Off-the-grid resistance Julie A. Wortman

LATELY I FIND MYSELF wishing that I could spend my full-time energies homesteading. With the freezer full of our homegrown produce, the back porch littered with buckets of root vegetables, and five cords of wood stacked in readiness to fuel the wood Our lives are still too thoroughly entwined with the economics of credit and debt. stove, it sometimes seems possible. But our lives are still too thoroughly entwined with the economics of credit and debt -- and we are still too woefully ignorant of what true homesteading would entail -- to turn the wish into flesh-and-blood reality all at once. Still, my household is incrementally working toward a simpler life lived sustainably and green. And we are not the only ones attempting such a shift. In this process of acting very locally and very personally, people are learning to grasp the global connections more deeply, reinventing Left politics along the way. The success earlier this year of organic food producers and consumers in forcing the federal government to back off from its proposal to water dow Adelaide Winstead n organic labeling regulations is a stunning recent example of the growing power of green-minded voters to challenge society's routine accommodation to the profit-at-all-costs agricorporations. BUT LET US BE CLEAR We are talking here not primarily about a reclaiming of political will, but about a reclaiming of soul. I've been thinking a lot about this lately as we here at The Witness have been living with the frightening reality of co-editor Jeanie Wylie-Kellermann's brain tumor. Having worked so closely with her over the past seven years and seen her overcome last-minute editorial disasters with breathtaking determination, it is unimaginable to me that she will not pull off a defy-all-odds recovery. Not that I haven't at times (all too characteristically) doubted her process, impatient for quick choices and fast positive results. But the politics of the medical world are not so easily or swiftly negotiated, especially for someone with Jeanie's strong sense of self-possession. She has proceeded in this matter trying to sort out the fact from the fiction, the life-giving from the life-denying, the self-affirming from the self-defeating. Jeanie hasn't always gotten her way in life, but more than most people I know she is aware of the compromises she is forced to make and does her best to test and retest their validity. She knows who she is and to whom she belongs -- and responds to life accordingly. WITHOUT SUCH SELF-POSSESSION a person could end up sleepwalking her days away. In his own time, Henry David Thoreau believed such somnambulance afflicted most of the general populace. Worried that he himself might be infected, he packed himself off to Walden Pond in the hope that he might figure out how to live fully awake. His was a mystic's quest to which few of us consciously aspire. But living in a state of alert self-possession (which is not the same as self-centeredness) -- that is, living as if we and our choices truly matter -- is a sacred vocation to which we are all called. I believe the off-the-grid metaphor - and the hope it embodies - still holds. The radical reordering of our individual and communal lives that such a way of living entails suggests why one mother's son I can think of was killed when he urged a disenfranchised populace to embrace it. We spend the Advent season admonishing one another to keep our eyes open to the unexpected possibilities that open up when we honor this man's counsel as gospel. This we do in the face of continuing, often daunting pressure from the powers that be to accept their smoke-and-mirrors version of what we long for most. Thoreau took to the woods to cleanse his palate of the politics and social presumptions of the powers of his time and to simplify, simplify, simplify. Thirty years ago like-minded folk went back to the land and off the utility grid. These days, with so many former hippies living mainstream lives and with corporations poised to wrestle the renewable energy movement away from any association with alternative economics, it is difficult to imagine completely unplugging from the systems that dominate our way of life. But I believe the off-the-grid metaphor -- and the hope it embodies -- still holds. A RESISTANCE OF GOING OFF THE GRID still means a resistance of making choices that free us to see how corporations, the global economy and the various powers and principalities of this world seduce us into living according to the bottom-line value of financial profit -- profit at the expense of justice, profit at the expense of environmental It is a resistance through which we teach ourselves awareness of life as it is. quality and profit at the expense of our own self-possession as God's own. It is a resistance through which we teach ourselves awareness of life as it is -- and through which we learn where our true security lies and what faithfulness entails. These off-the-grid choices could be modest in the extreme, such as committing oneself weekly to a complete day of sabbath or going 'green' in some area of regular consumption -- or they might entail dramatic lifestyle shifts, such as cutting up all the credit cards or joining a co-housing project. The purpose is to destroy the artificial limits of profit-based possibility and open up experimentation in ways of operating that nurture life, community and the common good. The goal is to learn sustainability, the uncomplicated exchange of goods and services that sustainability implies, and a commitment to environmental quality and egalitarianism. IF WE'RE LUCKY in the process more and more of us will wake up to the truth: that no one need go without the basics of life -- including the self-possession required for choosing life in the face of death. Julie A. Wortman <julie@thewitness.org> is co-editor/publisher of The Witness. Back to the top Back to the current issue