Rearranging the Deck Chairs
We are all just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic of global industrial civilisation at this stage — how are you rearranging yours?
We have just moved from one ridiculously overpriced rental to another, and by chance the place we have moved into has a pool, that through neglect, has turned into a thriving ecosystem.
Wim hoff style I have been taking a cold water plunge the past couple of mornings, acclimating to a bit of pain and discomfort, to be rewarded with some clarity and calm. Maybe this could replace my daily coffee habit of a lifetime? — not likely, I am a civilisation addict through and through, but who knows.
The pool to me is an irony of life, as the trigger for us having to leave our previous rental was my concern about having no water security during an emergency; if mains water became contaminated or if it simply got too dry.
So I asked if we could install a rainwater tank and diverter at our own expense, and was told NO as the owners were moving back in shortly. We were given our 60 days notice and were on our way.
So now this pool, which is filled with some kind of thick thriving water grass, has found its own equilibrium and effectively serves as a water tank of thousands of liters. It is rain water fed from a pipe that goes from the roof of the property into the pool, with a diverter in case the water level gets too high, as we were told it did last year during Australia’s flooding.
It has a lazy goldfish (we have named Sam) who likes to hang out at the top of the water rushes on sunny days, and a school of many smaller black fish that dart back and forth, playing hide and seek in the nooks and crannies of the foliage.
The pool is a joy to me, as it has brought a pair of ducks, some dragonflies, and other squiggly insects I cannot identify. I love to watch the fish swim in among the pot plants that I arranged on the steps. Their movements are mesmerising and peaceful.
Now of course the practical side of me has already started to think of all sorts of ways of scaling up this solution to water insecurity. That’s what our western, left-brain centered ways of being like to do. I looked up how many households in Australia have pools.
“More than 3.1 million Australians live in a house with a swimming pool or spa, equivalent to one-in-seven people, or 14 percent of the population, up from 13 per cent when Roy Morgan looked at the prevalence of swimming pools and spas five years ago.”
And I saw there was one council in Australia who had started a campaign to convert your chlorinated pool to a pond to bring back biodiversity to the suburbs.
Then I investigated ideas about aquaponics and how to stock the pool with fish, to feed them, then to get a small pump to run the water through a grow bed of annual veggies etc etc — all great plans, but I do remind myself often that I am still just rearranging my own personal decks chairs on the Titanic. We have hit the iceberg and the ship is going down.
While I have the luxury to potter around in our backyard, swimming naked and fish gazing, I also know the extent to which my life is funded by The Machine, that my lifestyle in so deeply compromised in many ways and that I have not been able to live with the ecological integrity that is in my heart.
This is a little about me, as I was pretty surprised from the amount of people that engaged with my last piece, and I have learnt a lot in writing publicly in this way, but I don’t know that I will have much more of impact to share with the now couple of hundred followers I have got on here! But again — who knows.
But I would love to hear how YOU are rearranging your own deck chairs?
