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Re: [Livingontheland] The Most Radical Thing You Can Do
- From: "Lynn Montgomery" <sunfarm@toast.net>
- To: <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
- Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] The Most Radical Thing You Can Do
- Date: Sat, 14 Mar 2009 11:37:08 -0600
Perhaps poetry is a little out of place here. I wrote this a few months ago and have read it at some poetry readings. We all have a personal concept of "staying at home". Perhaps others will give us theirs:
SOMEDAY I WILL PUT THE WALLS ON THE OUTHOUSE, PERHAPS Gary Snyder said it
best: "The most radical thing you
can do is stay home". Being radical has been a lifelong
quest, the only way to choose and be and
act, the only way to meet one's
calling-destiny, the only way to have fun in the
revelry of it all. The outhouse has no walls-except
for the west side, which is hidden by trees anyway
and thus, has no reason but to keep the
wind out. It sits down near the flood plain of the
Creek, among the juniper trees and cholla cactus,
alone and secluded, giving off that necessary
coziness of such necessities. The rude latrine of many hippie
years finally collapsed, so the digging commenced and
after a short year or so, an eight foot deep pit six foot
square stood waiting, waiting for a proper
architecture, a proper vision, and, of course, the means to
bring it about. Energy was built, and the building took
form and intention. Several windows with frosted
glass from a salvage place, a sturdy plywood floor and a
shingled pitched roof. The door was well framed and had
a pneumatic return, and a cute little window in place
of the crescent moon. A nice oak veneer throne with a
plush padded seat, the veneer continuing to a
traditional Japanese-style squat. The weather intruded through the
open sides and the finish slowly faded, the wood cracked,
and the veneer peeled. A New Year's storm dumped over
two feet of snow one evening, and the morning
revealed a ruin of shattered studs and bared nails. Denys the
carpenter managed to somehow re-erect, and all was salvaged save the
door and some windows. Still no walls! No walls, no walls, but the views
are fine, the ventilation sublime. The lizards, in season, entertain
with good conversation. The birds are there, scrub jay,
towhee, hummers and flycatcher, mockingbird revealing all others
and ravens clucking their affections, there aren't as many flies as one
would expect, the wasps don't bother, being radical and staying at
home, no walls, no walls; And
so....... trio build, build-build; build,
build-build; jobs, jobs-jobs; jobs,
jobs-jobs; drill, drill-drill; drill,
drill-drill; grow, grow-grow; grow,
grow-grow; sell and buy; buy and
sell; fortune and, ego and, just right
kitchen cabinets; hammers and, backhoes beep, and
rigs roar, money is, to be made, false
dreams rise, and they fade; cancerous boxes, pop!, on the
ridge, one by one, stop!, as we
cringe, as the insidious spores settle on
every lot, vapid windows stare down, and one
cannot scratch where it itches
while planting carrot seed no longer
can we be we. Springs dry up. And
so..... No walls, no walls, pray why are
there no walls? It's not the result of some anal
retentive extroversion? Not, I think, as the need for
radical nonviolence calls, to make those that cannot stay at
home have an aversion to such a view, a view of no
walls, through those windows now shaded and grown over with
ivy, to block the view of no walls. The views that extend their
territory and caused their cheap huge boxes to cost so much,
territory once mine. Are there no walls since my
ancestors, in the Revolution, would spend Sunday afternoons
strolling over the to shoot Burgoyne's Hessian
mercenaries from behind boulders and trees? To take back
territory that was mine?
Or is it the simple revolutionary
impulse to be radical? All revolution and politics is
local, staying at home, drawing them in and watching the
values fall down, down, down, the vendetta
has no walls. But there is no real victory that
comes from vengeance, so what are the real reasons for
no walls, no walls? Mayordomo acequia patrol, shovel
carried as authority, stepping in footprints centuries
old and still breathing. Long before us, nine hundred
years, the ditches ran from Ojo la Rosa de Castilla to
fields our ancestors kept, only three hundred years, just
yesterday, so that we can stay at home in the San Antonio
Land Grant and grow chile. Bowels of the earth to the top of
the sky through you and I, the magic liquid flows through
the cycles of Planet and life. Lubricating, supporting,
quenching, dissolving, precipitating, answering the ceremonies and
prayers to continue the cycles. Ignorant well pumps suck the
life-blood, and the cycles break, throwing us back into the
Underworld-endless, hopeless, darkness. Salvation and survival rest in
love, love of place, love of home. Fear of loneliness into love of
solitude, denial into love of ourselves. Moving in our vehicles watching
the world spin by into staying in one place, observing
that apricot ripening into divine sweetness. Perhaps, soon and one day, the
radical will dissolve into us all, allowing, at long last, for there
to be walls and more walls. November,
2008
To Grow a garden is to believe in tomorrow - Eleanor Roosevelt Message: 1
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:04:50 -0700 From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net> Subject: [Livingontheland] The Most Radical Thing You Can Do To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org Message-ID: <200903131104500890.180905B4@mail.lobo.net">200903131104500890.180905B4@mail.lobo.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1" The Most Radical Thing You Can Do http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/3628 Staying home as a necessity and a right BY REBECCA SOLNIT Published in the November/December 2008 issue of Orion magazine LONG AGO the poet and bioregionalist Gary Snyder said, ?The most radical thing you can do is stay home,? a phrase that has itself stayed with me for the many years since I first heard it. Some or all of its meaning was present then, in the bioregional 1970s, when going back to the land and consuming less was how the task was framed. The task has only become more urgent as climate change in particular underscores that we need to consume a lot less. It?s curious, in the chaos of conversations about what we ought to do to save the world, how seldom sheer modesty comes up?living smaller, staying closer, having less?especially for us in the ranks of the privileged. Not just having a fuel-efficient car, but maybe leaving it parked and taking the bus, or living a lot closer to work in the first place, or not having a car at all. A third of carbon-dioxide emissions nationwide are from the restless movements of goods and people. We are going to have to stay home a lot more in the future. For us that?s about giving things up. But the situation looks quite different from the other side of all our divides. The indigenous central Mexicans who are driven by poverty to migrate have begun to insist that among the human rights that matter is the right to stay home. So reports David Bacon, who through photographs and words has become one of the great chroniclers of the plight of migrant labor in our time. ?Today the right to travel to seek work is a matter of survival,? he writes. ?But this June in Juxtlahuaca, in the heart of Oaxaca?s Mixteca region, dozens of farmers left their fields, and women weavers their looms, to talk about another right, the right to stay home. . . . In Spanish, Mixteco, and Triqui, people repeated one phrase over and over: the derecho de no migrar?the right to not migrate. Asserting this right challenges not just inequality and exploitation facing migrants, but the very reasons why people have to migrate to begin with.? Seldom mentioned in all the furor over undocumented immigrants in this country is the fact that most of these indigenous and mestizo people would be quite happy not to emigrate if they could earn a decent living at home; many of them are just working until they earn enough to lay the foundations for a decent life in their place of origin, or to support the rest of a family that remains behind. >From outer space, the privileged of this world must look like ants in an anthill that?s been stirred with a stick: everyone constantly rushing around in cars and planes for work and pleasure, for meetings, jobs, conferences, vacations, and more. This is bad for the planet, but it?s not so good for us either. Most of the people I know regard with bemusement or even chagrin the harried, scattered lives they lead. Last summer I found myself having the same conversation with many different people, about our craving for a life with daily rites; with a sense of time like a well-appointed landscape with its landmarks and harmonies; and with a sense of measure and proportion, as opposed to a formless and unending scramble to go places and get things and do more. I think of my mother?s lower-middle-class childhood vacations, which consisted of going to a lake somewhere not far from Queens and sitting still for a few weeks?a lot different from jetting off to heli-ski in the great unkn own and all the other models of hectic and exotic travel urged upon us now. For the privileged, the pleasure of staying home means being reunited with, or finally getting to know, or finally settling down to make the beloved place that home can and should be, and it means getting out of the limbo of nowheres that transnational corporate products and their natural habitats?malls, chains, airports, asphalt wastelands?occupy. It means reclaiming home as a rhythmic, coherent kind of time. Which seems to be what Bacon?s Oaxacans want as well, although their version of being uprooted and out of place is much grimmer than ours. At some point last summer I started to feel as if the future had arrived, the future I?ve always expected, the one where conventional expectations start to crack and fall apart?kind of like arctic ice nowadays, maybe?and we rush toward an uncertain, unstable world. Of course the old vision of the future was of all hell breaking loose, but what?s breaking loose now is a strange mix of blessings and hardships. Petroleum prices have begun doing what climate-change alarms haven?t: pushing Americans to alter their habits. For people in the Northeast who heat with oil, the crisis had already arrived a few years back, but for a lot of Americans across the country, it wasn?t until filling up the tank cost three times as much as it had less than a decade ago that all the rushing around began to seem questionable, unaffordable, and maybe unnecessary. Petroleum consumption actually went down 4 percent in the first quarter of the year, and miles driven nationally also declined for the f irst time in decades. These were small things in themselves, but they are a sign of big changes coming. The strange postwar bubble of affluence with its frenzy of building, destroying, shipping, and traveling seems to be deflating at last. The price of petroleum even put a dent in globalization; a piece headlined ?Shipping Costs Start to Crimp Globalization? in the New York Times mentioned several manufacturers who decided that cheaper labor no longer outweighed long-distance shipping rates. The localized world, the one we need to embrace to survive, seems to be on the horizon. But a localized world must address the unwilling and exploited emigr?s as well as the joy riders and their gratuitously mobile goods. For the Oaxacans, the right to stay home will involve social and economic change in Mexico. Other factors pushing them to migrate come from our side of the border, though?notably the cheap corn emigrating south to bankrupt farm families and communities. The changing petroleum economy could reduce the economic advantage to midwestern corporate farmers growing corn and maybe make shipping it more expensive too. What?s really needed, of course, is a change of the policy that makes Mexico a dumping ground for this stuff, whether that means canceling NAFTA or some other insurrection against ?free trade.? Another thing rarely mentioned in the conversations about immigration is what American agriculture would look like without below-minimum-wage immigrant workers, because we have gotten used to food whose cheapness comes in part from appalling labor conditions. It is because we have broken out of the frame of our own civility that undocumented immigrants are forced out of theirs. Will the world reorganize for the better? Will Oaxaca?s farmers get to stay home and practice their traditional agriculture and culture? Will we stay home and grow more of our own food with dignity, humanity, a little sweat off our own brows, and far fewer container ships and refrigerated trucks zooming across the planet? Will we recover a more stately, settled, secure way of living as the logic of ricocheting like free electrons withers in the shifting climate? Some of these changes must come out of the necessity to reduce carbon emissions, the unaffordability of endlessly moving people and things around. But some of it will have to come by choice. To choose it we will have to desire it?desire to stay home, own less, do less getting and spending, to see a richness that lies not in goods and powers but in the depth of connections. The Oaxacans are ahead of us in this regard. They know what is gained by staying home, and most of them have deeper roots in home to begin with. A nd they know what to do outside the global economy, how to return to a local realm that is extraordinarily rich in food and agriculture and culture. The word radical comes from the Latin word for root. Perhaps the most radical thing you can do in our time is to start turning over the soil, loosening it up for the crops to settle in, and then stay home to tend them. |
-
[Livingontheland] The Most Radical Thing You Can Do,
Tradingpost, 03/13/2009
- <Possible follow-up(s)>
- Re: [Livingontheland] The Most Radical Thing You Can Do, Lynn Montgomery, 03/14/2009
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