Author: jennynazak

What if more jobs came with housing? This is a question I have often pondered over the years. And all the more so lately, as many people’s housing struggles and other economic struggles have grown.

Late at night, from way in the wee hours til just before dawn, I hear people talking as they walk by my high-foot-traffic corner. Some of them are obviously just tourists or young folks wandering around after a late night at the bars, but others are equally obviously homeless people who either walk around all night, or just stay in one place a couple hours at a time and then move, to avoid getting busted for sleeping.

The Biden administration has expressed interest in starting a Civilian Climate Corps. Analogous to the Civilian Conservation Corps that was part of FDR’s New Deal of the 1930s, the climate corps would employ young people doing things like planting trees, installing solar panels, maintaining trails. In addition to paying wages it would also provide basic shelter. I can imagine a lot of people I know — and not just young ones! — would find this an appealing gig. Maybe even some people who currently fall into homelessness rather than deal with the seemingly ever-increasing challenges of holding up a “normal” life (security deposits, first and last month’s rent, credit checks, background checks, yadda yadda yadda), would be happy to have this option.

Back in the early 1990s when I lived in Tokyo, a lot of the companies where I taught English provided their employees with dorm housing. It was very basic but more than adequate.

My last apartment in Tokyo, where I lived for the final year of my 5 years there, was in the heart of Harajuku, a supercrowded paradise of pop culture and street fashion. Sprinkled among the high-rise concrete-and-tile buildings were older structures, including small neighborhood Buddhist temples and a pre-WWII wooden house. Also there was some sort of shopfront which appeared to be a headquarters for newspaper delivery boys. (There may have been girls there too but I only saw what appeared to be teen boys.) What was this place where they drank tea and warmed their hands around a space-heater on bitter winter days? Was it communal housing or just the place they went to pick up their papers each morning? I never knew; never asked. I always felt drawn to it though.

Same with the mysterious camp I stumbled on in the middle of a multi-day hike around the island of Izu. On a rocky beach (most beaches I saw in Japan were rocky), people appeared to be sheltering in makeshift structures made of corrugated metal propped against or between rocky outcroppings. I recall having the impression that the people were divers; maybe I spotted some diving equipment or something. They did not look to me like recreational tourists or visitors. Were they diving for pearls? Fish? Was this their housing or just their day-camp? So many things you can only guess at when youre on the outside looking in. (I could have asked, but somehow I felt foolish, not knowing what to ask. “Who are you people? What are you up to? Your vibe is so interesting?” In retrospect, I’d have found a way. My language skills were fine and probably all I needed to do was show polite interest.

I’ve often thought city parks should have caretaker’s huts, where someone could live in return for keeping the trash picked up and trimming the shrubs and cleaning the restrooms and so on.

Lately I’ve been delving into ancestry research. One of our family ancestors, the one who fought in the Revolutionary War, lived to be 91! Quite remarkable for back then. He worked as a carpenter and cabinetmaker and he fathered 13 children — nine by his first wife and four by his second wife. Sounds like a full life. I wonder if he started his carpentry career as a young live-in apprentice somewhere? (His father died at 38.)

What would a writer’s apprentice house look like? Would they have writer’s roundtable chats and serve absinthe?

As a kid, I was obsessed with those giant concrete tubes you see lying around construction sites. A person could take shelter in there, and I often thought I could live in one of those if I had to. Looking back, I wonder if my thoughts were just a child’s fanciful musings, or if I somehow had glimpses of a future time, in my own lifetime, where people I knew personally would face much harder living conditions than what I’d been taught were normal.

I once spent three months on a friend’s farm in Austin, painting signs and helping out with cooking and other tasks. I was welcome to sleep in the house but I mostly slept under an oak tree or on the second floor of the barn, where garlic hung to dry from the rafters overhead and I could look out the open end of the barn and see the city lights twinkling in the distance. I wanted for nothing. It was a sweet carefree period of my life, sandwiched between two very stressful periods when I was feeling adrift and very financially and emotionally insecure.

More thoughts on this topic coming later, no doubt! What are your thoughts on how it would be if more jobs came with housing? Have you ever WWOOFed or done some other gig that came with housing?

Update 9/23/21: Just now I googled “jobs that come with housing,” and found many promising-looking links. If you explore any of them, let us know how it goes for you!

Further Exploration:

• coolworks.com: “Unlike a typical employment situation in a city or town, where you go to work and then go ‘home,’ many of the employers posting jobs on CoolWorks.com are located in resort or remote areas. It would be nearly impossible to have an employee live in the surrounding areas and travel to work every day. Because of this, a large majority of employers you’ll encounter provide employee housing and meals. Housing can range from rustic to brand new, from bunkhouse to private rooms, from dormitories to cabins. Some may even include wall tents or camping out.”

• wanderjobs.com: 20 types of jobs with paid room and board

• According to this page on indeed.com, there are even jobs offering free housing in NYC! And my google search revealed a number of other similar NYC job links too. And if housing-provided jobs exist in NYC, you know they surely must exist in some other urban areas too!

• And then there are the fairly well-known old standbys, workamping and WWOOFing (Worldwide Opportunities On Organic Farms). I know a number of people who’ve done one or both of these.

My email earlier today to an organization that puts on outstanding conferences and webinars. The organization recently sent out an email invitation to its upcoming “shape of our region’s future”-type webinar. Their use of the year 2070 in the event title prompted me to email them this:

I love all the work you guys are doing. That said, it feels shockingly optimistic to see the year “2070” used by a climate-aware organization like yours, as if it’s a given that we humans will still be around that far into the future!!

Do you really feel that optimistic? Or is the use of “2070” in your program mainly to attract the interest and buy-in from conventional organizations, planners, govt leaders etc?

Thanks for all you are doing, regardless.

Jenny Nazak (Daytona Beach Permaculture Guild; Daytona Beach Resilience Task Force)

I will let you know what I hear back from them, if anything.

I just heard back, very quick!

Jenny – My kids often ask my – why do you care? You won’t be around then. LOL. But they will be. We are trying to show that if Florida is to have a future we must start long-range planning now so used a 50-year time frame. But your point is well taken.

Thanks for your interest!

And I responded just now:

Thank YOU. I totally share your viewpoint. Same as you, I care A LOT about future generations. We owe it to them. My point was that I’m just not sure ANY humans will be around by 2070 at the rate we are going. And I worried that when people see 2070 in the title, they might have a false sense of security, like it’s OK to take things for granted and continue with business as usual.

But maybe if we all pull together, and with wise organizations like yours helping people wake up to the need for long-range planning, humans might just live to see that year. And maybe even be thriving, in a civilization that has repented the error of its ways and become compassionate and reconnected with nature.

Thank you so much for undertaking this work! I do look forward to your event! River-Friendly Planning, and human survival on a healthy planet into 2070 and beyond, is a great thing to aspire to.

When it comes to pest control, my practice of nonviolence has sometimes veered from my ideals. The lone garden-spider, ant, palmetto bug, cricket or other everyday critter who has gotten into my house, is routinely escorted outside, using the basic “humane bug-removal toolkit” that consists of one of those shiny junk-mail postcards and sometimes a jar.

One time, when my late sweet kitty Starshine (April 2002-March 2017) brought a live mouse into the apartment, I had to act quickly so I rolled her and the mouse up in the scatter rug they were standing on, and carried them both outside.

But, when it comes to potential infestations of cockroaches or termites, and other less “manageable” critters, I have sometimes resorted to poison or a shoe.

At such times, I always feel sadness and remorse, even while I feel relief at getting the situation “under control” before it becomes an actual infestation. So I am always seeking to expand my toolkit for nonviolently dealing with creatures. I searched and found some good articles. Hope you find them helpful!

• How To Get Rid of Pests and Bugs the Buddhist Way (tricycle.org). “In Buddhism there is a long held and integral tradition of caring for animals and all living creatures. They are regarded in Buddhist thought as sentient beings, different than humans in their intellectual ability but no less capable of feeling suffering, fearing death, and craving life. …” This article offers practical tips, plus helpful background reading on how Buddhists practice an attitude of non-violence toward creatures including those we call “pests.”

• Attending to Insects (Joela Brown; voices.uchicago.edu). “In the West, many of us would describe ourselves as animal-lovers. What we tend to mean by that, though, is that we like to engage only with certain animals — animals for which we have some affection, such as domestic dogs and cats, or ‘cute’ animals like koalas and dolphins, or interesting zoo animals like elephants and sloths. We tend to permit non- humans into our lives and spaces only if they please us, entertain us, love us, or at the very least do not frighten or annoy us. …”

• How Nonviolent Religions Handle Bedbugs (medium.com). “Practically speaking, insects and other vermin are harmful. The mosquito may be the world’s most dangerous animal — it kills far and away more humans than any other creature (as evidenced by the current outbreaks of dengue fever and the Zika virus). Flies and roaches can also spread disease. Bedbugs are lately on the rise. With all that in mind, here’s a look at how spiritual-minded folks have approached the vermin problem …”

Yesterday as I steered my bicycle in to the shopping plaza where the driver’s license office is (I needed to get my driver’s license updated), I beheld the treeless forlorn parking lot and the charmless architecture of the mall buildings. And a thought struck me: that our USAmerican culture is an experiment in what happens when a whole country decides that beauty and practicality don’t mix, and that the latter must always take precedence.

Voilà! We get utterly desolate landscapes that often, adding insult to injury, end up being impractical as well as ugly! (The design of the place made it really hard to see what stores were in there. And, the parking lot with its many different car-paths perpendicular to one another looked like a massive fender-bender festival waiting to happen.)

I will nonetheless be a regular visitor to this shopping mall from now on, because I found this utterly charming and adorable little Russian food shop inside the mall next to the license office. The proprietors have managed to create great beauty amid a desolate setting!

Speaking of beauty and the built environment …

My friend’s son is a carpenter in Japan. Here’s a rammed-earth construction project he is/was working on.

I have done a teeny bit of natural building (helping on other people’s projects), and one thing that always moves me is the beauty of working with quiet hand-tools and in close connection with other people. The reverence for materials & process, and for every set of hands.

What if every building had to be built by hand with non-fossil-powered tools? How different would our buildings look and feel — how much more human-scaled and beautiful?

How much quieter and less jarring would the whole world and rhythm of our days feel? I have come to feel that the default settings of “mainstream business-as-usual” USA have been cheating ourselves of great beauty and meaning, while at the same time trashing the planet. We all deserve better, don’t you think?

But to get it, we have to believe it’s possible. And one way to start is by seeing the beauty of the built environment in other parts of the world. All of our ancestors came from places where beauty and sustainability and integrity went hand-in-hand with function.

On the subject of scale … In the Natural Building module of a 6-month permaculture-based course called Earth-Based Vocations that I took in New Mexico back in 2006 (unfortunately the program is no longer in existence), I joked that we learned the most important principle of natural building as soon as we picked up a shovel or pushed a wheelbarrel: BUILD AS SMALL AS POSSIBLE! How many big ugly buildings could we avoid if we had to build them all by hand?

The vine has pretty, morning-glory-like flowers, but it is not native to here, and it climbs and grows everywhere. Literally this vine would cover every other plant, tree, and bush if I would let it.

I’m sure many gardeners hate this vine. But, in permaculture design class, we learn that everything serves a function in the ecosystem, and we can find uses for it. In keeping with that principle, I just cut the vine back rather than try to eradicate it. I use the cut foliage as free “chop and drop” mulch. Also, during the most punishingly hot time of year, I will often let the vine grow over most everything, as I figure it provides some shade to the soil and to roots of other plants.

The vine dies back in winter, doesn’t like even our mild winters.

One characteristic of this vine is that its stems get tough, ropy, almost woody. Maybe in some other times and places they have been used for rope — whether braided or single-strand. I thought of that the other day as I was cussing out some dried tangled strands of the vine that were intertwined with a nice pile of twigs and leaves that I was trying to grab from a neighbor’s curbside discard pile in order to add to my mulch pile.

It’s always good to remind myself that everything has its own inherent value. I can choose to remember that, or only choose to focus on the “pesky” characteristics of a thing.

Maybe I should do some weaving or rope-making experiments!

Speaking of natural rope, my friend Barbara, who is a longtime resident of Japan (maybe even a citizen), does a lot of writing and translation about traditional Japanese building methods, which rely entirely on locally grown wood, vines, and other materials. Thatched roofing and so on. Her Facebook posts are lovely. Here’s an excerpt from a recent one:

By now the old roof had been completely removed and the thatchers were repairing the roof frame. In addition to the rice-straw rope that had been used as binding on all the sites I’d visited previously, they were using another type of binding called “neso.”

“Neso” is obtained from “mansaku,” a kind of hazel that grows in the mountains of Gokayama. This should be used immediately after harvesting, while it is still green, but here they were forced to use branches that had been cut in November and had dried too much. Before using, the branches were soaked in water and then pounded to make them somewhat pliant. Even at best, this material is difficult to handle, but once the knot dries it becomes extremely hard and strong.

Barbara’s post is set to Public, and you can go here to read the full text and see photos.

President Biden is setting out to create a Civilian Climate Corps, which would be a current-day counterpart to the Civilian Conservation Corps.

“Building on Biden’s oft-repeated comment that when he thinks of climate change, he thinks of jobs … the $10 billion program would address both priorities as young adults find work installing solar panels, planting trees, digging irrigation ditches and boosting outdoor recreation.

“‘We must seize this opportunity to build a big, bold pathway to critical careers, for a diverse generation of Americans ready to take on this existential crisis that we face,’ said Ali Zaidi, deputy White House climate adviser. …

“The effort comes as the White House and many Democrats are intensifying their focus on climate change after a series of devastating storms recently battered parts of the nation.”

I hope this idea comes to fruition. It would provide a lot of people with useful work and a roof over their heads while addressing climate change.

Today when I was grabbing a cup of coffee at my local minimart on the way down to the beach to watch the sunrise, I noticed that an extra-spicy snack food billed as the “One Chip Challenge” had been given a new, bright-yellow warning sign, enjoining store employees to educate themselves and customers on “the intensity of this product.”

I commented on it with a laugh to the morning guy who works there, and he offered to let me try the product. “No thanks!” I replied with a laugh.

I didn’t say this but I felt it: “I don’t need to buy extra-spicy challenges; they are all around us.”

And I pictured myself on a trail with a shovel, working for the Climate Conservation Corps or equivalent. Yep, we have plenty of spicy challenges and, despite being of a life-or-death nature, they might even be fun, and bring people together. And offer people a form of housing security, and community. Not just young people, but older people who still have something to give; don’t want to fade away and stop being useful.

“When we go slower, we are more patient and when we are more patient we have a choice in how we respond.” — Eknath Easwaran

A friend posted this quote on social media and it expresses something that’s been a major theme of my life lately.

At first I thought that slowing down is a hallmark of patience; that a person has to first become patient in order to slow down. And no doubt it’s true that constitutionally patient people might find it naturally easier to slow down than the rest of us do.

But I’ve realized that it very much works the other way too. Just as the quote says. I have found that I can become more patient by deliberately slowing down. Be it making coffee or doing laundry or writing a blog post or whatever. It works.

And the effects are very pleasant. So nowadays when something or someone seems to be trying to get me to speed up, I’m not so easily led in that direction.

Deliberate slowing down is one of the keys to finding a way of life that’s sustainable; that runs by nature’s rhythms.