no man is an island

I just finished reading Emily Matchar's book Homeward Boundon the New Domesticity movement.  The book is about women (and some men) embracing home & hearth in a new cultural twist, about being tired of corporate pressure and the lack of the government's and the corporate world's response to women's (and men's) family needs here in this country, while European countries are introducing more and more of it (more guaranteed daycare spots, more maternity and paternity leave, more vacation time).  This movement also comprises the so called "preppers," who believe in taking things into their own hands in light of a perceived potential armageddon that the government is not prepared to manage, and become as self-sufficient as possible.  Some of that self-sufficiency drive is shining through in homesteaders who only trust the safety of their own vegetables, the quality of their own childcare and school instruction, etc.  (note that this lone-man-on-the-frontier and homesteading syndrome seems specific to this country because of its pioneering history).

In nature everything is intricately interconnected in the famous web Chief Seattle (supposedly) spoke about ("whatever you do the web you do to yourself").  When you remove elements of a system (eco or social), like removing a card from the middle of a house of cards, the system starts to crumble.

Since we are part of nature we also exist within an intricate web of relationships and associations.  By the way, the more meaningful our relationships, the richer our lives.  People with a large social network and strong relationships live longer.  When we opt out of the web some part of the web crumbles and weakens, and what we are able to accomplish diminishes.  Matchar makes this crucial point.  When people become so self-centered, as in if-public-education-crumbles-I'll-just-pay-for-private-school, or if-the-general-food-supply-is-unsafe-I'll-just-grow-my-own, or if-corporations-don't-give-a-damn-about family-life-I'll -just-quit, then we have a problem.   Then the country no longer pushes towards a common agenda that benefits all.  You may call me a socialist, but what is bad about jointly rooting for the highest good of all (as opposed to my own highest good)?  What is bad about making education accessible for all and increasing the level of intelligence and critical thinking of the entire population?  What is bad about pressuring the government to put proper food safety measures (including those against GMOs) in place?  It benefits all of us in the end.  We need to remain within the web and help to improve the entire web instead of jumping ship and going it alone.

"Ask not what this country can do for you, but what you can do for your country," as one famous president said not so long ago.   Please also take a look at a previous post on the people factor.

food forests

Permaculture, although around since the 1970s in Australia, is still a fairly new idea over here.  The word is a contraction of the words permanent, agriculture, and culture (interesting that agriculture, which means cultivation of the land, is so tightly tied to culture - without agriculture there is no culture!).  The idea of permaculture is a completely sustainable agriculture, and more so culture.  Sustainable means that there is no "garbage," that everything we need to live on comes and goes in a permanent, circular, mutually beneficial and dependent, and therefore WASTELESS cycle.  The principle of agricultural permaculture is planting crops together that complement one another in a wildly complex and diverse composition that emulates nature, although it is man-made.  These food forests work at every stratum of the vegetation, from low down mushrooms, herbs and flowers, to the next level of berry and hazelnut bushes, to higher up fruit and nut trees.

This is not a new concept, though.  But then - sometimes we need to revisit old ideas from a fresh perspective and a higher perch.  Thanks to the suggestion of a friend, I recently read the book 1491 by Charles Mann and learned about milpas.  Milpas are South American planting compositions that comprise up to a dozen crops (maize, avocados, squashes and beans, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potatoes, jicama, amaranth, and mucuna), which all "complement one another nutritionally and environmentally."  Some milpas, I learned, have been in existence for four thousand years without depleting the soil!!!

One of the problems of our conventional farming methods, which is exacerbated in monocultures, is the lack of diversity in crops, because a lack of diversity in the insect/grub/bird population follows it.  This disconnect between agriculture and nature then depletes the soil on top of it all.

I am never advocating a return to the past!  However, new for the sake of new is often short sighted.  In this case we have two inspirational and sustainable agricultural models whose principles are worthwhile knowing about.  (please also visit a previous post on "spiritual farming.")

frequency, energy and the blessing of food

My son and I picked some things up at Walmart the other day, and he reflected that the "Walmart atmosphere" with its blue-grey color scheme surely has a negative influence on the employees' psyche (I agree, I'd much rather work at Target for its warm color scheme). The NY Times recently reported how we adapt our behavior according to whose company we are in - which means that we adopt and become part of the surrounding consciousness or frequency, that there is a fluid seamless interrelationship.  When I travel to France or Germany I put on my French or German culture hat, I become a lot more French or German than I am here at home in Warwick; when I am here, I am back to my (almost) American self (reminds me of mimikry in biology).

Masaru Emoto's astounding water experiments became known in the West through the 2004 movie "What the Bleep Do We Know?"   The thesis of this movie is the seamless interconnectedness of the physical and the spiritual, the influence of consciousness on the physical, and the far reaching consequences of this hypothesis (let's call it that, although I firmly believe in it).  Although not yet accepted by the scientific community (which in general doesn't yet accept that consciousness might influence matter, much less create matter), Emoto's research of several decades indicates that consciousness influences the molecular structure of water.  He maintains that we can improve the structure or frequency of water by taping a sign with a positive word to a water container or imbuing it frequentially with spoken words, such as saying out loud "love" or "gratitude."  Think about the benefits of a glass of water, if it had indeed absorbed such positive frequency, and think of the implications on the human body, which consists of between 50% and 65% of water.

Lastly, all of this reminds me of the religious custom of blessing food and drink, which would improve its frequency or energy, and therefore its beneficial influence on us.

death and wordlessness and the spiritual

Two days ago our dear sweet cat Snowball died and I explained to my daughter how much we look at death from our human perspective.  The regret and sadness and ensuing emotional heaviness in the chest all come from two things:  Our "word world," and a doubt that our existence could be more than just a once-and-never-again-opportunity to appear on earth, which of course causes a massive fear of death. Existing in a "word world" enables us to live with awareness of the past and projecting into the future, instead of living in the present, as animals do (and as we did pre-language).  We look back and remember, we compare it to the present loss, and translate it into future loss.  But the feeling of loss is one-sided because the transiting animal perceives the process totally differently.  Animals are different from us because of their present-oriented consciousness and inability to reflect (although meditation and mindfulness teach us to enjoy fleeting moments of being in the moment- also see previous post on "Now" and previous post on "wordlessness").

I recently read a very helpful description of an animal's death in Martha Beck's Finding Your Way In A Wild New World.  Beck reminds us that "...we suffer more from our thoughts about events than from the events themselves.  Detaching from our verbal thoughts eliminates almost all our psychological suffering."

Here is Beck's description of watching an antelope being killed by a leopard, how she connected with the animal and understood the death process on a different level:  "...The impala's always Wordless awareness is filled with shock and confusion, but absolutely none of the thought-based fears that make my own mortality so frightening to me.  I'm struck by the lack of resistant ideas, like 'This shouldn't be happening!' or 'I'm not ready to die!' or 'My loved ones will be devastated!'  There's just awareness of the strangeness of the situation and disorientation.  Then it feels for all the world as though the impala senses my compassion for it.  The animal seems very relieved to find someone caring about it, joining with it.  I project all the calm and peace I can.  Then I feel a gentle whoosh, and an incredibly sweet sensation of delicious, liberating expansion........Dropping back into language, I can clearly see that the leopard killed the impala.  Then I immediately find truth in the opposite statement: I could just as easily say the leopard 'lived' the impala, taking its stored physical energy into her own body.  Holding these opposites in my verbal mind, I feel language create a strange loop, pushing me beyond paradoxical belief structures and putting me smack-dab back into Wordlessness."

"Death is the stripping away of all that is not you.The secret of life is to 'die before you die' - and find that there is no death."

Eckhart Tolle

back to basics

Storm King

A few years ago our electric lawn mower broke and we replaced it with a little mechanical push mower, of the kind I remember my dad using in the 1960s.  It takes a bit of arm muscle and some double mowing when the grass is longer (and I am getting blisters on my hands), but the mowing is really quiet and non-polluting, and you are bound to spend an hour or so out in the beautiful sunshine - exercise and fresh air all in one.  Granted, the push mower doesn't work for a large field sized lawn.  But then, I saw years ago at the Storm King Art Center outdoor sculpture park that lawns can be partially mowed to great effect (and less energy) - just mow a circulation path and where a sculpture or a sitting are is located, and leave the rest to the wild grasses (the insects will be happy, too). More basics - I recently read that some new age farmers are going back to plowing their fields with the help of horses.  Horses don't break down, they don't pollute, their manure is free and environmentally friendly fertilizer.

Not that everything was better then, but not all innovations are good simply because they are new.  New York City is finally jumping on the cycling bandwagon with its newly inaugurated Citibike rental program.  Biking was never out-of-fashion in Europe, but it's finally in fashion again on this side of the Atlantic.  Also see my previous related post "sitting and more sitting."  Just saying - some of this older and slower technology is not so bad, and provides a bit of exercise in fresh air all-the-while accomplishing something - transportation, plowing, mowing - beats the gym for sure.

the fat myth

Food research of the past years has revealed that food is healthiest when we eat it the way nature made it.  When food becomes a "product," meaning when it comes from a factory and they've done stuff to it, it's no longer so healthy and in many instances even harmful. There are a lot of food myths out there that we/our culture created from the ill gotten belief that man-made stuff would surpass what nature makes because it is based on science.  But the food industry pushes under the rug that it's really after the profit, not your health, and that's what they apply their science to.

So here goes the fat myth:

FAT IS BAD FOR YOU  - "lite products" are better for you.

Hence low fat and no fat everything, cheese, milk, yogurt.  The absurd and unhealthy culminations of this misguided belief system of course are butter substitute and margarine, not much nature left in those.  Hence also the French Paradox - why the northern French don't get fat on all their cream and butter and delicious camembert, and the southern French thrive on the olive oil rich Mediterranean diet.  Sally Fallon, one of my nouveau food idols, has all the scientific back-up information for the skeptics in her oft cited food myth debunker and cookbook Nourishing Traditions.

I switched our whole family back to full fat everything a few years ago (I am only a few steps ahead) and we have neither gained weight nor become sick; as a matter-of-fact, we are all very healthy, love to eat, and never spare a thought on the fat question. 

may God bless the whole world

I love the all-inclusive bumper sticker "May God Bless The Whole World," which some awakened people created in reaction to the restrictive "God Bless America" bumper sticker.  Not that I am against well wishes for this country, but I do not wish any other country any less than this one.  The problem is the distinction between "them" and "us," whereby "we" believe that we are more deserving than "they."  As long as we exclude others from our well wishes, as long as we think we are better or more deserving, as long as we think of ourselves in isolation, we have a problem. My teenage son ran in a Spartan Race this week-end.  It was hot, it was humid, it was long and difficult.  As a mother I was of course worrying and quietly asked "for the most benevolent outcome for his wellbeing and safety"  (see  Tom Moore's The Gentle Way for more on requesting positive outcomes).  He was running with three of his friends.  So then it occurred to me that I wanted of course all of them to be well and safe as well, and I quickly added my quiet request for that.   And then I thought "Gee, actually I would not want anyone in this whole race to be hurt, I really do want all racers to finish safely, and I added yet another qualifier to my "most benevolent outcome wish."

It is misinterpreted Darwinian thinking that one party has to lose for the other to win, or that there isn't enough wellbeing and goodness and abundance available for all of us.  Win-win for all!