Desperately Seeking Simplicity

Public discourse

2008-09-02T08:15:00.000-07:00

Let me begin by lifting up my former father-in-law. He and I are on opposite sides of the political spectrum, but he is always interested in my opinion, always listens respectfully to what I say, and he is no one's puppet. He goes out of his way to learn from others, especially those who feel or think or believe differently than he does.

He and people like him are the best hope for this country.

I have been so disappointed this week in every side's discourse, if you can call it that, around Sarah Palin's presumptive nomination as vice-president. From the Democrats' side, it's been shocking to read that she should be "forced," as a conservative, to stay home and take care of her kids. What, we only believe in feminism for women who think like us? It's one thing to call hypocrisy on Phyllis Schlafly, who really did advocate for women to stay home while she enjoyed a distinguished public career, but as far as I know, Palin has not said similar things. And what about the esteemed Mr. Palin? Doesn't he bear some responsibility for rearing the children as well? Or does that automatically redound to Mommy?

It's been even more appalling to read hints that Palin bore her Down syndrome child solely for political purposes. Here I thought the meaning of pro-choice (which is legally extended, thank God, even to those who are anti-choice) was that women have a choice, not an obligation to abort. My most charitable response is that such sentiments are counterproductive.

Of course the Republicans and right-leaning pundits have had some pretty boneheaded things to say too. I'm sorry if I can't believe that being mayor of Wasilla teaches you any more about how the Senate works than your average high school civics class, or that I should do anything but laugh out loud when someone suggests that Alaska is right next door to Russia and therefore qualifies as a kind of classroom in foreign policy (hey, did you forget about Canada? or is that just a state in your book?). But at least nothing I've seen from them this week has made me ashamed of my humanity.

Both sides get demerits for discussing Palin's, uh, physical attributes. Really? Is this the 21st century?

My prayer is to be a little more like FFIL.

Puppies, puppies, puppies

2008-07-18T15:56:00.000-07:00

Meet Hazel, the newest member of the Simple family. She is the sweetest, calmest puppy I have ever met. She is also the smartest, chewiest puppy I have ever met, which means that my brand new copy of Walter Brueggemann's The Word Militant now has a considerable chunk out of its hard cover.

At least she has good taste.

When it hits the fan (Or, who are the people in your neighborhood?)

2008-07-01T07:04:00.000-07:00

When I talk to my friends back in the rural northwest, where an anti-government, quasi-apocalyptic ethic has reigned for decades, there is a common beginning to sentences: "When the [stuff] hits the fan," meaning, in this case, when the economy falls apart, when there is no petroleum energy to rely on, when food and water sources dry up, when infrastructure crumbles. When, not if.

I have to say, although I'm no conspiracy theorist, a combination of childhood traumas and adult misadventures has always predisposed me to think this scenario could happen. Self-reliance, or what I think of as tribal reliance, is a virtue in my book, and everything I've written about in this blog, and most of the decisions I've made in my lifetime, can trace their heritage to that belief. Over time, I've modified my vision of the Good, so I can see grace in other kinds of living, but I remain fused to an ideal of doing for myself where possible.

Longtime readers of this sporadic blog will remember that last year I tried to cut my driving in half compared to the previous year's mileage. I shaved quite a few miles off but failed to reach my goal, and put most of the blame at the feet of Suburubia. If work and school and play are all 7-10 miles away, I reasoned, and public transportation remains largely out of reach, no wonder I can't stop driving. Houses in Suburubia are approximately 200K to 400K less expensive than comparable houses in the city, so moving is not an option (and when I say comparable I do not mean opulent). I have grown accustomed to grousing about being "stuck" in the suburbs, although I love my house and its burgeoning collection of fruit trees. Thus, Suburubia has seemed at best like an inconvenient vessel for a convenient place to live.

But I am a bit of a crank (see above), and when the national anxiety level starts to rise over gas prices and suburban living, I am motivated to think against the grain.

This is all a fancy and long-winded prelude to a simple tale: last night I decided to find out how many places to get food (not including my back yard) were within easy walking distance from my house. "Easy" is defined here as how far Progeny is willing to walk without whining or wishing out loud he were playing Yu-Gi-Oh instead. He and I have sometimes walked to the Blimpies that is a part of the gas station convenience store on the main road, but I was looking for something a little less generic and more nourishing. I found--

* Innumerable convenience stores in a half-mile stretch (eight? ten? is this about brand loyalty? a better selection of malt liquor?)
* Three wings places
* A better than average Jamaican restaurant
* A homestyle-cooking-to-go joint
* Two iffy American-Chinese places, one serving pizza as well
* An Ethiopian sports bar
* A KFC/Taco Bell combo
* A slightly horrifying grocery store, which nevertheless has organic milk, a little bit of produce, and a great selection of Bosnian and Vietnamese food items
* There were also two package stores and a "gentlemen's club," but I did not stop to inquire about the availability of food.

Now, I have been to a few of these venues before, and driven past and made note of each of them at some point or another. But I had grown used to thinking them as part of the suburban landscape, only worth escaping. Now that gas is $4 a gallon I can finally see what has been right in front of my face. This too is a place where people live, and eat, and recreate, and work. It's time for me to stop being a tourist in my own neighborhood.

I buy nothing!

2008-04-09T16:40:00.000-07:00

Well, my neck is considerably better, although it will never be a hundred percent. I guess that's like saying I will never be 28 again. I've been able to go out and plant trees and transplant bulbs, which makes me considerably happier.

April may be the brokest month, so it's an interesting experiment to celebrate Buy Nothing Month. Many people are familiar with Buy Nothing Day, which occurs every year on Black Friday, the day after the U.S. Thanksgiving. The name has always sounded suspiciously like Black Monday or Black Tuesday to me, although I think it's meant to evoke quite a different feeling.

It's one thing not to buy anything for a day, but a month is turning out to be quite another. Exceptions are made for necessities: food, medicines or medical equipment, fuel, and--luckily for me--gardening supplies if used to grow food. There are no official exceptions for clothing, birthday presents, media, or entertainment, although Crunchy Chicken has kindly set up a Sunday confessional at her blog for us to expiate our marketing sins.

Actually, the confessional turns out to be the reason for this post. It has been fascinating to see what various people of a simplicity turn think are necessities and what are not. Some of the supplicants itemize what to me seem like huge outlays, with accompanying justifications, while others confess things that I wouldn't even give any thought to before buying: three pens, vitamins, postage. One of the ongoing conversations concerns eating out, whether it's more or less wasteful than eating at home, whether or not the benefits outweigh the drawbacks and so forth. It's all very interesting food for thought. What are your necessities?

(P.S. The title of this post turns out to be a big fat lie, for I too have sinned!)

Surfeit

2008-03-21T06:52:00.000-07:00

The books all say you're not supposed to prune your camellias until after they've bloomed, but mine are so spectacularly loaded this year that the branches have begun to split. So I went out with the pruning shears and tried to mitigate some of the damage. Branch after branch of lovely flowers fell to the ground, and the bush is still full (although looking kind of scalped).

The service on Good Friday in my congregation is an Adoration of the Cross. Instead of the standard bulletin, everyone is given a rose, and during worship, we place our roses on a rough-hewn cross in the middle of the sanctuary, where the altar table usually stands. In the old Roman Catholic mass, "Prosternimur corpore ante crucem, mente ante Dominium" (While we bend down in body before the cross we bend down in spirit before God).

I wish I could bring my camellias.

A healthy planet for all

2008-03-18T06:21:00.001-07:00

While this blog is on hiatus due to a herniated disk (mine, not the blog's), I'd like to direct you to an article in the always-thought-provoking magazine The Sun. In it, David Kupfer interviews human rights advocate Van Jones, who limns the links between environmentalism and social justice much better than I ever could.

Once again, a hat tip to Colin Beavan.

Find of the Week

2008-03-07T04:44:00.000-08:00

Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook, by Beth Hensperger and Julie Kaufmann, 2005--I was looking for something on my favorite online independent bookseller recently, and saw this on their top 10 sellers list, half price. Like many people of my age and station, I have a 20 year-old crock pot in the cupboard that I use primarily for soaking and cooking dry beans, because I can't be bothered to babysit them on the stove. Since I am making a concerted effort this year to eat less insta-food (i.e., shells and cheese three times a week), I decided to take a chance on this book for inspiration and convenience.

Reader, I am inspired. This is not the cream of mushroom soup casserole slow cooker of yore. The authors give recipes for breakfast foods, rice dishes, side dishes, meat dishes (if you're into that sort of thing), desserts (mostly combinations of stewed fruits--yum!), and of course, the old standby bean pot. So far Progeny and I have made homemade applesauce, overnight oatmeal with last year's frozen blueberries, and roasted root vegetables. It's not that we couldn't make these things without a slow cooker, and if I didn't have one I wouldn't rush right out to buy one, but the fact that they're so much easier to make encourages me to make better use of this resource that was otherwise gathering dust behind the toaster. I don't want to betray copyright, so I won't reproduce it here, but I'm excited to try "Your Own Blend Overnight Porridge." See if your library has this gem.

Brrr

2008-02-28T09:13:00.000-08:00

Subarubia had a big gas leak Tuesday night, leaving 2000 residents without heat. Although the gas company claims to have restored service, in reality they need to go door to door to reconnect everyone individually, for obvious reasons. I am car blogging today because I don't want to miss the technician, but it's below 40 in my house right now (the thermostat only goes down to 40), which is a little chilly for sedentary work.

There goes the idea of making bread today.

Living in the material world

2008-02-26T09:47:00.000-08:00

Colin Beavan, over at No Impact Man, has this post about his coffee date with Juliet Schor, whose work includes Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. He asks Schor if Americans are too materialist, and she replies that the problem stems rather from our not being materialist enough--in other words, we don't pay enough attention to the material right in front of us, and hence misuse it and throw it away, whether it be (and here I'm embroidering) in the form of consumer goods or people.

I think she's right on the money. The false dichotomy between spiritual and material is responsible for at some of the worst excesses in our society. As I said in my comments on the post, to value spiritual values over material values leads rather quickly to, for example, the James Watt apocalyptic view of creation, where depredation doesn't matter because the rapture's coming soon anyway. Yet the spiritual traditions that we commonly think of as being most least materialist are all about giving material its proper weight, neither too much nor too little. Chop wood, carry water. In Christian terms, if the spiritual is all that matters, why bother giving God a body?

By the way, the last time I wrote about Beavan, I was rather uncharitable. I've been following his blog now for several months, and I think he's the real deal.

Alter ego

2008-02-22T07:02:00.000-08:00

My presence in the blogosphere these days is mostly limited to making unhelpful comments on other people's blogs. I have seemingly become everyone's environmental harpy, a role that I do not relish, and the beams in my own eye and practice could build a McMansion. However, and this is where I struggle, I think I actually do have a body of simplicity knowledge that might be helpful to someone, if only I can figure out the right forum. This blog was supposed to provide that to me, but I can't seem to find a voice that isn't pure preachiness. Maybe I need to go with that? Obviously there is a soapbox reformer inside of me who is dying to come out.

Let me begin this new career with a rant that I've been forcing back for months, and that is "how to be a water conservative." Common wisdom in Subarubia and surround is that, in the midst of a severe drought, the best thing to do with water is to make sure it goes as directly as possible back to the river whence it came. Considering that my state has been in considerable trouble over its bogarting of shared resources, this makes a kind of sense. In order to meet obligations to folks downstream, we treat and return the water we use.

Only, a river isn't an aqueduct. Treating it as though it were is an exceedingly short-term solution. In a healthy system, water returns to the ground, which holds it like a sponge and bit by bit releases some of it back to the river, some of it into biomass (a not-inconsiderable reservoir), some of it to evaporation (i.e., rinse and repeat). Holding water in the ground is a buffer against both drought and flooding, which is why paving over massive areas of land increases the dangers of both. Obviously that doesn't mean that the best expenditure of potable water is to water the lawn or the golf course, but it does suggest that recycling graywater toward native plants and trees, or storing and using rainwater, is not "irresponsible," as a letter to the local Big Newspaper suggested. Unfortunately, mine seems to be a minority opinion.

Plant dreams

2008-02-13T16:16:00.000-08:00

http://flickr.com/photos/vsny/

I don't even have all the fruit trees in their proper homes yet (it's 32 degrees and drizzly), and I have ordered more plants. Are you ready? An American hazelnut (I planted its sibling last year, so it's not as lonely as it sounds), a Sitka alder (I'm a very long way from Sitka, but alders grow well in clay and are nitrogen fixers), and [fanfare please] a dwarf date palm. The last is a total experiment, but even if it doesn't flower, I think it'll look cool off the screen porch.

So, as of some indeterminate but near date in the future, these will be my edible or medicinal plantings:

Black haw
Elder
Black Arkansas apple
Callaway crab
North Star cherries
Rabbiteye blueberries
Pineapple
Saffron crocus
Passionflower (Maypop)
American hazel
Valerian
Ashwaganda
Astragalus
Elecampane
Garlic
Fennel
Daikon
Dwarf date palm

I'm on the fence about whether annuals will follow. Perennial gardening gives so much more bang for the buck, and it's beginning to be true that local vegetables are easy to obtain, either at farmers' markets or from all of my friends whom I turned on to CSAs.

It's a start. For the last few evenings, however, I've been curled up in the easy chair making lists of items for next year: a Jeffrey pine, a couple of pawpaws, a sweet woodruff, bulbs for decoration, and a nice black cohosh. . . . Oh, and a good hedge shears.

Corporate Intervention

2008-02-11T06:42:00.000-08:00

Crunchy Chicken has an excellent post today about Proctor & Gamble's campaign to keep South African girls in school (which they might otherwise miss) during their periods by providing menstrual products and even constructing new bathroom facilities for the schools. I don't watch enough tv to have heard about this before, but it sounds benevolent, doesn't it?

Not if the project a) creates a new and not insignificant source of pollution by incinerating and b) creates a dependency on consumer products that the girls cannot afford--think free infant formula, although of course the scale of perniciousness is different.

Before you say "Whoa, whoa, Simpleton, isn't this another example of disparaging use in the developing world of products you yourself enjoy?" Mais non, gentle reader. (If you have a significant buy-in to cultural "ew" buttons, you may want to avert your eyes during the next paragraph.) I've been using homemade non-disposables for years. If you're not a seamster, there are lots of other options out there. Crunchy mentions the Diva cup, while Etsy carries some more conventional alternatives (which are cute and hip, by the way). And so Crunchy's blogpost suggests that sewing may ultimately be a better alternative than being buried in paper products.

I'm not trying to talk you into anything here. If you've considered the alternatives and have a system that works for you, rock on. And clearly there may be other factors involved in African life (lack of water for laundry comes to mind) that make disposable products more feasible in the long run. Even still, my response is to look for the cynical side of corporate "benevolence."

Soul of a Man

2008-02-10T17:54:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the best antidote to despair is Bruce Cockburn. Oh, that and 300mg of Wellbutrin.

Too much in my head

2008-01-30T10:18:00.001-08:00

I am having to write yet another in a series of autobiographical essays in this school/scholarship/candidacy process. I know that it is a genre that I need to master for reasons beyond the moment, but I hate it. I hate it. I am not good at self-revelation in a vacuum. Ask me any direct question, and I can answer at length, but I will size up my answer as part of a dialogue rather than a soliloquy.

I met someone the other evening who shares (no, exceeds!) my interest in growing things, and we had a multi-hour conversation about fruit trees. In fact, we closed the neighborhood coffeeshop. While we were talking about jujubes and cherries, I was on confident ground, but when he asked me about my experience at seminary, I started hemming and hawing. So many conflicting emotions, and no way to do justice to all of them. There is too much going on in my head; that's one part of the blogpost title, but I also live too much in my head these days, and not enough experientially. It seems to me that I need to do a little metaphorical trepanation, let some of my demons out and some fresh air in.

Monday, Monday

2008-01-26T07:17:00.000-08:00

Reverend Mommy passed along a little bit of wisdom that just charmed me: Monday was officially the gloomiest day of the year. I guess I had a bit of a delayed response; my gloomiest day was probably Wednesday or Thursday, but I'm happy to know it's not just me and my broody northern genes.

Without a compass

2008-01-26T06:44:00.000-08:00

I have been reading The Golden Compass aloud to Progeny, who is not quite seven.

I'm smart enough to know that this is not really appropriate reading material, but we were led here by a slippery slope. First he saw the ad for the movie while we were at another movie, and begged to see it. I reasoned (rightly) that he would be so entranced by the armored bears that seeing the movie would not occasion any emotional or theological difficulties, so we went to see it. Also, I should mention, we have read all the Harry Potter books, bowdlerizing them in the early years, but increasingly less now. And I have a Bruno Bettelheim-like regard for reading fairy tales to children in their original form.

After the movie, inevitably, Progeny prevailed on me to read the books, which I effectively dragged my feet about for a while, but eventually I caved, and we're gobbling up chapters (that would be a truly egregious pun if I had meant it). I am trying to trust myself to come up with the right answers (or the right questions) when we come to the hard stuff. It's helpful that Pullman draws in the concept of intercission slowly, and through rumor (and of course Progeny already knows about it from the movie). It's harder to figure out how to talk about Dust, and why the Oblation Board is so afraid of it, and how this connects--and disconnects--with my own beliefs about the institutional church.

I tell you, I'm trying to trust myself, to stay loose and observant and responsive like a fighter. Like Lyra.

Corridors of Breath

2008-01-22T17:18:00.000-08:00

I just said goodbye to five days of company--talkative company at that--and I have nothing left to say. In an effort to shame myself into writing more, generally, I am hereby attaching a poem from my once-upon-a-time master's thesis, which will blow my pseudonymity for the approximately six people still alive who have read said thesis, should they happen to be reading my blog and yet not know it's my blog. C'est la vie. This poem is based on a passage from Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, one of my all-time favorite books, and it is dedicated to him, and my friend Phil.

Corridors of Breath (Solveig at Tule Lake)

Solveig awakes in silence
the uneasy drift of wild grain and rice
the language she holds in her mouth
breaking down like a fine clay

One marsh hawk hangs for an instant
over the distant internment camp
It is an old story, like winter
like a boy gazing through wire
at the snow geese returning

And a knot of teal rises and churns
along the shoreline, the sound of wings
against wings, against air
They are not at home here
They are at home in motion

And now a chiaroscuro of the geese
against black water, their voices
incongruous, the sound of metal filings
But what does she know of birds?

There is a language she holds in her heart
spilling bead by bead into the blood
She is learning to read an alphabet
scrawled in willows under early snow

And the noisy punctuation of snow geese
in formation as they roll into a headwind
seamless movement bringing thousands
to the ground, gently, like falling leaves
For days she has been listening

Random

2008-01-17T09:47:00.001-08:00

* Progeny was home sick yesterday from school, so we melted down the myriad candle ends we'd been saving into one giant pillar candle. My experience is that said pillar candles never burn as well as commercial ones because you have to get the wick perfectly centered, and I am not meticulous enough to do that well, but Progeny thought it was great fun anyway.

* While he was amusing himself with books on disk (briefly), I planted two apple trees before it started snowing.

* Company's coming tomorrow, so I should be cleaning house and/or planting the other four trees. Instead I am blogging. And reading blogs.

* I am still mulling over an article from the NYTimes Magazine. No Impact Man has a post discussing whether or not collective action can be moral action (or more accurately, whether the article's author thinks it can). Anyway, it's all tasty food for thought. I'd love to hear what you think about either the article or the discussion.

Clutter fly

2008-01-15T08:38:00.000-08:00

Of all the simplicity-related topics that circulate through my social circle and community, I hate the decluttering conversation the most. It gets bandied about most frequently in January; you know the one I mean--

"I sorted and gave away 50 pounds of old clothes this week."
"Oh, that's nothing. Partner and I are going through our basement and freecycled two couches, three chairs, a lamp, and an armoir."
"I told my kids they're not getting another toy this year unless they give three away."

I'm not sure why this brings out the curmudgeon in me. Certainly no one thinks that decluttering is actually a bad thing, even dyed-in-the-synthetic-fiber materialists. Maybe it's the relative certainty that the 50 pounds of clothes will be replaced in time with other newer, clothes, that furniture will be drafted for new decorating purposes, that grandparents or friends of the family will augment the toy stash until the ratio goes up rather than down.

Now for full disclosure. I am the worst clutter hypocrite in the entire world. Several years ago, I gave away the most rococo kitchen gadgets I owned (electric tortilla maker, anyone?) and have managed not to replace them with anything too awful. I do keep--and use, several times weekly--a bread machine. In the summer, I make smoothies with a blender. Other than that, I've reformed. In every other aspect of my life, however, I am a hoarder. Scraps of fabric must be saved because some day they may become a quilt. I buy books and hold on to them forever because, hey, they're books. Books aren't really material; they're ideal. I have a tendency to fall for the newest organic growing panacea (mycorrhizal sprays, micronutrient soil tests) and justify it by saying "It's not for me; it's for the earth." Oh, please.

If you are beginning to see why I find decluttering a painful subject, don't tell me. In any case, I have slowly begun to reclaim my bedroom (aka the bowling alley), which has been the stash-everything-when-company-comes room for so long that the boxes I use to throw things into madly are in boxes which are in boxes. There is no organizational principle. My friend L. says this is because I am a "creative messy," a term I think she got from some organizational guru or another. If you or someone you love is a creative messy like me, please tell me what has worked for you in terms of, say, being able to find your financial documents at tax time.

Too cool for school, or anything else, for that matter

2008-01-14T08:24:00.000-08:00

Monday has arrived. I moved the trees, still in their box, into the entryway last night because it was supposed to get down to 30, which it did. With wind chill, it's about 22. Not so good for planting trees, either for the trees, which would be shocked after spending the night in 58 degree temps, or for their planter, who is feeling somewhat stove up in the cold. Yes, I used to live in Minneapolis. Why do you ask?

Plantastrophe

2008-01-12T06:43:00.000-08:00

Did I say the fruit trees were coming later in the month? I must have meant yesterday. Holy cow, it is the middle of January; I'd better get the garden in. /sarcasm. However, a friend of Progeny's is coming over in a few hours to spend the weekend with us, and I foresee that the help of two six year-olds is too much help. The trees will just have to hold it together until Monday.

Seed season

2008-01-11T09:31:00.000-08:00

I am having a happy day, and it inspires me to think I may be able to plunge into the discipline of maintaining this blog a little more regularly. Seed catalog season is always a hopeful time for me anyway; maybe I love the idea of the garden even more than the thing itself. By late July or August I'm usually hot and bored, whether or not (perhaps especially if) the garden is producing well at that point.

I have six fruit trees coming this month, and I'm signed up to take a series of (sub)urban beekeeping courses a little later in the winter. (Ha! Winter! It's 51 degrees here today.)

My Simplicity group is talking about food this year, and I am going to make a concerted effort to eat more locally grown and less-processed food. I find this is more of a challenge with Progeny around, since he would happily eat nothing but McNonFood and balks at anything that was once grown in the ground, but we need to bloom where we're planted, and I'm currently planted in a household with a six year-old.

Since I'm making this grandiose gesture toward transforming my life, inquiring minds may well wish to know how I did with my last year's resolution. The answer is not so well, by one measure. I did not nearly make my goal of driving half as much as the previous year. However, I did shave off nearly 5,000 miles (which I achieved mostly by not leaving metro Hotlanta) and got a used car that gets better gas mileage. I haven't done the actual calculations, but I'll bet my carbon footprint took a big dip. (I also got a new furnace and a new tankless water heater, which were not exactly voluntary purchases.) So on the balance, I am happy with my progress but not feeling particularly self-righteous--always a danger when I meet my goals!

And while there are lots of interconnected reasons for buying locally (I'm sure you'll get to hear me pontificate about them), a big one is saving on the cross-continental and even global energy costs of catapulting one's food around. So I'm looking forward to this year and this garden. May it be a happy one for you too.

Spicy

2007-12-05T06:49:00.000-08:00

OK, this is an odd comeback, but I really love spices and got a kick out of this test.

Your Score: Saffron

You scored 75% intoxication, 25% hotness, 100% complexity, and 50% craziness!

You are Saffron!

Those other spices have nothing on you! You're warm, smart, and you make people feel really good (and with no side-effects!). You can be difficult to get to know and require a lot of those who try, but you're so totally worth it. *Sigh*

Link: The Which Spice Are You Test written by jodiesattva on OkCupid, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Steamshovel mama

2007-08-15T18:19:00.000-07:00

It's dawning on me that I don't really have much of a calling as a blogger. Too many years of writing on demand have made robbed writing of its pleasure for me. When I was younger, and had little of value to say, I used to walk home from school rubbing random words together in my head until they were burnished like brass. They made their own serendipitous sense. Now writing is purely utilitarian, a dump truck, baby, to unload my head.

I've gotten down off my high horse regarding the decision to encourage restraint. It is in the way of good leadership not to leave your sheep back on the other side of the creek--or crick, as they say where I come from. Sooner or later I get off my high horse about most things. But I fired my ISP yesterday after eight different customer service representatives took an hour and a half (88 minutes of which I spent on hold) to answer a simple question. It may be time for me to meditatively consider a more limited place for teh Internets in this simple life. I'll keep my blog spot here for a while, not least because it gives me an identity to comment on other people's blogs, whom I've come to rely on as part of my community. And who knows? I may eventually be back with some metal polish and a soft cloth, buffing up those words at a later date.

Toddlin' town

2007-08-12T14:42:00.001-07:00

Greetings, earthlings. I feel as if I'm talking from Mars, or possibly Andromeda, but it's really only Suburubia. My trip to Chicago was seriously dislocating, in the simultaneous senses of "What in tarnation am I doing living in Suburubia when I could be looking at the Bean every day in Millennium Park?" and "I've been up since four and the only thing I've eaten today is a cheese danish."

Even though I am a fond believer in attachment to place, it can be good to be dislocated once in a while, as long as it doesn’t lead to a sugar coma. I have a feeling the questions that came up for me in Chicago will remain with me for a while.

I have to be a little careful, because having my heart broken by a failed relationship slops over a little too easily into the separate issue of having my heart broken by my church. People whom I love and whose opinions I trust believe that the Lutheran church has made a leap forward by encouraging bishops to refrain from or show restraint in disciplining rostered leaders who are in a mutual, chaste, and faithful same-gender relationship, and so I am trying to feel heartened. But I fear that, while the resolution will certainly give quarter to those bishops willing to hear the living Word in the proclamations of LGBT pastors and others, it will not similarly "encourage" bishops elsewhere. In other words, the resolution seems to me to institutionalize the same inequalities that led to the removal of Pr. Bradley Schmeling. And as a candidate for rostered leadership in the church, it is painful to be told continuously "We need gifted and qualified leadership! We need it now! We need it a lot! But not from you, or you, or you."

I have come a long way on my discernment road. I am no longer afraid that someone can take my vocation away from me. But as someone who hears a call, not to Word and Sacrament but to Word and Service in diaconal ministry, it is beginning to seem likely, perhaps even desirable, that I answer that call through means other than a consecrated relationship with the Church. That’s tragic in one sense, but as an ECP pastor and good friend of mine once said, "I answered God’s call; it’s not my fault that the church didn’t stay on the line."

The coming out post

2007-07-28T10:28:00.000-07:00

I've been mulling over coming out on my blog for the last month or so. Not coming out as liking both boys AND girls--that's no secret to people who know me IRL and not much of one on this blog--but coming out as being a real person with a real life that doesn't always fit easily under the category of simplicity.

The feeling that my life has been, in essence, closeted for the purposes of writing has accelerated during the recent break-up of a 17-year relationship: my primary relationship. What might I choose to say about that? How much should I keep to myself? How much do I owe the privacy of others who, though they might not be named here, would certainly see themselves reflected in this, a very public medium?

But in keeping that bit of dialogue in the dark, I seem also to have lost the yarn that knits together global warming with tomato plants, and home coffee roasting (key point: air popcorn popper) with saying no to television; that is, this abundant life. I don't know that I have the answers to simple living or blog privacy, but it might be time to start publicly living the questions in a more profound way than just simply grousing about my bad commuting habits.

I'm on my way to Chicago next week to try to be a voice for change in my church. When I get back, I'd like to try to tell the story of happens there, and why it's important to me. I'd also like to fill in some of the blanks around my successes and failures as a purveyor (and consumer, if you will) of simplicity. Wish me luck.

Random orbit

2007-07-25T21:10:00.000-07:00

Well, it had to happen sooner or later, so Shehun tagged me to do the eight random things meme. I'm a fairly random person to start with, so this should be easy, right?

* Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
* People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
* At the end of your blog post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
* Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

1. I've lived in six states. This is the first one that doesn't border Canada.
2. My great uncle played professional basketball for the Minnesota Lakers, before they moved to L.A. Have you ever stopped to ask yourself why a Southern California team has the name "Lakers"?
3. I played a (very) small role in the development of polypropylene balloon tubing for angioplastic surgery.
4. I was born with the caul, a fact that my mom will tell you means I won't drown.
5. I still had to take swimming lessons every summer until I was 12.
6. My favorite spice is cardamom.
7. I visited the Slovak Republic when it was still Czechoslovakia.
8. I am a splendid baker of bread . . . and of masa cherry pies, as I believe Shehun will attest.

I am the very last person in the blogosphere to do this meme, so you're all it, so there. Although I agree that Hossy very definitely needs her own blog. She would be the Boss Hoss.

Update for Carbon-Based Life Forms

2007-07-06T15:12:00.000-07:00

My hot water heater gave up the ghost on July Fourth, which inconveniently forced my hand to get a tankless model today. Some women will do almost anything for a shower. But it works, and works well, and hopefully I will get something like the advertised energy savings over its life.

If all goes well over the next few days I will soon be driving not an aging Subaru but an ancient 40 mpg Metro. Car notwithstanding, Progeny and I plan to stay in Subarubia rather than moving to the Polis.

Finally, I am grieving many things these days, but the most recent, and the most raw, is this. Your prayers are appreciated.

Read it and reap

2007-07-01T16:02:00.000-07:00

From Shehun, the bestest discovery of the year: Librivox, a catalog of audio recordings in the public domain.

Uncompensated advertisement

2007-06-22T05:22:00.000-07:00

I'd just like to put in a plug here for a book that's great at thinking through the ramifications of living in a consumerist culture, while maintaining a laugh-out-loud sense of humor as well as a sense of proportion. It's called Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping, by Judith Levine, and you can click here to buy it through your local independent bookstore. (Enter your zip code on the splash page.)

Joyful, joyful

2007-06-19T09:16:00.000-07:00

I was reading something about voice recently on somebody's blog (I can't find it now, and if it was your blog, I apologize profusely. My memory for sources is like a sieve), and it made me realize that it's time to do something about the voice in charge of this blog. If you were to listen to me, you'd get the impression that simplicity means a joyless guilt-ridden life, which I think is the impression that most Americans already have.

But while I may publicly kvetch here about my car guilt and my refrigerator purchase, IRL I try hard to consider my actions--before and after--and then move on. True, I get an unseemly amount of pleasure from "releasing my books into the wild" through BookCrossing or finding a pair of broken Adirondack chairs through FreeCycle and fixing them up again, but not, I don't think, because it allows me to circumvent the cycle of guilt and consumerism. As a Lutheran, I don't think I get to escape from guilt--we are all implicated (and the "we" is a slippery pronoun here, but let me finish) in an imperfect, in this case capitalist, system. Middle-class Americans much more than most. But again as a Lutheran, I don't think that's the end of the story. Grace happens, and we are freed to experience the abundance of creation. There is enough for everyone's needs (although obviously not for everyone's manufactured desires).

I'd like to figure out a way to focus this blog on my quest to find the "enough," especially in very small things.

Danger: invalid at the wheel

2007-06-13T19:41:00.001-07:00

Today was the day I was going to sheet mulch a spot for the apple trees to go next year. Sheet mulching, for the uninitiated, means taking layers of various decomposable materials--first newspaper or cardboard to smother the weeds, then straw or leaves or or something full of carbonaceous goodness, mixed together with a few lawn clippings, then already-achieved compost (as if!) or plain old dirt, and then, for the landscape designer in you, wood chips or other commonly-conceived "mulch." You put these things together in pleasantly moist layers like a torta or a trifle, and then they are supposed to magically make your soil into black gold.

Well.

Instead I sliced about 3/4 of an inch off the pad of my big toe by stubbing it against a rough concrete block. I was raised to believe that unless you can soak a dishcloth with blood in less than a half an hour you don't really need stitches, but it gave me pause for thought. Not to mention a throbbing foot that didn't really feel like playing Iron Chef with garden implements.

So instead I commenced dreaming beautiful dreams about my someday-paradisical garden (hmm, do I smell trouble ahead?) and wound up buying a new refrigerator online. What!? I calculated the amount of carbon dioxide represented by running my 687 kWh model and realized that I could save 585 pounds of the stuff per year by upgrading to a very modest new unit. I do believe, though, that a refrigerator represents the very farthest, most expensive frontier of impulse shopping I have ever done. Please God, let me go back to work tomorrow.

Ah, rain

2007-06-12T17:46:00.000-07:00

Is there any sound sweeter than a much-needed rain?

I've been praying lately with Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Send my roots rain."

Driven to distraction

2007-05-30T12:07:00.000-07:00

Over the last month, I've been dealing with one of those Life Stressors up near the top of the chart. I didn't want this blog to become about that, but I have had very little space in my head to think about anything else either, so I have been pretty silent.

Now, I find I've come to a place of stock-taking. Suburubia, like its region, is sunk deep in a drought, the kind that seems to confirm all my worst fears about global warming. An editorial in the local paper said scientists opine that the lush southeast is among the most at-risk areas, and that we are likely to become an arid plain before long. The drought-resistant clover I planted to increase nitrogen in the soil has all dried up, and chipmunks and moles are making my kitchen garden into swiss cheese with their attempts to find moisture. On the other hand, every tree and bush that I planted and mulched is thriving.

Other actions in my not-so-simple simple life have had equally mixed results. The west windows installed earlier in the year, plus extremely low humidity, have made it possible not to turn on the air conditioner or use the dryer yet this year, a first. The two rainbarrels that I bought in anticipation of water restrictions stand empty, still waiting for enough rain to make them worthwhile. Progeny is enjoying a week of Zoo Camp, away from the temptations of tv and Yu-gi-oh cards.

But the most mixed news of all, as you, dear reader, may have anticipated, is that my mileage for the year so far is almost exactly the same as my mileage last year. Since you'll remember that I made a promise to cut my driving in half, this is more than a disappointment, it's a travesty. Partly, it has to do with lending my car to someone who drives it 120 miles on the weekend, partly it has to do with unexpected driving due to the aforementioned Life Stressor, but mostly it's about my ineffectual attempts to use alternatives and my addiction to driving because it saves time, blah, blah, blah. Lord forgive me.

I have some serious thinking to do about the rest of this year. Most of the work I do is volunteer work with a serious claim to be about making the world a better place. I believe it to be literally true that I would need to give up about 2/3 of my volunteer work if I refrained from driving. But my driving is not making the world a better place; it is making the world a smoggier, warmer, more unstable place. As I said, I'm in a place of stock-taking. What are your thoughts?

Good neighbors

2007-04-22T16:30:00.000-07:00

Last fall and winter, Progeny and I heard nightly serenades from the local Suburubian coyotes, and only slightly less frequent singing by a resident owl. The other night, out to watch Venus doing a dance with the new moon, I realized it's been months since I've heard either. It might be that they're busy with denning and nesting, or it might be that these brand honkin' new efficient windows are dampening the sound. I hope it's not that our friends have succumbed to the lure of the cheaper real estate east of here.

He is risen

2007-04-08T09:54:00.000-07:00

My father-in-law, who believes that all bad things can be placed at the feet of religion, once asked me if I actually believed in the resurrection. The implication was that someone as educated as I am couldn't possibly believe in something so plainly contrary to fact.

I said, simply, yes.

I believe in the power of narrative to bring all kinds of things back from the dead: hope, green leaves, relationships, the people we love, dreams, butterflies, neighborhoods, a sense of community.

I believe that the much greater danger than believing something contrary to fact is to think death or abuse or resentments or cynicism have the final word, are the end of the story.

I believe that it is less illogical to believe in something that can't be verified by my own eyes than it is to believe that only things I can see exist.

I choose to think that God decided to favor a poor, subversive rabbi from a small town over the dominant powers and principalities, and that God's strength is more often found in those of any faith or religious background refusing the thrall of violence and coercion than in any number of proclamations of glory or righteousness from God's followers.

Make no mistake. I do not reject the teachings of the empirical and the humanistic: the world is not flat; human beings did not cavort with dinosaurs, except in the mind of Hollywood animators; God's plan does not include slavery; and I'm fine with women shaving their heads if they damn well choose to. When I'm sick, I want the insights of modern medicine available to me, but when I'm in pain, I'll be glad to accept the insights of acupuncture as well, which modern Western medicine has had to scramble to try to explain.

I hadn't intended to preach an Easter sermon, but these are the things I wish I had said to my father-in-law.

This I believe.

Hog Heaven

2007-03-25T10:34:00.000-07:00

LutheranChik links to an ecological footprint quiz here. See how you fare. If everyone lived like Progeny'n'me, we'd need 3.8 planets, chiefly because of our food consumption. I gave up meat for Lent this year, which is not that difficult for me to do personally but is difficult for me to do domestically, because Progeny is a major carnivore (don't look at me--I've never encouraged him to eat meat, although I've given up active discouragement because it just doesn't work). I just decided that if I had to make two dinners every night while I ponder my relationship with eating other animals, I would. And it's not actually that hard. Progeny has always been willing to eat mac and cheese and quesadillas and occasionally pasta (as long as there's no marinara involved), so we eat the same thing a few times a week, and I spring for fish or chicken for him for the rest. Over time, we'll work this out.

In the meantime, we're eating ourselves out of planet and home.

For shizzle

2007-03-25T09:51:00.000-07:00

Progeny and I went out yesterday to the local public stables (how cool is that? public stables!) and bought two plastic trash bags of manure--or dung, as six year-old Progeny prefers to call it, proud of his scatological vocabulary--for $10. A couple of teenage boys shovel it into the bags for you, tie it up securely, and lift it into the back of your car. The proceeds go to buy a biological fly control for the stables, and you get all the sh-- your garden can use. My compost pile is now steaming in the 75-degree heat; I'm sure if compost piles can be happy, mine is doing the compost dance.

Progeny to his father this morning: How come you don't go to church, Daddy? Father: Oh, I have a few things I need to get done. Progeny: What's more important than praying?

On the agenda for next weekend: buying the cheater car, so that I don't actually have to fulfill my promise.

I don't even know where to start

2007-03-23T12:32:00.000-07:00

with this story that ran yesterday in the New York Times. On the one hand, I have sympathy in mass quantities for anyone who tries to control their consumption of fossil fuel, and these people are clearly doing a much better job of it than I am. On the other hand, the fact that they find going without toilet paper a better lifestyle choice than giving up their Eames furniture (and while getting to keep the Fifth Avenue apartment and the book contract) seems nothing short of precious. I don't know of a single local food activist who thinks it's important to go without salt or cinnamon--trade in spices and condiments has a much smaller impact on the environment than several of the Beavan-Conlins' practices and has a millennial history. Sheesh.

Was I a good American?

2007-03-18T09:33:00.000-07:00

Rebecca Solnit asks that question here.

More songs about food and buildings

2007-03-15T19:22:00.000-07:00

I am the queen of incomplete thoughts. It's a kind of verbal ADHD. Anyway, one of the link-ups missing from my previous posts is why I'm always talking and thinking about food, beyond some crappy privileged view that eating organic is my right and more pleasant to boot--in other words, how it manifests itself for me as an ethical rather than simply an aesthetic issue. Where does the rubber meet the road?

Let me go on record as saying that everyone deserves to have food that is not covered in toxic waste (not to mention that the people who plant and pick and process food deserve not to have to handle said toxic waste). Everyone deserves to eat (read: to be able to afford to eat) food that is fresh, nutritious, and yes, pleasing to the taste. Everyone, meaning everyone in every place on earth, deserves to have dignified and adequately compensated work. These three principles are intimately connected, although some would have us believe that one needs to pick and choose.

While I understand that not everyone is a gardening dork like I am, that some may prefer not to grow their own food, I do think that local farming/gardening and local markets are the answer to the issue of fair eating. Local means that African cotton farmers do not have to compete with American subsidized and commodified cotton (OK, so cotton isn't a food; but substitute grain and you'll get the picture). Local means my community has some control over the practices that produce our food. Local means that the peaches that I eat in the Peach State are not picked green and trucked in from California at the expense of huge amounts of fossil fuel. And yes, it means no out-of-season grapes from Chile or apples from New Zealand or, strictly speaking, bananas at all, unless I grow them in a passively solar-heated greenhouse. It means probably not all Americans should pile into the water-starved southwest, or pave over vast tracts of midwestern farmland to make more Suburubia (guilty as charged). But local food is also the means to see that communities remain more or less in control of their own food supply rather than falling prey to government commodity schemes (70% of all U.S. commodity payments go to 10% of the farmers; most farmers are never eligible) or, globally, to punitive or variable humanitarian "aid" sources.

I'm always a little bit of a pontificator (no, really, Simpleton, tell us how you feel), but I'm particularly on a rant today because I watched a Bread for the World video regarding the Farm Bill up for reappropriation this year. See it, and call or write your congresspeople.

Random simple thoughts

2007-03-15T08:34:00.000-07:00

I've spent the week making good on my promise to look at new used cars. I would really like to get a hybrid, but they hold their value too well. (Euphemism alert: they're too fireplacin' expensive.) So I found a list of the ten vehicles with the highest fuel efficiency and am extrapolating to cars of the 2000-ish vintage.

Frankly, car shopping isn't nearly as interesting to me as daydreaming about planting some apples and blueberries next year. Or reading blogs for that matter. Two about food: Chews Wise and The Ethicurean, both short and sweet, à la del.icio.us.

Probably this blog would be more entertaining if I had photos of this pilgrim's progress, but I don't have a digital camera. How's that for simple?

Schpring is in zee air

2007-03-10T17:55:00.000-08:00

I am officially, but not technically, on break. I still have a paper to finish, but I took the day off to buy dirt (it's dirt cheap!), plant 25 strawberry plants, and do a little judicious pruning. Tomorrow, the Progeny and I are going to participate in a Hunger Walk to benefit the local community food bank, so I wanted to get some gardening in while the gardening was good.

My current obsession is with the idea of permaculture, specifically with a couple of books describing a permaculture approach to Suburubian-sized lots such as mine. Tony Hemenway's Gaia's Garden is probably the most useful for U.S. audiences. He comes in for some criticism for using invasive exotic species (he's a little fanatical about nitrogen fixing), but I trust that his audience can make decisions that don't involve planting, say, kudzu as a ground cover and still get something out of his approach.

You may well ask: why is The Simpleton so fixated on gardening? I thought her deal was just spending less time in the car? The first answer is that hopefully the garden will let me spend less time in the car. For the last three years, I belonged to a CSA that let me taste the pleasures of local food, but I had to drive an hour round-trip in rush hour traffic every week to savor those veggies. Moving back in time through my train of thought, local food itself is an important contribution to climate health, since the average food item in this country travels 1500 miles before it lands on your table. Add in the energy costs of, for example, freezing (and keeping frozen) and your Amy's spinach pizza looks a bit less appealing.

In truth I just like puttering with plants, and I'm a bit of a closet foodie. It seems to me as if simplicity really is about finding those things that give genuine pleasure, that fill you up, so to speak. I get a little extra frisson from feeling that my choices are also part of an integrated life--that I will see where my food comes from, that its manner of raising will also benefit wildlife and soil health, that I will waste less and enjoy more. I'm a little bit of a freak that way.

Brought to you by the Stephen (King) ministries

2007-03-05T16:37:00.000-08:00

All work and dull play make Jack a no girl.

Dull work and Jack play make no an all girl.

Jack work and girl play make all a no dull.

Instead of the post

2007-02-28T18:38:00.000-08:00

Oy, the posts, they percolate, but I have papers due this week and next, so they will have to wait.

Meanwhile, the tomatoes, the cabbage, marshmallow, calendula, shiso, and borage have sprouted in their snug little newspaper nests. Still waiting (and waiting) for valerian, sage, celeriac, and broccoli (a late addition) and I can't remember what else without walking upstairs.

And the Suburubian home has new west windows, low-e and lovely, to replace the cast aluminum louvered lot. I sort of miss the louvers. They reminded me of 1940s lake houses.

Next week, the Raised Bed. If you have thoughts on Bonhoeffer, please communicate.

Simple living and poverty

2007-02-22T10:03:00.000-08:00

There is an interesting discussion going on over at the New American Dream about whether the "simplicity" movement is essentially a pipe dream of the privileged class. Clearly there is some basis for making that claim, when the gurus of simplicity (Joe Dominguez, Jim Merkel) are touting retiring from their Wall Street or Department of Defense contract jobs in order to do volunteer work, or getting rid of clutter as a spiritual practice, or when a member of my simplicity circle wonders if he is truly welcome if he can't afford to buy organic vegetables.

But as someone who lived in a substandard trailer without running water for five years in involuntary simplicity, I think I can say that on both the practical and the ethical level, simplicity so-called is not just for jaded trust fund yuppies. I have difficulty with the counterclaim that simplicity is essentially about frugality too, but at least that claim is on some level about living in the real world of labor and material objects. And in terms of the crunchy spiritual goodness inherent in each bite, when I was poor, much poorer than I am now, I was no less beset by images of people in nice clothes in front of handsome Craftsman houses with roofs that didn't leak. Logically enough, the material necessities I dreamed of were not generic but imbued just the same with messages from the culture.

One of my hopes for this blog is to limn that hazy line that separates simplicity as an aesthetic practice from simplicity as an ethical practice. I mean to do this from my perspective as one now firmly entrenched in the middle class who hasn't always had the luxury of deciding whether to use my station wagon less frequently to be nicer to the Earth.

Just for the record

2007-02-22T09:49:00.000-08:00

I can obsess perfectly well over things that don't run on internal combustion engines. I now have 70 little seeded containers and a bizarre plan to grow strawberries here in Suburubia. All I have to do is drive to my nearest nursery and pick up a baker's dozen 18" concrete paving stones. Progeny is anxious to have strawberries--I think he thinks that we will no sooner water them but we will have fruit to eat. Too many Harry Potter books or something.

Meanwhile, I am going to get rid of the comment moderation, because I can't seem to remember to check for comments (d'oh), and, although I have paid to offset my carbon for the year, I still see the humor in this.

Getting serious

2007-02-18T15:26:00.000-08:00

Weigh in: 144,933. Miles so far this year: 1,290. Miles left in my budget: 6,310.

This is a serious crisis. Now admittedly, there was some out of the ordinary driving in January (just a little matter of a church trial), but 1300 miles represents a serious abrogation of the driving diet. I am having to consider the equivalent of gastric bypass surgery (e.g., buying a new used Hyundai) in order to bring my fossil fuel consumption under control.

Drastic times call for drastic measures. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, I have 20 little newspaper pots seeded with herbs in preparation for my first attempt at Southern Raised Bed Gardening. My fantasy is that in a few years, I can stop driving to the grocery store altogether.

In which she begins to speak

2007-02-17T17:58:00.000-08:00

You're already asking yourself "How can someone desperately seek simplicity? Isn't that a contradiction in terms?"

Yes. But if I had already achieved simplicity, I wouldn't be desperate, now, would I?

This blog begins because I foolishly pledged, at the beginning of January, that I would drive my car only half as much this year as I did last year. Now for a multitude of reasons, mostly economic, I and my Progeny live in a first-ring suburb despite the fact that he and I both attend school intown. We also go to church intown, recreate intown, and see our friends intown. We spend a lot of time in our suburb-mobile, which is, logically enough, a Suburu. It's not an SUV but it's not a Prius either. In fact, last year, we spent the national average of 15,000 miles in that car, which included a couple of side trips to Mountain Region and Beach Area, but no cross-country roadtrip movie adventures.

So skinnying down to 7,500 miles this year will be no small feat. There is some public transportation available in my neighborhood (it's a little less than a mile to the bus stop), but although it is now February, we have ridden public transportation a grand total of once. Yes, that's right. Once.

With any luck, dear reader, I will also be able to regale you with my more successful attempts at being a responsible global citizen: eating more local, less processed foods; installing new, more efficient windows on the west side of our house; and so on. But given that it's mid-February and I'm still a drivin' fool, you can expect to see most of the blog drama here taking place behind the wheel.