The Other Side Of Sacrifice Is Blessing

Reducing reliance on corporate food is probably going to mean you’ll spend more time cooking and preserving food, and that you might not be able to eat strawberries in winter or oranges at all.

Reducing fossil-fuel use might mean you’ll have to spend more time walking, or that you’ll give up some of your freedom in order to carpool. Or it might mean you won’t just ask what BP the corporation is doing about the oil spill, but what we the people are doing about it.

Fortunately, the other side of sacrifice is blessing, and the journey away from corporate-reliance toward self-reliance and local-reliance, though I have barely begun it myself, seems full of blessing.

Anyone who grows their own food or who has gotten to know their farmer at the farmers market knows this.

Anyone who has done without a particular technological gadget knows this.
Anyone who has organized to protect the interests of small farmers from the greed of corporate agriculture businesses knows this.

And anyone who has looked into the course catalogue of the Driftless Folk School — which is educating our community about everything from blacksmithing to mowing with a scythe to pickling to soap-making — sees how delightful the journey toward self-reliance can be.

This reminds me of something that Derrick Jensen, I think, once wrote. Which is that, yes, the move from consumer culture and big oil is going to involve sacrifice. My G/Son won't live the hedonistically creature-comfort-loaded life that I've led. But he might gain something, as well. If our children and grandchildren gain an increased closeness to the Earth, to the seasons and cycles and processes of Gaia, well, then, they will, indeed, be blessed.

Of course, Jensen also posits our descendent, starving to death on the banks of Yukon River, cursing us for killing off the salmon in return for cans of corn syrup that we could throw away. Cursing our great grandparents for killing off the buffalo for sport and the flocks of passenger pigeons so large they darkened the sky for days at a time for no reason at all other than the love of destruction.

And, yet.

Read the whole thing here.

Picture found here.