survivors

I encounter a lot of independent work around the web that I enjoy and some I admire. Very few of these mostly creative, fierce individualists inspire me, however, but the guy who posts his writing and photos a few times each month at the EarthHomeGarden blog. certainly does.

I don't link to EarthHomeGarden here, but I do on my other blog -- the Omnem blog. What I'm finding is that Jim's photos and short accompanying essays get better as time goes by; he's been doing this for five years now, and is clearly warming up to it. Most of his work is upbeat and full of the joy of living on God's green earth, but the joy issues from the realization that the fragile little ball we live on is an endangered ship, and being driven to destruction by a decrepit and crumbling civilization.

As the ancient cliché goes, "Enjoy yourself; it's later than you think."

I feel a great affinity for Jim, the proprietor of this little corner of the internet, and not just because he and I were born very near the same time (a few years before the middle of the XX century) and share many of the same cultural traits and experiences. Jim is also a guy who knows and has accepted Where We Are. He lives with his wife and dog in a cabin in the mountains between Los Angeles and the High Desert of inland California, without a car and foregoing most of the machines usually called "modern conveniences." Living in that way is an expression of what Jim, in one of his more serious and not-so-upbeat posts, visualizes as "those of us who remain scaveng(ing) the grotesque ruins of (our) addictively consumptive oil-addled civilization for tools and materials to help make our humble lives of meager subsistence a bit easier."

In the near future, so near that it's already upon us, intelligent and purpose-oriented scavenging will be one of the habits of effective survivors.

Knowing Where We Are leads to the search for better, often older ways of doing things, and that awareness is not exclusively the province of older people. It's shared these days by many who are under 40, like the young man in the photo above happily listening to 78 rpm records on his electricity-free Victrola, or the kids living on a Missouri commune who built their cob cottage entirely by hand. When you see people obstinately resisting those "modern conveniences" and doing things by hand or with manually operated machines (including bicycles), like, for instance, sewing on a treadle-operated machine, it's a sign you're dealing with someone who knows Where We Are.

Is there hope for this exhausted, battered old lady we call Earth? Maybe. But only if a lot more people know and are willing to accept Where We Are than do now. Because we don't have the slightest idea of where we want to go or how to get there unless we have an accurate notion of Where We Are.