06 08 11 Relationships Require Care

Part of the reason we bought our bioshelter home was personal and part was public. The personal part had to do with the desire to personally depart from living in a way that is complicit with the currently unsustainable human way of life. The public part was to show the house to others, in order to encourage more people to enter conversations on how to live differently. Because of this, we are often inviting people over, and we are often asked to provide tours for various groups.


One of the comments we often hear from visitors is how much time and work must go into maintaining the systemic, living network that is the bioshelter. The first year, we were making that comment ourselves. When we bought the house, the previous owners assured us there would be an owners’ manual to guide us. It turned out the builder, himself, had to become the owners’ manual, because nothing had ever been written down. For over twenty years the house had been the builder’s home, which gave him the freedom to experiment with various itinerations of improvements to the system. The bioshelter was, and is, a wonderful, living experiment, but it certainly never came with an owners’ manual. Instead, he promised to be personally available by phone and email. And he has been true to his word.


Even so, that first year was difficult, resulting in strings of emails.

  • When the water in the fishpond turned gray—a sign that our water recycling was not working—we had no clue what to do and sent an email. His response: did you check out any recent changes in soaps, etc., to be sure they were biodegrading? Uh...no.
  • When the ventilation system began to sound very labored, we traced the system and found nothing. His response: did you check the outflow vent located in the basement behind the compost toilet barrels? Well, it was rather hidden behind there…so, no.
  • When the filter flies took over the water system, he asked if we had hosed out the coconut husk filter recently…and whether we had started a worm farm. Oh.

By the end of the first year, though, we knew the system fairly well and things settled into something of a routine. Recently, Cindee gave what I think is the best description of what the routine of living here is like. She told a visitor that we do not have a dog. We do not have to walk the dog, feed the dog, throw the ball for the dog, or otherwise relate to the dog. We do have a house that requires relational care. We probably spend thirty minutes or so daily caring for our home.


There are also periodic tasks that take more care. The compost barrel has to be emptied every six months. The fishpond has to be cleaned annually. Gathering wood for the masonry stove requires both annual gathering, and daily feeding of the stove in the winter. But those kinds of tasks are mostly predictable and can be put on the calendar as a bigger project. The Kind of commitment for care that goes with our living in our house is very much like the commitment that goes with living with a pet.


Ever since Cindee made that comment I have been thinking about it. Basically, living in our bioshelter home is an obviously relational life, and relationships require care. Children, marriages and communities all require regular care or they will deteriorate. So it is with our home.


And quite frankly so it is with our planet. With seven billion people living a technologically demanding life on the planet, humans now comprise the single most significant stressor on the life systems of our planet. If we do not care for our planet in a very caring, relational way, we can expect it to deteriorate until the systems of life collapse. Our planet is the bioshelter home of all living things.


Genesis 2:15 is one of the creation texts from the Bible describing humans and their relationship with life on this planet. According to this passage God put the humans into a garden “to till it and to keep it.” It was the Garden of Eden—the garden of abundant (lush) life. The primary purpose for humans in the Bible, perhaps the first commandment to us all, is to care for this garden of life.


This planet is the closest thing to Eden we have. The relationships we have been given are ours to care for. If we think of Eden as perfection, then of course we do not live there. Even so, living in a way that cares for our world, our communities, our neighbors and our families is the only way to really care for ourselves. Relationships require care, and that is a good thing.

_______________________________

[1] In Hebrew, eden means “delight.” But the root, dn, means “lush” and “abundant.” “Delight,” then is related to lushness and abundance.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gardening with a gun on my hip

Image
Yesterday really felt strange to me.   On the one hand it was a great afternoon to be outside.   The snow is gone, the ground is drying out, and the mosquitoes are not biting…much.   I found myself reveling in the work of cutting out some dead wood and making room for the new growth we are planning this year.   I almost never get to do brush-work when there is no snow and no mosquitoes.   What a day! On the other hand, I was doing this work with my Smith-and-Wesson .44 magnum handgun hanging on my hip.   You see, the day before yesterday our neighbor was attacked by an 800 lb grizzly bear .   The bears are particularly hungry this time of year, given that they haven’t had much to eat in six months, and that the salmon won’t be in our river for another six weeks.   The bear chased our neighbor down, clawed him up a bit and the, mercifully, left him alone.   As I enjoyed being outside preparing ground for permaculture-style gardening, it somehow seemed wrong to do with
Read more

06 02 11 Rediscovering Enjoyment

Image
We hadn’t lived in our bioshelter home very long before Cindee began teaching me about permaculture. In brief, permaculture is about a way of life where the land feeds the people, the people tend the garden in a way where gardening feeds the land without chemical fertilizers (more on this later—but some plants actually build up and feed t he soil, even while producing food), and where the waste from each process of life on the land becomes the resource for feeding something else. In short, it becomes a more-or-less self-sustaining system t hat cares for itself with relatively little labor on the part of the people. From my perspec tive the problem of permaculture is that it takes time to develop the plants and the land. This is especially true for us, because we had more than pure permaculture in mind. We are both allergic to cottonwoods, and our whole 1.9 acres is a cottonwood grove. Why not replace the cottonwoods with berries and fruit trees? We need some paths to go
Read more

06 20 11 How to Identify a Weed

Image
The potatoes are up—at least most of them. We planted three varieties of potatoes and plants from two of the three varieties have broken the surface. It is somehow very satisfying to see the plants come up, even though harvest is still months away. Watching things grow, by a mysterious power we call biology, is a wonder. At the same time, the cow parsnip and the fireweed are up in the same garden space. As we have been working on the garden I have been trying to decide how to define what is a weed and what is not. Fireweed is beautiful and technically edible. Cow parsnip surely has its uses, too. Do we remove these plants? Some things that I used to consider obvious weeds are actually quite useful. Dandelions are a case in point. As a kid I remember digging dandelions out of the lawn with a knife. They were too prolific and tended to crowd out the grass (not a weed) in our lawn. Dandelions seemed to me to be pure weed. Later I learned that dandelions
Read more