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Welcome All! I'm a dreamer, I hope you are too! A Posse ad Esse, or From possibility to reality, is a general state of mind. I hope you'll share your possibilities with me as I will with you. Namaste~

April 11, 2008

Oh...OK then?

Well you know that Summers just around the corner, or at least that Spring is in full effect when you start getting the knocks on the door from the lawn "Care" specialists. A~ informed me this afternoon when I got home that we had had three different companies stop by to talk to her this week. Two of them knocked on the door and gave her the pitch. She informed them that we are an organic house and didn't like to put chemicals on the lawn. They countered, as a good salesman would, with "You do know that we do have fully organic fertilizers that we can use?" Never the one to be outmaneuvered by a slick salesman, A~ parried with "We like to know where everything that we use comes from, so we only buy from local farmers and suppliers." Well, this was enough to convince both of the first companies that we were some kind of strange suburban freaks and deter them. While generally speaking what she said was true, we do like to buy from local farmers and suppliers quite a bit, we have never bought any fertilizers from anyone like that. But nonetheless, if they can't take no for an answer, they need to expect some embellishment right?

The last company to stop by had a couple of people walking around the sidewalk in front of our house looking and pointing at our yard when A~ saw them. She went outside and asked if she could help them with anything. After they gave her generally the same pitch, she and they exchanged much the same conversation as the previous ones. This company, to their credit, was not ready to give up just yet and made a final attempt to win our business by adding "Well you know if you don't like to use fertilizers, we do have some organic products that will kill those dandelions for you." What do you think she said? She tells me she looked them dead in the face and matter-of-factly said "We eat the dandelions, so we don't want any chemicals on them either." Oh man, I wish I could have been there to see the look they gave her when they finally said, "Oh... OK then... well, have a nice day...?!" Priceless! I love that woman!

You know I understand why their in business, it is nice to have a lush green lawn. It's nice to have large sweet tomatoes in the winter too, but are they really worth the price? God made the earth to run in cycles. The ground needs to have some down time too. People burn out and get sick when they run too long, getting up early and working till late, gleaning ever more and more production from themselves. I shouldn't think that the ground is any different. Is feeding it fertilizers to increase production and pesticides and weed killers to keep the diseases and pests as bay really much different than a person working too many hours and taking stimulants to "Stay alert", and vitamins and medicines to stay "healthy"? No. What happens to the people that do that? They get sick, tired, unhealthy and miserable, and over all their time and effort may increase, but their true production and quality level decreases. It's just not a sustainable way to live. Just the same, I may be able to grow things faster and longer with the help of some of today's finest NPK wonder drugs for the garden. But over time the ground will suffer, quality will suffer and the health of myself, my family and my friends will suffer. It's not sustainable. At some point, something has to give.

As A~ and I began to change a lot of the things in our daily lives last year, there came a natural point where one thing led to another. Does it make sense to try to have a healthier home environment if your not going to eat healthier? Why bother to eat healthier if everything you buy is just full of tons of chemicals and growth hormones? Why grow your own food if your just going to mimic all the unsustainable practices that you're trying to get away from to begin with? And on it goes. This is why I refer very often to these changes as "the journey" that we're on. It really is a journey from one place, of relative ignorance of our actions and their effects, to another of greater participation in the process and connection to the world around us. Thanks for peeking in once and a while and traveling with us on it.
P~

3 comments:

Robbyn said...

Wow, I'm cheering every point you made in this post, Patrik!

And I LOVE that A~ told the lawn care folks that you eat the dandelions...heehee! It's weird..now that I'm wanting to try eating dandelions, I can't find any :)

You're right, this IS a journey and it impacts every area of our lives with its domino effect. ALL the aspects end up changing, and it's sobering how much we perpetuated it the way it is for so long...after all, for HOW much of history did EVERYONE do it the "old way" for thousands of years before the age of "progress"? Now I'm beginning to think that real progress is a journey backwards...

Your blog's much appreciated!

P~ said...

Thank you so much Robbyn. You know sometimes you say something that makes so much sense to you, but never have any idea if it resonates with anyone else. I appreciate your encouragement.
P~

Kory said...

Thats great!

"Oh however did we get by without the miracles of the modern petrochemicals?" FEH!

What lawn I have left is just fine as is, bring on the "weeds" they make great homes for the bugs that visit the garden. Nature doesn't like monoculture, a diversified system is a stable system. Thats why "weeds" keep popping up on the lawn, its just natures way of fixing an inherently vulnerable and unstable system, one dependent on yearly "treatments."

I love the clever retorts, btw.