So I got home from work today to find a video for the New York Times being shot in my apartment.
The video was about Harry Potter.
I'm not even joking.
I have since learned that:
one of my roommates used to work for the Harry Potter Alliance (she's not in the video - it features the head of the organization, who's staying on an air mattress in my living room)
"B roll" is extra footage they shoot to splice into videos when they edit
if current conditions continue, chocolate will be as expensive as caviar in 20 years (I checked. It's on the Atlantic. While demand for chocolate is increasing with rising wealth in India and China, farmers are abandoning cocoa farms because of the very difficult work and low wages -- lots of child slave labor ends up involved.)
So yes. The New York Times. At my dining room table.
Don't believe me? Here's a picture with Dumbledore.
A decent measure of my spiritual state is what I spend my walk to work thinking about - what is so important that it surfaces as a theme for those few, uncluttered moments. All to often lately it's been a mental rehearsal of The Budget, and what may or may not fit into it, particularly (I'm sorry to say) what I can (or in most cases cannot) afford to wear. It's come down to one, small, three digit number to cover my groceries, Thanksgiving, clothing, and going out for the month of November. And I think about it. A lot.
I'm thankful for every moment of grace that interrupts that whirl of anxiety. Most recently, it was a passage from the novel Sophie's World. The book is the history of Western philosophy as told to a 14-year-old Norwegian girl. A few days ago, I got a little reminder from that book. It describes pursuing mystical spirituality as "[consisting] of the simple life and various meditation techniques". I am far far from any sort of mysticism at the moment, but that phrase was enough to remind me that simplicity is something I am choosing as much as it has, for this season, chosen me.
This past Saturday afternoon I set out to find something every bit as likely to exist as the Fountain of Youth: a pair of boots that are both cute and comfortable for under $80. My search took me to one of my least favorite parts of Manhattan - 42nd St/Times Sq/34th St./Herald Square. This area is perpetually clogged with foreign tourists excited to shop in stores they can't normally go to, and American tourists excited to shop in stores they go to all the time at home (but Old Navy in New York City is just so much more exciting!) It wasn't long before, boots or no boots (in this case, no boots), I needed to leave.
When Kat asked me how I was adjusting to the city, I realized that most days I hardly even think about it. I've tried to keep my everyday life relatively small. I can walk to work from where I'm staying now, and I limited my search for a new place to a 2 mile radius of my office (although something called "winter" might put an end to my pedestrian habit soon). The grocery store and laundromat are just around the corner. It is manageable. I've started to recognize people, and this afternoon a group of older adults hanging out on the sidewalk who I walk by every afternoon talked to me for the first time.
But then there are moments in downtown Manhattan or while navigating a subway station at rush hour that I do get overwhelmed. Two kinds of overwhelmed, actually.
The first is what I felt on my boot search, a downright ecclesiastical sense of futility when surrounded by thousands of people working (if they're lucky) jobs they (usually) don't enjoy to earn money so they can buy stuff (lots of it) to impress each other, and then start the whole thing over the next day (to what end?). In those moments, everything is so meaningless it hurts.
On the other end of the spectrum are the occasional encounters with strangers that remind me that every person is indeed a human being with a story. Sitting on a bus one evening, I watched a child's curiosity about an architectural model the man next to her was carrying turn into a conversation about community art and the future of Prospect Park involving a third of the passengers. It might seem insignificant, but in a city where everyone is so close together all the time yet trying to avoid interacting, seeing strangers engage is something special. In those moments, everything is so meaningful it hurts.
As I've moved closer to the people and processes involved in making the most basic material goods (food, clothing) in the past two years, the physical world has taken on a new weight. Driving past malls and outlet stores, the sheer volume of the stuff inside is overwhelming. I've had a little glimpse into the lives of those sewing and picking, so that in my more lucid moments I can't grab an appliance off a shelf without wondering how many hands were involved in making it, or pull a shirt off the rack without a peek at the tag to see where it came from.
Being a bit more aware sets me up for an exhausting series of mental gymnastics any time I make a purchase.
Today, for example, I found myself grocery shopping in Walmart.Already I’d had to do some justifying.Walmart is the Big Bad Wolf, up there with other dastardly corporations like Monsanto.They underpay their workers both here and overseas and force local operations out of business everywhere they go.
But…I needed a plastic storage bin.Target would have been my first choice, but it was out of the way and I have a sneaky suspicion my aversion to Walmart is partly a class thing (Target is, after all, where upper middle class folks by their Made in China).
On my list after the storage bin were a number of grocery items (since, as of Wednesday, whatever I eat will have to be transported home without the help of a car).I’d planned on patronizing a local grocery store, but did the impact of the extra gas from the trip outweigh the karmic good of supporting a local family?
So…I found myself grocery shopping in Walmart.Already feeling guilty, my calculating had just begun.How much more was I willing to pay per can of organic beans (and could I even justify beans in a can when the dried varieties were available)?Coffee: fair trade, organic, Rainforest Alliance…could I find all three?If I could buy non-organic brown rice in a bigger bag, did the plastic pollution I saved in any way cancel out the pesticides used in growing?How about salt – would going for the Morton’s be a capitulation to advertising or would choosing the cheaper Walmart brand create downward pressure on prices that often has consequences for workers and the environment?What size cans of crushed tomatoes should I buy – the smaller size (and waste packaging materials) or the larger size (and likely waste food, since I’ll be cooking for one)?
All this, and I get to the check-out aisle and realize I’d forgotten to bring re-useable bags.
At the end of that trip, at the end of a couple weeks of shopping to get ready for life and work in NYC, after so many tiny (and at the same time overwhelmingly significant) decisions, there is this:
A Short Testament by Anne Porter
Whatever harm I may have done
In all my life in all your wide creation
If I cannot repair it
I beg you to repair it,
And then there are all the wounded
The poor the deaf the lonely and the old
Whom I have roughly dismissed
As if I were not one of them.
Where I have wronged them by it
And cannot make amends
I ask you
To comfort them to overflowing,
And where there are lives I may have withered around me,
Or lives of strangers far or near
That I've destroyed in blind complicity,
And if I cannot find them
Or have no way to serve them,
Remember them. I beg you to remember them
When winter is over
And all your unimaginable promises
Burst into song on death's bare branches.
Becoming (somewhat) grown-up and getting a (somewhat) grown-up jobs means obtaining some semblance of a grown-up wardrobe. And that means doing one of my least-favorite things: shopping.
For several years I've tried to avoid buying new clothes whenever possible. With a few exceptions for hygiene and safety (new underwear and running shoes), I've managed to clothe myself primarily with thrift store finds and the occasional "donation" from my friends' closets. I've chosen to do so for several reasons.
I disagree with the conditions in which most of what's on the shelves is made. I stopped buying new stuff my freshman year of college with a vague sense that the global clothing industry was problematic. Living with garment factory workers in Cambodia did not convince me otherwise.
I disagree with disposability. Following trends means buying new stuff as often as the industry wants me to. If I’m only supposed to wear it for a few months, chances are it's not made to last. Making new clothes is also environmentally costly.
I can't afford new stuff. And as it looks like I'll be either a student or working low-paying non-profit jobs for the foreseeable future, this is unlikely to change.
(This one was a surprise) I like this way better.
Just like I'm lucky that I don't like meat (it makes being a vegetarian so much easier), I'm lucky that I can't stand shopping. I credit this to my childhood. Every other summer my family would return to the US to visit family and friends, gain weight eating American junk food (okay, maybe that was just me), and stock up on what we needed for the following two years. This lent our shopping trips urgency and anxiety. Urgency (because if you don't get what you need from Old Navy now you won't have another chance for 2 years) and anxiety (because how, at age 11, can you be sure that your feet are done growing? and should you buy your jeans expecting that you'll lose the recently-acquired 5 lbs or not?).
But it was more than just the anticipation of long, boring days at the mall and frustrating decisions that made me dread shopping. It was the change I could sense in my spirit, the heaviness of feeling like I needed more and more new stuff that wouldn’t lift until I was back home. Kenya was no non-consumer Eden, but there were fewer options and therefore less anxiety.
In a way, my decision to stop buying new stuff in college was an effort to create a less-choice environment for myself. At first it was scary, and then it became an adventure (a pattern that recurs in my life every now and then). I can appreciate finding my bridesmaid’s dress for a friend’s wedding at a second-hand shop or inheriting a favorite outfit when a roommate moves out as gifts. Getting a pair of jeans I like from a Goodwill is a small miracle.
But. But. I start a new job in a couple of weeks and will need to be dressed professionally. Every day. I don’t often see quality dress shirts or suits in the racks at Salvation Army.
Once again, growing up means getting close enough to what was once black and white to have to taste the gray.
Femivore. I can see my brother rolling his eyes. Here it comes, some cross between two of the things he understands least about me - my distaste for meat and my tendency to pontificate on gender issues in the name of feminism.
Close, but not quite. I ran into "femivorism" in a recent NY Times article describing women pursuing "self-sufficiency, autonomy, and personal fulfillment" in orienting their lives around being as involved in their family's food sources as possible (backyard gardening, composting, raising chickens, urban beekeeping etc.) These "tomato-canning feminists" are about more than just tasty, healthy food - their commitment is to reducing their impact on the environment and counteracting materialism as well, to making their homes places of production not just consumption.
It probably goes without saying that I resonate with that vision. When I'm honest with myself, I recognize that some of my moments of greatest contentment and joy have been hanging my laundry in the backyard wearing muddy work boots and an apron over my yoga clothes, taking a break from cooking a meal with ingredients I mostly either grew myself or bartered for at a farmers' market and trying to keep my curious hens out of the laundry basket. I love all the things I'm learning - how to maintain a compost pile, harvest onions, make cheese, cook with turnips and yes, even kill a chicken.
To back-pedal a little bit - I still love books and ideas. I will go to grad school (eventually). I confess that I often use a couple of hours of my day off to go to the library and read the Economist, and that one of the biggest thrills of the last few months was attending a local city council meeting. But it's also hard to picture myself being satisfied in the world of journal articles and computer screens and academic conferences without an equal measure of fresh air and growing things and recipes modified and embellished until they're unrecognizable. I want to honor the education I'm getting right now, and the skills of my mother and aunts and grandmother, all of whom were raised with some experience of feeding and clothing themselves and their families.
Wendell Berry writes
The callings and disciplines of the...domestic arts are stationed all along the way from the farm to the prepared dinner, from the forest to the dinner table, from stewardship of the land to hospitality to friends and strangers. These arts are as demanding and gratifying, as instructive and as pleasing as the so-called fine arts. To learn them, to practice them, to honor and reward them is, I believe, our profoundest calling. Our reward is that they will enrich our lives and make us glad.
So here I am, an equally avid student of the domestic arts as I was of the liberal ones. Living in Cambodia taught me that as a member of the most affluent, materialist society ever, one of the most important things I can do with my life is pay close attention to what I consume - to start living simply and maybe help others like me do the same. And I'm finding Berry's words to be true - not only is this a profound calling, it has enriched my life and made me glad.
Thanks to Sarah and Amy for doing photographic justice to life on the Farm!
Yesterday I wrote about some of the ethical complications I see in the conspicuous efforts of companies to tie buying certain products to charity donations. It’s probably not surprising that this isn’t the only US “giving” practice that makes me cringe.
On my way to and from visiting the Angkor Wat temples while I was in Cambodia, one particular village caught my eye. All the houses were made of the same green corrugated iron (which strikes me as impractical in a hot, sunny climate), but this didn’t make it stand out – groups like Habitat for Humanity and Tabitha make houses that look similar. What was special about that village was that in front of every house, placed close to the road for maximum visibility, was a sign with little American flags announcing the name of the donor whose funds had built the house. I wonder what kind of people really needed to know that their names would be displayed in a language none of the locals would be able to read in order to give money to construct a home.
I see this as an extreme example of common need in the West to make our giving personal. A more typical scenario is child sponsorship. For $30-35 a month I can provide a child with school books, basic medical care, and a nutritious lunch every day (or something along those lines). In turn, I get the child’s picture for my refrigerator and receive occasional letters from him or her.
On the surface, this doesn’t seem like a bad arrangement. Rather than just throwing money at big problems like poverty, underdevelopment, malnutrition or child labor, I get to know (or at least think I know) that my money is making life better for little Joseph in Tanzania.
Except it’s rarely that simple. The reality is that organizations like World Vision and Save the Children with child sponsorship programs often pool the money for sponsorship within a certain community – so I’m supporting Joseph’s village, not just Joseph. That seems fair. After all, it’s a bit offensive to think that Joseph is receiving more care than his playmates because I picked him out of a catalog of children. But even though the funds may be combined for community projects, child sponsorship organizations still use a significant amount of their resources facilitating and administering the connection between the donor and the sponsored child. If those resources could be going instead to providing more books or mosquito nets, at what point does sponsorship become more about me than about the kids?
Perhaps it’s natural for us to want a human connection in our attempts to do something to address the suffering in the world. And perhaps its better to use money connecting sponsors with kids than for that money to not be given in the first place (though I’m not convinced – perhaps a future post on that). But at least we can start by being honest about the importance of feeling good in our attempts to do good.
This post deserves a bit of a “Sarah on her high horse” warning. Sometimes I say or write things not because I think I’ve got a particular issue figured out, but because I want to ask uncomfortable questions of myself and the world around me. With that in mind, then, one of the questions I’ve been asking recently is when the choices I/we make in the name of helping others are more about feeling good than actually doing good.
The advertisement sidebar on my Facebook page tells me that tomorrow Starbucks will be donating 5 cents of the cost of every drink to the (red) campaign. Money for people with AIDS in Africa – it’s a good thing, right?
Maybe. Leaving a discussion of the actual impacts of charity efforts like the (red) campaign aside for a moment, I wonder what they say about us as US consumers. To begin with, there’s the absurdity of using the donation of a few dollars or cents of the profits from a purchase to some worthy cause as an incentive to buy something. The obvious question here is – if you really wanted to help, why not donate the whole $15 cost of your t-shirt?
Okay, so maybe your t-shirt purchase isn’t so much about helping the poor, but if you’re going to buy the shirt anyway, isn’t it better to go for one that will support someone in need? Again, I want to say, “not so fast”. I wonder if by highlighting special opportunities to make particular ethical consumption choices, companies like Apple, Starbucks and the Gap aren’t distracting us from the fact that all our consumer choices have social, political and environmental ramifications in the developing world. Does a dollar or two given back to the communities in Lesotho where (red) t-shirts are made make up for the fact that what you pay for the jeans on the next rack is the same as what the woman who sews them in Cambodia makes in a month? Does a few cents donation from your latte do anything to address the environmental degradation of non-fair trade, non-organic coffee? Though it’s impossible to measure, does the good you do with the occasional contribution to consumer charity outweigh the negatives impact of the product you buy? Of all the non-charity items you get from those companies?
Perhaps my argument is not so much with campaigns like (red) themselves as it is with how the highlight the lack of a bigger conversation about the amount of stuff we buy, where it comes from, and how the earth and other people are treated to get them to us in the first place. At any rate, I don’t think hitting up Starbucks tomorrow will be my way of marking World AIDS day.
