With a hill to our east, we greet the sun itself about an hour after astronomical sunrise, and as I begin this post, it’s growing in strength as it clears the trees, doubly welcome after overcast days and fogs and thunderstorms. Hail, Lugh, in all your guises!
At Mystic River Grove‘s Lunasa celebration on Friday, I had to laugh: we were blessing with fire and water as part of the ritual, and a light rain had just begun to fall through late afternoon sun. No need — fire and water are already with us, my inner Bard satirist exclaimed. Sometimes you just want to celebrate what is — sometimes ritual gets in the way, if Things already are chorusing all around you. But we doggedly went ahead anyway. Couldn’t we just recognize what was already with us and dance in the rain around the fire in welcome?! No need to invoke the Directions, either, snorted my inner Bard, irony-meter on high. Where do you think you are? North, south, west, east — they always embrace you. You stand at the Center, always. No distance.
Nothing like a gathering of Druids to kick my awareness of change and focus. Discomfort can be a useful guide for where to look, a shift from the stasis we too easily fall into day to day.
This morning I woke early and read a little.
Consider a cup of coffee. The energy needed to run the coffee maker is only a tiny portion of the total petroleum-based energy and materials that go into the process. Unless the coffee is organically grown, chemical fertilizers and pesticides derived from oil are used to produce the beans; diesel-driven farm machinery harvests them; trucks, ships, and trains powered by one petroleum product or another move them around the world from producer to middleman to consumer, stopping at various fossil-fuel-heated or -cooled storage facilities and fossil-fuel-powered factories en route; consumers in the industrial world drive to brightly lit and comfortably climate-controlled supermarkets on asphalt roads to bring back plastic-lined containers of round coffee to their homes. To drink coffee by the cup, we use oil by the barrel.*
I got up and brewed a pot, sipped from my cup and returned to this post, holding all the many ironies at bay while I considered what I wanted to think about out loud on the page.
Rather than seeing Greer’s words above as an accusation, I read it as a map of points for focus.
And I recently read in our local papers of the increasing likelihood in the immediate future of planned rolling black-outs by our local Green Mountain Power company, in an effort to manage demand. (For the extra-paranoid, there’s added levels of worry about the vulnerabilities of our national power grid, and rumours of the Russians hacking it –any day now!) How many prods to action do I need?!
Time for setting up car-battery power for lighting and small appliances. The blackouts will teach us to use less anyway. It’s too easy to forget that reduce-reuse-recycle aren’t just the 3 R’s for our age, but a hierarchy of priorities, with reduce being by far the most important, and recycle a stopgap of last resort, only for when the things slip by the first two strategies. Cleaning up after our anniversary celebration last weekend, with some 100 aluminum soda cans going into our recycling bin, also gave me pause.
It was some 20 years ago now that my wife and I investigated cordwood masonry building techniques at Rob Roy’s cordwood building school, in West Chazy, NY, along with a suite of sustainable tech by amateur and professional builders who walked their talk. It’s a measure of how far the two of us still are from doing the same that I’m writing this post. Again, not to blame ourselves or wallow in pointless guilt — and guilt is always pointless unless it motivates change — but to find in my discomfort a map for focus. A Druid can and should always ask what now? — and as well as ask, listen for the many answers to that question that are always arriving in ways both obvious and subtle. The answers come, in abundance, if I’m listening. If I don’t yet hear them, there’s my practice, mapped out for me.
Our raised vegetable beds and compost piles are slowly expanding, and for now, the three CSAs nearby that we’re members of raise 80% of our vegetables better than we can. Likewise with good chickens, eggs, dairy and beef less than four miles away. So far, not a prime focus. Should they change, so will we.
Beets, kale, squash and potatoes in a modified hugel-mound bed. We’re trying out several different sizes and shapes to see what works best.
But our energy needs remain a focus. Solar, however admirable it can seem on the consumption end because it feels so clean, relies on components extremely energy-intensive to extract from the earth, process, fabricate and distribute.
When we met, my wife and I discussed for a long time the kind of life we wanted, and at the time our lack of funds — deep irony! — prevented us from getting the land and building the house and living the kind of sustainable life I’d imagined. So we took the employer-employed route instead.
The obstacles for so many of us are systemic, and harder, though all the more needed, in times of challenge like now. Difficult to navigate, but deserving our creativity to find pathways that work for our situations. The best changes, often, are incremental. I’m more likely to stick with them, I find. I can adjust as I go. No need for the dramatic transformations — those will come regardless, as long as I’m alive.
We’ve returned to questions of sustainability through the decades, out of a mix of opportunity and necessity and common sense. Wood heat, small-scale gardening, one car, locally-produced foods — these we’ve achieved. But still fairly high electricity use: that’s where we stand now. Our solar production covers all but about $100 a year, yet a single power outage renders oven-fridge-computer-water pump and hot-water-heater large and useless household ornaments, until the current is restored and flowing again. No reserves. And that stands as a metaphor to explore on many levels, not just the physical. What spiritual reserves do I need to develop?
Barometer rising, forecast clear — time to wash clothes and get them out onto the line in the backyard. I’ve got work cut out for me. I’ll update here as I discover what I can do.
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*John Michael Greer. (2008). The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age. New Society Publishers, pg. 115.
A Druid Way 