I had a wonderful morning with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
prk and transcendancing. prk drove us out to John St Cafe in Cottesloe, which had been recommended by samvara and does an excellent breakfast in a pretty set-up. We then went and lay on the grass overlooking Cottesloe beach and dozed and chatted in the pine trees.
We covered a whole range of topics from ideal cultures and economies to the ways work is valued or devalued totranscendancing's theme for the year. I have Thoughts bubbling all over the place, but little coherency for the first two. I am developing a theme of my own, though, which is forming based on a bunch of things I've read recently, and how I want to live, and the sort of world I want to live in.
To that end, my theme for 2011 is Sustainability.
How I envision this looking (and what I'm already doing, in several cases):
Lots of these overlap, but I'll have a stab at categories, anyway.
Environmental
-- Continue to live without a car (of my own). Continue to walk and take public transport wherever I can. Usesamvara's car sparingly, for food shopping trips and the like.
-- Consciously choose vegetarian or vegan options whenever they're available (ties in with food and health and money) This is partly an environmental thing as well as an ethical thing. This has been something that I've started doing in the last few weeks, and so far, I'm not missing meat. I'm not willing to give up dairy, we'll see how I feel about seafood when that comes up :P
-- Shower consciously. I've previously been a 20 min-per-shower person. Showering consciously – not letting myself zone out in the shower – and getting a timer and setting it to 10min has been an excellent water and time saving move.
-- Continue to recycle whatever I can.
-- Get a fold-up-tiny reusable shopping bag to put in my backpack, so I have way less excuse to accept plastic bags.
-- Invest in an actually reusable water bottle.
-- Install temporary fly-wire on the side of my bedroom window that opens so I can have it open during summer without also having mosquitoes. Also, get a mosquito net.
-- Seal the fraking bath already.
Relationships
-- Regularly (at least once a month) make time to hang out and be with my friends *waves toprk and transcendancing*, and family – my mum and dad, granny and grandad, Joan, and Nanna.
-- Consciously reach out to co-workers – really basic things like making eye contact when I ask how they are etc.
Money
-- Track my spending, both in terms of my needs (shelter, food, bills, clothing etc), and my wants (music, random comfort foods, books, knitting etc). Find out where my money is actually going, and as a result, who it's going to.
-- As a corollary of that, buy as local and as little new as possible, (yarn shops, markets, second hand shops).
-- Investigate second hand shops as a possible place to get clothes, for srs, and generally buy second hand wherever possible.
-- Investigate donating to (non-religious) charities, either here or overseas.
-- Focus giving my money to local people, women, and organisations that are in line with my value system.
Health (as part of sustaining my body)
-- Make my own lunches and possibly snacks to take to work. See also: vegetarian and vegan options wherever possible.
-- Brush my teeth TWICE a day, and floss once a day.
-- Keep up my transport walking.
-- Stretch
-- Use my foam roller to loosen tight knots of muscle
-- Get a regular massage (once a month once I'm at 'maintenance' point
-- Go to the gym regularly, and learn how to use the equipment.
Creativity
-- Write, making it sustained :P
-- Learn to sew, for the purposes of making a patchwork skirt.
That's everything I can think of at the moment. Any suggestions? :)
Also, while I remember it: I brought up in the morning's discussion my ideal culture whereby food and shelter were basic rights, rather than something a member of the culture ever had to seriously worry about, and what our culture would look like if that were true.prk suggested at one point that it'd be best suited to a culture like The Culture by Iain M. Banks, where there's no resource issues, at all (possibly this was more related to transcendancing's idea of creating money equality? It's all blurring together in my head).
I was thinking further on that, and remembered much later that the fourth largest city in Brazil, Belo Horizonte, declared access to food a right of citizenship in 1993, and has been providing food for its citizens accordingly for the last fifteen years (the above article makes my heart sing every time I read it). The city earned the Future Policy Award in 2009 (link is a 20 page pdf, and well worth the read).
prk and transcendancing. prk drove us out to John St Cafe in Cottesloe, which had been recommended by samvara and does an excellent breakfast in a pretty set-up. We then went and lay on the grass overlooking Cottesloe beach and dozed and chatted in the pine trees.We covered a whole range of topics from ideal cultures and economies to the ways work is valued or devalued to
transcendancing's theme for the year. I have Thoughts bubbling all over the place, but little coherency for the first two. I am developing a theme of my own, though, which is forming based on a bunch of things I've read recently, and how I want to live, and the sort of world I want to live in.To that end, my theme for 2011 is Sustainability.
How I envision this looking (and what I'm already doing, in several cases):
Lots of these overlap, but I'll have a stab at categories, anyway.
Environmental
-- Continue to live without a car (of my own). Continue to walk and take public transport wherever I can. Use
samvara's car sparingly, for food shopping trips and the like.-- Consciously choose vegetarian or vegan options whenever they're available (ties in with food and health and money) This is partly an environmental thing as well as an ethical thing. This has been something that I've started doing in the last few weeks, and so far, I'm not missing meat. I'm not willing to give up dairy, we'll see how I feel about seafood when that comes up :P
-- Shower consciously. I've previously been a 20 min-per-shower person. Showering consciously – not letting myself zone out in the shower – and getting a timer and setting it to 10min has been an excellent water and time saving move.
-- Continue to recycle whatever I can.
-- Get a fold-up-tiny reusable shopping bag to put in my backpack, so I have way less excuse to accept plastic bags.
-- Invest in an actually reusable water bottle.
-- Install temporary fly-wire on the side of my bedroom window that opens so I can have it open during summer without also having mosquitoes. Also, get a mosquito net.
-- Seal the fraking bath already.
Relationships
-- Regularly (at least once a month) make time to hang out and be with my friends *waves to
prk and transcendancing*, and family – my mum and dad, granny and grandad, Joan, and Nanna.-- Consciously reach out to co-workers – really basic things like making eye contact when I ask how they are etc.
Money
-- Track my spending, both in terms of my needs (shelter, food, bills, clothing etc), and my wants (music, random comfort foods, books, knitting etc). Find out where my money is actually going, and as a result, who it's going to.
-- As a corollary of that, buy as local and as little new as possible, (yarn shops, markets, second hand shops).
-- Investigate second hand shops as a possible place to get clothes, for srs, and generally buy second hand wherever possible.
-- Investigate donating to (non-religious) charities, either here or overseas.
-- Focus giving my money to local people, women, and organisations that are in line with my value system.
Health (as part of sustaining my body)
-- Make my own lunches and possibly snacks to take to work. See also: vegetarian and vegan options wherever possible.
-- Brush my teeth TWICE a day, and floss once a day.
-- Keep up my transport walking.
-- Stretch
-- Use my foam roller to loosen tight knots of muscle
-- Get a regular massage (once a month once I'm at 'maintenance' point
-- Go to the gym regularly, and learn how to use the equipment.
Creativity
-- Write, making it sustained :P
-- Learn to sew, for the purposes of making a patchwork skirt.
That's everything I can think of at the moment. Any suggestions? :)
Also, while I remember it: I brought up in the morning's discussion my ideal culture whereby food and shelter were basic rights, rather than something a member of the culture ever had to seriously worry about, and what our culture would look like if that were true.
prk suggested at one point that it'd be best suited to a culture like The Culture by Iain M. Banks, where there's no resource issues, at all (possibly this was more related to transcendancing's idea of creating money equality? It's all blurring together in my head).I was thinking further on that, and remembered much later that the fourth largest city in Brazil, Belo Horizonte, declared access to food a right of citizenship in 1993, and has been providing food for its citizens accordingly for the last fifteen years (the above article makes my heart sing every time I read it). The city earned the Future Policy Award in 2009 (link is a 20 page pdf, and well worth the read).
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