After the Break

I’ve been on a long break, thanks for your patience.  2017 really knocked me on my tookus. There are multiple reasons why, and one of the biggest is that we have sold our house and moved into a shared permaculture homestead site. This has been a wonderful and exciting change, but also an overwhelming and stressful one, as selling a house and moving are never easy endeavors. However, we’re now settled in and have been in our new home for quite some time, and it has been a learning experience on so many levels.

First, the land. This is a photo of our new backyard. It’s a ~15 year old edible forest garden, and it is so abundant with life. I have been trying to soak up and learn as much as I can, and after nearly a full cycle of seasons I feel that I am just at the tip of the edge of one corner of the place. The phrase “life is complicated” might be cliché, but in the case of an ecosystem, it is absolutely true.

This also extends to the social ecosystem. Our homestead is shared with another family, and navigating the exit of multiple members of a collective space and the entry of new ones is an equally complex transition. Particularly challenging has been the introduction of our children. With two only children and a three year age difference, it has been surprisingly difficult getting our kids to enjoy each others’ company. Additional factors such as school and the general hectic pace of our lives have only added to the challenge. My expectations have been seriously altered in the face of this, and of course the advent and then lingering nature of this winter has not helped.

Right now I’m still in the Assessment phase, observing and absorbing as much as I can before I start thinking about design possibilities for both the physical and social space. But as Spring slowly (ever so slowly!) spreads her wings, the creative thoughts have begun flowing and I am looking forward to a new season.

Circles and Lines

I am so tired of the notion of progress. Tired of time being seen as linear, a solitary line that expands into the infinite, always moving upward or forward, toward some unseen destination, improving, improving, improving. Never satisfied or satiated. I want to return to the worldviews where time was circular, cyclical, where we imagined ourselves in curves and bends instead of endless lines; Where things return, revisit, and get closer instead of constantly moving further away. When you live in a linear timeview, the future is always a blank, an unknown. In linear time we see ourselves as if on a train, moving from one station to the next, rewriting and revising our timetables and worrying about which train we’re on and whether we took the right line. In cyclical time we are stationary, and time moves through us. We know what the wheel looks like, and when each turn will come to pass: seasons, patterns, generations, eras. Knowing what’s to come – which is also what has been – allows us to exist fully in the present, to understand that the impermanence of the moment is what makes it truly beautiful, and to know that what is now has come before and will come again.

As a designer, I understand the value of iteration, the trial-and-error process that allows us to gradually develop an appropriate solution that meets the needs of our circumstance. The permaculture design process, like many, does use a cyclical model for its problem solving: Articulate goals, Assess, Design, Implement, Evaluate. I see the work of permaculture, with its focus on landscapes and plantings, to be enmeshed more than most disciplines in a circular concept of time. Yet I see very few people, permaculture designers included, myself included, who are able to live in the moment, to trust and embrace the abundance and confidence of a round worldview. Much like the Flat Earthers of centuries past, we are Flat Worlders, who live in scarcity mindsets, perpetually terrified of plunging off the edge of our comfort zones. Our calendars and lists and educations and workloads are heavy with lines, and we strive endlessly to push those lines forward and upward, toward some ever-lofty goal. We jump from deadline to deadline. Even the words we use – deadline – convey the opposite of the circular, cyclical life that we aim to cultivate. We chide people for “running in circles”, implying that they’re getting nowhere, learning nothing, wasting time.

I want to be a Round Worlder. I want to stay still in a single spot and watch time move through me, watch the sun and the moon and the stars and the seasons rotate around me, to live fully in the joy and beauty of a perfect autumn day precisely because I know that it will not last, but also that perfect autumn days will circle back again. I want to watch the circle of a human life, to see the generations and the life cycles of all beings intertwined like a singular, spectacular, enormous hoop dance. A constant push for progress and improvement does not allow for much celebration or reflection of the present, and we need much more of that balance in our overly linear lives.

Live Like the Cup is Completely Full.

Today at work we had an all-day symposium focused on environmental sustainability, with guest speakers, workshops, and other festivities. Very inspiring and educational, and I rushed from session to session, trying to glean as much knowledge as I could from the time that I had. During a lull in the programming the organizers put out a coffee service, with drinks and snacks to keep us going. Free coffee? Yes, please! I grabbed a cup and decided to head back to my office, but the cups were not designed for transport – no travel covers. So I found myself walking back to my office while trying not to spill a full cup of hot coffee. And then an amazing thing happened. My walking pace slowed down. I paid attention to where I was walking, making sure that there were no sticks or other obstacles in my path that might cause me to trip and spill my drink. I became aware of my body’s balance as I let my arm relax. My breathing slowed. Because I was forced to slow down, I was also able to notice the warm sun on the sidewalk, the early autumn breeze, the leaves that were starting to turn, and the activity of the humans and non-humans in my path. I was no longer just getting from point A to point B, I was experiencing myself and my surroundings. I suddenly realized how infrequently I do this, as a person trying to juggle work and home life, care for a young child, improve my community and my environment. It is easy to get sucked into not just the day-to-day but the second-to-second without actually noticing the seconds. A simple cup of uncovered coffee was all it took for me to slow down and realize who and where I was, and it was magnificent. What if we took time each day to walk somewhere with a full cup, balancing our physical and mental selves in the process? How many different ways can we envision living with a “cup is completely full” mentality, one of abundance instead of scarcity? How does that change our end goals and our daily priorities? Many people would argue that coffee is not really food, but today a simple cup of joe was plenty food for body, mind and spirit.

What Does Family Centered Design Look Like?

What would our homes, offices, schools, shops, restaurants, banks, possessions, entertainment and schedules look like if family needs and relationships were the primary design consideration?

This question has so many answers. On my site I have a page called Family Centered Design that articulates my focus on partnering the design of products, structures, and lifestyles with values and ethics that place family as a high priority. Before I fell down the rabbit hole of parenting, I had another life working for a design and fabrication program at a liberal arts college. This program had a heavy focus on assistive technology for people with disabilities, and it was there that I learned about the concept of universal design, the idea of designing products to be inherently accessible. My permaculture training reinforced my commitment toward inclusivity in the design process rather than creating specialized alternatives to the mainstream. Stack functions. The problem is the solution. Recently I have been thinking a lot of how these principles can be applied in our everyday lives. For example: housing. As the parent of a two-year-old I am painfully aware that most of our houses are not designed for small children. Everything from eating to sleeping to bathing must be modified or redesigned to meet the needs of our youngest humans, and that’s just the built environment. Things get much more complicated when the social element is added. There is an entire, extremely profitable industry based on making adjustments to our living situations to accommodate kids. There is also a widespread, if unspoken, intolerance of small children in many commons areas – see Donald Trump’s recent remarks to a woman with a crying baby as an extreme of this point of view. Why is this? There’s a two-sided reason. First, we don’t usually design things with young children in mind, unless we’re designing specifically for them. They are the exception rather than a given of a design, and this is a system that is not based on inclusivity. Second, we have developed an expectation that our adult experiences be in no way inconvenienced by the needs and normal, healthy, age-appropriate actions of children or adults with children. These two phenomena feed off each other, creating a feedback loop: Public spaces are designed for adults and do not meet the needs of families, so children and families struggle to function in them, provoking the annoyance of other adults. It’s a vicious cycle.

What if we used the universal design principle to create living spaces that were inherently supportive of families, not just adults, and not just retrofitted for children?

I can think of one reason for the exclusive model of designing for children when it comes to homes. In our current American society, most children grow up in fairly nuclear households. People have kids, those kids grow up, and there are no more young people in the house until maybe years later when grandchildren appear. So the child element is  a temporary stage, after which the dwelling reverts to an adult-only space. But what if we rethought the nuclear model and started developing more multi-family, intergenerational dwellings, where there is a constant presence of children and where all ages are continually represented in the household?

Letting my imagination run, I tried to imagine a house design that would be equally friendly to children and adults of all ages.

If I were designing a dwelling for families, what features would I include?

Communal indoor and outdoor space. Child rearing is so much more manageable when the task is shared. Creating spaces for children to gather with other children, both their age, older, younger, and with adults and elders provides playmates for young kids and opportunities for older children to exercise their caregiving skills and responsibilities, allows elders to communicate important knowledge to younger generations while giving them a sense of purpose, and relieves the burden of monitoring and entertaining the children from the parents, who are probably doing the majority of the breadwinning for the household. The space design could range from an interior shared social space in a multi-family dwelling to a neighborhood in which backyard fences were removed and the yards turned into a shared commons, accessible by all residents. Check out the examples of  Pocket Neighborhoods, cohousing in the UK, and a group in Oregon that lives and parents communally for ways that people in dominant culture environments are innovating.

Floor seating and dining. The typical dining table, with its height and adult-sized chairs, is poorly designed for children, so much so that various forms of adaptive seating are necessary to accommodate a growing child. High chairs, booster seats, cushions, and phone books (remember those?) have all been employed to allow children to join us for dinner. Other strategies have been to create a “kid’s table”, sized appropriately but segregating the smaller folks to a different eating surface and often a different room altogether. The adaptive seating is also fairly dangerous, requiring safety straps and buckles to ensure that the child doesn’t fall to the ground. As children grow and seek independence they often rebel against this clumsy seating, longing to move as the adults do and preferring to kneel or stand on the chairs. Often they fall or tip the chairs over with their unpracticed movements. A solution? Take the dining down a notch. Many cultures have a tradition of low-to-the-ground seating when socializing or eating meals. Low tables and legless chairs are common, or seating that goes below ground rather than above. In this way children may participate in the family meal on more stable and equal footing (or seating), and the danger of falling from table height is eliminated, as is the need for specialized safety and seating furniture. There may also be health benefits to floor seating and dining that extend long into life.

Versatile sleeping spaces. From the time we’re babies until our elder years, our sleep needs vary significantly. Yet, sleeping spaces and furniture tend to be quite uniform and inflexible across conventional home design. For babies there are bassinettes and cribs, toddler and youth beds, but these often do not accommodate a baby’s need to be close to its caregiver in the early months and years. Teenage and adult needs for both private and shared sleeping spaces are complicated by the singular bedroom, and large families who lack the resources to provide a room for each household member can find themselves in conflict. But why is a teenager’s need for private space inextricably linked to his or her sleeping location? In addition, elders and young children might go to bed and wake earlier than the rest of the household. Couples need intimate space and time away from the rest of the family. What’s more, designated sleeping areas are often not used during the day, resulting in a great deal of underutilized space. What changes could help? Portable or convertible sleeping furniture (and not just for guests); adjustable spaces that can have both sleeping and non-sleeping functions; designated private or quiet spaces that could be used for solitary time, intimacy or uninterrupted sleep; “family bed” space that is large enough to comfortably accommodate three, four, five or more people and is low to the ground so that babies and toddlers don’t fall out.

Redefining baths. One of my many challenging situations since becoming a parent has been how to take a shower while minding a young child. Conventional American baths are horribly antiquated designs – inefficient use of water, tub sizes and shapes that are uncomfortable or unaccommodating, and the combination of multiple porcelain surfaces, slippery floors, and toilet bowls full of water at the ideal toddler height is a parenting nightmare. My most recent attempt to shower with my son in the room resulted in water being dumped all over the floor and leaking through it and into the basement. So let’s finally update these ancient baths and make them better adapted to everyone: Drains in the floor. Child- and elder-friendly tubs that are easy to enter and exit. Adjustable height showers. Easy to clean. And get the toilets out of the bath! We can also think about all the lifestyle lessons that our designs teach our children, and incorporate graywater and other systems that reduce or reuse water. I have found Japanese bath traditions – communal soaking tubs with adjacent “seated” showers, drains in the floor, separate toilets with built in handwashing basins – to be a great inspiration for a healthier, more sustainable bathing experience.

None of these ideas are new. Most if not all human societies have or had these elements in some form or another, but we have lost them along the way as Western architectural design has evolved and dominated. So how do we bring them back, shift away from the standard 3BR/2B house plan? Based on these design elements, what would a family centered home look like? Here are some sketches.

These are rough ideas, and designs would vary greatly depending on climate, space and other constraints, but by changing our design approach to prioritize a healthy, well-functioning family/community, and using that as our jumping off point, we will see a shift in the types of designs that are created.

 

 

Things Are Falling Apart

I saw a devastating video on facebook. It was of a man who had lost his children in the Syrian war. The most gut-wrenching part of the video was that the way he was holding them, initially I didn’t realize that both of the children were dead. It was one of many, many similar videos, but the fact that they just keep happening, and the fact that so many of these dead children remind me of my son is making my heart feel like it’s going to explode. I feel so helpless in the face of this endless, relentless madness of war. I am angry at what is happening and at the people who actively perpetuate it for their own political and economic profit, and I feel responsible in that my lifestyle is propping up much of the warmongering. I want to change the way I live so that others may stay alive; I want to be able to raise my son from a place of love and confidence that our culture is one of support and care, and is something that we can both be proud to be a part of.

I don’t know how.

How can I, as an individual, stop a man’s children from being murdered halfway across the world? How can I remove myself from the most devastating and destructive culture ever known when it surrounds me wherever I go? How do I face my son every day knowing that these things are happening and will continue to happen, not just in other places but on our very streets? How do we walk away from this?

What do we walk away to?

This is insanity, I can see the cracks in our world widening, spreading, fissures that will engulf us if we continue to ignore them. We must start walking, running away from the madness. We must start embracing new ways, old ways, each other. Our children. Creating instead of destroying. Listening and supporting and stepping up and responding. Unlocking, sharing, and caring. Joining and celebrating instead of fearing and condemning.

I know the kind of life I want to live. I’m sure the man in Syria wishes he were living a different life as well. No father should have to cradle the lifeless bodies of his toddlers so that others can live in perceived comfort. Things are falling apart. Let’s fall together instead.

 

OverIndependence

On Monday, the Fourth of July, I had just about had it with this town. I was feeling more isolated than ever, trapped in my toddler jail and feeling like the only stay-at-home-mom in the entire neighborhood. Despite the near-perfect weather we’ve been having this summer, I never see kids or parents outside around here. There are no children playing outside their homes. When I moved here I didn’t even know that my neighborhood had any kids until I happened to be home when school got out once. The streets teemed with children for about fifteen minutes, and then it was as though tractor beams pulled them all into cars and houses, and they disappeared.

The day before I had bumped into a mom I actually know, one who is in an early intervention playgroup with my son in another town. I was surprised to see her, as I’ve known her for over a year but never knew that she lived in my neighborhood (see above). Her twins are about the same age as mine, and she was pushing them in a stroller. We stopped to chat for a minute, and I gave her my contact info and suggested that we meet up for a playdate sometime at the park that’s between our houses. Weeks on and I’ve never heard from her. I’ve tried to reach out to several parents in this area, and they’re just not interested. I’m not sure of the reason. Maybe they have fantastic support networks and don’t need to hang out with an acquaintance. Maybe they’re really, really busy. Maybe they like keeping to themselves. Maybe I’m an intimidating person. Whatever the reason, I feel like I’m slowly going insane from the lack of community in this neighborhood, and I’ve decided that, as much as I adore my house, it’s time to move. A sad decision, but a necessary one. In this country we pride ourselves on independence, autonomy, individualism. I think we take this to an extreme, where the individual is nearly always valued above the group or community. Our society has compartmentalized into cells of uberindependence, walled off by fences and doors and locks and takeout and online shopping. Alone together.

In that rather depressed mental state, I decided to take myself and my son to the park anyway. I pushed him in the swings and watched as he scaled the big kid slide for the first time by himself. I sat on a nearby bench and watched as some other children entered the playground. They were older than my son, ages ranging from about 3 to 7 by my guess. They ran around in a happy, tumbly crowd, jumping from swings to slides to rings. One of the smaller children noticed my son toddling around and called to the others, “Hey, let’s go play with the baby!” Almost immediately my son was surrounded by older children, asking his name, taking his hand. They asked me if it was okay for him to play with him and I happily agreed. Suddenly my son was carried aloft, escorted to the choicer parts of the playground, carefully assisted up and down the play structure. I was asked many questions about him, and they seemed to feel sorry for the fact that he had no playmates at home, counting off their multiple siblings to me on fingers and telling me their names and ages. My son was a little nervous and overwhelmed at first, but quickly settled into this new group, chattering, jumping and showing off his new sliding skills. I sat and watched, beaming with delight at this experience that I so desperately wanted for him – free play with older children – but had been unable to find here until now. After a while the children were called back by their parents, who were gathered at a nearby picnic table preparing lunch. They sadly departed, promising to not take too much time eating, to return quickly so that they could continue playing with the baby. It was nearing my son’s naptime anyway, so we hung around for a little more then began heading home. I was struck by the organic nature of the encounter, the ease with which these children played with each other and with my son, the lack of hovering parents and dictates and cautions and the freedom that this group had to, well, be kids.

What are we doing to ourselves as a culture? I feel like the parenting world is being slowly wrung into the clutches of a boa constrictor, revolving in ever-tightening circles of fear and judgement and isolation, fewer and fewer parents understanding how to step back and fewer kids learning how to function on their own.  And our community grows ever distant, propped up by technology and fear that build walls instead of bridges, offer silence instead of friendship. Why is this the trend, and am I the only one who wants to see it reversed? Because I most certainly feel that way these days.

I don’t think this is rocket science. I think it’s more like what happens when you get into the habit of eating a bag of chips and watching reality tv on the couch every night. It becomes normalized and suddenly you can’t even remember how you used to spend your evenings. Let’s get off our parenting couches and start reaching out, connecting, and giving our children the opportunity to build the relationships that are so vital to their growth. Let’s celebrate our interdependence, our need for community and connection, and the true freedom that we can receive when we do this – freedom from shouldering the entire care and engagement of our children ourselves, freedom from being hypervigilant 24 hours a day, freedom to step back and be our old selves once in a while, or even once a day, because we’re not alone together, we’re just together.

On Water Pistols and Gun Control

In the month of June 2016 a few things happened. In Orlando there was a horrific mass shooting that killed 49 people and injured 53. In Washington D.C. Democrats staged a sit-in to protest the House’s refusal to budge on passing gun control legislation. In Cleveland family privately celebrated the 14th birthday of Tamir Rice, who was shot and killed by a Cleveland police officer in November 2014. And in Connecticut my two-year-old son had his first encounter with a water pistol. We were at a family gathering and some older boys had brought them out to play with in the pool. My son was avidly watching them fill the reservoirs, pump the little guns and fire long streams of water at each other. He then tried to unsuccessfully use one himself. A friend who was watching remarked, “The NRA would be so proud!” This kind of experience can present a moral dilemma for some parents. How do we watch acts of unthinkable gun violence play out in real life, while at the same time smile indulgently, or even halfheartedly, at our children playing with toy guns?

I have heard and read the reinvigorated calls for gun control, and I respect them. Something needs to be done in this country about gun violence. However, I don’t agree with the mainstream feelings about how. If we truly think about new paradigm, outside-the-box solutions, what can we come up with?

When I examine the cultural underpinnings of this issue, a few things surface. First is the dichotomy between guns as part of play, whether that be water pistols, paintball or video games; and the uses that these real tools were designed for.  Weapons are an essential part of human history. They are a characteristic of our ecological niche as a tool-making species. Unlike species whose weaponry is built into their bodies in the form of shells, claws, horns, venom or jaws, ours must be constructed for the most part.  So we developed spears, arrows, traps, shields, knives, and other tools in order to procure our food and protect ourselves. We also evolved as band societies, providing security for both needs in the form of a cooperative, close-knit group.  It was necessary for children to learn these critical survival skills in order to flourish in adulthood, and as children learn through play, toy weapons made sense. The Anthropology of Learning in Childhood mentions earlier accounts of Inuit children and toy use, which consisted of miniature household implements, carved animals, and toy harpoons, bows, and slings. In this context it is obvious why the children (typically boys) are playing with toy weapons. But in our culture? How many of our children are being presented with toy weapons as preparation for adulthood, for procuring food and providing defense? How many will transition from toy guns to real guns, and how many parents would approve of this transition? Some, I’m sure. There are many proud parents of soldiers, and many families who hunt and want to share these skills with their children. What about everyone else? This demonstrates a vast disconnect between the purpose of the play and the role of the weapon, and results in adults whose only experience with weaponry is in its role as a toy, a state that I think is dangerous.

A second disconnect that our society has is with the concept of death. We spend most of our time in denial of it, from the deaths of the plants and animals that we eat to the deaths of our loved ones, to our own eventual experience. We sacrifice immense amounts of quality of life to stave it off. We run from it, and our burial practices reflect that: cold, isolated, inorganic plots, forever separated from the earth by barriers of concrete and metal. We communicate this: Humans are such a toxic and destructive force that we cannot even allow our dead to touch the soil for fear that we might contaminate it. What a horrifying mental model! Because of our own dysfunctional relationship with death, we are inept at teaching our children about it. It’s no wonder. Teaching a child about things like genocide, factory farms, habitat destruction, and mass shootings while never having developed a comfortable relationship with death ourselves is a recipe for disaster, and it brings up uncomfortable truths about our way of life that don’t align with the values we want to instill in our children. If this country successfully bans guns, does that mean we can continue to pretend that death doesn’t exist because – sigh of relief – we won’t have any more mass shootings to explain to our kids? How do we shift to a holistic relationship with mortality, and how do we address the still-present issue of the weapon as perpetual toy? I don’t think that a gun ban will respond to either of these issues, but they need to be addressed if we are to improve our overall social and emotional health.

Finally, this country is facing an epidemic collapse of community. The cooperative, close-knit group is dead, literally killed by guns in the case of the Native American genocide. Even in a more recent context, it is no longer commonplace to know your neighbors and be interdependent with them, to trust them with your kids and to have a strong social and economic fabric where children are able to autonomously explore within an acceptable comfort zone, where adults do not feel isolated and exhausted under the burden of singlehandedly providing all of their childrens’ economic and social needs, where children are not raised on television and the internet and video games because their parents are exhausted, where struggling members are supported by the group and given the help they need, not left hung out to dry and morph into angry, alienated individuals. Whether they have access to guns or not does not address the fact that they are unseen by a community, invisible until they explode with catastrophic consequences.

Let’s talk for a moment about non-white communities, the military and the police. In the band societal structures in which humans evolved, defense was provided for and by members of the immediate community. These were people who knew each other personally and who each had a vested interest in maintaining the safety of the group, because it was their group. Even when the Second Amendment was written, it was in the context of a standing militia of local residents and not a global superpower military. The scope of the defense was much, much smaller. There were no nuclear arms races or corporate interests and profits. In our current American culture, in contrast to this, most of us do not provide our own defense. Instead we outsource this need to others (as we do with our food procurement), often people we don’t know, often people of color or poor people who have more limited employment options and access to education, and for whom the military can provide both. In essence we are putting their bodies in harm’s way instead of our own, and as such do not have to consider the impact of worldwide imperialist military campaigns as intimately as they do. Many of us might personally know veterans, but they are only defending our immediate communities in the abstract sense. Their actual jobs are far removed from us.

The police are a smaller scale, community-based force, and there’s a better chance that we know some of them personally. However, as we have seen manifest in now countless incidents, police are not always defending their own communities, but are instead hired professionals who might feel animosity toward the communities they have been contracted to protect. I have not seen anyone state that a national firearm ban should extend to police, but if the power of a community to defend itself is stripped (and in many communities of color it essentially already has been by way of the “terrorist” or “thug” labels) while those who despise it retain it, I don’t believe that protection is being achieved.

What does true self-defense look like? How do we successfully protect our communities without an imbalance of power? I’m sure there are many ways to approach this, but I don’t think that pretending that we don’t need to defend ourselves is realistic. I’m also not okay with people living in terror of the very force that is entrusted to protect them, or with letting other unknown people’s sons and daughters die for us in unnecessary international wars for reasons of corporate or political profiteering. That’s a really tough conversation to have with your kid.

What does this mean for me as a parent? For now, I am going to make sure my son learns how to identify and use a firearm as well as a bow. This is in part because I never want him to approach a real weapon as though it were a toy. No matter how strict a ban is enacted, I do not believe guns will ever be eradicated during his childhood, and I want to ensure that he knows what to do if he should encounter one. It is also because I want him to develop empathy; to understand, respect and embrace the concept of death; to come face to face with the inescapable necessity of taking another’s life as food in order to perpetuate your own. I want him to take personal responsibility for that life and not outsource it to others, and to express gratitude for the life that he took. This can be accomplished in other ways, such as raising and slaughtering animals, and I want to teach him this as well, but guns are a part of our current entertainment culture and rather than sheltering him from that fact, I want him to fully understand their impact and not relate to them solely as toys for the rest of his life.  I can’t hide all the water pistols and war games in the world from him. What I can do is give him the appropriate context, training, and respect, and in this way guide him through the transition into adulthood. Most of all, I want him to grow up in a supportive and nurturing community where he will be mentored and not feel isolated or unable to communicate his emotions in any way except through violent action.

I am in no way expressing my support for the proliferation of firearms or for their unfettered access. I am not pro-gun, in fact I wish they had never been invented. I also do not expect anyone who has lost a friend or family member – particularly a child – to gun violence to ever be in favor of guns in any form or situation. Were I in their position I would likely have the same views. However, I feel it is the responsibility of the rest of us to consider the big-picture context on the history, roles, and use and abuse of firearms as we articulate our viewpoints and advocate for change going forward.

That’s my researched and considered take on the gun issue as I understand it right now. My opinions are not static, and I welcome others’ ideas and perspectives.

 

It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world. So how do we raise our kids in it?

It’s a mad world, and I mean that both in the crazy sense, and in the angry sense. People are mad. A question I have been asking myself over and over again for a while now is, “How do I raise my child amidst all of this?” Environmental degradation. Economic instability. A resurgence of fascism and political polarization. Increasing concentration of wealth. Violence on so many fronts. Relentless consumerism and materialism. Reality TV. There’s a lot of doom and gloom in my newsfeed these days, and given the most recent events, I don’t foresee it letting up any time soon. The gravity of our global predicament can be overwhelming, and most of the time I feel like I’m at the mercy of cultural and political trends beyond my control that are in direct opposition to how I wish the world could be. What’s a parent to do? After thinking and reading and experimenting and thinking some more and talking it out with friends and other parents, here are some strategies I’m trying:

1. Creating a solid home base. What happens at home has an enormous impact on young children, one that lasts long into adulthood. How many of us have (for better or worse) caught ourselves in a moment of, “Oh God, I sound just like my mother”? We take more than just our music collections and old yearbooks with us when we move out of our childhood home. We take our upbringing as well. I’m gonna invest in this one.
2. Not being an ostrich (or a blindfold). It’s tempting to just pretend all of this isn’t happening, or to shelter our children from the horrors of the real world. But they’ll find out soon enough, and if we haven’t prepared them by talking to them in the safety and comfort of our home, who will? Kids aren’t stupid. Even young children can understand a staggering amount. My observation is that talking to them in straightforward terms about things like racism, sexism, climate change, and poverty is beneficial for both parent and child. Uncomfortable with these issues yourself? You’d better get comfortable then. We can’t explain these concepts to our children and respond to their emotions  if we aren’t first clear with ourselves and our own feelings about them. Check out Danielle Slaughter’s Raising an Advocate for a primer on how to start those tough conversations.
3. Raising a fisherman. You’ve undoubtedly heard the expression, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” While cliché, I think the same principle can be applied to our parenting. If we raise our children to become independent and make informed decisions for themselves instead of handing them a pre-cooked list of do’s and don’ts, they’ll be better prepared to navigate the rapids of the world they will inhabit as adults, a world we can’t even imagine right now. How do we raise independent children who make informed decisions? I like Alfie Kohn’s take on this in his book Unconditional Parenting.
4. Finding my people. I really don’t want my kid to grow up having an iPhone from the time he’s four. But if he’s the only four-year-old in his circle of friends without an iPhone, I feel like I’m gonna be in for a lot of preschool drama. So I’m on the lookout now, while he’s two and still thinks it’s fun to play with my ancient dead flip phone, for like-minded parents who don’t intend to make lots of electronics part of their children’s daily routines. I’m not saying I’m a total Luddite. I just don’t want my kid’s childhood to go by without him noticing because he was glued to a screen. My hypothesis is that success lies in numbers on this one. A parent making an item or behavior taboo has good odds of backfiring, but if we can work together to create a culture where those behaviors aren’t the norm, and children aren’t feeling ostracized by their peers for being the exception, maybe we stand a better chance of success.
5. Being the changemaker. If I want my son to live in a kinder, gentler world, I need to start being a little of that myself. I have never been drawn to the conventional activist approach because to me most activists are more against something than they are for anything. They tend to be angry a lot, and I get that. There’s a lot of madness to be mad about. However, I strongly favor the positive visioning strategy used by permaculture design and the Transition Towns initiative. It’s so easy to get sucked down into a black hole of negativity and despair. I try to counteract that by using design principles and asking myself the following: What life do you want to be living? What life are you living now? How do you get from here to there? The answers are certainly not easy, but if we stop asking those questions we will truly lose any chance of overcoming this unbearable status quo, and our children will be the ones to suffer most.

So there you have it, my back-of-a-napkin roadmap for how to parent one’s way through the seven levels of our modern global inferno. I’m sure there will be many dead ends and revisions, but if at the end of the day I can remove even one or two of the “mads” from this world, I think my son’s life will be the better for it. Wish me luck and perseverance.

Who Owns the Surplus?

As part of my research on historical/evolutionary parenting models, I came across this phrase describing the band social model of human communities: “In his 1972 study, The Notion of the Tribe, Morton Fried defined bands as small, mobile, and fluid social formations with weak leadership that do not generate surpluses, pay taxes nor support a standing army.” This got me thinking: one of permaculture’s ethics is fair share, often phrased as “redistribute the surplus”. What is the difference, physically, semantically and ethically, between redistributing the surplus and not generating one? What are the implications of ownership, and what should they be? I attended a talk a few years ago that broke down various economic models: capitalist, socialist, communist and subsistence, the latter of which I would use to describe the economy of a human band. After a lengthy discussion I came to the conclusion that 1) Healthy subsistence economies generate enormous abundance, but it is not the humans that are exclusively or deliberately generating it or, more importantly, believe that they are; 2) The humans don’t think of themselves or anyone else as owning or controlling this abundance. It doesn’t belong to them, and is not theirs to redistribute. Rather, they belong to it, as a member of a larger community. Subsistence is a misnomer, as it implies a population just eking by, when in reality, if functioning properly, the opposite is true. This highlights a spectrum of worldview, from the Earth belonging to humans on one end to humans belonging to the Earth on the other. Where does permaculture reside on that spectrum? I have witnessed conversations in many permaculture forums that indicate that the permaculture movement is generally not doing very well with the “fair share” ethic. Surpluses are still guarded by those who own and control them for the most part. Scarcity models prevail, people are exploited, the Earth belongs to humans and only a few of them at that. What real-time, real world things can we do in order for this to change? How are our designs transitioning us away from the notion that we even have a surplus to control and redistribute?

I think we need to make a mental shift in the way we perceive our environment, away from fair share in the sense of redistribution of surplus, and toward the redistribution of our right to access. I think the concept of private property, of us owning a piece of land,  should be replaced by a belief that we belong to a piece of land, that this land is stewarding us and not the other way around. What do those kinds of contracts look like in the context of our current culture? How does the land obtain a deed to us?

The concept of surplus will always reside in a mindset of scarcity and ownership and power, and it will encourage the stockpiling of wealth. I am aiming for a day in the future where, like the band animals we evolved to be, we belong to communities of abundance, and our only surplus is one of relationships.

The Simple Things

Today as I was driving my son to our weekly playgroup, I noticed that the van in front of us was that of Simple Diaper, our local cloth and compostable diaper delivery service. I started out as a Simple client when my son was born, then completed a six month apprenticeship with them. Simple is a worker-owned cooperative, and the experience of working for a company that not only upheld my values with respect to caring for the Earth, but also those of respecting, valuing and caring for its employees, was phenomenal. I felt supported, trusted, and truly held as an equal voice in the business, and took that responsibility very seriously. After finishing my apprenticeship I decided to pursue my passion of developing Regenerative Parenting as a viable enterprise of its own, but am still a customer and participate in Simple in an advisory role. I am grateful for all that I have learned and continue to learn about environmental and socially responsible business practices. So the sight of the Simple van brought a smile to my face this morning. This hammered home a salient point for me about the importance of community support of family. A Pampers or Huggies or Seventh Generation truck would never have made me smile or wave, or give me a rush of connection and recognition upon seeing it. Most of our most vital and daily needs in are being met by nameless, faceless entities who scissor in and out of our lives, contributing nothing more to them than the products we purchase. There is no social capital. There is no sense of being known, of being held in the gentle warmth of community and trust and good will, the ingredients that friends and neighbors and family regularly exchange along with goods and services and gifts and conversations. Raising our children in societies that are bereft of social capital is as detrimental as tossing into landfills the diapers that will outlive the grandchildren of the babies they swathed. Let us set up social investments and savings accounts for our children. Let us build equity in the form of meaningful relationships and potluck dinners, watching our friend’s children and helping our neighbor in distress, instead of dollars and possessions. The dividends are far, far greater.