I don't know where to begin this update.
There's a lot on my mind and no way to say it succinctly.
Musings On Death
For the past week or more I've been searching for a reason to live. I haven't been suicidal, per se... I've been suicidal before, and this was different... this was less emotional and more reasoned. I keep hitting walls that I don't have the resources to get over, and I have fewer and fewer resources with each passing day. Fulfilling my basic needs just to keep myself alive is getting more and more challenging and my quality of life is getting worse and worse. Things are breaking and wearing out and I don't have the resources to replace them. The every day discomforts that I've been tolerating for the last few years are weighing on me more and more. I feel like I (or maybe even we as a whole) have passed the point of no return, or are very near it. If things don't improve soon (when? this year? next year? in the next few years?) that I'll be firmly on a path where it will be increasingly difficult to keep myself alive, and the joys that make the struggle worthwhile will fade and fade until there are none left. And if I hopelessly try to extend my life with the help of others, and if that help only delays the inevitable rather than getting me out of the hole I'm in, then I'll have objectively made their lives worse for nothing. It makes me wish that out culture had a healthier relationship with death. I wish death were viewed more objectively. A quick and painless death would distress those I leave behind more than the slow, agonizing death I'm likely to face at the hands of illness, injury, or starvation. That's the only real argument I have I have in favor of prolonging my life—that my loved ones would ironically rather see me suffer, and would suffer themselves to extend my suffering—other than the vague hope that maybe something will change before I'm truly at some unknowable point of no return. I'm not in any hurry to die, I just objectively don't know if it's worth staying alive, or if my life is causing more harm than good. That uncertainty, and the hope that the work I'm doing is ultimately a net positive, are the only things keeping me going, but I'm not sure how long such a flimsy excuse can be justified.
It's hard to discuss my death without it seeming bleaker than it is. After years of studying philosophy/religion/science, especially those of an eastern persuasion, my metaphysical beliefs are wholly unrecognizable by most people who grew up in the west. Based on the available data, I think one of a handful of things is likely to happen when we die. The most basic is nothing. We simply cease to exist. Any suffering we've been experiencing simply comes to an end. This is the most boring option, but is in no way bad. The next option is that our bodies release endogenous DMT as we shut down and we
experience a biochemically induced psychedelic afterlife. It's simply a physiological response, but it gives our dying brain the impression that it's living on infinitely as part of the oneness of the universe (unless the nature of our life or death induces the dreaded "bad trip", thus forcing us to spend an eternity in our own personal hell.) Barring the bad trip scenario, this would also be a perfectly "enjoyable" death, and there's some scientific evidence to back it up. The next is one of my personal favorites. Michael Pollan, in "How To Change Your Mind," mentions in passing a theory of consciousness that had captivated me ever since I read it. The theory is that consciousness is not something that is manufactured by the brain, but rather the brain is an antenna that picks up a consciousness which exists somewhere outside of the body. We simply don't have a good enough understanding of consciousness to say with 100% certainty that it's a construction of the brain. This alternate theory is corroborated by by some of the shared experiences of people who've had near death/out of body experiences, some monks with over 10,000 hours of deep meditation under their belt, certain high dose psychedelic experiences, and some mental health conditions like dissociative identity disorder. The implication is that our bodies are just vessels that are used by whatever our "true self" is to experience the world, and even this body fails, we simply stop using it. We return to our "true life" or else start to occupy a new vessel. This aligns with an common belief in reincarnation there shared by many eastern religions, as well as having parallels to the Judeo-Christian belief in the soul, as well as a belief in a literal heaven or hell, much as the endogenous DMT version of death does as well. And in amongst these more physiological explanations for what happens after we die, there are also metaphysical questions about what our life actually is. Maybe we are just as example of biological life spontaneously occurring in the universe. But maybe our life is the hallucination of a dying brain. Or a dream. Or a simulation. Or a psychedelic experience. Or any number of things. And maybe any number of beliefs held by the world's religions are true. The only way to know for sure is to die.
This is why my own death doesn't bother me, and why I'm actually kind of impatiently awaiting it. The odds are in favor of whatever comes after this being neutral or good, with relatively little chance that what comes is objectively bad. But the religious viewpoints, and the endogenous DMT hypothesis, do leave open the possibility of a bad or terrifying death, especially when one's life or death are unpleasant. But I am but concerned about a bad trip in my final moments of brain activity, and I have tried to live the best life that I can, so if any religion proves to be true and punishes me for living my best life, or leaves me with some lack in the afterlife, then I have already accepted that fate. Death is a mystery, but it's one that fascinates me, not one that scares me.
Okay. That's enough rambling about death.
Eastern philosophy
I've been trying to revisit my eastern philosophy
roots and make sense of this past year. It's a tenet of most of the eastern philosophies that expecting or trying to force things to go a certain way are the causes of our mental and/or physical anguish. That's interpreted slightly differently depending on the tradition, but the basic gist is the same. And I've realized that I've been trying to force almost everything this season. Trying to force a certain size, style, and state of Harvey. Trying to force
land to be productive before it's ready. Trying to force the wildlife to behave by my standards. Trying to force the weather to behave. I expect things to go a certain way and it destroys me when they don't. I already hold this fundamental truth to be true, but the uncertainty I've found myself in has made it harder to live by that truth. But I'm going to make a concerted effort to just live reach day about concerning myself greatly about what my life will look like tomorrow, or a month from now, or a year from now, etc. Worrying about the outcome robs me of the present moment, and it makes me do inferior work, which is ultimately what makes my future worse than it otherwise would have been. And that's why things like seed balls and automating as much of the animal care as I can will allow me to just allow things to happen how they want to without trying to force a specific outcome. At the end of the day, I won't physically be any worse off for going with the flow as I have been by trying to force a specific outcome, but my mental health will almost certainly be better for not being attached to a specific outcome that never materializes.
Seed balls
Speaking of seed balls, I finally made the ones for the "human" garden. I'm starting to refer to it as my "forage garden," which I suppose it's a phrase that would apply to mist
permaculture gardens, but which I mean to describe a garden which is seeded intentionally by human inhabitants, but only in a haphazard way, and with wild
native and naturalized foods being allowed to take up residence amongst the domesticated plants, and where the only real maintenance is to harvest. Weeding is a mere suggestion. Some undesirable plants may be chopped and dropped or collected at animal
feed when the fancy strikes, but I will otherwise year it as any wild space that I forage in: a certain percentage of the plants are fine to harvest, and the rest (and the best) will be left to produce seed and feed the wild life. I will be less attached to individual plants and simply enjoy what I find and what looks appetizing each and every day. And that will blend more harmoniously with the "actual foraging" I do. The wilder my gardens have been, when it's intentional and but just because they've been overrun by weeds, they hair they've made me and the mud productive they've been. The rigidity I've been trying to enforce has been killing me.
My seed ball process and recipe had changed. The one I got from Paul's video just didn't do it for me. I wanted something more akin to how
Fukuoka describes his management. I nixed the compost because it made the "balls" too crumbly. I also treated it more like I was battering the seeds—back and forth between wet and dry target than adding a bunch of water haphazardly to powdered clay. And I decided that it was worth potentially trashing my food processor to powder the clay rather than continuing to wear my self out trying to crush it up by hitting it with a stick. In about 20 minutes I could make double the clay powder that I was making in a day and a half the hard way. Totally worth it. The actual process involves dunking the seeds in water, then placing them in a tray in a relatively thick layer of clay powder and then dusting another layer of clay on top. The dry clay kind of acts like flour like when you dust the counter before working with dough. It keeps things from sticking—to your hand, to your tray, to each other. The water on the seeds allows the clay powder to stick in a fine layer and you can mix then fairly aggressively to separate seeds from each other (my biggest complaint with the last method is that each ball ends up containing an obscene number of small seeds which will ultimately mess up the ultimate plant spacing.) Sift out any remaining powder and place the seeds in a secondary tray where they can be remoistened with a fine mist. I tried more conservative and more liberal uses of water. I initially thought that a more conservative approach would be better—wet enough that more clay would stick, but not so wet that they would become a sticky mass or that the clay would wash off—but ultimately using relatively more water and having them stick together a bit was the more efficient method. The method I've landed on so far is to place enough seeds in the tray to just cover the entire bottom, and then push all of the seeds to one end of the tray and wet them with a fine mist. Hold the tray at an angle and shake so that the seeds fall towards the bottom. Any time that a dry surface is exposed, apply more mist. When all of the seeds are at the bottom, repeat in the opposite direction. Then start to dump the seeds into the first tray with a good layer of clay powder in the bottom. If any dry patches are exposed as you're transferring the seeds, apply more mist, but only in the secondary container. Don't mist the tray holding the dry clay powder. Some seeds will stick to the secondary tray. You can scrape them out, but any that you can't get off easily will dry relatively quickly and then be ready to remove. Once all of the seeds have been transferred, add another dusting of clay on top and mix. It's kind of the crumbly texture you have when mixing fat into flour for a pie crust, and the more you agitate it the smaller the individual balls begging. Given that I generally want one or a small number of seeds in each ball, I made sure that none of the balls were much larger than the largest seeds in my mix, which were winter peas and beets. Sift out the dry powder and repeat the process again for one final time. I found that three coatings was perfect for getting a uniform coating on like 99.9% of the seeds. Only a few of the smooth, round daikon seeds failed to be fully covered, but most of them were, and that was good enough for me. In 5 hours of processing clay and making seed balls, I was able to make about 2 gallons of balls, minus the third coat of clay that still needs to go on the second gallon. Still plenty of room for improvement, but way better than the last batch.
Given the amount of seed I should be able to collect next year, I'm thinking about scaling up my process and selling some as an instant
local fall
landrace forage garden. Or maybe I'll just go crazy and cover the property in the stuff. It'd certainly make the
deer happy. But it's just a thought. Once possible way that I might be able to cover any expenses I have.
Broody hens and animal feeds
In the world of animals, I woke up to a broody hen. Not surprisingly. I hadn't collected eggs in the past week. I barely had the
energy to get out of bed just to feed them. I've never had problems with breeds breaking it's eating eggs, and it's genuinely cooler in the chicken pen than it is inside, in account of it being on the north side of the barn, so I just left them. This morning I finally had the energy to go collect them. Hen was on the nest. No big deal. Come back an hour later, there's still a hen on the nest. Maybe it's a different one? I give it another hour and there's still a hen on the nest, so it's time to move her. Honestly, Buff Orpingtons have to be the chillest broody hens. She pecked at me 2 or 3 times, but not hard enough to notice through gloves. She didn't make and nightmarish velociraptor noises like other breeds I've had. Once I was holding her she was perfectly calm. I noted the color of her leg band (yellow) so that I can try to have her hatch eggs for me when that time rolls around (since I didn't have my chickens marked last year, it don't have any way of knowing if it's the same one that went broody last year, but there was a second full best box full of eggs and no one interested in it, I have a suspicion that it was the same girl.) Once I set her down and removed the eggs, she decided that she was done being broody (at least for today.) She was sitting on 14 eggs, plus the remnants of a 15th which had broken. One of the eggs on the outside edge was on the cool side, but she could have easily hatched an even dozen.
I've kinda given up on chicken feed this week. I thought the main feeder was where the chicks couldn't get to it, but they're more determined that I anticipated. I haven't had the energy to come up with a better solution, and I have to refill the chick feeder about 3 times a day now in order for them to get enough feed, and I just don't have it in me right now. So they win. They get to eat with the big birds. I've already been cutting the layer feed 50/50 with starter feed to try to get more protein in the larger birds (with supplemental calcium on the side.) It's a slight protein cut for the young birds, and maybe a bit more calcium than they should have, but until I can come up with a better solution, that's what I have the energy for: a 50/50 mix of both feeds feed try everyone with supplemental calcium for the layers.
Duckweed is finally starting to look healthy. I never went and scooped more from the creek. This is strictly the few stragglers that weren't dead the last time I moved/made adjustments to the duckweed
pond. It's not growing out of control, but it's at least alive. I haven't really checked on it at all, so I can't say for certain what rate is growing at. This could be pretty exemplary growth, given how close to death everything was the last time I did anything with it. But I'm anticipating that it's going to need some tweaks to really increase the production.
I did set up a small prototype black soldier fly bin. I already had grubs starting to grow in the stuff that I fed it, so it should just be a matter of time. I don't know that my moisture is soaked in perfectly though. I might have to dig around in the bin a bit tomorrow and see how things are growing. If this design works I already have a plan for scaling it up.
Rabbits have been on nothing but vegetation fit the past three days and are tolerating it well. I wish I had more and more varieties of grass, but I've been doing surprisingly well given how dead almost everything is. I pick a ton of stuff every day and the next day (most) it looks like I never touched it.
I have been contemplating getting them a mineral block. That used to be a thing with rabbits that had mostly gone away now that they're mostly fed fortified pellets. Supplementing minerals might be a necessity if I feed them entirely from the land. I'm undecided this far and have seen contradictory information. I'm also not sure if the mineral blocks made specifically for rabbits contain different proportions of minerals that those for horses and livestock. There's not a lot of information online about about their contents. At this point they still have and get pellets when I don't have the energy to feed them exclusively fresh food, so I won't really need to have it figured out until I decide whether to buy more pellets to continue supplementing their diet.
Rotten meat
I pulled some of the clearance rack
beef I'd purchased out of the freezer to thaw. And then a friend bright out some equally perishable food for me. I underestimated the amount of time it would take me to finish the food my friend brought, and overestimated the energy I'd have for cooking. That meat say in the fridge for over a week. It was too valuable to justify tossing it, even if it it was too grow more soldier flies for the chickens, so I did a bit of research. Found some stuff on the history of humans and dogs burying meat to eat days, weeks, or months later, plus the history of various cultures eating rotted/fermented meat (not all of which were new to me.) I've also ready accounts of various herbs being cooked with rotten meat to meet people from getting sick, but I cannot recall which ones. I also recently stumbled on a travel channel on YouTube where this guy hunted with the Hadza and spent time with a number of tribes, one of which served an aged, maggot-filled meat as a delicacy. I also found the wild and crazy world of high meat, where people intentionally leave raw meat to rot so that they can purportedly get high off of it. Science basically says it's pure luck that they haven't looked themselves yet. I did find one contemporary example of people routinely eating rotten meat without especially ill effects. I believe that was in Venezuela, where poor people bought rotting meat directly from the butcher because a kilo of fresh meat is the equivalent of a month's salary. It was hard to find any really thorough science. Most just said "don't" and left it at that. But I kept having flashbacks to other travel shows where you could almost smell how rotten the fish and meat hanging out in the markets was. I was able to piece together enough information from various sources to increase my confidence. Botulism is the big one, but I couldn't find any definitive sources that says anything about botulism and meat. But, even if botulism occurs in raw meat, a mere 10 minutes of boiling is enough to denature the potentially lethal toxin produced by the botulinum bacteria. Most of the other stuff was pretty run off the mill. Salmonella, e. coli, etc. Of all the pathogens I could find that might show up on a piece of meat, only one produced a toxin that was heat resistant. I couldn't find any information about that specific toxin (and I've already forgotten what it was), but probably its proteins would denature under some conditions, I just don't know what time, temperature, or other conditions might be relevant. In any event, it wasn't fatal. I might regret it, but I wouldn't die (as best I could determine.)
Armed with what information I could find, I decided it was worth at least opening the package and deciding what to do from there. I expected a stronger smell, given the week or more that it was past its expiration date. It didn't have a particularly strong or bad smell, but it did smell different. The part of the meat that was exposed had oxidized and darkened, but the underside was still red. It had maybe a slight glisten that wasn't there when it was fresh. It was just a little off, but not enough to make me run from the room or gag. I decided I was worth cooking up and trying. The temperatures needed to kill some of the possible bacteria or denature their toxins was above what could be achieved by boiling, so that meant I was going to be using the pressure cooker. Adjusting the pH is also key to killing off some nasties, so I added a healthy bit of citric acid. In any examples I could find, heavily spicing spoiled foods is the number one technique for covering any off flavors they might have, and so it got a big scoop of taco seasoning. The last element I could control was time, so it spent over an hour in the pressure cooker just to be sure that anything I could kill was killed. After it was done cooking I fished out maybe 3 tablespoons into a bowl and took a hesitant bite. It was fine. It had a flavor that I wasn't used to, but I honestly couldn't say if it was just the citric acid, or if there was actually an off flavor hiding underneath all of that acid. It was perfectly edible at any rate.
I finished the few tablespoons I'd dished up and put the rest on to slow cook until dinner so I'd have several hours to determine if it was going to make me violently ill. Dinner finally arrived and I hadn't been sick yet, so I served a more generous portion over rice. Typically I'd cook the meat with beans to make it stretch and to flavor the beans themselves, but the goal here was to speed up consumption, not slow it down.
Do I recommend trying this? Of course not. Am I sure I'm going to live? I'm fairly confident that I will, but credible research is hard to find if it exists at all. Am I going to be sick? I'd say there might be a 50-75% chance that I'm violently ill tomorrow, despite taking every precaution that I could. But at I write this about 15 hours have elapsed since my first sample, and 5½ hours have elapsed since dinner. I have no ill effects to report. And as push comes to shove, I suspect I'll end up eating way grosser things than this.
Fasting
I fasted yesterday. I have fasted at various points in my life, and at one point engaged in alternate day fasting, wherein you eat about 50% more than you normally would on one day, and then don't eat anything the next, and cycle like that indefinitely. I think it helps emulate the cycles of feast and famine that our ancestors would have experienced (if on a way more predictable schedule than they would have had.) There's interesting research indicating that experiencing hunger and environmental extremes like heat and cold can be important for increasing our longevity (at least if studies on
mice translate nicely to humans.) This particular fasting cycle also represented a 25% calorie reduction, so weight loss was an inevitable result. And the big spike in calories every other day, in my limited experience, seems to keep the metabolism from downregulating like it tends to with regular calorie restriction. The first couple of fasting days can be tough, but then it becomes routine. It actually becomes nice to not have to worry about making food every other day. And eating 50% more calories, especially when it's all coming from whole foods, is actually challenging. You kind of get in a cycle where you're glad to be able to stuff yourself, but then you're glad to have a day off from food the next day. But the biggest benefit I noticed was an improvement in my mood and productivity. I don't know what all is at play there. It could just be that it brings order and intentionality to eating habits that then spills out into other parts of life. But I suspect that it ties into the ancient biology within is that was tailored for all environment where food was not a certainty. They body is primed to find food when when haven't had any for an extended period, and then when go from a fasted state to completely gorging ourselves (at least on whole foods), out body shoots off neurotransmitters to reward us for being such good little food finders. But that's just my theory.
I didn't fast yesterday because I'd planned on it. There's just been so much conflict with the landowner over them breaking promises that I just couldn't deal with them yesterday. I holed up in my room until they left around 7pm, which was more than 24 hours since my last meal, and then I ate a bit of corn and went to bed. My mood was much better today, and I can't help but think that was a direct result of fasting.
I've thought about fasting over these past few months, but I've never been able to bring myself to add more discomfort to an already pretty uncomfortable life. I'm now starting to think that it might be worth it to get back into the habit. Especially if there can be noticeable mood (and productivity) improvements. But it would also be a helpful way to conserve the food I've got left, and it makes it harder to get bored with foods if I'm eating them in a state of genuine hunger. I haven't decided that that's something I actually want to do, but after my mood today I'm thinking about it more seriously.
At any rate, I've rambled on for far too long and I doubt anyone will actually read all of this.
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