Author: Philo

human

The Daily Dream

pastoral

It’s interesting watching dreams move in and on, change and morph into new and strange, sometimes traditional and familiar themes. At the end of the day, working to make a dream a reality is like most other jobs: it requires long hours, tough work, compromise, eating crow and learning; always learning.

The snow is on the ground now, and days are spent in the wood shop making cabinets and built-ins, making onion and potato boxes, and planning out woodsheds and chicken coops for the coming spring. With each of these things the drawings and dimensions, the measurements and plans change almost with each passing day. But the days pass, and pass quickly.

Every morning, however, starts the same: make coffee, fire up the wood stove in the shop, and take the dog for a walk. I guess some things never change.

Six months into my dream, reality is taking hold and does so every morning when I get out of bed and feel sore, wanting more sleep but not being able to sleep because of the day’s work that rolls around in my head. I watched, and worked, with my father-in-law dairy farmer for some years and told him this the other day. He just laughed, but it sounded like “I told you so…”

And so tomorrow morning I’ll get up, make coffee, fire up the wood stove and go for a walk in the snow with the dog, and when we get back, I’ll get on with the work of making my dream a reality.

New-Old Lifestyles

When talking to people, especially older people who sometimes don’t understand why anyone would want to “go back” to raising and slaughtering your own meat, growing your own food and working your own land, they often point out that they are “fine” eating the modern products and processed foods of our current world. They are right, of course; at least sometimes, or partially.

But the real point is lost on them; the point is not just the healthy aspect, but also the moral aspect. We humans have somehow lost the necessary respect that life deserves and demands. It is not just for health reasons that we till our own gardens and raise and slaughter our own meat. It is healthier and better (lacking the additives and antibiotics) but is most certainly a more moral choice (respect for life and the living): a better choice.

A respect for life is the cornerstone of the agrarian lifestyle. This does not preclude, but does not necessarily include, a religious adoration of life, but it is a necessary moral choice that does much to define who we are at the end of the day. People that were raised on farms eighty years ago seem to remember the drudgery and forget the community. They seem to remember the hardships and forget the rewards. I’m not sure why and perhaps I will too at some point, but I hope not.

The irony of talking to older people who have had such “lifestyles” is that they seem to look upon the new crop of self-sufficient people as being a bit spoiled, but I would argue that the new farmers of old ideas are not spoiled, but curious and willing to do the work. Although many people will fail at these new old endeavors (because the physicality and harshness of the work have not changed) there are many who have found solace and education in pursuing “non-progressive” ways of life.

I think that when an honest lifestyle is dismissed so easily by others that it is because those that dismiss it have never really thought about their own life. To do so, like the new agrarians will find, is physically and morally demanding; no less than the new- life that they have chosen to lead.

My Own Mistakes

I continue to be taught by my tools and the wood and earth that I now work with on a day to day basis. It is a wonder how much a table saw can teach us if only we listen. My bandsaw lays in waiting for the lesson to be taught. A piece of lumber is a particularly harsh professor. Lacquer is a nun with a ruler.

The oak that I saw lures me into the comfort of knowledge only to take it away again, leaving me in the darkness of ignorance; but there is always a light at the end of that educational tunnel. The maple slabs never let me slack nor do they allow me to rest my weary head. I lay my well-worn sander on them only to find a new lesson.

My jack plane is a peculiar teacher. The razor sharp iron lures me into comfort and laughs at me again and again as its paper thin slices suddenly turn to chunks of precious wood. I cry and it offers no solace and so I am angered and it is entertained.

My shop lays in wait at night for me to wake and try my luck again at learning a trade that I thought I knew. It proves me wrong and I still fight. There is no “first place” or empathy; there is no participation points. I am learning from the best teacher that I know of: my own mistakes; and teach they will, one way or another as long as I keep trying.

Pride, Ignorance & Reality

(Trump Voters Will Not Like What Happens Next)-Washington Post Garrison Keillor is an author and radio personality.

So he won. The nation takes a deep breath. Raw ego and proud illiteracy have won out, and a severely learning-disabled man with a real character problem will be president. We are so exhausted from thinking about this election, millions of people will take up leaf-raking and garage cleaning with intense pleasure. We liberal elitists are wrecks. The Trumpers had a whale of a good time, waving their signs, jeering at the media, beating up protesters, chanting “Lock her up” — we elitists just stood and clapped. Nobody chanted “Stronger Together.” It just doesn’t chant.

The Trumpers never expected their guy to actually win the thing, and that’s their problem now. They wanted only to whoop and yell, boo at the H-word, wear profane T-shirts, maybe grab a crotch or two, jump in the RV with a couple of six-packs and go out and shoot some spotted owls. It was pleasure enough for them just to know that they were driving us wild with dismay — by “us,” I mean librarians, children’s authors, yoga practitioners, Unitarians, bird-watchers, people who make their own pasta, opera-goers, the grammar police, people who keep books on their shelves, that bunch. The Trumpers exulted in knowing we were tearing our hair out. They had our number, like a bratty kid who knows exactly how to make you grit your teeth and froth at the mouth.

Alas for the Trump voters, the disasters he will bring on this country will fall more heavily on them than anyone else. The uneducated white males who elected him are the vulnerable ones, and they will not like what happens next.

To all the patronizing B.S. we’ve read about Trump expressing the white working-class’s displacement and loss of the American Dream, I say, “Feh!” — go put your head under cold water. Resentment is no excuse for bald-faced stupidity. America is still the land where the waitress’s kids can grow up to become physicists and novelists and pediatricians, but it helps a lot if the waitress and her husband encourage good habits and the ambition to use your God-given talents and the kids aren’t plugged into electronics day and night. Whooping it up for the candidate of cruelty and ignorance does less than nothing for your kids.

We liberal elitists are now completely in the clear. The government is in Republican hands. Let them deal with him. Democrats can spend four years raising heirloom tomatoes, meditating, reading Jane Austen, traveling around the country, tasting artisan beers, and let the Republicans build the wall and carry on the trade war with China and deport the undocumented and deal with opioids, and we Democrats can go for a long , brisk walk and smell the roses.

The effect of working women on society goes well beyond added income.

I like Republicans. I used to spend Sunday afternoons with a bunch of them, drinking Scotch and soda and trying to care about NFL football. It was fun. I tried to think like them. (Life is what you make it. People are people. When the going gets tough, tough noogies.) But I came back to liberal elitism.

Don’t be cruel. Elvis said it, and it’s true. We all experienced cruelty back in our playground days — boys who beat up on the timid, girls who made fun of the homely and naive — and most of us, to our shame, went along with it, afraid to defend the victims lest we become one of them. But by your 20s, you should be done with cruelty. Mr. Trump was the cruelest candidate since George Wallace. How he won on fear and bile is for political pathologists to study. The country is already tired of his noise, even his own voters. He is likely to become the most intensely disliked president since Herbert Hoover. His children will carry the burden of his name. He will never be happy in his own skin. But the damage he will do to our country — who knows? His supporters voted for change, and boy, are they going to get it.

Back to real life. I went up to my home town the other day and ran into my gym teacher, Stan Nelson, looking good at 96. He commanded a landing craft at Normandy on June 6, 1944, and never said a word about it back then, just made us do chin-ups whether we wanted to or not. I saw my biology teacher Lyle Bradley, a Marine pilot in the Korean War, still going bird-watching in his 90s. I was not a good student then, but I am studying both of them now. They have seen it all and are still optimistic. The past year of politics has taught us absolutely nothing. Zilch. Zero. Nada. The future is scary. Let the uneducated have their day. I am now going to pay more attention to teachers.

Sustain Sufficiency

sustainability

The fall has come here at our new forest/farm. The renovation on the bathrooms is almost finished and the months past have flown by. The question still remains: is self sufficiency a pipe dream, is it possible? This discussion, I’m sure, is common in households that have decided to turn their backs on the supermarkets, the food-consumer concentration of non-sustainability, and suburbs that offer comfort and the all-consuming security.

First, self-sufficiency. The problem, it seems, is energy. How to sufficiently produce and continue to produce the energy that it takes. There are two possibilities: add to the energy production or take away from the energy consumption. Alone, there is no option: we must take away our need for energy to be self sufficient. So, self-sufficiency becomes a community approach to living at some point, which (in order to be moral, to be healthy and to be virtuous) must be sustainable.

Second, sustainability. The problem is energy. How to continue to sufficiently produce the energy that it takes to be self sufficient. There are two possibilities…

So while self-sufficiency and sustainability are not the same they are reliant upon one another: to sustain self-sufficiency we must have sustainable energy sources. This is the catch and the secret. This is the unending education that I am reminded of as a look out over my new acreage and feel the damp coolness seep in, watching the golden leaves fall.

I throw another log on the fire and sip my hot coffee.

Mess

(Pic of my shop. Can you find the dog?)

My shop is a mess right now, but on Saturday (at the end of the day), I looked around and liked what I saw; I turned out the lights and left it that way. Sometimes a mess is just what we need. It reminds us that we’ve worked; that we’ve done something and people need that: we need work.

There were the maple slabs on the bench that I had planed and jointed. There were the shavings from the jack plane and the tools laying about; the newly stained drawers on the sanding bench and the stack of smaller drawers on the shaper in the corner. There were the 24″ cherry slabs on the lumber stack and the tractor sat in its place dusty from use.

The pile of slate tile and the tools that go with such things next to the beer fridge in the corner. The newly installed mud sink was, well, muddy. The commanding 24″ sander with the stack of newly built cabinet doors on it waiting to be sanded; it waiting to work. Even the machinery needs to work.

The two table saws in the center of the shop were covered with cabinet door pieces waiting to be built with the cut pieces from the lumber from the stacks. The mess is coherent: the mess is meaningful. The sawdust and shavings wafting the smell of newly cut wood; the wood stove wafting the smell of warmth from the scraps that were burning in it.

As I turned to walk inside Saturday I turned for one last look knowing that the mess I now saw would just be a mess on Monday and nothing more. Turning off the light and grabbing a beer for the evening I felt like I’d done something and people need that: we need to work.

Any Questions?

The Community of the Self Sufficient

self_sufficient

To be self sufficient is a personal thing, not unlike so many who just want to “get away” and have everyone leave them alone. I am, and was one of those. However, things often must change, and do. NOFA puts on event up here in New England, and I went to a hog butchering class today. There I realized that to be self sufficient, there must be a community.

It does sound strange, but it is, and always has been, true. In the cities we often forget this fact of independence. Often we can live around millions of people and be completely alone. This is sad, true, but it is only because there are communities of self sufficient communities of people that support such lifestyles.

Aloneness is important. Being alone we can often find our “true self”, and what we find is often a bit disconcerting. But the self sufficient ought to be able look that self in the eye every morning and meet it head to head on those nights when we wake up feeling so alone and vulnerable. One way to do this, is to realize our dependence on healthy communities.

Unfortunately, self sufficiency is often correlated with those who have opted out and see survival as a pile of rations and guns. This is a misconstrued view of self sufficiency. Self sufficiency is an education and there are many great teachers out there that are willing and often able to teach those willing to learn. To realize that the community of the self sufficient are not these radical outliers one only has to reach out to learn, well, to be self sufficient.

At the class, there were seven of us, we each took turns learning to cut the 1/2 hog in such a way that would do justice to the animal, and to those who had, and will continue to create a community of the self sufficient.

The Birth of Dreams

beer

Since the dream has died, it is time to make new ones and so it is time to brew beer. Beer is one of the few possible proofs that there is a god in the universe, but brewing your own beer reminds you that really god is not needed; just clean water. And so new dreams start again, this time with the help of some well water, yeast, malt and hops.

Brewing beer gives us a break from building other things and gives us a chance to remember what counts: time. This because brewing beer takes time. If you are not cleaning, then you are waiting. The smells waft from the kettles and there is time to dream new dreams.

The Armchair Philosopher

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