small is beautiful...

...or quality over quantity. McMansions, ever growing restaurant portion sizes, jumbo eggs, jumbo strawberries, big SUVs – why has bigger become better?  The earth is finite.  It is physically impossible for everyone of 7 billion people (and growing) to attain the standard of living we call the American Dream.

Something is sustainable when it self perpetuates without growing beyond its original size and without using up the principle.   In our irrational quest for ever more we are shamelessly gobbling up our principle  - natural resources, rainforest, soil (the Black Dirt here in our area) – without replenishing this precious capital.

When we begin appreciating quality over quantity we begin to shift our priorities to holistic ones.   Think small sun ripened sweet and intense tasting strawberries.  Think small eggs with deep yellow yolks, strong shells, and egg whites that don’t run, fresh from the farm.  Think  small zero energy house (the average American home was under 1000sf in the 1950s!).

 

Smaller and better oftentimes costs more than larger and of lesser quality, but there is nothing wrong with paying more for better quality - and that may mean saving somewhere else.

free clothes drier

When energy prices spiked several years back I remembered the European clothes drying racks of my childhood that are still customary over there (neither my parents in Germany, nor my sister in Belgium have driers).  I ordered two over the internet and have dried our clothes for free ever since.  My electric clothes drier gets used only very rarely anymore.  These racks are inexpensive and you can find them on this side of the Atlantic as well.  In comparison to the stationary racks sometimes found in gardens, or the overhead clothes lines strung between trees, I can move my racks outside when the weather is nice, and inside during the cold months.  Moreover, when there are no clothes to be dried, I don’t have to look at the rack in the garden.  They fold up flat and store behind a door or against a wall.  Between my two racks I can fit three loads of laundry, and when the air is dry the laundry dries in a few hours. 

bulk produce shopping

My shopping logistics have changed drastically over the past 10+ years since I have shopped for more and more organics.  In order to get the best variety and price on produce I order every 4 weeks from Albert's Organics  through our food coop, through which I also get bulk groceries.  Getting bulk produce in huge loads all at once takes some getting used to. 

 

When my son was a toddler I belonged to a biodynamic working CSA.  When I’d return from my once-a-week work and harvesting sessions loaded with the freshest and ripest vegetables right from the field I got used to processing large amounts of vegetables since it was impossible to eat it all right away.  And I don’t mean canning (haven’t learned that yet), but cooking some, keeping some in the fridge, keeping some in the cool basement, and blanching and freezing some more. 

I keep the fruit in large bowls around the house, which looks so beautiful and abundant.  The fruit lasts about two weeks, bananas keep well and ripen slowly, but sometimes we end up having to sauté them slowly in butter (with a pinch of curry) for dessert (very good with vanilla ice cream, too), sometimes I make banana bread and muffins, and in a real pinch I'll freeze them (works just fine for muffins).  Some of the pears I roast in the oven, brushed with olive oil, salted and peppered (wonderful with blue cheese and some walnuts for dessert, or sliced on arugula salad (with goat cheese and honey), or simply eaten as a snack.  Apples keep, and if they start to go they get juiced with carrots.  The peaches are trickier because they ripen, and potentially go bad,  all at once – so I am envisioning peach jam, ½ organic sugar, ½  peaches by weight, slowly cooked on the stove top until reduced by ??? (I forgot, maybe by 1/3).  Since I am no canning expert,  I simply freeze the few jars (just finished the rest of some plum butter from last August).  Tuesday I got many pounds of plum tomatoes and decided to  make a quick sauce (onions, garlic, tomatoes, bay leaf, honey, balsamic vinegar) slowly simmered for an hour or so, then pureed, and voilà – several jars of sauce, which I froze (good for making homemade pizza or calzones, pasta of course, English muffin pizzas…).

forever young

The world shapes itself around your beliefs.  Positive beliefs empower you, negative beliefs, on the other hand, hold you back. Whether you believe you are starting to “become old” when you notice a little ailment here or there, or whether you consider it simply a passing appearance that will self-regulate back to perfect health,  is based in no small part on your beliefs.  Whether you are an old 30 or a young 30, an old 90 or a young 90, has so much to do with your beliefs about life, the body, aging, sickness and health, and your attitude in general.  Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer staged the famous experiment with the nursing home residents who were brought to live for a few weeks in an environment that emulated a period several decades earlier.  Well lo and behold, their minds literally turned their bodies’ physical clock backward in small but significant ways (read more about this amazing study in her book Counter Clockwise).

Some beautiful examples of older inspired and inspiring people have come across my Facebook page.  They remind me that your attitude and beliefs can keep you forever young until the day you die.  One of them is the 94-year old yoga master Tao Porchon-Lynch, another one that brings a smile on my face every time is the older piano playing couple, and the last one is the former Rockette Louise Neistat who tap danced until her recent death at 92.

Two more well-known examples of the power of the mind are world records - it is not unusual for several more people to break a world record as soon as someone has broken one – and the supposed difficulty in conceiving children –  couples who have resigned themselves to adopting a child  oftentimes conceive as soon as they have actually adopted.

 

organic epiphany

(photo by captrosha)

I had this epiphany a while ago when I needed to buy a new duvet cover and saw an organic cotton one on sale.   Previously, I had mostly thought about organics in terms of the health benefits to my family and myself - that buying and eating organic foods would prevent us from eating pesticides, harmful additives, antibiotics and growth hormones, genetically modified and weakened foods in general.  But the perspective is much more encompassing, which is why I ended up buying the organic cotton duvet cover.  With this purchase I voted for a healthier environment and a healthier agriculture, because that cotton didn’t get sprayed with pesticides or subjected to chemical fertilizer,  I also voted against the industries that develop and manufacture these fertilizers and toxins,  I voted for the health of the farm workers who weren’t subjected to the poisons, and lastly I voted against GMO crops and the big conglomerates that develop them.

peace and quiet

Life has been such a whirlwind for me in recent months that I feel a bit like a patchwork quilt.  Although I think sometimes that I don’t have time for one more thing, periods of peace and quiet become so much more important when life is so intense.   Whether this is meditation time, yoga time, sitting quietly with a cup of tea, chopping and cooking dinner, or puttering around in the garden and weeding, doesn’t matter much.  It is very tempting to check email or Facebook or whatever else several times a day.  But I found that that is exactly what I need to refrain myself from doing.   It is like letting go of the stream of thoughts when we quiet the mind.  Remove the irrelevant distracting stuff.  Focus on what matters.  We all need such contemplative time to be with ourselves and turn inward, to settle, to ground ourselves, so we don’t become fragmented.  Quiet time is when I collect all those patches and sew them back together.

win-win is better

We are so used to the adversarial win-lose scenarios of our predatory culture that we forget that win-win scenarios are not only possible, but so much more advantageous for everyone.  In win-lose scenarios one party must lose for the other to win, such as in our many team sports.  Same goes for business.  We believe we can only make enough money and come out on top if the other party gets less than enough.  Kids are told that they need to learn to be a good loser.  What a bunch of…..it feels terrible to lose, no matter what we are told.  It’s time we opened up to a new reality.  Using mediation instead of litigation to resolve differences is an example of this new way of thinking.  Litigation works according to the old model, one party wins, the other loses.  Mediation, on the other hand, looks for the common ground and considers both parties’ needs, then brokers win-win outcomes, the new model.  Thinking win-win takes some truly worthwhile rethinking.

the joys of composting

Recently, I bought an Earth Machine with high hopes that my composting efforts will become more effective.  For a few years now I have been accumulating a big heap of our compostable kitchen wastes in the back of the garden.  And while composting and recycling have reduced our regular net household garbage to less than one large garbage bag per week, the messy pile in the garden doesn’t decompose without some help.  Ok, I admit it, I am somewhat lazy when it comes to certain things.  I was hoping that it would do it by itself.  But I don’t usually happen to have piles of dried leaves sitting next to the compost pile to mix in with the kitchen scraps, nor do I feel like getting the pitch fork out of the basement to turn the pile when I am in the middle of making dinner and find myself with a full compost bucket that I quickly need to empty in order to continue peeling onions and garlic.  So I am hoping that this Earth Machine will make things easier and produce actual compost, that rich fertile stuff that is supposed to come out of the bottom.  Yet, their instructions, too, specify that I need to add either some soil, or dried leaves or weeds, although I am hoping that “kitchen browns,” such as paper towels, tissues, coffee filters, or teabags, will do the job (stale bread is another "kitchen brown," but I don't throw my stale bread out, I collect it in the freezer and make bread pudding or a breakfast strata out of it).  I will keep you posted of my composting success (or lack thereof).