Our Religion

A few years back, I was perplexed by the broiling anger a lot of women had at even the mention of the name "Martha Stewart." Her phenomenon hadn't touched me much. I've always been fairly disconnected from popular culture and didn't even have a television that worked then, but that is not to say I was unaffected. Human behaviors can be positively contagious. The Martha Stewart Way was all very refined, for a rabid frenzy. When I bumped into my best girlfriend in line at Wal-Mart  --  at 4 a.m. on a work / school night, both of us with craft objects in our hands  --  a veil was yanked from my eyes and that was the end of that for me. My excursion with over-homemaking was short-lived enough that I didn't develop a grudge, but I've grown to understand others' anger better now. With no small amount of corporate backing and marketing savvy, Martha Stewart took advantage of women's desires to want the very best for the ones they love. She lied; her way wasn't easy, women would fail and exhaust themselves in the process, to the point of pitchfork-wielding fury. We are growing tired of failing expectations, publicly, and paying for the privilege.

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If I think of how to explain the description "Half Homesteader" from my Blogger profile, you'll be the first to know. So far, all efforts have yielded no complete theory. What does it mean to be a "homesteader" in this day and age, with blended families, the near absolute requirement of motorized vehicles to get to full-time jobs and lots of other essential places, so much information from everywhere that a person could suffer a breakdown from overload? Most of all, what does it mean when we have so much wealth  --  in the form of both dollars relative to most of the rest of the world, and a disproportionate share of the world's finite oil supply? (I don't mean we personally are rich. I mean in this country  --  yes, with notable exceptions  --  money problems usually mean stress, even grave stress, but not starvation.)

A partial explanation for the "half" in Half Homesteader is that there are no dire consequences for half-finished projects around here; we need not remember that some Native American cultures know the February full moon as the "Hunger Moon." Regarding my too numerous homemaking "works in progress," I blame Martha Stewart for a degree of burnout, and myself for a childish tendency to become distracted by just about any beautiful, pleasure-inducing thing. My eccentric, wildly painted dining room will be gorgeous  --  just you wait  --  sometime around Spring, 2021. See, because, my very existence does not depend on the dining room’s completion.

But there's another, less carefree side to what we are doing, too. An exception that proves the rule of half-finished projects would be canning the harvest. The job always gets finished because the vegetables won’t wait until 2021. The visceral satisfaction of knowing the fruits of our labor could save us during the time of the Hunger Moon is probably evolutionary, and immediate enough to carry me through the work.

Another exception would be our compost pile, an altar to all that we believe. Visiting is a form of prayer. I mean it. We pour sacrificial gifts onto it  --  you may say kitchen trash but I say carefully sorted nutrients, virginally perfect if "free of chemicals and metals" is the test. That altar holds life and the essence of life. We imbue it with all the hope and faith we’ve got in next year's garden, thanks for the lifetime supply of sustenance that we are about to receive. Years ago, taking the compost to the pile was a punishment I gave naughty children, a replacement for barbaric practices of past generations like hitting. We didn't have many material things to take away from our daughters, and they weren't quite old enough for social lives so "grounding" was useless. They hated the compost pile, though, or learned to. In hindsight I realize that was a mistake. Religion, if it's to stand its best chance of sticking with your children beyond the years you can strong-arm them to an altar, should not be used as punishment.

Despite the “Get Out of Jail Free” card that we use too often with our homesteading efforts, we are deadly serious. We are learning. I'll not go into the details of the seething, stinking mess we humans as a species have made of our planet and our climate, and the fact we're in deep shit. (I'll not mince words, either.) Plenty of others have done a bang-up job of trying to get the message out, and I commend them for their tenacity when so many people hold their fingers in their ears singing la la la la la and refusing to accept the veracity of the science. Multiple disciplines in science, I might add  --  biology, chemistry, meteorology, archaeology, geography, paleo-botany, etc. etc. etc.  --  all of whose results are in accord and dovetailing into one whoppingly terrifying conclusion. Those who believe it’s all a hoax are working awfully hard to ignore the evidence.

All I feel I can contribute is to tromp around the confines of my life, peeping quietly on occasion: "Please. Learn how to grow your own food. Learn how to preserve it. It takes more than you may think." I hope our family's efforts amount to at least that  --  a bank of stored knowledge for the future. Somehow or another we dodged a bullet with "the compost punishment" mistake. My grown daughters looked around on their own, said OM-EFFing-Gawd and commenced to devoting their lives to sustainability and, unspoken but equally important, adaptability. Making plans in sync with the mess they've inherited. They are the amazing examples to me. I'm still trying to work out what it is to be sustainable, after a lifetime of making choices from so much societal wealth, and the contagion of my human group's behaviors.

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Suggested reading: 

First, Bill McKibben’s Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, for the solid science of it, and a beautifully written, thoughtful consideration for what to do next. (Or check out his website at http://billmckibben.com/index.html.)

Second, Dimitri Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects. In this case I would caution that the man, who incidentally is an engineer, is extremist for my taste. I don’t particularly like his politics. But for those who can look past that, he has a sparkling intellect very worth reading, and a truly fascinating hypothesis comparing the current U.S. corporate-government monolith to pre- and post-collapse Russia. I don’t recommend his website, however, mostly because it’s too disjointed.

All In This Together

I am an ape. An animal more specifically described as a human ape, but there it is. Out and proud, I say. Somebody's got to start the dialogue.

I wish I had a good answer for what kind of woman goes around publicly announcing she's an ape. Me, obviously, but I mean, beyond that. My undergraduate training in anthropology says absolutely, every single time, you must begin an ethnography by introducing yourself, as fully and honestly as you can. People ought to know who you are, before you then engage in the utter folly of trying to tell them about someone else, through your own self-deluded eyes. So far as I can tell, the effort works perfectly. Ethnographers tend to write the most amazing purple prose about who they wish they were, or how they wish the world to see them, but where ever you go, there you are  --  the deception is easily detected. In the process of writing, they might as well strip themselves naked before the security cameras in Grand Central Station.

Despite that, here's some stuff I know about me. Like a chimp, I always want to touch everything and anything that piques my curiosity. (In fairness, I like to think I share the keen intelligence of a chimp, too, which calls for a proper degree of caution and no small amount of fear when it comes to real danger.) But as an example of chimp / ape-like behavior:  My husband and I were standing on a treetop-high deck years ago, only a few feet a way from a pair of flying squirrels. He could see I was practically quivering with the desire to reach out to one -- something that was A) likely to get me bitten, and B) certain to interfere with our observation of the sweet squirrelly courtship. "Why do people always want to touch everything in nature?" he asked. As if this was a rhetorical question aimed at no one in particular.

Touch? I wanted to grab one of those cute little suckers up, turn it over, and see if I could find and name all the internal organs under the soft belly fur.

And if I ever accidentally wander onto an ancient burial ground, and no one except God is within a hundred miles? I'll touch something. I'll fall on the ground, look a skull right in the eye sockets and have a little conversation. I'll tiptoe around as carefully as I know how and slap myself on the head a lot, trying to sear everything I see into my brain. Heart going thumpity-thump and body quivering all over. Then I'll go directly to the proper authorities and point to the find, so they can secure the area and keep people like me out. (No I wouldn't do any of this really, same as I didn't pet the squirrel. But it would be hard. Sadly, this non-practicing anthropologist probably just put herself on the equivalent of an Indian No-Fly List.)

Whoops. I may have skipped purple prose, and gone directly to naked.

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So believe it or not, this blog is about someone else. An ethnography, if you will  --  let the folly commence. Or continue.

In the late 1990s, a quiet young woman came into my life through a work association. She would become a close friend, but it could so easily have been otherwise. Whether she becomes a friend all depends in part on whether you notice her  --  she's so extraordinarily quiet  --  and then on whether you have a high comfort level with someone who, without a trace of self-consciousness or even of awareness, completely resists definition.

Strange that I say people wouldn't notice her, because she's got certain traits that we apes tend to notice. She's very tall and very angular; she has delicate hands and fingers that, because she is a born leader, creatively and technologically, she must use to illustrate and to teach. She has dark walnut hair that she has often worn buzzed boy-short. She surprised me recently, though  --  we hadn't seen each other in a number of years  --  with her hair in a shoulder-length sweep, magazine perfect, blindingly shiny after so many years of acute cuts. Short or long, the dark hair frames crazy-colored hazel eyes (teal?), round and fascinated, that swivel together to take everything into view, the world every moment with a childlike wonder. Whether she is trekking around Europe with a backpack slung over her shoulder, or sitting with hot tea at your kitchen counter, she is content in her own skin. She's always smiling. She likes to go and to play. Golf is a passion, as is sunshine on her face, and heaven help the person who gets between her and a county fair and a funnel cake.

She knows what she likes, and if her haircuts have dumbfounded people, so too has her unchanging wardrobe. Whose wardrobe doesn't ever change in this day and age? Jeans, comfortable cut; tennis shoes; t-shirts in the summer; sweat shirts in the winter. She has thus far forcefully refused to get married or to have children, and fiercely guards her time alone.

For the life of me I can never remember her age; I had to ask yet again, for the purpose of writing this. She is nearly 37, and though she does not seem to change one iota over the years, she is not a grown child. She can be extremely motherly, super smart to begin with but also with a wisdom that comes from not having the sometimes emotionally flighty encumbrances of a spouse and children. She is kind and a very moral person  --  but imagine a razor-sharp sense of humor, too, which will bust you in your follies, and make you laugh at them. (As in, once when from the back of a two-person kayak, as I was failing miserably to keep up with her athletic prowess, she said, "Just sit there and look pretty.")

People are always trying to label her. "Are you ________?" they ask when they believe they've gotten close enough to beg "the question," whatever it may be. I leave the space for the descriptive term blank not because of some concern for political correctness, but because that's the whole point. The question varies. There are no easy labels. Her surprised but not offended answer is always an honest "no." A little bafflement. "I am just me."

I understand this human  --  or is it ape?  --  need to categorize absolutely everything. I also understand that sometimes, you just can't. That's why I adore the study of humans. In addition to the usual biological variation within a species, we have consciousness and cultural variation that allows for infinite words with which to fill in the blanks. Think about it: infinite.

 

So I keep this friend of mine close, chase after her sometimes as she walks through the world, and stay clear of her place in the funnel cake line. And I turn my own primate brain to watching the fascination of everyone else, those who notice her. Because rude questions aside, people also want this rare quality, are magnetized to it  --  the magic of a person  who really, truly, genuinely, is herself. Who does not feel any need to broadcast it in some way  --  no outward physical purple prose that says, this is who I wish I was. And who is so visibly happy about it.

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 *Comedy aside, disturbing or looting a Native American site is unethical and can carry extremely high costs for the offender: consider the Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) maximum penalty of a $20,000 fine and two years' imprisonment for a first offense. And it is unlikely "God" is the only one around. Please see http://www.preservationnation.org/magazine/2010/january-february/inside-man.html for an excellent article  --  or just check out the photo to get the point.