This is a response to Jacqueline DuBoiss article about the ISH factor of self sufficiency. For those who have not had the privilege of reading any of Jacquies writings or seeing any of her videos, you dont know what youre missing. She is an urban farmer, living with the earth on her small homestead. Jacqueline wrote about how she is being more self sufficient-ish with everything she does. The ISH factor is the fact that most of us never get to be totally self sufficient, but in the doing we get closer and closer all the time. What this reminds me of is a conversation I had with some ladies a month or so ago. We have a community center where the Methodist and Lutheran ladies take turns putting on a community meal each day. I had dropped off a few things for the Lutheran ladies to work into their meal for the night. I left several jars of tomato sauce, green beans and pickles for them to use. I told them to just leave the empty jars there on the counter and Id pick them up the next time I stopped in. The ladies warned me they might get stolen because, They are so dang expensive these days. Then they teased me that is was all those canning classes that I was giving that was making everyone buy those jars and that made them so expensive. Youve got to stop giving those classes, One of the ladies said, before theres so many people canning that the rest of us cant afford to do it anymore. While I disagree with that sentiment I do understand where it came from. Five years ago I was buying my regular mouth pint jars for $2 - $2.50 a case, now Im lucky if I can find them on sale for $6 bucks. And the problems with the resurgence of the self sufficiency movement does not stop there. The last Amish auction I was at was packed and I was out bid on most of the items I was interested in. Canning jars arent just more expensive, there have been times when I saw the shelves at the hardware store emptied so if I had needed to buy them, they werent even there. When I called for my chimney sweep to come clean my chimney they were so busy I had to wait a month before they could come. They think next year there will be an even longer wait. Two years ago I bought a wood splitter for $250.00, this year the same model was on sale for $1000.00. The new self sufficiency movement is costing us old timers an arm and a leg. Then why would any of us encourage new people to join us? The answer is simple. Being self sufficient is really a myth. We all work with the ish factor. Really, we are all self sufficient-ISH, but we still all need each other. For example, I live in Wisconsin and no matter how I try, there is just no way I can grow big enough olive trees to get my olive oil. It just aint gonna happen. So I go through a co-op to trade with someone down south who can grow olive trees. I send my maple syrup down the Mississippi River on a barge and they send their olive oil up. The same with my cotton that I weave with. Cotton as a crop can be one of the worst for the environment and...you guessed it...it doesnt grow all that well up here. I can get small patches of it to grow, but I cant get whole fields of it to come to fruit. So I found a wonderful person who grows her cotton organically and I trade some of my winter weavings with her. . No matter how much we wish we could, being totally self sufficient in todays world is probably not going to happen. Even if we live in a place where we have lots of warm days or lots of water or lots of woods for fire wood or lots of perfect soil or few diseases, there is only 24 hours in a day and only 365 days in a year. How can we get everything done? We simply cant. But the more people who are part of the movement, the more we can share, trade, and barter with what we produce. And while many people start out doing the same old, same old as everyone else, we eventually all find our nitch, our specialty that draws people to us. Self sufficiency teaches us that each individual person is important, and when all those individuals come together we are unstoppable. This is a lesson that the modern world, with all of its buy your lifestyle ideas, takes away from us. Instead of knowing the people we work with, wanting to give them a product that will keep them trading with us, the modern world teaches us that the cheaper we can get one thing, the more things we can have. If we dont know those who produce our things, we can easily stop thinking of them as people and treat them like sweatshop workers, only here for the people with moneys convenience. This way of thinking can be put onto us as well. We become nothing more than cogs in a wheel, not really caring about what we make or how we make it, as long as we can get more money to buy more things from more people who we dont know and dont care about. By removing the self sufficient-ISH part of our lives we have become dependent on those who make sure we are fed, housed, entertained, and kept in line until we are willing to settle for less, we see ourselves as less because after all, we are just a cog, easily replaceable. We cannot see the powerful beings we are because we simply do what we are told, buy what are to buy, and take what everyone is willing to give us until we feel like we are nothing but what others tell we are. We are powerless in the face of overwhelming odds. Self sufficiency tears that silly myth apart. We are not at the mercy of others because we are all needed. We are important because without you, I am not able to live the life I chose and vise versa. The ISH factor of self sufficiency is a built in way of bringing people together, of each of us lifting the other up until we touch the sacred knowledge of our own strengths. We are important and we are all in this together. This is the lesson of the ISH part of self sufficiency. Together we are a powerful group of individuals. So if it cost me a bit more to buy my canning jars, or if I look over at you as you out bid me at the next Amish auction, I see this as an extremely small price to pay for my place in this emerging movement. I get to be a part of the people taking back a power that they really never lost.
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 18:48:22 +0000
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