The Logic of Dreaming
Lovely One, I invite you back into my fantasy. 💫
Quick Recap of the Dream
In my last post, I shared a podcast episode in which I imagined aloud what could happen in the “burnt house lot” next door to where I live. Visions of small cob houses and a community garden, all built by volunteers, by hand. 🏘 🌱🍅🥬 A gathering space for music and dancing. 🎶💃🏻🕺🏼 The neighborhood’s well-being prioritized over somebody making a buck.
(There’s more info on cob construction at the end of this piece. 👇🏽)
Eyes light up when I share my imaginings. People get excited. Yes, that would be wonderful! Of course! I want to help! It’s so much better than cutting-down-trees-to-build-another-cookie-cutter-duplex, which is happening all around town.
What About Numbers and Logic?
I was told a few days ago (it was inevitable), that in order for this idea to be taken seriously by The Powers that Be, I need to do some calculations. Reduce the imagery to data points that can be compared and contrasted, to appeal to the developer’s reason. Count things. Make it logical. Nothing in this world happens if it can’t be put into a spreadsheet first. That’s just the way things work.
I understand that our society values numbers above all else — especially the number of dollar$ someone with too many dollar$ can extract from those with not enough dollar$. Money talks and that is, indeed, The Way Things Work.
Here’s the thing, though: The Way Things Work is failing more and more people every day. It’s wrecking the planet. It’s pitting us against each other, causing despair and an aching emptiness that drives people to addiction, depression, violence.
Numbers
In the past
2 weeks there have been
20 shootings in the U.S. where
4 or more people have been injured or killed. There have been
200 such incidents this year. (It’s June
3rd — the year’s not even
1/2 over.)
In Buffalo, New York,
10 people were killed in a racist massacre at a grocery store by an
18 year-old.
19 children and
2 teachers were shot dead at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas by another
18 year-old.
10 people were shot at a garden party in Charleston, South Carolina.
4 people were shot in a hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and
8 more were shot in a nearby town called Taft; those who lost their lives ranged in age from
9 to
56. This list of numbers — the statistics on how we take our hatred, fear, and loneliness out on each other (sourced here) — stretches almost to
♾️.
The shooters are overwhelmingly male. Nearly all white. Increasingly young. In other words, they represent our country’s
3 most highly valued demographic markers. What does that say about The Way Things Work for them? For everyone else?
To quantify other-than-human beings, let’s not use one of the few remaining old-growth Douglas firs near the Oregon coast which may have sprouted in, say,
1258, which is
546 years before Lewis & Clark arrived on the scene and
567 years before the Scotsman, David Douglas, was introduced to the species that now bears his name.
Instead, let’s use a “second-growth” tree planted around
1948. If our tree is
80 feet high and
2 feet in diameter, it can be hacked down, sliced, and planed into
754 board feet of lumber. Approximately
16,380 such feet are required to frame
1 average house in the U.S. which has
2600 square feet of floorspace, so you’ll need to cut
22 trees to for the framing, then another
24 trees for the hardwood floors, ceilings, cabinetry, and all that.
Alternatively, we could pulverize that magnificent being — either the
74 year-old tree or the
764 year-old one (which, if left to its own devices could live another
250 years), into
2,845,000 sheets of double-ply toilet paper, or
7,679,000 toothpicks or
4,023,000 single-use coffee stir-sticks. (I conjured those last
3 numbers out of thin air, but I found the house-building calculations here .)
Logic?
So I ask: Is this logical?
When we allow our planet’s natural weather regulators to be carted off on logging trucks, leaving vast swaths of stubble and stumps which can no longer clean our air and moderate the temperature, and then we mill their round trunks into flat boards to build square homes with drafty corners that require more heat and more AC each year because of what we did to the trees… is that logical?
When data brokers sell every little tidbit of our lives to corporations that use the crunched numbers to advertise back to us things we don’t need but might be convinced to buy because there’s no forest to play in and we’re plugged into the devices we were told would keep us connected to each other but we feel empty looking at the screen and our necks are sore but luckily we can buy pharmaceuticals right there through our device — or an AR-15 if we’re having a really bad day… well, that system does have logic for the people making money by mining our despair. This is The Way Things Work.
When young people, especially but not only boys, are bullied for showing feelings and admired for hiding their pain, and when we’re told to “suck it up and keep going” rather than address our trauma, and when our country has 400+ years of a violent, murderous history that many people want to pretend didn’t happen and isn’t still happening but everybody knows deep down that it did and is, and when community connections are lost but the human need for belonging is still present, and when we keep making and selling firearms to our disconnected, unhealed compatriots, and then act surprised when they go on killing sprees… does that make sense?
If The Way Things Work is the problem, can it logically provide the solution?
Imagine Better Ways For Things to Work
The main reason I’ve been speaking this dream out loud (about the cob houses/community garden, in case your mind got bogged down in the numbers and “logic”) is because we need to completely reimagine how things get done around here. That includes how we legitimize our ideas, and what counts as “sensible.” Every system, every process, every rule and regulation and building code is fair game for scrutiny, redrafting, and scrapping if it’s causing more harm than good. Let’s invent better ways.
Dream Along With Each Other
To help normalize the open dreaming of possibilities, I have some advice:
Rather than smothering the oxygen out of each others’ fresh little ideas because the data hasn’t been collected and graphed yet and you’re really worried that it might not work out and then it would be such a bummer if you went to all that trouble for nothing… why not breathe some gentle magic of your own onto the flickering flame? Join in the “What might happen…?” game. Refrain from grabbing at the tiny wisps of imagination and contorting them into a strategic plan. It’s too soon for that, and if Better Ways catch on, maybe we can do away with the 5- and 10-year plans completely and just start something. Then manage the energy that comes into it and see how it grows.
Many of us have atrophied imagination muscles, but we can get them back in shape.
Practice communicating in images.
Conjure poetic scenarios that speak to our deepest humanity.
Daydream and doodle.
The more we dream out loud about how we want the world to be, the less crazy our ideas will sound. But first we need to picture it.
And remember: A Soulful work of art is never conjured into existence by calculating the dollars per square inch that the finished canvas might fetch.
Yours, still dreaming,
Pam
About Cob: The philosophy of cob construction is to nestle your home into the site, removing as few trees as possible. The dirt below your feet is a primary building material, along with salvaged wood, doors, windows, and hardware. If you’ve never heard of cob or feel like having your mind blown open to possibilities, check out this video, or these design ideas, or search “cob houses” and see what comes up.