Cutting Through Blog-ual Materialism

This post on another blog got me thinking about something.  I have a love-hate relationship with a lot of the "lifestyle" blogs that are out there - people sharing their experiences living outside the mainstream according to various principles like simplicity, homesteading, Waldorf, etc.  Obviously, I think they have something to offer (having started one of my own), but sometimes they leave a bad taste.  I'm seduced by the almost-requisite photos, always lovely and professional, and am prone to becoming equally seduced by the sense of inadequacy that at some point usually overwhelms me.  I wonder how a mother (as these bloggers almost always are) with four children finds the time to sew, spin, farm, bake 10 loaves of bread and knit a sweater every single day.  A good day for me means I got 6 or 7 diapers changed (quite a process with a combative toddler), I and/or the kiddo got cleaned and/or dressed, dinner got cooked, the dishes got washed, maybe some laundry got done, and if it was a really bonus day, I got some knitting or blogging or studying for my doula work done.  Even though I know what I'm up against in trying to get through my days, I still can't help but feel as though I'm not trying hard enough, somehow.  Either that or these mamas have amazingly, precociously independent children who aren't needing nursed or otherwise fed, changed, read to, comforted, or helped every five minutes.  It's hilarious to me now that I once thought I would work from home doing transcription while minding a toddler.  HA!  What naivete.  I'm saved, though, from feeling inadequate in that department by my brother-in-law and a dear friend who have both recently expressed that they can't get anything done either as a result of having to mind their children.  So in that light, I can only conclude that these superhuman bloggers are either unusually productive or that there is some dishonesty of reportage going on.  "Natural" and DIY lifestyles are trendy right now among a certain crowd, and there's an undoubted cache in that image of purity and industry.  I can understand the urge to portray your life in a certain light, and I recognize that I am also guilty of some similar sins of omission when I tell people what I'm into.  "Hey!  I knit things!  I bake bread!  We make beer!" and people are suitably impressed, but what I don't tell them is how long it took me to actually complete one hat or how many messy moments there were on the way to the Kodak one.  I'm not saying that any of these bloggers are insincere in their dedication to the lifestyles they portray, but sometimes I wonder how authentic those blogged-about portrayals are. 

All things considered, that's probably a trivial quibble, as I know that I alone am responsible for how good I feel about my life and what I do - what doesn't seem so trivial is a deeper disquiet that surfaces as I read.  For all the bloggers' claims toward rejecting the values of consumer-obsessed, stuff-obsessed, status-obsessed culture, I'm often aware of a not-so-subtle fetishization of possessions and accumulation.  Artful photos capture still-life montages of hip accoutrements, from vintage thrift scores to shelves and shelves arrayed with high-dollar all-wooden toys.  What exactly is the message here?  I certainly identify with and applaud the philosophy behind thrifting and wanting my child to have playthings that support our values, but the expression of those desires seems to have taken a different path in our household.  Maybe it's a function of disposable income; we simply don't have the money to go out and buy shelves full of anything, no matter how much we might value it.  And that still isn't, as I see it, really changing your fundamental relationship to stuff.  You might be making non-traditional choices that are unplugged from Big Consumerism, but it's still all about what you're accumulating, about being tied to possessions.

And we also started out with the grand idea that our daughter would have basically all "natural" toys, but we abandoned that in fairly short order.  We were given so many toys, and it seemed less wasteful to go ahead and use them, and certainly more polite to not refuse them.  We've gently steered people towards choices that we approve of when we've been asked, and there have been a couple things we've passed right along to others since they were just too far outside our philosophical boundaries.  And this goes for all the things we have and need for our daughter, from diapers to bowls.  So yeah, my kiddo has quite a few plastic things and she doesn't have a lot of the hip gear I see some mamas almost self-consciously pulling out of diaper bags, but she seems perfectly happy and we feel we're raising her right.

And all this leads me to ponder exactly what I'm doing here...  Why am I posting pictures of my yarn and talking up my resourcefulness?  Am I having a crisis of motivation as a blogger?  Maybe, though it's never a bad idea to do an occasional sort of self-authenticity check.  It's probably also time to go back and re-read Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, which, even though it's more narrowly about Buddhism, is really one of the best general lessons on authenticity I've ever read.  And lifestyle bloggers, if you think I might be talking about you, please don't take it personally.  I get it.  I really do love what we all do.  I just need to go think about it.   

And spring thinking...

Well, we've decided to forego planting a full in-ground veggie garden (yet again) this season in favor of keeping our regular herb garden and ordering up a share in our university's CSA.  We decided the amount of time and effort required to get trees down, beds put in, and everything started from seed and planted was too ambitious for this year.  I still want to get a rain barrel set up and a compost system started up again, since that's something we used to do but got away from in the last couple years.  I've been dealing with a recent flare of my illness, as I do most years around this time, so between that and the doula training, there just hasn't been much time to really think about anything else.  Even after over a decade of living with my health issues, at times - and this is one of them - it still catches me by surprise when I realize how much effort it sometimes takes just to get through the days, to do what I absolutely have to do.  This is especially true now that I am a mother, and I feel as though I watch a lot of time and energy just slip away without anything much to show for it.  It's then that I have to stop and reframe things.  If a happy, well-adjusted, thriving child isn't a good use of my time, then I don't know what is.  Also, there will be plenty of time to get around to gardening and canning and everything else I feel that I'm not doing now, once the kiddo is older and I can carve out a bit more space in the routine here and there.  I also know that signing up for life as a doula, which means that I will often be on call and will sometimes have to work very long hours, is going to bring additional challenges and require additional sacrifices, but I'm so thrilled to finally find something I feel passionate about doing that I am willing for now to do what it takes.

Every little hiccup with my health takes me to a sort of inner space for a brief round of navel gazing.  It used to be a scary place, full of fear and anger and pain, but now it's finally feeling like a place that stays a little brighter, a hole that's a little less deep, and one where I can more constructively deal with the issues that come up.  It's taken a lot of hard work on my part and a lot of generosity of spirit on the part of my husband (especially in the last couple of years, which have been very healing) to get here, but here I am, and the view is - for the most part - fine.

Are those buds I see?

   

What's making me happy now

For those of you waiting with bated breath to learn the fate of the muvv, I'll say it's coming along.  That's about all I'll say.  It's a mixed bag.  I've decided it will be mine (ahem) because with all the weird ambisexuality, it's not a great fit for my husband's hand.  It's not really a great fit for a human hand, come to that, but it works better on mine.  I'm working on the half-fingers now, which really aren't too tough, and I'm doing a fairly capable job of picking up the stitches along the fingers, something that made me quake with fear when I first read the pattern.  I'm also pretty proud that, aside from mixing up the stitch counts for the men's vs. women's size, it looks pretty decent for a first attempt at a hand covering-type thing.  Once I finish the fingers, I'll have to go back and pick up stitches to make the flap and then finish the thumb, and THEN start over on the ones that (hopefully) will actually be for my husband.  Progress has slowed a bit over the last few days because I'm horribly sick - another sinus infection.  I don't know whether it's funny-as-in-ha-ha or funny-as-in-kind-of-sad that as few posts as I've made over the past couple years, at least a couple of them have been made in the throes of a bad sinus thing.  I did break down, after fever and swollen lymph nodes hit, and go get an antibiotic.  I think it was partially due to denial, but also to the fact that I'm still nursing the kiddo and only want to take medication if it's absolutely necessary.  Apparently I didn't get started on it soon enough to prevent feeling even worse for a day or two, but hopefully things will be looking up soon.  Naturally, the kiddo has chosen now to pop her first year molars, so I've been up and down with her every 30 minutes or so for the last couple nights.

I always enjoy it when bloggers share what things are rocking their world at the moment, so since I've not had the mental energy the last couple of days to write anything for this space, I'll throw out a few of the things that are rocking my world these days.

I'm a huge fan of Björk, going back to when I was in high school and came across The Sugarcubes' newly-released record Life's Too Good.  My friends all thought I was nuts - nobody else seemed to like it much, but it remains one of my favorite albums to this day.  Every so often I dust it off and groove out all over again...  Screwball and totally uplifting.  Here are two of my favorite songs:

I'm a re-reader for sure, and I love visiting again and again with books that touched me somehow.  One of my favorite winter re-reads is Smilla's Sense of Snow, probably on my all-time top 10 fiction list.  On the surface a thriller, this book has metaphysical depths and passages of such astonishing beauty they leave me breathless.  I tend to think that it is in fact author Høeg, and not Smilla, who has the real sense of snow.  His descrptions of snow and ice in all their myriad forms are so vivid that I grow cold as I read.  Adding to the chill is the pervasive theme of alienation and the sobering colonial history of Greenland.  The plot itself takes a back seat to the storytelling.  Just beautiful, in a strange and lonely way.  I love to burrow deep underneath the blankets for this one.

Keeping up with the kind of chilly theme, there are the wintry tones in the breathtaking photographs of Hendrik Kerstens.  They remind me a lot of the gorgeous Xteriors series by Desiree Dolron, also a Dutch photographer.

    
Lotta Jansdotter designs the kind of stuff I go nuts for - clean, organic shapes that somehow have a bit of a vintage feel about them.  And apparently I'm a little slow, but I had no idea that IKEA sold fabric.  Really cool fabric.    

Some blogs I'm loving right now:  Crafting Japanese, a site about Japanese craft books.  I've always found the Japanese aesthetic sensibility to be fascinating.  This blog has patterns mostly for things only the "fantasy me" would wear, but that are a lot of fun to look at nonetheless.  Then there's The Zero Waste Home - probably not realistic, but highly motivational.  And then there's the sadly defunct Saartje Knits.  Thank goodness for archives.

Stay warm!

Oddments from the corners of my brain

Outside, there's a fresh skiff of snow and tonight it's supposed to be down to 4 degress.  That's Fahrenheit.  Amazing, then, that it's already time to start thinking about starting seeds for spring planting.  And the big question around here this year is whether or not to finally get hard-hearted (meaning, primarily, me) and take out a tree or two in the backyard so that we will have enough sunlight back there for a bigger garden.  We have a yard full of silver maples, which are not particularly lovely trees, and they can be problematic.  Their wood is fairly brittle and they are prone to storm damage.  We've had three significant ice storms in the years we've lived in this house, and those have definitely taken their toll on the maples.  Even a simple thunderstorm with strong wind is enough to bring down big chunks of tree, so it's hard to keep them from looking ratty around the edges.  Also, they have very aggressive root systems and can cause problems with underground pipes, and, in our case, foundations.  We have trees planted too close to our house, too close to our power lines, and my husband (ever the practical one) has been after me since we moved in to take at least a couple of them out.  I understand the arguments in favor of removal, and they are compelling, but my in my heart I feel that trees (lovely or not) are kindred souls and taking their lives is not something I find to be particularly desirable.  Certainly not easy or to be taken lightly.  When I stand with my hands on the bark of a tree, I can feel its life force flowing.  Trees have an amazingly potent energy, and cutting them down seems a bit like doing murder.  These trees are my friends.  But I also realize that nothing lasts forever and that I am far too sentimental for a life lived within the realities of nature.  Everything dies or ends or burns or simply fades away, and the best thing we can do when confronted by these realities is not to cling, but to mark the passages with due reverence and appreciation.  The trees might be going, but in their place would be a garden, full of new-growing life to nourish our bodies and spirits.  I expecially feel that it's important to have a nice garden for the kiddo, not only to grow good food to feed her, but also to have her participate in its care, now that she's old enough to toddle around and to express an interest in "helping out" with the household whirl.  I want her to know where food comes from, what is involved in producing it, and even more, to have her know and respect the cycles of the land.  That would be a great gift those trees could give to us in exchange for their lives.  So.

Shifting gears a bit, I've been thinking more and more about education for her in a larger sense.  It will still be a little while before she's ready for any formal education, but it's never too early to start thinking about what that's going to mean for us as a family; what form its going to take.  We've already decided against any mainstream education in a public school setting (or at least identified that as the least desirable route), and are seriously thinking about homeschooling, either by ourselves or (hopefully) in some sort of cooperative.  I've been doing a lot of reading about educational philosophies, particularly Waldorf and Montessori, and I'm sure I will have a lot to say here about those as I learn more and digest more.  But immediately, it finally occurs to me what I find so troubling about mainstream education in the United States.  It was articulated particularly well in this article about Waldorf education:  "...we know that in most ways public education represents and reinforces the culture of consumerism, competition, and materialism. At a Waldorf school, our children will not be treated as future job seekers or savvy consumers or high tech warriors in the battle against foreign competition, but as evolving spiritual beings who seek lives of meaning and beauty and inspiration."  Yes, yes, yes.  I'd been having trouble articulating for myself what it was that is so troubling about public schools, aside from the deplorable amount of learning that actually goes on and the conditions under which it occurs (or doesn't).  I don't want metal detectors to be a part of my child's everyday life.  I don't.  Everything within me cries out at the wrongness of that.  But there's more to my objections, except that I hadn't realized what they really are.  It's the cultural values that mainstream education presumes: that it's best to be the smartest, the fastest, etc; that what you know matters more than who you are (and that what you are taught matters more than what you know); that the Western model of civilization is superior.  It seems that what is being transmitted are not the skills needed to think independently and imaginatively, reason critically, and to make a good path through whatever life they choose, but rather a mass-produced, one-size-fits-all blueprint for being a successful little cog.  They want to make sure that you hit the treadmill running, that you will define success and measure happiness by the standards of our race-to-the-bottom consumer economy.  The educational environment is a sort of microcosm of larger society that either explicity or implicitly endorses a lot of values that I would prefer my daughter to have limited exposure to.  I feel like public education is mortgaging the souls of our children, and that's not where we want our kiddo to be. 

The responsibility of educating a child seems awesome and at times totally overwhelming, but then again so did breastfeeding, once, and we've sailed through that with flying colors.  It's all about trusting your instincts (our "guts" are smarter than we can imagine) and going with the flow.  

And I'm committing to attend a weekend-long birth doula training workshop in March - so excited!  It's been a while now since I decided to totally change course and pursue a career as a childbirth professional (hopefully some combo of doula/lactation consultant/childbirth educator), and it's nice that my enthusiasm and the conviction that this is absolutely the right path for me are strong as ever.

Hey, stranger

So... when last I posted (back in JULY, ouch), I had just lost my hard drive, and right on the heels of that, my power supply. These events, unbeknownst to me at the time, would mark the beginning of a long separation between me and my computer - and all things and activities that I had previously associated with my computer, like blogging. As my previous posting frequency will illustrate, however, such drastic occurrences were hardly necessary to throw me off my blogger's groove, but they pretty much guaranteed it would be a while before I got back here in the driver's seat. I've been snagging email and random internet time on our laptop in the months since, but it's not the same for me as being able to sit down here at my desktop and really get comfy and compose. But Santa got me back up and running, so here I sit trying to figure out where to start. I have to say that the computer disaster (one of several in a line of similar losses over the past year or so) has been yet another thing that, despite the short-term pain, has actually been good for me because it has forced me to get out of habitual patterns and to see where those patterns were holding me back. I've seen where I have been wasting too much time or spending too much energy involved with things that don't really matter so much. I've learned a lot of lessons about how to move my life towards greater simplicity and purpose, and I don't know when or if I would have learned those lessons had I not had the opportunity foisted on me by circumstance. I hope that this will also teach me to view adversity a bit differently... to find the unlooked-for lesson in those inevitable downers.

But enough of the serious for now - yes, there's been adversity and growth and lots and lots of mamahood (both joyous and trying), but there's also been quite a bit of knitting, and that's been pretty upbeat. In the run-up to Christmas, I knitted 7 toddler flap hats, including, finally, one for my own kiddo. I also knitted a newborn hat for some friends' new arrival, and made my mother a Saroyan for Xmas. Remember this Malabrigo? That became Mom's Saroyan, a worthy use for it finally found. It was a nail-biter up to the end, since I had to make the entire scarf (or "scarf-ette" as it were) out of the one hank, so imagine me weighing, measuring, and sweating the whole way. It turned out beautifully, though, and I will be adding a digital kitchen scale to my look-for list as I go thrifting. My analog scale just doesn't quite cut it for weighing yarn. The toddler hats were all well received, and I was extra-pleased because this is essentially my own pattern, which started out as a heavily modded version of the Hudson, and kind of went from there. I made a pact with myself to be much more organized with Xmas knitting for next year, and - most importantly - to get started before (ahem) Thanksgiving. Right now, I'm working on a balaclava and convertible mittens for my husband, which really should have been a Xmas gift (see previous statement). After that, I have a couple more projects that I have to get out for other people, and then, I plan to finally knuckle down to a couple projects for myself.

Photos to come... (did I mention I lost Photoshop in the conflagration?)

Roll with it, baby

I'm learning a lot about impermanence these days. My previous life, where I had time to do things like write? Not so much, anymore. And my hard drive where I had stored most of the writing I have done up to this point? Trashed - broken spindle. Not cheap to fix - we're talking upwards of $1000. So... it's likely to stay broken. Gone with it were no fewer than five drafts of posts I had been wanting to make here, so I am going to have to start over from scratch. When I have the time...

Is this thing on?

Well, let's see. Where were we? It's been interesting around here lately, to say the least. I'm on my third antibiotic since Christmas for sinusitis that won't go away and leaves me feeling exhausted and sick about all the time. My doctor thinks it wil require surgery to fix my crazily deviated septum and restore proper drainage to my sinuses before it's going to go away, but I'm reserving judgment until my upcoming appointment with an ENT specialist. I've known for quite a while that, structurally speaking, the inside of my nose looks like a train wreck, but fixing it has always been more of an optional issue as opposed to something I'd have to do just to get well. Also, I am fresh off of 48 hours of life with only 4 hours of sleep, thanks to my daughter, who - in spite of the fact that she becomes more beautiful, charming, and incredible with each passing day - is nonetheless going through the incremental teething process and has now added the 6-month growth spurt to her repertoire of angst just to keep things interesting. Never a dull (or well-rested) moment with a baby in the house. And, for a little dollop of icing on the cake, my computer contracted a nasty rootkit infection which - very long story short - is requiring me to wipe and reinstall everything on my hard drive. So for now, the blog will be flying photo-less, until I get Photoshop and all my camera utilities redone. Not that there's much to take a picture of, since all the upheaval of late has resulted in no knitting, though as we charge headlong into spring, I'm hoping soon to have photos of our garden going in, and more cooking and booze making in the works.

In the meantime, snagged from my email, here's a very recent picture of the kiddo, dressed for spring and saying goodbye to the last of the winter leaves.

In which I don't blog about anything I said I'd blog about...

Most bloggers probably go through this, so I am going to go ahead and join the club. When we create blogs, we probably have some specific idea of the kind of content we plan to create. We probably advertise this through the title of our blog and/or a sort of "statement of intent" post in which we toss out our raison d'etre. For many of us (myself included), it feels kind of lamely self-indulgent to think we're just going to blog about our daily lives as if anyone cared, so we come up with a point to it all, something we're genuinely interested in, mind you, but nonetheless something to actually blog about. Then, faster than you can say RSS, we (myself included) find ourselves writing nothing much about what we set out to write about, and instead are going on about our socks, our cats, and what we ate for breakfast (unless of course that was the intended focus of your blog, in which case, you were probably quite smart). Some bloggers manage to avoid this pitfall and demonstrate a dogged and enviable ability to keep their focus, but the rest of us, well... So let this be the post where I out myself as one of the haplessly distractable, and hope that you, in your burning quest for pertinent content, can find it in your heart to forgive me, and maybe even stick around for a while.

(Taking) Stock pile

I'll admit it - I'm a hoarder. If there's something I'm interested in, I have a prodigious ability to accumulate said thing in vast quantities. This has had consequences from the comic (my collection, as a child, of empty oatmeal and tea bag packets) to the tragic (times, as an adult, when I have pathologically overspent on these collections). Although I know that living simply isn't about deprivation, I nonetheless feel that the hoarding drive is something I have to learn to effectively manage as part of a committment to the simple lifestyle. The primary reason is that hoarding is, after all, about stuff - and about stuff in a way that feels unhealthy and out of balance to me. There's an aspect of hoarding that has the touch of frenzy, of obsession. I find that the desire to accumulate sometimes becomes more of a focus than the things I'm hoarding. And as there's a dimension to simplicity that tells us to slow down and take pleasure in the things we have without grasping for more, I realize how far off that mark my hoarding puts me.

I received some money for Christmas - on the one hand, perfect, as it allows me the luxury of buying some things for myself that I really wouldn't otherwise have the ability to buy. But the process of agonizing over how to spend the money has shed new light on my oft-dysfunctional relationship to the objects of my desire. When I found out I was pregnant, two things happened: we cinched up the financial belt tighter than ever and I sold a sizeable chunk of my library to raise some much needed funds (and clear some much needed space) for the impending arrival of our daughter. I had to make peace with letting go of some of my books and accept that there wasn't likely to be extra money to buy more for quite a while to come. Coming to terms with these two things was a bit rough at the start, but as time went on, a funny thing happened. Not only was I OK with the new status quo (nearly 20 boxes of books that had been stashed in a closet gone, and no books bought for months), but I found that getting away from buying also got me away from the obsessive dimension of the hoarding. As it fizzled out, I clearly felt the lifting of a burden. I had been completely unaware of the sense in which buying fed on itself, fueling the desire to buy more and creating an odd sort of stress. The time I had once spent thinking about acquiring stuff I now spent on other things, like knitting and baking and writing. Granted, as a new mother, my priorities underwent a massive shift anyhow, but there undeniably was an aspect of lightness that came from not being yoked to the wheel of getting.

Enter the Christmas money. I've caught myself once again sinking lots of time and energy into trying to decide what to buy, time that - you guessed it - I'm no longer spending on those other activities. In some ways, having this money to spend feels like a burden, and there's a part of me that almost longs for the uncomplicated state of being moneyless. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for the gift and no - I don't really wish I hadn't gotten it - but it has nonetheless been a powerful lesson in how not to relate to the material things in our lives. I still want books and I still plan to buy a few fun things for myself, but I really need to find a way to take the need out of it, to keep it healthy and fun and simple.

Holidays, posthumously

A couple years ago, Bill McKibben, known for his excellent writings on nature and the environment, penned a slim but meaningful little book called Hundred Dollar Holiday in which he makes a case for a less materialistic approach to Christmas. I only heard about the book a month or so ago, and it really struck a chord with me, thinking as I was about the first Christmas we were to spend with my daughter. Christmas has always been a time of great joy in my family and every year I look anxiously forward to the holiday season, which always makes me feel full of contentment, good will, and hope. The problem, though, was that we were planning on spending Christmas with my parents, who have a break-the-bank policy when it comes to holiday gift giving. Their generosity is magnificent and I appreciate the love that finds its expression in the package avalanche, but an avalanche it still is, and that's not something my husband and I are comfortable raising our daughter with. It's been hard to talk to my folks about this, since their "stuff is love" understanding makes them see the lack thereof as something stingy and Grinch-ish and criticizing it makes me feel like an ungrateful wretch (I'm not). It isn't that we want our child to have nothing, but I want to be sure she doesn't get the idea - at Christmas or at any time - that meaning is conveyed by "stuff." I want her to know the season for the best it has to offer, as a time of family togetherness and joy taken in the simpler pleasures. She was really too young this year for that to matter much, but it still seemed important to lay the philosophical groundwork for what my husband and I hope to share with our little girl.

As it turns out, Fate took matters in hand... My parents' house was burglarized while they were away (ironically as they were with us for our daughter's birth), and one of the things stolen was the Christmas gift fund. It made me sad to see their disappointment at not being able to have the "first Christmas with the granddaughter" they had envisioned, but at the same time I felt relieved that the materialistic aspects of that celebration were, of necessity, going to be curtailed. My daughter got a few gifts, and we each got a small amount of spending money, but the main pleasure of our time together was had in baking, eating, visiting with kinfolk and friends, and in the joy of admiring the newest addition to the family. It was quality time, and I doubt anyone really missed the tons of presents we usually have. I know I didn't.

Calls for an anti-consumer Christmas are nothing new, but McKibben somehow manages to put that across without a lot of the bah-humbuggery that usually accompanies similar critiques. He offers, instead, a way for us to re-envision traditions in the spirit of the season. Here's a quote:

"Our strategy with Christmas, then, has gone slightly awry. We've gotten used to spending more money to make it special. But if money's no longer as valuable as time, we're offering each other a devalued currency. If you spend ten or twenty hours buying Christmas presents each year, you could use the same ten or twenty hours to make presents--time that you'd be able to spend with children, spouses, friends."

My daughter is going to be old enough next Christmas for this to really start making an impact, so that gives us a year to work on making a plan for how we want it to unfold and then pitch it to those who will share the holiday with us. I'm making a pledge to myself now that we will make the majority of our gifts next season, and I'm going to start now with drawing up a project list and thinking ahead about how to make it happen. It will be interesting to see how our own Christmas traditions develop as a family, and I think this is a great place to start. I'll close the same way McKibben did:

"But the greatest cost may be the way it's changed us, the way it has managed to confuse us about what we really want from the world. We weren't built just for this life we find ourselves leading--we were built for silence and solitude, built for connection with each other and the natural world, built for so much more than we now settle for. Christmas is the moment to sense that, the moment to reach for the real joys."

Orienting

I wanted to share a little bit of background on the hows and whys of this blog before actually getting started; a road map, if you will, for finding the way through a tangle of hopes, dreams, ideas and ideals... Our lives are a process of evolution, one thing leading to another, and - if we're lucky - we continually learn and grow from our experiences. It's interesting to sit down from time to time and look back over our lives, seeing if we can trace the tap root of how we came to be where we are today. For me, to start with, I've never been exactly what you would call mainstream. I've been accused of a lot of things, but being "ordinary" has never been one of them. I've always been a bit off-center, in my own head and doing my own thing. People have referred to me variously as a free spirit, a weirdo, a freak, a geek, artsy fartsy, a hippie and a throwback (although with that last, I'm not sure if they mean that something about me recalls an earlier time or whether they mean I'm the kind of creepy three-eyed fish that if they caught, they would hastily throw back into the pond). A lot of my life, I think, has been a search for the best (for me) way to express this desire I have to live meaningfully, apart from the herd. I'm not saying that I have finally found the ultimate answer, but for the last couple of years there's been a sort of convergence, a coalescing going on. The strands come from a long-standing interest in ecology, over a decade as a vegetarian, several years now of having a meditation practice, and - most recently and perhaps most importantly - the fact that I am about to become a mother. Where I've landed is a strong desire for and readiness to commit to a life where simplicity, sustainability and self-sufficiency are the guiding principles. I've gotten really into urban homesteading, making more of our own things, in leading a deliberate, meaningful, and purposeful life. My husband and I have already been taking some steps in this direction - "greening" our lives, gardening, cooking most of our own food, scaling back and paring down, but we're still relative newbies with a lot to learn and a lot of ground to cover. What I hope to chronicle here is that journey, with all its challenges and rewards, as my new family and I set about to stake our claim.

Oh - and when I said that I am about to become a mother, I mean imminently. I am due any day, so that's sure to make blogging interesting, at least for a while.