I found this article about China producing fake organic certificates. I’m sure it’s just a small drop in the bucket of consumer fraud. Organics means money. So watch what you buy and consume. The best bet, shop local from people you know and trust, or better yet, grow your own. Even a few small window planters can yield a summer’s worth of meals. Plus, as mentioned in yesterday’s blog, look around your own backyard.
Category Archives: Jan’s Blog
Welcome!
Currently, I put most of my energy into the weekly channeled messages, the daily Soulbytes, and the completion of The Recapitulation Diaries. An occasional blog does still get written when the creative urge strikes. Archived here are the blogs I wrote for many years about inner life and outer life, inner nature and outer nature. Perhaps my writings on life, as I see it and experience it, may offer you some small insight or different perspective as you take your own journey.
With gratitude for all that life teaches me, I share my experiences.
Jan Ketchel
A Day in a Life: Mother
Spring is eagerly looked forward to in our house. The first signs of green growth, what some people would call weeds, herald platefuls of nutritious meals and the making of tinctures, infusions, and decoctions. At this time of year we are gathering those weeds, drying some for teas, cutting and infusing others to become medicinals for winter use, and cleaning and eating others fresh from the ground. Those weeds are full of energy, the first signs of offerings from Mother Earth after a long winter of making due with what we can find in the local markets. As the winter waned we watched the struggle, the earth awakening, the buds growing a little more each day, the need for sunlight and rain to aid in the natural unfolding of what has been lying dormant for so many months.
As a young teenager, I hiked along the Appalachian Trail that ran along the top of the mountain where I lived, a copy of Euell Gibbon’s Stalking the Wild Asparagus in my backpack, learning to identify plants and trees, digging for roots, picking leaves, and always on the lookout for that elusive wild asparagus. My daughter tells me that Stalking the Wild Asparagus has taken on a cult meaning now, within a new hippie culture; her friends posting that they are out ‘stalking the wild asparagus’ when walking the land or simply unavailable. I like that, the idea that a book written by a man who Johnny Carson regularly used as a brunt of jokes, but also respectfully invited to his show, The Tonight Show, is still important, still valued. I know that this modest man and his book are extremely valuable now as we face the call to change how we live upon this earth.
Yesterday, while driving and listening to the radio, I happened to hear part of an interview with Vandana Shiva on Alternative Radio, a woman from India, a nuclear physicist turned environmentalist. Unfortunately, I am unable to provide a link to that interview, called War on Earth, originally recorded on April 26, 2011, but I urge anyone who is interested in the environment and what is happening to our food supply to read her books, look for interviews, and pay attention to the truths she so eloquently speaks of. At the end of this blog I link to some You Tube video recording of interviews with her, for convenience, in an effort to aid in awareness of her lifelong calling to save what rightfully belongs to Mother Earth and to us as human beings living on this planet.
In the interview I listened to yesterday, she spoke of the differences between Eastern and indigenous knowledge of the earth as true Mother and the Western concept of earth only as nature, totally separate from man. No, she says, the earth is Mother; she gives us everything. In fact, we are the guests here, though we have lost this most vital and humble connection to our presence on this earth.
As visitors for only a brief period of time, are we not responsible for being better guests? Are we using the earth as a cheap hotel, leaving it in a shambles for someone else to clean up? Are we going to keep trashing, burning, drilling, cutting, tampering with, poisoning, and destroying what Mother Earth provides? Are we going to let a greedy few take away our health, our land, our most vital resources because we don’t have the energy or time to care?
A few weeks ago, someone turned to me in the aisle of the grocery store as they read the label on a can of tuna fish that stated it was sustainably caught and caring of the planet. This person looked me in the eye and said: “I don’t care about the planet, let the planet take care of itself.” When I heard this utterance I felt my face turn into a mask, my entire being becoming earthen and solid, as I felt the deep well of disrespect that I know is rampant in our country. To speak even the word ‘mother’ in the West, as Vandana Shiva mentioned in her radio interview, is often rebuked as silly, dismissed as naive, unimportant.
In truth, we are so distant from the true reality of ourselves as related to all things. We prefer to be superior, above and beyond nature. We are a culture resistant to breastfeeding, where a woman’s body is no longer sacred or respected; mother no longer held in the highest regard, as the giver of all life.
Vandana Shiva is part of a group of international environmentalist working toward earth change, part of the group that recently helped enact the law in Brazil calling for returning equal rights to Mother Earth. As she said: She is mother.
How can we not understand that? The indigenous cultures know this and they see what has happened to their mother and they want to stop it. Can we not also see this and embrace this cause? Can we not see that our very lives are at stake?
It takes more than an individual effort; it takes a global effort to enact this kind of change. But, in the meantime, we must still, each one of us, do our individual part. Today, I suggest that we each take a look at what Mother Earth offers us in our own environment so that we can truly begin to understand just what she provides us. I follow with a few examples from our own backyard.
Chuck and I have been resurrecting our acre of land over the past several years. Once highly landscaped, it fell into disrepair and by the time we purchased it most of the gardens were overgrown, hiding the ornamental trees and bushes; the rock walls covered in poison ivy, sumac sprouting up everywhere. When we lost our tall pines in the tornado that came through last fall, we at first bemoaned the loss of those majestic trees, home to many birds, that had shaded us in the summer and protected us in the winter. Now however, we have embraced what nature did, for we have sunlight and the ability to grow food that we didn’t have before. As we have cleared and cleaned our property we have discovered its hidden offerings as well. As we walk the land, we find that we could actually survive off it, food aplenty, medicinals and healing opportunities abounding.
Crab apple and magnolia trees, though often thought of as only ornamental, offer many healing properties. Their blossoms, leaves, and barks hold many properties that have been used by indigenous and Chinese herbalists for centuries, some of them making their way into products we find on the market today. If you chew the bark of the magnolia you may recognize that it tastes like something familiar, used in many dental products, because it is good for the gums and teeth. The pesky sumac, the kind with red berries, not the poisonous kind with white berries, is actually full of healing properties as well, as is the rapidly growing catalpa with its large leaves and long pods, the seeds especially medicinal.
Dandelions, the leaves, roots, and blossoms are full of vitamins, minerals, and healing properties as well. Plantain, the lowliest of wild plants probably—everyone has this in their yard or can easily find it alongside the road—is amazing in the healing of cuts and stopping the flow of blood. We use it often; chewing the leaves and laying the pulp over a cut to stop the bleeding and knit the skin back together faster than anything I have ever seen. In telling his story Black Elk, the holy man of the Oglala Sioux, refers to being healed in this way after having been in battle, his guts hanging out and the shaman having him chew the leaves of this lowly plant and it knitting him back together so that in a matter of days he was back on the battlefield.
Last night, Chuck and I had a meal of tender dandelion greens sauteed with shitake mushrooms and garlic in olive oil, a little lemon juice sprinkled over it, salt and pepper. We also sauteed, in butter, tiny buds of dandelion flowers. Tasting like tiny asparagus they are the little green nuggets at the center of the plant before the stems grow. We sprinkled our plates with a few edible purple violet flowers. In picking the greens before the flowers grow the characteristic bitterness is avoided; after that soaking them in salted water removes this taste if it is unpleasant.
We make salads or sautes of chickweed, garlic mustard, plantain, prickly lettuce, wild onion or ramps, and clover, all found in our backyard. We make dandelion brandy from the flowers of this so-called pesky weed; its properties cleanse the liver; its roots a tonic for many ills of the digestive system. We make tinctures of chickweed, good for the skin; lemon balm, good for the nerves, heart, and brain; burdock for innumerable reasons.
Get a good book, research ancient folk remedies on the Internet, learn to identify what Mother offers in your own backyard, neighborhood or park. Everyone, no matter where we live, can have access to what the earth offers if interested. She is right below our feet, we don’t have to go far to find something to sustain and heal us. She does indeed offer us everything we need.
Stalking the wild Mother,
Jan
Go to the Source
Here are a few quotes to ponder from Hexagram #48: Well, taken from The Living I Ching by Deng Ming-Dao.
“The muddy well does not feed. No birds come to an ancient well.”
“Well: draw from it, and you draw from the source. No matter how advanced a civilization becomes, its foundations depend on nature. A source of water cannot be replaced.”
“On a practical level, we must maintain our supply of water and food. On a spiritual level, our understanding deepens the more we dwell on the sources of our existence.”
“The water comes to us freely from the earth, deposited by the last winter’s rains…This free use of a well is a metaphor for how we should conduct our lives. If we are careful and healthy in our conduct, we will be replenished each day. Accordingly, we must give all that we can today, knowing that tomorrow will bring new support. Those who are narrow and selfish with their energies grow smaller, not greater. Give everything that you can. Do not hold back: unless water is drawn from a well, new water cannot flow in.”
“Water from the earth is wonderfully pure, refreshing, and invigorating. Our scientists can find little different about this water in their laboratories, but those who drink from the wellsprings know better. Expensive bottled water and manufactured beverages cannot help us in the way a well can. Eschew the artificial. Go to the source.”
A Day in a Life: Face the Chaos & Question Everything
We must all make personal decisions that are right for us, but we must also challenge our selves to go beyond our limitations. We must ask ourselves: What is the possibility that I may be getting this wrong, that I am not seeing something? What am I missing? We must all take personal responsibility for our lives, for how we interpret our experiences, and how we ultimately decide to view and live in the world.
During my three-year long intensive recapitulation, I learned how to question not only the reality that I was encountering from my past, but also how I was going to interpret it this time around. Could I really trust that what came to greet me out of old forgotten memories had really happened? How could I embrace the truth of what I was learning about my childhood? How could I take it all in and move on to a new interpretation of what it meant when what I was reliving was often so devastatingly overwhelming that some days I could not even get out of bed?
I learned how to question everything. This was the only way I was going to get through the recapitulation of traumatic events from my childhood that had held me so tightly in their embrace for decades, though I had little or no inkling of this fact. I knew little about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the tentacles of trauma that infiltrate every aspect of a person’s life until finally faced. For the most part, I felt that I was not really living life as I sensed it could be lived, but I did not know why until I elected to take the recapitulation journey. When I began to allow old memories to surface I had to face old judgments, prejudices of self and others, truths and lies that were incredibly uncomfortable to confront, disassemble and release myself from.
The entire time I worked through this recapitulation process I also disassembled the world as I knew it, the outer world as well as the inner world—one could not hold up without the other. As I deconstructed the old self, I found that I could not live in the same world that the old self had constructed. Recapitulation meant a total disintegration of the self I had been. So, as a result, who I thought I was and how I viewed the world all changed as I plodded along, chipping away, day by day, at what I thought was reality.
Some days I would wake up in such pain that I immediately wanted to seek medical advice, but at the same time I knew there was nothing in the conventional medical world that would help the somatic experiences that my body was telling me I had to go through. There were times when I did indeed need to go to the doctor, like the time I had Lyme disease and could not walk or think properly. There were other times when what was buried inside produced real physical symptoms that needed attention, though I knew they originated from something deep inside me looking for a way out, like the time I had skin cancer. I knew it was not related to sun exposure, but to the unknown stuff that was putrefying inside me, needing release. I had to learn to distinguish between these issues by questioning the reality of my situation and determine how to address them, taking full responsibility for my choices along the way.
As I faced some very painful memories, I had to learn how to let myself be taken into other worlds, knowing that I had the power within to face the truth that those worlds were indeed as much reality as the everyday world that was looking more and more unreal to me. As I recapitulated, I learned, by taking one incremental step at a time, how to be an observer as well as a participant in those alternate realities. In strengthening my inner conviction to complete the task my body was laying out for me, calling me to, I found that I had within me more than enough personal power to face the challenges presented and change the way I experienced everything.
I learned to question everything too; from the physical symptoms I was experiencing to the way I thought. I let myself learn, through the process of recapitulation, to perceive reality differently—reality being all the conventions I had been taught and adhered to, all the beliefs and ideas that kept the world in order. I allowed myself to blow apart everything that held me together. In the end it was my salvation. It not only changed the way I viewed the world, but it changed the way I viewed my place in it.
What am I really here for? What is it that I must do in this lifetime? I knew I was not here for a selfish reason, that to be eternally depressed and self-absorbed was not going to cut it in the long run. I knew that I was no longer going to be able to hide, to isolate myself in a private world of make-believe. I faced the deepest kind of isolation and make-believe during my recapitulation process and found that they no longer granted me anything of substance, though at one time they had been the backbone of my entire existence.
In constantly questioning the true meaning of my life throughout the recapitulation process, I learned that the main thing I was being asked to do was to break down, literally. I had to deconstruct my entire being, inside and outside, into tiny pieces that I then had to sift through before finding the proper way to reconstruct those pieces into new pictures. As I broke down the past, I also learned how to break down the present and, in so doing, be open to a new kind of future.
I know that all of this may sound very esoteric and impossible to do in the context of a very busy life, with all that we must encounter each day to simply survive, but it is not that difficult if one is committed to change. From personal experience, I can say that the recapitulation process is one of total reevaluation of self and world, leading to the ability to take full responsibility for both. It means taking on the challenge to committing to change with a conviction that defies all other methods.
Perhaps the most helpful part of the entire recapitulation experience, a simple statement that not only anchored me as I entered the darkest and most complicated issues of self and world, was this one: Question reality. Chuck said this to me on more than one occasion.
One day it came up in our conversation as the most meaningful of statements and the next day I was driving behind a car that had an enormous bumper sticker plastered across its fender saying the same thing in large letters: QUESTION REALITY. I could not ignore that it was exactly the right message. In continually questioning reality, I was able to not only face my darkest moments but re-envision them in the context of a new world, a world that I was totally in alignment with, having allowed it to form out of my deepest inner process.
I wish for all people to have a new world vision, but it can only happen by facing the world that we have constructed. This is what we are facing now as a nation and as a global world, but most importantly, personally. We are facing the reality we have created, trusted, and believed in. But now we must re-envision it. It is time to see it for what it is: a reality of exploitation, distrust, greed, selfishness, with little regard for human, animal and natural life. Are we really so heartless?
How can we re-envision a just and right world for all? In questioning reality as it now stands, breaking down the rules and dogmas we have lived by, facing the truth that we are all responsible for everything that has happened and is happening by our adherence to old ideas, tactics, and habits, we can begin to change.
We must all change. This, I believe, is the only way for us to evolve. But even change must be radically different from the means of change as enacted in the past. It is not enough to reinsert new rules that uphold an old order. It is time to face the chaos. Only in facing the chaos within will we be able to face the chaos without. If we don’t do that we will simply reassemble what we have already discovered does not work. We must indeed question everything about ourselves; about the worlds we live in, and ask ourselves to face the truth of the existence we have constructed.
Why am I really here? Personally, I continue to face that question each day as I read, write, meditate, and break through the conventions that arise. The old world will never give up on me; it will continue to pose its side of the story. But I must face it and ask: Are you the reality I wish to live in? The answer that always comes up is a resounding: No.
Still questioning everything,
Jan
A Day in a Life: Dancing Crows
Last week Chuck and I had many discussions around the subjects of good and evil, death as an advisor, impermanence, the shadow, accepting that we all have inner demons, negative energy, the capacity to commit murder, and that we must all face these things at some time in our lives or risk having to reincarnate. The subjects kept coming up again and again in various circumstances and encounters. As we sat at the breakfast table early one morning over the weekend a synchronistically powerful event occurred right before our eyes that we just could not escape. It was supremely meaningful, underscoring the very conversation we were having at the time, which centered around the capacity that we have as human beings to hide from our true nature, to want to pretend that we are only good, and how hard it is to confront the truths of our inner darkness. Life would be so much easier if everyone were happy, good, loving, kind and compassionate. I totally agree and could wish for nothing more. But as any Buddhist will tell you, it can take a lifetime of intense inner work to reach even a moment of enlightenment.
The following is a quote from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche, which I am particularly fond of and drawn to almost daily.
“One of the chief reasons we have so much anguish and difficulty facing death is that we ignore the truth of impermanence. We so desperately want everything to continue as it is that we have to believe that things will always stay the same. But this is only make-believe. And as we so often discover, belief has little or nothing to do with reality. This make-believe, with its misinformation, ideas, and assumptions, is the rickety foundation on which we construct our lives. No matter how much the truth keeps interrupting, we prefer to go on trying, with hopeless bravado, to keep up our pretense.” -from page 25.
The author goes on to say the following:
“Reflect on this: The realization of impermanence is paradoxically the only thing we can hold onto, perhaps our only lasting possession. It is like the sky, or the earth. No matter how much everything around us may change or collapse, they endure. Say we go through a shattering emotional crisis . . . our whole life seems to be disintegrating . . . our husband or wife leaves us without warning. The earth is still there; the sky is still there. Of course, even the earth trembles now and again, just to remind us we cannot take anything for granted . . .” -from page 25 and 26.
So, what occurred before our very eyes last weekend that so profoundly affected us, as we sat at the breakfast table and chatted over our omelets and toast?
I was sitting and facing the backyard when I noticed a pair of crows doing a funny dance in the sky. They were twirling, diving and whipping about as if in the throes of a mating dance. This was my first exclamation as I pointed them out to Chuck: “Look at those dancing crows!” But there was something odd about them at the same time; they did not look really happy and I had never seen crows doing such antics. Normally they are very businesslike. They fly with purpose, heading directly to their intended destination with little fanfare or distraction. These crows were acting very strangely indeed.
We both got up from the table to watch more closely when I saw that they were not doing a mating dance to new life at all, but were in fact doing something more like a dance with death, for we saw that a huge hawk was sitting in the tree close to their nest and they were dive-bombing him, trying to scare him off. They were dealing with the true nature of reality: death comes to call; no one can escape it. They could not ignore this truth, but they could put up a valiant fight to save their young. And indeed they did. We watched as the crows repeatedly attacked the hawk, and eventually, scared it off the branch. Their fight continuing in the sky, they dove at it continually, cutting it with their wings, sending it spinning at one point and, eventually, the hawk flew off. I said to Chuck: “He’ll be back. He’s not going to give up. Just wait.”
Perhaps an hour later I happened to look outside and saw that the hawk was indeed back, his head stuck inside the nest, pecking away. The crows were nowhere in sight, but I could hear their gentle keening coming from a distance, acquiescing to the inevitable. Death had come. They were accepting the impermanence of life, that change had come and they could not do anything to thwart it, their mournful cries marking this truth.
Chuck and I watched the hawk tearing at something under its claw, though even with binoculars it was difficult to see what it was; an egg or a baby crow we could not tell, but the truth was plain to see. Eventually the hawk flew off the branch and, as it did, the crows flew up out of hiding and, with one last cry of pain, attacked it again before it flew off for good. I expected the crows to return to the tree where their nest lay disturbed, but was surprised to see that they did not. “Wow,” I thought, “they really do accept the loss, they aren’t even looking back, just moving on.”
I don’t know what transpired after that, if they did in fact go back to see if anything had survived, but I think they already knew that nothing remained, that the hawk was just doing what he should do, what they in turn do to smaller birds; that it was just nature. But the sky was still there, as Sogyal Rinpoche writes, and they took off into it. The earth was still there too.
“What is our life but this dance of transient forms? Isn’t everything always changing: the leaves on the trees in the park, the light in your room as you read this, the seasons, the weather, the time of day, the people passing you in the street? And what about us? Doesn’t everything we have done in the past seem like a dream now?… We are impermanent, the influences are impermanent, and there is nothing solid or lasting anywhere that we can point to.” –The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying pages 26 and 27.
The only thing we can really count on is now, this moment, this breath we take, this truth that at this moment in our life we are alive. And then the next moment is upon us, even as we let the last one go. Each moment is as impermanent as the last.
Personally, I am awestruck by such acts of nature. They are always thrilling moments. I feel lucky to live where I do, that I can have such moments of brilliance in my life, that I am offered such grittiness to reflect on. I cannot say that I would be able to fly off as easily as those crows did, though eventually I get there. I know myself well enough now; that after many years of inner work I am fully capable of walking on into life without regret or sorrow. I know how to face new life, letting go of the past, though I have learned to appreciate that death, in its many forms, always accompanies me.
I don’t mean to be morbid, especially with so many experiences of life abounding now, each new spring day bringing nesting birds, emerging plants and flowers, the earth reawakening. But I cannot help but point out the truth that we are all impermanent, that we must all one day dance with death. We already do it all the time, in so many small ways.
We must learn to face our own deaths each day, preparing for it in our thoughts and actions, learning from the crows how to let go. We must also learn from the hawk that we too are capable of taking what we need to live; we too kill to survive. We must keep learning from the people in our lives how to face the transient nature of life, learning from them what the most important questions to keep asking are. We must all face the truths of our make-believe worlds and face the grittiest of the truths of reality. I am thankful for everyone who is a part of my life, even if only peripherally, for showing me that everything is meaningful and how important it is to keep working on the personal inner process.
As the seers of ancient Mexico are so fond of saying: I am a being who is going to die. The hawk and the dancing crows teach us this. Chuck and I learned this again last weekend as we watched this lesson play out in the sky. But, in the meantime, we intend to fully live, for we have so much to still learn.
Living fully, sending you all love and good wishes,
Jan
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