Why I Chop Wood

The past week has been a cold one here at Sunnyside, and I've had to keep the stove continually stoked to keep up with it. I've been chopping wood too with my Finnish-made ax, which cuts like the prose of Oscar Wilde, being finely balanced, elegantly constructed, and devastatingly effective. The firewood we buy comes already seasoned and roughly split, but if you want to keep the fire hot and also burning clean, it's best to have a healthy mix of smaller wood pieces in with the larger ones, hence the need to split at least some of the wood. As a rule I work about forty-five minutes a day, chopping and tending to all the needs of the stove.

In any case, as I was splitting wood this week, I was reminded of a moment, oh a month or so ago, when I mentioned to a coffee shop acquaintance that I chopped wood daily to fuel up my stove. This was someone with whom I've occasionally discussed books and a little politics. I think she is only vaguely aware of my homesteading aspirations. 

“Well,” she said, turning the thought over in her mind a moment, “at least that's good exercise.” I agreed that it was, and that was that; the conversation moved on. Nevertheless, I stored the moment up, especially the rather awkward pause after her “well.”

My impression of my coffee shop friend, is that, like many well-educated left-leaning Americans, she lives an environmentally concerned sort of life, so long as it doesn't cost her any appreciable sacrifice or comfort, which probably in her mind shouldn't be necessary, since eventually science will come up with the necessary improvements in renewables. Furthermore, her ideals are scholarly and cultural. She assumes that the life of the mind can be lived without much reference to the life of the body. That, if there's learning to do, or an enlightening interview on the radio, the chores can wait. That the reason we have snow blowers, automatic washing machines, central air, and food from the deli, is to free ourselves from drudgery, and commit ourselves to the pursuit of more worthy tasks. 

So what she was struggling with in that little awkward pause, I think, was just how to justify in her own mind, my spending precious personal time on the task of chopping wood. Chopping wood, is, after all, not what most people would classify as mentally enriching, say like a book or a good jazz concert in Chicago. It's not self-improving like meditation. It's also what Reagan did to pass the time on his ranch, which doesn't endear the activity to the Left. So, some part of her was probably asking me: “If you're looking for a little heat in the house, why not just locate the thermostat on the wall and press the up-arrow where it says "temperature"? Or, if you really MUST own a wood stove, why not purchase wood for it that's been chopped to an accurate choppiness in the first place? Why waste time chopping it yourself? Just think what you could be doing with that time!"

Which is why apparently the only real justification she could come up with that fit with her sense of my basic sanity was, well, exercise and all the good things that come with it: a life free of heart disease and maybe cancer too, which, in turn would ensure a decent life span and thus more time for concerts and books and meditation. So, good. Exercise. That must be why he's chopping wood. 

Now, I am aware that I'm being a little satirical here. And the satire is of course intentional. Satire has real uses. Satire clears the mind of cant. Still, my point is not to make fun of a human being for having a certain outlook, especially when such views on living (if I've described them accurately) are not far from the views I myself held say, five years ago. I am a Johnny-come-lately to the peak oil, de-growth, and homesteading camps, and I certainly have no corner on carbon-free lifestyle purity. No one does really, except perhaps the poorest of the poor in places far away from me, and they, to be frank about it, generally not by choice. 

But. It was certainly not for exercise that I bought the ax. Nor for longer life and all that. I bought the ax because I wanted to chop wood, and I wanted to chop wood because that's part of the art of keeping a wood stove hot. And we bought the wood stove because we wanted to heat our home as minimally as possible and as renewably as possible, and a wood stove does that pretty well—not perfectly, but pretty well. 

So it's a pretty big thing—the ax. It's a kind of creed in the person of a tool. It chops about what I believe. About how much I want to give to the world, and how much (or how little) I want to take from it. It's an image of my resolve to give every hour of every day something of a physical tang.

So, in harmony with my ax, while the year is still new; while it still feels like a propitious time to reassert and recommit myself, I want to articulate once again, for myself and for my readers, the two major reasons I do the homesteading work I do, chopping wood inclusive—work which is, by and large yes, physical work. Work that's sometimes, yes, boring and repetitive. Work that yes, also takes a good deal of time.

1. I believe that for the earth's sake, and also for the sake of humanity's future, it's time to wean ourselves from the daily use of so many machines, which pollute the planet in their manufacture and their use. Carbon pollution is maybe the biggest and most weightily worrisome of these forms of pollution, but it is by no means the only one. There is for instance, sonic pollution. Distraction pollution. Narcissism pollution. Sex pollution. Information pollution. Speed pollution...etc.
2. I believe that physical work, done for a purpose directly connected with my own body's keeping, deeply enriches my mental and spiritual life. It's as simple as that. The sense of competence gained. The sense of closeness to the elements. The sense of immediate access to beauty, in flowers and the living earth. The depth of what you might call “the reality factor” in my life. Also the way my relationships with my family and community have been strengthened by means of this work: All of this has combined to make the considerable time I put into homesteading seem much more like an investment than a thing consumed away. Of course, I can't be certain that the householding experience for others would be as positive as it has been here for us here at Sunnyside. Still, plenty of other venues on the internet and plenty of books these days, resonate with the same theme: “Don't be afraid to change. The rewards are real.”

All of which makes the thought of chopping wood merely for exercise seem pretty small in comparison. Or maybe you could say that the goodness of exercise is just an extra that  comes with the complete homesteading kit, that when certain of your ducks are in a row, the others waddle their way into the line as well. Because of course, hefting the ax, washing the clothes with a board and plunger, kneading bread, lugging rainwater around the house-corner in a pail, hoeing weeds, chopping leaves to enable their efficient assimilation into the protozoic nation of the compost pile: sure, all of it's great exercise. I can't think of any better exercise. I can't think of any better kind of life. 

More on the question of time though soon! There's so much more to grapple with. So much more to say. 

HB

(Next Post January 18th)

A Tale of Dispossession

It was early 1977, and my family had just moved from South India with its temples and monkeys and identical black bicycles to...well, to Minneapolis, with its skyscrapers and stadiums and malls. So this was a big move. I was eight when we moved away. My brother, whose story I am telling here, was ten. And it must have been soon after our arrival that this incident occurred.

The house in which we were staying was located on 46th Ave South, and it belonged to my grandparents on my father’s side. We were borrowing it, which worked out fine, because the two of them were down in Texas for the winter so that my grandfather could play some golf. He had retired recently and wanted to play the amateur circuit. They were to be away till the late Spring.

Back then the streets of South Minneapolis were still lined with elms. The houses had canvas awnings and stucco siding, and if you went inside of them, they smelled like roast beef and potatoes. The names on the mailboxes were names like Ellingson and Starr and Tollerud and Arnold. And of course ours said Bjornstad.

The nearest heavily trafficked street (or “main drag,” as my father liked to say) lay only about six blocks away. This was Lake Street. And right across Lake stood a convenience store, a Seven Eleven. It was to this Seven Eleven that my mother sent my brother Kris, one winter afternoon.

“For dinner tonight, I need some curd,” she said, handing him some money.

Now most American readers would probably recognize the word “curd” as something out of a nursery rhyme and nothing more: “Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey.” Otherwise the word here is rare and about as meaningful as “tuffet.”

But back in India, we had used the word practically every day, because practically every day, we ate the stuff it signified. Curd, when served with curry, cooled the mouth. Plus it added protein to the diet. And when you asked for it at the dinner table, you’d say “could you please pass the curd?” and it arrived in your hands and that was that.

Had my mother forgotten that Americans said “yogurt,” instead of “curd?”

Maybe.

Was she out of her mind anyway, thinking, back in 1977, that there would be yogurt available at the Seven Eleven on Lake Street and 46th? Probably. 

But in any case, my brother took her at her word that the errand was possible, and headed out to the Seven Eleven for curd. Though as he left, my mother made sure to tell him--and with some urgency--NOT to cross the street unless the pedestrian light said WALK. Was that understood? If it said DONT WALK, he was not to cross. Was that clear?

Yes he answered, of course he understood.

About thirty minutes later, having successfully crossed Lake Street on WALK, he was at the Seven Eleven, searching for curd. It was, of course, taking him some time. After all, the stuff he was searching for probably wasn’t there, and even if it had been, he was searching for it under the wrong name.

He doubled down on his efforts. He continued to search the aisles: The gum and candy aisle. The snack-cake aisle. The aisle with the batteries and the headache medicine. He also checked and re-checked the fogged-up refrigerated cases containing the ice cream in boxes and the milk in plastic jugs...

Finally the cashier asked what he was looking for.

“Curd,” said my brother.

“Curd, what’s curd?" asked the cashier. What, was the guy kidding? What was my brother supposed to say?

Well so there was nothing for it. My brother left the store, and went and stood on the corner of Lake and 46th, and waited for DONT WALK to turn to WALK. It was winter. It was cold. It was taking a long time.

It was still taking a long time...

The DONT WALK wasn’t changing...

He stood there for fifteen minutes or so, waiting for the light to change to WALK.

“But so why did that happen with the light?” I asked my brother. This was just last week when he told me this story--for what I think was the first time--some thirty-seven years after it happened.

“What do you mean?” he asked, “why did what happen with the light?”

“How come it said WALK getting to the store, but DONT WALK on the way back?”

“I have no idea.”

“And how come you didn’t just press the pedestrian request button to get the light to change?”

“Because I didn’t know you could do that.”

“Mom didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

I considered this for awhile. Then I said:

“Seems kind of existential.”

“How so?”

“Well, I’m thinking, if it had been me, I would have felt as if I was getting a DONT WALK signal because I didn’t have the curd. Because I hadn’t completed the quest.”

“That’s because you take everything so personally. You take the whole universe personally.”

“I guess that’s true.”

“Of course it’s true.”

“So what happened?”

“Dad came and got me. Mom must have gotten worried.”

“Figures, she didn’t come herself.”

“She was probably still fixing the dinner.”

So my brother told me this story just this last week. And I can’t get it out of my head. And what I’ve been wondering about it is this: how was his probable emotional state, as he stood on that corner, a ten-year-old, waiting, waiting, really all that different from mine now in middle age?

I’m serious.

Here I am, forty-five years old, and over and over again these days I get the feeling that the big quest on which I was sent when I was born, is just not going all that well. Whatever I was supposed to get; whatever I was supposed to achieve; whatever I was supposed to discover before turning around and heading back home--well I just don’t have it, or I just haven’t done it. I haven’t located and purchased the curd of life. And now it’s starting to get late and what do I do? How do I go back so empty-handed to mother earth? And I wonder if maybe others around me on this planet might feel the same way. Maybe, Dear Reader, you?

“So, what are you looking for?” people ask me, in so many words.

“Well,” I say, “you know, I’m looking for the really nourishing stuff--the curds of life.” And I’m picturing the sunshine and wind and rain. The laughter of friends. My own two hands in the rich black earth. Lots of conversations with family. Campfires. Hymn-sings. The superb pleasure of sitting in a circle in the living room, just passing around someone’s new baby, and commenting on how super-cute her cheeks are, while she gurgles back and smiles.

And of course I’ve HAD that. Sure, sure I’ve experienced all that. But the point is, that I want more of it, so much more, in fact, that it sometimes feels as though I haven’t even had what I’ve had. Plus, as my brother was learning that day at the street corner, the fact is that this whole project of curd isn’t something any of us can really do on our own. Like the angels that sing in choirs “alleluia” and the bees that dance in code, in the middle of a crowd of other bees, saying “here’s the honey, here!” we’re social beings. We're dependent on others for so much of the meaning in our lives. Which means that other people’s poverty of understanding and experience is our own. Inward, outward, material, imaginative, it doesn’t matter. Other people’s poverty is our own. 

But these ordinary pleasures: why, in our time, have they become so rare and undervalued? Heck, I have to admit to that I’ve undervalued them myself. I’ve allowed my impatience with people to ruin time spent with them. I’ve devalued and avoided physical labor, simply because it was physical and somehow therefore “below” me. And I believed for ever so long that the only thing wrong with my own privileged life as a citizen of the richest country on the planet was that the privilege wasn’t spread around quite yet. But time would take care of that, right? Time and science and progressive politics and maybe a smattering of the stock market and the Federal Reserve. Right? Right? 

I’m working on mending my ways, but it pains me to think of how much meaning and how much real honest life I’ve missed over the years on account of my participation in the "what’s-the-curd-of-life?" lifestyle. 

Time to unplug all that smart-stuff and put the i-phones in context. Time to cool it on the packaging. The pure convenience. The consumption. And really cool it. Time for life, real life. Life with the grit in the gears. Life with the grubs on the leaf. Life lived in connection with the earth. Time to encourage other people, by way of example, to do the same. 

Maybe my writing here at 9-volt amounts to a kind of penance for me. A way of confessing my collusion with the forces of depletion. A way of trying to nurture the many life-sustaining connections that for so long I have so thoughtlessly lived to prevent. A way of finding and staying happy exactly where I am, and not demanding more of what really does not inwardly satisfy. A way of accepting that others really do have what I need--that I just cannot find meaning on my own. A way of begging for my curds, with a bowl of words.

So how about it? Any curds for a needy nomad? Any curds? Anyone? Any curds?

HB

Facing the Music

A few nights ago, I watched a film called A Late Quartet. I don't intend to review it here, though I will say I found it consistently interesting, and would recommend it to anyone who wants to see an intelligent film about Western classical music, and what it's like to take part in the work of perpetuating that great tradition. For the purposes of this post, though, I mention the film because it served as the prompt for the thoughts that follow.

The story of A Late Quartet follows the members of a fictional string quartet, called The Fugue, which has been playing together for some twenty-five years, but which finds itself suddenly in the midst of a staffing crisis. Its cellist has just been diagnosed with Parkinson's. His continuing with the group is out of the question; drugs might help him for awhile, but not for long; at most for another season. He wants to leave with dignity and not out of embarrassing necessity, and so he recommends that, before his playing gets any worse, the quartet immediately replace him with a cellist who has substituted for him before, and who he believes would do beautifully. His first desire is to see the life of the group continue on. 

I happen to think that the world is facing a set of circumstances a great deal like the loss of a cellist to a string quartet. We're losing something basic, something fundamental, something that touches on every aspect of our civilization. Something serious enough to stop the music as we know it. We're losing the cheap resource base on which we depend. We're losing easy oil, cheap ores, fertile soil, and clean water. And these are not extras. These are necessities.

Now there's plenty of denial about all of this still, but the truth is that the game of cheap resource extraction was up about ten years ago now, when the general price of commodities (for the first time in a century) began to rise instead of fall. And while it's true that we are a long ways from having extracted all of everything--we'll never get there, thankfully!--we have come to certain limits of expense; we have come to the place where, if we want more of any given resource, we are going to have to pay progressively more for the work of getting it out; and every year, more and more.  

Already an ounce of gold costs more to extract and refine than it can command on the market, even at today's historically high prices. Already groundwater is running dangerously low everywhere from Saudi Arabia to India to the American West (and again the costs of alternatives such as desalination are prohibitive!). Topsoil is blowing away at alarming rates, so that the cost of growing food on less and less fertile soil can only go up. Fisheries are collapsing as well; recently a single Pacific blue-fin tuna sold for more than a million dollars! So. Maybe our present way of life can continue for a season or two. That is, maybe for a time, we can blind ourselves to the facts and manifold facets of decline, and continue to live as though our present pace of consumption can continue forever. Eventually though, a reckoning will come. Eventually we'll have no choice but to change. And we'll have to learn to live with less. And live more lightly on the earth.

Here's a short list of what will strike many people as the downside of change. None of this is predictive; it is diagnostic. All of it is already taking place, at least in the developed world. 

• Rising prices for basic necessities, as measured against people's ability to pay for them, and not necessarily in the official inflation rate.
• Widespread break-down of urban infrastructure. 
• Declining real wages.
• Changing employment patterns: with fewer and fewer people participating in the labor force, and more and more of those who do take part, doing so part-time only.
• A rise in the underground un-taxed economy, say in bartering for skills, or renting out properties informally for vacationers, or living with family. 
• Less travel.

Here are some changes that are more in the embryonic stages, but will probably become much more a part of our lives as time goes on. 

• More gardening and local food production. Not just as a hobby, or because it's green and progressive, but really out of a practical need to feed ourselves.
• Less money spent on research and development, in everything from cancer research to nano-technology.
• In general a greater sense of distance--with geography making a difference again, in world trade, for example.

How will people react to having to make these necessary changes? Well in general, I suppose it makes sense to say that they will not like them. Will resist them. Will continually want to believe that limitless progress and economic growth is right around the corner.

There is an instructive scene in the movie, in which our cellist attends an exercise class for Parkinson's patients. The instructor opens class by saying that, with Parkinson's, everything in the patient's life contracts and bunches up: the shoulders hunch, the handwriting shrinks, the hand can no longer palm the grapefruit. She then leads the class in stretching exercises, the point being, as she says, to take control of the symptoms. To face the facts of contraction, and do your best to deal with them. To take responsibility for the only body you have, shaky as it is, hunched as it is becoming.

The class begins the stretching exercises, with every student taking part except the cellist and another man behind him with a cane. The man with the cane seems oblivious, and our cellist can only look on in horrified disbelief. He stares and stares, unable to get himself to do the stretches. It's a painful scene. And yet later it becomes clear that he's learning to cope, and with a kind of noble humility. In particular we see him in a harness on treadmill. Just walking walking walking--into his new reality.

I see much my work as a householder at Sunnyside as a sort of analogue to the treadmill scene, though I will say I consider my own work a great deal more cheery! Still, it's work! Learning to garden. Learning to preserve food. Learning to do with less. Learning to say "I don't need that," or "I can do that myself," or "instead of this, I'll do this." Part of the trouble with the work I'm describing is that the necessity for it isn't always viscerally clear yet. My family, if it wished, could spend more freely. We could turn the thermostat back up to where it was, say, five years ago in the wintertime! We could drive a lot more. We could decide the garden was just too much work and turn it all back to grass. And to entertain ourselves and maybe to impress the neighbors, we could buy a lot of things that we don't need. 

But all that would be to move backwards, not forwards, into a world in which it's time (at long last) to share with the poor. Time to care about the effects of our lifestyle upon the life systems of the planet. Time to labor to add beauty and life to the world, not consume the same beauty and life. Time to accept the reality of a grand universal contraction, and learn what the new situation, however painful, has to teach us. 

I hope you consider joining me.

HB

Until Saturday the 18th!

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!

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! 

The Cloudy Side of Sunnyside

Three brief points as preface:

1. The trouble with trying to write persuasively, is that, as you work, you usually feel that you have to leave the unpersuasive stuff out. 
2. This a concern if and only if, in addition to persuading, you also want to tell the truth. 
3. As it happens I do want to tell the truth.

There was a moment a few weeks ago when my wife and I were in the middle of canning peaches. It wasn't particularly pleasant work. No, to tell the truth it was actively unpleasant. It was hot in that kitchen. The floor-tile was sticky underfoot with syrup--which just no matter what seems to insist on spilling itself on the floor, and I mean no matter how hard you try to be careful. The two of us had been working for maybe two hours and had probably another hour's work to go: sterilizing, parboiling, slicing, hot-packing, boiling the packed jars. So to buck us up, I said something that turned out to be somewhat fatuous; something about how much I liked the way we were living. My wife replied, calmly and politely, nevertheless firmly:

"Yes well let's talk about that later sometime."

Now this was not a moment of snark. It was her way of asking: "Um just how honest are you being with yourself here? Are you really paying attention to what's going on around you?  Because after all, this is really hard work." 

And she was right. This was where the rubber meets the road. Where the talk that we used to engage in (in the future tense and passive voice) about the troubles of the planet--"something at some point really has to be done,"--was being translated into real action verbs in the present progressive--"I'm digging, I'm planting, I'm biking, I'm canning." And here's the thing: it's in that painful, active space of change that we might do best just to let the slogans be. Not pick them up at all. Not pretend the way is straight and plain, when in fact it's crooked and hard. No sentimentalizing the labor, no exaggerating the benefits, no denying the costs. No. Just quietly do the work.

So in the spirit of that call to truth (while my wife and I canned peaches) here's a little honest list of current costs at Sunny-side. Call it the cloudy side of Sunny-side.

Let's start with a minor pain: Oh, take the fruit flies for instance. Fruit flies, to tell the truth, are a part of our life at Sunny-side right now. They're always around at harvest and canning time. We're not talking clouds: just a few here and there, but they are annoying. There are of course strategies: you can begin by covering all new produce brought into the house with tightly woven cloth. You can set out a bottle trap or two, baited with cider vinegar and a drop of dish-soap. And after every meal it's best to clean up spic and span from sink to table. But of course the fruit flies have their own ways of winning. For instance they have sex a lot, which has a way of producing more fruit flies, not all of which end up in bottle traps. And it irks me that the sex for them has to be more fun than tightly woven towels and bottle traps and cleaning up after dinner are for us.

But to enumerate a cost less seasonal:

To tell the truth, Sunnyside under the current regime doesn't look as neat and clean as it did in the past, when we didn't think of the home as a place of daily industry. Every home sewing project means threads and scraps of material here and there and everywhere on the floors. And the work of canning involves a whole bevy of jars and lids and tools, all of which need a place to be and tend to travel in traffic jams to get there. Gardening has its tools too as well as its associated dirt brought in on freshly dug vegetables, shoe soles, and trouser legs. Furthermore, the house is comparatively small, so that every room has to be given at least two uses--one for industry and one for the attested primary use. My own writing studio (the sun porch) houses all our vegetable seedlings in the winter, and there are a lot of them. The dining room holds the piano and doubles as a musical practice space (another home industry). Our son's old bedroom doubles now as the sewing room. The point is that since our home is not just about rest and relaxation, but a workshop too and maybe primarily so, it'll never be clear and clean in the same organized and minimalist way that my wife and I once considered the ideal. Is this important? Well, put it this way: sometimes it feels like a loss.

Then there's the matter of minimizing travel, which has been one of the more painful changes for me. Because my wife and I take the effects of carbon pollution very seriously, we travel as little as possible. We do not fly, and we limit our driving (errands included) to three thousand miles a year on the one car. But the loss here is pretty palpable. Both of us have enough experience with travel to class it as a wonderful means of entertainment and enchantment. I miss the pursuit. I miss the innocence of thinking that the only cost of travel was the money for the ticket and the price of accommodations and food. On the other hand, this beautiful planet is so damaged already that I just can't bear the thought of damaging it more. Especially when it comes to natural places, I want to involve myself as little as possible in the irony of harming (by means of the ecological costs of carbon) the very sights I go to see.

Again, none of this is intended as complaint. Nor is it intended to evoke sympathy or pity. I have seen enough of the world to know that, in terms of wealth and opportunity, a middle class American like me is privileged beyond imagining. I have really precisely nothing to complain about. Even my hardships are chosen!

No, what I have written is intended as truth-telling, a sort of caveat emptor, a buyer beware: to anyone who wishes to go this way--the more local life, the more hand made life--I promise there are many many rewards! And yet, to say it again, some costs are just honest costs. Some work is just hard work. You do the work anyway. You bear the costs anyway. Because where, in the whole world, is there a thing worth having, or doing, or being able to do, that costs us nothing? And the beauty of the earth and justice for the poor and the sanity of a spirit not focused on consumption are worth a great deal indeed!

Until Saturday the 12th!

HB

Where We have Been, Where We are Going

I've been writing for this blog for about a quarter of a year now, and feel it's time to take a breather and to reflect on the work so far and on how it ought to proceed. First of all, a thank-you to all my readers, regular and irregular, nearby and far away. It humbles and inspires me (really) to think that people, and especially people who do not immediately know me, see enough in my work to give it the gift of their time, to read it and maybe discover some angle of insight that they otherwise would not have known existed, or find in it some inspiration to do something they might not otherwise have done. I trust that at least at times we have connected. That's the important thing here. As the novelist E.M Forster said, "Only connect. Only connect."

But there's still so much to do! So many ways in which the blog could be improved, particularly I think in terms of sharpness of focus and steadiness of mission. At times over the past few months, working on these posts--saying to myself "what's this blog really about, what am I trying to do?"--I've felt a bit like a man waking up out of a drugged sleep, and coming to consciousness in the bowels of a mysterious sailing ship. He looks at his shoulders and sees the gold epaulets and knows he is supposed to be the captain. But what sort of vessel is he on? What is it carrying? What are its ports of call and final destination? Only bit by bit does the evidence present itself, although eventually, painstakingly, his mission and his methods do make themselves known. 

And maybe that's where I am now. I've spent several months now feeling out the parameters of my mission, tallying up my resources, learning the ropes of the scheduled blogger's routine. I feel much more nimbly in command. I'm ready to proceed.

Coming up now are four brief points. Brief point one and brief point two concern themselves with 9-Volt Nomad's mission, brief point three with 9-Volt Nomad's methods, and brief point four with motivations for the project. So: mission, mission, methods, motivation.

Mission One: Defining the Sustainable Lifestyle

This is the most important work of the blog. I want to define and describe a lifestyle that, without wishful thinking and in all dimensions of experience--from the psychological to the ecological--can truly be called "sustainable." A lifestyle meaningful and rich, yet one that when multiplied by billions of other human lives lived much the same way, would not impossibly strain the planet's living systems.

Some caveats and provisos here, especially for those who believe that technology and public policy alone can usher in the age of sustainability: I don't agree. I believe that, when it comes to this great labor, garden-spades and cheesecloth will prove more important than this or that subsidy for solar panels or wind turbines, the actual flexing of the individual human hand more powerful than the fantasies and fortune of Elon Musk. We can't manufacture our way out of a manufactured mess. We can't consume our way out of the trap of consumption. 

Mission Two: Discovering Joy

Of course sometimes sacrifice is just sacrifice, and costs just honest costs. Still, let's never count out the possibility that, even as we strip the motto "more stuff, more power" from our lives, we gain a great deal. Giving up certain material expectations and setting aside fantasies of technological control can amount to a surprise investment in sanity, community, and inner humanity: real civilization, in other words. Simply put, living green doesn't have to mean living the melancholy blues.

But first we have to take up the challenge, or at least see someone who has done so, and hear their stories and reassurances! If you have not yet learned to cook, how can you know the pleasures of being self-reliant in that way? Or if you've never shared your tools with a neighbor, how can you really know how your sharing will cultivate a sense of community? So I intend as much as possible to use myself and my home Sunny-side as illustration; not because I have achieved the perfect lifestyle--not at all!--but because we at Sunny-side are trying to move that direction one do-able leap at a time, and because I want our work and the blessings we discover in it to serve as the reassurance that people need. Then readers might just decide such a venture is possible and make a leap or two themselves. 

Regarding Methods: Consulting my Past and my Life Abroad

As it happens I grew up in India and New Guinea, and I want to make use of that fact in my posts. Those were more elemental times and places. So much more was done by hand, and there was so much more of a sense of time spent slowly on the earth. And since I believe the human future belongs to the human hand and the earthly elements, well then my memories of those times and places may well speak to how it might feel to move that direction again; the how-to's involved in that project as well as the rewards. Also, if such memories are honest, they may serve to inoculate me and my readers against impractical idealism and foolish mis-estimation. Not everything was perfect back then and over there. Not hardly, as they say here in Indiana. 

And here I can't leave out my mother, and my memories of growing up under the influence of her strong character. She was a woman who wanted food for the hungry, justice for the poor, and competence in cooking and cleaning for everyone, including her sons. She hated waste of any kind and had a deep sense of the value of the domestic arts. It made her impatient to think that anyone would not know how to fry up an onion, or would think themselves too good for the job of brushing out a toilet. If you follow this blog, you will learn more of her, guaranteed.


So: 

• 9-Volt Nomad is about defining "sustainable." Honestly. Without wishful thinking. 
• 9-Volt Nomad is about discovering joy.
• 9-Volt Nomad seeks in past times and even foreign places a guide for us here in the difficult present.

Finally, Regarding Motivation:

Here I want to return to the metaphor of the sailing ship, and ask what propels this whole project forward? To be honest, it's the winds of worry and concern: the lowering of water tables and the erosion everywhere of ton after precious ton of topsoil, the logging off of rain- and old-growth forests, the rising of the seas and the measurable and ominous acidification of their waters (another cost of carbon pollution), the extinction of thousands of plant and animal species, the effects on the human body of air and water pollution, not to mention the spiritual emptiness that so many of us feel because of our urban separation from the voices of the earth: all of these compel and propel me in my work, both as a householder and a blogger.

It's my conviction that, for any thinking, feeling, informed citizen of the earth, the present path of industrial civilization is simply out of the question. How can we bear to see the life of the planet suffer this way and not change our behavior? How can we simply continue these habits of waste and consumption? How can we shy from change, especially if by changing, we could invite into our lives and homes so much that is so joyful, sociable, and true?

Until Tuesday the 1st!

HB