Decadence

We are living a truly decadent moment. 
New shoes, eyewear, pajamas, mattresses, blankets and lying down to sleep on a plane. 

It certainly seemed so to us when we thought of all the $ we had spent just to put our feet up on the Emirates business class journey across the world. You don't want to know!

And the decadence continued as we ate the absolutely best food and got ourselves washed with hot towels and slept in their lounge pajamas with blankets, mattresses, eye covers and slippers. `The washing and waste volume would have been huge, but what can you do as a conservationist but make sure you try to eat every piece of delectable chocolate and mid coarse meal you are primed with every few hours.
And decadence grows on you. I started to really enjoy it. 

And why not? The West in the rural setting has always celebrated the moment of excess because sometimes the earth produces more than we can eat or sell.
City people miss out on this wonderful moment when excess takes over;
I remember well when my Father (an Orchardist ) would just give away as much as he could because it was valueless once supply exceeded demand. Normal history for our antecedents, but a matter of choice( to give)  for us, the richest generation in history. 

My dad knew how to enjoy the moment of excess for others,  The moments of depravation for himself and us were less obvious but real to "our women"( G K Chesterton) 

These tensions between scarcity and abundance and how to live with them were a given to our forebears. Farmers and even landless serfs like the Modras (for hundreds of years ) who take a whole days rest on compulsory rest day know and learn to love life within its local limits ;
They found life hard  but to know that we all have enough ( and that the Lord of the manor cared in our case ) meant its Ok to enjoy a moment of indulgence and grace; even a moment of depravation. Hard to keep things in perspective though - isn't it, especially now our grandchildren are going to run short of at least one thing; fossil fuels and for all our wealth our governments do the sharing thing ( which is not so much fun ) The farmer where we are staying had to pay out over $100000 dollars in land tax this year and we were his first tenants in one of his barns . +

When my dad had plums, every other farmer had plums, so that wonderful and valuable fruit of his labor , like the watermelons we saw carted to Melbourne from Mildura was left to rot where they finally landed. That good reality is decay and its natural even when we do our best. 
Infact, in the big picture (the place of rest)  our soils and plants need that decay to keep life going,

Composition and Decomposition,

 Unless the seed of the fruit of labor dies, there can be no life. Noone talks of death which means we are not at rest about it and our people worry beyond reason. There is growth and there is decomposition and they are all in a cycle - a good cycle; a sustainable cycle
Our world panics about scarcity partly because it sees only the decadent side that eats at growth ;( and the one case of immanent high cost of fossil fuels) 

Thankfully for those of us who live on the land both scarcity and abundance live in harmony, Thankfully for those who live as recyclers every day, even the threat of paying more for liquid fuels does not worry us. 
Soon people will stop worrying about things they have only a smidgeon of reasons to worry about ; like the impact of CO2 concentrations on Global warming.  


YET it goes against the grain to the well educated and disciplined Westerner to rest easy with rot. By being productive for centuries and using that surplus of savings from selling more than we can eat, our forefathers invested in innovation that drove the adoption of innovations and further efficiencies for the leisure time we were now enjoying.  Those who force panic over a little decadence do not understand life and life in its fullness.
Make a stand when a resource is wasted but don't go woke and not see that life will continue with the same recycling systems that operate whether we abuse or use them . 

Decadence is not always bad 
A bit of decadence then is not bad; its even natural. What doesn't work in the shallow one sided worries of this world is the idea of a life without dying and decadence.

Decadence is not the complete answer, but scarcity and abundance are: more elsewhere 
you just have to know your own limits in your own area, 

The Decadence in the Desert


Landing in Dubia, those with more than enough mere money, wanted to sell us glass insulated swimming pools in the desert 6 stories up. ADS are all over the air as you watch the screen and even when you get to England . 

So, what does someone cocooned is such a place of lifetime decadence live?   For all the money from all that oil, they can't desalinate enough water to turn the desert into the gardens we enjoy back here, Death and decay, like growth, has its best place and timing.  The salts accumulated in the soils over eons in those places rise up and eventually kill most of the plants.
They have plenty of sand and water and they can dig it up and make cement cities. The more water you apply to soils there though, the worse it gets; abundance of one thing is not the answer, but it can be an answer for other things.  

There are so few leaves growing freely in such a materially rich place.
None of us can have it all but perhaps we can all find some abundance to be thankful for.


Leaves reconstitute the grand object of the West's current concern, Carbon Dioxide .
ALL leaves for all time which remind us of the grace of life in creation. 
Its leaves that source most of the good we can enjoy when taking the rest and indulgence that was always meant to be a least one day of rest each week for every one of us. 

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