morning at the springs

We have too many plums, so I told Andre I’d make pancakes with plum compote.  After a leisurely morning in bed, listening to the occasional train and the bubbling hot springs nearby, we dragged ourselves out and started chores—dishes from last night, evacuating maggots that had infested one of our lentinous ponderosas—constant work foraging is.  On our visit to Goose Lake, we chopped so much firewood that we threw a few pieces on top of Butter and are still hauling it around.  It seems silly when you think about it, but calories are hard to find in nature relative to the ease of finding the minute amount of extra diesel those couple of logs use. 

Andre depitted the plums while I made tea and batter. I finally figured out the perfect use for that oat bran we found during a dive last spring.  I checked email between flips, put on some music, plugged in our batteries to recharge, and even left the refrigerator door open slightly while grabbing the hemp milk for our tea… hmm… in just a matter of hours, electricity seems to have become something I don’t even think about using too much of.  All the mental resources devoted to conserving have been freed up to think about other things, after all, we are dealing with a limited pool of attentional resources.  It’s no wonder we see so much waste.  Here I am, an active environmentalist, connecting with nature, having no real schedule other than a few talks here and there, and when electricity doesn’t mean draining Butter’s battery, I just use it right up.  This is something I’ll have to give more thought to—vertical hierarchies that we’ve created to simplify our lives have left us feeling powerless; limited resources, cognitive limitations, make it challenging to juggle our immediate life and the things we need to do to ensure our continuation.

I saw a man walking out of his monstrosity of a motor home, a castle compared to Butter, with a Styrofoam cup of coffee.  No judgment, just taking it all in.