Spring Memories

Every year about this time I step outside, take a deep breathe, and smell that smell. Each year it is a smell that triggers a memory almost as old as I am.

It is not of flowers, or gardening. Nor does it concern the balance between winter's dark and summer's light. It isn't about the exuberant energy about to wash over me, or a Saxon goddess, or fertility. Nope.

The memory that comes to me about this time every year is about playing marbles. 

This persistent memory etched into the folds of my brain was formed in my elementary school days. Life was good, and it was one of the happiest times of my life.

I lived 3 city blocks from school, so walked to and from there every day. That meant being outside and noticing things, like the light and heat returning. I felt safe traversing my neighbourhood, and knew that I could, if needed, knock on any door and get help.

Once at school, my dad was the principal, so the classroom and school grounds felt like an extension of home. It was a carefree and innocent time. 

At the end of every winter I would break out my big bag of marbles and count the agates, crystals, steelies, cateyes and boulders. My brothers and I would compare our caches of glassy globes, ready to bring to school when the time was right.

After long, cold winters, the student body became restless waiting for warmer weather. When we went outside for recess, it was that smell that you wanted to smell. 

It came in the moment after the snow melted, and the ground began to thaw. And then, after a few sunny days, the glorious time had arrived that everyone had been waiting for since the marble bag had been put away for the winter. 

That unique smell advertised the fact that the playing field had thawed, and dried out sufficiently. It was time for marbles again, and the joy in the classroom was palpable. We couldn't wait to get outside.

That is what the little boy in me thinks about every year when I am outside and smell that distinctive odour of the landscape waking up. It is a simple, powerful memory that never ceases to bring me joy.

Happy spring, everyone. It's time to play.

Reprogramming Bad Consumer Code Redux

I feel tainted by putting corporate logos on this blog, but I couldn't resist the power of this image. Artwork by Steve Cutts.

After our last post "Reprogramming Bad Consumer Code", reader and frequent comment participant, Madeleine, asked, "Yes, reprogramming is essential, but how to achieve it?"

That is the question, isn't it?

As Madeleine knows, the best thing voluntary simplicity has going for it is that it is a "thing of comfort and peace" compared to a regular 9 to 5 lifestyle plugged into a consumer pod that sucks the life, time, and money right out of you.

That alone makes me wonder why people aren't rushing enmasse out of the malls and straight toward the simple life.

Of course, there are many reasons that people initially find consumerism appealing. Many of those are institutional, systemic, and therefore difficult to avoid. However, there are ways to achieve a thorough reprogramming to get back to a more self-reliant, life-affirming, pre-consumer code.

Here are a few I have been thinking about.

Reprogramming The Consumer Brain

Question authority. Question everything.

Practice non-participation in the current economic system, as much as possible.

Free yourself from a 100% reliance on money by doing things like growing a garden, cooking your own food, bartering, and sharing.

Live with fewer material things. This makes possible a joyful engagement in the elegant simplicity of a life of just enough, free of endless desires and disappointments.

Educate yourself on the industrial military complex, and the industrial health complex, and the industrial food complex. And the industrial consumer complex. The industrial everything complex. Learn what happens when we participate in these sick systems with our votes and our money.

Read broadly rather than narrowly. Good books as well as good journalism. Read non-fiction and fiction. Every public library is full of the antidote to today's narrow revisioning of reality. The net opens up an amazing array of investigative tools.

Vet all information sources. Doubt the validity of mainstream narratives. Be curious, be skeptical. Analytical. To that, add your intuition and feel what makes sense to you.

Steer clear of organized anything. Don't put yourself in a pod, to be used and controlled by others.

Resist cultural programming and peer pressure. Do what you want to do. Assert your rights as an autonomous individual. Question anyone that wants to limit your experience of an open, unfettered existence.

Express and revel in your creative capacity. Allow yourself to think differently. See differently. Feel differently. Create the life you dream of.

Use mindfulness to become an observer of your own mental state and life. Take a step back. How does it all look? Is it a thing of comfort and peace? Is there joy? Harmony? Love?

Supplement your child's education with life lessons at home. Parents are children's primary teachers, whether this is recognized or not. Children learn a lot by observing parents and others. We should act accordingly. What message are we sending our children with our behaviour?

Think freely. Don't think. Continually improve your thinking, and not thinking.


Share good consumer-free code with everyone you meet.

Happy Earth Day 2017

From: The Earth Day Network

Earth Day 2017’s Campaign is Environmental & Climate Literacy 

Education is the foundation for progress. We need to build a global citizenry fluent in the concepts of climate change and aware of its unprecedented threat to our planet. We need to empower everyone with the knowledge to inspire action in defense of environmental protection. 

Environmental and climate literacy is the engine not only for creating green voters and advancing environmental and climate laws and policies but also for accelerating green technologies and jobs 

This Earth Day, gather with your community for an Environmental & Climate Literacy Teach-In or another project focused on education. 

This is also a day to show your support for science-based decision making. Marches are planned globally.

The March for Science is the first step of a global movement to defend the vital role science plays in our health, safety, economies, and governments.

-  www.marchforscience.com 

Happy Earth Day to all Not Buying Anything readers. We are grateful for your support for this blog, and for all things green.

Go Green, and spread the word. Our survival depends on it.

 “We need intense activism along with structural analysis and the building of alternative, sustainable lifestyles. We need wisdom, reverence and creativity that we pull up from the depths of our uncertainty. Author Joanna Macy calls it ‘the Great Turning.’ It’s a shift in consciousness that aligns social healing, economic fairness and an end to war with environmental sustainability. And the time to make it happen is running out. We can’t afford to lose another decade, or another twenty minutes.”

-  Robert Koehler

Indoctrination or Freedom

Just another brick in the wall.

When reporters in 2007 told Doris Lessing that she had won the Nobel Prize for literature, she said, “I couldn’t care less.”

She did care deeply about being free.

"Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly," Lessing said, "throughout his or her school life is something like this:

"You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do.  

What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be.  

You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. 

Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements.  

Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society."