Quaint
I had no agreements with my new housemate that he would contribute to heating costs.
I offered him a flat rate for a furnished room.
Yet, since it got cold outside, he's been hauling and chopping wood, starting and tending the fire, and my heating bill is $200 less than this time last year.
Recently a city slicker from SF was adoring the fire in our home, and made a comment about chopping wood as if it's a quaint and distant fantasy.
But it's LABOR which is VALUE; it is a baser form of currency than money.
It is contribution and collaboration.
Truly, I had no interest in renting out a room.
I wanted to make a home with a collaborator who will eat my food and grow me food and wash my dishes and leave his for me and keep the fires burning.
I don't want to cook for one, I wasn't even trained for that; I was trained to cook for a family.
He grew up with the scarcity of money which is the reality of labor, and with true appreciation for this privilege.
We live a quaint reality, he and I. We discussed it on our walk to the library that same day our fire struck the city boy as cute.
I could just about lose my mind with the fact that I can walk to the library. Seriously. In the January sunshine I walk out my door and go to a perfect small town library? How does it get better than this?
Same thing with the forest. I stare into the greenery, goldened with sunlight and think "I LIVE HERE. I WALKED HERE."
It is so simple, what pleases me. Home to cook meals for myself and the ones I love. Home close to all the things, with people stopping by throughout the days. Home in nature, with a woodstove burning and something hot in the crock pot. I write and think and be with people all day, and when someone asks me what I do for a living I almost always in a panic think "Ohmigod nothing. Ohmigod I'm unemployed. Holy shit I forgot to get a job!" and then I think "you pay the bills every month. You are paying lots of bills, you must be working somehow..."
Ah, it's funny in here, inside this consciousness, especially as I see so closely the abstractions of reality in which many of my fellow humans are bound.
As if only money can keep a house warm.
As if a theme park is required to entertain a child when there's a forest and a creek just down the road.
As if food comes from a store, or an app! As if it grows inside that plastic bag, as if it's safer because it's machine-touched.
I've seen the abstraction closely because I have lived into it myself. Attempting to invest in it left my soul shredded; it took years for reality to land once again for me, and I will continue to awaken to it for the rest of my life, to be sure.
Burning something someone harvested keeps a house warm.
Unbothered children create in the world, especially in nature.
Food comes from the land, from nature, including humans who decided to grow it and humans who were careless with their leftovers. Food involves death and breeding. Food decays and new food thrives on that decay.
Life is fertile, and that is why there is nothing to save. Why save it? Spend it now, life is always growing more, if you don't use it, it will just get eaten by something else.
And if I find myself craving something I can't eat, something that doesn't decay, something that doesn't interface me with life as I'm living it, well, that would simply not be very quaint, now, would it?
