Beautiful Living

Tonya at Plain and Joyful Living has a post up today entitled Vision.  She relates how her family's decision to live simply in rural Vermont has meant coming to terms with the fact that not everything on the homestead is beautiful.  Money to landscape nicely, haul away rubble from building projects, or repair the barn is not usually available, so they live with visions of future beauty among the not-so-beautiful parts, relying on the work of their hands and Providence.  This passage exemplifies her can-do spirit, I think:

I didn't want to look at those big ugly concrete blocks, however, so I am in the process of building a branch fence to put right in front of them. I will plant sweet peas in front of the fence and I can envision the beautiful flowers and green vines climbing over the fence this summer. I piled up rocks around the well head as a worked in the garden. There was trash to remove. I found some flat rocks to add to our entryway walkway. (The chickens enjoyed finding insects and worms while we were cleaning up!)

After reading (and admiring) her post, I found my thoughts taking a tangent on the role of consumerism in our conception of beauty and ugliness.  Beauty -- that is, the orderly, manufactured beauty that requires purchasing things -- is lifted up in our culture as a key to a happy, meaningful life.  This is a marketing ploy, of course, but it's wielded not only by mainstream corporate interests (which I am fairly successful at ignoring), but also by interests which are much more alluring to me. I'm invited to furnish my home with beautiful organic products, to purchase aesthetically-pleasing, artisan-made toys, tools and clothing that support local, independent manufacturers and merchants. (I almost feel guilty NOT buying them.)  I could landscape my yard with native vegetation and pave my ugly mud driveway with permeable concrete -- as beautiful as it is environmentally friendly!  My home really should have bamboo or cork floors (gorgeous!) instead of the dirty, undoubtedly toxic carpet we live with, shouldn't it?  Even at my co-operatively owned grocery, special products for beautiful sustainable living abound, strangly tempting even when I don't really need them. Hand-thrown pottery with eco-friendly glaze, or my grandmother's hand-me-down 1970's Corelle? Hmmm... (Actually, that one's a no-brainer with kids, and we could never afford the pottery anyway, but you get the idea.)

Frankly, waging this constant internal battle to resist these messages can be exhausting.  Marketers -- even ones who pay their office cleaning crew a living wage -- are clever, clever, clever.  They can make me forget what is truly beautiful in my life, and that's a shame on me, as much as them. 

On my best days, I feel good about how we are resisting consumerism in favor of other, more meaningful life experiences.  I can catch Tonya's vision and see that we are working toward a different kind of beauty in our lives, a kind of unkempt, wild beauty of gardens and fruit trees, of family togetherness and honey bees.  On my worst days, I feel like I'm not even doing a good job with the meaningful life experiences part, and I really just want some matching furniture.

October 2009

It's been a while since I've posted anything here. I've been wanting to put up something of substance, but honestly, my brain hasn't been ruminating on much that is original lately. I've been getting into the homeschooling routine for this year, finishing up the garden (still don't have the garlic planted yet), running to sports practices and games. I guess all of that external activity is not good for introspection and reflection. I still think about things, but mostly they are things that are brought to my mind externally -- from reading or hearing a news item or someone else's thoughts about a subject. I'm not reflecting long enough to form many  new or interesting ideas of my own. This doesn't feel bad or wrong; it's just where I am right now. As we head into November and the natural world goes dead and dark, perhaps I will be able to turn inward and find something worth writing about. In the mean time, here are some scenes from our house in October. Missing are pictures of Alexander's flag football. I really wish I had some, because 7 year old football players are super cute. :o) I think all of the recent pictures of Alexander are on Firmin's iPhone and I don't know how to download them. My own hit-or-miss shots with the real camera will have to do:

This is a typical mid-afternoon scene in the living room. The older kids are off playing elsewhere -- perhaps outside or on the computer -- having finished their school work for the day. I'm in the kitchen. Ethan has finished his nap, had a little Mommy time, and will play contentedly by himself for quite a while. What you can't get from the picture is the background sound track: The Wiggles, most definitely!


Firmin has always loved spending special one-on-one time at the table with the kids while they are little. I think Ethan looks especially like Firmin in this photo. He always has, but this picture captures a more mature face than Ethan usually exhibits, so the similarity stands out all the more. Ethan usually looks much more toddler-ish -- more like this:

Friend Ann washing some of the 200 chairs stored in our garage for eventual use in the new Meetinghouse. Between the grime from their previous life and the dust from being in our garage for a year, the cleaning crew had their jobs cut out for them!

Even hard work is fun if you get to use a power washer!

Brianna's bookshelf. (Found this on the camera -- she must have taken it.) The top shelf is her "stack" -- the books she is planning to read, aranged in the order she plans to read them. Most of the stack is composed of library books. The bottom shelf is a selection of books that she owns. This stack is average to small. Since this picture was taken, we've been back to the library. Her current stack is larger than usual and fills the top shelf completely!