The quaintest swings.

As I worked around the house today, repairing, cleaning, moving things to where they belong, reclaiming space post-divorce, I ended up thinking expansively about my life. This led me to affirmations I'd not heeded previously, but am otherwise proud of. Later as I cooked dinner, sauteing onions and shiitake mushrooms with some garlic from the garden, my plan was to have it over arugula with tomatoes, also from the garden, and to augment with Israeli feta.

I found myself wondering that I can grow beans, and enjoy them fresh off the vine, better by far than I can get anywhere else. I can grow tomatoes, and though I struggle with early blight, the fruit I get is astoundingly good compared to any I can buy. I enjoy many flavors, complexities that thrill me as I eat, and after sauteing the onions, throwing the mushrooms in for their turn, I decided to add a chopped fig from the tree given to me by a dear friend... I knew this salad would be special in ways that I could never impart to some people. It would be special, like all salads, and all meals I enjoyed making to nourish myself.

A great love of my life gave me a book many years ago, Gardens, An Essay on the Human Condition. The opening salvo is, "Human beings are not made to look too intently at the Medusa head of history... . This is not a shortcoming on our part: on the contrary, our reluctance to let history's realities petrify us underlies much of what makes human life bearable: our religious impulses, our poetic and Utopian imagination, our moral ideals, our metaphysical projections, our storytelling, our aesthetic transfigurations of the real, our passion for games, our delight in nature. Albert Camus once remarked, “Poverty kept me from thinking all was well under the sun and in history; the sun taught me that history is not everything”. The truth is an uncompromising bastion of hope for me. I’m a humanist, and the truth is that I’ve been thinking about this person, perhaps too much lately. I’d not read the book in years, and upon the inspiration to write today, the aforementioned wonder at growing beans, tomatoes, arugula, etc., I found myself naturally thinking of her. I grabbed the book and read the preface, what I quoted above, and found it strikingly relevant to what I’d been thinking all evening as I contemplated the work I was doing around the house, and then my dinner. Go fucking figure! Some use the word synchronicity, but that’s too clock-like for me. I love clocks, but links like this are outside of time.

I often wish I were better read - and over the years I’ve listened during my commute to some of the books I always felt I should read, the Russian masterpieces, the highly derided capitalists, more of the works of greats like Mark Twain, the early feminists, Charlotte Perkins Gilman for one. I’ve digressed.

During the making of my salad, these thoughts settled deeper and stronger, and I found myself feeling proud of my nature that adapts and adopts better ways to do things. I’ve learned to be utterly open minded and to welcome new ways and understandings, when intelligent or obvious.

Further, I realized I love the mess spiders make in their work of living. Their ‘mess’ is beautiful, whether the wrapping of their prey in some elaborate weave, or their intricate webs. They are a part of a cycle I feel I understand intrinsically.

I love buying records I don’t know, and taking them home and enjoying that I don’t know them. They are regularly amazing to me. Tonight I listened to Ruth Laredo’s interpretations of Rachmaninoff’s solo works for piano... whether significant or not, it was wonderful.

As I made my salad, I thought about several things that I'm quite proud of, and that are now so natural, that I can barely believe anyone feels differently. Washing my arugula, I found a worm, and accidentally washed it down the drain, quickly apologizing, but while I did so, I thought fondly of the beautiful moth that would have been it's parent, a white marvel with a black dot on it's wing. I thought too of the ants who had been parading across my counter or floor for a couple weeks. I don't feed them like pets, and I do clean up and try to get rid of them, just so they don't get so bold as to infiltrate my cupboards, but I also talk to them, and encourage them to stay outside, because whatever they're finding inside (cat food, butter left on a knife, a spatula I'd stirred last evening's meal with) would be gone very soon. Equilibrium is best. And bees and wasps and hornets - when in the garden, I often find myself surrounded by buzzing insects working their sexy wonders with the flowers that will be my vegetables and fruits, and those that are the dizzying array of scents in my herb gardens, lavenders, mints, dill, thyme, sage, and many others. I feel a part of a greater existence when among these wonders, and I find I’d lost my fear of any of them a long time ago.

My life is a delicious soup of hurdles and realizations, sure - mistakes were made - but I don’t like the idea of regret. There is truth in chickens - they lack particular prideful practices, yet strut as if proud, and they at least entertain, and damn if they don’t squeeze eggs out for us to eat, though, of course it’s obvious they’re squeezing them out to raise chicks... purpose is confusing. I’ve fucked up a couple times, and yes, I’ve had some real trouble reconciling my humanism with the humans I’ve encountered here and there, and yet one, one particular human is a marvel to me, and I simply nod, and get it, and agree, and know, and see, and feel, and want.

Sex Education (the show) gave us a new season recently, and it came and went in a few days. This unrequited, or perhaps nervous - love between two main characters is charming, and painful. The excellent writers have conveyed to us that they are made for each other, and that tugs at our heart strings as we recall the quaint ones who were made for us, and sometimes got away. The season ended with them parting yet again, and it made me long for resolution.

My expansive day is not over yet. I’ve moved sewing machines to their temporary home as I contemplate selling, using, admiring them. I’m looking into home improvements... maybe just to sell, maybe to further engulf myself in domesticity. I made maple syrup once, heated with my own labor, fixed my own cars, sold shit to make some cash, and imagined all I could and would do. I work now, a lot, and make pots that go unsold. Many hundreds have accumulated, maybe thousands, and my retirement is in those pots and others I have yet to make.

Here I am with a long list of projects, the patio, garden fence, outdoor bathtub, pizza oven, chicken coupe (a car for chickens?), greater gardens, more pottery, swing time, a small deck, more south-west facing windows, and I'm thinking a lot about how to proceed, using fewer resources, and enjoying more of my natural surroundings.

Dad - September 11, 2018

Tom Francis - Thomas McKay Francis - Dad - passed away suddenly this afternoon. I was fortunate to have seen my parents twice this summer, the last time only a few weeks ago at 'camp'.

In return for all he gave us over the last 50+ years, I was able to fix his computer when needed, help him move a thing or two when visiting, fix a roof or build something, and give him some things to talk about with friends, but not much else. He was a rock, a very calm and collected rock, methodical, never rushed. He was thoughtful and generous, and he was a great dad who moved gracefully through life. I regularly think of the many skills, and the knowledge and care that I possess that is directly attributable to him... and the confidence to take anything apart and usually to fix it, sometimes within a few years, but often much quicker.

I'm not sure how he'd have felt about this post - he checked Facebook, but didn't participate, though he often knew what was going on because he paid attention. A Facebook post isn't special in any way, but one last thing I can do is to immortalize him here. He really deserves to be remembered and known.

He worked steadily his entire life. I don't know of any friend of his who would not readily agree about how generous he was. He helped when help was needed, he volunteered, showed up with tools and/or know-how - I remember when a kid being the last ones to leave most events because we had to help clean up. That's how he was. He hated to be seen laughing, but sometimes had to anyway, like in the first picture below. He was well spoken, but didn't like to speak. He gave the family a few words at this year's McKay Day Reunion with a goofy hat on. Maybe those words should have been 'Start your engines', but they were actually 'welcome to the McKay Day Reunion' as he passed the baton to me. He was the senior clan member of his maternal great-grandfather's descendants.

It's clear that I could go on and on, and I hope he knew that any one of us can go on and on about all he's given us.

So now he's immortal as befits a truly good and humble man.

Too much of nothing...

I wake up daily to the marvel of this world full of possibilities, miracles really, like the chestnut tree blooming in the back yard and scenting the entire yard with it's utterly natural perfume.

That's wonderful, but a question haunts me, and I suspect it haunts many people when not distracted from everything I write about below. What is all this distraction with growth and stuff? I like stuff... and have too much stuff, but I'm talking about commerce, economics, the world of products and choices. More products are being added to stores, more techniques to entice shoppers to buy little pickup items they don't need, more 'styles', more 'NEW!' slogans, more claims of improvement, more smaller portions in more packaging, and more solutions to problems we don't have, like fidget spinners. Imagine a time before there were 12 brands of pasta sauce and 12 choices of flavors for each brand. And the problem I have with all of this is three-fold:

One - we have more distractions in our lives - more stuff to store, to discard when it breaks, to feel bad about knowing we did not need it, to feel bad about the minute it breaks and we realize we were kind of duped into buying a piece of junk, to just plain think about. This is not to pretend that we don't have free will, but that we are a part of a ginormous system that makes it all seem OK to continually make, consume/buy, discard. It is not OK.

Two - we're increasing demand for raw materials, creating jobs and industries that should not exist, and we're perpetuating a nightmare of disposal problems that are as-yet unresolved - because they can't be. The amount of trash produced is still increasing, because populations continue to grow, and production and consumption continue to increase.

Three - increasing production, increasing wealth, increasing, increasing, increasing..., cannot continue. The thought that we might stop economic growth frighten's economists and politicians alike, but the plain truth is that we are surrounded by a finite resource, and literally 100's of millions of people work daily to use that resource up by literally using what's under ground to make stuff, and by using more of the surface of the planet for increasingly more destructive purposes.

Perhaps the problem that haunts us is the interplay between our discomfort with the knowledge that we can't continue to 'increase' while also sustaining the planet. Because this is obvious, it is troubling, like dumping chemicals in a stream, it is bound to have affects that we can't readily see - and yet some people continue to dump chemicals, with their fingers in their ears whenever the suggestion of this eventual destruction is raised.

Social scientists call it 'cognitive dissonance' and while the small scale of this is exemplified by justifying stealing paper clips from work because co-workers are doing it, the much more profound and greater example is the continuation of growth at the expense of our own health and the health of the planet, because that is the system we've believed in for millennia. We continue on a trajectory that will clearly destroy the planet one day, heedless of the acknowledgment of this truth, because nearly every system we live under currently forces this agenda forward.

I try to solve problems by going to their roots. My most profound related question to my opening question is, 'how did we get stuck in belief systems that perpetuate the fallacy that perpetual growth is OK?' Religions have typically 'blessed' increasing the flock, for example. 'Markets' panic if growth falls below a certain level. Politicians can't get elected if they campaign on making a community stronger by halting growth. Companies lose shareholders and value if they don't increase their production or grow their bottom line. And yet if we all stopped growing, invested in better, healthier living, disposed with the rules that demand growth, fostered new understandings of our humble reliance on a limited resource, created corporations that provide the products and services we need, rather than inventing needs we don't have, wouldn't we grow happier? If the population decreased a little bit, wouldn't that leave more of everything for everyone? I say this not as a proponent of eugenics or even communism, but of a more conscientious approach to procreation, to production, to growth.

It seems obvious that all but a few of us are stuck in the system that forces us to scramble, to buy to survive. Mortgages, unsatisfying work, 'keeping up with the Jones' ', insurance that increasingly doesn't serve our needs, politicians dividing us up like tasks, and corporations keeping it complicated to continue to grow. I've seen jobs where no job should exist, brokers between brokers and makers, employees in place, it seems, to create more paperwork and confusion, to maintain the need for their jobs, professional obfuscaters, frivolous law suits... where does it end? Can a person be happy and live as a conservationist? Many believe those who live in ways that address these problems are happier. I would agree.

Overcoming the education system that has taught everyone that growth is good is the only answer to this problem. In countries where conservation is treated more seriously and legislated, they have found it provides better lives to their citizens. These countries are more efficient, less violent, and in some cases have zero waste. If it works for one country, it can work for all countries.

In the US we not only have religion encouraging us to grow, but we have the religion of antiquated economic theories that demand growth to function. Growth as an economic goal should have long ago been relegated to the dustbin. Instead it remains strong, a huge plank in every political platform for nearly all countries on Earth. Our economy should be based on human beings, not on products and services.

Picture this microcosm: A restaurant that serves a community that employs xx number of people. The community is static - minor population changes over many years. The restaurant serves the same people, employs the same number of people, uses the same amounts of local food, keeps the same number of farmers in business, uses reusable wares, and sustainable products. In our current economy, that restaurant is a threat, that town is considered a failure or an opportunity to exploit. In a smarter economy, that town would be a success, the people employed, everyone would know their role. Some might leave, some might arrive, children will be born, elders will pass away. Sustaining the farms that provide for the community, educating doctors to take care of the community, teachers to teach the community, ensures a place for everyone. Assuming anyone can come or go at any time, people will be happy. This scenario is too often portrayed in dystopian fictions with laws that keep people from being free... these are fictions that defend our current destructive system. The pressure to grow is what upsets that community, and upsets the balance, and adds collective pressure to the planet. And growth is exponentially more frequent than it's counterpart the world over.

We have to change the system that can't function without growth, stop the production of stuff that nobody needs, and educate people to know the difference between happiness and collecting.

SPUG - another great, telling moment in history

This year, my favorite call to counter capitalism came via Treehugger online... http://www.treehugger.com/culture/brief-history-society-prevention-useless-giving.html. It's about a 1912 effort to curb useless giving at Christmas, but you can read all about that at Treehugger... 

Each year, something surfaces in the media about over-consumption at this time of year. Our family has, for the most part, shed gifts, since we're spending the second half of our lives trying to get rid of useless, shiny stuff that nobody wants or ever wanted, but that someone felt compelled to give. I prefer the gift of beauty that arrives unexpected, and that accompanies us every day in our families and friends.

What's eye-opening about this story from Treehugger is that it demonstrates the ability of a few to get a message to a community, then to the nation, and the demonstration of the right of a person to stand up and speak his/her mind and truth, a right we seem to have nearly forgotten. Today with cyber-Monday following black Friday and days of shopping nom-sense meant to attract consumers to retailers, I feel a kind of desperation from the retailers - they know that without them, without their customers filling shelves and stockings and cars and offices with low grade electro-chaff, gag gifts, and the latest blenders and other kitchen conveniences, that the economy will tank. 

Bush II wasn't wrong when he suggested we could shop ourselves out of the recession, but he shouldn't have said it. It's a depressing thought, spending one's savings to help the country regain the bubble. Many of us treated him like a capitalist pig for saying it, and I guess a president, (even if by nefarious means) suggesting it to a country is a bit like telling the nation to go down to the crossroads, make a deal with the devil, and you'll come back singing like Placido. I suppose if you believe capitalism will free your soul or make you happy or fill the stomachs of the poor, if given the chance, you'd be considered naive. But, sadly, our economy doesn't run on good will, and we don't have gross national happiness indexes. What we're left with are importers, wholesalers, middle-persons, marketers, lawyers, retailers, and consumers who mostly make their money by getting a cut of your money at the cost of a great and massive distraction from what is important, living.

Think of this. The USB thingy that charges your phone cost about $.04 to make, and you pay $5 or more for it. 125 times the manufacturing cost, and retailers say they have low margins, so where is that $4.96 going? YEP - it is that crazy. Even building materials come from all over the world and are processed products like squeeze margarine, and the more complicated products get, the less well we feel about our stuff. We lose comprehension of what is around us, where and how it came to be. We CAN'T make things to last, because the economy would collapse. 

So keep this in mind: When you get excited to see your brand of coffee on sale with buy-one-get-one free, don't be fooled. You are paying for the free one each time you buy the regular priced product before and after the sale. Sales, freebies, free gifts, coupons - they're all built into the price of what you buy. And what you might consider is this: My coffee would be cheaper all the time if not for the buy-one-get-one-free deal... and coupons and such tactics. You are just playing the game that the manufacturers and marketers want you to play. We're sheep, easily herded, easily led, and we're distracted by the notion that we're as clever as the retailers. But they're not offering the deals to be clever, they're offering them because we buy more when they do.  

Critical thinking: We do some, but not much, which is why we buy more gifts each year than the year before, which is why the GNP rises annually or we feel like we're falling apart, which is why we still can't see the wall that is the limit of what our planet can handle.

Depressing?  I believe that knowledge is power, so it's encouraging to be 'in the know'.

This holiday season, take to heart the meaning of whatever you believe to be true to your soul/heart/happiness. Is it a 'better deal'? Is it fulfilling the perceived need of a relative to have the latest device? Might it'd be better to simply be happy to be alive, to have relatives and friends, to see snow coming down, to smell and breath clean air, to not worry about where to put the latest appliance, to not give a shit about keeping up with the Jones'? I bought some gifts, and all the time I'm buying gifts, I make sure I'm filling an actual need, solving a problem, otherwise I'm more likely to share a glass of wine over no thing and be happy. 

Happy holidays to all, may they be clutter free, mindful, soulful, and devoid of material distractions. 

Nectarine juice

You must let the juice drip down your chin at least once. It is quite therapeutic, I think. I find myself neatening up, frustrated when I drop a berry on the floor... 'argh, gotta wipe that up!', and when I am busy, that dust that builds up in so short a time and must be sucked up and away to keep a keen house is just another source of angst.

Today, I was in the middle of a project, but hungry, and saw the nectarines on the counter watching me work. I reached over and grabbed the softer of them, and took a bite. I was doused with sweet juice, my beard now sticky and the window where it squirted eyeing me, waiting for my reaction.

It was a learning experience, a life lesson, and I smiled to myself and to the walls and thought, 'hey baby, let the juice flow.' If you've read my 'other stuff', you are probably wondering what I am on about, but soon you'll nod and know.

Last week I was out returning home from a midweek appointment and decided to take the shortcut past the local orchard and farm store. I needed eggs and milk, so I decided to see if they had both. They did. Both top quality and local. Since I am making a big effort to eliminate plastic from my life - that is, any future plastic, I bought my milk that day in the glass quart bottle, like it used to arrive on our doorstep when I was a child, except this one had a plastic top (grrrrr). I bought eggs in a paper carton, local too, free range, natural ingredient fed (not organic) eggs. And I bought a little paper container of nectarines, yes, one of which doused me only a short while ago.

I went to the counter to pay, and the teenage cashier looked at me and said, "you realize there is a $2.00 deposit on the bottle?" I said I did, and proceeded to get my wallet out. I looked at her and asked, "do people freak out about that?" to which she responded, "Oh yeah, you have no idea!" She was right, I did have no idea. I couldn't imagine people having a problem with paying $2.00 to be sure they brought a bottle back to be reused. And they would either get the $2.00 back or take another bottle away without paying again. But that was the naive me talking - any outlay of money upsets some people, which brings me to sadness 2. Why does the good food have to cost more than the bad food? We all know why - economies of scale and subsidies, but the irony is that huge profits go to corporate leaders who produce that subsidized substitute for good food, while local farms struggle to stay in business producing actual healthy food.

Lately I've been reaping the rewards of my own garden, and of local farmers. I went to The farmer's market, you know, the one Michelle Obama spurred to growth near the Whitehouse, a couple blocks from my office. The peaches I got there a week earlier were perfect, and some had true character.

This guy was yelling from the vendors booth for me to come and get him. I know it's a he... I can just tell. And so he and four others came home with me and I enjoyed them all, then the chipmonk outside enjoyed the pip of one of them as well, the pip I had just planted to see if I could get a whole tree of these beauties some day! Ah well, I'll put a cage around it next time.

So you see, I've been 'working' to buy more local foods, and spent more time preparing my own garden this year too so that I'd have my own food. I have a dozen or more cukes in the fridge ready to pickle one night this week, and I've not bought greens in a month now for all I have in the garden. I made blackberry wine a couple weeks ago, blackberry infused vinegar too, and some simple juice of blackberries that I canned to use at a later date as well. Wild blackberries.

I'm happy because I feel good about being able to support farmers and to grow some of my own food. I want to grow more, want to grow it all, want to be on the land, responsible for it, because it supports me. I'm usually so far removed from all the stuff I eat, that it is dispassionate consumption, a hollow sustenance. This last week, the juice, the fresh produce, the smart and good milk and the determination I've gained have all brought new light to my living, and I encourage you all to give it a try. Hit the brakes (rationally) next time you see a local farm stand. Wash whatever you buy, because even if local, it is usually also sprayed, but it is fresh, and there is nothing better than local and fresh produce.

Easy peasy, saving the world

One bite at a time, I'm saving the planet. In a past blog, I noted some of the rather mundane things I do to save/conserve energy, most of which are just plain old energy saving common sense. Like hanging clothes out. When I can't, I dry them with air - it's the heating element that really soaks up the energy, so put it on low/off and dry with cool air. It works!

This is me gearing up to hang clothes.

I have a 50 gallon drum under one gutter downspout, and the other night, in a single night of combined storms and light rain, it filled that bucket to the brim and overflowed. Today, I dipped a bucket in and watered all my gardens with that water.

Which brings me to my favorite environmental trick. Gardening - not necessarily for show, but for food. With pretty minimal purchases (some organic garden soil) I managed to raise enough lettuce and arugula to have fresh salad whenever I want, while also able to give some away. Cukes started coming two days ago, I've had five picked so far with many to come. Beans didn't do well this year - I ended up with a single string bean plant growing. And today I harvested it's 6 beans, but they were fantastic. There are hundreds of tomatoes ripening, from small through giant, and I hope to be eating those in a week as the first have just begun to blush.

Then there are the wild blackberries on the west side of my yard and the cultivated raspberries and the herbs, dill, basil, oregano, a couple kinds of mints.

This year I have lots of mulch (not the bagged kind) and weeper hoses buried in the mulch to keep the ground wet without above ground evaporation. I plan to install a water tank at some point to store water in the future too, and eventually hope to waste very little water. It is an evolving exercise in practicality, and a bit of fun and hard work too.

So you see, it's easy to save the world!

The next blush

It's upon us, the next series of blushes, nature ripening another round of fruits, flower, vegetable...

The tomatoes are showing the first color, the wild blackberries are ripening one at a time, but there are thousands. Look closely, there are large diagonal raindrops in this picture.

The peach lily is blooming as if aroused to a new height this year, perfect weather, rain, sun, balance.

This is one of my favorite flowers of all time, and now, I wait each year for them to bloom. This year they are welcoming July again, right on time.

The cucumbers are coming alive too, dozens of flowers, a few cukes ready for the weekend.