Spot the difference

How gardening makes me look:


How gardening makes me feel:





What gardening does to my brain:




What gardening does to my soul:



How I feel when I have to write:


My face when I'm writing:



How I feel when I'm blogging about "The Crisis":




What blogging about "The Crisis" does to my soul:


What blogging about art and gardening does to my soul:



Pretty much a no-brainer.



~

"They know in their bones that something has gone terribly wrong..."

Blessed fellowship of likemindedness.

John, a longtime reader, sent me a link to a blog by a guy who is doing what I'm doing, and apparently for much the same reason. Brian Kaller is apparently trying to raise a daughter in a way that is not in keeping with the mainstream. It seems like a pretty good idea to me. I don't have a daughter, but I have got latent maternal instincts. I feel the urge to teach people the things I was taught. I'm more glad than I can say that I'm not the only one.

Let’s say we've lost most of the self-reliant skills and classical education that our forbears posessed. Let's say we have replaced them with a culture of buying and discarding things we don't value, and staring at glowing screens. Let's say you want to try to rediscover an older way of life, believing we will need such things again. And let’s say you have a daughter.

Restoring Mayberry

When I ask most modern people to remember a particular decade, they usually remember the television shows and video games that took up much of their young life, or the clothes and hairstyles that were fashionable. They remember what Hollywood celebrities were doing at the time more than their own lives. They don’t typically remember what my elderly neighbours do, like the wildflowers that grew in a particular meadow, or peeking as children into the nests of herons and listening to the eggs. They don’t remember playing children’s games, or exploring the woods, or swimming to an island in the middle of the pond, or declaring themselves kings and princesses of their newfound lands. Most of them never had the friendships to even have such adventures – people moved around too much, or were always playing video games - even if they had been allowed to roam, and even if there were any woods to explore.

Most people my age spent 20,000 hours of their best years warehoused in a school that looked like a prison, but few remember anything they learned. Most remember spending many more hours in the backseats of cars, but never rode a horse or sailed a boat as children, or did anything that depended on skill and subtlety. Most modern people grew up with enough toys to fill an orphanage, but remember few of them, no more than their own children can remember the fifteenth toy they received last Christmas.

Perhaps most importantly, most people my age don’t remember ever having done anything useful. As children they might have been indulged or ignored, but when I ask if they ever contributed to the family, most are confused even by the question. A few cleaned their room or raked leaves outside. But few people my age grew up feeling necessary, or learning any skills, or feeling alive.

As working adults, most people I know spend their waking hours moving electrons around a screen, but they are still not necessary, and they feel it. Most depend entirely on electricity, but have no idea where my electricity comes from. They depend on pressing a button to keep warm, but don’t know what the button does. They need purified water from the tap, but have no idea where it comes from, or how pure it really is, or how it could be cleaned.

They know the president, but not their mayor or councilman, and know more about their favourite movie star than the old lady down the road. Most, I expect, have spent far more time watching others make love than they have making love themselves, and have spent thousands of hours watching actors feign death but have never bathed a body for burial.

Many Americans these days see family only on uncomfortable holidays, have no traditions to pass down, and little knowledge of songs or stories older than their parents. Most have spent their lives drifting across an ocean of strangers, committed to nothing and no one. No wonder suicide, which was once rare, has become a common cause of death. Most people don’t kill themselves in any identifiable way, of course – but when I return to my native country, I see many people who have ballooned in size, or require drugs of one kind or another to get through another day.

Even those who are nominally successful – who live in houses the size of barns, drive trucks the size of school-buses and have enough toys to stuff an orphanage – remain deeply unhappy. One way or another, they grow angrier every year; they know in their bones that something has gone terribly wrong.

~

Glad I'm not the only one to have noticed.










The more I think about the Beguine idea, the more I think if it is going to be useful, it has to encompass some kind of educational and hospitality aspect. The idea keeps coming back of having people to stay, receiving guests, according to the Holy Rule, is receiving Christ:

All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ, for he himself will say: I was a stranger and you welcomed me (Matt 25:35). 2 Proper honour must be shown to all, especially to those who share our faith (Gal 6:10) and to pilgrims. 3 Once a guest has been announced, the superior and the brothers are to meet him with all the courtesy of love. 4 First of all, they are to pray together and thus be united in peace...15 Great care and concern are to be shown in receiving poor people and pilgrims, because in them more particularly Christ is received...

And helping them reconnect with a more authentic way of life.

As this gentleman has pointed out, even the very materially wealthy people of Modernia are culturally impoverished to the point of absolute penury. As he says above, children are given toys and told to go away and stop bothering their parents. Anaesthetised by video games and screens, they are raised by machines who can teach them nothing useful, nor teach them how to be useful themselves. And I know young people feel this lack. I have friends younger than I who can't sew on a button or make a pot of tea.

There simply must be way not only to preserve this kind of life, but to help others discover and grow in it as well.



~

Strength and virtue - a good place to start again

DAY-um!

I knew I sort of liked this guy. (And no, not for the obvious reasons.)


He's actually a lot like many of the people I grew up around. In the 70s, the hippie movement on the West Coast hadn't morphed into the solipsistic leftist political stuff it is today, and there was room in it for genuine masculinity, and the general gist of rejecting the Modernian lies about how we are supposed to live was still there.

I wish we could do something to make these kinds of people Catholic. We could do with some of this. It's not entirely gone, that old virile, pagan, filial piety, virtue. The kind that was Christianized in the early centuries and went on to build an entire civilization.

Yesterday Annamaria was telling me what sort of fertilizers to put on the tomatoes, and we were in the big garage under my flat where they keep all their contadini stuff. She pointed to a big round basket-y kind of thing hanging on the wall and asked if I knew what it was. In fact, there were two, hanging up together, one made of a big round wooden frame with one side closed in with metal mesh, about 5 feet in diameter; the other smaller made of wicker, looking like giant flour sieves. I said no, and she said, "My father the contadino used it when I was growing up." Then I realized.


I'd seen it on television and in the movies; it was for winnowing grain by hand, a winnowing fan.

You put the grain in the baskety thing, and on a breezy day, you toss it up in the air, and allow the wind to carry away the chaff while you catch the grain again, to throw it all up again, and again. People had been using them since the agricultural revolution began.

One generation away. Annamaria is probably old enough to be my mother, maybe in her early 70s. She dug out five rows of ground, three for her and two for me, to plant our tomatoes, zucchini, beans, peppers and melanzane. The rows are about ten meters long, and she did it by hand with a long handled iron mattock, a job I could not possibly have done myself.

They've given me a huge patch of land to do whatever I want with, and I'm a little overwhelmed. Frankly, I haven't been terribly strong, physically, since chemo, and after 15 years of sitting down to work, but I remember when I was 19 or so, redoing an entire garden alone one spring. A little house I'd rented with some friends hadn't been seen to in a couple of decades, and I took to it like a duck who'd never seen water before.

I rented an electric trimmer, and cut and pruned, and trimmed and dug and turned over beds that hadn't been dug in a long time. I found the old compost bed that someone had dumped an entire sack of potatoes into some time in the past and that had therefore become the potato bed, and produced the best potatoes I'd ever eaten before or since. I did carrots and beets and broccoli. I cut back the wilderness of Himalayan blackberries that had grown to fifteen feet deep, and of course - being roses - they loved the pruning so much they produced an enormous summer crop of berries. Someone had planted climbing white roses right next to the hedge and they had grown right into it, so when I trimmed the hedge I also pruned the roses, which then sprouted huge white blossoms all along its length. The pink clematis had turned into a huge tangled wall and I cut it down into an arch that became a mass of flowers in the summer.

That spring and summer in that little garden - that we lost again the following winter when the landlady sold the property to developers - will stand in my mind as one of the happiest periods of my life. I remember it in a kind of pink and green and golden glow. I'm not 19 anymore, but maybe we can do something like it again.

I've been here three weeks and it's been busybusybusy, so it only occurred to me the other day that there's a good chance here, perhaps even better than in Norcia (where flat land is hard to come by). Unlike the city, where rotting, corrupt Modernia is still reigning supreme in the last days of its wicked glory, here, only a few miles away, a much older kind of life is still lived, and remembered. I think Annamaria likes me because I so obviously value it, and so clearly want to live it myself (I think her daughter wasn't that interested). Even though our ability co communicate the details is still a bit limited, we've become friends because we both discovered a similar kind of soul, the same sort of priorities.


I've mostly finished organising the house. The books are all out of their boxes and arranged in the cases, and the oratory is set up. I sang Compline in it on Sunday night. The only thing that's missing now is someone to share it all with.

A bit of what will be the flower garden, with the oldest fig tree I've yet seen.

But I'm also happily anticipating the arrival of a friend from the US. (Note to self; order sofa-bed from Ikea.) She's a young lady who found that her ordinary life - with good, morally praiseworthy work, good, believing friends, a large and loving Catholic family - wasn't enough. She is thinking thoughts of bigger things, as you do, and her spiritual director suggested she come to Europe.

Annamaria's doves. In the big shed behind it are chickens and rabbits.

So I invited her to come to think them here, to stay and use my place as a home base to look for answers to her vocational yearnings, (there's no more centrally located place in Italy than Perugia.) and meanwhile, eat a lot of good Umbrian food and drink a lot of tea. There are monasteries on the continent where the Faith is preserved, though not many. And there are plenty of other things going on. She says it's a funny sort of urge, to leave where she is and come to Europe to look for something. How well I know that urge! Say a prayer that we can help her find what she's looking for. She will come in September.

San Fortunato, the church on the hill behind the house. 

Annamaria's chair in the orto, where she has a rest and a smoke and can just sit and look at the view.

Last night I went down to the bottom of the garden with a pair of kitchen scissors and cut the remaining wild chamomile to start drying. It grows very abundantly all over the place here, usually twined up together with the brilliant scarlet poppies that are just coming into bloom now in the fields and along the edges of the roads.

Her patch, and mine on the top right, which we planted the other night. 

The other night I took a bit of a stroll around as the sun was going down and the opening chords of our next stormfront was starting to really blow, and stood watching three kestrels wheeling and spinning and riding the wind like acrobats.

This weekend, I'm going to start building my flower beds, and I've got a bucket of seed packets and jars of wild seeds I'd collected from Norcia. We're a bit late in the season to start seeds but I don't mind.

The growing season here is very long. Who knows what we can grow here, given enough time.



~

Practicing for old age

Fascinating blog about the people who live in remote corners of Romania, perhaps the last "untouched" traditional agricultural communities in Europe. Wild Transylvania. There are a lot of interesting stories in it, and a great deal of writing about the local ancient agricultural practices of these people. But one story really stood out.

Maria Dogaru is an elderly lady who lives by herself with her sheep and cows, in a high mountain.

"Since Maria's husband died 35 years ago she has lived alone in a small house with no electricity or running water. She uses oil lamps for light and collects water from a spring 200 metres away for drinking and cooking. When she needs to wash her clothes, she carries them down to a nearby river. She lives in a single room with an earthen floor, small bed, stool, stove and a low lying table. It was a cold day but her room was warm and comfortable. Maria liked sitting next to her stove which she would feed occasionally with small pieces of wood cut by herself. After catching up with her family members who visit two or three times a year, she gave us some food, painted eggs from the recent Romanian Easter, bread and salt. Everything Maria eats is produced from her land and the small number of sheep, hens and one cow."

I have a kind of daydream about this sort of life. Maybe it's just a fantasy. I don't know why, but it seems terrifically appealing. But I think I could live this way very happily. All it would really take is a bit of land.

"Maria, why do you choose to live here in the mountains, when you could live a more comfortable life in the village lower in the valley?" She replied, "because here I feel free and because I never liked gossip" She also found it easier to graze her animals on meadows that surround her house. In the village she would have to shepherd her livestock along roads to reach the meadows at the edge of the village. 

I then asked her about her health. She said she has always been fine until recently. Her family took her to hospital where she was diagnosed with hypertension, she was then prescribed medication but she said she never takes it. I asked her what medicines if any she uses for other ailments. She said she only uses herbal remedies from herbs she forages for in the forest. She also eats wild fruits, mushrooms and makes soup and sauces from nettles. 

What intrigued me was Maria's fitness. The route down to the spring involved steep inclines which I personally struggled with just carrying my camera. Maria does this everyday carrying two full buckets of water in all kinds of weather, in all seasons! She also walks nine kilometres down to the village church every Sunday and back again uphill.


It reminds me of Suora Charia Barboni.

I still dream of those things.



~


Lots of garden work today, starting with some weed clipping and pulling in the back where the path goes up to the house from the car port, and one last turn-over of the veg bed to pull out the last of the sprouted acorns. Oh.. the acorns! Life! It just won't quit!

I planted out six kale seedlings, companion-planted with a whole bunch of garlic, and some nice dark pink gladiolus that should perk things up. The weather has warmed up, so I finally put in the six tomatoes that have been living on my bedroom windowsill. But I completely forgot to add in the rosehip squeezings I have so carefully saved for weeks from the rosehip wine, that was going to go under the poms for fertiliser. I'll have to dig it in tomorrow. I also read that garlic and nasturtiums are good companion plants for poms, since they both tend to discourage aphids and other pests, so another trip to the farm shop  is in order, where the sprouting garlic are for sale for 50 cents each. I've still got loads of nasturtium seeds.

There's still quite a lot of room, and I've got beets, little onions and some butternut squash seeds to go in. Six pumpkin plants have started from the seeds I saved last year, and are happily growing in the east-facing window, but I think I'm going to experiment with these. Instead of the ground bed, maybe put them in a big pot each, and do them next to the fence that gets sun all afternoon, so when the fruit comes, they can be hung up in nets from the fence so they'll be away from slugs and bugs and fungus.

Big plans. Always things to do, especially this time of year.

A whole bunch of the wildflower-mix seeds I buddy-planted with some rucola are starting to sprout in a little tiny terraced step I made in the slope, along with more of the nasturtiums and two more pots of mystery-seeds. The lavender that just sat in its pot and sulked all summer last year has suddenly sprouted and is getting ready to burst forth in flower, and the slope is completely covered in wild purple campanulas. It's been raining pretty steadily for weeks, so the lack of sun has kept them from opening, but the slope is completely covered in them and it can't be long now. The upper part of the garden, that I'm just letting go wild, is completely covered in these wild white ombrellate flowers, that I can't remember the name of at the moment, and all the poppies are coming out in between, like little living scarlet flames.

The slope continues to be a puzzle. I've rescued it from further careless mowing by the Old Guy, but the years and years of careless handling has kept anything from growing up there much. I have found a big patch of wild thyme growing in another section, and I've read that clover fixes nitrogen and is a ground cover that will survive in nearly any conditions. The plan is to cut little plugs from the established thyme - that is a great spreader and ground cover and can grow in almost no soil, and then buy some of the clover seeds that the farmers get for their haying. This, I hope, will fix the soil and stop wind and water erosion, and start building up the nutrients.

The Eruca Sativa I found on the verge and dug up to rescue from the town mowers has finally perked up after transplanting. I thought it was a gonner. It's a nice looking plant with lovely flowers, and is a particularly healthful Brassica, with very peppery tasting leaves that are ridiculously rich in iron and vitamins and antioxidants. It was an unusually handsome specimen, and I couldn't bear to see it killed by the town guys and their horrible gas-powered death-machines. But the day I dug it up I was in a hurry and it was the full heat of mid-day, and the thing was already in full flower. Just about the worst possible conditions. It sat in its pot and drooped, and refused to come out of its funk. I almost gave up on it, but it seems the constant rain has had an effect. It's even producing new leaves and flowers.

To my complete delight, the rose canes I cut in the very early spring and just stuck in pots to make a rose trellis for beans and some other climbers, have actually sprouted. Rose family plants are really resilient, and I knew the canes can often propagate by themselves, but I had left them to dry for quite a long time, and wasn't expecting this. But I cleared away the oak leaves I'd put in the pots to protect from frost, and there they were, four little green leafy shoots of Rosa Canina. Now I think I'm going to go get some more and stick them all over the place.

The other day I brought home some aquilegia and wild strawberries from the Great Outdoors, and they seem to be doing pretty well in planters. I also rescued all the poppies that were growing up in the place where the Old Guy with his death machine comes once a month or so to kill everything. I couldn't bear to have them mowed so now they're all jammed together in one long planter. They were very quick to recover and are now happily producing flowers.

I seeded a bunch of wild poppies last autumn in the pots with the roses, and now they are towering up over my neatly trimmed rose bushes, with huge fuzzy flower heads on them. They bloom until June here, so will be quite lovely.

My big pot of potatoes is recovering from the freak frost night we had in April, and the surviving beans are starting their secondary leaves. Things have been slowed by that awful night of cold. It outright killed all the wisteria blooms in town, just as they were reaching their peak... a tragedy, and it has blighted quite a lot of the trees. Even some of the very hardy tilia and oaks, the ones that had late leaves, were affected.

Quite a lot of the oaks and nearly all the sumac all over the place are affected and some so badly that they are obviously not going to produce any leaves this spring at all. I wonder if a tree dies when that happens. Maybe they'll come back next year, but quite a few of the trees, even the flowering locust and some of the walnuts, have only got little black rags of dead leaves on them and no new growth at all. I'm surprised that the local trees are so delicate. Surely this isn't the first time there has been a late frost.

Most of the flora is just fine though. A short walk in the Marcite yesterday revealed that the elder is about to burst forth in blossom. I'm going to have to bottle that rosehip wine to make room for the elderflower champagne and cordial.

Brother Michael has come home from his beekeeping course. The St. Anthony's nuns keep lots of bees. I wonder if someone would be willing to teach me.



~
 

Tradition

Procession through the town on the Festa di Sant Antonio

Posted by Hilary White on Monday, 26 January 2015

What I like about Norcia is not only the food, the people, the weather, the monks, but the culture. This is a place that loves its traditions, and keeps them very consciously as a shield against the outer world that is becoming denuded of unique traditional life.

This is is a little video I took last winter on the Festa di Sant'Antonio when the townspeople bring their animals up to the monastery of St. Anthony and the priest blesses them all, and they have a little festa.



~

Doing it different

This was one of the first alt-farming videos I saw demonstrating that there is a movement to change things substantially.

One of the big issues, as this person says, is knocking the global addiction to fossil fuels. Right now the world's food supply is totally dependent upon oil. But whether you believe in Peak Oil or not, this is an enormous problem.

And something that is probably too politically incorrect for the BBC to mention, kicking the world's fossil fuel habit would also render the threat of Islam null. Right now, the only reason the Mad Mullahs have become a resurgent threat is the oil money buying the bullets and bombs.



~

Permanent Culture

I walked past one of the local realtors' offices today, and had a long look at one of the postings. It was for 5300 sq m. of tereno agricoltura, that's a little over half a hectare or about 1.23 acres, for €8000. It has water access and some structures for enclosing animals.

I keep thinking about it...

And about this.



~

The title of this interesting documentary is perhaps not the best. It's not so much about getting "off the grid". I would have called it Downsizing. The idea of downsizing your life on a personal, individual level, has always seemed like a good one to me. But not only getting rid of stuff, most especially consumer debt (credit card debt) but of getting rid of the desire for consumption, curbing the appetite for Things.

I've seen so many people try to climb up into that strange model of living that involves huge ownership of material things in opposition to huge commitment to people, to truth or knowledge or spiritual benefit. And I think a lot of people are quietly starting to understand that these things are not only largely out of reach (mainly by design) but unworthy of our commitment and personal resources. We have been sold a mess of pottage in the form of the lies of people who want to sell us a lot of useless things, and a great many people are starting to give it a serious re-think.

The hippies had a pretty good idea at the foundation of their "drop out" doctrine, but they ended up getting distracted with the urge to indulge other appetites. In many ways they made an accurate critique of Modernity and their exhortation not to participate in it was much in line with some home truths that can be found in the Bible and in a lot of other religions.

Things are not what life is supposed to be for. We all know it. It's hard to live this truth, but we do all know it.

~

This is Passion Week, and I've resolved to consider doing things a bit differently, perhaps radically differently (though perhaps not). I realise that despite having been a moderately serious Christian for a while, I've really never approached the Bible in any systematic way. While I was doing the housework this morning, I ran another interesting documentary about a group of Amish teenagers being taken to Britain to experience the outside world. I was impressed with the sincerity and seriousness of mind these young people displayed, even though none of them were over 17. They were, as the Proddie saying has it, "Bible believing Christians" but the first thing they were, clearly, was Bible-knowing Christians. I could do with a bit of knowing what they know.

How about some Passion Week homework: what one thing do you all think you would do well to add or subtract from your life?

I think I might try reading the Bible.



~

It used to be normal

Rubbish. This is just normal knitting speed for someone who was taught properly in childhood.

This is one of the great crimes of modernity, the robbing of these skills from young people. I grew up watching my mother and grandmother and their friends doing this constantly. None of them ever went out without some kind of needle work tucked into their purses, and any time they had reason to wait, in the post office, at a bus stop, out would come the stuff and off they went. Throughout my childhood, I took it for granted that this is just what ladies did.

And they all knitted this fast. Crochet too. Later in life, my mother took up bobbin lace and tatting.
So familiar were the movements that when I finally decided to pick it up myself, at 16, it took a few lessons from the (of course) English mother of a friend, and in no time at all, my fingers just automatically started doing what I had grown up watching.

But I realised how culturally impoverished modern young people have become when I took some knitting with me to a meeting of student pro-lifers in Toronto one weekend. As the speakers were talking, I sat at my spot working on a pair of socks. They were all fascinated, and quite taken aback. I told them that my mother had knitted her way through her undergraduate degree (maths and marine biology). She said it drove her professors mad to see her there, fingers flying, looking as though she wasn't paying attention, but they soon learned that it actually aids concentration. These days of course, the kids sit in class looking at their phones and tablets. (Note to self, if I ever teach a class in anything, the first person to pull out their phone while I'm talking will get the ruler across the fingers.)

Mothers, if you don't know how to do these things, learn them, and do them in front of your kids. Save Western Civilisation; learn to knit.



~

Ci sei mancato...

I have a question to put to all able-bodied priests and bishops who were in Rome yesterday.

What were you doing while thousands of lay people were Marching for Life?

I went to the front of the March, and stood by the side of the road for the whole procession to sweep past me so I could get an idea of the size and make-up of the crowd. I observed that there were huge numbers of younger people, that in fact, probably the most prominent demographic was people in their 20s-30s, a great many pushing baby strollers. The pro-life movement in Italy appears to be very big with the family set. This is a bit of a contrast with the DC March where the largest single group seems to be teenagers.

The other thing I noticed, and this was a VEry sharp contrast with last year, was the absence of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate. There was a small (very small) contingent of the sisters, but not. one. single. friar. Last year, there was an entire flotilla of FFIs. And I can't imagine that they were absent by their own will.

The third thing I noticed was that the number of priests (at least, priests wearing recognisable clerical dress) was - being very generous - about 1 in fifty. In Rome.

ROME.

Where were the clergy?



~

Being "poor," having "enough," and being grateful: the gross personal happiness index

A personal hero of mine, the 5th and current reigning Dragon King, Druk Gyalpo, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, of the Kingdom of Bhutan, the happiest place on earth.

Kathy writes today on a theme of hers:

People are ‘poor’ because they are dumb, lazy or both — and many of them LIKE being ‘poor’

Yep. Pretty much.

In fact, I am (kind of) poor because I've chosen to be. I don't have a credit card, and never will, because consumer debt is a bad, bad, BAD thing. I don't own a car because I have always lived in places with good public transit and where it is perfectly feasible to walk to everything I need to go to.

Suburbs are stupid and bad for people and no one should live in them. Live in the city where you can walk to the things you need, or live in a village where people cluster, so you can interact in a human way with people outside your immediate family, so you can live in a real community. Or live out in the country where your work is right outside your kitchen door. Pick one.

Suburbs, where you need a car to get a carton of milk and a newspaper at the "corner store," but aren't allowed to grow your own food or raise livestock, where you don't know the names of more than two neighbours and do everything you can to avoid seeing them, are an evil invention of Modernia.

I do wish I could own a house, but with house prices what they are everywhere, and with my profound aversion to debt of any kind, that is so far out of the question as to be the equivalent of saying I wish I could live in a magic airship and never set foot on earth again. Wishing is just fantasizing, and all the world knows how I feel about that. All my working-class English and Irish relatives and ancestors, until this last generation, paid rent all their lives.

I also recognise that just being white and having English as my first language, and having been born Canadian/British, makes me automatically richer not only than nearly every other person on earth, but than nearly every other person who has ever lived on earth. I'm insanely rich, if for no other reason than I can turn on a tap and have hot water come out of it, or flick a switch and have light after dark. I'm literate, and own hundreds of books. I have more than two pairs of shoes. Get the historical perspective, and you'll begin to see how rich you really are.

I know full well that if I wanted to be more wealthy, financially, I could just work a little harder, take on more jobs, do the effort it would take to go all the way as an entrepreneurial free lancer; I could make a lot more money. Maybe not enough to ever be "rich" or even "well off" by modern standards, but certainly waaay better off than my immediate ancestors ever could have hoped to be, (post-war Manchester was a place where "rich" and "poor" were more or less meaningless).

I have chosen, quite freely, to be in a profession and position in life where money and things are not the highest priorities. And I LOVE what I do. It makes me happy (or at least, as happy as a chronic depressive, choleric/melancolic can reasonably expect to be in this life). And I'm aware that I can make this choice because I come from two of the richest nations the world has ever seen. I live in the modern, developed world, and just this fact alone makes me wealthy and gives me choices very, very few people have ever had.

For this "suck-it-up-and-own-it" attitude, I can really thank my hippie mother. She taught me something that I still think is true, that being happy is the real goal of the material aspect of what you do in life, and that while it is certainly possible to make loads of money, the two things aren't (necessarily) the same. And in my case, my personality, tastes and objectives have simply placed financial wealth pretty low on the priorities list. I think too much to be in a creatively dead-end, well-paid, crap-job. I wouldn't last five minutes.

My hippie mother also taught me how to be poor efficiently. She taught me the financial priorities of sensible, working-class northern English people: keeping a roof over your head is the first priority, so if you have to starve and bundle up in the winter because you can't afford to pay the electric, absolutely always pay the rent, in full, and on time. Maintaining a home as a safe and as-comfortable-as-possible haven is the most important thing you can do with your money. After that, her most important lesson was the deep fear of debt, that I'm sure also comes out of her early upbringing in working-class Manchester.

She also taught me how to eat poor effectively: get the biggest nutritional bang for you buck. I was told by the doctors during the Cancer Thing that the reason they were willing to go with the extended treatment was that my general health was amazingly good, especially for someone my age. And that came from a lifetime of eating nothing but fresh fruit, veg, chicken, fish and liver. Never, ever packaged, processed foods, (no matter how much I begged for them as a kid).

It's totally possible to be both poor, dignified and healthy, but this is mostly by choosing to own it, to realise that it's a choice and be a fricken' grownup about the decisions you've made in life.

So, maybe a good thing to do would be to talk and think about the concept of "enough". We hear all the time about the "divide between rich and poor". But maybe there is, or could be, a third category: just fine. Because I think there are very few people in the developed world who can genuinely qualify, in absolute terms, as "poor". "Poor people" in the developed world in the 21st century, whatever their source of income, often own flat screen TVs, drive cars, talk on their cell phones and have fridges full of food. In fact, in Britain and the US, the number one health problem for poor people is obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

Maybe we should talk more about "enough". I have enough. I'm content, materially. I have most of the things I've always wanted; quite a bit more than I expected to have when I was younger, in fact. If I were to die tomorrow, in terms of "he who dies with the most toys wins" I'd say I would have come in at a pretty respectable position.

Moreover, I have what I need in the non-material realm too to get on with the really important task of saving my soul. I've got work I can do, that's well-suited to my temperament and abilities. Work that gives me a lot of scope for growth and development and has a good future. Work, indeed, that I'm probably going to be able to do, and want to do, up to the day before I die.

I also have strong relationships, good friends, who don't let me sink too far when I let myself sink a bit, and who keep me responsible to the community at large.

The Kingdom of Bhutan has an interesting take on success. The previous King of Bhutan decided not to go along with the standards of national success that the rest of the world adheres to. In 1972, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, invented a thing called the "Gross National Happiness Index" for his country, and based all his plans for reform and "modernisation" on it.

The assessment of gross national happiness (GNH; Wylie: gyal-yong ga'a-kyid pal-'dzoms) was designed in an attempt to define an indicator and concept that measures quality of life or social progress in more holistic and psychological terms than only the economic indicator of gross domestic product (GDP).

"He used this phrase to signal his commitment to building an economy that would serve Bhutan's unique culture based on Buddhist spiritual values."

And it's working out pretty well.

Why don't we try something like that?


~ * ~

Homework assignment:

Think about the concept of "enough", then write down in the commboxes five things you're grateful for and five things you could do comfortably without, with maybe a few personal adjustments.



~

Someone's mad at me

for being... well... me.

I have been saving this little gem for a rainy blog day. You remember the other day when I was musing briefly about isolation and what it does to you. The context, I believe, was the weird spectacle of the "official" mourning activities being filmed and enforced in the world's most isolated state, North Korea. I was thinking about it because I had also been musing on what sort of conditions one has to have to ensure that an entire nation of 33 million people have ex-ACT-ly the same opinions on the usual range of, shall we say, reproductive issues.

Canada, you will remember, has a press and broadcast media that is almost entirely state-run or state-vetted. The CRTC ensures that nothing in broadcasts from radio or TV comes with anything other than the officially approved editorial position. Nearly every newspaper in the country is owned by the same company, that is a heavy funder of the Canadian Liberal Party, and of course, we can count on academia and film to do its bit in making sure that everyone adheres in lock-step to the Frankfurt-school, feminist, neo-marxist, Planned Parenthood, Our Bodies Our Selves marching orders. There really is no place in Canada where you can get away from this, it is a self-contained media bubble, or was until the internet came in.

I pondered this once many years ago. Canada seems to have an ideal situation to be used as a guinea pig in a big experiment on how to change a deeply conservative country into a nation of whiney welfare-state addicted leftists. Part of it is the low population to land mass ratio. Canada has the second largest landmass in the world, but a tiny population. The population centres, moreover, are very far-flung indeed. If you grow up in, say the Gaspe, you will without a doubt have to move to somewhere larger and more densely populated like Montreal to get a job and start your life. This trend tends to isolate individuals, separating them often by thousands of miles from their family and their communities of origin.

By rigid control of the media, by creating an atomised population who have only the official state-controlled line for information and no other sources of moral or social stability but the state, you have a population that is ripe for brainwashing.

How do you shift an entire nation to the left? Look at what has been done in Canada.

I was thinking about all this because of an interesting email from a young man whose prodigious skills as a Classical Realist painter had caught my attention. You may recall that I linked to David Gluck's blog, Painting Stuff to Look Like Stuff.

Delighted that I had found more Classical Realists to play with, who moreover live in Duncan BC not an hour from my birth place, you can imagine that I wasted no time in giving them a little extra boost. It never would have occurred to me that I was not worthy in their eyes to dare to link to their page.

I received one friendly commbox note from Mr. Gluck and then, honestly, more or less forgot about him.

What with getting the news that I am much less likely to die of cancer, dealing with the long-term side effects of chemotherapy, recovering from major abdominal surgery, dealing with the emotional and physical stresses of surgically induced premature menopause and suddenly finding myself in contact with a father whom I had assumed had forgotten all about me and from whom I had not heard since the early 1980s, ... oh, and trying to get back to work...you can imagine that Mr. Gluck was not prominent in my mind.

Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I received the following little note by email.

From: David Gluck
To: quicustodiet66@yahoo.ca
Sent: Monday, January 16, 2012 12:20:52 PM
Subject: please remove our link

Please remove the link of my blog from your blog. I must say at first I was excited to find a fellow BC Canadian realist who was supportive of what my wife and I were doing, but quite frankly after reading your blog, I am turned off. I cannot accept intolerance of gays, transgender individuals, woman's rights, etc. I also found it in very poor taste you are trying to draw a parallel between abortion and the holocaust (especially since many of my family members were wiped out in it). You seem like a very angry individual, and we do not want your followers bringing that sort of hatred to our our blog. Thank you.

David Gluck

ps. You may also want to consider removing Sadie Valerie as well considering she is a huge supporter of gay rights and marriage. In addition, I am friends with most of the artists on your links section and I cannot say they would approve of your blog either.

(emphasis added)

A pariah in the Classical Realist world! Dear me. Having other things on my mind, I responded somewhat tersely,

I'll do whatever you like, but I'm disappointed that a fellow adherent to the Classical Realist revival is so narrow minded as to be unable to disagree on politics in a civil way.

I'm always shocked at the ingrained intolerance of the left.

Very disappointed.

H. White

He replied,

"On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 10:13 AM, David Gluck wrote:
Trust me when I say this is me being as civil as humanly possible. I sent you a personal message as opposed to posting anything on your blog that was negative and I was very polite in the manner in which I did it. By the way, I find it a stretch to call someone who is accepting of people for who they are "narrow-minded."

Yesterday, I found out that he must be lurking about here because I received the following, "I asked you very politely to take me off of your blog. Please take me off the links section immediately. Thank you."

I thought of all sorts of replies, (like, Good grief boy, I've really got other things to think about...) but then I thought I would put it to my readers what my response ought to be. (I also considered "friending" him on Facebook, but worried that his little head would explode.)

I have thought about writing back to explain that in the world of grown-ups it is possible not only to disagree civilly on political matters, but to remain close friends with people for many years who differ radically on such issues. It is often difficult, but with the application of charity, forbearance, kindness and forgiveness, and a habit of keeping one's own faults and failings firmly before one's eyes, (I realise these are rare traits in the lefty world, but I have met them there) it is possible greatly to benefit by maintaining contact with people outside one's own political bubble.

Faithful chorus, please discuss.

(I ask only that you do not bother the poor fellow at home. No emails please or commbox messages at his place please.)



~

What else is art good for?

In Western societies, particularly in the post-colonial Anglo nations, we are suffering a terrible crisis of self-understanding. One of the things that struck me the hardest when I finally went back to England as an adult was that the English seemed to have forgotten how to be English. They have forgotten who they are. The older ones seemed to remember but appear to have learned to be ashamed of it. It was a very strange thing and I marked it at the time as a terrible evil. A society that doesn't have a self-understanding, doesn't have a sense of who and what it is, can't be one that will survive for long.

One of the things that art does, particularly painting, is to help define a cultural identity. For obvious reasons this is especially true of Italy. I'm still working my way around Vasari's Lives of Artists and it is clear that the world of painting for three of the most important centuries of art were utterly dominated by Italians (as we call them now).

But if we want to know who we are, how we think of things, how we see the world and what it means to us, painting is obviously the most direct and simple means. I think if the English were to revisit their artistic heritage, there would be great gains in re-establishing a solid national identity.

Make kids look at and understand Constable, Turner and Gainsborough. Familiarise them with Pre-Raphaelites. Once you have introduced them to the painters and their works, they will not be able to avoid also gaining a broader understanding of their own history and culture.

Art tells us how we see ourselves and our neighbours and how we should or could live. It shows us what life can look like from perspectives and times that we might never be able to experience personally. This can have a profound effect on a young mind. It certainly did to me. It immunised me against the cultural malaise and historical amnesia, all the social disaster that was coming throughout the 70s and 80s. It has helped me solidify my own self-understanding and helped to rescue me from that diseased anti-culture that has taken over the world since the 1960s.

It is in great part because of my knowledge of art history and the general cultural knowledge that came with it, that I have been able, in a way, to recapture or rebuild who I really am after fighting my way out of that toxic feminist/hippie fantasy world. And I see no reason that it could not do the same thing for whole cultures, entire societies that have been deracinated and have lost their identities.

When I first looked at the painting above, I thought, "This is me. Or at least it was. The painting seems to exactly depict my childhood and the core of who I was before the calamities of my adolescence and young adulthood made me forget it all."

Art can help you see yourself, the sort of person you are or could be or want to be. And it is true that a lot of my childhood looked exactly like this, right down to the little velvet dress with white lace cuffs. Only mine was brown. My mother made it for me when I was five and I remember the cuffs getting dirty on the London Underground.

Here's a little thing the class can do while I'm working on something else. A kind of art thought experiment for y'all. Look over at some of the art sites I've got on the sidebar. Underpaintings is a really good one, and see if there is a painting that strikes you as deeply. Find one that is a kind of picture of your inner self, your character. See what you come up with.

Sometimes it is a bit surprising and it is possible to learn things about yourself that you never knew by looking at art and measuring your reactions to it.

If you find one that is really good, share it with the rest of the class.



~

VE Day

In your charity, pray for the repose of the souls of my great grandfather, William Doloughan, who served in the Home Guard in WWII and in a mounted regiment in WWI, for my paternal grandfather, Norman White, who served in a tank division in Mesopotamia in WWI and in London in WWII, and for my maternal grandfather, Herbert Edward Burkett who served in the US Air Force and flew missions from England over to France.

Requiescant in pace.



~

The Greeks were wrong about a lot of things

They used to play a lot of cool old films on TV in the afternoons when I was a kid, and whenever I was home sick from school I always made sure to watch as many of them as I could. (It's how I got to watch all the Road movies even though I was born 20 or 30 years after they were made).

One of the series of films that I particularly loved were the ones made in the late 50s and early 60s about the Greek myths. They had a lot of statues coming to life, and skeletons springing up out of the ground and monsters and harpies and all manner of good things. And loads of sword fighting. My two favourites were Jason and the Argonauts and 7th Voyage of Sinbad.

I remember one scene from one of these cool old classics in which someone has to battle the Hydra. You know the schtick, you cut one head off and two more, or seven more, or something, grow back, so you can't win unless you have some kind of magic object or some other clever trick up your sleeve. Or you're a favourite of one of those good-for-nothing Greek gods.

It was supposed to be symbolic in a typically fatalistic Greek, pagan, Kobayashi Maru kind of way. You know, it's the usual, 'everything's hopeless and life sucks because the gods run everything and they hate us, so we lose. Wah'.

I have written before about this attitude in reference to the story of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Iphegenia and Whatsisface. I've said that when the soothsayers tell you you have to sacrifice your daughter so the storms will stop and allow the fleet to sail for Troy, but you know that sacrificing your daughter is a horrible unnatural crime and your wife will probably kill you when you get back (and poor old Cassandra) so your son will be thrown into an impossible connundrum where he has to avenge you but that means killing his mother so the furies will follow him to the end of his life and everything will suck...

The solution is before your eyes: kill. the. soothsayers.

Same with the hydra. It's not rocket science: you kill the bastard.

You keep on chopping off those damn heads until the ----er just lies down and quits. Or better yet, you get some clever Greek to equip you with a stock of grenades made of Greek Fire, and you just lob one straight down one or all of its throats and Kaboombah! Problem solved.

Shee. What's so tough to figure out?



~

Fr. Ted Colleton: a genuine hero

A lion. A hero.

There are some people who really are "great". I was privileged to have met and spoken with him, and received his encouragement, several times when I worked in Toronto.

Requiescat in pace.



~

I guess it's really not something you see every day in London

Update: This just in via FB from Fr. Hugh (the gentleman in white)

At Twickenham (where the pic was taken) I left early because I had to get back for a requiem. As I left, the protestors screamed at me and were pretty ugly. the moment was redeemed by an African nun in blue appearing out of nowhere and giving them all the "V" sign. I was soooooooooooooooo proud!

Ah yes, the Peace n' Tolerance crowd distinguishing themselves by their good manners and intelligent commentary.

The nun, btw, is a Visitation sister from this monastery.



~

I knew this little old lady when I was growing up. In fact, I knew a whole bunch of them. They were every bit as great as this, and showed me how you are supposed to be in life. I want to be this little old lady when I grow up.

Domestic Graces

What should people do with their spare time?

Watch TV?

Ah, no. I don't think so.

This is what Real People do.

These lovely things were made for my friend Hilary who lives in Rome. It gets cold there, who knew? It’s a trellis pattern around the cuff and up the front and a moss stitch across the palms.

the money quote is at exactly 4:12

And "praise awlmahty Gahd" for Pastor James David Manning.

Ay-men






H/T to the Wild One