The ordinary sense of true

On Sunday we had the reading at church about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the one that has God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, calling “Adam – where are you?”

A vicar once phoned me to demand that I tell him straight up if I thought that the Bible is “in the ordinary sense” true. 

Evidently he had not the imagination to grasp that the reassurance he wanted is inherently impossible – nothing to do with the Bible, just that there is no “ordinary sense” of truth.

Take that reading about God and Adam in the garden as a handy example.  The reader’s interpretation of the truth of that interaction is revealed by tone of voice.

So, you could have a jovial, playful God, calling Adam in hide-and-seek tones that implies He always has this trouble finding him amidst all this undergrowth – a kind of “Yoohooo!  A-a-da-a-am!  Where a-a-are yo-o-o-o-o-u?” tone of voice.  Then maybe when later God asks Adam who told him he was naked, the question could be redolent with hurt bewilderment, Adam’s discovery coming as a nasty shock to God.

Or you could tell the story as our reader did at church on Sunday – a brusque, hectoring God roaring “Adam!  Where are you!?”  in a kind of get-here-mighty-quick-if-you-don’t-want-your-backside-tanned tone.

That God demands to know “Who told you you were naked?” much as a barrister might question a prisoner in the dock.

Or, if you read it right (according to my interpretation) God’s call to Adam “Where are you?” is the loneliest, most heart-breaking question the world has ever heard from Day 1 of creation until now.   The question reveals not God’s ignorance of Adam’s geographical location, but that He knows He has lost him.  Adam has gone off-radar.  Their relationship is broken.

There was a night of unbearable sadness when my first marriage was ending, when I sent a text message to my then husband (who had moved out) asking him, “Please, will you come?”  Because we had the same cell-phones and network, I was also able to add into the message one of the optional icons available: a broken heart.  I knew it was ending, but I missed him so.  When God asks “Where are you,” it is (in my opinion) that kind of message.

But it’s all in the interpretation, isn’t it?  Avon calling, enraged headmaster or broken-hearted lover – who’s to say?  There is no “ordinary sense” of “true”.

When I came into the church service where we heard that reading, I was already mulling over this, because of two events; one more than a couple of decades back, recalled to mind by another that took place on Saturday.

The one from twenty-five years ago took place in the home of the people who were then my parents-in-law.  They had an open-house coffee morning for the churches of the Methodist Circuit.   I, then a young mother of a couple of small children, came in from the garden to find a couple of complete strangers sitting either side of the fireplace in my parents-in-laws’ armchairs.  Now I was there to help with the coffee morning, and was expecting guests – but the situation struck me as amusing, so I said to the couple: “Hello!  What are you doing here?” 

Not everybody shares my sense of humour.  And how was I to know I was talking to a retired policeman?

The man explained why they were there and who they were, and we chatted awhile and I fetched their coffee and thought no more of it.

Fifteen years later, by that time ordained as a Methodist minister, I came across the couple again.  They were in membership of a chapel of which I had just been made pastor.  As I came in the door, they went out.  Turned out the man had been hating me for fifteen years because I said “Hello!  What are you doing here?” 

You see, that couple had been new in the Circuit, and this had been the first event they’d attended!  He didn’t know me from Adam, and certainly didn’t recognise my brand of jokes.  He thought it was about the rudest, most unkind thing anyone had ever said to him.

And I’d just thought it was really funny.  There is no ordinary sense of true.  Or funny.  Or rude.

Then, last Saturday, this was recalled to mind by an encounter in a pub.

One of the Badger’s first acts on crossing the threshold of our church was to organise a Men’s Breakfast group.  It’s (advisedly) called the Big Boys’ Breakfast and is a Christianity-Meets-Cholesterol-fest at The Welcome Stranger pub.  They have a slap-up full English breakfast followed by a talk from an interesting speaker.

The speakers are good and the subjects intriguing, and I wanted to go too.  But I appreciate that single-gender dynamics are different from mixed-group dynamics, and I didn’t want to muscle in on their male bonding.

So while they congregated round a group of tables in readiness for their fried eggs and bacon, I sat just round the corner with my hot chocolate and toast, planning to slip unobtrusively onto the edge of the gathering when the speaker got up to address them.

Mostly they came surging into the pub past me, focussed on God, Grease and Good Fellowship; but not our church treasurer, who is in many ways a gem of a human being.

He saw me, stopped, and asked: “Why are you here?”

So I explained that I didn’t want to intrude on the men’s gathering, and I was happy where I was, and would come over and join them when the speaker started.  Having satisfied himself that I was okay and sure I was welcome to join them if I wished, he went and took his place with the others.  Later on, when the talk started and I stealthed across to join them, he looked out for me, and welcomed me further into the gathering than the edgemost edge I had opted for.

But what interested me was that here again, there was no ordinary sense of “true”.

If you had a transcript of that situation, to be read aloud in church (I mean, it reads a bit like the Book of Ruth in some ways), then when it got to the bit where it told of the lone woman coming uninvited to the Men’s Breakfast and taking her place on the edge of the gathering with her cocoa and toast, nobody noticing her until the church treasurer comes in and stops at her table to ask “Why are you here?” – I wonder in what tone of voice the reader would dramatise the question?

Because it could be completely misrepresented as the most shrivellingly hostile confrontation dividing men from women of all time, couldn’t it?   

Truth, in all its facets and flavours, is relational, contextual and experiential.  And it is never “ordinary”, simple, or flat.

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365 366 Day 163 – Monday June 11^th  

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

We’re having an auction of promises at church.  I couldn’t think of anything to promise that fitted the overlap between what I am prepared to do for a bidder and what they might be willing to bid for.  So I said I’d give them a thing to auction instead, and I took along this statue of St Francis – which I think is very beautiful.

365 366 Day 162 – Sunday June 10^th  

Oh, map pins come in boxes of about a trillion, so we didn’t need the whole box for our pinboard.  I took these down to church to supplement the stock of notice-board drawing pins.

365 366 Day 161 – Saturday June 9^th  

Now, this was a lovely thing.  A kelim (Afghan rug) that I had in my tiny apartment in between husbands.  Then Buzz had it for a while.  Then it was a sofa throw for a bit.  Then we gave the sofa to the Hastings Furniture Services where low-income people can furnish their home affordably.  By this time we all have all the rugs/carpets we need in our various houses, so I passed it on.

Rubbing out lifemarks

I went back today and read over one or two of the posts I’d written here when I dressed Plain.  It was an odd feeling.

I love Plain dress.  Reading what I’d written brought back the feeling of it – that sense of having a persona/identity to rest in, greater and deeper than myself.  I loved the sense of retiredness that kind of modesty brought – the covering, the full skirts, the aprons – as though my clothing was an actual house or, even more than that, a tower to take refuge in.  Yes, I can feel as if it were now that sense of solid peace.

I liked the feeling of slow that those clothes gave me – a heavy grace that felt peaceful and dignified.  I liked the physical feel and smell of the folds of cotton, and the colours – blue, brown, purple, green, white.

I love Plain dress.

There were things I didn’t love about it too.  I didn’t like that it drew attention to me, because it is not part of anyone’s sartorial vocabulary in England: here, Plain dress actually and oddly is Fancy dress.  Everyone stared at me, from other folk come to church to worship, to the dustmen come to empty the bins.  Dressed Plain, I took people’s minds from what they were about – even when what they were about was worshipping God – and distracted them to look at MEEEE instead.  And I did not like that.

I didn’t like that it separated me from my family, took me into a different culture, a different life language, from the people God has given me for my belonging.  I didn’t like it any more than an Amish woman would like wearing jeans and a crop top with a shaved head, a tattoo and earrings.

I didn’t like that it spoke very loudly in a language nobody it was addressing could possibly understand.  Apart from a man who stopped me on a street in central London one day – he was from the US and I reminded him of home.  I had learned a vernacular that did not grow from the earth where I was planted, because I learned it on the internet not in the environment of physical presence.

Nowadays I dress plain but I don’t dress Plain.  I wear modest clothes in mostly solid, quiet colours.   I wear what will make me disappear – what will say not “MEEE” but “you”; clothes to make people overlook and forget me.

Most crucial of all is that I believe I have traded “Plain” for “simple”.  When I dressed Plain, I had a dress rail to hang my dresses, aprons, blouses, petticoats and cloak, and a chest of drawers for my sweaters and jersey tops, with a compartment for coverings.  I had a couple of bonnets to store.  Plain took quite a lot of space.  There was an iron and an ironing board too, necessary accessories for Plain.   My clothes now fold up small into a chest of drawers and underbed drawer – and that includes my shoes and one drawer in the chest given over to candles and stationery bits.

I love Plain.  It has about it, oddly, something intensely romantic, a charming grace. 

But I have come to accept that my way is not Plain but simple and getting simpler, a slow rubbing out.

I think that for me Plain was a sort of hobby, an adventure – but not, I think a distraction; more an education.  I learned a lot, just from wearing the dresses and coverings; they kind of spoke to me, every day.

What I am imagining now is a life like a cloth so small and insubstantial you can fold it up and store it in a hazel nut.  Hidden, quiet, forgotten, unseen.  A still small life that has no part any more in earthquake, wind or fire.

I don’t know any way to do this but step by step by step, learning to walk lighter and lighter and lighter until I can reach a point where I cannot be tracked because my life leaves no footprint at all.

I wonder if I can actually do that?  It would be a little like learning to fly.

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365 366 Day 155-160 

Sunday June 3^rd - Friday June 8^th

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

Tea breaks and fire breaks

At the time my husband Bernard died I was pastor to two churches.  He died right at the end of August.  On the first of September I added four more churches to my flock.  During the last weeks of his life, Bernard occasionally had some good advice for me.  One thing he said was, “Don’t forget to take your day off!”

“Bernard,” I said, “don’t be daft.  I’ll be pastoring six churches.  There won’t be time for a day off!”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, take tea-breaks, then.”

Bernard believed in tea-breaks.  He thought them necessary to an effective day’s work.  He was foreman in a large building firm for quite a lot of years before he set up on his own as a general builder, and he observed that men had a certain capacity for work, a certain amount of strength and energy to give to the day – and a certain need for rest, for spacers; tea-breaks.  In the course of his working life the government at some point dreamed up some benighted scheme for getting more out of the work-force, and tea-breaks were stopped.   Bernard said they didn’t understand; this couldn’t work.  It just meant the men paced themselves differently, working with less energy through the day overall if they were not allowed to stop for refreshment – and it was demoralising too.  It removed a source of cheerfulness and affirmation.  So he kept his tea-breaks for the men in his firm, and in due course got a phone-call from an inspector saying “I understand your men are still having tea-breaks.”

“No,” said Bernard, “they’re not.  We have beer-breaks here.”

“Take tea-breaks” became one of his life mottoes, and it’s a good one, an excellent aid in getting the ground covered, getting the work done.

The way of simplicity includes exercising a discipline of spaciousness – knowing when to stop, when to take an afternoon off or sit down and read a book for a bit – knowing when to take a tea-break.

Another of Bernard’s sayings was “all rush and tear”.  He didn’t approve of life lived in the fast lane, all rush and tear.  “Slow and steady wins the race”, he might have said.

He also liked the words of the book of Ecclesiastes: “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might”.

And he loved these words of Sir Francis Drake:

“There must be a beginning of any great matter, but the continuing unto the end until it be thoroughly finished yields the true glory.”

And the likelihood of accomplishing thorough completion, the attainment of true glory, was, Bernard felt, substantially enhanced by taking tea-breaks.

I think he’s right.  Going at a thing gently and steadily, with stops along the way for a cup of tea, is the way of simplicity – the hallmark of a spacious and contented life.

Now, here’s another thing.  As well as tea-breaks, fire-breaks.

St Benedict was a canny one for fire-breaks. 

When are you most likely to fall out with other members of your household?  My best guess is, either before you’ve properly got going in the morning, when you haven’t had your coffee and you haven’t woken up properly; or else towards the end of the day when you mind is no longer fresh and you’re getting tired and therefore possibly a bit snappy.

St Benedict’s rule instituted for his communities the Grand Silence – from after Compline (about 9pm) until after the morrow mass and breakfast (about 9am) they had to shut up.  No conversation.  I bet that stopped a lot of friction from breaking out into quarrels.  The Great Silence is not primarily a noble spiritual exercise.  It’s a fire-break.

The way of simplicity is about spaciousness and peace.

“If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.”

So says St Paul (Romans 12:18). Wise and lovely words.

Now I aspire to live this way, but I find it quite difficult.  The things I like least about myself are my habits of criticising, arguing and complaining (see here).   However, I have found that just trying hard doesn’t really cut the mustard.  In fact, it’s completely ineffective.

What I notice is that I am most lethal when under pressure.

This last week, for one reason and another, I have felt under pressure.  Everything – everything – has felt annoying.  I had the mother and father of all rows with the Badger at the weekend, and I was impressed to note, waking up this morning, that I’d spent the night still arguing and fighting with people in my dreams! 

Stop, I thought.  Just, stop!  Realistically speaking, how can this be addressed?  Not by moralising or hardening of the oughteries.  Practically speaking, what needs to happen so that “as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone” becomes a reality in my life?   And that means what I say about them as well as what I say to their faces! Yes.

I pondered on this for a while.  Then, as Venus was making her transit across the sun, it came to me: what I need are tea-breaks and fire-breaks.

We discussed this, me and the in-house wisdom gurus.  One of us said that she had noticed in herself a weakening of compassion in recent times, a withering of sympathy for her fellow human beings.  She put forward the suggestion that a way to address this is in strengthening boundaries.  If sufficiently clear, strong, high boundaries are in place, that gives space to think before responding, space to deal with one thing before moving on to the next, space to consider, pray and rest before going from one set of demands to the one queuing up behind it.

In other words: take tea-breaks and make fire-breaks.

She also spoke of the protection afforded by hiddenness and secrecy (another form of fire-break) - just keeping quiet about things, not advertising them, "Keep it secret, keep it safe".   Protecting and nourishing what is good, beautiful and effective in one's life by refraining from blabbing on about it, promoting it, touting it round.  Making a fire-break around it.  Establishing, maintaining, protecting the boundaries.

For me, an integral part of the way of simplicity is gentleness.  I am here to build the Peaceable Kingdom.  It seems to me that my good intentions have been thwarted by boundaries too permeable and friable to defend the citadel of peace in my soul.

I would rather people found me disappointingly inaccessible than bad-tempered and snappy.

So my simplicity focus at the present time is on establishing patterns and rhythms of peace, mapped and maintained by tea-breaks and fire-breaks.  Let’s see if that works.

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365 366 Day 155-160 

Sunday June 3^rd - Friday June 8^th

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

 Sunday morning.

Today, the Badger is preaching at church, and I am looking forward to hearing him.  I’m proud of my husband.  He’s a good man.

Time to get up and cook some porridge, start the day.

Later on today is the wonderful flotilla of boats along the Thames to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.  I love our queen, and so admire and respect her.  It’s chill and overcast – I hope it doesn’t rain for them!

Then this evening our family is singing in a concert – another jubilee celebration.  And Hebe cut the letters and shaping in the stone they have laid in the special flowerbed at Battle to mark the jubilee.  I’ll try to get a photo of it to show you.  It was a bit of a scramble!  Every day she was cutting as fast as she could, then they rushed the stone across to Battle to fix it in place in time for the dedication ceremony.  Alice helped with the design and finishing off the letters – painting or gilding, I can’t remember which they said.

Now Alice is working on the glass panel for our Carmelite friends at Thorganby – at Thicket Priory.  It’s of St Joseph, because of his kindness and his silence, nurturing and protecting the Word; and it’s going to be so beautiful. 

And the garden is GROWING – I swear those potatoes put on two or three inches in one day!

God bless this Lord’s Day to you.  May you be happy today xxx

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365 366 Day 155-160 – Sunday June 3^rd - Friday June 8^th

Five pairs of glasses!  Why I had so many was because I used to be a minister of the church.  During the spell when I was pastor of six churches all at the same time, just after Bernard died, everything I was at, I was leading – meetings, worship, funerals, weddings.  I went through a patch of being really anxious lest I forgot my glasses and couldn't see to read the words of the liturgy/sermon notes etc.  So I made sure I had spare glasses in my car, my briefcase, the pulpits, by the phone, on my desk – everywhere!  Thank the Lord those days are gone.  The only remnant of them is this clutter.  Our optician collects unwanted glasses to send overseas where people are glad to have them - so I donated them there.

Ideas as promised

I promised Sarah in Australia I’d come back to her comment of yesterday.  To save you fossicking around wondering what it was she said –

Your path is admirable. It is visionary, gentler and humane. Now, how can such plans as these be translated so that those living in flats (highrise for our North American friends) the frail/infirm, those with disabilities etc can participate? In many jurisdictions tank water for domestic use is still a no-no (check with your local council to see what is permitted within your LGA), increasingly, wood stoves are, in a twist of irony, being 'outlawed' for 'Green' purposes and at any rate, for folk in a place like Australia, many regions are too hot for combustion water heating/cookery for most of the year and firebans would prevent such being operated even in a kitchen or canteen separate from the house during stretches of our summer months. Many of us, though we would love otherwise, are part of the system - especially, with yet more sad irony - the vulnerable. Could 'Slow food/Slow money/slow living/transitional town' inspired households be established similar to the amazing L'Arche model to be a way forward for we with a disability, the elderly/infirm, the lonely, the isolated? ...Australia has the highest rate of urbanisation in the world; I think it is up around 91% of our overall population. Our wonderful 'Gardening Australia host 'Kosta' has sparked an interest in nature-strip/grass verge veg patches and already one local council has successfully outlawed them. Systemic change is needed so those of us who would love to can, because the post WWII model is, I fear, in the medium term, largely unsustainable.

Okay, that was Sarah’s comment; and here are my thoughts.

I think the two questions to ask are:

Where are we?

Where do we want to be?

From there we can start to determine the direction we might like to take.  The journey will be achieved like any – one step at a time.

My own focus/purpose/direction/destination is simplicity.  If you want to read about that in detail, I’ve written about it fully in my book In Celebration of Simplicity.

In brief, I believe simplicity is essential for sustainable lifestyle, and unless we achieve that we’re all stuffed; and I believe simplicity to be essential for personal holiness and all spiritual development – which is a heart’s desire of mine.

The great thing about simplicity is that you can do it anywhere with whatever resources you have.  It transplants and relocates with the greatest of ease.  It can tuck into urban high-rise studio flats or mountain huts or remote farms.  The style will vary according to the individual and the location – but anyone can live in simplicity.

My own goal is to keep reducing and reducing my possessions until I have almost nothing, and to walk lightly on the Earth in my daily habits.

I recommend to you, if you are a Facebooker, the Facebook page called Innermost House.  Michael and Diana Lorence, who live at Innermost House, practice a lifestyle of stunningly beautiful simplicity.  Their possessions are astonishingly few.  Their home is a tiny wooden house in the North California woods – so, a very rural retreat.  But they are not self-sufficient homesteaders, far from it.  They run a car, they do their washing at the Laundromat, they have a shower and water closet.  They have no electrical appliances and they eat one-pot meals cooked over the fire (they actually own only one pot) or salads, bread, cheese and fruit.  They drink mainly water, a little wine, and occasionally a hot drink.

They have no garden, as far as I am aware they do not have a composting system, they don’t grow any flowers or veg at all.  Yet they walk very lightly on the Earth because they live so simply.  They chose natural fibres, materials and packaging, shopping at the farmers’ market and eschewing all plastics, machines and artificiality.

Another model of simplicity is the one I followed before I married the Badger.  I lived in a one-bedroom apartment with no garden.  There was a garage with a hard-standing (concrete bit for a car at the front of the garage) and a communal patio with a flowerbed covered in weeds.  Inside I had a bathroom with a cupboard, a bedroom with a fitted single wardrobe, a living room with a kitchenette alcove and a chimney fitted with an ornamental, non-functioning fireplace.

A friend who is a builder converted the garage into a studio – one side fitted for stained glass, the other fitted for ceramics for Hebe and Alice.  The hard standing I made into a garden grown in tubs, troughs and pots, and I put a wormery there for composting kitchen waste.  In those days I hadn’t started composting my own body wastes, but if I lived there again I would do it now I have the know-how.

I  bought a little woodstove, installing it instead of the non-functioning fireplace.

Another model of simplicity is a friend of mine who is blind, has ME and lives in a trailer.  She is frugal of necessity because she relies on welfare benefits since her ME stopped her working – but she would be anyway because she has always lived simply, that’s how she was brought up.  She doesn’t do anything extraordinary, she just uses less of the Earth’s resources than most people.  She has a fair amount of electrical gadgetry to facilitate her communications with the outside world – recording equipment to allow her to make and send letters, for example – but that’s appropriate to her needs.

So, let’s look at some of the areas touched upon by Sarah: if you are disabled, frail, or living in a block of flats, what are your options?

You might consider living with others, accomplishing in community what you cannot accomplish alone.

You might have the income/capital to have solar roof installations fitted so that your hot water and electrical appliances can be run with clean energy generated by you (in our home we use much less electricity than we feed into the national grid even though there are five of us, we have all the usual things like washing machine, electric cooker, fridge-freezer, TVs, laptops etc and we don’t have a massive roof).  Good insulation and double-glazed windows are also helpful for keeping down fuel consumption.

Maybe you are frail, disabled, poor and live alone in a high-rise block of flats.  You are probably living frugally already – and you can do things like when you boil a kettle put whatever hot water is left over into a thermos flask for later, snuggle up in a duvet with a hot water bottle rather than run the central heating high – heat the person not the house.

For the aesthetics of the thing, you can also enjoy the rhythms of the natural day.  Have just one clock and keep it discreetly tucked away where you don’t see it.  If you need to be reminded to take pills, set the alarm on it, you don’t need to see it all the time.  Let your life be shaped by natural light waxing and waning.  Keep the curtains open at night so you can see the dawn and the clouds, the moon and stars.  Even if you live in the city you can see some stars – even if your neighbour has an infernal bulkhead security light.  Have your bed by the window.  If possible, choose to live somewhere with a view of trees even if you don’t personally own a garden.   When you have your evening meal, turn off some of the lights you normally have on, and light a candle at the meal table.  This way you can be close to the living Earth even in a high-rise flat.  I can’t have the life-style I wanted – a tiny house in a field – because of my family commitments and obligations; so I asked if I might have the room at the top of the house, so I can be close to the sky instead.  If I lived in a nursing home, I would ask if I might have a window that looked out on a tree.

On a practical point, make sure you turn off any lights and appliances you are not actually using.  If I lived alone now, I would not own a fridge.  I live in an urban setting so I can walk along to the supermarket frequently, the ‘piles of rotting food’ people envisage are not the reality; most vegetables do well out of the fridge.  Dried milk is a more frugal option, hard cheese and butter don’t require refrigeration, and  there are usually long-life packaging options for items we might normally refrigerate. 

When you have to replace a freezer or washing machine, choose one with a good energy rating.  They say that in our society people throw away about a third of the food they buy!  Not doing that is a good start.  If one lives in an apartment in a high-rise block, part of one’s responsibility to the Earth will be to be mindful about acquiring well-judged amounts and types of food, responsibly produced and packaged, so that one is not putting out big piles of rubbish to landfill.  Perhaps a disabled person won’t be able to get to the farmers’ market for some reason – but mindful choices made by shopping online can help – perhaps a regular organic veggie box from one of the delivery schemes, or choosing eggs from hens free-ranging in woodland at the supermarket.   

When I lived in my little apartment, I did my washing every day, by hand, in the bath.  I dried it in a rack over the bath.  I kept a small chest freezer in the bathroom cupboard: the heat generated by the freezer made the cupboard effective as an airing cupboard.   I wear a lot of micro-fleece clothes – they are easy to wash and dry and keep me very warm in winter.

Just living in a very small apartment, or if you have a large house then letting rooms to tenants, of itself contributes towards living lightly and responsibly on the Earth.

Composting requires less land than people imagine – wormeries take up little space and are tidy and clean. A wormery could stand by the bins in the area of the property designated for those.    A person living in an apartment with no garden at all could maybe create a relationship with the local permaculturists (there will be some, even in the city), who may be willing to collect/receive veggie scraps for their compost heap.

One of the things Sarah asked about in her comment was using rainwater - not possible for everyone, she pointed out.  But we can all treat water as precious.  When I run the tap for the water to wash up, I don't let it run down the sink while the hot is coming through - I collect in in a jug and tip it into a bucket to water plants, steam veggies, rinse clothes etc.  When I shower, I turn on the water to get wet, then turn it off while I put the bicarb/vinegar on my hair, then turn it on again to rinse.  When I clean my teeth I use a little water from the bucket (collected while the hot water was running through) to wet the brush and rinse my mouth and brush.  When I wash my hands I put a little water from the bucket in a bowl, wash my hands in that, and tip the water onto the garden (or a house plant).  I don't stand there with the tap running.  In our house, no-one flushes the toilet at night.  Saves a lot of water from being wasted and a lot of people from being woken up.

Each person’s circumstances will be individual.  The path of simplicity and responsibility we create will be adapted to those circumstances – or we can make changes in our circumstances, often more readily than we might at first suppose.  The key thing is to start by looking at what we can do – the internet is heaving with ideas and examples and suggestions.

You may not have a fire to use your garbage for fuel, or the money for a solar installation, but everyone can put on an extra sweater before deciding to turn up the central heating, and everyone can share.

Again local variations make it impossible to be prescriptive, but where we live the charity shops drop bags asking for donations through the mail slots, so we don’t need a car or to be physically strong to get our surplus possessions responsibly passed on.

Group schemes are helpful – local libraries rather than buying books, in the UK the Red Cross will sometimes loan disability equipment so one can try it out without buying (and I think groups like eg the MS society do similarly), machines for building or gardening work can be hired rather than bought.

Freecycle is a wonderful thing for sharing resources and living frugally.  People want anything – part sets of tiles, half cans of paint, bags of electrical cables, cardboard cartons for housemoves, old duvets for their dog to sleep on – anything and everything!  This cuts down a lot of acquisition and keep a lot of junk out of landfill as well as out of your house.

Here are some principles:

• Your options may be few – but where you have a choice, choose in favour of blessing and cherishing the Earth.
• Reduce, re-use, repair, recycle.
• Get together with others – perhaps start a group committed to living simply, or get talking with friends at church.  What we cannot achieve as individuals often becomes easy in a group.  Sharing is very Earth-friendly, very frugal, and offers the fun and interest of interaction that alleviates boredom and offers an alternative to leisure activities that cost money.
• Simplify, always simplify.  Owning too little is rarely the challenge we face in the Western world.  The simpler our lives become the more clearly we can see and think and choose.
• Organise your mind.  Know what you are trying to achieve and take small steps every day in that direction.
• Set aside a small area for an altar, write down your prayers, and petition the Lord persistently for the change you want to see in your life; and work towards it yourself too.  Put a ‘please’ box and a ‘thank you’ box on your altar – encourage yourself with the delight of seeing your prayers answered and the slips of paper moving from ‘please’ to ‘thank you’.

In the end I think the bottom line really is just to know what you want and be prepared to prioritise it.  Being willing to change, compromise, question, sacrifice and work.  Get close to people who live simply and see less of people who live unwisely and extravagantly.  Follow blogs that encourage and inspire you down the road you want to follow.  Read, research, explore on line.  The important thing is not to concentrate on what you can’t do but work out what you can do.

• Change one thing.
• Share one thing.
• Give away one thing.
• Turn off one thing.
• Plant one tree.
• Choose one Fairtrade item in your regular grocery shopping.
• And one organically grown item.
• Choose one thing with no packaging in favour of one in a plastic bag.
• Do without one thing.
• Turn your heating down one degree.
• Flush your toilet one less time (the pee will sit there happily waiting until you go again).
• Spend one summer day in natural light, not turning on electric lights.
• Spend one evening a week not watching television.
• Throw one clothes-swap party.
• Take out one light-bulb from a multi-bulb fitting

Or any other One Thing you can think of.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way.  

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365 366 Day 154 – Saturday June 2^nd  

This pretty voile curtain went into one of the fabric craft kits I put together for Freecycle.   

Finding your way

When we walk down into Hastings, this is our route – down a flight of steps and along this path, then through the glorious park, green and peaceful, a place of lakes and streams, flowers, birds and huge old trees.

But for car drivers, the road up from the sea north towards Battle offers a choice: the A21 or the A2100.

I love our English road signs – they convey the sense that everyone has lived here forever and nobody really needs the information about which way to go.

This is our road.

And when you arrive back to our house you find someone else with a very relaxed attitude to life:

  

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365 366 Day 153 – Friday June 1^st  

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

   

Another practical and pretty sunbonnet.  I only wish they were part of the sartorial vocabulary in England, in which case I would have kept this bonnet, the straw bonnet, and all the Plain garb for sure.  Sadly, here, this kind of gear just makes people feel bewildered and uneasy.  But it was a good bonnet.    

Note to self

·         Begin and end each day with a prayer, 

·        Do not go out of your budget, save up for purchases.  Live as frugally as possible, leaving enough to be generous and to share, and see to it that there is a prudent margin then stop thinking about it.  Invest in property and do not leave sums on deposit in banks where it may be used for guns and bombs and sweatshops.  Keep your income low to avoid large sums going in taxation to the Inland Revenue where it will contribute towards war, vivisection and genetic mutation.  Keep your finances as uncomplicated and straightforward as possible: no credit card, no store cards, no complex investments, no tangle of insurances – just the basics.  Seek increasingly to reduce the role of money and the banking system in your life.

·        Be content with the provision of the household for food, adding only sparingly and a little of personal extras.

·        For cosmetics and toiletries be content with sodium bicarbonate, cider vinegar, aqueous cream, lavender and frankincense. Clean your teeth and hair with sodium bicarbonate and condition your hair with cider vinegar.

·        For medicines be provided with plasters, lavender oil, tea tree oil, propolis, hopi candles.

·        For keeping clean utensils and clothes, have good soap, borax, sodium bicarbonate, cider vinegar, lemons, lavender oil, tea tree, frankincense and myrrh.  Nothing else is necessary.

·        Let your food be simple and cheerful.  Enjoy wild food – blackberries, ramsons, mushrooms and elderberries, as well as home-grown vegetables and herbs.

·        For light and heat, be provided with seasoned wood and beeswax candles.  Every now and then go wooding for kindling sticks and fir-cones.

·        Limit computer use to writing your blog, professional commitments of editing and writing books and articles, preparing funerals, fulfilling the obligations of the church PCC secretary, archiving and recording, creating stationery, making financial spread-sheets etc, correspondence, researching (eg earth closets, gardening info, beekeeping etc) – and other creative work.  Spend no time on the internet socialising or idly cruising about looking at this and that and shopping.  If you need anything, look in the local stores or resource from plain and simple sites free of temptations (eg Dash or Landsend).  For the most part, strictly limit the time you spend using the computer to a couple of hours a day.

·        Shower once in three or four days, washing your clothes in the shower at the same time.  Eat a simple, low-fat, natural diet and avoid the stress of rush and tear and conflict, then your body will have no unpleasant odours.  Clean your teeth with bicarbonate of soda, wash your hair with bicarb and vinegar, adding borax and soap to the accumulated water to wash the clothes.  Rinse them in water saved from the roof or hot-water run-off.   Use family cloths or just water instead of toilet paper.

·        Save all water run off to get to the hot, store it in large jars and use for soaking pans, cooking vegetables, boiling for tea, watering plants, your bathroom needs and rinsing clothes.

·        Save as much rainwater as you have capacity for.  In rainy weather, harvest the water constantly to use instead of city water for watering indoor plants, soaking pans, rinsing clothes, steaming vegetables and house cleaning.  But do not drink the rainwater or incorporate it into cooking; use city water for that because of germs and parasites from birds.

·        Gather and dilute (from 1-in-3 to 1-in10) all urine and spread fresh on the garden at the end of the day once the dew falls.  It is full of nitrates and will make healthy plants.

·        Gather and compost in bokashi bran all nightsoil (free from urine).  Age the resulting compost in the big pile for the heat to neutralise pathogens before digging into the garden in the autumn.

·        Cook on the woodstove where practical in the winter, out of doors sometimes in the summer, and eat bread-based meals, fruit and salads often to avoid using electricity.  Use solar power for heating the water and running any electric appliances, remembering to work with the natural rhythms of light for any cooking with electricity, or ironing etc.  Save hot water in a thermos flask if you boil a kettle.  Stay with vegan or vegetarian food and fish for your own health, sustainable societies and compassion – let the animals go free.  Seek out honey from kind beekeepers who allow the bees to keep some of their honey for their own use.

·        Buy bread, cheese, butter, milk, fish, yoghourt, vegetables, grains and prepared foods from small local independent producers and retailers so far as your budget allows.  Remember that you bless and prosper only those you buy from, and are responsible for the society you have helped to shape thereby.  Check the social and environmental responsibility of your suppliers of clothing (and fabrics). Avoid packaging as much as possible, choosing shops that use paper bags which can be re-used for starting the fire.  Re-use what packaging you have attracted – for mailing packages, bagging trash (there shouldn’t be much of that), burning in the grate for a short fire (eg while you sit down for breakfast or a quick cup of tea but will be leaving the fireside soon).

·        Keep TV time to a minimum, watching only clean, intelligent and informative programmes, and uplifting well-crafted drama.

·        Every day: take abundant time in nature, walking and gardening; read and think and write; make things (bake, spin, knit, make stationery, prepare gifts for special occasions).

·        Give time to people who are lonely or vulnerable – little children and the old.  Identify a contribution to make to the work of the church, and do it faithfully.

·        Wherever possible, write letters not emails, do business personally with people not electronically or automatically with machines, deal in cash not plastic.

·        Go to live performances of music instead of relying on recorded music.

·        Live simply, kindly, justly and with immediacy – do not let the seeping isolation of automata and the electronic revolution saturate your life.  Avoid display of any kind; live quietly and retiredly.  Dress plainly and simply in quiet clothes that do not attract attention.

·        Be gentle with God’s creatures; give a home to a rescue animal, avoid killing, ensure that your choices look kindly on the habitat of wild creatures of every kind – leave a margin of wilderness in even the smallest garden, never travel with someone who drives too fast to stop for a running animal or startled bird.

·        Travel by public transport or walk. 

·        Take advantage of daylight and the morning hours.  Observe the rhythms of the seasons, work in natural light.  Every day take delight in the beauty and romance of light of all kinds – sunlight, starlight, firelight – sunrise and sunset; and remember to set time aside to watch the light on water – by lakes and canals, by streams and the ocean.  Walk in the woods and marvel at the dappling light in the trees.  Remember hearing and eyesight fade with age, muscles weaken and joints stiffen.  Do not miss the chance you have now to hear the birds sing, walk in the hills, and watch the glory of sunrise over the sea.

·        Work every day – keep your home clean, neat and clear of clutter, fulfil your responsibilities to family and society.  Work at what delights you, fulfilling the vocation of your inborn talents and abilities.  Play every day – reading, enjoying the company of friends, discussing and dreaming and creating.  If you work with the natural light and do not override the rhythms of the seasons by electricity, you will have the rest your body needs.

·        Do what you can for yourself, with your own hands.  Avoid automata, machinery you cannot maintain, sophisticated systems that mystify you and leave you at the mercy of people you do not know or trust.  Clean your own house, dig your own garden. Home-made clothes are the best, but be content with what you already have in your wardrobe, and avoid things that need ironing or add complication to your life. 

·        Don’t quarrel, speak kindly, think before you speak, never regard others with contempt, be patient and courteous.  Spend ample time in solitude and silence.  Always try to see the other person’s point of view.

·        Avoid clocks, mirrors, gadgetry, complication of every sort.  Consider the hidden dirt and risks, the moulds and leaks and health hazards of plumbing and electrification, the cost to the earth of white goods –  Be content with wet sand or water for cooling; take advantage of north-facing shady locations and the cool of the night; open and shut the windows and doors for a cooling breeze or passive solar heat; dry clothes on the line or over racks, doors and banisters.

·        Simplify wherever and whenever possible.  Live the simplest life your circumstances permit: and if your circumstances tend to complicate, look at how they can be changed.

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365 366 Day 152 – Thursday May 31^st

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

   

 I liked this enamel mug because it said something along the lines of “Would you like a refill?” at the bottom on the inside – which made me smile.  Apart from that I thought it was pretty ugly really, but good for picnics etc.  However, I do have more than one other enamel mug and in reality I almost never go on picnics – the appeal of lugging heavy bags of food and utensils across rough terrain when you can eat in comfort at home or have a cup of tea in a café is largely lost on me.  So this particular enamel mug went to a charity shop.