sustainable simplicity
Nearly ten years ago, I found myself deeply involved in the work of permaculture founding-father Bill Mollison. His writing is extensive and his influence on the development of the modern, sustainable, family-farm significant. His ideas about how to ensure long term sustainability on our planet are rather systematic. They require a great deal of planning and organizing. My extensive exploration of these concepts left me with a feeling that none of it was new or revolutionary – as though there is a common sense that died centuries ago, perhaps another unfortunate casualty of the Industrial Revolution
Then I discovered Masanobu Fukuoka. It was he who first inspired me to think about sustainability as a creative act. I believe that Fukuoka is, in some ways, the very opposite of Mollison – at least with regards to his methods. He would have us achieve the same goal, people living in harmony with our planet – but where Mollison’s brand of sustainability is a manufacturing of our environment, Fukuoka inspires us to closely mirror nature. His teachings suggest that our brains and their innovations unnecessarily complicate a natural way of being and create a rift between us and nature.
I am reminded of him today because an effort has started in California to transform “barren and neglected urban corners into colourful spaces of living greenery.” Common Studio, based in LA, has developed Seed Bomb Vending Machines. Looking a bit like a gumball machine, for 25cents you receive a ball of clay, compost, and seeds that you toss into some barren space. Sun and rain do their work and voila, greenery sprouts from the Earth.
Fukuoka used no-till methods for growing grain and made seed balls that he tossed out into his fields. Bill Mollison borrowed this idea after reading The One-Straw Revolution and incorporated the seed ball technique into his permaculture teachings. Now you can get them in vending machines, in LA, and toss them out as an act of guerilla farming – an effort to reclaim the empty lots and dismal corners industry has left us with. I think that Fukuoka would approve.
Masanobu Fukuoka spent more than 60 years of his life finding the simplest way to live – try something, observe, try something else. Trained as a microbiologist, his methods could be called scientific, but his answers often removed many of the innovations we call ‘technological advances’ in favor of a return to something more closely resembling a solution devised by mother nature herself. He assumed little about a given situation, tested creative ideas, observed and constantly adjusted without seeking to control his environment.
Maybe these ‘Seed Bombs’ are an opportunity to bring some of his simplicity and little common sense into our urban areas and teach people just how easy it is to be close to nature. Perhaps these tiny balls of earth contain the seeds of a revolution.
Although his books are currently out of print and may or may not be at your public library, you can always read more about Masanoba Fukuoka on the internets.
Masanobu Fukuoka’s Natural Farming and Permaculture, by Larry Korn
Greening The Desert - Applying natural farming techniques in Africa,
an interview with Masanobu Fukuoka, by Robert and Diane Gilman
monsieur gainsbourg
On another music trip lately. Profoundly influential for many of the musicians that I love, Serge Gainsbourg is a strange bird and certainly worth a listen. He lived through Nazi occupation of France, fucked Bridget Bardot, wrote songs about teenage girls giving head, and pissed off the Vatican and Bob Marley. His list of offenses is long but he is remembered as a visionary.
My favorite album, and the one you should listen to if you must pick just one, is Histoire de Melody Nelson. It’s about an older man who seduces and starts banging a 15 year old girl after hitting her with his Rolls Royce. Then she dies in a plane crash. Yeah, he really wrote this album and although it’s sorta sick, it’s a masterpiece.
There are string and choral arrangements all mixed up with funky guitar parts and spoken word putting it at the top of my list of amazing auditory experiences. I think it is well worth the brief 28 minutes of your life that it would take to listen all the way through.
it’s not what you say. . .
Heaven forbid that I ask you to tell someone ‘no’ because we already have plans. You consistently manage to make me feel less important than everything else that is happening in your life. I don’t know how I managed to ignore it or keep hoping that maybe, on occasion, I would be at least as important as those other things. You would say that I was but you didn’t act like it. So I made the same mistake as I have made before – I listened to what you were saying and what I wanted to believe rather than pay attention to what you did.
Out For Delivery
I have to admit to being really into delivery tracking data. I love watching a package make its way across the country to its destination. Origin scan, departure scan, arrival scan, departure scan, arrival scan, etc. until I see that it is out for delivery. . . and there is nothing left to do but wait for for the email notification of delivery. The idea of this is absurd when compared to the Pony Express and other early transcontinental mail services – i imagine you just hoped they would get it there.
The Pony Express rider changed his horse about every 10 miles – apparently this is how far one could gallop before the horse is stressed. So they rode across the country on horseback to get mail from the midwest to the west coast – until the railroad put them out of business. Today, we romanticize that journey but really – it had to suck. I can say that I would not want to be a Pony Express rider. I shall content myself with the tracking numbers and the scans that I follow from here to there. . . .
Oh – in case you are wondering, the package I was watching as it traveled to its destination was delivered exactly on time. Shortly after receiving an email alerting me to the delivery, I heard from the recipient who seemed quite pleased at its arrival.
bicycle
I know people who rant and rave about how pedestrians and bicyclists get in their way. These are the same people for whom walking two blocks when they park is an abomination. They complain about traffic and the cost of gas. These same people shop at Walmart and eat at Arby’s for lunch. When you examine all the facts it seems that they are completely unaware and represent the epitome of consumption and wastefulness. They are the perfect example of a parasite.
You drive a car – it consumes petroleum and pollutes our environment. YES! You should have to pay to park and maybe if you walked a bit more you would not be such a burden on our health care system. I wish we could heavily tax your lunch – with your CAFO raised beef and corn syrup laced beverages – so we can pay for the health care you do and will continue to require for the next 30 years.
I ask you to consider this – when the flow of petroleum becomes a nearly imperceptible drip, for it will be in your lifetime, how will you manage? What will you do? Bitch and complain? Keep voting republican and start another war? Steal it from the ‘terrorists’ and the ‘communists?’ When whole communities start to rot because the good, white Christians of the world take care of their own – will your conscience be stirred or will the poverty-stricken, minority communities ‘get what they deserve?’
The world is changing. Are you changing with it or will your cold, petroleum soaked hands clutch the wheel of your gas-guzzling, carbon-spewing, roadkill machine until there is nothing left? How many people will die trying to suck up or control the last drop of oil? You hear people talk about the crisis and you stand by, skeptical and apathetic. There’s nothing we can do about it so why change – right?
We’ve got americans ditching their cars and installing bike racks. People are trying to keep Walmart out of their town and choosing the farmers’ market. We have public policy makers looking for ways to promote and expand public transportation. The world is changing and it’s time for us to change with it. Innovate or die. Adapt or go the way of the dinosaur.
If we have the awareness to do these things it seems that we must do them.
absentee
I have not written in a long time. It’s not for having nothing to say. . . I say that I don’t have time but really it’s just that I don’t make the time for this.
I logged in today for the first time in a while to find an enormous number of page views happened yesterday. I wonder who found me and think that perhaps I should write a little more often.
yes, i think you are afraid of something.
I’m okay with getting old and I am okay with not being alone. I think it’s a fine thing to find a person you want to make a life with. it’s not necessarily out of weakness or fear that we embark on this sort of journey with another.
I think that sometimes I disagree with people – even the people I love. I don’t think its effortless – because nothing in life is effortless. our tiny brains fuck stuff up – it is the nature of things. humans misunderstand and communicate poorly. that is the nature of language and the beauty is in finding that person who is willing to step back and rethink what they just did or what just came out of my mouth because every time you learn to communicate better it brings you one step closer to that absolutely intuitive way of interacting with a person you really know, appreciate, and love. so yes, I ask the question, what are you afraid of?
my tiny little brain
I have written of it before but there are albums I find that I can FEEL when I listen to them. I want to listen to them over and over again. There are two lately that have had this affect on me and they make me think about the curiosities of life and death and love and all the things that make us human.
They make me think about the people who want to deny all of it – avoid the human parts of life maybe because it is hard or because you can’t always know what will happen and yeah – sometimes it hurts. . . . They make me think about the people who embrace every bit of it and go out into the world as true to themselves as the day they were born. And they remind me that life is just as full of laughter and wonder as it is tears and pain.
I will admit to being that person who wants to be ok with all of it. I want to embrace every moment and be okay with it because what else can I do? It’s happening and I need to breathe deep and be thankful that I am here experiencing it. I think a lot about the why. . . what the hell are we doing? We eat and drink and sleep and reproduce. All the stuff that is bigger than that is imagined by these tiny little brains of ours. I am so small. This music reminds me of that.
The best laid schemes – Gang aft agley.
There are a lot of dreams I’ve let go – lots of disappointment and failure that I shoo away from my bedside each morning. I wake up each day in a life I never imagined for myself, in a place I never planned. I look back on it all and I try to understand what happened because I never saw this coming. I spent 9 years dreaming up a life that is no more. 5 years of it were spent planning and building a home I never really got to live in. I planted rose bushes that I will never see flower, trees that will grow tall and make shade I will never enjoy on a hot, summer afternoon.
I am not saying I am the only person this has happened to. I am not asking for pity. I am just trying to live again. It is harder than I ever thought it would be to let go of all that happened and find a new path.
I am trying to find my way – some direction – that will lead me away from all those painful memories and dreams that I left behind. At first, this was about things. I wanted to surround myself with beautiful things because I had lived for so long with nearly nothing but a dream and it seemed to me that using furniture, art, pottery, books, curtains, 400ct egyptian cotton sheets and beautiful fluffy towels would help define this new life. I am not sure that I succeeded in defining anything but it has given me a space to which I can retreat, a place where I feel safe enough to lie on my couch and mourn for everything I walked away from.
It has taken a great deal of casting about to realize that I have no idea what I am doing with my life. I am generally capable of getting out of bed each morning and going to work. I cook great food, write, laugh with my son. . . but I lack any plan for where I want to be in 10 years. I’ve always had a plan for where I would be in ten years and I knew that even if it changed, I still needed to have one. I am not sure what to do now that I find myself unable to invent one.
I’ve tried. I have planned everything from going back to school or finding a job in another town to moving to Italy so that I can live on a vineyard and make wine. When one of those plans falls through (as they all have because I don’t really want any of those things,) I find myself simply getting drunk enough that I can pass out and not dream.
I am not at a complete loss.
Even without a plan, I have recently come to realize a few, rather important, things.
- I need to be okay with all of this. I need to trust myself and know that it is my path, that I learn from it, that it might happen again and that I should be thankful for all of it because it is what drives and shapes me. It is impossible to imagine who I would be without all of this.
- Maybe I don’t need a plan. Maybe I don’t need to be in such a hurry to run away from myself. I think it might be time to stop and look at who I am rather than continue pretending to be someone I am not. I have done a lot of self reflection in the last 5 years but I am talking about dedicating time and energy to becoming the person I really want to be.
- I might need some help working through all of this. I have always been ridiculously, fiercely, stubbornly independent. I am starting to realize that it pushes people away and maybe it is time to start looking to others for help. I have been debating this one for a year (ridiculous!) and a lovely man I know has helped me realize what I need to do. I am not sure he knows he has done this but he’s been caring and patient as he’s explained to me what I do and how he feels about it. I am so thankful.
- I must write about all of it. I have always written about my life. I will sit down upset and distracted and sometimes it takes hours but writing focuses and relaxes me.
Some people exercise or paint – I write.
It started out as something that was just for me and I was terrified of people discovering my journals, my deepest thoughts. Revealing all those things made we weak, vulnerable. I hid my writing away for years – decades, actually. Then I decided to make it public.
Being open and honest about who I am and what I feel is one of the hardest things I have ever done but also one of the best. I am not even sure who reads this stuff but I am not going to hide anymore. The writing is for me. It is how I process and it is how I remember. I share it simply because I need to stop being afraid of people knowing who I am.
So I guess it boils down to this. Know what I want from life and ask for it. Stop being afraid. Find a good therapist. Be open and honest. Smile. Love back.
thank you
cheers to an awesome opportunity.
cheers to me imagining that i am standing in that space and
we are getting ready to open the doors to our first night.
cheers to something so fucking amazing that we can hardly believe it might actually happen.
thank you for this – it is pretty cool and it matters to me more than I ever thought it would.
let’s do it.
