My being caught in the economic collapse last fall, was laid off in December, has submerged me into a internally reflective world. I have oscillated through the anxieties you might imagine and fully felt and processed the depression that comes with being unemployed during such a malignantly depressed job market.
No job in sight.
I have had my homesteading life to distract me.
I spent the early winter ordering seed catalogs, I spent the mid winter starting seeds (we have such a small growing season here have to give the plants a head start indoors), I spent the very cold early spring trying to build semi-warm environments in my garden for some of my starts and then spent mid spring lamenting the fiercely rainy and cold weather.
During that early spring (snow, ice) we experienced our first kidding season so I was also busy being a midwife doing on the job training. We lost one momma goat and gained 10 baby goats, whew. I wish these animals didnt do this when its still frozen solid outside.
We are now milking with a mechanical milker and getting between 2 and 3 gallons of fresh goat milk a day. I am starting to make all sorts of cheese and we are sharing these with friends who appreciate raw goat milk cheese and other products.
We are now dreaming of the possibility of a dairy to make raw goat milk cheese for sale. We dont have the money for this but, who knows, perhaps there are people who love our goats milk who might want to help us out.
Still no job in sight. Our unemployment benefits are running perilously close to out for both my husband and I (did I mention that we were both laid off?).
There is this massive cognitive dissonance - we have built a fantastic homestead that gets better every day but it seems we could easily lose it all if we dont find some gainful employment soon!
Most of the time I shut all of these thoughts out. Today, I decided to spill them out there for you to read.
I feel like am at the bottom of the curve in terms of fiscal and emotional resilience. I know that its not helpful to feel hopeless but you dont really have much of a choice, when you do or do not feel hopeless. There are so many external factors that I am not able to beat into shape.
I know I am talented in MANY different ways but I still find myself unemployed. Many of my talents and passions lie outside of my schooling so my resume is rather toxic when I try for jobs that do not require a PhD (those few that do).
It really doesnt matter how smart you are but rather the types of connections you have and my network is as brown and shriveled as you might find at the end of the growing season after a few frosts and storms.
I am not asking for sympathy, just opening a window into my world at the moment. Who knows. Maybe I will win the lottery or, gasp, actually get a job (lottery seems more likely) and my next story will be about starting my dream - a self-sustaining life boat community in a far away land.
Its funny how a massive and scary idea like Peak Oil can wrap it’s tentacles around the mind and nudge thoughts in particular directions. There is certainly the whole grief dynamic that one must cycle through, of necessity it is a loop and no resolution because we live within the moment of collapse, not the other side.
But Peak Oil was a specific concept that my scientific mind gravitated toward, it seemed like the most likely candidate for the next event horizon.
Its been a somewhat confusing time these past few months because the price shock of 2008 and then the collapse came sooner than PO estimates suggested. It was a non-intuitive dynamic with a non-linear trajectory.
Hindsight that tells us that CDSs and the whole Ponzi nature of the American and global financial system was manifestly unwholesome doesn’t help people like me who didn’t create it, participate in it, profit from it, nor can do even a single thing about it (then or now).
This hindsight only serves to make one feel small, angry, and foolish for buying into the claptrap of the middle class American Dream.
Like any religion, I didn’t have much choice in that indoctrination but that doesn’t lessen the hurt you feel when you learn that there is no santa claus, that what your parents told you to work hard for would in the end not result in a life that improves or equals one’s own upbringing. That would not be such an issue for me except that it took me so long to figure out and here I am fully invested in the middle class nightmare of being excessively educated, well endowed with educational debt, further endowed with the massive debt of a mortgage and with 3 innocent kids. If I were single and childless, all this would be so much less heavy man.
Because of the dogmatic thinking that panic and fear can induce, I have not felt as prepared for this collapse as you might imagine. I feel that my resilience was impaired because I was watching out for one sort of collapse and then was surprised by another. It is a personality flaw of mine, to abhor this sort of surprise. I am still scrambling for footing and that means lack of resilience, sense of perspective and humor, lack of conviction.
It was a whole lot easier last fall when I had a job. It was frustrating because I could not be at home doing things but at least we had income. Even so, we could not use that income for many nifty projects because we were paying down debt that refused to be ignored.
Now that we both remain unemployed, the panic and fear is easier to feel and its quite easy to fall into a malaise of cold sweats, little sleep, dithering fretting and wishful thinking.
One might think that all this free time would translate into homestead related productivity but there are only so many things we could do in the depths of Massachusetts’ winter. I have many seeds started, I have cleaned the raised beds, several times, I have built some cold frames. I am ready to grow. Where we live, the last hard freeze date is MAY 15th so there is a limit as to how early I can get started. No matter how early you start seeds, there is still transplant shock and delay - the growing season is only so long here.
Biology itself is pulling us out of the house into the backyard homestead though. Our dairy goats have been kidding like crazy. It has not all been sweetness and light though. Our first doe to kid was a horrific tragedy (you can read about it at my other homesteading specific blog Humble Garden in this post - RIP Wheatie, our sweet goat girl).
Since that horrible day, we have had 4 easy peasy deliveries and we have 7 precious little LaMancha goat kids.
Our chickens and duck are well and ramping up their egg production. Things are moving forward here, as biology has an inevitable nature and will to live.
On dry days, I stand in the hay/milking shed watching the momma goats nursing their babies and I feel immense contentment. The smell of hay seems to relax me, sending me into rather amorphous thoughts of simple times when this sort of homestead was viable, made sense.
Other times, I stand with the goats and look back at the house and garden and force myself to really get in touch with how we are NOT a closed system and that we have MANY external inputs that make us profoundly vulnerable.
We are MUCH more prepared than many in the US but it serves to reveal the giant gaps between a self-sufficient life/future and the extensively fenestrated lives we live; we are interlinked with incomprehensively complex and vast global networks of technology, energy, politics, and inertia that are infinitely non-intuitive on the ground and intentionally hidden from we consumers.
Going off the grid from that is an almost overwhelming task. For me, its not about electricity or even warmth.
No its about how we will find a way to feed the goats, llama, chickens if the supply chains fall or if we default on the mortgage.
I would say that our almost total lack of resilience is leagues more resilient than your average American but that only serves to scare me even more.
Apart from being the sworn enemies of public education and science, Republicans have reveled in the hate that is best personified by Grover Norquist who famously proclaimed:
“Cutting the government in half in one generation is both an ambitious and reasonable goal,” Norquist stated in May 2000. “If we work hard we will accomplish this and more by 2025. Then the conservative movement can set a new goal. I have a recommendation: To cut government in half again by 2050″. (source) “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” primary source, secondary source
Obviously, this was just a front, to be consumed by the GOoper grunts who finance the GOP ops. Behind the scenes, Bush and Company have promulgated the most pernicious, ambitious, and far-reaching looting of the American Treasury of any generation since the beginning of our republic.
I have embeded several videos from YouTube in the post for you to see the various Bushville tent cities popping up across America.
Grover must feel replete with satisfaction. The American Dream is circling the drain and rushing out of the bathtub.
(Kudzu doing what kudzu does, in Atlanta - from the wiki)
If you have not lived in the deep south (in the USA) then you may not know the charms of kudzu. When you first come across it, you wonder why someone never trims their ivy then you realize its absolutely everywhere and consuming just about anything that is not tended on a regular basis.
Coming from your typical American suburban background where we dedicate our free time to vast tracts of inedible grasses, pouring toxic waste and precious water on this piggish crop to prove our neighborly worth, we might mistake kudzu as a plant that is all about rude infinite unsustainable growth.
Kudzu laughs at us for our blind zeal for order and complete willful ignorance of complex systems.
It is able to grow so fantastically because it doesn’t take from it’s environment so much as enhance it. It is a legume which means it fixes or captures nitrogen from the air (something our industrial mono-agriculture - other than soy beans - doesn’t do). It doesn’t suck the nitrogen from the ground, it gives it back.
It grows roots deep into the soil, bringing up water and minerals from way down, making it available to more surface dwelling organisms.
I could sing the praises of kudzu all day but its the way we DON’T appreciate it that is illustrative of our dysfunctional culture.
We don’t harvest it like the Japanese do, for food like kuzu starch and tofu. We don’t use it as a nitrogen amending cover crop. We don’t seriously develop it for cellulosic ethanol biofuels.
We emulate it’s prodigious growth without caring to understand it’s real nature.
We would, if we had our own misguided monkey brain ways, have a Kudzu Economy.
We built an economy these past 100 years based on infinite growth. We were lazy because, with liquid fossil fuels, the illusion of infinite growth is easily maintained.
Our consensus culture formed our minds to not ask where the power comes from or what to do if it stops. That is dangerous thinking when you are driving the bus on the very edge of a cliff.
No, we sip at the teat of fossil fuel even as it lies supurating in the morgue.
We suck ever harder as we close our eyes to a global economy that has ceased its expansion, inevitably resulting in disastrous immediate contraction.
We want our economy, our individual supremacy, our global domionism to grow on for ever, like kudzu growing greedily across a wasteland of broken down cars, moldering tires, burbling barrels of toxic waste, all the wages of that explosive growth, without ever once paying the dues, without ever once fixing the nitrogen for true and honest growth that requires a willful and respectful understanding of the complexity and limits to a system that may one day be sustainable.
No, I state the obvious when I say that we, as a nation, are snuggling up tight to that corpse in that cold morgue, sipping ever more ferverently.
We are closing our eyes and our ears tightly, living in a matrix-like construct where economic depressions get fixed, gutted banks pass their stress tests, deeper oil deposits are just waiting to be found, and a huge preponderance of hard data showing how we have committed climaticide and have overshot the tipping point quite completely are all utterly wrong.
Recently, I came across a solar cooking wiki and a whole group of YouTube videos about how Africans are adopting parabolic solar cookers in their villages. The importance of this didn’t really sink in for me until I saw how women walk hours through elephant infested nature preserves to find wood that they poach unsustainably. They get chased by angry elephants (its THEIR home after all) and the women spend ALL DAY finding dwindling resources, leaving behind unattended or poorly attended babies and small children.
In particular, there is the Zambian Mfuwe Solar Cooker Project initiated by Manda Chisanga, a guide in South Luangwa National Park who had won a guiding award and decided to spend his prize money on Solar Cookers.
“The documentary covers the installation of five SunFire14 Parabolic Dishes - the project has been expanded to 15 and we are looking at ways to get 500 Parabolic Dishes into the community to cover 6000 families.” source
With a parabolic solar cooker, all of these risky and ecologically unsustainable practices are stopped immediately. The women can stay with their kids, young girls can go to school instead of watching babies or collecting wood all day themselves.
If that doesn’t sound radical and revolutionary, you are not thinking it through.
You can learn all about the basic principles of solar cooking and see plans for building your own DIY cooker at the Solar Cooking Wiki. Give it a whirl and see what you think.
I have been wanting to make our own DIY solar oven for ages and have finally scraped together some found objects that we have used to make our first winter relevant solar cooker. No cooking is happening yet because I am still testing it and there was no sun to speak of today! We do this in part as a homeschooling project too so the testing is an important part of it.
If you do this, share! Let me hear about how it is going for you.
Found materials and also some high heat enamel spray (which I bought for this project)
Cut to fit insulation on bottom of the oven
Crafting, with duct tape, the interior box
Need to trim height of the box
Trimmed and taped and ready to be sprayed with enamel
Sprayed, dried, inside larger box, found insulation in place
Next step is to make all manner of reflectors to sculpt the photons into the oven
Materials for reflectors
Two reflectors made. I rigged up a tape slide holder on the backs so that the reflectors are placed without taping them onto the oven part.
Slide holder rig
One reflector rigged up
Black covered pot and temperature probes
Solar oven set up inside as we test it out
Made a third reflector and started testing positioning (which isn’t really intuitive, more experiential)
I know I could buy a solar oven but what fun is that?! Not terribly frugal either
Once we get a good sunny day I will test it properly and share back here!
If you read my garden blog - Humble Garden - you would know that I am already planning the 2009 garden. I have already gotten the first batch of seeds and am gearing up to start seedlings soon.
I started gardening seriously as a foodie and a scientist who was worried about the toxic nature of industrial food. I would never claim to be able to grow enough food for this whole family and all the animals we feed, that’s a VERY advanced topic. It is a goal though but it takes planning and I need to find more arable land.
While I do not condone their religious dogmas and practices (not my place, all their own business), I admire the hard work that the Mormon church has done to make it easy for people to store away food for hard times. They have quite a lot of free information on how to determine how much food a certain sized family needs to have on hand for a year and also how to keep it in a safe and effective manner. Visit their site on Family Home Storage to start your journey.
Another resource is Sharon Astyk’s blog posts and classes on food storage at her Casaubon’s Book blog. She is much more comprehensive than the Mormon site and she is more engaging, check it out.
I have started my food storage - though do not take my example 100% gospel, I am sure I am doing all sorts of things less than perfectly!
The photos here show some of what we are doing, storage wise.
Below you can see some of the things I canned last summer. Last spring the tomatoes came in late so I was only able to put up a few 8 or so jars of tomato sauce.
I also had to take down some badly behaved roosters and some past-their-prime broilers so I made a large batch of chicken stock with meat and canned that too. Let me tell you, this broth makes freakishly delicious soups.
In terms of staples that I do not grow and which I can buy in bulk, I figured I need about 100 pounds of dried beans for the year to feed our family in times of poor cash flow and possibly during food scarcities. Below you can see a 50 pound bag of pinto beans and then after I have put it into gallon sized bags.
Beans and rice make complete protein and they store VERY easily. Add a little bit of fat and some homegrown greens such as kale, collards, or lettuces or spinach and you need nothing else.
I am also stocking up on my favorite masa harina to make Colombian empanadas and arepas. I need this for mental health issues!
I have some less than nutritious meat products and mixes that would be REALLLLY easy to make happen should we lose power for long periods of time - better than making french toast!
I use this fabric remnant that I got as a photography background as a way of masking the grocery store look a bit.
This is just a small amount of food storage. I have a lot more rice you do not see here. That bulk rice and other grains will be stored in big plastic light tight tubs in a cool location.
These shelves you see above is right next to a very drafty window (AC unit there) so these foods will be kept cool. I plan on using those canned items soon, otherwise, they would stay in the dark cool pantry you see below.
What I would really love is a set up like you see below built in our basement. The issue with the basement is the fact that we have 5 cats and their litter box is down there.
Please share what you are doing to stock up on food or what you plan to do!
Hubbert saw it all so black and white back in the 1950s. His bell curve was a simple affair, nothing revolutionary, simply a unimodal use diagram of a limited resource.
We had been using oil for something like 50 years by then. We had already poisoned our atmosphere with the vast belchings of bucky balls from burning coal during the Industrial Revolution. We were awash in hydrocarbons for centuries and we certainly didn’t know what the heck we were doing, just blindly going forth in our domination and neglect of our precious earth.
Our science fiction has been mostly about technological dominance or dystopian submission to technology. Star Trek is all about the promise of Post-Carbon Man. You can see what Roddenberry thought we would be like in a powered down dystopia in the movie “First Contact“. Star Trek is the ultimate passive aggressive reaction to a latent fear of peak oil with it’s warp drive, a money-less society, food replicators, and the Prime Directive.
Isaac Asimov was asked, in 1977, by Time Magazine to envision a post-peak oil future. Yeah, thats right - 1977.
Asimov wrote of a distant 1997 in his short piece “The Nightmare Life Without Fuel“, which you can find at this link and which I had included below.
In the end, I do not see this account as all that much of a nightmare. I think that the intended nightmare was that it could have been avoidable. I think peakniks have moved past that now, we are now on to how to survive and thrive. Tell me what you think of this piece.
So it’s 1997, and it’s raining, and you’ll have to walk to work again. The subways are crowded, and any given train breaks down one morning out of five. The buses are gone, and on a day like today the bicycles slosh and slide. Besides, you have only a mile and a half to go, and you have boots, raincoat and rain hat. And it’s not a very cold rain, so why not?
Lucky you have a job in demolition too. It’s steady work.
Slow and dirty, but steady. The fading structures of a decaying city are the great mineral mines and hardware shops of the nation. Break them down and re-use the parts. Coal is too difficult to dig up and transport to give us energy in the amounts we need, nuclear fission is judged to be too dangerous, the technical breakthrough toward nuclear fusion that we hoped for never took place, and solar batteries are too expensive to maintain on the earth’s surface in sufficient quantity.
Anyone older than ten can remember automobiles. They dwindled. At first the price of gasoline climbed—way up. Finally only the well-to-do drove, and that was too clear an indication that they were filthy rich, so any automobile that dared show itself on a city street was overturned and burned. Rationing was introduced to “equalize sacrifice,” but every three months the ration was reduced. The cars just vanished and became part of the metal resource.
There are many advantages, if you want to look for them. Our 1997 newspapers continually point them out. The air is cleaner and there seem to be fewer colds. Against most predictions, the crime rate has dropped. With the police car too expensive (and too easy a target), policemen are back on their beats. More important, the streets are full. Legs are king in the cities of 1997, and people walk everywhere far into the night. Even the parks are full, and there is mutual protection in crowds.
If the weather isn’t too cold, people sit out front. If it is hot, the open air is the only air conditioning they get. And at least the street lights still burn. Indoors, electricity is scarce, and few people can afford to keep lights burning after supper.
As for the winter—well, it is inconvenient to be cold, with most of what furnace fuel is allowed hoarded for the dawn; but sweaters are popular indoor wear and showers are not an everyday luxury. Lukewarm sponge baths will do, and if the air is not always very fragrant in the human vicinity, the automobile fumes are gone.
There is some consolation in the city that it is worse in the suburbs. The suburbs were born with the auto, lived with the auto, and are dying with the auto. One way out for the suburbanites is to form associations that assign turns to the procurement and distribution of food. Pushcarts creak from house to house along the posh suburban roads, and every bad snowstorm is a disaster. It isn’t easy to hoard enough food to last till the roads are open. There is not much in the way of refrigeration except for the snowbanks, and then the dogs must be fought off.
What energy is left cannot be directed into personal comfort. The nation must survive until new energy sources are found, so it is the railroads and subways that are receiving major attention. The railroads must move the coal that is the immediate hope, and the subways can best move the people.
And then, of course, energy must be conserved for agriculture. The great car factories make trucks and farm machinery almost exclusively. We can huddle together when there is a lack of warmth, fan ourselves should there be no cooling breezes, sleep or make love at such times as there is a lack of light—but nothing will for long ameliorate a lack of food. The American population isn’t going up much any more, but the food supply must be kept high even though the prices and difficulty of distribution force each American to eat less. Food is needed for export so that we can pay for some trickle of oil and for other resources.
The rest of the world, of course, is not as lucky as we are.
Some cynics say that it is the knowledge of this that helps keep America from despair. They’re starving out there, because earth’s population has continued to go up. The population on earth is 5.5 billion, and outside the United States and Europe, not more than one in five has enough to eat at any given time.
All the statistics point to a rapidly declining rate of population increase, but that is coming about chiefly through a high infant mortality; the first and most helpless victims of starvation are babies, after their mothers have gone dry. A strong current of American opinion, as reflected in the newspapers (some of which still produce their daily eight pages of bad news), holds that it is just as well. It serves to reduce the population, doesn’t it?
Others point out that it’s more than just starvation. There are those who manage to survive on barely enough to keep the body working, and that proves to be not enough for the brain. It is estimated that there are now nearly 2 billion people in the world who are alive but who are permanently braindamaged by undernutrition, and the number is growing year by year. It has already occurred to some that it would be “realistic” to wipe them out quietly and rid the earth of an encumbering menace. The American newspapers of 1997 do not report that this is actually being done anywhere, but some travelers bring back horror tales.
At least the armies are gone—no one can afford to keep those expensive, energy-gobbling monstrosities. Some soldiers in uniform and with rifles are present in almost every still functioning nation, but only the United States and the Soviet Union can maintain a few tanks, planes and ships—which they dare not move for fear of biting into limited fuel reserves.
Energy continues to decline, and machines must be replaced by human muscle and beasts of burden. People are working longer hours and there is less leisure; but then, with electric lighting restricted, television for only three hours a night, movies three evenings a week, new books few and printed in small editions, what is there to do with leisure? Work, sleep and eating are the great trinity of 1997, and only the first two are guaranteed.
Where will it end? It must end in a return to the days before 1800, to the days before the fossil fuels powered a vast machine industry and technology. It must end in subsistence farming and in a world population reduced by starvation, disease and violence to less than a billion.
And what can we do to prevent all this now?
Now? Almost nothing.
If we had started 20 years ago, that might have been another matter. If we had only started 50 years ago, it would have been easy.
I realized when I was planning last year’s garden just how fantastically hard it is to grow enough in the summer to replace an entire year’s food from the grocery store.
And, even though it is a somewhat frustrating activity while even the day time temps are below 0 F, I find myself planning this year’s garden.
[see photos of how we have built our 1024 square feet of raised beds and grown gardens in 2007 and 2008]
This is a fantastic activity but it also means that I am thinking a lot about food, which is fine because we are not without it. If my job search is not fruitful pretty quickly in the new year we may be exploring the world of food stamps to bridge the real gap between now and when our harvest comes in MANY months from now.
These thoughts could take me in any number of directions but the two come together to prompt me - how much food is enough?
The question of water is very easy - no ambiguities. You need it every day and you need it in one flavor - clean.
Food, well, food is a whole other monster because we humans make it more complex than it all needs to be.
While simply boiled beans and rice can provide complete protein, some people can not even eat it once without having a bad experience the first time eating it (their GI tracts being unused to fiber, a temporary condition that goes away in time) and others cant face eating this simple meal more than a couple of times in a row.
The truth is that we need variety. There is a physiological basis to this. In natural pre-industrial diets, the need for diversity (even seeking out and ritualizing unusual food types) was a means for people to get rare minerals and other nutrients and co-factors.
In a survival situation, pre-industrial people knew how to mete out dwindling resources and how to enhance their food with wild-caught food sources and also how to spice or include “waste” fats (bacon grease for example) to increase the palatability of meager rations.
Not only do we not have these skills any more, we would probably not be very interested in those strategies.
Cynically, I think the only solution for the modern junk-food diet replacement would include a single industrial chemical - MSG (monosodium glutamate). You can sprinkle this on cardboard and people will eat it. Further, our diet is so saturated by MSG that we have become not so much addicted but accustomed to a constant input of this neurotoxin. Obviously, the LESS MSG we eat the better and I think that MSG is used now to mask our food poverty as it is.
I return to my root query though - what is enough and how do we make certain that the “enough” is not boring and that it doesn’t become an agent for depression in of itself.
If you look at what the FDA suggests in terms of caloric need - you will see that there are recommendations based on the basal metabolic rate that is a function of one’s weight and the needs of your body to work properly. If you go below this base caloric need, you will lose weight. If you go above, you will gain. Obviously, not all weight is the same and losing muscle due to a lack of protein in the diet is a very serious matter if you are having to use your body to obtain more food.
If you get those calories from nutrient depleted foods (like most of the meats and vegetables and dairy and eggs we find in our stores today) then you force your body to either pull from it’s own seriously depleted stores of co-factors and other nutritional elements, or the body simply doesn’t perform correctly because all the building blocks simply are not in place and so things like new proteins are not made and toxins are not cleared, etc.
Even though the western world is awash in obesity, we are also starving from malnutrition.
If we find ourselves with little food, provided to us on an emergency basis from central feeding centers in bigger cities (MREs anyone?) - we will be two steps behind because we are already experiencing chronic malnutrition.
If we try to anticipate this by growing and storing our own foods, how do we decide the best diet for adults and children when we have only really known an abundance of calories and food choices?
I would love to hear from you, your thoughts. I am at the beginning of this particular path. As a gardener I know how hard it is to have success growing enough food to eat and store. Its not just a matter of buying a load of different plant types. You have to also grow long storing ones (potatoes, other root crops, squashes, dried corn and meats, canned everything) and also learn how to store them in a way that is good for you.
To close this open ended post (just for now), I will share something I made the other day.
I love many of the products from Bob’s Red Mill and have lots of their flours on hand. One that I had on hand but had not worked with yet is Rye flour. I used the recipe on the bag for rye crackers and also modified it a bit.
My interest in crackers comes from the use of similar though fat-free crackers called Hard Tack in survival situations. We here in the North East see them now on the shelves as oyster crackers or cream crackers.
The wikipedia tells us this about hard tack:
a simple type of cracker or biscuit, made from flour, water, and salt. Inexpensive and long-lasting, it is and was used for sustenance in the absence of perishable foods, commonly during long sea voyages and military campaigns.
Because it is so hard and dry, properly stored and transported hardtack will survive rough handling and endure extremes of temperature.
To soften it, it was often dunked in brine, coffee, or some other liquid or cooked into a skillet meal. Baked hard, it would keep for years as long as it was kept dry. For long voyages, hardtack was baked four times, rather than the more common two, and prepared six months before sailing.
Mix together dry ingredients and seeds. Work in butter until fine. Stir in milk. Form into ball and roll out to 1/8 - 1/16 inch between waxed paper. Cut into desired shapes, prick with fork and transfer to ungreased cookie sheet. Bake at 400 F for 5-6 minutes until lightly browned on edges. Cool on rack. Store in airtight container.
Craving stability in our living arrangements, our food sources, our political and governing state as well as our personal security is a natural enough thing, truly. As babies, this is something we are instinctually driven to do, find food, find our mother’s voice, her smell, her face, her love.
The problem with this is that any stability, any security, is an illusion.
If you open your eyes to this, then you should take the next step and understand how best to view the state of being that is non-stability - transition.
The Buddhists, being the deep thinkers that they have been these past 2,600 years, have a name for the state of transition - Bardo or antarabhava in Sanskrit.
Just as the Inuit, who live in a world of cold, ice, and snow, have many names for snow and ice, Buddhists - who live in a world of honesty relating to our illusions and how we relate to illusion and “reality” and transition - have broken down transitional states into six different types.
Shinay bardo (Tibetan) - birth and life
Milam bardo (T) - the dream state
Samten bardo (T) - meditation
Chikkhai bardo (T) - the moment of death
Chönyid bardo (T) - the luminosity of the true nature which commences after the final ‘inner breath’ (available to those who have practiced meditation)
Sidpai bardo (T) - becoming or transmigration (time between last breath and first breath in next life)
To me the deeply important lesson we must learn is that surviving and thriving through transition requires us to avoid attachment, attachment that will force our ego to hold onto the old even though it has slipped from it’s grasp.
We Americans are ALL about attachment - it is how a capitalistic individualistic system works, how it thrives. Just because this is the way we have been aculturated, doesn’t mean that this is the best thing for us. It is exactly the wrong worldview for the hard work ahead as we are all forced to power down in a carbon-reduced world.
Quite the opposite. We have traveled just about as far as we can on this fossil fuel bonanza of orgiastic consumerism and debt dollars. Without these things, our way of life will become an illusion that is no longer possible.
Make no mistake, recognition that our worldview makes us blind to the perils of our age doesn’t mean we will magically escape those perils and not suffer.
I know that I am quite deeply attached to many people and to my homestead. I also know that there are many unperceived or dimly perceived attachments that surround me and my family.
I have stood in my garden on warm sunny days in the midst of the abundance, the fruits of so many months of labor and have tried to imagine doing the same in some post-apocalyptic time where chaos has come to distant cities and relatives. Even if we had some how magically survived those times largely intact, our home wired for solar, water well managed, food in abundance, a local economy that provided us with off-homestead things - would I be able to release everything that defined “America” even though those things were never really something I aspired to? (great wealth, vacations, huge houses, second homes, fantastically expensive educations, high paying stressful jobs, excessive power consumption, etc).
Its a continuum, a process. I would prefer to do this on deep levels as well as in the outer world so that I am not coping with surprise even as I cope with loss. I fear that surprise will always be a part of it, expect it.
