Restorying the Earth

The Giving Project, One Month Later

While I’ve not managed to blog as often as I planned, I’ve continued to engage with the act of giving and to reflect on my experiences in relation to Charles Eisenstein’s book on Sacred Economics (along with a collection of other authors). Lately, I’ve been thinking about how to connect more to the donations I make to charity, most of which just slip out of my bank account while I’m not watching thanks to Direct Debit. I’ve calculated how many hours of paid work go into earning the money that funds all these donations, and it’s approximately 4.5 hours. So I’m going to consciously dedicate the first 4.5 hours of work each month to the idea of funding charities I believe in, starting on July 1st. Hopefully this will help me to connect more with the feeling of giving in our digitised world. It may even encourage me to dedicate more of my work hours to charity.

Highlights from our Shropshire Yurt Adventure

Just returned from a low-key adventure in Shropshire. Here are the highlights:

Glamping in a arboretum with 400 year old oaks and the first Douglas Fir tree to be planted in the UK. No electricity, spotty mobile phone reception, birdsong that lasted 22 hours of the day and hot showers in a wooden out building = Heaven.

Booked through Canopy and Stars’ inspiring collection of one of a kind, eco-friendly vacation destinations.

Picked up two books while I was away. Dip: Wild Swims from the Borderlands, by Andrew Fusek Peters. I’m always excited when I fine a new ecological memoir. The Garden Forager: Edible Delights in Your Own Back Garden, by Adele Nozedar, to add to my collection of gardening books. The latter was picked up at Art and Artisan, a little bookshop in Bishop’s Castle with a mouthwatering collection of books. The former I bought at Sheepish, along with a sheepish amount of local yarn.

Books read in the yurt: Gossip from the Forest, by Sara Maitland. Glamping in an actual forest with a 12-foot wooden bear, a Scandinavian chapel, several gypsy caravans and a copper-topped russian dacha is the perfect place to read about forests and fairytales! Face-to-face: Women Writers on Faith, Mysticism and Awakening, edited by Linda Hogan and Brenda Peterson.

Favourite desert of the trip: Avocado ice cream made by the blogger at Spread a Little Love. Who knew gluten-free, sugar-free, dairy-free frozen deserts could be so delish.

Favourite beverage: Robinson’s of Tenbury Cider. They know their ciders in that part of the world.

Our local for the week: Powis Arms.

Favouite buildings: Ludlow’s 500 listed buildings, many of which dated from the medieval period.

Return of the green cocktail dress

I’ve not had much time for blogging lately, but I’ve carried on with my experiment of paying attention to giving. Tonight, at yoga class, my cocktail dress returned. A few weeks ago one of my yoga-mates mentioned she had a party to go to that required a vintage tea dress. She was going to buy one on-line. I just happened to have a lovely vintage, Italian wool tea dress in the most brilliant shade of green hanging neglected in my wardrobe. I can’t remember the last time I wore it. Next week I brought it along to class and handed it over to my colleague. Not a gift in the strictest sense, a loan, but still very much in the spirit of the sharing economy.

I like the idea that the dress went on an outing without me. I got into Tom Robbins’ books in my late teens. In Skinny Legs and All, a couple of the major characters are objects. In particular, I remember a can of beans and a spoon. These objects go on a journey, have adventures of their own. It caught my imagination. When Mike and I came to Edinburgh, a storyteller friend of ours moved in to take care of our Canadian house. At the time, we were only planning on being away for a couple of years. During her tenancy, the house had a life of it’s own, hosting storytelling house concerts. Later, some permaculturalists moved in and the garden became a staging ground for workshops and learning. It’s been a community perennial vegetable nursery too.

From the orientation of a money economy, which emphasises accumulation and possession, we tend to approach objects as being inanimate, solid, as having meaning only through our ownership. However, we could just as easily tell another story, that we are waypoints on the journeys that objects make. All “human” artifacts start as raw materials. They pass through many hands, many processes and many places before they become ours and they will all pass out of our hands to rubbish bins, recycle bins, charity shops and friends. Even if we hang onto them until the end of our lives, when we are interred, we move beyond the ability to own. In what sense are they inanimate? In what sense to they depend on our ownership for meaning? In what sense are they ours?

See followthethings.com for some of these journeys.