(This is a cross post.)

What we are experiencing here in America, and the world over for that matter, is the inevitable collapse of the consumerist culture. For years we have gorged ourselves on the upside of consumerism but now we all must suffer the downside of this system. The consumerism system relies on three things. The first is that the system must be in a constant state of economic expansion. The second is that the planet must have an infinite supply of resources to supply the ever expanding amount of goods needed to support the ever expanding economy. The third is that the people must be trained to live in a state of constant consumption. See The Story of Stuff to learn more about that and watch Money as Debt for an explanation of how the ever expanding wad of credit that fuels the consumerist economy has no real value.

The world has more or less lived on a credit card for decades. This willingness to spend imaginary money has bankrolled the creation of a wide variety of material goods and services which has in turn afforded us all an unprecedented degree of physical comfort. Unfortunately, we do have to eventually pay the credit card bill although there is not enough money in existence to pay off the world’s collective debt. Nor do we have the ability to replace the world’s finite resources which we have already used up. These resources for the most part have been turned into a variety of toxic materials that are now polluting the environment and making it that much harder to grow food and so forth.

It is, however, not the system that is of the most concern about our situation. It is our reaction to our situation that is what is most disturbing. We have overwhelming evidence that our economic system is destroying our planet, yet we continue on while running away from our collective problems. We are all on borrowed time living irresponsibly, making more and more mistakes, to keep from facing the consequences of our original mistakes such as borrowing more money and using up more resources to cover the loans and interest we already cannot pay. We are living way beyond our means and yet instead of facing up to the debt and changing our lifestyle, we create more debt and live even more lavishly. All the while we are inventing ever new addictions and distractions so that we can avoid doing what we know we have to do. The capitalist, consumerist system has always been deeply flawed and was always going to fail eventually. It doesn’t work; it isn’t sustainable. The system is so bad that if it lasted too long the earth would become uninhabitable. Taking good, wholesome natural resources and turning them into toxic garbage is a horrible system and can never be made to work.

Unfortunately, most if not all of the solutions that are being proposed by both the right and the left, by both political parties, by major corporations and by the mainstream media still involve us all living with a consumerist orientation towards life. The solutions seem to be along the line that our system just has to be a little greener, a little smarter, a little better but we can still keep our stuff while our personalities and consumer orientation towards life can remain unchanged. Our stuff just has to be a bit more organic but we don’t have to change at all. Our attachment to the lifestyle, comforts and gadgets that only a consumerist system can produce for us has clouded our vision to the palpable reality that this system does not work and is not appropriate.

This of course makes sense as we have been trained all our lives to operate as relative gluttons. We have been taught through a bombardment of advertisements and interlocking social structures to obtain our self-worth by what we possess and by our standing within our consumerist system. And we are completely dependent on this system to deliver to us all of our goods and services. We are used to the comforts and lifestyle this system has delivered to us all of these years. We are totally dependent on it to provide us work, bring us food, power, clothing and water. Because of our dependence we lack any and all training necessary to live more self-sufficient agrarian type lifestyles and we don’t have communities within which we can effectively barter and trade to obtain what we need. Also we are addicted to a wide variety of stimuli that we can only obtain through our current system. If we all had a more balanced approach to life and we collectivity shunned credit, abuse and the shortcuts necessary to maintain our standard of living then we would have less of the stuff that makes up the center pieces of our lives. So of course we would try desperately to find a way to fix our broken system but we all know that it cannot be fixed. Deep down we know that the system has made us worse as a species and we have to make wholesale changes to ourselves. We have to adjust ourselves so we can live without many of the comforts, addictions and materials that will no longer exist when our system collapses.

We humans have great difficulty changing and the kind of changes that are being demanded of us are in some ways almost impossible. We have to retrain how we think and how we perceive the world. We have to retrain our bodies too in terms of routines, hot water usage, the food we are able to eat, pretty much all of our habits. We have to retrain our goals and what we can expect to get out of the world and our lives. We also and most importantly have to retrain our orientation of looking to the material world alone to make us feel good about ourselves.

For years and years we have focused on our lavish material existence with very little of our attention going inward. As our material world collapses and we are faced with a much harsher and all around more difficult existence, our only choice will be to be nurtured from within. All of us, especially our children, will have to internalize ourselves to a large extent as the pleasures, comforts and overall abundance that has propped us up will be a distant memory. A world of vibrant colors, abundant tastes and fragrances, rich sounds and a host of multi-media distractions may become a gray desert world where even a bland meal will be hard to come by. Therefore people of the future will have to nurture themselves from within. They will have to have a rich inner world where they can escape from the external nightmare of pain, deprivation and suffering. They will have to be internally strong so that they can make their weakened, malnourished bodies do the hard labor it will take to survive. The people of the future will need strong characters and good hearts to endure the mess that we are about to leave them.

We can of course began this process ourselves by starting to internalize our own existences and live more simple and natural lives. Unfortunately a life of dependence on an arrogant system has left our minds and personalities rigid with entitlement and with little experience or training in connecting with our inner resources. In fact our system does everything in its power to dissuade a more internal spiritual existence. We have even externalized God to such an extent that we are trained to believe that to obtain divinity we must first transcend into another plane of existence. The idea that God is already within us is quite foreign and we have little to no ability to make this inner connection.

Adults cannot be counted on to make these internal adjustments but we can prepare and train our children to live a more balanced existence. In fact, it is our duty to do so. Our children will need different training than the training we received. In many cases they will need the opposite training than the training we received. Instead of gorging themselves on the material world, they will need rich inner lives from which they can draw forth their internal wealth. They will need to develop their hidden abilities of connecting inwardly to the divinity that resides within all of us. And they will also need to refocus to see this same divinity within others and within everything for that matter.

Because of these beliefs, my wife and I have over the years initiated some training for our children designed to turn some of their attention inward. Along with a natural based homeschooling program and a homesteading environment, some of their education and training is about connecting with the divinity within. We have developed a spiritually based homeschooling curriculum and written a couple of children’s books for it. We have now set up our own publishing company and have released for the general public our first book entitled My Friend Within. It is a spiritually based picture book for young children.

The book comes with a free 29 page pdf file lesson plan that is designed to help children connect with the divinity that is inside of them. We think that this type of training is essential for all children and we hope that all parents and caretakers will buy this book and do the lesson plan with their children as a start. I think we all can agree that something in our world needs to change and that something is us, is humanity. Children are always the answer when it comes to change so training our children to live in a world that will no longer exist is not only wasteful but irresponsible. Whatever course parents and caretakers now take in educating their charges, they must realistically assess our current state and pray for guidance in leading these children in the right direction. The next few generations will be transitional ones and they will need all the help they can get. That is the least we all can do for them considering we have wasted so many of their resources and left behind for them so much toxic garbage.

I hope that all of you will agree that there is at least a partial chance that our system will collapse in the near future. If the system that we are 100% dependent upon for all of our needs does collapse then we are all in big trouble. It makes sense then to prepare ourselves and, more importantly, to prepare our children for that possibility. Our children don’t need training in how to indulge themselves on the world’s resources as that isn’t exactly difficult. Rather they need training in surviving in a radically changed world. They need a new training. They need to build new skills and a new and improved character. That is where our duty resides as adults - preparing our children for a worst possible situation that has all but become a certainty. Our duty is towards the future.

Merry Christmas,
Paul

It has felt like ages since I posted last. My adrenal fatigue is worse again and we are having heart-stopping trouble with our computer. My whole thought life is on the computer. Which makes me wildly uncomfortable, by the way. It is dopey to rely upon things that are not reliable, right? I mean that is the whole point of the direction of our lives and the posts on this blog. Sigh. Well, I will deal with that one another day…

Meanwhile I have been jotting down little notes about posts I want to write on our various blogs. This shorthand list is three pages long. Makes me tired just looking at it. However, I thought I would take the time now to convey a conversation we had as a family on Thanksgiving that will affect the future direction of our homestead and homestead kitchen.

Just before Thanksgiving, we had to drive to Roanoke. While there, we stopped in at an Indian grocery to pick up a few things we were out of. We eat Indian food here at least three or four times a week and have done so for a long time. In the back of my mind has lurked the thought that someday we may not easily be able to get Indian supplies as, in reality, India is a long way away. But, like the problem of being dependent upon capricious computers, I kept putting conscious thought and problem solving about this off for another day.

Rice has been expensive for a while now, as you may know. We have discovered during this time that basmati rice may actually be as good a deal as jasmine rice because it cooks up to a much larger volume than jasmine rice does. I guess I would have to do a detailed analysis between price and volume but just from cooking every day in the kitchen, we have found basmati to be a better deal than we thought and not just a rice for special occasions. But still - it so expensive. It darn near takes your breath away to pick up a bag of it with an intention of heading towards the cash register. So, I put that off and headed over towards the bags of mung dal.

What I saw shocked me. The price was so high on this ancient, simple food of poor and/or spiritually oriented people that I couldn’t dream of buying it. Rice and dal. Cheap, cheap food. Now so expensive that it is out of my reach. And rice and dal are - or have been up until now - staples in my kitchen. With my mind reeling, we left the store. We had not a bit of mung dal in the house but we left nevertheless.

I had to work on turning my reeling mind into a mind that simply meditated on the problem and came up with a solution or an approach, at least. I did this and it resulted in a family discussion which I will relate but first there is another strand.

In homesteading literature, you constantly run into debates about whether it is better to raise cows or goats. We solved this debate for ourselves years ago by doing the rather unusual thing of raising both on very limited land. We love the cows and don’t ever want to live without one ever, ever, ever gain. The goats are fun and easy to manage and child sized and, well… I really love feta cheese. Plus I need all the minerals I can get and goat milk is higher in minerals than cow milk. Anyway, we have raised both and enjoyed both.

The thing is that my family is very animal oriented. I am very happy to have these animals as companions and do not want to go through life without their energy and intelligence any more. We count on them. However, I am also a very plant oriented person. I crave greens and used to dream about herbs when I was an apprentice to an herbalist so many years ago. We have done little bits of gardening here and there but nothing really major. Everything has gone into maintaining the cows and goats and the many other projects around here like wood-fired earth ovens and outdoor bamboo showers and whatnot.

But with this economic crisis adding a certain flavor and with our maturing a bit as homesteaders, we are starting to take on a different view and this is really what our Thanksgiving Day conversation was about.

I talked with the family about my sticker shock with regards to Indian food supplies. I also talked about the significant reading I have done about families that choose to eat locally only. We then all talked about the morality (or not) of shipping food thousands and thousands of miles just so that others can choose to eat what does not grow in their region. The people I have read who have eaten locally for a year, say, all tend to have far more resources at their disposal than we do. Floyd County would be a great place to undertake such a project, I think, but we just can’t afford it. I proposed that we consider making every effort to eat what at least can be available in the United States. So while mung dal would not be available, mung beans would be (I Googled it. They are grown in unexpected places like OK.). What did everyone think of this idea?

Then I raised the issue of keeping goats when we already have cows and a lifetime commitment to having cows. We need to diversify - we need more than milk and cheese in order to survive and thrive. We need to garden, I suggested. We need to garden A LOT. We need veggies and herbs and so many things. The goats are occupying the space where we would otherwise immediately start expanding our gardens. What shall we do? I asked this with some trepidation because no one here ever wants to give up any animal. But drawing upon my social work training, I had talked with my husband and several family members ahead of time and already discussed their feelings and ideas to a certain extent.

So we as a family decided two things on this Thanksgiving Day:

1. We will gradually learn to limit our food choices to those foodstuffs that can be grown in the United States. We are doing this as a preparedness measure in the face of wildly uncertain times and we are doing this as a morality measure as the resources that go into shipping foods such vast distances should really be spent more effectively locally.

My husband encouraged me to apply Indian cooking spices and cooking practices to more of the foods we will continue to eat and sort of invent a hybrid cuisine that will work for us. I already do this some and I appreciated his practical and supportive suggestion. Now I only have to set about carrying it out. (And get over my heartbreak about eating less Indian food. I am not a foodie. I just have a heart thing with India and an abiding respect for the ancient science of Ayurveda.)

2. We will sell the goats, our surefooted little companions of several years, and put our energies into getting much more serious about veg and herb gardening. As a matter of fact, a young man with a rather large farm to develop is coming tomorrow to meet our modest herd. It will be difficult to see them go. I have resisted selling them several times over the years but now it is time, as evidenced by the fact that everyone is surprisingly on board. Eager even.

I have to immediately start thinking about seeds for spring. I have read lately on a number of agrarian blogs that quality heirloom seeds will be more scarce this spring and to order early. So after the goats go to their new home, we will apply ourselves to this next phase of our homestead development.

Shortly after all of this bracing family discussion and decision-making, I read the following in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver:

He told us that in India it’s sometimes considered a purification ritual to go home and spend a year eating everything from one place - ideally, even to grow it yourself. I like this name for what we had done: a purification ritual, to cultivate health and gratitude. pps. 338-339

Yes, this is exactly what it feels like to us. For us this way of life is about more than adjusting ahead of time to straitened conditions. It is about more than spending time together as a family. It is about more than learning to live frugally so that there are more resources available for others. It is about purification. It is about living naturally. It is about easing out of sense gratification and conventional ways of thinking and finding ourselves. And finding inspiration. And peace. And time to look inward.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

I stumbled across this amazing little video the other day on a site called Earthsave - the Compassion Campaign. It shows a mutually generous, reciprocal, affectionate relationship between an Indian yogi and his family and their family cow. I personally wasn’t too surprised at how the yogi doted on the cow but I was very surprised at how the cow doted on the yogi!

I was keen on my husband and children watching this video to see what their reactions would be. Everybody enjoyed it a great deal with almost everybody being really surprised at what they saw. My husband was particularly surprised at the cow looking for affection in the way that it did. Our cows seem very self-contained by comparison. But our middle daughter said she was not surprised at what she saw, interestingly enough. She commented that she thought that the video showed a natural relationship the way it should be and wishes that we had something more similar with our cows. (Watch the video and imagine how challenging that would be!)

I was intrigued by how commonplace an occurrence this arrangement of yogi and cow apparently is in this household. With everyone situated just so, the yogi carried on conversations and read his scriptures and carried on with his daily life in a very life-as-usual way.

I wonder what that would be like…

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

This is cross posted from Bamboo Grove Press Blog.

The modern human being is filled with unrealized gifts, abilities and talents.

Given the limitations and diversions of modern day society, we do not generally receive the training and experiences necessary for drawing out the higher, more noble qualities that exist in all of us. Technology and industrialization have become crutches that have kept us from having to realize our full innate abilities. Instead we have become dependent upon man made systems and hypnotized by materialism. In fact, most of us have become “disabled” in a way because we have no working relationship with the Divinity that resides within us. Everything in our consumerist culture pulls us outward and away from our true Divine inner nature. All of our intentions, goals, and actions tend to be of a material nature while our sacred inner relationship with the Divinity within is left to wither and die.

For this reason, my wife and I have made providing experiences, training and education geared towards forming an inner relationship with the Self or Master our top priority with regards to raising our children. We have always felt that our primary duty as parents was to provide the circumstances necessary for our children to uncover their true wealth, the Divine being that resides within them. By creating an enhanced environment through prayer, intentions, training and experiences, we are giving them the very best chance to become what they are meant to become and succeed in both their inner and outer worlds. With their inner Friend to guide them on their path, success will be assured and their true inner natures will be honored. Our ultimate goal is not to give them fish or even teach them how to fish but rather to provide them with all the tools and time necessary for them to find their “Inner Fisherman,” so to speak. With their “Inner Fisherman” in the lead, a lifetime of fishing will come to them naturally and successfully.

Out of this inner compulsion my wife and I share, we have spent years developing spiritually based lesson plans and activities of various sorts for our children and, really, for all children. In order to make these opportunities potentially available to all children, we have published My Friend Within, and have a few more children’s books to come that are along the same lines.

We are also now very happy to provide, at no cost, a complementary portion of our general lesson plan to people who purchase a copy of the book.

Anyone has purchased My Friend Within need only email us and request the My Friend Within Lesson Plan and we will send back the 30 page pdf file of activities, games and experiences designed to nurture the innate relationship between the child and their Friend who resides within them.

While it is true that children are born with the innate knowledge that God is within, any innate knowledge that is not triggered by models and experiences in the child’s environment will tend to lay dormant or even disappear entirely. We parents should do our best to not let that happen, especially when it comes to our children’s relationship with the Divine. It is our deep hope that as many parents as possible will get a copy of My Friend Within and use the Lesson Plan as well as develop activities of their own to further enhance this training for their children. In fact, we hope that someday nurturing a child’s inner relationship will be considered as mandatory a requirement as teaching a child to read. There is no greater gift to our children than aiding them in allowing their true inner nature to emerge into useful practice.

Here is a five part video series featuring our now older children doing some activities from the Lesson Plan. In the first video, I talk a little more about about some of the ideas in this blog post while spending time with our cows out in the pasture.

In this video, the children read My Friend Within aloud.

In the next two videos, our children play The Exploration game. With their eyes closed, they use their senses, including their inner senses, to figure out what objects, food, smells and even some of our farm animals are. Even at their somewhat older ages, they still love this game and ask to play it.

This last video is some old video clips I found. The first is of the children doing one of the circle exercises from the Lesson Plan. The second clip is from three years ago when our youngest son, then three years old, read a copy of My Friend Within back when it was called He Sits.

I have watched this last video five times in the last few days and I still am filled with joy and laughter each time I see it. I wish for all parents, teachers and children to find their own joy as they connect with their eternal Friend within.

From the rustling leaves of the Grove,
Paul

About a week or more ago, my boys did a father-enforced deep clean on their rooms and finished switching out their summer clothes for winter clothes. This resulted in a sparkling room for them but a rather large pile of laundry for me.

When laundry day dawned (for it is still a weather-based activity for us), I was dismayed at the formidable mountain of laundry waiting for little ole hand washing me to tackle. My husband responded by pointing out that we still have our old washing machine in the basement. He thought it would be a good idea to hook it up, use it to wash all of the extra laundry this one time, but just stand there through its cycles to stop the machine as it started to flood.

Now that was a very logical, thoughtful suggestion. But you know what? I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. Even though hand washing our laundry takes so much time (and would especially take so much time in this circumstance) and I get absolutely starving from doing it (!) and I am usually in pain for a couple of days afterward (I am plagued by loosey-goosey joints), I just couldn’t go back to using a machine even in the face of an unusually large pile of laundry. I just couldn’t.

I said, “Thank you but … well, I would know that those clothes aren’t really clean.” (He understood what I said and, I think, understood what I couldn’t quite say.)

OK. Yes, it was partly that I guess. But, honestly, it was much more than that. There is something about doing laundry this way. I don’t know if I can quite put it into words. It is the elemental simplicity of it. It is the sound of the water and the rhythm of the movements. It is the quiet attention you can pay to each piece of clothing and each beloved family member to whom it belongs. It is the feeling of connection with brothers and sisters all over the world who wash their clothing in a similar manner. It is working together with enthusiastic children and strong, broad shouldered husbands to accomplish this necessary task of daily living. It is laughter and water and prayer all rolled up into one “mundane” activity.

What else can I say? I think that it is the naturalness of it. Yes, that’s it. The naturalness of it. Hand washing the laundry and hanging it up to dry feels congruent. It feels right. It feels … well, natural.

A slapdash, machine-made, apparent efficiency cannot make up for laughter and water and prayer and naturalness. All the machine really does is move clothing mindlessly from one pile to another. Hand washing the laundry, on the other hand, always holds the potential to increase awareness, build muscles and character, and extend love. It fits into a natural day like the in fabulous quilt above. See the block showing hand washing laundry? It is all of a piece.

I never, ever would have guessed this on my own. Only doing the work, paying attention to the actual experience, and submitting to the discipline of it showed me. I am truly grateful for myself personally, and am so glad that the children will grow up with more naturalness in their lives. Functioning a bit more naturally will come naturally to them. I view that as a good thing.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie