Being busy for the sake of being busy ……Tim Kreider wrote in the NY Times recently how we worship busyness as a virtue and are addicted to it. Yet, it fills life with meaningless activity, and I have caught myself at it. Checking Facebook or email five times a day, snacking, driving around shopping, hovering over the children, staying late at the office because of peer pressure (because working hard is a virtue here in America, right?), even when the day’s work is done. Busyness is not only a mechanism of procrastination, but also a shield against delving deeper into life in general, filling emptiness with busyness. I say “work smart” not “hard,” and fill the rest of your time with meaning. It’s quality that counts, not quantity.
energy for the future
Not coal, not oil, not natural gas, not wood, nor nuclear are energy solutions for the future regardless of what the politicians are or are not saying. “Drill baby drill” and “fracking,” or "liking coal," are indications of increasing desperation, and talk of energy independence without investing in alternative energies is simply a short-term stopgap measure and not a long-term solution. Closing our eyes and ears to the inevitable, that some time in the not-so-distant future we’ll have depleted the reserves of non-renewable energy sources, is childish and irresponsible. The sooner we accept responsibility that the world is changing and that we must change with it, the better for all of us.
A large roof with southern exposure is ideal for solar panels that can meet your hot water needs and/or supplement your electric needs. State and federal tax credits make them worthwhile considering, and they can also be leased now. Consider triple-pane windows (the standard now for new construction in Germany) and thicker and better insulated walls to avoid heating the outside (in Europe walls are usually about 12” thick). Geothermal systems use the constant 55o subsurface temperature to heat and cool with much less energy input than conventional HVAC systems and the federal government offers a 30% tax credit on equipment and installation costs. Passivhaus is a German concept of insulating a house so much that not much energy gets lost, period. Inevitably, the price for non-renewable energies will keep rising. Investing in one of the renewable energy sources for your home is like an insurance policy against higher and higher utility bills.
Renewable energy sources are indefinitely available, they never deplete, how great is that. Solar panel applications, for example, are now ubiquitous in Europe and many other countries. We saw them everywhere in Italy this summer.
are you a cultural creative?
It is quite possible that you have never heard of them. It is also quite possible that you are one of them, or us. It is estimated that we – yes, I am definitely one of them - are more than 80 million strong in this country alone, and that there are about 250 million of us worldwide. The funny thing about the Cultural Creatives is that they don’t realize how many others share their values. Cultural Creatives believe in authenticity, in quality over quantity, in contributing to a healthy planet, in transparency, in many of the values that people embrace who are into sustainable and green living, homesteading, the farm-to-table and locavore movements, sustainable agriculture, and so forth. The Occupy Wall Street Movement is full of Cultural Creatives, but fizzled because of lack of leadership and lack of realization how many actually share these new values; dare I call it a newly emerging consciousness structure?
If this has perked your interest, you can find out more about The Cultural Creatives and whether you are one of them, on Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson’s website. They are the sociologist psychologist husband-and-wife team who gave this emerging phenomenon its name and wrote a book about it in 2000.
Filmmaker Frigyes Fogel made a movie about the movement, its ideas and values, and is now planning a TV station.
education for the future
Imagine if school was designed for the specific purpose of bringing out the best in each child instead of trying to create corporate drones, teaching to the test, or catering to the supposed needs of “The Economy;” imagine if your child’s teacher looked each one of her students in the eyes each morning, shook their hand, and greeted them individually by name; imagine if school was designed specifically around your child or teenager's emotional developmental stage; imagine if school was designed to wake up your children’s creative thinking abilities; imagine if school was designed around seeing the relationships across subjects instead of segregating subjects into neat compartments (that don’t exist in reality). The Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner conceived such a school system about one hundred years ago that does all of the above, it is the Waldorf school movement.
love those germs
Enough fighting already! We fight too much – enemies, wars, illnesses, death. They are all simply another aspect of the same thing. Balance, not eradication, is the answer.
A little dirt, a little dust, a healthy amount of bacteria is actually good for you. Most of us know by now about the drawbacks of antibiotics – those indiscriminate bacteria killers prescribed much too liberally to humans and animals over the past decades in an effort to kill all the “bad” bacteria. A new book was recently published on the possible relationship between our modern germ killing frenzy and the surge in recent civilization and autoimmune diseases, possibly even autism.
So eat your yoghurt, sauerkraut, kimchi and pickles (naturally fermented, not the supermarket vinegar kind), drink your kefir, kombucha, wine, beer or mead, and clean your home and body with gentle and natural cleaning and cleansing products instead of those germ killing antibacterial soaps and cleaners.
lawn mowing goats
I love it, the NYC Parks Department rents goats to “mow the lawn” at Freshkills Park in SI, as the NY Times reported recently. Now here is a solution in the spirit of our times. Eco solutions go mainstream, there is definitely hope on the horizon!
to weed or not to weed
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Weeds are not “bad” per se, after all they are part of the biodiversity of the plant kingdom. It is more a matter of perspective how we see them. Out of laissez-faire I have weeded relatively little in both our vegetable garden as well as the rest of the garden this year, and I am finding that the whole garden is just so filled with all kinds of plants, more so it seems than in other years. Our bees are happy, wild flowers and herbs are spreading, vegetables are self-seeding from one year to the next – it’s incredibly abundant. Some “weeds” are actually edible, such as dandelions or purslane for example. Other “weeds,” which we call wild flowers, are pretty in the garden or beautiful in a vase gathered in big generous bunches. Others spread an incredible scent, as does our wild and wildly growing honey suckle. Making weeds my allies, instead of “fighting” them as enemies, is a much more cooperative approach, as The Healthy Environment Group and Bill Finch explained recently in separate write-ups.
education is not filling a bucket but lighting a fire
...a recent fortune cookie insert. Something to think about.
small is beautiful...
...or quality over quantity. McMansions, ever growing restaurant portion sizes, jumbo eggs, jumbo strawberries, big SUVs – why has bigger become better? The earth is finite. It is physically impossible for everyone of 7 billion people (and growing) to attain the standard of living we call the American Dream.
Something is sustainable when it self perpetuates without growing beyond its original size and without using up the principle. In our irrational quest for ever more we are shamelessly gobbling up our principle - natural resources, rainforest, soil (the Black Dirt here in our area) – without replenishing this precious capital.
When we begin appreciating quality over quantity we begin to shift our priorities to holistic ones. Think small sun ripened sweet and intense tasting strawberries. Think small eggs with deep yellow yolks, strong shells, and egg whites that don’t run, fresh from the farm. Think small zero energy house (the average American home was under 1000sf in the 1950s!).
Smaller and better oftentimes costs more than larger and of lesser quality, but there is nothing wrong with paying more for better quality - and that may mean saving somewhere else.
free clothes drier
When energy prices spiked several years back I remembered the European clothes drying racks of my childhood that are still customary over there (neither my parents in Germany, nor my sister in Belgium have driers). I ordered two over the internet and have dried our clothes for free ever since. My electric clothes drier gets used only very rarely anymore. These racks are inexpensive and you can find them on this side of the Atlantic as well. In comparison to the stationary racks sometimes found in gardens, or the overhead clothes lines strung between trees, I can move my racks outside when the weather is nice, and inside during the cold months. Moreover, when there are no clothes to be dried, I don’t have to look at the rack in the garden. They fold up flat and store behind a door or against a wall. Between my two racks I can fit three loads of laundry, and when the air is dry the laundry dries in a few hours. 