You are what you grow

In today’s technical world we often don’t give a second thought to how things happen.  That’s the professional’s concern not ours. It would be a very long day if we had to sit and figure out where every electronic device, piece of furniture, clothing article and every other every day to day item that we owned came from or who made it or what it was made out of.  Even if we wanted to know all the karma that came with that item , we’d be hard pressed to find someone willing to take the time to tell us. And that’s ok, for some things.

Most inanimate objects don’t directly effect our health. Yes, the carbon blue print and social exploitation of depressed nations do greatly effect us… but that’s an other blog.  What effects us is what we eat.  As an American I know this too well.  You can see the people all around you turning into what they eat, round plump engineered “people”.  Here I see the people of a nation that has become dependent on everyone but themselves.

When you are brought food, told what to buy, and where to buy those things it becomes less about you and more about who is telling you what to do.  You can become lost and totally dependent. Free yourself and take an extra few minutes to learn where things come from and how to make a choice. (It’s easier than you think!)

Pets are the best healers

I have two loving cats. They greet me when I come home and snuggle with me when I sleep. But the best thing is they are extreamly emotional beings and they don’t fake a darn thing! They are the person I wish I was: caring, loving, individual, free, fun, silly, deeply compationate and fully aware.

Spending just a few minutes thinkig about the complex simpistity that embodies their little bodies instantly humbles me. I think we all (even those whom don’t have pets) can take the time to meditate on the qualities of their character.

How to be kind

Hello! It has been a while, but I’m back and in full force! I am going to start with some advice that is simple and done best right now:

Restrain from criticizing or saying anything negative to anyone this week. In a challenging situation, dare to see the glass half full rather than half empty. Listen more than you speak. Give freely of yourself. Practice kindness at every opportunity you get.

You will feel better, look better and have a better sex life! No joke!!

Just Plain Lazy

I love to relax. I love to sleep.  I think that my couch is sad when I don’t lay on it, at least, two times a day.  I don’t need an excuse to “unwind”.  I just do.  This is healthy.  We always find ourselves in a fast paced world surrounded by fast paced people trying to cram in everything all at once.  So to be able to let yourself just sit and relax is very important.  But when is it enough?

There is relaxing and there is just plain lazy.  Yes, we should all de-stress and relax, but no, you shouldn’t let the laundry pile up until you are out of underwear.  So when do you draw the line?  You draw it with time.  Just like de-stressing you need to find the time to do your housework.  If you can’t find the time MAKE the time.  Take off of work early and schedule time to fold clothing and sweep the floor.  Then put in time to relax.

A typical (perfect) day would be:

• 7:30am wake up and get ready for the day
• 8:30am off to work
• noon eat lunch at one of my quiet spots to relax
• 1:15pm arrive back to work a little late from lunch, explain you had a very important meeting that ran over
• 5:15pm LEAVE WORK; this means leave it behind, as much as you can leave it there … it had it’s time
• 1.5 hours for dinner
• .5 hours clean up one room in the house
• 1 hour to “veg out”
• .5 (at least) to just be quiet
• Bed.

Think you need more time?  Maybe spend two hours cleaning and an hour of quiet time. Or if the kids/work/partner are being extra demanding have quiet time during cleaning.  The more you let the people who care about you into your schedule, the more they will become flexible in their lives for it.  It can be a challenge to introduce a “rigid” schedule into your life, but you will find that “rigid” part slips away to habit.  With your good habits formed you will find yourself with all the time in the world to get it done, stress-free.

New Year New Foucus

I’m sorry is it too late for this blog?  Well better late than never, or something like that.

I don’t like to make New Year’s resolutions. They are cliche and always make you feel worse before better.  Going cold turkey or all out for anything is never a good way at starting/ending a habit.  But this year is different for me.  This year I will be getting married (that is if I ever find a venue) and I have also started my new career.  With both of these new things happening I have a more profound view on health.  So I have set a New Year’s resolution: Cook and cook healthy.

Now this isn’t anything new for me I have been preparing for it for years.  I have watched documentaries on food  that covered everything from; the fast food evils, to how Zen masters cook.  i have also read book and invested in five cookbooks.  I have been working on my fiance to eat more veggies and learn a few cooking tricks of his own.  But preparing for some thing and actually doing it are two totally different things.

My biggest concern is general laziness.  It’s a disease that I have suffered from from birth.  A disease nurtured by our culture and cherished by millions.  Somewhat like a crooked spine there is no denying it and no short term remedy.  But I’m going to let myself embrace it.  The first step is to admit I have a problem;

• I would like someone to cook for me every night.
• I would like to never have to do dishes after a long day.
• I would like to give up and eat pizza every night.
• I would like to have so much money that I could eat out EVERY night.

But more than all of that I want to be in control of my life.  You are what you eat, and I want full control of it.

The Epic Bean

While on a quest to cook more at home to both save money and eat better.  I decide to take inspiration for Jules and Julia, and cook all the recipes from my favorite cook book.  I was totally amped.  I spent a productive day going to the store and hunting down all the fresh ingredients for my dish, $60 dollars later (what was this about “saving money”) and the day mostly gone I start to soak the beans.  Beans take 8 hours to soak!  Eight hours!  Now I could have gone the “short route” where you boil the beans, cutting the time down to two hours, but I needed to leave the house and run some more errands.

Oh, then life came into play.  Everything too way too long, five minutes at the home store turned into and hour daze, focus was lacking at the other grocery store I had to go to and milk and butter turned into an other $65 of food I’m sure we’ll not eat in the next few days, oh and,  I also needed to get gas where the line was 10 cars long.

Then night fell and it was time to cook dinner. But there was the small fact of BEANS!  They now needed to cook for two more hours!  We were starving after a full day and not willing to eat at 10pm! So the beans went into the fridge, for the next day.

Right, the next day.  I did cook at home but after spending all day looking at wedding venues I had no time to cook for 2 hours and again we were unwilling to eat past 9pm.  So back to the fridge for the next day.

Guess what, I was lazy and we got pizza. I refuse to learn how long beans keep for after being rehydrated, these beans will be cooked!

So the beans are being cooked tonight, when I finish blogging, cleaning, looking at more wedding venues and having a snack before my 10pm meal tonight. Please tell me when I will have time or money to cook!  Maybe around 11pm, when I’m still digesting my wonderful bean dish I’ll look for a new cook book.

Anyone know of a cook book named, “Vegetarian Bean-less Meals that  Take Less than 10 minutes to Make and Taste Like You Know What Your Doing”? That would be perfect!

Green Pets

We all can closely examine ourselves, but what about our pets? What are their environmental impact on the earth?

Here are the two websites that I liked best for our most common pets.

For cats

For dogs

For our other pets, take a look at these websites and see where your pet’s life can be improved.  Just taking a moment to think about it might be all you need!

Rain Forests = Healing

This question was poised to me the other day, “If the rain forests only cover two percent of planet earth, why do we need to stop everything and ‘save them’? I mean, don’t you think there are bigger things to save, like, cancer and aids?”  This question made me laugh because armed with only a little information one can be more ignorant than having none at all. Here are a few facts about the rain forest and what it means to you.

Facts about the Global Coverage of Rainforests (taken from the Nature Conservancy):

• Fact: Covering less than 2 percent of the Earth’s total surface area, the world’s rainforests are home to 50 percent of the Earth’s plants and animals.

• Fact: Rainforests can be found all over the world from as far north as Alaska and Canada to Latin America, Asia and Africa.

• Fact: Rainforests are found on every continent across the Earth, except Antarctica.

• Fact: There are two major types of rainforest: temperate rainforests and tropical rainforests.

• Fact: The largest temperate rainforests are found on North America’s Pacific Coast and stretch from Northern California up into Canada.

• Fact: Temperate rainforests used to exist on almost every continent in the world, but today only 50 percent – 75 million acres – of these forests remain worldwide.

We can see the most beautifully diverse places in the world disappear in front of our eyes. But WHY DO WE CARE? Yes, the forests are the most biologically diverse places in the world, but why should humans really care? Well, its for our health!

• Fact: Seventy percent of the plants identified by the U.S. National Cancer Institute as useful in the treatment of cancer are found only in rainforests.

• Fact: More than 2,000 tropical forest plants have been identified by scientists as having anti-cancer properties.

• Fact: Less than one percent of the tropical rainforest species have been analyzed for their medicinal value.

• Fact: One-fifth of the world?s fresh water is found in the Amazon Basin.

• Fact: Rainforests act as the world’s thermostat by regulating temperatures and weather patterns.

Before there were drug stores filled with artificial drugs people found cures for almost any ailment in the forest.  Native Americans found, before 400 b.c., that chewing on a piece of willow bark would heal a head ache or sooth a toothache.  Today we know that the willow bark contains salicain, which we use in common aspirin.  We come from the earth and the earth knows how to take care of us, if we let her.

• Fact: There are currently, 121 prescription drugs currently sold worldwide that come from plant-derived sources. And while 25% of Western pharmaceuticals are derived from rainforest ingredients, less than 1% of these tropical trees and plants have been tested by scientists.

How can I help the rain forest save me?

Give what you can and educate yourself on what you consume.

Go to The Nature Conservancy

Buy fair trade tea, coffee and fruits. Check out what that means here.

And don’t forget, recycle! It’s that easy, really. If you want to do more educate others, education is the strongest weapon!

My Holy Grail

The dark damp forrest, lush with green, barren of human destruction is my holy grail.  A place where nature is her undeniable self.  It was the back drop to all of my childhood dreams, a place that made sense.  The life giving rays of sunlight would tickle my nose as I laid my head on a giant mushroom and conversed with a fawn.

Every dream ends at the break of day, but this dream didn’t have to end.  This dream (minus the talking fawn) was very real, a place I could visit, my world – or so I thought. Unfortunately, in the midst of growing up and “finding my place in the world” (which is a romantic way of saying “finding a way to pay the bills”) I never had the chance to find my dream world.  The world of my childhood dreams was becoming more and more of just a dream.

The urban streets that lined my everyday life resembled something so removed from the forest world of my childhood it appeared that only the most remote lands contained anything of my dreams.  I never even noticed the absence of them, it would have been just as normal for me to crave such wilderness as it would be to crave to ride a unicorn with a leprechaun.

Yet unlike the unicorn or leprechaun these forests do exist.  They are everywhere!  In different forms all over the world these magical places survive.  Six hours north of my home after 25 years of “finding my place in the world” I found my world. Giant redwood trees and violently green ferns marked this world. There littered on the fallen trees where the mushroom pillows lay. And in the dark and wet mud you could see the passings of all types of wildlife, even a fawn or two.

Still, these worlds are disappearing ever more from our planet.  I hope that one day they aren’t just dreams.  This forrest that I found is a protected forest, but only because of peoples’ voices. We all would love to live these dreams, but to do so we must protect them. In this blog series I will introduce some ideas that are worth spreading, ideas that could use a little spreading.

First in the series is a wonderful video from ted.com on how those mushroom pillows could save the world (or at least ourselves).

(Fungi found in my world)

Ted.com Talk on how mushrooms can save the world

Eating Fresh Local Food Is Easy!

In my quest to eat healthy sustainable food, from producers that treat their workers, animals and the environment with respect I have found a lot of resources. One that I just discovered helped me to find a better place to buy my food. Check it out for your self and vote for better food three meals a day, by choosing organic, in season and organic!

Eating Well Guide