The Dissociative States of America

I’ve been wondering about money lately. It’s been said to be the root of all evil, but that’s been so often repeated that even if it’s true, it doesn’t help much. Yet, money does seem to have a perverse effect on people and societies unless its influence is actively kept in check. For some time, my question has been, what’s the mechanism? Why is this so?

The answer, or at least part of it, turned out to be surprisingly simple. It came to me the night I was dismissed from jury duty a few months back. The case I would have heard, had I been seated on that jury, involved money.

I pondered why so much organizational energy would be expended on such a thing when there are potatoes to dig and clothing to sew. Money is, after all, a secondary value. It has no intrinsic worth. So what is really at issue in a crime involving money?

My conclusion is that the criminality of theft consists in that the thief values my money or possessions over our relationship, and our relationship in that moment is the local node of a more universal human connection. Break the bond of trust and the whole fabric is compromised.

The thief, the embezzler, and the perpetrator of fraud present an inversion of values. This inversion is the metaphysical underpinning of the crime. It is also an important determiner of whether or not a crime has been committed. In the case of stealing money, it is not a crime because money is so valuable, as is commonly believed within a culture that has made an idol of it. The criminality of the theft is that the thief breaks something of primary value in our relationship, trust, in order to elevate something that is inherently of secondary value: mere money. Ultimately even property, things of real value, is also secondary to relationships. Where this is not the case, relationships break down.

This distinction – crime as violation of relationship versus crime as violation of property – is of immense significance, for those who would promote the idolization of money and property would have us believe that precisely the opposite is the case: that we have made a crime of theft because money and property are of primary value. Once this misunderstanding takes root, those whose power flows from money can constantly enlarge the domain of legalized criminal behavior – behavior that elevates money, a thing of secondary value, over relationships of intrinsic worth. Corporations creating and introducing chemicals and organisms with demonstrably hazardous effects on life, for-profit prisons that successfully lobby for laws that ensure a steady stream of prisoners, banks selling worthless securities to credulous pensions and would-be retirees … there are relationships being compromised by all of these activities, but the activities are profitable, so they go on.

People think it’s all about the money, and these kinds of activities seem to support that idea. But it never really is. It can’t be. Money is nothing. Its meaning is entirely dependent on the contiguity and integrity of the social fabric. This is the reason that money crimes, from embezzlement to fraud to robbery, are real crimes: they are attacks on the social fabric upon whose integrity the value of money ultimately depends. However, for this same reason, money and property are secondary to the primary injury of a “property crime.” This cannot be emphasized enough: the thief becomes a criminal not so much by taking things of value, but by breaking something of infinitely more value in people’s trust. This is why “The People of the State” have a vested interest in maintaining the trust that underlies social functioning. Distrust can reach a level that society cannot bear, as it exacts a toll on every interaction. Transparency, truth, trust, honesty, labor, and freedom: these are the things that generate wealth in the grand sense of the term.

But the interesting thing is, once enough people think money and property are the primary focus, the relationships involved and things of intrinsic worth fall into a secondary position, and then become obscured. The next link in the chain that follows from this error is that as primary and secondary values are inverted, they dissociate. Navigating by the headlights of monetary gain alone, soon enough, medicine will make people sick and dependent, chemicals will be introduced into foods for the convenience of their manufacturers as opposed to the well being of those who eat it, and livestock will live in perpetual misery and stress because more money can be made when their misery is discounted. Criminality can expand virtually unnoticed in such a society and subordinate the law to its own ends. Lacking the discipline of real relationships and intrinsic worth, false relationships rule, and it isn’t long before the mass of society is living in the throes of an amnesic, dissociative fugue.

On the other side of my tax dollars I find torture, predator drones, war crimes and crimes against humanity. On the other side of the dollars I spend on gasoline is an industry that leverages tax subsidies with political donations, despoils the environment, and hires scientists willing to lie about climate change. There’s a banana peel beside my computer – and on the other side of that purchase, often enough, are agricultural practices that abuse land and labor, as well as gross social inequality. And finally, this miraculous device on which I type these words is made by what might as well be called slave labor, except that slaves, being owned, are treated as assets, while many manufacturing workers in some overseas markets are treated as expendable.

Contemplating these realities, I can try to extricate myself from the web of moral failure connected with nearly everything I do with my money, or I can join the amnesia, allowing money to dissociate my experience from the realities on the other side of my monetary transactions.

Assuming I choose to regain consciousness, it is essential to wake up from the mass hallucination of money as a primary value. I can think of no better illustration of the nexus of this confusion of primary and secondary values than the television game shows I watched as a child. Many of these had a quiz format where the participants' production of scripted, called-for information or other performance is instantly rewarded with specific sums of money, the tally of which appears somewhere on the screen. So what is important here? Where is the value? Is it in the information, the task, the performance, the skill, the intelligence? No, it’s pretty clear that there’s no meaning to the maze but the cheese, and the cheese is the money. Drill that into people – it isn’t hard in a social construct where hunger follows from pennilessness – and soon money becomes a value unto itself rather than a marker of value. It becomes primary. Once these values have been inverted, it’s almost automatic that money will further dissociate them, altering our perceptions. We don’t see the hungry person, we see the poor person—and the response is very different. Again: first primary and secondary values are inverted, and then they split. This is highly consequential.

Because, regardless of how stuck a culture is on it, money is not primary. This is simply an error, albeit one that can remain undetected among many for longish periods of time under the right cultural conditions. Of course, the effects of the dissociative psychology of money are everywhere to be seen, for its deep genealogy of dissociation is revealed in the social fragmentation, broken people, and broken world it invariably engenders unless it is held in check.

If money holds its inverted place as a primary value long enough, eventually we reach a position where, for example, supposedly sane, reasonable people in the nation’s highest court can assert that money is speech and that corporations are people. Yes, well I can say that donkeys are daffodils, but that doesn’t make it so; I guess it’s because I’m not sitting in a special chair in a black robe. It’s as though they would do anything rather than admit the original error of putting money in the place of primary value. So much was built upon it subsequently, and the constituencies of this error became so large and powerful, that any verbal devices that are needed to prop up the false front can and will be used, regardless of how internally twisted, weak, and just plain false they may be.

However, a child could spot the absurdity of such propositions, even if a presidential candidate cannot. Not only does the emperor have no clothes, it is abundantly clear, if we are reduced to talking in this way, that neither has the empire a fitting social fabric. The pernicious influence of inverted and dissociated values ultimately shows up as socially sanctified madness, and in the blindness of that insanity, criminality insinuates itself into everything from the highest institutions of governance down to everyday acts like fueling a vehicle or buying a piece of fruit.

Am I saying that we should do away with money altogether? No. However, I am suggesting that we do away with the thinking that puts money in a place of primary value, which inevitably leads us to a place where we confuse profit making with value creation and monetary wealth with personal worthiness. Granted, those who have used money to cudgel their fellow citizens down will not willingly concede that privilege. But the reality is, both individuals and nations who use money in this way are relying on the dissociative power of money and the hallucinated world it creates to hide their actions from view. The deeper truth here is that we are all collaborators to one degree or another in these crimes, but this doesn’t mean the bosses of the rackets shouldn’t go to jail.

Fairy Houses

Fairy House - builder unknown
Macworth Island, Maine

            I was first introduced to fairy houses in the Nichols Arboretum in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and then encountered them again while sightseeing in Maine on Mackworth Island.  Bark, sticks, stones, leaves, pine needles and (in Maine) shells were the construction materials.  A little online searching will reveal it’s a growing phenomenon.  Fairy houses are big!

            And small.  They’re cute little houses, and lovingly made.  Maybe that’s the reason I’m starting to think there’s more hope for the future in fairy houses than pretty much anything else I’m coming across these days.  Certainly there’s more hope in them than anything I’m seeing in politics.  The recipe is simple: Find a little place and love it.  The fact that the sticks and bark are real, things with smell and texture that came from the cycles of life and are still part of those cycles, well, that’s a bonus.  And, they’re free.  That’s a bonus, too.

            What’s most amazing to me is that, just a few years ago, such fairy house villages were largely unknown.  Now they’re popping up everywhere.  Secondarily, it amazes me that, in this age of digital multimedia glitz, people of all ages would see such beautiful worlds of creative possibility in forest litter.  So what happened? First, there was a model: somebody built a fairy house.  Then, as with the cairns that also seem to have sprouted in colonies across the landscape, so too do additional fairy houses spring up.

            Find a little place and love it: Presto! Something new under the sun.

Find a little place, and love it.

Because it’s not so much with sticks and moss that children young and old are building, but with love, with feelings, and with imagination.  The sticks were already there.  The leaves, the green mosses, the shining stones, they were waiting, they are waiting for new hands, new eyes, new heart.  The things of this world that people have built already are likewise at our disposal.  The great nations, the cities, the sheaves of legal wrapping paper that shroud the corporations, these are just moss and mineral crusted upon the earth, and fallen leaves.  We can make something of all of this.

Find a little place and love it. 

First, it becomes a mirror.  As we build with feelings, so our feelings become visible through our building.  Are we building barricades and fences for our fairy houses? What perils are we imagining? Do we really want to build this way again?  This is our world.  We can make it in our image.  In fact, we cannot do otherwise. 

This is our world. 

This is our world!  

This is our world!   

This is our World!

So we will build with awareness, with feelings, and with love.  The fairy houses we build attract attention, visitors, and emulation.  More spring up, all in different styles.  More visitors come.  Amazing how they all fit together!

Find a place and love it.  First it becomes a mirror.  Then it becomes a lens. 

We feel the intent of the builders, look into the works before us, and see the possibility of new worlds.  Same old stuff here, but with new possibilities inherent, new vision opening possibilities within the treasures and the trash.  Each example becomes a lens that brings new possibilities into focus, new ways of building, yes, but more importantly, the new feelings and sensibilities that built the buildings, even new ways of being that are implied by how things are being made.  And the world is different in the moment we are changed.

Find a little place – even a moment in time – and love into it.  First it becomes a mirror, then a lens.  Then, the world begins to bend around it, and be remade. 

Find a little place and love it; let it be a mountain or a stone, a river or a cup of water handed to a child, a handful of forest litter.  Let it be a business, a garden, a home, a corner of your desk, or a clear and intimate moment shared during the day.  We can build with moments as children build with sticks.  Everything and every moment holds a new world within it, bursting with anticipation, longing to expand with us.

Find a place and love it. First it becomes a mirror. Then it becomes a lens.  Then, the world begins to bend around it, and be remade. 

           

           

    

Peak Oil and Climate Change: a Midsummer Night's Meditation

A lot of discussion in the Peak Oil/Climate Change community focuses on rational responses to these game-changing influences on modern societies. Along with these proposals comes much hand-wringing about how political or corporate leadership remains largely as intransigent as ever on the most pressing and most obvious of these responses, and the fact that most of them should have been implemented 30 or more years ago, or the very least, immediately. Public transportation, walkable communities, sustainable agricultural practices, renewable and reduced energy use…these are reasonable things. However, for a lot of reasons, then as now, the reasonable things didn’t happen, or haven’t happened at a scale needed to meaningfully affect the trajectory of onrushing events.

So at present it seems that with peak oil and climate change we have a collective problem without a collective response. Of course, it is true that while we may feel disappointment at failed international resolutions and the absurd theatrics of flailing governments, positive things are happening here and there. We see small victories: a city council passes a peak oil resolution, a Transition group forms, a Peak Oil conference takes place somewhere, someone starts a community garden. However, such events are mostly functioning as signs, and as every driver should be aware, an unheeded signal does not affect the motion of a motorcar. Further, it’s not clear that making the signal larger or clearer would have much effect. 

Given all of the foregoing, it is becoming increasingly clear that on the individual level at least, there is precisely no reasonable response to peak oil and climate change. This is an improv, a dance with emerging possibilities, and it is a dance within ourselves as well as between us and our changing world. What works for one person may not work at all for another. My suggestion here is that we must not take the fact that there is no reasonable response to be a cause for despair. It is simply an invitation to get in touch with something that is deeper than reason and capable of reforming it, difficult as that may be to describe in reasonable terms.

For example, much talk is devoted to the subject of the economic side of Peak Oil. Unless the petroleum-powered economy keeps expanding with the pace of money creation, money loaned into existence with interest cannot be repaid. A kind of generalized bankruptcy follows, in which inflation or deflation exhaust the symbol of money by attacking the roots of its capacity to signify. The symbolic medium that we have worked for, fought over, connived to get, stolen, and inherited loses meaning within our human experience as the system that supported it breaks down. What follows from the loss of a symbol of this centrality is the failure of culture: erosion and breakdown on all levels, from our inner lives, feelings and thought processes to shuttered factories, empty strip malls, and decaying concrete roads. The inability to pay a debt is but the beginning of a cascade of expectations breaking down, taking with them many other social forms and significances. It is also accompanied by the loss of the material capacities with which it was linked in our collective mindset through our social institutions and physical infrastructure.

The exigencies of climate change, on the other hand, are rightfully thought to be of a different order than those of the symbol system of world finance in a losing battle with emerging realities. However, whether it is flood or drought, the rains that don’t come or the paycheck that evaporated, on a personal level it amounts to an encounter with an abyss. Every hockey-sticking graph we’re looking at represents an abyss, but to encounter it personally is something else again. This is the thing, the thingless thing at the heart of our experience, the place where our inner chaos is drawn to the surface by the growing chaos around us. This is where our waking thoughts merge into the dream to which we awaken in our sleep. When peak oil messengers tell us to “start our collapse now,” there’s no better place to start than here, on the inside, where words break down into sounds, and the inner reverberations of those sounds reveal realities that were formerly invisible, showing us what was really inside of those words all along.

Given that our culture took the technology of combustion so far as to alter the climate of the planet in the pursuit of our dreams, it seems the poetry of burning and the power of the infinite that lies hidden in every flame should be quite familiar to us. But typically it isn’t, even as the drama plays out and we see that the very contents our minds are catching fire. This is the real “new normal,” a phrase people started hopefully intoning to come to terms with the progressive disjuncture between representation and reality. However, the expression bears the stigma of an ominously Orwellian inner contradiction.

The words of Antonin Artaud come to me now:

"Burning is a magic act . . . we must consent to burning, burning in advance and immediately, not a thing but everything that represents things for us, in order not to expose ourselves to being burnt up whole."

Reason does not fare so well under these conditions, and this is precisely the point we are heading for. We must then find our refuge in something other than reason as the culture that found such ingenious ways of tyrannizing itself and the planet with symbols and paper goes up like a trash can ablaze. This is the gift we have prepared for ourselves.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the lovers leave the city and all they know when the reality of their love comes into conflict with the abstract mandates of Athenian law. They find themselves in a wilderness where, as it turns out, the elemental forces of nature are likewise in upheaval as the fairy king and queen are estranged from one another. In the end it is not through reason that order is restored, but through the agency of madness. My sense is that this is what’s happening to us as well, but as a culture we’re so far astray that a single crazy night in the wilderness won’t be enough to set things right again.

Feelings, Art, and the Making of Movements

I recently had the privilege of seeing performances by Lucas DiGia and Walter “Soul” Lacy at the HomeGrown Local Food Summit in Washtenaw County, Michigan. Lucas brought a powerfully articulated vision of the relationship of food, culture, and society to his raps—spiced with a bit of wry humor. Walter left me stunned with his spoken word poetry and thoughtful commentary themed on social justice and redemption.

My response to these performances could be summed up in a single word: visceral. On my way home I reflected on the words of Sifu Robert Brown, under whom I studied kung fu for a number of years: “All movement starts in the dan tien.”

For those unfamiliar with the Chinese term, the dan tien is the region of the body centered just below the navel. Of course, as a novice Kung Fu student I don’t pretend to fully understand what my teacher meant, although I think I got the basic gist of it. Today it occurred to me that what is true about body movements is also true of social movements: they start with something at the feeling level, a gut-level response. It’s here we will find our motivation, our willingness to take a stand, and our desire to turn our activism into real activity. For this reason I see a lot of value in starting off the Local Food Summit with performances that evoke such a response, and I felt a great appreciation for the performers and their talents.

Of course, given that the gut and the feeling center there is so powerful, there are similarly powerful efforts made to align people’s feelings with the prevailing power structure. And it’s not hard to do. The reason is pretty simple. Here’s an example.

As shoppers we see a can of food on the shelf in the grocery. The can has a label with a design we recognize from our childhood, when our mothers may have opened a can with the same kind of label and served it to us. Now we are adults, and of course, we really want that image and design on the label of a canned food to mean it’s safe to eat and serve to our families. Discovering that “gender-bender” BPA is being used by many manufacturers in the canning process and that this hormone-like substance could affect our body systems is unsettling, to say the least. It’s even more disquieting to consider that there are corporate offices where people calculate that the risk of human reproductive cancers is an acceptable cost of doing business. Since we want to believe it’s safe, even if our reading of the research suggests it might not be, it’s easier to side with those who would have us believe it is safe.

There’s an awful tendency to forget what we’ve just read or learned about because it’s easier to convince ourselves we are safe than to really engage with the information and the feelings it provokes. However, when we separate our knowledge from our feelings in this way, we stymie our ability to act on that knowledge. Without our feelings, we will have no gut-level response. No gut-level response, no movement.

Given the way it gets embedded in us, to unplug our blind faith in industrialized food and then build food systems based on real relationships with people and the earth, we have to get over our viscerally linked loyalties to food brands and generationally engrained consumer shopping habits. The package design and other aspects of the marketed product identity of a brand of tortilla chips or bag of french fries are consumed along with the industrial food itself, and in a way these images are just as deeply assimilated. Once they’re a part of us, there’s a tendency to defend them.

As behavioral scientists are well aware, food is a powerful reinforcement. Each time a food is perceived and eaten without immediately producing ill effects, a deep conditioning happens. We see the package of processed cheese or a hamburger with a certain brand stamped on the wrapper, and we literally salivate like Pavlov’s dog. This is another way of looking at why changing dietary patterns and habits can sometimes be difficult.

One saving grace in all of this is that the human body is wiser and more ancient than any particular culture a person inhabits, and we can allow ourselves to help this wisdom make our true needs known regardless of the local customs or the prevailing personal and cultural conditioning. We can learn to listen to this wisdom and notice whether a particular food or a certain quantity of it is weakening us or strengthening us. We can connect with our gut-level responses and untangle them from the conditioned cultural overlay.  We can even re-train our conditioned responses, refurbish our food aesthetic, and create a food culture based on conscious participation rather than mindless consumption.

Doing this, however, requires that we wake up to food, to the voice of the body, and to the need for change. And to really move toward change, we must connect with our feelings. By feelings I mean both physical sensations and emotional responses: How does drinking a liter of soda make us feel, really? And, what does it emotionally feel like to have food handed to us in a paper bag through a car window?  Conversely, what feelings show up with a meal thoughtfully prepared and eaten in a social context that brings it meaning, or a plateful of potatoes grown, dug, cooked, and served with care and love? My experience is that just one such food experience can undo a lot negative conditioning as we connect with a new set of feelings. In this way it is quite possible to develop an appetite for ways of eating that really nourish us.

To make a movement, we have to connect with all of our feelings, and with our capacity to think reflectively about them. Since artists model this connection and help create a culture where it can happen, one place to start is by looking to our artists to help us make our own inner connections. This is why I’m grateful for people like Lucas DiGia and Walter Lacy, who can articulate a message and get it through to a place where I can actually feel my own truth in what they share. If we can feel it strongly enough, we can find both the motivation and the right path of action to move with it, and ultimately we may also be able to help others make connections in turn to build a larger movement.

***

To learn more about Lucas DiGia's Rap for Food visit: www.facebook.com/rapforfood and rapforfood.org 
Contact poet and spoken word artist Walter "Soul" Lacy at: thesoulemcee@gmail.com

The Cultural Renaissance of Free Gooseberries and Outlaw Dandelions

I love giving plants away, and I hold that the sharing of vegetative abundance is the foundation of a sustainable culture. Every time that seeds, cuttings, runners, crowns or rootlets change hands among friends and community members, powerful things can happen.

Let’s start with the miracle and freedom of the plants themselves. Soon after the purchase of our first home, I surveyed the back yard and counted 70 ornamental and fruiting perennials that had come into our hands through friends. Some of these had moved with us from the rental property where they had lived for a year prior, then new plants were added during the summer of our move. These plants had been mere surplus to my gardening friends, freely given. There was no cost but transportation and labor. 

But there’s something more important. For example, when a currant start went in on the south side of the compost pile (it turned out to be an excellent location, by the way) suddenly a new being was inhabiting our space. I had no idea that in just a few years the shrub’s luxuriant growth would lead to an abundance of fruit, or that my daughter would suggest making ruby-red jars of currant jelly as a home-school project. Making the jelly ultimately became an annual family ritual, and the homemade treat a classic holiday offering to friends and family as the years went by.

Nor could I have known how important the gift of three crowns of ostrich ferns would become as in succeeding years they spread and softened the air in the back corner of the lot beneath the trees from which ultimately hung a hammock, the fronds grazing us with cool touches on summer afternoons. Likewise, how could I have guessed the cumulative and overall effect of these and all the other plants in this community: the German chamomile in profuse sprays, the spring displays of primroses, or the long-lasting waist-high backdrop of biennial Black-eyed Susans gracing many backyard gatherings?

In essence, these plants, these inscrutable earthly beings living in our back yard, had rooted themselves not only in the soil, but in our lives. Further, their beauty and abundance both merited the care required to sustain them and motivated me to share them with others.

The depth of all this points to another powerful sphere where sharing plants adds value to life: human relationships and community. Sharing in the mystery of plants serves to remind us of the ultimately mysterious interface between us as human beings. Personally, I think it works this way: whether it’s a handful of heirloom morning glory seeds of unlimited potential, or a dozen leafless raspberry canes in a bucket of dirty water soon to meet the earth again and spread in a friend’s back yard, human relationships that touch upon the plant world draw from it both the rootedness and the cosmic connections of the plants themselves.

At a certain point we may even wonder who is serving whom in this dynamic where plants, friends new and old, and happenstance encounters can combine and lead to growth on all levels. At my nephew’s graduation party a few years back, I was asked by a neighbor if I’d like to visit his vegetable garden around the corner. There I noticed some mature gooseberry bushes and obtained permission to take a couple green cuttings.  These cuttings soon rooted, and six years later those bushes have reached enormous sizes and their self-layered progeny grow in the back yards of more than a half-dozen friends. Who else, unknown to me, might ultimately also have gooseberry pies and preserves as scions are shared, and what children might connect with something primal in themselves by plucking the blushing fruits on a hot summer’s day – this is impossible to know. I do know that I will remember the gardener who shared them, and that those friends of mine whose yards are bearing new fruit because of those two cuttings also now have living memorials to our relationship that weather the seasons along with us.

Friendships can take on an expansive quality and a touch of immortality when we share our plants.  

Finally, by combining the grace of the plants themselves and the magic they can bring to human relationships, sharing in this way also revives an ancient cultural narrative and creates a beachhead for life-sustaining values to emerge in a culture that lately seems hell-bent on running headlong in the other direction. Plants, after all, provide their services for free. In our culture, anything free is devalued. This is true whether we’re talking about the pure water that used to run freely, on the one hand, or the flow of energy involved in parenting and childcare on the other. We do not value these things unless we start to pay for them, and the fact that we do now pay for such things, if we really feel into it, has already devalued them at a much more basic level.

Putting a price on everything ultimately means that we too are bought and sold, yet this remains in the blind spot of a culture where commerce has become the central focus. It doesn’t have to be that way, but in a classic case of the servant becoming master, the markets that were intended to follow the needs of life and the living somehow took the reins and started driving. The term, ‘free market’ is, when we stop for a moment and think of it, an oxymoron, for the things we find in the market are seldom free, and many of the costs do not even appear on the price tags.

This is why freely giving plants just as they freely give of themselves is a paradigm-changing act. And it’s interesting to see how people inured to a market mentality sometimes respond to a gift. With everybody selling everything, gifts freely given can meet at first with misunderstanding and incomprehension. Good, then! That just shows how much they are needed. Ultimately, I suspect, the biggest gift is shifting the mindset that assumes our self-interests are achieved at the expense of others.

When operating in a balanced system, plants don’t do it that way. A dandelion that sprouts up in a vacant lot, for example, is in every way a pioneer and an entrepreneur. It’s also anarchical, however, in the sense that it pays no rent and holds no title. The dandelion is a squatter at best, a trespasser and an outlaw if we stop to consider. It claims its freedom and it holds the land, and in so doing it claims also a place for itself and its progeny in the world.

But look more closely and we see that just as the plant has taken its place without title, it yields up a host of benefits that are likewise unfettered and untaxed. As rain patters down on the disturbed earth, the dandelion and its companions work together to blunt the impact and slow runoff. It does this for its own reasons, of course, and as a result erosion is mitigated. With its taproot reaching down into the subsoil and funnel of leaves directing the water its way, the dandelion furthers this process by channeling water deeper into the earth – again for its own use later, but this also benefits the other plants and trees that would find their water there.

That taproot also draws nutrients up from the subsoil for the dandelion’s own use, but these nutrients in turn are deposited on the topsoil as the plant loses leaves to growth and herbivorous animals. From the resources it procures in sun and soil, the dandelion plant also offers up food for nectar and pollen eaters as well as a profusion of airborne seeds that can multiply all of these benefits as they colonize other areas.

Operating in parallel from the human side, being an agent for the propagation of plants can, when pursued with consciousness and care, give the living system a push in the direction it’s already seeking to go, and gently shape it to bring enhanced benefits to us as well. For example, lettuce seeds travel on airy puffs like dandelions, yet sharing my heirloom seeds with friends miles away helps to ensure that if I had a crop failure, other sources of seed might be available to begin again. Note that this is in direct opposition to the “market” strategy of withholding seed, patenting it, inserting genes to prevent it from reproducing, and otherwise making seed scarce and controlling it.  

The abundance principle also applies every time I share food species and their garden allies in a world of increasing food insecurity. In a food crisis, I don’t want to be the only person in the neighborhood with fruit hanging from my trees or knowledge of how to garner calories from the soil. Real security rests on my neighbors having the resources and ability to so as well. Thus I share liberally, and in my own self-interest…just as plants do.

How values got so out of whack that many people in our society fail to see this option is an important question, but outside the scope of this essay. For now, I would suggest that human life, like plant life, holds the possibility of expression as a celebration and an offering if we choose to participate in this way. Vegetative generosity is the foundation of an abundant life for all earth’s inhabitants, and it’s well worth sharing.

Time, Money, and the “$50 Tomato”

At the end of last summer a friend of mine was telling me about a client of his gardening business who said at one point in the price negotiations, “I hope you’re not going to sell me a $50 tomato.”

The reference, I learned later, was to a book called The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden, by William Alexander.  I haven’t read the book, but the reputed high costs of gardening are second only to “I’d love to garden but I haven’t got the time” on the list of reasons people don’t grow their own food.  Another close contender near the top of the list is something that usually comes out as, “I kill whatever I try to grow.”

Each of these arguments has merit, but only as symptoms of the underlying conditions in which they are made.  It might take a village to raise a child, but it takes a worldview and the infrastructure it generates to validate an argument.  For some time now, I’ve been trying to understand a world where it makes no sense to grow food.

My own reflections on the topic started one day when I bought a bunch of radishes at the supermarket.  Radishes, while not exactly a staple food, are arguably one of the easier food plants to grow for most people and in fact are the first crop I was successful with as a child gardener.  As an adult when I looked at the cost and the amount of pre-tax income I’d have to earn to buy the radishes, converted to time, I wondered why I would ever bother growing them.  It made no sense economically: end of story.  Plus, what if I do invest the time and effort, and fail? And that’s where gardening stops for many, many people.

But even then, I felt there was actually more to the story.  And no, I’m not going to write at length on the intrinsic value of having intimate relationships with one’s food plants, a topic I’ve explored elsewhere.  Nor is it my intent to analyze the perversity of market pricing that externalizes costs resulting from fossil fuel use, fertilizer and pesticide runoff, or the abusive working conditions of farm laborers, though this is also worthy of consideration and an important part of the picture.  Instead, what I feel is most important here is the personal time and money equation that results in part through the mechanism of perverse pricing.  It’s on this level that people’s decisions get made.  This is basically how we got to a place where it makes no sense to grow food, or where growing food came to be seen as a kind of luxury activity for the privileged.

Yet the time/money equation that had me pondering my purchase of commercial radishes is changing for many people, and with it the decisions they are making.  My view of the fundamental shift we have seen in the last few years here in the USA is that we are changing from a people who on aggregate had more money than time to a people who on aggregate have more time than money.  When a person has disposable income but little free time, this puts a premium on convenience and speed.  Here in the “developed” world, what this means is that not only do we feel there no time to grow, thresh, mill, and bake grain into bread, we often don’t feel we have time to make our own sandwiches or even to get out of our cars to get them from those who make them for us. 

No doubt there is an economy of scale in operation that makes the livelihood of, for example, a baker viable under fairly broad market conditions.  But let’s be clear about this: bread in itself is a ready-to-eat convenience food, and occupies a place along with butchered meat and apples that are grown and bagged by others on the time vs. money continuum.  

I started seeing the basic economic paradigm shift – from more money than time to more time than money – during the first stage of the most recent economic downturn in 2008-09 when in many instances one or both parents in two-income families lost a job, significantly affecting the market for child day care.  Among the home-based industries that have fallen prey to market forces, childcare is quite a big canary in the contemporary economic coal mine.  It is a prime indicator of the personal time/money decision making process, and little wonder.  Even with the increased “child care productivity” leveraged by stratified age groupings and non-biological adult-to-child ratios, when there’s no money to pay for it and a parent out of work at home, the economic incentive to outsource one’s childrearing with curb-service daycare simply evaporates.

There are many, many aspects of life that change as people get pushed out of the mainstream economy with its productivity treadmill, and families find themselves possessed of relatively more time and less money.  One of the changes is that growing food starts making sense again, if one can find a place to do it. Effective resource stewardship is another aspect.  Call me frugal, but it seems pretty wasteful to buy special bags so that yard leaves can be hauled away in the fall and then buy bagged compost trucked in from elsewhere in the spring. Left alone, the leaves will turn into compost with very little coaxing.  But this presumes a couple things: time and the willingness to use it.  The “$50 tomato” comes down in price very quickly when time is used to grow plants from seed, when developing friendships bring tools and know-how, when a little muscle and a lot of patience turn waste into compost, and, in general when human energy and clever management of time and resources supplant a product-centered, money-driven approach to problem solving.

Another change is, presuming that with less money one can still locate something to eat and strategize a way to stay out of the rain (I’m not suggesting one could live with no money at all), there’s time for the valuable work of connecting with others and educating one’s self on issues, if one has the inclination.  As we’ve seen recently, one might just set up a tent in a park on Wall Street and start asking important questions and demanding real answers from those who work and live in the towers overhead.  Yes, and I’m sure it isn’t lost on those looking down at the colorful tents and personalities that there are important political dimensions to this social shift that goes by the name of unemployment.  After all, to employ is to use.  Unemployed, unused people can definitely find ways of making themselves useful.  Unused people have time to protest, to organize, and to do all kinds of interesting things.

In day-to-day living, the shift to more time than money could mean it makes sense to turn flour into bread, cook for big groups, collectivize living and transportation arrangements, care for one’s own and other people’s children, share, trade, and barter for tools, skills, and basic necessities, read and play instruments rather than pay for entertainment, and talk with the neighbors.

For every one of these activities, the mainstream economy has a product or service that offers a shortcut that costs money.  But if we really look at carpooling, for example, what we’re seeing is people willing to give up a bit of convenience and use a little extra time to save money.  Somewhere another car sits empty to the benefit of its owner, the air we breathe, and the global climate, and to the detriment of the national GDP, which is as much a measurement of waste as of wealth in a society where the two are easily confused.

The irony is, sometimes the products and services being marketed aren’t even much of a shortcut.  Once in the thrall of a money- and product-centered mindset, we will sometimes even endure inconvenience and lower quality to participate in the illusion that the more we pay the more it’s worth, and that when money changes hands something intrinsically good is happening – the shopping culture.  And, while a lot of what we buy is needless, it seems to me that even with necessities like food, it really doesn’t take much more effort to, say, make a better, cheaper, and healthier sandwich at home than run out to buy one because one “deserves a break today.”  Granted, I sometimes gratefully take a cup of coffee from a friendly face at a cafe, but honestly, I can always brew myself a superior and cheaper cup than I can buy.  The “$50 Tomato” has its counterparts in many formerly free or inexpensive but lovely things that emerge from the market as grotesque extravagances like $3.75 cups of coffee.

In the end, an important piece of my hope for the future is that productive people are productive people, and will find ways to use time to add value to their lives directly when sidelined by the mainstream economy’s avenues for value creation.  Spending time instead of money when money is short makes sense, and as we awaken from the idolatry of commerce I see a strong possibility that Americans will paradoxically find themselves possessed of more entrepreneurial drive than ever. 

From Crushing Distance to Opening Space: A Meditation on Speed and Local Consciousness

I drove south on Interstate 75 after dinner last night to help a friend with yard work some 29 miles from my home. We’re in the last days of August here in the middle latitudes of the northern hemisphere, and that only gave us a couple hours of useful daylight. However, that was no problem. With a relatively small amount of gasoline, I could use my car to cover that distance in a 40-minute drive, accomplish the tasks, and be home before my wife had fallen asleep.

But as the pavement blurred under my tires and the soft August air howled with hurricane force on the other side of the auto glass, this is the thought that occurred to me: I’m crushing distance with fossil fuel. I was suddenly filled with a sense of awe at what was really going on there, the terrific forces and amazing engineering involved in the feat, and both the exhilaration and the violent hubris of it. I’ve heard about longtime prisoners newly released, and how as car passengers they will sometimes grab the dashboard in a reflexive panic as the vehicle accelerates and the world warps around them with increasing velocity. For most of us, of course, it’s rather mundane. We forget, until we gawk at a twisted heap of metal in the ditch, what it is we’re really doing when we drive. And even then, are we really remembering, or do we just momentarily go dumb as the gears of cognitive dissonance grind in our heads?

With this revelation still fresh in my mind, and so many people in the Peak Oil / Climate Change / Transition community beating the drum of “relocalization,” I think it’s time to review the basics if we are really to awaken from the fossil fuel dream. Some friends and I were joking recently about people jetting in from all over the country to attend a relocalization conference, but underneath the humor is something even more worthy of our attention.

As we approach highway speeds in a motor vehicle, the terrain thus covered flattens out. This flattening happens in several ways, all of which are related in the subjective experience of speed. For one, the physical dimensionality of space itself is squished. The driver’s focus narrows down to a kind of tunnel vision, and the surrounding landscape becomes, in effect, the wall of the tunnel on which play images of things that progressively lose their reality in the mind of the speedy one. Second, the significance of our surroundings undergoes a parallel loss of depth as actual landscape features become mere symbols. Physical objects are actually always rich in meaning, but how could one explore that when one is passing them by at such a clip? With these two forces of compression at work, the net effect is that by crushing distance with fossil fuels, we flatten our experience of inhabiting space.

I am certain there are those who would deny this. There are also those who still argue for the educational value of television. Big picture, though, what we see in societies now several generations into watching screens is that the medium is indeed the message, and it is a physically pacifying one, incompatible in a half-dozen or more important ways with a healthy society. McLuhan’s contribution to discourse on communications media applies also to our various mediums of conveyance; the medium is the message not only for TV’s, but cars and jet aircraft as well.

Now, it’s true that we can open and experience space, and the spacious generosity of significances that flow from the living world, and still drive cars. Such reasoning does little to persuade me that the broad effects I’m seeing are not real. It’s a bit like climate change deniers who take a particular cold winter’s day as refutation of global warming. I would argue that on aggregate, the tradeoff of becoming a society inured to crushing distance with speed is a relentless pressure that flattens human experience in all its dimensions.

The grand experiment in overcoming the tyranny of locality by progressively extending our mobility with motors has landed us in but another kind of provincialism, with new fetters to replace the old, and feelings not of freedom but of frustration, servitude, impatience, and captivity seeming to predominate among motorists. And we don’t need to look to the social stratification and physical impediments that result from our collective motor mania as described by Ivan Illich to reach the conclusion that these things no longer serve their intended purposes, although these observations are persuasive enough. Nor do we have to look to the homogenization of the constructed landscape, as many other observers have noted, to conclude that for all our moving about, we Americans, in particular, seem not to wish to really go anywhere new, preferring the same predictable fast food places, stores, and motels from coast to coast.

But with these contributions to the discussion already logged and accounted for, I would narrow the focus to emphasize this: We do not really cease being drivers when we step from our vehicles. Like television, automobile travel strengthens some of the more pernicious habits of the egoic mind: positioning self as separate from the living environment, seeking to control experience by external means, and generally in many ways reaching for levers, pushing buttons, and forever seeking control. Bottom line: motor travel is addictive, and the effects of the addiction are likely to persist even if we can no longer afford to drive.

Assuming this is true, I would go further and suggest that consciousness shaped by the influence of speed may have difficulty with the very capacity that is most needful in relocalization: the ability to open space, or to put it another way, the ability to open to space, and thus actually inhabit a locality. Flatness becomes a habit of the mind, and so in every way we careen helplessly from image to image and word to word. The world becomes a magazine rack.

For Exhibit A, consider what passes for landscaping in car-centered, suburban USA: the flat expanses of green lawns extending from the street to the foundation plantings of geometrically-trimmed shrubbery, the lollipop trees set off by themselves. What is this, if not a place converted into a symbol, a symbol that moreover always seems to hover on the brink of having the last of its meaning wiped away like a film, leaving nothing at all? No wonder such places are seldom occupied by people – they are practically meaningless, flat, and devoid of experiential content. However, I suppose such designs do have the merit of offering no distractions for drivers whose endless forward plunge carries them by.

In communities with sidewalks and where pedestrian traffic is significant, by contrast, my experience is that the landscaping is almost always richer, more varied, more interesting, and more idiosyncratic in design. Space opens up in such places, and we are invited to slow down even further to appreciate it, thus coaxing yet more opening from it as we do, since as we open, things indeed open up to us. People occupy such spaces because they have meaning, and as they occupy those spaces, dimensions of significance, depths of feeling, and the richness of the physical environment grow in unison, encouraging human occupation, shared experiences, and growth.

All of which is to say something you might hear in any seminar on developing consciousness, whether the topic is Zen meditation, high-level business management, or tantric sex: slowing down matters.

Of course, it is also a little scary for many people to slow down enough to actually occupy and open space, which is perhaps an unacknowledged reason for the challenge of getting relocalizing efforts started while the current paradigm persists. One of the dimensions of experience that suffers in this cultural milieu is that of feeling and emotional depth; to slow down is to reacquaint one’s self with it. I take some comfort, however, in the knowledge that the process of rediscovering space can happen fairly quickly when circumstances slow us down, and what we will find there is likely something many people been feeling the absence of in their experience.

I used to drive a ’74 Volvo with then-new fuel injection technology, and on hot summer days sometimes the car would stall I would have to raise the hood to let the system cool off for a while before I could be on my way again. This happened once on I-94 and the rusty old vehicle happened to roll to a stop just outside my old hometown near a creek. Seeking refuge from the noise and heat of the expressway, I clambered down the embankment some distance away, sat down in the shade and cool soft grasses near the little watercourse, and looked up to see a kingfisher light upon a branch over the creek just overhead. I’d never seen one before. Although I was on my way to the wedding of a childhood friend, more than thirty years later that remains the most memorable event of the day.

So, it’s quite possible for space to start opening up for us, and very quickly, once we stop crushing distances with fuel. And fortunately, we weren’t born this way, so the path to our rehabilitation may be as simple as remembering. Children instinctively know how to open up and occupy space. As parents, we fight it, of course. Mystified by speed, our heads spinning like the wheels so often turning beneath us, we wonder why our children are so difficult to manage when they’re strapped into the car and the world goes by in an inaccessible blur. It really should be kind of obvious: as recent arrivals, children live to occupy and open space, and everything about the experience of motor travel militates against it. That the recent solution to this problem is another bad idea – mounting DVD players in the back seat to pacify the children and distract their minds – simply shows how insane our culture has become.

I have a photograph of my older daughter and niece in our back yard at about age 7. They are peering out from under a forsythia bush whose overgrown and arching branches conceals a hiding place they’ve outfitted with a kitchen and a bedroom, all made from sticks, leaves, and other yard debris, artfully arranged. The little girls had made a world in there—rich in meaning, full of feeling, and open to endless possibility. To the relocalization movement I offer this as an inspiration and a model. We don’t need to fly to a conference or drive ourselves crazy, we just need to slow down and play in our back yards.