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A thought-provoking post in one of the permaculture groups I belong to:

Widespread home ownership has been promoted in the United States since World War II as a way to get people invested in capitalism instead of pursuing more cooperative livelihoods. William Levitt, one of the original architects of suburbia, famously said “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist. He has too much to do.”

I’ve always thought that permaculture’s focus on the private domains of homeowners undermines the collectivism needed to make the permaculture principles transformative on a social scale. Is focusing on homeowners an attempt to turn a problem into a solution, and if so, how is that supposed to work? (Post by Dave Meester in the Facebook group Permaculture Money, Livelihoods, and Society via Transformative Adventures).

My response:

Great points here!!! My two cents:

It is a dilemma. Renters are dependent on landlords – can be very unstable arrangement especially nowadays more and more.

Mortgaged homeowners pay hefty premiums to banks and insurance companies. And pay property tax to govt. (Renters too pay that tax, just indirectly.)

Homeowners who own their home free-and-clear have lower overhead at least in terms of mortgage interest. Still have to pay property tax which is almost like “rent” to the govt.

Living alone or with only one other person in a house is exhausting and also can foster selfishness, insularity; diverts too much of the occupants’ energy away from community, civic, humanitarian concerns IMO.

On my blog I have often talked about what I see as best option: house owned free and clear in a part of the country where you can tolerate the weather and the ambient social climate. Ideally go in with family, or friends, or people whose sense of mission at least somewhat overlaps with yours.

Lower overhead gives occupants more freedom to pursue right livelihood; become contributing members of the surrounding community; help with the collective re-skilling and social-fabric-rebuilding that may offer our best hope of making a positive turnaround.

Further Reading:

• Radical Vitalism blog (Dave Meester): Herbalism. Deep Ecology. Reconnection Medicine. Really good stuff – Recent posts include “Why This Is No Time for Cynicism”; “You Are Nature: Working with the Elements for Change”; and “Two Visions for the Future of Life on Earth.”

More stitching adventures …

This past week I added an external pocket to an old, already-hacked sweater in a most eccentric yet functional way. It struck me that throughout the ages, different fashions of clothing have come to be defined socially as “normal” and stylish. But, viewed through an objective eye, some of the most wildly popular fashions over the years would look no less weird than my bizarre little cellphone pocket that I stitched onto this sweater in eccentric hangy-downy fashion.

You know what? THE VERY MOMENT i finished stitching the pocket on and donned the sweater, I immediately found the cellphone pocket incredibly convenient and helpful. Like, Where have you BEEN all my life?! I always take that as a good sign.

Before, I was keeping my phone in the zippered hip-pouch I wear. But it took time & energy to fish it out of the tight confines of the zippered pouch when needed, and jam it back in there (around my credit-card case and my pen and my mini notebook and my reusable spoon and my cloth napkin and other stuff that lives in the hip pouch) when not needed.

Taking the phone out of my new external pocket, and putting in back in, takes almost zero time and energy.

(To see the photos I refer to below, check out the corresponding post on my DEEP GREEN page on Facebook.)

First photo shows aqua-colored pocket (cut out of a worn-out pair of shorts) stitched onto the magenta sweater. Second & third photos show my trusty grey hoodie layered over that because it was a chilly morning.

Also visible in the photo my green zippered hip-pouch, with lightweight to-go coffee cup attached by a ring. I also always have a mask attached to my hip-pouch.

Besides the pocket, I also stitched on a button closure (cut out of the same aqua pair of shorts) as a closure, because the zipper corroded and became unusable. (Our coastal climate can be rough on certain metal zippers.)

Subsequent photos show details of my earlier “hacks” to the magenta sweater. It had been a plain pullover sweater; I cut it down the front and installed a (short) zipper, plus a no-purpose-except-decorative tag in the back. (I was working in a leather repair shop at the time and had access to an industrial sewing machine.)

There was an article someone shared, about keeping clothes around and repairing them rather than throwing them away. The writer mentioned that if you keep something in your cloth storage or craft stash or whatever for awhile, sometimes you forget about it — and when you rediscover it, it’s like finding a new item in a shop; like shopping in your own home! (all words my re-phrasing based on imperfect recollection; not the writer’s own).

When I was living in Tokyo during the 1990s, I met some lovely Norwegian folks also living and working there, who told me that in their country, a lot of everyday people sewed clothing of their own design. I thought that was the coolest thing ever.

Around the age of 12, I wanted to be a fashion designer “when I grew up.” I realized later that I’m happy to design fashions even just for myself!

Thank you to my friends/colleagues in Transformative Adventures who have recently sparked discussions about clothing, either by posting their own experiences or by sharing wonderful articles or both!

Getting busy with needle and thread for the first time in a while has helped me unglue my brain which had been stuck in a mode of only being focused on scalped lawns, badly pruned trees, and other things around me that I see as wrongs that I need to address. When I get into a more centered and creative mode, I am better at finding leverage points for addressing the problems around me. Sewing is one thing that helps me do that.

Plus, I just enjoy life more. And even with all the problems in the world, life deserves to be enjoyed.

What about you — do you design things for yourself? Clothes, tools, furniture, work processes, ……? I would love to hear about it and also about anything that helps you get unstuck and into a more creative flow.

A few years back, I stumbled on a great little booklet, “Tyranny of the Urgent” by Charles E. Hummel. “Tyranny of the Urgent” … isn’t that a great phrase?

In life, there is the urgent and there is the important. They don’t necessarily overlap. Most people are so used to being ruled by the tyranny of the urgent, that a person who puts the important first can be perceived as a bit eccentric if not downright crazy.

Another phrase for putting the important first is LIVING DELIBERATELY. Putting the urgent first all the time is defensive living. I liken defensive living to standing on a melting ice-floe and trying to make oneself smaller and smaller to adjust to the shrinking space. No way to live!

Further Reading:

• Living Deliberately (book by Harry Palmer, author of The Avatar (R) Course materials). Available in print form, or immediate download as PDF. “Many people are trapped in mind-numbing routines. Their lives carom through a changing landscape of directions, rules, wins, and losses. THEN, occasionally, someone wakes up and realizes, ‘Hey, I am alive.’ This is an extraordinary moment. When it is examined, a seeker is born …”

• Review of Charles Hummel’s Tyranny of the Urgent (Tsh Oxenreider, theartofsimple.net): “In the 1960s, Charles Hummel published a little booklet called Tyranny of the Urgent, and it quickly became a business classic. In it, Hummel argues that there is a regular tension between things that are urgent and things that are important—and far too often, the urgent wins. …”

In junior high and high school, I led a double life. Early on I had been labeled book-smart and treated accordingly, placed in the “advanced classes” with all sorts of passes and privileges. I did truly enjoy some academic subjects, namely English and foreign languages. But I felt a little embarrassed about that, as those weren’t considered “cool” subjects.

The people I idolized — OK, let’s be honest, the boys I idolized, because for the most part back then I didn’t really idolize anyone of my own sex — were all hardcore intellectual in what I considered the “hard” subjects. The ones that required a person to learn and retain a lot of facts or formulas. Math, sciences, history.

But I had an even deeper secret. Even more than English and foreign languages, my real favorite subjects were art, and … Home Ec. My love for these subjects was tempered by the shame I felt at loving them. They were for “less smart people,” according to beliefs I had absorbed from the world around me.

My mother was a fulltime homemaker. She worked outside the home at times but mainly stayed home to raise us. Back then I didn’t really respect “homemaker” as an occupation, though I didn’t understand why at the time. I didn’t respect homemaker for the same reason I didn’t respect myself for Home Ec being my favorite subject — though I didn’t understand any of that at the time.

I loved sewing. One skirt I made in seventh-grade Home Ec class stayed in my wardrobe til my late 20s.

Prone to depression and anxiety from the time I was small, I experienced a vacation from my troubled mind by working with my hands. Even much later, after I got help and learned how to operate my mind deliberately, I never lost my love of hand-work. To this day (even though I’ve learned tools for navigating my emotions and harnessing them for the good, and use those tools every day), when my mind starts to get to me I still experience a huge boost in mental wellbeing the minute I pick up a needle and thread, or a paintbrush.

I went to college, got on the mainstream white-collar career track, stayed on it for the first decade or so of my working life.

It wasn’t until 2012, when I spent a few months living and working on a farm in Texas, that I got a taste of doing home ec fulltime. My main duties consisted of cooking, managing flows, and keeping an eye on things, and helping to promote my friends’ farm. I felt like every bit of knowledge I had, every cell of my body and brain, was relevant and needed. At that time I realized why my Mom had chosen to be a homemaker. And I came to understand and respect why Home Ec had been my favorite subject. And art — the two are intertwined for me.

And now I come across this brilliant article shared by a fellow permie in the Transformative Adventures group. I had somehow never heard of Federica or the movement to pay women for domestic labor.

Her insights about labor and pesonal fulfillment and societal wellbeing strike a deep chord in me.

Further Reading:

• The Lockdown Showed How the Economy Exploits Women. She Already Knew. (Article about Silvia Federici and the idea that domestic work is unwaged labor; by Jordan Kisner in New York Times, Feb 17, 2021): “Federici is a longtime advocate of the idea that domestic work is unwaged labor and was a founder of the Wages for Housework movement in the early 1970s. It is a form of gendered economic oppression, she argues, and an exploitation upon which all of capitalism rests. … These ideas weren’t exactly obscure before the pandemic. But mainstream feminism — not to mention mainstream economics or politics — has mostly ignored domestic labor. Instead, it has measured women’s empowerment by their presence and influence in the workplace, which is attained by outsourcing housework and child care to less economically advantaged women for a low wage. Even so, women remain mired in housework. It’s common now to hear the term “the second shift” (coined in 1989 by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild), which describes how the work of maintaining a home and caring for children still falls disproportionately to women, even if they have full-time jobs and pay for help. What’s more, people who are paid to do domestic labor or care work (like elder care or house cleaning) are, as a group, badly compensated and denied workplace protections or benefits. These jobs are held mostly by women of color and immigrants. … ‘You cannot make good policy if the single largest sector of your nation’s economy is not visible … You can’t presume to know where the needs are.’ … How might this year have looked different had the work we do to care for one another, ourselves and the world around us been valued at a premium?”

• The Weaving Women of the Bauhaus Have Inspired Generations of Textile Artists (Alexxa Gotthardt; in Artsy.net): Relegated by sexism to the fiber arts department, these women artists took their craft to phenomenal heights, and wove themselves a supportive community as well. “Despite the limitations imposed on them, artists like Gunta Stölzl, Anni Albers, and Marli Ehrman made the weaving workshop not only the Bauhaus’s most commercially successful sector, but also one of its most collaborative and audaciously experimental.”

What a lovely & informative article – thank you Denise Miller for sharing!

Today I’m thrilled to be able to bring you this guest post from Mike Hoag. As always, Mike’s writing mixes creative inspiration and motivational juice with a refreshing dose of common sense. Mike is a permaculture teacher and designer, who has founded a grassroots economic resilience network called Transformative Adventures. Mike’s mission is for us all to support one another in finding ways to earn our livelihood doing things we love while helping the planet. Note, where Mike talks about farming as an example, you can plug in any other occupation you aspire to, be it candlemaking, opening a restaurant, tutoring kids online, making ethical clothing, having a bicycle-based composting service, building websites or doing PR for eco businesses, organizing a neighborhood homeschool/unschool co-op and developing lesson plans for it, pet-sitting, repairing bicycles, operating an errand service, helping people with end-of-life planning, singer-songwriting, painting custom signs, making and selling your art, starting a bioregional publishing company, being a doula, or whatever other beneficial occupation grabs you.

You’ll find links to the Transformative Adventures group, and Mike’s website and Permaculture Design Certificate course and other classes, at the end of this post. And now without further ado … I bring you this wonderful shot in the arm from Mike Hoag! Take it away Mike!

For me, the best Permaculture is about figuring out our own values and goals and then designing to meet them.

It’s not that there’s a right or wrong way to do things. Bill Mollison won’t rise from the grave and send the ghost of soil loss past to rattle chains at you if you row crop your garden.

It’s about our goals and designing to meet them.

This is actually pretty transformative! Most often we never really do that.

So what we have is folks want to escape the rat race. If they thought about it, they’d say their goals were things like:

I want to reconnect with nature, plants and animals.
I want to spend my days in a beautiful natural environment.
I want to have more time for friends, family and community.
I want to eat better, fresher, safer food and have better health.
I want to do something good for the planet, and Industrial Ag is horrible.
I want a simpler life with less stress, conflict, and pressure.
I want to cut free of the corporate system.

So we start learning about farming and take a $1,000 “profitable farming“ course that promises we can “make $1,000,000 on an acre!!!” (Yes, there’s a famous course that promises that in its ads.)

We get a loan to buy our teacher’s brand name rototiller, tear up our acre of lawn, and row crop it. Inevitably, reality sets in:

Instead of connecting with nature, we spend all day at war with nature, killing any plant or animal that happens into the system, spraying poisons on the insects.

Instead of a relaxing natural environment, we are working with noisy, bad smelling machinery.

Instead of safer food, we are using lots of plastics.

Instead of more time, we have less, and the “profitable farming” guru keeps saying we just have to work even more hours to be successful. Like most farmers we are working far longer hours than folks in the corporate rat race.

Like most other market farmers we eat Pizza Hut all growing season, because we are too busy and tired after the long work hours to turn fresh veggies into meals.

Instead of feeling healthier, we feel worn down, like most farmers do, from long hours of repetitive labor in harsh conditions.

So we hire some cheap labor and get Wwoofers to pick up some slack and get back our time. Now we have got conflicts and stress, and have to fire people. It seems people being paid less than minimum wage are unreliable and unhappy.

The million dollars hasn’t appeared. Without rock star status, customers won’t pay the 4 times market prices for our produce, and we don’t have an army of 100 Unpaid interns who want to use our name to sell their own profitable farming e-courses.

And we’re still doing as much sales and paperwork as we did in the corporate world.

Another study comes out showing that because of increased fossil fuel, fertilizer and plastics use, small scale intensive farming has a higher ecological foot print than industrial farming, and we don’t even want to think about that!

This is actually a really common story.

If we had connected with our values to begin with, and done a good design phase, everything might have been different.

We could have started with a design to create a beautiful natural environment with space for flowers and native plants and wildlife all around them.

We could build a small 10,000 foot no till garden and find we have the same overall productivity working a few hours a week with no wwoofers. It isn’t optimized for the market, but the hourly wage for the work is far higher to just harvest for the family and sell the produce to their immediate friends.

With our extra time not spent managing machines and labor, we cook amazing farm fresh meals of exotic ingredients, which first turns into a value added business, and later into a farm dinner and catering business fueled by all the excess produce.

Guests are drawn to come have amazing meals in this beautiful environment, with super fresh ingredients. A neighbor was an ex publisher and another was an artist, and together you write and publish a cook book …

The garden requires no fossil fuel, few plastics, and no exploited labor. This is a landscape designed to meet our real goals …

Further Exploration:

Permaculture Money, Livelihoods and Society via Transformative Adventures (group on Facebook): Come on in, the weather’s fine and the conversation is popping! Sorry, I don’t seem to be able to get Facebook to let me share a link to the group, but just type into the search field and you’ll find us. “Transforming our lives/transforming the world, through connection with nature and community. Focusing on practical ways to transform communities and landscapes that are economically empowering, whether it’s growing gift economies, right livelihoods, vibrant villages, or regenerative enterprises.”

Transformative Adventures website: Go here to check out Mike’s classes, blog posts, stunning photos, and other great stuff! By the way, I am currently taking Mike’s online Permaculture Design Certificate course. It is my fifth(!) PDC and I have been thrilled by the learning and the community.

Our rain chance that had been forecast for today looks like it has dried up overnight. At least according to my weather app.

A few years back I started noticing a weather pattern that I dubbed “The Big Crispy” here in my bioregion. In spring, the hot weather starts before the normal spring/summer rainy season kicks in. And then again in fall, the summer heat lingers long after the rainy season ends. The two “Big Crispy” intervals seem to be getting longer. Do you notice anything similar in your area?

Well, maybe rain will come today still. And no use fretting over things I can’t control. Sharing with other people, even in writing, gives comfort. Wherever you are, I hope you are getting a nice amount of rain, and are not beset by drought-flood extremes.

Hand-carrying water from my rainbarrels is great exercise for me, as is walking the stepping-stones (they are tricky, which is partially intentional – fosters alertness).

Thoughts:

1) I am trying to get more of my neighbors & friends to see the value of installing rainbarrels — seems like more folks should be open to it, the more disasters we have all over the USA and the world that shut off water and electricity;

2) A big part of why I am so disheartened by rainfall shortage is that I strongly believe that land-management practices (by homeowners and by governments) are responsible in huge part for pushing us into desertification. It’s frustrating to watch. I get discouraged trying to find people who will listen to me about this.

But, it occurred to me just now that I need to be like WATER: persistent, and flowing in the direction where I see an opening. One strong potential entry point I see is “promoting urban food-growing.” There’s a lot of enthusiasm from many different factions right now about that, and it’s a perfect Trojan Horse for rainwater collection, soil-building, mulching etc.

Also: Practicing gratitude is key. It is a soft cool cloudy morning.

Suggested action steps for creating a buffer against drought-flood extremes:

• Get at least one rainbarrel. Even one is a great start. Once you see how great it is to have a big container of free water from the sky, on hand for all sorts of emergency uses (and everyday uses too!), you’ll be hooked.

• Cultivate a dense micro-forest garden on your yard or balcony. Every little bit helps (microclimate is powerful!), and also, your visual example will influence other people. Terrible at growing plants? Me too! Start with natives or other locally adapted plants; they’re tougher. Note, you might have to make a little up-front investment (both in terms of acquiring plants and watering them at first to get them established), but it’s well worth it.

• Mulch and compost are other “water storage buffers” that are easy to implement even if you don’t have plants or want to mess with plants.

• Encourage your city government to plant more trees and other vegetation; encourage likeminded citizens to make known to your local leaders that this is a priority.

Further Exploration:

Babying Transplants Through the Hot Dry Time, and Celebrating Small Wins (a YouTube video I did awhile back)

(Recycling a Facebook memory post that is still true. Will add more thoughts on this later.)

On the “$54 billion increase in war spending” thread, one person commented that “Good people don’t start wars.” This is a popular misconception. In fact, good people DO start wars. Good, well-meaning people start wars all the time. They do it because, in humanity’s toolkit, war is the default “go-to” response to this or that (perceived) insult, this or that craving for resources, this or that fear or prejudice. At least it’s been a default go-to response up til now. But we humans are becoming aware that there are more tools available. Will we human beings evolve quickly enough to avoid bringing about our own extinction? Maybe, maybe not. I like to think so though, and I’m betting on it. Those of us who believe in peace, and who are aware that peace is a PROCESS and a PRACTICE and a SKILL-SET, just have to keep on working to share the tools of peace with anyone who is receptive.