I see that govt (UK) is now advising us to stock up wth a prepper pantry and lots of water, in case of any one of a possible range of emergencies.
The water is a good example of what I want to say about systems rather than things. Govt advice is to have a 3-day supply of just-in-case water, being 3 litres per person per day, which would give you 9 litres each for however many people are in your household. Say there are 2 adults and 2 kids, that would be 36 litres, which is quite a lot (especially if you have a small house) but not a massive amount.
Of course the next thing that happens is people get wind of this and before you know it the supermarkets are all out of bottled water.
I suggest that there is a better approach. Instead of focusing on buying 36 bottles of water, because there's loads of water falling out of the sky most of the time; get a filter.
A few years ago, the ageing water pipes in the town where I live sprang a leak, fairly high in the network. Southern Water leapt into action, delivering bottles of water to all vulnerable people, and giving it out from the back of lorries in supermarket car parks. As a result, the approach roads to the supermarkets were gridlocked, jammed with the cars of anxious people desperate to be sure they had their share.
This all passed us by as if it hadn't been happening. As soon as I heard the water was going to be turned off, I filled up our bath and told my family and neighbours to do the same. That gave us enough for all the things we normally do with tap-water, to cover the several days the system was shut down. Meanwhile, in the garden we have 3 water-butts each holding 250 litres of rainwater from the roof, and we filled up a watering can of this for each bathroom (in that house we have 2 toilets and one bathroom with a toilet), every morning and evening, to flush the toilet. And we followed the time honoured rule, "If it's yellow, let it mellow, if it's brown, flush it down".
For our drinking water we did what we always do, walk down to the spring and bring back a bottle of free, natural mineral water straight from the earth, which we run through a filter like this that stands in the kitchen. It's just easy.
The flaw in this system for some people is old age or disability meaning it's too hard to go and get the spring water from the wild places, or someone may live in an apartment with no garden to stand a water butt.
But this is what I mean about systems not things. Thinking has to be specific and individualised, and part of it is people acting like a mycelium, all working together and helping each other. So far in my life I have never had to ask my grandson or my neighbour's lads to lug the water home for me, but maybe the time will come when I have to find the humility to do that if I want top quality water, or just filter the rainwater for a while. If push comes to shove I can just run the de-humidifier — that certainly yields plenty of water!
Similarly with food. Yes, have some rice or pasta, some tea/coffee and dried milk put by, have some powdered bone broth (you could probably live on that), some ghee/tallow and some tins of oily fish. But don't bother with tins of vegetables. Grow herbs if you have a garden, get familiar with which wild plants you can eat (eg nettles and dandelion greens), notice where the mushrooms and blackberries grow, and any sweet chestnuts or wild apples or hazelnuts. You can just improvise.
I don't think it's helped us to view everything as commodities that have to be purchased in commercial units. We do better to shift a bit closer to the natural world. When we took one of the cats to the vet the other day (not Clarence, Miguel who lives in the other household), I overheard a conversation in the waiting room between another client and the receptionist. The client was lamenting a recent occasion when her dog, a sight hound, had bagged a rabbit while out on a walk. She was explaining how she had managed to persuade it to let the rabbit go. What? I would have cooked the rabbit for tea, boiled the bones and offal for broth, and taken the dog for walks in that place very frequently. I think it is time to take the pressure off our lives by moving closer to the old ways. A lot of our problems are unnecessary, springing from the complication we've put in place that make financial transaction too much of everything we do. We don't need to buy everything, but we do need to lay down a different pattern, set our own system in place.
I was going to say something about inner preparation too, about the soul work, but I think you might be tired and have finished your cup of coffee by now, so I'll come back to that another day.
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