Thursday, July 21, 2011

Frutti di Bosco

I winter in a cold and unfriendly climate. Some love to ski and skate, and walk the wintry streets. I enjoy a bit of cross-country skiing, but my African infancy taught me the pleasures of a nice hot sun, preferably above body heat. Which pushes me to southern and equatorial climes. But, as I said, I winter in a cold spot and that is where I can make enough money to summer in the sun.

As I work and struggle with the winter, I watch my cold-weather friends and I see there is a definite sense of scarcity. The Rat Race is a northern concept, and the affluence of the northern societies is born from and gives birth to this sense. After all, if there really is enough to go round, we don't have to claim anything as ours. I find myself subscribing to the scarcity theory, when I don't feel I have enough work for a month, I blame my colleagues' greed and worry that I will lose clients to less qualified folk. We all rush around, in the cold, to get and spend more and more, to fill our days with goods and things.

I summer in a paradise, fertile, green, affluent in a different way. We live alongside wild boar, deer, badgers, snakes, scorpions, mice, and all sorts of creepy crawly creatures. Birds sing in the morning and evening. A predatory bird and his family fly and call overhead. We spent the first few years in tents and now have a cozy house that echoes Middle Earth. It is not everyone's idea of a villa in Tuscany.

But here I learn about scarcity. I reflect on my life as a farmer, when we were raising children, poultry, grapes, and grains. Feeding our family from the earth was our priority, and we managed to do it with a great sense of satisfaction. Here in the middle of nowhere, on a mountain top, I can wander down the road and pick wild berries, or not, as the whim suits. There are mushrooms growing in the woods, some will kill me, others are delicacies. An egg is produced every so often from one of my hens. Nature doesn't care if I eat or not. There is definitely enough to go round, but we humans continue to build mazes and fences to feed our rats. Let them free!

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