east texas – Page 15 – Kensho Homestead

Addictions & Distractions (Part 2)

Part 2.1 Misunderstanding and Misdiagnosing Addiction
Part 2.2 The War on Drugs vs The War for Drugs

Intro:

My friend Rick is an addict who is helping me understand addiction to a degree I’d missed before, despite concerted effort on my part. I’ve known many addicts and addiction has had a profound effect in my own family, something which I’m sad to say most reading this can surely relate.

Most of us in the US know an addict in our intimate circles. In my family we lost an addicted cousin far too young to drunk driving. There were several from my university circles who were in and out of rehab, a few also succumbing to relapses that led to their premature deaths.

Because there are others from different parts of the globe who will not fully understand without some background context, let me give the 2-minute elevator pitch to precede what we are about to present, Rick and I.

Imagine you live in what is referred to in the US as ‘the Bible belt‘.

You go to church every Sunday. Your familial social life revolves around church and your festivities around the church’s calendar. Every motel you have ever visited, probably from your traveling sport team or summer camp or girl’s or boy’s scouts, or other state-sponsored extra-curricular activity, until age 12, minimum, has a Bible in the nightstand drawer.

You are surrounded with billboards and slogans of “Jesus loves you” in various verbiage. You say the pledge of allegiance in your public school, which is of course a place you are required by law to attend.

And, most importantly, you live in a ‘dry county’ and all the counties around you for a good distance are also dry. Dry, as in alcohol is illegal.

Alcohol. Allow that to absorb a moment please for those of y’all who aren’t familiar with this reality. Not just marijuana is illegal–Not just heroine or barbiturates or Heaven’s-to-Betsy ecstasy-like designer drugs–You can’t even legally buy WINE!

220px-Tartuffe — **Tartuffery–look it up!**

Ok, just let that sink in a spell, because we still have some here in the south up until this present day, though the bulk of them lost social credit in only the last 5-10 years!

As of those ‘previous’ days, from the 1980s, “Dry” counties started hauling drugs through them suddenly so thick it was like stink on a possum.

Do possums do math?!

And still, your parents drink. Right? You live in a dry county, but your parents drink.

Yet, they can’t comprehend how illegal drugs infiltrated their Sunday-service-oriented Bible-pumping counties.

How their children and children’s children succumb to addiction in such astonishing numbers is as strange and as believable the man on the moon.

Right?

Meanwhile the music goes from Tiptoe through the Tulips to MORE MORE MORE MORE!!!

To now, cultural death by a thousand paper cuts.

How does this happen?

Cultural conditioning? Social engineering? Brainwashing? Epigenetics?

“I come from a good family. They did the best they could. They had no idea they’d given birth to a bouncing baby addict,” says Rick.

Of course not, how would they?

One becomes an expert at walking the line, or a hero in crossing it.
And the prisons get filled and the poems get writ.
And some do it solely for the money.

“I’d sell my soul for you, babe. I give you all and have nothing. MORE MORE MORE!

A rebel yell?

She want more. Oh yay the little angel, she want more . . .

“According to the report, over the past decade, the number of Kentuckians who have died from drug overdoses has steadily climbed to more than 1,500 a year.”

https://www.jessaminejournal.com/2018/08/02/jessamine-ranks-fifth-for-overdose-deaths/

https://drgabormate.com/book/in-the-realm-of-hungry-ghosts/

“Countering prevailing notions of addiction as either a genetic disease or an individual moral failure, Dr. Gabor Maté presents an eloquent case that addiction – all addiction – is in fact a case of human development gone askew.”

Rick, in his own words.

Let me say that I come from a good family, my mother was a school teacher who later became a high school guidance counselor and is well educated with a masters degree, my father was a farmer in the beginning but later worked for the Commonwealth of KY.

I believe as do many addicts that I was born with the disease and it laid dormant until I took that first one, which happened around 10 – 12 yrs of age. My father not realizing the magnitude of his actions gave me a drink of this beer which changed my life for ever because this started the chase, it was the end of my innocence, It was like I had opened a window that I could never close.

From that point on I would sneak and take drinks from his beer every chance I got and the fact that I was sneaking tells me I knew it was wrong. I started sneaking and acting out in other ways as well, like smoking cigarettes, if it was wrong I was drawn to it It was also around the time in elementary school that I changed and my grades started to go from straight A’s to B’s, C’s and D’s and I was always into mischief.

I drank heavily in high school every chance I got but swore I’d never use drugs, that lasted until my freshman year in college when I met a girl who introduced me to marijuana and just like the beer I liked it right away. And just to be clear, my brain doesn’t know the difference between alcohol and drugs all it knows is that when I use any mood changing or mind altering substance it’s pedal to the medal and I don’t know how to stop. Looking back I would say addiction happened pretty quickly although I denied it vehemently, I was no addict. A drug abuser? Sure but not an addict, and that was my stance for close to 25 years and by the time I realized I was addicted it was too late.

I was in and had no idea how to get out.”

Real folks’ stories, perhaps it’s time we start really listening?

Here’s another good one, for starters. Proud2BProfane with Ross Cessna

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROrH5pnjjF0

Misunderstanding, misdiagnosing, exploiting . . . and that’s exactly where we are at, until further . . . notice?

What’s Growin’ On?

We just wanted to share a few updates from the wee homestead, on the winter garden and other news.

Dreary weather whiplash here, hard to say if our holidays will be white, green, gray or brown, but thankfully we still eat fresh, easily, every day.

Growin’ on now are: broccoli, lots of lettuces, carrots, cabbage, brussel sprouts, beets, kohlrabi, garlic, onions, kale, our favorite herbs–dill, chervil, cilantro–loads of collards for us and the critters, planted thick as green manure and spring bee food, too, like hairy vetch.

It’s high maintenance, we cover and uncover the boxes as weather requires, and it’s slow growing with shorter days and an abundance of overcast days.

But, the limited harvest results are DELICIOUS!

Triumph for the season:

I was interviewed about natural living on Crow777, a site I’ve mentioned here many times as a cutting edge, paradigm shifting, life affirming podcast I highly recommend.

https://www.crrow777radio.com/137-leaving-hurricanes-and-citified-chaos-for-self-sufficient-natural-life-free/

They follow my nervous-nelly ramblings patiently and pleasantly and thankfully follow me up this week with a professional, a doctor saying exactly what I’m wanting and needing to hear!

https://www.crrow777radio.com/138-healing-medical-doctors-still-exist-dr-franco-lenna-talks-natural-medicine/

Blessings for the season:

Thought for the season:

Manufactured outrage?! They go berserk over a cute old song and meanwhile, Paradise is lost?!

https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2018/12/11/radio-station-ends-puritanical-ban-of-baby-its-cold-outside/

Taking the Waters

Balneotherapy, crounotherapy, the drinking cure, taking the waters–whatever you want to call it–chalybeate pools, hot springs and mineral spas have a very long tradition behind them. And before I get accused of ‘appealing to tradition’ once again in order to assert the value of these traditions, there’s beaucoup science behind them, too.

But to find this science you typically have to go to the Russians, because in America they call it pseudoscience, at best, hucksterism, at worst. http://www.texasescapes.com/DEPARTMENTS/Visible_Ink/Waters_in_Texas/Waters.htm

“From the frontier years of the Republic to the postwar years of the twentieth century, people flocked to the state’s mineral waters primarily for one reason–health. In that sense, Texas springs were resorts in the truest sense, despite their relative anonymity to the rest of the nation.” (Valenza)

From the Journal of the American Medical Association, 1943: “Much of the discussion to follow on the historical background of resort therapy will be concerned with the forces which at different periods have raised this therapy to the central feature of medical care, have reduced it to the status of superstition, have diverted its main features into voluptuous cultural practices, have opposed its use on the puritanical background that its measures coddled the flesh that needed scourging from the sins of disease, have degraded it to a social fad, have allowed it to pass into the hands of the charlatan and enthusiast as a panacea, have obstructed it with the lack of economic provision for care and have brushed it aside with a disinterest that has come from attention fixed on only the novel in medicine.”
(Howard Haggard, MD) sited from “Taking the Waters in Texas: Springs, Spas and Fountains of Youth by Janet Mace Valenza

“The use of mineral springs for therapeutic purposes declined for several reasons. Many hotels burned or were washed away by floods, and rebuilding them seemed inappropriate because medicine had begun to change. With the rise of “germ theory” and the discovery of sulfa drugs and antibiotics, the belief in the usefulness of mineral water diminished. Many doctors supported water cures, but some began to eschew balneology, the science of bathing, because of some resorts’ extravagant claims. In Marlin the tradition lasted into the 1960s, primarily because the medical profession appropriated the practice and transformed it into a tool for physical therapy. Other factors, such as war and depression, also hurt resorts. The railroad guaranteed the success and demise of some resort.”

Marlin_mineral_water — Gentlemen taking the waters in Marlin

“Texas spas were unique among Texas towns and also different from resorts in the East. Daily life at these resort towns revolved around the waters. Architecture reflected the tradition. Pavilions and drinking fountains became gathering places for local citizens, depots attracted bands and drummers to meet trains, bathhouses set the scene for private ablutions, and large hotels employed big bands for entertainment. Other diversions included domino games, burro rides, picnics, and dances. Bathers overcame the fears attendant upon the theory of miasma-that harmful vapors association with swampy waters cause disease-to seek the sanative pleasures of the springs and wells. Osmotic exchanges with the water were supposed to benefit the body. Rheumatism, arthritis, and skin diseases were reportedly relieved more often than any other condition. (Valenza) https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/sbm11

Sounds to me like getting cured was a lot more fun back then!

MineralWellsTXHomeOfcrazyWaterPostcard1930SF

As for the science

It was Europeans like Ernest Kapp, an early geographer who opened the Hydropathic Institute, that brought these practices from their own countries and ancestors to ours. “Dr. Ernest Kapp’s Water-Cure Treatment included not only hydropathy, but also gymnastic exercises.” https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fka01

Viktor Schauberger was another early researcher studying the properties of water.

For the deep dive into where the science stands now, including references to the numerous studies and on-going research, I’m definitely over my head with this newish publication, Pure Water: The Science of Water, Waves, Water Pollution, Water Treatment, Water Therapy and Water Ecology.

But it’s fascinating nonetheless and certainly convinces me our ancestors knew more than we often give them credit for.

http://store.greenmedinfo.com/product/pure-water-science-water

A Spoonful of Sugar

Some not-so-random quotes and links, interspersed with happy homestead snaps for better digestion.

photo(2) — Cleaning up the acorns on the deck, so helpful!

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.”
Frederick Douglass, former slave (1818-1895)

Six deceptions needed for Agenda 21/2030/Sustainable Development
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGCkSRXo-jk

Despite a vast body of scientific knowledge, the issue of deliberate climatic manipulations for military use has never been explicitly part of the UN agenda on climate change. Neither the official delegations nor the environmental action groups participating in the Hague Conference on Climate Change (CO6) (November 2000) have raised the broad issue of “weather warfare” or “environmental modification techniques (ENMOD)” as relevant to an understanding of climate change.

The clash between official negotiators, environmentalists and American business lobbies has centered on Washington’s outright refusal to abide by commitments on carbon dioxide reduction targets under the 1997 Kyoto protocol.(1) The impacts of military technologies on the World’s climate are not an object of discussion or concern. Narrowly confined to greenhouse gases, the ongoing debate on climate change serves Washington’s strategic and defense objectives.https://archives.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO201A.html

“an attempt to eradicate human violence” William Sweet Minds of Men film 2:02

Solutions? #1 self-directed learning
https://www.crrow777radio.com/131-the-higher-education-political-money-machine-free/

Life eats life. Deal in reality.

It’s not always pretty and sweet, that’s why we have sugar. And salt.

And why roses have thorns.

Fake Clouds = Fake Weather

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about my favorite topic, which is, the weather. Supposedly Mark Twain once famously said: “Everyone complains about the weather, but no one ever does anything about it.”

If he did really say that, he was lying, or joking. Even before his day this statement would have been completely false, and he most certainly would have known this. After all, he was a newsman, and it was hot news (pun intended) and Twain was nothing if not au courant.

Weather modification began in earnest before aviation was invented and back then was publicized regularly in the newspapers. To control the weather was a dream of every farmer, military strategist, and tyrant: He who controls the weather controls the world!

“James Pollard Espy (or “The Storm King”) (May 9 1785 – January 24 1860) was a U.S. meteorologist who proposed burning forests on the west coast of the United States of America to increase rainfall on the east coast. Espy developed a convection theory of storms, explaining it in 1836 before the American Philosophical Society and in 1840 before the French Académie des Sciences and the British Royal Society. His theory was published in 1840 as The Philosophy of Storms.” https://weathermodificationhistory.com/1836-james-pollard-espy-the-storm-king/

“In the late 1960s a group of American barley growers in Colorado decided to enlist the services of professional weather consultants to assist with the control of the weather for the production of an optimum premium-grade Moravian barley grown under contract for a brewery. The required weather modification included supplementation of rainfall during the early part of the growing season, suppression of hail in mid-summer and suppression of rain during the final stages of ripening. ”

And, because a few folks wanted premium beer, the lettuce and potato farmers were screwed and so they appealed to the governor.

https://archive.org/details/WeatherModification_201802/page/n1

In the century and a half since experimentations began, they’ve come a very, very long way, and, they no longer advertise their failures, or really anything at all, to the general public. To where or to whom would you make an appeal when the officials pretend it’s not happening?

https://weathermodificationhistory.com/usda-sprays-electrified-water-over-texas/

The main job of the mainstream press is to normalize these man-made creations and atmospheric and environmental experimentations and manipulations, so that these sciences can continue unabated to ruin our natural world.

It’s thanks to I-phones we’ve suddenly ‘discovered’ all these new clouds? Seriously!

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/03/eleven-new-clouds-atlas/

They tell us it’s ‘climate change’ and “global warming’ and insist we must lower our carbon footprints, use less water, less energy, eat less meat, and on and on, and it’s all complete NONSENSE!

photo(5) — Feeding the hungry bees, who are certainly very confused with the ***weather whiplash***.

The institutions are all trying to convince the aware public that geoengineering is now necessary to ‘save the planet’. This is classic ‘problem-reaction-solution’ strategy. Create the problem, get folks in a state of fear and concern, then provide the ‘solution’ which is not a solution at all, but a system guaranteed to create a whole heap of new problems for the ‘experts’ to solve.

Arecibo’s Ionospheric Heater is Boiling the Tropical Sky November 3-9, 2018

Getting educated and spreading awareness is our only chance right now, and LOADS of folks are doing this all over the web. The ‘officials’ and ‘experts’ won’t be able to lie to the public much longer.

Unless of course, so many others continue to do nothing at all and continue to let their governments treat us all like lab rats and our earthly home as a toxic waste dump.

https://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/legal-action-update-government-controlling-weather-forecasts-to-cover-climate-engineering-crimes/

chemtrailsmall — Come on now, this ain’t normal, folks! Stop playing Sveik!

Grievance Studies and Virtue Signaling

While so many are focused on the doom and gloom of politics and environmental degradation and censorship and climate change and fake news and on and on, I am seeing glimmers of hope striking up everywhere.

beeglory — Our honeybees love the morning glory in late summer, which is considered an invasive and highly undesirable weed among most farmers who kill it with herbicides and then complain there are no bees to pollinate their fruit trees in the spring. Things that make you say, hmmm . .

And this poor sod just doesn’t get it either!

“Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/

You don’t have to be waving a flag on the Trump train to appreciate a politician making a public sport of the ‘Deep State’ –which is now a Front & Center label in the global lexicon–thanks to his administration.

Will he manage to drain the swamp? Was that ever his intention at all?

It doesn’t matter now! He’s put language on it, he’s given the corruption a popular catch phrase, which will survive long after any degree of embarrassment or hate speech or lack of diplomacy under which the American left currently feels they are unduly suffering.

And still another delicious dose of Hopium:

This little team of prankster scholars not only provided us with some great laughs, but got some great work done in the process. This is creativity at its finest and an inspiring look at how sometimes the gatekeepers can be beaten at their own game. Some of these fake papers were then published in peer-reviewed academic journals, including a hilarious one about the rape culture inherent in dog parks.

“This process is the one, single thread that ties all twenty of our papers together, even though we used a variety of methods to come up with the various ideas fed into their system to see how the editors and peer reviewers would respond. Sometimes we just thought a nutty or inhumane idea up and ran with it. What if we write a paper saying we should train men like we do dogs—to prevent rape culture? Hence came the “Dog Park” paper. What if we write a paper claiming that when a guy privately masturbates while thinking about a woman (without her consent—in fact, without her ever finding out about it) that he’s committing sexual violence against her? That gave us the “Masturbation” paper. What if we argue that the reason superintelligent AI is potentially dangerous is because it is being programmed to be masculinist and imperialist using Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Lacanian psychoanalysis? That’s our “Feminist AI” paper. What if we argued that “a fat body is a legitimately built body” as a foundation for introducing a category for fat bodybuilding into the sport of professional bodybuilding? You can read how that went in Fat Studies.” https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/

Of course we continue to have the usual misinformation and disinformation being shoveled out by the usual culprits:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/10/huge-reduction-in-meat-eating-essential-to-avoid-climate-breakdown

But then we have at our fingertips the rational-minded push back of real journalists, scientists, experts, researchers, whistleblowers, etc.:

https://www.corbettreport.com/interview-1117-jim-steele-on-how-bad-global-warming-science-hurts-the-environmental-movement/

“(Always) 10 years left to save the planet”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPGK6pNO0Qw

These are miraculous times!
On the wee homestead there’s always proof of that close on hand.

But in the attempted Globalist takeover of our cultures and our individuality it can be very tough sometimes to see past the fear-porn. And once that’s accomplished, it can be even tougher to get a personal clue as to what to do about it in whatever way one can.

But that’s happening!

Derrick Broze on 5G in Houston on DTube, not Youtube:

https://d.tube/#!/v/dbroze/q8uqc45w

Folks are rapidly moving away from the corporate-sponsored programming.

They are organizing, creating new platforms, sharing ideas and truth and camaraderie. It’s now already passé to be only ‘woke’ — the new fashion is to break the chains altogether.

https://sustainabledish.com/am-i-less-woke-because-i-eat-meat/

Folks are no longer satisfied with waking up and they are now standing up and those old neocons are dying off, but that doesn’t really matter, because it was never just about a group of white men. Just as it was never just about any one group, it’s not just the Jews, not just the Russians or Chinese, or the Communists, or the Nazis. The problem is, was and always will be the mindless, honorless order followers. That problem is being overturned on our watch and I am a thrilled witness and ardent participant in that sabotage.

What’s been revealed now en mass and which the masses have lapped up like starving kittens is the strategy. We have witnessed the Revelation of the Method and there’s no way to unsee it. Some don’t yet realize that’s what they are witnessing, they see only the chaos, they react in fear or trepidation. That’s ok.

Are you afraid of the future the technocratic Globalists have planned for us?

Good, that means we’re getting somewhere.

Now go do something about it! Please. 🙂

#Authentic Virtue Signaling

Celebrating Small Steps

Late summer here is my personal version of hell and I bitch about it every year.

What better time to take a break from my current reality where I feel like an indoor prisoner and wake up daily wanting to lash out at all the idiotic Geoengineering causing drought here and weather chaos all around the globe.

I even want to take a break from my last post pondering passivity and violence and just notice for a day, or so, all the little things and little ways we have improved upon since I last felt this level of droughtrage.

I know I am just a bit more blessed this year than last, mostly by my own sheer will and resilience, and that of Hubby as well, no doubt, and that of some inspiring neighbors and cyber-friends, and perhaps if I dwell on that fact just a bit, next year will be just a bit more blessed in turn.

Last year’s late summer garden

Or rather, lack there of 🙂

Last year’s late summer garden vs this year’s, not great, but still better!

A new young friend who loves plants as much as I do helps me identify the hardy, native heat-lovers of our area, and diligently and graciously watched our wee homestead so I could join my extended family at a reunion in July. I look forward to returning the favor when her family vacations in October. This is the sort of small steps a resilient community is made of, not the top-down control of Rockefeller’s ‘Resilient Cities’, because it’s the neighborly reliance that brings real hope and treasures and peace of mind.

borderpatrol — Collective Border Control, naturally 😉

I still don’t like okra, but I’m harvesting it anyway for the pigs and neighbors! Every once in a while I throw a few into a meal, along with other traditional Southern favorites we didn’t grow up with, but are learning to appreciate, like collards and Southern peas, eggplant and jalapenos, all which have survived the heat, but would not be here now without regular irrigation.

It’s very hard to keep up with the constant weeding and mulching requirements in such circumstances, but these plants, along with the sweet potatoes, are actually successfully competing with the grasses in some cases. Amazing!

I won’t mention the melons, because I’m hell-bent on keeping this post positive. So let’s mention instead the ‘mouse melons’, aka sanditas, or, Mexican Sour Gherkins. 🙂

Instead, let’s mention the fact that the young sweet potato vines and okra leaves are edible and quite tasty!

And the fantastic find this summer which I’m most excited to expand next year considerably, the Mexican Sour Gherkin.

Crop of the year, in my humble opinion!

Even in the dead of summer, of brutal heat and no rain, we enjoy meals raised primarily on this land. As an added bonus now my raw milk source is 5 minutes away, whereas last year at this time it was 5 hours round-trip!

The aging fridge is full of cheeses we will enjoy all winter: Cheddars, Goudas, a Parmesan and an Alpine, several Brie almost ripe, a Muenster even! YUM! Last week I taught a couple of neighbor ladies to make 30-minute mozzarella and we had such a nice time.

Next they will teach me skills they’ve acquired—spinning, dying, soap-making–a few more small steps in our agorism adventures. Skill-sharing has been such a crucial aspect of our most successful ancestors and I would be challenged to express how rewarding it is for me still, at 50 next month, to be learning so much that is new for me. It is indeed a sort of middle-age renaissance!

I also foraged for elderberries, mustang grapes and peppervine berries, dried some and made some syrups and preserves.

And, Another 400 pounds of pears, or so!

I do believe still that’s thanks to our bees. For several years we thought it was a weather issue, late frosts, whatever, but I am beginning to suspect it was a pollinator issue all along.

We will see, that’s just a hypothesis so far. And in any case we continue for another year to benefit from the cider, the preserves, the cobblers, and the pigs are getting their fill, too!

The Datura remains an absolute favorite of mine, blooming in crazy heat and exhaling the most exquisite fragrance into the evening air. The thyme, rosemary, sage, oregano are gracefully resilient as well, I appreciate all y’all!

And our dear Tori, who just as I was typing this post chased an enormous coyote off our chickens!

tori2018 — Tori today! Rewarded Homestead Guard of the Year 2018

The blessings are very close at hand, the frustrations a million miles away. I vow to maintain that truthful balance deep in my heart as I brave the coming days.

Peace and love to y’all, dear friends.

Renegade, Stupid, or Stubborn?

“I’m selling you bees on Friday so you can kill them in your top bar hives.” so smirks JC of Frost Apiary in the Ouachita Mountains, Arkansas. I drive 2 hours across the small mountain range from my dad’s place in Mena, which is a 6-hour drive from our East Texas homestead, mostly because gentle, treatment-free bees are not too easy to come by here.

We’ve got some bad genetics in these parts, as my nearby beekeeping friend and I can both attest to, only she got proof of her Africanized bees on video. Had someone been filming me as I tried to work with mine, it would’ve been cartoonish and probably hysterical as I ran circles around trees trying, in vain, to get the vicious little buggers off me.

I’ve yet to meet a commercial beekeeper who doesn’t scoff at the Kenyan-style hives known as ‘top bar’ or sometimes called ‘horizontal’ hives that are now trendy with hobbyists. I chose them as a completely novice beekeeper for 3 reasons only: weight, esthetics, and the personal preference of the teacher of the beekeeping workshops I took.

Clearly none of those reasons would impress JC even remotely, so I kept them to myself.

In all his decades of beekeeping JC has yet to meet a beekeeper successful with top bar hives. It’s good for business, he says, because they come back every spring for more bees, until they switch to Langstroth hives. He recites a string of reasons why this is, which begins with “they starve in the winter” and ends with “they starve in the spring.”

For those of you who might be curious about this less-traveled region of the fly-over states, but without the time or inclination to actually visit, here’s some of what I saw, and smelled in that 2 hours.

There were approximately 20 Jesus billboards, 10 churches, 2 banks and 1 gas station, thanks be to Jesus perhaps, because I was running on fumes by that time.

As for the smell, unless you’ve had the misfortune to experience the poorer areas of Bangkok in rainy season, you will not have approached this particular olfactory ballpark. It is directly related as to why you see houses on the left directly juxtaposed to houses on the right.

You might have guessed, get-rich-quick by factory farming. If the entire region then smells like you live in a baboon cage at the zoo, well, at least you have the means for air conditioning and Febreeze spray.

JC and his wife busy themselves moving around the shop and yard, bees buzzing all around, as he offers me advice. After 5 minutes of this he says, “I want you to go now,” which he repeats again after 10 minutes, and then again after 20.

“My health’s no good,” he also repeats several times, taking his ball cap off to reveal a fresh scar the length of the top of his scalp where a tumor was recently removed. He says he has a similar scar down his chest, a barrel of a chest still I notice, at nearing 80 years old.

“You might take it a bit easier,” I suggest, because I know how heavy those Langstroths get and I’ve just watched him effortlessly move several around the yard.

“He doesn’t believe in that!” his wife answers for him. Despite his stooped posture and some less than urban-refined social graces, his eyes are still bright and his mind and tongue sharp, which greatly softens any coarseness, in my opinion anyway.

They then carefully load up my impressively-packaged bee packages in the back seat of the car and I set the feeders on them overnight until my 6-hour drive home the following morning.

-trip

Calm, happy, well-fed, well-contained bees ready for a wee road trip.
Or, so I thought!

I’m not sure at what point I fully took to heart that the bees were not at all well-contained. At first, I just thought I had a few roaming co-pilots, not a problem.

Then about high noon, still 2 hours from home, I made a pit-stop for gas and a sandwich and return to the car buzzing with hundreds of loose bees, inside and out. I have a moment of panic before realizing I at least need to move the car away from the main traffic area of the convenience store while I devise a plan.

Once at the corner of the parking lot I realize there is no plan to be made. There was no quick fix to this problem; I had no equipment to get the boxes apart and even if I could I could not figure out where the leak was coming from. I had a single choice and no other, leave 4 packages of bees in the parking lot right now, be out the time and the money and the bees, or get back in the car and finish the trip with them. It was all, or nothing.

It was worth the bees crawling over my arms, my face, my sunglasses to see the passersby at traffic lights gawk in stupor! Handy Hubby, being the wise guy he is prone to being, suggested with a chuckle that I visit the McDonald’s drive-thru. 🙂

Because as an American I can’t resist a happy ending, I waited a week to write this post until I had one: We now have four queen-right colonies happily nesting and growing in top bar hives.

The first of my determined objectives, as I stated plainly to JC before I finally left his apiary, “I will be your first successful top bar customer, I betcha.”

More Foraged Favorites

Our dear Tori is a master forager. She’ll steal unreservedly from the melon and berry patches to the fig and mulberry trees, to even the unripe cucumbers and squashes.

Equally in the forest she is clearly divinely inspired–the perfectly ripe passion fruit she’ll scout, the bones get unearthed as her possessions no matter who has buried them, and she leads me to all the best bramble patches. The forest and our garden are her perpetual oysters–and while to see my melons walk away makes me want to cry, to her happy prance with edible treasure, well there is only to laugh!

And, apparently she’s not the only astute forager.

I love seeing how many foraging sites and blogs are currently flourishing. They inspire me to add on and spread the wealth.

Indian Strawberry

We have a big patch of these amiable volunteers just adjacent to the asparagus patch, natural companions, perhaps? In Scandinavia I met gardeners who insisted on planting their strawberries and asparagus and dill in the same space. I While these taste pretty bland compared to our cultivated varieties, they are still quite pretty, which is enough for me to spend the time to gather and prepare them.

I toss them in a salad with mulberries coming ripe at the same time. Or use them as a garnish with a spring weed pesto, along with the leaves, in moderation. Here’s a variation using chickweed, but it’s fun to get creative with whatever is in abundance.

https://nittygrittylife.com/eat-weeds-wild-weed-pesto/

Honeysuckle

While it is an invasive species for us in the southern U.S., at least it’s a useful one! While I’ve only made tea with it, some are patient enough to make jam. Maybe this will be the year I give that a try.

It’s also prized in traditional Chinese medicine.
(From: Dr. Mercola https://articles.mercola.com/herbs-spices/honeysuckle.aspx)

In TCM, the honeysuckle flower is commonly used to help ease the flu, colds and sore throat. According to Science Alert,¹¹ this plant has the ability to prevent the influenza virus from replicating. An animal study published in the journal Cell Research supports this, as it found that honeysuckle, when combined with a plant microRNA called MIR2911, was able to suppress swine flu and bird flu viruses effectively.¹²Xiao Er Ke Chuan Ling Oral Liquid (KCL), an herbal preparation that uses honeysuckle and nine other plants, was found to help treat acute bronchitis in children. A study in the Chinese Journal of Integrated Traditional and Western Medicine said KCL has antiviral, antibacterial and potent pharmacological actions.¹³Honeysuckle was also found to have wound-healing properties in rat models, according to the BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine journal.

Sassafras

A quite undermined tree of the South, considering its illustrious origins and conspiratorial fate. It is a tree widely cultivated in Asia-Pacific as an essential ingredient to the popular drug, or versions of it anyway, generally called “ecstasy”.

At first, like cannabis, it was classified among the most harmful of substances by the FDA, though our ancestors had previously been very acquainted and attached to these and so many other suddenly ‘dangerous’ plants. Then while they were deemed “carcinogenic” by our government, simultaneously expanding was its cultivation in foreign countries. This was actually before “Poppy Bush” but perhaps setting that very precedent for the former president?!

While I’ve no idea how to make the popular street drug, I can assure you it makes a deliciously fragrant tea, traditional root beer, and gumbo filé powder.

Mullein

One of the few things growing strong all winter in the South is one of the classic remedies of the typical seasonable winter ails–upper respiratory infections, cough, sinus, and so on. Go figure, mother nature to the rescue.

Yaupon

As a tea it rivals the Lipton or Lausanne you are paying good money for, it really does. It does contain caffeine and was used among the native populations regularly and as an alternative to coffee in hard times among new settlers. Drying it for a just a couple of days before roasting makes the process quicker, but roasting isn’t necessary if you like a more mild ‘green tea’ taste. The beauty is, it’s prolific and harvestable all-year-round for humans, and for the bees they have a reliable early forage in spring. Just don’t eat the berries!

Spring weed pesto and/or chimichurra sauce

Of course we love our traditional basil-based pesto with pine nuts, such a classic. But, whatever’s available in our time/space, we use it! Walnuts or pecans can replace the pricey pine version, or skip the nuts altogether. I often leave out the parmesan too (my own homemade of course), and either add that last minute, if appropriate, or make more of a chimichurri-style sauce, so yum!

We both love a combination of wild and cultivated plants and I let them blend altogether in the garden and in the sauce. Chervil, parsley, cilantro, or maybe arugula generously and gorgeously partnered with wild violet, chickweed, wild rose petal, or whatever is out there! Once prepared it’s a delicious condiment for meats, a base for dressing and marinade, or a sauce, stand-alone or blended, an instant topping for eggs or toast. It freezes really well too.

https://draxe.com/recipe/chimichurri-recipe/

Let your local, seasonal nature be your greatest guide. 🙂

A few favorite resources:

Idiot’s Guides Foraging by Mark Merriwether Vorderbruggen, PhD
http://www.foragingtexas.com

https://www.growforagecookferment.com/forage

https://sustainabledish.com

Nature’s Garden: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting and Preparing Edible Wild Plants by Samuel Thayer

Collective Utopia vs. Private Idaho

I lost my last hive just a few weeks ago, mysteriously. They dutifully pollinated the pears before their departure, sweet little creatures they are. Unfortunately, they didn’t leave a note, or much clue. I hope they swarmed and found a suitable new happy home, but I believe from what little evidence remained, that this was not the case.

The drama of the bees has been droning on now for decades. But of course, have no fear, technology comes to the rescue! First create the problem, then try to fix it while creating 3 new problems–that’s the modern, strategic, scientifically-advanced model at work.

Problem with disappearing bees? Solution, robot bees!

http://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-robot-bees-farming-patent-2018-3

The next big thing according to TV’s famed Dr. Oz, is the RFID chip. Keep losing your Alzheimer parent? Get ’em the chip!

Steve Hoffman gushes over the new tech which will allow our minds to merge with one another. He calls it ‘almost like heaven’—a state of all-inclusiveness with others where our individuality is traded and usurped by the collective, to the extreme degree we can actually feel another’s pain as our own.

But, only if we choose it, of course. Right. That’s good, because mark my words, I don’t want to be in his mind, and I certainly don’t want him, or anyone, invading mine at will either.

Will we get to choose? I’m pretty doubtful on that point. Right now, do I get to choose whether my region is cloud-seeded, or not? Nope. https://weathermodificationhistory.com/

Do I get to choose whether Walmart creates robot bees? Nope.

Do I get to choose whether scientists experiment with technology meant to replace nature, meant to manipulate the environment beyond measure, meant to research consciousness with the intention of controlling it, even replacing it? Nope, nope and nope.

Dr. Andreagiovanni Reina, Research Associate in Collective Robotics in the University of Sheffield’s Department of Computer Science, said: “This study is exciting because it suggests that honey bee colonies adhere to the same laws as the brain when making collective decisions.

“The study also supports the view of bee colonies as being similar to complete organisms or better still, superorganisms, composed of a large number of fully developed and autonomous individuals that interact with each other to bring forth a collective response.

“With this view in mind, parallels between bees in a colony and neurons in a brain can be traced, helping us to understand and identify the general mechanisms underlying psychophysics laws, which may ultimately lead to a better understanding of the human brain. Finding similarities between the behavior of honey bee colonies and brain neurons is useful because the behavior of bees selecting a nest is simpler than studying neurons in a brain that makes decisions.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22616-y

Is it for a love of nature and mankind that science and technology seek to study it so thoroughly and in this particular direction? Or, is it with the intention of replacing nature and mankind for the benefit of god knows whom?

Do they ever ask themselves if we all have the same vision of a collective utopia?

As they preach for the essential Oneness of humanity, the love and light of unity, the exalted state of community, the Kumbaya collusion of the hive, the higher consciousness of the collective, do they consider as well the famed quote by a character in one of Jean Paul Sartre’s most read plays, “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” (“Hell, it’s other people.”)

As they profess their profound compassion and concern, do they care that some of us don’t care to live with robotized nature? Have they considered putting their intellectual efforts toward saving nature, co-creating with nature, relating equally to it, rather than commanding it, deconstructing it, subjugating it, destroying and replacing it?

Do they tread so shallowly in their own individuality that they cannot conceive of the notion that one’s relationship to oneself and to nature is by far greater, more fundamental and essential, than one’s relationship to any other?

Keep your robots, your synthetics, your hive mind, your Internet of Things, your technological collective Utopia, I don’t want it.

Many of us don’t want it, but we seem to have no choice in the matter.

If I weren’t an optimist, I’d feel we are doomed here on the wee homestead; doomed to watch as we are driven from the heaven of creating our own private Idaho into the hell of another’s version of ‘progress.’

My idea of progress:

Companion planting 3.0 (gardening by aesthetics) — cultivars co-existing with native volunteers (yes, I mean weeds); edibles among poisons; annuals with perennials with crops, seasonal ‘layering’. More on all that coming soon!