Small Revolutions: Voluntary Simplicity in Devon

Making the planet personal

I've got nothing to add to this myself, I just wanted to point out a great article and quote from another blog I occasionally read:

We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well -- for we will not fight to save what we do not love.

Dave Pollard then goes on to talk further about our emotional connection to the planet.

Though I don't want to add anything myself, I see a connection between this and metta bhavana meditation. It's one of the two meditations I practise (but not really often enough as I would like as always - I lack discipline).

The practise is really about cultivating a sort of friendliness/ loving kindness - or at least these are the words that best approach the translation of the word 'metta'.

What I like about the buddhist stand point here is that loving kindness isn't just automatic. It's seen as more like fitness, or weight training. It's an attitude or a feeling that needs to be cultivated. And it assumes that it can be cultivated by everybody.

Furthermore, it's first stage is having loving kindness for yourself. To love others you need to love yourself first. Then you 'lift progressively greater weights' by considering a close friend, the someone 'neutral' to you, then someone you don't particularly like and then all living things.

Love and connection has to be created, created where it currently is absent, within ourselves, those close to us, and then the greater world.

This is an extract from the metta sutra (words of buddha):

Even as a mother protects with her life
Her child, her only child,
So with a boundless heart
Should one cherish all living beings:
Radiating kindness over the entire world
Spreading upwards to the skies,
And downwards to the depths;
Outwards and unbounded,
Freed from hatred and ill-will.

So that's all I have to say about that.

LETS (Local Exchange Trading System)

Yes, Exeter does indeed have a LETS organisation.

http://www.exeterlets.org/

I love the way LETS is so subtle. It creates an economy where money is not used, essentially allowing people an agreed way of sharing skills and services as well as receiving them.

It's subtly radical and decentralist, just like the philosophy and practise of permaculture...

Asking the universe for what you want

Last night I was thinking about the kind of life we wanted in Exeter.

I'd already signed up for an allotment but I was told that the waiting lists we really quite long.

I also thought about the situation with having a dog. Since we will be in rented accommodation for a year, we wouldn't be able to have a dog.

So I posted the following advert on Exeter Freecycle:

Hello everyone,

I'm moving to Exeter in August with my partner. We're starting a new life, and we want to start getting to know people and the local community and get involved with some different things that interest us.

ALLOTMENT HELP OFFERED
Do you need help on your allotment? Is it just a bit too much for you to cultivate the whole thing?

I can offer a pair of hands to help with the bigger allotment jobs and help you get it under control, maybe for a bit of produce, or a bit of knowledge about vegetable growing, or even ideally the use of a scrap of ground you don't need to grow a few herbs myself.

DOG WALKING
We could help you out if your dog needs more exercise than you can give them.

We're looking for a friendly, well behaved dog to borrow occasionally for outings in the country and on the coast.

We're responsible people, and obviously you'd want to meet us first, but if it sounds like this arrangement could help you out, then drop me an email.

All the best and looking forward to moving in to Exeter and meeting you all.

Rob

The response so far has been fantastic. I've had kind offers from a whole bunch of people for bits of plot, and we've had offers of dogs we can borrow for country walks. How cool is that?

Just goes to show that maybe the universe does, after all, try to fit everything into its best place, and it helps if you make that intention known in one way or another.

Moreover, it goes to show how Freecyle is actually bringing us closer as communities, and thinking actively about how we can help each other out and contribute and give to our communities, as well as working out what we need and would like ourselves.

Does Exeter have a LETS (Local Exchnage Trading System) organisation I wonder?

It's not long until we move to Exeter, just another couple of weeks...

Straw Bale Rendering

I just wrote a whole long (rather good) piece about the straw bale rendering weekend and then went and lost it all. Bugger.

I'll have to write it up again when I am in France next week.

In the meantime, I've borrowed a pic from Rik's site (The Bristol Green House)and you can see what we got up to by visiting his site.

Just a couple of weeks to go until we finally make our move to Devon.

Mentally, we're already there... :)

Straw Bale Rendering

Going to the Bristol Green House tomorrow morning and Sunday for straw bale rendering.

S'gonna be well mucky but a lot of fun...

What does success look like?

I made a list of two columns this morning.

For the first column, I wrote "What success used to look like for me." And I wrote down everything that constituted my 'idea' of how success manifested itself and got some surprising answers in amongst the usual suspects.

What success used to look like for me:

• pleasing other people
• not letting other people down
• being wanted
• approval
• stress
• busyness
• conflict
• backache
• headaches
• drinking
• 'always on' culture
• taking responsibility for everything
• challenging problems
• variety (superficial)
• creativity
• pay off
• online networks
• self justification
• martyr complex
• helping
• needing to prove myself
• making a difference
• management by urgency
• imposter syndrome
• ethically sound

If you're having a hard time of a job, or you share aspects of the same temperament, you might recognise some of these. And there is a mixture of positive and negative in there.

So in what success used to look like, can you see how I sabotaged myself? Well, if it didn't look stressful, or give me backache, or have me 'always on' it just didn't feel like success.

My own personal recipe for success included these negative things. And if it didn't look like that, I didn't feel right. But when I got really stressed and overworked, I wasn't happy either. It was a Lose Lose situation.

Moreover, if success contained all those negative things, I just didn't want success full stop. Which isn't really the way to look at it all.

So then I started a second column:

What success looks like for me now:

• calmness as career goal
• Exchange of value
• Offline networks
• Knowing my story, understanding its trajectory and not needing to explain, justify or seek approval or understanding for it
• comfortably busy
• physical health as career goal
• laughter & fun
• contribution
• backing myself
• creative challenge
• ethically sound
• healthy self regard
• variety & nuance, skill and speciality - depth over breadth
• concordance
• making a difference for myself and others
• contentment
• responding instead of reacting (Full Catastrophe Living)

Outcomes

The exercise has had some important outcomes which is why you might like to try it if you ever find yourself in the same position:

• I've recognised the inherent flaws in my picture of success
• I identified that some things were also right in my view of success and realised it was important to keep them.
• I've acknowledged the negative parts and modified them to something more positive and in tune with my ideals.
• I now have a map of what success looks like for me now.

Replace negatives with positive things to move towards. In the second list, I wrote down the conceptual opposite for some of the negative things (pay off was replaced by exchange of value, stress was replaced by calmness as career goal etc.) as positive things to aim for. It's not just changing words into their opposite - it's about understanding the drive. Pay off basically meant suffering to deserve money. Exchange is a more ecological concept, it implies barter, fairness, giving value and getting it in return. Likewise, making a difference is no good if it doesn't also make a positive difference for myself.

Also, it's not enough knowing what you don't want. Because then you just set yourself into a holding pattern of avoiding that thing. Sometimes that might not be good. Stress is inevitable, so if you try avoiding that always you'll be avoiding a lot of things. However, having some idea of what you positively do want to head towards makes it possible to aim for it, seeing past any temporary negatives that may emerge in going towards the goal. It's a case of "freedom for" as opposed to "freedom from". It's a big difference.

Map is not the territory. When we know where we're going, it's easier to get there. The map is not the territory, but even so, this constitutes a picture of what my new version of success looks like for me. By having it on paper and not just floating around in my head and playing trial and error with it all, I now have a clear idea of what it is I am looking for in my work, what I believe are the ingredients that constitute genuine success as well as happiness and satisfaction.

Change the desirable to the necessary. In my past career, calmness was desirable as was physical health. I didn't have either. 'Desirable' often gets shoved off the list unceremoniously in the real play of life. By making them necessary, the picture changes again. Calmness and physical health are 'must haves' and so now form part of the route map as intrinsic 'career goals'. Because they are now seen as essential conditions for success, they'll start getting the importance they deserve.

This changes a lot of things. Feeling ill? Take a day off and recover instead of labouring on dutifully to spread germs round the office. Not calm? Rather than accept it as a modern necessity of life, you start asking whether it is necessary or unnecessary, temporary or permanent, whether it's something that requires a personal change of outlook, or other changes.

Conclusion

Things look a lot different for me today. A lot of things I can let go of, a lot of new things to embrace, and an ecological view of the ingredients my new career needs to have for me. Though clearly, time will tell exactly how this list changes things.

If you decide to try this little exercise out, please do let me know how you get on, I'd be very interested to hear from you.