The Good Life Lab

by Wendy Jehanara Tremayne

  Since we are part of the natural world, civilization’s acculturated knowledge is not our own. We cannot intuit it. People are meant to intuit our world because essentially we are not other than the world. It would be silly to think we cannot know ourselves. That would be like starving to death because we failed to notice that we were hungry. This is not how nature works. Nature is logical; it makes perfect sense. It is the common sense. Nature’s rules are reliable.

  For a world that cannot be intuited and is difficult to understand, we have created a variety of interpreters: lawyers, accountants, and highly specialized people who interpret civilization’s complex code. Since civilization does not come naturally to people, this causes every step in life to contain the weight of the world. With no natural system to decipher or intuit with, our nervous system goes ballistic. Welcome nervousness, fear, dis-ease.

  I have learned that knowledge is not obtained exclusively with our brains; it is gained through our hearts and by reconnecting to life, a source of wisdom. Makers of things are in a position to understand and change the world. Buyers of things need only know where to find what they want and have the money to pay for what they’re buying: acculturated knowledge. But makers of things know what things are made of, how they work, where they come from, what their real cost is, and how to fix them. Makers are connected to the world because everything that is made comes from the world. In my pursuit of a decommodified life, I came to believe that when all of life is for sale, it is a revolutionary act to become a maker of things.

  James Fadiman said, “Whatever we wish to know well, we must love.” All the knowledge that I acquired started out with love, a desire to connect to the thing I wished to know. In the form of desire — a spark of creativity, interest, and curiosity — I applied my attention to problems and in return gained insight.

  The inverse of what Fadiman said is equally true: we cannot truly love what we do not know. Every day I see human beings separate themselves through branding, cues read as signs that we are not related. Connection to life includes connection to people. This is why whatever is learned must immediately be shared so that we can survive and enjoy life. When curiosity connected me to the world, my desire transformed and became communication, communion, and empathy. The magic bridge between people and the things of the world, is material and emotional. Once connected to the world, I felt accountable to it. This is when I caught a glimpse of what value really is. Value is responsibility.

  During the decade that passed since making the first of many pledges, I thought long and hard about objects. I wondered why we worked hard to obtain things that we immediately threw away. I noticed that shame was embedded in our creations: sweat labor, pollution, the diminishing of life, our lives. I found that today’s manufactured objects point to where value is absent, and so I decided to make things that I value. I stopped buying mimics of what I already owned, nature transformed by machines and made into products, things that I paid for with the cost of life. Instead I made my goods out of trash and natural materials because I learned that it is not the thing that has value, but the life that made the thing and the life respected in the process. Then I put the things I made in a world that I learned to treasure by reconnecting to it. The best of myself, projects like Swap-O-Rama-Rama, I turned into gifts because only the gift has the force needed to move mountains. No longer other, the life of the world in all its forms became my own life, a life I wished to preserve.

  I have always imagined wisdom as something old, savored, experienced, tested, proven, and worn. At first I thought of it as something that cannot be lost, since wisdom is mainly stored in people. But wisdom can be lost: we lose it when we stop participating in life. This is what happened when our culture became commodified. We traded presence (the living) for representation (a lifeless mimic).

  Lived knowledge adapts and revivifies, remains always fresh, and is renewed by each generation’s creativity, by makers. Indigenous cultures know this. They transfer wisdom from person to person, from one generation to the next. Crafted by countless faces and through all times, each generation applies the wisdom given to them to their own lives. They make wisdom a living thing, reshape it by fitting it to a new time, and translate it to prepare it for who comes next. I think this shows us that knowledge has to be lived in an unbroken chain — otherwise it no longer applies to the problems of the day; it becomes extinct.

  If just a couple of generations choose not to use the knowledge that was passed down to them, a few centuries later people scratch their heads because they can barely remember it or find it no longer applies. They say, “Wisdom is lost,” and throw their arms in the air in frustration. People are doing this today.

  Sometimes I imagine people of the future gathered together reflecting on our culture and this time. We will be remembered as the people who consumed abundant fuel and energy in the flash of a hundred years. I imagine future people holding one of our trinkets, something they found in an archeological dig, maybe a Hello Kitty key chain. They look at each other and say, “They spent it on gum.”

  As I watch monetary systems crash and life shift and move like lava, I am not afraid because I know that what is dying never contained life. “Life lives,” the Sufis say. We are life; in each age humans, bees, microorganisms, and blades of grass live. The Sufis also say that only death dies. I know that our economic system, which is dying today, never contained life.

  Pruning a rosemary bush, I became intoxicated by its scent and made my first wreath. I needed neither the word “wreath” nor its history to know how. Love of the scent led me.

  When I found myself throwing my hands up in the air and went out looking for knowledge, I found it from within and without. I combined what I was able to gather from this world, tidbits of wisdom that trickled down in spite of being dismissed as no longer relevant, with what could be intuited through a connection to life, to nature.

  Now I know that essential knowledge needs no liaison, university, license, or permit. It is available to every one of us in every moment, and it is free. The best of the wisdom that was left to us points back to the truest book, of which we are a part. Nature is the truest book.

  To read the book we need only tune ourselves to it, an innate skill given to all that lives. It is fundamentally true that we are a part of nature, that everything alive is; we can’t help it. When we connect to nature through our senses and imaginations, no necessary thing is secret. Nature has no secrets, only gifts.

  We once knew how to connect, and clues of it are in our languages. The world religion has a Latin root that means “reconnect”; the root of the word universe is “toward one”; nirvana means “no difference.” The African word ubuntu as it was translated by Leymah Gbowee means “I am what I am because of who we all are.” “You can’t be human all by yourself,” said Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

  My reward for reconnecting is that I feel free and related to something imperishable: life. Not the life of a single thing or a creature named Wendy but the life. When civilization prompts me to be specialized, when someone asks Wendy, “What do you do?” I used to answer, “I’m in marketing.” Today I answer differently. I say what I think the person asking the question will understand. Sometimes I say things like “I teach yoga,” “I produce events,” “I am a conceptual artist, a green builder.” I hope for the day when the real answer will be understood: “I do what needs to be done.” That’s all any of us has to do. Buckminster Fuller knew this when he said,

  The things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done — that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.

  Today the little plastic troll I bought in Topanga Canyon on my cross-country drive sits on my bedroom dresser. S
he reminds me where I have been and where I have arrived and all that happened along the way. She reminds me that I once did not feel safe with myself. Today, I know that intuition can be relied on because I remember how I acquired it. The philosopher’s stone is in the heart of the sincere, the only safe place for a thing of value to be stored. The magic keys to obtain a working heart are readily available and found in nature. I also learned that to discover any true thing we must first come out to meet it; as Fadiman said, we must love that which we wish to know.

  Nature makes no duplicates. Though everything alive contains nature’s code, DNA, everything alive is also differentiated; no two things are entirely alike; each contains its own share of the common sense. You have something to offer this world that no other can. Without your participation, life is incomplete. Something is missing.

  Our invitation is to play, to love the life of this world, and to listen to what it says with all the desire we can muster. We don’t read life or think life; these are techniques of acculturated knowledge. Tools left behind, knowledge carried person to person, and wisdom captured in books, though meant to guide us, can only take us so far. Life is lived. Sensory experience is our language with the rest of life. When we come out to meet the life of this world, we can make wisdom living again and revive the common sense. My generation can pass something on to those who come after us. We can tell the people who come next that we are creators. The pledges I made and everything that followed them led me to see the task of the time that I live in. We are here to revive the soul of this world. And we already have all the tools we need to do it.

  Part Three

  Life Lab

  Mad Skills

  When the whole world is for sale, the maker of things is the revolutionary of the age.

  — The Holy Scrap Credo

  A postconsumer life requires what Mikey and I call mad skills. When you set out to decommodify your life, you don’t need to have mad skills, but you do need to acquire them if you are going to be successful. Once you have mad skills, you will be able to make and have things that are not available in stores. Things money can’t buy. With mad skills, most things can be repaired without the help of others. The best way to acquire mad skills is to make things, break things, and take things apart. Experiment. Play and rediscover the world.

  Start projects. Sometimes this might seem a little scary. Consider what Chris Hackett said: Fear is never boring.

  Start even if you don’t how. Perfection is an illusion. Do not aim for it. If it doesn’t work out, you can get someone to fix it later.

  When you discover a skill you want to have, search for information about it on the web. You might find a tutorial that demonstrates the skill being used: Instructables, Hack a Day, Adafruit, Flickr, YouTube, and technique-oriented media such as Make magazine or Craft are good sources for step-by-step instructions about how to make and fix things. Invite others to demonstrate their skills to you in person. Offer to make them lunch or gift them appropriately. You might invite them to peruse your junk pile. Tinkerers love junk. Offering them something from your junk stash is perfectly fine etiquette in the world of makers of things.

  Repairs and hacks differ from projects started from scratch. Repairs and hacks need only that you take something apart, remove an item’s body or case, and get into the guts of a thing like an electronic gadget or a broken car. New projects benefit from a sketch of what you plan to do, a guess at the expected measurements, and a list of tools and materials you think you will need.

  The start of any project can be frustrating. Without experience, systems, procedures, and tools, beginnings can be messy and require multiple trips to the store (or the trash) for things you did not anticipate needing. This is especially true of plumbing projects. Start plumbing projects when you know that the stores that sell plumbing supplies are open.

  The recipe for this batch of umber papercrete mortar failed. It peeled weeks after we applied it. We blogged about it so others could learn from our mistake.

  When starting a project, expect things to go wrong; know that you will refine and create systems as you gain experience. A stack of books cannot replace hands-on experience. Keep in mind that understanding follows experience and causes knowledge to grow exponentially.

  When beginning a project, consider documenting the process for the benefit of others. Take a before photo and note your activities in stages so that you can share your experience. Failed attempts, when shared, are valuable: they prevent others from making the same mistake. Photo documentation and detailed notes can be helpful for you, too, especially for repairing something that is easy to take apart and hard to put back together.

  Once you have acquired a mad skill, consider how to share your new knowledge. Invite friends over and show them what you know. Mikey and I regularly host parties that demonstrate things like making 5 gallons of wine; preparing kombucha brew; making tempeh, tinctures, and biofuel; and cutting a 50-gallon metal drum into a fire barrel. People love skill-sharing parties, especially those that revolve around food.

  Do for the doing. As consumers we are familiar with the buying part of being makers. Do you remember starting a new school year and thinking that the pristine notebook you bought would inspire perfect penmanship? A few scribbles later that idea was down the tubes. How about the inspiration you felt starting a new hobby? Many hobbies end minutes after the supplies are purchased. Coming out of consumer culture requires breaking the habit of acquiring and instead holding our focus on the making of the thing. Try out the mantra Do for the doing.

  Start by making what you buy. Start small and consider what you buy and what you might be able to make yourself. Write down the savings produced by making what you once bought, and tally the savings as the lists grow. A list will help you choose projects to prioritize. On the next page, you’ll find our still-growing list. This year I hope to learn to make liquid soap and shampoo.

  what we no longer buy

  big stuff

  Fuel (two electric vehicles powered by on-site PV solar system and two biodiesel vehicles that burn homemade fuel)

  Power (PV solar 2-kilowatt system)

  Hot water for bathing (hot spring on our property; we don’t have a hot water heater)

  Insulation (homemade papercrete)

  Furniture and home décor (garbage picked and refurbished or made from scrap)

  Household

  Vinegar (made from kombucha)

  Glass cleaner (vinegar from kombucha + water)

  Wax for salve and candles (from our on-site beehive)

  Sponges (loofah plant grown in our garden)

  Most clothing (swaps)

  Laundry detergent (wildcrafted soapberries used instead of detergent)

  Gifts (handmade and homegrown)

  Flowers (garden)

  Cosmetics and Medicines

  Lip balm (wax from beehive, plants harvested, and herbal oils made)

  Salve, skin moisturizer (wax from beehive, plants harvested, and herbal oils made and mixed)

  Hair conditioner (vinegar + plant-based teas)

  Soap (homemade)

  Toothpaste (baking powder + peppermint essential oil + Dr. Bronner’s soap)

  Haircuts

  Food

  Plant protein (tempeh, mushrooms)

  Flour-based foods (homemade breads, pancakes/muffins, pastas, baked sweets, phyllo dough, and so forth)

  Cheese and yogurt (made from raw local cow’s milk)

  Sweetener (honey from bees)

  Tomato sauce (garden)

  Jams (garden)

  Pesto (garden)

  Vegetable stock (garden)

  Veggies and greens (garden)

  Culinary herbs (garden)

  Medicinal herbs (garden and wildcrafted)

  Woods for smoking foods (foraged)

  Beverages

  Wine (kits)

  Mead (from beehive’s honey)

  Smoothies (fruit and yogurt from local raw cow’s milk)

 
Roasted coffee (green coffee beans roasted in a garage sale popcorn maker)

  Teas (local and homegrown plants)

  Fruit drinks (homegrown and local fruits)

  Carbonated beverages (yeast-activated and kombucha)

  Landscape

  Compost (from our kitchen scraps)

  Fertilizer (free camel poo from Stanley the camel)

  Mulch (free from the city)

  Wood for building (scrap from trash)

  Dormant oil, a natural pesticide (homemade from WVO + baking soda + hydrogen peroxide + tea tree oil)

  Garden trellis for climbing plants (thrown-away bed frames)

  Use waste. We live amid the largest surplus ever to exist. And we are in the middle of an environmental crisis. Since all new resources come at a cost to life, we ought to show examples of good etiquette by choosing waste rather than demanding that new materials be harvested for our consumption. Choosing waste is the polite thing to do. Waste is a low-cost or free material that encourages taking risks, which is great for learning and developing building skills. You have nothing to lose. Using waste is guilt-free. Using waste extends the life of raw materials that have already been harvested. It’s hard to know the real cost of a new item — consider objectionable labor practices, pollution, fossil fuels burned in production and transportation — but it’s clear that using anything a bit longer is better for the life of our planet.