Mike Humfreville
Super Nomad
Posts: 1148
Registered: 8-26-2003
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Haves and Have Nots
We moved recently, emptied a huge house, barn and recreation area into trucks and hauled the contents off, then filled three 40? roll-off dumpsters
with the remnants, the unwanted residuals of a lifetimes? collecting. The boys at the dump were, I?m sure, well pleased with the contents of our
castoff?s, could use them or sell them of recycle them as we had no time to consider that. We were busy working to maintain a frantic lifestyle.
We then filled up our new home with furniture and clothes. The fellow moving out of our new house had a pile of junk as large as ours had been. The
heap of throwaways included desks, construction equipment for which the previous owner had no use, a boat trailer, and mucho recyclable heavy metal.
He hired an independent contractor to remove the stuff. I negotiated with the same fellow to haul off all my moving boxes, knowing that they, also,
were recyclable.
As my family lives in an agricultural area not too far from our border with Mexico, and because most of the labor-oriented jobs in our area are held
by local Hispanics, I figure the bulk of our cast offs will find their way south. It?s not that they can?t get new ones like we can, rather that they
have more insight into the processes of repair and more patience then many of us gringos do.
I hope they are the recipients of these items as that will make a small dent in the debt I owe to our neighbors in Baja. I owe them big time for the
things I have learned there that have changed my life. They have taught me, not through formal lessons or tutorial processes, but by example, to
appreciate simple pleasures and time.
Simple pleasures: a quiet sunset over tranquil waters; birds working an afternoon breeze; buzzards facing into the wind perched atop cardon; a boat
rolling gently on the shore nestled amidst the calm ripples of a quiet cove; a visit with a friend from a small village; a storm that confines my
family and offers no escape from each other for a too-brief period; a tiny mouse that I have time to pay unwanted attention to; a campfire where I can
share space and time with those I care to know more of; times of too much grog and little sleep; time to reflect over the many years of my life that
have flown too quickly by with little notice; a removal from the hectic pace of one of my chosen cultures where I have no time for?time: time to
consider what it would be like if I weren?t so competitive and didn?t need a bigger house; time to evaluate the need of a new car every other year or
so, and dinner at world class restaurants once a week and extended lunches with work pals; time to relax and think deeply about what I really want for
the future and plan a strategy for obtaining it.
Time. That?s what I think it?s all about. Most of that commodity is found south of our border. Could you please pass a little north?
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Skeet/Loreto
Ultra Nomad
Posts: 4709
Registered: 9-2-2003
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Mike: thanks for you insight!
"Waste Not, Want Not!"
Skeet/Loreto
"In God I Trust'
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Markitos
Nomad
Posts: 218
Registered: 1-4-2004
Location: San Diego/La Paz
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Mood: let me check
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No Kidding Mike. We are raised here to GET STUFF! and ya never have enough STUFF. Then ya come to find out the realy good STUFF is free. Go figure,30
years of getting STUFF and finding out ya dont need it? huh. Live simply simply live. I learned that in Baja.
All that wonder are not lost
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wilderone
Ultra Nomad
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Actually, there are pink sunrises, and golden sunsets here in Southern California. The ocean waves roll upon the shores, then recede, day in and day
out; birds, in a hundred species, are everywhere, providing a sweet melody, a moment's entertainment; wildflowers - everywhere -- if you're looking --
are reminders of life's perennial miracles. The smallest backyard provides a simple barbeque venue with friends and family. It's all there - all the
time - even in the United States -- even in America's seventh largest city. Life is what you make it. The regret comes after realizing you're
learned life's lessons too late.
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Herb
Nomad
Posts: 202
Registered: 11-6-2003
Location: Torrance, CA
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| Quote: | Originally posted by wilderone
Actually, there are pink sunrises, and golden sunsets here in Southern California. |
Yes, but stop to admire them for too long in a nice beach neighboorhood and the police will want to question you because that would be considered
"suspicious behavior" here. 
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Oso
Ultra Nomad
Posts: 2637
Registered: 8-29-2003
Location: on da border
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Mood: wait and see
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Use it up
Wear it out
Make it do
Do without
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movinguy
Nomad
Posts: 257
Registered: 3-19-2004
Location: Chula Vista, CA and Tijuana, MX
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Interesting book out a few years ago called Affluenza - the disease we contract in our pursuit of more and more STUFF. A little wacky in parts but an
interesting read nonetheless . . .
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Packoderm
Super Nomad
Posts: 2116
Registered: 11-7-2002
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I know this is long, but its worth it if you take the time to read all of it. I think it sums things up pretty well. (I didn't write it.)
Work : Essays : Some Thoughts on the Common Toad by George Orwell
(1946)
Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the snowdrop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring after his own fashion,
which is to emerge from a hole in the ground, where he has lain buried since the previous autumn, and crawl as rapidly as possible towards the nearest
suitable patch of water. Something - some kind of shudder in the earth, or perhaps merely a rise of a few degrees in the temperature - has told him
that it is time to wake up: though a few toads appear to sleep the clock round and miss out a year from time to time - at any rate, I have more than
once dug them up, alive and apparently well, in the middle of the summer.
At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are
languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes look abnormally large. This allows one to notice, what one might not at another
time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature. It is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-coloured
semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet-rings, and which I think is called a chrysoberyl.
For a few days after getting into the water the toad concentrates on building up his strength by eating small insects. Presently he has swollen to his
normal size again, and then he hoes through a phase of intense sexiness. All he knows, at least if he is a male toad, is that he wants to get his arms
round something, and if you offer him a stick, or even your finger, he will cling to it with surprising strength and take a long time to discover that
it is not a female toad. Frequently one comes upon shapeless masses of ten or twenty toads rolling over and over in the water, one clinging to another
without distinction of sex. By degrees, however, they sort themselves out into couples, with the male duly sitting on the female's back. You can now
distinguish males from females, because the male is smaller, darker and sits on top, with his arms tightly clasped round the female's neck. After a
day or two the spawn is laid in long strings which wind themselves in and out of the reeds and soon become invisible. A few more weeks, and the water
is alive with masses of tiny tadpoles which rapidly grow larger, sprout hind-legs, then forelegs, then shed their tails: and finally, about the middle
of the summer, the new generation of toads, smaller than one's thumb-nail but perfect in every particular, crawl out of the water to begin the game
anew.
I mention the spawning of the toads because it is one of the phenomena of spring which most deeply appeal to me, and because the toad, unlike the
skylark and the primrose, has never had much of a boost from poets. But I am aware that many people do not like reptiles or amphibians, and I am not
suggesting that in order to enjoy the spring you have to take an interest in toads. There are also the crocus, the missel-thrush, the cuckoo, the
blackthorn, etc. The point is that the pleasures of spring are available to everybody, and cost nothing. Even in the most sordid street the coming of
spring will register itself by some sign or other, if it is only a brighter blue between the chimney pots or the vivid green of an elder sprouting on
a blitzed site. Indeed it is remarkable how Nature goes on existing unofficially, as it were, in the very heart of London. I have seen a kestrel
flying over the Deptford gasworks, and I have heard a first-rate performance by a blackbird in the Euston Road. There must be some hundreds of
thousands, if not millions, of birds living inside the four-mile radius, and it is rather a pleasing thought that none of them pays a halfpenny of
rent.
As for spring, not even the narrow and gloomy streets round the Bank of England are quite able to exclude it. It comes seeping in everywhere, like one
of those new poison gases which pass through all filters. The spring is commonly referred to as `a miracle', and during the past five or six years
this worn-out figure of speech has taken on a new lease of life. After the sorts of winters we have had to endure recently, the spring does seem
miraculous, because it has become gradually harder and harder to believe that it is actually going to happen. Every February since 1940 I have found
myself thinking that this time winter is going to be permanent. But Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead at about the same moment.
Suddenly, towards the end of March, the miracle happens and the decaying slum in which I live is transfigured. Down in the square the sooty privets
have turned bright green, the leaves are thickening on the chestnut trees, the daffodils are out, the wallflowers are budding, the policeman's tunic
looks positively a pleasant shade of blue, the fishmonger greets his customers with a smile, and even the sparrows are quite a different colour,
having felt the balminess of the air and nerved themselves to take a bath, their first since last September.
Is it wicked to take a pleasure in spring and other seasonal changes? To put it more precisely, is it politically reprehensible, while we are all
groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently more worth living
because of a blackbird's song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenomenon which does not cost money and does not have what the
editors of left-wing newspapers call a class angle? There is not doubt that many people think so. I know by experience that a favourable reference to
`Nature' in one of my articles is liable to bring me abusive letters, and though the key-word in these letters is usually `sentimental', two ideas
seem to be mixed up in them. One is that any pleasure in the actual process of life encourages a sort of political quietism. People, so the thought
runs, ought to be discontented, and it is our job to multiply our wants and not simply to increase our enjoyment of the things we have already. The
other idea is that this is the age of machines and that to dislike the machine, or even to want to limit its domination, is backward-looking,
reactionary and slightly ridiculous. This is often backed up by the statement that a love of Nature is a foible of urbanized people who have no notion
what Nature is really like. Those who really have to deal with the soil, so it is argued, do not love the soil, and do not take the faintest interest
in birds or flowers, except from a strictly utilitarian point of view. To love the country one must live in the town, merely taking an occasional
week-end ramble at the warmer times of year.
This last idea is demonstrably false. Medieval literature, for instance, including the popular ballads, is full of an almost Georgian enthusiasm for
Nature, and the art of agricultural peoples such as the Chinese and Japanese centre always round trees, birds, flowers, rivers, mountains. The other
idea seems to me to be wrong in a subtler way. Certainly we ought to be discontented, we ought not simply to find out ways of making the best of a bad
job, and yet if we kill all pleasure in the actual process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves? If a man cannot enjoy the
return of spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine will give him? I have always
suspected that if our economic and political problems are ever really solved, life will become simpler instead of more complex, and that the sort of
pleasure one gets from finding the first primrose will loom larger than the sort of pleasure one gets from eating an ice to the tune of a Wurlitzer. I
think that by retaining one's childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and - to return to my first instance - toads, one makes a
peaceful and decent future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one
merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.
At any rate, spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can't stop you enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time have I stood
watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who as you are not
actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the
police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the
dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.
[Edited on 11/21/2003 by Packoderm]
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Mike Humfreville
Super Nomad
Posts: 1148
Registered: 8-26-2003
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Worlds turning on crusted axes...
Just read a few of Don Jorge's posts here and sense his love for the dirt and the processes of regeneration that occur in Springtime. Thanks Pack,
good reading.
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Baja Bernie
`Normal` Nomad Correspondent
Posts: 2962
Registered: 8-31-2003
Location: Sunset Beach
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Mood: Just dancing through life
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Wilderone
At the risk of offending those who think that life ONLY exist in Baja. You are right on life is where you find it and how you deal with it. There
are many, many places in this good old US of A where you can still stop and view nature without being harrassed. Talk to the surfers who are
constantly robbed and harrassed in Baja just because they have boards sticking out of their vehicles before they stop to taste the waves and smile at
the sunset.
Life and fun are where you 'make' it.
I love Baja with all my heart but it is not really the only place to be. It was before all of the gringo's started trying to take over. As David
would say, VIVA BAJA and I would add VIVA ESTADOS UNIDOS.
Just got an email from a friend with a house down there and it told of their home being demolished in their absence!!
That was the brief part of the mesage--the rest read about the kid who we have been supporting because he has lucemia (to tired to look it up) and his
curley hair after so many years of treatment. They talked about the waves, the sun, and the wonder. They enjoyed life WHERE they found it. As I
believe we all should.
Hell!,
Most of us still sneak back into the US for the money and security.
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Gypsy Jan
Ultra Nomad
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Mood: Depends on which way the wind is blowing
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Eloquent & interesting, who wrote this?
Please give an attribution.
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Gypsy Jan
Ultra Nomad
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Registered: 1-27-2004
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Mood: Depends on which way the wind is blowing
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Duh!
BB Rules of Etiquette #19.
When poster is impaired and woozy from a bad cold, with a stuffed nose and sore throat, always, always scroll back to the top of the section just to
see if your question is already answered to avoid embarrassing yourself online 
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Mike Humfreville
Super Nomad
Posts: 1148
Registered: 8-26-2003
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Your question...
confused me too, but I find myself confused more and more of the time...Hope you feel better soon
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Packoderm
Super Nomad
Posts: 2116
Registered: 11-7-2002
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If you're talking about the attribution on my post, I edited it in after reading your request for one. I was hoping people would guess who wrote it.
It is from "Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays." Many of the essays are online. I especially like the essays "Shooting an Elephant" and "Politics
and the English Language." Heck, I like 'em all.
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