Mar 17 2009
How I am changing #1
We were out in the garden prepping the ground for planting the early peas and spinach–something we can do in March in the Northwest (though it did snow a bit Sunday and it’s been blowing ever since sun/rain/sun/rain, etc.). Anyway, I was troweling around and found half a potato from last fall, a small Yukon Gold, shovel cut and undiscovered. I gave it a glance and tossed it over the garden fence and into the field next door. As soon as the little tuber left my hand I had the thought, “That is the gesture of someone who can still go to the grocery store and buy more food.” And I wondered if I would ever be hungry enough that I’d be grateful to find half a potato and maybe even contribute it to the making of Stone Soup.
All my adult life I’ve been a person who recycles and saves and shops at the thrift store and looks for bargains. It’s a game of hide-and-seek I play inside this huge consumer culture. In 1968-69, my first year out of college, I was paid $3600 working in the peace movement, and I saved $1000 and went to Europe. I rode my bicycle and buses and bought my first used car for $200 when I was 30–part of the advance upon selling my first book. The list goes on, and I won’t recite it here. Suffice it to say I have traded a lot of security in order to have a self-designed, self-employed life. I have no regrets about that: it was a choice. It’s still a choice and I have a very comfortable level of frugality. For me, frugality is grounded in belief that consuming less is necessary for right relationship with planetary resources. I choose it: I am not desperate about it. And then, as I tossed half a potato over the fence, I began wondering what conditions I will be asked to face in the coming months and years and how I will respond as frugality becomes a necessity. For surely, in the great rebalancing of humanity’s place in the world, frugality is our path forward.
A few entries ago (2/08/09 “Taking Stock) I wrote about the conversation I had with my Zimbabwean colleague who was heading home to a country in ruins–and yet felt rich in knowing that in his Shona culture there was always a place to run to, someone who would share their last potato. I have just heard more recent news from Kufunda Village, the learning centre and experimental village outside Harare. They haven’t had electricity for two months since their transformer blew up–so they decided to take themselves off the grid intentionally, to study other ways to power themselves. The big concern is getting water from their bore hole and running an electric stove where the community cooks communally–and offers hospitality to the groups that rent seminar space and guest houses from them. The country’s health care system has pretty completely ceased to function, so they are running a clinic of herbal medicines at the edge of the farm. (For a fuller understanding visit their site www.kufunda.org. If you have some money you want to give, you can do so online and support their preschool, the herb farm, their shift to sustainable power sources, and their human spirit.)
These people are my teachers about frugality and resilience! I think of them often these days, and the challenges they face living collaboratively under the social conditions that surround them. Jackie Cahi, the director and interface person between the village and the outside world writes: “…we have opened our space and our hearts and are hosting constantly - mostly the Tree of Life, which conducts healing circles. This partnership is a perfect synergy for our healing place. It is challenging without power to draw and heat water and to cook for large numbers each week. But we are earning enough to keep going - to pay ourselves and to do some work in the communities. It’s a good feeling. I say tentatively that we are growing….. stronger, wiser, braver, more powerful, and that we know and hold the ground on which we walk.”
I look up and down the street on which I live–thinking of the 25 homes that comprise my little neighborhood, and wonder how we would do if we had to be frugal together. If we had to keep the cook fires going and homes heated and share resources. I want to believe that the great majority of people have an innate spirit of cooperation and altruism in us: my life work is invested in making that story true.
To make that story true in my own life, I offer a tangible gesture–this year, I am committed to eating or feeding others with everything we grow in the garden–no more potato over the fence. I will practice developing a truly appreciative relationship to the food that comes my way and to steward the earth’s abundance within the community. In the midst of a summer teaching and consulting, I’ll be taking a class on safely canning vegetables, and I’m saving Mason jars from the thrift stores. I have marked off dates in my fall calendar that I’ll hold for the work of harvesting.
No way, am I ready to become a subsistence farmer, but my family and neighbors and I are practicing how to live a very local life. Meanwhile, we’re working on a new book, supporting the books and work already out there, and keeping an eye on the world. Frugality continues to be my choice, my teacher, my connector between myself and conditions in wider world.
How are you changing? What is your tangible gesture?
I’m listening.
Copyright ©2009 Christina Baldwin. All rights reserved.
As leftovers are heating, alas, in the microwave, I am pondering your question about tangible gestures. As it pains me to ever throw food away, my husband has nicknamed me the Queen of Leftovers and marvels at my ability to create tasty dishes out of what he insists was an empty refrigerator. I’m not sure I would call myself frugal as the word has always had a connotation of lack for me. Maybe I see myself as an appreciator as opposed to a consumer, a believer that less is more, and ultimately grateful and appreciative for what I have. I’m already an avid recycle nut, but after a recent trip to Whidbey Island, where folks I met use fewer paper products, I am cutting way back on my use of paper towels in the kitchen and may consider weaning myself off of tissues (Handkerchiefs! They use handkerchiefs on Whidbey - can you imagine?). I may have converted my “department store” husband to shopping secondhand stores as while we were there, we needed warmer clothes and bought sweaters at the local thriftstore for a whopping $3.25 each. “Look at these hiking boots for $15; they’re practically brand new!” he exclaimed, grinning as he proudly put them in his cart. We consciously gave thanks for the true abundance we were experiencing and discovered a capacity for delight that is priceless. So, betcha I could do something with that potato of yours…
Frugality has never been a challenge for me - mainly because I hate shopping and the meaningless consuming that permeates so much of the world today. But what I have been changing is that I’m not silent any longer about the useless stuff that is out there and what we could be doing to consume less. I work every day with people who have lost or are about to lose their employment. They are sad and scared and along with hand holding and motivating and resume writing I always ask them: “How will you change how you live - what can you do without and how will that feel?” It might not change everyone’s thinking about stuff (I also usually throw in my anti-Wal Mark tirade - gently) but maybe it will get one or two thinking about doing without. If there can be any silver lining to this recession I believe it will be people’s renewed - or first time - commitment to use less of this world’s resources and enjoy the process.
I, too, have practiced frugality most of my life, partly out of a feeling of scarcity, I’m sad to say, and lately more out of my love of this wonderful, abundant planet we inhabit. I appreciate your piece, Christina, and I am hopeful that our new interest in saving here in America is part of the Great Turning we’ve been looking for.
As a person who was born in the depths of the Great Depression, it is a matter of wry satisfaction to me that the habits of thought and behavior in which I was instilled by my parents—even though they weren’t poor—are gaining some appreciation once again in my life. Our circles, short or long cycle, are still circles!
My partner Joan and I have always lived by the maxim “Less is enough”, pointing out to ourselves the hidden trap of the more common cultural saying “less is more.” We have grown in the meaning of this over several years;still, I have often found myself irritated by the small space in which we have deliberately chosen to live in order to afford a house on a river in a forest with three acres of land around it.
This and similar choices are teaching me more than I anticipated. They are a spiritual practice indeed, revealing to me my unconscious participation in a mad culture, and offering me opportunity upon opportunity of releasing that madness into the wind and the trees. In the current climate I feel blessed by this practice of now many years.
Still, we live in the space between simplicity of life choices (getting easier and clearer) and being vigilant that we don’t get pulled in by the current culture of alarm, anxiety and a seige mentality. This is difficult, and a necessary discernment. Many of us grow food and trade it here for several months of the year; it’s a weaving of essential community that we are about when we do this work.
Our times are opening more and more opportunities, I think, for a deeper knowing of ALL that is involved in intentional choices for the reality of interdependance. Now I love going into a mall and naming all the things I don’t and will never need!