Our overcast day turned stormy, so it’s a good thing I pulled dandelions yesterday. The neighbors might’ve thought I was just being an overanxious gardener, but in truth I was trying to harvest enough of the roots to get me through the week.

Inspired by a book called “Healing Teas,” I’ve been trying to have a cup of dandelion tea every morning and evening. It’s not that I necessarily buy the author’s claims that dandelions will help your blood pressure and digestion. It’s just that I’ve just noticed that simple, homegrown things make me feel better than mass-produced things with 300 ingredients. So this is just something I’m trying for a month.

I’ve never been the kind of person who harvests dandelion roots, and Greg is looking askance at this whole project. I see the way he eyes the floppy bunches of pulled dandelions on the counter and know he’s wondering if I’ll start wearing earth shoes and saying “far out” next.

I could put his mind at ease if I could say exactly why I’m bothering with this, but I don’t quite know. I actually think it’s tied in with the need more and more people have felt to get into survivalism.

According to the New York Times (via Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Conservative blog HERE), more people are showing an interest in doing whatever’s necessary to be able to get along if society no longer provides abundant food, shelter and protection:

Faced with a confluence of diverse threats — a tanking economy, a housing crisis, looming environmental disasters, and a sharp spike in oil prices — people who do not consider themselves extremists are starting to discuss doomsday measures once associated with the social fringes.

They stockpile or grow food in case of a supply breakdown, or buy precious metals in case of economic collapse. Some try to take their houses off the electricity grid, or plan safe houses far away. The point is not to drop out of society, but to be prepared in case the future turns out like something out of “An Inconvenient Truth,” if not “Mad Max.”

That sounds a little extreme. Personally, I’m not that scared about our future. Whatever comes along, I don’t envision us all suddenly turning into ravaging thugs. But I don’t necessarily think things can stay the way they’ve been, either. Rod Dreher put it like this:

Seriously. I think it is, or should be, becoming more apparent to sensible people that the high-wire act we’ve been acting out is coming to an end. That doesn’t mean Apocalypse Pretty Soon, but it does mean that we should be thinking about new and more sustainable ways of living at every level.

Bingo and hooray! I hated to be the only person out there thinking this. I’m not starting to get in touch with my inner gardener out of a sense of impending chaos any more than I’m doing it out of the secular ecologist’s sense of Gaia worship. But when I look at what American society has become, I see a lot of brokenness that is held in place with the incredible wealth this country has enjoyed. For all I know, we can all go on for many more generations just living off the moral and financial capital of our forefathers (and, for that matter, our fathers and mothers) who really knew how to get by with less, how to coax a living out of the earth and how to take only what they could use. We might all be able to live off their largesse for some time.

But that’s not really the point, and I suppose it’s the reason I’m making my modest attempt to consume what God has provided in my front yard in such abundance. The life of the 21st century American is expensive, busy and unrelentingly interactive. Virtually none of us make our own food, clothing or shelter. We don’t provide our own entertainment or tell our own stories. (One of the many reasons I love the Orthodox Church is because it shows people that they don’t need trained singers and a lot of studio musicians to hear beautiful music.) If the financial privilege we’ve all enjoyed were to change drastically, would we be at all equipped to make do with less? Do we have the slightest idea how to go to God’s creation for our food, drink and even for our medicine? It might never come to that, but then again, it might.

Even if it doesn’t, isn’t it time I back away from being a mass consumer? There doesn’t seem like any joy in it, or any future, other than guaranteeing that I stay in the rat race.

That’s a lot to have in mind while I sip on a cup of slightly nasty tea. I don’t want to make a lot out of it. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about.

What the heck. It couldn’t hurt and at the very least, I’ll have worked off some calories and weeded the garden.