I have a Black Thumb, but a Green Hammer

The whole question of becoming more resilient always seems to start with growing our own food. With good reason, since without water and food, everything else is eventually moot.

But I am not a gardener. And no matter how many times I have tried, I have not learned to enjoy growing plants, or gotten any better at it.

I often believe in a natural division of labor. It certainly worked for my late wife Trish and I: I built her gardens, she grew stuff in them, I cooked the stuff, and together we ate it. (And evaluated my experimental recipes for disposing of the inevitable garden excess, such as the Twenty Pounds of Green Tomatoes Salsa.)

We were both seriously satisfied, and grateful to each other. I still can see Trish bent over in between her rows of plants, happy, involved and grounded in a way I never understood. I enjoyed helping her harvest, but she was nourished by all the parts of gardening.

(So much so that I got Trish her own chipper shredder for an anniversary present, and she was deeply pleased. Now she could make her own mulch!)

Well, I am not nourished by gardening. It actually drives me a little crazy. Which is why it will not be one of my contributions to resilience.

Oxalis

Because I have realized that I work best in a 1:1 ratio of physical work and result. When I lift up a big rock and carry it across the yard, I am happy that it stays put until I choose to move it again. When I cut a board and nail it to another board, I am truly pleased that they stay together, unless I screwed up and need to redo the joint. When I demolish a wall, I am so satisfied that the drywall and lathe and plaster stay in the debris bags and don’t climb back onto the walls overnight.

My experience of gardening is that crook neck squash that you spend weeks growing, that look so healthy and perfect for picking tomorrow, can become shriveled gray blobs by dawn. That when you (naturally) fertilize and feed your soil, oxalis invites itself to the feast, turning your garden green--but not in a fun way.  That your hours of weeding are rendered useless as soon as you water your garden again, given the regenerative capabilities of oxalis. And that basically, nature loves a stockpile, so the more you grow, the more bugs and slugs and invader plants and fungus and deer and not-so-cute-bunnies come to eat it and undo all your work.

Please believe me. I know we need to grow our own food, and that gardening is a challenging, essential task for resilience.

But it isn’t going to be my challenging, essential task.

***

So as part of this project, I will be blogging about my search for how my passions and skills can be as effective and useful as growing food.

Because I can’t be the only terminally non-gardening person concerned about self-reliance and resilience.

Right?

I am the Perfect Crash Test Dummy - Part 3

Moenkopi Hopi Wash and Lower Village, my home for two years.

For you to have an accurate picture of what this project feels like from the inside, I need to include my experiences of living powered down and more self-reliantly.

I spent two years living in a Hopi village that had no running water, no sewers, and no electricity. The old Mennonite mission buildings where we were housed had electricity and slowly running water, siphoned from the spring at the edge of the lower village and then stored in a water tank above the mission. (I used to say we had walking, not running, water.)  Heat was by woodstove. For my two years there, I split most of the wood, often with an old coughing chainsaw, but frequently by hand.

Living at the mission meant constant work on its systems, such as the roof, our water supply, our septic system and finishing out enough of the stone barn to house a thrift shop downstairs, and me upstairs. All the work was DIY, although sometimes a retired contractor and his sons came to work on our buildings as their way of supporting the unit. Until a brave entrepreneur built a mini-strip mall two miles away in Tuba City, the nearest useful hardware store was in Flagstaff. Flag was an hour-and-a-half drive when there were no sandstorms, thunderstorms, or blizzards. So if something was broken at the mission, we usually had to find a way to fix it with what was on hand.

Some people who came to the mission found this mode of living too challenging. But I loved it. I had no romantic visions of pioneer or rural life; I happen to relish the kind of mental and physical engagement this way of life requires.

For example, the mission was built into the rocky slope of the wash, and it was held in place by a series of terraces with high stone walls. We used to let lower village families garden in the terraces to help them grow extra food. But one night a village man went off drinking instead of turning off the crude irrigation system we had rigged for the gardens. We didn’t notice it running, because it was in the first terrace above the mission. But we certainly noticed a few nights later when fifty feet of stone retaining wall collapsed , just missing the main mission building.

Me, left, and an occasional helping hand.

I spent weeks rebuilding that wall using mud and the mound of rocks now conveniently close at hand. At first it was overwhelming—so many tumbled rocks, so much sandy earth spilling down from the terrace, and after one day of help from a friend, just me and a shovel and a wheelbarrow. And this on top of my regular daily work, too. 

Figuring out the most efficient process of rebuilding the wall started out as self-defense, but I came to really enjoy the problem solving challenge; how much water with how much earth makes the strongest mortar? The rocks that used to be at the base of the wall are now covered by all the higher rocks that fell onto them—how can I get at and use the heavy bottom rocks without moving every rock twice?

Living this way was certainly harder than using a contractor, or buying a pre-made solution. And there were many times when my reaction was more like, “Oh God, now what?” And I do remember the feeling of never being able to get ahead of anything. Because there was always something newly urgent that needed doing NOW, on top of my official job of running a daily rec center and rec program for the village kids, my unofficial jobs of co-hosting visiting travelers, grant writing, and helping run the weekly church activities.

But the truth is, I felt more alive. I’d spent my previous life in school,  reading and writing and studying, and playing music and working in commercial kitchens. So it was alternately daunting and exhilarating to have so much of my life now be in my own hands—if I could come up with a solution to a challenge with our buildings or with my work with the kids, I could just do it. And if I couldn’t, I’d better keep trying because there was usually no backup.

I’ve included as much self-reliance and simpler living as I could in my later life, from working on the houses I’ve owned—carpentry, roofing, electrical, and plumbing—to putting in gardens and even (God-forbid) gardening.

Now,  I don’t particularly want to have to split logs again, or build a fire an hour before I want the room to be warm.

But I do very much want to live more simply and robustly, so that I can directly engage whatever I need and make it work. This gives me a deep, deep satisfaction that I have never forgotten.

The Gift of the Group

I'm realizing that there's another layer of motivation to doing this project than just reaching for the companionship and energy that collective living offers me. Even beyond the delight of space designing my house. There's a layer under that, that is starting to bubble up to the surface. Because at last it can.

If I think about it honestly, sharing my home means having to do less. Less of the obligatory and the responsible, and more that is quite personal. And that's a healthy thing! It gives me time to find what must come from deep inside me and act upon it. How often do we have the time these days to do that?

Years ago, my beloved hubby and I tried doing it all ourselves. We did the tree-hugging, "back-to-the-land" lifestyle on10 acres in Washington. We were by ourselves because no other family lived in the state, and because my husband didn't trust strangers to hold true as a family would. We also had two young children. Even in our early 30's it was an huge task to create that from scratch on raw acreage. And, it became an overwhelming amount of work to maintain; ask anyone trying their own version of radical homemaking or urban homesteading. It is one of the reasons I do not have my husband anymore. We were trying to be supermom and dad and super global citizens all at once. 

I will also tell you that living all those values as just a nuclear family was very lonely at times. Everyone was a car ride away. Think about it. If you are trying not to get into that car until you have multiple errands and places to go, and if you are trying not to waste resources and conserve, then you do not hop into a vehicle every time you just ached to rub shoulders with a friend who is miles away. Nurturing yourself kinda settles to the bottom of barrel.  

So now, have those old priorities lost importance? Just the reverse. Those values are all the more dear to me, but I'm seeking another path to them now. One not so burdensome, or lonely, so I can achieve it.

Dunno if I'm wiser now that I'm older, but at least I've learned. I've learned that relying on someone else's muscles is okay. I've learned that reaping the benefit of their fascinations, inclinations, and strengths, enriches me. And now I am also realizing that their presence gives me breathing space.

And precious time. 

Time to relax, and exhale or walk to see a friend...just because. And even more to the point, living this way gives me time to explore all sorts of interests, some they've stimulated as well as my own. The time lets me delve into all those passions I discover I want to improve. To deepen. 

So if I look honestly at my own motivations, there's a real desire to use the collective as a gift for my own pursuits. But see then here's the thing: Being who I am, and still reaching for those values now means I get to focus on what skills I want to bring into the way I live. To train in skills that are important, and intensify my expertise. And that allows me to become more resilient, a deeper resilience that grows from the explore and the pursuit. (At least in the ways that I can, being who I am right now.)

Altogether then, I'm seeing that collective living, the intentional community impulse is in total harmony with transitioning into local resilience, and the Transition Town movement. They are interwoven for me, one fabric. Intertwined, they allow me, and anyone seeking that part of themselves, to seek and exploit my own resilient strengths.  

So now, what do I choose to make of this gift?