Which Way Is Up?

Growing up, I was a good son, an earnest student, healthy, well behaved and totally embedded in a vibrant social network.  Life was good: all I needed was provided before I even asked. I perceived myself to be successful, progressive and modern.  But in my second year of university I began to experience acute existential longings accompanied by the feeling that something really central, vital and essential was missing from my life. 

 

I really, really, really wanted to know the "TRUTH".  Who was I, what was I, where had the "I" in I come from and what was my ultimate destiny?  What did the word 'meaning' actually mean, and where could I find real value?  My worldview was beginning to unravel and I felt like I was falling off the edge of the known universe.  It was scary but exhilarating- frightening and exciting.  A grand adventure with no map to show the way forward.

Eventually the lure of the unknown overcame my fear and I broke out of my comfy stall in search of answers.  It wasn't until I encountered the 'Urantia Book' that I found satisfactory answers to my questions.  The Urantia Book is a hefty tome of 2000+ pages, a collection of papers authored by various celestial beings that covers topics such as the nature of God, cosmology, the history of this planet from the nebular stage to the 20th century, plus religion, spirituality and much, much more.  I studied it for years.  It became the bedrock for and framework of my intellectual understanding and provided me with a cosmic perspective that just made sense.

 

One concept from the Urantia Book relates to the existential angst of my college years: Humans are endowed with 'perfection hunger'.  Perfection hunger is not just the physiological drive for homeostasis, the mind's search for equilibrium or the desire for emotional stability.  Perfection hunger also operates in the spiritual domain, ever drawing us upward (or inward) towards the Divine, towards the Beloved, expressing as a yearning for union.  Perfection hunger is the precursor to many mystical and religious experiences.

Perfection hunger sets humans apart from their animal cousins.  It is the secret of personal growth and progressive civilization.  It enables us to fulfill the divine injunction: "Be you perfect even as I am perfect."  In one sense it is a circuit into which we are all connected, originating in Source and terminating in Source, a circuit that came into existence when the One became the Many, when the "I Am" became "We Are".  Originating so close to the source of All That Is, perfection hunger connects us to the primal forces of creation.  Perfectly awesome!!

Creating Community

One of my favourite TV shows is National Geographic’s The Dog Whisperer, with Cesar Milan.  In each episode Cesar works with dog owners whose pets are wreaking havoc in their lives.  With few exceptions the actual problem and its resolution originates with the humans, not the dog.  I resonate with Cesar’s focus on the emotional and spiritual inner work that is necessary before the dog handling techniques he teaches can be effectively implemented.

In the world of natural horsemanship, the same dynamic prevails: the human who wants to have a balanced relationship with horses must first attain their own inner balance, trust, calmness and relaxation.  Again, from Abraham/Hicks and the Law of Attraction we learn that it is our inner feelings, thoughts, beliefs and attitudes that actually construct our experience of the universe.

So, how to create community? Can’t be done.  You cannot create community.  You can experience community, you can acknowledge community, you can allow community to blossom, but you cannot create it.  You can nurture community, deny it, refuse it or fall in love with it, but cannot make it happen.  You can regulate community, build walls around it, place it on a pedestal, write poems to it, study it and immerse yourself in it, but never can you force it to appear.

In that sense our community is who we are and there is no separation.  I have no way of defining my ‘self’ without including the community I am embedded in.  As we change our inner world, our experience of community will shift accordingly.

Choosing My Community

In 1970 there were lots of choices when it came to communal living.  One could always go the traditional route and live in a village, town or city.  Voila! Instant unintentional community.  Maybe you didn't know your neighbours (or even want to know them) but all the necessities of life were available, close at hand: food, shelter, work, culture, religion, school.  Police to keep order, water, sewage treatment, paved roads and lots of shopping. Of course, along with all of that came air pollution, traffic jams, noise, crowds, crime and lineups at the checkout counter.

Or one could find a commune in a rural or urban setting; groups of idealistic young people sharing resources, attempting to live co-operatively, even raising children as a collective experience.  Then there were the more structured "intentional" communities, in urban and rural versions.

If none of these were suitable, well, Canada is a big country and you could always find a place to start your own version of community.

We checked out a few communes, toyed with intentional community, but ended up living as a nuclear family on a series of farms in Eastern Ontario, Southern Ontario and Cape Breton Island Nova Scotia.  We often took in stray humans to help out, and depended on our immediate neighbours for assistance in our various farming endeavours.  Even though I sometimes envied people who spent decades in one place (imagine being able to watch a tree grow up!) my restless search for the ideal life kept me on the move.  Finally I realized my true community consisted of all humans on the planet.  In that sense it did not matter where or how I lived, I would always be living in community.

What about the other creatures that shared the world with me: the four-legged, six-legged, eight –legged, multi-legged and legless beings who occupied every nook and cranny of every single habitat in the sea, on the land and in the air?  Weren’t all of them, plants, animals, insects and bacteria, a part of my community?  Even my own body was a community, a collection of co-operating and sometimes competing organisms that travelled everywhere together.

Seems community is inescapable. 

So You Want To Be Self-Sufficient

Exactly what is self-sufficiency and how is it achieved?  That question led to many lively debates among us back-to-the-land types.  Even a narrow focus on just the material aspects of self-sufficiency such as water, food, warmth, shelter, tools and transport, leads to the realization that no-one achieves self-sufficiency on their own.  We begin life, live it and end it fully embedded in social networks: family, friends, classmates, roommates, co-workers, co-religionists, political parties, economic groupings, clubs, cults and on and on.

It seems that material self-sufficiency actually begins and ends with community.  So what is the minimum size of a truly self-sufficient community?  The family? The clan?  The tribe? The bioregion?  The nation-state?  The continent?  One important parameter is the technology being used.

A clan of hunter-gatherers using stone tools, spears and the bow and arrow can be self-sufficient, if there is enough game and food available within walking distance.  But they do have to be ready to move on to unexploited habitat when food runs out locally.  And there were times when they went hungry.  A few remnants of this stage of society still existed when I was young, but in my lifetime they have all been ‘discovered’, disrupted and engulfed by industrial civilization.

The next level up is quite a leap: settled agriculturalists and herders living in cultures with complex language, writing, social classes and castes, law, organized religion, property rights, specialization of crafts, kings and urban centers.  Some of these groups thrived for thousands of years all over the planet.  Many examples still exist, but all of them are enmeshed with the dominant global culture to some extent.

When we get to industrial societies, it seems nothing short of access to the resources of the entire planet is sufficient to sustain the current level of development, and even that may not be enough, given the primitive technologies currently in use.

My desire to be self-sufficient came with a parallel wish to live in community.  As I moved away physically, intellectually and spiritually from the Jewish, middle class, suburban, Toronto community that I had grown up in, I searched for a new community that would reflect and support my hunger for new experiences. 

My first communal experience was with my partner, a recent refugee from that hotbed of alternative living, Berkeley California.  We hooked up soon after I had returned from my mind-altering journey to India.  Jane was three days older than I.  She was staying at the house of friends of mine, with her 3-year-old daughter.  On our first meeting we talked long into the night.  I never left.  Soon we departed from Toronto and flew out to Vancouver Island on the west coast of Canada.  The search for community had begun.

Back to the Land

Yes, we were young, foolish, brash, overconfident, full of ourselves, arrogant, fearless and ignorant.  But we had a lot of fun!!  And we were not alone.  The back roads of Lanark County were seeded with others like ourselves, refugees from urban centers, exploring new/old ways of living.  There were plenty of work bees, potluck dinners, parties, sharing of resources and a sense of community.  The social conventions that held our parents and grandparents in a vise-like grip seemed fragile.  Experimentation was the new norm.  Just get out there and do it!!

After a few years of living on and from the land, I began to believe that surviving the collapse of civilization was not that big a deal.  After all, just a few generations ago my ancestors had the necessary skills to survive on the land.  Humans have exploited every possible ecosystem on the planet for thousands of generations.  So it became a question as to how far back did I want to go to pick up the thread of living off the land:  the days of the European pioneers, who saw the forest as the enemy (after the native inhabitants had been extirpated by imported disease and war), and managed to denude the entire landscape with only axes, handsaws, horses and oxen; the Aboriginals of North America who lived lightly on the land but battled endlessly with other tribes over access to resources; the Bronze Age? The Stone Age?  Where to stop the journey into the past and take a stand?

Some friends eschewed the use of power tools, preferring the axe and double-handled buck saw to fell trees for firewood, hauling the wood back to the house with horses.  But where did the metal come from to make the axe and the saw?  What about the chains that hitched the horses to the sled- where did that originate?  And there was still the pesky problem of coming up with cash to pay the taxes on the land so that one had a place live while striving for “self-sufficiency”.

Get Me Out of Here!!

January 13, 2012

I began with a hunger for direct experience and a belief in the impending collapse of ‘modern’ civilization.  I did not want to be buried in the rubble of a disintegrating culture that was consuming non-renewable resources at an accelerating rate while poisoning the air, water and soil with thousands of untested chemical formulations.  The whole stinking mess, so sensible and rational when viewed from the inside, appeared as sheer madness when examined from the outside.

I wanted out.  I wanted a ‘natural’ experience.  I wanted to taste the earth, revisit the old pathways, learn how to grow food, create shelter, be self-sufficient; live without electricity, telephones, newspapers, radio, alarm clocks, money (never figured that one out!).

Those burning desires led me out of the city and into the countryside: the back roads of Lanark County, Ontario.  I found what I sought up on the Canadian Shield, a land of granite outcroppings and forested hillsides, crossed by streams and full of small lakes.  I had a partner as crazy as I was, several small children and soon a few animals: laying hens, meat chickens, milk goats and a pair of workhorses.



Just living became a full time job. We broke ground to plant seeds, nurtured the plants, harvested and preserved food, hauled water from the well, gathered firewood for the winter, collected eggs, milked the goats, fed the horses……….   Self-sufficiency was way more involved than I had expected.  We never did get to the part where we kept sheep to harvest the wool to spin the thread to weave the cloth to make the clothes to keep us warm.  Or kill the cow, then skin it for the hide, then tan the hide, then cut the leather, then make the shoes.  Not to mention lighting (candles? Kerosene? Propane?) or soap (start with wood ashes and fat….) or transportation (how far can a horse travel in a day?) or medicine (herbs? Plants? Dentists? Penicillin?).
I began to develop a grudging admiration for the gifts of civilization, but was still determined to do it my way.

The Journey Begins

 My journey towards sustainable living began in 1969 when I first travelled to Europe, Africa and Asia.  I grew up in the suburbs of Toronto, Canada.  That first trip abroad opened my eyes to the amazing variety of choices we have available when it comes to living on the earth.  I also discovered how much of our current civilization is derived from those who have come before us, stretching back thousands of years.

At some point I realized that I was actually living in the dreams of my ancestors.  All the forms and the content making up my social experience had started out as 'mere' thoughts, ideas and desires in the minds of other human beings who had left the scene long ago. 

The combination of the creative impulse of a human being and the receptive nature of the universe, expressed over time, has resulted in modern technology, agriculture, transportation, cities, educational institutions, fashion and all the other attributes of North American life in the 21st century.

Simultaneous with that realization came the next: I could dream up new ways of being, new ways of living and even new ways of perceiving.  Reality was not rigid and unchanging, but amorphous, mysterious, full of incredible potential.  I was no longer a victim of circumstances, but a co-creator of my own experience.  I was ready to dive right in and start experiencing!!