anti war or pro peace?

Perhaps surprisingly it’s not the same!  It is not the same to be anti big-ag/anti pesticides or pro organic.  It’s not the same to be anti abortion or pro life.  Why not?  Because energetically being anti anything perpetuates that which we protest, since that is what we keep thinking about (the energy doesn’t get the “not” part).  If you keep protesting against war, war is the energy that gets perpetuated, whereas if you lobby for peace, peace is the energy that is being strengthened. Being pro something turns our mind to that which we favor, that which we wish to manifest. That’s why it is so important to formulate what you do want in life, not what you don’t want, although defining what you don’t want first helps you to define better what it is you actually do want.

So next time you are angry with something out there – perhaps the politicians, the terrible meat industry, your coworker, your child for something s/he did – turn your thinking around and emphasize what you’d like to see instead – vote for something, buy meat that has been raised the way you prefer, talk to your coworker about the feelings his/her behavior elicits in you and what can be done about it, encourage and reward your child for the behavior you’d like to reinforce.

don't frack our future

Instead of digging into our earth, chopping it up, fracking it and injecting chemically laced water into it, carving some out of it, plundering it, hollowing it out, throwing our trash onto it and burying trash into it,

making a mess of it, plundering and raping it,

let's respect our earth, appreciate it for what it gives us, honor it, cooperate with it, and understand it.

happy earth day

It does look like “…the economy provides us with all of our products…,” as environmentalist David Suzuki writes.  However, that is simply a belief, and an erroneous one at that. Suzuki clarifies that “This is nonsense, of course.  Everything we depend on….comes from the earth and will eventually end up going back to it.”   Whether it is paper, glass, steel, fiber, or even plastic, it helps to remember that those are all made from natural materials.  But we have lost the connection to where those things really come from because our lives have become so abstract, so removed from nature. Because of the separation in our mind between man and nature, we separate ourselves literally from nature altogether, we eliminate it downright from our lives (and we tend to forget that our garbage ends up there as well - see my recent post on that subject). So here is my Earth Day thought-of-the-day:

spiritual farming

Huh, you might ask?  Yes, there is such a thing, and it is called biodynamic farming.  The Biodynamic Farming & Gardening Association’s website defines it as a “spiritual-ethical-ecological approach to agriculture, food production and nutrition.”  Fred Kirschenmann, author of Cultivating an Ecological Conscience, explained in his 2010 keynote address at the conference of the association, that the present big-ag paradigm of maximum efficiency is geared towards short-term gain, and is only possible through specialization and simplification (the small picture, immediate gratification).  However, he says, farms need to be run more like organisms (the Gaia principle), in sync with nature.

We need a new agricultural paradigm, what with the bees dying, crop varieties diminishing (Tom Standage reports that “of the 7,100 types of apple (!!!) that were being grown in America in the 19th century…6,800 are now extinct.”  WOW!), monocultures that discourage insect and bird variety and promote disease, and GMOs and pesticides as misguided solutions to increasing production with short-minded profit in mind.  While there is so much more to say about the deficiencies of the present paradigm, I’d rather look towards the future and better solutions.

Organic agriculture, sustainable agriculture,permaculture, and biodynamics are all promising alternatives, of which the first is the most profit and least nature oriented (yep).  The term permaculture comes from the contraction of permanent and culture and agriculture (there is indeed no culture without agriculture).  Permaculture is a completely sustainable agri/culture practiced in symbiosis with local nature and without waste.  Biodynamics incorporates more lofty principles.  Just like permaculture it works with the farm in a symbiotic wasteless cyclical organism-like relationship.  In addition, though, it takes into account our embeddedness in the larger cosmic picture, and considers the planetary influences on seeds, crops and soil, and works with “homeopathic” soil enhancements since the health of the soil is first and foremost in growing minerally rich produce, the ultimate aim of agriculture.

healthy soil = healthy food = healthy body

voting with your $

When you pay for something you not only send dollars but also energy its way, you vote for it, you strengthen it and its cause.  Say you shop at Walmart, or Whole Foods, or Amazon, or your local farmer (I know these are opposites in a way, that’s on purpose), you literally fill their pot with money. While it may not be immediately evident, remember that there is strength in numbers.  When a few thousand people take their food dollars away from Tyson and send them their local farmer’s way, it does make a difference.  When thousands of people become tired of built-in obsolence and take their household dollars away from shoddily made appliances and buy something well engineered that lasts, it does make a difference.  Why do you think big-ag and big-food businesses are so afraid of GMO labeling?  Because we make a statement with our money.

Today, a friend mentioned that it wasn’t necessary to buy organic avocados because they are not on the Dirty Dozen list of produce most contaminated by pesticides.  I explained that not only was the price difference only slight, but more importantly that I voted for a healthier environment and farm workers' health by buying the organic kind.

So next time you open your purse or your checkbook, remember it's a two-way street. It's not just about saving a few bucks, it's also about the cause you support.

stuff, stuff, and more stuff

 

Not sure whether you have ever given trash, your’s or that of others, much thought. But here are some statistics.  The average amount of waste each person generates has increased from 2.68lbs in 1960 to 4.5lbs in 1990.  Luckily that number has held steady due to recycling efforts.   However, it still totals about 1.35billion lbs/day or 251 million tons per year!!! Now wait - this is only personal trash, which constitutes 2% of the waste stream – yikes for the industrial waste stream!  But let’s stay with our personal garbage, because that's where we can make a difference.

The first rule of thumb is that recycling and composting are good, but buying less stuff is better.  Besides, it’s been documented that we can’t gain happiness through consumption.  Elizabeth Royte, who wrote a very enlightening book on garbage, says that “We don’t need better ways to get rid of things. We need to not get rid of things, either by keeping them cycling through the system or not… desiring them in the first place.”

But once we have garbage, what are our choices? They are dumping, incinerating, and recycling.  FYI - in untreated landfills waste can take 40 to 50 years to decompose, in treated landfills between 5 and 10 years.  Yet, plastics may take hundreds of years to decompose!   And there are other problems with landfills: their toxicity (supposedly landfills are the largest source of human generated greenhouse gases, although CAFO’s, those enormous industrial animal feeding operations that make supermarket meat are also huge culprits), and the ever increasing amounts of garbage and landfill space needed (1.because of population increase, and 2.because our consumer society model is based on ever increasing consumption– the system breaks down if we stop consuming, and then the politicians scream “recession” - stop screaming with them).

So, what can you do?

• Don’t pick up any more plastic bags from the supermarket, bring your own cloth bags
• Consume less, recycle and compost more
• Use compostable garbage bags, recycled paper products, and products made from recycled plastic
• Buy more groceries and cleaning supplies in bulk, reuse your glass jars and Chinese takeout plastic containers (I wish they would take them back, since I don’t like plastic in the first place), reuse your Ziplock bags a few times
• Subscribe to Freecycle (they are all about giving and getting for free)
• Donate your gently used unwanted stuff instead of throwing it away
• Buy clothes at 2^nd-hand stores (I am a huge fan)
• Most of all – stop wanting, wanting, wanting stuff.

poor bees

Whether Einstein really said that mankind would perish within four years if all the bees died is less important than the realization that bees are crucially important to our food chain and they are indeed dying at an alarming rate.  It is, however, true that Rudolf Steiner predicted 100 years ago that the bee population would be damaged or might die out if we kept raising and treating the bees in an industrial way – and this is exactly what is happening right now.  It is also a fact that our crops will decline by about 40% if the bees died out because there are not enough other pollinators out there. While big agri farmers and big agri beekeepers still talk about the “mysterious” colony collapse syndrome, and some scientists still remain vague about the cause (“it’s the mites” – no, the bees’ genetic make-up is weak and they can’t stand up to the mites any longer!), the cause is eminently clear to holistic beekeepers and all who are in tune with nature.  The bees’ genetic material and immune system have been weakened by the industrial approach to both beekeeping and farming.  Monocultures deprive the bees of variety in their food, the poor things feed on a diet of poisons (all the –icides we spray on crops and gardens), industrial beekeepers take their honey away and feed them diluted sugar water instead, and they wake them up in February from their winter slumber, pack the hives by the hundreds onto trucks, and shuttle them up the coast to a different orchard every six weeks.  This treatment is worse than what peasant endured in the Middle Ages.  No wonder they die of mistreatment and weakness.

What to do?  It is so encouraging that backyard and rooftop beekeeping are becoming so popular.  It is also very encouraging that more women, who are naturally more nurturing, are becoming beekeepers.  But you don’t have to become a beekeeper to help the situation.  Just stop spraying your lawn (what’s wrong with dandelions and clover?  the bees love them), stop spraying your roses (find more natural and gentle ways to interact with your garden), buy more organic produce, and simply become more informed.

compassionate communication

Most of the time we are quite unaware of how much we actually express in our verbal communications beyond the mere word content, through tone of expression, volume and voice timbre, facial expression, and body language.  Sometimes I notice that something I said came across all wrong (although it did express entirely how I felt about it).  Usually, we communicate from the I-am-the-center-of-the-universe perspective, and that often doesn’t come across as too pleasant.   When I say to my kids “I need the table set NOW, please!” I may have said “please,” but the emphasis on the “NOW” and the sharpness in my tone can come across as quite nasty, although it merely expresses my own need to get dinner on the table soon.  As a matter-of-fact, the sharp tone has nothing to do with how I feel about my kids, and all about how I feel internally at this moment – (self-imposed?) pressure to get dinner on the table.  But that goes unexpressed, and therein lies the problem. The art of compassionate communication entails expressing what we need to communicate without hurting each other, as well as listening with deep understanding of the other person’s perspective. NVC or nonviolent communication, as Marshall Rosenberg calls it, trains us to understand the role of emotions much better because we need to take into account our and others’ emotional needs in order to communicate respectfully.   Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish have also written some terrific books specifically on how to communicate more compassionately with children.  They influenced me deeply.

We all have basic needs such as food, shelter, safety, love, and respect; and more individual needs like order, beauty, creativity, acceptance, or perhaps challenge.  We reveal in our emotional reactions, expressed through the above indicators, how well, or not, those needs are being met.  That awareness should probably make us take a deep breath next time we are about to raise our voice.

safe skincare products

Ingredients in skincare products (anything from shampoos, to lotions, to make-up) are not regulated through a government oversight, which means that companies are supposed to comply on their own - with what, though, since there is no oversight, no standard? In recent years a lot of ingredients in such products have turned out to be toxic - as carcinogens, hormone disrupters, or endocrine system disrupters.  Here are two websites to begin your research on the products in your bathroom cabinet:  www.ewg.org/skindeep/ and www.goodguide.com. 

I know that it can be quite overwhelming to begin reading labels, and finding out that many, most, or even all of your products are on the “bad list.”  But instead of throwing up your arms and the entire content of your bathroom cabinet out, research and substitute one item at a time, as you run out of something.  That makes it a lot more manageable and a lot less expensive.

Between my food coop, Trader Joe’s, and my Shaklee friend I can usually find a reasonably priced and readily available substitute.  Within a year’s time you’ll have replaced your skincare products without too much effort with something that won’t harm you or your family.

spring has sprung

…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).  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.  

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.