|
I still carry with me the vivid images of a wartime childhood: the tin hats, the gas masks, the thankful prayers when morning dawned and our house still stood, or one of the rare letters, blue-&SHY;scrawled and scissored by the army censor, that came from my faraway father. Yet strangely, despite food rationing, the blackout, the nights spent huddled in the air raid shelter listening to the ominous screech of falling bombs and the staccato bursts of antiaircraft fire, and despite the absence of so many things the grownups missed, my child's world, as I look back on it, was still an okay place. The house was warm. I was surrounded by love, and I was never hungry. We had homemade Cornish pasties, deftly shaped by Grandma's expert fingers; delicious, wonderful potato cake on Sunday afternoons; saffron buns; and glasses of fullflavored cider that came in reusable glass bottles with popoff stoppers that squeaked and clattered against their necks. There were flowers and homegrown vegetables in the garden, and plump loganberries ripened on the fence. In our nearby park there was a pond, and in spring I brought home frogspawn in a jar and raised tadpoles in a shady comer of the garden. My mother took me for walks and picnics on the weekends. We went to the beach in summer, and even though the shoreline was festooned with barbed-wire entanglements to repel invading armies, there were still rocks to climb, caves to explore, sand castles to build, and tide pools alive with fascinating creatures. It was a world of restrictions, scarcities, and severely limited choices. Yet in some way, that very scarcity served only to heighten our enjoyment of what we did have. And when the missing things began to come back, the pleasure we took in them was unsurpassable. I shall never forget the taste of my very first ice cream. I was nine years old, and the flavor lives on my tongue to this day. If every kind of food is available yearround, where's the excitement of tasting the year's first plate of new potatoes, the first picking of fresh green peas, the first bowl of ripe strawberries? When I reflect on the way I live now, and the pride and joy I take in keeping small my "ecological footprint" on the earth, I can see that the seeds of my lifelong appreciation of simplicity must surely have been sown back then, in the forced austerity of war, against which every small pleasure was amplified tenfold. Looking around me now, at our glutted, bored, wasteful consumer culture, I find myself tracking back along the years, searching for the point at which the excited release from wartime privation and the welcoming back of exotic items like oranges and bananas, real silk, and colored china turned into an insatiability, a greedy grasping for more and more and more until there seemed no boundary any longer — and therefore nothing left to savor. After all, if every kind of food is available yearround, where's the excitement of tasting the year's first plate of new potatoes, the first picking of fresh green peas, the first bowl of ripe strawberries? Whenever I talk or write about the deep joy of simplicity, the intense pleasure that can come from having only what you absolutely need and no more, I often despair that I come across sounding like some stern, pleasurehating masochist. Yet the very opposite is true. Though my partner and I have no automobile and travel everywhere on foot, on bicycles, or on public transport, and though we live in a tiny twobedroom house with no central heating, no microwave oven, and no washer, dryer, or freezer, our lives fairly overflow with pleasure. That's why, when I write about the simple life, I always focus on the delight factor. I speak of the sensory pleasures of planting, tending, picking, and cooking our own wholesome, organic food; the cozy peacefulness of a cottage living room where the wood burner, not TV, is the center and focus of the room; the companionship of conversation around the dinner table; and the soaring joy of do-it-yourself music. I speak of a slowpaced life, where bread rises slowly by the oven, filling the house with its aroma; a supermarket-free, traffic-free life, where going shopping, to me, means a walk up the lane to the village store and a chat or exchange of greetings with whoever I meet on the way. A life that has time for birdsong, for meditation, and for noticing the slow cycling of the seasons. I believe that deep within those of us over the age of forty, who managed to live out most of our childhoods before the modern era of speed and excess, of prepackaged "infotainment," fast-food outlets on every corner, shopping malls and bubblewrapped plastic toys, there are intact memories of simple, homemade pleasures and the enjoyment of sufficiency. It is up to us to mine those memories and use them to construct a better world rather than simply grumbling about what we see around us. In another thirty years, how many people still alive will remember how nice it was to have all one's phone calls answered by a live person, to have a bank teller who knew your name, to get away to a place where no phones ever ring, and to be able to buy buttons or picture hooks loose instead of in packets of five or ten (when you need six or 12)? Just as heirloom varieties of vegetables are being lost in this modern world of seed patenting, hybridization, and genetic manipulation, so are many of the valuable ideas, methods, and values of yesterday being lost from contemporary memory. We, the elders, are the seedsavers. It is our particular job, simply because we are the only ones who remember. If we don't speak up for these things and try to reincorporate them into our redesigns for the world, then who will? It is up to us, more than to anyone else, to ensure that the true treasures of our culture are preserved for future use. Just as my grandmother used to salt down beans for the winter, we, too, have to preserve, in our daily lives, things we know to be deeply nourishing to the human body and soul, and work to throw out things we know to be destructive and harmful to ourselves, our loved ones, our communities, or Earth herself. But rather than attempting to turn back the clock, let us move forward, using every ounce of knowledge, wisdom, creativity, and skill at our disposal to help construct a world that incorporates the best of the past with the achievements of the present and the vast potential of the future. I am now older than my grandmother was when my hometown burned. Around me — around us all — new fires are raging. Each of us must find a way to put them out. Marian Van Eyk McCain is a retired psychotherapist and health educator who has published articles on many topics, ranging from personal and spiritual development to alternative technology. Her first book, Transformation through Menopause, was published by Bergin & Garvey in 1991. Her new book, Elderwoman, is published by Findhorn Press. For more information, go to <http://www.elderwoman.org/>. |
In 1942, when my
grandmother was several years younger than I am now, the heart
of my English hometown was torn out by war. From the back windows
of my grandmother's house, my six-year-old eyes watched the entire
city center burn in a wide, red sea of fire that seemed unreal,
impossible, an event beyond imagining.