Small scale living

I picked up an article and some attendant discussions recently about living in small spaces. Apparently new build in the UK is smaller than European averages, with one bedroom flats at perhaps 43 meters square. I did the maths and worked out the boat may be slightly smaller than that, and there are three of us in it. I also gather that in Japan, small living is more prevalent.

There are challenges, let’s be clear. Having more than one person in a small space means next to no personal space. Privacy is at a premium, but not impossible. It calls for constant attention and negotiation, so you really have to get on with the people sharing the small space. We’ve not struggled on this score, although in the depths of winter when it’s wet and grim outside and we’re all fidgety, it isn’t always a joy. Laundry and wet clothes are the biggest practical problem. Again, not insurmountable. I now have little lines strung up over the sink and draining board for when the waterproof outers get soaked. Dealing with wet clothes in a small space is not entertaining, but again, wholly possible. The person with a car probably wouldn’t face this one as much.

We had to give up all sorts of things to downsize. We have to be very disciplined about buying new stuff. Actually I like this, I like living lightly and not feeling weighted down by possessions. There’s less to clean, tidy and maintain, too. Every prospective purchase has to be considered. Where is it going to live? Is something else going to have to move out, and if so, what? It makes us focus on what we value and use most. It also discourages people buying us (and especially the child) anything that is both large and useless. Another win.

There is no way we can have dinner parties. I’m fine with that, I feel no lack. We meet people other places. No frantic pre-visitor tidying up, we just go to the pub. Splendid. We don’t end up with hordes of other people’s children coming to visit. This is fine too. We go to spaces where children can rampage. I do not worry about breakages, or children getting into things they should not. More win.

Large spaces are an invitation to accumulate stuff, (Been there, done that) most of the stuff is barely used, not even necessarily wanted, but it grows to fill the available space. The smaller the space, the less you let it do that. Unlike a lot of people I know, I don’t have an attic, garage or spare rom stuffed with unwanted things I can’t let go of. This is another win. Large spaces are also an invitation to stay in while your small space encourages going out. There’s a lot of space outside. Most of the time I’ve not felt cramped in the boat, because of what’s outside the windows. There’s a lot of space outside, and in nice weather, I can sit in it, and work. My ‘office’ for writing this afternoon will be under the willows. I can also use libraries, cafes, and other public spaces. I’ve felt more cooped up in houses than ever I have on the boat.

Then there’s the cost and environmental aspects. Often we only need one light in the evening, and the heating is much reduced. More space equals more lights and more heating needed. Bigger properties occupy more land, and that does have a direct environmental impact. Think how much soil is taken out of natural use in order to support all those bedrooms and garages stacked with unwanted junk. Smaller spaces take less cleaning and therefore use fewer cleaning products. Less carpet is required. Fewer cans of paint will be deployed in decorating, and on it goes. A smaller space means less consumption, continually, saving money and keeping you greener. Furthermore it will have been cheaper to buy or rent than a big space. And that saved money will enable you to get out and do more interesting things somewhere else.

I’m conscious that anyone with mobility issues may need a bit more space to get around. That’s a different sort of issue. Some working from home options require more storage space and work area than we do – again I’d not argue with that. However, having space so that you can have more junk, and as an antidote to not being able to relate very well to the people you ostensibly live with… not so clever. Small spaces call for interesting skills, managing possessions, accumulation, and human relationships. I can really recommend it as a learning experience. There’s so much to be gained from finding out what you actually need, and what’s just weighing you down. It’s easier than you might imagine, and more fun.

The Pagan and the Pope

So, we have a new Pope. Now, as a Pagan it might seem that I shouldn’t have much to say on the subject, but the size and wealth of the Catholic Church inclines me to feel that this has at least the potential for major impact. I live in hope. From the news this morning I understand that, in his former life, Pope Francis used the bus, did his own shopping, cooked his own meals and went into slums. He spoke in favour of baptising the children of unmarried mothers. I gather he’s not pro gay marriage or women Bishops, but I can’t see they’d have let anyone that radical into the top job. By all accounts, our new Pope cares about poverty and the environment. The question is, will he act on that, or will he let the corporate Vatican tame him? Keep him in your prayers, because if he’s half of what he seems to be, he’s going to need all the well wishing he can get.

There is an issue that lies under poverty, and under environmental problems, and that issue is population. Without talking about birth rates, and the implications of those for child poverty and death in the developing world, no real change can happen. There’s the aids crisis to consider, too. Education of women, rights for women – if all you do is squeeze out babies, this is a moot point. Currently the Catholic Church does not approve of contraception.

What the world desperately needs is a Pope with the courage, compassion and humanity to get up and use that infallible Popeness to good effect. He could decide that Jesus wants us all to be a bit less fruitful so that we can properly take care of the children we’ve got. He could change much of the world, and the lives of a great many people living in it. He could give countless families opportunity to escape poverty, and to build better lives for themselves, and a more manageable, planned number of offspring. He could help reduce the spread of aids, and he could radically impact on the viability of us as a species. Not many people get that much power.

Furthermore, we all know the Catholic Church is obscenely wealthy. Here is a man who has professed that as a Christian, he chooses poverty, and who through his work has shown a willingness to try and alleviate the abject and intolerable levels of poverty others suffer. How much power does he now have? How much wealth? How far is he willing to go?

Let’s hope he’s as good as he sounds, and as able to resist the allure of power and wealth as possible. Active compassion in the Vatican could make a world of difference.

Food for thought

We’ve had the horse meat scandal in the UK, with horse DNA turning up in processed food. As I see it there’s no reason to be sentimental over one endearing mammal (horse) and happily scoffing another (cows), but people do. What we should be talking about is why this has happened, and whether the cow DNA came from properly sourced cows. Were we getting healthy cows, or sick rejects in those burgers? No one seems to be asking, much less checking. It is the pressure from supermarkets to push down the prices they pay farmers that has lead to this. Quite simply, if we want it very, very cheap, we cannot also expect to have it be very, very good.

We keep animals in crowded, unnatural conditions as it is, to answer western demand for a high meat diet. 50% of the grain grown in the world goes to feed animals for the meat market (according to the BBC this morning). At the same time European advisors recommend we should not eat more than 20 grams of processed meat a day. That’s about one slice of ham, if you aren’t metric. We’ve known for a while that processed meats increase risk of heart disease and cancer. Processed meats use up all the stray bits you wouldn’t buy if you could see them ‘in the raw’. Lips and arseholes and all that. Now, my feeling is if you are going to kill an animal to eat it, you have an ethical obligation not to throw bits of it away, so that puts me in favour of processed meat, and it tends to be your protein for the poorer consumer as well. Cheap unwanted bits have been with us for a long time, and that could be made to work. I assume it’s not the meat content of the processed meat that causes the issue here because officialdom says that non-processed is fine. For the sake of argument, let’s assume they’re right. Processed foods however, are loaded with salt, and chemicals – especially preservatives.

I should mention that I’m a vegetarian. Not out of any particular ethical principle, I have too strong a sense of plants as living individuals too. I’m a vegetarian because when I ate meat, it made me very ill, all the time. I react to it like it was a toxin, without going into the grim details. I suspect it has nothing to do with the flesh and everything to do with the chemicals pumped into the flesh, both during the lifetime of the creature (I get sick on antibiotics too) and in the processing part. But, we’re not talking about identifying and clamping down on dangerous chemicals in our food that cause heart disease and cancer. Oh no. We’re talking about your 20 grams a day. That makes me uncomfortable.

I strongly believe that as a culture we consume too much meat. It isn’t environmentally sustainable (go back to that grain statistic), it create greenhouse gases, the animal suffering is increased dramatically as well. If you assume your meat comes from happy free range creatures, that’s a lot more comfortable than picturing the misery of battery farming, the endless pens, the animals that are turned into units of production and not allowed to be animals at all.

All that said, I recognise there is blood spilled regularly for vegetarianism, and that veganism would mean no more spring lambs in the field and radical changes to a British landscape that evolved around keeping animals. There’s a whole other essay to write there. However, in an ideal situation, animals get to live as animals in good conditions that allow them to be themselves up until we eat them. Animals contribute to the fertility of the land, when you do it right, are farmed where you can’t grow crops anyway, live on locally grown hay and grass, not imported grain, and are part of a holistic and functional system. Current demands don’t allow that. A percentage of people going vegan and vegetarian helps to bring demand down, and if that works for you, excellent. For everyone else, a low meat diet is, I think, the best option. That means thinking about how we ate say, 50 years ago, where it wasn’t a case of meat every day, and potentially at every meal. Having some days off from meat each week is evidently better for your body, with the whole heart failure and cancer issues to consider.

We’ve come to associate eating meat with wealth and luxury. We associate it with status, with being macho, and we still have people claiming that you need meat for a healthy diet. We don’t. We need protein. We don’t need meat so much that its worth having every bargain basement cow of uncertain provenance sneaking into the food chain. We don’t need chemical poisoning either. What we do need, is a radical rethink of our whole food culture.

Can I have your attention?

For a while, attention deficit disorder, sometimes also called ADD or ADHD has been a fashionable sort of diagnosis, with ever more drugs for unruly children. This worries me, along with quite a lot of other things. I’m sure some of it is driven by a pharmaceutical industry that wants to sell cures. I also think we have a culture more than keen to pathologize difference. Those of us, adult and child, who do not fit neatly into someone’s boxes (whose boxes are they, I’d love to know…) will get labels. Now, where labelling leads to useful support – like giving dyslexic kids more time in exams – fair enough, but I am wary of putting anyone on long term drugs for any reason. I’m wary of labels that seem to be more about marginalising difference than helping people. We might pause here and think about the kinds of labels folks currently identified as having ‘learning difficulties’ have been given through history.

My soap box for today is about attention though. I’ve never been tested for ADD, but this may have a lot to do with my knack for self preservation around the issue. I can’t tune stuff out. Noise, movement, information – it all comes in. I choose my environments carefully, and as the issue seems to have got more pronounced over time, I’ve learned to stay out of spaces that mess with my head. More than a couple of days in a big city makes me feel like my head is going to explode. This is a spectrum ailment, and I’m functional enough to have sneaked beneath officialdom’s radar. Being a quiet sort of girl and not prone to acting out at school, no one would have considered me a candidate for an issue generally associated with disruptive behaviour.

But is there anything actually wrong with me? I think not. Millions of years of evolution designed us to survive in a reality where a rustle could be all the warning you get of a predator. Being alert to the environment used to be a survival skill. We used also to live in much smaller groupings, with far less stimulating surroundings. What we’ve manufactured, especially in our cities is an overcrowded, noise laden, information dense space that our millions of years of evolution have very precisely equipped us not to be able to handle.

The only way to survive is to turn off as much of your awareness as possible. You have to squash the inner mammal that sniffs at new smells and tilts its ears towards sounds. You have to tune out the human self that can handle about 150 people and cannot cope with thousands. To survive in the environments we have created, you have to be not animal, not human, not present or feeling too much or caring too much.

Therefore your normal, functional, twenty first century, western, urban human must cultivate apathy and obliviousness as primary survival skills. You learn not to look, and not to hear, an all the while the adverts get louder, brighter, bigger to draw you back in. It’s a psychotic arms race that we cannot win because we are doing it to ourselves.

In woodland or in fields I don’t experience overload. I don’t feel shocked and jarred by noise and excessive input because there isn’t any. I am increasingly convinced that the ADD folk are probably more like historical humans in their humanity than those who are willingly entering zombie states in order to survive. Most of us are somewhere in between. I can’t help but feel it’s the environments that need to change, not the people.

Dear politicians,

I know most of you won’t read this, but I’m writing it anyway because then at least I will have said it. It does not seem to have occurred to you that the greatest assets a country possess, are its people, and its natural environment. Arguably, people are part of the natural environment, but that’s a whole other story. People are one of your most valuable assets not because of what they might do for GDP, what they might produce, the tax you can raise from them or anything else of that ilk. People are your most important asset, because they are living, thinking, feeling beings. A country should take care of its people, and take pride in taking care of its people.

The health of your nation is one of your greatest potential assets. It is worth spending money one, because without health, happiness is much harder to achieve. And, knowing how much you care about money and productivity, now might be a good time to mention that well people are going to be more productive. This does not mean the solution is to tell everyone they are well, and stop supporting those who aren’t. This, between you and me, is a bloody stupid approach bound to make things worse. Stop it. Ill people are not lazy, are not scroungers, they represent incidents of your most precious resource needing support. Treat them accordingly.

Compared to the tax dodges of big business and the financial abuses of the money markets, benefit fraud really isn’t that big a deal. Get over it. I know it’s very easy to whip up hatred against the most vulnerable and marginalised members of society, but this is not ethical and once again misses the point that these people too, are part of your biggest asset.

We only have the one planet. Our water, air and soil are precious resources that we damage at our own cost. And yes, I do mean the kind of financial cost that you are capable of understanding. If we do not take care of our physical resources, we are doomed. This ought to be a no brainer, but too often you put short term money making ahead of long term viability. You might not be in office ten years hence, but you’re still going to have to breathe the air. Think about it.

We have a system that has evolved gently out of tyranny and feudalism. It’s a system that has always put the financial needs of an elite few first. If you want to carry on being the elite few, you might want to try practicing a little enlightened self interest. We are facing epidemic level obesity, anxiety and depression, along with a great many other illnesses. We are in financial crisis. We have an environmental disaster hanging over our heads the potential cost of which is beyond your wildest imaginings. You need to do something about this.

How about we stop worshiping the gods of GDP and profit for a little while, and ask ourselves what actually matters? Does it matter whether the excessively rich get to give themselves million pound bonuses this year, or does it matter that all our young people should be educated to a standard that will allow them to survive whatever the future throws at them? Do we need a few more expensive toys, or would we be better off making sure that our food chain is not loaded with dangerous poisons? People, and the environment should, by any logical measure, be the two most important considerations of any government. Not the income of the few, but the welfare and viability of everyone.

And please, stop with the bullshit about trickle down. It doesn’t. The super rich do not cause much by way of life improvement for others. If you doubt this, look around. Look at the Middle East where extreme wealth lives along side abject poverty. Wealth comes from the roots and it goes up, and currently it accumulates with the few at the top, to the detriment of the majority. If there is no one at the bottom, at the production and purchasing end, making all the small cogs go round, there is no system. Look at how any eco system works. Take out the bottom, the least powerful, most predated aspect of a food chain and watch how the big, dramatic predators die off. Nature tells us that you do not get high level predators without a healthy system supporting them.

To you who would be those predators; the tigers, eagles, sharks of the world, I say this. With nothing to feed on, you die. If you can’t buck up your ideas for any other reason, you might try doing it for that.

Nurturing your paganism

There used to be a hefty debate in psychology about which was the most important: Nature (your DNA) or Nurture (your environment) in determining your personality, and through that, the rest of your life experience. As, for many of us growing up, our biological parents are also the main providers of our environmental experience, this is not an easy set of things to pick apart. However, it’s looking increasingly like lifestyle affects which genes we manifest – from that raw material, there is scope to switch on and off certain features, to express one option rather than another. As we grow, we also become more able to choose and shape our environment. It turns out that it is what we experience that does most to shape us.

The thing about experience, is that we are active participants in our own life. Most of us have at least some control over how we spend our time, who we spend it with and what we expose ourselves to. I’m not aware of any studies about how environmental choices affect adults, but there is a lot of evidence that children learn, and grow more happily and effectively f they have time out of doors. There is evidence of how observed violence in particular impacts on developing minds, tapping into mirror neurones that are part of how we learn. There is evidence that a mere five minutes a day out of doors in a green space has positive mental health benefits. I can’t recall sources, but if you’ve time to wander online, it’s all out there, because I probably got it from BBC radio.

Now consider what it does to an adult to get up, drive to work, spend the day in a little cubicle, drive back, eat a ready meal and spend the rest of the day in front of the TV or a computer. If this is the environment we create for ourselves – as plenty of people do – how is it, in turn, feeding and shaping us? Who are we if we do this? What is our life experience? What happens to our inner life, our emotions, our relationships? One of the biggest apparent reasons for being like this is the belief that there is no alternative. Every time I moot this kind of issue, someone tells me that they just can’t do differently. If you are not choosing this way of life, but it is being forced upon you, I would seriously suggest doing whatever radical, non-violent thing turns out to be necessary to escape.

I hear from people new to paganism who struggle with how to make that huge, almost unimaginable leap from normal life, to real life. Pagan life. The move from passive endurance to active, joyful living. The move away from a life in small boxes to one of great horizons. The answer does not lie in thought, or study, or wishful thinking. It lies in simple and direct action. Change your environment. If only for a few minutes every day, change your space. Bring plants into it. Go outside more. Walk. Turn off the television. Five minutes a day will shift you, and something else will naturally come from this, and when you do that too, you will be walking your pagan path, taking those first baby steps towards new perceptions and understanding. It is in your power to decide at least a little bit of where and how you spend your time. Once you start getting nature into that, once nature becomes part of your environment, the other stuff becomes easier. It’s not a struggle to find the time, but the ability to experience your own natural impulses, and the confidence to give them the space they deserve.

Then in turn, you change the kind of environment that you create for other people, and they too will be influenced by this.

Given due time, anything is possible.

Druidry and politics

My personal belief is that government and religion should be kept well away from each other, for the good of both. All those issues about power corrupting, for a start, and on the government side, it should be about making pragmatic decisions that will be best for as many people as possible, rather than being led by the morals and priorities of any single faith group. But that said, we are all people and what we believe inevitably does colour everything else we think. At a personal level, politics and religion are not so easily separated.

We know that historical druids were political. I get the impression that’s why Rome stamped on them so thoroughly. Where does modern druidry fit with modern politics though? Should we be joining parties and making like the druids of old, or are we better off keeping out of all that? I don’t think there’s a one answer fits all here (do I ever?) but at the same time, I can’t see how any of us can take forward any spiritually inspired principles without to some degree engaging with the political system.

Many of the big issues for druids are too big to be tackled through national politics even. Justice, peace and environmental protection have to be tackled at a global level. These don’t seem to be major priorities for our governments. But druids are international folk. Our orders, social groupings and networks cross borders all the time. And we’re a talkative bunch. My sense of things political in a number of other countries come entirely from what other pagans and especially druids, tell me. And I suspect that some folks perceive English politics primarily through the blog posts of Damh the Bard, Cat Treadwell and others.

At the moment, that might not seem all that important in the scheme of things. Druidry is a growing religious movement, and it is an international one in which political national borders mean very little. We utilise the internet a lot. Through podcasts we hear each other’s voices right across the world. The scope to share information, is considerable. As we grow, the political potential of Druidry will increase. No doubt that will offer us more challenges than solutions.

Druidry is inherently political. It prioritises things that governments do not prioritise. Quality over quantity. Environment over profit. Inspiration over conformity. Honour over expedience. So much of what happens in politics is based on short term thinking and a desire for immediate gain. Druidry does not encourage a buy now, pay later mentality. It is co-operative rather than competitive, favours compassionate ways of treating the disadvantaged, and does not dive enthusiastically into every available opportunity for war. Every time one of us gets up and mentions any of these values and priorities, we are acting politically. We are challenging the ‘norms’ and resisting the current tides.

The druids of old were not the chieftains and rulers. They offered advice. Generally speaking, telling people what to do is a very good way of getting them to ignore and resent you. We can however ask awkward questions, enquire ‘what if’ and keep talking about those other ways of being political, that are not about gross national productivity, economic growth, fantasy finances and yet another scapegoat to bomb as a distraction from issues closer to home.