So I was flipping through my September Sunset magazine and found this article about Decatur Island. It turns out the article is only in the print edition (hence not linking to the article on their website), but, in any case, the article is about this island where they have no tourist anything, where you build your own house, grow your own food and recycle and reuse your own refuse.
And at first I thought that would be impossible - the whole no garbage service thing - but then if you're growing your own food, there's no packaging there. And if you're canning your own jam and vegetables, no waste there either. So of course I'm horrified by the amount of frivolous waste we generate by living so far from where this stuff comes from.
Decatur Island, though, is the kind of place where you could live in a pirate ship in the trees, which is to say: ideal. Something about doing stuff from scratch, about doing real things, brings people together. People watch out for each other because you're all on some kind of common ground.
And that's what I think folk is about - on the fringes, at least. I mean, folk means people, right? but there's something folky about people getting down in the dirt and growing their own food and getting an up close look at nature. Not just because it's old, but because it's true. And I want to get back to that - to the realness of causes and effects.
I really think that it's still the natural world that gives us meaning. That tells us why we do the things we do. Why we don't build permanent settlements in flood plains or why we take a sweater when we go out. And all this new-fangled modernity frees us from nature to an extent, but I think we lose in purpose and meaning at least as much as we gain in convenience.
It's that connection. And connection is what folk is about. Connecting between people and between people and nature. Nature puts us on a common footing and makes all the rest of it possible.
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