My dear brother said to me last week, I'm "kteer hippie".
Yeah, yeah I know. Between no soap, quitting shampoo, making my own home made facials, recycling, walking and taking public transportation, and trying out home remedies for everything, the accusation seems fairly accurate. I'm also fairly certain you can go your whole life using shampoos, soaps, creams, deodorants, toothpaste, sodium laureth sulfate and parabens, and as long as you eat well, live to be 80 years old without much detriment to your health.
But you know what? Why do it?
To me it's not about soap. It is becoming a philosophy of life. It's about personal freedom and independence.
It's about, as Ivan Illich puts it, not becoming a lifelong patient. It's being free of these things that strangers somewhere decided I must buy and use for no reason other than an accidental societal progression of random decisions made by some historical figures and a whole lot of advertising. It's about not being wasteful. It's about feeling more connected to the earth I live in and feeling that I know myself, my body, and feeling empowered by knowing how to heal it if it needs healing, and accepting it if it doesn't.
If you can extrapolate the following quote to being a general pointer to life, I think it sums things up very well. He makes a comparison of the status of the doctor in society to the status of a shaman, healer, or elder in other societies.
"When he assigns sick-status to a client, the contemporary physician might indeed be acting in some ways similar to the sorcerer or elder; but in belonging also to a scientific profession that invents the categories it assigns when consulting, the modern physician is totally unlike the healer" Medical Nemesis - Ivan Illich
In other words, treating life as a parade of symptoms invented by those who can fix them, we become life long patients.
Ads tell us we can only clean up with soap, and proceed to sell us the soap. Our skin dries, and we can only fix that with a lotion or cream they sell. Soap makes our hair dry, therefore we must buy the conditioner. It causes oiliness, a symptom, and we must buy the stronger stuff, the cure. It causes dandruff and we must buy the anti-dandruff shampoo. Someone tells us that how we've eaten for thousands of years is wrong, and we are sick if we keep eating that way, and proceeds to sell us "heart-healthy" low fat food. Children who a 100 years ago would be considered roudy and in need of activity and play to let out their energy, are now advised to be fed fat-free food to grow well, even while fat is essential for brain development, fed tons of sugar treats, then put on ADD and ADHD medication to make them more like zombies and better equipped to sit still for hours on end.
Whoever convinced us that it was the right way to have kids sit still in a chair? Honestly, I can not think of a more unnatural thing. Left to their own devices, children are in constant motion, and learn about their world while in motion.
I find it a cruel, bizarre, and undeserved punishment to put innocent kids in a collective prison, have them talked at for hours on end, force them into an isolated society a la "Lord of the Flies", call it a school, then deem education impossible without it! Because in reality, I don't know anybody who learned very much in school. If one breaks education down to its elements, the vast majority of what is learned is not learned in class, it's learned from reading a book or notes, doing homework or studying on your own at home, or having someone, usually a parent or private tutor, explain something one on one. All anyone ever needed from school was a syllabus of books and topics, and a place to dump kids in while we're busy, because otherwise society has no place for them in it.
And while there are serious things out there that need treatment, the society we live in has made it so almost everything needs a treatment. Everything needs to be administered by a corresponding professional group or institution, whether it's doctors, schools, the FDA, etc. We have basically lost the power to know and educate ourselves, to heal ourselves, and gladly handed it to someone who most definitely doesn't know us at all. This ignorance of ourselves is so pervasive and addictive that many people can not function without running to the doctor needing to be treated and given medicine for something as simple as a cold, or having the school teach, raise, and discipline their kids.
For me, it all comes down to one thing: Somebody has taken the power over myself away from me and I want it back.
So in conclusion, being a hippie is to me not just an empty line or fun to do. I don't want to be an addict. I want to feel as if the body I was born in, and the raw ingredients provided by the earth are enough for me to make and get whatever I need. I want to be free to educate future kids in an environment where they can make noise, jump, laugh and run around if they want to without facing punishment for doing something that is by nature, their right. I just don't believe that the only way to live a good and happy life is to consider my body and my life an inadequate bag of symptoms that need constant fixing by things manufactured in enormous factories and plants or by professionals. I think that would be a truly sad and unfair existence.
I don't know. I went through this phase where I wanted to use everything natural. I also saw it as us being "told" what we need. It went a long time, did the whole thing and you know what, some things I stuck with, and other conventional stuff I went back to simply because they are more convenient or more fun!
ReplyDeleteI like the feeling and taste of toothpaste. So I buy a "natural" toothpaste with no fluoride. Maybe I don't need it but it still feels nice. I still though use baking soda and occasional hydrogen peroxide to keep teeth white.
I went back to using shampoo and conditioner because honestly, it makes showering quick, feels and smells nice. I like it. The whole natural thing made me miserable, my hair was taking way too long to adjust (I'm talking months) and I was not sure if it ever will! But I kept some of the tricks, I use very mild shampoo, and do use baking soda occasionally to clarify.
Same thing with soaps, creams and lotions. Honestly I love the feel and smell of soap on my skin. The whole no soap thing did not do much to my skin (except my face, there I really use no soap and it's great) but the rest, even with water only it was still dry, especially on my legs. And I missed the suds, the baths, the sweet scents. And the natural oils are not as convenient as lotions. They get on everything and nothing ever seemed to absorb well or help with the dryness (I tried coconut, jojoba, shea, cocoa, ...) Either too greasy or just not moisturizing enough. I now dry brush and use lotion and my skin is FINALLY smooth and soft.
The whole foray into hippie land is interesting. At first one is determined to do it all natural. After a while, at least I, calmed down about the whole natural thing and just picked the things that "really" worked. The things I went back to, I just pick milder and gentler versions.
The best hippie habit I kept is using baking soda. It is awesome for so many things.
ReplyDeleteAround the house: tough spots, white laundry; getting rid of smells
Personal care: face scrub (amazing, no face mask even begins to compete, it is the ONLY thing I use on my face); tooth whitening (not every day though); hair clarifying (just add a bit to shampoo).
As to natural cleaners, well they do work, some of the time. But the "chemical" stuff work much better and quicker (and I used natural stuff for years). So once a week I say "screw it, I really want my bathroom very white and squeaky clean". Out comes my not so environmental bathroom cleaner.
As to doctors and medications, well, I think in the states they are way over board with the whole disease and medication thing anyway. I take as little medication as possible (and I have a drawer full of prescribed stuff I never took to prove it).
I think in the end, it is not just about using only what you need, it's also about what you want. We as humans want things. We want ipads, pretty shoes, lovely smelling soaps, bubble baths and soft creamy lotions. I say pick and choose. Taking too tough a stand on either side just makes you miss out on some fun things that may not be necessary, but hey, they fun.
=) Okay. I did NOT totally forgo everything and am now living on a self sustaining farm making my own food and cleaners :P
ReplyDeleteI do use toothpaste, a natural flouride free one made with different essential oils. With a pretty good price and cheaper that the commercial stuff. Why? Well, I know that my teeth may survive without it, but I want to protect them because I know that occasionally I eat bad things like sweets and chocolate. I use a regular laundry detergent and toilet bowl cleaner, not because there's something wrong unless I use it, but because I simply want to keep my toilet clean and I've decided this is a good way. Being hippie doesn't eliminate commerce. It just changes it into what you want instead of what you must have. It brings the decision back to you.
The thing about shampoos and soaps for example is that they're not working for me. Their harm in my situation outweighs the benefits, but for some reason it's something forced on everybody equally. While it works for some, it doesn't work so well for others. But we're always ignorant of it.
That's actually my whole point. I'm not against buying cures, medicines, potions and lotions, and different products if you want for certain things. I'm against someone out there inventing something that needs fixing but doesn't really, and then the same person/institution selling you the product that supposedly fixes it, and making you feel inferior if you don't. It's the whole culture of taking the decision process about things like that out of your hands so that you no longer know if you really need or want what you're using or taking.
I mean who of us really knew what the heck we were doing when we started using vegetable oil for cooking. Some random person out there said it was healthier, told us to use it, and we did without question! Even when we didn't observe any health benefits. We were sheep. We weren't even sheep to a known or trusted herder. Worse, we were sheep to unknown strangers!
And While shampoo won't kill you, giving up decisions of important things like diet, medicine, and so on to people you don't know while keeping yourself ignorant, might actually kill you.
Nothing wrong with being a hippie.
ReplyDeleteI'm using a water filter on my shower head to remove chlorine. I used to have itchy dry skin after the shower and frizzy hair. Not so much anymore. It makes a big difference. I noticed that my skin got better in Lebanon even though I was eating a lot worst. That's when I suspected that the shower water may have something to do with it.