Unstuffed: The Things I Carry

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

The Things I Carry

I pack my backpack for work, as I do every morning.

I check to see that the cloth and mesh shopping bags are there.

At the bottom of the pack is a little, leather pouch with two knives and a Leatherman multi-tool. I also carry a pair of mini-binoculars. You never know what kind of nature you might find, even in an urban environment. It's good to be prepared to take a closer look at something, or to take a sample of a plant to bring home and identify.

Another permanent item in the bag is my trusty utensil carry-all, that my dear friend made me. Forks, spoons, knives, chopsticks and cloth napkins for two, are neatly rolled up in a pretty package that I never like to leave home without.

Into the bag goes the book I am returning to the library. I will exchange it for another book that I put on hold and is ready to be picked up.

Next in is my lunch: leftovers in reusable containers.

Then my travel mug full of hot tea, and a glass bottle pulled from a recycle bin, filled with today's herbal infusion: stinging nettle.

Those are the standard items I carry on any given day and if they were on Monty Hall's "Let's Make a Deal" list of what's in your purse, I'd be a wealthy woman.

This morning however, I added a pair of rubber tipped garden gloves, a trowel and a plastic bag to my pack. As soon as I'm done work today I'm heading to a place I know right in the heart of the city. Surrounded by a busy road, the transit way and a shopping mall, there is a small stand of trees on a hill and growing in amongst those trees are trout lilies. Erythronium americanum. I grew up knowing them as dog's tooth violet. They are an early spring flower, very pretty, with uniquely mottled leaves and they are edible. Sam Thayer gives the best treatment I've found so far of the whats, wheres and hows of trout lilies, in his book Nature's Garden. I highly recommend it.

My quest today will be to gently harvest some bulbs and the newly emerged leaves to bring to a potluck.

I love that my growing knowledge and intimacy of the landscape I inhabit leads me on these adventures on a Tuesday afternoon in April. I love that you won't find credit cards, a makeup compact or an iAnything in my bag. I live in the city and work at a desk job in an office, but at any given moment I am fully prepared to get down and dirty in the nearest patch of earth!

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3 comments:

Rachel said...: Awwww. I miss you! When can we go urban foraging? Or have some tea? Or both? :-); April 20, 2011 at 8:29 PM
Amber said...: Yes!! Let's forage for things to make tea with. :) I'll email you...; April 21, 2011 at 8:56 AM
Pamela said...: Your blog is so inspiring. :)

For the past few weeks. I have been thinking a lot about my bag, too... how what I put in it allows me to lively lightly when I am out of the house. I keep finding more to carry which then leads me to seeing what I can reduce by finding multi-purpose items.

Happy foraging!; April 21, 2011 at 8:26 PM

Raison d'etre

In 2008 I didn't buy anything new for the whole year. Food and basic toiletries (but not toilet paper) were the obvious exceptions (twice I broke my own rule). Used items were allowed, but I tried really hard to reduce consumption as much as possible.

I finished my year successfully, and along the way learned a lot about how much the world consumes, the waste we produce, sustainability, voluntary simplicity, climate change, peak oil, resource depletion, the water crisis, the food crisis, voting with your dollar, voting with your fork....

Now, I've transformed into a slightly nutty, very passionate, gardening, preserving, DIYing, simple living, nature loving, weed eating, backyard medicine making, urban homesteader, and I still don't use toilet paper!

With the help of the Awesomedudeguy (ADG), I'm continuing my exploration of living lightly and frugally, while increasing my self-sufficiency and resiliency, staying debt free, and preparing for a climate changed, resource depleted world, in uncertain economic times.

My nothing new restriction is lifted, but I continue to be a gentle, local consumer as much as possible.

My hope is that some of the information and resources I post about here will be helpful to others. Thanks so much for stopping by !

Yours in unstuffing,
Amber

"Forgive me if I never visit. I am from the fields, you know, and while quite at home with dandelion, make a sorry figure for the drawing room" ~Emily Dickinson

"I never had any other desire so strong, and so like covetousness, as that.... I might be master at last of a small house and a large garden, with very moderate conveniences joined to them, and there dedicate the remainder of my life to the culture of them and the study of nature." ~Abraham Cowley

"The laws of nature are under no obligation to cater to our culture’s emotionally charged fantasies of perpetual progress and limitless growth." ~John Michael Greer

"Sometimes we think we are too small to make a difference in this big world. Our actions seem insignificant in comparison to global issues such as climate change and population growth. However, the reality is that action on an individual level is exactly how big changes are made. Without individual and family sustainability, there’s no community sustainability. And without community sustainability, there’s no global sustainability. In fact, earth-wide change is absolutely impossible without individual change.
It really does come down to you and me."
~From Living Sustainably: It's Your Choice

"The universal conspiracy of the silent-assertion lie is hard at work always and everywhere, and always in the interest of a stupidity or a sham, never in the interest of a thing fine or respectable. Is it the most timid and shabby of all lies? It seems to have the look of it. For ages and ages it has mutely laboured in the interest of despotisms and aristocracies and chattel slaveries, and military slaveries, and religious slaveries, and has kept them alive; keeps them alive yet, here and there and yonder, all about the globe; and will go on keeping them alive until the silent-assertion lie retires from business--the silent assertion that nothing is going on which fair and intelligent men and women are aware of and are engaged by their duty to try to stop." ~Mark Twain

"It is not enough simply to abstain from theft...We must remember that nothing in this world really belongs to us. At best, we are merely borrowers. It is our duty, therefore, to borrow no more from the world than we absolutely need, and to make full and proper use of it. Taking more than we need, and wasting it, is a form of stealing from the rest of humankind."
~Commentary on Sutra 30 The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali