Outpost Post #1

I’m increasingly attracted by the idea that there can be at least small pockets where life and character and beauty and meaning continue. If I could help protect one of those from destruction, maybe that would be enough. Maybe it would be more than most people do.

—

Paul Kingsnorth

¹

Sometimes when I’m driving along the highway and feeling dispirited by the exhaust fumes and industrial parks, the billboards advertising personal injury lawyers, the fast food places that bring to mind those words from the Book of Common Prayer, “There is no health in us,” I remind myself that outposts exist beyond the exit ramps, deep in the countryside and in hidden pockets of the cities and suburbs, places where people are making and growing and cultivating and creating. Someone’s out in the garden weeding the tomatoes, and someone’s writing a letter to a friend. A guy’s playing fiddle on the front porch and a little kid’s collecting eggs from a coop. Somewhere out there beyond the billboards, in the middle of a bleak subdivision, a woman is feeding her sourdough starter, which over time has incorporated molecules from every member of her household.

There are lots of reasons that the thought of these outposts makes me happy, but mainly it’s because the people there are engaged in good work. They’re using their hands and their minds in concert to create and tend to and care for and cultivate. They’re not selling or buying or scrolling or influencing.² They haven’t been consumed by consumer culture. 

I know a lot of people who make stuff and grow stuff, maybe because I make stuff (quilts, bread) and grow stuff myself. I know printmakers and garment sewers and weavers, lots of gardeners and at least one fiddle player, a few potters and a bunch of really good cooks, plus a handful of letter writers. When I’m at home in my little bubble, I can believe that the makers and growers and cultivators are legion. That the poets are, as Shelley would have it, the unacknowledged legislators of the world. 

It’s when I hit the road that I’m most quickly disabused of such notions.

It’s not the people I meet on the road that cause me despair³; it’s what I find on the sides of the highways and byways. It’s the buildings designed without the smallest nod to beauty; it’s the storage units filled with unwanted stuff and the slow fast food restaurants that call their factory-produced food homemade. It’s the billboards popping up every hundred yards. It’s not just that they’re ugly, it’s that they uglify beautiful places and remind me that commercial interests trump everything.⁴

When I’m feeling overwhelmed by these things, it’s good to remember that there’s still a living culture out there. True, it’s one that has been beaten back and struggles to survive. But it’s still there, sending out its tendrils and spores to be tended to and cultivated by people who love the homegrown and homemade, the idiosyncratically human.

Last fall, I participated in a five-week online course led by writer

Dougald Hine

called Regrowing a Living Culture.⁵ When I signed up, I assumed there would be seven or eight of us who wanted to know more about living cultures and how we can participate in them. To my surprise, there were close to 90 people from all over the world on that first call. 

(In the same way, when K and I planned our first meeting of the Spencer Street Collective, we thought maybe two people would show up. Instead over half of the households on our street were represented.)

There’s a hunger in all kinds of people for good work. There’s a hunger for beauty and homemade bread and community. Whenever I tell people about what we’re trying to start here on Spencer Street, they get excited. They want to know more.

But even the most privileged people I know feel trapped by modernity.⁶ We know that we spend way too much time on our various devices, but we don’t know how to participate in the world without them. We know the way we live contributes to climate change and that climate change is going to make life very hard for our children and grandchildren, but we don’t know how to live otherwise. How do we make our lives work without cars and planes and the internet?

I’m as complicit in the destruction of the world as anyone. This is not about pointing a finger, except to say, Look, there are things we can do. We can band together with our neighbors to make gardens and compost piles. We can grow tomatoes and learn how to knit. We can do good work that reminds us that good work is what we’re here to do.

1. I’ve read a lot of Kingsnorth, but I came across this quote recently in the wild and no text was cited. If you know where it’s from, please let me know!

2. It’s my fervent hope that they’re not taking selfies as they do this good work, and since this is my fantasy world, I will tell you that there are no phones anywhere.

3. Well, sometimes it’s the people. Sometimes it’s the drivers weaving in and out of traffic at 100 mph, or the ones that give you the finger as they pass you because you were going the speed limit in the right hand lane. Sometimes it’s the people in hotel restaurants who are doing some serious drinking at lunch. I’m not against drinking and I’m not against drinking at lunch. But there’s a kind of lunchtime drinking you run into that reeks of despair, and it makes me very sad.

4. Except in the four U.S. states that don’t allow billboards–all hail Alaska, Vermont, Maine and Hawaii!

5. I became aware of Dougald Hine early last fall (I think it was via Elizabeth Oldfield’s The Sacred podcast). Then, suddenly, I was having a Dougald Hine Autumn! I read his book At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics and all the Other Emergencies (which I highly recommend), and ultimately took the Regrowing a Living Culture course, which I found quite meaningful. One of things I learned early in my DHA was that, along with Paul Kingsnorth, Dougald was a co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. How did I not know that?

6. Maybe it’s mostly privileged people who have a hard time stepping away. We’re the ones who have the most goodies that are doing the most harm.