Sunday, May 31, 2009

An Attitude of Gratitude

Cameron says...

Today we went to church, and all the ladies flipped over the new baby. They were also amazed that Emily would even come to church four days after having a baby, let alone stay for three hours. It’s days like today that remind me how much I have and remind me to be grateful for the richness in which I live. I take for granted that I can walk out of my front door every Sunday morning in a suit and not worry about getting killed because I profess to believe in Jesus Christ. I take for granted that I can always turn the key in my car and not worry about whether I am going to make it to church because of engine failure or lack of funds to buy fuel. I take for granted that I can drive on well-paved streets that are orderly and safe because of a well-trained, effective police force that silently, patiently watches over my town 24 hours a day. I take for granted that I can walk into a large, beautiful building built upon attractive, well-manicured grounds and participate in worship services freely and openly. I take for granted that I live in a time and place in which sanitation, hygiene, and health services are well-established and effective so that my children can grow up without sickness approaching death one or more times in their childhood. I take for granted that I have three large grocery stores and probably at least ten other stores that sell food, medicine, fuel, and supplies within a five-minute drive from my home. I take for granted that I can get on the internet and have the answer to any question I can possibly think of and many that I never would have thought of in just a few keystrokes—that I can communicate with my family 2500 miles away instantly and study about things that interest me. I take for granted hundreds of other blessings that I can’t even begin to count or understand every minute of every day.

If this sounds over the top to you, it is because you have chosen to remain isolated from the realities of life in the world outside your own town. People are outraged in America that they are possibly on the verge of becoming major stakeholders in a formerly privately owned corporation. How would we feel if our houses of worship were all state sponsored? How would we feel if our communications infrastructure were state-sponsored and censured? How would we feel if—God forbid—our 298 channels were taken away and all day every day our TV showed pictures of an insane dictator running around in a military uniform he didn’t earn? How would we feel if we grew up in a place where we felt we were unworthy to ask for a greater ration of water after having a baby? How do we look at far Eastern countries who have been so crippled by the artificial constructs of a socialist economy that they are now unable grasp the concept of freedom from government ownership? How would we feel if we didn’t have a public school system to complain about—one that produces high school graduates at dozens of times the rate achieved in third world countries? This is the reality of much of the world’s population. This is the mire in which our brothers and sisters live daily while we squander water, electricity, food, clothing, building materials, fuel, medicine, etc. at a rate that would boggle the minds of people who have never even seen more water than they could carry in a bucket.

I am grateful for all the little things in my life, because they are not little. The very poorest Americans are rich by world standards. I am grateful to live in America. I feel it my duty and my destiny to make America a better place—and make America make the world a better place—by not taking more than I need and passing on that which comes into my control to others who could benefit not by a hand out but by a hand up.

In Lime We Trust

Cameron says...

Today I sprinkled my garden with lime. There are ants in my bed of greens, and I have no idea what they want there. There aren’t very many holes in the leaves for the number of ants that are marching on the bed, and I have cleared three caterpillars out of there since I planted, so I’m sure that the ants aren’t the ones going for the leaves. Hopefully that will repel them suckers long enough for me to get the garden soil nice and fertile so the ants won’t want to live there.

I cooked some of the millet I bought last night. I tried to boil it like oatmeal or cream of wheat, but millet is not a grain you can bully around with high temperatures and very little water. You have to coax it. So I reduced the heat to 2 out of 10 on the dial and let it simmer for about half an hour. It smells and tastes a lot like corn. In fact, if I didn’t know what it was I started with, I would have thought I was eating grits. The grains popped as they were cooking—not like popcorn—it was more of a rupture than a pop. I made amaranth as well. That was a pleasant tasting grain. It was chewy and had a woody taste. But when it cooled down to room temperature, it felt like rubbery sand in my mouth. I’ll still eat it.

I also shared some lentil sprouts with Corey. To my surprise, he really enjoyed them! He said, “I looOOOve them!”

Wow. A six-year-old with enough taste to recognize how delicious a simple sprouted legume can be. Corey has always been a good eater, his mom tells me. She is the picky eater in the family. While Corey and Emily both can’t even stand to look at cayenne pepper, Corey likes a lot of foods that Emily has rebuffed quite sternly. She said the millet I made today was gross. So it’s two against one, and I think she’ll end up eating sprouts some time down the road. Maybe she’ll like mung sprouts or sunflower greens or something else.

I ended up eating the raw lentil sprouts in handfuls until I got the idea to mix it in peanut butter to make “crunchy” peanut butter.



















I am trying to find ways to make my family eat healthier without them having to realize it. While I can reduce my expectations that everything I eat be the sweetest, saltiest, most flavorful food I’ve ever eaten, I don’t expect my family to have the same attitude. Yet. I was really happy to find I could mix about two tablespoons of lentil sprouts into enough peanut butter to make a sandwich without it changing the taste. The texture was of course crunchier, but who doesn’t like crunchy peanut butter? And this crunchy peanut butter has the added benefit of not shredding the flesh on the roof of your mouth!

And, just for your viewing pleasure, here are some pictures of my new baby boy.



We Don't Doo It That Way--We're Americans

Cameron says...

San Diego County—the county in which I live—is now in mandatory water conservation mode. The usual rules of allowing lawn watering only three days a week between 6 pm and 10 am and using buckets to wash cars and all that jazz are in effect. I think if the county really wanted to be fair and consistent, it should only place restrictions on the number of units of water consumed after taking into effect the property’s lot size and number of bedrooms. People like me who take a Navy shower two to five times a week and recycle graywater from the washing machine to irrigate my lawn and garden are already using far less water than the guy who is “being really conscientious” and watering his lawn only twice a week but still takes 20-minute showers and leaves the water running while he shaves, brushes his teeth, and does the dishes. I’m just glad I don’t care to have a Petco Park lawn. I just need cut grass for compost, and three days a week is fine for that.

I got mad at my son Corey today and made him bathe out of a bucket in the shower. We have instituted the Navy shower rule to conserve water before the city ever told us to do so, and Corey just doesn’t seem to get it. I mean, how could it take two whole minutes just to wet down your body and the rag? So after fighting this battle with him since I’ve known him, I decided he gets a bucket and a fill line and a rinse cup and ten minutes. It’s always been a battle to get him in and out of the shower in a timely manner on school nights when both parents work, but more recently I have taken more of a water conservation approach. Hence the Navy shower rule, and hence my displeasure at a child just standing around doing nothing in the shower for two minutes and not even getting his hair wet. I have some friends who live just a few minutes north of the Arizona border in the red rocky desert, where all of the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons were filmed. The last time I visited there, I witnessed one member of the family take a 45-minute shower. After asking the head of the household why he allowed this person to take such long showers, he replied that he’s been trying to get him to take shorter showers for years and has given up. While I am very fond of the people in this story, I’m very frustrated to see this attitude in every day American life. This is exactly the kind of situation I want to avoid Corey getting into when he becomes a teenager. I don’t want to pay for water, water heat, and lost family time as my kids take 45-minute showers. Bathing is just not a recreational activity. In my house, 60 seconds in the shower means 2.5 gallons of water. A 45-minute shower would use 112 gallons of water. One 112-gallon shower per day for a month would be 3375 gallons of water. That’s 40,500 gallons of water for ONE person for a year. While the monetary cost of that water is not terribly high, (In my city, the water only for a daily 45-minute shower would cost $10.55 a month.) this behavior is a terrible waste of natural resources and an arrogant affront to those citizens of the world who drink, bathe in, and irrigate their crops with water downstream of a dairy farm or chemical plant. I watched in Iraq as a contractor came on base with the “SST”—as it was so affectionately named—and Sucked all the S out of the dozens of portable toilets all over the base, then proceeded directly to the bank of the Euphrates river and pumped all the S into the river. Part of me wonders why the government couldn’t see that we should have just installed the toilets directly on the river instead of paying someone to drive their big T on base to move S from one undesirable location to another. But that’s another story. The point is that the water situation all over the world is horrendous. But instead of using only what we need and helping our fellow man, we consider what a higher standard of living we could be enjoying. We consider how more materials surrounding us mean more comfort or more success. Perhaps we are so deluded as to believe that money equals materials equals success equals happiness.

In 2007 the population of the city of San Diego was 1,266,731 people. Assuming that the average toilet uses 1.6 gallons per flush, and assuming that each resident of the city flushed only once per day, the average daily water use for sewage alone would be 2,026,769.6 gallons. That’s 60.8 million gallons per month, or over 729.6 million gallons per year. So San Diegans, all of whom are using ultra low-flow toilets and only use the toilet once per day, are using enough water to fill the 6.75-million-gallon Lincoln Memorial 108 times every year.

San Diego is the 8th largest city in the United States. Imagine if eight cities the size of San Diego adopted the practice of composting humanure. We could all stop flushing our toilets, and the resulting 5.8 billion gallons (using a more realistic estimate of two gallons per flush and two flushes per day, the number jumps to a staggering 14.8 billion gallons or 2191 Reflection Ponds—that much water could fill an area the length and width of 4.18 football fields and the height of a 126-story building.) of water could go to the war-torn villages in Africa where women risk getting raped or shot on the 2-mile walk to the well every day. We could start fish hatcheries. I’ve been to the Reflecting Pond at the Lincoln Memorial, and I’ve seen some prize-winning goldfish swimming around in there. We could help people become agriculturally strong in order to gain survival independence from warlords, drug dealers, and terrorists. We could use that water to teach a lot of people to fish, make some good friends, and make this world a better place to live. We could also use the resulting compost from the 9.6 million people who participate in this plan to fertilize our growing fields rather than using chemical fertilizers and insecticides.

On the other hand—flushing my toilet is kinda nice.

Saturday, May 30, 2009

Culinary Exploits

Cameron says...

Not much of a red-letter day today. I made whipped cream with heavy whipping cream and raw sugar, then again with cream and brown sugar. The raw sugar made the finished product taste closest to the whipped cream (non-dairy whipped topping) I have always eaten, but the brown sugar gave it a very attention-getting, very heavy taste. It was good--maybe an acquired taste--but I think I'll stick with non-brown-sugar whipped cream. Both versions taste way better than anything I’ve ever eaten out of a tub or a can.

I made horchata. I used basmati rice. It turned out better than any horchata I’ve made so far, but it tasted exactly like rice pudding. So...maybe less sugar or less cream or both. I’ll have to experiment.

I bought some millet and amaranth. I’m going to finally taste these two little rascally grains and see what comes to mind in terms of experiments. I’ll probably sprout some of both as well.

I read an article in the Feb/March edition of Mother Earth News magazine today about a man and his three grown children who grow over 3 tons of vegetable produce annually on a tenth of an acre. Needless to say, my homesteading dreams seem closer than I thought possible before. I do have a slightly different situation, however, in that I have small children who need a yard, and I have two dogs, and I am not exactly sure how long I will be staying on this piece of property.

I just watched the movie Valkyrie. It was really good. Very intense. It is “based on true events” about the 15th and final plot by Germans to assassinate Adolf Hitler. I always want to know just which parts of a movie like that are the true events and which ones portrayed have arisen out of the judicious usage of poetic license. Either way, this movie has reminded me of the need to study history outside of state-sponsored institutions.

Friday, May 29, 2009

Bread Again

Cameron says...

I made the Zarathustra Bread again today. This time it turned out much better. I let the wheat sprout longer before grinding it. I don't know if that made a difference or not. I also added more oil to the pan to prevent sticking, but it still stuck a little. It made the bread taste like oil, too. So to avoid this problem in the future, I bought a baking stone. I so excite! I have been wanting one of these for a long time for general baking purposes, and this seemed like the perfect excuse to take the plunge! Last, but not least, I used a rolling pin to smooth out the surface of the bread and even out the thickness. This was more of a cosmetic concern than a taste or nutrition concern, but food is always to be presented well. Nobody wants to eat baked cat puke.

Joy and Rejoicing In My Posterity

Cameron says...

I have a son! His name is Benjamin Thomas Smith. He was born at 1:01 PDT on May 27, 2009. He was 7.5 lbs and 19" long. He's cute as a button. I think we'll call him Squeaky, because his version of crying is letting out a little yelp once in a while and then going right back to sleep. When I was a kid, we had a cat named Squeaky who would give a frail little sigh once in a while for seemingly no reason, and that's what Ben does. He's already a funny little guy just like his daddy.

Pictures tomorrow.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Foodday's Bounty and Scavenging

Cameron says...

Yesterday I made some Zarathustra bread. In my reading, I have also seen it called Essene Flat Bread. It is simply sprouted wheat berries ground into dough and baked. It turned out very tasty, except that I need to use more oil or use a non-stick pan. A baking stone would be best.

I put some home made cheese on my homemade flat bread. The cheese I am referring to is the cheese I began two nights ago. It turned out well. The taste is very low-key. It’s not bland, but it could definitely use some herbs to get the party started.

Speaking of sprouting, I am reading a lot about it, and I am very excited to get sprouting as soon as I can—especially sunflower greens. Sunflower greens are the leaves and stems of the sprouted baby sunflower seed before it grows into a manly sunflower flower. I have read that they contain more whole protein than the body can assimilate. Whether that is whole protein or not I know not.

But I do know that raw milk costs $16 per gallon. I thought less processed food was supposed to cost less! At those prices, it would definitely be worth it to have a goat or a cow.

Tonight I went scavaging. It is the night before the garbage truck comes, and when the garbage truck comes, he brings his little friend, the green waste truck. Just look at my beautiful pile!



Now, I know I must be addicted to gardening because I have resorted to prowling about after dark with the intent to take other people’s waste products without them knowing it. But hey, if those people wanted their grass clippings and palm frond trimmings, they wouldn’t have put them in cans on the curb, right? And the garbage company sure doesn’t need it. They’d love to not have to do their job but still get paid, right? I mean, I didn’t sign a contract with the trash company stating that they could take my green waste and use it to make a profit somewhere else, so nobody else probably did either, right? So I’m not really stealing from anyone. Besides, I’m more than willing to share the beautiful bounty my garden is going to produce with all the compost I’m going to make out of my harvested green waste. So not only am I completing the nutrient cycle by returning what came from the ground back to the ground, I am completing the cycle of good will by returning stolen grass clippings to other people in the form of produce.

Right?

Sunday, May 24, 2009

Foodday

Cameron says...

Today is Sunday, but I like to call it Foodday, because on Sunday, I like to experiment with...you guessed it...FOOD! I am sprouting some wheat berries to make Zarathustra Bread (sprouted wheat berries ground into dough and baked--that's it!). I tried this once before, and I don't think I got the berries soft enough before grinding and/or I didn't stick with the grinding long enough. Anyway, I'm at that one again. I also read up on how to sprout seeds as a for food source at a really great website, http://www.sproutpeople.com/index.html. And, last but certainly not least, I made cheese today! I found a cool website, www.foodwishes.blogspot.com --"A video recipe blog for people who love food and fun." It's like an on-demand internet cooking show! Scratch that--it's not LIKE an on-demand internet cooking show. It IS an on-demand internet cooking show. Anyway, I followed the recipe, and much to my delight, it worked! I always think really big, but when it comes down to it, I lose faith in myself a lot. I was really astounded when seeds I planted in my garden actually began to grow! And today I was very excited when the vinegar and lemon juice I stirred into my hot milk actually began to cause the milk to curdle and I had curds and whey staring me in the face! I had a little help from an angel, though. Pictures below.





My Family





Cameron says...

Just a quick glance at my family for those interested.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Garden

Cameron says...

My garden contains so many plants I can't remember them all right now. Actually, it contains a good number of plants and many seeds that have yet to sprout. I have tomatoes, radishes, beets, carrots, sunflowers, canteloupe, honeydew, strawberries, corn, two kinds of beans, peas, cucumbers, nasturtiums, marigolds, chives, arugula, rosemary, lavender, gerbera daisies, another flower whose name I can't remember, lettuce, spinach, kale, "variety" lettuce, oregano, eggplant, swiss chard, and a fig tree. I ordered three banana trees a couple days ago, and I'm really excited to begin harvesting some yummy tropical fruits in 2012.

DANG CAMERON! YOU HAVE A HUGE GARDEN!

Nope. Actually, my garden measures 134 square feet, which, if it were laid out in a contiguous square space, would measure only 11 ½ x 11 ½ feet. I built my garden and divided it into square foot sections according to instructions provided by another of my good friends, Mel Bartholomew, who wrote the book Square Foot Gardening. Pictures below.







Graywater System

Cameron says...

I have been promising my dad I would send him some pictures of my graywater system for a while now. So here it is. This first image is the collection point. I drilled a hole in the wall between my laundry room and the garage and extended my washing machine drain hose so that it was long enough to reach behind the dryer, through the wall, and up to the top of my collection barrel.



Inside the barrel is a 1/3 HP submersible utility pump that sucks water through its bottom and pumps it out the top, which is fitted with a standard garden hose adapter. I have attached a hose and fed it through the lid of the barrel with a 90-degree elbow to prevent kinking. The leader hose is attached to a splitter (hanging down on the right side of the barrel). One hose goes to the front yard, and one to the back. The idea when Em and I set up the system was to use the graywater to water the lawn. That's why we have the splitter. We have since decided to keep using the sprinklers in the front lawn and use the graywater only in the backyard since the [expletive] dog has chewed up my sprinklers back there. We also are using graywater exclusively in the garden. We have a second 55-gallon drum in the backyard, which I just set up for use today! I so excite! I drilled a 7/8" hole near the bottom and installed a hose bib so I have 55 gallons of pure (except for the dirt from my clothes and the biodegradable detergent) on demand!

I never thought I'd be so excited about moving water.

hose from the garage to the back yard

garden barrel

Friday, May 22, 2009

TTPs or A Jump Off the Deep End

Cameron says...

If I may borrow a term from the military, I'd like to talk about the TTPs or Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures we plan to employ on our homestead. Our intentions are to do “organic” gardening, (which I say as if to distinguish from all the other types of gardening. What else was there for the first umpteen millennia of recorded history?) including orchard keeping, raising chickens, keeping a couple cows and/or goats for milk, beekeeping, canning and preserving, and pottery. To start with. These are the activities we intend to learn and practice to keep a good food supply going. Depending on how much land we have, we might also start a small fish hatchery or stock our lake or pond as well as harvest timber from our forest if we have one. Of course, we may have to either build a home based business or produce a surplus of crops to sell on a small scale locally or work part time away from the homestead. But for the most part, we want to be self-sufficient and sustainable in our own rite. Oh, and one more thing.

We’re going to compost humanure.

Yes, I said “humanure”, and yes, it is what it sounds like. It is the recycling of human waste by composting it and returning it to the soil where it would be used to—yes—grow food. I’ve always been somewhat of a revolutionary. I am fascinated by new ideas that make sense even if those ideas are not widely accepted. I am also fascinated by new possibilities, even if attaining those possibilities would make others look at me as though I am diving into the deep end of a pool with no water. Now before you go calling any government agencies on us, consider a few things. Every day you eat chemicals that are known to the State of California (and probably a large number of other entities who disclose neither their identities nor their knowledge of the facts) that can cause cancer. Those ingredients don’t include the pesticides and chemical fertilizers that were used in growing the peas in the casserole or the broccoli in the summer medley. You also drink water that came from your toilet and was recycled and treated with chemicals in an industrial plant. Using recycled biological waste to grow food is the same as drinking water from the toilet except that composting humanure uses natural means while recycling and treating municipal sewage uses chemicals. Composting the excreta of any species allows earthworms (whose raw feces, called castings, is considered to be finished compost in and of itself) microbes, and heat to destroy harmful bacteria and mix up the remaining nutrients and elements into a usable fertilizer. This is not the process of dumping feces directly on a tomato plant. This is the process of allowing nature’s magicians to do the job for which they were designed by providing a link for material at the end of the ecological chain to return to the beginning of the chain. And, as evidenced by the existence of man without technology from the beginning of time until the Industrial Revolution, I’d say nature is doing just fine.

Besides, people reuse human waste in Asia all the time. If you want to tell 1.3 billion Chinese people that the agricultural system that has sustained them for the last 7000 years is wrong, feel free.

In my experience telling people about this part of our plan, I have already met with what you might call “violent opposition from mediocre minds,” to be intimate with Professor Einstein. The civilized, modernized, urbanized Western mind thinks itself to be above what it perceives as dirty, tedious, or humble. I would submit that working in the garden is all three, as is saving and transporting one’s own feces from a collection point to a compost pile. However, it is in these and all other humble actions that true peace and contentment are found. You might say that work, all its attendant forms, and all its costly, dirty consequences are the best kept secrets of happy, secure people. To finish this thought, I will defer to my new friend Joseph Jenkins, who wrote a book I’ve come to love lately: The Humanure Handbook. It is part instruction manual, part philosophy treatise and part political commentary. I’ve only read the first four chapters myself, but I plan to finish as soon as time allows.

Concerning why composting is not appealing to many people—This passage addresses the root of the problem of commericalistic, urbanized fundamental beliefs about mankind’s relationship with the earth. Mr. Jenkins had been invited to speak at a convent about humanure. Surprised by this invitation, he asked his host about their interest in his book.

“'We are the Sisters of Humility' they responded. 'The words “humble” and “humus” come from the same semantic root, which means “earth.” We also think these words are related to the word “human.” Therefore, as part of our vow of humility, we work with the earth. We make compost, as you’ve seen. And now we want to learn how to make compost from our toilet material. We’re thinking about buying a commercial composting toilet, but we want to learn more about the overall concepts first. That’s why we asked you to come here.'

“This was deep shit. Profound. A light bulb went off in my head. Composting is an act of humility. The people who care enough about the earth to recycle their personal by-products do so as an exercise in humility, not because they’re going to get rich and famous for it. That makes them better people. Some people go to church on Sunday, others make compost. Still others do both. Others go to church on Sunday, then throw all their garbage out into the environment. The exercising of the human spirit can take many forms, and the simple act of cleaning up after oneself is one of them. The careless dumping of waste out into the world is a self-centered act of arrogance — or ignorance.....” (pp 69-70)

In essence, we want our homestead to utilize the infrastructure which the Master Scientist, Mother Earth, has given to us as a free and everlasting gift. To depart from the wholesomeness and the ease of use of this natural system is, in our opinion, to take a jump off the deep end.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

The Illusion of Money part III

What is the solution? Our introductory blog post entitled "Beginning" poses two questions:

1) How do we teach our children to be happy, healthy, peaceful, and content in today's world?
2) How do we learn to live our own lives this way so that we can teach by example?

I believe I have always known the answer, and I believe I know it now, but those inclinations have lain dormant in my mind for so many years because I was just a kid yesterday myself. I didn't know what to believe.

Here is a quote from the book The Ecological Health Garden by Edmond Bordeaux Szekely, co-founder of the International Biogenic Society:

True peace of mind, enjoyment of the great works of literature and music, complete appreciation of spiritual truths, the creation of worth-while additions to our cultural heritage--these things are not fully attainable, if our bodies are ravaged by disease, if our nerves are disordered and if we live in constant dread that disease and death may "attack."

It is indisputable that modern living conditions in big cities are mainly responsible for the ill health, boredom, mental unbalance and lack of true spiritual life which afflict contemporary man. There is an obvious--and practical--way out: individual and collective return to living in small communities where social relations again become meaningful and where the family can regain economic independence and control over the production of the main part of its food supply and other basic necessities.

This is to be our sobering up period after years of indulging in the plastic excesses of an overly wealthy society. This is to be our new game.

The Illusion of Money part II

Eleven score and thirteen years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. They brought with them seeds of all kinds of plants, fruits, and vegetables. They brought with them cattle, sheep, and goats. They brought tools and beasts to dig, plow, sow, and reap. They took a wilderness (please, let's save all the discussion of indigenous tribes for another blog) and erected cities. They grew food, spun clothing, built homes, enacted laws, and transformed the land into a place worth fighting over--a place worth dying for. They did this all with no modern machinery, no electricity, and, in the beginning, not even an established mail system. They provided for all their needs out of the ground on which they stood. Contrast that time to our world today in which a person could conceivably live out his entire life sitting in front of a computer screen. Ship me some food. Ship me an exercise bike. Buy my online products. It is in this backdrop of detachment from the gifts of our own lands that the 20th century American grew into quite a peculiar creature indeed. He began to obtain his clothing from a tailor after not witnessing him spin a single thread. He began to obtain his fuel from an underground pipe after not taking the first swing with an axe. He began to obtain his shelter as a second or third-hand consignment, after not even seeing a hammer and nails or knowing the first thing about the upkeep and maintenance of a building and often choosing a home motivated by egotism and financial profit more than by functionality and comfort. Most importantly, the 20th century American began to eat food every day that he has had no hand in planting, pruning, harvesting, raising, slaughtering, cleaning, or preparing. Nor has he even thought to give thanks to God in many cases. How easy it has become for the 20th century American to believe that all his needs are only a credit card swipe away, never seeing the effort and material expended on his behalf, never appreciating the good earth from which his needs were harvested. It is a funny thing to see how appetites can be tempered when consumption depends directly on one's own efforts.

The illusion of money has drawn man away from the lands into the cities where he hopes to reel in bigger and bigger fishes until perhaps one day he has caught so big a fish he will have no desire to fish again. The problem is that this pursuit arises out of greed and not out of a defined necessity. Necessities can always be satisfied. Greed can not. As a result, the American lifestyle has become a constant chase after that elusive big fish, and the 10% of people who have dedicated their lives to the real work of providing basic needs (i.e. food) for society have taken on the burden of providing for the 90% who are out living unnatural lives, not providing for themselves. Then, in the biggest irony of it all, those farmers, growers, processors, packers, and shippers have by necessity become big business men with looming deadlines and quotas to meet, which has forced them to adapt unnatural, barbaric practices that have resulted in the denaturation and sterilization of our food. America's farmers, like so many suspect professional athletes, have resorted to chemical means to improve their performance.

In light of all this, perhaps a little mercy would be in order for Barry Bonds.

The Illusion of Money

Cameron says...

I'll tell you a little about me. I'm 27 years old. I was raised in the suburbs of Atlanta by loving, very supportive parents. I did not lack for any of the basic necessities of life when I was a child. However, my parents did struggle from time to time to make ends meet (whatever that means). I began working when I was ten years old out of a desire to have money to pay for my grape flavored bubble gum, cheddar and sour cream flavored potato chips, and what I hoped would be endless hours of playing Street Fighter II at the local convenience store. I borrowed my Dad's lawn mower (almost two decades later, it has just hit me: I probably owe my dad some money for granting me my first equipment lease) and trolled up and down the streets of my neighborhood offering to cut my customers' front or back yard or both for one easy, no-hassle price: $5. Even at 1992 prices, this was a steal for a homeowner. It's no wonder looking back why I got so much business. I guess Sam Walton must be a distant relative of mine, cause deep discounting seemed to be in my genes.

My first taste of "success" was so sweet. Mmm...grape bubble gum. Hey, what's this...I have money left over? Mmm...grape bubble gum tomorrow.

Fast forward to the year 1999. My senior year in high school, my best friend Phillip's dad is a real estate investor. He has bought and sold several properties at a nice profit--nice enough to make our little heads spin anyway. He introduced us both to a book he has found to be highly inspirational--Rich Dad Poor Dad. It was a best-selling book that year, and a lot of people bought the book, read it, got really inspired and did absolutely nothing about it. They were all following my example, mind you. As a moment in history, this book marks the time in my life at which I began to feel that "working for the weekend" was not my ideal lifestyle. It seems I was destined to read that book that year, because earlier in the year I had told my other best friend, Chris, that I would much rather work twenty hours two days in a row than eight hours five days in a row.

Fast forward again to the year 2006. This year marks the first time I was exposed to and began seriously subscribing to a financial management discipline. This discipline, also introduced to me by Phillip's family, was named "Dave Ramsey." To this day I still claim Dave as my financial management guru, although I have lacked the discipline to prove it. This is the year I began to suspect that I was behind financially despite being only 24. Hey, if you had been working for 14 years and had nothing but debt to show for it, wouldn't you feel a little behind? I know I felt like one.

Fast forward to the present day. I met my wife in 2006 and married her on January 27, 2007. She gave me a stepson and our first daughter together on March 19, 2008. Our third child will be born hopefully sometime this week. I "own" a home in Southern California--the populated part--and I am getting out of the Marine Corps in October of this year. People advise me to stay in for another four years to keep the benefits and the salary--it's a tough job market out there, they say. I know it is. But I've decided I don't care about the money. Money is really, at the end of the day, merely an object. That's all you can get with money, too--objects. It's not even an object sometimes. Sometimes it's a little magnetic tick mark on a little disk in a little machine in a little room in a little building somewhere on the other side of the continent where people measure the value of other people based on how many magnetic spaces they can fill up on the little disk.

Money is so great an illusion that it's hard to imagine doing anything without attaching a monetary value to it. Yes, it is a powerful illusion, albeit a necessary one because without it, our only other answer is communism. But it need not be such a beloved illusion that is given so much authority in our lives. I say the true value of a person is in the quality of his or her relationships with other people. Some of us figure out this important truth in life before it is too late and so would be content to possess nothing more than clothing, shelter, food, maybe some books and a musical instrument, and...ah, what the heck, a cool bubble blowing machine. But because this illusion is so firmly entrenched in our collective psyche, we who have seen the light condescend to believe in it simply so we can have relationships with other people--like a parent who tells their kids what a great scribbling they have brought home from school. Or like a sheep. I mean, really--how many friends can a sheep have if he professes not to eat grass?

It was at this point (the whole getting married thing and having three kids) in my life that I realized emotionally and not just reasonably that I have been playing the wrong game all this time. The game I was taught as a child was that one day I was going to grow up to be anything I wanted to be. I could be a teacher, or if I wanted to, I could even be a doctor. But the only way to get there was to do my homework, take challenging classes, go to college, get a good job, and work over 96,000 hours until I could finally retire. I remember my mother pleading with me in tears to do my homework because if I didn't I was going to end up like her, scratching to keep the ship afloat. She didn't quite say it like that, but that was the point.

Well the game that has gotten so many millions of Americans through a couple generations can't be all that bad. But there are problems with this game. It places working to earn money as the highest priority. We can say our families come first all we want to, but just look at how we spend our time. Look at whose call is heeded first: the boss's call or the wife's. And in a game in which potentially over 96,000 hours or almost 11 years of our lives are devoted to earning money, why do we not take more care from the start in employing our hard-earned dollars in the service of making our lives easier rather than instigating a spiral of indebtedness which only reinforces our servility?

The illusion of money has taken us away from our families. It has taken us away from our homes. It has taken some of us away from our morals, some from our faith, and some from our integrity.

But above all, the illusion of money has taken us away from our lands.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Beginning

We have been at it for almost a quarter century now. We've been friends since we were three years old. Now we're going on 28 with growing families, and it feels as though the world is going to close in on us! We feel stifled by the sounds of cars and airplanes rushing by all our waking moments. We feel cramped by the square feet in which we live and the short hours in which we pretend to cram a family life in between swapping the best hours of the best days of our lives for the opportunity to do so. We feel the suppression of the soul resulting from our participation in this version of the game of life and the unfairness of sitting through traffic lights twice only to get home to perform more household chores before hurrying our kids off to bed so we can get enough sleep to do well at our jobs the next day. And we say we don't care about money.

We feel a profound sadness by the sight of the next generation falling straight from the womb into a landslide of consumptionism, want, selfishness, corruption, immorality--every step of the way provoked by the constant rush of messages they receive from radio, MTV, TV ads, the pump tops at the gas station, the checkout line at the grocery store, movies, podcasts, the Internet, and our iPhones or Blackberries. Isn't it great! We can carry around a little device in our pockets to make sure we don't miss a single message from the adversary, thereby ensuring that our minds have no place for Godly wisdom to be implanted. We can't even use the bathroom now without a commercial advertisement assailing us unawares, gently--ever so subtly--informing us that the life we currently live is wrong, and the life which we could be living if we only had that next $29.95 plus tax would be all right. Our children are growing up in a world in which people are excessively busying themselves in search of perfection--from the right tan to the right tattoo, the right drink, the right car, the right technology, the right spouse--maybe we'll get it right next time. Sheryl Crow said it best when she said, "It's not having what you want. It's wanting what you've got." When will our society begin relentlessly publishing the message that happiness is not in possessions and peace not in the size of our--well, anything? Except maybe our hearts. What should we do if we want to raise our children to know the good life without thinking they have to own an iPod to get it?

We have fallen victim to the lack of published wisdom in our society today. Oh how we wish we had 10% of all the money we have earned since we began working--both of us really--at the age of 10. What a down payment for a house that would have made! What a cushion of one year's living expenses that would have made! Oh how we wish we could have back the vitality and opportunity we spent in bad company and in preparation for responsibilities lesser than Husband and Father! What should we do if we want to divert ourselves off the destructive course we set when we were but foibling teens?

We have participated in this game long enough to know that it is a broken and disharmonious one. It is like trying to iceskate with a ball and chain. It can be done--but it's not the way it's meant to be done. It involves too much risk, too much effort, and too many casualties.

We look to the future now. With a vision fixed upon a new life and a steady determination to live it, we begin today playing a different game.