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… is not necessarily the insult it’s meant to be. There’s a heck of a lot we can do from our armchairs! Make phone calls, write letters, read up on our fields, take webinars.

And the letters and phone calls don’t even need to be to the “powers that be” per se. It could be to our Mom or aunt or our sister or a friend. Societies reclaim their sanity from the bottom up, and it starts with person-to-person transmission.

Sharing little tips we’ve discovered that make life easier. Optimizing a household process, finding or making a cool new tool that simplifies a daily chore, etc.

I used to love reading that column in the newspaper called “Hints from Heloise.” They were always just tiny little household tips, but obviously they added up to savings or people wouldn’t have bothered to write or read about them.

(An influential teacher of mine once asserted that societies go insane from the top down. If that’s the case, which I agree that it is, then I think that societies can only reclaim their sanity from the bottom up.)

At some point during Bike Week, it became official that my bag (left) was officially too tattered and holey to safely carry my money, phone & things. I decided not to try to add any more patches, reinforcements, layers, etc., as much fun as it had been over the years. And as much character as it had gotten.

So today I swapped the strap (and of course my silverware and cup) onto a different bag, which I put together today out of an old bag someone threw away, plus some canvas scraps I had.

You may notice on the old tattered bag some Velcro squares. Those are still good and I will be salvaging them before I compost the bag, you bet!

All of this material was diverted from landfill. I did not have to buy any of it!! (Actually correction, I did originally buy the green fake leather bag a few years back. From a locally owned biker shop on Main Street that I enjoy.)

In addition to being fun and practical way to be creative, sewing is a form of mental health therapy for me. Helps me get calm and grounded, focused on what’s in front of me. Before I started working on this bag I was anxious about some stuff, but as I went about the project, the worries and anxieties settled into their proper proportion and became solvable.

You can see pics here.

Too much of anything, even something that has value, becomes trash. It’s a sad fact I’ve learned from years of house clean-out gigs. Where the people had either died, or had had to move to nursing homes etc.

At one house we found boxes and boxes of brand-new stuff still in the box. Actually that happens all the time, but this one time particularly tugged at my heart because it was a lot of writing supplies and art supplies. Maybe the people had been teachers or something. As often happens with such gigs, our work team was free to take any stuff that was not wanted/needed by the client, but we just didn’t have the time and resources to distribute it all. So we left so much behind.

Brand new, shrink-wrapped, perfectly good stuff, nestled there along the decaying piles of clothes, rusting canned goods, boot-top-high piles of rat-shredded insulation.

One of our team, Goddess bless him, did take a bunch of the stuff back to his apartment, and for a while he had quite the excellent weekly yard sale there. I was so thrilled and grateful to him, that I sometimes actually went to his little table he’d set up in the driveway and bought stuff from him, if it was something I needed. Ironic, that: buying stuff that had been part of our group pay. But it’s a funny world we inhabit!

Inevitably, some of the respectable citizens’ brigade of the neighborhood frowned upon the yard sale, and we feared that they might call code to shut it down. (Because yard sales, as other activities, are beneficial when coming from a respectable single-family home but extremely shady and unseemly when coming from an apartment or other multi-family unit.)

But somehow the yard sale, our little “free commerce zone,” ended up persisting for a while. I cheered it on every second with every fiber of my anarchist soul. (Same as I cheer on the mysteriously tolerated pocket of RV parking that sometimes is overlooked during big festival weeks. Or the various home-based kitchens that popped up during the height of the pandemic and some never quite went away.)

The excess stuff in our “first world” environment is a thing that’s been discussed extensively. And by now, most of us middle-aged people are aware of the need to not accumulate a lot of stuff, and winnow down what excess we have accumulated — if nothing else in order to not burden our families with a huge house cleanout if we die before they do. (If you haven’t already, check out “Swedish death cleaning.”)

The fact is that modern industrial society is set up to produce more stuff than is needed. And the surplus just keeps growing. Piles and piles of clothing in the Atacama desert can be viewed from space, I hear.

I have the DIY thrift recycled version of this excess-stuff disease. Most of the stuff I have has been diverted from the waste stream, as in somebody was throwing it away and I gave it a second chance at life. But still, the guilt is intense and the sheer weight and volume of all the stuff gets to me.

Yesterday while I was looking for a tube of glue that I never ended up finding, I kept running into boxes and boxes of various types of craft supplies. I would open a box and as I lifted the lid, it would seem to vomit forth its contents as if the contents were under pressure, be they beads, fabrics, thread, yarn, whatever. And there would be nothing I could easily find to let go off or use or get rid of. I felt flashes of despair and self-loathing

It felt like that Sorcerer’s Apprentice scene in Fantasia where the task just keeps multiplying.

This is strictly personal, not meant to tell anyone else what they should do. But for me, it’s a huge sign that I have not been doing enough creative activity, and the flow of stuff in my life is very stuck.

Yesterday I finally sat myself down on my studio floor and pieced together a scarf out of a bunch of scraps. I knew it would turn out my version of cute and stunning, and it did. It didn’t solve my bursting boxes, but it did tame things down a little. And gave me something useful that I am now enjoying.

I also found a flat little piece of smooth cedar that had been sitting around for a while, and painted a “welcome home” sign which I hung inside the entry hall to the housemates’ quarters. And fashioned a few other decorative things out of old odds and ends. And put them in their new locations.

Of course, I could just solve the glut by taking boxes and boxes of stuff and sticking them out at the curb. Some people would be happy to get a few treasures, and then the rest would go on to landfill. But it’s become very clear to me, as an artist, that this is not what I am supposed to do. I actually feel resistance of from the stuff when I try to do that.

It’s clear that I’m supposed to use these things; make things out of them. And either give the finished items away, sell them, share them somehow.

There’s a very risk-averse thing in our society, where creativity is associated with extreme anxiety. Not everyone, obviously. I know a lot of artists who are constantly creating. But I know a lot of others who are stuck, as I get stuck sometimes. There’s no standard remedy but I would say one of my remedies is to just sit my butt down like I did yesterday, and just, finally, make something for gosh sake.

It’s about the flow, not so much about the volume.

You might not think it, but sometimes, there’s even so much surplus food that people can’t use it all. One of the things that have been floating around the neighborhood in too much quantity lately is these one-pound bags of shelled nuts. Premium nuts. Bags and bags of them.

Given that nuts, especially premium, shelled ones, routinely retail for $15 a pound or more, one wouldn’t think that there would be bags and bags of shelled walnuts and shelled almonds in surplus. However, the churches and other nodes of the nonprofit “food aid distribution complex” have some uniquely funky economics, or else they represent a deeper truth than what we can usually see at the food stores, but in any case, people have been known to accumulate 5 or 10 of these one-pound bags of almonds or walnuts and they can’t even give them away, so they often end up by the curbside with someone’s trash when a person gets evicted or whatever.

A neighbor and I thought we might make sugared/spiced nuts and try selling them at the farmers’ market. But we quickly learned that it would take so much labor that even the electricity for the stove would probably negate any economic return for our efforts.

A few years back, there seem to be a run of several shipments of bagged salad, which included a little plastic container of dressing and a little bag of cranberries and nuts. I was in the habit of going to the church at the end of the day to get the rotting produce to feed to my garden, and when there would be actual edible food left over that would otherwise get thrown away, I would sometimes grab some of that as well. One time I picked up one of the bags of salad only to find that someone else had had the same idea; they had beat me to it. I felt some weird solidarity there like, oh, my fellow discerning pursuer of calories and rejecter of rotting lettuce! (I wonder when the food packagers will figure out that plastic is really bad for lettuce and other greens. I’ve never seen a bag of that stuff that wasn’t at least partially rotted. But especially back then, when I was sometimes skipping meals to make the rent, I was willing to paw through a few bags of slimy “boutique salad greens” for those little mini bags of nuts and cranberries!)

I was torn between feeling sad that someone else was that hungry, and feeling thrilled that other people had the same level of keen appreciation for a resource at the margins.

By the way, I never signed up for the official food distribution roster, because I figured that since I had voluntarily dropped out of the so-called white-collar middle-class, I had forfeited any right to take resources meant for low-income households who did not have my same level of choice in the matter.

But back to the secret mini bags of dried cranberries and chopped nuts: Back then, if someone had told me there would one day suddenly appear on the neighborhood food economy a glut of one-pound bags of perfect, whole, shell-free nuts the same way that there had at one point been seemingly endless truckloads of canned green beans that no one could give away, I would’ve laughed or cried or both.

BTW I still have a bunch of notebooks left over from that one house cleanout gig. I’ve gone through several, which I used for taking notes at meetings and webinars, or writing my seemingly endless novels in progress. But I still have a bunch left that I just noticed in a drawer not long ago. The angels, ancestors, and goddesses are nudging me to please use them or find other homes for them. Same with all my other stuff, regardless of whether I purchased it new or — as is much more often the case — diverted it from the waste stream.

It’s a worthy effort. I always remind myself of my dear cousin Jim Kay, who was not only a great artist but also an environmentalist, activist, and great mentor of young people. He worked right up until age 87, when he died a few months after learning that there was no funding that year for a community youth art/performance program that he had been leading for years. Anytime I neglect my art, or start acting spoiled about my studio, I always remind myself of Cousin Jim and what a blessing he was to so many people, including myself, always encouraging our creative endeavors.

I also think of one of my aunts, Sally Eklund, a quilter of some renown. She was even on a TV show once. When she passed, her eldest child, my cousin, offered us our pick among some 60 quilts that were left in her collection. Almost all of them or handstitched by needle and thread, rather than machine-stitched. As a fellow artist, I can appreciate someone having inventory that was not yet sold. But knowing my aunt, she probably had given away more than a few of her amazing creations. And would’ve been happy to give them rather than leaving them behind. It’s just that most people probably already had linen closets overflowing with blankets and quilts, albeit not of a one-of-a-kind handmade caliber. I now have about five of her beautiful quilts, and they are part of my plan for my house to always be able to accommodate up to 11 people. Maybe more. And when I say people, I am thinking of refugees. Political refugees, climate refugees, whatever. My aunt would definitely be on board with that. (Hey, I figure that if my house could accommodate 11 leisure guests for bike week — which it did, almost the minute I signed the closing papers in March 2018 — it should certainly be able to accommodate at least the same number of people in emergency circumstances.)

The plates and cookware are certainly there for a large number of guests. Beautiful, durable stuff, almost none of it purchased new by me, but rather inherited — or in some cases purchased from yard sales or thrift shops.

Same with napkins, towels, and of course blankets.

You can see pics of my new scarf here.

Caption:

Scarf I made yesterday from old scraps of fabric. I hand-stitch with needle and thread, but it’s pretty quick since I use a very large stitch, which has various advantages, including allowing me to stitch up things pretty quickly even without a machine.

(I have a machine but not the skills to keep it properly tuned. No matter how many old user manuals I download (which there are surprising amount available considering that the machine was made in the early 1900s; it belonged to my grandmother and was the machine I learned on), I don’t seem to be able to keep the proper stitch tension. Which is fine, really, because I have always had a natural attraction to the most basic and portable technologies. To indicate the priority of sewing in my life: My bug-out bag for evac on foot includes multiple needles and thread, let me just say!)

One of my favorite Permaculture principles is “Turn problems into assets.” Sometimes expressed as “The problem is the solution.”

In that vein, I have recently reached a new level in terms of figuring out how to turn some of my more debilitating and obnoxious character traits into something of use. When I say obnoxious, I mean not only that these traits are obnoxious to others but also that they are obnoxious to myself.

Some examples:

• Being extremely irritable and sensitive about certain things. Like, a few years back, I was working on a natural building job where we were using salvaged materials (some really great stuff including pilings from an old pier), and it was emotionally killing me that we were using a nail gun. The noise, the extreme violence, the fact that we’d be machine-gunning multiple nails to try to get a successful attachment in one spot, etc. My senior colleague noticed my level of pain and irritability, and suggested in a somewhat condescending manner that I might want to seek therapy. Instead, I just stopped taking jobs where we used nail guns. Which wasn’t hard, since they went against so many of my beliefs, and since I had other ways of paying my bills. Another example of super sensitive and irritable is when I would literally rather do anything than accept a plastic bag at the store. I have taken off my windbreaker jacket on a cold windy day and turned it into a temporary makeshift bag in order to transport my groceries home without having to take on yet another plastic bag. I was like, I would seriously take a pair of pliers and rip out my molars one by one in order to distract myself from the emotional agony of taking on another damn plastic bag right now. Since I like being able to chew, I managed to find another solution. Being super sensitive and irritable can make life exhausting (for those around me as well as myself) — or it can be a great BS detector, or moral reality check.

• Being extremely emotionally needy. Sometimes, I get these crushes on people. I’m not talking about sexual or romantic crushes; it’s more like just being an extreme fan. To the point where the person can wreck my day just by not noticing me, which happens rather often since I’m not really all that inherently noticeable, and don’t always have much useful to offer the person. I can let this character trait run my life, or I can use it as motivation to make sure I don’t need very many things from very many people. I’m much happier being a person who has things to offer people, than being a person who needs things from people. Of course, we are social creatures and we all need other people. I have zero problem with needing other people in general. What I do have a problem with is if I become emotionally needy around one or two specific people. It impedes me from being in service and just enjoying the general wonderfulness of people and life. Being emotionally needy from a very early age has prompted me to develop all sorts of passions and very absorbing pastimes that reduce my emotional neediness, while giving me practical skills and providing a lot of intrinsic joy. Ironically, I have had some people be envious of me because I enjoy my own company so much. If only they knew how I got there, ha ha! I still get the weird crushes but I am able to remind myself that it’s just an emotional tic and that I don’t actually need anything from the person. Sometimes I feel moved to explore the emotion, and it uncovers some deep past seemingly unrelated trauma that I had not yet processed, so it becomes a gateway to healing. (And of course, if the affinity is mutual, then it becomes a deep friendship or colleague relationship or whatever it’s meant to be.)

• Being extremely lazy. I am probably the most lazy person I’ve ever met in my life. This has led me to be able to offer virtuoso-level advice to people who are seeking to save themselves money and labor. In fact, my biggest obstacle — gven the extreme compulsive busywork component of USA culture — is persuading people that they really can just refrain from doing some fussbudget task that would be expensive for them and bad for the planet.

My obnoxious character traits, allowed to run untamed, are super painful to me and can totally wreck my day. As well as being bad for the community and the planet. But they don’t have to!

On a related note, in my first permaculture class, when we started getting overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information, our teacher let us in on a secret. He told us that this info overload was being done on purpose to make us give up trying to compulsively remember everything. The point was to get us to gain pattern-literacy as opposed to trying to compulsively memorize an impossible volume of facts.

How about you, do you have any obnoxious and/or burdensome character traits that you have managed to redirect in a way that brings you joy and freedom, and helps your mission?

I don’t know the answer to this question, but I am setting about gathering examples of how a person could be making a lot of money and still live within the Degrowth paradigm.

In the Degrowth movement, one caveat we always give is that in some parts of the world, some economic growth is still needed just to bring the living standard up to basic human standards of livability. Clean drinking water, healthy food, medical care, and so on.

The idea is that those of us in the rich industrialized world will voluntarily reduce our incomes and stop hoarding money and other assets, as a way to alleviate the severe inequality of income and wealth that is driving so much ecological and social destruction around the world.

But, not everybody is going to be willing to voluntarily make a lower income, or voluntarily give up their wealth. Or maybe you have your dream job, you really love it and you are doing good work for people on the planet, but it just happens to make a really high income.

So I started pondering ways that a person could keep making a cushy middle-class first-world salary, and have stored wealth, but ethically distribute it and only use what they need.

Even within the rich industrialized nations such as the USA, there are in fact still people and communities that do not even enjoy a basic humane standard of living. We can be distributing our wealth to those communities in various ways.

There is generational inequity too. Even in solid middle-class families, many times the younger generations are really struggling, and we Boomers can & should use our wealth to help alleviate that as well.

Starting a list, will add to it over time as I think of things.

• One, if possible, we should pay off our own mortgages; not have any mortgage on our own house or our own commercial building.

• Then, if we have adult children (or nieces, nephews, grandchildren, etc.), we can pay off their mortgages, pay off their college debt, and so on.

• If we have extra houses that we are currently either leaving vacant or renting out, we can instead offer them for sale with owner financing. The monthly payment that we get, if we don’t need that cash money we can immediately disperse that money out into the community. And if we do need the cash money, we can spend it on what we need. For example, let’s say you need cataract surgery and it costs $3000, well that would be a perfect use. The idea is to avoid hoarding money in banks or Wall Street accounts.

• If you have acquired or otherwise come into a big lump sum, distribute it out among one or more small local businesses. You be a money partner or a part owner. Do not ask for or accept distribution of profits, unless you actually need the cash money immediately. Otherwise, just keep your money parked in there. If you need a lump sum for something, then cash out and use it.

• Invest your money in education and training — for yourself, and/or for someone else.

• Unless you truly need the cash money, avoid working jobs beyond a certain age. We should leave the jobs open for the younger people who need them. That’s one thing I love about being self-employed; I’m not taking anyone’s job. (I actually only accept new gigs if I need the money; otherwise I send them to younger people, new up-and-coming businesses, etc.)

Nutshell micro-summary of my views on this topic:

• If you don’t have immediate need for cash money, avoid pursuing cash money.

• Keep the minimum amount of money on hand that you feel is essential for basic needs. Seems OK to include a bit for emergency home repairs, car repairs, etc.

• If you come into a big income flow, or a big lump sum of money, distribute it out into the community — either via investments (without seeking interest or other profit), or via donations, or via being a customer of small local businesses.

Update April 9, 2024: One drawback to earning a lot of money is that we end up paying more taxes that support war and other destruction. I just heard from my CPA who has finished preparing my 2023 taxes. In 2023 I earned more than usual because I had an extra gig. So, I will end up having to pay a couple hundred dollars in war tax. Usually my income is low enough that I only end up having to pay Social Security tax. But, I don’t feel too bad about the couple hundred dollars in war tax because I also gave $1000 to Veterans for Peace by becoming a life member, so there! Take that, war-machine!

Further Exploration

Recently two books came into my custody. One is about how to become a millionaire. The other is about how to achieve our wishes and goals through creative visualization. Both of these books have in common that they don’t fall into the hard-edged, greedy tone and fake “positive thinking” of so many other such books I’ve seen.

I have come to believe that a person can in some cases earn $1 million while still being ethical. It’s all in how we distribute it. The hoarding of wealth creates problems. If we look at how nature does things, nature flows. Nothing can be stored up for very long or in very large quantity.

Anyway, here are the book titles for you:

• The Millionaire Booklet: How To Get Super Rich; by Grant Cardone.

• Creative Visualization; by Shakti Gawain.

My yard is my business card!

Sharing this as an example of a community-oriented eco landscaping business. Feel free to use any of this in developing your own community-based landscaping business.

See accompanying photos here.

Doing our best to help stop the flooding in Midtown … one Beachside yard at a time!

#BarrierIsland #StormwaterSponge

PS. Attention Fellow Landscapers! Are you looking to increase value-added services for your clients, while reducing expenses on large equipment and gasoline? Contact me to find out about our upcoming mini workshops on how to incorporate Permaculture Design elements into your landscaping services. (And homeowners, and apartment landlords! Would you like to increase your household health & preparedness, and would you like your yard to work for you instead of the other way around? We will be offering a version of this workshop for you as well!)

Here are some pictures of my table at the FRESH Book Festival. This was my fourth year as an author at the festival. And I am proud to say this is my easiest, and most minimalist, yet most cute & visually coherent, setup yet!!

I particularly love how my landscaping business vehicle can convert to an event display component! Did not think of this till the other day. I made a “skirt” out of this adorable flower-print valance that I purchased for a pittance from a great vintage shop I went to over the holidays with my sister and my brother-in-law.

To check out various other authors’ tables, and see videos of our interviews, visit the FRESH Book Festival page on Facebook.