I fantasize about taking my television or laptop into the backyard and shooting it. I resent the time I've wasted on mindless browsing and watching, and I crave the catharsis that destroying TVs and computers might bring. Today, I did something with similar symbolic implications. I buried my credit card statements, my mortgage statements and other papers indebting thousands of hours of my life to institutions that I have no power over. Many of those documents are now providing a weed barrier for the new raised beds I installed over the winter. Though this action was purely symbolic, though in fact the bank still owns 75% of our house, and I owe Visa nearly a thousand hours of my labor, this small action felt really, really good.
Over the winter Maiga and I were cleaning out our filing cabinets. At the end of the day we had a large brown bag filled with documents we no longer needed. These documents had lots of personal financial information, so we didn't want to throw them away, but we didn't want to take the time to shred them. I put them in the basement and figured I'd throw them into a campfire this summer.
Today as I was gathering up cardboard to act as weed barrier in the raised beds, I noticed the heaping pile of papers. As I threw rich, black composted soil over the bills I felt incredible. Here's to planting seeds of independence and interdependence, to putting our bills to better use, to shooting our televisions, and to designing the lives we want to live!
(This post was written on 3/16 for later publication.)
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