No rain, no rainbow.
Mick Fisch wrote:
My wife had a 'wake up' moment a while back. We had been going to a self sufficiency class in our church. This class was focused on finances (there are other classes with other focuses). My wife realized that she had been worrying about the money to buy things we needed. She suddenly realized she didn't need the money, she needed the stuff. So she started to focus and pray on how to get the things we needed. She quickly and consistently found the stuff either free or very cheap from a variety of sources. My wife told my daughter who is homesteading in Alaska about this. My daughter did the same thing. She needed a bookcase, a printer and something else (I forget what it was). She felt like she should check the dump. (they have an area where people can leave stuff others might want). She found everything but the printer there, exactly what she needed. While she was loading it, a guy drove up to drop off a printer. He had bought a new one but the old one worked perfectly. This attitude of repurposing and scrounging is part of the permies mindset. The reason I tell the story is to point out that needs were met without spending money. What we need is our needs met, not the money to pay to get our needs met.
Tyler Ludens wrote:I've never been bored in my life.
Maybe that's not strictly accurate. I have too many interests to be bored.
I envy people who can work hard.
siri atma khalsa wrote:I think the premise that Gert works 48 weeks 10 to 20 hours/week and 4 weeks 50 hours/week is unlikely.
Idle dreamer
siri atma khalsa wrote:I think the premise that Gert works 48 weeks 10 to 20 hours/week and 4 weeks 50 hours/week is unlikely.
Thanks for your kindnesses,
Christine
Christine Le page wrote:I believe that permaculture will soon become very acceptable in the next decade, between the popularity of the survivalist preppers out there and people like myself 30 to 40 year olds who are quite disillusioned with work culture/jobs availablity/low wage standards will be turning other methods more and more just to make ends meet.
Many of the cooks that work with my man do the best they can with their back yards. One lives in a trailer but has a raised beds squished into his insanely tiny plot. The head chief has made his bark yard into a garden and uses the restaurants rooftop for a herb garden. One of the dishwashers keeps pestering my man for some of my little Rhode Island Reds' eggs and would like to be gifted a chicken for his own fresh eggs.
Beyond the gate is a scene from an enchanted garden, with birds flitting in and out of tree branches that have not succumbed to pruning shears, where the wild land has been tamed only enough to make room for the rows of cucumbers, corn, cilantro, horseradish, comfrey, beets, tomatoes, potatoes, parsley, okra, green beans, onions and collard greens that peek up through the fertile soil.
Cedar, pine, Sequoia, oak, dogwood, maple, holly trees — all here. So are wisteria, trumpeter vine, honeysuckle, lilacs and currants. The air is steeped with sweetness, a brew of violet, peppermint, lemon balm and spearmint.
Somewhere, a chicken crows. Then, bleating. Five sleek Nubian goats climb to their feet in an enclosure tucked beyond the garden, wet noses snuffling as Lynn Cosmos, 75, approaches with fresh grass in her hands.
Cosmos has been scorched a deep bronze by the sun. She wears an olive green tank top and loosely flowing pants. She is barefoot. Hard work has made her hands strong. Daily gardening has lined her fingernails with moon-shaped crescents of dirt. Her snow-white hair is piled on top of head, held in place with a scrunchie, and her sea-green eyes, sparkling with laughter, are startlingly clear.
She gestures at the land. “This is my health plan. This is also my retirement plan. I don’t have anything else.”
Cosmos lives along the proposed route for a county road expansion that will provide an alternate connection from Terrace Heights to downtown Yakima. She is one of three homeowners who will lose their homes in the first phase of the project.
But Cosmos will not only lose her home. She will lose her studio, where she offers healing massage and Feldenkrais body work, and hosts community drum circles and a monthly women’s circle.
She will no longer be able to grow her own food, collect eggs from her chickens, make cheese from her goats’ milk. She will no longer be able to live off the land, like she’s done for decades.
paul wheaton wrote:Maybe, in time, this community will safely nurture Gert so much that Gert will decide that she is a writer and write that book.
Ante nos rexit, nos servierunt.
Geoffrey Chew wrote:
paul wheaton wrote:Maybe, in time, this community will safely nurture Gert so much that Gert will decide that she is a writer and write that book.
Or, nurture Ferd so much that he will become a lawyer who defends Gert from having her dream crushed under a bypass?
One of the subconscious attractions of impermaculture is that when Bob the Builder decides to nuke and pave, it's an inconvenience rather than a death sentence. You can "just" move to another place with all your precious stuff, eat the same junk out of the same boxes, and tell yourself things happen for a reason. Whatever else Gert is, she's also exceptionally vulnerable to forces that only respect power, and gauge that power by the number of zeroes in bank accounts.
I suspect that the most effective way to nurture the largest number of Gerts over the longest time span is to convince as many lawyers as possible that they personally have something to lose by unhoming them. If you can convince them that that "loss" doesn't have to mean "cash", so much the better. Can you train them to reflexively defend Gert? How? What would it cost Gert to take advantage of that reflex once it was in place?
How much propaganda value would you find in a high profile example of Gert winning a lawsuit after being defended pro bono by lawyers simply because she was a Gert? Americans fetishize raw political power. Repeatedly bending governments to your whim in defense of "individual" rights, and being seen to do it, could sell the value of permaculture to people who don't even know there's a dream to have yet. If you can pull it off, how do you build a simple system that encourages the event to repeat?.
How do you organize a system that turns the abundance of a Gert, who chooses to work 11 hours when they only need to work 10, into legal protection (legal celebrity, even) provided by a Ferd?
...
I know you're not exactly short of things to think about, but maybe this idea can just here on the side of the road and look cute until someone lets it follow them home.
leila hamaya wrote:well i agree with your sentiment, and agree with what you said here, except i would add (fake) before the word power...in all that you wrote.
thats not power, it's more like abuse
Ante nos rexit, nos servierunt.
At my age, Happy Hour is a nap.
“When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.” -Alanis Obomsawin
http://strawberrymoonfarm.com/
At my age, Happy Hour is a nap.
At my age, Happy Hour is a nap.
Mike Haasl wrote:
paul wheaton wrote:
I think that there are homesteaders that are not using permaculture techniques - they work a lot. Year after year to keep it all moving forward.
I think that there are homesteaders that are just getting started with permaculture. The first few years is a lot of work. Then it just gets easier.
I agree wholeheartedly. I'm the second one but I'm still in the first year...
SKIP books, get 'em while they're hot!!! Skills to Inherit Property
Come join me at the 2024 SKIP event at Wheaton Labs
Lorinne Anderson: Specializing in sick, injured, orphaned and problem wildlife for over 20 years.
Tyler Ludens wrote:I've never been bored in my life... Maybe that's not strictly accurate. I have too many interests to be bored.
Blessings,
Alana
Living a life that requires no vacation.
Dougan says: If I took all the money I am paying retroactively for school and could put it into land, I would be a Gert. However, I cannot find a permaculture solution to this debt. I have tried government aid, and working with my private loans. Neither work. Bankruptcy won't even erase it. I probably won't even be approved for a mortgage until I'm in my 40s.
Joy and abundance, Cory "Cimarron" Layne - Building a Permaculture community on 30 acres in SW Virginia Appalachian Foothills. Still looking for liberty-loving, resilient people ready for a challenge. PM me with your email address for more info.
Anderson gave himself the promotion. So I gave myself this tiny ad:
Donating to permies.com + getting fun stuff in the process!
https://permies.com/wiki/154707/Donating-permies-fun-stuff-process
|