Hugelkultur Raised Garden bed after 1 year

Raised Garden Beds – Hugelkultur

Imagine a garden with no irrigation or fertilization that uses up old wood and gives you more plant miles for your space than any other form of raised garden bed or otherwise.  I’m so excited about Hugelkultur which is a wonderful way of gardening ecologically.  Paul Wheaton, a permaculture guru [in my opinion] has written in great depth on this specific form of raised garden beds. We are so excited about it we are planning to make a hugelkultur bed in the next week or so.  Here is some basic info and a link to the real deal.  This form of raised garden beds allows you to make magic in your garden

You can grow a typical garden without irrigation or fertilization.  It has been demonstrated to work in deserts as well as backyards. It uses up rotting wood, twigs, branches and even whole trees that would otherwise go to the dump or be burned. It can start small and be added to later and is pretty much nothing more than buried wood. Hugelkultur raised garden beds have the potential to feed many people at no cost and will endure into the future,  For more on this interesting form of eco conscious raised beds, and very comprehensive how to information – check out Paul Wheaton’s blog article here

© 2012, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

Forest gardener working mulch into the soil

We live in the rural back hollers of the N. Georgia mountains.  The elders here, those in their late 60′s and above, all remember how to be poor and successful.  Their success wasn’t about accumulating stuff or status or money, it was about surviving on the land.  This is a skill that has almost died out. Many of the elders we speak to lament that their kids only know how to flick on a switch and if they lost that they’d be lost.

Stop Trying to get ‘Rich’ and Learn to be Richly Poor’

Programmed with this idea of acquiring more status, stuff and money and escaping poverty, that generation wanted their kids to not have to get up at 3am and milk cows before they walked 10 miles to school.  They were bombarded with the idea that ‘more is better’.   They ‘did the right thing’ and proudly sent their kids to college, working all hours at jobs that took them across the country, sometimes away from home for months.   And now they see that their kids are not equipped to survive the coming tough times.

I found a blog this morning entitled ‘We knew how to be poor’ and as I read, I realized that knowing how to be poor will soon become a very sought after skill.     The writer is musing on the knowings of the elders and how they survived poverty.

In the 60′s an enterprising English teacher in the South Eastern Appalachians, sent his class off to interview the old timers for articles about ‘the old ways of doing things’ in a newspaper that would form their class project.  The project turned into a series of books called Foxfire. They are named after a local Appalachian plant that glows and, like the knowing of the elders, has gone from prolific to near extinction.

If you haven’t read the Foxfire books yet, you might want to get hold of a copy – They are full of old timey knowing.  Marilyn was one of the people interviewed in the blog [link below].

At age 79, Marilyn had a remarkable life story. Besides the six children (five in five years, if you can fathom that), she spoke of living low to the ground in a way that I cannot really imagine. Her family grew, raised, and put up darn near all their food, and had a small dairying operation that served as their cash crop. (Until, that is, the logic of BIG economies of BIG scale discarded their efforts.)

Deliberately Choosing to Live on Less

My husband and I came here to live on the land.  I wanted to go into the woods and write, but I found that this was not my purpose, just a by product of it.  Since coming here we have exhausted all but a teeny bit of our funds but in return we have learned some valuable life skills and we are part of a community. In other words we are richly poor!

I know how to live poor. When I first came here I had no idea how to start a fire, and my growing was limited to planting an avocado in a pot for fun.

NOW – I know how to garden.  I have mentors to help me and books and experience of what works and what doesn’t.  I know how to preserve food and on a grander scale, I know how to plant food forests that will provide perennial abundant food for all, including meat and requires virtually no tending after the first year, other than to harvest.

I have learned how to make shelters out of cob and earthbags – the rudiments of natural building.   I have learned to cook on a woodstove and how wood works to provide heat.  I have learned about hunting and preserving meat and even how to cook squirrels and dumplings.  I have  tried to do many tasks by hand before using my machines, so that I understand and know how it works and I am acquiring more knowledge every day as I LIVE instead of working for a living.

Forest, my husband,  does honest labor jobs helping people build things, clearing brush, guarding land in hunting season, birthing cows and decorating.  He brings in just enough to keep us in rent and utilities [which we conserve].  He cuts and puts up wood and I help him. We heat by wood alone and it keeps us plenty warm.

Our now revised 'chicken motel' built entirely from scrap

We know how to scavenge, refuse and recycle.  We aren’t too proud to take other people’s garbage.  We built our chicken lodging out of stuff gleaned from old barns, neighbors discard, stuff lying around and an old mattress we acquired.  When you’re rich you think ‘chicken house – Home Depot or send off for an online kit or have one built’.  When you’re poor you ask ‘what can I find to build this chicken house without paying a dime [where possible].  Poverty leads us to be creative, ingenious and work harder!

Paying Into the Bank of Kindness

We deliberately put ourselves in a position where we were free to explore, connect, engage and learn.  We became part of a local community by endlessly showing them that we were for real because we were!

My husband got up early one snowy, freezing cold morning, just before Christmas last year and announced he was going to help our farmer neighbor.  ’It’s cold and he has cows to birth and feed and he’s all alone and sick and he needs my help’.  He went every day for several months knowing that the farmer couldn’t pay for an extra worker.  He even got up at 4am to go down there and massage a newly born crippled calves feet.  The calf lived and thrived.  He called this ‘paying into the bank of kindness. And in return we received so many kindnesses from this farmer, from food to connections that our ‘investment’ has been rewarded.

It does not mean that you do this deliberately to see what you can get.  You cannot approach the bank of kindness way from that space.  It means that you take the leap and offer your gift because IT’S THE RIGHT THING TO DO and you trust that you will get only what you need to fulfil your purpose.   We do not need that much as we’ve learned.

What Do We Really Need?

What do you really need to be truly happy?

Maslow had it sorted when he came out with his hierarchy of needs.  After all, what do we really need versus what we’ve been programmed to think we need?  We need food, shelter, air, clean water, sleep at the basic level. We need safety and security [and today those are truly semantically hypnotically loaded words]. We need love and companionship. We need self-esteem – and we need self-actualization.  That last one’s at the top of Maslow’s list.

When we are being who we truly are destined to be in the greater scheme of things, using our gifts for the good of the whole, we are actualized.

We”ve been hypnotized into believing we need a lot of things [that, strangely?!, make lots of money for very few of us] and we’ve been told the right way to get them.   We have to work for a living so that we can come home exhausted, but with a pocket full of green paper so that we can buy instant food [no time or energy to grow, prepare and cook our food] get a dishwasher [no time or energy to wash dishes] buy a car [work too far from home to walk], go to a gym [our work is so sedentary that we need to create exercise time] watch tv [because we're so stressed we need to cut off from reality] and so it goes.

Living v Working for a Living

What these old folk were about was living.  They may have done some work, but the majority of their labor and that of their forefathers was taken up with building shelter, putting up wood to keep warm, preparing the land to grow food, sowing seeds, tending and harvesting, putting up food for winter, tending livestock which provide meat, milk and manure.

And the Winner is… the poor person who’s adapted

If you are working for a living, doing a job that you hate, then it’s time to ask yourself  ’What has to happen for me to simplify and learn how to live on very little?’.  A few years back, parents were worrying how to get their kids into college so that they could get a degree and get a good job. If I were a parent nowadays, I’d be doing everything I can to ensure my kid knows how to survive and live by his or her own labor.

If the 99% would just stop maintaining the rungs of the 1%’s stairway to fake heaven in the hope that they too can climb that ladder and turn their energy to working out how to live a sustainable, self sufficient life, they would create a new ladder to HEAVEN on EARTH.

Return to Earth, Recreate Eden.  Withdraw your lifeblood from the system and inject your energy into a simple life for you and your family and your community.  And while you’re at it, pray.  Pray that you get exactly what you need to do God’s work and accept that there is a difference between asking for what you need and asking for what you think you need [oh we need a big fancy truck or whatever].

Related Blogs

http://satori.hubpages.com/hub/Common-Ideas-to-Put-to-Bed-With-a-Shovel–Pt-2

http://www.culinate.com/mix/dinner_guest/life_and_food_lessons

© 2011 – 2012, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

Wheatgrass is one of the most powerful nutrients around containing every amino acid, vitamin, and mineral required by the human body.  If you consume refined wheat in items like bread and pasta, you are actually eating the least nutritious part of the plant especially with today’s modern row chemical farming.

Many wheatgrass aficionados believe that 1 ounce of fresh wheatgrass juice is more nutritional than eating regular veggies.  1 oz of wheatgrass has more vitamin C than 1 ounce of oranges, twice the vitamin A than in 1 ounce of carrots.  And unless you buy organic, the amount of nutrients in the veggies will be very limited.

Charles F Schnabel, an agricultural chemist, conducted his first experiments with young grasses in 1930, when he used fresh cut grass in an attempt to nurse dying hens back to health. The hens not only recovered, but they produced eggs at a higher rate than healthy hens. Encouraged by his results, he began drying and powdering grass for his family and neighbors to supplement their diets. The following year, Schnabel reproduced his experiment and achieved the same results. Hens consuming rations supplemented with grass doubled their egg production.

Schnabel started promoting his discovery to gristmills, chemists, chemists and the food industry.  By 1940, cans of Schnabel’s powdered grass were on sale in major drug stores throughout the United States and Canada.

In one pilot study of children with thalassemia (a hereditary form of anemia which often requires blood transfusions), of the patients who were given 100ml of wheatgrass juice daily, half showed reduced need for transfusions.  In another pilot, breast cancer patients who drank wheatgrass juice daily showed a decreased need for blood- and bone marrow-building medications during chemotherapy, without diminishing the effects of the therapy [Bar-Sela, Gil; Tsalic, Medy; Fried, Getta; Goldberg, Hadassah. Wheat Grass Juice May Improve Hematological Toxicity Related to Chemotherapy in Breast Cancer Patients: A Pilot Study. Nutrition and Cancer 2007, Vol. 58, No. 1, Pages 43-48]

Wheatgrass juice is rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream and gives a real energy boost that you can feel very quickly after drinking it. Some people with poor diets may feel sick because the juice is really concentrated.   This is common when people who’ve lived on processed foods detox. My husband experienced a lot of detoxing sickness as we changed his diet from junk to a much more healthy mix.

Wheatgrass juice taken on a daily basis

• Energizes you and prevents tiredness.
• Can suppress the appetite
• Improves digestion
• Can neutralize toxins and stabilize blood sugar levels.
• Helps lower blood pressure
• Has antibacterial properties that can cleanse the liver
• Improves complexion including reducing acne scars
• Boosts the immune system  and helps food  pass quickly thru the colon

Irvine Analytical Laboratories did an analysis of Wheatgrass showing it contains fairly significant amounts of Iron, Folic Acid, Calcium, Magnesium, Selenium, Potassium, Zinc, Phosphoros, Vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B12, C and E, Choline and Chlorophyll.

Why you should grow your own wheatgrass

Wheat may not be so readily and cheaply available for long.   If  food prices continue to go up at the current rate [The FAO Food Price Index (FFPI) rose for the seventh consecutive month, averaging 231 points in January 2011, up 3.4 percent from December 2010 and the highest (in both real and nominal terms) since the index has been backtracked in 1990.] it seems like common sense for us to to have some very powerful nutrition to keep us healthy while we wait for our permaculture gardens and organic veggie patches to mature.

When prices go up, people buy cheap, and that means mass produced veggies or processed food which is actually less costly than home cooked organic healthy meals IF you buy your ingredients at the store.  It is sad that we live in a country where a burger can be got with a ghastly soda for less than $1 – less than a pound of apples at current rates of $1.50 a lb.

How to cultivate your own wheatgrass

If you’re a rich ‘greenie’ you probably don’t mind paying $17 for those packs of frozen wheatgrass. That’s fine, but if you want to be prepared for when the stores may close or be so prohibitively expensive even you can’t afford it, you might want to grow your own.

If, like us, you’re poor and living on a minimal budget or food stamps, you’ll want to grow your own.  Invest in some organic wheat berries [Google for your best supplier] and once opened store the contents in sealed containers.   I use 5 gallon buckets with special lids that are easily openable .  I keep the wheatgrass in plastic bags or their original containers but sprinkle the inside of the bucket with Diatomaceous earth, which kills off weevils and any insect larvae that all grains contain are stopped from hatching. The lids cost around $8 each, but they are a lifetime investment and the ability to store food for a long time is vital, IMO.

In a sprouting  jar, place a cup of washed wheatberries in enough water to cover them. Leave to soak overnight.  In the morning, drain out the water and rinse again.   Continue to rinse daily, and as soon as the berries are sprouted and have about 1/4 inch of sprout, it’s time to ‘plant’ them.

I planted mine in pots inside.  They don’t need a lot of soil to sprout the grass. A thin layer of soil 1/2 inch in a tray with drainage is fine.   Scatter the wheatberries over the soil evenly and spray lightly with water. Spray daily and watch the green shoots sprout.

When the grass is grown up about four inches, cut along the top of the grass, about half an inch or even more depending on how much yours have grown, and they’ll continue to grow.   Last year, in the hot summer we kept the wheatgrass trays in the cooler back kitchen. After we’d cut quite a bit and thought, they were done for,  we left the trays outside in a shady spot, dampish spot and to our amazement they continued to grow.

You can either chew the grass with your teeth until there is nothing but pulp left or use the grass in a juicer with carrots, ginger, apples or anything you want to mix it with – I use ginger and apples because the wheatgrass has a strong taste that not everyone likes and they disguise it.   I actually like wheatgrass juice on its own.    We have a Greenstar juicer which we’ve had for years.  It’s fine while we can afford electricity, but I’m always planning ahead.  And I laughed when it occurred to me that our teeth are natural juicers. We don’t need to put stuff in fancy juicers, but for now, it’s a good way of getting instant nutrition fast.

Wheatgrass for your pets

I had a cat who was FIV positive many years ago and the holistic vet told me to feed him wheatgrass powder.  The cat survived for much longer and when an allopathic vet told us to cut of his nose cos he had tumors on it, we ignored her and just kept feeding him the wheatgrass. He was  8 yrs old and considering his condition [FIV is the cat version of HIV] he remained healthy for two years afterwards without painful surgery and with no continued growth to his tumors.

Now I give my dogs some chopped up wheatgrass and leftover veggie stalks mixed with raw milk and cheap dog food.  They lap it up.  After researching this article, I also decided to chop up some wheatgrass for my chickens and see what happens!

© 2011, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

Say what you mean and mean what you say

Words act like neurotransmitters that send messages to your body that generate feelings. Your words play a critical role in determining your moods, health and happiness and that of the people you speak with. Here’s how to get a better grip on language.

The following piece, adapted from ‘You Are What You Say’ by Matthew Budd and Larry Rothstein explores the excellent work of Fernando Flores on language and affect

You are in language already all of the time. But you are not skillful at observing it because you have no powerful distinctions for doing so. With skill at observation comes more success in life and less suffering. According to Flores, there are only five kinds of linguistic “actions”:

REQUESTS: A request is an action that you take when you seek the assistance of another in satisfying an underlying concern that you have. For example, “Please pick up some rice and broccoli at the market for dinner tonight.”

PROMISES: A promise is what you speak to indicate your commitment to fulfilling what someone else has requested. (“I will get the flounder and broccoli.”) It implies that you understand the request fully and that you are competent and sincere about fulfilling the request.

DECLARATIONS: A declaration is an utterance in which some¬one with the authority to do so brings something into being that wasn’t there before. Personal declarations such as “I will lose 30 pounds by July 1st” have the power to shape our lives, if followed by consistent behavior.

ASSESSMENTS: An assessment is a judgment that you make about the world in the interest of taking some action. For example, in the interest of going to a ball game, I might make the assessment, “It’s a beautiful day,” in which no wind and a temperature of 8o degrees are my standards. On the other hand, in the interest of going sailing, my assess¬ment, “It’s a beautiful day” means that the wind is blowing, the harder the better. Assessments are never the truth.

ASSERTIONS: An assertion is a statement you make for which you are willing to provide evidence. For example, if I say it is 68 degrees in this room, I’m willing to show this to you on a thermometer. We live by the social agreement that this device reflects temperature. In other words, a society builds certain ways of establishing and asserting common, often quantitative values. These assertions live for us as “facts”: They are either true or false.

LANGUAGE ALLOWS PEOPLE TO BECOME AWARE OF THEMSELVES AND OTHERS AND BUILDS TRUST, INTIMACY AND, YES, SUFFERING. WE CAN’T EVEN IMAGINE LIFE WTHOUT IT.

The 10 Linguistic Viruses

Breakdowns in these actions generally result from what I call “linguistic viruses.” They attack relationships, alter the structures of the individuals in them and cause dissatisfac¬tion, bad moods and even ill health. Learning what they are will allow you to listen to others more effectively, and heal them and yourself.

1. NOT MAKING REQUESTS. There may be something that you want or need from someone else, but you don’t make a request. Why is this? You may have a reticence or fear about asking others for something: They could say no and cause you to feel rejected. In fact, a no to a request is just that ¬no to the action of requesting, not a rejection of the person.

Another reason people don’t make requests is that they’re afraid others will think they’re

incompetent. But making a request is not an admission of weakness. The president of the United States or the CEO of a large corporation makes a staggering number of requests each day. In fact, one aspect of power is the capacity to make powerful requests. Still another reason people don’t make requests is that they think a request is an imposition. They forget that one way that people achieve meaning in their lives is in fulfill¬ing the requests of others.

A request simply invites another person to participate in your life. Take this as a way to honor others, not to burden them.

2. LIVING WITH UNCOMMUNICATED EXPECTATIONS.

A common form of “not requesting” occurs when an individual lives in a world of expectations that are really just unex¬pressed requests. Often we have private conversations with ourselves about what others should and should not do. But we never make overt requests of these people. Subsequently, when they don’t do what we expect, we’re disappointed, resentful and angry. The solution is to translate “shoulds” into clear requests. The benefit will be less resentment, less anger, less guilt and more satisfying relationships.

3. MAKING UNCLEAR REQUESTS.

A husband may say to his wife, “I want you to support my career.” Can you see that the husband may have a different picture than the wife of what “support” looks like? What kind of support? When? All of this information is missing. Later on, when a minor prob¬lem arises, the maker of the unclear request is likely to say, “You promised to support my career, but you didn’t!”

To coordinate your life successfully with others, your requests must be precise and detailed. You’re not insulting the listener, you’re setting up the possibility for mutual satis¬faction. It’s not enough that you understand; the person receiving the request must share your understanding.

4. NOT OBSERVING THE MOOD OF YOUR REQUESTS.

The mood of your utterance, as much as your words, affects the listener. If you’re demanding, people might decline your requests because they see you as arrogant and righteous, or they might make promises to you out of intimidation, not choice. My high school algebra teacher always made requests in the tone and mood of demands. Students rarely declined his requests, but acted resentfully when they tried to do what he had asked.

On the other hand, I had a patient named Shirley who made all her requests in the mood of begging. I always felt manipulated by her she was so pathetic that I didn’t want to make her suffer, so I promised what she requested so as not to feel guilty. Weakness and guilt what a combination! A suggestion: Observe the mood produced in the listener of your request; adjust your mood to produce the “listen¬ing” you want.

5. PROMISING EVEN WHEN YOU AREN’T CLEAR WHAT WAS REQUESTED.

Committing yourself when you aren’t clear about what you’ve committed to is foolish. Sometimes a person thinks he knows what’s being asked of him, so he begins an activity, such as making a meal. But as he goes along, his lack of clarity is revealed. He becomes con¬fused. What did she really want? What if I’m doing it wrong? If you’re not sure what the requester wants, clarify it with him or her. You won’t look stupid. Rather, you’ll be building an identity of being commit¬ted to fulfilling his or her request.

6. NOT DECLINING REQUESTS.

Some of us say ‘yes’ to every request. We’ve been trained to please other people, and this is made manifest in our compliance. The problem with this belief is that it’s destructive for both you and others. The yes sayers are often overloaded with promises to keep. The result is a perpetual fear of failure, which prompt¬ed the compliance in the first place.

This vicious cycle generates anxiety, exhaustion and burnout. Things aren’t much better for the people receiving the yes sayers’ promises. They never know which promises will be fulfilled and which ones are in jeopardy. Over time, people become distrustful of the yes sayer. They think, “You just never can be sure about him; he’s not sincere.”

An inability to say no is not a prob¬lem of articulation or diction, but of an embodied tendency to have to say yes, to be “nice” and not to upset others. Learning to say no requires practice for those yes sayers who find it difficult.

7. BREAKING PROMISES WITHOUT TAKING CARE: UNDERMINING TRUST.

I don’t want to make this section sound moralistic, as in “Thou shalt not break promises.” Rather, I want to show the human and biological consequences of a broken commitment to coordinate action. When you make a promise, you’re building expectation that you will take action. If the promise is broken, the person will begin to lose trust in you and feel betrayed.

We are all human and cannot know the future. In the process of fulfilling a promise, things may happen that keep you from completion. If you simply ignore your promise, you’re consciously betraying your word and not taking care of the other party. In contrast, if you contact the requester, describe the present problems that are keeping you from fulfilling your promise, apologize for the broken promise, offer to make a new promise in a time frame that you can guarantee and assist with the cleaning up of any mess that you produced, Both parties feel relieved. The relationship can even be strengthened by this mutually caring action.

8. TREATING ASSESSMENTS AS FACTS. There is no truth to statements of judgment. You can provide evidence for what you say, but that still doesn’t make it the truth. If we treat assessments as truth, conflict arises. For instance, my wife, Roz, and I both love a “nice” home. For me this means a study, lots of bookshelves, a place for my stereo and a quiet bedroom. For Roz, it means colors, textures, lighting, spaces, a sense of grandeur and flow. Can you imagine searching for “nice” home together? We must blend, accept and weave our truths.

People who hold their assessments as the truth are generally rigid or arrogant. They cannot stand diversity and become angry at differences. These people are a pain to be around and are themselves uneasy.

9. MAKING ASSESSMENTS WITHOUT RIGOROUS GROUNDING.

Even though your judgments aren’t the truth, you can make them with rigorous “grounding” – that is, you can say what you say based on evidence. People who make assessments without rigor are viewed as flaky and full of opinions that change like the weather. They aren’t taken seriously and they often suffer from insecurity and low self-esteem. Gossip is an especially pernicious kind of assessment, which lacks rigor and purpose. Gossips get a false sense of power from this activity, but underneath they remain insecure and uneasy. Connect your declarations with doable plans for action for which you are accountable,

10. MAKING FANTASY AFFIRMATIONS AND DECLARATIONS.

When you make a fantasy affirmation or declaration, you assume that it will happen by itself. An example would be declaring that you would like to start a restaurant, even though you don’t know anything about cooking or how to run a business. By contrast, a realistic affirmation or declaration pictures a reality that does not yet exist, but is attainable through a series of reasonable steps.

President Kennedy made a famous declaration in 1962 that America would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Although he didn’t like to see it, we did accomplish what seemed like science fiction at the time of his utterance. His declaration was grounded in a rigorous appraisal of our country’s scientific and technological capabilities. Languaging and Well-Being:

The Viruses in Action

The 10 Linguistic Viruses not only create ineffectiveness and friction between people, but also produce negative mood states, which, in turn, threaten your well-being and health. For instance, people who never make requests usually don’t get what they want in life and are often disappointed and stuck. Such people may have secret expectations of others, which they never express. This also leads to disappointment and anger and resentment. Inertia and anger are both negative mood states that produce bodily changes in the muscles, circulation, heart and brain.

People who can’t decline requests also place their health in jeopardy. They are often overburdened and become exhausted, burned out and depressed. If language is the foundation upon which human life is build, on which we construct our human interactions and even our notion of self, then competence in language will bring you more satisfaction, joy and effectiveness in living. My work with thousands of patients bears this out. When people become aware of their behavior in the linguistic domain, they achieve greater effectiveness, greater satisfaction and a better mood.

Matthew Budd designed the first behavioral medicine department at the Harvard Community Health Plan in Boston. Larry Rothstein has collaborated on several self-help books. Adapted from You Are What You Say by Matthew Budd, M.D., and Larry Rothstein, Ed.D. Copyright 2000 by Matthew Budd, M.D., and Larry Rothstein, Ed.D.

Reprinted by permission of Crown, a division of Random House, Inc. Date of publication: December 2000, Volume 17, Issue 9. NEW AGE (ISSN 1098447X) by New Age Publishing, Inc., 42 Pleasant St., Watertown, MA 02472; (617) 926-0200.

© 2011, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

Winter is coming and it’s time to start thinking about immune boosting natural remedies.   Essiac Brew is a modern name for an ancient healing recipe culled from a small group of  Native Americans living in the South East USA.  They called it Muscogee Tea.

Muscogee tea is purported to have healing qualities, helping with cleansing the colon, liver and blood.  It has been used by many people with cancer seeking alternative remedies.   I love anything that is natural and can help boost my immune system.

Ingredients:  These are gonna be a lot more than you need to make 1 gallon see below!

You can usually find these ingredients online from a reputable herbal supplier

• 6 ½ cups of burdock root (cut)
• 1 pound of sheep sorrel herb   powdered
• 1/4 pound of slippery elm bark   powdered
• 1 ounce of Turkish rhubarb root    powdered

You can buy all the herbs for this tea at Mountain Rose Herbs.    They also sell their own Essiac Tea Blend of organic herbs, ready for making a gallon of tea.  I bought both kinds ready made and ‘put together yourself’  I also bought seeds for all the plants from Mountain Rose as I really want to be self sustaining and grow my own.

The utensils for making this tea can usually be found in your local hardware or grocery store in the canning supplies section.  Do not use any aluminum utensils as aluminum can react with the tea.

Utensils Needed:

Enameled or stainless steel pot with lid.  Quart canning jars, lids & rings.  Strainer and funnel or a glass measuring cup. I also got one of those kits for canning which has a great holder to pull hot jars out of the water and a long stick with a magnet on the end to retrieve the scalding hot lids and rings.  You can get those in most stores that sell canning stuff.

The following recipe is for making one gallon of tea using 1/2 cup of Muscogee tea herbs.  You can make a smaller, two-quart batch by dividing this recipe in half.  It is perferable to make just enough Essiac tea to last about two weeks because Essiac brew is perishable and will eventually spoil, even in the refrigerator.  In winter I keep it in the jars in a closed cardboard box outside.

You can increase the shelf life of Essiac tea by sterilizing all utensils, jars, rings, lids, etc. in a boiling water bath for at least 15 minutes. You can skip the sterilization step to save time abut you will have to make it in small batches and  drink it up quickly before it spoils.  You can also make it double-strength by using 1/4 cup dried herbs to one quart of water.  I usually sterilize all the jars and lids as per the recipe.

What to do

1.  Pour one gallon of unchlorinated water into pot and bring to a boil.  (Optional:  Add extra water to compensate for water boiling off and water absorption of herbs.)

2.  Add 1/2 cup of dried tea herbs to boiling water and boil hard for 10 minutes (making sure it doesn’t boil over).  (To make a two-quart batch use one half of the packet, i.e., ¼ cup of herbs.)

3.  Scrape down the sides of the pot and allow the tea to sit, covered, in a warm place (room temperature) for about 12 hours.

4.  Reheat the tea in the covered pot until steaming hot, but do not boil it twice.

5.  Allow the tea to sit covered and undisturbed for several minutes so that the herbs will settle to the bottom of the pot.

6.  Place funnel and strainer on top of preheated canning jars.  (If you don’t have a funnel and strainer, you can use a glass measuring cup to pour the tea into the jars.)

7.  Carefully pour off (decant) the liquid from the pot into the canning jars so as to keep sediment out.  Screw the lids on, allow to cool and then refrigerate.  The sediment can be used for poultices or can be discarded.

How to drink the brew

Pour 1/4 cup Muscogee tea (about 1 or 2 oz.) into a cup and add hot water according to your taste.  Do not microwave the tea.  Drink the tea on an empty stomach about one half hour before eating.  Take the time to sip your Essiac tea slowly; don’t gulp it down.

For preventive purposes people usually drink 1/4 cup of Essiac tea once or twice daily. The brew is detoxifying so it is very important to drink plenty of pure water during the day and to have regular bowel movements.

Discard Essiac tea if it tastes sour or when white mold appears floating on the surface.  Essiac herbs and tea are light and heat sensitive so it is important to store in a cool, dark place  - cellar or refrigerator is idea.

This tea is not just for cancer patients, although many benefits have been reported. We are not allowed to claim that this is a cancer cure, but we do believe it is good to drink it for overall immune boosting.

© 2010, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

Transcribed from a talk delivered by Guy Dauncey

First Unitarian Church of Victoria

April 20, 2008

What’s going on ?

Well good morning everyone, and thank you for inviting me to come and join you here. When I was cycling up Interurban Road to get here today and snow was melting into the creek, which was rushing along by the edge of Interurban, and the fawn lilies were sort of bursting out everywhere… You know we live in such a miraculously beautiful part of the world here.

I must admit if you’re a cyclist, you also notice the incredible garbage along the roadside – the toss-away McDonald’s stuff that’s been thrown out. If you’re a motorist you don’t see that, but if you’re walking or cycling you really see the disgusting garbage that we leave.

So there’s a duality to my theme here, which is the incredible need for us to be grateful, and appreciate the wondrousness of this planet we live on, and to pull a piece out of the prophet Job and say “what a shit-awful mess we’re making of things!”

What a shit awful mess we’re making

Whenever you go before the divine, you’re supposed to bring your heart clear and empty, and one way to do that is to show gratefulness ‘cause it gets the ego out of the way. Another way is to honour sins. I mean there’s a good old-fashioned tradition in the Catholic Church of honouring sins, because if you come and you’re holding onto that and you’re not honouring what you’ve done that’s bad and harmful and wrong, your heart can’t be open to receive grace, to transmit prayer, to be clear in any kind of giving. It’s a precondition of that contact with the divine to have that openness.

Some of the things we do are willfully obvious and blind. Others of them happen at a distance. And the analogy I found myself working with recently for us humans on Planet Earth is very similar to that of a child. When a baby is born, for the first year and a half or year of its life it lives in this world of yes. Its parents give it everything. It gets unconditional attention, love, the breast, the sleep, the food; it’ll do whatever it wants, and we say yes to it all the time.

On Planet Earth, for the last ten thousand years here, ever since we stopped being hunter-gatherers and started being settled agriculturalists, we have taken everything from the Earth. We’ve taken the topsoil, we’ve taken the forests, we dump our waste wherever we want it just as a one year old does and we expect Nature to clean up just as Mother cleans up. That’s the world you expect as a one year old.

And you live in a world of abundance, and that’s how it should be for a one year old! That’s what you need, ‘cause you’re ignorant of the ways of the world. You don’t understand how it all works. You look up at the adult world and it’s a mysterious thing, just as we look up at the stars and it’s a mysterious thing.

Me, Me, Me and Screw You

Then there comes that period when you’re beginning to become a bit more important, as a two year old. And you think “oh, I’m getting good ideas now, and I’ll take that and I’ll take this and I’ll take that” and your parents say “no, no! Put that down!” and “Put that back! No, no, don’t go there! Don’t, watch that!” and all that. That issue comes in and the child is entering the world of no, no, stop, stop; you all know that.

Now if the child is allowed to go on living in a world of yes after it’s crossed the barrier of no, and its temper tantrums are indulged, you’ve got a miserable eighteen years of parenthood coming up! And that child has got a miserable life coming up, because it grows up thinking it can always live in a world of yes. Everyone owes it everything it wants, whether it’s the forest, the water, the land, the fish; it’s entitled to take it.

The grim truth is that of the world’s major large fish – the tuna, the cod, the sharks (which have been around in our oceans for probably some six to eight hundred million years) – in the last fifty years, we’ve eliminated ninety percent of them. And by the year 2015, in about seven years time, a lot of them are going to be extinct. Because our fishing fleets are using modern, fancy equipment, we’ve taken the world of the endless yes to the depths of the ocean.

Land, Forests, Water, Air, Food – we’d grab it all if we could

An analogy I heard is that, if you have the Plains of the Serengeti in Africa, and you took two big tractor-trailer type vehicles and put them a kilometer apart and put a net between them, and you drove across the Plains of the Serengeti and put everything into a great big pile – all the lions, all the antelope, all the trees, the bushes, the shrubs, a big pile – and picked out the ones you wanted and left the rest to rot, that is what we’re doing on the floor of the ocean with our trawling practices.

So that we can fill our shops with fish, and our cat food and our dog food with fish, and stuff like that. That’s what trawlers are doing on the bottom of the ocean, ‘cause we have no legislation at all that guides what happens outside territorial waters.

It’s the same with the forests. (This is the Job in me coming out now.) You know, we’ve taken most of the old-growth forest on Vancouver Island – gone.

We’re treating the atmosphere like it’s just this invisible thing up there. The reality is that our carbon-dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels – and we take fossil fuels for granted, even our candles here, unless they’re beeswax…

That flame you’re looking at is ancient sunlight that’s two hundred million years old. Because the oils used to make the candles are the fossilized remains of forests that grew two hundred million ago, that stored sunlight from the sun, locked it up as carbon and became coal and oil and became candles. You’re looking at the sun that shone two hundred million years ago, in the release of that little flame.

Using in a second what took millions of years to form

And whenever we drive a car, that’s the energy we’re using. Every single year, we use a million year’s worth of ancient sunlight! All the heat over a million years is being put back into space.

And the blunt reality of that is that the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere, which is absolutely essential for us to have warmth and existence… Mars has no atmosphere, no carbon dioxide; it’s minus one hundred and eighty-three degrees Celsius at night, on Mars, and plus ninety-three Celsius in the daytime. So like, you don’t want to live on Mars in a hurry.

But on Planet Earth we have this wonderful atmosphere, thanks to carbon dioxide and water vapour and methane gasses which create the right temperature.

But you put more carbon dioxide in there – ‘cause you’ve taken the energy over two hundred million years gathered in fossil fuels, and releasing them in two hundred years – you get a rise of CO2 levels from 285 parts per million, which is pre-industrial, to 385 today, to 450 by the year 2030.

The last time the Planet Earth went through the 450 parts per million barrier, (which is when it was cooling down fifty million years ago), at 450 parts per million, Antarctica became ice. So when we go the other way, past 450, Antarctica becomes water again. And there’s enough water locked up in Antarctica for an eighty-meter sea level rise.

Richmond is at sea level. Bangladesh is at sea level. Shanghai is at sea level. I’m talking eighty-meter sea level rise. And that’s within thirty years, that we’ll pass that threshold. It’ll take several hundred years for the melting to take place, of Greenland and Antarctica and stuff like that, but if we don’t change our behaviour that quickly, that’s what is coming for the future of this world.

And the scientists say they can’t get over that threshold point. James Hanson, NASA’s top climate scientist, said the threshold we need to aim for is not 450 parts per million, it’s 300 to 350, which is lower than we are at the moment. So we’ve got to cut back on all our fossil fuel use right now, and find ways to farm differently and forest differently to absorb the carbon back into the soils and the forests. We have a very, very practical, immediate agenda to cease using all fossil fuels by the year 2030.

And it’s possible and doable – I’m not going into all the details ‘cause I have other things I want to share now.

Get together to find group solutions

But one of the very practical things you can do as a church (‘cause your biggest carbon footprint as a group here, without doubt, is your traveling to get here) is to do a benchmark, and say “here’s how many car trips we have in April 2008; let’s reduce that by 20 percent by April 2009, by 40 percent by 2010, by car-sharing.”

By setting up a site on your website, anyone who’s willing to offer a ride or needs a ride can use a Google Map – a little Google Map symbol for everyone who’s willing to offer a ride or can share a ride – you can look at the map and see who lives nearby, click on the button and it tells you the phone number… to sort of collectively reduce that footprint.

And then by doing so, show how every other church in North America can do the same. When we do something innovative, it becomes a torch for everyone else and becomes a beacon for everyone else.

There’s a major conference of the churches in British Columbia happening a week on Monday, “The Fate of the Earth”, in Vancouver, which Campbell’s going to be speaking at, and all the Sikhs and the Christians and the Buddhists and the Muslims and the Jews are all gathering together to look at global climate change. Saying “what do we do, as spiritual congregations?”

Religions Unite

Now moving to the larger theme here, before I put that Job piece aside, ‘cause I can go on… Job can get quite a grip and there’s a lot that Job wants to say. But, if we look at the history of our religions, it’s interesting: almost all of our major religions have a story, which says that the Earth is a terrible place of pain and suffering and woe, and that if we just pray enough, or buy enough indulgences, or confess enough sins or meditate enough, we can escape Earth, and get enlightened and go to Heaven.

It’s a standard story! Even the Hindu faith, when you scratch it hard enough, that’s what it’s saying. The four ages of God, the four ages of Earth: the Golden Age, which degrades to the Silver Age, which degrades to the Bronze Age, which degrades to the Age of Metals, and there’s a great conflagration, a massive terrible disaster and everything gets destroyed and the world is made new again.

These religions were made, you know, two thousand years ago before anyone had any concept of “progress”, of “science”, of “development”, the fact that you can overcome patriarchy, overcome slavery, overcome child labour, overcome misery, overcome all that stuff. And since the Renaissance, we have had a new vision that actually, we can achieve miraculous stuff on this planet. And every generation since the Renaissance has hoped that their children will live on a better Earth. Our parents put up with terrible grinding work so that their children would have better lives.

For the first time now, we’re the first generation where the children are actually going to have a worse life, ecologically and materially speaking, than we are, ‘cause there’ll be less of everything – unless we go through this crisis and change things. Because every crisis is also a crisis of opportunity.

The key piece in here for me is actually our modern understanding of what evolution is all about. Because our science (which is our story to these days), our scientists are really telling us that evolution is a random bunch of genes trying to reproduce and going nowhere, doing nothing. It’s formally and officially random and meaningless. That is the formal, official science of evolution.

The wonder of human potential

My evolutionary theory includes the work or Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo, and it’s that the whole of our consciousness is evolving toward a greater divinity. There’s a deeper unfolding, which I call the process of “syntropy”. All of life seeks wholeness. It’s a very profound thought.

Now have you ever found a human who says “I wish I had hemorrhoids!” Or “I wish I had a lousy marriage!” You will never find a human with negative ideals. Why is that? Why are we all programmed with a positive vision, with a hopeful vision? Why is that?

There’s something profound, biologically, because… science is not just about the material world. And very soon this great merging is going to happen, of science and spirituality. When science understands that, yes, consciousness is for real, that consciousness touches the world of the greater wholeness where prayer is operational, where meditation works, where healing is clearly something that works, and that we’ve got to understand that and link these things together.

Abundance is possible for ALL

Then we can start looking at our future. Then we can start thinking – well, if on Planet Earth, we accept the nature of our two-year-old tantrum process, and accept the need for limits, the world of no, and accept that we need to manage the fish carefully… And by the way, we discover that whenever we create a marine reserve which is totally off-limits to fishing, the fish recover very quickly, and you can fish sustainably on the perimeters of the marine reserve for our needs. Not necessarily for our greed, but for our needs.

And when you farm organically, there’s enough food on the whole planet. When you stop eating meat, there’s eight times more food, because every kilogram of beef requires eight kilograms of grain to feed it. There’s no need for any food crisis in the world if we simply stop eating meat. And if you’re worried about the healthiness of that – I’m sixty years old; I’ve been vegetarian for forty years; I ran ten kilometers around Elk Lake this morning and then cycled up here and back.

I’m healthy; I’m strong on a totally vegetarian diet. And I don’t get sick, at all. (Helps being self-employed because no one pays you to get sick, but that’s another story!)

Work with Nature not against her

There’s an abundance available to us, if we cooperate with Nature. An abundance on the material level, and on the spiritual level. It’s like when the two-year-old discovers the joy of cooperation with its parents, you discover “what a wonderful childhood I can have!” What wonderful things we can do together, when we cooperate together.

There’s always fighting, and saying “mine, mine,” grab, grab, from the world of scarcity – when you think there’s not enough, you’ve got to grab it all.

When you look at the world of alternative energy, you say “how do we operate a whole planet with no use of fossil fuels?” I’ve done all the numbers, I’ve examined the whole thing; there’s a thousand times more energy than we need, when you take solar voltaics, solar thermal in the world’s deserts, wind energy, super-efficiency, deep-rocks geothermal energy, tidal energy, hydro power; all done within ecologically appropriate means.

There’s way more energy than we need. Including totally enough to run our vehicles on electricity, as well as to use far more busses and transit and cycling and ride-sharing and stuff like that.

The numbers add up just fine, and there are companies showing that it works out. I mean, Catalyst Paper, the one that runs the pulp mills, has reduced its CO2 emissions by 71 percent since 1990.

There’s a small town of Gussing, in Eastern Austria, where the whole town has reduced its carbon footprint by 93 percent in just fifteen years.

Apply Our Mind by asking HOW DO WE DO IT?

It’s just a matter of applying our mind with a positive approach to say “ok, how do we do it”? How do we systematically stop using carbon fuels, farm organically, forest sustainably, fish sustainably, and live within the limits of our Earth? And then turn our brains around so that instead of seeing the environmental message all the time (which is like “humans are a disaster, we’re a cancer on the Earth, we’ve got to stop doing this, we’ve got to stop doing that”, you know, it’s all negative, negative, negative), see it as a cooperative vision of where we’re going.

Once we get over this two-year-old tantrum crisis and learn to cooperate with Nature, to do green chemistry instead of toxic chemistry, eliminating cancer, and asthma, and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s (all of which come from our relationship to our lousy food and our toxic chemicals getting into our bodies) – all that can be gone! We can get back to healthy living for a good, hundred-year lifespan. We can live within the abundance of Nature.

And then, start asking the fundamental, deeper questions. Like, “ok, now that we’ve got over that crisis, what are we going to go for our next ten million years on Earth”? We’ve been walking around on two legs for seven million years quite successfully; why shouldn’t we have another seven million years? Planet Earth doesn’t go supernova for five billion years!

There’ll be historians around a million years from now, looking at this little crisis we went through with the age of fossil fuels, when we suddenly got the knowledge of science and technology and fossil fuels all at the same time, and what did we do with it? Did we use it to just indulge ourselves on flying to Hawaii, and getting a bigger truck, and a bigger house, bigger television and everything?

Or did we use it to do a transition; as a takeoff process to enable us to become a world entirely in harmony with Nature; as a baseline for a happy childhood? So we’re just about to enter our childhood on Planet Earth. As to what adulthood might mean, that’s so far beyond us, it’s like asking “what might God be?” Why should we begin to know that?

Humans are Phenomenal

But here’s another thought. The fact that every single one of us is alive today, with fingers and eyes and ears, is 100 percent proof that if you go back through your ancestors, right back through the human chain to the primate chain, to every single form of existence there’s been – every single one of your ancestors has had successful nookie and produced a new generation. Without failure! Not a single one of our ancestors failed or else we wouldn’t be here.

We have a genetic heritage that runs back, unbroken, to the very first bacterial cell division. Unbroken! It’s a phenomenal thing to carry in our beings.

The fact that each brain has one trillion – a thousand billion – brain cells in it is because Nature took that long to evolve such an incredible thing. And my belief is that every single step of the road, every cell was conscious. Even the atoms were conscious.

I’ll wind up with a much bigger thought here now, because we’re about to have a whole rediscovery of the integration of consciousness and spirituality into the nature of science, coming out of the interaction with healing and the way we know that healing works on our bodies.

Using our Consciousnes to Change the World

One of the interesting things here is around quantum theory, where it says there are positrons and electrons. Electrons have their causal origin in the past, but positrons have their causal origin in the future.  No one’s got close to finding them yet, but we know they should exist. And the reason we haven’t found them yet is that all consciousness, everything that has consciousness, everything we do has its causal origin in the future, through intention.

Every one of us set an intention to come here, and we acted on it and here we are. Everything we do is set on intention set in the future. And that may be the very nature of consciousness and spirituality in the atom itself, that it’s always moving. That’s how time is created, is we have future intentionality.

When we have negative intentionality we will get pain and suffering and grief.

You have negative thoughts about yourself or about the planet, that’s what you manifest. If you think you can’t win a soccer game, you’ll lose it. To be a beautiful choir, you’ve got to visualize that clear ringing note, those harmonies, and know you can do it.

As a planet, we absolutely have to visualize that clear, ringing, harmonious future, ‘cause in the process of science and evolving consciousness, that’s how it happens. When we can visualize it clearly, we can move toward it and make it happen. If we visualize fear and disaster and things going wrong, we get immobilized!

The people who are systematically denying climate change, the oil companies, are as harmful as the environmental communities who are stuck in negativity and defeat; who say that “the corporations are to blame, the government’s to blame, we can’t do anything”, and feeling hopeless and defeated.

Can you imagine Churchill feeling that way in 1939? I’ve been reading Churchill’s memoirs of the World War II and the analogies are really close. Because in 1939 Hitler had occupied the whole of Europe because no one had done anything about the Rhineland or the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, or about anything else, and let him do that stuff. The home army in Britain didn’t even have a rifle to hold!

The only thing the British had going for them – Hitler wasn’t even invading Britain – the only thing Britain had going for it was an absolute determination that they were not going to put up with that bully thug Hitler. They were not going to let him do that to the world. And there’s a point in Churchill’s memoirs when he first became Prime Minister, after Chamberlain handed over, he said to his Cabinet, “look, we’ve got nothing here apart from our own determination to go the whole distance and get total victory”. And he said in his notes “if I’d said anything different, they’d have tossed me right out the window”, ‘cause his whole Cabinet was so fully behind him.

We’re not quite at that stage yet; we’re in 1935 equivalent when it comes to these global ecological crises. Most people are still in denial, still thinking it’s not going to happen, we don’t need to change. And it’s really, really serious.

And yet out of that seriousness comes a whole new vision. Out of World War II came labour rights, came the welfare state – ‘cause after World War II they tossed Churchill out and brought in the first Labour Prime Minister, Atley, who brought in the welfare state.

So out of this upheaval comes a new vision of who we can be and what we are. And it’s really important not just to leave it to the ecologists who have just a narrow scientific basis and don’t include the spiritual dimension. ‘Cause it’s that understanding of how spirituality works that we get the power of our deepest vision from, and the power of our ability to manifest the beauty in our human interaction with the world that Nature has in its own interaction with the world.

So please ask your transportation committee to get organizing on ride sharing. Tell other people what you’re doing. And hang on to that deep belief that we’re going somewhere amazing on this planet. It’s not just an ecological disaster; this is the bumpy road we’re coming to. And we’re heading toward an amazing, amazing transformation”

Acknowledgements – Check out Guy Dauncey’s blog  Earth Future. This guy has some cool ideas

© 2010, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

I want to know why after years studying physics and chemistry all I can remember is what a rheostat does [dimmer switch technology] and how to change a plug.. oh yes, I also remember that Na = sodium and that sulphuric acid really burns!

I sat for years in a geography class listening to Miss Church droning on about the products and flora/fauna of faraway lands.. whilst being forced to take down all she said using a dip in pen and an inkwell.. no biros!  I remember that Hawick produces wool, and that was only because her Scottish pronunciation of the word was so amusing.

I spent years creating great masterpieces of essays only to find I had been downgraded because of crossings out and inkblots.  A fine way to encourage a budding author.

I was forced to memorise useless facts and wear a uniform that included lisle stockings, a boater hat and flannel knickers with a pocket for my hanky.  When I individualised my clothing I was called a rebel.

I worked beside people who were labelled as dumb because their academic abilities weren’t up to scratch.. and yet I have seen these same people go on to make great successes of their own lives, not because of but in spite of this so called privileged education.

This is what I call crap education.. and believe it or not, parents  paid good money to subject their kids to this rubbish.

I was very ‘clever’ in school [that means I could REMEMBER FACTS] and they had high hopes of me filling their expected quota of Oxbridge students.   I wanted to study psychology and they laughed at me.   Why?  Well, I represented the school’s worst nightmare.

On one hand I was a potentially great academic star for their portfolio but I did the minimum amount of work to get by [my reports often read A minus, can do better!].   On the other hand I was the ringleader of a group who smoked, played truant to sell and make wire jewellery in Russell Square, ran away from the games pitch, drank in the pub underage and hemmed my school skirt into a mini-skirt– we won’t talk about the drawing of graffiti in the metro and we certainly won’t talk about the hideous practical jokes we played on teachers.    For this I was labelled a rebel.

What if the school had looked at me for who I was.. instead of labelling me A- can do better, they could have praised me for my good results.. Instead of labelling me a rebel troublemaker, they could have focused on my individuality and my potential for leadership and entertainment.

Rebels make great leaders and motivators

Instead of dowmarking me for inkblots they should have seen through them to my eloquent words and nurtured me as a great writer…  They didn’t. They failed me miserably. I a lucky, I found a way to turn it round thanks to the many self growth programmes I have taken.   Many people don’t!

Learning how to live

So, Johnny what did you learn in school today…? How many of you have asked that question of your children and how many have been asked that themselves…

How many of us can reply, we learnt to be nice to each other or we learnt that together we are strong or we learnt that it is everyone’s basic right to have food shelter and education [we’ll come to what kind of education later!!]   Not a lot of us,  I suspect!

Schools spend far too much time teaching kids facts, history dates, chemistry symbols etc… This is crap education promoted and encouraged by generations of governments and compliant voters.

Schools place excessive value on academic achievement.  Parents, many of them ignorant themselves of what makes up good education, berate their kids for not passing exams and encourage them to swot, memorising fact after fact.

Some parents remember their own awful experiences at school and conspire with their kids to play truant.    Other parents despair because little Johnny likes to play football instead of studying yet when he tells them of his dreams to be another David Beckham or Joe Namath, they dash his hopes with tales of how so few succeed in a competitive world and advise him to buckle down and work for his exams so he might get a decent job with a pension in local government or a bank!    And most of the kids who don’t succeed academically, are discarded as no-hopers.

OK, I know that things are changing, but is it radical enough or soon enough.. and how many people are aware of the desperate need for a complete revision of the current education system?

It’s time for an alternative curriculum

Facts about anything and everything are freely available on the internet.  Kids can find out about anything that interests them if they are encourage do so.

Learning that Hitler is an evil man in history is not useful.  Being encouraged to discover that Hitler was helpless without all the people and governments who accepted and supported him in his philosophy, is far more useful..

Caitlin Moran, the prodigy child author who produced her first best seller at age 17 was removed from the formal education system by her parents.  Caitlin came from a large, blue collar, Irish family. Caitlin’s blessing was that her parents had radical ideas about education.  They filled the house with books and encouraged their children to discover for themselves, allowing them to develop their own natural talents.

Caitlin became an author, another sister became an expert on dinosaurs and each child found that special something inside.

“ Follow your fascinations and the money will appear” – Joseph Campbell

I was talking to a cab driver the other day who was worried about his daughter not performing at school  I asked him what she was good at.. he said, she likes to draw.   By the end of the journey, he said to me ‘You know you’ve made me think.  I ought to spend some time finding out what my daughter loves doing and what she’s good at and encourage her in that’.  I smiled at the thought of having made a difference somewhere…How many other parents are convinced their children will fail because they don’t rank high up in the academic achievement list.

How many schools, like mine, encourage people to go on to further education in the form of teachers training, because it is better than no further erducation and a second best for those that failed to get to university… I dread to think how many teachers out there are the product of the ‘well I studied for it, might as well use it’ syndrome.

I spent 10 years working as a secretary because I took a course ‘as a back up’, when I dropped out of University… I didn’t get to study psychology, didn’t try the Oxbridge exams [much despair an dhair wringing on the part of my teachers]..and I discovered that the study of English literature was not for me!

I was a lousy secretary and I suspect some of those teachers are just as lousy.   Whatever job you do it is vital that you are doing your lifework.. what is you.. and if you aren’t, you will feel the sense of being off kilter… many of us live with that for the rest of our lives.. how sad!  But it’s not too late for our kids..

So, I’m promoting the development of a blueprint for a radical new curriculum.. it excludes all factual learning and it was inspired by Neale Donald Walsh’s Conversations with God, Book 2 and the work I have been doing with Joseph Riggio around realising your personal myth and living from the space of who you are, completely.

Walsh asks these questions some of which I have modified and added comments to– you may want to consider them carefully?

Why do you spank children the moment they exit from the womb, wrapping them in blankets and keeping them from their mothers? Is this really the only way to get them to breathe.. I think not!   And why do they need to be cleaned up in preference to being placed on their mother’s belly while still attached… Why do women give birth upside down, against nature…and gravitiy.

Why do you allow some of your child’s earliest images to be exposure to violence..? The media is a powerful, influential, distorted and addictive force and  yet we allow it to babysit our kids.. If you were interviewing a nanny for this job and she told you her favourite books were murder mysteries and that her hobby was talking about death and violence, and that when her friends came round you could expect them to indulge in fist fights and stabbings…would you employ her.. I think not!  Yet you give the TV [purveyor of violence, crime, greed and anger] pride of place in your children’s education!

Why do you teach children to be ashamed of their bodies and their nakedness. As a child my parents were naturally naked around the house and I never remember my father covering himself in shame. Consequently I never had the experience of shock and horror at seeing a penis for the first time.

Why do you think children spend time in the playground exploring each other, maybe its because they’ve never seen another naked body.. who knows…Why do we teach children not to touch themselves and make them afraid of giving themselves pleasure.. What awful messages of shame are we passing on?

Why don’t you teach children about movement and music and the joy of art and the mystery of fairy tales and the wonder of life?

Why do you put kids in schools where competition is encouraged and there is an interminable race to be best be first and slower than average pace is barely tolerated.

Why don’t schools understand the gifts of ‘different’ brain wiring and dyslexic people who have become great architects, mechanics and artists, like the guy who carved detailed figures out of toothpicks, barely visible to the naked eye.. And how did he discover this talent?    Boredom led him to find something to do while the lessons passed him by.  He was lucky, he found value in his ‘disability’..

Dyslexics have an ability to visualize in 3d i.e look around corners in a way so-called normal people cannot.  That’s why my husband can put together stuff without measuring just from the feel of it.

Most dyslexics have no idea that they have unusual gifts around perspective.  Instead, they get shunted into ‘special classes’ and classed as learning disabled..And, yes, they are disabled in a society that places value on facts more than intuition, creativity and exploration.

Why don’t kids get to learn from the beginning about critical thinking, logic and evaluation, using their intuition rather than rules and memorised systems of a society which has already proven itself to be unable to live satisfactorily by these methods?

Walsh suggests that the new curriculum should have 3 core concepts.

Awareness, Honesty and Responsibility.  I’d add Curiosity and a Go for It Attitude as well as practical skills.   In addition they need to learn to read and use a computer so that they can explore facts for themselves.

New Paradigm Curriculum

Here are some of Walsh’s suggested courses

• Understanding Power
• Peaceful conflict resolution
• Loving relationships
• Function and interrelation of body mind and spirit
• How to learn
• Creativity and using it
• Joyous sexual expression
• Fairness, Compassion and Tolerance
• Awareness and responsibility
• Science and spirituality
• Ethical economics – trading, bartering, resource based economics

We need a Holistic Curriculum NOW

And we also need to teach practical skils for the new paradigm that is evolving.

Permaculture – how to grow perennial food plants symbiotically without pesticides or fertilizers incorporating useful animals and water catchment.

Natural building – creating homes and other structures from natural resource materials relevant to the area  e.g. Adobe in desert areas and Cob  [clay straw and sand] in other areas. Earthship homes are created out of discarded tyres filled with mud.

Herbal medicine – learning the healing and nutritional value of local herbs, and how to make tincture and powder medicines from plants, how to use plants in emergencies

Repurposing – learning how to create useful stuff from material that would normally be thrown away.

Basic Survival Skills – how to make a fire, how to cook on a woodstove, how to forate for edible plants, how to catch and cook wild game and so on.

Nutrition and Food Awareness – every person needs to know what crap is in which processed foods and how it can affect them. And they need to know what goodness is in natural foods and how to grow and prepare their own food so that they are not forced into dependence on the processed/junk food industries poisons.

Walsh points out that many of his suggested topics are already taught in the guise of Social Studies.   BUT it only takes up a minute percentage of the current curriculum. Walsh suggests it should BE the curriculum and I believe that it should also include the practical topics.

Once a kid has developed creativity and learnt how to learn, and a sense of the wonder of each individual, the world is their oyster.. if they want facts they are all out there on the internet, in books etc…

This is where NLP and associated ‘sciences’ come in useful.. Kids can be taught some of the skills of rapport, language, second positioning, pacing and leading, creativity processes, creating anchors for the good times, positive self talk, affirmations etc…

The Hero’s Journey – everyone’s path is unique

Joseph Riggio, my former mentor bases his work on, amongst many other philosophies and scientific, social, psychological, neurological studies,  Joseph Campbell’s study of mythology..and Roye Frazier’s Generative Imprint work.   Frazier believes that we all hold every experience somatically in our body.. and that we can relearn the ultimate state of being at our best.. and with guidance can learn to pinpoint it exactly, by making minute adjustments to our posture, line of sight etc..   This is the essence of the practical work I do with personal coaching clients.

Campbell says ““If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track, which has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.”

When you learn to Do what is YOU, you will be happy.. BE who you truly are, follow your divine blueprint and it will all work out OK.

Campbell examines the common underlying theory  and structure of mythology all over the world.   It all follows the same pattern.  Campbell outlines this in what he calls the Hero’s Journey.  It goes like this.

We all hear a call to adventure, many of us ignore it because we have been taught to buckle down and accept our lot.  Get a sensible job rings in our ears, competing with the knocking.   Some of us never answer the call and die unhappy and unfulfilled.   The call is always about who you are asking to be heard.

When we do answer the call, it is because the knocking is so loud we are compelled.  At that point, a master teacher appears [remember that saying ‘when the student is ready the teacher appears].. then we begin our trials and throughout magic helpers come to us..

Finally we come through, find the elixir and take it back.. but of course we know that the elixir is not the holy grail, but one of many similar elixirs… and before we know it we are ready for the next call.. It takes courage, but once the leap of faith is made, and the intent is out there, the universe conspires to assist…

I like this because it works for me and I am currently experiencing my latest call to adventure…

Instead of teaching kids, “Life happens, struggle through because it isn’t fair but tough”,  we could teach them that Life Happens, What Next? If you can’t change something move on..   there is only living in the now then moving on..

Life is a journey and we are all unique so when we open ourselves and our kids out to that fact and teach them the values of harmonious living, and how to survive in an alternative system, we will truly be contributing to the evolution of the world through the evolution of each individual to their own greatness.   If we continue to teach them what hasn’t worked for us, we are not following the basic presuppositions of life.. If it doesn’t work, do something else..

My son the Surveyor – NOT

I had a client recently, a 21 year old student who came to see me ostensibly for flirting tips.  What he really wanted was to talk to someone about his dreams and desires.  He was studying to be a chartered surveyor which was a ‘follow in the footsteps’ of a respected step-father, a successful property developer.  And yet what he wanted to do was make a difference in the world.

His plan was to study and open his own company and give lots of money to charity.. When I worked with him, I uncovered that he didn’t really want to be a chartered surveyor, but felt that unless he had a ‘good job’ he couldn’t make a difference.. he equated money and charitable donations with the only way he could do it.

Once he had expanded from his tunnel vision he realised that he could not contribute to the world by doing work he hated.. and that he would have to seek other paths to follow his bliss… I love my work!

And so, when you ask each kid, how are you when you are at your best.. you will find a uniquely different answer. If being at their best means writing poetry and living with very little to do so, fine.

If being at their best means running a large business that gives people work fine, and if being at their best means travelling the world looking for fauna and flora fine .

AND if, like the lovely lady who sweeps the road in Hammersmith a London suburb, [she got the British Empire Medal for long service, so I took a chance meeting on the street to ‘interview her’] being at your best is just looking around and seeing that she has made a difference and feeling a pride in a street well swept – wonderful!

Let Your Children BE

Until we give children free rein to be themselves and provide an education system that fosters this fully, we will continue to produce generations of unhappy people locked into what other people think they ought to do, taking on beliefs and values that aren’t right for them… What a terrible thought…! I know, because I’ve been struggling to emerge for a long time.

It took me 50 odd years to travel my path, rewrite the old programmes, gain courage and attitude and create new programmes, to believe in me being me and to find my way… perhaps we can help the next generations of kids to find their bliss a little more quickly!!!

Sunny Soleil Sunny is a survivor of a crap education system . She is a writer, facilitator and coach. A Licensed trainer of NLP  and MythoSelf Process -tm Facilitator as well as a Licensed Strategic Attraction-tm coach.   a consummate networker.  Her passions are communication and linguistics, permaculture and a new kind of education system that teaches the skills of today – natural building, growing food forests, water conservation and catchment, repurposing, alternative healthcare prevention and sharing and caring with a focus on 7 generations into the future.

Sunny is writing a futuristic novel and developing, with her husband, Forest Gardener, a transition workshop  for urbanites who want to sample living communally and simply and learn some simple everyday creative survival skills.

To enquire about the following click the link

Transition Courses in Northern GA/Tennessee

or

Pathfinder life coaching with Sunny

© 2010 – 2011, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

A small nursery in Haiti.



Will says

Local nursery for perennial fruit trees and bushes

I think it’s a great opportunity to start a small business growing useful species of trees and other perennials for one’s local community.  It’s an excellent opportunity for young greens of modest means. I am not an expert, but i have some resources and tricks that i’ll pass on here now.

Growing from Seed – adapting to zone and local species

My favorite species for growing from seed, remembering that i am in the BlueRidge mountains of Virginia USDA zone 6b,  are:  american persimmon, pawpaw, various chestnuts,  hicans, hardy pecans, and various walnuts, hazelnuts, and red mulberry. There are many places online where you can check what zone you live in and what grows best in that zone.

There are many others that are suitable.

Here are some sources I have used for seeds… and while some of my old favorites are no more,  there are new ones too:

http://trees-seeds.com/

http://www.treehelp.com/items.asp?Cc=SD420

http://www.sheffields.com/

Grafting and Root cuttings

It is a great idea to learn to graft and then you can graft improved varieties of scionwood on your seedling.   Most berry  plants are better propagated from cuttings or root cuttings and this is an excellent! and this is easy and a great  thing to learn.

Just take wineberry, raspberry or blackberry cultivars ( cultivated varieties)  and put a piece of root in a pot full of good dirt and a very salable plant results first season. I used to find cuttings in the classified section of Progressive Farmer that were very reasonably priced and I would think that they would be folks selling them on ebay or other sites because selling root cuttings is pretty simple too.

Growing and selling locally

There are disease problems with the rubus tribe  (mostly rust and with blackbery and raspberry etc but  not with wineberry) to watch out for in both buying and selling these. Disease and pest problems are one of the reasons I stress LOCAL and urge caution and education  in choosing what to bring to one’s area and to avoid shipping to other areas entirely. Real plant people ( you know who you are) have an intuitive feel about these things and they should listen and others should find another gig for sure.

Hardy kiwis are a good choice from cuttings , remembering that except for the “Iassai” cultivar they need a male for every several females to produce fruit so you need to root both.

Blueberries are a great crop in my area and are easily reproduced from hardwood cuttings taken in late winter , stored in wet sand in the bottom a refrigerator until the weather settles and then put in a frame with hardware cloth bottom and several incheds of growing media (remermbering that they are total acid heads needing a pH 4.0 to 5.0)covered by a poly humidy tent with burlap over that. Misting systems are awesome and thensome but i never had one.

http://www.stuewe.com/

Goji berries are easy from seed and you can soak regular berries you get in the store, blend them up just enough so the seeds all come out with isn’t much and then the seeds settle to the bottom.  Drink the juce, plant the seeds and jillions of the buggers come up easily and you do not need to buy the seed people are selling at ridiculous price or need any special fertilizer , but remember they are real alkies, mening they need an unusually alkaline soil. They have a a ph of 8.2 to 8.6 in their natural habitat..

Also remember that if the roots get warm in a black pot in the sun they will look like crap and be unsalable, key info i found out the hard way.  Here is info on growing them remembering that you do not need to buy their seed.

http://forgojiberries.com/HowToGrowGojiBerries.php3

Nut Trees

Nut trees will take a while to mature, but many people interested in permaculture are looking to the future and wanting seedlings to plant.   Local varieties always do best.

Walnuts,and hazelnuts, Chinese chestnuts, pecans and buratnuts hicans and butternuts ,true i am a nut nut loving all nuts  but peanuts.

Here is a very good overview of these species:

http://www.utextension.utk.edu/publications/spfiles/sp307-p.pdf

Acorn seeds! This looks like a great source for seed

http://www.acorno.com/

Here is a great article on acorns and how to use them.  Looked throught quite a few before i found this and this far the best:

http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles2/clay79.html

Acorns and other wild nuts have been a far more important source of food for our species for far longer than most folks have any idea. I strongly believe that they also will play such a role agian in the not too distant future. For those wanting extra tree nerd credits, here is a totally excellent pdf  called “

http://www.swsbm.com/ManualsOther/UsefulPlants/Useful_Wild_Plants-3.PDF

Containers for Bushes and Trees

The place i like to get containers is Stewie and Sons because they are real nice folk , but a whole lot more because their “tall one” one gallon tree pots are perfect for growing trees to salable size because they taper, have vertical ridges running down the inside to prevent root spiraling and have half open bottoms to promote air pruning of the roots.

All of these are perfect and the choice of professional growers. Plants experience transplant liberation rather than transplant shock this way if planted properly, in my opinion.

Buying, Selling and Trading Tree Seeds

Ebay is an awesome source of tree seeds.  Remember pawpaw seeds are easy to germinate if they have not been allowed to dry, and only buy  fresh or properly handeled of these.

http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=tree+seeds&_armrs=1&_from&_ipg=%EF%BB%BF

This looks like the way of the future for tree seed trading and buying and selling.  Selling tree seeds is a pretty good way to makes some money!  The internet hugely fascilitates this.  Here is an agricultural swap site with subcategories for seeds> forest tree seeds, fruit tree seeds and bush seeds as well as vegetable seeds and many other things.  Looks very good to me.

http://www.agriseek.com/buy-sell/e/Crops-Seeds/Seed/?AUT&FF_UMX=Y

http://www.agriseek.com/buy-sell/e/Crops-Seeds/Seed/Fruit-Tree/?AUT&FF_UMX=Y

http://www.agriseek.com/buy-sell/e/Crops-Seeds/Seed/Forest-Trees/?AUT&FF_UMX=Y

Buying bareroot stock in quantity and potting them up is cheap and quick way to salable plants!!  Here is the source i used for that:

http://www.lawyernursery.com/

Will recommends this book on Trees

http://www.amazon.com/Seeds-Woody-Plants-North-America/dp/1604691123/ref=tmm_pap_title_0

This book is fairly expensive but if you are really! interested in tree seeds i recommend getting it.  I loved this book, and still do i reckon.

The reason it was so important to me is that every different species has different requirments for germination; wet stratification, dry stratification, scarification, light, temp. requirments and for each process a time period minimum and by golly it is pretty close to necessary to know these things if you are doing them, and years back having this book was the only way i knew to get these.

Nowadays one can supply the supplication ” ginko seed germination requirments”  without the quotes into the Great Google and answers will almost always come forth.  Here is an  excellent thumbnail guide to the terms and basic processes involved such as  statification and scarification etc.

This site i found writing this note and is far far and away the single best source of information on growing trees i have ever seen. Praise the web and pass the information and we’ll all stay free!

http://www.treehelp.com/howto/howto-grow-a-tree-from-seed.asp

Tree Seed Technology Training Course

This manual is intended primarily to train seed collectors, seed-plant managers, seed analysts, and nursery managers, but it can serve as a resource for any training course in forest regeneration. It includes both temperate and tropical tree species of all intended uses. The manual covers the following topics: seed biology, seed collection, seed handling, seed-quality evaluation, seed protection, seed basics for nurseries, and seed programs. It also includes practical exercises.

Tree Seed Technology Training Course – Instructor’s Manual More Details Tree Seed Technology Training Course

http://www.rngr.net/publications/tst

Plant Health is Vital

APHIS stands for Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and is the thin green line trying to stop the rising tide of pests and diseases such as gypsy moth and emerald ash borer. Here is their website on plant health.  When in doubt, don’t do it.  Education and awareness are absolutely necessary in this matter.  The USDA is not the enemy in this,  human ignorance is.

http://www.aphis.usda.gov/plant_health/index.shtml

© 2010, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

Copyright is the result of our requiring money to share our gifts

A friend recently made a statement about  ’thieving’ words as she quoted some powerful words she’d found on another friends page. This thought of ‘thieving’  comes from a generally accepted paradigm that words, like skills and products are owned and can be exchanged for money.

Seeing this word has given rise to some contemplation about copyright and whether messages or indeed any of our gifts should be ‘owned’.   I am beginning to believe that there is no thieving.  This is not easy for I have made a living in the past from selling my words through self-help books.

We crave money because our basic needs aren't met. If they were we could use our gifts as TRUE gifts

Copyright and ownership and thieving are all restrictions and ‘abuses’ stemming from the love of the wrong god – the god of Money instead of loving God the All-One, All-that-is.

We feel guilty at ‘stealing’ another’s words and I too have felt a sense of ‘being robbed’, when my words weren’t credited to me. But that is because we have learned to use our ‘gifts’ as a means to supply us with our needs.

But I sense this is  my ego taking hold and I could learn, as we all could, that our creative gifts, including the good words that we send out  from our own channelling of what is right should not be copyright or used for selfish purposes.  And yet this goes against a paradigm in this world that who writes the words has ownership and that ownership can be used for personal commercial gain.  What a struggle this is…

And it’s a struggle because we need our basic needs to be met in order to survive.

Wouldn’t a truly self-less lover of humanity, and I am struggling with this, as an  ego-bound human, wish only for his or her words to carry the message and know that the message is more important than the messenger.  In other words, our gifts should not be gifts for us to selfishly profit from but  GIFTS TO HUMANITY.  And if our basic needs are met, we can truly use our gifts as gifts.

Breaking the circle of selfish concern

We are trapped in a circle of needing to meet our basic requirements, and having to use our gifts in exchange for ‘money’ in order to purchase those basic needs.   And we are trapped in a a mesmeric trance of believing we need more than the basics in order to be happy.    We learn that we can feel good when we buy a new pair of shoes, when we can purchase a planet ticket or buy gourmet food or anything beyond our basic needs.

Breaking the circle of gifts for money is one of the most challenging things we can do.

We need to break the circle of money, supply basic needs to all and enter the circle of gifts

I therefore declare that all words I put out are free to all to resubmit.  I do not ask for credit, but I do I ask that no one claims these words as their own or uses them to make their own selfish profit, but,  instead, uses them for the good of all.  The free Commons License states that the words may be freely passed on as long as they remain intact.   And even that should not be written in stone.

Sharing with Integrity for the Greater Purpose

If a particular message has been crafted, and changing it may change the original intent then it should remain intact, if the change is used to skew the intent in a way that it is NOT for the greater good.  If someone finds a way to pass on this message by changing the words I have used or using them as a basic jumping off point and by doing that they give greater power to the message, then, I must, if I am considering the greater good, be happy to have this happen.

Telling ourselves the complete Truth.

God knows the truth about us. Do we?

Granny Matthis, who is 97 and strives to be very pure said to me ‘God knows everything about us’  He knows all our transgressions and beyond that he knows when we are being really true. Humans are easily able to justify their actions through deeply seated personal lies that even we don’t recognize.

On our website we state that people may copy or use the words and we ask for a link back to us.  If I am to examine my motives I must recognize that while we would like people to go to our site and read the rest of our words, for we have some well crafted messages I also see a deeper motive.  We have affiliate links to products we like, so I know that my desire for that back-link is partly  based on our need to make the dreaded money.

And, like me, you have to live.   What is wrong here is the way we’ve been taught to ‘make a living’ versus ‘living life’.  We’ve been taught to pursue money to have a life, when living life in our true purpose is all we need to do.  And to do that we need to have our basic needs met.

This leads me to the philosophical contemplation of how I long to have no need to sell anything to make money and also to how I can regulate my acquisitoin of money so that ONLY AS LONG AS THE MONEY SYSTEM STILL EXISTS, I am directing it through who I am, to be for the greater good.

Embracing a simpler life is a small step towards freeing ourselves from the money system

We are in a transition phase from using money as the medium of exchange and all of us being focused on satisfying our own individual needs to a world where our basic needs are met and we can truly offer our gifts as gifts.  We must begin by simplifying our lives and working towards ensuring everyone has the basic simple gifts of life.

So right now I’m having to make do and do the best I can.

Praying for the minimum we need to live our purpose and share our gifts v praying for stuff

God, please give me only what I need to be able to freely share my gifts with the world

When I pray to God for ‘stuff’ I try not to ask for a car or a horse or ten dollars. I try to ask that God will give me enough that I may continue to live on this earth and be able to do the work I was put here to do in relation to the greater good.

This is something I am trying hard to be.. a servant of God of the Greater Force of this Universe… and of course, I have had years of ego training to the contrary.  I am praying that I will continue to develop this way of being.. and it is a struggle.. Life here on earth and living right is not easy… it is part of the evolution of humans into higher purpose non-egoic other-centered entities.

And we get greedy and live from selfish concern because we are biologically driven to have our basic needs supplied.  And in that drive, we’ve lost sight of what ‘basic’ means and struggle to acquire things so that we can feel good.  Yet feeling good should come from living a natural earth connected life.

WHEN WE SUPPLY THE BASICS TO ALL HUMANS – EVERY-ONE’S GIFTS CAN BE TRUE GIFTS

Air, Food, Shelter, Water, Love are humanity's basic needs and rights. Let us strive to achieve that

So how can we allow more and more of us to share our gifts freely?

It brings me to the theory I first learned from the Venus Project material and which is based on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of basic human needs.

Maslow saw that we have a hierarchy of needs and the diagram shows the most necessary at the bottom of the triangle and so on.   Our most necessary need are air to breathe, water and shelter from the elements as well as procreation.  Next in importance is security. We need to know that there will always be a place to lay our head and that we will be safe from predators. Beyond that, as human animals, we need social interaction and love . And beyond that we need esteem, we need to know that our gift is worthwhile and that it contributes to the world and that we have purpose.

If we were all guaranteed basic water, food, shelter and loving human fellowship, then any gifts we have whether it is one for spinning emotive words or building a cob oven, can be just that.. a true gift to the world.

Wow, my conscience and ego are already fighting this.. as I can imagine yours might also.

And this all comes from the one root of belief that dominates most cultures on earth today – we own our gifts and they can be used in exchange for money and thus for our own personal security.  We are all afraid of not having those basic needs as outlined by Maslow.  So we sell ourselves in order to find them.  And we become selfish.  We accumulate for us because we are AFRAID OF NOT HAVING ENOUGH.

What a paradise might we live in if we were so content with the basic needs that giving our gifts was not done out of necessity for those things, but because we are free to give them.. for we no longer need to sell them.

If you knew that you had a place to lay your head that allowed you to sleep well and be fit for the day to come and you had good healthy food and clean water to nourish you with sufficient energy to engage in the world and you knew you had companionship and social interaction… what else do you really need?   How much easier would it be for you to freely share the gifts that you previously sold to get more than you need?

When you take some time for honest inner contemplation you might find that you have been easily able to justify your quest for stuff and money and that you may be telling yourself lies by pretending that you are doing good works, when in fact you are actually satisfying more than your basic needs because you’ve been programmed through fear to think you cannot live without them.

We are in tough transition times and each and every one of us needs to take stock and start telling ourselves the deep honest truth about our own fear and our own greed…

Purpose beyond self and community

If, for example we desire to build an intentional community, we will probably be motivated from a need to meet our own basic needs.  We will come together with that community, in the same way we do with the nuclear family and kin and build a stronghold that will satisfy our community.   But if we don’t take count of the rest of the pattern, those without our walls, we cut ourselves off from the greater purpose of humanity as one unity.

When we can build that community with a focus on meeting our basic needs so that we can facilitate the entire community to release their gifts and that those gifts are used for the purpose of helping those beyond our little clique, then we’ve truly got it.

It’s a long hard road but we won’t survive in loving harmony and recreate the Garden of Eden if we don’t find a way to give all humans what they need to be able to freely share the gifts God gave us.

© 2010, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

The indoor composting toilet

Here is a video from a composting toilet manufacturer.  It makes a great case for changing to a composting toilet.  You can buy the expensive one OR you can make your own using an RV porta-potty or wood, buckets, sawdust and more buckets.

Ingredients for a basic composting toilet

• A wooden flat top box with a hole cut in the top  [screw on a regular toilet seat for extra comfort]
• A bucket that fits under the wooden top.
• Sawdust – put 3 inches of sawdust in the bottom and then add an adequate amount of sawdust to cover the contents of the bucket each time you use it
• When bucket is full, remove, take into the garden, throw in a bit of soil, seal and leave or put it in a composting pit [dig a trench in the pit and then cover each 'dumping' with leaves or hay. In a year you'll have wonderful mulchy organism filled organic compost.
• Or you can dig a large hole in the ground and empty the bucket into it, covering it with soil or hay or old leaves and use that as a  rich growing patch for veggies after at least a year

The Forest Gardener Composting Toilet

Forest disappeared into the yard for an afternoon and the result was this

Everything, except the padded seat [$6 from the dreaded Wal-Mart] was found in a dumpster or stuff we had laying around. The wooden box and step up was made from wood we’d retrieved from the moldy cellar we cleaned out. One side ‘wall’ was a fold out door from an old RV and the other a piece of old trellis.  The fancy toilet roll holder was found in a dumpster.  Even the ‘reading material’ was a free give away.

As you can see from the picture above, the bucket is contained in one of those $4 lidded plastic storage boxes.  When you want to go, you slide out the brown box and take off the lid then slide it back in again.

At the back of the platform on which the bucet and container sits are wood blocks that keep the container in the right position.

The RV sliding ‘door’ wall is secured with wire attached to hooks screwed into the ceiling of the car port.

On the wooden platform where the seat is mounted, we have room for reading material and a small spray bottle of colloidal silver mixed with a drop or two of oil or oregano. This makes a great hand cleanser as opposed to chemical hand sanitizer.

One friend suggested having a plastic bottle of sweet and nasty soda and a small glass bowl. Empty a drop or two of the soda into the bowl and it will keep the flies occupied and away from the poop!!

The entire toilet can be broken down and stored in the RV should we have to take to the woods !

Toilet in the Woods

Friends of ours building a log home have gotten the camping lifestyle down to a fine art, including potty stuff.   Digging a toilet in the woods is respectful, natural and feeds the earth with our waste.

Their outdoor earth-based toilet’pit’,   is almost invisible such that it blends into the natural setting. Clue – look for the twig toilet paper stand crossing one of the tree shadows.  Our friends set up this gorgeous homely camping site to live in while they work on constructing the log/earth house.

Kitchen Composting

By the kitchen prep area we keep a 5 gallon bucket for the compost and a cardboard box full of sawdust and wood chippings from our wood cutting [we use a woodstove in winter for heating AND cooking].  Just like the pooper, I line the bin with the chippings and each time I throw something in, I sprinkle a handful or two of chippings onto it.  This stops the smells and also begins to compost the material before you throw it onto the main compost pile.

Composting – 4 ways to do it

If you are going to grow food in a garden, it makes sense to compost.    This concise article by Ernest Wilmington outlines four methods of composting.

There are four methods of composting. Hot, Cold, Sheet and Trench

Hot composting is the fastest. However, it is also the most labor intensive.

When hot composting all of your ingredients have to be ready to go at once. You start your heap by placing sticks or twigs on the ground. This is for air circulation. Next you pile about four inches of brown dry material. Then four inches of fresh green material.

You want you pile to be about 3 ft sq. and 3 ft. high. This can be done using some kind of a wire cage. While you are piling this material, you are wetting it as you go. When you pile is 3 ft. high, you need to cover it with heavy plastic or a blanket (or old piece of rug, etc).

After three days, check the temperature. When the pile reaches a least 140 degrees, its time to turn the pile. From now on you must turn the pile every other day until its finished, which is in about four weeks. This is the method that is used by commercial compost makers. Of course, they don’t turn by hand.

Cold composting. This is quite easy, but takes the longest. The plastic bins that are sold for making compost, uses this method. You simply toss all of you compostable material into the bin. After 6 months, lift the little door at the bottom and you have compost, all the while, you are still throwing stuff in the top.

Cardboard composting is used to create new garden bed or plot. Like hot composting, all of your ingredents must be ready at once.

Choose a site where you want to create a new bed. Cover the area with a couple of inches of newpaper or non-waxy cardboard.

Then pile on alternate layers of brown [leaves, coffee grounds, twigs, torn up cardboard and paper and green manure [fresh garden mowings, green leaves]  in layers of 2 – 4 inches each.

When you get to at least 18 inches, cover the pile with heavy duty black landscaping plastic cloth.

In six weeks, remove the plastic and you are ready to plant. Nothing else needs to be done.

Trench compost is simply burying your food waste and other compostable material in your garden. The earthworms will work on it and it will be gone in about a month. This is the easiest and best to get rid of household garbage that might otherwise smell in a regular pile.  Some composting gurus suggest that you can compost anything including meat and bones [which is what we do] and others say ‘no meat or dairy’.

Here’s another video on composting which has a good tip on starting the pile with crossed over branches to allow air pockets in the bottom.

Compost Tea

I got this recipe on my permaculture design course.   It’s really easy and makes a great addition to the garden.

Ingredients: 1 x 5 gallon bucket with lid.  A mesh bag.  Comfrey or Garden weeds, Yogurt liquid.

Recipe: Fill the  bucket water [put it out in a heavy rainfall and let it collect the water from nature].  Stuff the mesh bag with weeds or preferably, comfrey [it grows wild or you can cultivate it most anywhere].  Put a rubber band round the bag to close it off and put it into the water.  Pour in  the liquid from a large container of natural yogurt.  Seal the lid

Leave this for a couple of weeks and you have 3 – gallons of rich compost tea.  Water your plants with it once or twice a week.

It’s natural, way cheaper than ready-made plant food and it’s loving and kind to the planet.

Heirloom Seeds

And once you get your compost pile built, you’ll want to plant some really great organic heirloom seeds.   We love this company because they sell a vacuum sealed variety of seeds for every situation be it the single urban liver, a family of 4 or a larger homestead or farm. They also sell specialist packs such as medicinal herbs, tomatoes and tobacco!

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