no place like home
to change ourselves, one gulp at a time…
So much privilege in writing this and imagining how things could be different when I’m not in imminent danger, have enough food, water, and shelter for my family. There’s much to say about the benefits of lived experience yet I’ve grown too reliant on a lifestyle and worldview that’s threatening the conditions for life on the Earth. What can any of us do to break free of this madness? Gandhi was a big advocate of experimenting with one’s own life and “being the change” you want to see in the world. I believe that we need to build our collective resilience and experiment with low footprint lifestyles while we still have some abundance of “wiggle room”. Any climate crisis/plague/collapse future will challenge our infrastructure, economic systems, and political capacity. Agriculture (feeding ourselves), general “ecosystem services” (water, air, soil, everything nature does to keep a biosphere intact), and who knows what else will be strained to their limits. While we still can, it will help us to learn from the past and share contemporary experiments in how to live.
That’s why I am most interested in “home-scale” articulture. What can we bring to our homes to support living in more resilient and low-footprint ways? If we can experiment at the scale of households, neighborhoods, or even homesteads and farms, we might gain some valuable insights.
The ecophilosopher Joanna Macy once asked me, “Why not just use what people have already in their homes? Why buy or bring in anything new? We already find meaning in the objects in our homes. So many people have too much stuff as it is.” Objects can remind us of past events, places, people, and ideas. Depending on what you have in your home and what you value, you could certainly begin to reconnect them intentionally as a “system” to support a theme or behavior you want to reinforce in your life.
For many people, home decorations and tools are less about metaphor, and more about style, history, or practicality. The hope here is to encourage a purposeful systemic way of thinking about the stuff in our lives and consider that we can use that space intentionally to help shape the life and world we want.
I’ve had the honor to spend time with people who made most of their own things. Their homes, their furniture, tools, clothing. For them, everything has a story. A carved wooden spoon is a tool for eating food they’ve grown (with its own deep lineage and adventures), but also a connection to a specific tree, the weather, a favorite knife, a friendship, a period in their own, or someone else’s life, etc. For years I strove to buy no new things, particularly clothing or tools. Everything I wore had a story. I could point to every item on my body and tell you how it came to me, who gifted what, and it felt like I was wearing all that love. This depth of interconnection can help us stay grounded and remind us constantly of what we value. I believe articulture systems have the chance to do something similar. To help us rewrite patterns in our brains and lives that support rather than distract us further. Bringing an artful grouping of things (or rituals, songs, etc.) to our homes might help do that, no?
Because these experiments are ultimately of a personal nature, it’s even more intimate than the spatial or architectural notion of home. It’s about personal transformation and creating environments that support meaningful shifts in artful, inspiring, and delicious ways around us. The tastier and more resonant we can make it, the easier it will be to embrace, share and spread.
It also reinforces a more fractal approach to life. The notion of an integrated world in which the personal, home, and larger contexts share some aesthetic and philosophical consistency offers additional cognitive redundancy. The elements are self-similar at any scale. Important things are harder to forget if you think that way.
Industrial cultures share an approach to consistent separation and disconnection to the detriment of all life. articulture.systems hopes to begin to shift that. It may take too long or be too late to make a difference but I reckon it’s worth trying.
Starting here, now. It’s an experiment.
