Dear Subscribers,

Over the last week, people have sent just endless emails about all the hair raising things that make them go ballistic.  There is the economy and as if that were not already plenty, there is the pandemic that is or might be.  There are pollutants in our pet food, our own food, on our children's toys and in our clothing, and well, the list just doesn't end, does it?  There was a message in the astrology books that I read years and years ago:  "You can't stop it from raining, but if you know it is going to rain, you can always carry an umbrella."  In short, the best most of us can do is prepare for a few of the more likely contingencies. 

This said, I believe the snowball is indeed rolling downhill, that it is picking up momentum, and that the world the next generation will inherit will be utterly different from the one into which we were born.  However, many of us have been preparing for many lifetimes or at least decades to make a difference and our time does seem to have arrived.

I want to continue a tad with my "revolution" discussion, not complete it, but then I have this Scheherazade complex and I never do finish the stories before starting a new one.  Revolutions in the esoteric sense are understood to arise from the need for Truth to prevail and they are thus heralded by Uranus Who resorts to all sorts of outlandish and eccentric behaviors in order to get attention for the mandates for which He is responsible.  On His own, Uranus is unable to effect the necessary changes, but He can stir things up and blow things around and wait for Saturn to ground the practical components of the changes.  This is essentially how I was looking at change and for years, I have said that the resistance always comes from those with vested interests in the status quo.  So, you can offer them a significant slice of the new pie, probably never a slice big enough for their appetites, or you can ignore the status quo and create an alternative on a sort of parallel and ultimately more viable track but, if you do this, you basically struggle against the status quo and therefore lack support and funding.  This is the only real issue with which we are currently faced, but I see the winds blowing!

Thanks to the new page on Landscaping Revolution, two people ordered Richo Cech's book on Growing At Risk Medicinal Herbs.  I was out of stock and called to order more, only to find they were not able to offer the normal discount.  I went on amazon.com and found the book is selling for $120-200, more or less.  Curious, I looked around at other hugely important books, like Fukuoka's One Straw Revolution and found that the story is more or less the same, but you can download the pdf from a library in Australia.  This one is being reprinted by the New York Review Books Classics and will be released in a few more days.  As that day approaches, the amazon.com price for the original edition has been dropping.  The other Fukuoka books are available from India.  The long and the short is that books, seeds, garden tools, you name it are all selling fast and stores are running out, which is essentially good news unless people are hoarding . . . which, of course, is bad news.

Last week, people deluged me with emails about our various crises.  There is really no "crisis" but the life styles to which we had become accustomed are changing and this is actually rather exciting.  Well, I admit, good arguments can be made for why our political and financial systems are in a state of crisis, why our educational and health care systems are in a state of crisis, why our soil and food are in crisis, but there is a parallel track and the fix is underway.  What is interesting about the One Straw is that it really happens one person and one day at a time.

As I listen to people explaining their lives to me and read all the emails about the changes each of you are making, I see an absolutely enormous range of motivations and inspiration.  For instance, I am transforming my few square feet of land because I'm a healer and came to understand that the land would not support the growth of plants or the wildlife that chooses to hang out here.  My awareness did not come as a great satori experience but there have been many soft "ah ha" murmurings.  For instance, over the last few days, there have been more and more wild birds foraging in my front yard.  This is the first year I have seen so many so I figure there are worms and seeds abounding.

Dan planted some ceanothus without telling me but as I looked around, I found some volunteers more than 60 feet from where he planted them.  Curious as always, I read up on them and realized they are nitrogen fixing and allow the forest to return after devastation, usually from fires but it is obvious there are other kinds of devastation as well.  About 20 feet from the ones growing on the edge of my natural stand of "forest", the goldenseal that Kathrin sent a couple of years ago seems finally to have struggled its way into the light of day.  I was so disappointed when it didn't come up the first year, but it was obviously waiting.

So, by way of motivation, I want to reiterate that I recognized my soil was dead, stopped struggling against Nature, let Her do her thing, shredded the letters from the homeowner's association, and now, I am a happy camper as are some squirrels, rabbits, and birds.  Last year, I planted for the bees.  This year, I am planting for the regeneration of the soil itself.  Of course, there are tiny harvests to be expected and so another benefit is that my own food is improving.

This morning, someone returned a phone call I made last week.  I wanted to know exactly what happens to food that is imported.  Okay, aside from whatever the circumstances and practices are where the food is grown, whether Mexico or China or somewhere else, the containers are fumigated for shipping (the outside so depending on the packaging, this may or may not leave residuals.)  Then, the containers are scanned at the port to be sure that the contents are as described.  This is all part of our post 911 world.  They are not calling this procedure "irradiation" but it obviously entails some form of x-raying of the containers.  The contents are then tested and if the contents are intended for your dining room table, they are irradiated.  In short, imported food is nuked.  I have known for decades that most spices that are imported in bulk are irradiated with 35,000 times the rads permitted in a chest x-ray but this practice has now spread to lettuce and just about everything else.

So, if terminator seeds were not headache enough, we have people intentionally nuking our food and zombies who are oblivious to the risks who go one step further and nuke at home.  What this leads to is something I used to refer to as counterevolutionary trends.  Now, just to be sure that you Geminians are not playing with words, let me explain that I mean we are going against the evolutionary trends and reverting to more primordial states in which simply massive amounts of bacteria and fungi are needed to stabilize the natural world against the idiocy of man.

If you think about it, it is fungi that are taking on the task of dealing with the depleted uranium in Iraq and Afghanistan and these fungi have to be extremely adaptable because of the dryness and cold.  It is fungi that trapped the salt in the Dead Sea to allow plants to grow in that wretched soil.  The way we are headed, fungi will not just return our flesh and bones to dust but they will challenge our survival the whole time we are headed for the grave because we are so out of balance . . . and this is obviously an immense topic.

One last nudge I would like to make today is that years ago I was involved for a while in Kirlian photography.  I never owned the cameras but I spent time with people who did have them and I was fascinated by the aura and how long it would linger once a leaf or limb were separated from the living entity.  According to Ayurveda, the nutrition of food is not in the chemicals but in the prana which, in turn, is part of the etheric body.  Dr. Vasant Lad and I discussed this years ago.  If you freeze food or store it for a long time, the prana dissipates and the food loses nutrient capacity.  It probably has the same chemicals but no viable mechanism for delivery of nutrients and this is why fresh food and herbs will always be better than ones that have been subjected to excessive processing and storage.

So, though I know most of you are still just a few toes in the water with seeds and planting, I want you to be thinking ahead to the handling of your harvests:  seed gathering, drying, canning, tincturing, distilling, whatever you are going to be doing.  It takes a while to line up your ducks, but they will march.

Meanwhile, I have added a little bit more to Landscaping Revolution.  There are a few herb profiles.  These are actually just documents I prepared for my own use because I am trying to be hospitable.  I have some rabbit families on my property and some squirrels.  The deer come and go and I wanted to define areas for them, plant what they like and then something they don't like in order to preserve some area for my birds and myself.  However, to the extent that you might be approaching your situations in a similar way, you might find the notes of use.

Many blessings,

Ingrid

Copyright by Ingrid Naiman 2009

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