Every so often I find it productive to leave a blog completely fallow for several months–or a couple of years–and then come back to it, possibly because I’m afraid regular posting might gain me an audience that I would feel an obligation to. It has probably been long enough that most people have wandered off by now.
I am presently living in a cooperative household in the SF Bay Area, where I’ve been building an earth oven, keeping a tiny flocklet of urban chickens, and growing vegetables. Our next door neighbor is a character with stories as long as your arm about his rough past and world travels, an unbelievable 30% of which may be true. I am engaging with a permaculture course, observing and interacting and hopefully strengthening my teaching repertoire slightly, and I am an interpretive naturalist at an ecological learning center. My living situation is virtually perfect except that it’s a little more expensive than I’d like, and my work situation is virtually perfect except that it doesn’t make me quite enough to live on. This is normal for these times, a situation which quite a lot of people are justifiably angry about. That just anger can be harnessed toward some beautiful productivity, but insofar as it is directed towards reforming the present broken system, it will not change overnight that which people are angry about.
I aspire to be part of the 100%, I told my friend—the 100% with enough healthy food to eat, enough clean water for drinking and bathing, safe enough places to live, and enough access to decent health care. I see that our system is designed not to deliver that. My earlier dream was to be part of building alternative systems that would allow people to gradually withdraw their support from the broken system so that it could collapse relatively painlessly. Now I believe that until the old system collapses, the majority of people will not cut themselves loose from it. I’m throwing in with those who call themselves the 99% in hopes that doing so will help to model potential new systems and allow the old to crumble with as little suffering as possible. But these are going to be uneasy times for most of us.
In the midst of this, permaculture offers what Sharon Astyk (after Pat Meadows) has called the theory of anyway: Whether or not oil is peaking, economy is collapsing, climate is warming, wouldn’t you rather be growing food and having fun with your neighbors, spending less money and more time, wasting less and having more? Would you rather dwell on scare-city or a-bun-dance? If we would rather be living this way anyway, what’s stopping us?
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Hey, what do you think of Ronald Hutton? I’m reading him at the right time in my own life, when I’ve just gone through this intellectual process of recognizing the irrelevance of literal truth applied to belief systems, or rather recognizing that literal truth isn’t necessary to the form a positive community. Thoughts?
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I haven’t read Hutton in years, but I share his views of the ahistoricity of contemporary neopaganism, and that’s put me directly at odds with an elder in my tradition who is very close to me, and for whom I have a great deal of respect. And I share his view that that ahistoricity is not necessarily in itself a problem for the foundation of a strong pagan movement. By analogy, there are Christian theologians and even congregations where the historicity and authorship of the Christian Scripture is viewed critically, and of those I’ve seen their faith practice seems to be even stronger and their community healthier for it—although not everyone wants to engage in that kind of analysis, of course. Is that sort of the lines along which you’re thinking?