The Evolving Homemaker

So I decided to sleep in this morning since the kiddos went to bed so late and were sleeping in.  Instead of getting up and blogging and starting our day, I hid in my room, took the time to meditate, read the second mindfulness training from Plum Village Monastery, and began perusing a book called If It’s Not Food Don’t Eat It. It was next to my nightstand and all my other books I am currently reading were in the living room.  Not worth the risk of waking the kiddies up to go get them.

Ahhhh…….

And then the kids got up. And our day has begun.  They are eating breakfast, yummy coffee cake from yesterday, and some yogurt, while I get this post up and think of breaking out the Omega Juicer for breakfast.

The knitting has hit a SNAG this week.  A big snag.  I finished the body of the glove then cast off, easy as pie.  Then I watched a You Tube video to try to figure out how to pick up the stitches for the thumb.  I knitted a thumb.  Then realized that there were a couple of large spaces in the knitting of the thumb AND it was inside out.  The knit was on the inside of the thumb hole and the backside was on the outside.

So I ripped it out and have yet to find the time to find another video.  We had a blasted busy Saturday and Sunday I played catchup with making a list of things that need to get done in the garden and in my life.  The list is long.  I am not feeling any pressure to get to it, actually feeling like I have knowledge of what it is, instead of the rambling thoughts in my brain that get lost.

So you can see my needle holding the four stitches that I had to ‘hold’ for later.  I will figure this out.  I will.  I want theses gloves.

I am still reading the Dynamic Laws of Prosperity, and will be for the next five weeks as long as the class goes.  And went back to I Need Your Love-Is That True.  Funny, the day I finished Stillness Speaks and went back to this one, a friend posted she was reading Loving What Is by Byron Katie.  She was loving it, so it will probably be next on my list since I am enjoying the philosophy of I Need Your Love so much.

That is it for my reading and knitting update for this week.  Not much to share since I have found myself stuck at the moment.  Hope you all are having better luck this week!

Joining, albeit late, with the weekly Yarn Along!

Joining Ginny after a month and a half away for this weeks Yarn Along over at Small Things.

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Finished my niece’s shawl yesterday.  I had finished the body like a month ago, but had yet to get around to the fringe.  Now if I can only get to the post office.  My least favorite errand on the planet.

I started a scarf for a little boy on Monday and finished it last night.  I also started one for his little brother last night too.  Hopefully I can finish it today cause there is a little boy in my house who is hoping for a knitted BLANKET for Christmas.  Gulp.  I originally wanted the brown and blue for the little brother, but it was too wide once I tried it on my little tykes.  It was perfect for my 7 year old, not so much my 5 year old.  Knit and learn.  Knit and learn.

I am reading at the moment Surrendering To Marriage, author of Surrendering To Motherhood, and Surrendering To Yourself which I will read both next, and have started Born To Run.  Born To Run because I need a lot of inspiration at the moment, and Surrendering To Marriage, because well you can never have too much inspiration to keep your ‘civilization’, as she calls the family unit, going strong.  My husband and I have been both VERY busy the last couple of months, I am personally choosing to slow down cause I was about to implode, but he doesn’t have that choice.  I am almost done, but this was a nice read to remember that the long haul isn’t perfect for any marriage, but it is worth it in so many ways.

Obviously not if there is violence or abuse in a relationship, there is no suggestion in this book to stay in such.  But how to keep the marriage strong in a time of such distractions that we have today?  Young children?  Building careers? Frustrations? Extended family?  Friends? Activities? There is so much pressure on families today to do it all, but at what cost?  How much pressure are we putting on our most precious of relationships?

“Loving someone at the moment they are asking for it because they need it even though you don’t want to give it is the ultimate surrender in marriage.” Ahh, how hard is that when kids have been clamoring for you all day, you feel busy and overwhelmed, and you just want to rest and replenish yourself?  And what about him?  Who spent all day at a stressful job and an hour and a half in a commute?  Doesn’t he want to replenish too and not have to give to me?

Surrender.

“It doesn’t get much better than this.  The older I get the more sure I become that the peaks and passing fancies are not what ultimately make for happiness.  I can’t say that the grind of the ordinary makes me happy, either, day in and day out.  But living our a conventional marriage with children and a husband has forced me to know that happiness is only ours in fragments, in delicious bites that we need to thoroughly savor, because, hey, the next day could be a whole different story.  Can any human ever really be happy?  The answer is yes.  The answer is no.  The answer is sometimes.”

Is it only sometimes?  I don’t know.  So many spiritual teachers would tell us no, that it is up to us, but it can be so much more of the time than it is for many of us on a daily basis, and some would argue most of the time.  I feel like it is sometimes now, but I am hardly enlightened and I suffer great mood swings while I am PMSing.  For now it is sometimes, and I will take it.  And relish it, because there is really no place else or no other thing I would rather be doing than what I am doing right at this moment of my life.

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Joining Ginny at Small Things for yet another yarn along update this week.  I took some time off after I finished the last two shawls two weeks ago.  I wasn’t ready to jump into the waters of yet another shawl just yet, but time is of the essence and Christmas is fast approaching.  I am knitting one more shawl for my niece, a nice shade of purple.

I finished Left Neglected, to be honest I really didn’t like it that much.  It was a nice reprieve from the mostly non-fiction I read I suppose, but it left a lot to be desired.  The characters seemed massively underdeveloped or just missing any true emotional depth.  Way too much brand name dropping for me, and way too much focus on material wealth and striving for success.  Even when the main character decides not to pursue life the same way, it is lacking believability.

I am still working on the parenting book with the long name, and started this essay book written by women about things men have said to them.  Some of them are incredibly poignant, I resonate especially with the ones that deal with the treatment of women on an international stage, but many are interesting to read, just to see how other women really do think outside my circle as a stay at home, homeschooling Mom.  I am not sure I would recommend it yet.  It would really depend on your personal tastes, there is a fair amount of cussing along the way in many stories.

Some have asked where I got the shawl pattern, why You Tube of course! Here it is:

If you are new to knitting like myself, this shawl turns out great and really gives you ample opportunity to perfect your stitches! I will be ready to move on after this, except my son wants a blanket for Christmas, and not sure what to do about that just yet…I haven’t even picked out the yarn!

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This weekend I went to a costume Halloween baby shower.  I thought is was the cutest idea ever, come dressed up as a character from your favorite kids book that your are giving to the expectant mother.  I initially thought about getting The Lorax, dressing as a truffula tree.  It would have been so predictable for me.  But then I spent some time perusing the children’s book section at the books store one town over.

Since our bookstore closed of course.

During my outing, I came across the Jon J. Muth section and read all of Zen Shorts as I sat there.  I have always loved this book, we picked ours up at a sale somewhere, I can’t even remember now where, but I decided that instant this would be the book I would get and a panda I would be.

Stillwater.  He is such a sweet panda. And smart.  Or should I say wise?

There are many fantastic kids books out there we have discovered along the way during reading time and long stints at the library, I could have picked any of them.  But what I thought about sitting on the floor of the bookstore, reading all of the ‘zen shorts’ in the book was how often we overlook the importance of teaching children mindfulness.

I can promise I was not taught mindfulness as a child.

I know that some schools are now taking it on, teaching empathy, compassion, and even meditation, but so much of what kids learn they learn from us.  Not all of what they learn, but a lot.  We lead by example, in our stellar moments and the moments that make us want to crawl under the carpet and stay there for a very, very, very long time.

Ahhhh, but the lessons of Zen Shorts, that the magnificent moon is enough, that ‘maybe’ is more realistic than ‘I got this thing all figured out’, and that carrying our burdens around in our minds is a waste of time and energy and it takes us out of the present moment.  These are lessons I want my kids to learn.

At least so they don’t have to struggle to learn them like I do, after my brain is already hardwired to do the complete opposite of each of these meditations.  Something is missing when we spend so much time focusing our children’s attention on what they need to do to ‘succeed’ and not as much time on how to actually live a life less focused on the future and the material but more focused on the simple majesty of now.

Let us be mindful about the importance of teaching our children to be mindful.  It is a valuable lesson that will hopefully keep them grounded in a world that is full of billions of dollars worth of distractions.

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For the last two weeks I have said I wasn’t really sure about The Well-Trained Mind.  I promised that I would finish it, but was sure we were not going to use it in our family.

Well I changed my mind.

Once I got passed the prologue/introduction stage, and read the actual schedules and sections on Reading, Math, History, etc., I actually fell in love with it.  For someone who is completely unorganized and wants to be more organized, this book laid out the way to teach each day, books to use/check out from the library, and how to organize the kids work once it is completed. And I loved how much emphasis it has on reading, checking out lots, and lots, and lots of books from the library, and incorporating interesting reading into almost every subject.

So up my alley. My brain doesn’t work so well organically.  It needs some structure.  This is why I think I get so overwhelmed so easily with things, my brain works best A, B, C.  This book lays my homeschooling out A, B, C.  And that makes me happy. And a whole bunch less stressed out.

I decided to start at the first grade level with all of the classical education books except with math.  My daughter who is in kindergarten and my son who is second grade can do things like history together.  The kindergarten curriculum is pretty easy, read a lot, write some, ask questions, and teach as you go through your day.  For my son, it is a little more complicated.  He is way fine in math, so we are just continuing the Singapore Math we use already and he is at the second grade level.  For reading, it has been an uphill battle.  I am going back and starting 100 Easy Lessons for both kids just to begin again for him and new for her, while also keeping up our work with sight words for him.  For everything else we are starting at the first level of grammar, spelling, working from there.

I am excited.  It feels organized, and it feels like a much higher quality of instruction than the books we get from the enrichment program the kids are in.  From them, we get mostly the books used by public schools and wow, the social studies stuff vs. The Story of the World books in the classical education method is like night and day.

So yes, I am sold.  Where once I was annoyed with what seemed like a method to raise brilliant children who would all be doctors or something, I am now totally excited to be homeschooling this year.

What a difference a week makes!

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I just finished Savor by Thich Nhat Hanh and Dr. Lilian Cheung.  Wow.  That took awhile.  Not because the book was boring by any means, but because my life was chaos and not so mindful these past 8 weeks or so.  I barely had time to read.  Not like in the olden days when I could pick a random day to stay in bed the whole day and just read a book.  Yes, those days are long over, I am trying to adjust without resentment to that which I have lost, instead trying to focus on what I have gained.

But a day in bed with a book and some tea does us all some good.  Well, if you like to read books anyway, my husband would call that torture most likely.

The first half of this book was more focused on health, while the second half was more focused on bringing mindfulness into your eating habits.  As someone who worked in the health food industry for a few years, and also has read more than a few books and magazines on such in the past decade, most of the health stuff didn’t present anything new to me.  It was however a nice reminder.

On the other hand, as someone who knows most of this information on health and still has a hard time putting it into practice due to her emotional eating, I found the mindfulness reminders about food, presence, and meditations more than beautiful.  They sort of brought me home last week reading them, after a few weeks away from living them since the retreat.

“If we experience a problem in our body or a disturbance in our feelings, our mind, or our consciousness, we need to identify what types of nutriments we have been feeding ourselves that have led to our negative state.  Once we have identified those nutriments, we can stop ingesting them and, in turn, heal the problem areas.  For example, if we find ourselves easily getting angry, agitated, or sad, which then causes us to eat too much out of frustration, we need to look deeply to see what has brought about our anger, agitation, or sadness:  What foods have we eaten?  What types of sensory input have we taken in?  What are the intentions that drive us, and what is the state of our consciousness, in this moment and as an accumulation of experience over the course of our life? Maybe we have read glossy magazines full of advertisements for clothes and accessories we cannot afford and do not need, and this has made us feel anxious and inadequate.  Maybe we are frustrated that loved ones don’t act as we wish, which fills us with anger and resentment.  Once we identify what nutriments we are consuming that are harming us or others, we can work to change our actions and find healthier ways to deal with our obstacles.  This will not only help with our well- being but also keep us from gulping down calories to deal with our difficult emotions.”

Later, “If there is pain, sorrow, or anger, we simply acknowledge that we feel the pain, the sorrow, and the anger.  When we acknowledge these feelings with mindfulness, we don not let the feelings of pain, sorrow, or anger take us over and lead us astray.  Instead we try to calm them down with tenderness.  Practicing like this will cause our knots to loosen up, and repeated practice will eventually help us understand their roots by identifying the sources of nutriments that have brought them into being.  With this insight and understanding, we can stop the suffering at its roots.”

I for one, need this reminder too:  “One of the aspects of engaged mindfulness practice is that it is continuous. We don’t just have periods of mindfulness throughout the day: we want to be mindful all day long, as much as possible.  When we incorporate mindfulness from moment to moment, we stay fresh, peaceful, and protected from the push and pull of our habit energy.”

Habit energy, that is a tough one for me.  I have some strong habit energy that pulls me to the Starbuck’s drive-thru even when I know I don’t want or need a coffee.  Same habit energy that pulls me to the Newman O’s when I yell at the kids.  Or grabs the half-gallon of ice cream out of the freezer at the grocery store because I may have been feeling completely inadequate for my partners wishes.

Toward the end of the book I found many striking paragraphs that truly got my attention.  “Don’t just sit there and wait for your negative feelings to pass.  Complaining will not change your life.  Change your thinking and you can let go of limitations on yourself.  Explore, and be proactive.”

“Reflect on whether you have been really nurturing yourself, feeding yourself with the good nutriments for your physical body as well as your spirit.  Consider not only what you have been doing to take care of your family members or your friends, but how you have been caring for your own well-being too.  Do you know your passion?  Are you doing the work you love?  Do you know what you really want to do in this life?  Are you doing what you want to do? Or are you loosing yourself because you are trying to meet someone else’s expectations?  You don’t have to be trapped in any predicament.  You have the freedom and ability to lead your life the way you want.”

I would recommend this book to anyone who has a relationship with food that is more than just sustenance.  We all have ways in which we deal with life in unhealthy ways, this just happens to be mine, and also millions of other peoples too.   Is Thich Nhat Hanh’s mindfulness practices with food a magic pill?

No.

We have to work at being mindful every second.  It is our practice that will make the difference in how we approach food, and this book can be an important addition to that practice. In the end it is still up to us to change ourselves, put the lessons into practice, and create the life we dream of living.  Seeing as how there are no guarantees to how long we have, there is certainly no time like the present to begin anew.

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Meet my dog.

She looks sweet doesn’t she.

Meet my addiction.

Books.

And the worst thing for the book addicted?  A bookstore going out of business practically right down the street.  I have gone twice now. I am hoping yesterday was my last visit, I can’t be 100% sure.  But I was happy to score these cookbooks, Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone is one of my favorite cookbooks, so having one geared toward what is growing in my ‘farm’, in Local Flavors, will much appreciated.

The Earthbound Cook, the second of the Earthbound Farms cookbooks, I bought awhile back at our local natural grocers.  I really like it and figured the first one, Food to Live By, probably had even better recipes!  So many look delicious I cannot tell you.

And then I got a couple homeschooling books.  I have wanted The Well-Trained Mind because I love The Story of The World history and activity books for homeschooling by the same ladies.  It isn’t a cheap book, so I waited as long as I could before I thought all the other homeschooling Mama’s in the area would beat me to it.

And who doesn’t need a children’s dictionary, homeschooling or not?

And then I got ONE book for fun.  One that both the kids and I would love.  One that is full of fantastic art and a fantabulous mystery and oh so creative writing prompts, for kids and grown-ups alike.  You might recognize this book yourself, or if you are a fan of The Polar Express, this is the same amazing magician.  The title?  The Mystery Of Harris Burdick.

If you have never heard of this book, I urge you to take a look at it.  It has a mysterious introduction about an artist who went into a publishers office with 14 drawings with captions.  He never returned to the office and the publisher had these pictures forever and no information on the artist/author who left them.  The premise of the book is that your children can create the stories based on the drawings, the title, and the caption that were left in the office years ago.

Just an example, here is one of the pages with the caption “He had warned her about the book.  Now it was too late.” What could possibly happen?  Why did he warn her?  What is the story about?

See?  A book to ignite the imagination.

Are you still wondering why I introduced you to my dog?  If so, look at the picture of the cover of The Mystery of Harris Burdick again.  Yes.  Yes.  My goober of a dog chewed the corner of the book the moment we got home.  She is a lucky girl she is incredibly loving, even if not that bright.

Forgiveness is hers.  Again.

“A thatched roof once covered free man; under marble and gold dwells slavery.”

~Seneca (Roman philosopher)

I just closed up Radical Homemakers by Shannon Hayes a few days ago.  It was a library check out, so I needed to get it back, my fines have gotten a little out of hand lately.  But can I just say…I LOVED this book!   It was really all that I was looking for in a book this summer. This book sums up my feeling from the last year and a half, and why I am taking the steps in my home to change, instead of trying to change the world from outside my home.

I love this from her introduction regarding all of the radical homemakers she interviewed for the book: “…the happiest among them were successful at setting realistic expectations for themselves.  They did not live in impeccably clean houses on manicured estates.  They saw their homes as living systems and accepted the flux, flow, dirt and chaos that are a natural part of that.  They were masters at redefining pleasure not as something that should be bought in the consumer marketplace, but as something that could be created, no matter how much or how little money they had in their pockets.  And above all, they were fearless.  They did not let themselves be bullied by the conventional ideals regarding money, status, or material possessions.  These families did not see their homes as a refuge from the world.  Rather, each home was the center for social change, the starting point from which a better life would ripple out for everyone.”

And I really couldn’t agree more with this: “What is our economy for? Isn’t it supposed to serve everyone? Are our families truly being served by an economy where employees are overworked, where families do not have time to eat meals together, and economy that relentlessly gnaws at our dwindling ecological resources?  In David Korten’s words, a true, living economy “should be about making a living for everyone, rather than making a killing for a few lucky winners.” A living includes more than just our paychecks, but would also include our quality of life, family time, resources for healthcare, time to build community relationships, and happiness.  Amazing.  Actual happiness level would play a part?

This next quote reminds me that lately I have read so often about how hard it is for a stay at home Mom to ever get back on the career track, and quite often that has created fear in me! “Our society is riddled with myths to suggest that anyone who forgoes a conventional career track and devotes themselves to sustainable home and community life is merely squandering their life…Committing her life’s energy to an employer has not made a truly “liberated woman.” A homemaker’s primary job is not to be a consumer.  The choice to cultivate self-reliance, curb consumption and live well on less money drains only the extractive economy, but feeds a life sustaining economy.  The pursuit of affluence, the ennoblement of excessive work and hyper-individualism are not manifestations of the American dream, but causes of a national nightmare.”

I am most excited about this little declaration, “First and foremost, we cannot give undue care about appearances.  It was most comical how, with each appointment I made to visit the home of a study participant, we wre greeted by clipped lawns, clean kitchens, put-away toys and made beds.  After a few hours in the home, the toys once more gravitated to the floor, dishes reappeared beside the sink, and the household slowly crept back toward its state of happy entropy.  Once the tape recorder was turned off and I complimented them on how beautiful and orderly the home was (such tidiness was far different from my own home), I was flooded by confessions of how hard the entire family had labored to have everything look perfect for my visit.”

Uh huh.  How many times have each of us done this?  I swear up and down that I want honesty amongst my mothering friends and I how I don’t want to ‘pretend’ I am something other than what I am…yet, over and over I race around cleaning, vacuuming, washing dishes, putting away toy after toy in hopes of coming off as a much more organized, together, tidy mother than I am.

Also, a good reminder to each of us, “Though children’s needs might keep us from meeting our immediate goals, advice columnist Amy Alkon once observed that “Your family is better served by a stay-at-home mother than a stay-at-home martyr.”  Being a Radical Homemaker does not mean being a perfect parent.  It means doing your best and allowing both you and your kids to have a life.” I often battle the ‘perfect parent’ demon myself.  I am learning, albeit slowly, to let go of my own expectations.

OK, enough already.  If you have ever felt like your dreams might have just been a little off kilter from what you hear your dreams should be from society, this is the book for you.  If you wonder if it is appropriate to give homemade gifts instead of imports from far away lands, this book is for you.  If you are ever inclined to grow your own food, keep your own bees, try your hand at sewing, educating your children at home, or otherwise ‘reclaiming domesticity from a consumer culture’, this book is for you.

So check your library or local bookstore today for Radical Homemakers by Shannon Hayes.  It is a gem.

This little delight of a book is a new favorite of mine!  I loved it so much that I sent it to my sister for her birthday, because we all know that anything that can put parenting in perspective on any given day is a miracle in itself.

Now that we have all finally realized there is no such thing as a perfect parent, that there is no ONE way to do it, that there are no perfect children, and nor should there be, we can move on and remember the blessing the journey is for each of us.  It can’t be perfect, but it can be full of magic and inspiration all along the way.

The Parent’s Tao Te Ching, by William Martin, I picked up from the bookstore a few months back actually.  After a particularly frustrating day last week I decided I needed a little inspiration at the moment and brought it to swim class.  I didn’t put it down until I finished it.  Ok, it is short, but so really lovely I promise!

This beauty from the author: “Parenting need not be a burden, one more thing you have to do and don’t do well enough.  Instead consider your failures, your sorrows, your illnesses, and your difficulties as your primary teaching opportunities.”

This book is written in the same form as the Tao Te Ching, simple, straightforward, and profound in short bursts.  Perfect when you might be having a challenging moment!  Grab the book and read one entry, it will change how you feel and engage your children.

This one stayed with me for a long while:

SEEING TO THE HEART

Some behavior in your children will seem “good” to you.

Other behavior will seem unequivocally “bad.”

Notice both in your children

without being overly impressed by one

nor overly dismayed by the other.

In doing so you will be imitating the Tao

which sees our behavior as a mask

and sees immediately beneath it

to the good within our heart.

Above all, do not attack your child’s behavior

and attempt to change it

by endless talking and scolding.

Stay at your center and look beneath the behavior

to the heart of the child.

There you will find only good.

When you see the heart

you will know what to do.

I wish I had room to write the whole book here!  It is full of so many wise lessons learned by a father along his own journey.  (FYI, he has the Tao portion written, and then a separate area in which he follows up with his thoughts, I have denoted these with the *)As someone who often gets overwhelmed by the state of the world, I really liked this too: “The world insists on achievement and progress and it is full of enmity and strife.  Can you see all this and still help your children maintain their trust and hope and peace?  Can you accept the world as it is, yet live according to a different standard?  Can you let your children see a way of living that transforms, heals, nurtures, and loves? * If you complain about politics, and gripe about taxes, and stew about the sorry state of things you children will learn to whine instead of laugh.  If you can see in every moment a chance to live, and to accept, and to appreciate, your children will transform the world.”

And on GOOD BEHAVIOR: “There are many ways to get children to behave as you wish.  You can force, plead, and bribe.  You can manipulate, trick, and persuade.  You can use shame, guilt, and reason.  These will all rebound on you.  You will be in constant conflict. Attend instead to your own actions.  Develop contentment within yourself.  Find peace and love in all you do.  This will keep you busy enough.  There is no need to control others.*If you are able to release even some small part of your persistent need to control, you will discover an amazing paradox.  The things you attempted to force now begin to change.  Your children find appropriate behavior emerging from within themselves and are delighted.  Laughter returns to all.”

I’ll leave you with this one, cause I can’t reprint the entire book: “Your children may frequently change the focus of their attention.  But this is not restlessness.  It is curiosity.  When they are doing something they are doing only that until they move on to the next thing.  Watch them.  Let them set the pace. See what you can learn.”

Get this book.  I wish I could get it for every single one of my friends.  Seriously.  It is that good.

Crazy Sexy Diet by Kris Carr; there is so much I loved about this book.  Mostly I LOVED the sassy attitude of the author!  Now that is a gal I could be friends with!  And you will remember from this post here, that I couldn’t speak highly enough about the photos!  They are so meditative and beautiful!  I seriously love to just look through the pages.

Kris Carr has a type of cancer that never goes away, while at the end of the movie Crazy Sexy Cancer, her cancer wasn’t growing.  She will always have it, and mostly it is a journey of maintenance, eating healthy and taking care of herself so her cancer doesn’t begin to grow.  So far so good.

While I know a lot of this information as a health food store worker for seven years, and a nonfiction health food reader junkie, who doesn’t always do what she knows, I LOVE the accessibility of her information.

“Are you ready for the Crazy Sexy Truth about meat and dairy? Of course you are!  You are a fearless Wellness Warrior full of rebellion and fire.  So with that in mind, it’s party time and I’m gonna give you a big, phat prezzie.  In fact, this treasure is so top-shelf that it’ll keep you young, cute, and alive! Going veg is one of the best decisions you can make for your health and the planet.  Period.  Your organs, blood, bones, teeth, and private parts will thank you.  Private parts? Yes, sassy, I’m talking sex drive!  There is no better way to light the night than to eat right.”

How cool is she?  You know you want to hang out with her now don’t you?  Even if through the pages of her book.

And I also did learn a lot about PH in our bodies and how that affects health:

“Okay, so why is this so important? Your brilliant body is designed to operate within a very narrow pH range.  Optimally, you want to be a little on the alkaline side, with a blood pH of around 7.365.  Blood is the most important, and therefore most protected, pH measurement.  Even a minor fluctuation in your blood’s pH (either too alkaline or too acidic) creates distress signals.  Symptoms generally start out small and then ramp up as the imbalance continues.”

Yuck.

The book focuses on all areas of our health, from what we eat, to how we relax and rejuvenate.  I can tell you that so far, I am eating WAY less meat again, I was a veg head for 16 years, just not a very good one.  I would say I have only eaten meat once in the last week or so.  I have also begun to exfoliate my whole body.  YES.  Dry exfoliate.  Apparently your body gets rid of toxins through your skin and if your pores are all clogged up, your body no can do. And where I live, the dry climate will make sure you have lots of dead skin cells.  EWW.

I have also juiced TWICE in the last week.  TWICE!  I have a weak belly.  Last time I did a wheatgrass shot I was laying on the couch for three hours.  My stomach was so upset, so I gave up on the juice/grass thing.  But she has some great advice to start with cucumber which is relatively mild on the belly.  The first juice I had a hard time keeping down.  The second?  I thought, wow, I could actually see how you would begin to crave these little numbers.

I started easy with a whole cucumber, two carrots, and an apple.  I will work my way up to less carrots and less apple, and add more spinach, kale, parsley and the like. But a sensitive stomach Mama has got to take it slow or I will put the juicer back under the counter and give up yet again.  I don’t want to do that this time!

I have to tell you too, that the kids LOVE the juicer.  Of course they only want apple and carrot.  But who cares?  My one finicky daughter who doesn’t like to eat anything except for fruit that is good for her, drank the nutrients in a carrot!  That is progress!  They actually made up their own recipe of two carrots, two apples, and a lemon.  It was delicious!

Kris has a bunch of recipes in the back of the book, along with a 21 day cleanse as well.  There are lots of tips and motivational talk to go along with the cleanse, cause lordy knows I at least will need the motivational talks everyday.  I have not attempted the cleanse yet.  I felt as if cutting down on sugar, juicing, eating more from scratch all while also doing the No {Mostly} Spend Month was enough to take on for now.  I also get really cold easily, a lot of raw and juiced foods in the springtime when cold days still sneak up on us isn’t exactly my cup of tea.

But I plan on doing it in the summer, when the days are warm and I can pick all I want from my homestead garden and eat, eat, eat and juice, it.

So check this book out, I highly recommend it.  With all of the people in my world who have had or have cancer in the last year, I think we could all take a note or two from Kris’s book and begin to take our health more seriously and rev up the already awesome lives we have!

I can simply say I LOVED THIS BOOK.

The Simple Living Guide by Janet Luhrs.

From the moment I started it up in the mountains for a weekend away with my family, to the turn of the last page.  This book has changed my life on a deeper level than any of the simplicity books I read at the end of last year.  This, along with all of the others, came recommended to me by Katie Berggren on a Facebook exchange one afternoon.  She was right, of all the others, she said The Simple Living Guide was still her favorite.

It is mine too.

The author Janet Luhrs, sums simple living up this way, “Simple living is about living deliberately.  That’s all.  You choose your existence rather than sailing through life on automatic pilot.”

I have written down so many quotes, I am fighting not to share them all!

As we have talked about time so often on this blog, and others that I follow, this one seems acute to some of us Mom’s:

“Our time famine is really and intimacy famine.  It is much easier to stay busy and frantic than it is to love and know ourselves and others deeply.  We’re busy because we want to be busy.  Staying busy appears to give our lives meaning (just look at all of the things I have accomplished and all of the things I do in my life!)  and staying busy is safe.  We don’t really need to get in and look at our lives when we’re rushing from one thing to the next.”

So often I think I have fallen into the trap of “staying busy appears to give our lives meaning”.  If I was busy, doing this or that, fighting this injustice or that, volunteering at this or that, I was more important to society than ‘just’ a stay at home Mom.  I am finding that, for me, being  ‘just’ a stay at home Mom is giving me the opportunity to actually become way more than the  standards in which society has set.

“The real answer was whether I was at peace inside or not.  If you’re peaceful inside you can live anywhere.  If you are in turmoil on the inside, or if you are used to giving in to one desire after another, no log cabin, monastery, or clutter-free house will still your restless waters.”

I can’t tell you how many times I have thought to myself, if I could just go to an ashram for awhile and be still, if my house was just clean and actually stayed that way for more than 20 minutes, if we lived here, or there, or had that book, or that latte, I would be happier.  More peaceful.  This is the key to blooming where we are planted I think!  Find the peace within, then you will reflect it out.

And I love, “Michelangelo was once asked about the process of creating a great sculpture.  He answered that all he did was cut away what was not the sculpture.  Our highest self is in there, waiting.” I suppose the only question would be whether we are honoring that, or whether we are running through our daily lives searching for our higher selves on shelves in store, in food in the cabinet, in addictions, busyness, and the like.

The greatest thing about the idea of simplicity is that it doesn’t mean giving up all of your possessions and moving to an island somewhere and living off the land.  That is the choice for some, but the key to simplicity is living YOUR life, in YOUR way, as simply as you want.  The freedom that can give us is time, choice, flexibility.  When we work all day to pay for all the things we have, it doesn’t give us a lot of time for contemplation, for volunteering if we choose, for spending time with our families, for learning new things, for cooking from scratch, for acquiring new hobbies, or nurturing the hobbies we do have, for travel, for just ‘being’.

Many people want high stress, high workload carriers.  Simplicity living doesn’t say you shouldn’t do that and point fingers, it says if that is what you want to do GREAT, just have awareness about it.  If that isn’t what you want to do, but are doing because somehow society deems it so, or your living to such an extent you have to do that, then lets realign with what we deem important and begin a new dimension of our lives.

She says, “Sit for awhile.  Think about this.  How much of your time is spent on the following (a) working to buy a houseful of stuff; (b) working to earn more money to pay to insure your houseful of stuff; (c) cleaning, rearranging, storing, and maintaining your stuff?”

I can tell you, I spend A LOT of time on C.

As a Mom, I will leave you with these two quotes, but go out and check out this book from the library or buy a copy of your own.  It just might change your life too!  Seriously, the one friend I convinced to finally read it is just as in love as I am with this book, The Simple Living Guide by Janet Luhrs.  Life changing.  Life inspiring.  Life enriching.

For our parenting:

“Ask yourself:  If I were to go through one typical day with my children with this tender, bittersweet awareness of the fleetness and fragility of time in my heart, how would it change my life as a parent?”

And:

“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment, and especially on their children, than the un-lived life of the parents” ~C.G. Jung

I wear two bracelets right now for those I know who are fighting cancer.  Everyday; they never come off.  And no, they don’t say “I heart boobies.” There are countless others I know who are fighting cancer right now too.  Only one is over 40.  Many have small children.  One is a small child.  Scary and enough to get me riled up.  Not that it takes a lot to get me riled up, but cancer, which so many environmental factors have become linked to, really aggravates me. Profits can’t take precedence over human health…period.  Yet it continues to do so.

Two weeks ago, I finally had a mole removed come back with a-typical cells.  For years I get a check over once a year in which they always removed stuff that always came back fine.  I had a lot of sun when I was a kid, now it becomes a twice a year check-up and expense with a follow up on my little current friend in three months.  A-typical hardly means cancer, but it really got me motivated to read the book suggested to me by my friend Anticancer: A New Way of Life by David Servan-Schreiber, MD, PhD who fought two battles with brain cancer himself.

If there is anything I can do to hep my body get stronger to fight against invading cells, I am willing to do it.  And the thing I really liked about his approach, was that it wasn’t preachy do this all now or you’re going to die, but a calm rationale that these items have been scientifically tested and have an impact on increasing the bodies immune system.  Add them to your life, slowly but surely.

“Until we have brushed up against mortality, life seems boundless and we’d prefer to keep it that way.  It seems that there will always be time to set out in search of happiness.  First I have to get my degree, pay off my loans, let the children grow up, retire…I’ll worry about happiness later.  When we put off till tomorrow the quest for the essential, we may find life slipping through our fingers without ever having savored it.  Cancer sometimes cures this strange nearsightedness, this dance of hesitations.”

This to me was fascinating:

“Our genes still bear the marks of having developed several hundred thousand years ago, when we were hunters and gatherers.  They were adapted over time to our ancestors’ environment and especially to their food sources, and they haven’t changed much since,  Today our bodies still expect a diet similar to the one we had when we ate the products of hunting and gathering.  That diet consisted of a lot of vegetables and fruit and occasionally the meat or eggs of wild animals.  It provided a balance between essential fatty acids (omega-6 and omega-3) and very little sugar and didn’t include flour.  Today’s Western surveys of nutrition reveal that 56% of our calories come from these three sources that were nonexistent when our genes were developing:

~ refined sugars (cane and beet sugar, corn syrup, etc.)

~ bleached flour (white bread, white pasta, etc.)

~ vegetable oils (soybean, sunflower, corn, trans fats)

It so happens that these three sources contain none of the proteins, vitamins, minerals, or omega-3 fatty acids needed to keep our bodies functioning.  On the other hand, they directly fuel the growth of cancer.”

He explanation of how sugars fuel cancer cells is well worth the read alone, but he also gives a lot of healthy tips, and scientific data, that explains why certain foods have been shown to fight cancer.  He also believes that we can’t be healthy if the planet we live on isn’t healthy:

“Polar bears live far away from civilization.  The broad expanses of snow and ice they need to survive don’t lend themselves to urban development or industry.  Yet of all the animals in the world, the polar bear is the most contaminated by toxic chemicals-to the point where its immune system and reproductive capacities are threatened.”

The author links the rise in chemicals in our environment to a post WWII phenomenon.  “The annual production of synthetic chemicals has risen from a million tons in 1930 to two hundred million tons today.” Mentioned too was a study done by the European WWF in 2004 to measure chemicals in people.  In the study, “thirty-nine members of the European Parliament and fourteen ministers of the environment from several European countries were tested.  They were all carrying significant doses of pollutants whose toxicity for humans is well established.  Thirteen chemical waste products (phthalates and perflouro compounds) were systematically detected in all the members of parliament.  As for the ministers, they revealed traces of among others, twenty-five identical substances: a flame retardant, two pesticides, and twenty-two PCB’s (polychlorinated biphenyls)…In the United States, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control have identified the presence of 148 toxic chemicals in the blood and urine of Americans of all ages.”

And this is just sickening to all of us who eat food.  Which is of course…all of us:

“What is already known for certain is that meat and dairy products (as well as large fish at the top of the food chain) furnish over 90% of human exposure to known contaminants.  These include dioxin, PCB’s, and certain pesticides that persist in the environment even though they have been banned for years.  It is also clear that typical vegetables contain one hundreth of the amount of contaminants found in meat and that organic milk is less contaminated than conventional milk.”

Good-bye lattes and hot cocoa out.

He doesn’t advocate vegetarianism or anything, he says that it is important to eat organic grass fed beef/meat due to an omega-3/omega-6 ratio.  I urge everyone who wants one leg up at least, it is no guarantee, to read this book and understand how what we eat fuels a growing cancer, and how what we eat can also help us fight cancer along with conventional treatment. He has lots of suggestions for exercise, herbs, spices, tea, spirituality, and more.  A lot of this coincides with information I have been reading for years in health magazines and books, it is the way he describes and gives backing to those things that got my attention.  If, “All of us have cancer cells in our bodies.  But not all of us will develop cancer” doesn’t at least leave you wanting to read the book, nothing else I say will!

My favorite quote is one that he quotes Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, who was quoting Upton Sinclair,  “It’s difficult to get someone to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Dang straight.

Spill it: Do you think that environmental factors play a part at all in cancer, or is it strictly genetics? Do you think there are things that you can do to help yourself stay healthy or are you convinced that everything will kill you so why even try?

Oh my goodness can I share how much I love, love, loved this book!  Every second of every moment of time I had in the last week, I was peeking through these amazing stories.

The author, Katherine Leiner, travels around the United States interviewing all kinds of folks involved in the current food movement.  From chefs, to farmers, to activists, to business owners, she brings us into their world.  Each piece highlights the journey of each individual in becoming whatever it is that involves food and sustainability practices.

You’ll remember, she highlighted Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, documentary filmmakers of King Corn.  But that was way back on page 67!  There are 300 pages of astute and passionate people sharing with us their dreams of quality, environmentally aware, conscientious food.

And did I mention it is loaded with recipes?  All that I will copy before I bring it back to the library!

From restaurant owners like Chris Jackson of Ted and Honey in Brooklyn, Tod Murphy of The Farmers Diner, highlighted in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, to Katrina Blair of Turtle Lake Refuge in Durango, Colorado, and Blake Spalding and Jennifer Castle of award winning Hell’s Backbone Grill in Boulder, Utah.

From farmers like Daniel Salatin, highlighted in Omnivore’s Dilemma, Amy and Jamie Ager of Hickory Nut Gap Farm, to Benina Marie Burroughs, an almond farmer.

From young entrepreneurs like Jamie Peterson of Peterson Winery and Vineyards, Alison Baily Vercruysse of 18 Rabbits granola, Neil Gottlieb of Three Twins Organic Ice Cream in Napa, to Joslyn Erica of Hummingbird Herbals.

There are food activist and oystermen, almond growers and vegetable oil vehicle converters!  This book is chock full for anyone who is interested in sustainable farming, homesteading, urban homesteading, organic food, health, natural remedies, living simply, or my goodness anyone who needs renewed hope in our collective future.

I think the story that stood out the most, although they were ALL beautiful and inspiring, was that of Matthew Moore.  A family of farmers, Matthew went off to study art in college then returned home to work his family farm.   As it slowly was getting encroached by suburbia, he started to take his art to the fields.  From his website:

“Welcome to urbanplough.com, my name is Matthew Moore and I am the last of four generations to farm my family’s land outside of Phoenix, AZ. Within five years, my home (this land) will transform into suburbia. In this site you can explore how I have documented and translated this development using art, in the form of earthworks, video and installation. While the loss of my family’s land is not the sole focus of my work, it certainly has initiated my greater exploration of using art to address environmental and economic sustainability issues.”

I think the most fascinating part of his story, is his art.  That is what hung in my memory.  His art.

In Growing Roots, there are two photos of his work on opposing pages and they are striking.  Check em’ out:

In this photo, he had cut into a 20 acre barley field the building plan for a house that was built in his area:

Here, he planted one years crops in the shape of the new neighborhood that would be built on top of that land:

O.K., enough already!  Go check this book out, whether you get it from the bookstore, or the library, just get it.

Spill it: What stories inspire YOU?  Are they those of the sustainability movement?  A CEO?  An activist?  Do share so we can be inspired by their stories too!

Two weeks ago, I reviewed Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire by Rafe Esquith.  Today is a follow up review about his next book, Lighting Their Fires:  How Parents and Teachers Can Raise Extraordinary Kids.

I have to be honest, most parenting books I find simply annoying.  Their ability to cause me to think that I am the worst Mom in the entire universe is huge.  It doesn’t take much. But Rafe Esquith’s books don’t make me feel bad, they make me feel inspired.  I am inspired to inspire my kids.  This seems better than being inspired to change myself cause I think I am a selfish, bitter, inpatient, lazy, or a terrible example.

He has some amazing quotes in the book, some of which I underlined twice I loved them so!

“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.” ~Mark Twain

“I find television to be very educating.  Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other toom and read a book.” ~Groucho Marx

“In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best is the wrong thing, and the worst things you can do is nothing.” ~Teddy Roosevelt

“If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.” ~Anonymous

“But before I live with other people I have to live with myself.  The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.” ~Atticus Finch (To Kill A Mockingbird)

“There are no one-man shows.” ~Sir Ian McKellen

“I never let school interfere with my education.” ~Mark Twain

I think the most interesting outcome from reading both of these books, is the fact that they created a desire in me to be better.  And to take responsibility for my own choices.  And that I can try harder.  And that…raising our children is exciting; the possibilities endless.

I guess what he is trying to teach his kids, might have just rubbed off on me!  It is never too late to learn after all.

In this book, Mr. Esquith takes his kids to a baseball game using the game as the backdrop for each chapter.  He takes on television too, which is never a popular option in mainstream society, but makes some important connections.

“There is also a direct correlation between increased television viewing and the decreasing percentage of kids who graduate from college.”

He is not anti-tv, he shows the kids in his class movies which he thinks portray important themes.  But passes on that quantity and quality should both be considerations when we are putting our kiddos in front of the tube, computer, and any other screen they might be exposed to.

He touches on selfishness, good decision making skills, being on time, focus, going the extra mile, humbleness, and more.

“Some people take pride in their jobs and others do not.”

Was I taking pride in my job? Or was I finding it a chore?  It is all in how you choose to think about it isn’t it?

My favorite tidbit was when the author talked about the film Inherit the Wind. “Teaching kids to go their own way and instilling in them the courage to do so is vital.” There is a monologue in the movie that he quotes in entirety which I will share too cause I so love it:

“I know what Bert is going through.  It’s the loneliest feeling in the world-it’s like walking down an empty street listening to the sound of your own footsteps.  But all you have to do is to knock on any door and say, “If you let me in I’ll live the way you want me to live and I’ll think the way you want me to think.”  And all the blinds will go up and all the doors will open and you’ll never be lonely, ever again.  Now, it’s up to you.”

Powerful stuff that we can all learn from.

So check out either of his books, and re-invigorate your desire to instill your values in your children, to show them responsibility, to teach them beyond the classroom.  They are so worth the trouble.

Spill it: Do you ever find that you are not the shining example to your kids that you thought you would be when you decided to bring them into this world? Do you once in a whole need to find a renewed sense of purpose in parenting?

I read Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire by Rafe Esquith in less than a week.  Which for a stay at home, homeschooling, trying to clear out the house Mom, that is saying it was AWESOME.

If you are a teacher or a parent,homeschooling or not, this is a fantastic book about how much kids can do given the chance, and how much we owe them to be creative and engaging.  This guy is amazingly dedicated to giving his kids an extraordinary chance to try their hands at all sorts of things from music to baseball to Shakespeare.

“Parents and teachers have to come through. If I tell the kids we are beginning a special art project on Friday, I have to deliver, even if it means running out to a twenty-four-hour Home Depot at 4:00 AM to get extra wood and brushes.  Being constantly dependable is the best way to buildup trust.  We do not need to lecture the children about how we came through on a promise, let them figure out that they can trust us.  It’s a cliche, but our actions truly do speak louder than our words.”

How many times have I said to my kids that we were going to do something and then we ran out of time and I said we would do it ‘tomorrow’ instead?  How many times have those tomorrows turned into weeks?

“Never forget that kids watch you constantly.  They model themselves after you, and you have to be the person you want them to be.”

Wow.  That is heavy and true.  And I wouldn’t want my kids to be like me in oh so many realms.

“This I believe:  If young people develop a love of reading, they will have better lives.  That objective is not listed in our state curriculum standards.  Our assesment of reading may begin with standardized test scores, but in the end we must measure a child’s reading ability by the amount of laughter exhaled and tears shed as the written word is devoured.”

The book obsessed can appreciate that, but not to mention, it was one of the reasons we wanted to homeschool.  I am sure many other parents are just as frustrated, when did learning become about standardized tests and not about passion and leading kids into the openings of discovery on their own, about things they love?

“The testing obsession that has swept our nation’s schools is detrimental to helping children reach their potential as students and human beings.”

Rafe Esquith shares with the reader many wonderful things he does in his classroom, famously called Room 56, that parents and teachers can take into their own worlds too.  Things such as the importance of art projects, the writing of books, traveling with the kids, the movie club, Shakespeare plays, and so much more.  The depth and quality of what he covers is phenomenal, and maybe a little miraculous!

He does think it is equally important to raise kids with values and standards to adhere to as well, and asks that of his kids.  They learn how to show respect, to work as a team, and to respect places outside of school that they visit.

One quote I appreciate is:

“I love being a teacher.  You have the chance to get better at what you do.”

Isn’t that they way with parenting too? We have the chance to get better at what we do?

Uh…I just hope I get better before I run out of time!

I leave you with, “And no television on a school night-ever-for you or them.  There are better things to do.”

Damn.  There are better things to do than watch Desperate Housewives or Biggest Loser.  I just can’t stop!

Spill it: Do you teach, parent, love, volunteer, guide, anything, like your hair is on fire?  Did you ever have a teacher that did?  (I can say I never did, not once, have a teacher that was so incredibly excited about what they were doing that I couldn’t help but to be excited too)

Talk about books that I devour.  Holy cow.  I truly LOVED this book.

Planetwalker by John Francis.  This book was a beautiful experience of traveling through the evolution of a man.  All I could wish is that my journey on this earth is half as realized as his.

In 1971, John Francis decided to leave his car in the driveway for good and stick to his feet after an oil disaster in San Francisco.  Soon after, he decided to stop speaking and spend time listening instead.  The 22 years of walking and 17 years of silence that followed is told in the book.

I was moved on practically every single page turn and brought back to the simple life by every paragraph.  When I was getting stressed or overwhelmed about whatever, all I could think was, “I will go read Planetwalker to be reminded about why these supposed stresses are silly and a waste of my time.”

His pilgrimage is not mine, but dang I’ll admit I am jealous.

“I leave them there still talking and continue on to Point Reyes Station.  My head is full, replaying real and imagined conversations, attempting to prove to myself that I am right.  I do not like the anger I feel; it eats into my gut.  I realize now that I have taken a stand that challenges a way of life, a way of seeing things.  It is no wonder that people challenge me.  I am challenging myself.  I feel frustrated because though it is clear to me, I am unable to articulate beyond a simple phrase about why I walk.  Even more difficult for me to understand is the bugeoning feeling of something spiritual and sacred in the ordinary act of walking.  I start to feel that each step taken is part of an invisible journey for which there is no map and few road signs.  I am not sure I am prepared, and the discomfort both frightens and excites me.”

I get that sense.  Ugh.  All the time.  That I can’t quite articulate why I think and feel the way I do, but that I know it is a direction I must go…even if I am unaware of how it will end.

“Then I realize that walking is not enough.  Perhaps it is a beginning, but now I see that I am going to have to change not just the outside but on the inside too, in more ways than I can now imagine.  I think that maybe I have already begun this inner change.  It seems that all change begins unseen or at least unnoticed in the journey we call life.”

The inside.  Isn’t that where all our greatness comes from?  The inside?  And the change is that much more profound when it happens not on the outside, where it is almost too easy, but when it is at the core of who we are and where we operate from.  Life’s clarity starts in that spot.  Life’s wonder.  Life’s joys.  Where “change begins unseen or at least unnoticed.”

“I am embarrassed at not having noticed the bamboo that is growing in our own yard.  It is not that I hadn’t noticed it growing there, it is just that I hadn’t noticed it enough to give it meaning.  I remember it fuzzily, low and green without any detail.  It makes me wonder how much of life goes by me that way.”

Uh…who doesn’t have those moments? When you realize a whole day has passed you and you haven’t taken a second to really be present and notice who and what was around you.  Not in some vague, hurried passing way, but in a deep, and connected richness?

He quotes:

“Many labor under the illusion that only war is evil and that if it could be averted man could go on peacefully to create paradise on Earth.  What is forgotten is that in both the state of war and peace man is waging incessant war upon nature.”

~Seyyed Hossein Nasr

And those moments of ecstasy:

“Before I stopped at the nursing home I had been thinking about peace, what it means and how it comes about.  Does it require a sort of tension to exist?  I don’t know the answer.  My mind now turns to ecstasy.  I think I feel ecstasy sometimes.  It is a fleeting moment of being in touch with all the pleasures and the pain, the vacant stares and touches, the clapping hands, and stars, the music and the rain…Tears well up and streak my face.”

I get those moments when I am quiet.  Or at the top of a mountain.  Or at the beach.  That moment where you understand the deep interconnectedness of everything that is.  You feel happiness, and expansive, and complete, and then you blink, or sneeze, or wipe the sweat off your forehead and the moment is gone again.  You are left to feel like the same crazed lunatic that hiked to the top of that hill just to feel a nanoseconds worth of ecstasy.

Oh yeah, he walked across the United States.  From Point Reyes, CA to Atlantic City, NJ.  It took him 7 years, and he picked up his masters and doctorate on the way.  In silence.  No joke.

This is a beautifully told story, that touched me somewhere deep in my psyche.  Some place we each hope to go during our life time on Earth.   It is well worth the read if you are into spiritual journey’s, travel narratives, adventure, nature, the environment, or simple living.

I was sad to finish.

Spill it: Have you ever gone to a book in search of little reminders about what is important to you in life?  If so, what book was it that calmed your spirit and soothed your nerves?

“This reality-things once possessed that cannot be done without-is so powerful that it occupies our unconscious.” ~Wes Jackson

Calling all homecomer’s!

What would it mean if we took to task the job of building communities?  Not cities, not suburbs, but communities that are diverse and rich with experts in many areas, communities that would share collective hopes for a different world, communities that were much more self sustaining than the ones we have created over the last century?

Wes Jackson thinks that investing our time and energy into communities is the answer to our ecological dilemma and goes about arguing this point in his book Becoming Native To This Place.  He is of the mind that over the last 60 years or so, we have been so focused on the economy and economic development that we have been pulled away from small, local communities, that were more ecologically sustainable.

“We have been through the hypocrisy of the church, the atrocity of the nation-state that peaked with Hitler, and now we are devotees of economics, the encoded language of human behavior that directs us toward ecological bankruptcy.  It is time to move more aggressively on to the fourth phase, already under way, ecology.”

~Wes Jackson

How often do you give pause to what you purchase and where the money actually goes when you have signed on the dotted line?  Does it stay locally for the most part?  Or is your money re-directed to some other area of the world into the hands of people far, far away?

“In a similar manner, the forces of power, particularly corporate power, are impatient with what is adequate for a coherent community.  Because power gains so little from community in the short run, it does not hesitate to destroy community for the long run.  The malls at the edge of town are a perfect example.  We forget why they were built.  Their designers did not say, “Let’s make them ugly, wasteful, and devoted to consumerism.” They turned out a design to export wealth away to their stockholders, most of whom reside in distant cities.  Malls are suction pipes, designed to export regional wealth.”

~Wes Jackson

How many of us buy blindly?  How many of us are following what the corporate and media enterprises without much thought in our daily activities?  What effect is this having on us mentally?  What affect is it having on us socially?  What effect is it having on our environment that we need for basic survival?  Can we change?

“An extractive economic system to a large degree is a derivative of our perceptions and values.  But it also controls our behavior.  We have to loosen its hard grip on us, finger by finger.  I am hopeful that a new economic system can emerge from the homecomer’s effort-as a derivative of right livelihood rather than of purposeful design.  It will result from our becoming better ecological accountants at the community level.”

~Wes Jackson

What if we, as a society changed our values? What are some ways we could change our current dynamic of corporatism dictating to us what and who we should be?

“Our task is to build cultural fortresses to protect our emerging nativeness.  They must be strong enough to hold at bay the powers of consumerism, the powers of greed and envy and pride.  One of the most effective ways for this to come about would be for our universities to assume the awesome responsibility to both validate and educate those who want to be homecomers-not necessarily to go home but to go someplace and dig in and begin the long search and experiment to become native.”

~Wes Jackson

“The economists have come along and taught us to believe that checks on self-interest are not only unnecessary but harmful.  In their minds, self-interest behavior is rational behavior.  Now that this ethos has become the dominant force at work in the market, wittingly or not, given the technological array that has popped up, the earth, including countless life forms, has become a mine and an overflowing sink for our wastes.  That is not the way a healthy prairie works, where wastes become ecological capital.”

~Wes Jackson

There are so many dog eared pages of this book in my lap, and I want to share with you all of it.  But the overall concept is that we learn to be native to the areas in which we live.  We observe how nature operates in that region and we mimic her; she knows what she is doing.  We come ‘home’ and become responsible and ecological business owners.  We invest in social relationships in our communities by buying locally, making locally, celebrating locally.

The ‘local’ movement is underway as we speak.  At Whole Foods I am bombarded with local tags on produce that grew right in our state.  Farmer’s markets have popped up all over the place and become the place to ‘be’ on Saturday mornings, your senses overwhelmed with the smell of roasting chili’s, and fresh dill; by live local musicians, and the eye feast of locally made wares.

But is it enough?  People are still flooding away from America’s open lands where food can be grown, and people more self sustained, to the cities and suburbs, hoping for a ‘better life’.

But is life really better for most of us?

This book isn’t about saying we never should have left the agricultural life, and not created technology that saves lives.  Not at all.  What it is saying is now that we have done that, lets reevaluate that which we have created and make adjustments where they need to be made. I would highly recommend this read to anyone who is in to environmental ethics.  It is a small, quick read, he does seem a bit cranky at times, and some of it was out of my realm regarding genetics.  But it poses a lot of philosophical questions that if we don’t face right now, at some point we will be forced to.

By then will it be too late?

Spill it: Thoughts?

I just finished reading Coop:  A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting by Micheal Perry.  (Evidently the paperback edition is titled slightly differently)  It came recommended by the gal over at A Life Sustained blog.

I loved this book.

Of course I would love this book.  It is about a guy who lives on farmland, with a wife and a daughter, and a bundle on the way.  He gets pigs, and chickens, and he writes a book in that year.  Besides the pigs, even more so after reading the book, this year in his life is a year I would like to see in the near future of mine!

Most of it anyway.  It isn’t a book that is all glory with no guts.  No ones life is void of ups and downs and crushingly painful downs at times.  It is the journey of humanness.  This book has one of those that caught me completely off guard. And hey, even with the pigs and chickens there are a few downs.

But I am in love with the idea of this.  If you have read my Dreams of Homesteading post, you understand.  Mr. Perry is funny and real in his writing, and hits some philosophical doozies that had me pause to look up from my reading:

“After the hot, sticky afternoon, storms have begun working either side of the valley and pushing a cool breeze before them.  It’s nice, all of us out here together, eating and talking, laughing with the baby.  I get going on the pigpen, or the garden fence, and from some imaginary omniscient perch I look down and see a man toiling on behalf of his family, forgetting that sometimes what the family needs is a man sitting still.”

~Coop pg. 178

As much as he wants to speak for himself, I feel as though he is speaking about me as well.  Sometimes what a family needs is a Mom standing still. Not a Mom trying to be everything to everyone running around at warp speed just trying to make some effort and doing it all.  We can toil all we want until we feel better and more in control, but often what is needed is moments of just being.

This crumb from pg. 245 had me in stitches for a multitude of reasons:

“And what better than haying to soothe the obsessive-compulsive beast? How clean the field looks when the last wagon departs.  The stubble reamins slanted in the direction of the last pass, and as on a checker-mowed lawn, you can read the bend of the stems and see how the day progressed.  On tight corners the haybine always missed little bed-head tufts of hay.  They bugged me like a collar sticking up, so sometimes I tried to trim them when I was done, but this plugged the sickle, so I’d have to shudder and drive home.  But still:  at the end of it all, you had the very green manifestation of summer swept cleanly from the field, pressed into cubes, and stowed in square corners against the winter.  Every time I stack firewood, there is this moment at the finish when I step back and survey the neat row, and a yogalike calm fills me.  It is the same with the hay pile.  You look at it, and you think, Well, whatever the winter brings, we’ve got out hay up.”

~Coop

I know you are pondering, why so funny? Am I right?  Two things.

First, two weeks ago I mowed my first lawn EVER.  Yes, I will confess, this outspoken feminist has never mowed a lawn.  Why would I have?  I have always lived in apartments or in the mountains.  No lawns in either locale.  But as I have been getting more keen on the idea of homesteading, I thought I should branch out in areas of knowledge.  After all, if I want to use a tractor, best to start with a lawnmower I presume.

Regardless, my husband and our neighbors sat and drank beers on the driveway as I learned to wrestle the little orange machine up and down our slanted lawn.  I was so proud of myself when I was all done, I knew it wasn’t like some soccer field with a checkerboard etched in it, but our lawn was significantly shorter than it had been moments before.

Then I sat.  On the driveway. Looking around at my work.  Only to see all of these tufts of grass poking up in random places…all over the lawn.  I was shocked and irritated too!  It isn’t as if I can haul the mower all over the lawn again for 24 ‘stray hairs’ that I had left.  But it annoys me still!

Second, from the statement “Every time I stack firewood, there is this moment at the finish when I step back and survey the neat row, and a yogalike calm fills me.”

Yes, yogi Michael.  I get that too.  Except it comes when I am at the helm of the Bissel 12 amp Pet Hair Eraser with 2x the cyclone action.  There is nothing like the overwhelming sense of calm and control that follows in the footsteps of the last horizontal line vacuumed across my carpet.  Pure success.

Back to that Coop…not co-op tag line.  I can’t tell you how many people would read the cover of the book as I had it hugged to my chest then say “Coop.  Or Co-op?”  Followed by a strange and bewildered gaze.  The man is holding a chicken on the cover.  This book ain’t about a co-op, it’s about chickens.  And people.  People with chickens.  It is COOP people.  Coop.

Spill it: I am always looking for a good read, any other suggestions for a book junky who loves the idea of living with the land and following the seasons?  (And yes, I have read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle…five stars!)