It’s 30 days ‘til 30 and I’m sitting at a Peet’s coffee shop in Carlsbad, CA. It’s a lovely 70 degrees this morning and expected to go up to 74 where the weather has been every day this week. The particular Peets I’m sitting at is in the office park with the Trader Joes, incase you need a point of reference.

I am here today, dressed in my only suit that fits, sipping a redeye and prepping for an interview with a tempt agency in just under two hours.

In other words, it’s 30 days ‘til 30 and I have no friggin’ idea how my life will look 30 days from now.

After 12 months of sending out resumes, the husband and I have decided that I should consider applying for jobs in San Diego’s job market as well as Portland’s and we will follow whatever path opens for us.

I spent the first quarter-century of my life fighting with and giving into the pull of the South. I was a pure Southerner who didn’t belong. Like too many people who are born in the South, I spent my whole adolescence feeling like an outsider only to spend much of my twenties trying to appease my guilt for leaving. It’s been nearly a decade since I left the south and, aside from a stubborn sense of propriety, I’m not a Southerner anymore.

I lived in the South for 22 years, the Midwest for 6 years, the Pacific Northwest for 1 year, and now I’m toying with the idea of moving to southern California. The truth is I feel no particular attraction to any of these places. I know I’m done with Chicago and I know I can’t go back to Kentucky but rest doesn’t seem too important.

What kind of life do I want to have—if these two paths open before me. Do I want the quiet, rough-neck, anti-establishment, permanently recessed ways of Portland or do I want the surf, sand, sun, and vapid consumerism of Southern California? Can I bring my Portland personality to California? Is there any soil for it to grow in if I do?

These are some of my thoughts on the 335th day of my 29th year at roughly 8:30 in the morning.

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As I approach 30, there are a wave of changes beginning to happen—mostly in my approach to life and confidence. One of these changes is my approach to happiness, and the idea that it may be much easier to achieve than I’ve made it out to be.

The question I’m considering today is how to move from consumption to collaboration.

Kill consumption completely. How do I make all of the things I experience in life—food, sex, music, film, dance, work—experiences of collaboration rather than consumption?

An Example: Work.
In a given job there are only so many pegs on the board. Your job is to move said pegs. Someone tells you how and when those pegs should be moved. You do it—with precision, clarity, professionalism. If you do this, you’ll always be employed pushing pegs across a board. For the rest of your life. This is the corporate trap.

Another option: You see the pegs, you understand your function, you move the pegs across the board. Sometimes you recognize that your feedback is in the way, so you just shut up and move the pegs. Other times you recognize that there is room for collaboration. You discuss the pegs, their shapes and colors and contours. You know the board and why each peg is placed the way it is. You are not a functionary in this role, but a collaborator. As the people instructing you become more trusting of your feedback you rise in their estimation and when an opportunity presents itself you take it, lifting yourself up the rungs of the ladder.

A year ago this discussion would have repulsed me—the problem I would have said—is that any of us have to play these games in the first place, that there’s no work to be done with our hands that gives us meaning. A year ago I would have believed that was true, I might still believe it’s true today. But after a year of recessed living my outlook has become more rooted in harsh reality.

No, none of us should have to work for corporations. But, try as I might, I cannot single-handedly change that. I can participate in my consumption, avoid all corporate chains, buy my food at the farmer’s markets, resist the corporate machine through my dollar and support all things local, organic, and of the community in which I live. I cannot, however, resist the need to work.

The world is what it is, and I can either fight that and live in my idealism or I can go with it and make my inner world without all this constant struggle. Credit cards and student debt have already tethered me to the system, and other than giving up everything and disappearing into the mountains for the rest of my life, the only real choice I have is how to deal with my place in the system.

We can wear a suit to work or we can wear an ironic t-shirt, either way we all have to work. We can pretend that isn’t true, but that doesn’t change our need for a home, a car (in this culture) and a way to pay for all of those glorious, useless MFAs we were sold as kids.

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In 2008 the economy crashed and all around the world markets fell as scientists screamed about the Earth’s demise to no avail. The American Consumer wasn’t listening and chose instead to go on wrecking the world.

As the Bush era ended, John McCain tried to charm the nation with his hot-headed ways and Sarah Palin became the white-trash butt of a dangerous national joke. Crowds gathered in Minneapolis shouting “Drill Baby Drill!”, but there was a bigger crowd in Denver who spoke of responsibility, dignity, and hope.

That sound is America turning on a dime again, just when we all had stopped believing that we could turn away from our own selfish aspirations and entitlements. Here we go again, turning, voluntarily, back towards progress.

We are still awash in ignorance, greed, lack of responsibility, and mis-infotainment, but now the numbers are getting close to even. Every small-minded, scientific-revisionist dogmatist is matched by an open-minded, aware, and cynical idealist.

This year there was a word, a reticent but solemnly felt word that was on so many lips whether we uttered it or not. The word was revolution .

We are living through the change so many of us have conjured for so long, a cultural re-alignment, a great crash and a reckoning.

How much longer can any of us go without our hands in dirt, without our lungs inhaling all that clean air that we can restore with a little care and planning. How much longer can we distract our bodies with newer, flashier toys before our mind revolts entirely?

For many decades now we have watched the world change before our eyes. Our forests have disappeared, as have the farms, clean water, and our national will and dignity.

No animal can live far beyond the degradation its environment. Humans are animals; the same rules apply to us. This truth we know instinctively in our bones, down beneath the product placement and preemptive war, down father past the segregation and the legacy of tyranny, beyond the preciousness and the righteousness, beyond the certainty of the truth, we sense that we have failed our environment and now the environment is turning its back on us.

Our current financial crash is just the price we must pay for our greed. Unfortunately, there are decades of greed to atone and the planet is yet to cash in all of the debt that is due to it. Before the reckoning is through there will be much to dismantle and much to repair.

Only our hands can do it. Only our minds can steer the craft.

Hope is only hope. Action makes it real.

Comment?

Now that the glut of the holiday season has passed, and a weeklong bout with the flu has forced me to step back from the rumble of the day-to-day, I settle in on this moist January day in our modest apartment in Portland, OR and I consider the madness of the season that has ended.

The sobering idea that keeps coming to my mind is consumption. Or, more directly, how can I escape the crazed consumption that is encouraged, even enabled and re-enforced, by the culture that surrounds me.

Our economy is crumbling, our planet is sick and poisoned, most of my fellow Americans live lives of not even quiet desperation, and yet I feel sometimes that not even the wise among us will point our fingers directly at the cause of that which makes us ill. We are, increasingly, removed from the natural world by an artificial world of inflated and unsustainable consumption.

We have become a culture of mindless, empty consumers. Our lives are full of distractions, our cars and homes are larger, and even the food we eat has little to no nutritional value. From our food to our entertainment we are surrounded by empty calories. We are fat and dull.

How many people do you know popping pills just to get by? How many watch television not because they enjoy it but because they can’t face the wreck of their lives.

There’s an illness for every condition now, so we see shrinks and pop pills for ADHD, Bi-Polar Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Syndrome, Chronic Depression. Big-Pharma has a pill to mend it all, and Wal-Mart and Macy’s has thousands of wonderful things that will make us feel better.

Except, we never do. Our mindless, short-term consumption forces the planet’s fever higher and continues our alienation from one another. Our kids grow up and we’ve forgotten how to talk to them. Our parents die and we realize we never really knew them. Our teenagers’ minds are addled by mall-driven boxed rebellion. They see personality in the brand of jeans they choose rather than in the queer contents of their character.

We drown in a sea of infotainment.

Phone calls replaced writing letters, then email replaced phones, text messaging replaced email, and now we’re content just to leave pithy comments on one another’s Facebook walls as a substitute for real communication.

I am guilty of all of this and worse.

I began this website two years ago next month with the intention of it serving as a creative portfolio and a source for occasional updates and commentaries. Over the course of these past two years the website has had many incarnations (some more successful than others) , and at times the site has seemed like so many frivolous, badly composed blogs that pollute the internet already.

I want to be more than a tireless consumer.

In this new year I vow to be more mindful of consumption, both in terms of what I take from the world and in what I contribute.

With this idea in mind I hope to strike a new course with this website. Instead of the pithy and off-the-cuff posts I have been guilty of posting here from time to time, I want instead to write letters to you, my readers, whomever and wherever you are. These letters will not come daily, sometimes not even weekly.

I will try to steer myself away from the trends of pop culture and infotainment and focus instead on what is more essential: namely the natural world and the development of my own mind.

All we can truly know in the world is that which nature provides and that which we develop in our heads, hearts, and character.

I don’t want to be entertained anymore, spoon-fed the latest clothing trend or American Idol “entertainer.” I want experience and I want wisdom, and with some effort this website will serve as a record of my progress along these road.

I have no voice but my own, and no compass but my own intuition.

I hope you will stay along for the ride, but if you don’t I at least hope you replace me with something else that gives you meaning. Or, even better, turn off the computer altogether and go for a walk outside. If there are any trees left where you live I am sure they will be happy to see you.

Note: Image is by the photographer Chris Jordan whose provocative work you should certainly check out.

Comment?