Notes on the 9-Volt Nomadic Life

1. We begin and end our days embedded within the cosmic economy. Death is a part of the arrangement here. Without death there is no life, as the garden soil continually reminds us; for the soil is the sum of all that has gone before us and died, that we may live.
2. To die then, is to be in the position to give life to others. 
3. Now there are many ways to die, most of which do not involve physical death. To forgive a person is to die a little death. To put the needs of another person before your own is to die a little death. To say something like this--"the life of the earth demands that I give over thoughts of human convenience and speed, as well as power and my ambitions to control my surroundings"--this is also to die a death.
4. For the sake of the life of the earth as well as for the sake of reclaiming an honest straightforward human life tied to the life of the earth, it is time for us to die a certain difficult death. This death will require us to give up circumstances and machines that put us physically at ease. It will require us to share our wealth with others. It will require us to accept our dependence on the earth, as well as the consequences for poor decisions made in the past, many of them not by us.
5. There is no way to buy ourselves out of humanity's past errors. Additional consumption (enabled by the printing of money and the accumulation of debt) cannot lead to less consumption. More machines manufactured at the cost of more pollution cannot buy fewer machines and less pollution.
6. Our work must be more personal. It must treat the damage directly. It must substitute physical labor for financial fictions. It must replace fantasies of industrial control with a painstaking intelligent program to harmonize the human being with the landscape as well as with the indispensable life of the ocean. It must transform our wish to be the absolute rulers of nature into a desire to be its faithful servants and live according to its dictates.
7. The pleasures of consumption can no longer be our society's goal. We must not ask "what new thing should I buy?" but instead "what can I do without, or make myself, or repair?" Not "how much of my wealth should I give back to the world?" but instead "how much is it right for me, in the first place, to take?" 
8. From here on out, we should strive to acquire only what will unequivocally equip us to die this death into greater simplicity. Say a packet of seeds. A scythe. A pressure canner and glass jars. A book, the words of which are self-evidently magical and will entertain us with only the light of the sun to help us to read them.
9. It is true that none of us can die this death today, all at once. This is because the death in question amounts to a complicated universal labor and involves the regaining of many lost skills and competencies.
10. At the same time we do not say "one small step at a time," but instead "one big step at a time." Otherwise this dying will never happen; we will only play at it.
11. A few minutes of your time to sort your refuse into the proper bins is not the same as dying this death.
12. Turning off a light switch when you leave the room is not the same as dying this death. 
13. The purchase of gizmos that purport to save a bit of energy is not the same as dying this death.
14. However, "This year I will learn to cook." "This year I will plant and tend a garden." "This year I will walk everywhere I can." "This year we will give up the car..." Eventually these things add up to a respectable death, which is to say, one that truly, powerfully, imparts life. 
15. The household is the smallest meaningful human unit of the cosmic economy. Responsibility for the human portion of life of the cosmic economy begins there, in the nucleus of the household. This is where our dying must begin. 
16. Do not look to others elsewhere to do your dying for you. This is an abdication of responsibility and a culpable sleight of hand. 
17. Do not look to technology or science to obviate the need for this death. Technology and science have had their own obvious part in creating this all-too human mess of our home planet. At best they will help us discern between prospective methods of labor that tend toward reconstruction and renewal, for instance in the creation of nutritious perennial grains, or in guiding the renewal of marine ecosytems depleted by over-fishing and pollution. 
18. Do not look to government to solve the problem. The resources of governments the world over are materially and politically  in serious decline and in any case there can be no large scale solution to the problems we face without the involvement and commitment of individuals. We must all do our part. 
19. This death we must die will not be without its pain. All dying involves pain. We are not dying until we are feeling a certain amount of pain. 
20. Beyond the pain though, lie blessings implicit in this death--blessings that will unfold in surprising ways, as a new life for us takes shape from the fertile ruin of the old. Pleasure, for instance, in this new life will be simpler and quicker to come by, as well as far more certain for its being more elemental and basic and near at hand: the morning light, the sweet fuzzy heft of a peach in the hand, the joy of muscles and nerves that know precisely how to do a task... 
21. Remember our ambition is not control but to widen the circle of community and love and to find (in the earth beneath us) our common sustenance. 
22. Remember the future is slow. The future is perennial. The future is elemental. The future is hard work. 
23. This death I speak of is slow. This death I speak of is perennial. This death I speak of is elemental. This death I speak of is hard work.
24. Consumption is the emptiest goal.
25. "More, more, more," is the cry of a soul in error. Even "more with less!" is a mistake, if the "more" we speak of still involves the ambition to control and consume. How much better it would be simply to do nothing much at all with very little! To do a little fishing and catch no fish! To sail lazily around a lake in a sailboat with no other end or goal in mind than to enjoy the lap of the waves and the rippling of the sail and the warmth of the sun!
26. Once there was a boy with the initials HB who believed he could power a go-cart on a standard 9-volt battery, purchased with an advance on his weekly allowance from the corner store down the hill. 
27. Did he, in the material sense, fail to create such a go-cart, or even to procure adequate capital for the purchase of said battery? 
28. Yes. Alas.
29. But in a visionary sense did he fail? 
30. No not at all! 
31. How could this be?
32. Because to this day HB (sitting in his sun room in a wooden chair) by use of his imagination rides over the entire universe in a go-cart that is powered by a 9-volt, and there is no end to his adventures because of course the go-cart's battery is continually recharged by the twenty-three watt generator of his now middle-aged brain, which is fertile with the ruins of his youth. 
33. So far as he (HB) knows, he is the first world's first 9-volt nomad. But you too can be a 9-volt nomad if you wish to be and HB is certainly desirous of your joining him perhaps in a 9-volt go-cart race to Alpha Centauri. You will find him (as soon as he has completed this post) most likely in the vegetable garden saying vroom vroom.
34. In any case, seize the day! Seize it as a time to die, which is to say as a time to live joyfully, vividly, imaginatively, sympathetically, elementally. 
35. Who else can do either your living or your dying for you?

HB