03.20.09
Life Outside
There are a few issues that concern me that are Outside The Scope of the essay I am writing. They are:
The loss of children’s geographies – where are children’s spaces now that they are “container” children, spending more time than ever in boxes of various sizes (cars, classrooms, carseats, strollers)? Where are their secret lairs, where are their alone-spots? What is the world made of when we have no liminal spaces? They don’t even walk to school anymore. They are never alone, unsupervised, in free child culture? What is happening to children’s society when it is totally mediated – by adults and by screens?
also, how can we live outdoors? How can we move our lives outside to bring the awareness of nature and life into our experience?
and, the man-machine and the nature-machine.
now, back to work.
02.22.09
On Nature – some preliminary thoughts
I’m in a course theoretically about nature and culture, about how humanity interacts with our environment. But mainly we talk environmentalism. What this has led me to is a few questions, though, about nature and culture on the big scale.
Firstly, in my life I have been approaching a relationship with nature based on observing details – looking for clues to nature’s working in the urban environment. Hearing birds, observing wildlife, noting the buds swelling in springtime. I look for berries, nuts and thorns, crouch down to watch ants scrabbling across the sidewalk, and pay attention to all the minute changes in my own little garden. After years of gardening I know the feeling of spring and the set of summer, I know the tease of early spring warms and the chill of coming frosts. But is this nature? And how is this qualitatively different from someone who walks in the urban landscape and doesn’t notice a thing?
Am I engaging with nature, if there even is such a thing? All the clues point to the notion that Nature itself (herself?) is a construct. This is an archetype, an ideal, a model, not something real… But we sense our own alienation (linked inextricably with urbanism, agriculture and the loss of small tightly-knit communities) from it, we feel there is something Missing in the urban landscape if there are no trees, no grass, no shrubberies. Yet I am tempted to argue that Landscaping is Far From Nature. It is a garden, it is an aesthetic feature that adds value to a place, but it is not Nature. I suppose it couldn’t be. Nature is an archetype. It can’t really exist.
Is nature linked to Wildness? Is the absence of human domesticity the marker of Nature’s domain? Is nature the same thing as an ecosystem? I am starting to think that nature is a force that operates -in degrees- on an intrinsic level of all parts of earth. In other words nature is apparent to us stronger when we encounter a “wild” zone – the culmulative impact of so many things-containing-nature is to have a sense of its system. Nature operates within us, as well, perhaps as instinct, perhaps as the processes of living, mating, and aging. Nature, I think, if it is a force, is mightier than its parts alone… the more things-containing-nature there are, the stronger it is.
So in the urban environment nature is of course present – it is simply in lesser degrees than in the forest or desert. The urban environment reduces the quantum of variation to the point that you can count species on one hand in a city park. I think we can sense this force or character – even in the small rocks embedded in cement – but because the original form has been changed or because there are less things-containing-nature operating, we have trouble sensing it. The force of nature is muted, from lack of variation, from the forcible adaptation of form by humans, and also from our own tools that we have developed to silence “her”.
Not to say that nature is all good – this force – should we agree with this definition – brings us discomfort and even death in the form of disease, cold and hot. It brings us danger in the form of night, predation, and weather events. We have good reason to silence it. Or maybe we did, when it all began. We framed our basic needs as “food, clothing, and shelter” – all things that involve the transformation of nature’s objects into products for our consumption and use. We did not say we need nature, but it’s starting to come to that.
I don’t want to stop heating my home in an effort to connect with nature. Connect with Nature implies some kind of agency on its part. This force cannot be connected with. Instead, I would rather say “sense” nature – I’d rather say that if we can build the capacity to intuitively measure this force, we could develop responsible “ecological citizenship”. I am starting to think that Nature, if it is not an archetype alone, is the force that powers ecosystems. It is the common link between all things – living or otherwise- within the system. The connectivity is already there. We just can’t feel it.
01.25.09
Home, detached
We whipped through the fantasy as we always do in January. The detached home. The place of our own. The place we can own, just us. The ground would be ours. There would be no one else. Between walls would be air and grasses and lilies of the valley, and we would have an enormous vegetable garden and a garage for doing work in. And the girls would have their own rooms, a room of their own, and walls between them, and no one else to infringe on whatever we wanted to do, whenever we felt like it, within the limits of the law.
We looked through the MLS and we gazed and dreamed. We looked at the places we can’t afford and we looked at the gardens already built and the walls already painted, the awful appliances and the narrow old windows. We looked at the places we could afford, to achieve our dream of independence. And then we looked at our own little place and said “well… if we stay here for another few years…”
And we said “we like this little place” and our justifications weigh out far heavier to stay with just under 200 square feet per person, to keep the carbon footprint small, to enjoy the control and support of our strata, to take our little garden with its vegetable yield and the little apple tree for what it all is: just the right size for right now.
And so the dream of home is detached from the physical house. The reality of home is detached from the walls and it lives in our walking patterns through this well-laid-out suite, the sight-lines of privacy and openness, and our huge 1970s size windows that let the south sun in summer. Here we live within our means, and this living is good enough for us.
01.22.09
Surveys: Another way to see the world
I attended an education session on the survey process and surveys on reserve. You don’t think a lot about surveys and surveyors usually, but they live in the world with a particularly engaged and specialist eye.
We were told that a surveyor “find the boundaries”, he doesn’t create them. Borders and boundaries are created by speculators, landowners, governments and individuals. But whatever description is given of this land by these people, the surveyor turns from an idea to a reality. They bring land from the abstract to the physical, and they leave a mark that will last for potentially hundreds of years.
Survey posts are wood or metal. You can find them on the corners of your lot, anywhere there is a bend in the “border”. They are marked with the date and the name of the surveyor and other arcane data that only the secret brotherhood of surveyors can decode.
I imagine walking long distances in the wilderness, seemingly untouched by man. And then you see it: a surveyor’s monument. A wooden post, inscribed. Or cuts in a tree. Or a metal post, driven into the ground and capped with a stamped disk.
It is a criminal code violation to move or alter these marks of man’s ownership of the earth. What a relationship we have built with the land, that we would drive boundary markers forever into its skin.
Earliest Spring: Clematis Buds
Clearing the garden on a rare sunny january day this weekend, pulling back the old leaves that well insulate baby slugs, I found the slightest, lightest, most subtle signs of spring and life. Here is the first stretch of new life in last years’ clematis.
01.21.09
Earliest Spring: Clematis Buds
Clearing the garden on a rare sunny january day this weekend, pulling back the old leaves that well insulate baby slugs, I found the slightest, lightest, most subtle signs of spring and life. Here is the first stretch of new life in last years’ clematis.
01.10.09
Hunter Gatherers, Work, and Leisure Time
For this semester’s class on Culture and Nature we opened with readings from a book on Hunter-Gatherers, economics, and the environment titled “Limited Wants, Unlimited Means” (J. Gowdy, Editor). The initial readings paint a picture of neolithic life as characterized by short work and long leisure periods, extensive interpersonal relationships and non-attachment to objects. The hunter-gatherer is painted as a process person over a product-oriented individual, as a person who works little and plays often, and as essentially peaceful.
All this is well and good and it led to many discussions about cultural differences between hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists, between immediate-return societies and delayed-return societies, and the challenges associated with bridging those cultural gaps. What was profound for me, however, was the way in which anthropologists were imposing the delayed-return temporal perspective on these immediate return groups. The very fact of immediate-return implies a different perspective about the future and therefore about time. So how is it possible to measure their time by our standards? This matters a lot when we talk about leisure time vs work time. If you don’t measure time the same way, if you don’t experience it in a similar manner, you can’t compare it accurately.
Take the (for simplicity we’ll call it Western but truthfully i think it’s the industrial perspective coming out of the labour movement) “western” perspective: work is the unpleasant but necessary activity the virtuous enact and the unworthy avoid. Leisure is the very opposite and can be either quiet contemplation or sinful revelry, but it is characterized by pleasure, idleness, and choice. Work is a “burden” for westerners because it excludes Choice. You work because you MUST, you play because you CAN.
For Hunter-Gatherers described in our first readings, work is apparently not a burden because it is a choice (not explained in the book this way, but quite obvious to me). The freedom to commit whatever activity you wish operates under social and environmental controls, but the plain fact is that if you don’t want to go pick berries today you don’t have to and no one is going to make you. Post-modern industrial society has a model for this in certain select retirees who are able to become contractors after retirement. In effect they begin their “real job” once they have the freedom of choice about what kind of work they will do. It is no longer considered “work” on the same scale, because on any day if they don’t want to go pick berries they don’t have to and there is no one who can make them.
We have a million and one self-help books about finding the career, “choosing” the life you want, making your hobby your job. No one says “make your hobby your work” – because work has come to mean something else. I suppose what I’m trying to point out here is that the very definition of work, and the relationship we have with it, significantly impacts our analyses of other cultures’ economic and life-sustaining activities. I’ve tried out living “the hunter-gatherer way” – not being concerned about the time (but showing up at work at the same time every day), being socially oriented while at “work” or not, working in rhythms of intensity and relaxation, and most importantly, applying the same importance weighting on my home life as my work life. If all becomes equal in value and emotional attachment, should I have the same resentment about doing the dishes as I would about whatever pissed me off at work today? Or should I have the ability to really relax at work, see myself as living there , and be settled in my life in both locations? there are “stresses” everywhere, there are things we can’t control in every aspect of life. But I think that the less we imagine that the weekends “should” be for resting or playing (not for laundry and other home “work” activities), and equally the less we believe that weekdays “should” be resented with the roll of the eyes about mondays and the excitement about fridays and the imagined R&R on the weekend, perhaps the MORE we would be happy and content, the more balance we would be achieving in our daily lives.
I conclude this ridiculously long post with an encouragement to see the CBC’s little documentary “Educating Margaret”. This is not about hunter-gatherers and I certainly don’t want you to think I am mistaking this. But it is, in some ways, about work and responsibility. Margaret is a Kenyan woman who, by being sponsored for education is now a nurse. What is incredible is to see her GLOW of pride when she describes the sheer number of people she, and she alone, supports with her income (11 people, some who she lives with, others back home in her village). To see her smile is to know that for her this responsibility is not a burden but is a blessing. It is a beautiful thing, not a “source of stress” as we would have it here. Here in the west people have nervous breakdowns because of the pressure of having to support many people on a single income. Yet here is Margaret, smiling and counting on her fingers all those who she is able to help. Hers is a very different perspective indeed.
01.07.09
Little Girl Leads
It’s snowy and slushy and overall gross here these days. Our record snowfall (thrice the amount of snow we usually get) has left us all somewhat stranded and we are walking like never before. So, I’ve been walking the little girl home from school. It’s actually really nice to just walk and talk without any interruptions, and as we were walking I realized that children very rarely get to lead the way.
Think about it. You’re short and dependent, and you follow everywhere you go. There’s no sense of the open road, is there? There’s the safe and comfy back of mummy or daddy, and the scenery just floats by. Well I put on my best old-lady voice now and say “in my day, I was walking to school alone by grade 2″ which is partially true – but I also lived in a small town and not far from school!
“Do you want to lead the way home?” I asked. She stared at me with surprise.
“Yeah!”
“Ok, then which way do we go? She hemmed and hawed,then pointed with firm finger and unsure glance towards the south. “Yep, that’s right. Let’s go. You go in front.”
And so our long trek through the snow-covered neighbourhood began. I made sure she knew which way NOT to go so as to not lead us too far from our target, but she figured everything out. We crossed streets, we walked a new way home, and she had so much pride, so much excitement in her voice as she walked. “I can’t wait to tell Daddy that I led the way!”
She grew about an inch taller yesterday, came home bright and happy with a sense of location, a sense of where she stands in the world that was different from where she began.
Today we did it again – she was so excited to lead, so thrilled to follow her instincts and memory. We talked about landmarks and directions, and then I said “you know what, if we are both really quiet, I bet for a second it’ll feel like you’re walking alone. Wanna try?” So we were silent for a block or so. This dreamy, sober crunching through ice.
Suddenly she skipped like Dorothy in Oz for a few beats and sang “i’m all by my self, I’m walking by myself!” as if she didn’t remember that I was even there. She was a girl with power over where she goes in the world. Then she looked at me confidently and said “Mummy, there’s room here. let’s hold hands.”
01.05.09
A new year, a new post
This year will be a better one than the last. It will. It must. There are only improvements to be had… This I tell myself while sitting in a daze, remembering the friend I once had. I thought she would be here forever, I would run into her at random, I was sure I would see her again. I did, and we said good-bye in December. And on December 28, my friend Angela died of cancer. I’m numb, lost in thought on what it all means.
What it means is that if there’s one promise we should try to keep it’s to tell the people we really love that they mean a lot to us. That someone shouldn’t be dying to get to see their friends and family. That life and relationships are precious and fragile, and we should do whatever it takes to maintain relationships.
And along with this, to play with my children as if I am a child, to do arts and crafts with unselfconscious abandon, and to smile more at everyone. Even strangers. Even the grumpy ones at the store or parking lot. Yes, I resolve to be open, loving, emotive, and annoyingly cheerful. I think we’ll call it “neighbourly”.
So that would be the content of my (shhhh) first “new year’s resolution”. I hesitate to call it that as the tern usually implies that the future of the promise is in fact doomed. BUT we shall see.
My second thing on the “list of lifestyle changes to try out in 2009″ (shhh… resolutions again!) is to reduce the amount of garbage, recycling and waste for which I am directly responsible. Such as soup cans, packaging, and shrinkwrapped meats.
Finally, I hope to expand my social world. I have been happiest when I have known many people, been friendly with multitudes. So I shall say “yes” to invitations, make efforts to be open and fearless (locate the resolve, in the promise of attempts at bravery). At least, I’ll try to be.
Naturally there are other things I want to do, such as the elusive “Results” – accomplishments, something to show for my efforts. I’ve made a list (checked it twice), and set my success bar low at 10%. If I can get 10% of my listed hoped-for accomplishments done by next year, I will be really happy. 10% annual increases over the course of 5 years would make a significant impact.
Wish me luck and happy new year!
