Cornucopia At Kentucky Street Farms

WOW. what I want to tell you is that the gardens are booming out food & flowers & medicine...... feverfew, clary sage, mints, chamomile, rose hips and yarrow are already drying for tea or ready for harvest; fresh sage & basil & marjoram & thyme & anise are ready to grace our plates; three kinds of apples, sweet nectarines, plums & peaches are falling from the loaded branches into our grateful hands & mouths; the corn's tasseling & fattening & the tomatoes are over 7 ft tall, loaded with red & gold fruit; delicious blossoms are ready for saute when we don't leave them to grow into fat little squash; the peas & beans are so densely packed in the green we can hardly find em before they grow fat & tough..... roses & clematis are blooming & filling the air with amazing perfume..... the chickens are laying three eggs a day.
All this probably isn't as astonishing to people who've raised food & flowers & chickens as it is to me; somehow, even knowing that this IS, in fact, how the Earth provides for us, I'm amazed, gratified, and extremely Thankful. It's HARVEST.

Speaking Chicken

Some time ago, a couple of the local kids were here to visit the chickens- Jason announced that he knows chicken talk, and Mitch immediately started squawking and purkling; Jason shouted WAIT! You're telling them the wrong thing! Well, I thought I knew chicken talk, too. I've been going out to them, squawking and purkling, whenever I have food for them; they all come running for it.... I've been quite pleased with my supposed ability to speak chicken. SO. Imagine my surprise: this morning I called out Heeeerrrre Kiiitykitttyyyyykidddeeeee- in a very high-pitched, most un-chicken like voice- and the chickens came running. Maybe the chickens speak cat?

Brains On Cruise Control

We've probably all heard about, and are appalled by, the latest infant death from heatstroke after being left in a car. Interestingly- but maybe not surprisingly- I'm not able to find the information online, published in last week's SF Chronicle, I found most important. First of all, there are about 3 dozen of these deaths each year in the US alone. That would be THIRTY SIX infant-left-in-car-deaths each year; three deaths each month; almost one each week.
What's up with this?!? The Chronicle posited an answer: "brain researchers" ( my quotes) have found that the human brain can, and does, go on automatic pilot. The brain does NOT make any distinctions regarding the importance of what's forgotten- it could be the coffee cup on top of the car; the ice cream melting in the trunk; the baby in the back seat. It doesn't matter- the brain makes no value distinction when on auto-pilot. In fact, the perceived importance of the baby actually makes it easier to forget: we tell ourselves we'd never forget the baby, for god's sake. Thirty six grief-struck parents per year tell us a different story, one I think we need to pay close attention to. Not only so we don't forget our babies or the ice cream- we need to pay attention to this because auto-pilot is a potentially dangerous hypnosis, and we're all vulnerable. What else do we "forget"? What happens to our critical thinking abilities when we're on auto-pilot- accepting the "news" as Truth, buying tainted food & polluting chemical cleaning products, using pertrol-based energy, distractedly listening to political leaders, accepting official counts of US soldier deaths in Iraq as the only ones we need to hear about, choosing the lesser of the evils? How many times have we told ourselves "they'd never let that happen...." probably as many times as we've reasssured ourselves "I'd never do that, allow that, put up with that...." and we do, all of us, over & over again.
As Jim Hogshire (see Poppy Post) reminds us, when we're raised to believe something cannot exist, we don't recognize it, even when it's before our very eyes. Well. Waking Up is obviously very hard. Compassion for ourselves & others is crucial to the process. I think we can do it- recognizing and challenging unspoken assumptions, remembering and evaluating from one day to the next the changing stories political leaders tell us, asking the hardest questions- especially of ourselves- and really hearing the hardest answers, learning to see what's before our very eyes - hey, the coffee smells GOOD!

The Venerable Angel, Poppy

Jim Hogshire, in his excellent article "Poppycock" published in "You Are Being Lied To" (see library sidebar) tells us: " Ever since the passage of The Harrison Act made made opium America's first 'illicit substance' 85 years ago, propaganda has proved itself most effective in the war on poppies. This has not been done so much by eradicating the poppy plant from the nation's soil as by eradicating the poppy from the nation's mind....the United States government battles the poppy by creating and enforcing a sort of deliberate ignorance about opium, opium poppies, and everything connected with them.... Being brought up on falsehoods almost inoculates a person against true information. If you know for sure that opium poppies do not grow in the US, you could not recognize a poppy if you were staring directly at it". "


Boy, does THAT ever ring the bell of Truth..... frinstance, did you know that ALL poppies- not just the infamous papaver somniferum- have sedating and analgesic properties? Or that those fine big dried pods we can get from the flower mart could easily be brewed into an analgesic tea? How about the pretty cottage garden down the street.... did you know that nice little old lady is growing OPIUM? I'll bet she didn't realize it, either...... how about the fact that opium poppies naturally grow everywhere in the world except the North & South Poles? How about the fact that opium is by far a better pain reliever than the expensive, MD-controlled synthetics demerol or methadone? AND THAT IT'S LESS ADDICTIVE?!? How about the fact that it's actually legal to grow them in the US ..... as long as you don't use or intend to use them medicinally? And, yes, those really are 90% viable opium poppy seeds on those bagels at Safeway and everywhere else we buy them..... Then, of course, there's the "common knowledge" that producing opium from an opium poppy is extremely difficult; did you know that all you have to do is score the green pods and collect the sticky juice a few hours later? That juice is, yes, opium.
Hogshire reminds us, too, that "the power to relieve pain is even greater than the power to inflict it..... so the government's control of opiates- and its larger effort to deprive anyone of truly effective pain relief (unless they get the government's permission)- is a stunningly crude method of social control. Pain avoidance is a powerful motivator." And "Ceding control of opium means ceding control of pain relief to the State... which has shown a truly morbid interest in inflicting pain and denying its relief in order to effect social change. This is not a power a free people should give up without a fight."
Of course, we could believe that the government is merely trying to save us from addiction..... after all, who wants to be a strung-out street-living thieving-for-the-next-hit junkie? Not I, said the fly. But is that really the price of effective independent pain control? I think not. For someone like me, maybe so- I have a highly addict-prone streak; cigarettes and coffee have their fangs sunk deeply into my daily routine, and I sure don't want to add another- esp illegal- habit to my repertoire. But not everyone's like me: millions of Americans take addictive pain relievers regularly; codeine cough syrups, vicodin, norco, codeine pills, demerol, fentanyl, dilaudid..... and millions of those pain-relieved Americans are NOT addicted. In fact, opiate use rarely leads to addiction when used solely for pain control.
Well, the next time you wake up in the middle of the night with a tooth-ache, or sprain an ankle with no medical insurance, or suffer from debilitating menstrual cramps you're told are "all in yr pretty little head" - you MIGHT want to check that nice old lady's garden for some pods to boil up.