Two Moving Sidewalks

In your ideal life, you may picture yourself as a miller or a cobbler, selling your products for Vashon currency that you can exchange for all your needs. The fact is, though, we don’t have much of a market for those occupations just yet, and you won’t be able to pay your mortgage or other debts with Vashon currency. Since we produce very little out here, most of our income comes via those of you that commute to the mainland everyday. So how do we get from this "business as usual" world to a saner one we would like to live in?

Elaine Poyourow of Transition Los Angeles explains the problem this way in one of her blog posts:

"Ever feel like you’re zipping through the fast-paced hours of your day, the crowded pages of your calendar, like you’re on a swiftly moving sidewalk?

"Then you learn about alternative lifestyles, other ways of living and pacing one’s life. As you learn about the Transition movement, perhaps you get caught up in community events and activities within this other way of viewing life.

"It begins to feel like you’ve hopped off that swiftly moving business-as-usual sidewalk onto a second moving sidewalk—one that isn’t necessarily headed in the same direction as the first one.

"[W]e will feel for a time like we’re hopping back and forth between sidewalks. We hop between mainstream life—perhaps with a competitive corporate job, perhaps with children to get off to college—and the new ways of the future.

As time goes by, we’ll spend more and more time on the sidewalk that is headed toward the saner future: more and more time in local food production, local economies, community events. We’ll find less reason to hop back to the old-paradigm sidewalk. It wasn’t headed where we wanted to go anyway."

"Going Green" is one way that makes it seem we are doing what needs to be done. "But at a certain point, ‘greening’ an old-paradigm lifestyle maxes out. As one ventures further into the understanding of what is ‘greener,’ we begin to glimpse the disconnects. We’re told that recycling is better than landfill for those single-use coffee cups, but deeper examination begs the question: Wouldn’t eliminating them altogether (reuse) be far better? Fair use coffee is less evil than conventional, but peppermint tea from plants grown in your own backyard ... now that’s greener. CFL bulbs are touted as a ‘solution’ to global warming, but in order to achieve an 80% cut in emissions, it’s quite clear we’ll have to do a whole lot more. And meanwhile, the corporate managers command you to fly cross-country for the annual meeting." "As one delves more deeply into the ‘greening’ process it becomes obvious that the two lifestyles don’t mesh."

"The saner-future sidewalk understands that we have only one small planet. And that the presumption of a perpetually growing ‘economy’ upon one small, finite planet is ludicrous. The saner-future sidewalk understands the concept of Fair Shares, that it isn’t right for us to rape and pillage other continents so that we can bask in excess in our country -- that less stuff (including less ‘greener’ stuff) can mean infinitely more satisfaction with life, and that media and corporate advertising are diligently working to make us pretend this isn’t so. The saner-future sidewalk moves at a slower life pace, with all the richness that can entail (see the Slow Food Movement to begin to appreciate it). It takes time to smell the roses.

"The saner-future sidewalk includes forming new relationships with the fabric of life itself -- appreciating the role that earthworms and fungi and bacteria play in creating a rich soil life which in turn grows health-promoting food. Valuing, even giving thanks for, the annual water bounty that falls from the sky, rather than whisking it into storm drains as quickly as possible. Observing earth systems, humbling ourselves to comprehend their magnitude, and embracing our place within them.

"The saner-future sidewalk requires different relationships with the people around us -- trusting and interdependent community relationships. We haven’t learned how to trust deeply; we need to reskill in these basic human interactions, not just in how to raise vegetables. And that takes repeated gatherings, and in-depth exploratory conversations, something we’re never going to encounter in the 140 characters of Twitter."

So, the way that we get there is step by conscious step, knowing where we want to go, and making the appropriate decisions when they come up. And we do it diligently, as time is of essence! Thanks so much to Elaine Poyourow for her wonderful insights. Read the entire post here: http://transitionus.org/blog/two-moving-sidewalks.

The latter comment about community relationships is something I want to go into in depth in the next article. The All Island Forum is committed to helping to build these skills and will be holding a public forum at the end of February to further this process. I hope to entice all of you to participate, because we need all of us to make this work.

The Food Security workshops beginning this Saturday are already filled, but inquire anyway if interested as they will probably hold another series if enough want it. Call Cathy Fulton, 463 5652.

Comments?

terry@vashonloop.com