So far the garden is doing pretty well, although some things much better than others. I have the following things growing: radishes, carrots, spinach, lettuce, chard, beets, basil, butternut squash, green beans, lima beans, watermelon, cantaloupe, pickling cucumbers, zucchini, and sweet corn all in 100 square feet! I’m probably not doing tomatoes this year since I didn’t start any from seed and the tomato plants at the store were lousy. But I am going to do a fall crop of cabbage, snow peas, and broccoli. Also I’ve got additional basil indoors and I just started some indoor seeds for chives, parsley, cilantro and catnip. Oh, almost forgot--I’ve got a few little sprigs of spearmint growing too.

Next year I’d like to at least double the size of the garden if the landlord doesn’t object. I’d like to try to grow most of my potatoes, plus also onions, garlic, tomatoes, bell peppers, jalapenos, rhubarb and strawberries. I know, I’m getting ambitious.

If I owned the house I’d also plant fruit trees and have a grape arbor, and maybe put in some raspberry bushes. And if I had more land I’d do a patch of wheat and oats and maybe some sugar beets. And lots of sunflowers.

I’ve just finished two books on food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan and The End of Food by Thomas F. Pawlick, both of which were focused on the problems and dangers of industrial farming. I so desperately want to be able to grow and raise all of my food. I find it just unbelievable the type of reality we’re manifesting for ourselves. It’s like something out of a bad science fiction movie. Corporations should just be outlawed--their greed is destroying the earth. There is no accountability whatsoever.

The stuff you buy in the grocery stores any more is not food. Since corporations can manufacture “food substitutes”, which are cheaper than real foods, they do so to increase their bottom line, with reckless disregard for human health. It is so despicable. I just want to opt out. It’s frustrating not to be able to do so fully.

If I owned this house, I would have chickens and bunnies in the back yard, and a much larger garden. But as a renter, that’s not going to happen. So I will have to wait until I move back to Pennsylvania, or else earn enough money here to be able to buy this place.

Well, this is the last week of school before summer vacation. Another year has just managed to fly by. Last week we had a few tense moments at school. I was there for the academic awards assembly in the gymnasium, but there were tornadoes being spotted left and right, so for about fifteen minutes the kids were crammed down into the locker rooms and the adults crammed like sardines into the windowless music rooms, until the worst of the danger passed. From what I could gather later, the nearest tornado to touch down was about seven miles from us, near Dacono. Another seven miles or so further from Dacono (near Platteville) was where the big tornado formed that ended up causing so much destruction (and one fatality) in Windsor. It was a scary afternoon—with a nervewracking drive home under the most ominous (and constantly shifting) skies I have ever witnessed.

We’ve had bizarre weather lately, especially these storms coming from the east. It’s unnerving for some reason to see the clouds going the wrong way. You just don’t know what to expect. There have been tornadoes almost daily in the U.S. I guess it’s already the worst tornado season in over a decade and it’s still early.

I just finished reading a book about climate change. Very depressing stuff! It has me back to thinking we’re on the verge of extincting ourselves. But that’s OK. I imagine that throughout the universe, as sentience develops on various planets, it reaches this very critical and dangerous stage--the point at which ego is overly developed, before it can evolve to a stage of supraconscious awareness. I would venture to guess that on most worlds the transformation is unsuccessful. Beings self-destruct before they can transform. Ours will likely be one of them. But the experiment will keep going and eventually beings will make the transformation.

If we extinct ourselves here I think we will be reborn as souls on another planet. I don’t think we will lose what we have learned so far. The soul remembers. So eventually, somewhere, we may reach the next level of evolution.

The earth blossoms and dies, and life on other planets blossoms and dies. But energy and soul transforms.

I came across a different reference to Ellsworth Huntington in another library book—what an odd synchronicity! Two weeks ago I had never heard of him. Maybe this means I should look into his writings, but I’m sure since they were written in the early 1900s they’d be nearly impossible to find.

In browsing through a book I brought home from the library (In the Beat of a Heart: Life, Energy, and the Unity of Nature, John Whitfield), I came across an interesting paragraph in a subsection called “Job Opportunities”. It said nothing new--basically that we evolve to occupy niches--but it said it in a novel way, and it’s tickling something in my mind that I haven’t quite been able to reach.

In the Homage, Hutchinson suggested that one explanation for the number of different species lay in the range of possible biological professions and addresses. Belonging to a species is like having a job: it’s a specialized way of making a living, and an evolutionary choice that closes off other employment options. By becoming excellent at one way of life, through adaptation, animals and plants become inept at others. You would no more set a sheep to catch a rabbit than you would employ a plumber to cut your hair. Tropical orchids would struggle on the tundra. Cows are good at digesting grass, bad at ant eating; pangolins, vice versa. Species divide up resources, and each species can exploit some so well that it can monopolize them. But due to life’s ubiquitous trade-offs, the ability to hog some resources comes at the cost of being able to use all of them, leaving other jobs vacant. If all organisms use energy in the same way, maybe diversity reflects the number of different ways to get it.

There’s something there about the way we divide up resources--I’m not sure what it is. Somehow it helps me see the whole pattern, to see all of us as functioning parts of one organism. We each contribute some function, something that helps the organism as a whole remain healthy. We fill out the organism, our niches rubbing up against each other, creating a seamless whole, and a web of interconnectivity. To dissect any part of it is to wound the whole organism. Of course, the organism has a significant ability to self-heal; excise an occupant of one niche and something else will usually rush in to fill the void.

Now, the troubling thing is, we humans have removed ourselves from the earth’s ecosystems (as if such a thing is really possible)! What niches do we fill? Well, it seems like we’re trying to fill every niche. We want to be the predator of just about everything.

I like the author’s choice of the employment metaphor. Especially because I’ve been thinking about the issue of right livelihood for myself. Back in Pennsylvania I know that right livelihood could easily include either woodworking or writing (or both). The woodlands of Pennsylvania spawned me; it seems fitting that wood be the resource I monopolize (in a sustainable way of course). If I get into woodworking, I want to get most of the wood for my own land or reclaim it from old buildings. If I wrote I would want my publisher to source the paper from environmentally responsible mills (if such a thing exists)! Here in Colorado though I’m still all wishy-washy about what right livelihood would be for me.

As far as the personality of this place--it’s dry as opposed to Pennsylvania’s lush abundance. Therefore life forms here seem to be much more reserved in their self-expression. The Pennsylvania land is sensuous; here the land seems more interested in practicalities. In Pennsylvania the people may be poor, but their yards and properties always seem to be meticulously and beautifully maintained. Here, people are poor and trashy--letting weeds and junk take over. In Pennsylvania people seem to be more crafty and artsy and innovative. Here people are conservative and don’t take risks or try new things very easily. I think a drought-prone area will always foster conservatism. It just isn’t safe to expend energy on anything but the tried-and-true. The positive thing about here is the slower tempo--it let’s me get in touch with larger cycles of time. Things change very slowly here, whereas in Pennsylvania change is visible. To see how the forest is reclaiming Mr. Miller’s farm each time I go home is amazing!

So in a dry, dusty, flat, conservative place, what could I give birth to? You have big sky and big weather here. Maybe it’s a place for big ideas and seeing big pictures? But how do I actually make a living from that? Whatever I find to do here, I’m sure it won’t be showy. It’ll have to be understated yet tenacious. And it’ll need to have some practical application--it can’t simply be a bunch of lofty ideas.

Oh, the other thing about this place--it’s a grounded place. Compared to Boulder especially, which was so flighty and air-headed (albeit in a spiritual way).

I read another interesting essay in Rooted in the Land. It was by a guy named John A. Livingston. He wrote about the flight behavior of flocks of birds, and the coordinated behavior of schools of fish and other groups of animals, and suggested that there’s a higher level of consciousness than mere self-consciousness. In fact he used the term ‘downshifting’ or ‘downgrading’ to indicate how we enter that state of being. I loved the way he implied that self-consciousness is a very base state of being. It’s mostly engaged to deal with issues of brute survival. He suggested that there’s individual self-consciousness, group consciousness, even interspecies consciousness.

Well, of course there is! I used to regularly experience group consciousness when I went to the Dances. Each week there was always a unique group mood or personality. It superseded the individual--we became one unit or organism. Also with the cats at home I often feel this fusion, as if we’re part of the same phenomenon. As if we share the same mind or the same…something.

Here are a few little quotes from the essay “Other Selves”:

If all of the individual beings in a community share that total, greater consciousness, it is not unlikely that they may see individuals of their own and of co-participating species not as ‘others’ but as simultaneous coexistences or coexpressions of that place, perhaps as extensions of themselves.

…Awareness of self as individual, self as (same-species) group, self as (many-species) community inheres in all of us animals. The major differences in this respect between ourselves and the healthily integrated bears, monkeys, and coyotes is that our cherished individualism, celebrated at the expense of other (shared) selves, has left us stalled at an immature stage of social development. They remain whole. They know in their bones and viscera that they belong. We are taught that we do not.

So Ellsworth Huntington had a piece of the puzzle that Jared Diamond (in Guns, Germs, and Steel) left out. I guess in a roundabout way Diamond addressed climate when he talked about east-west versus north-south axes, but he never directly addressed it. Of course the personality of the land is shaped by its climate! Of course the human civilization that arises in a locale represents the confluence of land and sky influences. Of course each one of us individually is made from our environment--we are local phenomenon created by local conditions.

What the implications of our increasing rootlessness are, I’m not entirely sure, but it can’t be healthy. True health can only come from being part of our ecosystems again--full participants in the world that birthed us.

I’m getting close to another insight now. Sometimes it’s just a sentence or two here and a sentence or two there in different books I’m reading that triggers some new association. I think I’ve told you before about my favorite definition of genius: simply a keen ability to make novel associations. All learning is really about making connections you’ve never made before. Again it brings me back to the image of the matrix--everything is already here, already intricately interconnected; we are merely becoming aware of the connections. Learning (and genius) is simply making novel associations.

In one book I read (Rooted in the Land--a collection of essays by various people) there was an essay called “Coming into the Foodshed” by Jack Kloppenburg, Jr; John Hendrickson; and G. W. Stevenson. The following paragraph lodged somewhere in the recesses of my brain:

We understand the foodshed to be a sociogeographic space--human activity embedded in the natural integument of a particular place. That human activity is necessarily constrained in various ways by the characteristics of the place in question. Ignoring those natural constraints or overriding them with technology is one of the besetting sins of the global food system, the ecological destructiveness of which is now unambiguously apparent even to its apologists. In the foodshed, natural conditions would be taken not as an obstacle to be overcome but as a measure of limits to be respected.

Then yesterday I started a biography on Aldo Leopold (Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey: Rediscovering the Author of the Sand County Almanac, by Julianne Lutz Newton) and I read this paragraph:

Leopold listened in the night air to the quiet rustle of leaves and the rippling waters. Here was a river that had not yet witnessed the American ideal of progress in action--the ideas, as Leopold later expressed it, ‘that every river needs more people, and all people need more inventions’ and that ‘the good life depends on the indefinite extension of this chain of logic.’ What did the ‘good’ in good life mean, Leopold wondered. And where did human inventiveness and power cross the line between positive creativity and destructiveness? Progress to most Americans was defined in a way quite different from the vision slowly developing and gathering cohesion in Leopold’s mind.

From these two paragraphs I’m turning over some ideas pertaining to: “human activity embedded in the natural integument of a particular place”; limits; and creativity.

At this adolescent stage of our human evolution we don’t respect or even seem to recognize limits. As separate, egoic individuals, we don’t recognize our embeddedness. We’ve become conscious of self but not yet of Self. We don’t yet comprehend our greater identity as a pattern in the greater matrix. We don’t even recognize ourselves as part of the pattern of our local ecosystem. If we did we would honor limits.

How does creativity bear on this? Creativity has always been quite a puzzle to me. Why as humans do we have such an insatiable need to create? Why are we constantly converting nature into “stuff”--taking, taking, taking along the way? But I’m trying to look now at creativity as a natural phenomenon; human creativity as a process of the matrix. Stuff blossoms in the same way as people, plants, animals, and weather blossom forth from the matrix. The problem with human creativity is simply that we aren’t yet aware enough to honor the limits of our ecosystems or the matrix.

As the foodshed article implied, limits are not obstacles to be overcome. Limits create the framework in each ecosystem for the blossoming of unique creations. What unique forms of expression might blossom from the matrix here through me? Honorable creativity is truly a product of the land and sky.

This helps me look at right livelihood more clearly. Simply manufacturing stuff to meet demand in a particular consumer markets does not respect the matrix or its limits. In order for me to find right livelihood, I must attune to my local ecosystem and try to figure out what wants to be birthed through me in this place (while honoring its limits).

Now this doesn’t answer my question about rootlessness. Here in Colorado I’m an invasive Pennsylvanian weed seed. I’m not a natural product of this ecosystem. Can I in my un-naturalized condition here positively contribute to this ecosystem?

In talking about my homesickness for Pennsylvania, I’ve described it as the place where I can most be who I meant to be in this lifetime. My understanding of that truth continues to deepen. That ecosystem birthed me. That’s where I’m in my most natural state and where I can function optimally.

But, being that I’m here, for at least another six years, how do I attune with and interact with this ecosystem? I don’t know yet, but I suspect that my “haunting” by the Native American spirits is a product of this ecosystem. I don’t think that I necessarily would’ve had that experience in Pennsylvania. Maybe all of the insights I’ve had in the past year are blossoming from this unique part of the matrix. Definitely there’s been a deepening of my thought processes since I moved out here from Boulder county three years ago. This area is more supportive for me than suburbia was, for sure. The suburbs were so unbalanced, and even with all of the destructive agricultural practices around here this feels like a healthier place.

I keep trying to reason my way through this weather puzzle, even though I know what I’m getting at can’t be arrived at through rational means. But maybe my reasoning will get me closer to the insight.

So, just as the earth is literally a part of us (since we eat it through the food we consume), the atmosphere is a part of us because we breathe it in. But the atmosphere isn’t the weather per se--so we don’t really take the weather into us. The atmosphere (and its weather) is a matrix we move through. On a microcosmic scale, as we move we create subtle winds and currents, our body heat rises, we contribute gases to the atmosphere; in a sense, doesn’t that make us subtle weather-makers?

If all 6.6 billion of us gathered in one place, would our collective body heat and off-gassing create measurable weather? I think quite possibly yes. Metropolises change weather patterns--couldn’t human bodies do the same thing on a noticeable scale?

But again, participating in weather-making is not the same thing as being the weather. I think the insight has something to do with the emanation of life forms and weather from the earth. They’re part of the same phenomenon. Conditions were right for me to blossom out here in America for a number of decades before I’ll eventually fade, other conditions allow weather patterns to blossom briefly and fade. Is all I’m getting at simply the ephemeral nature of physical reality? That’s hardly a new insight! But no, that’s not what I’m getting it. Maybe matrix is a good word to describe all of the emanations of the earth, all life forms, and all patterns that arise. The atmosphere and its weather I move through (as well as the earth I move upon) is always touching me. We’re always linked and so as emanations, aren’t we really one? There’s no stepping out of the matrix, no opting out. We’re always contributing to it, making exchanges with parts of it. Just as the cells in our body constantly make exchanges. I am one with the weather (and everything else).

It’s funny how I’m being taught lessons with no teachers. Last spring I mentioned wanting to learn how to resonate with the vibration of the whole earth. I think that’s what I’m slowly being taught to do. There’s something lurking here in this insight about me being a global pattern (or part of one). More than anything I feel this intuition--this deep interconnectivity. There is such a sensuousness and fluidity when I allow myself to merge with the weather around me. To allow myself to feel, deeply in my body, this larger identity is incredible.

I don’t know exactly why weather is the focus of this insight, but it seems really important. I think there will be a lot here for me to learn. For now I’ll just stay receptive and see what happens.

Hm. Between the last paragraph and this one I found a book at the library that’s about the connection between human health and climate and weather. A few pages in I read this:

In the early 1900s, American geographer Ellsworth Huntington published his book, Civilization and Climate. Huntington believed that the way that human progress ebbed and surged forward in waves was the result of an interaction between climate, quality of people and culture. His beliefs culminated in his own magnum opus Mainsprings of Civilization, which contended (based on his own extensive studies of various populations across the US) that our intellectual and physical vigour depended to a large extent on being exposed to a climatic optima where temperature and humidity were concerned. Taking a worldwide view, he believed that place was more influential than race when it came to differences between cultures.

Under the Weather: How the Weather and Climate Affect Our Health, Pat Thomas, 2004

I have no idea why I keep coming back to my vision of the man calling up the weather. It seems irrelevant, yet I keep coming back to it, keep feeling like I’m getting closer to something really important.

Today it’s been this recognition that the weather and myself are one and the same thing. Can I explain that yet? Not really. It has something to do with my imagery of the earth’s patterns (from a few months back)--the way we emanate from the land in almost the same way as the weather. We’re natural phenomena that blossom when conditions are right and die back when they’re not, just as weather “blossoms” when conditions are right. But how can I be saying we’re the same thing? Aren’t I just saying we’re two different phenomenon the earth produces? No, I know what I mean is that we’re the same--it’s just that the words that could explain it are still eluding me. What is the man doing when he calls up the weather? He’s not controlling it. He’s not an agent acting on it. Somehow he is it. I’ll have to leave it at that for now—it’s just too tenuous for me to fully grasp.

Then the other connection I’ve made goes back to Amy Chua’s book on free-market democracy. I was thinking about the way in which we’re no longer participants in our local ecosystems, and it dawned on me that Chua’s market-dominant minorities are exactly like nonnative, invasive weed seeds. Once they leave the culture they were hatched in and “invade” a new country, all checks and balances are gone. They grow rampant in the foreign soil because the foreign soil didn’t co-evolve with the newcomer, and couldn’t evolve defenses to it. The same is true now for corporations who have globalized—they are evil weed seeds that native populations can’t defend themselves against.

I’m an invasive weed seed here in America, but I’m at least a tenth or eleventh generation weed seed, so maybe I’m starting to become naturalized to the conditions here. Funny how newcomers can become naturalized citizens just by taking a little pen and paper test. I think the actual process is just a bit more involved than that.

Eventually, if newcomers stay put they do become naturalized, and checks and balances evolve. But the dangerous stage is while they’re still foreign, invasive, and unnaturalized.

So, what about corporations which are run from afar? With no real soul, can they ever become naturalized? They can’t co-evolve, or not easily, at any rate. Won’t they always be in the invasive weed seed category, always be destructive interlopers? How can we control invasive species such as corporations so as to minimize their damage?

It’s funny, the clouds today have been exactly like the clouds in my vision. I sure wish I could grab hold of this insight completely.

I read a blurb on the Internet the other day that was intriguing. It was about a study that found that mothers who ate a more nutritious diet during pregnancy had a higher likelihood of having a boy (56/100 as opposed to 50/100). I didn’t read the actual study, so some of my inferences and information may be off-base. The article noted that in the US, the birth rate for girls has been going up, so this study may be implying a growing nutritional deficiency in women. Which makes a kind of sense. Despite the fact that we have an obesity epidemic, people are eating crap (I think it’s now around 50 percent of calories in the average American’s diet coming from high fructose corn syrup!) and since the Green Revolution, as our soils have become more and more depleted and sterile, the actual nutritional value of foods has dropped dramatically. It’s sad that in a land of so-called plenty we could actually be malnourished (yet fat). The article suggested this male/female fluctuation serves a biological function in times of famine. I forget what their theory was, but mine was slightly different from theirs. In a time of famine, more children will die before reaching reproductive age. Therefore you want to produce a surplus of girls to ensure an adequate base of surviving adults to bear a new generation. The boys don’t matter as much because they can impregnant many women, even if they are few in number. In times of plenty, more boys mean fewer available wombs, which helps to keep the population from exploding (and thence creating a new famine cycle). It’s all very fascinating stuff.

I find it so astounding that people mindlessly put so much crap into their bodies. All of these chemicals (aspartame!) and manufactured food products, instead of basic, real food.

I’m still trying to grow mold on my piece of commercial bread. I left the ziplock bag open for a day to give the moldies a chance to move in, but they didn’t take the bait. I’ll leave it open for another day, then add a little bit of water and see if that’ll produce any mold. If this bread is not even life-sustaining for mold, how can it possibly even be considered a food?

In my opinion, shelf life is a thing to avoid. If the food doesn’t spoil, it’s probably not a food anymore. If the little critters that make food spoil aren’t willing to touch it or digest it, it probably has no life-giving value. Why waste the energy to send it through your digestive tract? And not only may it have no life-giving value, it may possess life-destroying properties--chemicals, pesticides and preservatives that do real harm to your body.

The diet I’m striving for is closer to a hunter-gatherer diet than anything else. I doubt I will ever completely wean myself from grains, but at least I’ll continue to incorporate more kinds of whole grains. My meat consumption is kind of hunter-gatherer in style, not what I’m eating but how I eat it. Meat is occasional, as if the men had just come back from a successful hunt. Most days are vegetarian days, but here and there are meat days. I think that’s a good way to do it. My body isn’t constantly being taxed, every day, by having to digest meat, but I still get the nutritional benefits that meat provides.

I still find myself breaking out of the consumer mind-set, and it’s often surprising to see the ways I’ve been caught up in nonsensical ideas, once I escape them. These beliefs that you need certain paraphernalia in order to participate in activities are often a real load of crap. When I decided to start growing sprouts I went to all of these websites to find sprouting guides (how long each type of seed needs to soak and how long they take to sprout). It was amazing to see all of the specialized sprouting equipment they had for sale! All you need is a Mason jar and some kind of mesh (cheesecloth or window screen). But I’m sure there are plenty of people gullible enough to think they need special equipment to grow sprouts.

But then, I find that I’ve been gullible in thinking about something else. For the longest time I’ve wanted to get a hand-cranked pasta roller so I can make my own homemade pasta. Collin eats so much pasta, and the store-bought pasta is probably as much of a health disaster as the white bread. Now of couse I didn’t want a motorized pasta machine—I like simplicity, after all. But even the mere $30 price tag on a hand-cranked model has stood in the way, given my budget constraints. So we’ve continued to eat store-bought pasta. The other day I was browsing through my favorite cookbook and there was a section on homemade pasta. It listed the various methods: hand-kneading and machine-kneading, hand-rolling and machine-rolling, hand-cutting and machine-cutting. And Mel’s very sluggish light bulb finally went off--oh, you can make pasta by hand! Well, who knew! The ridiculous thing is that I’ve been making my own egg noodles for several years now for my chicken noodle soup. It never occurred to me that I can also use the same old rolling pin to roll out dough for spaghetti, and ravioli, and tortellini, and fettuccine….

How do these silly blind spots persist for so long?

I still think a pasta roller would be a nice gadget to have, but at least now I know I don’t need it and I can start making pasta now. In fact the other day I made a small batch of ravioli and they turned out beautifully.

A good practice for me would be to ask myself, whenever I start to think I need a gadget: how was this task performed before this was invented? Is there a simpler, less contrived way?

As a species, I think we’re going really soft. Basic skills around food especially are being lost, and food after all is the main reason we’re able to be here at all. Why are we allowing ourselves to lose such core knowledge?

When I move back to Pennsylvania, I want to achieve food self-sufficiency. I want to grow and raise all of my food, the food for the animals, my green cover crops, and I want to create my own seed bank. I want to use a combination of canning, drying, a little bit of freezing if I have a freezer, root cellaring, and solar and cold frame gardening to get me through the winters.

I may still buy exotic things I can’t grow myself, like bananas, coffee, sugar (although I may try to grow sourghum), avocados, and mangoes, but I won’t need any of those things nutritionally.

My goal for the rest of my life is to earn enough money to buy land and build my modest off-the-grid house, without ever having a mortgage again, and to become as totally self-sufficient as possible. If I can save enough to pay for my house and land up front, after that I will need very little cash, and will largely be able to escape the cash economy that I so despise.

There will still be things like property taxes and I’ll probably still need a car, unless I live close enough to a town, in which case a bike would do. I’ll need new tools periodically and incidental things, like toilet paper.

(Oh, by the way, my experiment with no-deodorant/no-shampoo has more or less fallen by the wayside. As far as the deodorant, yes I will definitely need something, although not necessarily a commercial product. For now, I’m finishing up my stick of aluminum-laced stuff. As for the shampoo, I’m back to using up my chemicals-soup shampoo and will try to find a good homemade recipe for when that runs out.)

Yesterday I started a new blog on the Internet. It’s about voluntary simplicity like my old one, but more focused. My old one (which I haven’t written on for over year) was about voluntary simplicity in the context of my small quirky town. It was more bounded by concrete, day-to-day reality. My new one doesn’t include the small town aspect, so it can more easily go off into the realm of ideas. I want to be able to explore my vision for a new paradigm and other more ethereal things. I’ll still include practical and grounding entries too--tales of my journey or concrete things I’ve learned from all of my research.

The blog is part of my master plan for building a life as a writer. It’ll be useful in a number of ways. For one, it gets me writing every day (okay, maybe that’s not totally realistic, but it’s something to shoot for). For another, it encourages a more relaxed writing style than what I’ve been able to produce so far in working on my book. I think it will help me find and get comfortable with the right voice. For another, it’ll be an asset when I go looking for a publisher for the book, especially if I can drum up a decent following.

 

 

Yesterday I brainstormed a list of blog topics and came up with roughly 90, so I’ve got plenty to say, and the ideas just keep coming.

At some point I might also try to come up with a workbook that I could self-publish and offer through the blog. Of course, that won’t be feasible unless I can create some amount of traffic to the site.

And the blog I think is really going to help me figure out my organizational issues with the book. It still doesn’t feel right. I still struggle with whether to include pieces of my personal story or not, interspersed with the more scholarly stuff. My gut says it will make the book much more engaging, but I haven’t figured out a smooth way to do it.

The blog structure makes it very easy to do just that. One day’s entry can be scholarly, another day’s personal. It can very naturally shift focus and still seem relatively coherent. I think (or hope) that it will offer up some clue on how to organize the book.

Then, lately, I’ve been thinking that maybe I’m even writing the wrong book. It may be this book is too ambitious for a first book. Maybe I need to write something that’s almost a self-help book, very practical for the most part. And then later I can write this book. Again, I think the blog is going to help me clarify what the best direction to pursue now would be.

Two nights ago I had an odd little dream. I’m still trying to decipher its meaning. There was a wide dirt path (or a narrow dirt road and this may have been back in time several centuries so there were no cars). It was going straight through a young forest. There was a boy of about eight or nine walking along the path. Along one side of the path ran an embankment. It was like the abandoned railroad grades you see around here. A tangle of young trees and bramble grew on it, creating almost a tunnel-effect on top of it. I was walking along the top of the embankment, following the boy secretly from several paces behind, and partly obscured by the brambles. The boy turned at one point in my direction and I instantly froze to the spot so he wouldn’t notice me, but as I froze I also swiveled my body to look behind me. There on the embankment about ten or fifteen paces behind me was a man, who also was instantly freezing to the spot as the boy turned in our direction.

I recognized the man instantly--it was Father Christmas! But he wasn’t round and jolly and he didn’t wear red suit. Instead, he was tall and lean, with white hair and a white beard. He wore a long robe that was trimmed all around in white fur, but the robe itself was tan, like deerskin (reindeer skin??) or suede. I realized in an instant what should always have been completely obvious (but wasn’t)--Father Christmas is a wizard! He gave a subtle nod to me, with maybe the merest hint of a smile. We were both up to the same thing--stalking the boy.

And that was it, the whole dream. What on earth am I to make of it? I was not working with Father Christmas. I had never seen him before (I don’t think anyone is supposed to see him) and I had no idea he was following right behind me until I turned. Yet we were up to the same thing, and I get the sense that I was up to something rather wizard-ish myself. I was stalking the boy, wishing to evade detection, but I think there was more to it than just freezing to the spot and blending in. I think I was actively, maybe mentally, practicing an invisibility technique. It wasn’t the freezing to the spot alone that prevented the boy from noticing me--there was some technique I was using that made it far less likely he would see me.

Let me add that there was nothing sinister in me stalking the kid. I meant him no harm. I never intended to interact with him at all. It seems more like I was practicing on him.

Where on earth did this dream come from? The only thing reminding me of Christmas in the past few days was a book I read about a family who boycotted all Chinese products for a year. Christmas was very trying since they had small children and virtually all toys are now made in China. The four year old boy started making his list for Santa in August and kept adding and adding to it, and everything he added the mom knew was made in China.

But how did my mind make the leap from our traditional American Santa to a wizard in animal skins stalking a boy? Very unusual! But it sure has a neat, mythic feel to it. It feels like for the first time I’ve gotten a glimpse of the real Santa. And I mean that, too, as ridiculous as it sounds.

Okay, so what could this mean? Am I only able to see the truth about Father Christmas because I’ve transcended the consumer paradigm? We’ve taken this wise, sacred being who I’m convinced has some sort of mythic reality, and dumbed him down, made him into some goofy, jolly, materialistic caricature. Gosh, now I’m going to have to do some research on Father Christmas. (Hey, it might make an interesting blog entry.) Father Christmas was a powerful but benevolent wizard and I was teaching myself to be a wizard too, it seems. His subtle nod showed me he was pleased.

It’s a beautiful morning and it’s supposed to get up near 80 degrees today. I’m planning to double-dig the garden once it warms up a bit, and spend as much time outside as I can.

For now though I’m sitting at my desk at the front window, looking out at the bright green grass, blue skies, and sunshine. It’s already 44 degrees at 7:30.

I just came across a quote I had copied down from the book, Beyond Beef, which talks about eating as a way of connecting with nature. I must have unconsciously absorbed the message without realizing it:

Eating, more than any other single experience, brings us into a full relationship to the natural world. The act itself calls forth the full embodiment of our senses—taste, smell, touch, hearing, and sight. We know nature largely by the various ways we consume it. Eating establishes the most primordial of all human bonds with the environment, and that is why in most cultures the experience is celebrated as a sacred act and a communion as well as an act of survival and replenishment. Eating, then, is the bridge that connects culture with nature, the social order with the natural order.

I’m starting to read a book called The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, by Karen Armstrong. I think her general thesis is going to be that we have never evolved beyond the religious traditions that began thousands of years ago and there is much that they can say to us in these desperate times.

It does make sense that we have not taken to heart the core messages of the great traditions, because we’re still in the egoic age. But we are on the cusp of a new age, so of course these great teachings are extremely relevant today.

I’m still trying to gain a more in-depth understanding of the rise of ego. This book is perhaps delivering a few more clues. As with Jared Diamond, the author points to the domestication of the horse as being a pivotal moment (along with the development of bronze weaponry).

Before horses, tribes were relatively isolated, peaceful pastoralists. But horses brought mobility which brought strangers into contact, and the combination of horses and weapons gave rise to looting, raiding, and the acquisition of “stuff”. The horsemen had power and by looting they had wealth. They developed a belief system that only the wealthy and powerful would have eternal life. In a sense they were becoming gods themselves as they commanded more resources and became more and more powerful and dominant.

The horse artificially gave individuals a boost up—from nobodies to persons of wealth and wicked power. Obviously, as individuals they were no more special than anyone else, but by using things outside of themselves (horses and weapons) they made themselves look bigger than they really were.

And in a nutshell, isn’t that what ego is? Simply making yourself look bigger than you really are? It starts to seem ridiculous that after all these thousands of years we’re still doing the same childish thing. I guess in the whole sweeping span of our evolution, a few thousand years is nothing, though. So long as we’re not stuck here forever! And there does seem to be more and more evidence of our readiness for the next paradigm.

I read something in a newspaper the other day about scientific estimates of the fate of the earth. I think it said the sun will become a red giant in another seven-point-something billion years, but in only a billion more years the earth will no longer be habitable because of the sun’s rising temperature. Material life is so temporary, no matter if you look at it in planetary terms or in terms of an individual’s lifespan. How comical it seems that we still cling to the material when it is the ultimate illusion. The paradox is that as wispy spiritual beings we are actually far more real and durable than matter and ego.

In the material world, what are the ways we assert our egos? By boasting about our achievements—actions taken on the physical plane for the most part; by boasting about or flaunting our acquisitions—money, things, trophy wives, landholdings, etc; by gaining status—that is, by gaining the consensus of others that our interactions with the material world have been more persuasive or of greater value than other people’s interactions; and by gaining power, which requires that other people value ego in order for that to be conferred on us.

Where I’m heading with this I don’t know. I’m groping around since there’s something here I’m trying to understand….

So all of these ways we assert ego—they’re all artificial extensions of the self. Self plus fast horse plus bronze weapons equals ego. We’re not the horse, or its speed, we’re not the weapon or its honed edge, but we expand our egos to encompass those things as if we could take credit for them. As if they were parts of ourselves. So we childishly think we’re bigger. We allow these external things to define who we are.

And these external things are not us, unless you look at it all spiritually and then everything is us, but that makes us all one being, all equally powerful. And then there’s no point in egotism because who are you going to boast to, and about what?

What keeps coming to mind is my vision a few weeks back of the man who was calling up the weather. In that moment he was egoless, fused with the Divine. He was one with Nature, or Gaia, or the Universe, or God—however you want to look at it. Self has to completely recede in order to so merge with nature that the rain clouds will roil and churn towards you.

I’m trying to piece together several different strands of my recent thinking.

Of all the most recent thoughts, the most important one seems to be the connection between being alienated from the land, and materialism. People have no qualms about exploiting the land when they no longer have a connection to it.

In the last hundred years or so we’ve been moving off the land in droves and often in only a generation or so losing all of our ancient, traditional knowledge. In urban centers and suburbia we don’t ever see the effects our consumption habits have on the body of the earth. There can be no system of checks and balances without the direct feedback you get by living on the land. What we don’t see essentially doesn’t exist.

I’m suspecting that this recent trend of moving off the land is the culmination of our individuation process. The development of ego and the individual self surely started thousands of years ago, but so long as we maintained a connection to the land it could never be complete. We were still a part of nature, a participant in a richly interconnected web.

Moving off the land is the last step in separating and becoming aware of ourselves as discrete beings. It’s a sad state of affairs as we seem to be isolated dots, separate from everything else. Until this historical moment we’ve been connected to the whole, albeit unconsciously for the most part. But moving off the land has to be the last straw. As we see the devastation our sense of separateness causes (and now on a global scale) we can also begin to see how everything is interconnected. The damage we cause to one part of the earth causes a whole web of effects. It’s becoming more and more obvious the more dire our situation gets. But what an opportunity to wake up and see! We evolved out of our unconscious wholeness into isolated selves, selfish egotistical selves. Now we stand at the cusp of a higher state of awareness—a supraconsciousness, of knowing for the first time that we are an inseparable part of the whole. No longer mythically being part of the whole, without awareness, as our primitive ancestors were, but now awake at last to our reality.

When we’re all awake to that knowledge—imagine the beautiful world we could inhabit (if we don’t destroy it in the meantime)! When I think along these lines, it’s an exciting time for the earth. I just pray we can make it through the transition.

This process of even just beginning to think about taking responsibility for my food supply is fascinating.

Something clicked in my mind last night while I was reading a book, Blessed Unrest, by Paul Hawkins. The author was talking about food and regional cultural identities:

Food has always been at the heart of cultural identity. The loss of its traditional foods is just as devastating to a culture as the loss of its language. Although globalization has caused havoc in all areas in every country, slow movements are not anti-globalization; they are pro-localization. Savoring something--a spice, a radish, a piece of cheese—brings us back home to the world in which we walk and breathe. It slows us down. Taste is social. We come together, sit and talk together around food; we clink glasses and laugh and engage in small gossips and whispers in the presence of local beers or wines, tisanes and small cakes with gooseberry preserves and clotted creams, or thin wafers bearing full-fatted cheeses daubed with slices of purple figs. It is how we share being alive. We can engage in the virtual world of iPod music and TV drama, but there is no virtual world of taste. It is in our mouth, and everyday our mouth connects us to place.

My connection to the land has always been so important to me. We literally are one with the land and the land shapes us. What clicked for me is that until now I’ve been missing a very vital aspect of this connection: food! When we lived close to nature and experienced oneness and rootedness and a sense of place, we were literally being sustained by the land. We were becoming one with the land by eating it, bringing it into our bodies, turning it into our flesh!

 

 

The earth fed itself to the plants and we fed on the plants. By eating locally, our place became literally a part of us. How beautifully grounding!

Nowadays, we rootless nomads eat foods from thousands of miles away, from sterile soils in hundreds of different places. We’re not products of our local ecosystems, we’re foreign invaders who remain separate and uninvolved.

I became really moved last night thinking about growing my own food. It’s a way to honor the earth and this place, to be a part of nature again. And I was moved just thinking about my first batch sprouts—how miraculous new life is!

I felt such an overwhelming love for the land and again, like when I was a teenager, I felt the urge to hug the earth. A really deep feeling of peace and contentment washed over me, as if my whole body and soul let out the deepest sigh. I keep getting closer and closer to the real essence of life! I love this process.

Still I feel like I’m being remade. Each passing month brings new realizations and new subtle changes. Bit by bit it’s all adding up (to what I don’t know).

Well, I decided I am going to have a garden this year. Just a small plot—4’ by 25’--but I’m going to try bio-intensive gardening, so I may be able to produce quite a lot from it. And if that goes well, next year I’ll make it even bigger. I spread my three years worth of compost on it, and then a good layer of aged manure that John brought over. Next I need to double-dig it to loosen the deeper soil, and then it should be ready. I’m doing a simple mounded bed (without wood sides, so no expense there) and I’m going to interplant my beans with the corn, so I won’t need trellises for them. I’ll need to stake or cage the tomatoes, but that’s probably it. Peas can climb up the outside of the compost. So, I got around my ridiculous idea that having a garden required the outlay of too much cash up front.

I did buy a fan type sprayer for the garden hose, a V for the outdoor faucet so I can have the sprinklers on one and the garden hose on the other. I need to buy one more length of hose still, plus probably some garden fencing to keep the cat population out. I’ve got most of the seeds already and I’m building seed flats this weekend from lumber scraps. I also got a few clay pots to start some indoor herbs (but I’m also doing an outdoor herb garden as well).

Yesterday I started my first batch of sprouts (for eating, not growing). I’m eager to add them to my regular diet since they’re so full of enzymes and nutrients.

This is one more step towards becoming self-sufficient that I can be doing right now--raising at least some of my own food. I’ve gotten beyond the idea that it all has to wait until I move back to Pennsylvania. I’ve been reading up on bio-intensive methods and it’s so exciting to realize just how much food can be raised in a very small area.

I also took a book out of the library on solar gardening. It combines intensive gardening with solar aids to extend the harvest. It’s cool to know I can have at least some kinds of fresh vegetables virtually year round.

It’s funny how voluntary simplicity reaches into every aspect of life. Food is definitely one of the most vital aspects and it’s so much fun to be delving into it now. Gardening is just the next logical step. I already cook everything from scratch from whole foods, but to be able to grow it too will be awesome.