Five delightful women, each with varying degrees of gardening history in both their childhoods and adult lives, took this class today that reviews how, in steps, one can create an increasing degree of self sufficiency in water and food and comfort and purposefulness. We were kept in quite a while by a light rain ( I NEVER complain about rain) that once again kept my clothes on the clothesline damp another day, but later we got to take a tour of my evolving urban farmstead that more and more is embracing the "Food Forest" concept by expanding way past my original plantings of own root citrus trees with moringa and neem and loquat and more. My dog Cracker was unusually wound up and entertaining but as always, won over everyone's heart. The class was held mostly in my "Gay Trailer Trash On Acid" livingroom, then the other aspects of my home and yard based on re-purposing items gleaned curbside and from dumpsters to reduce my costs and provide fodder for creative projects. Find and be given a LOT of big sheets of mirror? Of COURSE you cover your livingroom floor with it!
What better way to mark the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the Bush Regime's use of 9-11 to savage America on every level with an intensity that Bin Laden could have only dreamed of by seeing that an abundance of produce and eggs and meat, all organic and at very low cost, can be had in a modest south Tampa yard, with a casual, non-linear "system" that evolves as I do. Bush and Cheney and Rice and Powell and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and Rove, instead of facing charges for breaking U.S. and international law, trashing our Treasury and military and Constitutional form of government and global reputation and thus handing Bin Laden a wide-ranging victory on a silver platter, were/are given legal immunity WITHIN OUR BORDERS (hence their conspicuous lack of world travel) plus lush lifetime pensions and stellar taxpayer-provider health care plans (funny, modest versions of that for you and me is evil "socialism") and lucrative book and speaking and consulting deals. Since working Americans who sell healthy raw milk, or enjoy the safe simple pleasures of cannabis are arrested and imprisoned, there IS no justice in "The Land of The Free" that has the world's highest incarceration rate and prison population.
Urban farmsteading, barter, defying cannabis laws, starting and joining community gardens, discouraging our children from becoming fodder for the war machine that has nothing to do with "protecting our freedoms" and everything to do with corporate empire building, dumpster diving, giving fresh fertile eggs to chickenless neighbors, hosting and attending seed swap potlucks, setting up rain barrels and worm bins, these things and more can create new freedoms and creative energies and forms of security as Gandhi-inspired gestures of defiance of the institutionalized predation of the people of the world by a very privileged, much too powerful few seemingly devoid of empathy. We can plant seeds in our gardens and our minds while refusing to use our shovels as swords.
As a 58 year old "old hippie" it does my soul good to see "idealism" being embraced by millions for what it is.....REALISM in the face of the daunting challenges to us and the planet and its non-human inhabitants resulting from unsustainable avarice and greed. I am convinced that, short of global nuclear war being unleashed, we are powerless ONLY if we agree to be.
Thanks again to those five cool women who today wandered through my place, teaching me as I taught them!
John
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