Epiphany

Tonight, again raining lightly and chill. Certainly the weather has changed in the last week. I imagine we'll get a couple of weeks yet of good weather before it really comes on, but "summer" is clearly over.

Tonight, cooking on the rocket stove a curry of taro(out of the garden, lauloa ele'ele omao, and I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong on the variety!) with local onions and local beef. The rockets stove is happly sucking away buring construction scraps. It's very quiet. I type at the computer with the battery bank nicely full. Ran the generator today to power the wirefeed welder, and the whole house is powered up if the fuel gets burned.

Cool outside but toasty in the cabin, and dead silent except for the pop or two of a stick and the hard pat of rain on the roof and the softer hiss of the same on the ferns.

This, of course, is the simplicity we seek manifest.

Of course it wasn't simple in the slightest to achieve it. How soon we all forget that.

So the epiphany. Everybody wants to live a simple life. Everybody tries, according to their definition of it. No one wants a life full of drugery, stress, pain, worries, and confrontations. No one who isn't pathalogical, anyhow. The problem is simply this--people simply don't know how to go about it.

This is compounded, of course, by the fact that the majority of what is out there marketed with the idea of making life simpler is really just someting being sold for the sole purpose of enriching the seller--making HIS life simpler with a fatter account, but that's about it.

Certainly when you see people plowing away after the big house--a lot of it, at least hypothetically, is that more living space eases tensions in a family, and the house itself is an investment that will pay off with better living down the road. Really? When you see expensive cars it's that they are safer in a collision and are more reliable. Really? When you see people with acid refux and irritable bowel syndrom pulling their hair out trying to get ahead in a "career" the only the reason they do so is so that the income that they will achieve will allow them, at some point, at least, to take a step or two back and maybe a vacation in Bali. . .really. . .

Well, I'm sure most everyone in the developed world is questioning those assumptions at least a little bit at the moment.

With the exception of people who are stunted, and there are more than a handful of those, who can only function in environments with very high levels of stimulation--you've got a brute creature which is nothing more than a bit of human colored spray paint on a brain stem--one that simply has nothing in its head without the racket of roaring motors or the company of bouncing clowns. . .except for those. . .the sane among us only miss out on a life of simplicy and sanity not because of a lack of desire, but because of a lack of hope, skills, and honest guidence.

This is where the responsibility comes in. If you know something, share it. Give it away. We must achieve a critical mass of people who do live in this manner. Unfortunately, most who would desire to live so give it such a bad go that their lifestyles effectively are near indecernable from those who simply don't give a damn about anything but the next fix, whatever it is. This gives a disproportial sense of real values of society--and sells us short.