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April 23, 2012 by Angie

Deep Thoughts About Building Sanctuary in a Disposable World (+ $125 Value Giveaway!)

Recreational pot smoking was never one of my talents. I was just putrid at it.

In college I was the killjoy in the corner, saying nothing for fear my lips might stretch hugely & stay that way. My boyfriend solicitously packed us more bowls. Surely my coolness would return, given the right conditions.

Would I care to order bread sticks? Chant softly about Jah People?

No. A spliff big enough to make me believe we were in an impoverished Caribbean island-nation did not yet exist. For one thing, his friends were white. As in a kind of white that goes beyond skin tone.

Their souls, I thought stonedly, must be made of soft, non-nutritive bread sticks.

Fraternity boys. Nicknamed after bodily secretions, these were the future corporateurs of America. Literally.

Marijuana cannot soothe such folk. Studies have shown it actually makes them bark.

Far Out

At least the hippies before my time had made gestures toward brotherly love, consciousness uplift, etc. Of course, back then, before the plant had been hybridized to produce higher & higher THC levels, the marijuana was a lot gentler.

Perhaps this made young folk feel tender toward one another. It was the dawning of the age of Aquarius, after all.

My day was more like the dawning of the age of Applebee’s.

Mystical connection with anyone or anything was no longer the point, even ostensibly. The point was to disconnect further so that the pain of lack of connection no longer hurt.

Homelessness comes in many different forms.

Hooking Up

Now more than ever, many of us seek respite from the disposable world, with its disposable products, species & people.

Finding community within such a cultural landscape can be difficult enough, with or without recreational lubrication. Communing with spirit, however one may define such, can be downright daunting.

(Going to Costco, for instance. Once you’ve shown your member card, your soul is instantly & painlessly tethered to a kite string to wait outside until your body has finished hunting for savings in the great white forest. They carry Kerrygold cheese, though, from pastured cows, & so, God help us, it may be worth it.)

So does locating a sense of the sacred then require a cave, a prophet-like air &, ideally, the Himalayas? Perhaps with a side of burning sands?

Well, good ole American transcendentalist literature tells us one reliable method for pulling off the whole finding-sanctuary & right-livelihood-thing could be a shack in the woods. And so I lusted for one.

This is how Johnny D later snared me like a love-hunter in a great brown forest. He had laid his trap: one room cabin, mountain, nonstandard employment.

…Also a prophet-like air, enhanced by the worst thrift store clothing ever engineered.

Thoreau's Cabin. Ours was not as cute.

Dumpster Divas

Pretty soon that cabin was a bustling little shack o’ life. It’s amazing how many children, pets, Mason jars & Dixie cups of 1-Shot paint one room can contain if only you keep building shelves. And building them. (Note: Children will not remain on shelves, regardless of threat.)

Thoreau may not have approved. This was not exactly a spiritual retreat in the woods, but our actual way of life. Our home & labors were – then & now – both sustenance, connection to community & source of starry-eyed wonder. (On unusually good days, anyway.)

As well as recreation. Though we’ve lived many places – rural, suburban, urban, trailer park – since the love-forest, our date nights will probably always involve scrounging for wood.

There is nothing more romantic than trying to laugh quietly when both of you get stuck in a construction dumpster, from which it is probably illegal to be harvesting scrap wood to make into signs, furniture & home décor.

Not exactly a night out at your neighborhood Applebee’s.

Flare!

Which is not to say Applebee’s & their ilk are soulless. Their boards of directors most likely consist of our own frat boys all grown up, after all. Salt of the earth.

If, in a disposable culture, fraternity houses substitute for Community while thoughtlessly ingested substances stand in for Communion, then the food & décor of mid-level chain restaurants must count as Hearth & Heritage.

From Marilyn Monroe to vinyl records to, like, whole snowshoes on the walls, we’re supposed to form an emotional connection.

And we do. At least, Johnny D & I do: Those old-looking signs straight out of the corporate office, for instance, induce in us a great gnashing of the teeth.

(Assuming they still decorate this way. My grandmother died a few years ago, so I haven’t actually been in an Applebee’s/Ruby Tuesday/Friday’s/Bennigan’s/Chili’s/Chotchkie’s in a while.)

Perhaps putting fake memorabilia on the walls goes beyond lulling the rest of us into buying more Kaj’n Chik’n, though. Maybe, secretly, the décor soothes the suits, too. Makes them feel a part of something bigger than themselves. Something fun, even.

They were never very cool when young, you know? Who else barks during “No Woman, No Cry?”

Yippie Kay Yay

Nor can their jobs be easy, truly. Imagine spending the better part of a lifetime convincing oneself that short-term growth at long-term cost is Important & Good.

Wrangling neverending profit from manufactured belongingness & pretend foodstuffs, sourced from fellow fraternity brothers’ Darth Vader companies, served to unsuspecting grandmas.

All for the purpose of populating a 3k square foot home with as many gadgets as possible. From which warmth & security will – surely — arise.

The anxiety must be horrendous. No wonder corporate executives of all stripes need annual retreats.

Getting high on nature calms them, like us, given our shared core humanity.

(It seems they may need special teambuilding games, challenges & amenities to make the effort worthwhile, however, according to this.)

Perhaps it’s their fraternity roots. Initiations often took place out in the woods, as I recall. Forest & fire add a certain gravitas, even for dubious ceremonies meant to seal dubious bonds of brothershipness.

If only…we could just sort of make them STAY in the woods, or out among the cattle. Just rock the simple life for a while, transcendentalist-style. Eventually, perhaps, they might pick up on some sense of the sacred.

Then maybe they might reconsider their policies of crapping all over the planet.

Click image to buy this print!

Walden Schmond

By golly if they don’t make this difficult, though, by deciding the danged trees are disposable, too.

Yes, this: Genetically modified trees. Despite the universally restorative comfort of woods, of simple homes made from free or cheap, locally available materials, of hot homemade meals within, made from actual food, grown in actual clean, rich soil.

You know, our true common cultural landscape.

Well, it wasn’t enough to mess up the food, soil, air & water. Now it’s time to go after the trees & thus the iconic cabin materials as well.

Whoa ho-ho, cowboy-Rastafarians!

Amongst the gigantic moral, ethical, environmental, practical & spiritual questions regarding genetically modified trees lie these burning questions:

How will Johnny D & I harvest scrap wood for signs & stuff if the trees are patented, the way frankenseeds are now? Will the wood watch us when we sleep?

And: Can we just go ahead & officially get marijuana genetically modified, too? So that we all may forget, blessedly forget, real trees, forevermore?

Please, mon!

Grooviness

Let’s hold hands now, brothers & sisters.

In the spirit of community, of gratitude, of good ole solid wood, of handmade by real humans, & in the spirit of pastured cows boldly showing their faces at Costco, we’re having us a giveaway.

If you’d like a chance at winning The Farm’s Fanciest Cameo Cow Coat Rack below, leave us a comment describing how you build sanctuary into your home &/or life, wherever it may be.

Extra ways = extra points. Signing up for the Bare Root Studio newsletter = another extra point. Be sure to put your total number of entries at the end of your comment. Let’s not get crazy here – one comment only, please.

Sharing this giveaway across the vast social webs would be awfully nice of you, though….

Winner will be announced on May 3!

This post shared on Real Food Wednesday, Freaky Friday, Fight Back Friday & Sunday School!

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March 4, 2012 by Angie

Creating vs. Destroying (or: Winning Arguments with a Dead Father)

I don’t know about your father, but nobody could ever accuse mine of delicate phrasing. However, his vulgarity did betray a certain elan & interest in the natural world.

Someone else might affirm an obvious question with: Does the Pope wear a funny hat? Or that all-time earthy favorite: Does a bear crap in the woods? Mix n’ match for increased hilarity.

In our house, we might ask something like: “Dad, can we go get ice cream?”

His response: “Frog’s ass water-tight?”

Wait. Read that again. Can you imagine a frog sitting at the edge of a pond? You’ll agree its nether regions must indeed have some sort of seal.

Stupid Frogs

Hopefully it’s a very strong seal. Frogs share the planet with us, after all. And we’re into kinky stuff.

Take Atrazine, for instance. Though banned in Europe, the US still sells 80 million pounds of it every year as a pesticide. It’s one of our most popular tap water contaminants & endocrine disruptors. Who can imagine surviving the millennia before this magical elixir hit the market fifty years ago to bathe our corn, sugar & lawns in tender caress?

Turns out frogs’ asses are not Atrazine-tight, though. Buzzkills. Maybe they’re developing all those creepy reproductive abnormalities on purpose, just to make our really cool friends at Syngenta look bad.

Though, admittedly, our own bits & pieces aren’t Atrazine-tight, either. Turns out the pesticide works similarly in us, converting testosterone & androgen into estrogen & giving rise to aromatase, the enzyme that flips on cancer cells & makes tumors grow.

No worries. Our really cool friends at Syngenta have got that covered, too. They also make the leading breast cancer drug, Letrozole!

It’s an aromatase blocker. Not that aromatase causes cancer. Because it don’t. And that’s why Atrazine is totally safe, stupid.

….Were he here for this discussion, this would be the point at which my father would shake his head over my antics, by the way.

Generation Gap

Sis, he would say, the world isn’t made up of puppies & perfume. He would actually pantomime spraying on perfume, eyes half-lidded to convey girly privilege.

Nothing made my father happier than instigating both fury & helpless laughter at the same time.

Except, possibly, the time he caught me shopping at The Gap. In a mall, no less. This moment, this alignment of the heavens, lit his whole being in euphoric flames.

Look, the only reason I was there was to get a pocket-y bag for my new job. My youngest was heading to kindergarten & it was the first time I’d worked outside the dirty hippie home in years. I’d forgotten how people, like, carried stuff. I mean, without a pack animal handy.

Go to The Gap, my coworkers whispered. All your dreams will come true.

Certainly my father’s did. For years thereafter I heard: “Idealism can only take ya so far, Sis! Next thing you know, you’re standing in line at The Gap….”

Intersexed Shepherds of the 21^st Century

In my father’s view, idealism must die to make room for practicality & thus a brighter future. Circle of life, baby.

Playing with words, plants & paint, for instance, could not go on forever. Not if my husband & I wanted our children to get a shot at being future Gap shoppers.

And, you know, we did. To a degree. If only so they could learn to see through that false life rather than crave safety via its excesses. Those who’ve known poverty will get what I mean here.

So, out with the old, in with the new. Can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. Or squeezing them through frog testicles, as it were.

In fact, if pesticides weren’t working so hard for us out in the fields & golf courses of America, we wouldn’t have the leisure to fool with little things, like blog posts about dead fathers. Or, say, the pretty wildlife linens at EmbroideryEverywhere, top of post, which will hopefully never, ever get sucked into the vaults of Bed, Bath & Beyond.

But Dad, I would say to him. Selling handmade is a business, too. Since when did embroidery ever kill anybody?

When its children starved because it wouldn’t stop fartin’ around & get a real job, he might answer.

National Parks Promote Anti-American Sentiment

It’s not that my father didn’t love the natural world. He did, deeply, & with zeal. Touring the national parks as a child had left a huge impression on him, which he in turn insisted on passing to his own children. I am forever in his debt for this.

He & I experienced wild places differently, however. For him they were separate from real life, from work, from himself. More like recreational pods. Wonderful backdrops against which to win.

“Get up here, Sis!” my father would shout from the top of a mountainette, straddling a waterfall. “You’re not a baby anymore!”

True that. Seven was too old to gaze into the depressions in boulders, filled with bits of water, lichen, life & story.

But later I would find I was not alone. Like Nikki from Queenbeeloved, above, who can clearly see whole dimensional worlds within gourds, complete with amber & honeycomb & golden resin, this planet does indeed contain multitudes. We are legion.

Newsflash: Asses in General Not Water-Tight

Nope, there are no real divisions. Only porous membranes, between us & the world beyond ourselves. Between work & play, between my father & me.

Not even between Atrazine & our really cool friends at the pesticide corporations, as they eventually will begin to see. They will eat the corn & the sugar & they will drink the water, too. Their testicles will shrink & their babies will sicken, too, assuming they’re able to make babies at all. Their wives, too, will find lumps in their breasts.

No one will win this game. Even their money will slip away like water over rock.

And so, out of compassion for those who work in Big Ag, & in the can-do spirit of my father, we, the multitudes, must stop them. Before they fill our world completely with six-legged puppies & poison perfume.

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January 30, 2012 by Angie

How to CHOOSE to be Thin, Rich & Entitled!

susansdolls.com

Sometimes the scariest people on the planet are the self-improvers. The career go-getters. The weight-losers. The winners.

They will bring you down, baby. They will bring you down to Chinatown.

Exhibit A

A few years back I taught night class literature to adults in college. Cops, secretaries, auto workers & IT folk, mostly. People from working class backgrounds similar to mine. Fairly successful in their careers & looking to achieve more. Busy people, laudable goals.

And nice people. Except they often weren’t. The most vocal ones, anyway.

One of my brilliant strategies for spinning dull & hoary old stories into, say, polyester, was by teaching about the historical contexts of the works. You know: politics, peasants, the aristocracy, all that.

But then…I would ask how these historical situations might relate or not to the current political climate.

Well, that got everybody all fard up.

Entitlement Programs

This is one of my favoritest terms. It just sounds so wonderfully princessy.

So my students brought up social welfare issues a lot. For example: They felt much sympathy for hardworking 19^th century Russian serfs & much disgust with the nobility, those fops who just inherited wealth.

Toward fellow Americans, however, their feelings ran exactly opposite. Poor people were slimes living off entitlement programs, while the richest folks had obviously done something right. This was self-evident.

Put another way: modern American poor people had made bad choices, while the rich had made good ones.

Simple. Easy. Nearly everyone agreed.

So, um, why was one student crying & another calling me a communist?

Exhibit B

We’ll get back to that cliffhanger in a moment. Let’s talk now about people who’ve lost significant amounts of weight &/or otherwise gotten healthier through diet.

They’re looking good. They make jazz hands. We ooh & ahh.

They have every right to be proud of themselves. These are folks who have worked hard & maintained focus despite plenty of temptations.

They were not born thin. It was not handed to them on a plate, as if they were the Russian aristocrats of body type. No, they’ve sweat blood, sweat & tears to get that way.

Much like going back to school as an adult, as I & my students did. All of us were or had been some combination of parents, single parents, caregivers of our own parents or grandparents, full-time workers &/or multiple job-holders.

How did you lose the weight? the rest of us ask excitedly.

Low fat, they’ll say, for those who still believe that load of lard about saturated fat being satanic. Low carb, for others, primal/paleo, whatever.

For the chemically-entranced mainstream, there’s Nutrisystem & the like. Or vomiting & self-flagellation.

There are plenty of specific answers. What they generally boil down to is this, though: Good choices.

Which is really to say: moral rectitude. Because we all know, secretly, that fat people, like poor ones, are lazy. Lazy in body, mind, thought & deed.

Thin is the New Nobility

To the modern observer, the Russian peasantry seem like far more picturesque poor people than our own. For one thing, they were skinny. And those peasant blouses were cool.

But just as fat used to be the sign of prosperity, since only the wealthy had access to large amounts of food (brought to them by their morally inferior little helpers, the serfs), now thin is the new nobility.

Why? Because only the minority can achieve it in a world of fake food, environmental toxins & medical care dominated by a medical industrial complex almost too ludicrous to be believed.

And yes, statistically, this minority tends to be on the richer side of things, while the obese tend to be poorer. Inequity in quality food access will do that.

But On a More Communal Note

As our food system gets wackier & wackier, soon we’ll no longer be able to tell the difference between the rich & the poor. We’ll all be fat!

Think of it this way: So one person can afford to avoid eating food from cans, which he’s anxious to do due to the BPA content. This isn’t common or even common school-taught knowledge, so this person would have to be self-educated on such matters. Great, right? He’s making good choices.

However. The poor family on the other side of town eats from cans all the time, because they’re cheap. (Bad choices.) Then they pee. And the municipal water system cannot filter out BPA, any more than your personal water filter can. So it leaches into the groundwater, just as the richer person’s antidepressant-laced pee does.

The groundwater: From which we all drink, bathe, cook, live.

What happens to our bodies, over time, bobbing around in this chemical cocktail? Could these things, among others, be linked to cancer & other diseases? Or – most dreaded of all — obesity?

Oh, pshaw.

The United States of Willpower

As Americans, we love to believe personal willpower is THE answer to every single blessed problem on this planet. Our choices will determine our future, absolutely.

Fat? Lose weight! Poor? Work! Or work harder!

Correspondingly, we think we can do everything ourselves if we just try harder. Be better. Visualize better.

(No shocker that one of our most popular spiritual movies taught us how to visualize…sports cars. It also noted that an entire continent, Africa, suffers due to…wait for it…its hundreds of millions of people & 50-some nations not visualizing better lives for themselves. Why they be so stupid?)

The alternative is to admit vulnerability. To larger systems, larger events.

This is not easy. Which is why – back to the classroom – one of my students was crying & a couple others looked ready to kill.

Pretty, Pretty Princesses

After all the Fox News-fueled talk about the dreaded entitlement programs, one night I passed around a list of federally-funded college programs. Aka, entitlement programs. Some students were dismayed to see that their Pell Grants & work-study meant they weren’t, in fact, going back to school all by themselves, commando-style.

The loudest of my students sighed & whisper-screamed to his neighbors that I was a communist.

Discussion ensued anyway. Developing critical thinking skills is essential, according to the college’s brochure. Besides, next on the syllabus was the Inferno, so God knew we needed to keep things lively.

It all began innocently enough. An Iraq vet noted that he’d never thought of it that way, how his grandma’s Medicare – which she’d paid into – left her descendents largely free to pursue their own dreams rather than footing her medical bill. Like the VA – paid into with his service – was doing for his kids. He didn’t like either of those programs & would scrap them if he had his way, but still, food for thought.

Loud Man said those weren’t the real entitlement problems. It was the welfare people, dammit. They were the lazy, immoral ones who were draining the system dry.

And so the mother in the front row on TANF (a whopping $288/month for a family of three) started crying. She’d been disabled by the (groundwater-poisoning) environmental toxins at her dry cleaning job & had been denied disability but was getting an education so she could try for an office job.

Iraq Vet stood up & threatened Loud Man. TANF Mom ran out of the room.

Loud Man said, “Good riddance!”

Teacher wondered if someone else might take over her literature class right about then.

Counting Blessings

Was Loud Man bad? An evil guy?

Not at all. Just fragile. He was doing what we all tend to do when we feel our worldview has been threatened: fight.

It can be painful to accept that none of us achieves anything by ourselves, ever. Whether that help is from a government or the assistance of friends, family & mentors, we all need it. And even with help, it still ain’t easy.

Even the Russian aristocrats, born into wealth the way our own Mitt Romneys were, still needed a huge population of serfs to maintain that status. Hence the Bolshevik Revolution.

The good news is, though most of us have to work hard for that better career or better body – & sometimes, even then, it just doesn’t happen – all of us still have privileges. Brain & breath, to begin. If you can walk, too, why, consider yourself lucky, indeed.

It behooves us to remember this, often. Preferably before opening our mouths about the struggles of others.

But there’s more good news: clean water, clean food & clean air aren’t privileges. They’re birthrights, common to us all, even those poor Africans who just can’t dream up a better continent.

The bad news is this: We’re going to have to fight for them. Anything less, such as fighting with one another over largely meaningless differences fueled by corporate media, would be a very poor choice.

Let’s put on our peasant skirts & get our fat asses to work instead.

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December 31, 2011 by Angie

So What if You Don’t Eat Meat? It’s 2012.

The Farm's Fanciest Cow Cameo Coat Rack

Recently a dear friend said he believes meat-eating is a vast, right-wing conspiracy. He was joking, partly.

I laughed automatically, because I, too, tend to be a bleeding heart, animal & poor people-lovin’ liberal, & this is just the kind of thing we do together. When we’re not busy grinding elitist granola out of bloated governmental programs, that is.

I was not laughing about the meat, though. That’s because I don’t care.

Other People Do

Yes. They do. A lot. Hoo boy.

You can’t go anywhere these days without hearing about someone’s courageous decision to stop eating meat & how the light shineth upon them forever thereafter.

Which is not to say I believe the choice to not eat meat, or animal products at all, is not terribly sincere. Some of the nicest, most intelligent, most thoughtful & most planet-loving people I know (like my friend) have made this choice from their innermost hearts.

I just know I was not one of them.

When I became a vegetarian over twenty years ago, it was largely a textural issue. Not geopolitical, agroempathetic or hydroelectrical texture, either.

Just- texture. I don’t like meat. I do like the amazingly creative things vegetarians & vegans have done with vegetables & nuts. I also like fish, some years, when my body asks for it (which technically makes me a part-time pescatarian, I suppose, a club with no charter.) And always dairy & eggs. Not big on a lot of grains or sugar. Have seen the true, dark face of processed soy.

Not that this is really any of your business.

Let’s Snuggle

But while I’m still in a sharing mood here: I do care very much where my dinners come from, how they were grown & how they are prepared.

Nourishment, of my life, my body, my family, my communities (including all species, especially microbial ones) & my planet, is dead serious round these parts. In a bumbling, sexy kind of way.

Also: I care about others being able access the quality of food I’m able to enjoy, regardless of age, health, income or location. This is sexy, too. It is.

For a quite a while, the most vocal advocates, if not the only advocates, for the planet via the plate were vegetarians. They were the ones looking at the bigger picture of the industrialized food system & what it was doing to us as a species, not to mention our fellow species.

Ooh, they’ve taught us all so much. Major sexy credit due here.

Not Quite as Hot

Among other things, the vegetarians have always been right about factory-farmed meat, of course. It’s going to kill us all quite dead, but which way first is up for grabs.

Will it be through the massive environmental damage? Spread of disease via filthy conditions? Instant karma for the atrocious conditions of the CAFOs?

Wait, wait! Worldwide antibiotic resistance? Just the plain ole slowly-developing health problems from corn & soy-fed animals, who are not meant to eat corn & soy, not to mention the pesticides on their feed?

How about something more exotic, like that weird, unidentified entity from genetically modified animal feed causing infertility in animals &, presumably, humans?

Or perhaps the growth hormones in the meat & dairy? Maybe soon we’ll be growing genitals out our eyeballs. It might become fashionable, albeit briefly. Start saving now for your children’s surgery to enhance their eyeball assets.

There’s just so much out there to worry about. But arguments for or against eating meat or animal products in general?

Meh. Passé. Perhaps it’s just me, but I fail to see how a creamed GMO soybean sundae is a whole lot less cruel than a glass of conventional milk.

Distraction from the most important issues, these arguments are, much like the those screaming pundits in the media. Liberal v. conservative or what have you get bleached of meaning in a world like this. Maybe this is not the worst development.

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On Garden Perves & Farmers Hitting the Streets

Once upon a time my friend may have been closer to stereotypically correct categories: Enlightened people eat little to no meat, smile quaveringly at the butterflies & never suffer heart attacks.

Fat folks, on the other hand, gorge on barely-dead carcasses because they’re hateful, greedy freaks hell-bent on shooting us all into the stratosphere on a big, burning ring of methane.

(Is that what I thought, too, in those early veggie years? Oh, maybe a little. Maybe there might have been a teeny bit of smugness. I don’t know who told you I went around dressed like Gandhi, though.)

These divisions are not true ones, obviously, & never were. For one thing, I’ve known some vicious veggies in my time. Vitamin B-12 depletion did not seem to soothe their native aggression. I would not trust them alone with any garden vegetable, ever.

For another, well, for Gandhi’s sake: These days there’s a great big & far more nuanced world of positive action connecting plate to health to planet.

Here are just a few:

Grass farmers; seed savers; school lunch activists; creative foragers; rural farmers marching in NYC; raw milk activists; urban gardeners; GMO freedom fighters; traditional cooks teaching the next generation how to feed themselves appropriately & gain independence from processed foods; food desert-eliminators….