Moving Right Along

I've been feeling a lot of anxiety lately. Oh, there are the obvious things - the looming deadline, the endless winter, the kids being sick, work, all the other commitments. But there's been something else, something that's really been weighing on my spirit. I just couldn't figure out what it was.

On Saturday, I went to a writer's workshop where we were asked to list, for ten minutes, any and all questions that popped into our heads. We then wrote on one of our questions for ten minutes.

My question, of course, was "Why am I feeling so anxious?" And I think I got my answer.

I've been spending the better part of my life engrossed in intellectual pursuits. I like to read, to write, to ponder. That was how I always defined myself, how I evaluated my worth - by the thinking I did. As I entered parenthood, I thought things could continue that way. If I read all the right books, had the right ideas, I would be a good parent.

What I found, though, was that I was spending a lot of time asking my kids to wait while I was thinking, reading, and researching about parenting. How the irony escaped me I don't know, but there it was - I was spending so much time thinking about parenting that I wasn't actually doing as much parenting as I would like.

I've decided to get out of my head and into my life - or to take a step towards that goal, at least. I'll be leaving this blog behind and moving on to a new one, more in line with my new goals for myself and my vision for my family. Ahimsa Mama will be more about what the day-to-day of Humane Parenting looks like, and less about lofty philosophizing about it. Sometimes there will be big issues to discuss, but mostly I am going to set the goal of sharing how I am trying to do it instead of how I think about it.

Check it out, please.

Homeland Security

As more time goes on and I become more interested in what it means to parent in a humane, sustainable way, the more I find myself turning inward towards my family, my community, my home and myself. This is not to say that I no longer am interested in global issues - indeed, the opposite is the case. But whereas I used to feel like one had to do something BIG to be doing anything worthwhile, I am starting to see more and more how personal action is the true road, at least for most people, toward real and lasting sustainability. There are some people, to be sure, who have a larger role to play. For me, though, I am energized by finding ways to affect the world from my one little corner of it.

A recent post on the No Impact Man blog echoes my recent thoughts on the subject.

The problem is, that when the economic tide goes out, the corporations
shrink and--by a variety of mechanisms including layoffs and plunging stock
prices--so do the benefits our relationships with them offer. Because the
relationship between the corporation and the individual is entirely fiduciary,
loyalty and longstanding relationships don't really factor. A decision at
far-away head office suddenly decimates an entire community.

Meanwhile, because we have invested so much in the relationships
with corporations, the other relationships [with family, friends,
religion, the needy or government] are weakened, which means that they
can't provide sustenance when the corporate bond breaks. Why would neighbors
help neighbors when they barely even know each other?

So what if, instead of investing government money only in corporations
to bolster that bond, President Obama also invested in strengthening local
community and familial relationships? Suppose he invested in local farming and
local business and general strengthening of bonds between people at the
proximate level?

If he did that, when the crises came, and the corporations shrunk,
wouldn't that mean that we might have the relationship with family, friends and
local business that allowed us to rely on each other? Wouldn't that mean, too,
that even if the boom money went away, we would still have the enduring
satisfaction and support of a strong community?

I often think that the key to the sustainability of the planet as well as each person and family is learning to live close to home in all facets of our lives. I am gratified to think about the ways in which I have become, and continue to become, more self-sufficient. I also am grateful for the community that I have been able to build with family and friends, and I know that in tough times we will continue to support each other, share our resources, and make things work. I'm not sure if this is anti-globalism, or anti-capitalism, but it is definitely pro-family, pro-community, and pro-love!

Ahimsa Mama

I am feeling really drawn to the idea of "ahimsa", as described by Gandhi:

"Without a direct active expression of it, non-violence to my mind is
meaningless. It is the greatest and the activist force in the
world."

So it is not just love, but the active, deliberate expression of love. It is not only acting lovingly, but choosing not to support acts of non-love and violence.

Isn't this at the heart of what Humane Parenting is all about, really? We are talking about being consciously, purposefully loving to our children and families, to our friends and community members. But we are also talking about being consciously, purposefully loving on a global scale by withdrawing our support from things that are not in accord with this ideal. We are talking about withdrawing our support (dollars) from exploitative food production, from sweatshop labor, from earth-destroying enterprises, from greedy businesses, from consumption-driven media. We are talking about speaking against these things, and helping others to learn about them so that they, too, can withdraw their support.

For Gandhi, this meant different things than it does for us, today. He may have chosen to disobey unjust laws, to make his own salt. For us, in a culture that revolves around the almighty dollar, one of the most powerful ways we can make change is by changing the way we use our Currency. We can choose to eat differently, buy differently, live differently, parent differently. We can buy local food instead of food grown by multinational conglomerates. We can go outside and hike instead of watching hundreds of commercials for plastic toys filled with PBAs and produced in sweatshops before being shipped thousands of miles to our local box store that pays its employees sub-living wages and does not offer benefits.

And when someone asks us why we do what we do (or don't do), we can refrain from judging what they do and how they live, and simply explain that we are trying to be loving towards animals/the Earth/poor laborers in third-world countries/unskilled workers in our communities.