Sustainability · 16 days ago by Julie
Story of Stuff
Prescription for Being Perfect Like Me · 25 days ago by Julie
This is a continuation of the previous post.
Other Bob asked, “What is your prescription for the lives and values of humanity, based on the previous answers? I’m not so much thinking of moral or philosophical values, but the more pragmatic values of economics [recycling? how/whether to cook what kind of food from where? etc] and locational [where do we live now, and when we have kids? etc] values.”
Like many people, I have ideas about how everyone else ought to live. Some of those ideas are related to what I’ve learned by living here.
Be Joyful: This, I think, is the most important. At any particular moment, most of us in the developed world are in a position to be perfectly happy. It’s only in thinking about past ills or future worries that we begin to shift around uncomfortably. It’s then that we’re likely to try to mask our unease by lusting after extravagances.
It’s not that I think extravagance is evil, far from it. It’s that, if its only purpose is to silence a troubled soul, then it will never satisfy.
Yes, joyous serenity is a moral value, but without it, any effort to live well will have the stink of righteousness.
Respect: Listen to yourself and respect what you hear. Listen to your neighbors and respect what you hear. Listen to the natural world and respect what you hear.
I think part of respect includes knowledge. Read appropriate self-help books, take a leadership class, become a Master Gardener or Beach Watcher.
Another part of respect includes action. Figure out how to get from where you are to where you’ve told yourself you want to be. Build relationships with your neighbors and strengthen ties with your family and friends. Do the things that best available science tells you will do least harm to the environment. If you don’t know what they are, find out.
I didn’t start with specific prescriptions because diversity is part of what I think of as a healthy human stance. On the other hand, I think that our billions, and the fact that our influence on the planet is leveraged so much by technology, means that there are certain things that can no longer be governed by culture, but should be practiced by almost everyone. These include:
1. Don’t have lots of children. If you like kids, adopt or teach. We should aim for one or two billion total people, nicely sprinkled amongst cultures.
2. Follow Michael Pollan’s dietary advice: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
3. Live close to your work. Bike or walk if you can.
4. Learn about nonviolent ways of solving problems and practice them.
5. Learn about environmental stewardship and practice it.
6. Learn about issues in social justice and work to help solve them.
More in next post.
Tendentiousness Challenged · 26 days ago by Julie
I have a vast audience, it appears, of Other Bobs. One of them asked me what, specifically, is so great about living here?
Good question. Like Other Bob, I do get a little weary hearing about great spiritual and social advantages that obtain here which are not robust enough to be examined. As a personal religion, I trust experience and analysis as a way of attaining depth. It makes me suspicious when it’s claimed that at the very heart of the magic is a core that is not only unknowable, but that will be harmed if it is examined. So I’ll try.
Valuing non-human nature: Sure, there was a bear somewhere in Seattle last week, but on the whole, it’s the built environment that dominates the senses in town. There, it’s possible to move entirely within human mediated systems, and from there, to jump to the conclusion that our comforts are infinitely expandable. It’s possible to talk about “empty land” or to blandly use up several lifetime’s worth of carbon footprint to go on an eco-tour. In contrast, what you learn here is that every bit of land and sea has a prior claim on it from untold generations of bugs, thrushes, lichen, sculpins, blackberries, otters, and salamanders. Any human improvement is at their cost.
Urban people can go for generations without quite understanding why we should care. What claim do opossums, cockroaches, or poison oak have on us? Well, Other Bob, it’s by being physically in the presence of non-human life that their voices can become audible. People don’t work well in the abstract. Until you’ve whistled at a harbor seal and it cranes its neck and swims closer, you’re not likely to care one way or another about its role in our fisheries. If you don’t care, you’re not likely to make decisions based on their welfare.
Urban blindness to the immanence of nature leads to philosophical and practical pitfalls: If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one to hear it, does it make a sound? Without an observer, is Shroedinger’s cat alive or dead? Avoid anthropomorphizing animals. These are all bullshit. Forest creatures hear, a cat observes, and we are demonstrably on the same emotional and behavioral continuum as animals. In the same way, focusing only on human profit and social justice leads to deforesting Brazil, depleting India’s water table, and pumping more carbon into the atmosphere than it can digest. Anyone who lived with and listened to nature could have told you what a dumb idea things like the Green Revolution are
Access to solitude: True, you can find solitude anywhere, but in practice, people seem to need conceptual as well as actual solitude. A park or chapel simply doesn’t feel as silent as a rock on an isolated cliff. Since people are primarily tribal, our need for varied human interaction can sometimes drown out our less insistent need for contemplation. Many of my neighbors are practicing contemplatives. After weeks in their (occasional) company, it becomes clear that there is a difference between them and many urbanites, quite apart from non-measurable depth of soul. They’re not that interested in status symbols. They tend to eat low on the food chain, have fewer possessions which filter direct experience of the world, and be more interested in how the universe unfolds than in deciding how is. Birders, wildcrafters, poets, writers, and artists outnumber the yahoos.
Which brings me to my third point, social competence: On an island, it’s clear that, short of leaving, you have to deal with your problems. So, social interactions tend to be more skilful. People will always have difficulties with each other, but in a small community, there’s less of a tendency to sue or shoot. People, on the whole, forgive without in any way forgetting. Conspicuous issues between people become part of island gossip, a fairly good teaching tool. This point is brought home when I watch non-islanders with differences. Since it doesn’t seem to matter as much if the relationship is broken, they tend to take risks that make win-win less possible. Rather than working with their opponent, they try to force or punish them. Here, people often say, “How can we make this work for both of us?”
More in the next post.
Trenchant Words · 28 days ago by Julie
Bob (this is yet another Bob, not any of the Bobs I’ve mentioned before) and I were talking about what it’s like to live on an isolated island.
“In some ways, it’s just like living anywhere else,” he observed. “Except that other people have such strong ideas about what it’s like.”
“When we used to go to the Farmers’ Market,” I recalled, not without some sentiment, “people would come up to us and, without preamble (I didn’t actually use the word preamble, but it fits better than what I actually did say), tell us what it was like to live where we do.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Bob, shaking his head slowly. “My visitors yesterday told me that they’d love to live here forever, because it brings them closer to the earth.”
“But it does!” put in The Spink, who had been embroidering a triceratops and a moth on a piece of violet fabric.
“True,” I said. “That’s one sort, the people who think of it as a place where you can get in touch with the noble savage within. But then there’s the other sort, the people who think of it as a cesspit of primitivity, and think we are all either criminals or hippies or both, using our food stamps to buy alcohol and pot, and voting liberal.”
Bob shuddered.
I nodded. We sat in silent contemplation for a few moments, watching the triceratops take form.
“The thing is,” he ventured, “is that they’re both right.” So saying, he put a skillet of lemon-feta-olive chicken with cinnamon-cornbread on the table. A reverent silence ensued, punctuated only by the schnauzerlike noises that gourmands emit while head down and fingers greasy to the elbows in the presence of good food.
“What we need is a transcendent paradigm,” I said, licking my fingers disgustingly. “We need a way of looking at lives lived in closer awareness of trees and salmon and bats that doesn’t marginalize it, doesn’t turn it into rather shallow archetypes of pre-civilized living.”
“Because we’re anything but shallow,” said Bob, trenchantly and even tendentiously. “There’s something going on here at the intersection of irony, culture, and nature that’s worth pursuing.”
Other Bears · 31 days ago by Julie
I told Bob’s story to a neighbor, Bobette. She said, “One time I was up in Alaska. Someone told us we could spend the night in a floating scow, but when we got there, it was trashed. It was better upstairs so we slept up there. In the middle of the night, we found out why the downstairs was so messed up. It was bears.”
Bears · 34 days ago by Julie
Bob (not his real name) was on one of the Aleutian Islands about 20 years ago. Bears wandered in and out of town. Every morning there was another bear story.
One guy said, “I was walking home one night from a party, kind of a little bit drunk. So, I get home and fall into bed. In the middle of the night I wake up and I hear snoring, so I think, ‘One of the guys from the party’s crashed out on the floor,’ and I go back to sleep. So, the next morning I wake up and there’s still that snoring but nobody’s in the room. I reach under the bed for my shoes and there’s a bear under it. So, I left the house without shoes, pants, or shirt.”
The townsfolk told Bob how to talk to the bears.
“How do you do that?” I asked.
“Oh, you sing to them. Little ditties. They stop, and listen, and then you both go on your way.”
Brush Your Teeth With Your Other Hand · 49 days ago by Julie
A neighbor observed that routine is what swallows your life. It kills time and you can’t remember what you did all day.
But, on the other hand, when my time is most usefully spent, I’m so absorbed in my project that I’m unaware of time passing.
Ships on the Ocean · 49 days ago by Julie
Who’s sailing around near us? These guys.
You can find out about individual ships here.
Polite · 55 days ago by Julie
I used to tell my kids that if they were having too much fun with their food, they probably weren’t being polite. Same goes for anything loud or active in the house. There’s always the option of doing whatever it is outside, where different standards apply. I don’t know what they made of that advice, but they were seldom rowdy at meals or in the house.
An off-island friend told me about a visit from a neighbor with a little girl who laid waste to her house, scaring the cat, banging the piano, and re-arranging the knitting. “Damn hippie mother,” she said. “Has issues with authority herself so she can’t stand punishing her kid.”
I think punishment is passé. Maybe sometimes the situation demands it, but I think it’s an indication that you’ve lost control of yourself. It’s not that hard to get your kids to be allies in their own upbringing. Every kid wants to mature into power and glory. The fewer self-imposed walls they run into, the better all around. They know that.
What to advise Ms. Rainbow?
First of all, figure out who you are and what you want out of life. Recognize that you should take steps to actualize yourself, and that your children are not the arena in which to play out your personal issues.
Next, observe your children. How can you facilitate their blossoming? Act from your own strengths, help your children with their strengths. Address your own weaknesses, but, in my opinion, it is seldom useful to concentrate on your children’s weaknesses. Much of what an adult sees as a weakness in a child is simply developmental. If you need to address something, work from their strengths.
Recognize that one of the strongest drives is towards competence. Ordinarily, people, including children, don’t want to feel out of control. Help them with strategies for finding stuff out, for playing, for dealing with pets, for interacting with strangers.
Be alert for toxic patterns in your parenting. In my observations, cranky (or incompetent) parents who don’t believe in hitting their kids sometimes resort to passive-aggressiveness, guilt-tripping, reasoning, controlling behavior, or opting out. You know you don’t want to be that person. In tense situations, just announce clear, enforceable limits in simple words, and then enforce them. No fair mentioning it later.
Learn more about parenting. I’d go here.
Don't Be a Crepe Hanger · 62 days ago by Julie
What’s the biggest constraint in your life right now?
What would you be doing if that impediment wasn’t there?
Why aren’t you doing it anyway?