Owning and Being Owned:
I am feeling a bit domesticated these days. My house is not really my house; it’s the farm-house and therefore, all kinds of people wander in and out on a daily basis. My family, my friends, visitors, and various dogs; many days, the teapot fills and empties and is filled again. So therefore, I feel it somewhat behooves me to keep the place at least minimally tidy and in working order; consequently I have new drapes, courtesy of my friend, Yvette, a new floor, courtesy of my brother and sister-in-law, and a new lawn mower, courtesy of my son. All a bit amazing to watch!
I have never been a house person. As a child, for me to be given a choice between being outdoors and in was no choice at all. I was almost always outside. The house was a place to eat and sleep and read. My mother looked after the house. Talk of decorating and renovating was an immediate excuse to flee.
But – I have this house. The house seems to always want things, drapes and flooring and cleaning and furniture. Occasionally, on my way home from buying groceries and chicken feed, I wander into the local hardware store and wander, lost and marveling, up and down the aisles. What a lot of stuff one can buy for a house. I stand, marveling, in front of the appliances, coffee maker, blenders and food processors. I can’t believe I am doing this. I hate stuff. I am an anti-consumer. But there I am, staring at stuff. The house is making me do it.
Louis, who is nine, is coming to the farm again for the summer. Lately, he has been talking about a TV show he watches, in which a group of kids are attempting to survive in the wilderness. We have decided we will play survivor on the beach this summer. At night, as he goes to sleep, we have conversations about what we can take with us. Are sleeping bags okay? Yes, he decides. Can I take my Swiss Army knife? A pot, teabags, salt and butter?
I know where this leads. I’ve packed up many a picnic for the beach. The amount of stuff needed to produce just one meal is formidable.
When I was a kid, I loved the idea of surviving outside. I had many and various hideouts on the mountain above the farm. Often, especially in the spring or fall, I would take some matches, a can of beans out of the pantry and my trusty hatchet, and head up there just for the sheer delight of making lunch on my own. There were two books in particular that I loved and read over and over; Two Little Savages, by Ernest Thompson Seton, and My Side of the Mountain, by Julie Craighead George, which were about kids who lived in the woods and did it well. I never quite lived outside, but I always liked to think that I could, if I had to.
But at sixty, a teacher and writer, I find myself stuck in the house far more than I would like. And I am completely amazed to find that I am actually learning to care for this house; learning how much time and energy and stuff it takes to keep a modern house functioning. And this isn’t a big middle class house. This is a small log house on a farm, with a woodstove.
And outside -- lawn, garden, mowing, pruning trimming. Yikes.
I have often said and it is true, that I belong to this place where I live, far more than it belongs to me. It has mothered and fathered me and made me what I am and for that, I am always utterly grateful. But belonging to a place, versus owning a place; belonging to a place versus being owned by a place; or being owned by possessions, being possessed by my sense of ownership, versus simply having enough things to function comfortably, are very, very different ideas and states of being.
I don’t want to own this place, but more than that, I don’t want my sense of connection to be transformed into one where the place owns me. It is a gift from fate that I have the chance to be here in this beauty; to share the gift of the non-human lives around me, to balance my choice to be here with the care that I give the house and the garden in order to maintain them in beauty as well. It’s an enormous and important distinction, a whole universe of value, between belonging, and owning.
Showing posts with label land versus real-estate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label land versus real-estate. Show all posts
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
walking the lines in February
February: 2010
This has been a strange month full of complex odd contrasts. Today, Sunday, the end of February, although the major earthquake in Chile has been the second item on the news, the first item all day has been – a hockey game. Yes, THE Olympic hockey game between the US and Canada. All month, the radio has been blaring the Olympics, day after day – I tried turning the radio off but I have been sitting and typing with CBC in the background for so many years, it is hard to work into the silence. So it goes back on but at a low buzzy level where I can barely hear it. It isn’t the Olympics that really bothers me, not the athletes, not the events even, or people having fun; somehow it’s an odd sneaky tone of triumphalism that creeps into the media; that says, see, naysayers and doommongers and liberal bleeding hearts do-gooders, the world really does belong to Coke and corporatism, so all you negative people can just shut up. And the thing that made me rejoice about the Olympics is that in some odd way, the people and the athletes took it back from the corporate spin, if only very briefly.
And today, my dear friend Mair Smith is in a hospital in Edmonton dying of thyroid cancer. She and I worked in the Alberta Status of Women together and did other feminist work ; we had long conversations about all kinds of ideas but our relationship changed somewhat after she went to Findhorn and became ‘spiritual.’ And today I sat on the porch with dear friends and had a conversation about how thin are the lines between spirituality, religion and superstition. Mair walked those lines with elegance and, yes, occasionally drove me crazy with her enthusiasm.
Yesterday, I read on some news site online about a woman who is running for governor of Texas who declared that all the government anyone needed was the right to private property, and the right to own a gun. Yes, I can occasionally see the temptation of such simplistic bizarre thinking in which you never again had to think about or consider anyone else.
And all month, I have been dealing with our beloved farm as a piece of real estate, a dichotomy that drives me really, really crazy.
But at least today was sunny. The heavy grey sky lid day after day, that sits over the lake and screens off the mountains, that seals in damp and despair, burned off by noon and I went outside, pulled my baby maple trees out the sawdust and watered them, planted some sprouting apricot pits and went for a walk.
We made a number of decisions about the farm this month, most notably, to invite a couple of our close friends to put RV’s on sites near the beach – a break with our traditional family culture of proud solitariness– but we did it because of money, because a farm endlessly needs money, needs infrastructure, needs fences, barns, pens, tractors, seeds, mowers, and so on. Needs to pay its taxes.
We also contacted a lawyer and real-estate agent and met with both of them in order to finish our subdivision, and put conditions on the sale of the lake shore lot that we must sell in order to buy out our sublings.
We met with the bank loan officer and I drafted a ‘business plan’.
This will all be an ongoing process for a while. And I hate it, loathe it, loathe the concept of land as real-estate. Want to hide from it all. My druthers would always be to leave the farm untouched and intact; to even let it go back to wilderness as much as possible. Instead, inch by inch, we are surrendering to civilization. To roads. To people. To buildings.
Everything we are doing makes sense and it’s all for the best of reasons. The people with RV’s are people who would be visiting and sharing the beach anyway. Our friends. The lot sale has to go ahead in order to save the rest of the farm. The lawyer is a good guy as is the real estate woman.
And it all makes me crazy. This land is not real-estate. It’s my home, a place I only want to protect and care for, a place that protects and cares for me. Not as real-estate, Not as private property. Not as a place that gives me rights or that I would shoot other people to defend.
Nor am I a person who should have to deal with money, real-estate, wills, taxes, contracts, or any kind of paper work,…I am a writer. Right now, I steal time to write; I steal time to work on my presentation on the new nature writing for the Banff nonfiction conference, the presentation I didn’t give last year but that is good because I have actually done a whole lot of work and research on it. I have a new YA book jumping at me, but not begun, a sequel to the last one. I am going to the coast in March to do research on the ethics of nonfiction book. I am almost done a series of essays on land issues. It all creeps along far too slowly, in among meetings and teaching and anxiety.
At night I huddle over the computer, watching BBC Mysteries, falling into them as if falling into a pool of deep water, wanting only distraction and escape.
This is a world which makes it endlessly hard to walk in balance, where contradiction lurks in every corner, where values shift and change, where the future lurks like a menacing shadow, and even a two week Olympic binge, however distracting it was, only staves off that shadow for a brief period.
How thin are the lines we balance upon. How deep and wide the contradictions.
This has been a strange month full of complex odd contrasts. Today, Sunday, the end of February, although the major earthquake in Chile has been the second item on the news, the first item all day has been – a hockey game. Yes, THE Olympic hockey game between the US and Canada. All month, the radio has been blaring the Olympics, day after day – I tried turning the radio off but I have been sitting and typing with CBC in the background for so many years, it is hard to work into the silence. So it goes back on but at a low buzzy level where I can barely hear it. It isn’t the Olympics that really bothers me, not the athletes, not the events even, or people having fun; somehow it’s an odd sneaky tone of triumphalism that creeps into the media; that says, see, naysayers and doommongers and liberal bleeding hearts do-gooders, the world really does belong to Coke and corporatism, so all you negative people can just shut up. And the thing that made me rejoice about the Olympics is that in some odd way, the people and the athletes took it back from the corporate spin, if only very briefly.
And today, my dear friend Mair Smith is in a hospital in Edmonton dying of thyroid cancer. She and I worked in the Alberta Status of Women together and did other feminist work ; we had long conversations about all kinds of ideas but our relationship changed somewhat after she went to Findhorn and became ‘spiritual.’ And today I sat on the porch with dear friends and had a conversation about how thin are the lines between spirituality, religion and superstition. Mair walked those lines with elegance and, yes, occasionally drove me crazy with her enthusiasm.
Yesterday, I read on some news site online about a woman who is running for governor of Texas who declared that all the government anyone needed was the right to private property, and the right to own a gun. Yes, I can occasionally see the temptation of such simplistic bizarre thinking in which you never again had to think about or consider anyone else.
And all month, I have been dealing with our beloved farm as a piece of real estate, a dichotomy that drives me really, really crazy.
But at least today was sunny. The heavy grey sky lid day after day, that sits over the lake and screens off the mountains, that seals in damp and despair, burned off by noon and I went outside, pulled my baby maple trees out the sawdust and watered them, planted some sprouting apricot pits and went for a walk.
We made a number of decisions about the farm this month, most notably, to invite a couple of our close friends to put RV’s on sites near the beach – a break with our traditional family culture of proud solitariness– but we did it because of money, because a farm endlessly needs money, needs infrastructure, needs fences, barns, pens, tractors, seeds, mowers, and so on. Needs to pay its taxes.
We also contacted a lawyer and real-estate agent and met with both of them in order to finish our subdivision, and put conditions on the sale of the lake shore lot that we must sell in order to buy out our sublings.
We met with the bank loan officer and I drafted a ‘business plan’.
This will all be an ongoing process for a while. And I hate it, loathe it, loathe the concept of land as real-estate. Want to hide from it all. My druthers would always be to leave the farm untouched and intact; to even let it go back to wilderness as much as possible. Instead, inch by inch, we are surrendering to civilization. To roads. To people. To buildings.
Everything we are doing makes sense and it’s all for the best of reasons. The people with RV’s are people who would be visiting and sharing the beach anyway. Our friends. The lot sale has to go ahead in order to save the rest of the farm. The lawyer is a good guy as is the real estate woman.
And it all makes me crazy. This land is not real-estate. It’s my home, a place I only want to protect and care for, a place that protects and cares for me. Not as real-estate, Not as private property. Not as a place that gives me rights or that I would shoot other people to defend.
Nor am I a person who should have to deal with money, real-estate, wills, taxes, contracts, or any kind of paper work,…I am a writer. Right now, I steal time to write; I steal time to work on my presentation on the new nature writing for the Banff nonfiction conference, the presentation I didn’t give last year but that is good because I have actually done a whole lot of work and research on it. I have a new YA book jumping at me, but not begun, a sequel to the last one. I am going to the coast in March to do research on the ethics of nonfiction book. I am almost done a series of essays on land issues. It all creeps along far too slowly, in among meetings and teaching and anxiety.
At night I huddle over the computer, watching BBC Mysteries, falling into them as if falling into a pool of deep water, wanting only distraction and escape.
This is a world which makes it endlessly hard to walk in balance, where contradiction lurks in every corner, where values shift and change, where the future lurks like a menacing shadow, and even a two week Olympic binge, however distracting it was, only staves off that shadow for a brief period.
How thin are the lines we balance upon. How deep and wide the contradictions.
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