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!