replenishing naturally

Lawns need fertilization.  Leaving the shredded grass and leaves after lawn mowing nourishes the soil on an ongoing basis. If you use a clippings bag you need to fertilize your lawn artificially eventually, and that never works as well as the natural way because of the chemicals.  Forest floors replenish themselves in a never ending cycle of falling leaves and other organic matter that decay and decompose back into the soil.  Houseplants especially need added nutrition since they grow in  the confined environment of a pot.  As the roots absorb minerals over time, the soil  depletes in the same way agricultural soils deplete if we don’t put nutrients back in.  I put the yellowed leaves from my houseplants back into the pot to perpetuate the continuous cycle of adding natural nutrients back, and I use the leftover water from steaming greens for my plants. 

Our minds and bodies are no different.  If you take out, you have to replenish lest your capital shrinks until there is no more.  Today’s Times has an article about the many rich who now work constantly because enough is never enough for them, and they operate on a treadmill of accumulation for the sake of accumulation - 85% of their assets are locked into investments!  But for what?  To make it to the finish line aka death with tons of money in the bank?   A business coach told me a while ago, when we were discussing some hang-ups over money, “Money is an incredible vehicle to purpose and pleasure in life.”  Locked-up money may give us a sense of security, but it doesn’t nourish the mind and gives you no purpose and pleasure.  Money by itself, sitting in an investment, account does not nourish your mind and body. Doing something with the money, dislodging it from its investment vehicle, is what moves mountains, creates meaning and nourishment not only for ourselves, but also for our society.  

If you keep taking out of yourself, by working constantly without putting back in, meaning, experiences, friendships, you deplete your human capital and your ability to experience joy and satisfaction.  Supplements can only go so far in replenishing your body and mind, coffee, alcohol and medications can help over a hump but do not replenish or heal naturally. 

How do you fertilize and replenish your mind and body the natural way so you experience meaning and joy on life?

the need to repersonalize

I have not yet switched to online banking and stop by the branch for many transactions instead of using the ATM.  Often, I get into a quick chat with one of the tellers, and leave smiling that this brief interaction was so worthwhile the extra time.  Yesterday, my husband, on the spur of the moment, stopped by a customer he hadn’t seen in person in a while.  A chat here, an exchange there, and lo and behold, he walked out with an unexpected order.

In business, we often hide behind our emails and wonder why some issues don’t get resolved, why misunderstandings arise, or why some things take an awful lot of emailing back-and-forth, with lag time in between.  Picking up the phone can resolve something in a heartbeat, and seeing someone face-to-face can move mountains and achieve so much.

In an effort to “save time,” our culture has moved relentlessly to remote, internet and email based business and communication.  However, not only does the human connection get lost, we also don’t get the full picture because the interaction is depersonalized.  So do we really save time? 

Hearing a person’s voice, reading their emotions and body language, and looking into their eyes, all provide a deeper level of communication that we seem to underestimate, and that is lacking in email correspondence.  Go to lunch with someone, pick up the phone, stop by and see your customer.  Repersonalize!

product or produce?

The other day I had a casual conversation with two friends about cauliflower crust pizza, the new gluten-free and low carb alternative to regular wheat dough pizza crust.  I said that I had made it and like it.  To which the other friend replied, “Oh, I guess you don’t just go to Trader Joe’s and buy a frozen one?”

In the name of time and convenience - their sales strategy, with a hidden profit agenda - do you support Big Food and Big Ag and buy a product with multiple ingredients and a long production chain that feeds many profit driven cogs in the economic wheel? Or, in the name of health, taste, and control of ingredients, do you buy a cauliflower, steam it, rice it, add a few eggs, a bit of binding flour of choice and some spices, and bake it?

Do you choose product or produce?

our antiquated mindset

It can all be so overwhelming – climate change with its scary apparitions in the form of runaway Amazon rainforest fires or melting polar ice caps, the state of our agriculture which has decimated the insect population (produce and fiber crops) and contributed hugely to greenhouse gases and earth’s warming (mainly industrial beef and pork farms, but also the poultry and dairy industries), the grip corporations have over our lives, and on and on.  

And then – we need to remember that we’re wired evolutionarily to react to danger and the negative – to escape that potential saber tooth tiger.  Such physical dangers are no longer there as we as a species have come to dominate life on earth.  Instead, the danger is our antiquated competitive mindset geared to warfare, violence, and attack mode.  Yet, as we have opened up to Eastern philosophies and meditation in the past few decades, we have learned that we can gain control over our mind. Just got to visit those gremlins up in the attic and become conscious and aware of them – and then an amazing shift can happen.

Times are changing and we have to evolve with them.  Our minds are still operating according to paleolithic patterns, while the world around has changed so much.  Because of our danger oriented thinking patterns we have a hard time appreciating the ease with which we live nowadays (i.e. running water, hot showers, warm homes and comfortable clothes, as well as abundant food), the privileges we have gained (i.e. education, freedom of speech, freedom to practice any religion), the natural beauty that’s all around us, the endless opportunities we have in this new world (i.e. choice of vocation), the amazing foods from all over the world we can get at any supermarket, and so much more.

Let’s get with the times and try to shift, one mind at a time, to a modern mindset of cooperation, appreciation, wonderment, sustainability, mindfulness, and equality so we can all enjoy the tremendous gains we have made, and heal and appreciate our beautiful planet earth together.

a light bulb

The other night I noticed that one of my headlights was out.  When I called our auto mechanic in the morning the recording said that they were closed for the week.  My mind went into a whirlwind of how not to drive after dark for a week to avoid getting a ticket.  Then my husband disappeared into the basement. When he came back 15 minutes later, he handed me a small lightbulb and asked me to buy a replacement at Autozone. It cost me a few dollars, and my car was back in business in minutes.  

We live in an age of information, transparency, do-it-yourself, and availability of just about anything that was previously only accessible to professionals. It’s empowering and puts us in the driver seat.  In the past I would have had to wait for the shop to reopen a week later to get the headlight fixed and it would have cost a lot more than a few dollars.  Whether it’s about purchasing specialty items or acquiring information – the availability of pretty much anything to pretty much everybody gives us agency and puts us in charge.  We’re no longer helpless, or at the mercy of a professional’s hocus pocus, and perhaps even price gauging.  We can find out for ourselves and direct a desired outcome like never before.   

In the wellness arena we’re becoming the project managers of our health with the help of publicly available information – no more Gods in the white coats. We can have a productive dialogue with the providers and jointly decide on the best course of action. When we built our house a few years ago we researched construction methods, mechanical systems, and renewable energy options, and were able to have a productive dialogue with the architect and contractor and make informed decisions.

Times have changed. You’ve been empowered.

on the incoming Aquarian energy

The Age of Aquarius entered our awareness with a big flower children/hippie/Woodstock bang in the late 1960s together with the invitation to make love instead of war.  The New Age movement, as it was called later, was mildly derided during the 1980s, but this emerging energy is back in full force although it looks a bit different now.  

Between the #metoo movement, women entering politics in unprecedent numbers, and gaining a better education in many parts of the world, female power is rising. It’s the women who are carrying the shift away from our patriarchal cultural models of the past several thousand years.  However, something more is happening.  Indigenous leader and elder, visionary, author, and scholar Barbara Hand Clow wrote in 2001 that “the Aquarian energy is so androgynous that it will tend to balance male and female powers.”

The LGBTQ movement is vocal and visible like never before (here a somewhat related post on changing family structures), and many are openly questioning gender as a binary choice.  Some male to female, and female to male transitions are playing out in bright daylight, such as William Bruce Jenner’s transition to becoming Caitlyn Jenner.  Public figures like actor Billy Porter and Jonathan Van Ness of Queer Eye’s Fab5 are questioning what it means to be male with their wardrobe choices. 

In confirmation of the incoming androgynous Aquarian energy, The NYTimes Magazine’s recent article Neither/Nor presented us with people who are not transitioning from male to female, or vice versa, but instead cannot truly define their gender according to the binary model.  Thus, transitioning from one to the other is not a choice and they feel caught somewhere else. They don’t feel female, nor do they feel male. Gender fluidity is not necessary something new on earth, as many other cultures have acknowledged a third gender (see a previous post on that).   Whether Porter or Van Ness, or the less publicly visible people who are caught in the middle, they are on the forefront of an emergent energy that will balance the strong female/male polarity we have been taking for granted for so long in the Western world. Thank you to all those pioneers who are showing us a different way.

hitting the glass ceiling

All eyes these days are on climate change.  Climate change is of course the huge challenge of our times.  This in turn creates other challenges, such as people migrations north to escape arid and hot, unsettled or flood prone areas; agricultural quandaries like longer drought periods or overabundance of precipitation, and more erratic weather patterns in general; but also shifts of growing zones, and with it for example wine growing regions moving further north, or the reduction and extinction of species. We could go on.

 With science currently being our God, we still focus on technology to fix all our problems, but we are hitting a glass ceiling.  The medical sciences don’t understand many of our current afflictions, hence cannot heal them.  Agriculture becomes ever more technology oriented with its last ditch efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change, and having to feed a still growing world population, by using ever more pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, and genetic modification technology, which is making us and the environment sick.  

Let’s face it.  Technology is helpless when it comes to something as huge as climate change.  Author Charles Eisenstein has reframed the whole climate quandary in his Climate: A New Story, and zooms out to recalibrate our outlook on a bigger issue yet, that of our disconnection from nature in general, the disassociation of ourselves from consciousness, and the need to recognize ourselves as spiritual beings in a physical body.  Even the atheist visionary historian and author Yuval Noah Harari leaves the door open to a solution beyond algorithms and technology in the final conclusion, and the final words, of his recent book Homo Deus .  He asks, ”Are organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing?  What’s more valuable – intelligence or consciousness?” 

Sometimes we need to zoom out to see an issue in a completely different light.  Already Einstein is purported to have said that you cannot solve a problem from within the same paradigm that created it.

acceptance of the rainbow

In recent weeks we have been watching the new Queer Eye series on Netflix, one nightly episode after dinner as emotional dessert.  The Fab 5, a group of celebratorily gay guys in all their fabulousness, help people find their better self with so much compassion, kindness, humor, honesty and laughs that you’ve just got to love them, even if you are culturally conservative.  How could you not like these joyful guys, besides their obvious great looks and wardrobes?  

On the surface the show is about helping their somewhat lost subjects to find their inner beauty through lifestyle changes. But the secondary message is just as important, if not more so. I love the message of acceptance the series conveys. The way to shift perspectives is obviously not through preaching, arguing or judging, but through the heart and by example.  This is a good one.

global food combos

People are on the move more globally than ever before, travelling, emigrating, fleeing, or simply moving to a new place halfway across the world.  Our cultures are no longer homogenous, and food combinations reflect that mobility as well.  The melding of food cultures across borders is nothing particularly new as emigrants have always brought their traditions and recipes with them.  Catherine de Médicis jumpstarted French cuisine as we know it when she moved from Italy to France to become queen, and the Irish brought their soda bread, corned beef and cabbage with them across the ocean.  Pu pu platters and Tex-Mex dishes are more recent pop culture crossover foods, as is pineapple pizza.

Salad of Asian Napa cabbage, Italian radicchio and North African pomegranates

But now we're jumping much more crazily across the globe, and that produces zanier combos yet. Several years ago, we went to a high end Chinese- Peruvian restaurant, a food combination I was unable to imagine, but that turned out to have been one of the most amazing food experiences ever.  I regularly make hummus, the traditional Middle Eastern chickpea dip, with any legumes I have on hand, whether lentils, white, black or kidney beans - unconventional for Middle Easterners to say the least.  Hummus mixed with avocado is another recent combination that reaches all the way to Mexico from the Levant.  Quinoa and vegan sushi are newfangled New World interpretations of the Japanese raw fish and rice classic.  Asian flavors in general have infiltrated international cooking everywhere, and a dash of soy sauce in my French vinaigrette transports me to a place almost diametrically opposed on the globe.  Asian tofu has settled in for good in the Western world thanks to the spread of vegetarianism and veganism where it’s become a welcome and versatile protein addition.  

What zany cultural mixes happen in your kitchen?  You may have to think twice because we forget how globally we’re oriented.

what will you do?

Jeremy Rifkin, the socio-economic visionary, has been saying for years now that technology and automation will eventually get us to a place where we may only need to work about four hours a day to earn a living.  That is incidentally the amount of time indigenous people spend on average to collect food. Yuval Noah Harari writes in Homo Deus that we have been pretty successful at bringing famine, plague and warfare under control, issues that have kept us sleepless and busy for millenia.  

 Over here in the US we are overworked and often required to be available 24/7 via cellphone in a corporate world more driven by perceived busyness than true focused productivity.  But Sweden has experimented with a 6-hour workday (although it's apparently not conducive in an entrepreneurial environment), Germany is on a 35hr week/7hr day and is currently trying a 28hr week/5.5hr day.   So experimentation with the best work-life balance is underway in the more forward thinking cultures. 

 But what will we do with ourselves as we are evolving beyond being busy with fire fighting, at least in industrialized countries. As we look at the shift in our Western culture, we see the answer already emerging - the pursuit of happiness, as Harari points out!  Between a vastly improved standard of living and not worrying about an early death from famine or warfare, and the slow shift to a shorter work week, we will have more time to take care of our inner life.  Perhaps we will focus more on the quality of life, the quality of our free time.  Perhaps we will take more time to reflect on how we eat, how we grow our food, how we think, how we treat the environment, how we treat each other.  

 It's a process and it's not happening by tomorrow, but the seeds for a shift are germinating.  What will you do?