2 hours ago
Saturday, 14 November 2009
Other thort
Prosperity and acclaim with integrity are found through perseverance and specialisation.
Thursday, 12 November 2009
Thursday, 5 November 2009
Chattelpurge
One of the rifs running through this week has been a steady pleasing chattelpurge – continuing with the gradual sloughing-off of all the stuff, in preparation for moving house.
It’s been a more instinctual than considered process, that is until the arrival midweek of the new issue of Permaculture magazine, which I most heartily recommend – it never fails to challenge and inspire me, more than any sermon I ever heard.
In this one, there’s an article about Mark Boyle, founder of Freeconomy, who has made the bold decision to live without money. The only other person I have come across doing this is Peace Pilgrim. I’m interested in the idea, and after I read about Mark Boyle’s life and choices I spent a long time thinking about it.
After much thought it came to me that being a man, young and single factored heavily in the feasibility equation. Mark lives in his caravan and cycles to where he needs to be. But, suppose he had a wife… then a child… and the child had a medical condition needing attention… then his wife developed cancer… what then? Wouldn’t the child like to go to school or otherwise be in the company of other children? Wouldn’t the wife and child, if they weren’t well, need transport to a hospital, and to benefit from the medicines, equipment, training, buildings etc etc that had all cost money? What about his parents? I wonder where they live? Does he not visit them?
I guess living without money would shorten our lives and limit our possibilities. As I turned it over in my mind, I concluded it is a noble ideal, and a wonderful, transformative endeavour; life-changing I should imagine. A way of making one’s soul. But also isolating and frustrating.
It got me thinking about the Darvell Bruderhof in Sussex, who witness assertively to a life where all things are held in common and the phenomenon of private property vigorously denounced. But I wonder. Private property and holding all things in common may not be as sharply distinguishable as might first be thought. In a big family are the household items private or communal? If private, isn’t the Bruderhof just a family on a bigger scale – corporate private property then. I think they might demur if I tried to remove some of their not-private not-property from the premises. But maybe they wouldn’t.
Tony the Badger and I are moving to a house-share with three of my family members. At first it was instinctive to mentally divide up the territory – this is your room, this is mine, this part of the garden is yours, this is mine. Only gradually did it dawn that we all got less that way. The more we shared the more we would each/all have. The more we clutched at the less we ended up with. Like a big green field divided into tiny yards.
I feel more drawn to sharing, living with little, living with less, than to living without money. But no doubt Mark Boyle’s freeconomy is a challenge and an inspiration.
It’s important that in our chattelpurge we give things away more than sell them. The kind of simplicity that appeals to me is about freedom and generosity not scrimping and saving. It’s about living in the flow of grace. Life can get very mean if one is always focused on the cheapest, the bargains, haggling and cheese-paring. Simplicity as I see it is about flow, and trust. If we all buy less and share and give more, then although we wouldn't have a freeconomy we would be less driven, we would be able to let go of our sense of scarcity. People giving things away - nice things, not just stuff too used and broken to sell - would create a new vibe of optimism. Giving and receiving bring joy.
Then there's the pleasure of walking light. When my children were little, I remember watching a friend whose children were teenagers, walking along the street. She had nothing in her hands to carry, and I envied her. Everywhere I went I seemed to have groceries or a nappy-changing-bag or a child’s coat or something to carry. I wanted to walk down the street with nothing in my hands too.
To walk light like that means accepting inconvenience – you might go out with no umbrella and then it rains; you might go out without money and not be able to get the bus home when you were tired; you might remember you needed milk and bread and vegetables and not have brought a bag; you might go out empty-handed but stop at the library and have to carry books home. Or determinedly refuse to and then wish you had a reading book when you got into bed that night. It's a matter of choosing. Which means most to you?
One of the games this week has been to try to get through to Friday without grocery shopping – eating up all the odds and ends from the freezer and store cupboard ready for moving house. I never ate so many pulses in one week! We did it, though.
Giving things away is fun. Adventuring into simplicity is fun. But I notice I get frightened when I run out of money. How interesting. What does that mean?
It’s been a more instinctual than considered process, that is until the arrival midweek of the new issue of Permaculture magazine, which I most heartily recommend – it never fails to challenge and inspire me, more than any sermon I ever heard.
In this one, there’s an article about Mark Boyle, founder of Freeconomy, who has made the bold decision to live without money. The only other person I have come across doing this is Peace Pilgrim. I’m interested in the idea, and after I read about Mark Boyle’s life and choices I spent a long time thinking about it.
After much thought it came to me that being a man, young and single factored heavily in the feasibility equation. Mark lives in his caravan and cycles to where he needs to be. But, suppose he had a wife… then a child… and the child had a medical condition needing attention… then his wife developed cancer… what then? Wouldn’t the child like to go to school or otherwise be in the company of other children? Wouldn’t the wife and child, if they weren’t well, need transport to a hospital, and to benefit from the medicines, equipment, training, buildings etc etc that had all cost money? What about his parents? I wonder where they live? Does he not visit them?
I guess living without money would shorten our lives and limit our possibilities. As I turned it over in my mind, I concluded it is a noble ideal, and a wonderful, transformative endeavour; life-changing I should imagine. A way of making one’s soul. But also isolating and frustrating.
It got me thinking about the Darvell Bruderhof in Sussex, who witness assertively to a life where all things are held in common and the phenomenon of private property vigorously denounced. But I wonder. Private property and holding all things in common may not be as sharply distinguishable as might first be thought. In a big family are the household items private or communal? If private, isn’t the Bruderhof just a family on a bigger scale – corporate private property then. I think they might demur if I tried to remove some of their not-private not-property from the premises. But maybe they wouldn’t.
Tony the Badger and I are moving to a house-share with three of my family members. At first it was instinctive to mentally divide up the territory – this is your room, this is mine, this part of the garden is yours, this is mine. Only gradually did it dawn that we all got less that way. The more we shared the more we would each/all have. The more we clutched at the less we ended up with. Like a big green field divided into tiny yards.
I feel more drawn to sharing, living with little, living with less, than to living without money. But no doubt Mark Boyle’s freeconomy is a challenge and an inspiration.
It’s important that in our chattelpurge we give things away more than sell them. The kind of simplicity that appeals to me is about freedom and generosity not scrimping and saving. It’s about living in the flow of grace. Life can get very mean if one is always focused on the cheapest, the bargains, haggling and cheese-paring. Simplicity as I see it is about flow, and trust. If we all buy less and share and give more, then although we wouldn't have a freeconomy we would be less driven, we would be able to let go of our sense of scarcity. People giving things away - nice things, not just stuff too used and broken to sell - would create a new vibe of optimism. Giving and receiving bring joy.
Then there's the pleasure of walking light. When my children were little, I remember watching a friend whose children were teenagers, walking along the street. She had nothing in her hands to carry, and I envied her. Everywhere I went I seemed to have groceries or a nappy-changing-bag or a child’s coat or something to carry. I wanted to walk down the street with nothing in my hands too.
To walk light like that means accepting inconvenience – you might go out with no umbrella and then it rains; you might go out without money and not be able to get the bus home when you were tired; you might remember you needed milk and bread and vegetables and not have brought a bag; you might go out empty-handed but stop at the library and have to carry books home. Or determinedly refuse to and then wish you had a reading book when you got into bed that night. It's a matter of choosing. Which means most to you?
One of the games this week has been to try to get through to Friday without grocery shopping – eating up all the odds and ends from the freezer and store cupboard ready for moving house. I never ate so many pulses in one week! We did it, though.
Giving things away is fun. Adventuring into simplicity is fun. But I notice I get frightened when I run out of money. How interesting. What does that mean?
Monday, 26 October 2009
Urban Simplicity
Most books and newspaper or magazine articles conceptualise living simply in a rural environment – back to the land.
Living simply is popularly seen as wabi-sabi and vaguely muddy: an exercise requiring gum boots, and probably a dog.
There is a great difference between England and America here (and obviously other parts of the world too), centring mainly on the issue of space. The American tiny house websites often show pictures of enchanting little dwellings only X square feet, squeezed in impossible nooks between larger houses. In England, most ordinary people’s houses look like that anyway. Land is at a premium, because there is less of it, and what there is either belongs to an individual or the government; so you can’t build on it or camp on it or stop a trailer on it overnight.
This means that in England living in the country is not as it was in Jane Austen’s novels, what you did when you ran out of money. It is now what you do when you win the lottery.
There are people who live simply and don’t have much money in the English countryside. Some have inherited farms. Some work as volunteers in retreat houses, or are part of intentional communities or New Age groups that have won the planning consents battle to settle (like Tinker’s Bubble). Some are very old people who have lived there since before the price of accommodation was pushed sky-high by the feminist movement with its working women moving the goalposts so that house mortgages were set to factor in two incomes. Some are people who had a lump of capital to spend on a house but do not have high incomes. Some have high incomes entirely absorbed by massive mortgages.
But people who have not inherited houses in the countryside, do not have and do not aspire to have the kind of jobs that attract high wages, are plain individuals not part of an intentional community or staff of a country house, probably live in the town.
In the English villages, the shops, post offices, pubs, schools, chapels, public transport and other facilities have gradually dwindled away. So people for whom living simply has an important Earth-friendly component, and who therefore want to live without cars, almost certainly (though not always) live in the town.
When television programmes discuss Earth-friendly initiatives and lifestyles, and look at choosing to live simply, generally keeping hens and installing solar panels and large underground rain-water reservoirs and wind turbines come into the equation.
All very interesting, but involves the living-simply-by-accumulating-gadgetry-and-accessories approach that is likely to appeal in a consumer society.
Urban simplicity is a far more practical proposition for young people starting out (with no inheritance) or for people who have been divorced and lost half their assets at a stroke, or who have been made ill by the rat race and forced to drop out and seek something richer in peace and poorer in finance, or who earn only enough money for a modest home for their family and can afford either for everyone to get weekly bus tickets or run a car but not both.
For people who cannot even consider the cost of installing photovoltaic panels and wind turbines, Earth-friendly simplicity is made possible in an urban setting. Here are some of the strategies.
• Ditch the car. Walk, use public transport. In some towns bikes are really good. I went everywhere on a bike when we lived in Bromley, because the terrain was even, the roads were wide and the people lived in big houses with off-road parking. In Hastings I don’t cycle: the hills are very steep, the roads are narrow and lined with parked cars because the houses are small and close with no off-road parking. Cycling here is for the bold and intrepid and the very fit. I get a £9.50 mega-rider bus ticket once a week, which takes me anywhere in Hastings and out as far as Bexhill (the next town, five miles along the coast). If you live in a town, you don't have to run a car. If you live in the country you almost have to have one (or someone does, to give you lifts).
• Share accommodation. We have sometimes had lodgers, and are currently in process of setting up a household of 5 adults, all family members. Living by cultural norms, those people would have 4 (there is one couple) sets of rent/mortgage, 4 TV licences, 4 sets of council tax & utilities, 4 heating and water boilers running, 4 stoves on for supper, 4 computers, 4 TV sets, 4 fridges, 4 freezers. So we shall have reduced all that by 75%, except the council tax which will be a little higher than for the sort of dwelling one of us would have been able to afford – but still much lower than 4 separate ones.
• Share costs and possessions. We shall have a car (a Toyota Prius) for our household, paid for by the company one of us works for, but we probably won’t run a second one. We certainly shan’t have one each!! We shall have a little more furniture than each of us would have had alone, but nothing like as much as all of us would have had living separately. Shopping, eating, cooking and utilizing garden produce is more economical per capita as a big household than as a household of one. One Christmas tree. One wood stack. One DVD to watch in the evening. Und so weite.
• The usual mantra – repair, re-use, recycle. The towns are rich in pickings of second-hand stuff. Hastings is stuffed to the gunwales with second-hand furniture shops and charity shops, and if you live locally they will deliver your purchases free, and if you only bought a small thing – a stool or shelf – there is a bus to take it home on or home is not too far from the shop to walk.
• Wholefood shops and co-operatives tend to centre in towns, just because there are more people there to make them viable.
• I get a lot of things on ebay. Recently I got a warm winter coat with a glam faux-fur collar on ebay, for £8. When my children were small, we got almost all their clothes second-hand. Their winter coats we acquired at the end of the summer term (the end of the school year), when all the items languishing in Lost Property were put out to be claimed or moved on. Some of the wealthier children had in fact not lost but dumped the new coats their parents had bought them, because they were not fashionable. We waited for those. We never had to buy a winter coat for our children until they all moved to a school where a uniform coat was required, when I became chaplain there. So we had to buy them second-hand coats but we did get a free house, so that was OK. But the thing about second-hand clothes is you depend on what’s available more and can be less demanding about what you want (unless you are mega shrewd and patient). We found that hardwearing practical clothes came up less often – when they were little our children’s everyday wear tended to be other people’s outgrown party-dresses because the track suits never made it to the charity shops. This means it’s easier to be a Second-hand Rose in the town, where the environment doesn’t need special shoes etc.
More thoughts on same subject to come…
Living simply is popularly seen as wabi-sabi and vaguely muddy: an exercise requiring gum boots, and probably a dog.
There is a great difference between England and America here (and obviously other parts of the world too), centring mainly on the issue of space. The American tiny house websites often show pictures of enchanting little dwellings only X square feet, squeezed in impossible nooks between larger houses. In England, most ordinary people’s houses look like that anyway. Land is at a premium, because there is less of it, and what there is either belongs to an individual or the government; so you can’t build on it or camp on it or stop a trailer on it overnight.
This means that in England living in the country is not as it was in Jane Austen’s novels, what you did when you ran out of money. It is now what you do when you win the lottery.
There are people who live simply and don’t have much money in the English countryside. Some have inherited farms. Some work as volunteers in retreat houses, or are part of intentional communities or New Age groups that have won the planning consents battle to settle (like Tinker’s Bubble). Some are very old people who have lived there since before the price of accommodation was pushed sky-high by the feminist movement with its working women moving the goalposts so that house mortgages were set to factor in two incomes. Some are people who had a lump of capital to spend on a house but do not have high incomes. Some have high incomes entirely absorbed by massive mortgages.
But people who have not inherited houses in the countryside, do not have and do not aspire to have the kind of jobs that attract high wages, are plain individuals not part of an intentional community or staff of a country house, probably live in the town.
In the English villages, the shops, post offices, pubs, schools, chapels, public transport and other facilities have gradually dwindled away. So people for whom living simply has an important Earth-friendly component, and who therefore want to live without cars, almost certainly (though not always) live in the town.
When television programmes discuss Earth-friendly initiatives and lifestyles, and look at choosing to live simply, generally keeping hens and installing solar panels and large underground rain-water reservoirs and wind turbines come into the equation.
All very interesting, but involves the living-simply-by-accumulating-gadgetry-and-accessories approach that is likely to appeal in a consumer society.
Urban simplicity is a far more practical proposition for young people starting out (with no inheritance) or for people who have been divorced and lost half their assets at a stroke, or who have been made ill by the rat race and forced to drop out and seek something richer in peace and poorer in finance, or who earn only enough money for a modest home for their family and can afford either for everyone to get weekly bus tickets or run a car but not both.
For people who cannot even consider the cost of installing photovoltaic panels and wind turbines, Earth-friendly simplicity is made possible in an urban setting. Here are some of the strategies.
• Ditch the car. Walk, use public transport. In some towns bikes are really good. I went everywhere on a bike when we lived in Bromley, because the terrain was even, the roads were wide and the people lived in big houses with off-road parking. In Hastings I don’t cycle: the hills are very steep, the roads are narrow and lined with parked cars because the houses are small and close with no off-road parking. Cycling here is for the bold and intrepid and the very fit. I get a £9.50 mega-rider bus ticket once a week, which takes me anywhere in Hastings and out as far as Bexhill (the next town, five miles along the coast). If you live in a town, you don't have to run a car. If you live in the country you almost have to have one (or someone does, to give you lifts).
• Share accommodation. We have sometimes had lodgers, and are currently in process of setting up a household of 5 adults, all family members. Living by cultural norms, those people would have 4 (there is one couple) sets of rent/mortgage, 4 TV licences, 4 sets of council tax & utilities, 4 heating and water boilers running, 4 stoves on for supper, 4 computers, 4 TV sets, 4 fridges, 4 freezers. So we shall have reduced all that by 75%, except the council tax which will be a little higher than for the sort of dwelling one of us would have been able to afford – but still much lower than 4 separate ones.
• Share costs and possessions. We shall have a car (a Toyota Prius) for our household, paid for by the company one of us works for, but we probably won’t run a second one. We certainly shan’t have one each!! We shall have a little more furniture than each of us would have had alone, but nothing like as much as all of us would have had living separately. Shopping, eating, cooking and utilizing garden produce is more economical per capita as a big household than as a household of one. One Christmas tree. One wood stack. One DVD to watch in the evening. Und so weite.
• The usual mantra – repair, re-use, recycle. The towns are rich in pickings of second-hand stuff. Hastings is stuffed to the gunwales with second-hand furniture shops and charity shops, and if you live locally they will deliver your purchases free, and if you only bought a small thing – a stool or shelf – there is a bus to take it home on or home is not too far from the shop to walk.
• Wholefood shops and co-operatives tend to centre in towns, just because there are more people there to make them viable.
• I get a lot of things on ebay. Recently I got a warm winter coat with a glam faux-fur collar on ebay, for £8. When my children were small, we got almost all their clothes second-hand. Their winter coats we acquired at the end of the summer term (the end of the school year), when all the items languishing in Lost Property were put out to be claimed or moved on. Some of the wealthier children had in fact not lost but dumped the new coats their parents had bought them, because they were not fashionable. We waited for those. We never had to buy a winter coat for our children until they all moved to a school where a uniform coat was required, when I became chaplain there. So we had to buy them second-hand coats but we did get a free house, so that was OK. But the thing about second-hand clothes is you depend on what’s available more and can be less demanding about what you want (unless you are mega shrewd and patient). We found that hardwearing practical clothes came up less often – when they were little our children’s everyday wear tended to be other people’s outgrown party-dresses because the track suits never made it to the charity shops. This means it’s easier to be a Second-hand Rose in the town, where the environment doesn’t need special shoes etc.
More thoughts on same subject to come…
Friday, 18 September 2009
Cautious Pudding
You've heard of Hasty Pudding? This is like it but subtly different: It is Cautious Pudding.
My doctor told me, my scales told me, the medical charts told me, the mirror told me: I have to lose some weight. Then eventually my joints and varicose veins began to tell me the same thing, but louder and a little more shrill – and I gave in.
After the menopause, weight is easy to accumulate and hard to shift: I was prepared for that, so I felt encouraged to discover it’s not as hard as I’d been dreading.
Acid reflux and fluid retention (sorry, this isn’t too much information for you, is it?), and relentless inflammation pain in my legs mean that fats, sugar, and citrus fruit (and any other very sour food) cause me quite intense pain. There’s something else too – either wheat or yeast, I can’t figure out which, that makes me very bloated and stiff.
So I’ve upped the exercise, and been eating food very, very low in fat and sugar. I eat almost no wheat (rice/corn/oatcakes R us) making my own muesli with oats as the only grain. I don’t go near acidic fruits, especially citrus, except for the smidge of citrus in my Earl Grey tea. I can’t imagine life without a cup of tea, and Earl Grey is about the only one that doesn’t set off the acid stomach problems.
It’s been very effective. Where I was having to take analgesics every night because of the intense pain in my legs, and experiencing a lot of fluid retention and deep, dragging weariness, I now have no pain, enough (though not loads of) energy, and the fluid has all gone away.
The thing I have missed is comfort food. I love steamed vegetables and fish and salads and fruit. But sometimes, especially if I feel lonely or cold, I long for a bit of stodge.
Today I made a pudding I hope might be OK. It might not. If I eat bread – any, even a slice or two – I can reckon to gain 3lbs weight: if it’s the wheat doing it, then this pudding must remain a distant dream. Time will tell.
I put an ounce of semolina (which is wheat, but I tried making this with brown rice flakes and the result was disgusterous), with just a scant teaspoon of sugar and a dash of vanilla, in a glass bowl. I added a cup of skimmed milk, and microwaved it for about 3 minutes, whisking it up with a fork every so often to stop it clumping. When I had made it, I put a very small amount (about half a teaspoon) of jam on it. And it was delicious.
I don’t think it can be very fattening, because the amounts of the wheat and sugar are so small. It has to be better than a slice of toast with butter and jam.
You may be wondering why we have jam and semolina and sugar in our house at all! Well, the jam is Badger’s because he loves it and eats quite a lot. The semolina is left over from before I started this reformation. The sugar is for Badger’s porridge in the winter, and for when people come who like sugar in their tea.
I suspect that it would be more intelligent to just cross wheat and sugar right off my list. I have a bad relationship with sugar, because it sends me a bit bi-polar and creates anxiety. I am also suspicious of the voice inside me that says, ‘Just once in a while – just now and again for a treat’: because past experience tells me that today’s treat is tomorrow’s habit.
But I’m hoping it will be all right. We’ll see.
My doctor told me, my scales told me, the medical charts told me, the mirror told me: I have to lose some weight. Then eventually my joints and varicose veins began to tell me the same thing, but louder and a little more shrill – and I gave in.
After the menopause, weight is easy to accumulate and hard to shift: I was prepared for that, so I felt encouraged to discover it’s not as hard as I’d been dreading.
Acid reflux and fluid retention (sorry, this isn’t too much information for you, is it?), and relentless inflammation pain in my legs mean that fats, sugar, and citrus fruit (and any other very sour food) cause me quite intense pain. There’s something else too – either wheat or yeast, I can’t figure out which, that makes me very bloated and stiff.
So I’ve upped the exercise, and been eating food very, very low in fat and sugar. I eat almost no wheat (rice/corn/oatcakes R us) making my own muesli with oats as the only grain. I don’t go near acidic fruits, especially citrus, except for the smidge of citrus in my Earl Grey tea. I can’t imagine life without a cup of tea, and Earl Grey is about the only one that doesn’t set off the acid stomach problems.
It’s been very effective. Where I was having to take analgesics every night because of the intense pain in my legs, and experiencing a lot of fluid retention and deep, dragging weariness, I now have no pain, enough (though not loads of) energy, and the fluid has all gone away.
The thing I have missed is comfort food. I love steamed vegetables and fish and salads and fruit. But sometimes, especially if I feel lonely or cold, I long for a bit of stodge.
Today I made a pudding I hope might be OK. It might not. If I eat bread – any, even a slice or two – I can reckon to gain 3lbs weight: if it’s the wheat doing it, then this pudding must remain a distant dream. Time will tell.
I put an ounce of semolina (which is wheat, but I tried making this with brown rice flakes and the result was disgusterous), with just a scant teaspoon of sugar and a dash of vanilla, in a glass bowl. I added a cup of skimmed milk, and microwaved it for about 3 minutes, whisking it up with a fork every so often to stop it clumping. When I had made it, I put a very small amount (about half a teaspoon) of jam on it. And it was delicious.
I don’t think it can be very fattening, because the amounts of the wheat and sugar are so small. It has to be better than a slice of toast with butter and jam.
You may be wondering why we have jam and semolina and sugar in our house at all! Well, the jam is Badger’s because he loves it and eats quite a lot. The semolina is left over from before I started this reformation. The sugar is for Badger’s porridge in the winter, and for when people come who like sugar in their tea.
I suspect that it would be more intelligent to just cross wheat and sugar right off my list. I have a bad relationship with sugar, because it sends me a bit bi-polar and creates anxiety. I am also suspicious of the voice inside me that says, ‘Just once in a while – just now and again for a treat’: because past experience tells me that today’s treat is tomorrow’s habit.
But I’m hoping it will be all right. We’ll see.
Friday, 28 August 2009
In Celebration of Simplicity - Chapter One
Click on the Scribd tool bar top right for full screen, then zoom in to get a big, properly readable page.
In Celebration of Simplicity - Chapter 1
In Celebration of Simplicity - Chapter 1
Monday, 24 August 2009
Dirt Woman Transcends the Dust Mites!
Worried about the way mattresses take your sweat and dead skin cells and give you allergens and dustmites in return?
Wish you could go on holiday in the Caribbean but haven't got the money?
Wondering how to furnish a very long thin room?
Or just in need of a blissfully relaxing place to chill out?
A hammock could be your answer! This one came from Handmade Hammocks UK: the frame is made of sustainably produced rubberwood and the woven bit is made from fairly traded organic cotton.
"My life is my vacation" (Mohandas Gandhi) Woohoo!
Hallelujah!
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