skills. And this is one reason why my wife and I often say to ourselves that, as much as we might want to change our lives quickly (to live within the limits of ecological reality, and also more in solidarity with the poor) we still say to ourselves: "one big step at a time." That is, don't set your sights too low--really work toward change. But at the same time remember that the attempt to do so all at once will likely bring the whole project of change to a shuddering halt. Better to be strategically ambitious, tackling one difficult project at a time, and integrating each new skill in with the others as time goes on. So for instance this past year we made the digging of a substantially larger garden our biggest project, and combined that with learning to preserve several new items of food. In 2014 we'll work hard on improving the garden soil; also I intend to to build a cold frame (to provide us with early greens and seedlings) as well as a solar oven to expand our food-preservation options. Also, because I want badly to find a way to serve the community with my own hand-work, and most particularly with my theater work, I plan to make my newest play "Myles to Go" into an engine for community fundraising. My troop will perform at as many venues as possible in the Valparaiso area, in order to raise funds for a low income housing project.

All of which brings up something more about hands: they can grasp one another. They can work together. It is not possible to do everything ourselves, nor should we ever try to make that a goal. No, the best place to live and be, as a human being, is where skilled hands meet skilled hands in community, exchanging one skill for another, and finding joy in the sharing. So. Out with business as usual in this anonymous economy-at-large, where stranger provides service to stranger, and products are manufactured at a distance to fill our (often imaginary) needs, and natural limits are continually transgressed, and speculation is the most profitable enterprise, and the poor (who do not know how to speculate except in lottery tickets) are left to their own devices. Truly a different world is possible, one in which we put our own beautiful flexible hands to collective work until the earth becomes a garden and a holy wilderness, instead of moving, as it is moving, so inexorably, so mechanically, toward a vision of emptiness, smog, and infinite loss.

HB

Until Saturday the 21st!

On Hiatus till December 17

9-Volt Nomad will be on hiatus until Tuesday the 17th of December, as I put the finishing touches on a new play, and prepare it for a public reading. Thanks so much for your patience!

HB

The Drones are Coming! Hurry Up and Buy!

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon has informed us that within a year or two we may well have the privilege of receiving packages under five pounds by way of automatic flying drones. Yes sir, request a product over the web and within perhaps as little as half an hour it could appear at your doorstep. Yeehawwww. Just whipping up that fruit compote and realize you're out of vanilla? This is just for you! Need some birth control pronto, with only minimal interruption at the love nest? Amazon Air Prime to the rescue! 

Once upon a time, the only thing a drone was good for was impregnating the queen bee, whose progeny kept the fruit trees fruiting, and the honey jars flowing, and come to think of it pretty much all of human agriculture afloat. Then THAT form of drone was translated into something large and mechanical and useful for exterminating wedding parties in Afghanistan, paradoxically losing its association with fertility. Now however the benefits of drones come to humble little ol' you and me! Because now, like everything that started out good and natural, the drone has been reached its final state of perfection, and has been transformed into an instrument of commerce and consumption!

Apparently the only thing standing in the way of drone delivery nirvana is those pesky government regs regarding low-flying aircraft and public safety. Aw who the heck cares? Kid playing on the jungle gym gets bombed by sack of organic sugar?  Hey it's a Darwinian world. Gust of wind hits drone, which snags a massive transmission wire, blacking out half a mid-sized city? Let it go! In general they look so cool, landing in the yard, like they're out of Mission Impossible. 

I'm even told that Bezos's proposed delivery method is going to be "very green." That is, because the drones will run on electricity, they're theoretically less polluting than delivery trucks. Color me skeptical. First of all, electricity comes from all sorts of sources, among them coal; now coal is about as green as a black bear's coat is blond. Second, dunno how many packages each one of these drones can carry, but I doubt it's that many. So sure, delivery to a half dozen houses would probably be "greener" than the pizza guy delivering the pizza to the same number of houses, but it ain't going to be "greener" than all of us waiting for a day or two to get what we ordered by way of a good-old-fashioned, big-ass truck. Those trucks may run on petroleum, but they also carry hundreds of packages. They're also driven by human beings, who sometimes say hi to you and smile, but hey, we all know those are going obsolete. Heck some of them even belong to unions.

Actually if we really wanted to make instant delivery into something green, why not hire folks to pedal rickshaws? It's just a thought. We could power the drivers on rice and dhal. Come to think of it, there were once a few places where this was done. Even within living memory. A country of hundreds of millions, if I recall, and with a civilization of some age and repute.

Mind you, I'm not saying the drone scheme is going to be unprofitable, though it may prove to be. I'm not going to insist that it's unsafe, though it probably is. I won't even claim it's uncool. I am however going to claim that the genius of the scheme (and it is genius) fits a general and insidious pattern of distraction. I am going to claim that its primary function is to serve as the propaganda of progress and to associate the Amazon name with it. In other words it's today's update of the Roman bread and circuses. Lost and lonely in suburbia? Don't have a job? That's okay, have your consumer soma delivered by drone. At least you got that! 

If you're a glutton for punishment, take a look at this article, on a slightly, but not all-that-different, subject. It really honestly comes within a whisker of telling us that the poor and downtrodden in these bright shining days of the modern financial super-state, ought to be content with their situation, because by golly they got some good programs on the tube, and by golly they can see them nice and clear on that really big screen that they bought at Walmart! 

"I know it seems like it's out of science fiction, but it isn't," says Bezos in the interview, which was aired on Sixty Minutes.  Well great. Listen I have news for you, Mr. Bezos. A whole lot of science fiction is really damned dystopian, and I don't use either of those d-words lightly. 

Thanks for making the world such an obviously better place, Mr. Bezos.

Thanks for injecting some balance and perspective into our lives. 

Thanks for reminding us that what really matters in life is power, speed, and convenience. 

Thanks for helping to make the automatic earth so much more than just a cool phrase in a Paul Simon song. 

Thanks for being out in front of the pack on the question of labor too, and who or what ought to be given labor: robots with no needs but only missions; or living, needy flesh. The second category is so yesterday. 

Thanks once again for harnessing the power of golly gee-whiz in the service of existential distraction. This especially helps us ignore the dying of natural world, and the relationship of that death to universal instantaneous gratification and conspicuous consumption, which after all we can do nothing about. 

By the way, I propose that--partly in honor of the Christmas season-- you name the first drone Gabriel, after the archangel of the annunciation, who was said to have informed Mary that she would give birth to a savior. Clearly we, too, are on the cusp of a new age, of what, we are not free to say. The mind however reels in an ecstasy of anticipation. The spirit rejoices in Amazon our groovy savior, whose messenger is landing soon in our very yards, delivering toothpaste and flip-flops.

Oh, just one more thing, Mr. Bezos, you might want to take a look at this. Clearly there are a few yahoos who might impede the glorious coming of the Amazonian Lord. Though maybe you can buy them off with a few free handgun deliveries.

HB

Till Saturday the 7th!

How to Daydream in Winter

I'm worried for the daydream. Its future seems bleak. All things seem to militate against its prosperity. It used to be that the only threats really hazardous to the existence of daydreams were chores and strict teachers. Nowadays though, its not just survival that's tough for the daydream; no, it's hard for a daydream even to get itself born! I mean, you've got your television, computer games, texting machines, overtime hours spent at work, you name it--all, all of which serve as daydream-contraceptives, all of which work fabulously well, but ah, but at what cost? It's an dreadfully sad thing to note, but in a world so full of external distraction, we're pretty much eliminating the original self-generated distraction. Yes, the ordinary, unforced daydream is becoming an endangered mental species, even among children and our youth who used to be its proudest, most prolific progenitors.

In my opinion, all of us ought to cultivate the art of daydreaming, and for at least three reasons. 

1. It's fun
2. It's fun
3. It's fun.

No further reasons need to be given. Although, to provide readers with an adequate measure of my passion for the subject, I'll set down the following as well:

• When you daydream, you do not argue with your spouse or brother or sister or friend.
• Daydreaming burns no petroleum.
• While you daydream, you can also wait for a train.
• So very many great minds have been committed daydreamers: Einstein, Thoreau, Li Po, Robert Schumann, Virginia Woolf. Such grand spirits, all of whom gloried in their propensity for mental wandering. Why shouldn't we? 
• Daydreaming is not taxable (at least not yet).
• When you are day-dreaming you are not weeding the garden or doing the laundry, neither of which is as pleasant.
• Because.

I'm sure my readers can supply many more reasons to praise the daydream, though I would hope none of these reasons touch on possible economic or practical benefits: for instance please, please, none of this: "Daydreaming has the potential to raise our test scores in Math and Science," or "Daydreaming reduces stress so that we can live longer, healthier lives;" or "Daydreaming ultimately makes us more creative, and therefore more competitive in the workplace!" Indeed not! How rash, counter-productive, and dastardly: to inject gross pragmatism into a supremely useless, and therefore supremely delicious pastime!

Now, many folks, I know, consider summertime outdoors--with the lawn chair and vacation time--to be the ideal environment for the cultivation of the daydream. But my own research has revealed that even winter works surprisingly well. In fact I have found that any aspiring daydreamer can even turn the cold to his or her advantage. Here then, by my lights, and without further ado, is how best to daydream in winter:

1. Turn off all media devices. 
2. Close all books, marking your current page for future reference.
3. Turn the thermostat down to whatever will seem unpleasant to you.
4. Locate the nearest favorite couch or recliner. 
5. Lie down thereupon with thick blankets and comfy pillow.
6. Snooze.
7. Wake up to a cold house, feeling groggy and deliciously warm beneath the blankets, unable to imagine getting up because of the ambient cold.
8. Take advantage of your recumbent position, your unwillingness to get mobile, and the absence of other stimuli, to...
9. Daydream!
10. Repeat step 9.

Note that this method is not only sublimely productive of daydreams, but (here's a small gift for the pragmatically minded) also has the benefit of saving on the heating bills. 

HB


Until Saturday the 30th!

Thirteen Ways to Identify a 9-volt Nomad

9-Volt Nomads:

1. Watch their bird feeders more than their televisions.
2. Are seen walking past the gas station, more often than they're seen pulling into it. 
3. Award themselves one point for making their own lunch, ten for growing it.
4. Prefer redwoods to skyscrapers. 
5. Play well with others.
6. Make far more love than money.
7. Would rather travel by book or by daydream, than by plane or by car.
8. Will look at a child and say "his/her future depends on my present choices."
9. Aspire to competent poverty. 
10. Place more trust in a bean seed than in the Federal Reserve.
11. Heartily enjoy a good nap.
12. Know that if the world is to be green, our hands must have dirt on them. 
13. Live by this proverb: "when you cannot afford real oranges, cheerfully substitute intangible tangerines."

HB

Until Tuesday the 26th!

On Going Web-free at Home

Several posts ago, I mentioned that my wife and I were experimenting with another lifestyle-change; we wanted Sunnyside (at least for a time) to go web-free. It's been six weeks now since we got ourselves disconnected, and six weeks is long enough I figure, to give us a feeling for how it's going. To tally up the costs, whatever they might be. To sum up the rewards as well. Sunnyside isn't a doctrinaire place. Neither my wife nor I want to stick with a project that's obviously silly. Of course you have to be open. You have to try. You have to give your ideas a fair shake. But if, after you've made a change, you realize that change hasn't been worth it, why would you want to stick with it? Just for the sake of pride? Naw, let it go.

The big picture is this: we Sunnysiders like to think of home as a quiet space. A refuge. A sanctuary. A place in which the mind is free to focus. To read. To write. To meditate and pray. To rest if necessary. To turn inward and reflect. To commune with living things in the immediate vicinity--birds at the feeder, plants inside the home. And to converse with other human beings in a common physical space that is as free from distraction as possible. 

Now, how much of this describes the sort of the home the web can really help us to create? Not much, frankly. If anything, the web, with its infinite variety of distractions and opportunities to connect with others here there and everywhere at any minute of the day or night--if anything I'm saying the web gets in the way, impedes the project of creating that meditative, communal space that we're reaching toward as the Sunnyside ideal. It's not, of course that the web doesn't have it's uses. They're probably just more professional and communal than familial and domestic, at least by Sunnyside's definition of familial and domestic. 

But I want to stay away from couching any of this in moral pronouncements or abstract general arguments: i.e. the web is good or bad; or the web is a force for this or that; or the web does this or that for us; or doesn't do this or that for us. There is of course a place for that conversation, but it's a huge theme, and one beyond the scope of this blog. And in any case, I'm not an analyst. I'm not that kind of thinker. I'm more interested in argument from direct experience. And I suspect most of my readers are too.

I think it's really worthwhile to note that we often try much harder than we need to, to prove with words and abstract arguments that what we are doing with our lives makes sense. Life isn't really all that abstract. It's about emotion. It's about the breath and the beat of the heart. It's about relationships and feeding them. So why work so hard to justify our opinions with words and abstract arguments before we've even tried to embody them in active living? It's like trying to prove that French cuisine is wonderful and worth devoting your life to, without ever actually cooking it or tasting it. For heaven's sake why not just run the experiment and record the results? Why not taste the pastries and look inside yourself and ask, how do these make me feel? What can I feel my devotion to souffle's doing to me? And how does this fricassee make the world at large more like the world I want?

At the time Sunnyside went web-free, here were a few questions on my mind:

• If I want a more peaceful, more meditative life, then how does surfing the web for an hour or so every evening make me feel more peaceful and meditative?
• If I want a more articulate focused mind, how does continuous access to email, news, and video contribute to that goal?
• If face-to-face conversation is of great value to me--especially face-to-face conversation with my wife--how does the presence of a screen in two corners of our living space contribute to or detract from that sort of conversation?

Now, it seemed to me I could answer these questions best by means of a live experiment, namely an experiment in subtraction. Why not subtract the web from the home, or rather, subtract the home from the web, and find out what happened? 

And here's what happened, at least to me.

1. I did not die. 
2. I found that with some regularity I missed listening to music streamed over the web. 
3. On occasion too, I missed being able to look up this or that fact or statistic.
4. One evening I wanted to check on my bank balance, and had to wait until the very next day to do so!
5. On the positive side, I have (over the last few weeks) felt a good deal less mentally scattered and more devoted to the activities I care about. I have in particular been reading more. And I like that.
6. I have also found myself far more able to fall into trance and reverie. I like to daydream. It's important to my work.
7. Also on the positive side, I have simply not had to resist the temptation to seek out more-or-less mindless entertainment on the web. This is an advantage worth extolling. You see, to not have to struggle with impulse is often a very good thing. Our planet has limited supplies of energy. We human beings do too. Why spend so much energy resisting the impulse to do what we don't really want to do, when we might be using that same energy positively and actively doing something that we really do want to do? Simply remove the temptation. Sure the removal is radical. But, like marriage and monogamy, it has its genuine advantages.
8. The change has also encouraged me to walk more, especially to the library. Use of the computers there is free. As is the company of many of the good citizens of Valparaiso. And I enjoy walking. It's a time to think and a time to be outside.
9. Intriguingly, although the number of hours that I have spent listening to music has declined since Sunnyside went web-less, the quality of my listening time has gone up. I am actually sitting down at the library exclusively to stream music. Last Friday in fact I sat down at a carrel and listened to an entire Brahms Piano Quintet. Deeply. Drinkingly. That sort of thing never happened before, when music was available at home at any time. So again, the law seems to hold: less is often more than we think. 

I should emphasize that by no means have the lives of us Sunnysiders become wholly Internet-free. Neither my wife nor I would really want that. We both have many uses for the web. We've simply acted to keep the web and its place in our lives in perspective. We've drawn a clear border (at our front door) demarcating where the web may be a part of our immediate experience and where it may not; and in doing so, we've affirmed our own power to control the medium for our own human advantage and use. After all, the web is a human creation, and ought to serve human purposes!

HB

Until Saturday the 23rd!

A Baking Accident

It's is like a perpetual leap of faith, going home-made. You know there's always a risk; something's always liable to go wrong. You just never know exactly what or when. 

"Oh my aching back," my grandmother called out from downstairs.

I was only eleven and still a little dense to my grandparents' folksy, depression-era expressions. I thought she'd popped a spinal disc, or maybe backed into the kitchen counter-corner and stabbed herself in the kidney, or maybe she'd had an aching back since last week and was no longer interested in keeping it a private matter. 

In the cabin where this took place, you had your downstairs, which served for your standard Minnesotans, who wanted to talk things over about the deer and woodticks and the horsepower of certain outboard motors, and maybe play some scrabble. And then for us young barbarians, you had your loft. Well, up I lay in the loft, possibly reading Isaiah, but more likely practicing burping. However, out of concern and curiosity about my grandmother's lumbar regions, I descended to investigate. The air smelled of melted plastics. It also smelled of bread, but in a way that mixed the sweetness of dough with the charred scent of toast.

The good lady stood in the kitchen, looking forlornly into the oven. Just behind her, commiserating in silence, stood my grandfather.

"So much for the rolls," she said.

It was one of those old gas ovens, with the perpetual pilot lights. My mother (back home) loved hers. She used the draftless oven space for defrosting frozen berries, frozen corn, and frozen green beans. Or she'd take a bowl of yogurt-to-be and set it in there to gel. Or maybe after kneading the bread dough, she'd make use of said oven as a space for getting the dough to rise. See, the pilot light kept the inside of the oven just warm enough to encourage civilizations of yeast cells within the dough to rise to a kind of superb literacy of flatulence (much like the boy upstairs in the loft). This idealized cultural space reduced rising-time by a third to a half. Plus you could look in through the oven window and see whether the belly of the dough-ball had doubled in size inside its bowl. Was it touching the underside of the damp linen cloth that you had placed over the doughball to keep it moist? Well, when that linen was looking good and maternal--that was about when you'd take it out and shape it into loaves or buns and proceed. 

Here's the thing, though: if ever you used the oven space for rising the bread, remember this: you were never but never but NEVER  to preheat the oven (while the dough still in there) for anything else! 

Just ask my grandmother and her aching back. 

A pond of melted plastic (formerly the bowl for the dough) lay on the floor of the oven. Bread dough lay all over the oven racks, in grotesque foamy lumps baked in with a green dishtowel. And to round out the outrage of the incident by means of contrary comparison, there on the kitchen counter-top, in supreme ignorance of the disaster, lay two pans of lovely acorn squashes ready for roasting, the squashes neatly cut in half. Oh the proud little boats of them, with their bright orange passenger-spaces all sprinkled with brown sugar!

Watson what happened here? Well clearly sir, the perpetrator placed her dough-victim into the unlit oven, covering said victim with the damp linen. Then, in her industrious eagerness to get the squash roasting for lunch, she preheated the oven, forgetting however to remove the bowl of dough...

Case closed. Though I ought to add that for lunch that afternoon (served unusually late) we ate the squashes and whatever else there was to eat all pretty much in silence. Clearly my grandmother did not want to talk any of this over. Please note as well, that no one had gone into Hackensack to the grocery for buns. This would have been tacky in the extreme, an insult to my grandmother. After all we were all family. If she was suffering, why shouldn't we all suffer with her? That's what being family means.

Now last Tuesday, I wrote about nine-volt strategies for dealing with the occasional tough curves that circumstance can throw our way. But what about those moments when we ourselves have made the mess? And made the mess in part because we chose to do things the hard way? Making our own lunch say? Doing our own baking by hand? Trying to hang the darn door ourselves, with a few tools and a Reader's Digest handbook for home repair?

The answer is there's not much to do in such moments of despair, beyond just grit your teeth. Just bear it. Convince yourself you will not die, which you probably won't. Remind yourself that at worst, your grandson years from now will tell the saga of your blunder to utter strangers all across the world on some world-wide network of computers. 

Maybe in such moments of failure, it helps to remind yourself that failure happens to everyone, and even to those with a huge amount of experience. My grandmother for instance, by the day of the baking accident had raised five children, seen them married off and have children of their own, then watched those children grow into adolescence as well. All that time she'd been baking and cooking. Yet in spite of all that experience she'd managed that day to make an elementary mistake, and her embarrassment and displeasure were extreme. She was a child of the depression after all, and here she had destroyed a nice durable plastic bowl, as well as put the kibosh on the existence of two dozen rolls, and made a mess of her oven to boot. 

And yet life goes on. You clean up and move on. Which in my grandmother's case, on that particular day, meant you get the acorn squashes into the oven and the remainder of the meal ready, and serve it.

There was something just a little heroic about my grandmother at lunch that day: her fortitude and dignity. And something exactly appropriate about everyone's silence too, around the table, regarding the events of the previous two hours. It was as if the principal cellist of the orchestra had just flubbed an important solo, and this was aftermath and the concert was over and there she is coming out of the hall case in-hand, the experience of genuine bummer-hood on her face; look she looks as if she's just been in a bus accident, in which no one was hurt but everyone was shaken. Well so if you count yourself as her friend, you keep your trap shut. Maybe open the door for her. But let her go on her way in silence... 


HB

(Until Tuesday the 19th!)

The Angel of Perspective

Many of these entries are posted from a coffee shop called The Blackbird, which lies right in the heart of downtown Valparaiso, less than a block from the courthouse square. It's a bustling little place, domestic, unpretentious and homey. The tables are always full. It sells baked goods--muffins and scones and cookies and bagels--and of course coffee. Everything from the chicken soup to the cinnamon scones is made on-site. The dishes are washed by hand. All in all, it's quite 9-volt nomadic, a vision of the more local and down-to-earth future that we as a world are slowly drifting toward, as toward a forgotten continent. Ordering coffee? Here it's brewed into pump-thermoses. The customer gets a mug or a carry-cup, and heads over to the thermoses, as if to a town water-pump. Oh, and if one of the thermoses is getting low on coffee, could you maybe let one of the staff know? More Italian. More Hazelnut. More Kona blend. More Blackbird blend. More decaf. Otherwise, well, the staff is too busy to always be checking, so if no one warns them it's getting low, it's likely that, before they brew any fresh, that particular thermos will run completely out.

Well so there I was on Thursday morning last week, when a customer a little ways ahead of me in line ordered coffee. Mug in hand, he pressed at the button on the thermos containing the coffee of his choice--only to find that the thermos was empty. As it happened, he was perfectly cheerful about it. He simply let the cashier know, chose a different flavor, and as he pumped the button on his second choice, said to the customer behind him: "Well, if that's the worst thing that happens to me today, I'll be doing pretty darn good."

So that's the first part of the story. Then this Sunday morning at Sunnyside, when I got up out of bed, it felt unusually cold. Pretty much right away I knew what had to be wrong. I made my way downstairs into the basement in my slippers, cordless in hand. After locating the handy-dandy sticker on the side of the furnace "Emergency service? Call 464-HEAT." I punched up the number on my phone and left a message.

Twenty minutes later I got a call back. The voice was cheerful, phlegmatic, and in retrospect I guess it sounded a little familiar, but it wasn't till the repairman showed up at my door, tool box in hand, that I realized...

It was my fellow Blackbirder, the philosopher of coffee. He recognized me too.

"Hey you go to the Blackbird?" he asked.

"Yeah, and this is like not getting my Kona blend."

"Aw, it's a little worse than that, isn't it"?

I appreciated his sympathy, as well as his sense for ranking the severity of troubles, as well his familiarity as a spirit of cheer, all three of which helped reconcile me to the occasion; which is to say, the minor outrage of a cold Sunday waking and even (eventually) the two hundred dollar repair bill. 

Let's call him the angel of perspective.

The point for the aspiring 9-volt Nomad here is this: say you're presented with a difficulty in your circumstances or with a challenge in your pursuit of plain living: Let's say the garden-mud is all caked to your shoes and you forget and track it into the house. Or say you're at home on a cold day and feeling bulky in your wool sweater and you're eyeing the thermostat and just really wishing you could go against your energy-saving conscience and crank it way the heck up. Or say it's October and you're in the Northern hemisphere and the leaves are falling and your neighbor has a new leaf blower and you want one too, because raking with a rake stinks and who cares about the carbon or the consumption or the noise? In such moments, it helps to picture your own angel of perspective (whoever that may be) and remember what such messengers like to say:

"Heck if that's the worst thing that happens to me today, I'll be doing pretty darned good."

So my furnace went out today and had to be repaired. So what? I could have fallen down the stairs instead and broken my arm. Or I could have argued bitterly with a friend. Or I could have said something stupid to someone I admire, and lost his respect. Or heck my favorite coffee house could have caught fire and burned down. Furthermore, as far as material comfort and convenience goes, the 9-volt angel of perspective encourages me not to forget that I lead a life full of privilege; that the vast majority of the other seven billion human beings on the planet have way less than I do, and the vast majority of human beings in history have lived on far, far less. Even if I don't buy the leaf blower.

Then what happens to these complaints--about furnaces, a little garden-mud on the living room floor, a personal lack of leaf-blowers, etc.? Well, in the bright light of a wider perspective, they tend pretty quickly to melt away. Really they do. 

A coda: this week I intend to keep the Philippines in my prayers, and keep at least a few of the images I've seen of the typhoon and its aftermath in mind, as a sobering force. What's this or that annoyance that I will suffer today, compared to that immense sum of loss? Why not hold my tongue and choose to be content?

HB

Until November 16th!

Love What You Have, Be Where You Are

In a recent post--the one from last Saturday--I wrote this:

there is just no way that several billion people can live the lifestyle that I, for the last thirty-five years or so, have led.

Now those of you who know me personally, probably know that I'm in my forties. Actually I'm 44. So you might wonder where the extra nine years went, and why I didn't count them. I will tell you.

In the first place I cheated, giving myself an extra year or two of grace and youth. In the second place, I did not count the years I lived as a boy in India. Those years were different. Back then my family lived a lifestyle fairly close to the nine-volt nomadic ideal: low-energy, down to earth, elemental, local, big on imagination, big on community. For now I'll stick to the practical aspects of our lives, and what we had and didn't have in terms of conveniences. In short we didn't have much, at least in comparison to what we would have had back home in the States. No, even back then (this was the 1970's, and this was rural India) most Americans would have considered our lifestyle absolutely crazy for rustic. 

We had:

• no television
• no radio
• no car of our own
• no telephone
• no refrigerator
• no freezer
• no electric range or gas stove
• no toaster
• no blender
• no dishwasher
• no central heat
• no air conditioning
• And did I mention no TV? 

We didn't really travel much either, except in South India itself, and by train. Air travel was too expensive. We returned home to North America on furlough only once during the first eight years of my life. I knew my grandparents mostly by letters.

Then what did we have in terms of modern conveniences? Well, we did have electric lighting (although we also kept plenty of spare candles). We also owned a wringer washer, with a motorized agitator and wringer. This machine at one point required a spare part that my grandfather Brooten had to mail to us from the US. (We still have my mother's letters home to her parents, and one of my favorites is the one in which she attempts to diagram the necessary part. She is no artist, but she gives it the old college try.) My father also had a fine reel-to-reel tape recorder. I'm probably leaving out a few other things. But the point is, that my first eight years were spent in (wink wink) the DIREST TECHNOLOGICAL POVERTY.

But here's the thing. The actually-not-so-mind-blowing truth:

• I was happy there. 
• As a family, we were happy there.

Which in turn suggests to me that: 

• happiness and technological convenience are unrelated.
• happiness and having lots of stuff are also unrelated.

I like thinking about all this nowadays, because it comforts me. It comforts me because, well, when I write here about giving up things; when I blog about how so many of us (including me) are eventually going to having to make do with less, if the planet is going to be able to make a decent go of it; when I say hey folks we really can't go on like this; when I say all this, I sometimes wonder how it is that I know that I'm not being a stereotypical Puritan--all thrift and no fun, all preachiness and no joy, all thou-shalt-not and no go-get-'em, Tiger. But I know I don't have to worry about this. I know the nine-volt nomadic life is doable, and even adventurous and fun. I know that yes, it's a different life I'm recommending, but not a joyless one at all. And I know all this, not just from what might be wishful readings of present experience (i.e. the forays I've made in recent years into a more elemental hands-on life) but from a significant chunk of my personal past.

I'm going to say it straight out: Very few of the hallmarks of the modern lifestyle--from Internet shopping to "intelligent" dishwashers--really contribute to human happiness. Oh we may enjoy using this device or that service. It may be convenient to shop for lithium batteries from Amazon or pop a package into the microwave for something to eat. It may be fun to sit down in front of the TV and watch a favorite show, and easier to throw your wet clothes into the dryer than hang them up on a rack. But it doesn't make us one iota happier than we might be under a different regimen. No, other folks in the past found ways of being happy without these things, and others in the present day under different circumstances and conditions continue to find ways of being happy without them. Some openly despise the things we have. Some indigenous peoples literally flee from our stuff. 

Now, we could debate and consider about how far in the direction of downshift any one of us is obligated to go, or is ever likely to go simply by force of persuasion; but the general direction and necessity for change, at least to me, is pretty clear. And of course I hope that as time goes on, the same will become clearer to others as well. In the meantime, there is no need to fear. Really, none at all. Change toward the nine-volt is possible. A long slow drift toward it is already occurring. It can be embraced. It ought to be.


One final thing to note: As a boy I of course never had to make the transition to a more rudimentary lifestyle. I was just born into it. But my parents moved into it! In fact, they chose that way of life quite consciously; they knew a least some of what they were getting into, running off together to teach at a school for missionaries' kids in the South of India. Yet they made the shift, and made it handily. In fact, I think I am correct in my assessment when I say that those years they spent way out in the comparative boonies were some of the most satisfying years of their lives--personally, professionally, socially, spiritually, you name it. Oh, I know my mother missed really good Swiss chocolates and my father missed hearing the Minneapolis symphony, and I know that once I had sampled some of my grandmother's strawberry jam, I yearned for more. But really, we were happy without these things. We knew one of the great secrets of life:

Love what you have. Be where you are. Then you will be living the great adventure of enough.

HB


Until Tuesday the 12th! 

A Parable about Living Imaginatively

The whole thing started out as a funny miscommunication: the kind where, when you say "Yo Jennifer," the other guy hears something like “pro janitor” or, if you say “mezzanine” he hears “Pez machine.”

So one day, when Jordan Reynolds was talking to his boy, he used the words "somewhat strange."

Back then, Jordan was produce manager of the Bellevue Piggly Wiggly. His son, who was five, loved to come to work with him. He watched his father stacking the fruit. He watched the customers pushing their carts past the produce and sometimes (oh joy!) stopping and picking items out and bagging them up for purchase. The boy had learned to identify almost all the produce in the store. Even the seasonal and specialty stuff. The artichokes for instance. Scallions. Shallots. Pomelo.

“Kumquat strange?” asked the boy. Which Jordan found very funny, especially since the boy's facial expression in that moment communicated a kind of extravagant puzzlement. 

"He had this hilarious frown," Jordan says.

At first “kumquat strange” served as a consistent in-joke, a family phrase:

"We'd used it for comic relief," says Jordan. "Say after an argument. Or maybe during a traffic jam, to cheer up the situation." But then, after his boy fell from a tree and was killed, and after the subsequent break-up of Jordan’s marriage (it came only a year after the boy's loss)--after all this, Jordan Reynolds began to regard "kumquat strange" as a phrase to live by.

• He moved to an orange trailer and drove a small orange car. 
• He bought a dog and he named him Quat.
• He had Quat dyed orange and trained him to respond appropriately to the command: “Come, Quat!”
• He (Jordan) meditates an hour a day, visualizing himself as a fruit on a kumquat tree and visualizing every blood cell in his body as one of the cells of that kumquat. 
• He eats kumquats. Every possible day. Kumquat after kumquat.

To be sure, Jordan has experienced many obstructions and disappointments in the pursuit of his unique passion. Not once, but twice for instance, the greenhouse glass (of his backyard kumquat orangerie) has been broken by vandals. Also, just last year, his KUMQUAT vanity plate was stolen off of his car; it has not been recovered. And yes, five years ago, “Quat” the dog went lame in one leg, and eventually had to be put down.

In general though, what does he feel about his less-than-average life? Are the kumquats obtrusive? Will he ever get over them? Should he change fruits? Our conversations on these subjects have been deep and long, so I summarize his response:

First:  No one should dismiss his enthusiasm for kumquats as a “stage.” Kumquats represent a continuing era in Jordan's life, an era with its own wisdom, challenges, defeats and triumphs. If he were a painter, Jordan says, kumquats would be both the subject of his work as well as the paint. In other words the means of expression and the thing expressed. 

Second, to anyone who might consider his passion trivial or trite: who's to say that the kumquat (both as object and ideal) isn’t a fruit worth living for? Even dying for? Isn't every kumquat God’s handiwork too? Doesn't it amount to something like a beautiful bright letter in the greater text of life? Never never discount the importance of a single exuberant letter in that Text, Jordan Reynolds says. No matter how small it is. No matter what others say. No matter even whether it reminds you (somewhat mercilessly) of a brighter time.


HB

Until Saturday the 9th!

Less Is More Than We Think

We get used to everything; nothing stays entirely fresh. Not even natural beauty. Not even surplus. I've lived in places that could make your jaw drop, they were so beautiful. But then, after living there awhile, I found there was really no way to recover that initial awe, that first sharp print on the paper of the brain. I might have wanted to recover it, but I couldn't.

Or consider the written word. In information-soaked cultures like ours, a book (the actual item) is nothing special; it's a bagatelle to get your hands on one, a big so-what to own one. But in many parts of Africa, where access to the Internet is still a luxury, and where even books are rare enough, Anna Karenina might be something you'd literally hunger and thirst for, a story you'd walk miles through the dust and the heat to hold and to read. There's a marvelous address by Doris Lessing on this precise subject: a speech she gave on the occasion of receiving the Nobel prize. It is available here. 

It's probably an important adaptation--this ability to take things for granted, to allow certain overwhelming aspects of reality to depreciate in value in the economy of consciousness. We may like to picture ourselves living in a bliss of total consciousness, glowing diligently as angels with appreciation and gratitude, but I'm not so sure that in such a state, we'd get the laundry done. And the laundry does need doing!

Of course, as Lessing's address reminds us (with such beautiful cognitive intensity) the contrary premise is also true: that in the face of dearth or of a withering of supply, we tend to appreciate more whatever it is that's running short on us! We feel deeper gratitude for what we have less of.

• If you want to appreciate the beauty of your home, go camping for a week.
• If you want to increase your appreciation of travel, stay at home for a year.
• If you want to appreciate just what a privilege it is to have a car, ride on public transport for a month. 

There are a thousand variations on this theme. Consider living one of them out, and not just for the sake of your philosophical health, but for the sake of the planet too; for the sake of the re-balancing of the cosmic economy. 

Over and over again over the past several months on this blog, I've said that, if we want really to help the situation we're in (as a voracious species on a limited blue-green sphere), then many of us are just going to have to make do with less. I return to this theme so often because, after a great deal of reading and consideration of these questions, I've come to believe that it's the only strategy that offers any hope of success. To say it bluntly to myself: there is just no way that several billion people can live the lifestyle that I, for the last thirty-five years or so, have led; the ecology, as we know it, could not survive. So, for the sake of the planet, and for the sake of justice, I must change. I must change my life.

I suppose it goes without saying that most of us (including me) would like to avoid drawing such conclusions. Substantial lifestyle-change demands so much of us that, right away, by instinct, we're full of defensive questions: can't we just take the conventional cars and replace them with hybrids or electrics? Can't we just replace the coal-fired power plants with thousands of windmills? What about high speed rail, powered by solar? Such questions imply the hope that a greener world might be engineered without involving any pain for us, or any substantial loss at all in terms of living standard.

Unfortunately change without personal sacrifice is unlikely to improve the situation much. Consider the hybrid car. Yes once it's on the road, it consumes less carbon. Unfortunately, so much carbon is sunk into manufacturing a hybrid (the lithium batteries being the budget buster) that, before one of them can claim any credit against its conventional cousins (for saving any carbon at all) it has to be driven nearly 75,000 miles. There are similar limitations to almost every advance that the sustainability-tech movement has claimed or championed. Usually what we call green, is in reality only a little less brown, with a little camouflage of wishfulness included.

An even more serious problem, though, with the strategy of change-around-the-edges is this: what we save by means of efficiency in one area usually simply frees up more money for consumption elsewhere in our lives. So, say I've saved money on gas this year because I own a hybrid; well, I take that money I've saved and apply it to a new television set that I don't really need, or I replace the roof and the siding sooner than we would have otherwise. Since this alternate-vector consumption comes with its own environmental costs, it turns out that owning the hybrid serves no green purpose at all. There's a book on this subject. It's called The Conundrum, by David Owen, and it packs a lot of proof into a very small space.

I wish none of this were true, I really do. Life for us earth lovers would be a good deal less frustrating if we could just trust all this trouble to work itself out: trust the oceans to stay full of fish and the atmosphere to clear itself of carbon: trust the planet to supply us with fresh water and petroleum right on into the indefinite, ever-progressing future. But folks, it ain't gonna happen. Things are the way they are, and the system we live in is limited, not by the lack of human imagination or by a sudden down-sizing of good-old-fashioned Yankee optimism, but by the laws of thermodynamics and of mathematics, of geology and of resource distribution. We can't go on like this. We can't. What we need is a reconditioning of the human mind. And that, to say it again, begins with the acceptance that we just have to make do with less.

This can be depressing. But there's a hero to this story as well, a sort of knight that rides to our rescue: the realization that "less is more than we think." 

• What really matters to us, is what value our consciousness puts on a thing.
• Human consciousness tends to value precisely what is rare, what is limited in supply.
• Therefore, when faced with limitations and diminishings, we can deal with the change, because....
• Even as the supply decreases, the value of what remains to us goes up.
• We're proportionally happy with the remainder that we keep.

As a final thought, consider the ultimate resource contraction: consider what happens when we run short of time: I mean time with a capital T. The sensation of mortality. There are, after all, people who  know their time on earth is short: Older people, sicker people, and just plain wise people who have thought about mortality a lot. Now, many, many such people report that, in the face of the knowledge of the ultimate limitation, they savor every day all the more. Mind you, it's not that they wouldn't like to live in better health, or wouldn't like to be given a little more time, or even a lot more time to live! It's just that, now that they know and have accepted the truth (that their days really are numbered) they nevertheless deal with it, and find that somehow, remarkably, their flame of life burns brightly enough in spite of that knowledge, and yes sometimes even more brightly because of that knowledge. That flame seems to burn on a fuel of paradox and deliberate gratitude!

HB

Until Tuesday the 5th!