Permaculture inspiration!

So impressed by this! I would love to have the initiative and confidence to launch on out and do this kind of thing. That is so cool!

And what about this, hey?!?

Well, today (March 1st but much later, it's only a quarter to two in the morning right now - must go to bed!) I am the speaker for a group of ladies.  I can speak about anything I like.  Though I can prattle on happily to the Badger for hours and have plenty to say to my family and a bad habit of interrupting at meetings, I confess I have No Idea what to say to these ladies.  I mean, who are they?  What do they want to know?   Strange thing, being A Speaker.  Still, it doesn't happen to me very often these days.  "Come and speak," they said, "we need a Speaker."  

"About what?" I asked.

"Anything you like," they said.


Update.  Now, at breakfast time, having woke up with the sun and pottered about on Facebook for a while checking out Innermost House and various friends, I have discovered that this very day is World Book Day.  Relevant, right?  I'll let that be a starting point.

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365 366 Day 60 Thursday March 1^st  
(if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

Well, I have a funky little needle-book (A what? This kinda thing) that I got from Made In Hastings where I store all my needles and pins, so I no longer really have a need for a pincushion.  Every now and then this would’ve come in handy, but I’d rather have the space.

It's not just charity; simplicity starts at home too.

Living simply starts with one’s own life.  It has taken me all of mine so far to wriggle through to anything like the place I imagined. 

What I wanted was a hidden, quiet life, out of the way and hard to see or find.  I wanted a life that left only faint ecological traces, made little environmental impact, did not interfere with the Earth’s rhythms and processes very much. 

I wanted space and peace around me – time to think and dream and consider, time to watch the wonder of creation, to gaze with God and share His “Ô le bien!” 

I wanted to be free to write – and by “write” I include the thinking, focussing, imagining, centring processes that precedes the actual tapping away at the keyboard by months or even years. 

I wanted as much time as it took to be with my family, loving and encouraging them, cheering them up when they felt low, talking through puzzles and perplexities, sharing ideas, drinking tea together.  I wanted time to sit by the sea and work in the garden. 

But I also wanted to be financially secure and able to pay my bills.  Living frugally is fine, in fact it is part of the plan.  Thrift strategies form one of my happiest games.  At the present time, as other people’s utility bills are steadily increasing, ours are steadily decreasing, and in our household the most expensive people to feed are the cats. 

So I don’t need to generate much income.  I don’t even need to cross the tax threshold.  Just enough.  What is enough? £450 per month is enough.  £220 of that is my ¼ share of household living costs, £75 is my contribution toward family members either in transition or occupied on  family duty or establishing a business, £25 is my contribution towards the cats’ food and insurances, £120 is for regular giving to charity (about £40), national insurance contributions (about £10), travel, books, gifts, postage, eating out, candles, matches, clothes, books, toiletries (aromatic oils, Lush bar shampoo, package-free soap from the wholefood co-op), bits and pieces like hopi candles and spirulina, garden plants – and anything else I may like to buy. 

I can spend money quite fast!!  Any extra that comes in leaves with alacrity.  But £450.00 a month is what I realistically have to see coming in to cover my regular outgoings.

£450.00 x 12 is £5,400.  The tax threshold in England at the present time is £7,475.   The average wage in England at the present time is approximately £25,500.

Last year I sold a few books which bumped up my income.  It came in handy to pay towards the ongoing (now, thank the Lord, almost finished) building works on our dilapidated old house.  And I never have trouble finding things to spend money on!  I cheerfully disposed of the extra I earned on buying clothes and having fun.  In a couple of weeks, for example, some of us are off to Yorkshire to visit some really nice nuns with whom I have been in correspondence over the books I write.  With patience and application (slaving over a hot computer for 2 hrs while repeatedly forced offline in the crush of people buying the same thing) I managed to get 2 nights at a York Travelodge for £19 a night (hooray!), and the Stanbrook Abbey guest accommodation at Wass is modestly priced. Even so, I wouldn’t be able to go on a trip like that or replace my computer or even pay my accountant without earning over and above my basic as outlined above.  Nor pay for items like all the ink and paper for church admin etc.  Nor have all the ready-meals and take-outs we’ve enjoyed while the kitchen’s been out of commission.  Nor source toys for the Wretched Wretch and me to play with.  But that’s no problem because I do turn over more than £5.4k a year – it’s just, that’s the bottom line, what I have to bring in to keep my nose above the water.

So though I can get through almost as much money as the good Lord sends, my actual needs (for outgoings, this makes no provision for making savings) are only £5,400 pa.

It has taken me a long time, steady focus, and determination to reach the situation where a) things are in place that allow my regular expenditure to be so low (eg I no longer have a mortgage) and b) things are in place (like solar panels on the roof selling electricity to the national grid) to create that small income.  Writing income is too uncertain.  Publishers say things like "Thank you!  Yes, we may well want to publish that.  Can we let you know in a year's time?"  It's regular, dependable income that has to be in place.

So, financial realism is an aspect of living simply, and can make it a distant star while one works patiently towards one’s vision and goal.

Time management is another aspect of living simply – considering carefully before taking on commitments, and keeping a discipline of relative solitude.

Management of space is another aspect – and the most discussed and best understood one; people have grasped the importance of de-cluttering by now (in principle at least, they have a ready supply of reasons why they’d like to but personally can’t possibly).

Emptiness is an aspect of living simply.  For me, one objective in simplicity is engagement with the living world as distinct from the world of man-made objects.  I find that possessions, whether for ornament or utility, compete with that.  If I sit in a plain room that has very little ornament – basically, not much in it – then I notice the shafts of sunbeams moving and changing, the drifts of woodsmoke, the smoke from an extinguished candle, the shadow of fluttering birds wings, the passing of a cloud.  Part of the objective in redesigning the kitchen was to make space to allow in this living beauty.  As things stood, the morning sun came pouring in at an angle from the east, hit the wall cupboard – and stopped right there.  Now, with that block of veneered chipboard removed from its paths, the sun will stream in unimpeded.

I love this.  I want the beauty of travelling light and things that are alive to be the adornment of my days, not a vase or a statue.  Not that I have no ornaments; here are mine:

Another aspect of simplicity – an important one – is contentment.  This I am working on.  Naturally anxious, with something of a restless mind always looking for trouble (and willing to make my own if I can’t find any naturally occurring; if all else fails I can always worry about Hell), a discipline of contentment is an important objective for me; but I find it easier to isolate, identify, recognise and work towards that once the easier things like a financial structure, a clear space and a pruned diary are in place.

Now, when I began this, saying that living simply starts with one’s own life, I wanted to go on to think about how challenges to simplicity arise in association and interaction with others – in taking one’s place and making one’s contribution in the community.  But look, it’s taken me so long to say what I mean about living simply starting with one’s own life that I must leave it at that for today.   We can think about The Others tomorrow!

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365 366 Day 53 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here) 

Oh, I love the art of Sieger Köder.  When I became the secretary to our church’s PCC (the church council, its admin body), I wanted each of the documents for which I was responsible (agendas, minutes) to have a picture.  This was just because I like pictures and am always disappointed if there isn’t one, only words; but I have been pleased to discover the pictures offer a secondary function of making it easier to quickly identify a document from a pile of others similar.  At the Standing Committee I can see at a glance round the table who’s looking at their minutes of the last meeting and who’s inadvertently got the minutes for the last PCC out of their folder, so hasn’t got the right information to hand.

During the time I was equipping myself for the rôle of PCC secretary, I went to the Christian Resources Exhibition.  One of the stalls I like to visit there is that of the Paulist press, who have such wonderful materials for group study, personal meditation, correspondence and church life.  I got this CD ROM of images of the work of Sieger Köder thinking they would be wonderful for the pictures I wanted to head my admin documents.

At the same time, with some difficulty I managed to obtain all three of the books + disks of Steve Erspamer’s art, which takes me round the whole liturgical cycle of the Church’s years A B & C. 

I prefer to stick to the one artist for stylistic consistency, and Steve Erspamer’s work is in black and white – the colour in Sieger Köder’s is essential to the imagery.  This makes Erspamer’s much cheaper for me to reproduce.

So I found myself always using Erspamer’s images but, to my surprise, never Köder’s.  Accordingly I passed on the CD ROM.

Walking into Simplicity 2

This is a picture of my father four years ago at his 80^th birthday celebration.

He was a remarkable, unusual man, very intelligent, very private and shy.  He had to be free and was incapable of confinement to others’ agendas.  He didn’t like being  interfered with in any way – had some spectacular crises of illness at various stages in his life because he couldn’t countenance the idea of submitting himself to medical investigation at an earlier stage.   He always cut his own hair, and hated going to the dentist – when one of his teeth fell out he super-glued it to its neighbour; served him well for several years.

He was the soul of kindness but very inaccessible as a person – so I had very little to do with him through my life, but felt his love and concern emanating vaguely my way as from some desert island none of us could reach.

He travelled the world through his working life (he had an extraordinary gift for languages and was fluent in several), and was rarely at home and never for very long.  When he retired and had to live permanently at home with my mother, he moved out into a cottage of his own.  They stayed married, and spoke on the phone several times a day, went on holiday together and did lots of things together – he just wanted to live by himself; and he wanted to live simply.  I felt very at home in his cottage, which was comfortable but plain and unpretentious.  The heart of his home was his little dog, whom he loved, and the birds (and inadvertently, the rats) he fed every day in the garden.

Just over a year ago he died – quickly, neatly, suddenly, without fuss and with no preceding illness, just as he would have wished.  My mother and I found him dead in his cottage the morning after his death when we called by to visit him.

To me and my sister he left his estate: his cottage in the quiet English countryside, and a modest amount of savings.  My sister loved him very much and wanted to keep the cottage that had been his home, so she threw all she had at buying out my share; and his money was divided between us.

This has been a wonderful gift, and a key element in our household’s journey into simplicity.  The money from the sale of his cottage is in the bank ready (it is the exact amount we need) to pay off our mortgage on the house as soon as we can do so without penalty this summer (to do so before would cost more than waiting).  Having mortgage-free accommodation is the crucial thing that allows us to choose our occupation.  It allows me to work as a writer, Hebe as a letter-cutter, the Badger to work as a publisher only because he loves his job not because he is shackled to it, allows Fi the freedom to explore and travel and do a myriad different jobs and keep us all afloat at home in between time, and means that Alice’s bread-and-butter job at the library while she does the things that really speak to her soul – making stained glass windows, writing, textile crafts etc – is something she could walk away from and explore new possibilities if she chose.

The money from the cottage allowed us to pay off the mortgage, and this in turn allowed us to sell the small house we owned, that Hebe, Alice and Fi lived in before we all moved in together, to Grace and Clay and the Wretched Wretch at a price affordable to them on husband’s salary only – a vitally important thing, because it allows Grace to be a stay-at-home mother, and will in turn allow her to home-school the Wretched Wretch (hooray!)

So, a bit like Jesus’s picture of the seed that falls into the ground and dies and yields a rich harvest, in his death my father passed on to us the gift of the freedom he loved – freedom not to accept the ways of the world and the agendas of mainstream society.  It was a wonderful thing he did for us.

I should say as well that the little house Grace and Clay and the Wretched Wretch now live in was bought from money my mother gave us.  She was also a stay-at-home mother, raising sheep and organic fruit and vegetables, working every hour of the day, investing every bit of money that came her way into our home, so that gradually, buying shrewdly, buying low and selling high, she acquired two or three houses.  As she downsized and sold them off, she shared the proceeds with me and my sister.  Her gifts and my father’s legacy have given us both freedom and security – they have been Christ’s Good Shepherd to us whom they loved, allowing us to go out and find pasture, to come in and find rest.

Then of course the Badger has thrown all his resources and energy into the project, adding his savings and working hard to finance a considerable mortgage in the interim.

So our journey into simplicity has long taproots – it flowers out of the lives of parents who lived simply, frugally and thriftily, and have given us the gift of the opportunity to do the same.

But there was more.  In addition to the proceeds from his cottage, my father had his nest-egg of savings.  And this has allowed us to put photo-voltaic panels and tubes that harvest the sunshine to heat our water, on our roof.  They have just been installed, and the day they were connected we switched off the gas boiler that ran the central heating and hot water.  During daylight hours we now have electricity from the sun to fuel our household needs, and enough over to export a steady supply to the national grid.  We have enough hot water for the needs of five people – washing, washing up, washing clothes – all from the sun.

I always dreamed of having access to technology, but never imagined I would be able to generate the funds to do so.

Like my father, I do not fit in well to this world and its ways. I live an odd, shy, retired life, and have never been able to find my way in to any kind of belonging.  I communicate with the world through the books and blog I write, and have found that it’s best kept that way.  So I have never been wealthy; I cannot fit in to the employment structures well enough.  The idea of having solar panels on the roof seemed like a far-off dream that only rich people could have.

All my life I have tried to teach and tell people about caring for the earth and living naturally but, though people have listened to me courteously, the only converts I’ve made have been my own children!  Now, however, I don’t need to try to persuade.  They will buy the green electricity because we are exporting it from our own roof  :0D  Result!

So that’s another step we have made in the direction of simplicity – our washing machine, our computers, our iron, our water heater – the sun runs them now!

And somehow it’s all the more wonderful that this came to us through the mindfulness of my parents’ way of living.  They knew what to do with what they had and, when they passed the baton on to us, we knew what to do with it too.

It also pleases me that instead of waiting to inherit in their turn, because we all share and live together, it is possible for the generation of grandchildren and great-grandchildren to benefit simultaneously with the parents and grandparents – for my mother who was so generous to us benefits in her turn; this morning her bedsheets have been through our washing machine and are hanging out on the washing line in our garden to dry in the sun, for though her apartment has a beautiful view over farmland and woods it has no yard of its own for a washing line, and tumble driers have never been our way.