Language of Living

Everything we do has consequence. Some good. Some bad. But really most unseen. I looked in the mirror last night and laughed when I thought that every pound on me is from some choice I made at some point. My body is in many ways an accumulation of my choices. (And I have clearly chosen a lot of cookies over my time.)

I've always felt pretty strongly about some social and political issues. University actually sort of dulled many of those sentiments but my relationship with Zach has reawakened many. He is an activist but not because he's passing out annoying pamphlets or listening to himself talk at parties but because he makes personal choices on a daily level that reflect his personal beliefs. If you ask him about his beliefs he'd be willing to have a conversation with you but he probably won't bring it up. And if you don't look closely, you may never realize that he lives and believes far left of many. 

We've spent the last 3 days filming a food preservation how to DVD. It's not for work. It's something that came to us by way of one of Zach's childhood friends. The information itself is fascinating but the conversations had over long breakfasts and lunches is what gets my mind racing. I feel like a generation has lost a language. Like immigrants who came to America and taught their children ONLY english. The lilt of the mother tongue forever gone. 

I feel like our generation are refugees of the feminist movement and a society that has to put a $ amount to arbitrarily create value. Through this twist of good intention and a bad system we have lost basic and vital information for living. It's almost Newspeak but knowledge. If the word for "hot" is taken away it changes how people think. If we lose the knowledge of how to create the foods we put into our bodies, we lose the power to make choices of what we put in our bodies. 

The things our mothers knew we no longer know. The skills of our grandmothers are lost and there is this quiet desperation to find them again. We want to find those mother tongues.

But we are still caught in the same bind. Learning these skills takes time and committment. I argue not as much as we think (that is something I've been realizing this weekend) but it does take those. And if a family for example wants to take it on it means people spending large amounts of time on it. And I've felt the nasty taste of "homemaker" in my own mouth. The stay at home Mom. What do you do? If you don't make buildings or design cars or play lead guitar in a band or make movies or sell insurance or something that brings in revenue or creating something with cache you are automatically dubbed as all of these negative things. You suddenly don't have anything to bring to the conversation.

But we no longer know how to make the things that clothe our bodies or provide energy to our cells. We rely on giant companies in the middle of countries we can't even locate on a map. We have been told "trust us" and we can do nothing but that because we have lost the physical ability to make another choice. 

On the most basic and important of things we have lost our knowledge on how to live. Yes I can make things in 7 different programs on a computer, but I can't turn a tomato on a bush into something I could eat 4 months from now. And all it takes is tomatoes, a jar, boiling water and lemon. 

There is something off about this. When I'm quiet and just think about it on some not-even-so-deep-level I know there is something wrong with this. And I think it's time to change.