Thoughtstylings

Radical Homemakers

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Thoughtstylings
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Last year we had the great privilege of meeting and being interviewed by farmer and author Shannon Hayes for her new book Radical Homemakers. Hayes is well known as an expert on cooking grass fed meat–see her website grassfedcooking.com for more on that. Radical Homemakers takes a look at the new domesticity of the past decade through a series of interviews with its practitioners. Touching on issues such as gender roles, food choices and finances, Radical Homemakers is the first book I know of to delve into the motivations of the unnamed movement that this blog and its readers are also a part of. I really like what Hayes says in the introduction about the subjects of this 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.”

Now I have an excuse not to clean up the chicken poo I track into the kitchen! But seriously, I highly recommend Radical Homemakers, as well as Hayes’ other books. It’s about time somebody addressed the “why” of this movement and Hayes is the perfect person to do so.

You can pick up a copy of Radical Homemakers and read the introduction a radicalhomemakers.com.

Our Daily Bread

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Thoughtstylings
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This stunning documentary, directed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter in 2005, is the best film about our modern agricultural system that I have seen. It has no commentary, narration or interviews, just slow moving static and tracking shots. It proves that it’s better to simply show something and let the audience make up their own mind. That being said, I’d be surprised if many people would come out of a screening of this film and think that what they just saw, our industrialized agricultural system, is a good idea. But another point of Our Daily Bread, I think, is that, like it or not, we’re all a part of this system.

Our Daily Bread is available on Netflix and Amazon. You can read an interview with the director on the official website www.ourdailybread.at.

Stella Natura: Planting by the Signs

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Biodynamics, Thoughtstylings
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Judging from the hostile reaction the last time I posted about Biodyamamics, we need some kind of woo-woo alert for this type of post. Perhaps an animated flash animation, like those mortgage ads, of Stevie Nicks dancing to Rhiannon. I’ll get the Homegrown Evolution IT department on it right away. On to the post:
Timing planting according to moon, sun and zodiacal cycles is a very old tradition. Farmers and gardeners have consulted mysterious almanacs for thousands of years to determine the best times to plant. There’s even some, mentioned in the Foxfire books, that are still around: the Farmer’s Almanac, Grier’s Almanac and T. E. Black’s annual booklet God’s Way are just a few.

But the one I’ve been enjoying for the past few months is the Stella Natura calendar, published by the Camphill Village Kimberton Hills, an intentional community for the disabled associated with Biodynamics and the ideas of Rudolf Steiner. The Stella Natura calendar lists moon phases, the sun and moon’s position in the zodiac, conjunctions, oppositions and other celestial events. It suggests certain days and times for planting root crops, flowering crops, fruit crops, and leaf crops. Much of it is based on the writings and research of Maria Thun.

Do I believe that planting by the signs effects the growth of my garden directly? I don’t know and don’t really care. What I like is the symbolic message, in the Jungian sense, that all is connected, all is one. Not such a bad thing to be reminded of in our fragmented times.
You can get the same planting information here online, but you’d miss one of the best things about the Stella Natura calendar, the monthly essays. This month’s, by Laura Riccardi, says exactly what I’ve been thinking of late,

“I do answer with practical, logical, agricultural language most of the time. There is plenty to talk about regarding soil building, diversity, insect and drought resistance, quality, microbial life, nutrient availability. I am beginning to feel justified and unembarrassed to speak about subtle life forces, to say that everything is connected, because I believe it is important to balance out the one-sided approach that has dominated our intellectual human landscape for so long. What we call materialism is not inherently wrong or negative. It is simply in extreme presence in our lives today. In other words, it’s already well represented in everything around us, including agriculture.”

I put the calendar up by the stove. When I’m cooking (often during the past few months with vegetables from our winter garden) I look at the calendar. It’s a nice prompt that it’s time to plan for the next planting of vegetables.

Would I use this system if I lived in a cold climate and had a very tight window for planting? Probably not. But here in Los Angeles, where we have a four month time span to plant most things, following the Stella Natura calendar is a good way of avoiding procrastination. The calendar also has a handy space for taking notes on plantings, another thing I’ve been bad about in the past.

I want to be clear that I’m not discounting empiricism. But since don’t have a lab at my disposal, gardening is an intuitive process whether I like it or not. And, as Riccardi suggests, we need to seek a balance. The cornerstone of alchemy is the expression “Solve et Coagula”, to dissolve and bind together. We’ve been good in the past century at the dissolving part, breaking everything up into individual components, but not so good at the binding together part.

Now, if I could just get Rhiannon out of my head . . .

Bread and Transformation

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Bread, Fermentation, Food, Thoughtstylings
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I’ve not tried Reinhart’s baking method (even though I once had one of his books out of the library), but I like this 2008 Ted talk on the alchemical symbolism of bread. If you’re either a baking or brewing geek like me it’s worth a view.

The baking method I’ve used for over a decade is from Nancy Silverton’s book Breads from the La Brea Bakery. You use a sourdough starter and at least half the flour must be white to get it to leaven properly. I’ve had great results, but would like to someday make a loaf entirely from whole wheat with a sourdough starter. Reinhart, in his book Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor claims to be able to do just that and not end up with a hockey puck. If you’ve tried his method (and gone through his very lengthy directions) leave a comment!

Avatar: I’m not lovin’ it.

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Thoughtstylings
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Since it just won the Golden Globe award for best picture and several other garden blogs have commented on it, I think it’s time to take a break from blogging about nettles and weigh in on James Cameron’s Avatar. For the five or so folks who haven’t seen it yet, here’s a plot summary: An evil corporation sets up shop on a far off planet, “Pandora”, to mine a rare mineral necessary for the next generation of iPhones. Unfortunately, said planet is occupied by a tall blue Rastafarian/Smurf people who practice a quaint religion centered around a fiber optic tree (what Doug Harvey describes as the “Gaia Hypothesis Shrub”). The blue folks also have fiber optic connections in their pony tails, kinda like this:


In Pandora’s jungle, everything is bioluminescent and all the plants are networked with the fiber optic shrub. Even the flying lizards have fiber optic appendages. The tall blue smurf folks can plug into these connections and control the flying lizards and five-legged horses. Oddly, when the blue people make love they don’t seem to connect up their fiber optic pony tails (would that make for an R rating?). Best of all, Sigourney Weaver discovers that the quaint religion, which involves sitting in a lotus position and swaying in front of the Gaia Hypothesis Shrub, is all based on SCIENCE since the fiber optic network is just like the internets back on earth not some woo-woo esoteric thing.

Spoiler alert–a disabled veteran, using a fancy wii controller mounted inside a tanning bed becomes a blue person and, by jacking into a really big flying lizard, defeats the evil corporation. In the final scene the disabled veteran, now fully smurfed-out, uses a spear to tip over the corporate general who is walking around in a top-heavy robot thingy. Sigourney Weaver dies and gets sucked up into the Gaia Hypothesis Shrub. Or, that’s my memory of it. I got kinda distracted by the 3D Imax Sensurround experience.

As for Avatar’s ideas about nature, one of Cameron’s workers must have done a brief one page summary of Paul Stamet’s mushroom writings for the busy director. The whole fiber optic natural network subplot in Avatar is reminiscent of the discovery, thanks to advances in DNA testing, of what may be the largest living organism in the world, the underground mycelial network of a massive honey mushroom Armillaria ostoyae that covers some 1,500 acres in Washington. Mix mushrooms with undersea landscapes and you’ve got Cameron’s jungle. Add the fiber optics and you’ve got a computer geek’s vision of Mother Earth.

What bugs me about the critical reaction to Avatar is the idea that the movie somehow represents a yearning for contact with the natural world (ironic in a movie that substitutes flesh and blood actors with digital puppets). In fact, Avatar is an artifact of a culture profoundly out of touch with nature. and serves only to further that disconnect by embedding the myth of disconnect in our popular imagination. How deeply offensive it is–how simple minded and tech biased–to suggest that nature is something we can “plug into,” Matrix style, as if we’re somehow separate from the world around us, aloof from it until we choose to interact with it. We are one with the natural world, always have been, always will be. We are born jacked-in, but we learn to ignore it.

What really frightened me about the Avatar and all the critics who loved it, is how the movie’s protagonist redeems the natural world by becoming virtual. Sure, he becomes flesh and blue blood in the end but only after all those virtual hours in the tanning bed. In this way Cameron’s movie inverts Andrei Tarkovsky’s brilliant Solaris (not to be confused with the George Cloony remake). The doomed astronauts of Solaris descend into madness because they loose touch with the natural world and can no longer distinguish the virtual from the real. In the film worried government officials dispatch a psychologist, Kris Kelvin, to find out what is going on aboard a space station orbiting the planet Solaris. Kelvin spends his last days on earth deep in the woods at his fathers remote cabin. Once in space Kelvin loses touch with reality. His dead wife appears to him, simultaneously real and virtual. Jerry Mander describes Solaris in his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television:

“Without concrete reality, which is to say, contact with their planetary roots, they are adrift in their minds: insane. All information has become believable and not believable at the same time. It has become arbitrary. There is no way to separate the real from the not-real. Although the astronauts know this, since there is nothing that is not arbitrary, except each other, all information is equal. It is impossible to determine which information to act on . . .

Finally, the message of the film is clear. The process of going insane began long before the launch into space. It began when life moved from nature into cities. Kelvin’s ride from woods to city to space was a ride from connection to disconnection, from reality to abstraction, a history of technology, setting the conditions for the imposition of reconstructed realities by a single powerful force.”

Tarkovsky says far more about our alienation from the natural world in Solaris’ highway scene than Cameron can ever hope to and he does it without dialog or special effects. In the clip below, the people in the car have left the countryside, a peaceful interval of grounded-ness. Now they’re traveling to the city, and from the city, to space. The long silent car ride shows their transition from the natural world, to the dislocation and isolation of the city freeway system, setting them up for the final dislocation and madness of the space station.

As if we didn’t need more proof that our culture is dangerously losing touch with reality, like the doomed astronauts of Solaris, along comes the newfangled form of depression,”Avatar Blues,” a sadness that fans suffer knowing they cannot actually live on Pandora. CNN offers this helpful suggestion,

“Within the fan community, suggestions for battling feelings of depression after seeing the movie include things like playing “Avatar” video games or downloading the movie soundtrack, in addition to encouraging members to relate to other people outside the virtual realm and to seek out positive and constructive activities.”

Here’s our own suggestion for folks longing for Pandora. Go outside. Find a plant, any plant. A tree, a weed growing out of the sidewalk. Spend a few moments with that plant, observing what it looks like, how it grows, how it makes you feel. Believe what you hear, what you feel, what you imagine. There’s no need for tanning beds and fiber optics. You’re already jacked into a world 10 billion times richer and more imaginative than Pandora. To see it you just have to open your eyes.