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| SHOAL BAY'S LATEST NEWSLETTER
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February 13, 2007. Mark MacDonald’s latest report gets a little philosophical, but it’s good philosophy. If you’re on Mark’s distribution list and already have received this letter, you’ll notice that we changed some of the punctuation to bring it in line with publishing standards, and corrected some spelling. Not much else, though.
SHOAL BAY NEWSLETTER
shoal bay, e. thurlow island, british columbia, canada, v0p 1b0
Something dawned on me the other day while watching an hour television program with my friends here in Los Angeles. It had nothing to do with the program itself but with the commercials. During a particular commercial break, consisting of six separate ads, one specific word kept popping up. The word was “control.” One ad offered the ability to control blood pressure, another one controlled pests, another promised control over personal debt, another promised control over weight gain, and so on and so on. Lipitor: safely control your cholesterol level with a daily dose. Finally! a bed that allows you to control the firmness of the mattress on your side of the bed independently of your partner. Thank God for that. Another marriage saved -- at least until he buys a boat . . . or a racehorse.
I have learned countless life lessons since moving out to Shoal Bay. Much more than just that diesel engines do not have spark plugs. But I think some of the richest and most valuable lessons may be those that I am for the most part unaware of. I may have just discovered one. I arrived in Shoal Bay fresh from the corporate-driven world, ready to sculpt and shape this wilderness into my own personal paradise. A place where I would have complete control over not only my life but my environment as well. Actually, what was happening was that school was about to begin.
A simple human tendency bolstered by corporate marketing has made "control" an object of desire. People now spend millions on self-help gurus who help us gain control over our lives, control over our destiny. Marketers use the word to sell us all kinds of things that either do not work or that we have no real need for, simply because they know that the more control seems to slip away, the more we crave it in our lives. We all know people who are so control driven that it is easier to give in to their sad but driving need to control every tiny thing, not only in their own lives, but in the lives of all those around them. It just isn't worth it to bring on all of that wrath over denying them the ability to choose the movie or the pizza toppings. They are the "control freaks".
Shoal Bay is teaching me (it is an ongoing lesson) to be happy managing my life as opposed to trying to control it. Out here I find myself being directed at times by animals, weather, and tides. These are things I have no control over, and I find myself constantly changing plans and trying to manage my life around them. Soon after moving here I was told that it made sense to go to town in my boat only on a flooding tide. Well, being in complete control of my own destiny, I decided one day that I needed to be in town on that day and not any other, regardless of damn tide, and off I went. Lesson in humility -- and exposure to total and absolute terror.
I planted a lovely little shade garden near where the dock meets the shore of Shoal Bay. Right proud of it I was, hostas, flowers and ferns all looking beautiful down beside the walkway. Every day as I passed by I would look at it. After about a week I glanced down and the garden was gone. Not so much damaged as gone. As in no longer there. Well, apparently a passing deer had decided that my shade garden tasted as good as it looked. The deer of course has no desire to control where I plant a garden, her only interest is survival. Possibly, I can manage the deer with fencing, but thankfully, I have no real control over her.
I won't even get into electrical fires, government agencies, diesel generators, otter shit, or martens that kill my chickens. The list could go on and on. At Shoal Bay I am learning that I might manage but never control. And more importantly, I am learning that I can be happy beyond my wildest dreams doing it. Animals have minds and needs of their own, the weather does exactly what it wants when it wants, and no man is going to tell the Pacific Ocean which direction it should be going. New things are always popping up, plans have to be changed and revised, surprise is waiting for me virtually every single day. I can plan, to head off a problem, but then a salamander swims into the fresh water intake and, well, here we go again. These things can be managed but thankfully, never controlled.
Admittedly, my goals in life have changed. No longer based on financial or material accumulation, my goals have evolved into a desire to better embrace (it will be a long journey) humility, frugality, and conservation. These are perhaps the three most important steps to environmentalism. Shoal Bay not so much teaches me humility as it slaps me in the face with it. Frugality and conservation are by-products that sort of trot along behind, holding back giggles.
Markv
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