I have been reading The One-Straw Revolutionby Masanobu Fukuoka over the last year. It is a small book, but each essay/teaching/experience/chapter packs a powerful punch and I have taken my time, savoring each section. Usually I am quite greedy when I read a book and devour it too quickly, but this book is one that makes you see things from another direction entirely and it takes a while to allow the ideas to settle in, in fact you just want to take as much time as possible when reading this book.

I highly recommend this book. Masanobu Fukuoka was a remarkable man and I have only come to know about him and is work in the last couple years. Please enjoy the following excerpt from the chapter entitled A Village Without War and Peace by Masanobu Fukuoka:

Read more ...

I discovered this, written by a Shaker while I was studying at the Culinary Institute of America. One of the most fantastic aspects of that school is the huge library they have of culinary works from across the centuries. I was writing a paper on the Shakers. When I first read this I got goose bumps and my spine shivered.

Unfortunately the people who are in positions of power currently in our world are generally on pretty bad diets. Couple that with high stress lifestyles and we have a perfect recipe for paranoid, grumpy and negative thinking personalities. Is it really such a good idea to let people like this run our world? The following, written by a Western Plowman and published in The Shaker Manifesto of September of 1883, lays this out in clear language.

Read more ...

I would like to offer you all this to ponder upon in apology for my long absence…

Ibn El-Arabi of Spain instructed his followers in this most ancient dictum:

There are three forms of knowledge. The first is intellectual knowledge, which is in fact only information and the collection of facts, and the use of these to arrive at further intellectual concepts. This is intellectualism.

Second comes the knowledge of states, which includes both emotional feeling and strange states of being in which man thinks that he has perceived something supreme but cannot avail himself of it. This is emotionalism.

Read more ...

The One-Straw Revolution is Masanobu Fukuoka’s manifesto about natural food and farming. It is a collection of short essays that were translated from Japanese. Masanobu was trained as a scientist, but rejected modern agribusiness and centuries of agriculture lore. He perfected what he called the “do-nothing” technique of farming. Masanobu Fukuoka died in 2008 at a ripe old age yet still stunning the world with his highly effective no-work farming techniques.

This little book is filled with amazing insights into modern life. These excerpts were taken from sections on food and natural diet. Masanobu Fukuoka puts into clear and concise language a practical way to return to a state of health for our world and ourselves. I highly recommend getting your own copy as this book is so full of profound understandings of nature that they are best absorbed in small doses.

Read more ...

The Chinese Year of the Tiger begins on Valentines day this year, making it extra special in my book… 14/2/2010. I was born in the year of the tiger so I confess to being prejudiced in this area . In honor of the upcoming New Year and because I was just going through an old folder full of some favorite quotes from years ago and discovered this wonderful tale of a lost tiger:

A tigress, pregnant and nearly ready to deliver, walked stealthily along the edge of a high cliff foraging for food. She looked over into the grassland below and spied a flock of goats grazing in the sunshine. Hungry as she was, she hesitated because the drop was precipitous. Then she took a great leap, and in the fall she lost her balance. The noise sent the goats scurrying into the forest for shelter. The neck of the tigress was broken as she hit the ground, but in her death throes she managed to give birth to her cub. Then all was silent.

Read more ...

This post, from my series of posts on the history of Haiti, taken from Dr. Paul Farmer’s book Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor gives excerpts of the history of Haiti, especially surrounding the massacre that took place in Raboteau. An interesting side-note here is that the city of Philadelphia dumped a barge of toxic waste on Haiti, which ended up sitting at the port not far from the slum of Raboteau.

The following are taken from Chapter 2 Pestilance and Restraint: Guantanamo, AIDS and the Logic of Quarantine:

“Landmark human rights trials have taken place recently in Haiti, a first. The most important of these occurred in Gonaïves, once famous as the place where Haiti’s declaration of independence was signed, after the slaves’ decisive 1803 victory over Napoleon’s forces.”

Read more ...

Paul Farmer has worked in rural Haiti for more than twenty years. He is a doctor and anthropologist and has written several books on health inequalities. Known as Dokte Paul throughout Haiti, he has improved rural health by teaching basic health practices as the best preventive medicine. He has also worked in Russia, Chiapas and various other desperate places and has even had a book written about him: Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World by Tracy Kidder.

I personally don’t know much about Haiti, what I do know has come from reading Dr. Paul Farmer’s book Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Dr. Farmer knows the people of Haiti, he has worked with them and listened to them for years, healing them as best he can. The current situation in Haiti could have been avoided to some degree if more people had listened to Dr. Farmer years ago. This book, Pathologies of Power was written in 2004 and gives clear insight into the various levels of abuse that the people of Haiti have been subjected to for years from the international community, most specifically the US of A. There is not much I can do for the people of Haiti from where I sit except to share these insightful words. We are directly responsible for the terrible ongoing situation in Haiti.

Read more ...

The word “biodynamic” seems to be all the rage these days, so I thought it appropriate to attach it to Rudolf Hauschka’s perspective on Vitamins .

I am one of those people who personally believes that nature got it right the first time…in other words a spoonful of home-made rose-hip syrup provides Vitamin C in a natural form that is easily absorbed and digested by humans–synthetic Vitamin C will never be the same thing. (Despite this I do confess to taking a Vitamin B complex tablet daily at the moment – not something I usually do but a naturopath recommended it so I thought I’d try it out).

Chapter Eighteen of Rudolf Hauschka’s book Nutrition: A Holistic Approach (1967) gave me a completely different perspective of vitamins than I have come across before. His section on the history of food and nutrition also looks at the interaction of humans and food in an entirely different light but I will have to do a separate post for that.

Read more ...

Quotes in this post are from Nutrition: A Holistic Approach by Rudolf Hauschka.

“We have made use of our thoughts to develop techniques which aim to build a civilization based on comfort. Those who notice how narrow and egotistical this self-serving use of thought is may also find, as they observe themselves, that their thinking has become shadowy and abstract; it can no longer lay hold on the reality of the cosmos. Such individuals may begin to wonder what would happen if they served thinking instead of making it serve them. What would be the result of making oneself a perceptive organ for the power of thought, of concentrating one’s whole being in the act of listening? One who practices this art will find himself able, with this selfless new thinking, to enter the realm of living metamorphosis, where thoughts grow and become expressions of the creative thinking of the cosmos. He comes into touch with objective reality, with essential being.” p 45

Read more ...

Uncle Walter Johnson, the last of a generation in our family passed away on December 4, 2009. His wife Betty passed away earlier, peacefully and at home, something that Uncle Walter fought hard to have for her. His memorial service was held at Pearson Point in Washington state on the 11th of December, 2009 at the original church built by his ancestor. His grandson Mark, quoted this poem which was one of Uncle Walter’s favorites at the service. I am posting it here in memory of our great Uncle Walter. It sure is a big IF and mighty difficult, but well worth aspiring to.

If by Rudyard Kipling:

Read more ...