making space

Summer is proving a challenging time to write. Between working on the house, trying to earn some income, and visiting with family and friends, there is little slow time left for writing.

As much as I love the long, sunny days of summer, I am looking forward to the fall— having a warm and cozy space where I can take stock, think and work, start dreaming of plans for next summer.

A friend and faithful reader of this blog commented recently that he felt I was losing a larger sense of social purpose, embracing a nihilist, survivalist mentality. It’s not how I feel. Certainly I have been inwardly focused these last months, thinking more about home and family than about the larger state of the world. After twenty years working on social policy in the non profit sector, I feel somehow entitled to this indulgence.

Still, my friend’s words struck a chord—it is the chord of sacrifice and martyrdom that permeates the non profit world. The conviction that if you are not putting all your life energy into reforming social and environmental policy, then you are falling short. But it is hardly sustainable. I know too many people in this work who end up burned out and bitter, people who find themselves at mid career with no savings and no energy left for anything constructive.

This past six months, working on the land here and starting the process of building, I realize how much of my work in social change has been an ill fit. From my perspective now, it just seems wrong to spend 10 or 12 hours a day reading documents, scanning web sites, and writing policy papers. How can a life that is unsustainable and disconnected from the physical world help support a sustainable, connected world? It can’t. It is a great conceit to believe that we can change the world without being connected to the real substance of life and body.

From where I now sit, I also believe that real change will only come from the bottom up—from individuals, families, and communities coming together and finding out how to live together with each other and with the land. Governments, using the powers of regulation and taxation, can either support or restrict the possibilities of community, but it cannot create the very individual structures and experiments that are needed—that are happening now. I want to be part of that creative process, in my own way, through my own life.

We have our next work party scheduled in two weeks—hoping to make and pack the infill into the forms of our walls. This will give us two months for the walls to dry before the rains return in the fall.

Photo: Old mitre saw blade.