I’m really starting to think I don’t want any electricity at all when I go off-grid. To totally do that I’d have to find a property with a spring or else a shallow well that would allow hand pumping. If that presents too much of an obstacle I can settle for a solar or wind-powered pump. But that should be the extent of my electric needs, unless I absolutely need a laptop.

And still this crazy idea to have a dirt floor is holding sway—and not one of these fancy, polished dirt floors that you see in multi-million dollar “green” homes—I’m talking about plain dirt. At least to start, then maybe filling in some or all of the floor with brick or stone as time goes by.

It seems like dirt would have many good qualities. If the house was too humid, wouldn’t it absorb some of the moisture?  And likewise, if the air was too dry, maybe it would exhale some moisture.  And it would probably help to regulate the temperature too, moderating between extremes. (And wouldn’t it be wild to grow your houseplants right in your floor?)

Of course there could be some potential drawbacks. I’m thinking a dirt floor would be best in a dry climate, otherwise mold might be an issue. Bugs could be a problem too. And of course dust getting tracked around.

But, ah, just imagine always having your bare feet in contact with the earth—something in me is screaming out that this kind of contact is vital for our well being. I don’t know why—I just feel that I need to have my feet on the dirt.

And the separation of indoors and out would be minimized—you’d always be connected to nature.

I wonder if building codes require floors? Or would I have to find a place where building codes weren’t in effect or weren’t enforced?

People would probably think I’d gone off the deep end if I had a dirt floor. But billions of people have lived and do live on bare dirt. I certainly wouldn’t be without company.

Of course there’s a stigma involved with dirt-floor living. But that’s okay. We’ve been so busy getting civilized and giving up our primitive and barbaric ways that I don’t think we recognize everything we’ve lost.

“Dirt-floor poor” people are connected to the earth. The dirt-floor poor are not the ones out there plundering the earth. Is it just because they’re poor and don’t have the resources to plunder, or is it maybe because they’re still connected to the land—Mother Earth?

I keep reading up on the topic of re-mineralization. It’s such a fascinating topic. Today I found a website that talked about re-mineralization in terms of raising healthy horses—what was necessary for the soil in order to grow healthy grasses in order to have healthy horses.

I never realized (then again I don’t know much about horses) that metabolic syndrome is a major problem for horses, just as it is for people. It seems that when soils are depleted in essential elements the starches and sugars that plants synthesize cannot be built into amino acids. The minerals provide the alchemy that allows amino acids to form. So, the animals who graze on depleted pastures get too much sugar, not enough minerals, and not enough amino acids or proteins.

The author at one point said something along the lines of—the metabolism of the grass and the metabolism of the horse are one and the same. That was a powerful statement for me to read. It feels like it has really far-reaching implications—not all of which I feel able to express just yet.

But part of it has to do with my thoughts about us being emanations of the land and globules of the land and expressions of the land. We’re so ridiculously interconnected with everything else it seems absurd to act as though we’re each independent entities.

There’s such a weird blending in my mind of the factual and the mystical when I think about these things. It’s so fascinating to me and as I’ve said before this is just a totally unexpected line of thinking for me. Wisdom wants to unfold--it’s not a line of inquiry I ever would’ve planned to pursue. It just wants to be known. 

That book I took out of the library last year—The Herbal Medicine-Maker’s Handbook--comes to mind. I was reading people’s reviews of it on Amazon once and while most people loved it there were quite a few people who were put off by the author’s “New-Age”, hokey, and fruity asides about plant energies or spirits or things like that. Those critics are clearly people who have not worked with herbs, because as fruity as it sounds, when you begin to work with herbs it’s obvious that these are entities, that they have specific personalities and powers. It’s not “out there” at all—it is what is!

So, when I think about such things as herbs, it’s this weird blending of these very practical matters—what essential elements does this specific herb tend to concentrate, which essential oils are present, what kind of soil does it prefer, what habitat?—and the odder, more mystical thoughts—what is expressing itself here, why does this blending of the earth and sky manifest as this, with these particular properties, what is being communicated here? Every living thing is a communication of sorts. The land communicates through living tissue.

Plants communicate with us through dreams, imagery, and intuition. I find it odd how casually people talk about the way animals instinctively know what to eat for health and healing and yet such a fuss is made when anyone suggests that our ancestors instinctively knew these things as well. Animals know, and people know (if they pay attention) because all living things communicate. Plant wisdom is available to us simply because plants exist, they emanate from the earth, and anything that emanates by default communicates. We don’t need scientists to isolate healing compounds in a plant before we go to that plant for healing. If we listen, the plant will tell us what it can do.

I came across something interesting yesterday too. I was reading about hops and came upon a picture of the female flowers—the part that’s most frequently used. Now I’ve seen hops growing before but had never noticed the flowers. They’re shaped like little nubby pinecones, about one to two inches long!  Just like the things in my dream in January. And then I read that hops can induce vivid dreams. Remember that in my dream the nubby things induced hallucinations in high doses. Vivid dreams—hmm, could I be getting warm yet?

I poked around a little more. Everywhere I looked when it mentioned hops in the context of vivid dreams it mentioned mugwort in the same breath. My impression is that mugwort is much more powerful at inducing vivid dreams than hops is. Still, extremely interesting.

And because of that dream last January, I’ve learned at least a little bit about three different plants: buriti, hops, and mugwort.

Self-sufficiency has become an absolutely enormous obsession for me. It’s frustrating that I can’t do it all now, but encouraging because I see myself making progress in knowledge and applied learning.  I’m just doing what I can for now.

I really want to get some hens next year. Definitely for the eggs of course, but they should also make a dent in the grasshopper population should we have a plague again next year. I think I’ll probably get about ten unsexed birds to start, and butcher all the boys at around fifteen weeks. Ideally, I only want three or four hens, but you just don’t know what kind of mix you’ll get when they aren’t sexed.

This year’s garden has been so wonderful. I found the 500 square feet to still be extremely manageable—I probably average ten or twenty minutes in the garden per day—and with that I’m able to deal with watering, weeding, fertilizing and bug stomping, as well as harvesting, as necessary. These 500 square feet really produce quite a lot even considering all the losses this year due to grasshoppers and hailstorms. Raising all of my food seems quite a reasonable endeavor. I, of course, am not saying that just these 500 square feet would be enough to live off of—no, of course not.  And I don’t have enough space here to grow everything I would want to--the grains are the killer. But I’m getting a good sense of what I can produce and how much space is required.

If I get hens and rabbits and a beehive and expand the garden to a thousand square feet, I think I could reduce our grocery bill to $50 per month or less. If only I could have a dairy goat here that would reduce it to about $15 per month. And if I was able to grow all of my wheat then all I would need to buy would be spices and exotic things I couldn’t grow myself—plus maybe some other types of meat for variety. 

So, when I get back to Pennsylvania, even if I’m only able to buy an acre or two, I feel confident that I could easily disengage from the system.

Next year I might try devoting 100 square feet to oats (the hulless variety) just so I can get a little experience growing grain. I forget what John Jeavons says is the expected yield per 100 square feet for oats, but I’m thinking it’s about 10lbs. (I could be wrong—it might only be about 4lbs). At any rate, that would provide enough for the year, I think. We don’t currently go through a whole lot of oats. The nice thing is that it would also provide me with some free straw, which I use for mulch and I’ll need for chicken bedding. I’ll need to get a grain roller though, but that’s okay because it’s on the master list.

Next year I want to go vertical much more--picking pole beans instead of bush beans and climbing varieties of the cucurbits. Growing potatoes in a bin or a couple of bins, getting pole peas. Building a good tall climbing structure for my indeterminate tomatoes. I’m already using space quite efficiently with the bio-intensive beds, but I could do even better. The three 100 square foot beds I put in this year beside the house are such a hoot—it’s just one massive wall of vegetation right now.  A jungle out there! I love it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about land lately—how I’m going to afford to buy a piece of land in five years. If I give up on the idea of Pennsylvania (where land seems to be fairly pricey) I open up for myself many more possibilities. I noticed on the web that many five acre plots in the San Luis valley of Colorado sell for $5,000. Sure some of them are on the valley floor (i.e. the treeless desert) but other parcels are up in the hills. It’s not exactly the climate or place I’d ideally want to be, but if it could be had for $5,000 and I could raise all of my own food there it might not be a bad idea. Property taxes for a plot that size are about $75 per year and building codes are unenforced.

Think about it. Five thousand dollars would put me on a piece of land. I could erect a small temporary shack right away with a wood stove, a composting toilet and I could haul in my water to start. As I was able I could have a well drilled, start improving the land’s fertility, putting in the gardens, building the animal pens, eventually building the main house. It seems quite attainable.

I was reading up on soil mineralization on the web yesterday. Next year I want to get my garden soil re-mineralized, but I’ll need to get a soil test done first.

The one site gave me some food for thought. It was talking about all of the elements and how carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen come from the atmosphere and the rest come from the earth (of course, oxygen is also bound up as oxides in the earth). Ninety-five percent of our bodies and the bodies of all living things are made up of these atmospheric elements while only five percent of our bodies are comprised of the remaining elements and yet those elements are absolutely vital for our well-being.

This got me thinking about my insights (or glimmerings of insights) from earlier this year about the meeting of earth and sky within us. If the mineral elements have largely been leached out of the soils, then we are unbalanced in favor of sky influences. To be healthy and the fullest expressions of ourselves we need to feed on mineralized soils.

We are globules of earth and must carry the earth within us. The earth elements root us to the land. But instead of insuring our adequate intake of earth elements, we gorge ourselves on sky foods--carbohydrates, especially.

Healthy people need to eat from mineralized soils. They need to eat a diverse diet of plant foods—vegetables, fruits, herbs, nuts, grains and other seeds—as well as healthy animal foods. Each living thing concentrates its own unique spectrum of elements. By eating diversely we ensure that our own unique spectrum of elemental needs will be met.

I’m eager to remineralize the soil here and begin to become a healthier and fuller expression of my humanness.

Another thing that interested me on this website was the mention that ocean animals are always fully immersed in all of the natural elements, and that before we fouled the oceans with our toxic pollutants, sea creatures did not suffer disease or degeneration the way land creatures do. 

I realized that water is where earth and sky meet. They can’t mingle otherwise, or not readily. Our bodies are containers for holding water—the necessary medium for earth and sky to meet.

Sea creatures are bathed in the ideal medium. We land creatures are vulnerable to deficiencies because we are not.

The website mentioned the work of Dr. William Albrecht. He was the soil scientist who first recognized the importance of minerals for healthy soils and healthy people. Anyway, the website said Albrecht called foods comprised of the atmospheric elements “go foods” because they gave the body energy (which indirectly comes from the sun through photosynthesis). He called the foods comprised of earth-bound elements “grow foods” because they are necessary for the growth and maintenance of healthy bodies.

I find all of the earth and sky metaphors really fascinating because there seems to be truth lurking here. The sky is cerebral, ethereal, mental. The sky is about energy and Doing. The earth is grounded, rooted, about bodies and health and Being. Sky foods give you energy to Do, earth foods give you health to Be.

An imbalance which brings too much of the sky within us causes too much Doing, too much cogitating, too much ungrounded, disconnected action.

If we all ate properly balanced, mineralized foods would we all become more grounded and more balanced? If you fed the CEO of Monsanto healthy foods would he suddenly mend his ways? I’m sure it’s not so simple—the patterns of a lifetime probably could not so easily be changed—but I’ve no doubt he would see changes, in health, in mood and attitude, and possibly, just possibly, in more fundamental ways.

To really see changes would probably take a few generations. We raise our children from the day they’re born on healthy mineralized foods (well, okay breast milk from day one—hopefully mineralized breast milk),but we may still pass on some deficiencies to them because of our years of eating unhealthy, unbalanced foods, but their children stand a chance of achieving optimal well-being, and of expressing their fullest potential.

I struggle financially in this world because the global marketplace is at a scale that is too large for me to handle. The global marketplace hides cause and effect relationships and is destructive and dehumanizing.

I need to operate within a much smaller economy—a homestead with some local exchanges. I just need to figure out a way to earn enough money to buy some good land, build a good cabin and outbuildings, and supply it with all the tools I’d need to live self-sufficiently.  Then I’d be able to live in a proper-sized economy. The majority of our physical needs should be supplied locally. From the rest of the world we should only trade inspiration, love, beauty, culture, art, spirituality, knowledge, stories, dance, wisdom, dreams, myths, friendship, peace, kinship, sun, moon, stars, wild imaginings, and only those physical commodities that spring uniquely from the locale. Spices from the Spice Islands, Vidallia onions from Georgia, ginger and tea from China, maple syrup from Vermont, olive oil and balsamic vinegar from Italy, etc. The unique expressions of particular places should be our only commodities, and with limits. Certainly the earth should be left intact as much as possible—not ripped apart for diamonds and coal.

There’s a metaphysical aspect to gardening and eating fresh healthy foods. I’ve been experiencing this most strongly with the herbs—I feel like each one has its own personality and each one shapes human expression when ingested. Plants are powerful. It seems important to take in a wide variety of plant essences—not just for generic health but because in a metaphysical way we absorb their attributes. We will be sickly humans as long as we continue to eat the standard American diet—we will be physically sickly, but more than that, we will be diminished humans, unable to reach our full potential.

A few nights ago I had a dream that is still lingering in my mind. I had moved back east. In the dream it was Kentucky, but it looked just like Pennsylvania. I was moving into a simple, pleasant-looking house that sat on the edge of a forest. There was a front lawn that would be perfect for gardening and the woods would offer lots of wild foods and materials for crafting. I was going to be working at a Folk School of some sort. The whole feeling of the dream was one of coming home to my destiny, being where I belonged and doing what I was meant to do. And also of finally being a part of a like-minded community. I felt such deep contentment.

In my mind I can immerse myself in the setting of this dream and when I’m snapped back to reality here by some practical concern like having to move the water in the garden, the whole aura of the dream lingers and I feel like I’m a different person. If I lived in that landscape I would be the fullest expression of myself. For those fleeting moments where I’m transitioning back to reality here I am that fuller self.  It’s beautiful while it lasts, but it leaves such an ache in my heart. For a few moments, the aura of that land gets superimposed on the land here and it feels like anything is possible. I so desperately need to get back home.

The Folk School reference in the dream was interesting—and totally unexpected. It made me realize that a very core part of me is my love of traditional skills and crafts. Also it was clear that this love of mine is an expression of the energy of the whole Appalachian region, as evidenced by the Folk Schools that sprang up there.

Maybe part of my destiny there will be to teach classes. First, I will have to learn all the skills involved in self-sufficiency, but eventually I should have a wide range of hands-on knowledge to pass along.  It would be neat one day to have my own mini Folk School.

Last night I had a strange dream. I was in a forest with some other people in these wildcats chased us up the trees. These were mountain lions, leopards, panthers, etc.—the big cats except these either weren’t full grown or were just smaller varieties of each species—like medium-sized dogs, maybe.  Anyway, there was a person above me in the tree I had climbed so I was blocked from going any higher. A cat climbed up and started clawing at me. I grabbed it by the neck and kept punching and kept punching it in the face and head until it was disoriented enough that I could toss it to the ground. Then another one came up after me. This one I grabbed by the scruff of the neck and swung it around and around in circles to get it dizzy, then I tossed it. They kept coming up and I kept abusing them and tossing them away. In the end I had bloody hands but no other apparent injuries. I sensed that the cats were not going to allow themselves to continue to be harassed but would simply move on to new territory to get away from us humans. I felt sorry that we had entered their territory and forced them out—all I had intended was simply to save my own life.

The dream might simply be a metaphor for what we’ve done to so many animal habitats, but I wonder if there isn’t more to it than that.

The garden is now up to about 500 square feet, since I added a new bed for some of the fall crops—fall peas and beets are in already and there’s room for a little more of something.

I'm still thinking about expanding next year. Eight hundred square feet is sounding about right to me now. I think I could pull that off without making the whole yard look like one big garden. (If I owned the place that wouldn't be a concern.)

Next year I want to get some bean towers or rig up some bean trellises. I want to be able to grow a lot of dried beans for use in the winter. 

Herbs have begun to preoccupy me a bit. When I move back to PA, I want to have an enormous herb garden. It’s been great this year having nine different herbs growing, but I want much more than that. I really believe fresh herbs are vital for good health.

Most mornings Collin and I have been enjoying a cup of oregano and rosemary tea. It sounds a little odd, I know, but it’s really delicious. I make a decoction—just steeping the herbs isn’t enough to release the flavor—and it gets a really wonderful full-bodied flavor. It’s so wonderful to go out to that big bed of oregano every morning.

I've added a small still to my wish list now. I want it so I'd be able to distill essential oils from all of my herbs.  That would cost several hundred dollars, so it’s got to go lower down my priority list.

This month I bought a food strainer to help with the upcoming tomato harvest. And once I buy the optional screens it will be good for other things like pumpkins, berries, grapes, and making salsa.

Bit by bit I’m making progress—I expand the garden a bit, get a few more tools, learn new recipes and preserving techniques, try new varieties of veggies and herbs. By the time I move back east I should be fairly well set. It’s nice to be doing something productive while I’m here in Colorado. There’s a lot I can do already as I work towards self-sufficiency.

The garden is really starting to go crazy, even though I was so late in planting a lot of it. We've got a grand total of 448 square feet of garden this year—four 4' x 25' beds and two 3' x 8' beds. I've been having small salads every day—mostly just lettuce, spinach and chard plus a few radishes and green onions.  The potatoes and tomatoes have started to blossom, although I pinched off the first tomato blossoms. I think we have at least 30 different things growing this year: potatoes, radishes, parsley, garlic, zucchini, carrots, lima beans, oregano, red onions, cantaloupe, white onions, cilantro, chives, spinach, lettuce, Swiss chard, beets, green beans, watermelon, Roma tomatoes, beefsteak tomatoes, and a mix of heirloom tomatoes, gourds, butternut squash, basil, hot peppers, bell peppers, dill, chamomile, and pumpkins. In the house there’s also catnip and rosemary and more basil, plus some cabbage seedlings. Oh, and I forgot the two kinds of sweet corn and the pickling cucumbers (out in the garden of course!)

I keep praying a hailstorm doesn’t come and wipe it all out. We should have quite a bounty otherwise. The only major problem so far has been a plague of baby grasshoppers. They decimated the basil so I planted some more, but now the ones I thought were total goners look like they might survive. The new batch of basil has sprouted, so we could be totally overwhelmed with basil this year (or get nothing at all). We already have an absurd amount of oregano and parsley.

Next year I want to add still more types of veggies. I don’t know where I'll put them, though. I'll have to expand even more!  I still haven’t had luck getting any broccoli seedlings going. Either they don’t sprout at all or they die off as seedlings. This is the second year in a row I’ve had issues with broccoli. So I’d like to get some broccoli next year. Also, rutabagas, turnips, and parsnips, Brussels sprouts, maybe start some rhubarb and strawberries. Grow kale, collards, bok choy and celery.  Try Spanish peanuts and horseradish. Okay, so all of this would require at least one other whole bed, maybe even more space. If I could just get the side yard fertile enough to grow herbs, I could move all the herbs there. Not that that would free up a huge amount of space, but it’d make a dent.

I’ve been in another King Solomon phase again lately—what is there under the sun that is new? What hasn’t been done before and why do we keep doing the same inane things over and over again?

We went over to John's to watch movies last week and I realized there are really only a few plots out there—the great themes of human existence—just done over and over ad nauseam with infinite variations. Why do people want to watch the same thing over and over? So few of the major plots apply to me anymore so there’s really little appeal. Movies about money, riches, stealing, greed, materialism, envy, treasures, collections, fancy this, fancy that—no appeal. Murder, betrayal, jealousy, violence, war, brutality, gore—no appeal. Love, lust, sex, winning the girl (or boy), tragedy, loss. All of these basic themes over and over and over again. And none of them represent real life that sits waiting to be lived once you get off the couch. I just don’t get it. And once you do get off the couch and live the real themes of live—what’s really the point when they’ve already been lived over and over and over again in the real world just as they have been in the movies? There has to be more to it than this.

I’m at the point where I realize it doesn’t matter a bit if I live or die. I’m just one of an infinite number of processes unfolding on the earth and in the universe and death is just a transformation of my energy. I don't cling to my life because in and of itself it's not all that significant. I think it’s the ongoing process of life and transformation that matters much more.

Probably the fact that I wear my life loosely is an asset or could be if I knew how to use it. It gets back to fearlessness and freedom. With no fear of death I should be able to live fearlessly and radically. But what are these times really calling for?  What are the radical, free, and fearless acts that are needed?

I’ve been refining my latest model of the cabin I want to build when I move back east. I think I’ve got it pretty much figured out. It would be 512 square feet, strawbale on three sides (the south side will be largely windows and doors, so I will just in-fill the post and beam with 2 x 6 studs and thick insulation), there’ll be a stone floor (or possibly brick) with braided area rugs. A built-in bed, a loft above the bedroom/sitting area, a wrap-around porch on two sides, enclosed on the north side, so it could be used in three seasons and as a sleeping porch in summer, a masonry fireplace, wood cookstove and probably propane cooktop (for summer cooking), my non-powered fridge, solar and woodstove heated water, a composting toilet, a nice pantry that could easily be expanded by 64 square feet, bringing the total square footage of the house up to 576—91 square feet larger than the house I live in now.

This model doesn’t waste any space the way some of my previous models did. It’s pretty efficient, I think. At some point I’d like to build a balsa-wood scale model of it.

Speaking of using space efficiently, the other day I drastically rearranged the kitchen. By drastically I mean going so far as to move the refrigerator. There’s not really much else you could move around in there. The fridge was right next to the stove, which is always a bad place for a fridge, plus whenever someone had the fridge door open you couldn’t get past them to get into or out of the kitchen. I moved the fridge into a corner where I had some shelves and the table, moved one of the shelves where the fridge had been, moved the hexagonal table out into the living room, moved the rectangular harvest table into the kitchen and put it under the window where it fit perfectly between the counter and the fridge. What a huge difference it has made! It feels so open and airy and bright. It’s easy to move around and nobody’s blocking anyone’s way. Why didn’t I think of doing this sooner?

I was flipping through the workbook we used back when we had our little Mastermind group and I came across one exercise I had done in it. You were supposed to list your deepest urges and afterwards see if you could identify certain themes. Could some of them be grouped under a single theme, or were they quite separate? I don’t think I recognized it at the time, but what really jumped out at me when I saw it the other night was that it’s all one theme. All of my deepest urges concern occupying a particular spot on this earth and participating fully with that spot. That’s it. That’s all I really want.  A place of my own, preferably a place with some biodiversity. A place to sink down long roots. A place to get to know with great intimacy. A place that could support me—where I could raise and grow and gather all my food. A place that nurtured my soul as well. A place where I could participate in the rhythms of nature, and the seasons. A single spot on earth that I could merge with, become one with. That’s been my deepest urge and my deepest need. That’s how I can be the fullest embodiment of who I’m  meant to be.

I saw a neat plan on the Internet last night for a non-powered refrigerator. It just uses a copper coil full of refrigerant and a bunch of radiator fins placed outdoors to freeze solid a huge chunk of ice each autumn. The chunk stays frozen (or mostly so) all through the year until the next autumn when you freeze it again. More and more I’m leaning towards going not just off-the-grid, but even totally without electricity of any kind. I could have a masonry stove, wood cookstove with hot water reservoir, solar hot water, a non-electric fridge, candles, lanterns, a root cellar and other forms of cold storage, and lots of hand tools. If it was all paid for as I went and I truly could be self-sufficient I could get away with having no phone or internet. Those are the only two things I might still need if I weren’t self-sufficient and I still needed to earn some money. Of course, I’ll always need to earn enough to cover property taxes, but I could probably do that without having phone or internet.

It’d be nice to find an inexpensive piece of land and build a small strawbale cabin. I’d have a composting toilet and maybe an indoor hand pump and an outdoor one. And a gray water system from the sink, tub, and wash tub. No wiring, no septic system, no major plumbing to do.

I’m still pushing to get the garden dug. I have one more full bed to dig, plus I’m probably going to make a smaller bed for the corn. The weather’s been really rainy the past two days so it’s nothing but mud—terrible for digging, but great for all of the seeds and seedlings out there. I saw when I peeked out this morning that my mesclun salad greens had sprouted overnight. I planted them quite late, but since you harvest them so small I should be able to get something from them before it gets too hot.

I haven’t been good about getting my crops in early this year, but then again I’ve been preoccupied with digging the new beds. I think I underestimated just how huge the job would be. I gave up plugging the sod into the front lawn after I dug the first bed. It was taking way too long, so after that all of the sod went into the compost bin. At least next year it should all be a breeze.

Next week I’m going to buy materials to build some trellises. I’ll build two 7ft. stretches of trellis for the butternut squash and Collin’s gourds and then a series of horizontal trellises for the tomato bed.  I can’t afford to trellis the whole bed this year, so I’ll leave the determinate paste tomatoes to sprawl and just worry about the beefsteak and heirloom tomatoes. Next year I can expand.

I’ve eaten my first semi-wild food salad this year, and a semi-wild food stir-fry with Collin the other night. It just contained lamb’s quarters and dandelion greens in addition to our store-bought vegetables. Boy, lamb’s quarters are really delicious and I have a profusion of them in the side yard. To think I had been tossing them in the compost bin all this time. I do feel a little self-conscious out there picking weeds and then carrying them into the house for dinner. I doubt that the neighbors would even notice me doing that, but it still feels a little funny.

I’m still working on the garden expansion project. Unlike the bed I created last year, which was on bare ground, all the new beds are covered in grass, so I’ve been sod-busting—quite the slow and grueling process. It doesn’t help that I’m taking the sod and then plugging it into bare spots in the front yard. That seems to take even longer than digging it up. I’m running out of time to get it all done. It sounds like the weather’s going to be kind of lousy this weekend—we’ve had a long string of wet weekends now. But I need to push to get the garden ready.

Well I lied when I said I wouldn’t check out any more books!  I’m just utterly hopeless.  Yesterday at the library I saw that in the New Arrivals they had gotten in two books this week that I had seen referenced in recent days and was curious about.

The first one was by Malcolm Gladwell—called Outliers: The Story of Success.  It was a quick little read—I had it more than halfway devoured before I left the library and I finished the rest of it this morning once I got home. 

It provoked some new interesting thoughts which I will be exploring on my blog this weekend.  (I’ll fill you in once I write the blog—if I go into it right now I’m afraid I’ll lose the juice needed to turn it into a good blog entry.)

The thing I had heard about it though was that it talked about how people without exception need at least 10,000 hours of practice in a particular area of interest before they become a master.  It made me think about all of the hours I’ve put into reading and learning about global issues and (now) attempting to write about what I’m learning.  It would seem like I’m working towards some interesting level of mastery.  I have to be getting at least close to that 10,000 hour mark.  It’s just exciting to be reminded that an apprenticeship doesn’t go on forever.  At some point a critical mass of knowledge and understanding is reached and you can begin contributing your own body of wisdom on the subject.

I’m still reading a book about the evolution of language (the book I had allowed myself to keep reading) and the other new book I took out of the library was The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal.  As I mentioned last year when I read How Many Americans, I’ve never believed in borders, so I’m interested in seeing if this guy can make a compelling case for closing our borders.

But, really, after these two books I’m going to take a break from reading for a little while.  I need to take time to assimilate all of the ideas I’ve read recently and explore them through writing.

Except that…I forgot to mention one thing.  A few nights ago online I discovered that hundreds of thousands (if not maybe over a million) of public domain books have been digitized and are available free online.  Ellsworth Huntington’s early book (circa 1915) Civilization and Climate is available, but Mainsprings of Civilization was much later (the 1940’s I think) so it’s not available.  I started to read Civilization and Climate and have given myself permission to finish it too if I wish before the moratorium begins.  I’ve only gotten to page 17 but already his methodology seems crude and his underlying assumptions extremely racist.  I can see why environmental determinism got such a bad rap.  But I still want to plow through it and seek out any nuggets worth keeping.

Every Thursday after I drop Collin off at school in the morning I go get a cup of coffee at a Burger King right near the library and then sit there and read and write while I kill some time before the library opens at 10am.  Burger King is a great place for thinking (of all available options) because of its very un-hipness.  No one else is ever in there except this one guy who has the exact same schedule as me—he shows up at the same time and heads to the library from there.  It’s rare for more than one or two other people to drift through the doors while I’m there with my coffee, so it’s very quiet.

Anyway, while I was there yesterday I was free-writing about what the most recent spate of books is teaching me.  I’m going to include the notes here (because I’m too lazy tonight to clean them up and summarize them more coherently).  Beware all of the incomplete sentences and the way the ideas in the second half of the writing contradict the ideas in the first half—it was evolving as I wrote.

Here it is:

What has my reading binge this week taught me?  It taught me just how recently in the history of our species we have begun to move out of the mythic and unconscious into a rational, conscious awareness.  Still there are many vestiges of our magical thinking—witchcraft and sorcery in recent centuries in European cultures and still in many indigenous cultures today.

--address the need for us as a species to take a longer view.  We think we are these incredibly rational beings but in fact we’re still in a phase where there’s a huge overlap between magical and rational modes of being.  The rational mode of course isn’t superior, just different and fraught with its own set of problems.

Our rational brains make possible global solutions, but more often rationality is used to promote destructive self-interest.  Magical unconsciousness was about self-interest as well, or self-interest extended as far as the tribe but no farther.  Rationality needs to take us beyond self-interest, or at least extend it to global self-interest.  Altruism would be another word for global self-interest.

I need to examine myself to see how often I’m governed by potentially magical thinking versus rational thinking.  Is my experience of the energy of the land magical thinking, or is it something else?

How can I deny the truth of many intuitions?  Am I seeing and projecting connections that don’t exist?  For instance, my intuitions about J a few weeks back?  I dreamed repeatedly of her, had her pop repeatedly to mind, had a dream about N, only to find out that J had been in Phoenix that week and had revisited the place where she lived when N was born.  It would seem that intuitions are causally related to real events.  It can’t just be chance.  So where is the line drawn between magical perception and intuition?  Is superstition and magical thinking actually a crude, early version of rationality?

Maybe intuition and direct perception is a ground—a true mode of perception.  And maybe our crude early experiences with rationality were to try to layer meaning onto intuition and direct perception.  So, magical thinking is beginning to play with meaning and to try to attribute cause and effect to events.  As we began to separate out from the events and places we were immersed in, to become conscious we became aware of everything that was “Other” and needed to make sense of that.  Our myths and superstitions were precursors to science and other modes of “rationality”.

Magical thinking is actually rational thinking, it just may not be accurate thinking, but then again scientific thought is frequently inaccurate, too.  What we’ve been up to with all these modes of “rational” thought is to try to make sense of what is.  Magical thinking wouldn’t be possible if we were still unconscious.  We need to have separated out from the matrix into discrete dots of awareness in order to have magical thinking or scientific thinking at all.

What are we evolving towards?  Direct conscious awareness. Simple, direct knowing of what is.  Expressing what is—being and knowing.  Will the making of meaning be necessary anymore?  Will metaphor be necessary?  Probably not.  Or maybe it will.  It’s hard to imagine a world without metaphor—no poetry, no art, no innovation.  Metaphor, I guess, is the language of manifestation.

I need to expand on this line of thinking, plus there are other insights hovering about from this latest group of books and I need to capture those insights before they melt away.

Discovering Civilization and Climate online this week was a good thing because it let me see clearly how rational thinking has been evolving. His crude scientific methodology seems to fall somewhere between magical thinking and modern scientific approaches. He doesn’t seem to be aware of the biases and faulty assumptions underlying his work, which makes it very similar to the faulty logic of superstition, myth, and magical thinking. But he’s also being methodical, and sincerely trying to eliminate bias (which is impossible to do when the biases are still unconscious). Even present day science is blind to what’s unconscious. I’m sure today we have just as many inaccurate perceptions underlying our methodologies—and we won’t be able to see them until we evolve past those inaccuracies. We need to enter a different paradigm before we can see clearly the inherent inaccuracies and “magical thinking” in this paradigm.

So the earth excreted life—countless globules of earth—and once excreted, life could become conscious of itself because there were now points of reference.  Self and Other came to be.  We globules of land became aware, but at the same time, only aware of our separateness.  All of this has happened in the blink of an eye.  Now we’re at the point—self-aware and conscious and awake enough—to recognize that we’re not separate at all.  Once we fully awaken to our total, unified identity we will be able to act congruently with the land.  We’ve gone through a period of chaos as billions of us groggily awakened and said, Huh?  What?  Who am I?  Where am I? and groped about and made a mess of things while we tried to get our bearings.  Now we’re sloughing off the grogginess, and beginning to get it.  Oh, I’m just a node of Gaia, connected to all other nodes.  Part of a web I am utterly dependent upon for my existence.

I’ve been on another reading binge lately, which is very bad because I really need to be writing instead.  Once I finish the book I’m currently reading I’m not going to let myself check anything out of the library for awhile.

But regardless, as usual all of these books are triggering fascinating lines of thought.  It always seems like all of the various topics have a way of converging in my mind—leading to interesting insights and clues that you wouldn’t get to without the juxtaposition of so many ideas at once.  It’s a neat kind of synergy.