Slavery

Is civilization possible without slavery? 

I don't know that it is. You can read online that not every civilization has had slaves, but then again, most have. Certainly the most "civilized" have kept humans as chattel. In the West, our origins are tainted by this fact, as Athens and all of Greece was a slave society, and Rome, the West's Classical model, was very much dependent on the slave class. I'm not even getting into the Arab slave trade, nor what was going on in the East, which were monumental in their own ways. 

There was less slavery at other times. It declined in the Dark Ages and on into Medieval Europe. Not to the point of being absent, and it differed country to country, but it was largely replaced by serfdom. Which is still basically forced labor, though not as explicit and carrying somewhat more freedom. But then the Renaissance hits, the great "rebirth" of Western civilization, and what does it bring? The horrors of the African slave trade, the enslavement of whole nations of Native Americans, plus indentured servitude, which was in some ways worse, as far as how the people were treated (an African slave was an investment for life, so was somewhat less abused than someone only "owned" for 4-7 years. They worked the latter to death, more often than you'd think, to get their money's worth). 

I've heard that if people had been civil and patient, slavery in the Old South would have died out on its own, without the national bloodletting of the Civil War. Much the way Canada waited patiently to themselves eventually split from England by a gentlemen's agreement, no Canadian Revolution required. Canadians like to use these examples to prove how violent we Americans are. They are only partially right, because things aren't black and white or simple like that. There were principles at stake, and institutional human suffering, and these are worth fighting for and against, respectively.

Thoreau had something to say about this:

When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. (1)

It's true, it would have ended of itself, the way things were going. But only because we replaced human slaves with machine slaves. Be certain that I am not saying that it is immoral to use machines to do our work. I am simply saying that slavery has not been abolished, only mutated and changed. Of course, there is still wage slavery, as machines have not replaced all human labor, and actual human slavery still persists in pockets all around the world, even here in the US. But that is not my overall point here. The point here is that high civilization is not possible without free labor, and that the degree of civilization is based on how much free labor (energy) is available.

Hell, take animal domestication, the final nail in the slavery case. No civilization has existed that did not have domesticated animals, that is, enslaved animals. Perhaps the American civilizations like Cahokia, the Aztecs and Maya did (the Inca had llamas), but they practiced human slavery, were not as stable or long lasting, and not as developed (at least in the case of Cahokia) as, say, Greece, Rome, China, India, or the Arab world. That is, they were not as far removed from the hunter-gatherer and simple horticultural models they grew out of, and that is why they so easily disappeared back into those models when their civilizations dissolved (in the case of Cahokia and the Mayans). 

Animal slavery is where higher civilization began. It's one thing to keep a herd of sheep around to eat, or even cattle for milk and cheese and meat. But when you strap a saddle on a horse, or a yoke on a pair of ox and force them to do the work for you, you free up human labor to do things like form more refined administrative techniques, writing, art, religious embellishment, war, and technological invention. 

And it all comes down to energy, no? The Age of Fossil Fuel is exactly the same as the Age of Animal Domestication, in that the vast power available in either the livestock or the oil barrel frees humans from drudgery and labor to do other things. Each is a step up of an order of magnitude from what went before. That's why higher civilization developed out of the use of animal labor, and why the Industrial Age sprung up when we tapped the energy of machine labor running on fossil fuels. 

This is the issue around which our current energy woes revolve. Naturally no labor is free, even slave labor, since the slaves need to be bought, and fed, and at least minimally maintained in good health, much as a horse or ox needs to be. Likewise the machine, which, while often cheaper than human workers, still needs maintenance and fuel. It's funny, the way the owner class comes to depend on its slaves, and the energy they represent.

So now the upshot. If it turns out to be true that Peak Oil is not resolved via new energy sources, things are going to decline in complexity. This is obvious, but one must understand what's at stake. You read books like James Kunstler's A World Made By Hand, and it seems like democracy and freedom largely survive the fall. I wonder at that. Power doesn't let go so easily, and I wonder if instead of a sort of benign localism of freeholders and townsfolk, we won't end up with something more akin to a world under a myriad of Pol Pots. Those used to living high on the hog are not going to want to climb down, and I fear that they will simply see that as the oil energy goes, they must return to human energy in the form of serfs and slaves.

(Finally, check out this link, and savor the irony)

Lines of Travel

Path through a relic piece of urban prairie

There were two places back in Metro Detroit that I used to hang out in, two tiny little patches of woods (one makes do with what nature one has, in the city). One, Tenhave Woods, was right behind my old high school, a patch of trees about 22 acres, a relic somehow left alone when the area was suburbanized starting in the 40's. It felt larger because it was pretty thick with undergrowth in many places. Part of it (naturally the part where the gates both were) was swampy as hell in the spring, I'd have to wade, shin deep, through standing water and liquid, sucking mud, but it would dry out eventually. It had some really old, big trees in there, mostly maple, white oak, and beech, and a vast diversity of wildflowers and other plants. There was a decent little trail network constructed by local Boy Scouts, where people could walk or even jog. In one corner sat a little pond, and the whole wood was a helpful refuge for raccoon, opossum, even a little herd of deer, and probably by now, coyote. There were even remnants in there from the last Ice Age: Glacial Lake Erie had a shore running through those woods, visible to one who knows what to look for.

The other spot, at Douglas Evans Nature Preserve, was even better. It was a little smaller than the other, but the best part was that it had the very windy Main Fork of the River Rouge running through it. Half prairie (mowed once a year), half forest, a little trail along the river, a big tree fallen across the river serving as a bridge, even more wildlife, actual topography changes (the "deep" cut river banks, mainly, but it made it feel hilly). All surrounded by the nice homes of Beverly Hills-- which just there felt more like country homes, when I'd see deer browsing in their flower gardens. I remember one mild December evening, just before sunset, I got off work and I rode my bike out there, enjoyed maybe the best Christmas Eve in my life, even though I only stayed an hour. It was the right place to be on such a day. Nature truly became my church that evening. 

I visited both places pretty often, came to truly love them; but still I don't feel like I really knew them fully. The seasons made them feel constantly new, and because I couldn't really hike these places (which, in winter with the leaves down, you could stand in the middle and see houses in every direction), I was forced to sit still or walk very slowly, to simply watch and listen, to really see and hear and feel and maybe even begin to understand.

And yet, there is so much in that handful of acres that I never exhausted them. Twenty acres of woods or even a Zen garden could provide endless opportunities, if you are sensitive to depth. The hiker in me ridicules the notion and calls for whole mountain ranges, but this is true. A cubic foot of soil contains more life than you can even imagine, every tree's bark is different and is traveled by all manner of insects, every bend in a little stream holds interest to a sensitive eye, and all of them change over time.

Then I look at this map, a life history of my travels, most from the last several years. Part of me feels like, damn, there's still 7 states to hit, and huge areas even in states I've visited that remain unexplored-- I've only seen extreme southeast Idaho, for example, and in Washington State, just the Portland suburbs on the north side of the Colombia River. Huge circles of unexplored area can be drawn in the Northwest, the northern plains, the Southwest and even my native Midwest. But my point is, can I claim to have really seen much of even the parts these lines do transect?

I've spent so much time trying to see more, bitten by the travel bug...but most of the lines are just me driving the interstates on my way to somewhere; and you don't see much on an interstate, or from a car in general. Example: I've been the length and breadth of Kentucky, but only on the roads, so I can't say I've really seen it. And all the trees in the east don't help much; even when they're just a "beauty strip," they block the view.  And when you have long views, so what? It's all whizzing past you, you'd be better off just looking at a picture back home, if that's all you're doing.

Some of the lines are better. One, from Georgia to Maine, is a rough estimation of the Appalachian Trail, which I walked all in one go, slow travel, immersed. Segments in the Sierra Nevada and SoCal mountains are the Pacific Crest Trail, same deal. Some of the stuff in Utah are hikes or places I worked in. Naturally I've seen a lot more of Michigan than I've been able to draw here, being a native of the state. And many of the lines have explorations along the way or at their ends that are too small to draw on this map.

So, while many people's maps would have far fewer lines than mine, what a meager thing it really comes to! There is a ton more of New England I'd like to see: the Adirondacks, the Maine coast, Boston, Cape Cod, to name a few. It'd be great to see the Cascade Mountains. What I saw of the Pacific Coast was paltry, mainly from cars while hitchhiking, or else being stuck in places not much worth seeing. All in all, I didn't take my time, and blew that opportunity. Even in Michigan there are places I wish I'd visited: never made it to Isle Royale (yet!), nor to Tahquamenon Falls, and I could be pretty happy in some of those towns "up north," like Manistee or Petoskey, or Alpena. To say nothing of Canada, or Europe!

Thoreau said something wise in his essay Walking, "There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the three-score-years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you." And he was hiking around the rather gentle and tamed landscapes of eastern Massachusetts. I don't know how serious he was, since he took other trips, to Cape Cod, northern Maine, Canada, and even out to Minnesota. But he had his main stomping grounds, and was pretty much satisfied with them. 

The tree I call 
"Mother Oak,"
Tenhave Woods

How much space does it really take? Do we need to live next to Yellowstone to have a wilderness experience, or recreation in a natural area? The bigger the area, the less you get to know it, the more you miss and know you miss, and therefore the more restless you become, the more desirous. I remember many places along the AT, where I wished I wasn't thru-hiking, didn't have the need to push miles, and could hang around and explore, whether specific area like Smokey Mountains NP, various little towns along the way (especially in New England), even just random viewpoints where I'd have liked to just sit a few hours and bliss out.

I met a lady in Shennandoah National Park that summer of my hike; she lived nearby, and spent all the time she could hiking around in that one park, exploring, bushwhacking to places no one ever went to. She probably knows it better than anyone else alive, yet still finds more to keep her interested. My hike straight through was surely infinitely better than cruising Skyline Drive, but even so it was still just a tiny slice of the park, a fraction of what was there to be known. I'm starting to think she was on the right track.

I guess what I'm getting at is sort of an instance of the Little Way of St Therese. Clearly she wasn't talking about hiking or nature, but, "St Therese translated “the little way” in terms of a commitment to the tasks and to the people we meet in our everyday lives." It's rather Zen, and actually I wonder if having grown up in a parish where both my church and school were both named Shrine of the Little Flower, a nickname of hers, had anything to do with my Zen leanings. We did review her life in religion class, and I still remember her "little way" all these years later. Or maybe it's like Blake wrote, 

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

I still hold those two tiny natural patches, all the way up in Michigan, in the midst of so much suburban sprawl, as sacred, at least in my own personal spiritual landscape. The hours I spent there, the poems I wrote there, the memories I created there, they are all still with me. Their 'placeness' still resonates in my soul. I am still inspired by them. 

Though on balance I'd prefer more nature than is available even in such plots, and I'd prefer a smaller town (but not too small), I think a diet of little patches of woods and wild, while occasionally taking a real retreat, would work. Because I do need the occasional real escape from urbanity, it's noise and inroads, which are not available in the little places, where traffic sounds penetrate. And sometimes you just need an adventure. But over all, the point of these major retreats shouldn't, it seems, be to see ever more places, a mere catalogue of new terrain, but to find the peace, beauty, and spirit of Nature. Kids (and everyone) should travel to expand their minds and views, not to pile up a bragging list of exotica; to draw a map not of distances, but one with lines that lead toward depth. 

Mountains

“Thirty years ago, before I had studied Zen, I saw mountains as mountains and rivers as rivers. And then later, when I had more intimate knowledge, I came to see mountains not as mountains and rivers not as rivers. But now that I have attained the substance, I again see mountains as mountains, and rivers as rivers.”

I've posted on this before, true. But here's another simple way to think about this Zen saying. I read today in Rebecca Solnit's book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, that in Japan, mountaineering was thought of not so much as getting to the top of something, but to the center, like walking a labyrinth. The center of a mandala.

So. From a distance, from the valley, the mountain is a familiar thing, background, scenery, so familiar as to be ignored. The mountain? the villager says; What am I, blind? Of course I know the mountain, it's right over there, see it every day, no big deal. Thoreau said that "to the traveller, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely one form," which is best observed from afar.

But maybe you decide to go up it, to take the journey. Setting foot upon the slope, the mountain is no longer the mountain. You cannot see it, not the whole thing, not the greater shape; the old parameters are gone, vanished into the thinning air. You see Thoreau's "infinite number of profiles," fragments, rocks at your feet, the trees around you, the trail a little ahead, but not very far, because it bends out of view. The old idea of the mountain no longer applies.

Then you reach the top; the wind tugs at you, the sun bright in the massive blue sky. Now you see that the mountain is not, in fact, best known from afar. You see what the mountain is: not some distant peaked thing, a lot of rock thrusting up out of the plain, a familiar landmark in the townspeople's minds... but something else entirely. Something utterly wild, something I cannot speak of, something only someone who has been on top of a mountain can know; especially, and maybe only, a someone who has walked that vertical walk, moved over the rock under his own power, felt the stab of stone under his soles, drinking hard and deep the mountain-scented air, sweat the good sweat, fought the good fight, the fight against gravity and laziness, to finally break past the tree line, over the final rise, at last to glory in the endless all-around view.

The mountain is now truly the mountain, as object and subject merge as one peak experience. The distant object is gone; the mountain itself is hardly there at all anymore. The center of the mandala.

Stupid Homes and Waste

Well, my last post was sort of an indulgence. I get excited by small homes, rural living, sustainable building, and so forth. Maybe most of my readers don't care about any of that, but I put it out there anyways. I'm not sure how I'll end up living, in what sort of home; I just know that I don't want to live in anything they're building nowadays. At least here in Florida, all the houses are these squatty, bunker-like homes. I know some of it down here has to do with hurricanes, building codes require certain things and these concrete buildings sure won't blow away. But I know these sorts of homes are being built elsewhere. I remember seeing a picture of a home on a news article about foreclosures; I said to myself, ah, an article about the Florida housing market, then read the caption. The home was actually in Las Vegas. I think it may now be the predominant "style" in America; style is in quotes because these homes have no style, no character.

Even the higher end homes are still made this same cheap way. You'd expect quality in a $400,000 home, but it is not so, it's still concrete blocks, the cheap looking knock-down finish inside and out, walls not square or straight, just plain cheap. They dress them up a bit with things like crown moulding, entryway columns, and other various "adornments" but the materials these adornments are made with are cheap. Anyways, they are all variations on the same theme, and all end up looking pretty much the same.

Now, uniformity is not the worst thing in the world, and of course, as they say, there's no accounting for taste. Who am I to declare them inherently ugly? Of course I'm reminded of Pete Seeger's song "Little Boxes" every time I think about this, but I say people get what they deserve, and they can have it. They want big, grand homes for cheap, and that's what they've gotten.

But this way of building is so unsustainable. Construction waste makes up about 33% of landfill trash (in 1998, can't find anything recent, but given the boom, must be worse), and I can speak from experience. When we go into a house to renovate it, the first thing is to do a "trash out." This is largely to empty all the garbage the former occupants left behind (you'd be amazed at how much people leave), and also to tear out whatever's being removed or replaced: cabinets, doors, fences, tile, carpet, on one occasion a wall. Of course, if compressed, removing the big empty spaces in the non-optimally loaded dumpsters, there's actually less, but still, it's a lot.

In addition to the above, often enough to fill up one or two 20yd dumpsters; over the course of the job we create more waste, necessitating more dumpster space. Example: the other day we were putting new casing on the doorways throughout the house, that is, the decorative wood moulding around the door frame. I'd cut the two upright pieces from a single stick of casing, which I think was 14 ft; the leftover piece was close but still too short to use as the top piece, and was discarded. We ended up throwing 3 or 4 sticks-worth away; hard to say, I didn't lay them end to end to measure on my way to the dumpster.

What are you supposed to do with that? Surely there is a better way to use it. Perhaps as part of energy production, by buring it. Then again, as it's not real wood but medium density fiberboard, so with the binders plus the white coating, there'd probably be fumes. (I just read that it contains formaldehyde, and the dust should not be inhaled. All the dust I breathe at work has forced me to stop running, as it hurts my lungs too much; now I find out I'm upping my chance for cancer. Fuck my life). But why not make them long enough to accomodate standard door sizes? That way for most uses (not sliding doors or double doors, but most uses), there's less waste. What about recycling? We throw out lots of glass, plastic, and cardboard; and wood that can be chipped or otherwise used somehow, even if it is downcycling.

I especially hate the garage in front, showcasing blankness
The insanity of our car culture strikes again.

Much of all the other stuff we throw out is still perfectly good, often it simply doesn't match the standard design the new owner, in my remodelling work generally a realty group, prefers. Often we replace the old with new that isn't much better. Cabinets are a great example: contractor grade stuff is ubiquitous in new homes everywhere, even in nicer homes; they're all cheap as hell and won't last ten years probably. And things like fans and lights, which may not be fancy enough, or clean enough, or new enough. We do clean some of them, naturally-- no real estate group wants to waste money. But they inherently waste due to standard construction practices.

So in comes my fascination with the old log cabins and the like. My boss says they didn't build so cheaply up north, but that here in Florida everything's so shoddy. That may be true, I don't know; the big housing boom surely produced junk everywhere it struck, but Florida is the grand-daddy of all the housing boomtowns, so there you have it. Nothing built to last here, not really, not beyond the hurricane-proof concrete exterior walls. (Of course, most of the land here will probably be underwater in a century, so maybe it's moot). But the point is that building this way is so unsustainable and monstrously wasteful that it sickens me to think about it. Not only is there massive waste in the building phase, but the furnishings and the homes themselves will be garbage far sooner than is right. We might as well just throw the whole house into the landfill from the get-go and be done with it.

In addition to that, little of the material used is local or sustainable. Concrete uses lots of fuel and pollution to make, and must be transported. Native cultures built with what was around: down here they'd have wood frame huts with palm-thached roofs, probably. So a log or wood frame home, or a cob home, or a straw-bale home, or brick, or stone, these make sense. Depends on where you live. Cob wouldn't work here because the clay would have to be imported, same with stone. Wood homes are less practical in the western deserts, where adobe would be the better material. Sod homes were common on the prairies once, for obvious reasons.

I would add to this Thoreau's critique on ornaments on houses in this section from the Economy chapter of Walden (about halfway down the page). Who needs all this crown moulding and silly columns? This annotation from the linked site says:

Thoreau disagrees with the idea of making the ornaments have "a core of truth" because he sees no value in the ornaments. To him, a beautiful building is not one with a lot of fancy embellishments but one that has been designed from the foundation up to fit its purpose. True beauty comes from function rather than from ornamentation.

...and that makes a lot of sense to me. Indeed, the Economy chapter is the best of the book, in my opinion; it blew my mind so much that for a long time I never read past that, it just rocked my world. But this is how we need to be thinking about things, if we want to start moving towards a sustainable, sensible way of life.

Simplicity

Cym over at Effortless Flow recently put up a few posts about living simply and some issues she sees going along with it. I think she's pretty much right in her assessment, and just wanted to share my own thoughts on it, because after I mentioned a book Possum Living in a reply, I started musing it over some more.

Firstly, I don't see the simple life as being one of poverty. Poverty to me implies suffering and deprivation. I don't think I've made over $10,000 a year since 2007, and often quite a bit less than that, with my wandering ways keeping me unemployed for about half the year, usually. Part of the ease of me living cheaply is that I'm often either camping out on a long hike, or, in two cases, living free in government housing as part of a job (Forest Service cabins in Utah, a Fish and Wildlife bunkhouse in New Jersey). Otherwise I live in a cheap rented room, or with family, as I do currently. But I'm also able to go without a lot of stuff that others consider essential, which is key.

A big one is TV, which I've lived without for most of the last 4 years, quite happily I might add, as well as not having in-home internet most of the time. Internet is nice, but, as a bit of an aside, ever notice how you'll Google whatever random question comes into your mind? On the Appalachian Trail, we'd sometimes keep a "Google list" of stuff we'd discussed and wanted to know more about, or to settle a debate on something. Then we'd get to town and realize how irrelevant those things were, and how little we cared. Most of the time, no list, and forgetting what transient curiosities we'd wanted to look up proved their irrelevance. The internet is often a great time waster.

Anyways, the point is, I don't mind not having these things. And that's the point: simplicity has nothing to do with suffering. If you have denied yourself something, like, say, your television, and then constantly worry about missing all your shows, you haven't simplified your life at all: you still hang on to the thing, even in its absence. I think this is where the Christians got confused, with their renunciation ethic, of suffering with the poor. The point isn't to add more suffering to the world out of some sense of righteous guilt. It isn't a duty, to be taken up with regret or as a discipline. Renunciation and living simply are about realizing you don't really want or need a thing, it's about letting the extraneous stuff fall away easily like autumn leaves. It's like Diogenes, who owned only a cup until he saw someone drinking with his cupped hands, causing him to realize the cup was unnecessary, so he threw it away. This requires examination into your life, your desires, your fears, and so forth.

Diogenes with his friends

I go along with Lao Tzu: he who knows he has enough is rich. I'd add to that: he who thinks he needs more than he has is still poor; even those we call the wealthy. I also like the Bob Dylan line, What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do. This is the essence of possum living. This possum thing I keep referring to is from the book, Possum Living, written by Dolly Freed back in the 1970s, about the life she and her father lived in their home outside of Philadelphia. Possum living is quite a lot like what Thoreau did on Walden Pond. It's leaving the world of work (save for the occasional odd job), raising your own food (gardening, chickens, rabbits) or gathering, fishing, hunting for it. It's buying clothes, when needed, at thrift stores. It's not owning a car or most of the other stuff of modern life. It's being your own boss, doing your own thing, and realizing life does not equal work, and that unemployment does not equal starvation. It's freedom.

There are a few requirements. When they started living this way, Dolly's father already owned his home and land, free and clear, just as Thoreau built his cabin on a friend's land with permission and at no cost. Living in a society that believes firmly in land ownership means that, unless you want to pay rent, the best way is to own your land. Then all you have are property taxes, not negligible but probably less, depending on where you live. You can get land cheap, even in or near cities, through police and bank auctions, and foreclosures, you just have to put in the time to find it. For myself, I'd want a decent sized chunk of land (5-10 acres) in a more rural area, but not too far out of a town (at most a small city). Then I'd build a small, simple cabin on it to fit my needs and desires, rather than buy land with a house already on it, which would surely be too big for me (thus too much work to maintain, and too expensive to buy, heat and cool).

Owning is really the main issue. It'd be hard or impossible to live this way from an apartment, though you can certainly live cheaply; but growing your food, having chickens and such sounds like a real stretch, unless your landlord is really, really cool and lets you put in a garden and chicken coop in the courtyard or something. Yeah right. It'd also be easier in a more rural area, where more wild foodstuff will be available to supplement what you grow and raise yourself; though there's always something to be found anywhere.

That's the other thing: work is still involved. Not wage work, really, but there is an element of labor. Dolly makes this point in this YouTube documentary, a point I've made in the past myself. It's work, you have to do things, but the question is whether those tasks are work or leisure. Fishing is fun, but can feed you, so is it work or play? I love gardening and even composting, which both feed my body, directly and indirectly, and my soul, because it's enjoyable, it's leisure and work at the same time. And above that is the fact that I'm my own boss, and much more free in general.

Of course, one doesn't have to go to the extreme of homesteading, though I advocate it and hope to do it someday. Even city folk can simplify their life, drastically cut their expenses, and still live well. Eating a simpler diet doesn't mean sacrificing good food; it means you buy in bulk, beans, rice, flour, and so on, and learn to prepare tasty meals for yourself. Farmers markets often cost less, and are fresher and support local economies to boot. They allow you to taste the seasons as well, since you'll only have squash in the fall, asparagus in spring. Clothes are to be had cheap at thrift stores, though this is admittedly dependant on the overconsumption of others.

As for entertainment, there's always libraries, which often also have movies and music, if you have the electronics to play them. With my laptop alone, I'm set on that. If you're athletic, there's sports that you can do for cheap or free, like pickup basketball games, cycling and running clubs, neighborhood soccer, etc. Or you can take a walk somewhere. Call your friends up and have a poker night, or, in my case, preferably euchre. Lord I love me some euchre. Nature provides much diversion: birdwatching, wildflower or butterfly hunting, learning the natural history of your area, or adding to it with amateur studies, etc. People act like the only way to have fun is to go to the bar and spend a hundred dollars on alcohol, or going out to nice restaurants. Fine if this is really what you love, but there are a million other options, often more creative and enriching options, and cheaper too.

The upshot? The less money you need, the less you have to work. Now, I'm not allergic to work, and when I do have a job, I always work hard; but I don't mean to devote my life to the accumulation of things, and I have other things to do with my time than slave away after wages. I work because I need to, and the less I need, the less I must work, and the more I can devote myself to the things I enjoy doing but haven't yet really figured out how to get paid to do. As a bonus you get to not be a hypocrite, or far less of one, when you bitch and gripe about the banks, the wealthy, the 1%, the corruption of government run by big business. You've stopped voting for those pricks by not using their dollars, and found your happiness away from their rat-race economic prison.

The Good Life

It struck me today, that I am living a great life. I've made the right choices. I'm in a good position, I'm doing good things. Often I regret not finishing college, often I lament my unemployment and lack of direction. But just now, it finally became real to me, that this is not a problem. If I hadn't dropped out and spun my wheels for a couple years, I never would have hiked the Appalachian Trail. I never would have met all the awesome people out there, and in jobs and adventures since. I never would have seen the amazing places that I have.

Spring in Idaho

A great deal of the personal growth and positivity in my life, I'd say, sprung from my AT experience. I put myself out there, into the world alone, with no familiar supports, not even a familiar city lifestyle somewhere, just going with a sort of faith in the universe. And it worked out. In fact, it worked so well that I sometimes say to myself, half jokingly, that the AT ruined my life. It lifted me out of a life of settling for less, of just getting by, of being okay with being unhappy; it showed me for the first time what happiness is. I cannot walk away from this revelation.

Here's an exerpt from the end of this great book I'm reading, Deep Survival.

Not long ago, when I was flying the aerobatics constest circuit, a friend of mine, Jan Jones, was going about her ordinary business. She had started with the International Aerobatics Club at about the same time I did. Jan was an otherwise fairly ordinary person: she went the the grocery store, took a shower every morning, watched TV, did laundry. ... Then one day she took off, crashed her Pitts, and died. People talked gravely about the unnecessary risks she'd taken. But another friend of mine was doing the same everyday errands and activities but not flying, not taking the risks. In fact, she lived an extremely quiet life. Then one day she felt ill and went to the doctor and a few weeks later was dead from glioblastoma. Survivors know, whether they are conscious of it or not, that to live at all is to fly upside down (640 people died in 1999 while choking on food; 320 drowned in the bath tub). You're already flying upside down. You might as well turn on the smoke and have some fun.

Lovely Tennessee "snow"

I've always thought this way. Death has always been in my mind, teaching its lesson. I don't know anything about an afterlife and am content to let the issue lie. "One life at a time," as Thoreau said on his deathbed, refusing to convert. I could have 40 years left... or 40 seconds. Knowledge of death is a gift, for if one really embraces it, one relaxes and can laugh. Life isn't serious, it's a passing thing. The problems I have now won't mean a thing next year, let alone in 100 years. And it sure won't matter that I didn't have a stable career to exist in, unhappy but safe.

So dammit, I'm going to go hike the Pacific Crest Trail, I'm going to go work for room and board on some organic farms, I'm going to write and write and write and never cease in my unorthodoxy. So far so good.

Life of Subtraction

Having been living a semi-nomadic existence of late, I have had to be able to fit all my stuff into my truck, an extened-cab Ranger, not a very big space. This is a source of pride for me. I, unlike most Americans, am always looking through my stuff to figure out what I can get rid of next. Thoreau said, speaking of possessions:

It is the same as if all these traps were buckled to a man's belt, and he could not move over the rough country where our lines are cast without dragging them — dragging his trap. He was a lucky fox that left his tail in the trap. The muskrat will gnaw his third leg off to be free. ... If I have got to drag my trap, I will take care that it be a light one and do not nip me in a vital part. But perchance it would be wisest never to put one's paw into it.

My sister laughs at me, because while when she's standing in line to buy something, she often finds herself picking up one of the "impulse buy" products lining the checkout as well. Meanwhile, I'm standing there fretting about whether I need the thing I am about to buy, half the time leave the line to go put it back, then leave the store with my wallet intact.

Possessions are a burden. You have to take care of them, think about what to do with them, house them, labor for them. They clutter your dwelling. There are people who will break themselves with a too-big apartment or house, just because they have all this furniture and stuffthat they need to do something with. Myself, I feel a relief every time I lighten my load, drop one more thing on the side of the road of life.

I believe one's outer reality mirrors one's inner reality. Possessions can clutter the mind, too. I try to apply this minimalism, this life of subtraction, to my mind as well as my physical world. Simplifying my surroundings helps me to simplify my inner life, and that then helps me to see things I can further simplify in my outer world. It goes back and forth, ideally at least, though more often in fits and starts, with moments of accumulation, and others of dissipation. Sometimes I live amid clutter, my few things in a chaotic jumble all over the floor, and it is at those times that I cannot be bothered to organize it, that I sometimes stop and notice that I'm currently stressed and unhappy, my life in as much chaos as my room.

I try to pay attention to these things. Like in a previous post, where I talked about the body and its messages, one's surroundings are also always are talking to you, giving you clues about your inner states, and often showing the way forward. And sometimes just tidying up can help clear the mind, since the two are basically one anyways.

I'll end with what the Tao Te Ching says in chapter 48:

In pursuit of knowledge,
every day something is added.
In the practice of the Tao,
every day something is dropped.