Maebius Musing

As a bit of an experiment, I plan on taking an entire week off from the Intarwebs.

I’ve noticed my blog feed-reader has grown quite sizable, and it takes me a good 2 hours to scan through all the juicy things I’d like to read each monday.  More if I actually start commenting on things, which I tend to do if work allows.  Fark, Digg, Goggle Reader, Warcraft forums.  Too much time invested.

I’ve also been playing World of Warcraft a lot lately, and am about 2 hours away from DINGing the max level on my priest Kanandi.  This is huge to me, as whilke I’ve played casualy for years, I never made it to max level, while others in my guild have gotten one, sometimes, two characters within reach of lvl 70 in the past couple months.

Yet, the internet is not life.  It is a virtual life.   I need to take a breath and enjoy the real one a bit more.

So, I have set myself some rules.  This is not a complete and total disconnecting, since my employment requires I be online a lot.   Some of our sales reps use my gmail account to communicate with remote offices.  I also want to maintain contact with my friends Wren, Nettle, and Varwolf.  Friends fall under the “Real Life” clause after all. 

The rules:  Starting this Thursday, I will unplug from the majority of my online life, for a period of approximately two weeks, or the Full moon.  Permission hereby granted to extend this timeline as required.

I will limit my email correspondence to work-related activities, and members of the Zen-porch gang (varulv included).

I will limit my own Blog reading to Nettle’s Blog and Kwitchery.

I will not play World of Warcraft, with the exception of logging into my guild leader character once a week, for a MAXIMUM of one hour, in order to resolve any administrative banking stuff.  Grinding XP, gathering loot, and killing pixallated monsters are taboo for this time period.  That character will be stationed in the capital city near the mailbox, ONLY. (this I count as work-related because it is helpful to others in the guild and decidedly the least “fun” I have in the game.)

The time I generally spend playing online at night will be dedicated to either sitting outside (weather permitting) and meditating,  or sitting inside meditating on topics.   I have gotten too far out of the habit of quiet time that is not distracted by electronics.  Personal intervention is required if I want to be in shape for a planned ritual at Starwood.

….that’s it for now.  This blog will be fairly inactive for the next few weeks or month.  You’ve been warned.  Wish me luck.

/|\  Maebius

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We had some wonderful friends of ours stop up to visit recently, and have scheduled out some camping trips, and a Starwood Vacation this summer. He’s an engineer, she is an awesome “The Body Shop” saleswoman. (I love their Satsuma line). They have a 2yr old son, and watching their style of parenting gave me a good pondering for my own…

(The below is not meant to challenge or downplay the discussed strategies in parenting, merely highlight some differences to my own method, and ponder in an intelligent manner. I welcome debate. Please leave egos at the door, ye sibling/friend reading this!)

It’s interesting to see how different folks bring up their children, and if looked at in an unbiased manner, allows me to change our own thoughts and techniques. Parenting is an evolving art, and no amount of books can prepare you for the squiggly details of day-to-day parenting. It’s fun, it’s frustrating, but it’s entirely awesome to go through.

One big thing we do with our son is allow him to sleep in our room, and even our bed, whenever he wants. Granted, I’ve often lost sleep from from blunt-foot trauma to my nether-regions, fought the sleepy cover-theft-tango, and such, but we enjoy nestling in at night with a story and seeing a little face yawn and close his eyes right by the crook of his arm. We also are pretty well entrenched in the “mom or dad goes to bed with him” routine. If we are watching a movie, or playing outside, weekend bedtimes tend to stretch a bit later than “officially recommended”, but we sleep in the next day.

We’ve maintained that when he gets older, and school starts up full-time, there will be a period of weaning from this system, as he will need to get up before our current schedules allow for. I fully expect a week of hell when bedtime shifts closer to 7pm and it’s “Still light outside!”. I’m prepared to sleep in his room on the floor. However, even now, there are days when our little one actually requests to go in his bed. (This usually lasts until the midnight pee-time, whereupoin he’s back in our bed, but that’s easy enough to redirect when we bring him up to lay down again).

I see the Pro of the [perceived] mainstream method of “kid in own room, at own bedtime, good night now, shut door.” It gives the kid a set routine, which is important. It allows parental quiet-time in the evenings to work, chat, or whatever. In some part of my brain, I’d rather like that, but our current schedule with the wife waking at 5:30 is one factor our basic “mom and kid go sleep in bed now”. Yours truly then gets to stay up a bit later and play on the computer, or dry dishes, in peace.

It’s an interesting balancing act, between structure and coddling. There are many other things we do which seem odd and even “wrong” to some folks I know. We play video games for an hour if he’s been good at school. Some say games are just setting him up to be a TV/gamer junkie when he’s older. Yet we do limit the time. What weekend visitors do not see is the mid-week fuss when he wants to play and we enforce the ‘No’. I’m a huge proponent of outside time, whether we work in the garden (which bores him to tears), or run around with a bat playing the current favorite-of-the-week “pretend”.

Yesterday, we walked the entire fence line, just my son and I, at his lead, pretending we were “adventuring dragons”. My legs were not up for it, and there was plenty to do back home, but it was “Daddy hour” so I hiked through tall grasses and dodged ubiquitous thorn clusters. We found such geographic realms as (A)Reed Forest (near the pond), (B)Buttercup Field, (C)Spyro Flower Hill (so named because of unidentified purple flowers), (D)Thorn Path, and (E)Cow Skull Treehouse, and finally (F)Tree Slide Hill. This was a ton of fun, and something we encourage, though a family member expressed concern with encouraging him to wander so far away from the house.

There are many other examples I could toss out, such as snacking throughout the day, eating something different for dinner (Not that we allow just anything for dinner if he doesn’t like what we have, he just gets bigger servings of sides), and such. Yet it all comes down to one point.

Structure vs Freedom.

There are many points along the bell curve, and I’m finding we fall distinctly on one foothill slope. Are we too far down one side? Perhaps. But I’ll hold my tongue and accept that there are many, many other points along the curve. Life is nothing if not diverse. I like how we live, and will support our son, even if he grows to become the complete opposite of us.
…and if you are at all interested in “The Dragon Adventure”, I’ve created a map using Google Earth. Labels are described above.

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((Random update: I think the previous post-quiz has some problems, since when I re-took the test fudging my answers to get different results, and even leaving all answers Blank, or “all=agree” I got exactly the same results. Might be a factor with my work’s firewall preventing the script from running properly?! So all statistics below are in all likelyhood completely inaccurate!!…I will update it with results from my home computer once I get an evening free to go online instead of working until sunset outdoors!))

Cross-posted from an email I pondered on the AODA mailing list:
I’ve been wondering about all the talk of porch gardens, permaculture, and such, especially in light of the current trends with food shortages. The thought struck me a few days ago, that with everyone focusing on GM crops, corn/wheat prices, and the like, one option I have not seen is wildcrafting edible ‘weeds’.

The first caveat to this of course is that learning what wild-craftable edible plants and encouraging others to go pick them is NOT entirely sustainable, and just shifting our focus. Edible/medicinal weeds are niche plants that may be growing all around us, but encouraging their cultivation and mass consumption causes the same long-term worries that mass monoculture does with our fields today.

However, on a small-scale personal level, I wonder what some of us druidic-types think about the benefits or problems with expanding our pantries with less ‘mainstream’ food sources. Lambs-quarters (Chenopodium album) are just starting to sprout in the flower gardens, and our family has started using the tender leaves in salads with [soon] larger greens as side-dishes. (lightly steam/boil with a dash of garlic and vinegar = YUM! nutritious as spinach!)

Since these plants, to use them as an example, grow on their own in about every patch of disturbed dirt around the garden or even purchased hanging baskets from commercial greenhouses, they are abundant, hassle-free, and a VERY cheap alternative until the other ‘traditional’ leafy-greens are available locally.

Yet, why don’t I see more mention of local weeds among the ‘green gardener’ sites? It takes only a small effort to toss certain plants into one basket as opposed to the compost pile, and increases the productivity of the garden immensely. It’s a rhetorical question, on my part, but one I wanted to offer up for discussion with this group, and hope generates some thoughtful replies.

Under the edible albums,
-Nate

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Plenty of muses, not so much free time to put thoughts to e-paper…..

I’m happy to report I finally got the .htaccess working properly for this blog, and configured to show the actual topic-subject when you link to pages. Thus, instead of the URLs being simple and harder-to-comprehend things like (../Musing/?p=123) it shows the year, month, and title of the post (such as ../Musing/2008/04/of-april-cleanup-and-recent-posts/?p=100). I know, it’s a little thing, but I got frustrated with the defaults and have gotten it setup finally! Now I’ll have to make sure the post topics are accurate and creative though!
It’s that time of year again when the Everthorn Farm crew swings into action for springtime cleanup, fence fixing, garden digging, and the like. It’s a bit like later winter, early spring for Mrs Maebius (tax season!) but involves a lot more outside work and a lot less hermit-of-the-computer-cave on her part. *grin*

Even my World of Warcraft time has suffered, especially since I share the enjoyment of getting back in the fresh air, having sunlight beyond just-getting-home-from-work, and being able to get my hands dirty a little bit. It’s probably my second favorite time of year, when things have all the potential now that snow is gone, yet the yard is not starting to look overgrown and in need of constant trimming/mowing/upkeep.

The Hops vine is now a solid 17 inches tall, and well on it’s way around the support tree. I took a measurement of it yesterday, so I cna compare actual-length and see how fast the thing shoots up. I can almost literally watch the tip inch upwards if I sit still for a few minutes. It’s that fast! This of course is excellent news for those friends who want a cutting or two later this year. Very encouraging, in that I will probably get my first harvest this summer!

As per usual, the results of the cleanup will be piled high for our annual MayDay party, with traditional ribbon-pole and picnic dinner. Granted, there won’t be any driving of the livestock through the flames, but you can be sure that if the weather holds, I will have significantly shorter/curlier leg-hairs after that particular evening.

–

Regarding the recent posts related to food shortages, mindful consumption, and such, those musings have been bouncing around my head quite often this past week. It may be the fact the news is reporting on the riots and starving around the globe. It may be the topical-meme from other communication circles I frequent. Yet, I think the more I think about it, I worry the media attention may not be a good thing. Over-marketed paranoia does not serve a purpose, and while it is important to draw attention to the crisis, I think it’s safe to say we knew it was coming, if we would have stopped to look&listen to the world around us.

Again, I have no clear answers, and refuse to let myself fall into the cycle of pessimistic complaints, or overzealous activism. I know myself, and if I get too worked up about a topic, I will dwell on it and get nothing positive done. Likewise, ignoring the problem won’t make it go away. So, the best option I can see for me, right now, is to keep doing what we are doing.

Plant our garden, and build up the Labyrinth. Clean up the property. Try cutting out a few little things here and there to help pay off the credit cards.

Live. Love. Laugh.

It’s the least, and possibly the best thing, anyone can do, really.

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Inspired, somewhat loosely and somberly by this post, this thought kept bouncing around in my head today for some reason. (note: any sarcasm below is not intended to be directed towards Nettle or anyone else reading this…..consider this post privately cathartic and thought-provoking, not ranting)

Perhaps one underlying cause of a mis-balanced economic, ecologic, and commerce-centric infrastructure is due to overspecialization. In life, very few people want to be sailors; they want to be captains. Why be a soldier when you could aspire to be a general? Why be a slave when you could be a slave owner? Everyone wants to be great, and there simply aren’t enough peasants to go around, so people get frustrated and let their lives fall asleep. I am guilty of having a “great character” complex, so yes, I’m part of the problem.

I won’t pretend to ignore the problems with rising fuel/food prices, shortages, and the spiraling problems that affect not only our country, but the worldwide system. As Nettle mentioned, I too feel a certain fear and sadness that I probably can not do much to help those kids in Haiti who are starving and eating mud. But then I wondered, should I?
Should I rally against the world, selflessly burning my own resources to create some Great Charity which will help re-stabilize the socio-industrial machine? Should I cast off my own greediness and eat only minimal rice and beans so that the 3rd worlders don’t have to export their own meager supplies of grain to my bountiful abode? (a rhetorical question, of course).

Nettle describes her own efforts and lifestyle which certainly aligns with the current trendy ‘green’ lifestyle pushed by the eco-media lately, but I know she does them out of respect and her personal sacred paradigm. These simple efforts may not stop the suffering overseas, even if the entire east coast starts living to the same standards. It might be a start, but I doubt such efforts will resolve those issues within the next few decades, and by that time, Hubbert’s Peak will be a historical news-item, and our own culture will have moved on or pushed away.

But that does not mean the little things like buying local are useless.

It is the overspecialization of industry that makes the little local lifestyles like Nettles stand out and appear somewhat “puny”. Why grow a few tomato plants, a few corn stalks, a row of beans, and the like, when for far less personal investment, and with far greater efficiency, we can dedicate one large farm to beans, many fields to corn, and the like.

Problems like disease and natural disasters aside, monoculture makes real Economic sense in the short term! Even on a local level, my in-laws have a big garden which raises foodstuffs that are not found in my own personal garden. We share the bounty and are both enriched by it. It’s easy to extrapolate this outward to today’s mega-farms.

Yet, there crosses a point where the ‘mega’, becomes a mega headache. Even so, we humans still build and build, and build up each thing until it becomes top-heavy. I’m just as guilty of it.

Business, almost by definition, finds a niche and needs to grow until the niche is the standard. You either grow and expand, or you fail. Yet why should it be failure? Does everyoneneed to be the biggest best and baddest in the neighborhood? Human nature seems to say yes.
In the medical industry, this effect is being felt.

The AODA’s archdruid reported on this very topic, and it finally clicked with me. And his words are stated far better than my own ranting ones. Go read it if you want. I’ll wait….

But I wonder, what’s wrong with being a peasant? What’s wrong with a bit of humbleness? If we work in some little things every so often, our lives become simpler, and do not really require the existence of overspecialized industry. Walmarts would vanish (Doubt that will ever happen though).

This may sound like a plea for humanity to regress to a pre-industrial world, and in a sense it is…but I would hope it to be an intelligent regress. Having your own garden is a bit of work, true, and it is much easier to go shopping than it is to go weeding. I won’t deny that fact.

Yet, at least on out own tiny scale, the little changes add up. Being humble helps that person, personally. It may not feed the starving kids in Africa ( or elsewhere, since the shortages are felt in the US now), but making similar changes in my life might feed Me.

When it comes down to it, affecting ME is really the only thing I can do with assured success. I can help myself, and hope my own efforts offset the global gestalt so that one other kid gets to eat tomorrow. Maybe being humble, helps.

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(warning: A Looooong glimpse!)

Last weekend (April 12-13th) my son and I went on a trip to the 4-hour-away-now hunting cabin I used to frequent when I was younger. My dad, brother-in-law and his son, and some of the old “hunter gang” were there, plus a few kids I had not seen before. We had a fun time! *** -No Girls Allowed- ***

In talking with everyone, we realized I was last at this cabin around the age of 15 or 16, which is around half a life ago! The other man there, my age, had two kids with him, and while we were never really that close (being simply sons of our father’s friends) it was nice to reconnect on a mutually understood ‘weekend campfriend’ level and discuss random life events and swap parenting stories.

There were 6 younger boys there, ranging in age from 3-14 with all but the teen being under 9 yrs old. They had fun catching salamanders, having adventures in/on/around the broken down pickup in the side yard, and a few impromptu ball-and-bat games that bore no resemblance to anything World Series. The older men, in addition to the three of us 30-somethings, were the three “grandpas” and the group rounded out with “Uncle Bud” who was father to one of the older grandparents there. Bud was fully blind, and had the timeless manner of a different way of life. He was spry in his steps, slow and warmth in his wisdom, and quick with the wit of a practiced cynic.

We joked to him, after catching enough salamanders to feed a third world country, that his rocks on the trails were all overturned, so he should be careful, yet a quick hike to the nearby spring still saw him shuffle with remarkable spryness that defied his years and lack of eyesight. He KNEW that cabin and the woods around it. He may not have viewed it clearly for years, but it was his land, not by property deeds, but in spirit. (Having visited the property for more years than even my own father was alive, this could, I suppose, be expected)

The weather was perfect, with a bit of cool drizzle the evening we arrived, yet cleared up and sunny for Saturday. While I am not really into the hunter-mindset, it was with a fond nostalgia that I watched most of the others go through shell after shell of ammunition. No soda can or plastic water-laden bottle was safe from the .22 rifles. A box of orange clay-disks soared and shattered above the field in a flurry of shotgun pellets. Even yours truly, who has not fired-off anything remotely boom-sticky, took 20-gauge to shoulder and blasted 3 out of 4 clay skeets.

And those flying targets felt good. The shotgun rested tight; the bead steady as I swung towards the sailing clay; and a gentle tug on the trigger. #BOOM# missed the first, then three more broke apart like I had been doing this for years. Pull…aim…Boom. Reload. Pull…aim…Boom. Pottery fragments flew apart. It felt magical.

There was the not-quite-as-fun moments, like breaking up the inevitable child-argument (anyone with young kids knows that playtime sometimes requires adult intervention). There was the late night, sleeping in the room full of military barrack-bunks surrounded by either snoring old men, or wrigging dream-held kids and listening for the ‘THUD’ of gravity finding one outside the cots. There was the alternately cool and over-hot of the woodstove that made dressing a delicate dance of t-shirts and wool undergarments (often within hours of each other). And yes, there was the diet of crackers, soda, and grilled meat for meals (with the standard meat and eggs for breakfast). By sunday night, I wanted something green and leafy. *grin*

Still, even with the ‘challenges’ of camping, it is part and parcel of the experience. Such weekend outings need the minor bumps to make the entirety of the days a wonderful blessing to have attended. It felt deeply -fun- to be with the guys and just do whatever. They shot their guns. I tried a few shots myself. We hiked through the woods, drank directly from the spring, and cooked marshmallows over the coals. We slept in the next morning, and feasted on hearty sustaining camp-food. It felt magical.

And thinking back, as I did my daily meditations today, I realized it was magical.

Perhaps it was reconnecting to the primal hunter mindset. Yet, in some sense, the same thing happens when I visit the old Zen-porch crowd. In that group, no guns are blasted against cans, yet the bond is the same. It goes beyond words and eases into a comfortable silence watching some movie or game. And even in that group, I am blessed that the women are liberal-minded enough that any wise-cracks about their gender, or other male-centric topics (such as gastric processes) are accepted and retort-worthy in their own right.

This past weekend was, to glance quickly at it, a bunch of guys just hanging out at the woodland cabin. To glance closer, it perhaps was a bunch of guys attempting to connect with some primal hunter mentality. As I think a bit deeper on the weekend, it was more powerful, and yet more simple. We bunch of guys hung out at the woodland cabin.

It was something I had not done for a long time, and is sadly missing in a lot of mundane life in today’s culture. I begin to see a hint of why the AODA’s current leader frequently talks about fraternal organizations. There was a sense of deep connection between everyone there. Something unspoken, and brushed off as “girly-talk” if even dared to be mentioned by one of the kids. Yet it was there.

Thirteen men and boys, together in one place for two days. Four generations from varied backgrounds, and two states, sleeping within feet of one-another, sharing the same table, and vowing-without-saying to leave politics, religion, and our outside lives behind for a day. To just enjoy the weekend and Be.

I loved it.

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