COMPOSTING, ROCKS AND SHAMAN

Good Day To You!

I hope you all had a lovely weekend. I sure did!

I began my weekend on Friday. Sven and I spent Friday enjoying artwork, stacking rocks and walking barefooted on wet grounds. Great fun Sven!

COMPOSTING

This weekend, I finally fulfilled my manly responsibility to Penny and Vidya, who have been waiting patiently for me to handle our compost overflow.

I love composting because it is such a great way to support the cycle of life. Composting was part of my life on our pig farm in Idaho and our sheep farm on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, where my father still farms today.

Composting has been an integral part of farming for as long as man has been farming. In my studies of organic farming, I came across a book several years ago that was loaded with essential truths about organic farming. That book (which is rare and expensive, but worth it if you can find it!) is titled: Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea, and Japan, by F.H. King, D.Sc. and was published originally in 1911 by Organic Gardening Press, Emmaus, Pennsylvania. Of course you can get the paperback book through Amazon.

In this excellent book, Dr. King, a professor of agriculture was sent to investigate how these countries were able to feed so many people without modern farming technology; he shows that composting was an essential element of the long-term success of farmers in places like China where they were unable to afford farming equipment and the dangerous chemicals touted as essential aids to farming today.

Here is a photo from his book showing that throughout China at that time, villagers all saved their waste and composted for the benefit of the village farmers, who fed them. Back then, people saved their stool waste and composted it as well. This was referred to as midnight soil.

Not surprisingly, researchers in the field of organic farming have found that today, it is not a good idea to compost human waste because it is too toxic for the soil and generally kills plants! That one observation alone should be adequate warning that our diets and lifestyles have departed dangerously from being in harmony with the planet.

At our house, we have several orange trees and a beautiful lime tree. When people come to visit, they often ask if they can try our oranges. Since we can’t even begin to consume the number of oranges our trees produce, we love giving them away to friends and staff members.

I don’t think I’ve ever shared our oranges with anyone that didn’t tell us they were the best oranges they’ve ever tasted. I usually wait until they’ve finished eating a couple before I tell them why the oranges are so delicious! The orange trees grow around our septic field (where our sewage dumps into the earth in front of our house because we aren’t on city sewage) and their roots are all deep into our midnight soil!

I laugh and giggle as people eat them knowing that the reason the oranges are so sweet and nutritious is because they are full of the love we have returned to the soil, not to mention that I pee on the trees regularly while working in my garden.

When we get disjointed from the amazing simplicity and beautiful complexities of nature, we often develop contorted ideas about food and farming.

For example, I’ve met many people that would refuse to eat organic food because they were repulsed by the fact that the farmers have spread cow manure on the crops! No, they would rather eat food from seemingly sterile soils that are sprayed regularly with extremely dangerous farming chemicals!

In fact, a close personal friend of mine is a therapist on a professional basketball team. He worked closely with the kitchen staff to switch to organic food for the players. After spending significant amounts of time to source organic foods and prepare highly nutritious meals, he and the staff were shocked to find that most of the players not only refused to eat it, many of them got downright upset, demanding the return of their commercial gluten-laden pancake mixes, boxed cereals and commercial toppings!

And we wonder why steroid use is so common among athletes today!

Human beings, particularly westerners, have become dangerously complacent when it comes to standing up for the needs of the planet.

When you spend your money on commercially produced products made by corporations that are destroying the environment, you are voting for their continued destruction of the earth.

The number of diseases that have resulted directly from abuse of the planet and people supporting absolute silliness in all areas of life would require hundreds of pages to list. Yet, I repeatedly come across people running from doctor to doctor and hospital to hospital freaked out because they, their child, or someone they love is dangerously ill; even after seeing numerous doctors and therapists, no one has informed them of the absolute essential connection between diet, lifestyle and disease! When I inform such people of the need to change their diet as an essential element of the healing process, they are often amazed at what they learn, and experience when they do make the switch.

More times than I can count, people have come back to me asking why the medical system isn’t informing people about the connection between food and disease?

Well, quite simply, if medicine actually worked, the drug companies would dwindle to the size of small specialty companies in no time. Additionally, people would regain their energy and intelligence and start paying attention to the misgivings of government and state, which would destroy the sick little plan of world-control maintained by the super-rich.

Some time ago, one of my students that lives in Seattle took this photo of the wall of a local health food store.

This is a quote from Chief Seattle, who had more than his fair share of problems with the US government. In fact, one of the offerings the government made him as a gesture of compensation for taking their land was to put the Suquamish children into their school system.

Chief Seattle responded by saying (in paraphrase), so far every child that has come back to the tribe after being schooled by white man has been functionally useless! They could not hunt, fish, nor participate in any of the functions of the tribe. NO! I’m not interested in your schooling for our children!

Home Composting

Here you can see our home composting barrel. These barrels are available at almost any home garden center. They allow anyone to compost cleanly and without the smell a compost pile generates (which I actually love!).

Additionally, they keep the animals out of the compost. We had compiled three barrels of compost and were running out of room behind the house so I decided I would create an outdoor pile in the garden, which you can see here:

I created a nest of leaves and twigs left over from branches that had blown down from our trees during stormy weather. I then put the most mature compost on the bottom and the less mature compost on the top. The twigs and leaves allow the compost pile to breathe and allows the juices to run off into the soils so the plant roots can take up the nutrition even before we spread it around.

Even if you don’t have a garden, you can and should compost as a gesture to Mother Earth. The amount of good compost materials that end up in the dump every day could go a long way to rehabilitating our dangerously diminished topsoil’s worldwide.

If you love Mother Earth like I do, then composting and giving it away to any local organic farmer or gardener would be a lovely gift that supports planet healing. Please do so! It feels good to give back.

By the way, if you’ve not seen my DVD titled: Nutrition, the Dirt Facts, it is available through the C.H.E.K Institute.

For those of you who can’t afford to contribute to the institute’s cause, it is available on my youtube channel, which is www.youtube.com/paulcheklive for your viewing.

You can also see my most recent video titled: Love Heals Pain on the feature page, where I offer a simple method for healing our pains.

ROCKS
Here you can see me sitting in one of my meditation spots I’ve created in my zen rock garden.

As I enter my garden each day, though I am often in love with things I’ve created, I open myself to the voice of my soul for guidance as to what to create that moment.

Many times, my soul guides me to building new creations that require that I take down something I’ve recently created and really loved. My soul has been giving me a lot of training on detachment over the past few years.

I must say, learning detachment in such a playful way has really helped me manage my internal fire and not get so tweaked when relationship challenges emerge.

I spent several hours building this stack Saturday. Some of you may simply see a pile or rocks and wonder, “how the hell could it take several hours to stack a few rocks like that?” Before I started working with stones a few years ago, I probably would have had the same question.

So, if you are one of those people, allow me to enlighten you in this regard. First of all, many of these stones are very heavy. They don’t walk!

The bottom stone of the stack you see here probably weighs 250 pounds. It can take me 20-30 minutes just to push, pull, drag, carry and drop(!) a stone like that to get it from its previous resting spot to its new one.

Then, each successive stone comes with successive instabilities due to the fact that there is no binding agent like concrete.

For example, the tall stone you see in line with my upper arm probably weighs eighty pounds or so. Putting that bad boy up is truly a meditation in itself. Not to mention that when these babies come down, they crash in an instant!

Stacking stones like this requires exquisite awareness, focus and presence or, quite simply!you get hurt!

Yes, there is plenty of my blood feeding those orange trees as well. I go without gloves and shoes whenever possible because the increased risk of injury really keeps me in my meditation.

To some, this may sound masochistic, yet, when I raced motocross, stock cars, drag raced, boxed or kick boxed, I regularly faced injury as a result of not being present.

At the end of the day stacking stones gives me the same joy, thrill and mental-emotional development as the other sports, but costs much less and I don’t have to travel or maintain expensive equipment. I love that. Not to mention that I can teach this form of self-development to anyone.

By the way, you may wonder how that stack stands when it looks so off balance? Well, that’s part of the craft!

Once you master stacking them, then you naturally get into creating what appear to be impossible structures. While I was creating this stack, the winds were gusting quiet strongly and continued to do so through the night. She still stands! To me, that’s both art and joy.

SHAMANS OF THE AMAZON

For those of you with an interest in shamanism, the intelligent use of psychedelics such as the healing tea called Auyhschaua (I-ya-wosk-a), or what’s going on with the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, I have an excellent documentary recommendation for you!

I have studied many documentaries on shamanism in my career due to the relevance of shamanism and natural medicine thearpies to my work.

I can honestly say that Shamans of the Amazon by Dean Jefferys is among the very best!

This is a three DVD series and Jefferys does an excellent job sharing the wisdom of shamen living in both Ecuador and Peru and how they live and practice. He takes you through his own auyhschaua journey with him on film and uses very high quality computer generated art and graphics to enhance the viewers experience of what was occurring inside him on his healing journey.

It is very well done and authentic in its presentation.

Jefferys also exposes the oil companies and the mass destruction they are causing in the Amazon rainforest. He shows very clearly how desperate the fight for life is among the natives of the Amazon.

When you see what the oil companies and drug companies are dong to the rain forest, its natives and the impact on the people and the land, I suspect you will feel deep sadness.

This DVD series is definitely one of the best I’ve studied on the topic and gets an “A” for overall production and quality of the message.

I hope it motivates you to join me in blogging as an effort to create public awareness of how to create a life that is in harmony with nature, before its too late!

Thanks for joining me today. I have much more to share with you this week, so stay tuned.

Love and chi,
Paul Chek