3 October 1997 -- The fulfillment first of true need
Once again, I'm trying to reduce my list of "needs" by removing all
those that are merely spurious, unproductive (or counterproductive) "wants".
I wonder from time to time how I should classify a "want", once I've isolated
it, so as to determine its fate. It seems the human mind does well
with a small input of concentration on the frivolous, from time
to time.
I can make this into another great lament about the various industrial
powers that be, who know that a mind sufficiently conditioned, and with
frivolous products set before it, will tend to consume its fill and become
gorged with such "goods". Then, goes the lament (certainly not original
to me), the entrepreneurs behind the industries will congratulate themselves
over a job well done, hiding behind a dual, patriotic defense of laissez-faire
and caveat emptor, when attempts are made to hold them accountable for
externalized costs related to such consumption. But a broad brush
denunciation of business that serves its customers well is just as contemptible,
and I cannot long hold such a simple view.
So I come for awhile to the Cabin, where the media of influence operate
on a different model of "survival of the fittest". It is cold today...down
near freezing when I was out this morning. This has stood as an advertisement
since the pre-industrial days that I should seek warm vestments and/or
build a better fire. Can I consume too much warmth? Perhaps,
but then I'll get singed or start into a sweat, and know I've taken my
limit. Of course, my example of seeking out heat is hard to classify
in any way but as a "need".
I suppose there are things I might "want" here as well. I could
want, for example, the kind of luxurious shower that there are two of in
my real life city home. Turn the tap, and get in. Here, the
bathing process is more involved, as is cooking and using/maintaining the
outhouse. From life in the city, I often feel vestigial "wants" of
more convenient-to-use creature comforts when I'm at the Cabin. But
then I analyze this "want" for a moment, from the perspective of a Cabin-dweller.
Why did I "want" a dishwasher and an automatic electric hot water heater?
Because my mind had no time to deal with the alternatives needed here.
I had other matters that made the notion of stoking a fire to heat water
an ungainly one.
But what was the true content of so much of what made those conveniences
so "needed"? Well, some, granted, is the very nature of urban living,
since one does not build fires often for heating in the city (especially
with no chimney, in an all-electric house). But some, I'll admit,
must consist of excessive urban distraction and too many "wants" hiding
as "needs". There must be a way, back there in the metropolis, of
taking care of "First Things First", and then carefully examing all the
Second Things. Ooooh...I've been writing too long and the fire is
getting a little low...I must build up more heat to carry me through the
night. Why did I build the woodshed so far from the door, anyway?
RB
6 October 1997 -- The experience of my surroundings
I'm standing out in the grassy clearing again today, along the footpath
that I'm beginning to know better from the front door to the trailhead
into the woods, whose leaves are rapidly turning color now. It's
a bit warmer today; a real taste of "Indian Summer", during which those
with time off on this Monday afternoon might be out driving the country
roads in their touring sedans, gazing about. My own road up the valley
ends here at the cabin; I should not be seeing any today.
The front door of the Cabin faces to the northeast, the origin of the
sun each day as it finally takes its place over the ultimate top of the
ridge. Now, as day advances, the sun is behind me, and it shall soon
cast its deepening red upon a hillside that is already well-endowed with
that color. The rise from the other side of the stream is not so
steep, since its top only serves as a minor divide, to delimit the next-door
basin of the creek that joins "mine" about a mile and a half downstream.
So I stand in the clearing, recognizing the powerful effect of one's
immediate surroundings. Those small annoyances that seemed my whole
world so recently in real life are "out of sight; out of mind"; far away
and insignificant. Perhaps I've built myself to one of those conditions
of heightened vigilance and overreaction back there again. This should
really be testimony to a good life, I would think, when all of my
problems are so relatively small and easily forgotten. If I can come
to this open expanse and so readily dispose of their urgency, then I must
be truly ahead in the game.
So I try to back out of some of that dead-end fretting; that pointless
chasing of irrelevancy, to expand the scope of my perception once again
to my entire periphery, which indeed is a landscape as well-laid as the
crested terrain that rises all about in front of me. I can simply
stay here and rest. People in earlier times, who had to travel cross-country
through this terrain as a matter of reaching their own settlements in the
far distance, might have come to this point along the creek and stared
off in determined resolve at the ridge-top, as something in their way,
something of hardship to surmount. But even they, with their fuller
loads than I'll carry on a day-hike, only had to cross at one good point.
And they had pack animals.
I'm standing a bit restless, yet, from the old city habit. No,
I cannot let this beautiful and innocuous landscape become anything like
the imagined array of torments that encompasses me back there. And
even in real life, all I ever really have to do is face one single problem
at a time. Just me, just one.
RB
10 October 1997 -- Worn out by worrying
I have been sitting in the relative silence, out on the front porch
again, trying to gain that all-too-rare appreciation for the immediate
moment. I have noticed what I would term a "multiplier effect" in
recent times for the troubles that my real-world city life deliver to me.
It is not the actual problem that hurts so much as the fearful, fretful
and repeated anticipation of dealing with it.
Returning again to my thoughts on the Sermon on the Mount, I know that
I have been expressly warned not to think about tomorrow, for the present
day has sufficient trouble of its own. When I can center myself in
the present long enough, and forcefully expel all irrelevancy over which
I do not have control, I am able to see just what is in front of me, and
realize what are my real options for concern.
It seems that city life could be so much more livable if I were not
continually immersed in reminders of what I must do then rather
than what I can do now. This relates to the tyranny of a rote
schedule. There is no need, really, to have a defined activity and
way of feeling for each of the 168 hours in the week. This serves
industrial expediency well, since it keeps me on the job, but it eventually
gets dashed by the unexpected anyway, so what's the point? It begins
to resemble a form of immobilization, when every known, previously-encountered
eventuality is so carefully planned for but only one really ends up needing
attention, one that was not part of previous experience.
I think I need a way to remove myself from the various cues of the urban
grind from time to time, even if this would be called "running away" by
the "grin and bear it" types. Otherwise, the pattern of thought can
enter into a vicious, self-fulfilling circle, running through the well-known
and mindless track of an ever-deepening rut. The walls grow higher
about and the certainty of feeling becomes inescapable, no matter what
the truth of one's surroundings may really be. Truth! What
wonder it would be to know firsthand and without reservation; to be accepted
like a child who has not become cynically jaded by years of similarity.
It would indeed make me free. I would think that truth is at the
threshold of my senses, at every moment, but I have crafted an array of
distractions that appear expressly designed to minimize it.
This is no authentic life. But I am not powerful enough to divert
the fullness of what could and does eventually come upon me. God
is God and that is that. He'll do just what he wants. I now
spend some time with my gaze cast out upon the ridge, and the wide hollow
that holds me and the Cabin. It holds me, and what can I do but realize
this? I am one person who is not centrally located within
it. Now, I decide to let go and come to rest within the hands of
that which is greater than me.
RB
13 October 1997 -- Suffering from constraints in
the aggregate
A reality that has been on my mind lately, when I ponder why I can so
dislike the well-meaning structure of mass society, is what a constraint
it is, having to be a particular place, at a particular time, to be a participant
in something. Such constraints are part and parcel of the walls of a rut.
They tell me "this time of the week, in order to be the well-socialized
and responsible citizen you claim to be, you will simply be here
(or there, as the case may be), doing this (or that)". Soon, the
constraints remove every last remnant of freedom and close in as an ever-tightening
net; leaving me bound and immovable.
I suppose that a life according to nature here at the Cabin has its
own set of constraints; the weather, the lay of the land, the distances
to things, what can happen even to my simple shelter and equipment.
Some, even, can become far more severe than city-life constraints, which
always seem to have that built-in reasonableness and limit, so as to ensure
the greatest number of participants at a planned event. No great
throngs would come to a place where chance occurrence really has the power
to do major harm.
Socialization appears, by definition, to involve becoming held fast
within a system of easy-to-break individual commitments, but one whose
overall combination holds a person in the same iron grip as a single encounter
with sheer terror in the wild. I may go walk up an untried path along
the rocks on the ridge today, even though I have no schedule-book or calendar
telling me I have an appointment to be there. I need only return
before dark. Suppose, on this solitary venture, I lose footing and
tumble down a face I hadn't taken time to consider. That could very
well be it, right there.
But then take the typical urban commitment. Yes it's on the calendar,
and yes, I'll begin losing face and respectability and reputation for reliability
if I turn it down. Eventually, if I do it enough times, I'll lose
my job and start seeing the human forces of economic consequence move in
upon my various serviced debts that depend upon my job. But will
they smash me at once upon unknown rocks, 200 feet below the single missed
foot-hold? No, because urban living, in order to be possible, operates
by the rule of law. It has to. Death will still come, with
enough ignored social responsibility (and the accompanying constraints),
but it will be drawn out and in slow motion.
None of those constraining obligations, as I've said, are ever that
much in themselves. Compliance with them, one at a time, is easy.
But what is it, really, when the whole point of living the canonical, civilized,
urban life starts losing justification? "No," I say, shuddering for
a moment, as I brace myself to go meet those varied commitments back down
the hill, "there isn't really that much that will really put such a load
on me...today...". One day; one event; one obligation
at a time. That's all a person is ever really asked.
RB
16 October 1997 -- Deterred by perceived competitive
animosity
It has grown dark now and I have another fire going in the stone fireplace
in the main room, since the season has finally come to the point of being
reliably cold at night. After banking the coals later on and settling
in to bed, I'll light up the kerosene lamp and read some more from Henry
David Thoreau's Walden. In my real life education, I became
an engineer, so my token gestures in learning about the "humanities" in
high school and college didn't quite make it to him. But I had heard
of his "experiment" in simple living in general terms, and I suspected
almost from the start that I was somehow attempting my own Life in the
Woods by setting up the Cabin.
My general upbringing in the 1960's and 70's, within many of the institutions
of large-scale cooperative culture, was not really one in which I developed
a need to express a great many individual rights and make all my own decisions.
Rather, I thought that the goals of Church, Family, and State were, in
their purest sense, noble and worth pursuing. But then, in the 1990's,
I ended up disillusioned and embittered by the way my own life within these
was not always what such idealized entities would promise.
Since it is currently accepted as post-Cold War Gospel that unfettered
individual freedom is the only Way, the resulting excessive exercise of
self-aggrandizement and the disregard of others in the pursuit of personal
goals has come to alienate me to life in the city, since I imagine that
everyone is my natural enemy in some great survival scheme. This
amounts to a paradox when I think about it. Service of self and maximized
liberty are the best proven precursors of successful human groupings, but
these very traits can make life in such a grouping a difficult and depressing
matter.
I am reminded of the Greatest Commandments; to love the Lord with all
we have and to love our neighbor as ourselves. I'd imagine there
are a great many people down there in my urban life who really strive to
uphold these, and I must be ignoring them. Perhaps it is time to
take this advice myself, since I see no practical way of escaping the city
crowds ("neighbors", as it were), and even as I wander about the landscape
of the Cabin, there's nowhere to hide from God.
Maybe that multitude I face, every time I drive the truck back down
the hill, is too full of cynics and defeatists of my kind already, who
would not seek real solutions in a world full of lives that must interact
and co-exist in groups having social structure. Should I be walking
about as one of them, too, telling the rest of the world I cannot live
within it because I sometimes perceive it as cruel and depraved?
No, there's no real escaping...only accepting the things that must be and
doing my best to improve the ones over which my position grants me discretion.
RB
20 October 1997 -- Coming face to face with real
life
I'm sitting on the sofa in the main room again. There is a hard
chill in the air now, in the early parts of the mornings. Later,
if there is enough sun showing, it can be possible to feel a bit of warmth
outside, in the clearing, but today is one of those darker days.
I just light another fire and sit inside, as the building winds, that tell
of winter's coming, blow the assorted leaves about.
Up atop the rough beam that comprises the mantel, I have a few framed
photos of people of significance from my urban real life. Group photos
with friends; portraits of my parents, and the like. I sometimes
think I should be spending longer actually meeting with them or calling
them on the phone, which is not possible at the Cabin. Something
corrosive has distanced me from them, and it is not right. But just
doing Cabin chores and sitting on the chair on the porch or in here by
the fire seems so absolutely correct; so incapable of causing interpersonal
harm, since there are, by definition, no others involved.
Might I be causing harm by withdrawing myself? This hardly seems
such a great concern, since (I say to myself) they really don't think of
me except when I'm right in their faces, just like I lose sight of their
presence when I'm here. This is, perhaps, what many social critics
have rightly bemoaned...how easy it is to disregard others when they are
not in intimate closeness, with results like the atrocities committed upon
"strangers" in time of war. I would wonder, then, if I do myself
much good visiting the Cabin this often, when my true experience must be
gained back there, in the tempestuous realm of human living.
A few gusts come by every now and then and cause the frame of the building
to shudder, flex and creak, yet it remains standing. The design took
into account the toughest conditions this area will deal out, in the worst
of weather. I recall that God has told me something similar:
that I shall endure many sorrows in life, yet he will spare me from them
all; he knows just what I can bear. But, sadly, I seek too few of
those experiences in real life that would show how well designed I might
truly be, even though they are as real as the conditions of the mountain
winter. If I do not endure them regularly, then my person will soon
become neglected out of complacency, just like I need to hear the wind
bear down on the walls to be reminded that they need continual maintenance
and repair.
RB
23 October 1997 -- The increasing specialization
of labor
A real cold snap has fallen over the hollow the last couple of days,
and frost is etched across the panes of the now-sealed windows as I wake
this morning. I crawl from the deceptively-warm enclosure of my down
comforters and flannel sheets, into the darkness. I hastily
don some nearby wool trousers and a heavy fleecewear shirt to beat back
the draft. I pull on my moccasins and step out into the darkness of the
front porch, finding the door with my flashlight.
I turn off the beam for a moment to stand still and witness the glory
of the pre-dawn sky, on my way across the foot-beaten yard to the outhouse.
Crystal clear the night is, and with a quarter-moon to create the faint
outlines of the Cabin and the trees by the river. Soon, I know, the
snow will arrive. Then I shall adapt to different living, spending
most of my time within the enclosure of the Cabin building. No choice
in that matter.
City winters are so different, since the weather is generally held to
be irrelevant and moot, except in notable cases of real office- and school-closing
emergency. We're usually expected to be out and about, using our
vehicles on partially-iced roads and walking the best we can on salted
pathways with our street shoes. The municipal workers and building
maintenance staff do their best to homogenize the seasons, so that winter
is not allowed to be winter. Such conditions are not amenable to consistent
attendance on the job, and the job produces the economic wherewithal to
fund the city's tax base and maintain the buildings.
But when the dumping comes here, I'll simply have to dig in and know
the truth. Yes, the conditions of the harder season out here make for a
life that needs living with more forethought about basic logistics.
People in town have a greater support system and public infrastructure
and thus can be continually concerned about career and paying their bills.
No problem, should the milk, bread, or toilet paper really run out...just
wait a day or two, then drive to the store. I don't know...I tend
to find the challenge of keeping good supplies and readiness at the Cabin
far more enjoyable than keeping caught up at my real life job. There
is such greater authenticity to attending to the more basic of needs, as
Thoreau reminds me in the Economy section of Walden.
It still puzzles me, at times, to see the great monetary compensation
one can find in many downtown jobs, for work that is completely abstracted
from hands-on reality. A great, nameless, unseen corps; the "working
class", will take care of all of those nasty details. I go to the
store, impatient for having to slow down and shop, and buy their wares.
I rush them home, use them while my mind is on work, and never appreciate
them. I turn on the tap in the bathroom when it is below freezing
outside, and yet, the water flows the same as in July. Here, in contrast,
I have to take care that the cistern-tank is not left without heat from
the kitchen stove or fireplace for too long, lest all my drinking water
become
unusable until it melts.
RB
27 October 1997 -- The "improved" standard of living
Attending to the involved work of cooking on that old iron wood stove
and washing with river water heated on top of it, I began thinking again
of this matter of providing for more of my direct and tangible needs in
the Cabin lifestyle, as opposed to my real city life, where I live in a
world of specialized laborers, of which I am one. I have said before
that it is not my intention nor capability of living off the land, so even
in this imaginary space, I have to posit a certain number of support personnel,
although I am able to get away from them once I have what I need.
But more fundamentally, I began to question why I have such distaste
for the urban-industrial environment, since most of the real subsistence-living
people in those "developing countries" are now in a maddening chase to
ditch the need for washing clothes by hand and using oil lamps at night.
Every place you turn, it's "educate the workforce"; "we must compete in
the global information economy of the 21st century"; "living standards
must improve".
And then I stop and think about this phrase, "living standards", and
all it encompasses. What, really, are the "improvements" that a person
earning a living wage enjoys in modern America? First thing that
happens when you move where there's work is the price of housing goes way
up and the size of yards goes down. Then I'm supposed to accept this
in my stride, since, after all, I'm an "information age" worker, for whom
the open country like I see here at the Cabin would just be a hindrance;
a distraction.
They make sure that I have the proper information appliances in my home,
plus all those conveniences that are so coveted as indicia of "economic
development". I remember the 60's protest song about "little boxes,
made of ticky-tacky", as I bring to mind my real-life
home. Drywall and particle board and PVC pipe, where code allows.
So nice and new.
My whole life as a "specialist" is designed to feed the respective professions
of an army of other "specialists", living more or less as I do. But
this is "Civilization"! I am no barbarian! My upbringing was
entirely within the settled culture and it told me there is no honor in
living in a shack, even a well-maintained shack that can be rightly called
a Cabin. In the 1960's, everyone poked fun at Jed, Granny, Jethro,
and "The Beverly Hillbillies". But I submit that Granny knew what
she was doing, in that mansion of hers. Good thing Jethro didn't
have to commute in L.A. traffic to the other side of town in that truck
of theirs, either.
RB
31 October 1997 -- It need not seem like a bad life
The last of the city traffic is far behind and below me, as the Cabin
comes fully into view again. I pull the truck
off of the dirt and coarse gravel track, into its approximate parking area
near the woodshed. No need to strain at the controls this time, looking
every direction simultaneously, wondering how close those car doors on
both sides might come to mine (or mine to theirs). I just try to
keep away from the hemlock stand, and its predictable precipitation of
pitch. Engine off...silence is back.
Since I am only a part-timer here, maybe I am not fully aware of what
complete isolation would do to me. I wonder how livable it would
be. In an instant, I'll tell you what I dislike about my work,
saying how I'd resign and come live a life in such environs as these, if
only I were not trapped by circumstance. "It's an insane living,
working for insane management, in an insane city", I'll say, almost out
of habit, with the typical caustic sneer you'd expect from Dilbert.
Yet, something keeps me there.
Maybe I've been lying these last three months, and have a genuine love
of fast-lane life. Especially in my field, computing and microelectronics,
there is continuous excitement, and its pace increases exponentially. It's
nearly 2000, for goodness sakes! What things we'll have in areas
such as I have known! My argument to date for belittling such techno-hype
has been that it is just an unnecessary overload; excessive distraction,
for minds that are already tired from what has come before. But it
has a life of its own, and a life that one can know and share on
close to personal terms.
I imagine, for a moment, someone really setting me free and allowing
me to leave it all behind for good, and it starts sounding like a "loss"
I might positively "mourn". I decide I'm going to stand still out
here again for awhile, since there's yet enough sun to keep the approaching
evening chill at its distance. I'm looking out to the edges of the
high ridge, where the bulk of the leaves are fallen or nearly so.
The wind picks up and slows. It's changing. And my mortal body,
even as I'm still, moves along on its own way towards age. If anything,
death will pull me off of the wild ride of city living, and I'd hope not
on account of stress. That must be the dampening factor against exponential
growth; the limits of human endurance. I feel those limits telling
me to slow down.
I would wonder if the up-and-coming recent grads are made of any stronger
substance than I was in my 20's. Will they make things move even
faster? I start on my way towards the front door, since it is getting
colder now. I think about the incredible volume of business, industrial
activity, and personal affairs that go on, each and every second that I
live. But I'm out of the stream...it does not affect me. Back
on those gridlocked streets, I cannot ignore such a fact. I cannot
even neglect it in my real life home, where it has become so hard to shut
off the sources of media. Something is always happening. Well,
I'm here...I'll let it pass and catch up later. It's getting time
to cook some chow for dinner and then sit by the fire.
RB
Ahead to November 1997
