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In a post on Facebook this morn, I mentioned that when I was younger I used to just quit a lot of stuff as soon as I hit any obstacle. (The post was about feeling frustrated with myself for not being able to figure out a public library app that I was trying to use in order to participate in our public library’s online book club).

Not long ago I learned there is a name for that aspect of my personality or consciousness. It’s called “low frustration-tolerance.” Kids at a very young age ideally are able to work through this and don’t become an adult who is like this.

However, I am mentioning this in case it might help other people who are in a similar boat.

Even if, like me, you get to adulthood and you’re still struggling with this, it’s possible to reprogram one’s mind and at least sometimes or even most of the time become more willing to sit with frustration and not bail out at the first sign of not understanding something.

I have ended up persisting and fixing or finding solutions to a lot of things that when I was younger I would just have quit or given up.

Many books & other resources have helped me regarding this. One book that helped me immensely is Grit, by Angela Duckworth. Her TED talk (which you can see on her website linked above) is excellent as well.

A blogger whose writings I always find very helpful is David at Raptitude. He writes a lot about navigating discouragement and procrastination. Also, he teaches courses; you can find the info on his website.

Sometimes it’s enough just to know that other people are navigating the same things and are succeeding.

Exercises I have found very very helpful are the Will exercises and Attention exercises of the Avatar Course materials. The exercises in many cases only take a couple of minutes or even a few seconds, so they are very helpful in extricating myself from stuck patterns such as self-berating.

Each month at my neighborhood watch meeting (Beachside Neighborhood Watch), I do a segment called jenny’s corner, which the group leader invited me to do as a regular feature. I try to fit it into three minutes, and try to combine practical advice with encouragement. People seem to enjoy it.

One of the other big neighborhood watch groups, Midtown Neighborhood Watch, now has me do a segment at their meeting too. I was very honored and delighted to be asked to start doing it. Many of us attend each other’s neighborhood watch meetings now. The community is definitely becoming more cohesive.

I am posting this month’s BNW edition of jenny’s corner here, in case it might be helpful to other people who might want to start a similar environmental awareness segment in their neighborhood groups.

Hi everyone! Sorry I can’t be here with you guys tonight, as I’m attending the meeting on gun violence. Thank you Amy or whoever is reading this on my behalf.

I’m glad to be able to attend the very important meeting about addressing the gun violence in our community.

On an environmental note: Studies have shown that extremely hot weather can lead to increased violence, including gun violence.

Extreme heat is one of the top threats to public health and safety in general. This threat can be expected to increase as time goes by. A lot of cities are appointing Chief Heat Officers. And some are planting shade-tree corridors to help people safely get from one place to another.

Each and every one of us can help too, by turning our spaces into cool pockets. When you’re walking on the sidewalk, you probably notice there are some cool pockets, usually near the trees and shrubs.

Speaking of trees, check out the flyer about how to properly care for our state tree, the Sabal palm. We’ve been spreading the word that excessive pruning is bad for the tree. It also jeopardizes our precious shade canopy and beachside beauty. If you want to help spread the word, please take a flyer (or take a picture of it with your phone). Thank you.

We thank the city of Daytona Beach for setting a good example of respecting the Sabal palm and other trees.

Another thing that helps cool things down is water. I have this crazy idea of turning my whole neighborhood into a waterpark, fed by nice cool fresh rainwater, all the way to ISB. I would totally volunteer to have a giant waterslide coming down from the roof of my house into a tropical pool!

Also I have an idea for a pirate-themed condo where they have canals instead of streets, and there’s a pirate boat running all day as a shuttle service for the residents.

We could have floating gardens growing all sorts of delicious fruits and vegetables. The ancient Aztecs had these floating gardens called chinampas. Some of these gardens are still around today! You can see pics and descriptions by googling.

Cool ideas involving water are fun to imagine in the hot summer. And who knows, maybe some of them might even come true in some form!

Peace and love everyone! Try to stay cool. And stay hydrated. Thank you all for caring for Mother Earth and our unique beachside environment.

Good article in yesterday’s New York Times online. (Including the comments section — very much worth a read.)

Homeless Camps Are Being Cleared in California. What Happens Next? (Livia Albeck-Ripka; nytimes.com)

We need to really focus on people-care as top priority, rather than “law and order” as top priority. And I agree with the commenter whose comment I quoted below; I have always felt this way.

BTW here in my part of Florida, a very intricate camp on an island (which had some pretty fancy structures including four-story tree house), where a number of people lived and to some extent self-governed, was recently dismantled and demolished.

I would’ve preferred a solution like what the commenter quoted below described. It was a community, and honestly when I hear peoples outrage over how horrible and “lawless” homeless people’s communities are … all I can think of is that in the fancy HOAs, etc, all of that ugly stuff goes on behind closed doors and/or is insulated by money & privilege.

And also, how starved most of us are for a real community. Some of us are so starved, from inexperience, that we can’t understand why some people would be so adamant about putting community first even if it means turning down an offer of shelter.

“After reading many articles over the years about homeless shelters vs encampments, it appears that homeless people prefer the encampments for the sense of community and having their own home and possessions. Why not improve the infrastructure of the encampments? Make them like a national park campground with camp sites, complete with tents. There could be bathrooms with showers set up just like in a campground.
Have dumpsters for garbage like they have in apartment complexes, and have regular garbage pickups once a week.

“Also, the police should not ‘leave the residents alone’. They should be able to police like any other area of a town.
We have seen that moving people around over and over does not work. Make their encampments better and the homeless can continue to have their communities.”

Someone in the Zero Waste, Zero Judgment group on Facebook posted that she has just started using a bidet and is looking into switching from TP to toilet cloth.

She would have to wash it in a separate load from other laundry as per her partner’s request (he’d continue to use toilet paper). Since she would never have enough for a full load, she’d basically be running an almost empty washing machine once a week. Even given that her machine is an eco-friendly model, she wonders if using TC in this case would really be more eco friendly in terms of energy and water usage compared to the production of toilet paper.

A great question! And if you want to read a variety of responses, visit ZWZJ. If you haven’t already joined, I highly recommend it. It’s a private group so I can’t post a link to the post. But just do a search on toilet cloth and it’ll come up.

Myself, I wash my TC squares by hand in a small jar w gentle soap/detergent (put the lid on tight & “shake it up, baby now”!), then line-dry them so they get nice and clean in the sun. Or during rainy season, I dry them on the mini portable indoor drying rack which I keep in my bedroom/office next to the window and use for “girly underthings” and other small items. (Full disclosure: And use it as a rack to just hang things when there’s no laundry to dry and I’m just being lazy LOL.)

(I do all my wash by hand, & line-dry. Since it’s only my own laundry, and I live by the beach in a warm climate, this takes only about five minutes a day.)

BTW We also have a drying rack in the kitchen that’s only for kitchen stuff.

And each of my (male) housemates has their own clothes line that I have set up for them in the yard. Although, they generally do their laundry at the laundromat, but they still sometimes like to line-dry a thing or two, and I like to keep my girly things separate in case they might feel weird about it. We are all Boomers, and some of us might feel uptight about this kind of thing, in a way that younger people might not.

I think the person in the group who made this query, her partner’s concerns are more related to indoctrination around cleanliness/germs.

(BUT If they were actual family members, whose laundry I had to do, I would probably say hey, too bad so sad, my TC squares are mingling in the Maytag with your man-stuff unless you want to do the laundry yourself <wink emoji>. But I also understand about division of labor by choice, and understand that sometimes people want to respect their partners’ boundaries even if it may not seem rational. After all, most of us probably have boundaries that don’t seem rational to our family members.)

If housemates were using TC too it might be different. They might not mind, regardless. It’s not a thing I’ve ever asked them, but in any case that’s my two cents from a person living with fellow humans who are not necessarily on the same program.

Good Morning, Morning Stars!!
Beach, coffee, laundry, …

Next: Esplanade market, then neighbors’ gathering at Gus’s (all locals are invited, and I will be bringing some Mexican Miracle Spinach Tree cuttings if anyone is interested).

Then continuing w house cleanup gig so it’ll be walker-safe & spiffy when beloved elder gets home from hospital.

A fellow eco-minded citizen in my Facebook circles tagged me re. this story (“Making 3,000 bricks a day from invasive seaweed”; link at bottom of post) so I thought I’d post it here. This story rings a bell, think I saw it awhile back.

My take is …

1) Invasive seaweed??? I’m skeptical that invasive seaweed exists. Could be it’s there healing the ecosystem and/or feeding marine wildlife. I am curious and I’m going to check that out.

(BTW for various reasons I tend to look askance at the concept of “invasive” in general. Various posts are being made about this (= unpacking our concept of “invasive”) in eco groups, generating lots of good chewy discussion.)

In any case,

2) I don’t think making bricks from seaweed is a good use of energy, or of seaweed. Seems like a waste of the nutrients of seaweed, even supposing the seaweed is invasive. If the seaweed is truly invasive and causing problems, I would scoop it up and use it as farm or garden fertilizer. Someone could probably even make a local micro business of it. Either by hand-cart or motorized vehicle.

3) With all the conventional bricks & other building materials out there that are being sent into landfill after demolitions etc., seems best for people & planet that we reuse those, capturing the energy that’s already embodied in them. This is in keeping with the permaculture design principle of catching, storing, and using energy.

Sharing here in case someone among the many knowledgeable people in this community might know offhand; also good topic for discussion.

Insider Science: Making 3,000 bricks a day from invasive seaweed (Facebook Reels video)

In Transformative Adventures, Deep Adaptation, and some of the other groups, many of us are unpacking our indoctrination regarding the concept of land “ownership” and are advocating for alternatives.

The following post started as a comment that I made in a thread in the TA group that I started about people looking for land, and land needing people. Here’s the thread. It’s sparked a nice chewy subthread about attitudes toward land ownership.

I “own” a piece of land and house which I purchased with money I inherited when my parents passed.

Up until then for many years I had been a housing-precarious renter, sometimes skipping meals or taking dangerous gigs to make the rent. And a few of the roommates I invited in to help cover costs turned out to be unsettling or in one case outright threatening. (To be fair, I was dealing with a lot of mental health stuff and may well have come across as unsettling to the people I was inviting to room with me as well. I know that was true of one person for sure.)

(For a long time, til relatively recently, I had always beat up myself a lot: My economic circumstances were something I blamed on myself, since I dropped out of the so-called “respectable” middle-class office track — that my social indoctrination had carved for me — in order to be a full-time ecosocial activist.)

I am using the place I occupy in the most sharing ways that I know how (including having housemates, and creating “porous property” with benches at corners and edges, where the general public can simply come sit and rest under the trees), and I keep expanding my sharing in new creative ways as my consciousness around this expands.

If there were a way for me to cede this place totally to collective use without myself becoming economically unstable and possibly becoming a burden on my siblings and society, I would.

Maybe that day will arrive when I think of, or we collectively create, a way to have that.

In the meantime I will continue to advocate collectively for the Land Back movement.

Also, I am going to look into starting to pay an honor tax to the indigenous peoples who were on the land where my ancestors arrived in the 1600s. I earn a very low income (by choice now, though it was not by choice at first) but can still find a way to do this.

I just learned about an honor tax today in this podcast, The Response: ‘Land Back’ with David Cobb. The podcast came my way via a link in the always-excellent email newsletter from Shareable.net

The podcast also presents an excellent overview of the #LandBack movement, and presents some very exciting projects including an initiative to restore several old houses within a few blocks of each other in a city, and turning them into housing for youth who have aged out of the foster-care system. It’s a wonderful segment of The Response podcast.

I hope you will enjoy this podcast as much as I have! It’s a great antidote for privileged white doomerism.

A quote from the segment:

“The idea of Land Back — a growing movement to return occupied land to the Indigenous people that it rightfully belongs to, often exists as a metaphor for us. It can feel like the discussion around land theft and genocide by settler-colonists in the United States is often limited to land acknowledgments or statements of solidarity — both of which are important. But what about the most important element in these discussions — actually giving the land back?

“Today on the show, we’ve brought on David Cobb, a ‘people’s lawyer,’ self-proclaimed revolutionary, and advancement manager for the Wiyot Tribe’s Dishgamu Humboldt Community Land Trust in Northern California.”

On a related note:

On this site and my other channels (and increasingly in other permaculture spaces as well, as more of us learn the antecedents), we are not using the term “homestead”; “homesteading.” It is a genocidal term, and one that indigenous people in our groups have asked us to stop using.

“Homesteading” was the name of a law that pushed Native Americans off their homelands and caused deaths and loss of culture. We want to actively work to make permaculture-type spaces a setting where all can feel genuinely welcome and comfortable existing.

An alternative term that’s coming into use is “smallholding.” I also like “permaculture homesite.” And somebody just shared that they classify themself as a “smallhold homecrafter.” That one really resonates with me and I might just start using it.