Arte De Timo

Category: Sustainability

This category is for post about general healthful and sustainable living, not just in my house, or in societal terms, but about people living.

  • Self Sustainability

    If you’ve been on this planet and listening to it,  or feeling the weather change year to year, or simply watching the news, you probably know that humanity is struggling to grow up. We seem to be trying to figure out to how to come up with some long term life plans. This struggle is something that I have thought about since I was old enough to understand how destructive we humans can be. It is a struggle I have internalized and have tried to sort out in my own life. I have long sought to figure out how to live free of the shortcomings of modern self abusive,  resource intensive, and un-sustainable life style.

    My art has started to directly address my thoughts and ideas about where we are failing, but I think the theme has been subtly embedded in my work since I started painting and drawing in my childhood. In fact I would say that social and environment responsibility has been the core motivator of all my art work and writing through out my life.

    This isn’t a new realization or admission my any means, but as the world spirals faster and faster towards an environmental and social meltdown, I have become more urgent in my working toward solution. I am struggling more with finding sustainability and change toward a healthy and responsible life.

    My birthday last week both impressed on me that time wears on with us humans still having far to go to grow up, and that huge strides can be made in the course of life if honorable and responsible living become the core of all life decisions, and values. For my birthday I received a great book that  seems to hit this nail on the head.

    The book Natural Living: The 21st Century Guide to a Self-Sufficient Lifestyle is a trove of knowledge about everything from gardening to keeping animals, cooking, canning, knitting and everything in between. The book mostly just touches on the key points of all these topics, but its enough to keep someone like me going in my quest. It will definitely augment my ongoing projects as they become bigger and better.

    In all this I have learned that living a sustainable life is like any other skill or endeavor. It requires practice, learning from others, a support network,  failures and perseverance. Lying deep in all these struggles, too, lie issues of freedom. To change, we need freedom over what we do and how we consume, yet we live in a time and place where we give up those freedoms too easily in the face of comfort and excess, and maybe disillusion.

    Since I have moved into a mortgaged house, where I have more space and ability to make changes, I have realized that like so many science fiction tales stress, we live within ever changing and ever encompassing systems of control. What I can do in “my” house is actually very limited on many fronts as you may know or guess, but it does offer another step in my explorations and struggles.

    Breaking free of some of those controls is a challenge, but the systems do begin to unravel as you work back toward a simple life with the seasons and soil as your guides. It is a paradox isn’t it, though. To regain a freer life we must submit more to the aspects of our lives that we actually have no control over.

  • Mystic Olallieberries -Reposted

    Through the fruits of our labors we strive to become part of a big life narrative.  It is the productive goal of our endeavors. It is the juicy, seductive, and gratifying result of our work, and once in a while fruit becomes mystic, etched to memory, becoming myth in our personal histories. Our stories of fruit become part of who we are, and sprinkle our minds with sugarplums and … olallieberries dancing in our head?

    When I was younger, I used to spend much of my summer vacation at the beach. Just over the hill from Santa Clara county, past highway 17 and down highway 1 my family shared a retreat from suburbia and the bustle of the Bay Area.  Just down the road from a small beach town, my family, with my aunts and uncles had a house a block from the renowned sands of the Monterrey bay.

    For weeks at a time, my siblings and I, and several of our friends used to waste our days entertaining ourselves in the surf, playing games, walking to the local store in town, and eating way too much candy. Of course all of these fun activities bled into each other and fed on each other, until we exhausted all the daylight and energy we could squeeze out of the day.

    It was on our trips to the local store to restock our candy stashes that I remember my adventures of youth. I also remember a fruit, the olallieberry. This fruit is a legend in my mind. The mere hint at this berry throws me back into vivid dreams of my childhood and one perfect childhood morning I had. These fruit are special to me because of the discovery and adventure they represent. I had not known the olallieberry even existed before I had come upon them on that misty country day.

    My friend and I had walked a little over 3 miles to a KOA instead of our typical, closer destination, the store in town.  KOA stood for Kamp grounds Of America and were a chain of developed, almost village-like campgrounds in the middle of rural areas and near various parks. They usually have swimming pools and parking lots and tennis courts, and little stores filled to the brim with candy; lots of candy. On the way back from our candy run, we stumbled upon something out of the past, something special, and perfect.

    We discovered a roadside fruit stand. It was rustic, small and quite literally a stand. There was no one there to sell anything. The little wooden structure was only big enough for a few dozen packs of berries and a little cash box to leave some money. On each part of the display above the three different types of berries was a little hand painted white sign that simply listed the name of the fruit and the price. There were blackberries, and raspberries, and something new, and never before heard of, “Olallieberries.”

    Later I came to realize that they were just a cross of blackberries and raspberries, but at that moment they were new, delicious, shiny, and alluring. Of course they were also cheap; cheap enough to buy a few packs with the change we had left over from our candy buying spree. We plunked down our change and walked into the stand looking under this and that, only to re-up our fixation on the fruit, eating one hand full of the olallieberries after another. My friend was a little too stricken with these perfect beauties and claimed a 5 finger discount on a couple packs for the road. I was glad he made that decision, though. The berries were difficult to leave behind.

    All in all, we had 3 or 4 packs each by the time we got home, and boy did we pay for it in the Lou that night.  It was all worth it. The next day, we went back to bring some home for the others, who had at that point heard the stories of the mystic berries about a hundred times. Again, we ate 3 or 4 packs by the time we returned home and again we felt the berries wrath. This time, at least, we were able to return with enough for everyone else to try. I don’t think anyone else really understood the meaning of the olallieberries like we did. To everyone else they were sweat berries and a tasty treat, but not candy. They didn’t see them as an adventurer’s prize, or a brilliant piece of nature’s bounty like my friend and I saw them.

    We had discovered a perfect moment where for an instant the world was vibrant with smells and tastes down every road, and awaiting discovery. We had visited a time and place that didn’t exist in our lives. We visited a time that hadn’t really ever existed. We found mystic fruits that could only live in our memories on that slightly overcast cool summer-at-the-beach day of my youth.