The Cabin in the Woods

This morning I went swimming in Walden Pond. Floating on my back I could see the blue sky framed by the trees and even with the noise of the kids and tourists crowding the shore the experience was amazing.  I floated in the muffled sound of the water and the quiet of the sky.

Afterward I retreated up the path to find the site of Thoreau's cabin.  I had hiked it once almost ten years ago with my husband on a rainy October day. This morning was bright and sunny, though the cool shade of the trees provided a restive respite. I wandered the trail under dappled leaves, catching glimpses of the shimmering water which was almost turquoise.  The path was mostly empty and the dirt path ate the sound of my footsteps.   I walked through the forest, stopping frequently to enjoy the trees, the sticks, to watch the fish in the water.  The path meandered along the shore's edge, gently rolling down, then up, then down again. I cross the bridge past the meadow and stumbled on a small cove that had been discovered by a young family.  A simple wooden arrow pointed to the house site where Thoreau's cabin once stood.

I walked up the hill into a clearing with a pile of rocks, two foot high stone pillars marking the foundation.  I stood in the clearing and listened for birds.  I heard crickets and the hum of bugs.  In the time I stood there several families entered and left the site.  Some lingered long enough to read the signs.  One father told his son to "put a rock on the pile," which the sign said was a tradition started by the Thoreau Society to represent the idea that while the cabin may not remain, Thoreau's ideas live on.  I couldn't help but think that Thoreau might have preferred that we each instead remove a rock, until his woods were as unmarked as if no one had ever been there.

Yet the idea of one's legacy as a pile of rocks is powerful: the notion that small pebbles, placed one at a time over a long, sustained period of reflection can build itself into a physical presence, something real and enduring is comforting.  Rome wasn't built in a day, and you have to start somewhere, but too often we think we will fail and never start at all. I know sometimes I get intimidated by my ideas, want to write and get my thoughts down, but don't.  Yet on a day to day basis the work is as simple as placing a pebble.  If we can focus on that who knows what might get built, what ideas born.

The sign next to the rock pile quote Thoreau that he "came to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.  And see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." The rocks stand as a nice testament: challenging us to live each day in a way that places another pebble on the pile, motivating us ourselves to take small steps forward. Do something every day that leaves an impression, because even if it is not organized into a foundation, it represents you were alive.

The Sleep Lost to History

Modern life and technology have changed the way we eat, live, travel, and work.  One radical fundamental shift that doesn't get a lot of attention is how we sleep.  Not only are most people in the U.S. sleeping on a clean, bug free synthetic matress and pillow in a dedicated room (with only one other person on average no less!), but historians suggest that the standard eight hours of sleep a night is a historical fiction.  References in diaries and other documents reference segmented sleep, or the first and second sleep.  People often slept for an initial four hours, then got up for an hour or two to ready, interpert their dreams, pray, or have sex, only to fall back into sleep for an additional four hours of rest.  Many modern insomnia cases may actually be people reverting to this natural cycle, which has also emerged in sleep stuidies as a natural pattern when people are deprived of artificial light for 14 hours a day. There is even research that our biological clocks work on a cycle slightly longer than 24 hours, perhaps as an evolutionary advantage.

There are some fascinating articles about how the introduction of artificial light changed the pattern of daily life both physically, but also socially. Street lighting came to Paris in 1667, and followed in Lille and Amsterdam within several years.  Coffee houses stayed open later.  Secret underground nighttime religious services by those being prosecuted for their beliefs also normalized the use of the night.  Suddenly, the night became a place with things for reputable people to do, and not just the bastion of burglers.

So next time you wake up in the middle of the night, realize you may just be reverting back to a historical, natural pattern. 200 years isn't long in evolutionary terms for our new sleeping habits.

*You can download a computer program Flux to minimize your exposure to blue light before bed.  It has the added benefit of letting you see the web through rose colored glasses.  Or you can just minimize your screen time for the several hours before bed.  

Radio in a Post Radio World

Radio seems to be a dying art, unless of course you're listening to public radio. Even competing with the TV, Netflix streaming, and the Internets sometimes nothing beats a good radio show.

Try listening to this show about the history of night by historian Robert Ekirch in the dark with some candles. He talks about first and second sleep, and all the things people would do at night during their somabulatory hours.

Or this awesome discussion of patent trolls (hint* includes bonus mequito laser beams).

Of course, if you don't want to listen to radio you can always read about it in Sarah Vowell's Radio On: A Listerner's Diary.   

Where Do Good Ideas Come From?

Interesting show on NPR talking about what innovation looks like.  The metaphor of the light bulb going off, or the Eureka! moment paint a picture of ides as singular and original, but in reality innovation may be a more dynamic process of layering findings and ideas.  This notion doesn't fit with the American patent system at all.

The show is quite interesting, particularly the third segemnt which can be found here.

Essentially ideas and innnovation involve three key concepts:

• Ideas are borrowed, shared, and built on others' ideas
• Interaction is key
• Sobriety. It helped when people started drinking coffee or tea instead of getting sauced all day when alcohol was a means of dealing with unsanitarty drinking water.  

Coffee houses served as hubs for the exchange of ideas about politics, philosophy, technology and science. Steve Johnson argues that it wasn't just the lack of alcohol, but the proxemics of the space which supported the interaction of people from different backgrounds and expertise. 

So where do these conversations take place today?  On list serves?  Bulletin boards?  On the Google Bus or on Facebook (haha I joke!)?  If it is Davos and Ted Talks we're in trouble, because these types of settings are self-selecting and filter out the kinds of people who can offer new, outside perspectives.  Even confining interactions to within a private company could prove problematic.  These disruptive insights are valuable, yet they might not make it through the filter. 

Locations don't need to be physical, though there is value in face-to-face exchange.  How do we design spaces for these types of interactions to happen? What about in a society with increasing inequality?  We need to address and think through where good ideas come from if we want to ensure that good ideas can generate even better ones. 

In a Digital 24 World MH 370's Dissapearance Fascinates

Many have complained about the journalistic coverage of missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH 370.  The 24 hour news cycle has gone big on conjecture and rumour, with experts in no way connected to the investigation coming on air to speculate on their thoughts and opinions.  The reporting has reached near hysteria levels, reminiscent of the summer shark attack reporting back in 2001.

No trace of the plane has been found, little information has been confirmed, and the majority of passengers were not American: all factors that would typically predict little coverage by U.S. media.  Despite this, the American media and the public have been widely fixated on the disappearance of the Boeing 777 carrying 239 passengers and crew.

What explains the unusual levels of coverage is that for the average viewer this story is, at its core, about the role of technology in our lives, not an airplane, and not even the passengers.  In a world in which the average viewer can't fathom traveling to grocery store undetected by GPS, convinced that the NSA is listening to their every call, and a soldier in control of a drone is able to kill a target from thousands of miles away, the notion that anything as large as an aircraft can simply disappear is deeply shocking.  The idea that 239 people could be untraceable is unnerving.  As much as citizens are concerned about the fact that we can't seem to go anywhere without anyone noticing, there is also security in knowing that someone can always come to your aid.

Fundamentally, Americans feel so wired and connected to the grid that the idea one can fall off it is both exhilarating and terrifying. That there are areas of the world that are completely inaccessible seems foreign over a hundred years after the closing of the frontier, challenging deeply held and fundamental assumptions about modern society.  We take pervasive electronic surveillance and the intrusion of technology into our lives as an immutable fact--regulating and setting limits on these developments has been dismissed as fantasy outside the realm of possibility, and yet the disappearance of MH 370 demonstrates that these technologies are not yet so pervasive and fixed that we don't have the opportunity as a society to decide what their limits or expansions should be.

The opening of what some have dubbed the electronic frontier, with its restructuring of communication and society, and the tension between freedom and control inherent to technology was supposed to mean that we were in a new era in which we had mastered control of the physical terrain. The revelation that there are still physical limitations to the reach of these technologies suggests there is still time to address what their roles and limits should be not just in areas to which these technologies have not been extended, but also where they have already been accepted into the routines of our daily lives.

The disappearance of flight MH 370 is a very real tragedy for the passengers, crew and families involved, and we need to not lose sight of that.  Wild speculation and rumour don't help. Yet the story also opens the opportunity for a productive dialogue about what it means to live in a truly connected society.  We are still sorting out the role of technology in society and human lives, and we still have decisions to make.  Let's also not lose sight of that opportunity.

Taking a Break from the Cell Phone

I’m on a diet this weekend.  No, I am not watching my calories, but cutting down on cell phone time. Unless I am under a work deadline, I try not to check my email. I leave my phone plugged in the other room, and sometimes (Gasp!) I don’t even take it with me when I leave the house to walk down to town.

What if someone needs to get hold of me?  Well, I’ll be home within the hour, and I don’t know any life saving medical techniques that I could tell them over the phone to save anyone. I guess they can wait? 

Thoreau Provides a Great Housing Bubble Gut Check

“When the [owner] has got his house, he may not be the richer for it, but poorer for it, and it be the house that got him.”  Thoreau

After several hours wallowing in real estate blogs I decided to redirect my energies toward something positive: enjoying my apartment.  I brewed up a cup of French press coffee, which feels like a luxury since I cut back from my standard morning cup, and headed out to the balcony to read in the afternoon sun.  I rested my feet on my patio table in my pjs, plopped on my hat and settled in to read Thoreau’s writing on Shelter.

Shelter is an interesting word.  Thoreau draws a sharp contrast between shelter, which implies a fundamental human need, and a home, which he recognizes activates all sorts of other wants and emotions. Thoreau’s incredibly specific terminology is at its core a fundamental critique of society’s obsession with housing: shelter, he forcefully reminds us, is about keeping the elements at bay, and providing covering at night.  This is pretty radical thinking that is nowhere in evidence on the MLS (or in shelter magazines, a genre that modernly obliterates Thoreau’s careful distinction between wants and needs as it celebrates home décor and the very extravagances Thoreau sought to pare away).

While it may not be practical to look to Thoreau for literal real estate advice, reading him provides a great gut check exercise when you are in need of some perspective.  Besides, can’t you just imagine telling your agent you are looking for “Preferably four walls, a roof, and something that forces me to exchange as little of the thing called life for it?”  Challenging yourself to question needs and wants may allow you to approach your real estate search in a way that lets you better see potential in houses others take a pass on:  do you really need a living room, and a family room, and a dining room, or will a living space with an open flow and a shared dining room work for the way you actually live?  How much space do you really need, and are you buying the square footage for living or for storing stuff?

Rereading Thoreau has given me the clarity to see the insanity of our current local market, and to really feel committed that a much smaller place may work for us.

Don’t get me wrong--I don’t think that everyone needs to live in a small cabin in the woods (and for the record, neither did Thoreau who was very clear that his experiment was less about building a sustainable, alternative model of living than in provoking people to examine their economic lives).  I also understand that the frustration of continually having to scale back your dreams out of financial necessity can reach a breaking point when it runs up against that old thing called human dignity.  But the idea of periodically revisiting your wants and needs is a valuable one, and Thoreau provides a great sounding board even if the man did write his book in the 1840s.

Where to Live

"I'm rich according to the number of things I can do without" -Thoreau


Lately, I have been thinking a lot about where and how to live.  When my husband and I first left LA for Ventura, we were shocked by how much further our housing dollar stretched.  For less than we were paying in LA we could rent by the beach, with a huge balcony and a million dollar view of the ocean.  Fast forward several years and real estate prices and rents have both shot up.  Compared to Santa Barbara and LA, the City of Ventura now seems suprisingly unaffordable.  The fundamentals have shifted, and the math doesn't really make sense. 
So I've been thinking a lot about our options: 

• Stay renting where we are

• Move ten minutes outside of town to a more rural area (but increase my commute and necessitate two cars)

• Move to a cheaper, smaller town like Santa Paula

• Buy a 700 Sq Ft home here in Downtown Ventura

I'm seriously considering all of these options.  The one that seems most interesting at the moment is the small 700 sq ft house with no parking and second bedroom small enough it can only fit a twin bed. 

Hear me out:  a small house might actually work for us since it would let us live in a walkable community, which is really important to us. We like being in the downtown area, and a small house means lower expenses, less stuff, and more freedom to live intentionally.  It's also a five minute walk to the beach.

It would likely mean giving the dining room table back to my parents (it was my grandmother's) to store in their garage, but truthfully it is a piece of furniture on which we store mail.  We eat on our ottomon anyway.

The only reason it really makes sense for us is the location, and the fact that if we are honest withourselves about how we use our home, it could be perfect. 

The house continues to be available becuase we may be the only people insane enough to carefully question what we need versus what we want. 

What Not to Wear--Debt

What’s in Vogue—Saving Money

Women’s magazines are a guilty pleasure. Sure, I had the requisite subscription to seventeen as a tween. I read cosmo through college until I confirmed my sneaking suspicion that the magazine simply recycled its stories every two years and I had finished reading any remaining original content.   Still, while I showed up at the hair dressers packing my laptop and my work reading, I never had any intention of cracking open that book.  Instead, I would sit there for a half hour developing my color and my knowledge of trashy celebrity gossip, sex tips, and fashion advice.  And what overpriced fashion advice it is.

Yet for the past twelve months I have been a Vogue reader, courtesy of a miss-mailed subscription that the mailman insists of delivering to the wrong box.  So despite the fact that I haven’t invited any magazine other than Wired into my home for years, I’ve spent more time than I have since high school consuming perfumed ads, counting the number of pages of advertising I must flip through to find a table of contents, and wondering enviously how Plum Sykes manages to make enough money to pay for her expensive boot habit.

As someone who scores most of her finds at the local thrift store (theory camelhair and cashmere turtleneck!) or Nordstrom’s rack (Edlman and DJ Pliner boots!), even the prices in Lucky magazine seem ludicrous.  Vogue is a veritable shit show of how the other half lives.  I can’t really lose myself in the pages of a magazine whose ads remind me of CNN: where products and services I will never purchase (Really, Boeing?) are advertised.

Sometimes as I flip through I fantasize about what I would actually want.  If I made one splurge purchase what would come home with me?   But then that price tag and its requisite dollar signs dangle before me.  Which do you covet more?  Sky high killer heels or those sky high killer bills?   One of them definitely makes my debt look fat. Much like Domino (the best magazine ever) folded because its readers simply copied the magazine’s killer looks for less (which happens when you have a readership of DIY divas), I read Vogue not for product advice but the styling.  And so I tear out the occasional picture or ad, and let it inspire me as I go shopping in my own closet.  Because I can definitely afford that.

On Solitude and Technology

What does modern solitude look like?  In an era of the buzzing cell phone does refraining from picking it up when it rings count?  Or do you need to unplug completely?

Sometimes technology can make our lives simpler: I like my dishwasher.   But how do we avoid being the tools of our tools? 

On Solitude

Being able to spend time alone deep in thought or even doing nothing is important to many philosophical traditions.  Zen monks take vows of silence and Descartes called his philosophical works the meditations. Leo Babauta chronicles a number of great thinkers from Albert Einstein to Mozart who sang the praises of solitude.

So often, solitude is also equated with nature. As a college student enamored of both Thoreau's Walden Pond and my ability to live in a walkable urban setting, I thought a lot about what solitude looks like in a modern world.  All major transcendental traditions encompass the back to nature ethic, but it has always seemed too simplistic to equate rural living with solitude and simplification.  Thoreau never intended his time on Walden Pond as a permanant solution, nor did he believe everyone needed to move to a cabin:  his two years were intended to serve as an experiment in pealing away the needs of life to its essence.  What is simple about having to drive thirty minutes by car, or having to use a septic system?

Can you find urban solitude and quiet if it means being able to use the simplest mode of transportation possible, walking, to secure your needs?  Some people claim they don't mind their commute because that is their alone time to listen to music or just relax.  I never feel alone when I drive: I am thinking about other cars and anticipating what is going on around me.  Walking is the only mode of transportation that let's me really be alone and lost in my thought.

On Walden Pwned

In 1854 Henry David Thoreau published On Walden Pond, a reflection on living deliberatively.  His experiment sought to reveal the essentials of life, and his meditation on this exercise is one of the most provacative books in American history.  It is also one of the only modern treatises on modern industrial worklife, as explored in this phenomenal article, Thoreau's Alternative Economics, by Professor Brian Walker.

Thoreau's voice is perhaps even more relevant today in the face of stagnant wages and a world accelerated by technology, where the trappings and complexities of modern work and home life present increasing challenge to American Society and human happiness.  Thoreau wrote before the automobile, fax machines, smart phones, television, and the internet.  Yet much of what he says about man becoming the tools of his tools can be fruitfully applied to these discussions.

Thoreau never intended his time on Walden Pond as a permanant solution, nor did he believe everyone needed to move to a cabin:  his two years were intended to serve as an experiment in pealing away the needs of life to its essence.  Instead, he hoped to provide a model by which we could seperate wants and needs, and question the role of seemingly ingrained practices and habits in order to live a life of intention.

This blog examines the modern world through the lens of Thoreau's experiment, and seeks to realize his goal of the intentional life.  I use Pwned, a gaming term that is a corruption of the word "owned:" To pwn someone or something is to dominate it.   Walden Pond is an idea more than it is a physical place:  Walden Pwned pays homage to Thoreau's experiment, and refers to one's ability to live an intentional life while navigating the challenges of modern technology and society.  On Walden Pwned is a collection of my writings and reflections on what it means to live the good life.