Growing Without Buying Monday

I rescued this passionately purple plant from an eroded area down the beach

There is no end to the ways a person could spend money on gardening. Who wouldn't want to buy everything when looking at garden advertising? However, if one is patient and resourceful growing plants can be done without buying anything.

My patio is full of greenery, most of which I have acquired for nothing. Containers, soil, plants, some seeds, soil-enriching compost - all free. Gardens are, by nature, joyfully abundant places and gardeners are usually the type to share the bounty of their green spaces.

It took three years before this plant flowered for the first time this spring

 For me growing things is a form of moving meditation. When I attend to my plants I am completely absorbed by being with my green, growing relations. That I have been able to indulge in this health-promoting activity without buying anything makes it all the more challenging, and satisfying.

Strawberries were left by a previous tenant, and the fall crocus bulbs were a gift from a neighbour

Now I am in a position to pay it forward and I share my greenery with whomever wishes to profit from nature's abundance and do some growing without buying. And what can you expect?

Free, happy flowers, free, frugal food, and a healthier outlook on life.

"Gardening is a labour full of tranquility and satisfaction; natural and instructive, and as such contributes to the most serious contemplation, experience, health and longevity."  

- John Evelyn

All My Relations - Learning From Nature

We can learn a lot from observing our animal relations

"All my relations" is an expression highlighting the basic philosophy of many Native Americans. According to these beliefs, animals, plants, stones, and humans are all related because we come from a common source.

But we have become dangerously separated from contact with these relatives by modern fast-paced lifestyles. Standing Bear warned us, "Man's heart away from nature becomes hard".

Besides a diminished sense of compassion, the lack of exposure to nature also means a loss of knowledge. We are missing out on valuable lessons in the greatest classroom of all. However, it is always there, waiting for us to pay attention.

"Look at the flowers - for no reason. It is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are."    - Osho

Even in the city, the sky is always above. Flowers grow in cracks in the sidewalk. Gulls clean up the fries someone left on the bench. How can we notice these things when we are constantly rushing around struggling to "get ahead"?

We have to go slow, or better yet stop entirely, to observe and learn from nature. Its lessons often progress slowly with the phases of the moon and turn of the seasons.

From observing the rich world of nature we can learn how to live comfortably and sustainably on earth. We can learn about ourselves and how we fit into the larger picture of life.

5 Things I've Learned From Nature


1. Slow and steady gets the job done. Water wears down mountains to mole hills over millions of years. Nature doesn't hurry - neither should we.
2. Cooperation rules.  The excitement of competition may get all the headlines, but it is good old boring cooperation that is the overriding factor in nature. Like a beehive, things hum along nicely when everything works together toward a common purpose.
3. Don't take more than your fair share. Excluding the human animal, other creatures do not consume more than they need. If they did, their ecosystem would crash and the population could not be sustained. Nature deals harshly with the over-harvesting of resources.
4. Don't struggle. Water flows along the path of least resistance. It doesn't fight the rock in its way - it finds a way around it. Somehow, when you let go and let your life begins to flow like water, things always manage to work out. Nature's abundance provides when you let it flow into your life.
5. Do what you can with what you have where you are at. When the seed of a tree falls to the ground it uses what it has to grow at that spot. I have seen trees growing in the most challenging of locations, including in cracks in the rock high up mountainsides.

All your relations are waiting for you in their beauty and wisdom. All it takes is a few minutes of down time in order to have a quiet meditation on the natural world, of which we are but one part.

It can be done anywhere, anytime. Watch and learn. Feel the joy, the delight.

"Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair."  
- Kahlil Gibran

R. Crumb And The Consumerism Illusion

Building the illusion of the consumer capitalist dream

Underground artist Robert Crumb drew comics that expanded and distorted my malleable mind when I was a kid. I loved his twisted take on our crazy world.

After growing up with Crumb's alternative art, as an adult I discovered his writing and learned more about the man behind the drawings. In his words I found the source of the twisted views which generated so many classic silly images like the Keep On Truckin guy and Mr. Natural.

I found that this artist was a serious philosopher and social critic. I loved his way of thinking even more than his unique way of drawing.

Crumb, was born in 1943, the year that shoe rationing went into effect in the US due to WWII. But such restraint was not to last for long. Soon many parts of the world, including the US, transitioned into the post-World War II economic expansion, or the "Golden Age Of Capitalism".

During the period that lasted from 1945 until the 1970s, many western economies saw consumerism and advertising take over. Cheap mass produced items hit store shelves and shopping was packaged as an activity unto itself.

Lifestyles began to change. Both the complexity and speed of life began to ramp up in a way never seen before. The era of excess was about to dominate the common person's sense of reality as people were transformed from participating citizens to passive consumers purchasing distractions with their new "disposable income".

Of this period Crumb says, "As a kid growing up in the 1950s I became acutely aware of the changes taking place in American culture and I must say I didn't much like it." Indeed, the times were turning toxic.

Chemical fertilizers and pesticides promised "better living with chemistry", and they weren't even the most toxic inventions unleashed upon a dangerously unaware public at the time.

Other inventions like Disneyland, The American Dream, and corporate controlled mainstream media and entertainment were toxic to former free thinking, free living people across the land. It was the beginning of the consumerism illusion.

"What we kids didn't understand was that we were living in a commercial, commodity culture. Everything in our environment had been bought and sold. As middle class Americans, we basically grew up on a movie set. 

The conscious values that are pushed are only part of the picture. The medium itself plays a much bigger part than anyone realizes: the creation of illusion. We are living surrounded by illusion, by professionally created fairy tales. We barely have contact with the real world."

Crumb does not feel optimistic about how this experiment in social engineering will turn out. He envisions a result where everyone is scamming everyone else, a situation that we seem to have achieved.

"The problem is that the longer this buying and selling goes on, the more hollow and bankrupt the culture becomes. It loses its fertility, like worn out, ravaged farmland. 

Eventually, the yokels who bought the hype, the pitch, they want in on the game. When there are no more naive hicks left, you have a culture where everybody is conning each other all the time. 

There are no more earnest "squares" left—everybody's "hip," everybody is cynical."  

Robert Crumb knew that we left something important back in the 1950s, something authentic, slow, human, and real. It was all replaced with an illusion that keeps us complacent and too busy to think clearly about what is going on.

"It's much easier to lie to humans and trick them than to tell them the truth. They'd much rather be bamboozled than be told the truth, because the way to trick them is to flatter them and tell them what they want to hear, to reinforce their existing illusions. They don't want to know the truth. Truth is a bring-down, a bummer, or it's just too complicated, too much mental work to grasp."

I guess all we can do is keep on truckin' for the kind of changes that everyone will benefit from. I am sure Mr. Crumb would approve of a bit of free thinking that leads to restoring sanity to our increasingly crazy world.