aus dem buddhismus

der buddhismus sieht das ganze universum wie eine unendliche einheit, in ihr wiederholen sich unendlich oft geburt und tod. wir selbst erleben unsere geburt und unseren tod als teil dieser einheit, aber wir können auch jeden tag beobachten, wie ein teil von uns stirbt und ein anderer geboren wird: winzige millionen zellen sterben ab, haare fallen aus, neue zellen werden geboren, ein neues haar sprießt. unser körper altert jeden tag und dennoch erneuert er sich immer weiter, bis wir eines tages die hülle wieder in den kreislauf der erde zurückgeben, unser physisches dasein beenden, um in anderer form wiederzukehren. aber immer sind wir ein teil des ganzen, des universums.

♥

amazing graze...

... how sweet the taste!

read more here: grazing vs meals

the fruitarian = my inspiration

plus more inspiration to embrace a fruity lifestyle: great blog post by beautiful & vibrant raw fruitarian Michele.

and last but not least, someone special shared this vid with me today, and I must say, watching it was defnitely worth my time. it's about how self-abuse comes into existence and how we can get rid of it.

end self-abuse now!



- do not own the shame and guilt of self-abuse
- no child is ever born violent
- deprived of empathy, some children will direct their anger against themselves
- this can happen in form of eating disorders, drug addiction, depression etc.
- or they direct their anger against other (i.e. war etc.)
- who the hell is society to morally criticize me? fuck them!
- when I'm attacking myself, I know it's coming from the outside, projected guilt
- I push back the guilt
- stand up for children
- no one deserves to be abused
- who are you to tell me how to live my life?
- I'm addicted to life :)

exploding nutrition myths - brenda davis

I met Brenda Davis years ago, at the World Vegetarian Congress in Germany. I was high fat raw vegan back then and she was giving great talks on Raw Food and Vitamin D. She looked vibrant, fit and healthy - and really young, too. She told me, that she's high raw, especially in the Summer months, but also enjoys some cooked vegan foods, like veggie stews and legumes in the colder months. She's a great inspiration to me. (She's one of the people, like Jeff Novick, who inspire me to earn a graduate degree in Nutrition and Dietetics and become an RD. Maybe one day, who knows! I'd love to!)

Myth 1: You need meat to get enough protein!



Myth 2: Fish is necessary for omega-3 fatty acids



Myth 3: The lack of B12 in plants is proof that we need to eat meat



Myth 4: You need milk to get enough calcium



Myth 5: Plant enzymes are of no value to human health



Myth 6: Cooked foods are toxic



Myth 7: Soy foods are dangerous for your health



Myth 8: There are no bad foods

Chief Seattle's Speech

"Yonder sky has wept tears of compassion on our fathers for centuries untold, and which, to us, looks eternal, may change. Today it is fair, tomorrow it may be overcast with clouds. My words are like the stars that never set. What Seattle says, the great chief, Washington, can rely upon, with as much certainty as our pale-face brothers can rely upon the return of the seasons. The son of the white chief says his father sends us greetings of friendship and good will. This is kind, for we know he has little need of our friendship in return, because his people are many. They are like the grass that covers the vast prairies, while my people are few, and resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain. The great, and I presume also good, white chief sends us word that he wants to buy our lands but is willing to allow us to reserve enough to live on comfortably. This indeed appears generous, for the red man no longer has rights that he need respect, and the offer may be wise, also, for we are no longer in need of a great country.

"There was a time when our people covered the whole land, as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor. But that time has long since passed away with the greatness of tribes now almost forgotten. I will not mourn over our untimely decay, nor reproach my pale-face brothers for hastening it, for we, too, may have been somewhat to blame.

"When our young men grow angry at some real or imaginary wrong, and disfigure their faces with black paint, their hearts, also, are disfigured and turn black, and then their cruelty is relentless and knows no bounds, and our old men are not able to restrain them. But let us hope that hostilities between the red-man and his pale-face brothers may never return. We would have everything to lose and nothing to gain. True it is, that revenge, with our young braves, is considered gain, even at the cost of their own lives, but old men who stay at home in times of war, and old women, who have sons to lose, know better.

"Our great father Washington, for I presume he is now our father as well as yours, since George has moved his boundaries to the north; our great and good father, I say, sends us word by his son, who, no doubt, is a great chief among his people, that if we do as he desires, he will protect us. His brave armies will be to us a bristling wall of strength, and his great ships of war will fill our harbors so that our ancient enemies far to the northward, the Simsiams and Hydas, will no longer frighten our women and old men. Then will he be our father and we will be his children.

"But can this ever be? Your God loves your people and hates mine; he folds his strong arms lovingly around the white man and leads him as a father leads his infant son, but he has forsaken his red children; he makes your people wax strong every day, and soon they will fill all the land; while my people are ebbing away like a fast-receding tide, that will never flow again. The white man's God cannot love his red children or he would protect them. They seem to be orphans and can look nowhere for help. How then can we become brothers? How can your father become our father and bring us prosperity and awaken in us dreams of returning greatness? Your God seems to us to be partial. He came to the white man. We never saw Him; never even heard His voice. He gave the white man laws, but He had no word for His red children whose teeming millions filled this vast continent as the stars fill the firmament. No, we are two distinct races and must ever remain so. There is little in common between us.

"The ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their final resting place is hallowed ground, while you wander away from the tombs of your fathers seemingly without regret. Your religion was written on tablets of stone by the iron finger of an angry God, lest you might forget it. The red man could never remember nor comprehend it. Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors, the dreams of our old men, given them by the great Spirit, and the visions of our sachems, and is written in the hearts of our people. Your dead cease to love you and the homes of their nativity as soon as they pass the portals of the tomb. They wander far off beyond the stars, are soon forgotten, and never return. Our dead never forget the beautiful world that gave them being. They still love its winding rivers, its great mountains and its sequestered vales, and they ever yearn in tenderest affection over the lonely hearted living and often return to visit and comfort them. Day and night cannot dwell together. The red man has ever fled the approach of the white man, as the changing mists on the mountain side flee before the blazing morning sun. However, your proposition seems a just one, and I think that my folks will accept it and will retire to the reservation you offer them, and we will dwell apart in peace, for the words of the great white chief seem to be the voice of nature speaking to my people out of the thick darkness that is fast gathering around them like a dense fog floating inward from a midnight sea.

"It matters but little where we pass the remainder of our days. They are not many. The Indian's night promises to be dark. No bright star hovers about the horizon. Sad-voiced winds moan in the distance. Some grim Nemesis of our race is on the red man's trail, and wherever he goes he will still hear the sure approaching footsteps of the fell destroyer and prepare to meet his doom, as does the wounded doe that hears the approaching footsteps of the hunter.

"A few more moons, a few more winters, and not one of all the mighty hosts that once filled this broad land or that now roam in fragmentary bands through these vast solitudes will remain to weep over the tombs of a people once as powerful and as hopeful as your own. But why should we repine? Why should I murmur at the fate of my people? Tribes are made up of individuals and are no better than they. Men come and go like the waves of the sea. A tear, a tamanamus, a dirge, and they are gone from our longing eyes forever. Even the white man, whose God walked and talked with him, as friend to friend, is not exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers, after all. We shall see.

"We will ponder your proposition, and when we have decided we will tell you. But should we accept it, I here and now make this the first condition: That we will not be denied the privilege, without molestation, of visiting at will the graves of our ancestors and friends. Every part of this country is sacred to my people. Every hill-side, every valley, every plain and grove has been hallowed by some fond memory or some sad experience of my tribe. Even the rocks that seem to lie dumb as they swelter in the sun along the silent seashore in solemn grandeur thrill with memories of past events connected with the fate of my people, and the very dust under your feet responds more lovingly to our footsteps than to yours, because it is the ashes of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch, for the soil is rich with the life of our kindred. The noble braves, and fond mothers, and glad-hearted maidens, and the little children who lived and rejoiced here, and whose very names are now forgotten, still love these solitudes, and their deep fastnesses at eventide grow shadowy with the presence of dusky spirits. And when the last red man shall have perished from the earth and his memory among white men shall have become a myth, these shores shall swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children shall think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway or in the silence of the woods they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night, when the streets of your cities and villages shall be silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not altogether powerless."

better people ♥

Lyrics | Xavier Rudd lyrics - Better People lyrics


I ♥!!


I really like and respect John Robbin's work - check out this vid and his NGO EarthSave. He's definitely one of the 'good guys'. ;)

born to run

the starch solution?

some tunes

cluster of interests

Anthropology Atheism Philosophy Running Music Biology Yoga Linguistics Mythology Anarchism Primatology Communication Neuroscience Astronomy Literature Constructivism Cognition Nutrition Ethology Reading Anatomy Philology Botany Free Will  Evolution Writing Books Frugivorism Health Creativity Horticulture Theatre Poetry Physiology Natural Hygiene Physics  Permaculture  Languages Chaos Meditation Fantasy
Beauty Nature Consciousness Arts Ecology  
Freedom

 

eden was a garden, not a farm

I want to share a great article about the ecological, political and cultural reasons why agriculture is unsustainable and harmful to this planet and its inhabitants, and how permaculture/horticulture can be a solution.


Eden was a Garden, not a Farm
Is Sustainable Agriculture an Oxymoron?

Published in Permaculture Activist #60, May, 2006
Source

Jared Diamond calls it “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”(1) Bill Mollison says that it can “destroy whole landscapes.”(2) Are they describing nuclear energy? Suburbia? Coal mining? No. They are talking about agriculture. The problem is not simply that farming in its current industrial manifestation is destroying topsoil and biodiversity. Agriculture in any form is inherently unsustainable. At its doorstep can also be laid the basis of our culture’s split between humans and nature, much disease and poor health, and the origins of dominator hierarchies and the police state. Those are big claims, so let’s explore them.

Permaculture, although it encompasses many disciplines, orbits most fundamentally around food. Anthropologists, too, agree that food defines culture more than our two other physical needs of shelter and reproduction. A single home-building stint provides a place to live for decades. A brief sexual encounter can result in children. But food must be gotten every day, usually several times a day. Until very recently, all human beings spent much of their time obtaining food, and the different ways of doing that drove cultures down very divergent paths.

Anthropologist Yehudi Cohen (3) and many subsequent scholars break human cultures into five categories based on how they get food. These five are foragers (or hunter-gatherers), horticulturists, agriculturists, pastoralists, and industrial cultures. Knowing which category a people falls into allows you to predict many attributes of that group. For example, foragers tend to be animist/pantheist, living in a world rich with spirit and in which all beings and many objects are ascribed a status equal to their own in value and meaning. Foragers live in small bands and tribes. Some foragers may be better than others at certain skills, like tool making or medicine, but almost none have exclusive specialties and everyone helps gather food. Though there may be chiefs and shamans, hierarchies are nearly flat and all members have access to the leaders. A skirmish causing two or three deaths is a major war. Most of a forager’s calories come from meat or fish, supplemented with fruit, nuts, and some wild grain and tubers.(4) It’s rare that a forager will overexploit his environment, as the linkage is so tight that destruction of a resource one season means starvation the next. Populations tend to peak at low numbers and stabilize.

The First Growth Economy

Agriculturists, in contrast, worship gods whose message usually is that humans are chosen beings holding dominion, or at least stewardship, over creation. This human/nature divide makes ecological degradation not only inevitable but a sign of progress.

While the forager mainstays of meat and wild food rot quickly, domesticated grain, a hallmark innovation of agriculture, allows storage, hoarding, and surplus. Food growing also evens out the seasonal shortages that keep forager populations low.

Having fields to tend and surpluses to store encouraged early farming peoples to stay in one place. Grain also needs processing, and as equipment for threshing and winnowing grew complex and large, the trend toward sedentism accelerated.(5)

Grains provide more calories, or energy, per weight than lean meat. Meat protein is easily transformed into body structure—one reason why foragers tend to be taller than farmers—but turning protein into energy exacts a high metabolic cost and is inefficient.(6) Starches and sugars, the main components of plants, are much more easily converted into calories than protein, and calories are the main limiting factor in reproduction. A shift from meat-based to carbohydrate-based calories means that given equal amounts of protein, a group getting its calories mostly from plants will reproduce much faster than one getting its calories from meat. It’s one reason farming cultures have higher birth rates than foragers.

Also, farming loosens the linkage between ecological damage and food supply. If foragers decimate the local antelope herd, it means starvation and a low birth rate for the hunters. If the hunters move or die off, the antelope herd will rebound quickly. But when a forest is cleared for crops, the loss of biodiversity translates into more food for people. Soil begins to deplete immediately but that won’t be noticed for many years. When the soil is finally ruined, which is the fate of nearly all agricultural soils, it will stunt ecological recovery for decades. But while the soil is steadily eroding, crops will support a growing village.

All these factors—storable food, surplus, calories from carbohydrates, and slow feedback from degrading ecosystems—lead inevitably to rising populations in farming cultures. It’s no coincidence, then, that farmers are also conquerors. A growing population needs more land. Depleted farmland forces a population to take over virgin soil. In comparison, forager cultures are usually very site specific: they know the habits of particular species and have a culture built around a certain place. They rarely conquer new lands, as new terrain and its different species would alter the culture’s knowledge, stories, and traditions. But expansion is built into agricultural societies. Wheat and other grains can grow almost anywhere, so farming, compared to foraging, requires less of a sense of place.

Even if we note these structural problems with agriculture, the shift from foraging at first glance seems worth it because—so we are taught—agriculture allows us the leisure to develop art, scholarship, and all the other luxuries of a sophisticated culture. This myth still persists even though for 40 years anthropologists have compiled clear evidence to the contrary. A skilled gatherer can amass enough wild maize in three and a half hours to feed herself for ten days. One hour of labor can yield a kilogram of wild einkorn wheat.(7) Foragers have plenty of leisure for non-survival pleasures. The art in the caves at Altamira and Lascaux, and other early examples are proof that agriculture is not necessary for a complex culture to develop. In fact, forager cultures are far more diverse in their arts, religions, and technologies than agrarian cultures, which tend to be fairly similar.(3) And as we know, industrial society allows the least diversity of all, not tolerating any but a single global culture.


A Life of Leisure

We’re also taught that foragers’ lives are “nasty, brutish, and short,” in Hobbes’s famous characterization. But burial sites at Dickson Mounds, an archaeological site in Illinois that spans a shift from foraging to maize farming, show that farmers there had 50% more tooth problems typical of malnutrition, four times the anemia, and an increase in spine degeneration indicative of a life of hard labor, compared to their forager forebears at the site.(8) Lifespan decreased from an average of 26 years at birth for foragers to 19 for farmers. In prehistoric Turkey and Greece, heights of foragers averaged 5'-9" in men and 5'-5" in women, and plummeted five inches after the shift to agriculture (1). The Turkish foragers’ stature is not yet equaled by their descendants. In virtually all known examples, foragers had better teeth and less disease than subsequent farming cultures at the same site. Thus the easy calories of agriculture were gained at the cost of good nutrition and health.

We think of hunter-gatherers as grimly weathering frequent famine, but agriculturists fare worse there, too. Foragers, with lower population densities, a much more diverse food supply, and greater mobility, can find some food in nearly any conditions. But even affluent farmers regularly experience famine. The great historian Fernand Braudel (9) shows that even comparatively wealthy and cultured France suffered country-wide famines 10 times in the tenth century, 26 in the eleventh, 2 in the twelfth, 4 in the fourteenth, 7 in the fifteenth, 13 in the sixteenth, 11 in the seventeenth, and 16 in the eighteenth century. This does not include the countless local famines that occurred in addition to the widespread ones. Agriculture did not become a reliable source of food until fossil fuels gave us the massive energy subsidies needed to avoid shortfalls. When farming can no longer be subsidized by petrochemicals, famine will once again be a regular visitor.

Agriculture needs more and more fuel to supply the population growth it causes. Foragers can reap as many as 40 calories of food energy for every calorie they expend in gathering. They don’t need to collect and spread fertilizer, irrigate, terrace, or drain fields, all of which count against the energy gotten from food. But ever since crops were domesticated, the amount of energy needed to grow food has steadily increased. A simple iron plow requires that millions of calories be burned for digging, moving, and smelting ore. Before oil, one plow's forging meant that a dozen trees or more were cut, hauled, and converted to charcoal for the smithy. Though the leverage that a plow yields over its life may earn back those calories as human food, all that energy is robbed from the ecosystem and spent by humans.

Farming before oil also depended on animal labor, demanding additional acreage for feed and pasture and compounding the conversion of ecosystem into people. Agriculture’s caloric yield dipped into the negative centuries ago, and the return on energy has continued to degrade until we now use an average of 4 to 10 calories for each calorie of food energy.

So agriculture doesn’t just require cropland. It needs inputs from vast additional acreages for fertilizer, animal feed, fuel and ore for smelting tools, and so on. Farming must always drain energy and diversity from the land surrounding cultivation, degrading more and more wilderness.

Wilderness is a nuisance for agriculturists, a source of pest animals and insects, as well as land that’s just “going to waste.” It will constantly be destroyed. Combine this with farming’s surplus of calories and its need for large families for labor, and the birth rate will rise geometrically. Under this brutal calculus of population growth and land hunger, Earth's ecosystems will increasingly and inexorably be converted into human food and food-producing tools.

Forager cultures have a built-in check on population, since the plants and animals they depend on cannot be over-harvested without immediate harm. But agriculture has no similar structural constraint on over-exploitation of resources. Quite the opposite is true. If one farmer leaves land fallow, the first neighbor to farm it gains an advantage. Agriculture leads to both a food race and population explosion. (I cannot help but wonder if eating high on the food chain via meat, since it will reduce population, is ultimately a more responsible act than eating low on the food chain with grains, which will promote larger populations. At some point humans need to get the message to slow their breeding.)

We can pass laws to stop some of the harm agriculture does, but these rules will reduce harvests. As soon as food gets tight, the laws will be repealed. There are no structural constraints on agriculture's ecologically damaging tendencies.

All this means that agriculture is fundamentally unsustainable.

The damage done by agriculture is social and political as well. A surplus, rare and ephemeral for foragers, is a principal goal of agriculture. A surplus must be stored, which requires technology and materials to build storage, people to guard it, and a hierarchical organization to centralize the storage and decide how it will be distributed. It also offers a target for local power struggles and theft by neighboring groups, increasing the scale of wars. With agriculture, power thus begins its concentration into fewer and fewer hands. He who controls the surplus controls the group. Personal freedom erodes naturally under agriculture.

The endpoint of Cohen’s cultural continuum is industrial society. Industrialism is really a gloss on agriculture, since industry is dependent on farming to provide low-cost raw materials that can be “value-added,” a place to externalize pollution and other costs, and a source of cheap labor. Industrial cultures have enormous ecological footprints, low birth rates, and high labor costs, the result of lavishing huge quantities of resources—education, complex infrastructure, layers of government and legal structures, and so on—upon each person. This level of complexity cannot be maintained from within itself. The energy and resources for it must be siphoned from outlying agricultural regions. Out there lie the simpler cultures, high birth rates, and resulting low labor costs that must subsidize the complexity of industry.

An industrial culture must also externalize costs upon rural places via pollution and export of wastes. Cities ship their waste to rural areas. Industrial cultures subsidize and back tyrannical regimes to keep resource prices and labor costs low. These tendencies explain why, now that the US has shifted from an agrarian base to an industrial one, Americans can no longer afford to consume products made at home and must turn to agrarian countries, such as China and Mexico, or despotic regimes, such as Saudi Arabia’s, for low-cost inputs. The Third World is where the First World externalizes the overwhelming burden of maintaining the complexity of industrialism. But at some point there will be no place left to externalize to.

Horticulture to the Rescue

As I mentioned, Cohen locates another form of culture between foraging and agriculture. These are the horticulturists, who use simple methods to raise useful plants and animals. Horticulture in this sense is difficult to define precisely, because most foragers tend plants to some degree, most horticulturists gather wild food, and at some point between digging stick and plow a people must be called agriculturists. Many anthropologists agree that horticulture usually involves a fallow period, while agriculture overcomes this need through crop rotation, external fertilizers, or other techniques. Agriculture is also on a larger scale. Simply put, horticulturists are gardeners rather than farmers.

Horticulturists rarely organize above the tribe or small village level. Although they are sometimes influenced by the monotheism, sky gods, and messianic messages of their agricultural neighbors, horticulturists usually retain a belief in earth spirits and regard the Earth as a living being. Most horticultural societies are far more egalitarian than agriculturists, lacking despots, armies, and centralized control hierarchies.

Horticulture is the most efficient method known for obtaining food, measured by return on energy invested. Agriculture can be thought of as an intensification of horticulture, using more labor, land, capital, and technology. This means that agriculture, as noted, usually consumes more calories of work and resources than can be produced in food, and so is on the wrong side of the point of diminishing returns. That’s a good definition of unsustainability, while horticulture is probably on the positive side of the curve. Godesky (10) believes this is how horticulture can be distinguished from agriculture. It may take several millennia, as we are learning, but agriculture will eventually deplete planetary ecosystems, and horticulture might not.

Horticulturists use polycultures, tree crops, perennials, and limited tillage, and have an intimate relationship with diverse species of plants and animals. This sounds like permaculture, doesn’t it? Permaculture, in its promotion of horticultural ideals over those of agriculture, may offer a road back to sustainability. Horticulture has structural constraints against large population, hoarding of surplus, and centralized command and control structures. Agriculture inevitably leads to all of those.


A Steep Price

We gave up inherently good health as well as immense personal freedoms when we embraced agriculture. I once thought of achievements such as the Hammurabic Code, Magna Carta, and Bill of Rights as mileposts on humanity’s road to a just and free society. But I’m beginning to view them as ever larger and more desperate dams to hold back the swelling tide of abuses of human rights and the centralization of power that are inherent in agricultural and industrial societies. Agriculture results, always, in concentration of power by the elite. That is the inevitable result of the large storable surplus that is at the heart of agriculture.

It is no accident that permaculture’s third ethic wrestles with the problem of surplus. Many permaculturists have come to understand that Mollison’s simple injunction to share the surplus barely scratches the surface of the difficulty. This is why his early formulation has often been modified into a slightly less problematic “return the surplus” or “reinvest the surplus,” but the fact that these versions have not yet stabilized into a commonly held phrasing as have the other two ethics, “Care for the Earth” and “Care for People,” tells me that permaculturists have not truly come to grips with the problem of surplus.

The issue may not be to figure out how to deal with surplus. We may need to create a culture in which surplus, and the fear and greed that make it desirable, are no longer the structural results of our cultural practices. Jared Diamond may be right, and agriculture and the abuses it fosters may turn out to be a ten-millennium-long misstep on the path to a mature humanity. Permaculture may be more than just a tool for sustainability. The horticultural way of life that it embraces may offer the road to human freedom, health, and a just society.

Acknowledgement

I am deeply indebted to Jason Godesky and the Anthropik Tribe for first making me away of the connection between permaculture and horticultural societies, and for formulating several of the other ideas expressed in this article.

References

1. Diamond, Jared. The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. Discover, May 1987.

2. Mollison, Bill. (1988). Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual. Tagari.

3. Cohen, Yehudi. (1971). Man in Adaptation: The Institutional Framework. De Gruyter.

4. Lee, R. and I. Devore (eds.) 1968. Man the Hunter. Aldine.

5. Harris, David R. An Evolutionary Continuum of People-Plant Interactions. In Foraging and Farming: The Evolution of Plant Exploitation. Harris, D. R. and G.C. Hillman (eds.) 1989.

6. Milton, K. 1984. Protein and Carbohydrate Resources of the Maku Indians of Northwestern Amazonia. American Anthropologist 86, 7-27.

7. Harlan, Jack R. Wild-Grass Seed Harvesting in the Sahara and Sub-Sahara of Africa. In Foraging and Farming: The Evolution of Plant Exploitation. Harris, D. R. and G.C. Hillman (eds.) 1989.

8. Goodman, Alan H., John Lallo, George J. Armelagos and Jerome C. Rose. (1984) Health Changes at Dickson Mounds (A.D. 950–1300). In Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture, M. Cohen and G. Armelagos, eds. Academic.

9. Braudel, Fernand (1979). Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century: The Structures of Everyday Life. Harper and Row.

10. Godesky, Jason (2005). Human Societies are Defined by Their Food.


Copyright 2006 by Toby Hemenway

music I ♥

25 things I wanna do before I die

1. learn how to surf
2. learn how to play guitar
3. dance until I'm in trance
4. attend a mediation retreat/learn how to meditate
5. eat all the fruit I care for
6. learn how to sing
7. learn and live Yoga
8. read classics of world literature
9. learn belly dancing
10. write + sing my own songs
11. invent a fantasy story
12. find a fruity family/community
13. love myself the way I am
14. know favourite songs & poems by heart
15. jump into a deserted lake - naked
16. live without money/make enough money to sustain my simple lifestyle
17. travel to Nepal/Israel/India
18. eat fresh Durian when in season
19. go on Apple Island for an extended period of time
20. plant unlimited fruit trees
21. grow fluent in Hebrew
22. grow fluent in French
23. live in a permaculture paradise
24. learn Acrobatics
25. run a half-marathon

tasty and natural // ideas

This makes me teary-eyed. Love it.

If I went 'into the wild', what would I miss?

• music
• books
• dogs
• internet

Alternatives...

• make music with friends
• make up stories and tell them to others
• make friends with wild animals/adopt wild dogs
• if I stay with a fruity family, I only need internet once in a while to contact my parents

As you can see, I definitely think about leaving my current life behind and joining a fruitarian community in the future. I made this deal with myself: I'll study this semester, work hard and in the Summer months I'll be free to travel to my fruity family and experience some life 'in the wild'. Then I'll decide what's next.

But honestly, what is holding me back? Fear. It's always fear holding me back.

I'll make the best out of this semester, though! :) I'm positive, I have some pretty amazing goals.

Goals for Summer Semester 2011:

• Studying German Philology
• Studying Philosophy ♥
• Fruitarianism (intuition instead of dogma)
• Ashtanga Yoga
• Acrobatics
• Meditation
• Walking + Running
• Listening to great music ♥ 
• Reading + going to the theatre

Love it. ♥

inspiring post: no excuses, live your life

What a wonderful post. Thank you, Harrison.

Why Does Your Life Have To Be Less Than Optimal?
Posted by Harrison on January 1, 2011

I'm sick of excuses. People will come up with an endless list of why they can't eat a healthy diet or exercise or live in a health supportive environment... even though they claim to desperately want to do all of these things. The two excuses most common seem to be the cost and the time required for such luxuries. People, this is your life. It doesn't start next month or next year or when you get a better job or when you get out of school or when your kids get out of school. Your life is happening right now.

I've been communicating with a friend living in NYC who is always telling me how envious he is of my life and how I am so lucky. I'm not lucky. I simply made a choice. He is paying $2500/month in rent and tells me he can't afford to eat as much fruit as I do. He brings in at least 5x more annually than the most money I have ever made and tells me that he can't afford the luxuries of travel and tropical fruits in abundance.

I don't have a job. No steady income. I also don't have a watch or an alarm clock or a car or a mortgage or a defeatist attitude. I manage to travel all over the planet and also manage to eat as much fruit as I want. I don't have a trust fund or drain money from relatives. I'm not on any public assistance. If I can do it what in the hell is wrong with you?

When I travel I always meet people who are even more resourceful than I am at traveling/eating cheaply.

Anything you want as far as health, food and climate is available to you right now if you are clever enough to make it happen.

resource based economy

I've just watched Zeitgeist: Moving Forward and I really loved it. It's very well done, kudos to Peter Joseph for his amazing work and all the others who contributed. I'm definitely promoting a resource-based economy. I recommend this film to everyone who wants to know more about today's economic system, human behaviour, social change, sustainability and most important of all... solutions to problems the world faces today.

Amazing. Please watch this - it's eyeopening, full of truth and contains suggestions for a sustainable solution.



I went running in the rain/snow today, the air was just perfect. It's such a great feeling to sense your heart pumping for you and your legs carrying you to various places. Usually, I enjoy my surroundings and sounds, this time I went running with my mp3 player and it made it even more fun. I ♥ music. I ♥ running. I ♥ feeling alive. Movement really is key for me to feel good and radiant in my body, it makes me feel alive. Especially, when I fuel myself with sunshine. Eh, oranges, I mean!

Going to the theatre this evening! Yay.

today's lovely eats

Today I had some wonderful fruity meals. I'm always amazed at how beautiful fresh, ripe, whole fruit is. It makes me feel like a princess and energetic like a warrior.

I had apples, oranges, kiwis, bananas today. :)

I'm reading this book at the moment and I absolutely love Victoria Moran's energy, style and wisdom. 

 

A friend shared this quote today over at the 30 bananas a day community and I really like it:

Christopher Robin said to Pooh...

Always remember you're braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think!

I'm off to watch Zeistgeist: Moving forward!

i took the road less traveled by...

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

~ Robert Frost

...which road did you take?

wonderful inspiration: living in and with nature

This article below is about a very inspiring woman who left the city life behind, embraced a fruit-based raw vegan diet and went back to Nature. The way she describes her lifestyle is just wonderful, it touches my heart. I really feel like that's what I would love to experience myself some day - hopefully sooner than later! The simplicity, beauty and and peace of this way of life really fascinate me. Read for yourself:

From the Cement Jungle of Manhattan to the Tropics of Costa Rica
A Transformational Journey to Natural Living
by Amy Schrift
Source

What inspired a dedicated New York City jazz trumpeter and music teacher to put her horn in its case and set up a homestead in the rugged jungles of Costa Rica?
Perhaps it was the one decisive evening when, after observing the ill-effects of eating typical restaurant food on a gig, I decided to switch to a healthy simple diet of foods from nature in their unprocessed and uncooked state. I felt deep within that this was my path and I haven’t looked back since.

As my body began to cleanse and purify, so did my thoughts. I soon began to max out my New York City library card with books on spirituality, nature, permaculture, and, gardening. Through my investigations, I began the practice of sun-gazing at sunrise or sunset with bare feet on the earth. I then took a natural vision course and let go of 25 years of corrective vision by “embracing the blur” and allowing my natural vision to determine what I needed and didn’t need to see.

Combine that with barefoot walking and foraging for wild foods through New York City parks and it wasn’t long before I realized that I truly desired only three things which I considered to be my natural birthrights: fresh air, pure water and fertile land.

Fast-forward to the beginning of my fourth year living solo in a lush starry-skied oasis I now call home; a 17–acre piece of land in southern pacific Costa Rica, nestled in the mountains between the city of San Isidro del General and the surfers’ town of Dominical, four hours south by car from the capital, San Jose.

Here where everything is so vibrant and alive that linear time seems to all but vanish in the unending ebb and flow of life cycles that surround me, I have assumed a lifestyle that is simple, rustic and free of such modern conveniences as a car, (one can only enter the land by foot) refrigerator, oven, stove, furniture, lights, flush-toilet, washing machine, hot water heater, television, radio, and even a bed (I sleep on a mat on the floor). I thrive on the newfound creativity and resourcefulness inspired by the concept of “less is more.” I feel empowered by no longer giving my life-force over to machines that eagerly do our work for us while our bodies deteriorate from disuse.

I live amongst two simple structures made of nature’s provisions: a wooden storage shed with a dirt floor for my personal belongings and a round thatched-roof structure with no walls and a wooden floor called a rancho, also known as a palapa in Mexico, where I sleep during the rainy months. During the dry season, I sleep on a small yoga platform under the open sky, allowing cosmic radiation to freely penetrate my body while enjoying some of my most peaceful and deep nights of sleep. Not to mention the delicious feeling of waking up with morning dew in my hair!
I grow, harvest and recycle my own food, consisting of tropical fruits, citrus, low-sweet vine fruits, heart of palm and some wild greens. By returning them to the earth in their digested state, I joyfully complete the food cycle, as all other life forms do. I generate almost no trash—as there is no trash collection here, one is painfully aware of what can’t be reused or recycled.

I often bathe in the cold, flowing waters of the creek that runs through the property and always feel deeply cleansed and recharged afterwards. I live chemical-free: sans shampoo, soap, detergents, toothpaste, crèmes or lotions. If I can’t swallow it, then I won’t put it on my semi-permeable skin! All that is natural can be cleansed by nature. And pure living water, the ultimate cleanser, is abundant in this part of the earth.

A typical day on the land looks like this. In the morning, I am awoken by the “surround-sound” of howler monkeys greeting the first light of dawn, as I begin a daily practice of meditation, yoga, air and sunbathing—my true breakfast of the day.

I prefer to eat between the hours of 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., when the sun is at its strongest and my digestive system is correspondingly most alert and active. Meals require no preparation and usually consist of one thing eaten until satiated: a pineapple, a few mangos, a handful of bananas, or the liquid and jelly-like meat of a few baby coconuts. I experience each fruit as a beautifully and uniquely wrapped gift complete in its own dish, containing a perfect balance of sun-charged nutrients that my body needs. In nature, food combining and indigestion are seemingly non-existent and an added advantage of consuming mono-meals is that it is difficult to overeat. Your body will definitely tell you when you’ve had enough.

Spending most of my time outdoors, I find myself following the relative position of the sun throughout the day and relishing its warmth, its aid in healing my wounds, and its limitless capacity to energize my entire being.

After a day’s work, I eat my last meal and retreat to the spiritually charged hours of dusk for repose, reflection and renewed focus on the breath before retiring for the night. As darkness descends, much of Costa Rica’s wildlife comes out to hunt and feed. I am both grateful and awed by their graceful, silent movements. Without the use of artificial lighting, I feel much more attuned to my body’s natural rhythms.
The other days of the week may include a trip to town for supplies, teaching English classes in the nearby village, overseeing farms of friends who are away in the U.S., an occasional social gathering, or a trip to the warm Pacific Ocean.

But perhaps most of all, I value the many hours in silence that I spend here, accompanied only by the sounds of flowing water, birds and insects. It is in these moments of deep undisturbed thought and heightened awareness that I feel my deepest connection to all that is. I am filled with gratitude and the unconditional love that surrounds me. One of my favorite pastimes is to lie on my back and gaze up at the ever-changing sky, a true metaphor for our lives.

As I wander silently amongst the flowers and trees, I feel open and receptive to their needs, as I have watched many of them grow from seedlings. When such a flower blooms in its splendor, you can’t help but feel nature’s loving embrace.

I have surrendered to the mosquitoes and other insects who faithfully bring me back to the present. And yes, I have come within very close range of snakes, scorpions and large spiders who will almost always retreat if given right of way. Most of the snakes here are non-venomous and to avoid those that are dangerous, I stay on clear-cut trails. As I slowly release my ingrained fear of them, I am instead mesmerized by their rapid, slithering, undulating movements, unique to their species.
The only thing to really worry about in nature is our unfamiliarity with it. As members of the animal kingdom, it is designed so that all of our needs can be met here.

On a recent visit to San Diego, CA, I was reminded of how concepts that I have come to take for granted in the tropics could be much more readily applied in an urban setting. For example, we can reduce up to half of our trash volume by installing animal-proof compost bins in every household or apartment complex, recycling food scraps and garden clippings into fertilizer for gardening and landscaping use. We can reduce water use by diverting grey water from sinks and faucets to a collective storage unit where it would be filtered and used for landscaping and gardening needs. Additionally, we can urge our representatives to adopt a system similar to the one used in Germany where trash is paid for by weight. This leads to much more efficient composting, recycling, and the removal of packages at the stores where you buy the products—a signal to manufacturers that they need to share in the burden and provide packaging that is recyclable and/or returnable. If you accumulate plastic bags, reuse them by rinsing them and hanging them on a line to dry. You’d be surprised at how long they last! Lastly, seek out fresh, local organic produce growing on trees in your neighborhood. If you have your own, foster community spirit by sharing your abundance or ask neighbors if they will share theirs. You can offer to pick fruit for both of you, a win-win, especially for the elderly or for those who simply don’t have time. You may even find yourself eating more fruit when you taste the difference between locally sun-ripened vs. store-bought fruit.

Ultimately, each of us must create the changes we want to see, one empowering step at a time. May all who yearn to break free from the mold discover a lifestyle that is more in harmony with our natural rhythms, Mother Earth and our higher calling.
And as they say in Costa Rica, pura vida!

Contact Amy Schrift at aschrift@gmail.com.