Conservation Inspiration #1

Cosmic Gardener
May 25, 2016
3 min read

It's been 2 months on the road with my Beloved. We should be writing a book about all these crazy adventures, but something tells me they're more personal than fame-garnering.

When you're living in a house with yourself or other people, you have s p a c e

and so all of your systems don't interfere with one another, ie, you walk over here to take a shower, you take the garbage out over there, you're cooking away from it all. Much like your digestive tract takes miles and yards of space to carry out each step in the process of digestion, a house or even an apartment can allow you to breathe between the milieu of your bustle.

...Not the case when you're camping as a lifestyle in an urban setting, or living out of your small SUV to prepare for a lifestyle 'off the grid'. The appeal for forsaking the traditional is somewhere between an adrenaline rush and a bird-flip to the system that is so sideways and exclusive and to a degree that there are more empty houses than there are homeless people. It's a risk and a gamble, because you can't just jump ship and expect to live as comfortably as once before (though with thought it can be simpler). If you're a little less than prepared, it can feel like all of your internal organs trying to cram into the same space, because literally all of your actions (sleeping, eating, hygiene, affection) are happening in the same 7x5x3 box.

Everyday a new bag of trash compiles magically- how did this happen? I just had a meal and bought a donut at a gas station, here or there...?) But without this grounded place to reuse your wares or plot out your grand decision to save the planet through recycling and self-containment, one can just find themselves in a proverbial 'garbage soup'.

This wasn't the plan, but as plans are often extirpated, you adapt. As shifting and rearranging routinely requisites comfortable existence in Vehicle Life, one can't halp but feel somewhat discouraged and guilty about the insurmountable production of plastics, vinyls and papers that store the edibles and sippables we cherish and then quickly become obsolete oxygen-annihilators and future dolphin-killers orbiting our own bodies in our portable abodes.

Garbage has a sad, sentimental sort of presence about it. I don't have the same relationship to it as most people do, in that I am usually the one at festivals or gatherings picking it up, sorting it, taking it out, and even salvaging useful or what I consider to be "wrongfully-wasted wares" or 'www'. I remember a piece of information running across my mind's eye (in a dream, or an article blurb) about a person literally turning trash to treasure in the form of sculpture and art. I often fantasize (as a deflection to my guilt after reading of the physical harm we're doing in our disposable culture) about the kind of mobius loop beauty that could be if you could use the whole part of, say, a package of food and turn it into a sculpture or even another useful thing...something that would inspire awe and wonder and not lead the observer to feel dread and despair.

Inside the jungle of the brain is some kind of creative force that allows everyday objects to be seen under an objective light. It's not useful to look at a wrapper and see a wrapper: you can make wallpaper, recycle it into socks or yarn or sculpture or something funny if you make a collage. Like celebrating the whole part of our modern-day buffalo like ancestors once did.

I found articles where inspired artists do just that, starting with a major magazine publication, Mental Floss.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/13046/11-artists-doing-amazing-things-recycled-materials