If you get a regular home, then take away all the commercial packaging, you create a kind of fairyland. The feeling is subtle, and wonderful. Its a feeling of being seperate from the noise and exploitation that is the world of commerce. A no-commercial-package home is a private world, of us and our support crew. We look around and directly see the food that will become our bodies, the cleaners and objects that keep everything in good order.
We don't need to be told every day that things are 'New Improved' and 25% more. When did we choose to be housemates with these noisy colors, this font, this material? We never did, yet here they are.
Your food loves you. Its whole mission in life is to nourish and support you. It doesn't want to pollute your life with all that visual noise. Your cleaners too, everything you buy wants to take care of you. Get used to this thought, and life feels different. Other seemly unrelated choices change for the better.
In your final days of 2019, be like a squirrel cracking open nuts, and relieve everything of their packages. Line things up in the cupboards without wrapping, make splendid towers of your toilet rolls. They don't need 'protection', cupboards aren't dangerous. Commercial packages are designed for cajoling you, for transport, for selling. Things that have already happened. Put your goods into beautiful containers chosen by you. My favourites are perspex from Muji, Decor tell fresh from the supermarket. I order a heap of completly clear Ziplock bags, online. Thousands. They cost almost nothing. I share them with friends, and fill them with the lovely things that look after me. I can see everything at a glance, and it looks beautiful. They are silent and steady. No crinkling, tearing, no twisting closed or falling open.
This plastic packaging filling your bin was once primordial forests. Its not happy about its current use either. It wants to be heroic, and say to you "I'm just going outside. I may be a while".
Captian Oates, Scott of the Antarctic
Whats happening Now.
This week at Gardenfarm, we were blessed by Jean-Baptiste, a WWOOF volunteer from France. He is a cabinet maker. Storage here is about to get beautiful. The first berries and plums are ripe, next week our world will start dripping with fruit. I'm reading Jackie French on the verandah, and doing lots of yoga.
Australian New Year's holidays are the best.
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