Abundance is everywhere. We just have to open to it. It's found in your "time to eat sunflower seeds and watch the river, time to think about what it means to be a person, and what it means to be free."
I have just been sitting here at my desk in the early morning, looking at an abundance of stars sprinkled above me. I am so filled up. It's just taking the time to pause and notice isn't it.
Thank you so much, Jo! And it really is. I think that every year when people start posting online looking for anyone to come pick their plum trees ...
It's been overcast here for well over a week now, which isn't abnormal for winter, but your comment on watching the stars in the morning made me miss them!
How gorgeous! And thank you for drawing my mind to that part of this gorgeous planet. I've never been to New Zealand, though did live in Australia for a couple years (Sydney, for my husband's job over 20 years ago). Waving at you from the frozen lands!
Lemme get this out of the way: This is the first time I hear Abdullah Öcalan pronunciation in English. To us in Arabic it's more like "Oujalan". It's been ages since I heard his name.
I loved reading this and I sympathize with it a lot. I was listening to Barry Schwartz talk about how 'too many choices' isn't really good for us, and I see this in the American life as an outsider (https://behavioralscientist.org/is-having-too-many-choices-versus-too-few-really-the-greater-problem-for-consumers/). Everything has reviews, everything has 8-9 variations, every pair of running shoes is compared to 5 others, and you hear YouTubers talk about how 'the material in the tongue is not as comfortable as the other shoes, but the padding is more plush' and we're left to wonder and get paralyzed. I also see this with my New Yorker wife, who wants to take the subway in such an optimized way that she wants to align three trains so she can get off one, and not wait 4-5 minutes for the next one, all while forgetting the 'abundance' of trains coming and going, if we're willing to extend our space a bit more.
From our muslim tradition, we have Umar Ibn Al-khattab (one of the most important figures in Islamic history) when he saw one of his friends buying meat on the regular, and he was quoted saying: "Is it so that whenever you desire, you buy?!" and it really became a sort of a maxim. I take this with me on almost everything, I sometimes refuse to buy things I want because I don't need, and have been trying to live with this distinction. It's true that we won't live the lives of sages, but if we can take glimpses of it, it's a welcome addition.
Thank you for writing this Antonia.
P.S. This came at the same time I was listening to this podcast about how 'optimization of our lives' isn't necessarily the best thing we can do. A tangent, but can be useful somehow.
Thank you so much for all of this! First off the pronunciation, of course. I looked for some videos of people saying his name online, but I think most of them were from Britain. I appreciate it. Someone introduced me to him earlier this year and The Sociology of Freedom sunk deep into me.
I keep reading that line about “the material in the tongue” of the shoe and the padding and literally it makes me dizzy. My spouse and I have a lot of disagreements about this, some of which even sound similar to your optimization of trains. My spouse loves choice, I think. He can look at all sorts of options of something, like a blanket or a car, and I have to keep reminding him that if I’m forced to consider every one of them I will not only continue to not care and also probably make the wrong choice, I’ll get very grumpy.
I will have to look up Umar Ibn Al-khattab. I just read a short article about him but there is obviously much to learn. That is a good line! I, too, often find myself refusing things I want but don’t need. If I look at the thing for long enough and examine the want, it tends to fade.
And wow, that interview hit me right in the center. One thing that bugs me when people talk about optimizing is that things fall apart! Everything decays. Reading that transcript made me feel exhausted for it all, but particularly this: “that's one of the consequences of optimizing is you destroy communities, you destroy individual people's lives, and none of those things get measured,” which is something very few people are really willing to talk about. The economist Kate Raworth talks about in most economics the one factor they’re unwilling to include in the supposedly closed supply-demand is the fact that it has to be plugged into an energy system—the rest of life on the planet.
I have a garage full of the things I canned this season and it definitely feels like abundance. I have the luxury of time on weekends--kids are grown and gone--so I can spend the whole day making jam or using my mandoline to slice things for pickling.
When we moved into this house I set out to turn the yard into food production and habitat--abundance for critters and birds as well as for my husband and me. On weekends we walk to the farmers' market in downtown (Olympia, WA), which also provides abundance. I'm buying food from the people who grew it. I'm fortunate to have a job that lets me afford housing in this kind of location and buying locally grown food that costs more than the big-box grocery store.
Some of the jars are full of food I grew: My tomatillo plants grew like they were auditioning for Little Shop of Horrors and I kept making salsa verde. I have bags of frozen tomatillos from the last pickings as the vines turned black with frost so there's more to come. I made green tomato chutney and zucchini chutney, hot pepper relish and fermented pepper mash.
Some of it is food I gleaned: wild blackberries grow everywhere here so I have seedless blackberry jam (worth the labor to smoosh out the seeds). I live a short bike ride away from pick-your-own blueberry farms, I grew elderberries, raspberries and tayberries so I have bumbleberry jam and more.
A primary source of abundance I can't recommend enough is Buy Nothing, for people who have a local chapter. You don't have to be on Facebook; there's an app. https://buynothingproject.org/. People ask and give freely and it's both community-building and anti-capitalism. A lot of what I pickled this year is zucchini and summer squash I got for the asking, and I turned some of it into a citrus jam (the zucchini just disappears and becomes the medium). I made fruit leather with plums from someone who said "please come pick! I can't use all these plums!" I got canning jars for the asking.
I live close to a friend who bought a 100-year-old farmhouse with a neglected apple orchard she's been bringing back. I help with the press and get jars of ciders, as well as getting to drink cold, fresh cider straight from the press while her dozens of chickens cluck under the trees. I save the tops and seeds of peppers in the freezer because the chickens love them, then I buy eggs from her, and it all feels so wonderfully circular.
I love reading all of this. The richness of your place and what grows there, and the time, comes through so clearly and I want to try the hot pepper relish. Did we have a conversation about tomatillos before? About how they make much better salsa than tomatoes?
Bumbleberry jam is the best. It sounds delightfully like something from Winnie the Pooh. I made a bunch the first year I ever made jam, in different combinations, and got to smile every time I pulled out a jar. And I agree about the seedless! A friend of ours mentioned a couple years ago that she loves raspberry jam but only if it's seedless, so I made some to be able to give her a jar, and loved the way the raspberry flavor comes through so purely. (Did we also have this conversation? I have Covid right now -- frustrating! I just got a booster last week! -- so my brain is very foggy, but I'm getting some deja vu.)
Our town is full of plus people ask others to pick. It's how I make all my fruit leather!
The cider, the seeds, the time with a close friend and a press, chickens and eggs and the solace of all that represents. I love it.
Oh, yes we did! I can't remember which post of yours but we talked about exchanging jams and jellies. I keep talking about my canning because this is my most productive year ever. I'll have to go back through my journal where I made notes about how much I produced and tally it all up. My husband is on a restricted diet so I try to make lots of zingy, flavorful spreads and pickles to jazz things up for him. I made things I've never made before: piccalilli, chowchow, eggplant caponata.
So sorry you have COVID! I've had a horrendous case of respiratory flu I brought home from a conference--sick for over a week now with a painful, racking cough that's like an abs workout nonstop, achey, dizzy, feverish, congested. Got tested Sunday ("fluvid" test for both flu and COVID in one swabbing) and it's definitely the flu, but it knocked me out. I haven't been sick in over 3 years and I have to say I didn't miss the experience one bit. I'll get my next COVID booster as soon as I can after I'm through this. I hope you recover quickly.
I hope you recover quickly, too! I haven't had the flu in years and really hope not to--it's even worse than Covid, if that's possible. And a cough like that is beyond exhausting.
For some reason I can never get enough of canning talk. Maybe it's like the early years of parenting in particular, and it's kind of all-absorbing and changing on a daily basis and it takes up all different parts of the mind and also there are non-stop problem-solving iterations going on. I'm glad you have an opportunity to try some new things! My efforts were reduced this year BUT we have a lot of last year's pickles and so on still to get through. Still wish we could exchange the bounty, especially the Pooh-ish jams!
I am utterly overwhelmed by consumer choices and I haven’t stepped foot in a grocery store in a few years - online pickup is a pandemic holdover for me. My spouse does our Costco run because I can’t stand the “abundance.”
The big Amazon delivery truck drives through my neighborhood regularly and unfortunately I haven’t been able to break up with it yet completely.
When you write about hunting my first thought is - how do you find the time? For sitting for hours and maybe not catching anything at all? How do we have so many “convenient” choices, and yet still have so little time. Convenience meals and meal kits and one-day delivery and yet I still don’t feel any margin in my life for preserving food or like you said - everyone aligning their schedules for communal gatherings and care. 💔
My kids are 13 and 16, and I honestly thought this would be the year I really had more time for these things, but it turns out I have less. I don’t need to go into it deeply, but the emotional and mentals needs of teens compared to the infant/toddler years took me by surprise. I haven’t been out nearly as much as usual. Plus I’ve been crazy tired the last year or so and don’t have as much energy as I’d like.
The main reason I can make the time for these things is, I think, that I freelance and wedge my works hours in everywhere possible and around other priorities. When the kids were very little I worked late at night and early in the mornings, sometimes all night, while they slept. But honestly I don’t think that would be at all possible without my spouse’s regular salary + benefits job. That takes a certain amount of pressure off, even though I often ruminate anxiously in the middle of the night over it all. AND I still wish I had a lot more time for these activities.
There are so many factors that shape the choices we have, including invisible ones. When we lived in New York my spouse commuted an hour each direction 5 days a week, and I spent almost as much time in the car getting to things like the grocery store or pediatrician. We don’t have that here because nearly everything (bar Costco) is within walking distance, including family and many friends. I might spend the same amount of time walking as I used to driving, but I’m also exercising, being outside, socializing a bit, thinking a lot, … you know, all the things walkability gives! And I try to shape spending time with friends and the kids on activities I also want to do, like pick huckleberries or simply walk around town.
I know I’m just repeating myself a million times, and I know you already know this: I deeply believe that infrastructure and other structures, many unseen and systemic, dictate and limit much of our choices.
I can’t go into stores, even grocery stores, much less bigger ones, without a list. I get overwhelmed and walk around in a daze. Frankly, Amazon’s website overwhelms me these days. I look at their home page and it feels like walking into Home Depot. And our Target has deteriorated. I used to get the kids’ clothes there but order them all online now. There isn’t really another choice.
Oh yes, I am just entering the tween/teen phase. It’s so hard!!
I hope you didn’t hear me asking in an accusatory way - I genuinely meant, how do we find time for these valuable skills & community building when capitalism appears to offers choices/freedom/abundance but somehow makes our time even more scarce.
I love seeing the ways you’ve adjusted your life to more align with your values and it inspires me to find small ways to do the same.
Oh, no, not at all! I was trying to answer with those ideas in mind—how do we find time when capitalism and colonialism take so much? We’ve had enough interactions and I’ve read enough of your own writing to assume conversations come from a place of good faith and compassion. :)
This is something I should probably write about more, but something you probably know since you read my book is that finding visible and invisible barriers is really, *really* important to me. When I write something like this, I probably spend more time than I need to thinking about how my particular life makes this particular time- or money-hungry activity possible.
I can talk all I want about how walking and community and being in nature are good for us, but I’m honestly tired of hearing people advised to do those things from people who never consider where people’s choices and opportunities have been stolen. (I will never forget Ariana Huffington writing a thing about how important getting good sleep is, especially for women—she founded and made a fortune off of Huffington Post, which does not pay writers! Classic.) I feel like it’s a paradigm shift to focus just as much on barriers as on what truly serves us. It’s literally why I wrote that book. I think it’s staying stuck in an old paradigm to perceive talking about barriers as pessimistic, which a lot of people have told me they find it. To me, it’s not focusing on the negative; it’s literally what you’re asking: *how* do we do these things? To answer that, we have to clearly see what’s stopping us. At least, that’s what I think. Only then can we fully dismantle it and replace it with something better.
One thing about the hunting for me is that I don’t do a lot of it. Big game (elk and deer) rifle season here is only about a month. I could do a ton more the rest of the year, archery and shoulder seasons and birds and other animals, but I don’t, partly because of the time commitment. The hours I carve out are pretty much only in November.
Oh good. After I reread my comment I wanted to be sure that didn’t come off the wrong way. 🩷
I tend to view pessimists as realists 😆 so I appreciate the honest assessment and desire to shift the paradigm. It is hard to talk about because it can feel so insurmountable but I’m here for it.
I know one thing stopping me is the amount of accumulated stuff and all of the maintenance it involves. I’m slowly trying to shift my mindset from “decluttering” to only keeping items that serve the large values of our family - time, togetherness, place, etc.
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I love all your writing and the thoughtful interactions of your comment section.
I totally sympathize. I ruminate over things I've written or said waaaaayyyy too much and for too long. Very annoying, these brains sometimes!
I'm so glad. I think of myself as more fatalist (tracking with the Russian-Jewish side -- Russians are well-known as fatalists), but sometimes I do have to step way back to consider whether I'm catastrophizing or being realistic. I'm prone to both! Considering worst-case scenarios always calms me down, though, an entire topic all on its own.
That shift from decluttering to thinking about what you want to keep is beautiful. I'd love to read more about that, if you write something longer on it. My spouse is an acquirer and I'm a purger (a source of mostly benign tension in our house, but sometimes more frustrating), but sometimes I have to stop and think about how much time we spend just disagreeing over "stuff." 😆
Thank you and likewise! I'm not sure I could handle writing online if there weren't dialogue involved. The internet's a hard place for my brain to deal with. It's these real conversations that make it worthwhile.
It is always a pleasure to read your words and to hear your voice.
The abundance I wish to acknowledge today is the abundance I carry inside. I love how I see the world, and the intimate connection that this seeing sometimes brings. I wouldn't trade it for all the consumer goods and services in the world. I am grateful.
One thing I often like to remind my father and stepmother if is how rich they are in loving grandchildren, which is probably one of the things they wanted most out of their lives.
Internal abundance is probably the one I wish for most people.
I have a small sense of that culture shock you describe still each time I head out to grocery shop on the weekends--so. much. stuff. so many people buying so much stuff. I return home thankful to not have to look at it all, but that is no way to effect change. oof. I realize I have to compartmentalize my reaction/feelings, almost like when I fly--to not think too much about it in the moment because the immense sense of overwhelm that comes with it. I love hearing about your gathering, preserving, efforts--it made me wish we could all hang out and just work on putting all those beautiful foods into jars and candy containers (ha--loved that) and appreciating that abundance too. Really loved this--and of learning more about your experience of the Soviet Union and that history. 💜
Ooh, that would be lovely! You, me, Swarna, some other people here, … that’s the thing about all the preserving and canning is it’s meant to be communal activity. I have done it all with friends a few times but we’re all busy with different schedules. One of my friends has a cider press and has a cider pressing party in her back yard every year, which is so fulfilling and fun. And yummy!
Your description of shopping on the weekends reminds me of the first time I did a huge “stuff” purge when my kids were little and finally grew out of baby necessities, clothes, and toys. I went to Goodwill with all those bags, feeling good about clearing out, and then saw the mountains of bags just like mine. Realizing how much pointless waste our society creates, and how much I myself contribute to it. “oof” is right.
Yes! That would be so fun--a roving foraging putting up food trip from Alaska to Montana and India. 🥰 And I feel the same about goodwill--I always have that feeling of leaving the house lighter until I get there and see just...all of it. It really is overwhelming and kind of unfathomable. Oy. 🤦🏻♀️
This essay has specifically hit close to home with my experiences of the world, growing up in a small town and later moving to a big city. You have brought so much to life—the contrast of what is marketed as abundance and what true abundance really looks like. The strangeness of the supermarket aisles still makes me uncomfortable—the paradox of choice—why? What’s the need for it? Is it another distraction? A way to keep society at large confined to be lost in decision-making for the simplest of tasks? What are we missing out on while choosing our cereals and yogurts?
My experience of abundance, true abundance, was that of summertime in a Himalayan town where I lived during my graduation years. Every houseyard consisted of several lychee trees which would bear uncountable lychees with sweet, juicy flesh. So many would drop overripe due to summer heat, go to waste because there were too many trees than there were people to eat them. I felt so full through those experiences, so satisfied and abundant at the miracle of life and Mother Earth.
My mouth is watering so much reading this. I've only tried a lychee a couple of times, and I'm sure it was nothing like what a fresh one would taste like. Your description makes me feel the warmth of that place, the flavor and smell. So beautiful.
The abundance of them sounds like what apple and chokecherry and serviceberry trees are like here in good years. The food bank organizes people to pick apples on public lands--and private where invited--to provide food and also keep from attracting so many bears! It's amazing to me that we're sold scarcity when nature provides so much.
The paradox of choice is so odd. Like we'll be happy with plenty of injustice as long as we can buy pasta in 10 different shapes? And yet at the same time so much true diversity in food has been lost or forgotten or taken. I read an article a couple of years ago about heritage rice varieties being cultivated -- might even have been in India, I wish I remembered where I read it! -- and the kinds of nutrition those older rice strains have and the varieties of flavor and people's relationship with the kinds of rice they grew and lived on ...
I have never seen chokecherry and serviceberry before you mentioned it and now having known what they are, all I can think of the spicy preserves I could turn them into!
We as a species are so obsessed with progress that sometimes it’s hard to see if we are evolving forwards or backwards because we try to embrace every new trend that sells variety under popular labels. What we don’t understand is that, it is those very ‘labels’ that make us complacent because we base our success on ease and convenience that we can afford.
I am going to find out and read about the rice strains with more nutritional value. It is such an interesting topic for me because rice is staple for Indians and it has been recently debated that the high proportions of carbohydrates in the newer rice strains is increasing the blood sugar levels.
Thank you for this info Nia and for this beautiful essay. Your garden looks absolutely stunning! 😍
Those berries could both be good with the right spice! Now I am craving spicy mango. And now I'm hungry! And now I'm determined to find that article. I don't think it was in Hakai. Unfortunately, I think it was in a batch of articles I judged for science writing awards when I used to do that. I'll have to think of good key words.
Thank you for being here, Swarna! You are one of the bright lights in my world. Reading your words makes me as happy as that sunflower did last summer. :)
You know what spicy mango goes best with? Steamed rice and lentil soup, with a side of potato fritters! And roasted sunflower seeds are the best snacks in this world! 🥹
There surely is an abundance of flies on a decomposing corpse, and a gustatory treat therein for those suited to such fare, like maggots and worms. More to commodification, production and consumption than meets the unmindful "I." Thanks, Nia.
Such beautiful writing! As for choice and abundance in supermarkets, I find that plays differently in every country I've lived in. And I remember when I lived in Mexico, a visit to the US would be a shock in terms of the abundance in supermarkets, even though I went to pretty well-stocked shops in Mexico City.
It really does play differently. And then there are weird differences. Like why in England is all the fresh produce plastic-wrapped? It startles me every time. And then there are all the U.S.'s food deserts, where there might be nothing but gas station grocery for long stretches.
A good question: I don't know why so much fresh food is wrapped in plastic in England, but it may have something to do with the fact that a lot of it is coming from other countries (where it's probably grown under plastic too). We used to have greengrocers in England who sold fresh, local produce without plastic, but they are mostly gone now, though we do have some farmers' markets that do the same. There's a lot of plastic on fresh food in Japan too (where I now live), though, again, there are places where it's left unpackaged.
I remember seeing photos of a stretch of Spanish coast that is wall to wall plastic greenhouses, growing produce for the English market. Even here, one of the farms I buy vegetables from the in summer is dependent on their huge plastic-covered hoop houses to start seeds early (our growing season is very short).
My son is so interested in Japanese culture and language! I don’t know where his interest came from, but I’m always glad to be able to pass real-life information on to him. :)
Washington Post wrote a food desert article a few years back and namechecked Musselshell county. The stats were based on grocery stores, of which there's only one in the county -- and when all 4730 residents wrote in to say they don't shop in the store, they have gardens and butcher at home and occasionally go to Billings -- they had to run a correction.
Congratulations on finishing the first chapter! That's a huge accomplishment. I'm psyched that you're bringing in social science, even if your mom's ranch might have been a perfect opener too. My fave lines:
"choice has little relationship to abundance, especially if the choice is a mirage created by advertising, packaging, and small tweaks in sugar and salt content. All I could say was that something felt wrong."
"No matter how much we read or study, it’s never a replacement for lived experience."
The second quote is profound yet simultaneously ironic to me, because in fact one space where abundance feels real is the endless possibility of things to read; the richness of thought and especially, shared thought. (And they tell me reading is abundant in Russia!). But mostly, I struggle with the patience, attention and care stuff. And inability to make choices.
Some other people here are citing books and films (I second the Renata Salecl recommendation by Charlotte!). For myself, the film your post immediately brought to mind, more than any, was that scene from Katherine Bigelow's Hurt Locker when Jeremy Renner returns from a long stint in Iraq (where he invested his entire identity as macho colonialist savior, while internalizing the suffering and deprivation around him), and the camera suddenly cuts from Iraq to him pushing a shopping cart in one of those mega-supermarkets, with piped-in music and obscenely stocked aisles. You can feel his shellshock and existential emptiness.
Thank you! Getting that first draft done always feels like a huge hump, but the real work is yet to come ...
I have never seen Hurt Locker but it sounds like I should. I can imagine that scene so vividly. It would bring it all home.
Every time you comment, you bring up something I hadn't thought of! I know we're all inundated with things to read and listen to, but the richness of *good* and thoughtful things is hard to deny. The richness right now of science fiction alone is incredible, and then there are sites like Aeon that always make me think more deeply about something. Reading is abundant in Russia! My dad has talked about how much people read when he was growing up, and how surprised he was when he moved to the U.S. and people didn't. But even the most recent times I've been there, people read a lot, like on the metro.
See also: my ever-growing to-read pile. One of the reasons this first chapter took me so long is that there is always another book related to land ownership coming in that I feel I should read first. I'll never get through them all and had to stop and start writing at some point.
Another beautiful piece of poetry in prose form. So glad I found you on substack and that we can actually chat in person. I heard a Greg Brown song last night about his grandma preserving the summer in a jar. Thats the beautiful work you have done
Nia -- do you know Renata Salecl's "The Tyranny of Choice"? It's been a couple of years since I read it, but I found it really useful ...
And your grocery store moment -- one of my favorite Robin Williams' scenes is the grocery store freakout in Moscow on the Hudson ...
This is beautiful. And I too, look at my freezer, and my pantry shelves, when I get a tiny bit panicky about Everything ... it's work, but it's work I too find comforting. Someone's going to have to know how to do these things, it might as well be us.
I don't know it! It sounds familiar, maybe something I heard of at the time but didn't pick up. My TBR pile is so huge 😂
I find it comforting, too. Can I just buy dried apples? Yes. Is that the world I want to build? No. Well, not unless they were picked and dried locally by someone else I'm paying for them!
The photos you chose are lovely… and food drying is something that has niggled at me for years… perhaps I shall begin? Abundance has the word dance in it and though it is not something I actually do, it stood out for some reason. Loved this essay. Thank you, as always… 🙏🏼
Thank you so much, Sean -- I love that you pointed out the word "dance." That makes me happy to think about!
Food drying is much easier than you'd think. I have an electric food dehydrator and use it for many things, but my mom and stepdad have one he built that I think just uses a light bulb or the sun. It's just a faster way of doing things you can do with sun or other sources of dry heat/air. Like when I'm doing mint I'll use the dehydrator if I need to be fast with a lot of it at once, but otherwise just leave it out on the counter. My most common use is yogurt (which works well for me at 110F for 14 hours), and plum fruit leather, which I puree and pour onto parchment paper. You have to use the times as guidelines because it varies according to elevation, air humidity, etc. But I have kept fruit leather stored in airtight containers, unrefrigerated, all winter long, and it's been fine. A second cousin in desert California used to make tons of fruit leather, which she just put out in the sun under mosquito netting, and then wrapped in plastic wrap and kept in the freezer.
Or you can find a tree and dry mushrooms the way that squirrels do. 😀🐿️
I followed your link to the Mocetti & Barone study on socioeconomic mobility (or lack of it) in Florence. Those results are stunning! Six hundred years later, people are making 5% more than expected just because of being descended from one of the richest families of the 1400s! Six hundred years of intergenerational effects. It boggles the mind—and seems intuitively right at the same time. I look forward to reading what you have to say about it. And I'm grateful for your mention of Abdullah Öcalan, who is new to me. Tracking his book down led me to Frank & Gills and others who are laying out something I'd come to on my own: that capital accumulation goes back 5000 years, not just 500. For some years I've been delving into how social-economic-worldview patterns today have eerie resonances with patterns laid down 5000 years ago, and these sources are going to be a huge help. Thanks for your work!
Isn't it?! I've been sitting on that study for a year. I kept trying to frame an essay around it but it felt too big each time, or didn't quite fit. The researchers, as you probably read, looked into class and profession, but in Europe property ownership has gone hand in hand with those things for hundreds of years.
I'm glad you followed those links! Öcalan was recommended to me sometime last winter, and reading him I felt my mind calm down because it felt like reading what I'd been thinking for a long time anyway. A validation, I guess. James C. Scott in "Against the Grain" and Karl Polanyi in "The Great Transformation" also address this idea through the advent of agriculture, which allowed food storage and hence taxation (of grain), but Öcalan's perspective is helpful because he spends so much time in ancient Samaria and also isn't at all Europe-centric (he's Kurdish).
The focus on beginning of agriculture has always felt off or at least incomplete to me, because there are plenty of ag styles in the world (esp Indigenous worlds) that didn't lead to capital accumulation. So it's agriculture plus something else. Something about property and borders, something about inheritance, something about centers & peripheries, something about normalizing hierarchy, some mindset about "me and mine." Just started Tyson Yunkaporta's Sand Talk, where he says the most destructive idea at the heart of it all is: "I am greater than you; you are less than me." People placing themselves above others and above the land, he says, is a narcissistic thought pattern that Aboriginal people designed their societies to hold in check.
Just finished Sand Talk (which I believe Nia pointed me too) and can't stop thinking about that fundamental truth of the idea of 'power over'. It's something of course that is obvious but never talked about how narcissistic it truly is, and the damage it does....and just....why? oof.
At the heart of every dysfunctional relationship, from intimate partners on out, as far as I can see. A pernicious lie that unfortunately scales extremely well.
Well said. I often think of Riane Eisler’s “Nurturing Our Humanity” in these conversations, since so much of that book is about how authoritarian upbringings and parenting spirals out into authoritarian political leanings.
It's definitely relevant! I originally mentioned it in my near-last paragraph, but thought if I did that I'd end up referencing every book on my shelf. But that book was so eye-opening for me. I'd follow a whole book club Substack or whatever just discussing it if such a thing existed.
I've been thinking about indigenous thinking in relation to Daisy Hildyard's "The Second Body" which I'm rereading. In an email exchange, Joanna Pocock said to me she thought one of the big differences between the US and UK nature writers/thinkers wasn't just the lack of predators, as I'd posited, but also the lack of any real thread back to indigenous thinking. And as I reread Hildyard, I'm impatient with the idea of "the Second Body" -- isn't it just "the body"? The body of the individual not being separate from the body of the world? Is thinking of our global embodiment as something "other" just another extension of the "I'm greater than you" thinking?
It seems so obvious to a lot of us over here in this corner doing this work, but where I find myself stymied is when you get that blank look from people, the one we've all seen so much these past few pandemic years, "why should I care?"
Anyhow, a thread I'm trying to tease out into a post/essay ...
Charlotte, I'm not familiar with Hildyard, but I'm with you: the idea of our ecological body being our second body just emphasizes an imagined separateness.
I'm with both of you on this! It seems odd to me to perceive an ecological body as separate from the body we're walking around in. I'm also not familiar with Hildyard's work, though.
Many, many people point to Descartes as the source of this separation. "I think; therefore, I am" being his statement of how humans are separate from and superior to the rest of life because we can reason. There's a lot in looking at him and the rest of the Enlightenment but I think it does go back a lot further. It seems to me that there's something substantive in looking at the first commodifications of women and seeds: life.
She's a really interesting writer -- one of the Fitzcarraldo gang. Has a new novel called Emergency. And Lauren Groff cites her as an influence on the Vaster Wilds. She's someone I'm really grappling with right now ... I've written a bit for The Dark Mountain project, and seeing how some of the UK/EU writers are grappling with being severed from their indigenous pasts is also interesting to me. It's been one of those things I've been walking around with all week -- also, I really like your point about the "blame agriculture" strain of thinking.
The Dark Mountain project has done some important work on that front (Kingsnorth's turn to ... whatever he's turned to, aside from patriarchal Orthodox Christianity, notwithstanding) but it kept feeling like it stalled out on really digging into that past. But I haven't dived back into it in quite a while! I'll go look up your writing.
Another subscriber here recommended a book I've just finished that you both might like, Alastair McIntosh's "Soil & Soul." He's originally from an island in the Outer Hebrides, and was instrumental in making it possible for the islanders of Eigg to buy the land back from the absentee wealthy landlord. There are difficulties I have with it but it's still one of the most direct things I've ever read about land connection and land theft in Scotland, though I gather he's worked all over the world on these issues and colonialism.
I love that book. Read it again this year, and I know I'm going to again! It's one of those books that is different every time. And yes, it felt so good to read because at some level we *know* that a false psychological separation between humans and the rest of life is core to all of these problems. I can never get over this belief -- insane belief! -- that we can do whatever we want to water -- WATER! -- and it won't affect us.
Did you read The Dawn of Everything? That is really useful for dismantling a lot of these ideas, too, because their whole focus is on how many different ways human societies have existed over the centuries, all kinds of agriculture, property ownership (and lack thereof), hierarchies (and lack thereof)--and especially on societies that were specifically designed to keep narcissism and property/wealth hoarding in check.
Öcalan focuses on early hoarding of perceived surplus -- labor, grain, people, and of what he calls colonization of women, a theme he comes back to again and again.
Yes, really enjoyed The Dawn of Everything! Loved the diversity they laid out. Though I wondered how much I could trust their interpretation especially of Indigenous societies, since their data came exclusively from anthropologists. And I have questions about even their interpretation of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia. They see it as "primitive democracy," while other archaeologists emphasize the overwhelming hierarchical structure. I think my hat's with this latter group. I tend to see Uruk as a good candidate for a moment when that "original deception" of "I am better than you" took hold.
Yeah, it's the one thing about that book that a) thank you for dismantling this whole march of progress myth! but b) how much can we trust your knowledge of this mind-boggling number of societies you've covered? The thing I'm mostly hanging onto from it is that shattering of the march of progress idea combined with what they saw as the three aspects of true freedom. That's something I'd love to read more about, and write more about. One of the triad, of being able to leave (and survive without much hardship) was more explicitly written about in "The Prehistory of Private Property," which is more academic but also so much shorter!
I've heard of Uruk as overwhelmingly hierarchical, too. Isn't that where there were piles of those cheap pottery bowls found that were used to give slaves their daily ration of beer-bread or whatever it was? Maybe it was somewhere else.
I'm sitting and staring at our camper in the middle of the Colorado Desert a hundred miles north of the border with Mexico, where we decided to feast on stars instead of turkey.
It feels simple and it feels indulgent. We applaud human inventiveness and despair of our competitive nature. I've given away canned tomatoes from our summer garden and butternut squashes, but I'm proud of our winter pantry and the rows of purées and salsas.
Maybe I've learned something about what enough means. But I also think that's the privilege (and necessity) of age.
How can we look at our children and say they're happy enough? Wanting more seems human too.
I love your writing. In principle I hate capitalism and I hate the greed that suggests there is never enough.
I imagine it's also a privilege of *having* enough, whether of food or of time or of happiness. And of having the capacity and support to think about what makes us feel happy, or content. I've never been into material accumulation (this might be the consequence of growing up in essentially a hoarder household; I have nightmares about the overwhelm of "stuff"), but it takes a luxury of time, I think, to feel one's way into what might be lacking in life, whether it's companionship or time alone, or time to read or time to walk, or a new job or a new set of sheets. And the same to think about what we have that's abundant. To *feel* that abundance.
With children, it's so hard to say. For me it feels like a luxury, too, to have the time and energy and experience to listen to my children's dreams and talk our way into what they actually mean versus what all the messages they get from school and society tell them they mean. To think about the balance between what they want and what they value. I would like to make that normal and not a luxury for anyone!
Thank you for sharing this! I would love to be feasting on the stars in that desert right now ... sounds beautiful.
Such a beautiful, nostalgic, piece of writing.
Abundance is everywhere. We just have to open to it. It's found in your "time to eat sunflower seeds and watch the river, time to think about what it means to be a person, and what it means to be free."
I have just been sitting here at my desk in the early morning, looking at an abundance of stars sprinkled above me. I am so filled up. It's just taking the time to pause and notice isn't it.
Thank you for your story. Jo 🙏
Thank you so much, Jo! And it really is. I think that every year when people start posting online looking for anyone to come pick their plum trees ...
It's been overcast here for well over a week now, which isn't abnormal for winter, but your comment on watching the stars in the morning made me miss them!
Sending you some stars from New Zealand Antonia.... which have by now turned into rays of sunlight. Jo 🌻
How gorgeous! And thank you for drawing my mind to that part of this gorgeous planet. I've never been to New Zealand, though did live in Australia for a couple years (Sydney, for my husband's job over 20 years ago). Waving at you from the frozen lands!
Lemme get this out of the way: This is the first time I hear Abdullah Öcalan pronunciation in English. To us in Arabic it's more like "Oujalan". It's been ages since I heard his name.
I loved reading this and I sympathize with it a lot. I was listening to Barry Schwartz talk about how 'too many choices' isn't really good for us, and I see this in the American life as an outsider (https://behavioralscientist.org/is-having-too-many-choices-versus-too-few-really-the-greater-problem-for-consumers/). Everything has reviews, everything has 8-9 variations, every pair of running shoes is compared to 5 others, and you hear YouTubers talk about how 'the material in the tongue is not as comfortable as the other shoes, but the padding is more plush' and we're left to wonder and get paralyzed. I also see this with my New Yorker wife, who wants to take the subway in such an optimized way that she wants to align three trains so she can get off one, and not wait 4-5 minutes for the next one, all while forgetting the 'abundance' of trains coming and going, if we're willing to extend our space a bit more.
From our muslim tradition, we have Umar Ibn Al-khattab (one of the most important figures in Islamic history) when he saw one of his friends buying meat on the regular, and he was quoted saying: "Is it so that whenever you desire, you buy?!" and it really became a sort of a maxim. I take this with me on almost everything, I sometimes refuse to buy things I want because I don't need, and have been trying to live with this distinction. It's true that we won't live the lives of sages, but if we can take glimpses of it, it's a welcome addition.
Thank you for writing this Antonia.
P.S. This came at the same time I was listening to this podcast about how 'optimization of our lives' isn't necessarily the best thing we can do. A tangent, but can be useful somehow.
https://www.ted.com/podcasts/rethinking-with-adam-grant/why-aiming-for-the-best-isn-t-always-good-for-you-transcript
Thank you so much for all of this! First off the pronunciation, of course. I looked for some videos of people saying his name online, but I think most of them were from Britain. I appreciate it. Someone introduced me to him earlier this year and The Sociology of Freedom sunk deep into me.
I keep reading that line about “the material in the tongue” of the shoe and the padding and literally it makes me dizzy. My spouse and I have a lot of disagreements about this, some of which even sound similar to your optimization of trains. My spouse loves choice, I think. He can look at all sorts of options of something, like a blanket or a car, and I have to keep reminding him that if I’m forced to consider every one of them I will not only continue to not care and also probably make the wrong choice, I’ll get very grumpy.
I will have to look up Umar Ibn Al-khattab. I just read a short article about him but there is obviously much to learn. That is a good line! I, too, often find myself refusing things I want but don’t need. If I look at the thing for long enough and examine the want, it tends to fade.
And wow, that interview hit me right in the center. One thing that bugs me when people talk about optimizing is that things fall apart! Everything decays. Reading that transcript made me feel exhausted for it all, but particularly this: “that's one of the consequences of optimizing is you destroy communities, you destroy individual people's lives, and none of those things get measured,” which is something very few people are really willing to talk about. The economist Kate Raworth talks about in most economics the one factor they’re unwilling to include in the supposedly closed supply-demand is the fact that it has to be plugged into an energy system—the rest of life on the planet.
Thank you for all of these thoughts!
I have a garage full of the things I canned this season and it definitely feels like abundance. I have the luxury of time on weekends--kids are grown and gone--so I can spend the whole day making jam or using my mandoline to slice things for pickling.
When we moved into this house I set out to turn the yard into food production and habitat--abundance for critters and birds as well as for my husband and me. On weekends we walk to the farmers' market in downtown (Olympia, WA), which also provides abundance. I'm buying food from the people who grew it. I'm fortunate to have a job that lets me afford housing in this kind of location and buying locally grown food that costs more than the big-box grocery store.
Some of the jars are full of food I grew: My tomatillo plants grew like they were auditioning for Little Shop of Horrors and I kept making salsa verde. I have bags of frozen tomatillos from the last pickings as the vines turned black with frost so there's more to come. I made green tomato chutney and zucchini chutney, hot pepper relish and fermented pepper mash.
Some of it is food I gleaned: wild blackberries grow everywhere here so I have seedless blackberry jam (worth the labor to smoosh out the seeds). I live a short bike ride away from pick-your-own blueberry farms, I grew elderberries, raspberries and tayberries so I have bumbleberry jam and more.
A primary source of abundance I can't recommend enough is Buy Nothing, for people who have a local chapter. You don't have to be on Facebook; there's an app. https://buynothingproject.org/. People ask and give freely and it's both community-building and anti-capitalism. A lot of what I pickled this year is zucchini and summer squash I got for the asking, and I turned some of it into a citrus jam (the zucchini just disappears and becomes the medium). I made fruit leather with plums from someone who said "please come pick! I can't use all these plums!" I got canning jars for the asking.
I live close to a friend who bought a 100-year-old farmhouse with a neglected apple orchard she's been bringing back. I help with the press and get jars of ciders, as well as getting to drink cold, fresh cider straight from the press while her dozens of chickens cluck under the trees. I save the tops and seeds of peppers in the freezer because the chickens love them, then I buy eggs from her, and it all feels so wonderfully circular.
I love reading all of this. The richness of your place and what grows there, and the time, comes through so clearly and I want to try the hot pepper relish. Did we have a conversation about tomatillos before? About how they make much better salsa than tomatoes?
Bumbleberry jam is the best. It sounds delightfully like something from Winnie the Pooh. I made a bunch the first year I ever made jam, in different combinations, and got to smile every time I pulled out a jar. And I agree about the seedless! A friend of ours mentioned a couple years ago that she loves raspberry jam but only if it's seedless, so I made some to be able to give her a jar, and loved the way the raspberry flavor comes through so purely. (Did we also have this conversation? I have Covid right now -- frustrating! I just got a booster last week! -- so my brain is very foggy, but I'm getting some deja vu.)
Our town is full of plus people ask others to pick. It's how I make all my fruit leather!
The cider, the seeds, the time with a close friend and a press, chickens and eggs and the solace of all that represents. I love it.
Oh, yes we did! I can't remember which post of yours but we talked about exchanging jams and jellies. I keep talking about my canning because this is my most productive year ever. I'll have to go back through my journal where I made notes about how much I produced and tally it all up. My husband is on a restricted diet so I try to make lots of zingy, flavorful spreads and pickles to jazz things up for him. I made things I've never made before: piccalilli, chowchow, eggplant caponata.
So sorry you have COVID! I've had a horrendous case of respiratory flu I brought home from a conference--sick for over a week now with a painful, racking cough that's like an abs workout nonstop, achey, dizzy, feverish, congested. Got tested Sunday ("fluvid" test for both flu and COVID in one swabbing) and it's definitely the flu, but it knocked me out. I haven't been sick in over 3 years and I have to say I didn't miss the experience one bit. I'll get my next COVID booster as soon as I can after I'm through this. I hope you recover quickly.
I hope you recover quickly, too! I haven't had the flu in years and really hope not to--it's even worse than Covid, if that's possible. And a cough like that is beyond exhausting.
For some reason I can never get enough of canning talk. Maybe it's like the early years of parenting in particular, and it's kind of all-absorbing and changing on a daily basis and it takes up all different parts of the mind and also there are non-stop problem-solving iterations going on. I'm glad you have an opportunity to try some new things! My efforts were reduced this year BUT we have a lot of last year's pickles and so on still to get through. Still wish we could exchange the bounty, especially the Pooh-ish jams!
And bumbleberry jam is definitely a Pooh-ish sort of jam.
I am utterly overwhelmed by consumer choices and I haven’t stepped foot in a grocery store in a few years - online pickup is a pandemic holdover for me. My spouse does our Costco run because I can’t stand the “abundance.”
The big Amazon delivery truck drives through my neighborhood regularly and unfortunately I haven’t been able to break up with it yet completely.
When you write about hunting my first thought is - how do you find the time? For sitting for hours and maybe not catching anything at all? How do we have so many “convenient” choices, and yet still have so little time. Convenience meals and meal kits and one-day delivery and yet I still don’t feel any margin in my life for preserving food or like you said - everyone aligning their schedules for communal gatherings and care. 💔
My kids are 13 and 16, and I honestly thought this would be the year I really had more time for these things, but it turns out I have less. I don’t need to go into it deeply, but the emotional and mentals needs of teens compared to the infant/toddler years took me by surprise. I haven’t been out nearly as much as usual. Plus I’ve been crazy tired the last year or so and don’t have as much energy as I’d like.
The main reason I can make the time for these things is, I think, that I freelance and wedge my works hours in everywhere possible and around other priorities. When the kids were very little I worked late at night and early in the mornings, sometimes all night, while they slept. But honestly I don’t think that would be at all possible without my spouse’s regular salary + benefits job. That takes a certain amount of pressure off, even though I often ruminate anxiously in the middle of the night over it all. AND I still wish I had a lot more time for these activities.
There are so many factors that shape the choices we have, including invisible ones. When we lived in New York my spouse commuted an hour each direction 5 days a week, and I spent almost as much time in the car getting to things like the grocery store or pediatrician. We don’t have that here because nearly everything (bar Costco) is within walking distance, including family and many friends. I might spend the same amount of time walking as I used to driving, but I’m also exercising, being outside, socializing a bit, thinking a lot, … you know, all the things walkability gives! And I try to shape spending time with friends and the kids on activities I also want to do, like pick huckleberries or simply walk around town.
I know I’m just repeating myself a million times, and I know you already know this: I deeply believe that infrastructure and other structures, many unseen and systemic, dictate and limit much of our choices.
I can’t go into stores, even grocery stores, much less bigger ones, without a list. I get overwhelmed and walk around in a daze. Frankly, Amazon’s website overwhelms me these days. I look at their home page and it feels like walking into Home Depot. And our Target has deteriorated. I used to get the kids’ clothes there but order them all online now. There isn’t really another choice.
Oh yes, I am just entering the tween/teen phase. It’s so hard!!
I hope you didn’t hear me asking in an accusatory way - I genuinely meant, how do we find time for these valuable skills & community building when capitalism appears to offers choices/freedom/abundance but somehow makes our time even more scarce.
I love seeing the ways you’ve adjusted your life to more align with your values and it inspires me to find small ways to do the same.
Oh, no, not at all! I was trying to answer with those ideas in mind—how do we find time when capitalism and colonialism take so much? We’ve had enough interactions and I’ve read enough of your own writing to assume conversations come from a place of good faith and compassion. :)
This is something I should probably write about more, but something you probably know since you read my book is that finding visible and invisible barriers is really, *really* important to me. When I write something like this, I probably spend more time than I need to thinking about how my particular life makes this particular time- or money-hungry activity possible.
I can talk all I want about how walking and community and being in nature are good for us, but I’m honestly tired of hearing people advised to do those things from people who never consider where people’s choices and opportunities have been stolen. (I will never forget Ariana Huffington writing a thing about how important getting good sleep is, especially for women—she founded and made a fortune off of Huffington Post, which does not pay writers! Classic.) I feel like it’s a paradigm shift to focus just as much on barriers as on what truly serves us. It’s literally why I wrote that book. I think it’s staying stuck in an old paradigm to perceive talking about barriers as pessimistic, which a lot of people have told me they find it. To me, it’s not focusing on the negative; it’s literally what you’re asking: *how* do we do these things? To answer that, we have to clearly see what’s stopping us. At least, that’s what I think. Only then can we fully dismantle it and replace it with something better.
One thing about the hunting for me is that I don’t do a lot of it. Big game (elk and deer) rifle season here is only about a month. I could do a ton more the rest of the year, archery and shoulder seasons and birds and other animals, but I don’t, partly because of the time commitment. The hours I carve out are pretty much only in November.
Oh good. After I reread my comment I wanted to be sure that didn’t come off the wrong way. 🩷
I tend to view pessimists as realists 😆 so I appreciate the honest assessment and desire to shift the paradigm. It is hard to talk about because it can feel so insurmountable but I’m here for it.
I know one thing stopping me is the amount of accumulated stuff and all of the maintenance it involves. I’m slowly trying to shift my mindset from “decluttering” to only keeping items that serve the large values of our family - time, togetherness, place, etc.
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I love all your writing and the thoughtful interactions of your comment section.
I totally sympathize. I ruminate over things I've written or said waaaaayyyy too much and for too long. Very annoying, these brains sometimes!
I'm so glad. I think of myself as more fatalist (tracking with the Russian-Jewish side -- Russians are well-known as fatalists), but sometimes I do have to step way back to consider whether I'm catastrophizing or being realistic. I'm prone to both! Considering worst-case scenarios always calms me down, though, an entire topic all on its own.
That shift from decluttering to thinking about what you want to keep is beautiful. I'd love to read more about that, if you write something longer on it. My spouse is an acquirer and I'm a purger (a source of mostly benign tension in our house, but sometimes more frustrating), but sometimes I have to stop and think about how much time we spend just disagreeing over "stuff." 😆
Thank you and likewise! I'm not sure I could handle writing online if there weren't dialogue involved. The internet's a hard place for my brain to deal with. It's these real conversations that make it worthwhile.
It is always a pleasure to read your words and to hear your voice.
The abundance I wish to acknowledge today is the abundance I carry inside. I love how I see the world, and the intimate connection that this seeing sometimes brings. I wouldn't trade it for all the consumer goods and services in the world. I am grateful.
One thing I often like to remind my father and stepmother if is how rich they are in loving grandchildren, which is probably one of the things they wanted most out of their lives.
Internal abundance is probably the one I wish for most people.
I have a small sense of that culture shock you describe still each time I head out to grocery shop on the weekends--so. much. stuff. so many people buying so much stuff. I return home thankful to not have to look at it all, but that is no way to effect change. oof. I realize I have to compartmentalize my reaction/feelings, almost like when I fly--to not think too much about it in the moment because the immense sense of overwhelm that comes with it. I love hearing about your gathering, preserving, efforts--it made me wish we could all hang out and just work on putting all those beautiful foods into jars and candy containers (ha--loved that) and appreciating that abundance too. Really loved this--and of learning more about your experience of the Soviet Union and that history. 💜
I feel the same in stores and airports 😅
oof yeah, i’m with ya on that. 🤦🏻♀️
Hope Depot is my particular kryptonite. I canNOT walk in there and not feel like my brain just dissolved.
Ooh, that would be lovely! You, me, Swarna, some other people here, … that’s the thing about all the preserving and canning is it’s meant to be communal activity. I have done it all with friends a few times but we’re all busy with different schedules. One of my friends has a cider press and has a cider pressing party in her back yard every year, which is so fulfilling and fun. And yummy!
Your description of shopping on the weekends reminds me of the first time I did a huge “stuff” purge when my kids were little and finally grew out of baby necessities, clothes, and toys. I went to Goodwill with all those bags, feeling good about clearing out, and then saw the mountains of bags just like mine. Realizing how much pointless waste our society creates, and how much I myself contribute to it. “oof” is right.
Yes! That would be so fun--a roving foraging putting up food trip from Alaska to Montana and India. 🥰 And I feel the same about goodwill--I always have that feeling of leaving the house lighter until I get there and see just...all of it. It really is overwhelming and kind of unfathomable. Oy. 🤦🏻♀️
I will never forget that feeling of overwhelm in that New Jersey grocery store. I love seeing you put it to words.
If we hadn't been there together I might not believe it was real!
This essay has specifically hit close to home with my experiences of the world, growing up in a small town and later moving to a big city. You have brought so much to life—the contrast of what is marketed as abundance and what true abundance really looks like. The strangeness of the supermarket aisles still makes me uncomfortable—the paradox of choice—why? What’s the need for it? Is it another distraction? A way to keep society at large confined to be lost in decision-making for the simplest of tasks? What are we missing out on while choosing our cereals and yogurts?
My experience of abundance, true abundance, was that of summertime in a Himalayan town where I lived during my graduation years. Every houseyard consisted of several lychee trees which would bear uncountable lychees with sweet, juicy flesh. So many would drop overripe due to summer heat, go to waste because there were too many trees than there were people to eat them. I felt so full through those experiences, so satisfied and abundant at the miracle of life and Mother Earth.
My mouth is watering so much reading this. I've only tried a lychee a couple of times, and I'm sure it was nothing like what a fresh one would taste like. Your description makes me feel the warmth of that place, the flavor and smell. So beautiful.
The abundance of them sounds like what apple and chokecherry and serviceberry trees are like here in good years. The food bank organizes people to pick apples on public lands--and private where invited--to provide food and also keep from attracting so many bears! It's amazing to me that we're sold scarcity when nature provides so much.
The paradox of choice is so odd. Like we'll be happy with plenty of injustice as long as we can buy pasta in 10 different shapes? And yet at the same time so much true diversity in food has been lost or forgotten or taken. I read an article a couple of years ago about heritage rice varieties being cultivated -- might even have been in India, I wish I remembered where I read it! -- and the kinds of nutrition those older rice strains have and the varieties of flavor and people's relationship with the kinds of rice they grew and lived on ...
I have never seen chokecherry and serviceberry before you mentioned it and now having known what they are, all I can think of the spicy preserves I could turn them into!
We as a species are so obsessed with progress that sometimes it’s hard to see if we are evolving forwards or backwards because we try to embrace every new trend that sells variety under popular labels. What we don’t understand is that, it is those very ‘labels’ that make us complacent because we base our success on ease and convenience that we can afford.
I am going to find out and read about the rice strains with more nutritional value. It is such an interesting topic for me because rice is staple for Indians and it has been recently debated that the high proportions of carbohydrates in the newer rice strains is increasing the blood sugar levels.
Thank you for this info Nia and for this beautiful essay. Your garden looks absolutely stunning! 😍
Thanks Nia, I am heavily into nutrition since the beginning of my papa’s diagnosis and this articles are so relevant to my understanding of staples.
Love to you both, Swarna. I’ll keep an eye out for anything more. 💗🍚
💜
Those berries could both be good with the right spice! Now I am craving spicy mango. And now I'm hungry! And now I'm determined to find that article. I don't think it was in Hakai. Unfortunately, I think it was in a batch of articles I judged for science writing awards when I used to do that. I'll have to think of good key words.
Thank you for being here, Swarna! You are one of the bright lights in my world. Reading your words makes me as happy as that sunflower did last summer. :)
You know what spicy mango goes best with? Steamed rice and lentil soup, with a side of potato fritters! And roasted sunflower seeds are the best snacks in this world! 🥹
YUM!
I can't find any record of that article I read. I feel like it was in a smaller publication. But this one looked interesting and is on the same subject: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-struggle-to-save-heirloom-rice-in-india/
Also this one: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/indian-rice
There surely is an abundance of flies on a decomposing corpse, and a gustatory treat therein for those suited to such fare, like maggots and worms. More to commodification, production and consumption than meets the unmindful "I." Thanks, Nia.
That a good abundance! I like watching flesh beetles at work, too. Miraculous.
Such beautiful writing! As for choice and abundance in supermarkets, I find that plays differently in every country I've lived in. And I remember when I lived in Mexico, a visit to the US would be a shock in terms of the abundance in supermarkets, even though I went to pretty well-stocked shops in Mexico City.
Thank you! 🧡
It really does play differently. And then there are weird differences. Like why in England is all the fresh produce plastic-wrapped? It startles me every time. And then there are all the U.S.'s food deserts, where there might be nothing but gas station grocery for long stretches.
A good question: I don't know why so much fresh food is wrapped in plastic in England, but it may have something to do with the fact that a lot of it is coming from other countries (where it's probably grown under plastic too). We used to have greengrocers in England who sold fresh, local produce without plastic, but they are mostly gone now, though we do have some farmers' markets that do the same. There's a lot of plastic on fresh food in Japan too (where I now live), though, again, there are places where it's left unpackaged.
I remember seeing photos of a stretch of Spanish coast that is wall to wall plastic greenhouses, growing produce for the English market. Even here, one of the farms I buy vegetables from the in summer is dependent on their huge plastic-covered hoop houses to start seeds early (our growing season is very short).
My son is so interested in Japanese culture and language! I don’t know where his interest came from, but I’m always glad to be able to pass real-life information on to him. :)
Washington Post wrote a food desert article a few years back and namechecked Musselshell county. The stats were based on grocery stores, of which there's only one in the county -- and when all 4730 residents wrote in to say they don't shop in the store, they have gardens and butcher at home and occasionally go to Billings -- they had to run a correction.
Local reporting by local people matters!
Congratulations on finishing the first chapter! That's a huge accomplishment. I'm psyched that you're bringing in social science, even if your mom's ranch might have been a perfect opener too. My fave lines:
"choice has little relationship to abundance, especially if the choice is a mirage created by advertising, packaging, and small tweaks in sugar and salt content. All I could say was that something felt wrong."
"No matter how much we read or study, it’s never a replacement for lived experience."
The second quote is profound yet simultaneously ironic to me, because in fact one space where abundance feels real is the endless possibility of things to read; the richness of thought and especially, shared thought. (And they tell me reading is abundant in Russia!). But mostly, I struggle with the patience, attention and care stuff. And inability to make choices.
Some other people here are citing books and films (I second the Renata Salecl recommendation by Charlotte!). For myself, the film your post immediately brought to mind, more than any, was that scene from Katherine Bigelow's Hurt Locker when Jeremy Renner returns from a long stint in Iraq (where he invested his entire identity as macho colonialist savior, while internalizing the suffering and deprivation around him), and the camera suddenly cuts from Iraq to him pushing a shopping cart in one of those mega-supermarkets, with piped-in music and obscenely stocked aisles. You can feel his shellshock and existential emptiness.
Thank you! Getting that first draft done always feels like a huge hump, but the real work is yet to come ...
I have never seen Hurt Locker but it sounds like I should. I can imagine that scene so vividly. It would bring it all home.
Every time you comment, you bring up something I hadn't thought of! I know we're all inundated with things to read and listen to, but the richness of *good* and thoughtful things is hard to deny. The richness right now of science fiction alone is incredible, and then there are sites like Aeon that always make me think more deeply about something. Reading is abundant in Russia! My dad has talked about how much people read when he was growing up, and how surprised he was when he moved to the U.S. and people didn't. But even the most recent times I've been there, people read a lot, like on the metro.
I'm going to have to get Renata Saleci, it sounds like. I just read an article about her book (had to laugh because it immediately referenced one of my first serious editors, and her first memoir, which I've read but had forgotten about: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/21/tyranny-choice-renata-selecl-review).
See also: my ever-growing to-read pile. One of the reasons this first chapter took me so long is that there is always another book related to land ownership coming in that I feel I should read first. I'll never get through them all and had to stop and start writing at some point.
Another beautiful piece of poetry in prose form. So glad I found you on substack and that we can actually chat in person. I heard a Greg Brown song last night about his grandma preserving the summer in a jar. Thats the beautiful work you have done
I adore that song and haven't thought of it in years--how fun to find it here.
Aw, thank you! And I am, too. It's a delight. 🧡
Nia -- do you know Renata Salecl's "The Tyranny of Choice"? It's been a couple of years since I read it, but I found it really useful ...
And your grocery store moment -- one of my favorite Robin Williams' scenes is the grocery store freakout in Moscow on the Hudson ...
This is beautiful. And I too, look at my freezer, and my pantry shelves, when I get a tiny bit panicky about Everything ... it's work, but it's work I too find comforting. Someone's going to have to know how to do these things, it might as well be us.
I don't know it! It sounds familiar, maybe something I heard of at the time but didn't pick up. My TBR pile is so huge 😂
I find it comforting, too. Can I just buy dried apples? Yes. Is that the world I want to build? No. Well, not unless they were picked and dried locally by someone else I'm paying for them!
The photos you chose are lovely… and food drying is something that has niggled at me for years… perhaps I shall begin? Abundance has the word dance in it and though it is not something I actually do, it stood out for some reason. Loved this essay. Thank you, as always… 🙏🏼
Thank you so much, Sean -- I love that you pointed out the word "dance." That makes me happy to think about!
Food drying is much easier than you'd think. I have an electric food dehydrator and use it for many things, but my mom and stepdad have one he built that I think just uses a light bulb or the sun. It's just a faster way of doing things you can do with sun or other sources of dry heat/air. Like when I'm doing mint I'll use the dehydrator if I need to be fast with a lot of it at once, but otherwise just leave it out on the counter. My most common use is yogurt (which works well for me at 110F for 14 hours), and plum fruit leather, which I puree and pour onto parchment paper. You have to use the times as guidelines because it varies according to elevation, air humidity, etc. But I have kept fruit leather stored in airtight containers, unrefrigerated, all winter long, and it's been fine. A second cousin in desert California used to make tons of fruit leather, which she just put out in the sun under mosquito netting, and then wrapped in plastic wrap and kept in the freezer.
Or you can find a tree and dry mushrooms the way that squirrels do. 😀🐿️
I followed your link to the Mocetti & Barone study on socioeconomic mobility (or lack of it) in Florence. Those results are stunning! Six hundred years later, people are making 5% more than expected just because of being descended from one of the richest families of the 1400s! Six hundred years of intergenerational effects. It boggles the mind—and seems intuitively right at the same time. I look forward to reading what you have to say about it. And I'm grateful for your mention of Abdullah Öcalan, who is new to me. Tracking his book down led me to Frank & Gills and others who are laying out something I'd come to on my own: that capital accumulation goes back 5000 years, not just 500. For some years I've been delving into how social-economic-worldview patterns today have eerie resonances with patterns laid down 5000 years ago, and these sources are going to be a huge help. Thanks for your work!
Isn't it?! I've been sitting on that study for a year. I kept trying to frame an essay around it but it felt too big each time, or didn't quite fit. The researchers, as you probably read, looked into class and profession, but in Europe property ownership has gone hand in hand with those things for hundreds of years.
I'm glad you followed those links! Öcalan was recommended to me sometime last winter, and reading him I felt my mind calm down because it felt like reading what I'd been thinking for a long time anyway. A validation, I guess. James C. Scott in "Against the Grain" and Karl Polanyi in "The Great Transformation" also address this idea through the advent of agriculture, which allowed food storage and hence taxation (of grain), but Öcalan's perspective is helpful because he spends so much time in ancient Samaria and also isn't at all Europe-centric (he's Kurdish).
The focus on beginning of agriculture has always felt off or at least incomplete to me, because there are plenty of ag styles in the world (esp Indigenous worlds) that didn't lead to capital accumulation. So it's agriculture plus something else. Something about property and borders, something about inheritance, something about centers & peripheries, something about normalizing hierarchy, some mindset about "me and mine." Just started Tyson Yunkaporta's Sand Talk, where he says the most destructive idea at the heart of it all is: "I am greater than you; you are less than me." People placing themselves above others and above the land, he says, is a narcissistic thought pattern that Aboriginal people designed their societies to hold in check.
Just finished Sand Talk (which I believe Nia pointed me too) and can't stop thinking about that fundamental truth of the idea of 'power over'. It's something of course that is obvious but never talked about how narcissistic it truly is, and the damage it does....and just....why? oof.
At the heart of every dysfunctional relationship, from intimate partners on out, as far as I can see. A pernicious lie that unfortunately scales extremely well.
Well said. I often think of Riane Eisler’s “Nurturing Our Humanity” in these conversations, since so much of that book is about how authoritarian upbringings and parenting spirals out into authoritarian political leanings.
Not sure if it's entirely relevant here, but I found The Dawn of Everything
by David Graeber and David Wengrow very interesting on the subject of the origins of agriculture
It's definitely relevant! I originally mentioned it in my near-last paragraph, but thought if I did that I'd end up referencing every book on my shelf. But that book was so eye-opening for me. I'd follow a whole book club Substack or whatever just discussing it if such a thing existed.
I've been thinking about indigenous thinking in relation to Daisy Hildyard's "The Second Body" which I'm rereading. In an email exchange, Joanna Pocock said to me she thought one of the big differences between the US and UK nature writers/thinkers wasn't just the lack of predators, as I'd posited, but also the lack of any real thread back to indigenous thinking. And as I reread Hildyard, I'm impatient with the idea of "the Second Body" -- isn't it just "the body"? The body of the individual not being separate from the body of the world? Is thinking of our global embodiment as something "other" just another extension of the "I'm greater than you" thinking?
It seems so obvious to a lot of us over here in this corner doing this work, but where I find myself stymied is when you get that blank look from people, the one we've all seen so much these past few pandemic years, "why should I care?"
Anyhow, a thread I'm trying to tease out into a post/essay ...
Charlotte, I'm not familiar with Hildyard, but I'm with you: the idea of our ecological body being our second body just emphasizes an imagined separateness.
I'm with both of you on this! It seems odd to me to perceive an ecological body as separate from the body we're walking around in. I'm also not familiar with Hildyard's work, though.
Many, many people point to Descartes as the source of this separation. "I think; therefore, I am" being his statement of how humans are separate from and superior to the rest of life because we can reason. There's a lot in looking at him and the rest of the Enlightenment but I think it does go back a lot further. It seems to me that there's something substantive in looking at the first commodifications of women and seeds: life.
She's a really interesting writer -- one of the Fitzcarraldo gang. Has a new novel called Emergency. And Lauren Groff cites her as an influence on the Vaster Wilds. She's someone I'm really grappling with right now ... I've written a bit for The Dark Mountain project, and seeing how some of the UK/EU writers are grappling with being severed from their indigenous pasts is also interesting to me. It's been one of those things I've been walking around with all week -- also, I really like your point about the "blame agriculture" strain of thinking.
The Dark Mountain project has done some important work on that front (Kingsnorth's turn to ... whatever he's turned to, aside from patriarchal Orthodox Christianity, notwithstanding) but it kept feeling like it stalled out on really digging into that past. But I haven't dived back into it in quite a while! I'll go look up your writing.
Another subscriber here recommended a book I've just finished that you both might like, Alastair McIntosh's "Soil & Soul." He's originally from an island in the Outer Hebrides, and was instrumental in making it possible for the islanders of Eigg to buy the land back from the absentee wealthy landlord. There are difficulties I have with it but it's still one of the most direct things I've ever read about land connection and land theft in Scotland, though I gather he's worked all over the world on these issues and colonialism.
I love that book. Read it again this year, and I know I'm going to again! It's one of those books that is different every time. And yes, it felt so good to read because at some level we *know* that a false psychological separation between humans and the rest of life is core to all of these problems. I can never get over this belief -- insane belief! -- that we can do whatever we want to water -- WATER! -- and it won't affect us.
Did you read The Dawn of Everything? That is really useful for dismantling a lot of these ideas, too, because their whole focus is on how many different ways human societies have existed over the centuries, all kinds of agriculture, property ownership (and lack thereof), hierarchies (and lack thereof)--and especially on societies that were specifically designed to keep narcissism and property/wealth hoarding in check.
Öcalan focuses on early hoarding of perceived surplus -- labor, grain, people, and of what he calls colonization of women, a theme he comes back to again and again.
Yes, really enjoyed The Dawn of Everything! Loved the diversity they laid out. Though I wondered how much I could trust their interpretation especially of Indigenous societies, since their data came exclusively from anthropologists. And I have questions about even their interpretation of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia. They see it as "primitive democracy," while other archaeologists emphasize the overwhelming hierarchical structure. I think my hat's with this latter group. I tend to see Uruk as a good candidate for a moment when that "original deception" of "I am better than you" took hold.
Yeah, it's the one thing about that book that a) thank you for dismantling this whole march of progress myth! but b) how much can we trust your knowledge of this mind-boggling number of societies you've covered? The thing I'm mostly hanging onto from it is that shattering of the march of progress idea combined with what they saw as the three aspects of true freedom. That's something I'd love to read more about, and write more about. One of the triad, of being able to leave (and survive without much hardship) was more explicitly written about in "The Prehistory of Private Property," which is more academic but also so much shorter!
I've heard of Uruk as overwhelmingly hierarchical, too. Isn't that where there were piles of those cheap pottery bowls found that were used to give slaves their daily ration of beer-bread or whatever it was? Maybe it was somewhere else.
Yup, the ration bowls were from Uruk. And yes, I will forever be grateful to Graeber & Wengrow for taking down the march of progress myth!
I'm sitting and staring at our camper in the middle of the Colorado Desert a hundred miles north of the border with Mexico, where we decided to feast on stars instead of turkey.
It feels simple and it feels indulgent. We applaud human inventiveness and despair of our competitive nature. I've given away canned tomatoes from our summer garden and butternut squashes, but I'm proud of our winter pantry and the rows of purées and salsas.
Maybe I've learned something about what enough means. But I also think that's the privilege (and necessity) of age.
How can we look at our children and say they're happy enough? Wanting more seems human too.
I love your writing. In principle I hate capitalism and I hate the greed that suggests there is never enough.
I imagine it's also a privilege of *having* enough, whether of food or of time or of happiness. And of having the capacity and support to think about what makes us feel happy, or content. I've never been into material accumulation (this might be the consequence of growing up in essentially a hoarder household; I have nightmares about the overwhelm of "stuff"), but it takes a luxury of time, I think, to feel one's way into what might be lacking in life, whether it's companionship or time alone, or time to read or time to walk, or a new job or a new set of sheets. And the same to think about what we have that's abundant. To *feel* that abundance.
With children, it's so hard to say. For me it feels like a luxury, too, to have the time and energy and experience to listen to my children's dreams and talk our way into what they actually mean versus what all the messages they get from school and society tell them they mean. To think about the balance between what they want and what they value. I would like to make that normal and not a luxury for anyone!
Thank you for sharing this! I would love to be feasting on the stars in that desert right now ... sounds beautiful.