Straw bale gardening and salvation

I have had trouble growing vegetables in my current yard, even though I had started a successful vegetable garden in the yard of my last house. This year I decided to give straw bale gardening a try. I purchased the book Straw Bale Gardens. As I was reading about how to create a straw bale garden, I began to find myself completely drawn in and thinking I had discovered the meaning of life.

It became an obsession for several weeks. I purchased my straw bales, placed them in the yard, conditioned them with organic fertilizer and planted them.The garden is doing better than my previous gardens. And the book's author was kind enough to directly respond to a question I posted on his Facebook page. I'll also probably do it again next year.

However, it didn't turn out to hold the key to the universe. I occasionally look out the window to admire how the garden is doing and on some days I have to water it, but other than that I don't give it too much more thought. 

This experience makes we wonder why we get sucked into methods and products so easily. Clearly, authors of parenting and self help books are aware of this tendency, as are marketers of almost type of product. Even the package of flushable wipes that we use for our child promises something grand,   that the wipes promote children's independence. 

It is as if we are seeking something beyond ourselves. Even though we know a product or method, however it good it is, can't get us to salvation, we try anyway. If this one doesn't do it, maybe the next one will.

Data collection and power

When I was in graduate school in the mid 1990s, I read Discipline and Punish by French political philosopher Michele Foucault. In his book, originally published in 1975, Foucault contrasts the penal system of France in the 1700s to the modern penal system and describes how each exercised power.

In the older model, punishment was bloody, public and torturous. The modern penal system appears more humanitarian, but power is exercised more subtly and completely by creating the sense that one is always being watched. Foucault argued that people would change their behavior if they knew someone could be watching, even if no one was actually watching.

When I was in graduate school, I remember thinking and writing that Foucualt's theory of power was crazy. He suggest sthat power has become a forcefield rather than something exercised by the individual  I kept thinking, how could power be exercised without people?

But I now see where Foucault was coming from and can't help but think how much foresight he had, given that he wrote Discipline and Punish 20 years before the advent of the World Wide Web.
Today corporations can  figure out when someone is pregnant before friends and family members know. The National Security Agency is collecting all sort of date on people.

Many Americans know about this data collection and have a ho-hum attitude toward it, thinking in regard to the government "I am not doing anything wrong so I don't care" or in the case of corporations, "It's convenient." It was very easy to set up this blog which will track my patterns of behavior.

But I would urge people to see this constant watching of us, in part, as an exercise of power. Because being watched does change our behavior. Buying a particular product only because we received a targeted coupon is only one such example. But other ways may be more subtle and even unknown to those whose behavior is changed.

Butterfly face paint and impermanence

Recently my almost three-year old went to a carnival and a volunteer painted a butterfly on his face. Later that evening, as we were getting ready for bed, I mentioned to my child that I would need to wash the butterfly off his face. He became quite upset. I was able to momentarily stem the tide of tears by giving him a butterfly sticker. But 30 minutes later, my child was crying tears of grief again because he wanted his face-paint butterfly back.

This made me wonder how to teach a toddler that impermanence is the law of the universe. Frankly most adults, including me, don't fully grasp it. It's hard for us to be role models for children. I can remember many times in which I thought I had set things up perfectly and thought they would last a long time, but then some thing just changed. For example, we were so pleased that our child's daycare was within walking distance of our house; then the center up and moved. Whenever I feel like I get in a groove at work, somebody new comes along and I have to figure out a new way of doing everything. I constantly forget that things, especially good things, don't and can't stay the way they are.

I didn't have a choice, but to adjust to these changes. Yet they were accompanied by feeling of anger, frustration and irritation, or adult versions of grief. It makes me wonder how I and my child will react to the ultimate in impermanence, facing up to our own mortality and the mortality of those we love
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