In The Beginning...

For many years, I have had the feeling that I have something to say but that I don't have a framework for structuring the story; a sense that I am holding the pieces of something, but that I don't know what it is or how I can even begin to put it together. My home, education, and work lives have involved so many fits and starts that I now don't know how any of it relates to any other part. As I stated elsewhere, I occasionally begin something - a book or learning a new task - and I feel as though it is a constellation in the universe that I want to explore, but usually it fades away before I can figure out how it relates to the larger picture.

This blog is my attempt to stop that from happening.

I believe that most of my efforts have been hampered by a desire to rough out the larger picture before I start on the details. I try to start with a single paragraph that explains how archeology and fantasy fiction both relate intrinsically to gardening, painting, making jewelry, the destruction of the environment, self-reliance, local consumption, the importance of community, mythology, craft and art and the whole thing shatters to splinters - too flimsy a structure to support its own weight.

But I still believe that all these topics and ideas that I love - the things that excite and inspire me - do hold together. And that they can have meaning and relevance when viewed and discussed as a whole. And so I keep coming back to try and patch all those splinters together.

Here, I will attempt to take things a bit differently by approaching these topics from a practical perspective. There are skills that I would like to acquire that are, I believe, relevant to all these topics. They fit into the larger whole.

For various reasons (that I intend for a whole different blog post - or, more likely, several posts) there is a category of skills that have been a part of human existence for a healthy chunk of the time humans have existed, and I don't know how to do them. These can be concisely defined as skills needed to survive.

As the recipient of a fantastic education that focused on the theoretical at the expense of the practical, I am a fully grown, intelligent adult that, if left to my own devices, could not create my own food, clothing, or shelter. I cannot, at present, see to my own hierarchy of needs. Which isn't astounding, given the fact that I was raised in modern American suburbia - a lot of the people who are reading this post probably are, to varying degrees, in the same boat with me. A boat we didn't construct and probably couldn't replicate, even if we had the necessary tools and materials. Because, presently, we don't usually make boats (we buy them from China) any more than we create the culture in which we are raised. But we can probably learn to build boats - if we are interested - and we can work to make changes that will impact the culture that exists going forward.

Or, at least, that's my intention here.

In order to do this, I have set forth a couple of goals.

First Goal: set forth to learn some skills.

I've spent some time pondering both which skills I want to learn and the criteria that I should use to consider them learned. With regard to the latter, I am thinking that I want to attain a level of proficiency that would allow me to know how to do things on my own. For example, if one day life presents me with a large quantity of produce that needs to be preserved, I'll know the steps that I need to take to go about preserving that food. Will I sometimes ask a friend to join me? Yes. Will I need to search a book or the internet for a new recipe? Yes. I don't intend for this to be a solitary journey and I don't want to send time memorizing ratios of sugar to fruit. I just want to know, in my own mind, that I have the skills required to go about the task and that, if necessary, I could preserve whatever food I need to see me through the winter, or teach someone else to do it.

Will I ever need to do that? Probably not. Maybe. Perhaps it sounds crazy to even think that, one day, there won't be a grocery store from which I can buy a jar of Smucker's jelly. Sitting on the porch of the library, typing this for friends across the country using free wireless access, it does sound crazy. But, as the archeological record shows again and again, anything that isn't sustainable is headed for collapse. Sort of a dismal thought... but enough to justify the idea that learning to can some tomatoes might not hurt.

Second Goal: WRITE ABOUT IT!

In writing the above paragraph about preserving fruit, I managed to distract myself on two topics that made me think "Oh, I should stop what I'm doing and go research this for a while!" Which is the sort of distractible person I am. It's not that they aren't interesting topics (the first being kimchee and my family's history in Korea and the second being the collapse of cultures as reflected in the archeological record), and it's not that they aren't pertinent to the overall thesis that I am getting at here. It's just that I need to take things one at a time. To decide that I will talk about kimchee and family history (and, now that I think about it, how these relate to the fact that everything steady and stable that a family considers their life can be whipped out from underneath them in a moment) in the blog post where I actually describe making the kimchee and becoming proficient in that task. Which I've just added to my list.

I don't know how other people's minds work - but in mine, everything exists within a web that ties it to something else. Or, at least, it should be a web. A lot of times the various connections end up more closely resembling a Gordian knot. Hopefully, this blog will be the sword I need to slice through it.

I am, at present, working on setting up the wide variety of tasks that I want to learn. I know that I want to focus closely on skills that will teach me the basics of food, clothing, and shelter. If you have skills you'd like to suggest, or ways to go about learning them, I'm all ears. And I'd also appreciate whatever else you have to say about this project. I am hoping to have at least a blog post a week: if I fall below that, please hound me.