Welcome to Growing Freedom: Sustainable Self-Sufficiency as Social Change. It's a combination of my attempt to change the way I live life, along with the latest news and research into the subject of increasing freedom by increasing self-sufficiency.
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Hello all. Winter is fast approaching, and I am taking time to account for my sins and finish this garden. I was going to make a video of the process, but I seem to have misplaced my camcorder, so I’m back on talking about pictures.
The entire harvest of everything I’ll pulled out this year can be found on the Facebook picture portfolio “Garden Results” – but here are a few highlights from today!
This is not counting all the lettuce seeds I pulled out, plus all the rest of bed 1 and all of bed 2 I’ve yet to get to. I’m still shocked by that big red pepper… that was the last thing I expected to see in all those weeds. (All the rest of what I pull out is going to the compost heap)
Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to finish this project entirely and record my thoughts on it all…
Since I’m not really updating often, I figured I should provide a link to the album I’m keeping on Facebook entitled “Garden Results.” I’m pulling out some new things every few days, it’ll be the best place to see what’s new!
It’s been some time since I updated this once daily-video effort to sell more books. The lack of posting is the result of many circumstances, most of which I can’t really share at this point (moreover, most of these reasons are personal and thereby boring).
Suffice to say my attention has been pulled in other, possibly more lucrative directions. My garden is a terrible mess, despite being half-weeded by family members. It does, however, continue to yield food – so even with no effort beyond the establishment (the terrible digging, etc) food will arrive.
Behold!
more to come
And… a video too!
More beans are coming in, and possibly a bell pepper, sunflowers, tomatoes, more beans, beans, and potatoes. Possibly.
I’ll try to get a picture of the garden as-is now, weeds and all. Some of the grasses are nearly as tall as I am, which makes it look more like a prairie than a garden… but that’s fine with me.
As you can tell, I’m not on any sort of updating schedule anymore. I don’t have the time or desire to build up a regular following to the point where book sales could justify time spent.
I will occasionally blog over at Fairfield Voice – and if I do, I’ll probably post it here too.
I’m working on a few other things right now, so I guess we’ll see what happens…
[Section taken from the book "The Sharp Knife of Forced Simplicity, Volume 1: The Numinous Rebellion"]
I used to be completely against the Metric system.
Not as a system of measurement in itself, just against the apparently never-gonna-happen conversion here in the States. The basis for this argument was in an “organic” feeling, that the Imperial system of inches and feet and Fahrenheit felt good because they were somehow closer to nature. After all, a “foot” used to be the size of the king’s actual foot; you can’t get more real and arbitrary than that!
Lately, however, I’ve been thinking about the stubbornness of our non-acceptance of this “new fad” in light of, well, the rest of the world. Here is, at the time of printing, a complete list of all the nations in the world who do not have the metric as their primary or sole system of measurement:
Liberia
Myanmar
The United States of America
Considering this issue solely from a population density standpoint, Imperial unit-using people are rare, backwards people indeed.
Now, I’m not at all for the philosophy that one should go along with what everyone else is doing just because everyone else is doing it. However, if, say, everyone else is eating a healthy diet, getting a lot of proper sleep and exercising, whereas we are on the couch watching TV and eating junk food, such a direction wouldn’t be so bad. On the world stage, we can just as easily see that if all the other nations are doing it, and it works out really well for them, maybe we ought to give it the old college try.
Yet I cannot ignore that stubborn, ignorant American inside me that hates change and immediately believes that something horrible will happen should we attempt to move in any direction. I like things the way they are, damn it! I’m too old to change! Miles are and will forever be. Never mind the fact that we loose billions a year on conversion losses, not to mention yet more world credibility by so steadfastly anchoring ourselves in the things popular two hundred years ago.
Ultimately, our refusal to adopt the new standard system is symptomatic of everything wrong with this country: Denial of societal advancement due to greed and ignorance. Although I’m not exactly sure how not converting to the metric system qualifies as “greed,” I’m fairly certain it does.
Society exists for the benefit of the people, and the moment it stops improving the lives of the people is the moment it starts to decay. This stuck system rots us from the inside: Our teeth rot, our skin sags, our eyes grow weak because we refuse to move, to get up and advance ourselves.
We’ll have to move soon, or we’ll die. Accepting the metric system may not change much in itself, but it would be a signal that we’re ready to cast aside our insular and self-destroying philosophy. Willing to join hands with the rest of the world, we would enter into a new era of cooperation and communication. After all, it is hard to communicate when you don’t speak the same language, and a universal system of measurement would mean, for the first time in history, all humans could communicate with each other.
[Ron Khare is a local author, blogger and newbie gardener. You learn more about his book at ForcedSimplicity.com]
[Section taken from the book "The Sharp Knife of Forced Simplicity, Volume 1: The Numinous Rebellion"]
Problems. Despite what you may think, having problems is fine—everybody’s got ‘em, and they give us something to do. The real problem is acceptance. That is, when we start growing used to them, or even comfortable with them. In short, the danger is when it stops being “a problem” and starts being “my problem.”
No problem is life-destroying until it is accepted and expected as part of oneself—it is at that point that it starts to kill the natural you behind it. The reason we recognize them as “problems” in the first place is because they don’t belong, they block our underlying real self—if this were not the case then there would be no distinction within ourselves between “us” and “our problems.”
The process of removing problems isn’t “fixing,” then, but an uncovering of an existent, natural you. Some people, however, get so helplessly attached to their “problems” that they’ll base their whole life and outlook around a misery that isn’t even theirs to begin with! The idea of life without these problems, the notion of enjoying life naturally becomes something frightful, scary, to be avoided at all costs.
There are, of course, those deeply ingrained problems that mar and scar a person, generally from early childhood. These problems, having latched themselves on from the start, lie very close to one’s sense of self. Yet, the simple idea that it is a trauma, a scar, means that you still have the clear ability to see it distinct from yourself—that is to say, it is still obviously not a part of you. The ability to distinguish it as a separate thing means that you have the power to remove that problem. I don’t care how severe it is, how horrible it was, how much it rules your life today or how long you’ve lived with it. So long as you can see both it and you as separate entities, then you have the power, inherently, to remove it. There is no part of a person, no aspect, no part of his or her physical, mental, or spiritual makings that he or she does not have the power to change, if the will be present. Of this I am absolutely convinced.
Then there are those who believe that the pressure that problem-blockages provide can be used for good. Although I’m all a fan of pressures, with a little bit of analysis one can see that all enjoyable pressures (for a few examples: sex, shoulder rub, chewing, doin’ stuff ) all utilize brief pressure, then release. None of those things would be fun if, instead of pressure-release-repeat, they just kept adding pressure onto pressure with no movement other than a stifling one. Applying that to real life, pressure certainly can keep us moving in the right direction, so long as we find permanent, lasting relief from it. There’ll always be a new pressure to get us going again, life assures us of this.
So I don’t want to hear from people who think getting rid of a problem is impossible, because thinking and talking are useless. I don’t want to hear from people who tried and failed, because that means you just put in less effort than it takes. And the people who actually did it, well… there’s really no reason for us to talk, is there?
[Ron Khare is a local author, blogger and newbie gardener. You learn more about his book at ForcedSimplicity.com]
