It is 9:30am on a beautiful, crisp Saturday morning. I am sitting cross legged on the red bench my friend Jack and I built. It is one of the few items I have that I actually made with my bare hands. Jack and I designed this bench for a studio project. It is made of wood and nails and Colonial Red paint. I had never made anything like this before. My home crafts projects were a few baby quilts and a kimono as well as some crossstiching and the redworking I did on some pillow cases. Luckily Jack was familiar with power tools and saws and after we agreed on the simple, classic design, we got busy making benches.
The “dirty red bench” (our nickname for it) sat at Jack and Keaton and Steven’s apartment for a few years while we were in college. But when Jack and I graduated I took the bench as per our agreement (I paid for it and ultimately got the rights to it). So now this bench sits boldly on my back porch taking up almost half of my little space. It is chunky and imperfect – the wood doesn’t quite meet up in some places, the paint is pealing off, there is an article stamped on the left side where someone placed a newspaper and the text stamped itself into the paint. But I love it. It is one of the few things that I have made in the world of commercial mass production.
My view is of a side street and parking garage. Not the most natural of settings…but I can hear the birds and if i look to the left I can see the hill country. A new addition in my line of sight is a tall fountain. Just to my right there is a cross street that dead ends a few blocks down right past the galleria mall. They are still doing some construction and they must have completed the new fountain yesterday. Now I can see the water shooting up into the air with the as-of-now undeveloped hills in the background.
The bible talks about putting off the old man and becoming the new man in Christ. While that refers to death in sin and being alive in Christ, it makes me think of another struggle within me. I was raised by a conservative hippy and a local fashion guru. My father owns the oldest men’s store in town and my mom was an original employee for a locally grown, international health food store. Talk about opposing poles. As a child I was usually outside in the forest observing nature and attempting to grow a farm in my bedroom, much to my nannies despair. I enjoyed hanging out at the original health food store chatting with the growers and goofing around at the farmer’s market my mom helped organize. I was a little earth child much in the same way as my mom.
As I grew up my creative mind took over and I searched for a way to artistically express myself. I settled on fashion to follow in the footsteps of my father. This took me away from my nature loving beginings and soon I was far more interested in Marilyn Monroe and Women’s Ware Daily than in growing herbs in my window. My passion for fashion transformed who I was until I realized that I didn’t want to be a fashion designer…I attempted to merge my love for nature and design and obtained a degree in Landscape Architecture.
During my final years of college I began to feel a pull between my “old man” and “new man”. The glamorous girl I strived to be in high school was fighting with the new conservative hippy-ism I was taking on. Yes, now days organic food and loving the earth and sustainabilty are cool and thus, can be considered glamorous (I actually saw a book about living green glamorously haha!). But I didn’t really care to be cool. I just wanted to do what I like to do.
So I set about trying to figure out how merge my two lifestyles. Could I love pencil skirts and high heels but also want to get my hands filthy? Could I live simply and still have a fantastic wardrobe? If I was living simply where would I wear these fabulous clothes? Can I want to unplug from this world but still enjoy playing video games on a regular basis?
At the moment I am saying that yes I can…but I must set priorities. Like I don’t need my Wii, DS Lite, and Game Cube. I could sell the DS Lite and GameCube and be fine. I rarely play them anyway. Do I need to have a portable MP3 player? No, I have the radio and CDs and my computer. Do I need to have digital cable and internet? No, I can watch pretty much everything online these days. It is about streamlining….If I remove the things that I don’t need at all, then I can enjoy a simple lifestyle. Even with the clothes: I can buy a few nice things to wear to church, and some fun things to wear out but I will buy clothes that will last (aka not cheap poorly made in China stuff). Wearing something for years is far more sustainable then throwing it away soon after you get it because the fabric is disintegrating or the zipper has broken.
But to be completely honest with you…if I had a chance to be completely self-sufficent, living on a few acres of land, producing my own food and taking care of most of my own needs (I’m sure that there are something you just can’t make on your own), I would gladly take it and leave the glamour behind. My ultimate dream is to live detached from this world, but living every day fully and with love for God, his people, and his creation.
Peace and blessings.
Caffe e Vino 
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