Hobbit houses for Olney?

Have I mentioned I love Olney Friends School?

Emma Churchman put a link on Facebook to this charming house a man built in Wales for about $4,700 (3,000 British pounds): http://gaia-health.com/gaia-blog/2011-12-21/man-builds-fairy-tale-home-for-his-family-for-only-3000/.

Isn't it lovely? And apparently green too. For some reason, it made me think of Olney.

I'm remembering all the land Olney has, its expertise in green building ... and perhaps a need for staff housing. Of course, too, there's always the question of where to put the student lounge. Wouldn't this be a wonderful, whimsical way to live? Or a good place to go to hang out with friends?

And it could offer Olney some extra publicity. Who wouldn't want to go to the Hobbit school? Now we just need to get the film class students to film the building going up ... Maybe we could even invite over the man who built the original ... What do you think?

Needed: a society dedicated to the care of others and the pursuit of wisdom

Cary Tennis, the advice columnist at Salon, wrote this as part of an answer to a question by a person feeling overworked and stressed and yet dedicated to a job. Cary's response rang true to me. What do you think?

"We do not live in a good society. That's another thing.

This is not a society dedicated to the care of others and the pursuit of wisdom. Wouldn't that be an amazing society? But that's not the one we have.

You live in a world that tricks you into believing that if you do what it says you will be happy. You won't. You won't be happier if you get the top spot. You won't be happier if you answer every call.

You say you work for a cause you believe in. You might be happier if you work more directly for your cause. I'm not sure what cause that is, but if it's, say, to create safer conditions for fishermen, you might be happier if you were actually fishing. Or if it's to keep the environment pristine, you might be happier if you were actually in that environment keeping it pristine. Or if it is an organization dedicated to helping people, you might be happier if you were actually helping those people yourself. That's one thing that happens with organizations, is that they alienate us from the ennobling activities they are formed to promote.

So there's that.

And this other thing is about being a person in an adversary relationship to the large economic and social forces that affect you. I grew up in a time when this was clearer. But it is still clear today.

Nothing has changed structurally; we are still a hateful, war-waging culture that denigrates women, celebrates killing, despoils the planet, plunders the resources of less powerful people, keeps a permanent underclass in virtual economic slavery and wages imperialist wars abroad. We're still the same country we were when I was growing up in the 1960s.

We just have better games.

That's it in a nutshell. The "military-industrial complex" Dwight Eisenhower warned us about had a public-relations disaster in the 1960s, when it failed to adequately sell its project to America's youth. Since then, it has learned.

The other day I was walking along wondering about the differences between people in their 20s and 30s today and during the 1960s and 1970s, marveling at the happy, well-adjusted faces I meet in the cafes and clothing stores, and wondering why my anguish and panic at our global state does not dent their cheerfulness, and also thinking about my largely unsupervised youth, unhygienic and renegade, and it occurred to me to see that today's parenting regime seems to have coalesced around the project of keeping youth constantly socialized and trained and busy so that they cannot sit around and wonder what's wrong. Because wondering what's wrong leads to troubling conclusions.

We have responded to the problem of existential anxiety not by confronting it with existential philosophy but by creating an ever-larger and more sophisticated web of 24-hour distraction and socialization training, so that young people are prevented from attaining the socially analytical skills that might lead them to see how they're being fooled. If they saw how they are being fooled they might disrupt the functioning of this system. They might go on strike. They might bring the whole thing crashing down.
Keith Olbermann the other day suggested we take to the streets. What happened? Nothing.

We don't know how to take to the streets. Besides, it looks just awful on television.

So you can go ahead and do your job, but just be aware that you are being conned. You are living in a dishonest and rapacious culture, and you are doing the best you can to make it work for you. Even those of us working for causes we believe in are working in a basically anarchic, amoral system, without the benefit of unions or workplace protections and in an economic system that has no moral foundation.

That's what we do. That's who we are. And that weird anxiety you feel from time to time, that's not a problem. That's just the truth seeping in.

You're OK. It's the world that's messed up."

Visioning the green community

Shak El writes:

"Green Utopianism does not have to mean a return to the farm (tho it would not stop those who wished to do so). It could easily embrace an industrial society based on green energies (sun, wind, wter, geo-thermal etc). necessary labor would be gradually reduced by moving ever towards full automation and shared work load divided amongst the population. Some estimate that we could produce everything we need with only 10-15 hours of necessary labor."


"Some estimate that we could produce everything we need with only 10-15 hours of necessary labor."

When I was growing up in the 1960s and even into the early 70s, a shorter work week was very much a vision. With increased productivity, we would could all live well and by working fewer hours live, paradoxically, more abundantly.

In the 1960s, the idea of a shorter work week was linked to the technological Utopia that was going to liberate us all, and we were less sophisticated about environmental issues. I remember the first Earth Day, when our elementary school class stood on the baseball diamond and let go a great flock of colorful helium balloons. We wouldn't do that today ... but we meant well.

What made my heart sing was hearing others speak (not just Shak El, but Alice, Hysery, etc.) of that seemingly long lost vision of an abundance of time rather than of material goods. I have been thinking much about vision these days, and the quote from Proverbs that "without a vision, the people perish" sticks in my mind. It's not just any vision that Proverbs means, but a vision, as the next part of the quotes notes, that is tied to the law--which, as I read it, links it specifically to the building of the shalom community.

We seem so surrounded by visions of scarcity. We are told must work longer and harder for less and less and do so in an environment of fear. Yet our productivity has grown massively in the past 50--and even 20--years. By embracing a vision of simply living more simply, and wisely using the technology we have, we could be released from lives of toil. If we lived at the level of the average family of the 1950s, we could all work shorter weeks, with less stress and more joy and time for family, friends and community.

Back in the 1930s, Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin and the Catholic Worker movement advocated for the same vision: People living simply by working 20 hours a week and spending another 20 hours a week in discussion and education, ie. in community. If people in a society that had so much less could have this vision, we can too. (I think. I hope.)

We live in a culture too that values work as work, so that one can be fearful of advocating for leisure. And some, but not all of us, will have passions, be it for building a bicycle from scratch to helping build a Friends boarding school, that will take up large amounts of time--but not feel like work.

Overall, this green vision is not about "leisure" per se but achieving a more balanced life. In The Overworked American, the author, Juliet Schor, cites studies that once people work 30 hours a week or fewer, they actually watch less television and are more apt to be involved in politics and community. Could this be the real reason we are told we must work ever longer and harder?

Not to restate the obvious, but maybe it needs to be said more often: Fewer hours in an office or commuting to a job might lead to less money but it would also open up more time for gardening and hanging laundry and walking places and enjoying life. Maybe we'd read more books. Maybe we'd be healthier, driving down health care cost. Perhaps I dream ...

Utopia?

In her essay "Lush Life: Foucault's Analysis of Power and A Jazz Aesthetic," Sharon Welch quotes Steven Weinberg's list of five widely held utopian visions:





Free Market utopias: In this vision, government is limited and the world, freed of regulations, becomes “industrialized and prosperous.” However, “For many Americans the danger of tyranny lies not in government but in employers or insurance companies or HMOs, from which we need government to protect us. To say that any worker is free to escape an oppressive employer by getting a different job is ... unrealistic," Weinberg writes.

Best and brightest utopias: The best and the brightest are put in charge. The problem: all elites end up prioritizing their own interests.

Religious utopias: Religious revival sweeps the earth, getting rid of secularism. We know what happens when religious communities start to safeguard their "purity."

Green utopias: The world rejects industrialism in favor of simpler living and small communities. This vision “falls prey to the common tendency ... for those who don’t have to work hard to romanticize labor.”

Technological utopias: A dream of a world made efficient and rich through the dispersal of cutting edge technology. This vision doesn’t sufficiently address environmental concerns of loss of local community.

I've read much about all these visions, and the one I probably fall prey to is the Green utopia, probably because I never have supported myself through farming. Do you have a "favorite?" Are there more to add to the list? Could all of these work together or is that another utopic fantasy?

Sunflowers

We have a beautiful field of sunflowers just beyond our front yard, along with rows of corn and squash. Roger took a picture of one of the sunflowers, which you can see here.

It's hard not to think of Van Gogh when viewing a field of sunflowers. (Can we equate Barnesville with Provence?)

I remember that Van Gogh started out to be a preacher, but when he gave all his money away and showed too much solidarity with the poor, he alarmed his evangelical superiors. Eventually, sadly, because he lived the Sermon on the Mount too literally, he broke with the church, and became an artist. Yet in becoming an artist, pouring himself into and out through that creation, he became a blessing to the world. So, in the sunflower, I see Van Gogh and God, human creation illuminating God's creation.

The weather has been beautiful and it has been easy to enjoy the hills, the orchards and the views around Barnesville. A few nights ago the sky was moonless and lit with thousands of stars. We could see the Milky Way clearly. These are the times I love living in the country, with the view of Olney Friends School across the lake, and I think of what a gift it is to the students to be around all of this nature.

Wise or Foolish?

I read this in the New York Times:

Three months ago, a famously impoverished Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman was awarded the prestigious $1 million Clay Mathematics Institute Millennium Prize for his groundbreaking work -- having solved a problem of three-dimensional geometry that had resisted scores of brilliant mathematicians since 1904.

Thursday, the institute announced that Perelman, known equally for his brilliance and his eccentricities, formally and finally turned down the award and the money. He didn't deserve it, he told a Russian news service, because he was following a mathematical path set by another.

The president of the Clay Institute, James Carlson, said that Perelman was a mathematician of "extraordinary power and creativity" and that it was he alone who solved the intractable Poincaré's conjecture. "All mathematicians follow the work of others, but only a handful make breakthroughs of this magnitude," Carlson said.


I'm awed by this man's integrity, in part because I would be hard put to refuse $1 million.

What do you think? Foolish or wise?

And yet, if more people behaved this way in disdaining money ... what a wonderful world it would be. Or would it? Does it expose as a lie that the only incentive for people to achieve is material? Or is this guy to be dismissed as an eccentric?

cell phone idea?

We are getting frustrated trying to renew our AT&T cell phone service. We'd like to keep the basic plans we have had. AT&T makes it very difficult to renew without buying extra services. All of our phones broke at the same time right at the end of the contract (I'd think conspiracy but I don't think AT&T has the technical know-how to so well fine-tune it's strategy.) Right now we have no phones. To make a long story short, it has entered my mind that we could sign up with a socially responsible cell phone service company.

Any suggestions?

Today

Right now, I am in a brief period--a few of hours--of transition between a week at the beach and beginning teaching my summer English class at Ohio University. The vacation-- at Chincoteague--was glorious in terms of weather, and it was a rare opportunity for family time with all of us together. I loved the marshes, the cry of the seagulls, the brackish smell, the unspoiled beach.

I look forward, however, to beginning teaching. My class numbers only six and that marks a wonderful opportunity for workshopping and individualized learning. I also redid what had become the weaker parts of the class and feel excited about trying some new ideas. On this longest day of the year I feel both stretched and centered, whatever that means.

"Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation." Habbukuk 3:18

How are you?

Jobs for the Young, retirement $ for the Old

Young people can have jobs and old people can pursue, not the rocking chair, but fulfilling second ...third ...fourth ....careers ...
IF we push back.

According to the June 7, 2010 Nation:

"Social Security has accumulated a massive surplus--2.5 trillion now, rising to $4.3 trillion by 2023. This vast wealth was collected over many years from workers under the Federal INsurance Contributions Act (FICA) to pay in advance for baby boom retirements. The money will cover all benefits until the 2040s--unless Congress double-crosses workers by changing the rules. This nest egg does not belong to the government; it belongs to the people who paid for it. FICA is not a tax but an involuntary savings."

Our God is a God of abundance.

We could retire earlier ...

From the New York Times (http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/how-high-can-the-retirement-age-go/?scp=2&sq=retirement&st=cse):

Beth Almeida is executive director of the National Institute on Retirement Security, a nonprofit research organization based in Washington. She is the co-author of “A Better Bang for the Buck: The Economic Efficiencies of Defined Benefit Pension Plans.

She writes:

Longer lives do not necessarily require longer careers. Yes, seniors are living a few years longer than they did decades ago. Life expectancy at age 65 has improved by about 35 percent since 1950. But our country’s gross domestic product is also roughly six times larger than it was in 1950 and household incomes have grown by a similar amount.

Higher retirement ages are not economically or demographically necessary.
That means not only can we still afford retirement, we can afford even more of it if that’s what we want. That’s good news. Yet somehow, longer lives have become an economic bogeyman.

I have often thought about this: We have so much more wealth as society than we used to even 50 years ago that we don't "have to" up the retirement age. We could, for example, decide we don't want to provide 50 percent of the world's military budget. We don't have to assume that younger people won't want to pay for older people's retirement. I can easily imagine younger people buying into the idea that if they pay now, they will have the same benefits to look forward to when they get older. We could also allow more immigration if we are short of working-aged people to support baby boomers.

Another writer talked about the changes in aging in this country and argued that people want to work longer, take care of "unfinished" business and do meaningful work as a long as they can. I agree with this, but don't think it means we need to somehow limit or do away with retirement benefits. For many people, meaningful and part-time work at the end of life is only possible because of the cushion of social security and other retirement income. Also, I worry that what is good for the middle and upper classes--a lifetime opportunity to work--could become lifelong wage slavery for working class people. I hope we will find the will as a country to continue to both finance retirement and allow people opportunities to contribute to the common good or their own enrichment as long as they can.

The Bible speaks to this by noting that love casts out fear. If we are loving others and putting first the kingdom, there will be an abundance of resources. The story of the loaves and the fishes illustrates this point.

Ivy: Let it grow, let it grow

Despite all the critics who told me ivy would "ruin" our walls, I planted ivy on either side of our front door in Maryland seven or eight... or nine ... years ago. I planted a clipping from a friend's house in Oil City, Pa. Over the years, independent lawn contractors have approached me once or twice and offered to "get rid" of that ivy for me. Friendly eye roll. It's an aesthetic thing. Now, I feel vindicated:

"In a three-year project, Oxford researchers analysed the effects of ivy growing on buildings in five different parts of England and discovered that the plant plays a protective role. They found that an ivy canopy was like a thermal shield, combating the extremes of temperature which often cause walls to crack.
English Heritage commissioned Professor Heather Viles of Oxford University's School of Geography and the Envrionment to analyse the effect of common ivy (Hedera helix) to guide them in their important role as the steward of hundreds of historical sites. Professor Viles’s research team monitored the effect of ivy on walls situated in different parts of the country with varying climates and challenges.They found that ivy acted as a thermal blanket, warming up walls by an average of 15% in cold weather and cooling the surface temperature of the wall in hot weather by an average of 36%. The ivy was also found to absorb some of the harmful pollutants in the atmosphere. Walls where ivy was growing were less prone to the damaging effects of freezing temperatures, temperature fluctuations, pollution and salts than exposed walls without ivy.
Professor Viles said: ‘Ivy has been accused of destroying everything in its path and threatening some of our best loved heritage sites. Yet these findings suggest that there are many benefits to having ivy growing on the wall. It not only provides colourful foliage but also provides walls with weather-proofing and protection from the effects of pollution.’" (http://www.physorg.com/news193055372.html)

I would note that I have learned that it's best to plant a native ivy or ivy-like vine rather than invasive English ivy (if you are outside of England).

There's something simple, Biblical and earth caring about this finding. Creation works. Plants protect. Ivy warms.

This was a case of following the heart. I know we have to think with our heads as well as our hearts, but are there times you wish you had or hadn't followed "prudent" advice, such as don't grow ivy on your walls? Or something more important?

Then and Now

We all get to an age where we can look back over our lives and track change. I remember the 1970s in New York City, where we used to visit relatives fairly frequently. The city truly was grittier, dirtier and more chaotic back then. I remember high rises going up, relatives shaking their heads and wondering where all the extra people were going to fit in the city, the explosion in crime, and most of all, my mother's regret that New York was not the way she remembered it growing up.

I'm not usually a great David Brooks fan but enjoyed his column in today's New York TImes, which discussed crime in New York City in the 1970s and now: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/opinion/18tue1.html?hp.

My mother loved New York, loved the possibilities it presented for a young immigrant, the easily accessible arts and culture, the window shopping, the good educational system (including free college tuition for those that qualified) and the safety. As a teenager in the 1940s and early 1950s, it offered her a tremendous amount of freedom. She died in 1980, and one of my regrets is that she didn't live to see New York return to what I imagine is something akin to the city she remembered.

Who knew in the 1970s what would happen?

A few years ago I saw a play from the 1970s, set in NYC, that captured all the grittiness of life back them. It was set in an English class for foreign speaking immigrants, and its theme was that we continue to live in a tower of Babel of miscommunications. It was funny, but played on situations that seem archaic now, at least for NYC--a broken elevator, a lost contact lens. While it accurately described a world I remember, it might have been set a 100 years in the past. I thought of Laura Ingalls Wilder of the Little House books, who woke up one day and realized what was, to her as a child, ordinary life as a covered-wagon pioneer, was now the stuff of history books and movie adventures. I remember the jolt I had when I recognized that something as simple, natural and seemingly timeless in my childhood as a pick-up baseball game organized by neighborhood kids "sent out to play" was as exotic a fantasy to my son as traveling to the moon. I remember feeling a sense of loss ... who knew that this easy community and freedom of childhood, of all things, is what would go away? We never know.

Brooks traces the phenom of worried, helicopter parents to the fears of the 1970s, when the crime rate was high and people were fleeing to the suburbs or traveling nervously from their urban homes. I think genuine fear, love and anxiety does lead parents to hover, to the extent that we do, but I also take a darker view of the competition and triumphalism of some parents for whom "ultimate hovering" becomes a form of conspicuous consumption and a highly visible sign moral superiority. To the extent that it seemed not genuine (and I've certainly met the genuine), it bothered me, because it seemed to be based on the premise that "I can" do this or "we have the power." Often, it seemed a way to flaunt leisure time or status: of course "my husband" can time blocked out of his schedule to come to the little league game. How often did I hear, "I'm so lucky my husband can support me" or "Can you imagine being one of those mothers who let's someone else raise her children while she goes to work?" I would wonder about the women who had no choice (of course, the idea of "no choice" was pooh-poohed) but to work. Being in a situation of having to work--especially a low wage job-- seemed evidence of moral failure and hence "the sins of the fathers" was fitting retribution for the children. And a high school friend who had her child in her 40s reminded me of the pressure that a bullying Queen Bee mother can bring to bear even on her privileged peers--my friend wanted to tell off the tyrannizing younger woman who ran a preschool playgroup but didn't for fear her child would be ostracized. In my childhood--at least as I want to remember it--when children could make their own friends more easily, parents had less incentive to kowtow unhealthily to the "Nazi brigade." This kowtowing, while well meant, is not good role modeling for the children--our children. My friend knew all this, and yet felt helpless.

I'm glad crime has decreased and cities--at least New York City--are safer. However, I deplore living in a society where we're not in it for everyone's children, where there's such a push to protect mine and mine alone. Aren't we all supposed to be brothers and sisters? Isn't everyone's child in some sense my child? Isn't this what Jesus preached? It seems to me, looking back, that we had more of that sense when I was growing up. Of course, from what we know of history, at least in Western civilization, parents have always put their children first, but it seems to me that in the 1960s and 70s (and before, from what my parents would say) that there was more of sense of building bridges to other children to give them a hand, not pulling in behind the moat and watching for the safety of the ramparts as these families flounder. How can Quakers be part of the solution? Or am I misremembering?

January Days

Roger and I had a pleasant anniversary in Athen, Ohio, home of the University of Ohio, on Sunday. The town and the campus are very pretty--I hadn't realized the college dates back to 1804. More to the point, this Jane Austen fanatic had the chance to read Kathryn Sutherland's introduction to the Penguin edition of Mansfield Park while (or whilst) in Athens.

Sophie is back at Muskingum College. After some concern, as she started the semester last week short two classes and with no education classes, despite being an education major, I had lunch with her yesterday and found she had managed, by working with Joy in the registrar's office, to get into Education 112, which she needed, and into a history of film class to round out her schedule. (And I just managed to write one of the longest sentences ever!) I am happy with the outcome, and pleased that the school was able to work with her.

The boys had a "snow day" at Olney recently--the school never has an actual school-off snow day, as the students live on campus--but every so often the school declares an afternoon of sledding and snow activities. On the academic side, both Will and Nick are taking a class in Religion and Philosophy and working their way through some of the thought of figures such as Aristotle and Kant, not to mention the Utilitarians--a fairly heavy and welcome dose of thinking for tenth graders.

Public Transportation?

A few months ago, a thought crossed my mind and made my heart leap. Instead of driving back and forth every week from Barnesville to Richmond to attend ESR, I could take the bus! It would lower my carbon footprint, save wear and tear on my car, and better yet, offer me that all-important *multitasking* opportunity to get my reading done for my classes whilst in transit!

Well, no.

A multitude of web searches and phone calls revealed to me that you can get to Richmond anyway you want--as long as it's by car. There is no bus to Richmond. No train. No nothing.

Dreams die hard. The closest Greyhound stop to Richmond is Dayton, about 25(?) miles from that golden city on the plains. Maybe I could bus to Dayton... rent a car ... OK, this is getting too complicated ...maybe I could take the bus there and bike ... that's it ... that region is flat. I could do it. In the middle of winter? In the dark? In the cold? Yes, I could ... well, OK, maybe not.

I kept thinking I MUST have missed the key ... that there must be a way to get to Richmond without a car.

Dream on.

I understand Greyhound not stopping in Richmond. Why waste all that gas for a couple of people?

I may be able to car pool now and again and ... you never know what will happen. My whole life I've dreamed of living in a world laden with public transportation--buses, streetcars, trains, boats...maybe it has to do with early visits to relatives in New York City. Or dim memories of the very last streetcars in Baltimore. Or stories of relatives taking trains from the New York City to weekends in the Catskills. Or reading about Nancy Drew and her chums boarding the train to Phoenix. And let's not forget Huck Finn. (Why DO they let us read? It puts too many ideas into our heads.)

We're supposedly at or near peak oil now, meaning, as I understand it, "we" are producing worldwide as many barrels as we ever will. The supply will go down. The demand is already up, with the Chinese, for instance, buying more cars than we in the U.S. did last year. And we're still buying.

When gas prices truly go sky high, maybe it will pay for Greyhound to run the bus to Richmond. Or for the railroad "heritage trails" everywhere to be converted back to rail lines. As long as we can do this gracefully, I look forward to that time.

In the meantime, to paraphrase Joan Crawford in The Women: It's back to the perfume counter ... I mean ...car for me. Any other ideas?

Vegetarianism and Legalism

I became a vegetarian during the Thanksgiving holidays and that has worked well so far, except that I realize that now I have a new "rule" to follow. Here is what happened.

While I was briefly home during Chistmas, Sophie, Roger and I went to eat at a favorite small, family-owned Thai-Japanese restaurant. Thai and Japanese foods are not readily available in Barnesville--though a Japanese restaurant is coming to St. Clairsville--so this outing was a treat.

I was on the brink of ordering Tum Ka (?), a soup I always eat there, when I realized: it contains shrimp! Oh no! I can't have shrimp. There were certainly vegetarian options on the menu. But I ordered the soup because it's what I always do. I decided that --for the evening--I was a vegaquarian, as a seafood-eating friend labels herself. Then I felt guilty. What am I doing? I can't bend the rules! What's the use of taking a stand if you abandon it as soon as it's inconvenient?

In my defense, I am in the stage of getting used to a new way of eating--and thus far, hadn't fallen off the wagon. My biggest problem are the meals I automatically order. Auto-pilot habits can be the hardest to change, because they allow you not to pay attention For instance, I was in the IKEA in Pittsburgh before Christmas, and I went to eat lunch, which means--absolute auto-pilot ... Swedish meatballs. I caught myself in time, and bought a cold and soggy vegetarian wrap ... but I could have as easily found myself eating ... meatballs. I wondered: could I become a vegaquarianSwedishmeatballian?

I now have a new insight into how a rule can create a monstrous tangle of legalisms. I started wondering if becoming a vegetarian was a good idea or if it was merely adding a new layer of guilt to my life.

But I decided it was worthwhile to take a stand (such as it is) and that it's important to stay focused on the spirit of the rule. In other words, why am I doing this? Mostly, because I'm concerned about animal abuse. That's worthy ... even if I'm working my way up to getting rid of commercial milk and eggs ... which I can do, living near the Amish, but, again, it's not always ... convenient. I'm working on it. But without the "rule," there's no focus and no goal to work towards.

On the other hand, having been in the situation myself, I don't ever want people who are in circumstances in which vegetarianism is a luxury they can't afford to feel pressured about what they eat.

Bill Samuel posted on Facebook a copy of a pro-vegetarian statement that included a comment by Tolstoy positing a connection between eating animals --slaughterhouses--and war. Tolstoy argued that if we got rid of the one, we'd get rid of the other. Tolstoy could be completely over-the-top in so many ways, but as I started thinking about this, I saw a definite connection between how we today, in U.S. culture, are largely removed from both our wars and our meat production, leasing both out to a small class of people and then more or less "shutting out" both. So maybe there is more of a connection than we think. Do you think so? Or is this more "over the top" thinking?

What about legalisms? Does becoming a vegetarian, vegaquarian, a vegaquarianSwedishmeatballian or a vegan, create too many rules? How do we navigate this?

What are you Reading?

One of the joys of a holiday is the chance to read.

I've been reading some novels this holiday season:

In contemporary fiction:

The Elegance of the Hedgehog
The Lovely Bones
The Financial Life of Poets

Classics:

Tristram Shandy (Roger and I are reading this aloud in the car while traveling. We both read it in grad school, but that was long ago ...
The Scarlet Letter (Again, it's been a loooong time.)

The Jane Austen world:

I'm always reading Jane Austen's novels and as way of secondary sources:
Jill Heydt-Steveson's breakthrough book, Unbecoming Conjunctions
James Edward Austen-Leigh's Memoir of Jane Austen, written in 1870. I am leading a discussion of the Memoir every Wednesday on three lists: Austen-L, Janeites and WomenWritersThroughtheAges.
I also recently read my cyber-friend Diana Birchall's novel Mrs. Darcy' Dilemma, a light-hearted sequel to Pride and Prejudice.

General non-fiction:

Amish Grace (A little before the holidays, but close enough.)
Alice Seybold's memoir, Lucky.
Another book that I read six weeks to two months ago, but which is still weighing on my mind, is Middletown in Transition, a sociological study of Muncie, Indiana in the mid 1930s.

Have you read any good books lately? Any of the above books?

"right size it"

In yesterday's blog, I posed the question; If having fewer material goods is not "a lower standard living," how do we more accurately describe it?

An answer struck me. I remember that during the recession of the early 1990s, I was working for a computer company (ie, private industry). Many of our business associates were laying people off and shrinking their businesses. They insisted that they were not, let me repeat not, "down-sizing." They were "right sizing." I remember it being a faux pas even to say "downsizing."

Well, that was all rather ridiculous, but I think the term "right sizing" is in fact apt to describe a move to simpler existence. What do you think?

small towns

In Another Turn of the Crank, a book of essays by Wendell Berry published in 1995, he entreats us to build small, sustainable communities that recognize the interconnectedness of all people. He also advocates seeing the earth's ecosystem--air, water, soil, plants and animals--as at one with humankind.

Berry notes the environmental extremes and disjunctions on both sides of the equation. He abhors the strip mining and other degradations to the natural habitat of his native Eastern Kentucky and other places , but at the same time, he pushes back against the desire of some environmentalists for protected land that's so pristine humans can't use it. He argues that we live in a strange tit-for-tat system in which it becomes "OK" to rape and pillage part of the environment because you have "preserved" another part. "Preservation" of part of the land isn't a magic formula that offsets destroying another part, he argues. In fact, he says, both practices tend to be inhuman(e) in the sense that humans are Xed out of the environment.

Rather than striking a balance between unused, untouched land and ruined land, he says, we would be better off to use all land--or almost all land--in respectful, sustainable and environmentally sounds ways.

As I was reading Berry, I was reminded of Wolf Guindon, a Quaker who settled with several other Quakers in Monteverde in Costa Rica in 1950 because the country had no draft. Guindon became involved in the movement during the 1970s and beyond to save the rainforest he lived in and was instrumental in helping to set up vast preserves, such as the Children's Eternal Rainforest. However, he clashed at times with environmentalists who wanted to keep the preserved rainforests entirely pure. Wolf envisioned certain areas set up as picnic grounds and for swimming, so that the local population could enjoy the beauty.

I tend to agree with Wendell and Wolf that it's better to coexist with and enjoy the nature around us than to place it off limits to human touch. It seems better to teach people how to live respectfully in an eco-system than to forbid entry.

Today I read an interview in Sun magazine with James Howard Kunstler, who made largely the same point: to survive after peak oil, which he says is now, Americans will have to live differently, in smaller walkable communities that very much resemble the small towns of yesteryear and may in fact be those towns. He sees globalization not as inevitable but as something that will end when oil prices rise high enough to make shipping goods halfway around the globe economically unfeasible. (A friend from Singapore offered an example of the absurdity of globalization. (Maybe we need friends from other places to see what we view as "normal.") He and his wife, who own a house in Maryland, went to Home Depot and bought bags of gravel to put under their deck. The gravel was imported from China. My friend couldn't get over it. 'They shipped rocks halfway around the world!' Yes, absurd, absurd and yet we all understand the economics.) After reason is restored and it once again becomes crazy to ship gravel across the earth, local farming, local communities and local industry will undergo a rebirth, sez Kunstler.

I have to say that for years I have dreamed of living in a place where you could walk everywhere you needed to go and where trains connected communities. Kunstler calls this move away from the car--and the smaller houses we will have to live in and the gardening we will have to do-- a decline in the American standard of living. But is it a decline or simply different? To me, it sounds better. I spent enough time in a minivan chauffering children to activities not to want to do that again. I love the idea of children being able to walk themselves to little league practice or dance class or me being able to walk to market. I loved my time living in a small house and preferred it to the bigger home we moved into after our family grew.

On the other hand, much as we might like the idea of small town communities, they can also be bastions of cruelty and narrow-mindedness. We associate lynchings with small towns. In 17th century England, women in small towns who complained about abuse or injustice by the men in power there were sometimes labeled witches and burned or hanged. Today, we rely on larger government entities to control the abuses of the small town dictator. However, if we are going to go back to living in small communities, rather than rely on the government (though I do believe in Aristotle's model of a stronger force protecting the everyday person from the abuses of the petty tyrant) I believe we must find ways to structure our communities with kindness, compassion, creativity and opportunity.

So two different questions: If having fewer material goods is not "a lower standard living," how do we more accurately describe it? Second, if we are going to be living in smaller communities, what are some ways to keep them from becoming abusive?

Pumpkin (festivals) and Persimmons

I spent Thursday and Friday morning in the school kitchens baking pumpkin bread for Barnesville's annual pumpkin festival. The Olney Friends School senior class sells the bread as a fund raiser for the senior class trip.

Every year, the largest pumpkin is crowned King Pumpkin. This year's pumpkin came in at more than 1,500 pounds. This is close to the world record for the largest pumpkin ever, which is 1,528 pounds. However, the Barnesville pumpkin festival allows gourds into the competition. The largest gourd on record weighs more than 1,800 pounds.

The new King Pumpkin is huge ... and flat.

While I was helping to bake pumpkin bread, I learned some other interesting facts:

Persimmons don't ripen until after the first frost. Interesting.

Don, the Olney farm manager, said he is having the Jonathan and Empire apples (hope I have those names right) made into apple butter. First you boil the apples down into apple sauce, then you boil them down even further, adding a lot of sugar (apple butter is apparently half sugar) until you have a nice smooth paste. The key is never to stop stirring with the paddle.

Jessica, our gardener, came in with a plastic bucket filled with giant kale leaves. They were as big as palm leaves and a vivid green. I couldn't over how huge they were. My baking partner, Richard, told me it was a good season for kale.

About half a dozen wild turkeys have been shredding Richard's kale and other vegetables. It's hard to shoot them, Don said.

It's been raining buckets today, but Roger and I still went to the book sale that the Barnesville Historical Society holds on Pumpkin festival weekend. Do we need MORE books? Not really. But at 10¢ for paperbacks and 20¢ for hardbacks, it's hard for us bibliophiles to resist.

With the rain pouring down, we've yet to stroll the fair proper, so no fried snickers bars to sooth our tastebuds ... so far.

What's a Persimmon?

This time last year, after I had been living the bucolic rural life for about, say, six weeks, somebody asked me: "Are you going to put up your persimmons?"

Huh?

"Put up" my "persimmons?"

He must have seen the blank look on my face because he said, laconic, "You know, you've got that persimmon tree in your yard by the barn. Little tree. Looks like it's got a lot of fruit this year."

Oh--and he was asking me if I were going to can the persimmons.

OK. Like, oh yeah. Now where do I come from? S-u-b-u-r-b-s. Like right. Like I'm going to put up persimmons.

Now I know people in the suburbs "put things up." But what on earth is a persimmon?

I don't think I'd ever seen one. In fact, I thought they were some exotic fruit that grew in, say, England. You know, like gooseberries. The kind of thing Benjamin Bunny might eat in Beatrix Potter. Of course, I'm the person who some years ago took mulberries to my Quaker meeting because I didn't know what they were and my daughter had eaten some from a bush in our yard. As they say, you never stop learning ..

I went outside later and looked for the persimmon tree and sure enough, there it was, a little tree by a bigger tree by the red barn. And yes, little golden fruits that looked like yellow cherry tomatoes dangled amid its leaves. Persimmons. My body of knowledge had just once again increased.

I ate one just to make sure. I've been much bolder about eating flora since I wrote an article on poisonous plants in which I learned that it's exceedingly rare to die of plant poisoning the U.S. in this day and age. (Unless, of course, you're that young man in "Into the Wild" ...)

The golden fruit was sweet and soft inside. Good. I gathered some and ate some more, figuring, macrobiotic, anti-oxidant, what could I lose. I never did put them up. I think other people might have gathered them. Or the birds.

In any case, this year I went out and looked at my persimmon tree, and lo and behold, fruit was forming. It's wonderful--Edenic really--to have the earth produce such bounty without any effort on my part. I tried a persimmon. Not ripe yet. But soon enough.