spring has sprung

DSC07659…at least inside my house (it’s still so cold outside and it looks so barren because Easter is early this year).  I love Easter for its pagan symbols and meanings, eggs and rabbits for fertility and renewal, greenery in vases for new growth, young tender green vegetables and lamb for Easter dinner for the lambs that are born in the spring and the vegetables that begin to sprout (inside in our latitude). DSC07666 A German Easter custom is to blow chicken eggs out, paint or dye them, and hang them from branches; pussy willows are customary, but any branches cut from the garden will begin to sprout little green leaves during the weeks leading up to Easter.  Ahhhhhh – green!  So nice after all the browngrey and white.  Each year I also buy one hyacinth.  As it unfolds during the pre-Easter weeks its strong fragrance begins to permeate the entire house – hmmmm, the smell of Easter, the smell of spring.  DSC07660

As a matter-of-fact, I like all festivities that connect us to nature and the seasons, and life in general.  It is grounding and reassuring and meaningful.  It reminds us of our deep connection to nature.

cheap seeds or not?

I used to buy cheap seeds on sale at the end of the season, the cheaper the better, and non-organic of course.  I didn’t think it mattered whether seeds were grown organically or not.  My somewhat limited belief was that if the vegetables grew without chemicals and in my own healthy soil that was enough.  But that is a narrow perspective. DSC07641 Then I learned that poor soil (the depleted kind that needs to be sprayed chemically) makes poor seeds with poor genetic material, which in turn will make poor plants (and poor food).  Or the other way round, mineral rich soil makes genetically complex seeds and plants that make for good food.

More recently, I read an article by Margaret Roach, which opened my mind to two more implications of buying non-organic seeds.  First, “growing vegetables for their seed often involves more chemical use than growing those same crops for food" (didn’t know that).  Second, plants grown from non-organically grown seeds adapted over many seed generations to existing in a chemically enhanced soil, and thus may not do as well in mineral rich and chemical free soil (didn’t know that one either).  Tom Stearns, founder of High Mowing Organic Seeds, says that "organic gardeners are using a dull tool when they use seeds from conventional agriculture."

sacred agriculture

UntitledAgriculture is only about 10,000 years old and it has shaped today’s cultures fundamentally.  Agriculture enabled population growth and the population explosion of the past 50 years.  Agriculture is also what has brought forth culture as we understand it; it is specifically agriculture that enabled the development of the first great cultures in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Agriculture was a new concept then, as we moved from a nomadic lifestyle and collecting our food through hunting and gathering, to settling down and harvesting food from the same surrounding area year-in and year-out.  The hunter-gatherer lifestyle permits nature to renew itself naturally, while agriculture, if not practiced wisely and in tune with nature, depletes the soil – and then what?

Agriculture is the unification of nature and man.  We exhibit our current disconnection from nature through the type of agriculture we have created – soil-depleting monocultures that require outside chemical input to produce food at the expense of environmental and human health.  However, the significant growth of the organic (funny -  until about 150 years ago all agriculture was organic), sustainable (better than organic), and  biodynamic (the best) agricultural movements demonstrates an emerging awareness of the deep connection between ourselves, nature and our food supply.  We exist as part of nature, not apart from nature, and strictly on the basis of light and water.  Without nature we do not exist. Sacred agriculture!

the power of the positive

I was very saddened this morning by a short video that was circulated on Facebook on the far reaching (literally and pun intended) consequences of our garbage culture.

We create our reality through all the thoughts and beliefs we generate, either the fear-based ones about everything we don’t want, or alternately the ones that were not thought out carefully enough, such as  "more and more stuff."

Watch the video: the situation is the result of a culture that keeps wanting more and more in disassociation with nature and our fellow men.  I had to remind myself of the power of positive thinking.  Only when we begin to formulate in our minds the kind of world we actually do want to create, and when it is formulated in cocreation with nature, can we turn this ship around.  The thing is that it starts within each of us.

beauty of the seasons

Season specific activities, decorations, and foods ground me and connect me in a deeper way with nature and my surrounds.  Because they teach the children to live by the natural rhythm of the seasons I truly appreciate that we have four distinct seasons here in the northeast. Fall is my favorite.  October is so beautiful and I like the crisper temperatures.   In general, I love the many distinct fall activities and festivities, from back-to-school after the long and hot and lazy summer, to pulling out my sweaters and our thick down comforters, to apple picking and fall foliage, the last barbeque of the year, Halloween with its pumpkins and gourds, the first fire of the season in the fireplace, and then, when it becomes blustery out there, Thanksgiving, which leads directly into the sparkly year-end holidays.

love those germs

Enough fighting already!  We fight too much – enemies, wars, illnesses, death.  They are all simply another aspect of the same thing. Balance, not eradication, is the answer. A little dirt, a little dust, a healthy amount of bacteria is actually good for you. Most of us know by now about the drawbacks of antibiotics – those indiscriminate bacteria killers prescribed much too liberally to humans and animals over the past decades in an effort to kill all the “bad” bacteria. A new book was recently published on the possible relationship between our modern germ killing frenzy and the surge in recent civilization and autoimmune diseases, possibly even autism.

So eat your yoghurt, sauerkraut, kimchi and pickles (naturally fermented, not the supermarket vinegar kind), drink your kefir, kombucha, wine, beer or mead, and clean your home and body with gentle and natural cleaning and cleansing products instead of those germ killing antibacterial soaps and cleaners.

 

 

why eat organic?

The stale and narrow premise that what distinguishes organic from non-organic foods is simply their nutritional content is on the table again in today’s NY Times article by Kenneth Chang about a new megastudy to that effect.  But, as Sonya Lunder,a senior analyst with  the Environmental Working Group stresses, many who buy organic foods are aware of the complexity of issues beyond mere nutritional aspect. The nutrition debate leaves, as in the past, a whole host of other reasons why to buy organics off the table.  Besides ingesting less residual toxins from pesticides buying organic groceries, produce, meat and fish means choosing the health of the environment and biodiversity over sprayed monocultured fields, it means voting for the health of the farmworkers so they don’t get exposed to toxic pesticides and herbicides, in the case of meat and fish it means choosing not to ingest antibiotics and surface bacteria (another relevant article in today's paper), it also means voting against genetically modified plants and animals, and it means choosing the more humane tending to, raising and slaughtering of animals for meat.  Lastly, if buying from a nearby farm, choosing organic is linked to choosing local over global.

So, buying organics is a vote for a multitude of betterments, not simply a choice for more nutritious food.