Author: jennynazak

Today I got to combine 2 domestic tasks related to water: 1) topping off the water in the hand-wash station and foot-wash station just outside the front door; and 2) refreshing the emergency drinking-water supplies as we move into hurricane season.

In rainy season, the little outdoor hand-wash and foot-wash stations get refilled from the rainwater tubs. So much fresh clean rainwater constantly flowing in the typical Florida summer rainy season! Rainwater is delightful and great for the skin. You can feel the smoothness on your skin and it’s lovely.

But sometimes, like now, summer is in full gear and yet the rains are not arriving.

So, today I hit upon the idea of refilling the hand-wash / foot-wash stations from the emergency drinking-water jugs that we keep in the house. And then I refilled those emergency drinking-water jugs from the kitchen tap.

Today I was only refreshing the 1-gallon emergency drinking-water jugs; haven’t tackled the big 6-gallon jugs yet. If we go for more than a few more days without rain, the water from the big 6-gallon jugs will be emptied around the fruit trees etc., then we will refill those big jugs from the bathtub faucet.

You can see the photos here on my deep green Facebook page.

The other day I shared this post by Sustainable Human on Facebook. It popped up on my feed and it’s great so I’m following the page now.

(For those unable to access the post/Facebook: It’s some surprisingly deep musings on clothespins, and how the quality of the new ones is so much inferior to the old ones that were built to last. It is obviously widely applicable to many things you and I can think of. The post shows a photo of two wooden clothespins. One old and built to last, one new. As a person who uses clothespins every day, I constantly experience how flimsy and breakable the newer ones are.)

My thoughts: On a related note, in a real community that’s divested of capitalist/consumerism sickness, people are ALL needed & valued. Everyone’s skills are needed.

In such a community, there will be one person who is good at making clothes pins. It might need to be one person on every block! If people start hanging out their laundry again instead of relying on expensive and high maintenance clothes dryers.

I mean maybe there’ll be more than one person, but my point is that in real community, every single person and all sorts of little skills we don’t usually think of are 100% needed, and I think that’s one of our huge anxieties in capitalist colonizer culture, we define certain people as not being needed, and being superfluous.

This includes very young children and the elderly and people who would be classified as having supposedly unworkable disabilities etc. etc. etc. They can also include people who would in mainstream consumer-capitalist society be written off as mentally ill or deranged and impossible to deal with. If we all need each other, we all have to find ways of talking with each other!

Wait and see what happens when the only person in your community who knows how to repair machinery or catch fish or make clothespins or whatever is the person you thought was useless. By the way, it’s not only skills; it’s also patience or stamina or whatever you would call it. Not everybody has the patience, mix of inclinations, etc. for every task.

(Note, Even though the post I shared points out that the good old chopstick is made of hardwood, I doubt they are saying we need to be chopping down distant hardwood forests just to make clothes pins. We can all be growing enough local wood in our communities/bioregions so that we can sustainably fell some trees for our clothespins and chopsticks and other things we need.)

Coffee-jar cover that I hand-sewed from someone’s discarded koozie that was still new. (Hey, it’s a beach town and a tourist town so it’s also a thrift upcycle scavenger’s town lol.)

The custom cover on my enamelled metal cup is similarly hand-sewn and has a crocheted bottom.

I’m making this post not to brag about my very modest accomplishments but rather, as a demonstration of how sewing is constantly in demand if we step out of relentless consumerism. Same with carpentry and a bunch of other basic skills.

(Very important! Note, my posts are never meant to shame anybody who needs to buy stuff and doesn’t have time to make stuff. We live in a rushed treadmill world. And those of us who are capable of stepping back or walking out of it even partially are responsible for helping those who are more stuck. We need to share our time, talents, money, encouragement etc.)

A big thing I’m trying to say here is that sewing and needlework have become “crafty recreation hobbies.” Granted, they are very fun crafty hobbies. But a lot of ladies of a certain age who just love to crochet and knit and sew, run out of recipients for the items that they lovingly make.

Whereas in a less consumer – centered time, Sewing etc. was mandatory and constantly there were things that needed to be sewed and mended. I always have a bit of a mending pile of dish towels that need hemming, old towels that needs cutting up, Clothing and household items that need to be patched etc. In addition I always have a mental pile of a wish list of things I plan to get around to making.

In this mode, I rarely run out of recipients for my handiwork, because I’m busy making stuff that my household needs! Of course this does not preclude sharing with one’s friends and neighbors as well. I sometimes do give away my handstitched bags and other creations. I gave one to a tourist in need a few weeks ago, and one to an unhoused neighbor awhile back. And one to the lady I buy my organic produce from. To serve as a prop to encourage their customers to get in the habit of reusable bags.

Interestingly, the mending pile doesn’t have to be a treadmill. If the “sewing head of household” Has some autonomy, as many of us have these days, we get to decide how to chip away at the pile and only our inner stern critic is our enemy.

Why is all of the above, why does it matter? Well, making and bending things by hand is intrinsically fulfilling those of us who are inclined in that direction. Same as carpentry is fulfilling for people who are drawn to build things. And mechanics is fulfilling for people who love to repair equipment and machinery. These are all wonderful fulfilling activities, and in a society where more of us refuse to be only consumers, and insist on stepping up to our natural human state of being makers and producers, these activities become daily vital Lifesprings of the household.

Hope this makes sense, I have had a lot of thoughts lately so I’ve gotten a little bit less picky and less edity in my communication.

I don’t want to be a little old lady who needs to make things so badly that the stuff I make ends up being a huge volume piled up in someone’s closet. For somebody else to have to declutter, and then it goes to landfill. Actually it’s been some years since I had that worry, but I did used to worry that my innate drive to make things would just end up producing piles of junk and trash. Now everything I make is essential because it’s driven by my actual personal needs and household needs!

And honestly not all of us need intricate work to keep us entertained. Some of us are content to spend hours just plain old thread and needle making plain old seams. The mental benefits are the same! And even better if you have a little crafting circle who sit and chat. It’s been a while since I’ve had that — and may never again unless people are willing to meet outdoors a bit more — but I still immensely enjoy sitting and stitching and tuning into the quiet and calm channel of the universe.

Pix here on my Deep Green Facebook page!

DOG POOP HAZARD! I put this makeshift weighted sign here on the sidewalk as a courtesy to warn neighbors and other passersby, but for future incidents I may make some miniature orange traffic cones that say “dog poop hazard <poop emoticon>” on them. (You can see a photo on my Facebook post.)

Humor can be effective too! And we could all use a laugh in our day. I picture people doing a double-take at some homemade miniature orange traffic cones. With maybe some bright-yellow “crime scene” tape around them. <wink emoticon>

When people let their dogs poop on the sidewalk, I usually put sand over it and let it bake/dry in the blistering Florida sun for a day, and then clean it up off of the sidewalk. Once it’s dry, it’s way less obnoxious to clean up.

what if almost all clothes lived in community closets — say, block or neighborhood scale — and we only kept a very few articles of clothing at home?

What prompted this sudden creative spark was being irritated at the volume of clothing in my bedroom/office.

Now, I have vastly less clothing than most people I know. I love fashion and get a kick out of sewing and being creative; I just don’t like owning a whole bunch of things. I enjoy having a few reliable basic pieces, and then decorating with scarves or what have you. Or if I want a fancy outfit for one night I might go to a thrift shop. But usually I just find stuff that’s being thrown away in my neighborhood and turn it into “new” wardrobe items.

But this morning, even the small* volume of clothing in my room was irritating me. Part of the reason was there is this weird musty smell suddenly back there. So I immediately want to blame the density of fabric hanging up.

(* I see a small volume of clothing, but that is very relative. By the much more reasonable standards of other times and places, I still have a vast amount of clothing.)

But my mind generates all these fun and creative thoughts, thanks to some training I’ve had in permaculture design and other thinking out of the box.

So I lit a couple candles and some incense to maybe dry out the moisture and take the edge off the smell til i find the real culprit, and then I really had fun musing about how very few clothes I could get away with owning, if we had a neighborhood-scale clothes closet.

Everybody, just seems like everybody, is trying to get rid of their clothes. People drop off huge boxes of unwanted clothing the way some people who are good at gardening drop off eggplants on peoples doorsteps in the summer and run away.

But we can’t just throw away the clothing. We have to stop sending it to landfill, it off and even ends in landfill in the Atacama Desert or some other foreign land that certainly doesn’t deserve that trash.

I tried to take a picture of my clothes corner of my room for you but it’ll have to wait till it gets lighter. Not enough light right now to take a pic.

Even in cold places, people don’t need lots and lots of clothes. You want layers and a good shell and all that.

The abnormally large volume of clothing we own is undoubtedly yet another artifact of consumer capitalist culture.

I do have some fun experiences of something like a community closet. They have been at multi-day music festivals, art festivals, and other “hippie-ish” camping events events. Usually it’ll be some women who set it up in a tent or something.

Also I have been to clothing swaps organized by friends in somebody’s big living room.

And in my neighborhood, a church that gives out a big grocery bag once a week to local families in need has a little bit of a clothing rack that they bring out. What would be cool is if that could be open most or all of the time instead of just for a couple hours on Wednesdays.

Everything takes work. For something to be open, it would need to be loved and cared for by the community. If not, it falls on the shoulders of one or two volunteers and quickly falls apart.

I even find that as a steward of a Little Free Library for the past 13 years. Seems like it shouldn’t be that much work just providing a few shelves of books for my community.

but it takes an astonishing amount of work to keep things neat, keep the shelves in repair so they protect the box at least a little from the weather. I also have to manage large boxes of unwanted drop offs that people just drop off. I don’t need just large volumes of books; I mean like huge boxes of peoples unwanted clothing and stuff. As many of you who have tried to do a community thing no, a person doing a community thing sometimes just becomes the designated drop off spot for a lot of unwanted stuff.

Just some musings. I tend to not give up on stuff that’s worthwhile. I tend to try to tweak it, add something, subtract something, make something creative that will make it more lovable so people care enough to try to help take care of it.

Honestly I have not been all that good at attracting help. but I’ve realized that it’s not that I’m horrible or defective or something; it’s just a feature of modern life. We are very atomized and isolated, and people have to relearn how to even be in community. The concept of any kind of shared community thing whether it’s a repair café or tool garage or whatever. I have heard great examples working in other communities. I know it can work.

Do you know who inspires me? Coco Chanel! Supposedly she loved to just basically have a uniform, something that looks stylish but doesn’t require a lot of thought, and you don’t need very many of them. That’s really my ultimate goal. The capsule wardrobe concept is somewhat appealing to me.

Also I do need to mention that I live in Florida and operate my house as a low-footprint-living laboratory that includes living without air-conditioning in order to learn how to optimize shade and airflow (Well, I also do it because I really despise closed-up indoor environments, fake cold air, and electric bills over $18).

as such, living in an incredibly humid hot environment without forced air cooling, not only puts me on a quest for how to optimize passive cooling of the home, but also a quest to optimize comfort of the body, through appropriate fabrics and styles of clothing. That’s a whole Nother post and I have to tell you I haven’t gotten very close to the ideal, but let’s just say that sometimes synthetic fabrics such as board shorts used by surfers are surprisingly adaptive to this climate.

I like to say that I am my own experimental lab-rat of the low-footprint-living lab. When the heat and humidity, and mosquitoes finding their way in, and intrusive streetlights at night, and excessively aggressive “landscapers” during the day, and what have you start making me crazy, I take it as an invitation to look around and optimize something! I also remind myself that it’s for the collective liberation and redemption of this gross, dreary consumerist capitalist hell non-culture we have built. That renews my wellspring of energy. (So does my morning coffee, one of my favorite treats which I try to make as sustainable as possible; and which I accept that I may have to do without someday sooner rather than later.)

Post script update!

Update! And just like that, the mini community closet is in the communal space of the house now. It’s one of those trial run tentative experimental structures that will evolve over time. Photo on left shows the clothes hanging on the improvised structure.

Photo in the middle shows it covered with a white sheet because I’m really obsessive about quiet solid tranquil surroundings at every day times. Also, as I was hanging it up, I realized I also now have a projector screen for showing YouTube videos and stuff from off our phones or whatever. I have a little mini projector. It doesn’t get used much but in a fictitious hypothetical communal house, it will be our Indian village TV, indoor version. I also want one outside.

Photo on the right shows the other side of the communal living room area, to show you what I mean when I say I like quiet light color scheme for the communal space. It just seems to feel good and work well. The cool thing is that does not preclude a luscious mix of textures from various beautiful pieces of fabric I’ve picked up over the years including inherited multigenerational handmade etc. Long line of women who love to work with fabric and our hands!

Go here, to the post on my deep green Facebook page, to see the photos (for as long as time and the will of various entities shalt allow, as I am fond of repeating LOL).

(You will need to scroll down through the whole comment thread to see the photos, as the original post is just what I call “attention-grabbing poster-style,” text on a green background.)

Post script: And update on the yucky smell, I came to suspect it might be a dead animal outside, as opposed to something inside. So the yucky smell, a negative, ended up prompting me to do something that brought a positive: adding value to this evolving living laboratory!

On a meta-note: in recent months I have more and more frequently resorted to a composition technique that I have come to call “laddering.” It’s a way of getting words out of my brain and onto the screen or paper, without either procrastinating or deciding not to post.

I’ve been learning that a lot of times the posts I *almost* didn’t make (because I thought they were too stupid or jibber jabbery, ill-formed etc.), ended up really resonating with people.

So as one example of laddering, this post here on FB might get edited and later become a blog post. (Actually that’s what happened, because you’re here reading this blog post now!)

Sometimes a comment that I make on someone else’s post or a group I’m in, will end up laddering-up to a whole independent post I make here on FB, and then ladder-up to a blog post or work its way into a book or something. Mentioning it in case other people have trouble with lackluster motivation, procrastination, avoidance.

Using cut-up pieces of a lightweight reflective silver fabric sun-shelter that I found discarded on the beach, today I experimented with further reducing solar gain by covering outwardly-opening windows. This is also meant to reduce light intrusion from street lights at night.

It’s not low-hanging fruit like my homemade trellis awnings, or the thick drapes over the big windows. But already it still seems to be a worthwhile improvement in heat reduction. So I will probably make it a little more official by hemming the pieces and sewing little custom ties onto them. As opposed to just having them clipped with clothes pins etc. the way it is now.

See photos here of my preliminary effort.

I seem to have good results with things like this when I am willing to let myself start with a really “rough draft,” so to speak. Instead of feeling like I have to right away produce some perfectly tidy, professional-looking little window covers.

By the way, I notice I feel kind of OK with rooms being a little bit dark in the summer. What would feel gloomy in the wintertime feels cool and soothing in the summer. My windows are optimized to let in plenty of sunlight in the winter.

This is the post from Desireé B Stephens that I made the comments below in response to. https://www.facebook.com/share/1FDv6akAxi/?mibextid=WC7FNe

In case the link doesn’t work, it’s on her Facebook page and it’s titled: “Refuge Outside the Regime: How We Hold, Heal & Build in a Time of War
For those choosing not to participate in empire’s violence here’s what we can do.”

Here are some of my thoughts:

Right here right now, right where we live.
Redirecting resources from supporting war and prisons to forming a care and safety net.

I keep my money off of Wall Street because I don’t trust what it’s supporting, even in a so-called socially responsible fund. I’d rather support people in the local economy. Land and buildings, for anyone who can afford them, and then share them.

I always prefer to share my house (Which is also my place of business and hopefully also future bookstore/community house or something) with housemates, displaced people, People who just need time to think and refresh at the beach, etc.. It saves money, and offers many other benefits as well.

HyperLocal in our neighborhoods, and also can be in our online communities as well.

my neighborhood finally seems to be getting a critical mass of full-time residents including a number of families with children. The change is palpable, people are connecting and checking on each other. And it’s not some La La Land where everybody subscribes to some identical ideology etc. It’s just regular people looking out for each other.

Sharing skills and resources is just smart, plus there’s a lot more joy and satisfaction. and safety! A lot of main stream folks are concerned about safety, but what people don’t always realize is that the main way to have safety is to simply be connected and interact regularly. That’s what a safe neighborhood is. My neighborhood gets a bad rap for being dangerous but that is a skewed portrayal based on mainstream visual images of HOA “tidiness.” 

My house, a grassroots laboratory of various experiments in low-footprint living, Is small but equipped to sleep 8 to 11. If I can have 11 bike week visitors camped out here (Which I did almost before the ink was dried on signing the title back in 2018), I could certainly have 11 refugees or displaced friends. And, I always have housemates, visitors, etc. sharing this house.

I’m saying this as an example of sharing existing resources, assessing what we have to offer and exchanging that information with neighbors.

Even something as small and simple as a Little Free Library (Which I have out front, together with shaded benches that the public can sit on) can become an unofficial neighborhood comfort point and emotional support center. Great way to take the pulse of the neighborhood, exchange news, see how people are doing.

I’ve learned in the neighborhood that you have to work with the social structures that people trust. In this neighborhood it’s people walking their dogs that finally broke down the barriers and got more people connected and talking with each other. That has blossomed into some skills sharing and mutual aid.

Also, this being a hurricane prone area, people are always receptive to chatting about disaster prep so that is a good on-ramp. Not everybody wants to hear about or talk about big preps for The Big Stuff, you know, TSHTF / TEOTWAWKI level stuff. But the preps for hurricanes are the same thing as “Big Major Preps.” Both physical and social.

Kind of rambling here, But really great tips from Desireé, and I strongly suggest you follow her for lots of liberating and refreshing content! And read the tips in her post, let’s start that WhatsApp or Signal chat in our physical neighborhoods and or our virtual neighborhood!

And here I will close with one of my favorite quotes from Desireé’s post (the following quote also sums up the message I’ve been striving to promote with my Deep Green book, blog, and living demonstration laboratory):

“Divest Intentionally. Invest Communally.
Every dollar, every hour, every scroll is a vote.”