Subsistence Farming - Hawaii

if you can imagine, we had an intern on the land who turned out to be a missionary in training here to save the hawaiians from pele. i had some serious conversations with him about the arrogance and destruction caused by the christian missionary. i told him to go after the ice heads and leave the hawaiians alone unless they come to you.

in home schooling on friday lauren and i talked about the ideas we are fed by our culture that don’t sound right. like the one about only using 10% of our brains. hmmmm. nowhere else in nature do we see that kind of inefficiency. how do you measure magic, telepathy, creating your future…

i notice often lately how droopy i look and feel when i slip into the old habit of “figuring” and fretting and repeating montras like “our partners either make deposits or withdraws from our emotional bank account” which has always sounded true but upon further exploration is leaving me in a less than powerful position, at the mercy of another’s deposits and withdraws.

when i worked at dupont i was shocked by their environmental practices. dumping chemicals down the drain. it especially shocked me because they had a safety program that was so strict that you couldn’t bring an exacto blade into work unless it was one of those blunt ones. i guess they weren’t concerned about safety, but with dollars.

have you seen the movie The Corporation? sounds like it explains clearly why we are in this pickle. the way corporations are set up creates a system that becomes like a beast. it must be fed. it’s all about dividends at any cost.

don’t you love the emerging email shorthand? we are constantly amazed by the emails lauren gets from her friends in taos. lol, sys…. i also love that modified alphabet designed for palm pilots called graffiti. so clever. in home schooling we are creating a timeline book from pre-humans to the present and we are just a the time when a phonetic alphabet emerges to replace symbolic language. we are in the midst of that kind of change right now. i love teaching history because it grounds me. it makes this crisis we are in seem reasonable and survivable.

have you read daniel quinn’s Story of B? this is to religion what Ishmael was to agriculture. we will be reading it next year along with campbell/moyers Power of Myth. I told lauren that i consider it my job to present the basics so she can interface with the “real” world AND i want to present alternative viewpoints so that she never gets too invested in the party line. we are studying the ancient sumerian civilization and we did the standard stuff but then i read to her the sumerians creation myth from the cuniform tablets. its the story of the 12th planet. fascinating. i don’t know what is true, but i want her to stay open-minded.

at this moment, in her free time, lauren is looking at an anatomy of large animal book, has a medical dictionary beside her and her journal and i guess is taking notes. she is like a sponge. she has such an aptitude for dealing with the animals on the farm. with our recent horse injury we have gotten so much time with the vet that we hug and do the cheek kiss upon greeting. he loves working with lauren. he has taught her to do these complicated procedures and she just eats it up. she remembers everything.

we have friend coming for brunch today. they are bringing a ham they cured (hunted, butchered, brined and smoked) and we are supplying the eggs and the breadfruit home fries with a coconut milk/cream, jak fruit, banana, fresh vanilla smoothie to start. i can’t wait until more of our trees here are mature enough to fruit. we have lemons and limes, avocado, a handful of sweet fruits but just a small percentage of what is planted is fruiting. our latest favorite is cacao. we ferment it and roast it in the solar oven and grind it up. we either mix with banana and mac nuts as a dessert or add to our coffee. growing our own taro is one thing but the thrill of making coffee, or chocolate or harvesting cardamom or allspice just tickles me.