Here are the last of the summer flowers. The zinnias are particularly spectacular, as is the chard that follows.
But this is actually all illusion, in many ways. I'm not actually near the flowers, they wilted long before this post. It is actually the 10th of November, the birth date of my beloved mother whom I will be calling before too long.
This post is so long in the making that I am almost certain that they few who took the time to check for new posts have stopped. So much the better for the ranting...
Today's rant is brought to you by the letters B and A and by the number zero. I call it: a rock and a hard place. Increasingly, it seems, the people I know are less and less satisfied and more and more depressed. Maybe the sample of people I know is not representative of the total population, but they are the people that I care about, so that is what I care about.
Most of these people are smart enough to have a healthy distrust of large institutions, although most of them have been or are still engaged in an institution of some sort. Well, who isn't really. Not many individuals can honestly call themselves sovereign entities, and if they can and do, they generally have to promote/demote themselves to nationhood of some kind. Freelandia is an example of the tyranny of internationality.
Anyway, the people who are engaged in work for an institution (school, government, university, hospital, corporation) often have complaints about their institution and its lack of effectiveness in its sphere of influence. Governments are bizarrely inefficient and dominated by power-seeking self-interested infants, schools and hospitals are shackled by their own institutional standards that value formal education (pro-institution) over experience in the labourforce, corporations are attentive only to the bottom line even when ignoring the realworld aspects of their employees' lives begins to erode their bottom line, etc. The monolithic-seeming institution is the rock.
Alternately, an anti-institution position is usually taken as a reasonable reaction to the absurd nature of institutional living. Often the stance is strong and reactionary, which only entrenches the definition of both the institutional and anti-institutional positions. Demonstrations are a show of solidarity, which is good, but only gives the group the definition of existing in opposition to something else, generally a government or corporate policy. This only redefines reality in terms of institution and anti-institution. This is obvious in the recent and ongoing war on terrorism where binarism has redefined previously more heterogenous groups as either "with or against" government, as friendly or terrorist. This is the hard place, the reactionary stance that is the negation of everything institutional.
Of course, there is an entire world between, around and far away from the rock and the hard place. The ideal way to enter this non-binary world is to come up with non-binary ideas. Ideas, and not solutions; solutions are responses to present situations that are framed in a particular way (i.e. as problems) and are therefore reactionary. Are there any original thoughts? Who knows and who cares. It's not really about the historical originality of the idea, rather its appropriateness in a situation. To consider the world in a nonreactionary way is to explore the idea of what constitutes a good life outside of the limited options we are presented with daily. It is the formulation of individual morality, and therefore true morality instead of ascription (if there is such a word) to a culturally inherited morality. This exploration and its results should be exciting and interesting!
End of rant. If you read this far and are interested in or already engaged in figuring out what goodness and a good life is, let me know how it's going, what you've figured out, where you stumble and why. Of course, the caveat here is that I am writing this for my own benefit first and foremost, so these ideas may be old hat to you. If so, let me know what your morality trailblazing looked like. And as for what I've done so far, I guess that will just come in the next post.
Nice chard, eh?
and Rob:
The tree is nice, but who knows what its roots have gotten into. The septic works probably need to be figured out or reconfigured out again, as it's obviously been a while since anything resembling plumbing was needed here. There are apparently two wells on the land, but we were unable to locate them. They are no longer clearly marked, if they ever were.
The land further down is definitely wetter, due partially to the shade and water retention that the trees provide and the steady downward slope. A number of mosses and mushrooms grow on the lower part of the property here, as well as a bright orange fungus of some kind.
