Home, Home In The Zeitgeist

Sometimes I discover I’m floating along in the Zeitgesit Sea. This half hour interview on peakmoment.tv with Shay Salomon author of Little House On A Small Planet, with a website of the same name, reminded me that we are rarely alone in our perceptions of the world. While we who live in this disconnected world may not know many, or sadly, any, other people with whom we share a basic similar understanding of the world, this does not mean we are alone in our heartfelt beliefs and worldview or zeitgeist. I fell in love with this concept of “Little House on a Small Planet” as this is what Casita Gaia symbolized for me when I created the first iteration of what was then a company in a virtual world. We all make homes for ourselves. We all live on a small living planet. Our homes are part of the living planet. We all live in and on Casita Gaia. For me Casita Gaia is also a manifestation of what I call my inner Goddess which is the aware essence of self that is my spirit, that is the woman who is either mother or child, a relationship is the essential one of every other person who ever lived on this earth.

So it with the marvel of awareness of kindred spirits that I share this interview with Shay Soloman with you.

Sharing resources, including space, is sustainable. And Shay coins a very useable term, Yoga Moms, a term that could, and perhaps should replace Soccer Moms in our vernacular.

Casita Gaia is organizing a Blog Carnival on August 20th through August 31st (Tucson’s Official Birthday: August 20, 1775) to celebrate the wonderful community that is Tucson, if you don’t know what a blog carnival is, or blog-a-rama as I like to think of it, just keep reading. The nuts and bolts of it are: have something to say about the wonderful community that is Tucson. Write it up. Set it to post on the Between August 19th and the end of August. Post a badge. Send me the info. Detailed instructions and background follow for those of you who like instructions – Me? Well, I never read instructions, I just dive in.

How to Blog Tucson’s Birthday Celebration

To Participate in Celebrate Tucson’s Birthday Blog Carnival :

I. Grab the code from the sidebar. The code can be found in the form box under the colorful badge in the left sidebar. Copy that code and put it in your blog ( a text / HTML sidebar widget works well) to let your readers know you will be participating in Celebrate Tucson’s Birthday Blog Carnival.

II. Send an email to let me know that you will participate. Send it to: nfhill (at) mac (dot) com and set the Subject Line to read: Blog Tucson’s Birthday. In the email, please include:

your name and contact info so that I can get in touch with you if needed. I will not share it with anyone!
the name or blogonym you will use to publish the piece on your site
your site’s name
your site’s URL
the URL to the post

III. As soon as your post is written, and scheduled for publication between August 19th and 31st, please let me know. At that point I will publish non-linked Blog Titles here on a Participants Post.

IV. Be sure to have your blog post set to publish at 4 a.m. Tucson-time on August 20th. (We get up early around these here parts to get the day started before the heat hits.) Once we have visited your blog and verified the post, we will have a link go live on this site. (Actually and you know you want to know this is to accomodate those Right Coasters, Back Easters who forget that when they are having an early lunch we may just be having our first cup of coffee and “No, we did not forget that we agreed to call so and so in the morning which lasts until 3 p.m. for them in order to accommodate us. Yes, right, like they ever do this. Sigh.)

V. Include a sentence in your email giving permission for me to excerpt your post and a link to the rest of your post on your site.

VI. If, additionally, you wish to be included in the batch of blog entries from which Tucson’s Birthday will choose from for possible re-publication, say so and please send me a complete copy of the post, a statement authorizing re-publication, so I can forward them to the Tucson’s Birthday blog by August 20th. They may republish one or two submissions or all of them. It is up to them. I am just holding this as a cyber-neighborhood celebration, and Tucson’s Birthday likes the idea.

VII. Blog posts should be:

your own writing
be appropriate for a general audience
cover a positive aspect of the Tucson experience and community from a resident, visitor, or friend of Tucson perspective

VIII. If you do not have a blog, we will have a place for non-bloggers to share too. Just follow all the instructions above that apply to you and email your written piece to me.

IX. Be sure to give me the best email address to reach you so I can send a reminder out a few days before the event that you will actually see.

X. Don’t forget to tweet this if you are on Twitter. Use following hashtag: #blogtucson

Why Do This?

Tucson is an amazing place!
There have been people living here for 13,000 years making it one of the oldest known communities in the Americas!
We are “officially” a year older than the United States!
Tucsonans love their city!
Hundreds of thousands of people who don’t even call Tucson home, love Tucson!
Tucson is a creative city with an active population engaged in cutting edge online communication, business and art.
August is Monsoon Season so Tucsonans are occasionally inside to blog and read blogs.
Tucson has been through a lot this year and we want and need to celebrate all that is good about Tucson.
Tucson has been through a lot this year and we want to celebrate and even show off the fact that we are a loving and supportive community.
Your very own personal and wonderful reason.

Background Info

The Original Cyber Gathering

I found out about Tucson’s Birthday from a Tweet I received from Linda Ray a couple years back. She found out about my love of all things cyber on Twitter® and was interested in finding out more about Second Life® and expanding coverage of Tucson’s Birthday festivities into the virtual world. Linda and I worked our avatar’s butts off creating a celebration of Tucson’s Birthday in Second Life. It met with moderate success. We learned a bunch and I planned to improve on the virtual celebration the next year. Life got incredibly complicated last year, as did Second Life with ever increasing fees and constant changes to structure and interface. The 2010 virtual world celebration did not come together.

Celebrate the Tucson Community

This year, starting on January 8th, I began to want to do something more concrete to celebrate our community and help build community, so I revamped this site that had been associated with my virtual world business called Casita Gaia to be about local sustainable economies and the wonderful people, ideas, innovations, and businesses that are the very heart and soul of Tucson! I have lots of features I’m building, but for right now I’m keeping it small and manageable. But I figured since I’ve been blogging a bunch, a blog-a-thon, blog-a-rama, blog carnival would be a good way to highlight the cyber-riffic community that is Tucson. I will write about my own special reasons for doing this in a separate post.

Blogging

I attended BlogHer Entrepreneurs and Technology conference this spring to learn more about technology and how to build an entrepreneurial cyber venture. I’m still figuring that out. It is a big figure. I will be promoting this event at BlogHer ’11 from August 4-6 in order to give any interested residents, visitors, or just friends of Tucson at BlogHer a chance to participate.

Cyber Inspiration

Thanks to The Little Hen House for the tutorial on making a badge or button with a grab a code box.

Badge was created by N. F. Hill using one quail graphic from the Tucson’s Birthday resource page.

Thanks to Becca of Our Crazy Boys, Suzi of The Burrow Suzi, and Tami of What Tami Said, and Ginny, my dear friend who doesn’t even have a blog, for being the amorphous but specific catalyst that made me realize that Linda &/of Tucson’s Birthday would love this event and that this was a small thing I could do to celebrate and thank Tucson my home of 22 years.

Thank You!

Thank you for participating in whatever way you can. This is what makes Tucson a special and exemplary place. As someone said, “Together we Thrive.”

Peace and Blessings,

Nancy

N. F. Hill

Casita Gaia Editor & Publisher

Use It Up, Wear It Out, Make It Do

One of the phrases I carry with me from my childhood is “Use it up, wear it out, make it do!” I didn’t like it. I hated hearing my mother say it. Still, it became a part of me from hearing it over and over. Over time I have come to actually love the phrase. It symbolizes as well as embodies the wisdom of my parents, now both gone, and moreover it embodies the wisdom of their community and forebears.

As I’ve said elsewhere but not here, until now, I grew up on the edge of the 19th Century in the heartland of the U.S.A., in the middle of the Twentieth Century. My brothers remember Dad using horses on the farm before he had a tractor. Until the head of the REMC moved in next to my parents just before I was born, in the late 1950s, and brought the infrastructure of electrification to within a short distance of the farm my father had deemed the bill he would have to foot for “light poles” and cable and stringing to be just too prohibitive for a small mixed crop, subsistence farmer. My parents started their married life during The Great Depression and then started their family during the rationing of World War II. I was an afterthought born in the 1950s after my brothers were 10 to 18 years old. Frugality was simply our way of life.

Our farm property was 100 acres. By no means all of it was arable. There were woods and slopes and wetlands and creeks on it. Slightly over 60 acres were regularly farmed. That is not a whole lot of land from which to make a living. Sale of crops financed the continuance of the farm. Day to day expenses were largely funded by “egg money.”

Even though I live on a small city lot in central Tucson, I carry much of what I learned on that farm with me. Use it up. Get every bit of use out of any item. If it is food, eat it. If it is paper, use both sides. If it is cloth from old clothing, weave it into rugs. Compost your trimmings. Purchase only what you absolutely have to. Well, I don’t do as well as my folks did at this. I live a far less on the edge life than my parents did. Financially my little family is more comfortable than my parents ever hope to be. But with all the upheaval of markets and mortgages in our world over the last few years, I am paying closer attention to what we can do live well within our means. There have been challenges. I stayed home with our daughter and worked at odd writing jobs once she entered the ‘Tween Years. I needed to keep a closer eye on her moods, challenges and victories as she approached and moved through adolescence than what I was able to do working all the time and being on call 24/7. It hurt us financially. Now as a mature woman I find that the economy has changed, the market is skeptical of someone my age, and I’ve found that working part-time has many draw backs in a Right-to-Work, which I like to call a Right-to-be -Fired-without-Notice, state.

One of the things I can do, and do rather well, is to write. So I’m building this site and blog to talk about, and hopefully to discuss, the small network of large hearts that is the basis of a successful local economy. Local economy is so much more than money, although in our contemporary world money plays a large part of it.

Tucson has very low wages overall. There are exception to this, as some employers pay well but these employers are nearly always military-related or industrial employers. Overall, Tucson does not stack up well in comparison to other places to live when we look at income, “[T]he average wage in the Tucson area is more than 10 percent below the national average but its living costs are barely below average, meaning that its average wage after adjusting for living costs is significantly below average.” according to Arizona Indicators, a project managed by the Morrison Institute for Public Policy. Additionally, women whose income in Tucson is depressed even more than the national or state averages of wages for men also face the now common disconnect between time and income.

These factors undoubtedly factor into why Thrift Shops are so numerous and so highly accessed, why innovative programs like Freecycle started in Tucson, and why community seems stronger here than in other metropolitan areas. But I also think there is something special about a place that has had communities of one sort or another living within it for over 10,000 years. You really can feel history if you are very quiet and still and breathe in the air of a place.

I want to encourage everyone here in the Old Pueblo to be kind to our home and to those who live here with us. Use it up. Wear it out. Make it do. Sensible culture starts with us.

Buying Local Means 73% of Spending Stays in Your Community

Buying local isn’t just about shopping at local craft fairs a few times a year. It is about keeping as much of your hard earned money recirculating in your community where it will benefit you and your interests. Local products and services exist in every category of business in nearly all regions of the country. Nearest provider ends up translating to least expensive provider in the long run if we look at all the costs.

This graphic is from and links to the most often sited study that shows how local spending stays in the community and supports local community functions. It is sort of like your blood or oxygen supply, communities have to take in money and recirculate it through the lifeblood of the local economy or the local economy dies, it is just like if we don’t get enough oxygen for the blood to circulate, we die.

Short term savings are very enticing. Money in your pocket jingles nicely. But less jingle can translate to the wonderful sound of flipping through crisp bills later on. We as a nation seem to have forgotten this. The notion of investment has become tainted and intertwined with speculation as the later has come to overpower what was once understood to be the cornerstone of a sound personal and national economy. Saving and putting your resources, however meager, behind processes and products you believe in is an entirely different beast than gambling.

Examinations of these concepts comprise future blog entries as does the wonder of rag rugs in what I hope you will find to be a delightful blend of things that matter to women as we each take care of our home and family at the most intimate and the most complex global levels. We all take care of the household we know as Casita Gaia. If women don’t do it, it doesn’t get done.

Local Economy, Local Community

Think globally, act locally. Seems simple enough, but when we try to do this we face obstacles that can be daunting. Thus the reason for this site: to help you find resources to strengthen local business and local client interaction thus keeping a larger percentage of money spent in the local economy rather than have it leave the community to never return.

Not so long ago Main Street was filled with local shops where local folks shopped, talked, planned, and enjoyed themselves knowing they were part of a community where working together mattered. We can return to this type of interaction, but to do so we have to collectively and consciously make informed decisions and tell others about what we are doing. If you have a great idea, please share. We want to know what you think and do!