a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Category: Reflections

  • Beauty in the Grass

    Biking home from the post office yesterday, I was climbing up Bow Hill, when I noticed some bright purple vines snaking through the grassy hillside.

    RoadsideGrass

    The color of the purple vines was so intense, I had to stop and admire them.

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    BerryVineB

    They were new berry vines. I never would have noticed them if I had been in the car. Four years ago I made a decision to stop driving when I made my daily errands. I mostly did this to work exercise into my daily routine so I could lose weight. That I managed to do, but bicycling forty five minutes to an hour each day as I went about my errands, also opened my eyes to seeing things along the roadside I missed when I sped by in the car.

    When you are on a bicycle, it is much easier to stop and enjoy beautiful things than it is when you are driving a car. For those of you enjoying breakfast or lunch at Tweets Café this weekend, there is a good chance that the eggs you are eating and possibly the salad you are enjoying were delivered by bicycle from just up the hill. And that the person who pedaled those eggs and salad greens to Tweets, stopped to enjoy the beauty of purple berry vines on their way home.

  • Everything Moves, Everything Changes

    EverythingChanges
    While at the post office yesterday, I noticed that the line of concrete curb blocks there was helter-skelter. I’m pretty sure that when these curb blocks were first placed, they made a straight line. The workers who placed them may even have been proud at how straight a curb they had laid.

    Over the years, they have been bumped by vehicles so many times that they look like they were just tossed out the back of a pickup and left where they fell.

    It just goes to show that everything moves, everything changes. Even inanimate, heavy concrete blocks with feet crawl over time.

    The very first noble truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last — that they don’t disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security. Pema Chodron ~ When Things Fall Apart p12.

    If you can’t rely on a block of concrete to stay still, what can you rely on?

  • Never Shower Again? Using Bacteria to Keep Us Clean

    Julia Scott wrote an interesting article in the New York Times today about her My No-Soap, No-Shampoo, Bacteria-Rich Hygiene Experiment. She took part in an experiment done by AOBiome, a biotech start-up in Cambridge, MA. The firm is developing a living bacterial skin tonic.

    The premise behind the tonic is that humans don’t need to shower or bathe or wash their hair. In fact, “the M.I.T.-trained chemical engineer who invented AO+ has not showered for the past 12 years.” Instead, what we need to do is to restore the right balance of bacteria living on our skin and hair, and let the bacteria keep us clean. According to Julia Scott:

    The tonic looks, feels and tastes like water, but each spray bottle of AO+ Refreshing Cosmetic Mist contains billions of cultivated Nitrosomonas eutropha, an ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) that is most commonly found in dirt and untreated water. AOBiome scientists hypothesize that it once lived happily on us too — before we started washing it away with soap and shampoo — acting as a built-in cleanser, deodorant, anti-inflammatory and immune booster by feeding on the ammonia in our sweat and converting it into nitrite and nitric oxide.

    In the experiment, Julia Scott spent four weeks without taking a shower with soap. Her showers were limited to three minute rinses with water, no soap or shampoo. Instead, she misted herself with the water containing Nitrosomonas eutropha before she left her house and when she returned.

    Even though her hair did darken and become more oily, her skin changed for the better. As she describes is, “It actually became softer and smoother, rather than dry and flaky, as though a sauna’s worth of humidity had penetrated my winter-hardened shell. And my complexion, prone to hormone-related breakouts, was clear.”

    During the experiments, AOBiome was taking a swab of her skin every week to monitor the changes in her microbial community. Though her swabs showed that her bacterial community was similar to that of the majority of Americans’, by week 2 the swab also “showed hundreds of unknown bacterial strains that simply haven’t been classified yet.”

    After the four week experiment was over, it took just a few, short showers using shampoo and soap for her to destroy all the Nitrosomonas eutropha she had cultivated on her body during the four week experiment.
    DirtBath01

    Maybe the chickens are on to something with their dirt baths.

  • May Flowers

    This is a month of flowers. The rhododendron are in full bloom. Lawn flowers are in bloom all over. And even though the dogwood is not blooming yet, the bracts have spread out and look like flowers themselves.

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    Rhododendrum140521B
    LawnFlowers
    DogwoodGettingReadyToBloom

  • Paradise for Few – Hell for Many

    AManAndHisHoeChickens

    Looking at the peaceful pictures of roosters, hens and chicks at a man and his hoe®, it’s easy to get lulled into thinking that this is how many chickens spend their lives, happy and carefree. If you want spectacular eggs, this is what it takes.

    But the truth of how eggs are really produced is not so idyllic. According to the American Egg Board, there are roughly 280,000,000 egg laying hens in the US and they lay 75,000,000,000 eggs each year, about 10% of the world egg production. Almost none of these egg laying hens have the a man and his hoe® experience. A tiny percentage of them have something approaching what the chickens here have. Sadly, according to NPR, 90% of egg laying hens in the US live out their lives in wire cages. Most of the rest spend their lives in very crowded, cage-free hen houses.

    Today, I came across an article from Australia at Australian Broadcasting Corporation, reminding me again just how dreadful most egg production is. When you buy inexpensive eggs at Walmart, Costco, and most any supermarket, those eggs were most likely produced in a facility similar to that pictured below. In these battery farms, the hens spend their entire lives, four to six in a small wire cage. They never get to snuggle down in a soft, straw nest to lay an egg in peace. They never get to sun themselves under a blue sky. They never get to roll around in the dirt. They never get to do the things chickens want and need to do.

    AustralianHenHouse

    The result is billions of inexpensive eggs, but at an incredible cost to the hens. There is also a tremendous human cost. First, to the egg farmers who must face the unspeakable suffering they inflict on the tens of thousands of chickens under their care. It’s hard to imagine that farmers doing this do not incur an emotional cost.

    Then there is the cost to everyone who eats these eggs. Can it possibly be healthy to eat eggs produced by hens who live in such dreadful condition? This type of egg production makes people believe that it is possible to produce good food cheaply, but when it comes to eggs, that is a lie. Creating eggs worthy of human consumption takes a lot of space and time. To create an egg worth putting in your mouth, a hen needs to spend her day outdoors, free to go wherever she wants to. She needs to be able to scratch in the dirt for earthworms and bugs. She needs to be able to roll around in the dirt. She needs to be able to soak in the sun. And she needs a clean, quiet nest to lay her great egg.

    So when you buy your eggs, demand eggs that are worthy of you.