agorism, gardening, homesteading

Homestead Love-Hate

I hate August on the homestead. There, I’ve admitted it. I can’t stand pretending. Sitting at the kitchen table looking at the last of about 250 pounds of pears, I could almost cry.

I’d like to sell it all right now and move to Fiji. I imagine moving permanently into a rented beach hut complete with pool boy serving me colorful fruity cocktails all day. Not processing pears. Not plucking dozens of ducks. Not gaping helplessly at the crops becoming engulfed, scorched, withering to their deaths.

Handy Hubby could even join me there if he wanted to, it’s not his fault after all. The bugs, the heat, my aching hands, the better part of an entire nation on vacation, as if that weren’t bad enough.

Because then on top of it all is the garden. Every year, the garden horror show, unrecognizable from a month ago, my annually recurring failure at keeping nature mildly tamed.

In anticipation of my August mood, this year I planted loads of flowers at the garden entrance. Flowers and puppies are just about all that’s keeping depression at bay. Some are miserable in the dead of winter; I am miserable in the dead of summer.

Mowing stopped mid-way for stabbing arthritic pain in my wrists and fingers. I don’t care anymore. I can’t care anymore. There are plenty of cow peas and a few ripe melons in that mess, if you dare. After weeks at work, this is what Hubby must come home to, and rescue me from, furthering my shameful failure.

Okra successfully outmaneuvering the pernicious grasses, but I don’t like okra.

The pigs still have their wee escape, and I have mine.

Puppy love.

Puppy pics are way more fun than chemtrail pics.

I could be taking photos of the regular assault in our skies with the disgusting aerosols of climate engineering, as I was for a number of months. Another failure it seems, because I can’t bare it, it doesn’t seem to be helping anything at all, except for normalizing abhorrent “science”.

I simply have no more capacity or patience for folks who don’t, can’t or won’t see, or who don’t care, or who like, the whole-scale rape, murder and pillage of our planet. When will it stop? When will the madness heal? When will a mass of mankind have had enough of bowing to their masters as they crack the whip on the laws of nature?

I’m on vacation alright, just like the bulk of a nation, it’s just a vacation on my window seat, directly under the a/c unit, where I’m grateful to continue my climate engineering research thanks to these more tireless and consistent deeply concerned citizens.

http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/

https://stopsprayingus.com/

http://zerogeoengineering.com/

Cheese-making: Science and Sensuality

Cheeses currently in our aging fridge, which is nothing more than a cheap beverage model sadly impersonating a cave in Switzerland: Swiss (of course), Tomme (another Alpine cheese), Munster, Camembert (wrapped in fig leaves), Pepper Jack, Farmhouse Cheddar (cloth-wrapped), Gouda, Dill Havarti, Mozzarella (the old-fashioned way), Ricotta. Plus, in the kitchen fridge: yogurt, kefir, Mexican queso, and chocolate ice cream–all homemade with the freshest Grade A, raw milk from small farm, grass-fed cows available for purchase in East Texas.

These are the kind of cheeses one has a tough time finding where to legally buy, or sell, not only in America, but in quite a few other Western countries as well. In most of the countries who consider themselves ‘free’ as far as I’m aware, acquiring licensing for everything dairy under the Federal sun will still not grant you the right to sell such cheeses. Big Brother is so very worried about our health, after all.
http://theplate.nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/30/some-like-it-raw-the-state-of-unpasteurized-cheese-in-the-u-s/

Some of these are cheeses the way our ancestors made them–even using fig sap as rennet and kefir as starter culture. Others of them have been made possible only with the help of modern science–freeze-dried cultures in order to create the holes and flavor of Swiss, for example, or the orange-rinded stinky varieties like Munster or Limburger, or the blue veins of the pungent Roquefort, the reliable white mold of a Camembert–which make it possible to imitate, with a reasonable degree of success, the most famous of region-specific cheeses we’ve come to know and love over the generations.

The first time I tasted cheese that did not come wrapped in plastic I was a teenager in France. It was also the first time I tasted milk straight from the cow. I was stunned to realize these products, considered the same from my own home to my host family’s home, had almost nothing in common. To the eye they appeared congruent, but to the other senses they were not even distant cousins.

But it’s one thing to harness an appreciation for the depth and subtitles of a finely- crafted cheese, it’s quite another to think you can make one. In Texas. In an ‘aging fridge’ from Wal-mart. With $7/gallon milk you drive 3 hours to acquire and sometimes using cultures manufactured in a lab.

Is it just for the love of cheese? It’s true, while doubtless they can’t compete with their cave-aged predecessors, still available in their natural state to only a precious few, I’ve made some of the best cheeses I’ve tasted available in this neck of the Piney Woods.

Handy Hubby appreciates my rather expensive and quite time-consuming hobby, but that’s just a bonus. I think these old skills and crafts are crucial to maintain and pass along to future generations, that’s for sure. But none of these good reasons would be enough, even all together, if it weren’t for the pleasure of the process.

The sensuality of cheese-making cannot be over-stated and to describe it would take poetry far superior than is my capacity to create. This is a hobby that touches, demands, cultivates every one of our senses and a fair amount of intellect as well. A whole-minded approach is crucial for success, because process alone will only get you so far.

You may scoff and think a cheese is a cheese, it’s a matter of taste alone, and they mostly taste the same. If so, you poor, poor dear.

“Those . . . from whom nature has withheld the legacy of taste, have long faces, and long eyes and noses, whatever their height there is something elongated in their proportions. Their hair is dark and unglossy, and they are never plump, it was they who invented trousers.”

Anthelme Brillat-Savarin The Physiology of Taste quoted in A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman

You may laugh and say . . . “sound?” If cheese-making requires a subtle practice of every sense than that includes sound . . . how silly.

Someday I will make the case for sound in good cheese-making, because I think there’s a case to be made. In addition to my own experimentation, I suspect I need search no further than the many monasteries made famous for their cheeses for more supporting evidence.

Cheese is still more pleasure than exudes the senses in the thrill of retrieving and treasuring a fading art, and in marrying the inevitable couple of progress and tradition.

“We are all served more and more by factory machines, maybe inevitably, and by schedules, even our own, and in time, as has often been pointed out, we come to serve them. Some of us are becoming chafed by it all. We seek to reaffirm ourselves, to do and make for ourselves, to find new ways to do so–many of them admittedly old ways, but new and revitalizing ones to us and our friends. We want to find out how the basic components of our lives are made and come to us to use. We seek to become part once more of the processes, and possessors once more of the details of our own existence.”

The Cheeses and Wines of England and France, with Notes on Irish Whiskey
by John Ehle

A few favorite references and a favorite resource:

2016quesocheesedip-1024x932 — The Promiseland Farm

If you want to start somewhere, this is a super easy cheese even a picky American kid would surely like, think Velveeta, only healthy. http://thepromiselandfarm.com/queso-cheese-spread-dip/

No More Fakebook

“Fakebook,” Handy Hubby calls it. Of course he’s right, I’ve long known he’s right. I left Fakebook years ago, then went back, against my better judgment. It has become to me one more insufferable Catch-22 of the modern age.

I’ve met a few good folks there and it was the source in finding our new livestock guard dog pups, who are so precious it’s a real challenge not to spoil them!

It is a good tool for keeping in touch, no doubt. I’ve also appreciated how it’s like the modern equivalent of scrapbooking in some fundamental ways. They keep better track of our photos than I do. They record it all. And therein lies the Catch 22.

Fakebook has tipped in scales to more negative than positive, not just for me, I see folks leaving it and considering leaving it and I can’t blame them, in fact, I’ve again just rejoined the leavers, and this time, I’m never going back.

Oh my, I just felt a twang of panic in my gut. Never? Did I really mean that? That’s so very . . . permanent.

I know it’s wrong! I know they are spying, manipulating, engineering, censoring, and if that weren’t bad enough, the ads are over the top. I just can’t stand it. In fact, I find I’m turning to books, real books printed on real paper, just to be able to find a recipe without eight ads and pop-ups attached.

And I know very well it’s not just about the advertising, that’s just the surface level annoyance and distraction. It is about Big Data, which I’ve written about several times already, but for those still uninformed, some background material.

https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-319-psychographics-101/

And Truthstream Media:

If I am to align my life with my principles, as I’ve sworn to do, I cannot support this level of technocracy. Next will be the Smart phones, out of our lives! We do just fine without satellite TV already. We will vehemently reject all 5G roll-out “Smart” crap that we possibly can.

We will get better at it, these things take considerable time and effort. We are gradually becoming more refined in making due with the old ways, and isn’t it ironic. I jumped on-board with educational technology as a grad student, made it my thing, taught online courses since the first years that was possible.

And now I look and shiver as at a golem. Oh my stars, what have we created?

I must take a deep bow to those who saw it decades before I did, the ones I once considered practically prehistoric. The ‘old folk’ who were so afraid of technology, so concerned about privacy. The paranoid ones who suspected, no, even had valid proof, that the government could not be trusted with this information power house.

We are in the process collectively of accepting enslavement to the grid. If you still believe the powers-that-be are benevolent, that once was me. I can’t say all that it was that blinded me then, I was seeing it and reading it, but it wasn’t yet REAL.

I’m reminded of famous words that made a decent impression on me so long ago I can’t recall, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.”

We, Kensho, have been learning about self-reliance. It’s more work and more responsibility than I’d known before, certainly much more physical labor. Many sacrifices have been made by us both. We stopped traveling. Our social and political priorities have shifted. Our values and worldview and tolerance levels have become much more refined. Our skill-sets have increased ten-fold. One of these days I’ll make a list.

But this post is about Fakebook. What it offers is not worth what it takes away. In its absence I’ve started reading fiction again. I’ve also decided to take up sewing, which surprises me about my own self as much as when I took up cheesemaking, my now favorite hobby by far and one I’m getting pretty good at.

Fakebook is a time-sucking, energy-wasting, spell-casting, manipulating, ad-pushing pain in the ass. I’m done.

“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are so many better things to do!

Part 21: Strawberry Fields Forever

The perception sorcery we find ourselves in

Awash in illusion, deception, sin

Which flowers you grow laws rule

Let me take you down

Cause I’m going to

Strawberry fields

Nothing is real

And nothing to get hung about

Living is easy, with eyes closed. Misunderstanding all you see.

Always, no sometimes, think it’s me.
But you know when it’s a dream.

THE OA

I think I know it means a “Yes” but it’s all wrong.
That is I think I disagree.

Married to illusion. What sort of glam-golem are we-they creating?

You get to see the pretty pictures. But not the shit, literal shoveling shit, that went in to creating them. A Walt Disney dream. For every success, a dozen failures you don’t see. I don’t talk about.

This is what I really think, after many months of research into Geoengineering.

We are all now ruled by the cartoonish mentality of the technocracy. They are trying to force upon us a reality based on illusion.

I want to thank the following folk for their work, which has helped me tremendously to navigate this fool’s path. This particular journey may be over, but it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to move on too far.

yamakawa

What a long strange trip it is.

Part 19: Camouflaged

That’s not God! That’s men!

Youtube channels about the crazy weather are popping up like weeds in the garden. Quite a significant percentage of them are full-on fear porn blaming God for the bad weather and looking to Bible verse for answers. And of course, solutions. Those solutions, along with those of the New Age movement involve:

Adjusting. Adapting. Aligning. Accommodating. Acquiescing. Assimilating.

Not getting educated, nope. Not informing oneself outside the advised spiritual texts. Not observing and collecting data. Not questioning authority. Not blaming a corrupted system. Not pushing back against the insanity happening in the name of god or science.

Solar radiation management (SRM). Some say it’s bogus misinformation, a psyop. Others say, no, it’s absolutely true, they want to block out our SUN! They are already doing it! ‘It will slow climate change,’ say the ‘scientists’.

Bad move, whether true or false, unless the true aim is to get folks really riled up. We tend to like our sun. Some of us even worship it.

Among the religious and spiritual types, if one is really serious and needs some actual action on behalf of his integrity, he can brandish a placard. Or, become a prepper. In my experience thus far, only the latter has the potential to be self-empowering.

Otherwise, he can, as I have tried to do here, turn to science. In our collapsing system there are two kinds of science: real science and biased science. 99.9% of the science the average person is exposed to is biased science. In now several months of searching through the science of geoengineering and other relatable fields, I have confirmed for myself with 66.6% accuracy that even the real science is still biased.

And yet, a light at the end of the tunnel! Trudging through the sewers of deception I realize I’ve honed some serious skills of discernment. A most sensitive frequency now tells me who is making the call, God or Man. I have come a long way; I longed to stop long ago. But I’ve held tough and the tricksters’ tricks have become more transparent to me, where before they were mostly blinding.

Accelerate, is what that tells me now. Radiate. Expand efforts exponentially. Absorb the current intensity in the field and diffuse it toward my ends. It is the final steps of one journey that create the impetus for the next.

treasureguard — Our stellar huntress strikes again! She guarded her captured possum for several hours, but then lost interest. In classic possum camouflage, it lay there playing dead for half of the day, and then sure enough, disappeared.

inchworm1 — What is it?! A dead bee? A spec of soil? Nope. I could swear I saw it move! I showed Hubby, he scoffed and shrugged at first. I insisted, look, it moved again! We got out our magnifying glass, then our video, and sure enough, it’s an extremely well-camouflaged inchworm. WOW, now that’s some impressive nature.

Camouflaged warfare becoming blindingly apparent. How will the public react now? Best video of the week, not to be missed.

From the chemtrail Summit in Oregon, many more folks tired of the BS and amped up to make changes.

Part 16: My dark little secret

Some iconic lines in films imprint on the psyche collectively and I know you could think of one right now that instantly crosses several generations and continental divides.

“You can’t handle the truth!” Name that film, name that actor. Could you even name his co-star in that blockbuster?

Somehow, somewhere, as a collective, we’ve given ourselves over to worship and celebrity and fantasy and distraction in the most destructive ways. I am not resolved from that influence and never will be. I watched TV constantly for years in high school, only to give it up for years later in exchange for an exhaustive social life, only to give that up more years later for work I found most of all, exhausting.

I had/have this secret fantasy I’m going to share right now (again). After hurricane Katrina, right after, when I heard on the news the city was more or less safe, and me many hours away in a quaint bed and breakfast drinking wine with lunch, the hurricane widely reported as much less dangerous than anticipated, but that residents would need to stay away for a few days at least for safety precautions, I was glad. Nearly giddy, and not from the wine.

I had just started a new position at Tulane university and already I didn’t really want to go back. It took a day or so more before all hell broke out and select areas of the city flooded terribly and all residents had to stay out indefinitely. In our case, we were allowed to go back after two months. For some, it was never. We lived in a trendy and relatively upscale area right on Audubon Park. It was a beautiful spot, both before and after the hurricane. Some were far from so lucky and they’d been there many generations, not just two weeks, like us.

I do hold shame for this secret fantasy, because I still feel it. When I dwell, necessarily, in the dark places of my life and the world, I know there is much sickness, far too much. Far too much destruction, voluntary and deliberate and needless. Still, I have dwelt in destruction.

And there is too much wind, dammit, all around me lately seeming to get worse every year. It’s bloody annoying! We had no winter and now no spring. The plants and animals struggle with it far less than I, but still, I know, they do.

Wind is really stressful! This makes me smile, because there was a time I lived in Chicago and worked downtown and yes, the wind was legendary, but it was mostly something I peered at from the window and got annoyed at how it affected my hairdo.

But the wind is far more powerful and penetrating than I had, and I think most, ever realize. Is that not what blew down the house of each of the three little pigs?

They are blowing, those wolves, our weather right now is as manipulated as the currency market. And in my secret fantasy I sometimes can’t help but wonder—would we all be better off in the long run if they would just blow it all down? Roses blooming at the same time as the dogwood?! It just ain’t right.

This week’s breadcrumb, I’ve got so many I’d love to share this week, but this one is so essential it needs to stand alone.

Unslaved podcast, exploring the self in the work of Ayn Rand and others.

As the world reboots, this is where the rubber will meet the road.

https://youtu.be/vgL1AA-eX4I

https://unslaved.com/the-path-to-selfhood-ayn-rand/

huntress — After I got over the shock of hearing the squeals of a drift of wild hogs crashing through the forest, and the fear that I’d lost our dearest Tori, I was amazed to see her come through the trees clearly proud of herself.

duchesse — Still a fav, La Duchesse de Brabant, unfortunately with a bad case of ‘black spot’ but which I’ve been treating with whey, banana peels and chicken poop.

Part 15: Rascals of Science

Lots of color to encourage bees and butterflies and me to enter.

I am selectively NOT weeding the Queen Anne’s lace (wild carrot) and cilantro from the garlic patch.

I’m intentionally doing that! Beans with onions and select weeds, quel horreur!

Broccoli and lettuces and tomatoes in the same bed? What madness is this?!

pigsnchickens — According to modern science pigs should not eat table scraps and farm species should not intermingle due to cross-contaminating disease potential. Someone should really be informing the critters of these hazards.

There is a science underworld that borders with pseudoscience where mavericks and rascals believe the world, indeed the entire universe, is holistic, not mechanistic. I’m fascinated by these courageous thinkers who have ventured into unconventional territory. I recognize the strength of character and conviction such a journey requires. Whether or not they are correct is, to me ,secondary, though I believe they are on the right path.

What I admire is that they strayed from the consensus, they escaped the group-think and the brainwashing of scientism, all while holding fast to a theory of a collective unconscious. At what point, I keep wondering, did they choose to deviate from the accepted experts in their fields and trust their own knowing? I’m so curious, because I seem to have arrived at that crossroad myself.

I’ve read many books by seasoned gardeners and farmers with great interest; I was a Master Gardner for a couple of years until politics got in the way; I’ve taken many classes, watched loads of videos and have now about six solid years of practical successes and failures under my belt. I can say with relative assurance that close to half of what I learned was wrong, or useless for me, or this particular region. In hindsight some of it was just a waste of time. Of course, there was much essential learning happening too, but I’m making my own rules in the garden now, based on little other than intuition.

I might be completely wrong, I’m sure I’ll be called totally crazy, but we will see how it goes. Considering the weather whiplash of this year, we are off to a pretty good start so far.

What’s calling me has many names that seem vaguely similar: companion planting, permaculture, biodynamic agriculture—it’s basically like organic farming on (natural) steroids. 🙂

snappeas — Snap peas with a backdrop of Texas squaw-weed, thriving even in the weather whiplash.

There is a growing amount of literature on the subject and I will continue to peruse through it, for ideas and inspiration of what to experiment with myself. I get the very strong sense that what this field needs is more explorers, more rascals and mavericks, more little devils tinkering with the science-status-quo. I begin with one overarching position—the answer is not to be bought. The answer exists in the nature right around us. I need only slow down, focus, and really listen.

I had a lesson just today on how I am certainly lacking in that level of detail and attention. I was marveling for a moment on a butterfly that landed in the grass as I was walking back from feeding the pigs. How marvelous, I thought, and I squatted down slowly and got closer.

aniseswallowtail — An Anise swallowtail. I did not know it at the time, but looked very closely so I could remember just what it looked like to later find its name in an internet search.

http://www.gardenswithwings.com/identify-butterflies.html

I thought how lucky and clever I was in that moment– Lucky that I had such time and appreciation of beauty to take extended notice and so clever that I thought to consciously memorize its details so I could later look it up.

I was so intent on it, I nearly missed the smaller, paler, but on closer examination equally exquisite butterfly laying still in the grass not even a foot away from his showy cousin. A very tiny creature, brownish and so more camouflaged on the just greening grass, but with perfect miniscule polka-dots in varied shades of blue along the base of its wings–but I could not find his likeness on any search.

Most certainly they were enjoying a tour of our garden. Did they also think it too wild and untamed? Weeds and crops growing side-by-side, on purpose?! Were they as incredulous as most modern avid gardeners would be of my methods in madness?

I’m sensing the butterflies saw it more like this.

But the weeds! They are choking and starving your crops! Are they? All of them? How do you know this, I now question. You see, the jumping jacks are delicious and gorgeous in a salad and they want to grow next to the onions. And the lady slippers and carrots growing side-by-side not only looked lovely, but produced the best crop yet.

The most unexpected, and it would seem magical, transformation I’ve experienced since beginning our rural life is my sense of smell has gotten very keen. So much so it’s become a disadvantage when trying to engage in the outside world. What I consider a heightened sense, a new level of sensitivity that serves me very well in my immediate environment, is called by modern scientists as a symptom of a brain disorder. It’s in the ballpark with phantosmia– I ‘hallucinate’ smells and over-register the strength of them, it seems. I bet they’ve manufactured the ideal medication to rid me of my new superpower. 🙂

This week’s bread crumbs:

Yogic Science ‘one consciousness’ = high consciousness? Not sure about that, but found this one interesting enough to include it. He made me wonder, when did the goal of spirituality become happiness? Somehow, I missed that memo.

Dada Gunamuktananda https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo0X2ZdElQ4

Rupert Sheldrake—morphic resonance, 6^th sense–says, on modern science: “Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jiJM4ybiho

You may call them simpletons, I call them inspiring.

“The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is at the root of all true science. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, is my idea of God.” Einstein