Swimming Upstream

unschooling homesteading anticapitalist decolonization

[anarchistin]

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Less Institutions. More Communities

Institutions are organizations or businesses that shape the help organize social, economic, and political relations. (North, 1991) Banks, libraries, schools; these are all institutions. They are organized by groups or people or individuals and adhere to a specific set of rules and policies to ensure the health and well-being of the institution. They are governed: policed, if you will. If you, as an individual, have needs that don’t align with the institution, the expectation is that you need to adapt and not that the institution will change, although if enough members of the public complain about rules and policies of an institution, those rules or policies can be amended.

Communities are a set of relationships among people but also a feeling that we can observe when we participate in collective living with people with whom we trust and feel safe. Community is a sense of belonging. (Chavis and Lee, 2015) If you have needs as an individual, you can share your needs with the community with the intent of those needs being met. Communities inherently have room for fluidity baked into their nature.

Communities can form institutions. Institutions can foster a sense of community. But when I think about what kind of experience I want for my children growing up, it is the communities that I after, not the institutions. I want their “education” (I use scare quote because I don’t mean formal education) to be human-centred, not policy-centred.

Since we’ve moved, I’ve been searching for community – for that sense of belonging built on trust and shared experience. Recently, I’ve been looking towards institutions to fill the gap in community and have been disappointed more than once because institutions often need to prioritize profitability and efficiency over people’s feelings.

I know you’re sick of me always pointing at capitalism, but it’s role in this institution versus community analysis is critical. Capitalism seeks to turn community into institution, to package it, sell it, profit off it, commodify it. Online social media platforms sell us the community that we’re lacking in real life to the point where we can no longer disconnect as it feels like we’re abandoning our friends. Capitalism turns social media into institutions: a meager replacement for the real life community that we don’t have time or energy to find, exhausted from trying to make ends meet.

Capitalist institutions are trying to replace community and it’s working. But remember, these institutions are built on rules, policies, and profit-based principles. Communities are focus on human-centred connection and fluid to meet the needs of it’s individuals.

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On Becoming

If 2020 was the year of self discovery, 2021 has been the year of growth; of becoming and of growing into the person I want to be. Last year was all about peeling back and layers of confusion and shame and delusion. This year has been about growing into the certainties, the things I know to be true about myself, without shame or concern or guilt.

I have started being a writer: something I have always wanted be was once told that I was not good at so I tucked it away under layers of self doubt. I write because it brings me joy, not because I want people to read my writing. I write because it helps me process.

I have started creating: sculpting, drawing, weaving, baking without the need to be good at what I’m creating, without the need for it to have an audience (except maybe the baking!), without the need for it to be well received. This kind of creative freedom is what I needed when I was younger but never received because of our school to work to profitability capitalist culture.

I’ve started embracing myself as a non-binary person, without falling into the trap of the societal gaslighting that tells me I’m making a big deal about nothing. It’s not a big deal. It’s just who I am. Unapologetically.

I am anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-civ. Now that I can name these things, I can embrace them and hold them and makes changes in my life to live towards the ideals they uphold. Again, unapologetically. Without thinking that I’m too much for people.

For the first time in years, I feel like I’m able to set priorities for myself that reflect what I want to be doing with my time and energy without sacrifice. I can set goals for my days that leave me feeling accomplished and fulfilled without quantifying those feeling within capitalism. After spending the first year of the pandemic tearing it all down, I finally feel like I’m taking steps forward. And it feels really good.

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The Dichotomy of Outrage

There seem to be two camps of people when it comes to how to respond to oppression. One: outrage – this is usually from people who have a history of being oppressed. Two: gentle opposition – this is usually from people who recognize oppression but have not experienced it first hand, maybe systemically but not as someone who has had their life altered as a result of system of oppression. I’ve written about this before. BIPOC folks, especially women, seem to generally fall into the first camp, as do trans and queer folks, although many white LGTBQ people seem to feel more comfortable seeping over to the second camp, maybe as not to cause too much conflict.

Note: I’m not trying to shoe-horn people into either camp by their status. I’m here to talk about these two conflicting camps and how they have wreaked havoc on my brain.

Black Lives Matters taught me outrage. It told me not to be complicit or complacent anymore. It told me that my outrage was tangible and that it was justified and that it could fuel my action. No bullshit. No wiggle room. Racism has no place in the world and yet it is all around us. Racial oppression is not justified under any circumstance. These things I know to be true.

Unschooling has tried to make me be more gentle in my opposition to oppression. Everyone is on their own journey, having been influenced by their own set of experiences which shapes their own world. Even intersectional unschooling recognizes that so much oppression is born out of colonization: a concept that we colonizers are just starting to understand. Both decolonizing and deschooling takes time and we can’t expect everyone to instantly exist in the world without oppressing others when it is so deeply ingrained in our culture and society and lives. It takes time to relearn what it means to live without power-over dynamics and it obviously won’t happen overnight. These things I know to be true.

When I’m sitting in camp outrage and looking at camp gentle opposition, I feel frustrated. There’s not enough action happening. People are lazy and not willing to put in the personal time and effort to break down systems of oppression.

When I’m sitting in camp gentle opposition and looking at camp outrage, I feel hopeless. Why do we need to point fingers and cancel each other? No one is going to respond well to being shamed. We need to be more inclusive and not so divisive if we ever really want to see lasting change.

Is this a false dichotomy? Is there something somewhere in the middle between rage and apathy? Do any of us really have enough spoons to continually keep fighting the cis white capitalist patriarchy and still keep our lives together? Am I doomed to a constant cycle back and forth between these stages? I know that individual activism is useless but cannot for the life of me find a network or community that wants to do this work. Sometimes I can’t even imagine what this work looks like in community because every attempt I’ve made at joining community has failed. Maybe not failed. Flailed?

I don’t have answers but I do feel better having noticed the differences between these two camps and how I seem to flip flop between them. If you have answers, or even thoughts, send ’em my way.

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With Reckless Abandon

Now that growing season is over and all my garden produce is processed, the colder months bring on different projects that I’ve been thinking about all year for which I haven’t had time. Creative projects, old crafts, new skills I’ve been dreaming about. Winter for me is a time to hunker down and explore.

All too often, though, I lose my zeal for these projects when faced with the dilemma of what purpose they serve. Who am I making for? Will this skill actually be useful? Am I doing this craft the “right way”? And the most painful of all: can I monetize this? These questions sap all life out of my creative endeavours and squash the deep rooted seed that is planted in me, begging me to make.

With my writing lately too, I have found there are these questions that derail me: who will read this? is it good enough? why do I bother writing when others have said the same things? Is it long enough? Is it too short? Can I massage this into a post with 2200 characters and appropriate hashtags???

Yesterday I stumbled across this Andy Warhol quote:

Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make more art.

– Andy Warhol

It’s the kick I needed for sure. Whether it’s writing, weaving, sewing, making music, or anything else I take on, I need to make it about the practice and not the outcome. Create with reckless abandon, without filtering or censoring or catering. Make it just for me. And then if others enjoy it as well, that’s a bonus but I need to focus on creating out of the need rather than validation from others. I wish this for me; I wish this for my children; I wish this for you.

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Principles

I’ve been writing a lot more lately; writing about unschooling but also writing about myself. It’s been a really rewarding experience. Getting thoughts down really helps solidify them and also shows me patterns and re-occurring threads. One of the themes that keeps showing up this week is the idea of being guided by principles.

There are many unschoolers that have said it’s important to live by principles rather than rules. I’ve even written about this before but I only just realized this week how important it is to set out clear principles, whichever apply best to you and your life, and then let them guide your actions rather than looking to other people’s experience or advice. When it comes to raising kids, especially in an environment where we are embracing individuality and uniqueness, making choices based on other people’s experience can be incredibly damaging. Parents are different, kids are different, environments are different, seasons are different, the amount of sleep you got last night is different… you get the idea. Just like you can’t wear another person’s shoes and expect them to fit, you can’t expect to fit into another’s way of unschooling.

Instead of looking to advice or experience from others, forming a guiding set of principles can help keep focus on what’s important while allowing room for flexibility and breathing room in tough situations when making decisions about actions to take. For example, one of the guiding principles to my unschooling practice is to dismantle power-over dynamics between me and my kids. Another is to encourage a diversity of activities throughout the week. Another is to stay connected with my kids. These ideas are unique to my family because of how we all interact. My kids are on board with these ideas and also value them. They help guide me as a parent when communicating, decision making, and interacting with my family. I think these principles also help keep our unschooling focused on being intersectional and not slip into a bourgeoisie style of unschooling.

I think we all have principles that guide our every day actions but they may not be articulated. I value people over profit, simple living, and am anti-hierarchical. In the last two years, in discovering myself, I think I’ve really been solidifying my life’s guiding principles. Reading, learning, watching, and growing has helped me to better articulate both what I believe and how I want to interact with the world around me. I fully expect these principles to change over time as my landscape and values change – likewise with my unschooling principles. But I think it’s important to identify clearly what those principles are and share them with those close to me to help them better understand me as a person.

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Liberal Individualism

I just found a quote on Tumblr from an amazing speech given by Naomi Klein in 2015. Go read and come back. I’ll wait. I’m just starting to wake up to the idea of neoliberal individualism and I’m shaken because I buy into this concept so hard. It’s hard to see past what mother culture has been telling me for the past 20 years. This is the truth: our actions as individuals are meaningless. Life is too big and too powerful to be changed by the actions of one person. Only by acting together can we hope to make or enact any change. This just fucks everything up for me. So much of my political activism has been personal because I feel like that’s the only control I have over anything. To tear down that ideal means, in turn, that I have no control. And while I knew this in theory, it still feels like pulling a band-aid off a bit too fast. And I think I’ve known this for a while which is why I’ve been thinking and writing about community so much: because I know that I need community in order to make lasting change. Individually I can choose local food sources; as part of a community I can make local food available to everyone. Individually I can thrift for my material needs; as part of a community we can swap, reuse, and share to meet our collective material needs. Individually I can read about anarchist theory; as part of a community I can contribute to collective mutual aid and build according to the needs of the community, learning to live communally. Worker co-ops, unions, collectives, community gardens: this is what we need. Homesteading and unschooling might be great actions for my individual family, but we sure as heck aren’t changing the world from where I’m standing right now. I haven’t figured anything out about what this means for me (as an individual, haha). I think maybe it means that I have to change where I’m putting my time and energy. I think it means that I need to find more people to connect with. But I’m not sure how.

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Thoughts on Gender

I’ve been thinking a lot about gender lately; about being misgendered as a child and how it’s impacted my life, about gender assignment or pronouns in public spaces. I consider myself agendered or non-binary and use them/they or she/her pronouns when people bother to check, which is rare. This year I’ve tried to shorten my name from Kelly to Kel, which feels more gender neutral and a better representation of who I am as a person (as much as one’s name might define their personality).

I really spend too much time going back and forth; a societal gaslighting that constantly makes me wonder if I’m making a big deal about nothing. But I know who I am, and that’s someone who doesn’t fall into the social constructs of what it means to be a woman. While I’ve known this since I was a kid, I didn’t come to understand it until I was in my 30s, probably about 10 years ago.

The back and forth is a bit exhausting. Sometimes I feel like I need to be more androgynous to really be an “enby”. Sometimes I feel like I’m supposed to hate my body because it’s curved, after it has taken me years to learn to love it. Sometimes I think I’m supposed to be more firm with my pronouns and correct people when I’m misgendered but I already have a lot of social anxiety. All this thought recently has led me to a personal understanding of why I don’t have to do any of these things to be a valid non-binary person.

And it’s funny because it wasn’t until my long-haired five year old son started getting misgendered for me to understand why we even bother with things like pronouns or androgynous clothing. People treat others fundamentally different based on their gender. They see a little girl and assume she’ll be mild mannered or shy. They see a little boy and assume he’ll be loud and aggressive. Someone asked him if he was going to be a princess for Hallowe’en yesterday and I laughed told them he was going to be a zombie. (I later told him that it was because he had such beautiful hair, and offered to do him up a last minute princess costume to which he declined with a cheeky grin.)

When I use them/they pronouns, it’s simply so that you’ll understand assigning culturally gendered traits to me would be wrong. Calling me “sweetie” or “beautiful” or “ma’am” would be inappropriate and in fact does make me feel incredibly awkward. I don’t speak for everyone in the non-binary galaxy, but for me, presenting as my chosen gender is simply a cue for how I want to be treated in the society. And fuck, wouldn’t it be amazing if we NEVER assigned those traits to people before meeting them and understanding if they were appropriate on a person by person basis? Pronouns, clothing, haircuts, and such are there to help us present as ways that will allow us to be better understood as people.

And now that I’ve spent that last two years considering who I am as a person and how I want to present in the world, I recognize that I’m not too worried about being misgendered anymore because I have enough confidence as a person to know who I am without needing validation from other people. This is huge. I don’t think I’ve ever had that before. So I don’t need to pretend to be a woman anymore, nor do I need to try and present as more manly or androgynous. I can just be me.

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Living Communally

What does it mean to live communally? I have my ideas. I have beautiful visions of shared childcare, cooking and eating food together, multi-family gardens, cooperatively owned businesses. And all of those things feel very doable right now from where I am in life. But whether my ideas are too far fetched or we live too far away from others (my anxiety tells me that it’s me), it seems that others don’t see this beautiful vision, or that others are unwilling to share this way of life with my family.

I know 9-5 life is exhausting, and I know that people’s lives are full. But I struggle when people don’t return messages, or continually reschedule play dates. Is it society or is it me? Am I the one who always needs to initiate contact because I’m needy or because other people are legitimately too busy? Is it my social anxiety or is it capitalist culture? From where I am, it’s hard to see, and I am filled with self-doubt.

Social media has shown me that I’m not the only one who has these dreams. But we are few and far between and sometimes that distance makes me feel even more lonely.I keep hope that community will present itself when COVID lifts, but sometimes I’m not so sure. Sometimes it feels bigger than lock downs.

And legitimately I am happy with life as it is right now. I have an amazing family and get to spend my days living a self-directed life with acres of wilderness around me. I find community in that nature with my non-human relations. But I do feel like community is a solution to some of the bigger problems that we face and I’d like to share this way of life with others.

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Everyday Anarchists

When I talk with people about anarchism, they tend to tense up. I can use words like mutual aid or police abolition quite comfortably these days, but I think people have big feelings when I use the word anarchy. It conjures images violence, rioting, revolution. They think of punks and skinheads. But the colloquial use of the word “anarchy” (confusion, disorder, lack of obedience) is far from the political ideology.

Anarchism is a belief system that rejects all involuntary, coercive forms of hierarchy. Anarchism believes in autonomy, the right of the people to self govern without state leadership. Anarchists believe that the state should be abolished as it holds too much power and is harmful towards most people. That’s it. Not nearly as radical as one might think, right? At least not in today’s political climate.

Part of the misconception around anarchism is that many people think of it as an alternative form of government born out of violent revolution. But I’ve come to learn that anarchy isn’t necessarily just an end goal but an ongoing process, like “justice” or “solidarity”. Most anarchists don’t believe that revolution will happen overnight and people will be able to self organize in the ashes of that revolution. While that might happen, it’s not an ideal transition away from state control. Like so many concepts that we deal with these days: collapse, genocide, apocalypse, etc. anarchy is not one single event but a series of events that started in the past and will continue into the future. It’s an ongoing process.

What’s more, anarchism isn’t a single approach! There are dozens of ideologies that branch off from anarchism: green anarchism, anarcho-pacifism, communo-anarchism, anarcho-primitivism, anarcho-capitalism. The list goes on. Each take considered different factors depending on where you live, what your community looks like, what resources you have, how healthy you are.

No matter what ideology you follow, anarchism is built on some basic approaches to a better life: mutual aid, resistance to state control, communalism. And it’s funny because most people would agree with these principles but would not call themselves anarchists.

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Shifting Perspectives

Opinions that I have changed over the last year:

- Deschooling never ends. We will never reach a point where all schoolish thought has left our minds. Society and culture has too much influence on us.

- I cannot push myself through physical limitations. Maybe I once could but my body is old enough to respond with continued injury. I need rest in order to maintain my well-being.

- There is a place for violence. I used to be a very strong pacifist. But I understand that state oppression is a form of violence against people, and violent response to that oppression is both necessary and required for change to occur and for protection. A pacifist perspective is one of the privileged.

- There is no single path to living a good life. One person’s journey will never look the same as another’s. A million factors play in to one’s life and options and judging others based on those influences is completely futile. We can’t possibly understand another person’s position. This doesn’t relieve people of accountability; unwillingness to change and learn still creates bigots. But even bigots can still change.

- Community and friendship are not the same thing. Members of my community don’t need to be my friends. Friends aren’t necessarily part of my community. This also specifically applies to the home education world: I don’t have to be friends with parents in order for our kids to be friends.

- People in general don’t have the capacity to live in community in late stage capitalist society. Money has replaced relationships and priority is places on business rather than connection.

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Power-Over Versus Autonomy

I think about power dynamics a lot, partially because of unschooling, but also because oppression is born out of imbalanced power between different people.

Lately, when I’ve been thinking about power dynamics, I’ve come back to Zakiyya Ismail’s fantastic article articulating the difference between intersectional and bourgeois unschooling. In the article, she compares early feminism with the wave of unschooling that often just shifts power from parent to child. Without seeing childism as intersectional, we end up actually repeating the same oppressive power dynamics, but with someone new at the top and bottom of the relationship. I’ve heard this kind of feminism also referred to as white feminism, when practitioners (mostly white women) refuse to acknowledge racism in their feminism, simply replacing all women as the oppressed with BIPOC women as oppressed. Bourgeois feminism seeks an equal place at men’s table rather than dismantling the systems that perpetuate feminism in the first place. Likewise, bourgeois unschooling seeks to give kids the same power as adults without addressing the issues with this power-over dynamic to being with.

If we don’t acknowledge all oppression in undoing racism or feminism or childism etc, then we are just perpetuating the power-over relationship. Power-over always has to have this authority over someone else, meaning there will always be someone who is being oppressed. If our unschooling isn’t intersectional, our kids are still going to seek to have power over someone else (sometimes parents, sometimes younger siblings). Instead of seeking to re-allocate the power in our relationship with our children, we should seek to dismantle that type of relationship completely.

This is haaaard work. The power-over dynamic exists everywhere for kids: between siblings and grandparents, in classes and school, with friends and colleagues, work and play. Even when we are able to address this directly in our own relationships, I find that there is still remnants power-over learned from other cultural settings. It’s baked in everything we do. When dismantling the power-over dynamic, we need to extend our practice not only to our children, but everyone we interact with both demonstrate and practice what non-oppressive relationships can looks like in a society where oppression is everywhere.

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On Microplastics, Hard Conversations, and Glimmers of Hope

Last night I was scrolling on Instagram when I came across a post from The Slow Factory stating that there are now more microplastics in the ocean than there are stars in the galaxy. My 12 year old son was sitting next to me so I shared that stat with him. He put his headphones down and stared at me blankly. “Are you okay?”, I asked. After another moment he replied, shaking his head, “People are stupid”. I sighed and put down my phone. “It’s not people so much as the systems they live in. There are a few people calling the shots that are motivated by money that make bad choices, but that’s really systems too. You and I are a part of the problem as much as anyone else”. He looked depleted.

I haven’t had a lot of these heavy conversations with my kids beyond the standard “save the planet” bits they’d be hearing everywhere else. I don’t want to weight them down at such a young age. But in that moment of silence, I could tell that my son understood what a monumental problem plastic pollution is. I read him more of the caption on the post that microplastics are actually embedded on the ocean floor and kill more than 100,000 marine animals every year.

We sat back and had moment. “This is why we grow food, and raise chickens, and buy second hand stuff.” I said, hoping to inspire him a bit more. “So that we don’t have to be part of the systems that are causing problems like microplastics.” We talked about how capitalism fuels pollution like this, and how it became kind of a run away problem that no one expected, about how hard it is to stop now. I told him that in the last few years, though, it seems as though people are finally starting to understand the scope of these problems, so hopefully that’s a good step to making changes to fix the problems, but really it’s a few years too late.

But the solutions are there. The changes we need to make are right in front of us. We just need more people to actually make those changes and it would help if industry could put on their big kid pants and make changes on their end too. As a culture, we need to stop being fueled by financial gain: a hard sell but it’s all right there. It was nice for me to be able to give my son that glimmer of hope, no matter how faint.

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Decolonizing as Self Care

There is no shortage of folks out there talking about the importance of self care. And on the surface, I agree. But it’s also coming to light how some of those folks are also capitalizing on a “self care market” to profit off of something that shouldn’t really be about profit. Caring for community members and taking care of one’s self really shouldn’t come at an expense. What’s more: these so-called self care strategies are usually just band-aids that help us to cope under extreme stress while not addressing the root of the problem. Don’t get me wrong; coping is important! But if we aren’t acknowledging the source of stress and anxiety, no amount of self care strategies are going to help alleviate the weight.

The stress and anxiety that most of us feel today is caused by many issues, all of which are unique to each situation. The root of those issues, though, almost always leads back to colonial-based capitalism and there are very few people that seem to be acknowledging this root. White supremacy, sexism, poverty, climate destruction: all of these are rooted in colonial culture. No amount of yoga or meditation or ice cream or new shoes will change that. In fact, many of our “coping” strategies fuel a capitalist economy which in turn fuels our stress. Vacations away from work and shopping therapy drain bank accounts. And sometimes it feels like the only time that adults connect together is to drink.

Instead of self care being rooted in this capitalist economy, we should be turning to decolonial methods of care; connecting and supporting community, learning to grow and share food, connecting with the earth, dismantling power structures. Once we can identify that the problems we face are colonial in nature, it only makes sense that we should seek to decolonize and unsettle our lives as a response.

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On Growing Food (And Other Ancestral Skills)

The more food I grow, the more that I find myself changing. Growing, cooking, and preserving your own food cannot be defined in a capitalist system. It’s not efficient. The time and labour that goes into a jar of tomato sauce from seedling to processing could never compare with the $2 spent at the grocery store. If I try and compare these two products within a colonial mindset, one clearly outweighs the other.

My experiments with sunflower seeds this season has taught me a new appreciation for food. The time and care that goes into growing, harvesting, roasting, and storing sunflower seeds for consumption (versus the $3 that I could pay at the store) has given me lessons about food waste and consumption that I don’t know if I could have learned any other way.

You can’t attach a dollar value to ancestral skills. You can barely even practice ancestral skills in western civilization. They are time consuming and in-efficient by today’s standards, usually producing requisite rather than luxury items. Trying to monetize ancestral skills will barely pay your rent and often ruin the enjoyment and passion.

But the value that these skills bring to your life are countless. It is a lesson in decolonizing and unsettling; on slowing down, on connecting with the natural world. The care I put into my food, the time I take to enjoy it. The appreciation I have for homemade and handmade items. It has taught me to live minimally and be satisfied with less; to honour my time in the garden or at the loom. It is self care, but also community care. Because I know that my tomatoes are not sprayed with poison and grown in a way that contributes to collapse. Because I know my rugs are made with items that would have been in the landfill.

Growing food is no small undertaking but I wasn’t prepared for the profound way it would change my views on the world.

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The In-Between Step

For the last 10 years, I dream daily about running away to the woods. I want to live off the land. I want to be surrounded by nature. I want to escape. We moved to the country last year and I still want to I live in the woods and dream about running further away. It might be a standard “grass is always greener” situation but maybe not. My dreams are fueled by a desire for subsistence living and that can be hard to do in a city when you don’t always have room to grow food and where there seem to be more expectations about how to live as well as amenities that influence your decisions.

I think it’s a fairly standard dream: escaping the city to live off the land. And I think it’s also easy to tell ourselves that we can’t “escape” the city lifestyle while we live in urban areas. But I think there is plenty we can do in urban environments. Before we moved, my family lived in a very urban area. Looking back, I see that there were these “in-between” steps that helped us get ready for homesteading before we actually got to start our homestead. We pulled our kids out of school. I learned to cook and bake food from scratch. We started our own home business(es). I shared a plot at a community garden to learn. All of these steps helped us start our “opting out” lifestyle and I realize now that the dream to escape doesn’t actually require acreage or a homestead. There are lots of those little in-between steps that can carry you to a subsistence lifestyle while still living in an urban area.

One basic example that comes to mind as an in-between step is about beans. Way back when, I never really cooked with dried beans. They’re kind of a pain. You need to soak them for a few hours before you can even boil them. Canned beans are usually easier. This summer is the first year that I actually grew enough climbing beans to dry for storage. Knowing that this kind of food preservation was a goal, I spent the last few years buying dried beans in bulk to try and get used to cooking with them. Now that I’ve got my own beans, it’s not as much of a hurdle. That in-between step helped make the task easier and more manageable.

Some other in-between steps that I’ve found helpful:

buying local backyard or free range eggs

switching to a credit union instead of a major bank

growing herbs if you don’t have room for a garden (I love lemon balm and mint for tea!)

practicing egalitarian parenting even when your kids are still in school

buying second hand (on the way to buying less)

preserving food from the grocery store

getting a plot in a community garden (this is also a great way to connect with community if you’re introverted like me)

baking your own bread

cooking with food that can only be sourced locally

What other in-between steps can you think of that you already practice? What new in-between steps would be easy to adopt?

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You’re Not Alone

I often feel isolated from community, too radical or political or strange for others. It doesn’t help that I live in rural Ontario, where people are typically cis, white, straight, and conservative. One benefit from being connected to others through social media is that I know that there are in truth other folks out there like me: non-binary, unschooling, subsistence living, anarchists. While these people might not be my neighbours, it helps me to know that I’m not alone in my ideas.

I’ve also found that while these areas might be new to me, these ideas and approaches to living have been around for hundreds if not thousands of years, documented through books, images, magazines, journals, and more. I feel a huge sense of relief in knowing that there’s a bigger movement that has been ebbing and flowing for the last 200 years, not to mention the indigenous communities that have known how to live with the Earth since time immemorial and black folks that have been calling out racial injustice since they were first enslaved. Our generation is not the only one that has recognized these broken systems of education, social justice, and economics. “Wokeness” may be a new term, but people have really been awake all along. We settlers just haven’t been listening.

Because of this work that has come before our generation, there are frameworks that have been developed, research that has been done, statistics and science and policy that has been tested and there is SO MUCH to learn from. As a budding anarchist, I can tell you with certainty that there is enough theory that I could study for the next 10 years. While I don’t have direct ancestors or community that will teach me the skills and knowledge that I need, I can lean on revolutionaries from the past to help me learn what I need to know to survive late stage capitalism.

While I recognize that those who I am connected to by proximity in my community may not share the same ideals or practices, this doesn’t mean that they can’t be part of my community, using the traditional sense of the term. If I’m trying to live a subsistence lifestyle, I need that physical community to meet my needs. We can’t carry the load as individuals. BUT that doesn’t mean that all the members of my community have to be perfectly aligned. Heck, we don’t even have to be friends in order to support each other. I often get confused when we talk about community in these two different groups: online community that shares the same beliefs about how the world works and local community that helps me meet my everyday needs. In the past, I’ve tried to merge the two and end up disappointed because there’s not a lot of gender queer, anti-racist, anti-capitalist anarchists in the local village. It helps me to differentiate these two concepts of community so that I can still engage in both and not feel like I’m totally isolated by differences, but can also learn to draw on similarities. This also doesn’t mean that I need to tolerate bigotry or racism from people in my day to day life as those are the people who really DO make me feel alone. But I know that’s not true: that there are so many others out there like me that feel this need for change.