The garden continues to thrive. I just went out a little while ago when I first got up and picked lettuce, cucumber, and zucchini. The butternut squash are several inches long and there are a ton of them. It looks like there’ll be a ton of cantaloupe too, although right now they’re just little nubs. I’ve seen at least one watermelon, too.

We’ve got a couple of mystery melons growing on one of the cucumber vines. The only thing I can figure is that quality control standards were a little lax with that batch of seeds and it was able to cross-pollinate with a watermelon, because that’s what it looks like. The big one is about 4 inches in diameter already. I’m sure it won’t amount to anything taste-wise (a cucu-melon!) but right now it looks for all the world like a watermelon.

Even the small lima and green bean bushes have blossomed so we might yet get something out of them.

I planted the fall peas and a batch of fall beets, radishes and spinach, all of which are poking their little heads up.

So far this intensive method seems to be working amazingly well. My latest thought is to quadruple the size of the garden next year--up to about 400 square feet. I think I’d be able to raise most of the veggies we need with a garden of that size. I still need to get a pressure canner so I can preserve everything. At least for now I can water bath can pickles and jams and tomato-based things. And freeze and root cellar things.

I also want to build some cold frames at some point and maybe some solar pods, so I can start growing earlier and keep growing later each year.

I’d like to establish an herb garden along the side of the house too. I made an initial attempt with a few herbs this year, but some little critters kept eating everything as soon as the plants had a few little leaves. The catnip I even encircled with a bit of fencing to keep the cats out, but it was obviously something quite a bit smaller than a cat that got it. I don’t know what I’ll have to do to critter-proof the area until things get well established. I’m perfectly willing to share with other creatures, I just wish they’d not take the whole plants!

My thinking has been kind of cloudy for weeks. Last night I had an anxiety dream about seeing a doctor about eye and ear problems. I don’t remember the dream very well but I know I was a kid and I was waiting for Mom to show up because I wouldn’t be able to pay otherwise. I think the doctor was also a shrink; at any rate she kept insinuating that my problems were psychological.

In truth, I desperately need to get to the eye doctor because my ancient eyeglasses are worse than useless. The scratch-resistant coating flaked off long ago and now the lenses are so scratched I see everything through a haze. It’s a toss-up whether I prefer to go without glasses entirely, in which case everything is terribly blurry and out of focus, but clear in its own way--or wear them and be able to focus, but only through a thick haze.

Not being able to see well, physically, has always seemed to affect my mental clarity. I don’t know why, but that’s the way this.

Also, my ears have been bothering me lately. I just finally got them all healed from several years of mysterious oozing and now, especially at night, they hurt like I’m about to get another infection. I don’t want a repeat of two summers ago. I can’t figure what causes these problems. I had thought it was allergy-related--and it may be--but this is one of the mildest allergy seasons I’ve had in years. For the past couple of days I’ve had sinus issues too. It just may be the air is so dry lately. It’s been up near 100 degrees for the past several days. Anyway, all of these issues leave my head feeling thick and mucky.

Yesterday, Collin and I ate the first zucchini from our garden, and soon the beets ought to be ready. So far it’s been all leafy things-- lettuce, spinach, and chard--plus a few radishes. The cukes and the cantaloupe are blossoming, so there’s promise there, the corn is getting taller, and the butternut squash is about to blossom. The only things not doing well are the beans (limas and green beans); those plants are just straggling along. I don’t know if they’ll produce anything. I gave them some organic plant food yesterday—we’ll see if that helps.

Snyder seems to be going downhill fast. More and more people of dubious quality keep moving in, especially into the rental houses. I left my driver’s license in the glove box of my unlocked car the other week, and it vanished. The new kid up the street stole one of Collin’s fireworks. I’ve been awakened in the middle of the night by raucous partying. And two nights ago it was a verbal spat at such a pitch I’m sure it could’ve been heard over most of town. That was from John’s old house--some really high quality people living there! His yard has become a tangled weed-infested lot with junk piled everywhere and dogs on short chains.

Anyway I heard the woman screaming at the top of her lungs, hysterically, but the only thing I can make out was something like, “You never spend any time with me. He’s more important to you than me.” The level of this woman’s rage and hysteria was truly remarkable.

And as I lay there tossing and turning and drifting in and out of sleep I kept having thoughts about how largely egoless I’ve become and how that really changes everything. The extreme level of upset that woman was gripped by is a result of ego. It’s an identification with “me” as an isolated dot, a “me” that tries futilely to manipulate other isolated dots to meet its own egotistical needs. A “me” that will always be sorely disappointed. So much of the suffering in this world is due to ego.

When you largely transcend ego, you also largely transcend suffering.

A little while ago I had the treat of seeing a beautiful vivid orange oriole in the side yard. Earlier in the week I had seen him and his mate in the tree right outside the front door, so they may have a nest nearby or they may just be in the neighborhood because one of Joe’s trees is flowering magnificently right now. And then about five minutes later, the oriole was followed by a blue jay (they don’t show up in my yard too often). I’ve always loved jays even though they were a nuisance when I had bird feeders.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately on the Internet about permaculture. It seems to be a way we're reconnecting with the earth and the particular ecosystem to which we belong. Still, there’s something missing I sense. I can’t quite put my finger on it yet, but I’ll let it incubate.

I think it may have something to do with there still being too much human willfulness involved, too much ego imposed on the landscape. Granted, there is a highly developed level of mindfulness in creating these balanced and self-supporting systems. And yet they are being imposed on the land. I think to be truly integrated into an ecosystem, we have to tune into the spirit of the land and resonate with it, asking ourselves, “What wants to manifest here?” Rather than merely mimicking a healthy ecosystem, we need to let the ecosystem birth our human endeavors.

I’m sure there are some who are practicing this deeper kind of permaculture but I haven’t come across anyone trying to articulate it yet.

I need to get better at articulating my ideas about the land. It all seems like such a vital piece of the puzzle and no one else is addressing it. I need to be able to share what I’m learning.

For the past week or so, I’ve been haunted by a new “past life” memory which I’ve never remembered before, but which of course feels so intimately familiar I wonder how I ever could’ve forgotten.

Where do these come from and what makes them resurface when they do? Always I feel such aching and longing when they do, such sorrow for the loss of a precious way of life.

This memory is of ancient Greece (well not totally ancient because there are already impressive ruins). And it may not be exactly Greece, but at least that area of the Mediterranean. It seems to be a largely seafaring life, or at least the seafaring parts are the memories that are most prominent.

The qualitative feel of the memories is one of extreme well-being and contentment, of having a very rich life full of new experiences. I can feel the strong breeze coming over the prow of boat, feel the warmth of the sun beating down out of brilliant blue skies, see the white rocky coast and the hills beyond. All of those senses combine into the most luscious sense of well-being in my body.

When we anchor the boat, we go ashore and explore the surrounding countryside, finding fascinating ruins that speak of far earlier times and capture my imagination.

It is a peaceful time, a vibrant, healthy time for our civilization. There were few threats to our well-being and it was a time of abundance.

I wish we could recapture that!

I find it interesting that in all of the memories I’ve recovered over the years I have a very difficult time in remembering the people. I have a very good sense of who they were, in a general way, but I don’t usually remember individuals. I’ve heard it said that it would be too painful to remember all the friends and family and loved ones of past lives and I believe that to be very true. It would be overwhelming and sad to have full recall. All of those beautiful individuals, who manifested but once on this earth in that particular form--a product of that particular time and place.

I think it’s enough that I remember the landscapes, the scenery, and the whole “feeling-sense” of each life. I think the land gives birth to the lives lived upon it, so to re-immerse myself in the memories of those lands allows me to grasp what the relationships were like qualitatively. I don’t need to know the details (and I do think they indeed would be too painful) to get the full flavor of the lives lived.

So what triggered this memory now? There’s been something profound in just growing a garden this year--I can’t quite put my finger on it but it does feel like it connects me to the past. It may have been simply the smell of the basil I pinched back on the indoor plants. Obviously, I’ve smelled basil before. I’ve even grown it before and no Greek memories surfaced then. But it feels like right now, that beautiful pungent smell transports me there. And gardening in general gives me a sense of well-being--a pale imitation of the feeling in my memories, but a sense of well-being nonetheless. It’s been so long since I’ve revelled in that kind of overall, full-bodied feeling of wellness.

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.