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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org, OWL-OldWaysLiving@yahoogroups.com
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Occupy Your Life
  • Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2011 18:18:20 -0700


Occupy Your Life
By Joanne Poyourow 15 November, 2011
Transition US
http://www.countercurrents.org/poyourow151111.htm

Vandana Shiva visited my neighborhood last week. That single sentence in
itself continues to be absolutely amazing to me.

Dr Shiva was invited to Los Angeles to receive the Doshi Bridgebulider Award
at Loyola Marymount University. She gave a lecture for the University midday,
which I could not attend. In the the evening she gave a talk to a
packed-beyond-capacity lecture hall. Despite the university setting, easily a
quarter of the attendees were environmental, political or Transition
activists, many of whom I knew through activities of Transition Los Angeles.

Midday, between lectures, we were deeply honored as Dr Shiva's LMU hosts
brought her to tour "our" garden -- the food garden our Transition initiating
group built mere blocks from my house. Together we shared a chayote from our
massive vine, with Dr Shiva lightheartedly speculating what it might be like
with a certain masala sprinkled on it. We showed her our rainwater harvesting
operations and told her about the Seed Library that is being started in Los
Angeles. And we explained how our garden -- built on the property of a small
church -- grows food for the needy, meanwhile becoming a teaching garden from
which we teach classes in how to grow food in an urban setting. Later that
evening I was thrilled to hear her mention our garden within the context of
her lecture.

While waiting for Dr Shiva's arrival I had been shelling some heirloom
Christmas lima beans. Someone scooped these up and handed them to her. She
turned them tenderly in her cupped hands admiring their spectacular colors.
She said she had begun saving kidney beans -- and soon discovered more than
70 varieities. She spoke of India's 3,000 varieties of rice -- she's growing
out more than 300 of them on her farms.

I asked her about rice and water requirements. With a warm and delightfully
friendly laugh, she shattered the mythology we have been lead to believe.
More than 70% of those rice varieties do not need to be flooded. She told me
there are rice varietites for drylands, drought-resisitant rice varieties,
and varieties which are planted with the rhythm of the seasonal rains.

We can not get these here, I told her. "Then we need to start sewing them in
the hems of our dresses," she replied, fingering the magenta trim of her
sari. Many of the heirloom seed varieities we have in the U.S. came to this
country that way. Seeds of food plants were once so precious and valuable
that the people carefully brought seeds with them as they migrated to a new
continent.

Perhaps, given the fact that Dr Shiva was coming only to L.A. and to
Pittsburgh, I should have prepared a list of questions from the Transition
movement to ask her, to create some sort of rich dialog. After all, when
world-class guests visit Totnes, Rob Hopkins seems to have a well-considered
list of interview questions ready, after which he publishes the interview to
his blog. But on the other hand, some pretty wonderful things happened.

A student interviewed Dr Shiva in our garden for an Asian students'
publication. Meanwhile, a few of us quietly weeded the seedling beds beside
her. We helped each other learn to identify the baby plants. We tasted
sprouts and composted weeds, all the while surrounded by the deep wisdom of
Dr Shiva's interview responses. Perhaps, rather than lack of preparedness, it
was a case of teamwork. The interview happened. Meanwhile, rather than a
high-pressure scurry to extract some "thing-ness" of an interview to post
here, we had a chance to Be. How often do we really take a chance to Be in
our gardens or in the presence of such an august personality. It was restful
and deepening and meaningful and rich.

I came away with a sense of the deep preciousness of true seed, our food
heritage, a sacred gift from generations of seed savers. That to truly grow a
garden means to become involved with the seed and to know its provenance --
Where does your food come from, really? What are its ancestors, its history?
In my mind, post-Dr Shiva's visit, grabbing tainted seed packets from the Big
Box store barely counts as gardening food, it is still very much hooked into
that dreadful broken agribusiness system. It is only part-way to the goal.

Dr Shiva's evening lecture focused on biodiversity. Her opening comments were
that we have been convinced by the corporate business world that what is
"real" is the existence of a thing, the quantity of things. That qualitites
such as feel, taste, smell, we have been told do not matter. And in that
small shift has begun the undoing of biodiversity.

One of Dr Shiva's stories that stuck with me was that before the age of
plastic, each woman -- no matter how poor -- had at least one cooking pot or
food storage vessel, and they were beautiful, pounded metal. Now women are
being persuaded to give up that "old" pot and use plastic. My interpretation:
we might now have "more" but are we truly richer?

Dr Shiva had plenty of comments about economics sprinkled throughout her talk:

We are taught what is "real" and what matters. The conventional system
teaches us that if you are raising food in your kitchen garden and cooking it
at home it does not count. You're not "producing" anything because it's not
part of the conventional economy. If you are self-saving seed it isn't
creating anything; but in a laboratory, they're "creating" something that is
somehow "new" and therefore patentable.

These comments hit me personally since so much of my life -- gardening food,
homeschooling my children, building gardens and community networks with
volunteers -- is all within the "does not count" non-monetary economy.

Livelihoods: in India, 90% of the people are "self employed" -- small
businesses. Very few within this vast population work for the big
corporations.

In the context of my recent thoughts and writings about how to achieve
Economic Resilience, this statistic is of huge importance. Here in the U.S.
we so easily lose sight of it, thinking we have to have a "job." But vast
numbers of people around the world (as well as most of our ancestors) didn't
earn their livelihood from a corporate paycheck. As we move into a more
Resilient local economy, the concept of "jobs" will probably become an
antiquated concept.

Of all the things Vandana Shiva said, the comments that had the biggest
impact on me personally were in the final question of the night, during the
Q&A portion of her public talk. Someone asked "if you could say something to
the Occupy movement what would you say?"

Vandana Shiva flashed her brilliant and embracing laughing smile, a smile
that hooks right into your heart and you can't help but feel the connection.
She replied: "I'd tell them, Occupy your Life."

She reminded us how Gandhi had the symbolic actions -- sitting in protests --
but with that he also had the cotton -- the tangible actions. Dr Shiva said
that along with the protests, people need to grow food, to build connections
within their communities, to make changes in their lives.

Vandana Shiva's phrase "Occupy your Life" lingered with me for many days as I
went about my business. As the phrase deepened and spread within me, it began
to take on other dimensions, such as something akin to the Buddhist sense of
appreciating the present moment: Occupy the moment as I was weeding the
garden. Occupy the moment as I made a salad from the diverse heirloom
tomatoes of my harvest. Occupy the moment giggling with my daughter. The
portions of my lifetime spent frustrated in traffic revealed their
misguidedness and meaninglessness.

All of the statements Dr Shiva had made about what is real and what counts
became rolled up in that one phrase -- Occupy your life -- do the things that
really count. It is when we do the things that really count -- when we save
seed, when we cook and eat food that we know where it has come from, when we
break bread in kinship with others, when we give and trade from the bounty of
what we have created with our own hands -- when we Occupy our lives, therein
is the moment when we begin to reclaim the diversity, we begin to make the
change.

There are many videos of Vandana Shiva on YouTube. I enjoy this one and it
parallels the broad spectrum of her Los Angeles talk.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9K0cZGQgHA

How to Occupy Your Life

Over the past few decades we have become a nation of outsourcers. Just as the
giant corporations outsourced manufacturing and jobs to overseas, in our
personal lifestyles we have outsourced the basic skills of daily living
(often to those same giant corporations). We have given our lives over to
reliance on giant systems -- systems that are driven by the 1%, by the easy
credit of Big Banking, and cheap oil. The resulting dependence has left us
feeling disempowered, has created a dependence on high cash flow, and has
left us vulnerable.

Skills our great grandparents knew as essential, most of us barely know how
to do. For skills like growing food, cooking, food preservation, sewing
clothes, basic building, basic medicine, we now turn to corporate interests.
In fear, we tell each other one must use a "skilled professional."

It is time to "Occupy our Lives." Time to participate in the other half of
Gandhi's model. Time to take back those portions we outsourced to the broken
system. It's time to take back the basic skills of daily life into our own
hands. This action is protest, it is survival technique for hard times, and
it is preparation for the dawning post-petroleum era. But it also brings with
it that clean, fulfilling feeling of self-sufficiency, pride in
accomplishment, and wholesome living. "Occupy Your Life" is call to take it
back.

1) Take back your food. Every dollar you spend to Big Agribusiness -- every
dollar you spend at Big Box stores or conventional grocery stores --
reinforces, supports, and endorses the horribly broken system Vandana Shiva
campaigns against. Instead, buy from farmers markets and Community Supported
Agriculture (CSAs) as often as possible -- they're much more likely to be
growing more sustainably. Keep your local farmer in business. As peak oil
unfolds, we need that local food production up and running, in close
proximity to the urban centers where the people are. Also, learn how to grow
food yourself. Fill every nook and cranny of your cityscape with food
production.

>> more: "Why Eat Local Food" (pdf)
>> Food Not Lawns by H.C. Flores

2.) Take back your money. As you join the Move Your Money campaign to quit
the Big Banks, get vocal. Urge your community bank or credit union to invest
in our future -- to invest in, support and promote local projects which
better prepare your neighborhood for post-petroleum lifestyles. Additionally,
realize that the U.S. dollar is not the only way to achieve transactions
between people. Barter, time banking/LETSystems, sharing arrangements, and
gift cultures are a few of the many ways to get our needs met without U.S.
dollars. Diversity is necessary in our money supply too!

>> more: "A Multiplicity of Financial Vehicles"
>> Janelle Orsi, The Sharing Solution
>> "Community-based investment"

3) Take back your health care. Learn the skills of basic wellness, yourself,
without reliance on Big Pharma, the health insurance racket, nor AMA approval
(a form of branding, of fear-based control, and a way of limiting the market
solely to insiders). Learn the skills of traditional healing modalities and
practice them with your family.

>> The Healing Arts: Exploring the Medical Ways of the World, Ted
Kaptchuk and Michael Croucher
>> "Healing Without Harm ," by Joel Kreisberg, DC
>> Campbell, Anneke, "Sustaining our Health Care"
>> more resources: Health Care subheader, here

4) Take back your livelihood. The hours of your working day, your time, are
the very fabric of your life. If the crumbling conventional economy has
already unseated you, become part of the new future. Take Vandana Shiva's
examples to heart -- most of the world does not depend on corporate jobs for
their living. What are your skills? In your times of unemployment or
underemployment -- or in your leisure time -- what new skills can you pick up
which better prepare you, your family, and your neighborhood for a powerdown
future? As we localize our economies with the end of cheap oil and easy
credit, what basic goods or services can you provide for your local
community? What need can you fill?

>> "Rethink the idea of 'jobs'"
>> "Resilience-building businesses and industries"

5) Take back your value system. Reclaim feel, taste, smell, as valuable
attributes. That hard, red, round thing from Costco or WalMart doesn't count
as a tomato. Mere count or thingness isn't where it's at anymore. Allow your
inner sense of "right" to overcome the advertising slogans of Wall Street. We
certainly aren't experiencing "better living through chemicals"! Reclaim
environmental stewardship, social equity, and deep satisfaction.

Yes, by the counting system created by Wall Street and the 1%, many of the
practices I'm suggesting won't seem to measure up. They won't count on your
bottom line nor on your income tax return. But they'll count in your heart,
in your soul, in your sense of justice and of satisfaction with life.

more: "Redefine 'Success'"
Carl Honore, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed
Dave Wann, Simple Prosperity
Cecile Andrews, Less is More
"New Economic Indicators"

It's time to figuratively "sew seeds into the hems of our dresses." Time to
gather up the attributes of what is precious about life, to capture that vast
diversity, and carry it with you as we journey to new frontiers -- as our
society moves into a new era.

Joanne Poyourow is part of the Transition movement in Los Angeles. She is the
author of three books, including "Economic Resilience: What we can do in our
local communities." The full text of "Economic Resilience" can be read online
at http://EconomicResilience.blogspot.com




  • [Livingontheland] Occupy Your Life, Tradingpost, 11/15/2011

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