Tuesday 31 December 2013

raw dairy, health and ethics

Here's an audio piece I did talking about the role of dairy products in a raw food lifestyle for health and also putting the ethics into perspective hopefully!  Underneath is the basic flow of my thoughts on this subject:




1.  It seems that most people need to consume some animal material for fat soluble vitamins or bring in some processed fortified foods.

I am not talking about the exceptions that prove the rule here but am concerned with the majority.  It seems that in the long term most people need to consume animal fats in order to obtain the fat soluble vitamins A,D nad K in the form that the body can use; in the case of vitamin A this is retinol and in the case of vitamin D, D3.  All traditional cultures that we know of and as studied by Weston Price consumed at least some animal products, in general the further they were from the equator, the higher the ratio of animal to plant foods.

If at some point we lived a frugivorous diet in the forest, this would have included all kinds of insect material.

Grazing animals such as cows, goats and sheep not only consume insects along with a great variety of grasses and herbs, they are also out naked absorbing sunlight while we are indoors.  These animals can absorb the nutrients they need from the vegetation insects and sunlight in latitudes where humans need to clothe themselves, house themselves and cannot absorb the vitamin D they need from the sun.  We have traditionally piggybacked in this way off animals indigenous to these climates, whether we have used their milk or eaten their flesh.

2. So, given our current circumstances what are the healthiest, most efficient and ethical ways of taking in the fats we need?

Looking at flesh foods, apart from even the various ethical questions around the meat and fishing industries, meat and fish are actually quite difficult foods for us to digest.  Most of us would not be willing to spend our days foraging for insect filled fruit and it could even be that our digestive systems could no longer extract what we need from such a  diet.  It could  be argued that we are not designed to drink the milk of another animal or drink milk after childhood but at least we do have a an inherent capacity to digest mammal milk in our design because we are designed to drink our mother's milk as children.   We then can apply techniques of fermentation to make these milks even more digestible for us. For example the kefir culture breaks down casein, and lactose and changes the ratios of the amino acids in the milk to be more suitable for humans.

3. What are the broader ethical issues?

As a  species we have kept domesticated animals for a long time and have developed an interdependent relationship with them.  We have also developed a three way interdependence, a symbiotic relationship between ourselves, the animals, and the organisms in the cultures such as kefir used to ferment the milk. This is an ecosystem in itself. worthy of sustaining.  The cultures and animals that have been domesticated for so many years would not fare well if we abandoned them.  The damage to the planetary ecosystem and thus indirect harm to animals may actually be greater by the manufacturing or importing of other foods that we might use to replace dairy products.

We cannot separate out plant and animal life.  Even plants are feeding off soil which includes broken down animal waste.  The compassionate way is not to try to remove animal input but to avoid animal cruelty and connect to the animals.  A lot of this is about economics. Now, economic demand is leading  some farms to treat milking animals in much more caring ways such as letting calves stay with their mothers and keeping on  cows who have stopped milking to retire gracefully in the fields.  An example of such a dairy is the Calf at Foot Dairy. http://www.the-calf-at-foot-dairy.co.uk/  The milk from such dairies is noticeably more delicious.

4.  Why is this such a significant issue?

The question of whether it is acceptable to eat animal products seems to be a perennial one in the raw food scene and people get very heated about it, to an extraordinary degree.  I feel passionately about it for several reasons - health, freedom and reaching our full potential. Firstly I want people to be healthy, secondly because I want people to be free of imposed anti-human beliefs and thirdly I passionately believe that eating natural raw foods that fit our biology as a species is an integral part of us reaching our full potential and I don't like seeing this being undermined.

I have covered the issue of health above in connection with fat soluble vitamins, we also need to think about where we get omega 3 fatty acids DHA and EPA, there are other factors in animal foods too.

Then we come to the imposed beliefs.  Animal and plant life, not to mention human life is intertwined on this planet, that's just the way it works.  The idea of not in any way consuming anything that has at some point come from an animal is just a concept with no genuine reality.  It is something very different to the genuine connection and compassion that humans naturally feel towards other mammals.  A disconnected belief that makes it difficult for humans and especially the young to get the nutrition that they need really is anti-human.

And thirdly about human potential, getting undamaged (i.e. not heated above biological temperature) nutritional components can rebuild our neurological system to another level.  Essentially this means a nutrient dense predominantly raw and predominantly but not exclusively plant based diet.  To sabotage this with another contradictory thought stream which suggests it is wrong to do what we need to do to get vital nutrients seems to me unwise to say the least and thoroughly confusing and unproductive for someone who is improving their diet with a view to fulfilling their potential.  As so much on this planet hangs on humans coming out of their stupor and reaching towards their divine endowment, it seems ethical in the deepest sense to obtain whatever nutrition we need to take from other animals in the most respectful way possible.

Monday 30 December 2013

greening the desert

"All the problems of the world can be solved in a garden"

 

Sunday 29 December 2013

cults

The four factors that Deikman cites, in this link, as characteristic of cult phenomena are
• compliance with the group
• dependence on a leader
• avoidance of dissent
• devaluation of outsiders.
http://www.hgi.org.uk/archive/cults.htm#.UsHYS_RdVnY

Cultism is really an extreme form of culture,  we just need to be moving in slightly the opposite direction...cultural deprogramming.

Thursday 26 December 2013

what is evil?

"evil is whatever goes against the life force, the divinely endowed potential of the anthropos (human species), the beauty of nature, the innate desire of all things to thrive" John Lamb Lash

Tuesday 17 December 2013

boost of the earth

In this amazing and inspirational recent audio John Lamb Lash gives us ta sense of what it is to align ourselves with the dreaming power of the Earth, and make our magic real.

http://gaiaspora.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Nav-Briefing-96-The-Boost-of-the-Earth-28-November-2013.mp3

"We are magical animals".  Although the ultimate source  is the Originator, the immediate imminent source of our reality is the Earth.  The closer to the Originator we get the more catatonic we become, nothing happens there, the action is here...
Her (the Earth;'s) dreaming is material.  Her dreaming is manifested in the filaments of the organic light.  (non-material animating light that permeates and emanates from all matter on Earth) We can perceive it in the granular detail.

We were not given a certain quantity of life, we are given life at every instant.  She sustains our life in her dreaming.

Animism is the direct perception that the Earth is alive.  To indigenous peoples, and us today in certain states of awareness, it becomes self-evident that the Earth is a living being, as single entity that we can interact and communicate with.  Hunger for magic is in the human endopsyche.  It requires rigorous magical method to engage the boost of the Earth.  If we consciously align our lives with her life then we have a future.

Tuesday 10 December 2013

fat cell cleanse

We have been doing this amazing fat cell cleanse!  It feels great.  Basically you take 50-500mg niacin (B3), do some invigorating exercise such as rebounding to get the lymphatic system and blood flow going and sauna for 40 minutes. You drink plenty of water and we use zeolites to flush any remaining toxins out of the digestive tract.  Fat cells open and release fatty acids and stored toxins.
This method was originally developed to remove cravings for people recovering from drug addictions.


You can read more about the fat cell cleanse on Naturalnews by clicking here.

Monday 9 December 2013

thought and purpose

from 'As a Man Thinketh' by James Allen.

Until thought is linked with purpose there is no intelligent accomplishment. With the majority the bark of thought is allowed to "drift" upon the ocean of life. Aimlessness is a vice, and such drifting must not continue for him who would steer clear of catastrophe and destruction.

They who have no central purpose in their life fall an easy prey to worries, fears, troubles, and self-pityings, all of which are indications of weakness, which lead, just as surely as deliberately planned sins (though by a different route), to failure, unhappiness, and loss, for weakness cannot persist in a power-evolving universe.

A man should conceive of a legitimate purpose in his heart, and set out to accomplish it. He should make this purpose the centralizing point of his thoughts. It may take the form of a spiritual ideal, or it may be a worldly object, according to his nature at the time being. But whichever it is, he should steadily focus his thought forces upon the object which he has set before him. He should make this purpose his supreme duty, and should devote himself to its attainment, not allowing his thoughts to wander away into ephemeral fancies, longings, and imaginings. This is the royal road to self-control and true concentration of thought. Even if he fails again and again to accomplish his purpose (as he necessarily must until weakness is overcome), the strength of character gained will be the measure of his true success, and this will form a new starting point for future power and triumph.

Those who are not prepared for the apprehension of a great purpose, should fix the thoughts upon the faultless performance of their duty, no matter how insignificant their task may appear. Only in this way can the thoughts be gathered and focused, and resolution and energy be developed, which being done, there is nothing which may not be accomplished.

Saturday 7 December 2013

kefir, magic elixir, champagne of raw dairy


Kefir is an incredible magic food which comes into being through the symbiotic activities of three living groups: humans, grazing animals and beneficial micro-organisms. The culture which, with human help, transforms animal milks into a supremely nourishing drink is actually a mixture of numerous kinds of friendly bacteria and yeasts. Our bodies are really a whole ecosystem and ideally our digestive tracts contain ten times more friendly micro-organisms than we have cells in our bodies; these support a healthy immune system and brain function. Kefir is the most powerfully probiotic food or supplement that we know of. It actively repopulates the gut, laying down a healthy mucus layer that micro-flora can flourish in, supporting the digestive and immune system.

The kefir culture itself is potentially immortal – if properly looked after and fed with milk, it can live indefinitely. The liquid kefir that it makes is a preserved living food and can keep for months. The particular nutritive properties of kefir are numerous. The culture rebalances the amino acids in animal milk making them more suitable for humans. In particular it increases the amount of tryptophan which is the raw material from which serotonin, the well-being biochemical, is made. Tryptophan tends to be lacking in modern diets as it is easily damaged by cooking. Kefir contains ample amounts of B vitamins including B12. Acetylcholine in it improves sleep and is good for memory, intelligence, learning, enthusiasm and general mood. It contains lecithin which helps in the assimilation of fats. It contains 'right-rotating' lactic acid (as opposed to 'left-rotating' lactic acid found in other yoghurts) which revives cells.

One of the great aspects of kefir is that it allows us to take advantage or the nutrition in dairy milk, for example the fat soluble vitamins A (retinol), D and K2 whilst avoiding some of the potential allergenic problems of dairy products. The culture breaks down the lactose into lactic acid and the casein into beneficial peptides.

Added to all this, kefir has an unusual, delicious and acquired taste. When bottled,  it undergoes a secondary fermentation and becomes slightly fizzy - the 'champagne of raw dairy'. 

Thursday 5 December 2013

there we were happy...


In 'before they pass away' Jimmy Nelson documents 29 indigenous tribes, with lessons for us all about who we are...

In the TED interview on the site Jimmy describes how the Kazakh people he spoke to were given the option to live in apartments in the city but decided to return to their traditional way of life.  In their words "there we were happy, there we could feel how we were".

Living in their traditional way, close to the Earth they could actually feel, which is the basis for any kind of satisfying life....

http://www.beforethey.com/

Wednesday 4 December 2013

grasping the nettle

Nettles don't sting when you really grasp them...
they are serotonin boosters, cleanse mucus, boost metabolism and add minerals into your diet, they are great in green juices and are free!

tpv radio interviews tony wright

In this latest interview, Tony describes how a change from our archaic forest diet, which supported our incredible neurology, affected the build of the brain and led to the human condition that we experience today.  He talks about the way in which the left hemisphere has been affected detrimentally whilst ironically it now dominates our sense of self and experience.  This is what Tony describes as the 'biological origins of the fall from grace'.

If you are new to Tony's work this is definitely worth a listen.  I have a feeling that as time goes on these ideas will be increasingly accepted as self-evident.

Saturday 23 November 2013

yoga swing in the park



One of the great things about the yoga swing is the way you can comfortably hang upside down in it. You can hang it from a beam in the house, a frame, or, our favourite, a tree in the local park, in this case, Glastonbury Abbey Park.

"Inversion gives an excellent controlled workout to the muscles necessary for a healthy spine. The Yoga Swing helps to strengthen the lower abdominal muscles, creating a strong central core in the body which enables the entire bodily structure to become strong and unified.  Strong back, abdominal and hip muscles enable us to resist gravity, hold us up, keep the spine and pelvis in alignment and allow fluid movement."

Thursday 21 November 2013

intro to food for consciousness

In this interview with Tom Carter of CarterTV I tell how I started experimenting with my diet in order to produce changes in the way I feel, why we need undamaged amino acids, fatty acids and fruit compounds for optimal brain chemistry, how raw food helps supply these and how to make raw food work for you nutritionally long term. We then move on to talk about the wonderful chemistry of kefir and our new project producing and distributing beautiful Jersey milk kefir.


Wednesday 16 October 2013

a walk up the tor

Although somewhat of a cliche it is still true that when you walk up Glastonbury Tor barefoot and sit at the top to survey the scenery you connect with something very special, something very mystical that can get you back on track of what you need to be doing to fulfill your highest purposes....
We are lucky enough to have a view of the Tor from several rooms in our home and I never tire of the sight of this beautiful curve of land.



Monday 14 October 2013

raw chocolate kefir cheese cake

You need 300g kefir cream cheese and a batch of molten raw chocolate

Kefir Cream Cheese:
You can make kefir cream cheese  in two ways:
One is to pour kefir liquid into a muslin or nylon straining bag and hang over a container to catch the whey.  Leave for 24 hours and you have kefir cheese in the bag.  Alternatively leave kefir liquid in a kilner jar for a few days so that the creamy curds and clear whey separate out.  Then you can spoon the kefir cream off the top.  It works much better with the thick kefir you get from Jersey or Guernsey cows' milk.

Chocolate:
To make the chocolate you need the folloing ingredients:
110g cacao butter
50g cacao paste
3 Tbspns yacon syrup
pinch cayenne
pinch Celtic sea salt
4 Tbspns lucuma powder
1 Tbspn maca
1 tspn he shou wu
1 Tbspn strawberry powder
1 Tbspn fig powder
1 Tbspn purple corn
¼ tsp vanilla powder
¼ tsp blue green algae

Melt cacao paste and butter over hot water, add yacon and salt
Mix dry chocolate ingredients
Stir paste and butter mixture into dry ingredients

Making the Cheesecake:
Stir the molten chocolate into the cream cheese thoroughly and mould into cake shape.

Sunday 13 October 2013

ancient paths












Graham Robb, in his new book The Ancient Paths: Discovering the Lost Map of Celtic Europe
claims that 'Roman' roads were actually built by the Celts, also that the Druids created a sophisticated ancient society to rival the Romans.

Here are two reviews from The Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/10367457/Roman-roads-were-actually-built-by-the-Celts-new-book-claims.html
By Hayley Dixon
The findings of Graham Robb, a biographer and historian, bring into question two millennia of thinking about Iron Age Britain and Europe and the stereotyped image of Celts as barbarous, superstitious tribes.
In reality the Druids, the Celt’s scientific and spiritual leaders, were some of the most intellectually advanced thinkers of their age, it is said, who developed the straight roads in the 4th Century BC, hundreds of years before the Italian army marched across the continent.
“They had their own road system on which the Romans later based theirs,” Mr Robb said, adding that the roads were built in Britain from around the 1st Century BC.
“It has often been wondered how the Romans managed to build the Fosse Way, which goes from Exeter to Lincoln. They must have known what the finishing point would be, but they didn’t conquer that part of Britain until decades later. How did they manage to do that if they didn’t follow the Celtic road?”
Mr Robb, former fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, first came up with the theory when he planned to cycle the Via Heraklea, an ancient route that runs a thousand miles in a straight line from the tip of the Iberian Peninsula to the Alps, and realised that it was plotted along the solstice lines through several Celtic settlements.

He mapped the positioning of hundreds of other towns and cities in France, Britain and Ireland and found that the Celt’s had organised them to mirror the paths of their Sun God, created a network straight of tracks following the solstice lines across swathes of the continent.
The Ancient Paths, released tomorrow, suggests that the Druids possessed map-making skills that historians believed were discovered centuries later and created the “earliest accurate map of the world”.
But their scientific and mathematical achievements have been long forgotten as there is no written evidence and their history has been replaced the stereotypes of them as wood-dwelling wildmen.
“Anything to do with the Celts and the Druids seems very implausible and that is why I spent five years on this, I thought it can’t be true, I have to disprove it,” Mr Robb said. “But they were a very advanced civilisation.
“There is an underlying sense that the civilisation that won must have been superior and that clearly isn’t the case.
“There is a lot of admiring what the Romans did, but they didn’t do it in a void, and it might be nice if there was a more nuanced view of the almighty Romans.”


and by Tim Martin:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/10372050/The-Ancient-Paths-Discovering-the-Lost-Map-of-Celtic-Europe-review.html

'Important if true” was the phrase that the 19th-century writer and historian Alexander Kinglake wanted to see engraved above church doors. It rings loud in the ears as one reads the latest book by Graham Robb, a biographer and historian of distinction whose new work, if everything in it proves to be correct, will blow apart two millennia of thinking about Iron Age Britain and Europe and put several scientific discoveries back by centuries.
Rigorously field-tested by its sceptical author, who observes drily that “anyone who writes about Druids and mysteriously coordinated landscapes, or who claims to have located the intersections of the solar paths of Middle Earth in a particular field, street, railway station or cement quarry, must expect to be treated with superstition”, it presents extraordinary conclusions in a deeply persuasive and uncompromising manner. What surfaces from these elegant pages – if true – is nothing less than a wonder of the ancient world: the first solid evidence of Druidic science and its accomplishments and the earliest accurate map of a continent.
Robb begins his journey from a cottage in Oxfordshire, following up a handful of mysteries that had teasingly accrued as he assembled his Ondaatje Prize-winning travelogue The Discovery of France.
They had to do with the Heraklean Way, an ancient route that runs 1,000 miles in a straight line from the tip of the Iberian Peninsula to the Alps, and with several Celtic settlements called Mediolanum arranged at intervals along the route.
After examining satellite imaging (difficult for the private scholar even a decade ago) and making several more research trips, Robb bumped up against two extraordinary discoveries. First, the entire Via Heraklea runs as straight as an arrow along the angle of the rising and setting sun at the solstices. Second, plotting lines through the Celtic Mediolanum settlements results in lines that map on to sections of Roman road, which themselves point not to Roman towns but at Celtic oppida farther along.

Viewed in this light, the ancient texts of the Italian conquerors begin to reveal sidelong secrets about the people they supplanted. Piece by piece, there emerges a map of the ancient world constructed along precise celestial lines: a huge network of meridians and solar axes that served as the blueprint for the Celtic colonisation of Europe, dictated the placement of its settlements and places of worship, and was then almost wholly wiped from history. We are, to put it mildly, unused to thinking like this about the Celts, whose language is defunct and whose reputation was comprehensively rewritten by those who succeeded them.
Greek travellers from the sixth century BC onwards described a nation of sanguinary brutes and madmen who threw their babies in rivers, walked with their swords into the sea and roughly sodomised their guests. “It does not take an anthropologist to suspect,” Robb observes drily, “that what the travellers saw or heard about were baptismal rites, the ceremonial dedication of weapons to gods of the lower world, and the friendly custom of sharing one’s bed with a stranger.”
Later on, clean-shaven, toga-sporting Roman visitors to what they called Gallia Bracata and Gallia Comata – Trousered Gaul and Hairy Gaul respectively – were horrified by the inhabitants’ practical legwear and love of elaborate moustaches, and marvelled to hear them discoursing not in gnarly Gaulish but in perfect Greek.
As the Roman military machine rolled over Europe, depicting the Celt as a woods-dwelling wild man became not just a matter of Italian snobbery but one of propagandist utility. According to Robb, when the Romans arrived this side of the Alps, they found a country whose technical achievements were different from, but competitive with, their own.
Mapped and governed by a network of scholar-priests according to a template laid down in heaven, covered by a road network that afforded swift passage to fleets of uniquely advanced chariots (“nearly all the Latin words for wheeled vehicles”, Robb notes, “come from Gaulish”) and possessing astronomical and scientific knowledge that would take another millennium to surface again, Gaul remained a deeply enigmatic place to its military-minded conquerors. When Julius Caesar swept through, on a tide of warfare and genocide that would lead his countryman Pliny to accuse him of humani generis iniuria, “crimes against humanity”, much of its knowledge retreated to the greenwood, never to emerge.
Most significantly, suggests Robb, Caesar failed to work out the Druids. To most of us even now, the word conjures up the image of a white-robed seer with a sickle, an implausible hybrid of Getafix and Glastonbury hippie. (Robb suggests, following the design on a Gaulish cauldron, that they tended more towards a figure-hugging costume patterned like oak bark: much better for melting like smoke into the trees, a trait of Druid-led armies that Caesar vigorously deplored.) The Druidic curriculum took two decades to train up its initiates, but these men of science put nothing in writing. Like their wood-built houses, their secrets rotted with time. How could we hope to reconstruct them?
Remarkably, Robb has an answer to this, and it forms the centre of a book almost indecently stuffed with discoveries. One of the most consistently baffling things about Celtic temple sites to modern surveyors is their shape: warped rectangles that seem none the less to demonstrate a kind of systematic irregularity. Using painstakingly reconstructed elements of the Druidic education, which placed religious emphasis on mapping the patterns of the heavens on to the lower “Middle Earth” of our world, Robb comes up with an astonishing discovery: these irregular rectangles exactly match a method for constructing a geometrical ellipse, the image of the sun’s course in the heavens. Such a method was previously thought to be unknown in the West until the 1500s.
Other suggestions follow thick and fast, backed by a mixture of close reading, mathematical construction and scholarly detective work. Building on meridians and equinoctial lines, the Druids used their maps of the heavens to create a map that criss-crossed a continent, providing a plan of sufficient latitudinal and longitudinal accuracy to guide the Celtic diaspora as it pushed eastward across Europe.
The swirls and patterns in Celtic art turn out, Robb surmises, to be arranged along rigorous mathematical principles, and may even encode the navigational and cartographic secrets that the Druids so laboriously developed.
Robb manages his revelations with a showman’s skill, modestly conscious that his book is unfurling a map of Iron Age Europe and Britain that has been inaccessible for millennia. Every page produces new solutions to old mysteries, some of them so audacious that the reader may laugh aloud. Proposing a new location for Uxellodunum, the site of the Gauls’ final losing battle in France, is one thing; suggesting where to look for King Arthur’s court, or which lake to drag for Excalibur, is quite another. But both are here.
Amid such riches, readers of The Discovery of France – a glorious book that mixed notes from a modern cycling tour with a historical gazetteer of pre-unification France – may still be itching for the moment when the author gets back on his bike. Beautifully written though it is, The Ancient Paths can tend to dryness at times, but some of its best moments come when the author gets out into the field.
One example will suffice. Certain references in Caesar’s writing indicate that the Gauls operated a vocal telegraph, composed of strategically placed teams yodelling news overland to one another, which passed messages at a speed nearly equivalent to the first Chappe telegraph in the 18th century. To judge how this might have worked, Robb takes himself off to the oppidum above Aumance, near Clermont-Ferrand, where he reports on the car alarms and the whirr of traffic still audible across countryside four kilometres away.
He goes further. Aumance was one of around 75 places once known by the name Equoranda, a word with an unknown root that resembles the Greek and Gaulish for “sound-line” or “call-line”. All the Equoranda settlements Robb visits turn out to be on low ridges or shallow valleys, and would, he writes, “have made excellent listening posts”. Examined in this light, one word in Caesar’s account becomes fruitful: he observes that the Gauls “transmit the news by shouting across fields and regios”, a word that can be translated as “boundaries”. An ancient Persian technique for acoustic surveying, still current in the 19th-century south of France, involves three men calling to one another and plotting their position along the direction of the sound. Put the pieces together and you end up – or Robb does – with “the scattered remains of a magnificent network” that could have acted not just as a telegraph system but as a means to map the Druids’ boundaries on to the earth.
It’s a magnificent piece of historical conjecture, backed by a quizzical scholarly intellect and given a personal twist by experiment. So, for that matter, is
the whole thing. Robb describes in his introduction the secretive meetings with publishers in London and New York that kept a lid on the book’s research until publication, and watching its conclusions percolate through popular and academic history promises to be thrilling.
Reading it is already an electrifying and uncanny experience: there is something gloriously unmodern about seeing a whole new perspective on history so comprehensively birthed in a single book. If true, very important indeed.

Thursday 10 October 2013

kalis game

Gaming is the supreme metaphor for human behavior in Kali Yuga, especially in the last two centuries until its end in 2216 CE.  In the extreme condition of these times, any act or choice or venture that cannot be stated in terms of a game will not be either understood or mastered.
JLL

http://www.kalirising.org/2009/03/29/kalis-game-1/

Tuesday 8 October 2013

dreamed into life

Humanity was never created in a literal sense, for it is perpetually being dreamed into life. ~ John Lamb Lash (from the Gnostic teachings)

when words were like magic

...when words were like magic
the human mind had mysterious powers
a word spoken by chance might have strange consequences
it would suddenly come alive
and what people wanted to happen could happen...

Inuit poem

paradise on earth

Awake we maintain consciousness of heaven or paradise whilst living on Earth.

Sunday 6 October 2013

awake in the dream

The earth is undergoing a process of conscious dreaming in which humans also can awake simultaneously, one dreamer at a time, but preferably in pairs...

...how we dream together will be revealed to us...

The Gaian lucid dream is an eruption of the highest rapturous magic of the Divine Feminine into the human psyche, pouring through mind and body, all at once.

Sophia awakens, but still continues to dream with the planet earth realized as her vehicle of expression. "Gaia Awakening" signals the actualization of conscious dreaming through the instrument of her dreambody, this very earth. The progression of history toward a global or planetary status, uniquely achievable for human species, reveals her dream experiment refracted in human behavior, attitudes, and expectations, including the worst that can be imagined...
...At the same moment, humans who envision a correction of human deviance from the divine experiment awaken WITH her: conscious of being dreamed by a divine presence.

John Lamb Lash 

Thursday 3 October 2013

return to the brain of eden

In this interview Tony Wright tells us some startling stuff that can shine light of our current predicament as a species.  He explains how a natural biological diet including raw fruit paired with right hemisphere stimulating activities such as meditation, dance and traditional shamanic practices can take us, step by step, into an apparently new sense of self  but one which was known by the ancients; more functional, more connected and definitely happier, 'in a benign state of wonder and awe'.
Improved immune and digestive function are also on the menu, also a more balanced endocrine system, harmony, empathy  and also abilities that have been categorised as psychic, This is all part of our natural potential as humans.

The destiny of our species with its complex consciousness apparatus (including our brains)  is inevitably intertwined with the complexity of the forest biochemistry.  The sexual organs of the trees i.e. fruit is actually hormonally active in humans.  With the right steps we can improve the way our DNA is read to expand into our full genetic blueprint.

Tony's book 'Left in the Dark' is being republished next year as 'Return to the Brain of Eden: Restoring the Connection Between Neurochemistry and Consciousness'
His websites are
www.beyond-belief.org.uk and www.leftinthedark.org.uk where you will find more links which back up what he is saying.
There are also relevant links on www.foodforconsiousness.co.uk and http://foodforconsciousness.blogspot.co.uk/



During the interview we mention neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran.  Here Ramachandran documents how right brain stroke victims are generally unable to understand what has happened to them in terms of losing function in the left side of the body.  In contrast left hemisphere stroke victims do not have this problem.  This implies that the right hemisphere of the brain enables us to update our realities while the left hemisphere does not.

http://www.beyond-belief.org.uk/sites/beyond-belief.org.uk/files/Ramachandran.pdf

Wednesday 2 October 2013

rule of the kalikas

"Hold to your highest desire and surrender its attainment through the power of the Gaian Dakinis"

http://gaiaspora.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Nav-Briefing-87-The-Rule-of-the-Kalikas-22-Sep-2013.mp3

"what you cannot render unto yourself by control or wishing arising from the natural craving of your own desire is obtainable in the supernatural connection to the power of the Earth itself and the infernal dakini forces streaming from the Earth straight into your mind, heart and body and into every cell of your body every single moment that you live"
JLL

Tuesday 1 October 2013

wonders of kefir

Milk kefir is one the major staples of our diet.  There are many wonderful things about it.  Not least is that it enables us to benefit, with digestive ease, from the goodness in raw dairy milk, including the crucial fat soluble vitamins D and K2 and also various B vitamins which are otherwise difficult to obtain in sufficient quantities from a plant sourced diet.  In high latitude countries such as Britain it is not possible to obtain vitamin D from sunlight for about half of the year due to the low altitude of the sun. 

Kefir transforms the milk of another mammal, for example a cow, so that the ratios of the amino acids are more suitable for humans.  In particular in increases the amount of tryptophan which it is very easy to be deficient in and is the precursor to serotonin.  The kefir culture also breaks down difficult to digest casein proteins into peptides and lactose, which is  a problem for many, into lactic acid.  Kefir is  the most powerful probiotic substance we know of, actively repopulating the gut with friendly bacteria. 

If you make your kefir with the milk from traditional A2 type cows such as Jersey cows, then all the better. This milk does not release a particular beta-casomorphine called BCM 7 which is responsible for some milk intolerance.  Jersey milk also contains more cream therefore more fat soluble vitamins.(more below).

We integrate noni powder into some of our kefir meals.  The xeronine in noni helps the tryptophan get through the intestinal walls more effectively.

Demonstrating kefir at Dutch Raw Food Festival:



at our workshop:



addendum on A1 and A2 milk:

"All proteins are long chains of amino acids. Beta casein is a chain 229 amino acids in length. Cows who produce this protein in their milk with a proline at number 67 are called A2 cows, and are the older breeds of cows (e.g. Jerseys, Asian and African cows). But some 5,000 years ago, a mutation occurred in this proline amino acid, converting it to histidine. Cows that have this mutated beta casein are called A1 cows, and include breeds like Holstein.

Proline has a strong bond to a small protein called BCM 7, which helps keep it from getting into the milk, so that essentially no BCM 7 is found in the urine, blood or GI tract of old-fashioned A2 cows. On the other hand, histidine, the mutated protein, only weakly holds on to BCM 7, so it is liberated in the GI tract of animals and humans who drink A1 cow milk."
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/07/09/the-devil-in-the-milk.aspx

Sunday 29 September 2013

parallel universe and the physics of beauty

"On Andromeda, the mirror-world of human experience, aesthetic laws work like natural laws on earth. This is the physics of beauty. Plants grow there otherwise and flowers bloom in another way, mirroring how the Gaian habitat would look were it seen ecstatically, beheld in the rush of beautiful looking, without identification. On Andromeda everything looks that way, normally.

The parallel world in Andromeda is a close replica of the world inhabited by humanity on earth except that it contains no refuse, no rejected or superfluous elements of any kind. Identification produces the illusion of division, a false perception of inequality in which some factors must always be discarded, discounted, disrespected. On Andromeda no one throws anything away because there is nothing to discard. There is no look that does not praise what it beholds. In that parallel world everyone gets the attention they need because no one gets a special or superfluous dose of attention.

Throughout the entire range of the Becoming the myriad mirror-worlds are co-emergent one pair at a time. The Divine Trinity arises because in each pair the primary counterpart is coupled with a secondary counterpart. Primary counterparts mirror each other, as earth and Andromeda do. The secondary counterpart to earth, dimensionally concealed within the sun, mirrors the coupling of earth and Andromeda. The mirroring is fractal and extrapolating: the entire galaxy of Andromeda mirrors life on Gaia, but not vice versa, because the mirroring is assymmetric.

The Andromedan mirror-world and the earth-world arise together, co-emergently, just as people in a room arise simultaneously with their images beheld in a mirror placed in the room. When they appear in the room so do their images appear in the mirror. When their images appear in the mirror so do they in the room. Twinned worlds are subliminally intermingled the way dream and waking are. Each world lends some of its physical properties to the other. Scientists on earth will be forever baffled by the most elementary properties of the physical world as long they fail to realize that another set of laws intrudes into terrestrial laws. In cosmic co-emergence the beauty of physics intermingles with the operation of physical laws.

An example of co-emergent physics can be seen in the realm of plants and trees. A stalk of wheat would not be able to stand erect were it subject exclusively to terrestrial laws. The grain in the head of the stalk is heavy, and so the grain falls to earth due to terrestrial laws, but the stalk of the growing plant defies gravity. It plunges upward, straight and true. Before it can fall, die and regenerate, the grain must be raised into communion with the entire cosmic environment. The beauty of its self-offering is framed by Andromeda laws. On earth gravity is the primary world-shaping force. On Andromeda, levity is.

It is true that centrifugal force on earth has its counterpart in centripetal force, in gravity, but it would be pure foolishness to presume that centrifugal force -- i.e., fleeing away from the center of mass -- holds the wheat-stalk upright, or allows trees to dance lithely in the air, or causes millions of other plants, grasses and climbing vines to writhe ecstatically toward the heavens. Human ingenuity cannot produce the miracle of the wheat-stalk, the spiralling morning glory vine, or a massive sequoia tree. In terms of engineering these are living design miracles that defy both gravity and mechanical law. Nothing constructed by human skill could be so supple and yet so stable. Constructed on terrestrial principles, the wheat stalk is nevertheless incapable of standing tall and steady due to terrestrial laws alone. It needs the co-emergence of Andromedan physics. The plant-world on earth mirrors the physics of beauty, the aesthetic laws that prevail on Andromeda. Van Gogh’s sunflowers grow there as they appear in his paintings, gelatinously puckered into the translucent plasma of the atmosphere.

Scientists on earth will never work out terrestrial physics unless they recognize that all physical events on the planet arise from the conjuncture of two distinct systems of physical law, Andromedan and terrestrial. It takes two to know one."

John Lamb Lash

earth is living breathing entity

"it appears the planet is a living breathing entity" ~ an astronaut looking back at Earth

http://www.upworthy.com/some-strange-things-are-happening-to-astronauts-returning-to-earth

Saturday 28 September 2013

two sleeps

We are planning to try this, in fact I slept like this for years when I would settle my children and fall asleep with them for maybe three hours or so then get up again and do things before going to bed later.  I liked the head space I was in in these 'in-between' hours, it was calm and creative, though at the time it was just what seemed expedient and felt right for the circumstances.












http://slumberwise.com/science/your-ancestors-didnt-sleep-like-you/

"Ok, maybe your grandparents probably slept like you. And your great, great-grandparents. But once you go back before the 1800s, sleep starts to look a lot different. Your ancestors slept in a way that modern sleepers would find bizarre – they slept twice. And so can you.

The History
The existence of our sleeping twice per night was first uncovered by Roger Ekirch, professor of History at Virginia Tech.

His research found that we didn’t always sleep in one eight hour chunk. We used to sleep in two shorter periods, over a longer range of night. This range was about 12 hours long, and began with a sleep of three to four hours, wakefulness of two to three hours, then sleep again until morning.

References are scattered throughout literature, court documents, personal papers, and the ephemera of the past. What is surprising is not that people slept in two sessions, but that the concept was so incredibly common. Two-piece sleeping was the standard, accepted way to sleep.

“It’s not just the number of references – it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge,” Ekirch says.

An English doctor wrote, for example, that the ideal time for study and contemplation was between “first sleep” and “second sleep.” Chaucer tells of a character in the Canterbury Tales that goes to bed following her “firste sleep.” And, explaining the reason why working class conceived more children, a doctor from the 1500s reported that they typically had sex after their first sleep.

Ekirch’s book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past is replete with such examples.

But just what did people do with these extra twilight hours? Pretty much what you might expect.

Most stayed in their beds and bedrooms, sometimes reading, and often they would use the time to pray. Religious manuals included special prayers to be said in the mid-sleep hours.

Others might smoke, talk with co-sleepers, or have sex. Some were more active and would leave to visit with neighbours.

As we know, this practice eventually died out. Ekirch attributes the change to the advent of street lighting and eventually electric indoor light, as well as the popularity of coffee houses. Author Craig Koslofsky offers a further theory in his book Evening’s Empire. With the rise of more street lighting, night stopped being the domain of criminals and sub-classes and became a time for work or socializing. Two sleeps were eventually considered a wasteful way to spend these hours.

No matter why the change happened, shortly after the turn of the 20th century the concept of two sleeps had vanished from common knowledge.

Until about 1990.

The Science
Two sleeps per night may have been the method of antiquity, but tendencies towards it still linger in modern man. There could be an innate biological preference for two sleeps, given the right circumstances.

In the early ‘90s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr of National Institutes of Mental Health conducted a study on photoperiodicity (exposure to light), and its effect on sleep patterns.

In his study, fifteen men spent four weeks with their daylight artificially restricted. Rather than staying up and active the usual sixteen hours per day, they would stay up only ten. The other fourteen hours they would be in a closed, dark room, where they would rest or sleep as much as possible. This mimics the days in mid-winter, with short daylight and long nights.

At first, the participants would sleep huge stretches of time, likely making up for sleep debt that’s common among modern people. Once they had caught up on their sleep though, a strange thing started to happen.

They began to have two sleeps.

Over a twelve hour period, the participants would typically sleep for about four or five hours initially, then wake for several hours, then sleep again until morning. They slept not more than eight hours total.

The middle hours of the night, between two sleeps, was characterized by unusual calmness, likened to meditation. This was not the middle-of-the-night toss-and-turn that many of us experienced. The individuals did not stress about falling back asleep, but used the time to relax.

Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience at Oxford, points out that even with standard sleep patterns, this night waking isn’t always cause for concern. “Many people wake up at night and panic,” he says. “I tell them that what they are experiencing is a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern.”

Outside of a scientific setting, this kind of sleep pattern is still attainable, but it does require changing our modern, electric lifestyle. Very cool person J. D. Moyer did just that. He and his family intentionally went an entire month with no electric light.

In the winter months, this meant a lot of darkness and a lot of sleep. Moyer writes “…I would go to bed really early, like 8:30, and then get up around 2:30am.  This was alarming at first, but then I remembered that this sleep pattern was quite common in pre-electric light days.  When this happened I would end up reading or writing by candlelight for an hour or two, then going back to bed.”

Moyer didn’t set out to reproduce our ancestors sleep pattern, it just happened as a byproduct of a lot of dark hours.

Should We Revive Two Sleeps?
Although history shows that two sleeping was common, and science indicates that it is (in some conditions) natural, there is no indication that it is better. Two sleeps may leave you feeling more rested, but this could simply be because you are intentionally giving yourself more time to rest, relax, and sleep. Giving the same respect to the single, eight-hour sleep should be just as effective.

Note too that two sleeping needs a lot of darkness – darkness that is only possible naturally during the winter months. The greater levels of daylight during summer and other seasons would make two sleeping difficult, or even impossible.

Perhaps two sleeping is merely a coping mechanism to get through the long, cold, boring nights of the winter. Today, we don’t need to cope. So long as we give our sleep the time and respect it needs, getting the “standard” eight hours of sleep should be fine.

But next time you wake up at 2 AM and can’t sleep, just remember your great, great, great, great, great grandfather. He did the same thing every night.

Update
Well this article proved exceedingly popular! Thank you to everyone who visited, or took the time to leave a comment. I would encourage new visitors to have a read through the comments below for some interesting ideas and perspectives. I learned two things in particular:

1. This is far more common that I thought. A lot of commenters either practice, or used to practice this kind of sleep.

2. Another possible reason for two sleeps is tending the fire during the night. Several clever readers noted that in order to keep a fire running through the night, we would need to get up and tend it.

Commenters also raised questions regarding non-European and non-Western cultures, which we’ll be digging into in future articles. For anyone who wants to learn more about this kind of sleep, I’ve linked below to two books referenced in the writing of this article, available on Amazon."

from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783

"Much like the experience of Wehr's subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.

"It's not just the number of references - it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge," Ekirch says...
...Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society.

By the 1920s the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness...

..."For most of evolution we slept a certain way," says sleep psychologist Gregg Jacobs. "Waking up during the night is part of normal human physiology."

The idea that we must sleep in a consolidated block could be damaging, he says, if it makes people who wake up at night anxious, as this anxiety can itself prohibit sleeps and is likely to seep into waking life too.

Russell Foster, a professor of circadian [body clock] neuroscience at Oxford, shares this point of view.

"Many people wake up at night and panic," he says. "I tell them that what they are experiencing is a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern."

Every 60-100 minutes we go through a cycle of four stages of sleep

Stage 1 is a drowsy, relaxed state between being awake and sleeping - breathing slows, muscles relax, heart rate drops
Stage 2 is slightly deeper sleep - you may feel awake and this means that, on many nights, you may be asleep and not know it
Stage 3 and Stage 4, or Deep Sleep - it is very hard to wake up from Deep Sleep because this is when there is the lowest amount of activity in your body
After Deep Sleep, we go back to Stage 2 for a few minutes, and then enter Dream Sleep - also called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep - which, as its name suggests, is when you dream
In a full sleep cycle, a person goes through all the stages of sleep from one to four, then back down through stages three and two, before entering dream sleep

Jacobs suggests that the waking period between sleeps, when people were forced into periods of rest and relaxation, could have played an important part in the human capacity to regulate stress naturally."

Friday 27 September 2013

delicious raw strawberry granola

This really is delicious to everyone I have offered it to, though I say it myself...



here's the recipe:

150g almonds, soaked
75g sunflower seeds, soaked
150g fresh coconut
1 tsp mesquite powder
1 tsp maca powder
1 tsp rosehip powder
½ tsp vanilla powder
¼ tsp ground cinnamon
3 dried figs
3 dried apricots
300g strawberries, sliced
2 pears or apples, diced
2 Tbsp cold pressed honey

Process together all the ingredients except the last three, until broken down and smooth
Mix in the chopped fresh fruit.
Crumble the mixture over dehydrator sheets
Dehydrate until a little set then mix in honey
Continue to dehydrate until desired consistency

Thursday 26 September 2013

more on telemorase activator 65

Here we describe what we have been experiencing since being on the supplement TA65 which activates the enzyme telomerase and also seems to do a lot else besides.

Monday 23 September 2013

rosehips, vitamin c, iron and joints




More about rosehips:
Rosehips are the fruit of the rose. They are very rich in iron and vitamins C, D and E and also contain vitamins A, B1, K, P, B3 plus pectin, phosphorous, calcium and magnesium.  Rosehip powder is a very economical source of these nutrients.
Vitamin C increases mental function. It helps protect the unsaturated fats in the brain from free radical damage and oxidation. Vitamin C is a crucial factor in preventing much modern degenerative disease. Our requirements of vitamin C for superb health are far greater than the recommended amounts quoted to stop us getting scurvy. In addition vitamin C content is easily lost during transportation and storage so, where locally grown organic fresh fruit isn't abundantly available, it is wise to supplement our diet with vitamin C rich substances.  Iron is very often deficient in women and children and iron rich plant sources are invaluable. Vitamin C helps with the absorption of iron.  The rose hip has the highest concentration of iron of any plant known.

Recent research undertaken at Copenhagen County hospital suggests Rosehip powder may help to reduce joint pain.  Norwegian research carried out by Orthopedic Surgeon Odd Warholm together with his research team at Westfold central Hospital Norway produced similar findings. Some of the research was reported in an article in The Telegraph newspaper.  The vital substances for this are in the seeds.  

enjoying the equinox and a shot of the life force

Sat over the swirling mists on Glastonbury Tor in the early morning light, mesmerised by the swaying grasses beyond which little to be seen but the mist.

Understanding more and more the concept of 'your life is not your own'.  Yes, for sure, we have a life story but we cannot own life itself, any more than we can own the sun or the wind or the rain.  Life is about being part of the life-force itself - if you want to feel alive!

Recently we began taking the telomerase activator supplement TA65.  A big and newish subject, we just write an article for Funky Raw magazine about it and I don't feel I can preempt publication! - for now I am just going to quote the following:

"...We get the feeling and impression that telomerase is actually doing something more than just lengthening telomeres...we get the feeling that this enzyme ... has multiple purposes. The experience of being on TA65 is quite distinct. ...we feel it is changing our life trajectory. Ever since we were born and even in our so called youth we were aging, Now it feels different. This is about turning on an enzyme that we have not experienced since we were embryonic. While eating raw is rejuvenating, having our telomerase activated is actually youthing..."

Wednesday 18 September 2013

anaru maori healer

We have been lucky enough to have indigenous Maori healer Anaru Paine staying at our house over the last few days and hear the sounds of the screams of his clients...As he explains, he releases pain he doesn't cause it.  Having had two treatments with him over the last two years I can vouch for this.  The pain experienced as he clicks the body back into place feels safe and beneficial, and we are restored to wellbeing - there is even a  subtle euphoric high afterwards, if a little wobbliness.  Allow time for a warm bath afterwards if you have a treatment with him.  For sure he just a special presence, maybe attributable to his background living on his tribal lands. His mother is of Tuhoe tribe.  You cna read a bit more about Anaru here:
http://maorihealers.com/the-healers/anaru-paine




'No matter how small Tuhoe are (in number)
Their laughter resounds through the night

Tuhoe people have a love of deep belly laughter. They will laugh at the face of darkness. Deep belly laughter is known to be one of the highest of the healing arts. It is the fastest way to erase fear. All Maori Healers featured on this website are renowned for their ability to bring forth the deep belly laughter within others'

Wednesday 4 September 2013

sunrise agua blanca


first footprints on the sand, Agua Blanca

Tuesday 3 September 2013

foundation of wellness

The Secret of Healing with Richi
"we have wellness within us, we have this well-being that is innate and we all have access to it because we are all alive..."

Monday 2 September 2013

never ending fig tree


The local fig tree at Ciel Azul, Ibiza, every day the sun ripens another load of figs ready for us to pick...walking down the dusty lane into the sweet aroma of this spreading fig tree and climbing into it, hand straight to mouth and gathering more to take back...apparently figs are the fruit a primate will go for in preference to all other food.  Densely mineralised and alkalising with the cleansing power of the little seeds in  them, they also contain lots of mono-amine oxidase inhibitors (MAOI's) which help keep neurotransmitter levels up and make us feel good..




Saturday 31 August 2013

beach food


swathes of deliciously edible rock samphire at the beautiful beach Cala d'en Serra Ibiza,



 fun adventures climbing over rocks to a secret beach and up a woodland path to explore a deserted half built hotel and down again to the cafe,  there is so much natural beauty to discover in Ibiza that is so far from its loud reputation!


Thursday 29 August 2013

our local paradise ~ hemp

My son arrived with some hemp leaves he had freshly picked from his Dad's licensed hemp plot in Devon.  We dried them in the dehydrator to make delicious fresh hemp powder which I love to use in raw chocolate and smoothies.













There are many amazing benefits of hemp leaves.  It is a green like no other and tastes nice in smoothies and other treats where other green powders risk ruining the recipe...
"... an extraordinarily complex superfood, containing many of the essential nutrients in good ratios. It is rich in minerals, essential natural sugars ( glyconutrients), chlorophyll, silicon and light energy and energises the brain. It provides, amongst other nutrients, essential natural sugars and carbohydrates, invaluable to sports people. It also helps with melanin production in the skin and helps one absorb full spectrum light. It is low in THC (tetrahydrocannabinol). However it is still rich in other helpful cannabinoids, in particular CBD (cannabidiol). The high quantites of THC in highly bred strains of cannabis can bring on anxiety and paranoia. The original plant (to which all cannabis and hemp will tend if allowed to seed and regrow naturally) is well-balanced with the anti-psychotic cannabinoid, CBD. Hemp leaf is low in THC but has plenty of CBD so can be a very healing medicine food."
So easy to grow and apparently with one licence a lot of hemp can be grown.

This is my current favourite raw chocolate recipe using hemp leaf.  Though I say it myself, it is really delicious!

Superfood and fruit Chocolate

60g cacao butter
40g cacao paste
a few grains celtic sea salt
3 Tbsps raw honey
2 Tbsps maca powder (gelatinized maca works best)
3 Tbsps lucuma powder
1 Tbsp violet fig powder
1 Tbsp green fig powder
1 Tbsp strawberry powder
½ tsp vanilla powder
sprinkling cayenne powder
1 Tbsp hemp leaf powder
1 Tbsp purple corn flour
1 tsp he shou wu powder
sprinkling blue green algae

Melt cacao butter and paste over low heat and stir in salt and honey.
Stir the dried ingredients together well and mix into the melted paste and butter.  Pour into moulds to set.

Saturday 24 August 2013

our local paradise ~ blackberrying, edible garden, starlings


blackberrying

 

our edible garden

 

this pear tree was scorched in the hot sun of this summer and but it's leaves regrew!


Somerset starlings



Friday 23 August 2013

st ann's well buxton derbyshire


The source of this geothermal spring which serves up the most delicious warm water  is actually in the building "The Natural Baths" opposite. It is piped across. There are two types of spring water at the site, warm and cold, and there are about five springs in the area. The Celtic tribe, the Corieltauvi came here and honoured a Goddess known as Arnemetia at the site. The Goddess's name means "She Who Dwells Over the Sacred Grove" her name containing a variation of the Celtic word "nemeton" meaning sacred grove.  

Thursday 22 August 2013

ginkgo biloba

Just wandering down to our local village post office in the beautiful sunshine today I passed a gorgeous ginkgo tree, a  magical sight.














Ginkgo is thought to be  the oldest still-living tree species on earth   It can live for thousands of years and survive extreme conditions but also grows in a variety of climates. It is good for our happiness and longevity too. It improves circulation and oxygenation so is helpful to the body in many ways.  It improves blood flow to the brain, improves memory and mental alertness and has been used for a long time to improve the mind.  I add the dried herb to our tea regularly; it was wonderful to see those beautiful leaves wafting in the breeze and sunshine

Saturday 17 August 2013

water adventures and sacred places

St Nectan's Glen, Cornwall





St Pirans Well



Sancreed Holy Well



Sealife safari with dolphins


Boscawen-un


This stone circle can be difficult to find..here is the easy way:
Stop at the lay-by that's about a mile East of Crows-an-Wra on the Penzance - Lands End road, the main A30. Going from Crows-an-Wra, 1st there is a minor road turning to the right. Ignore it. 2nd, about 4/10ths of a mile further on, at the bottom of the hill, is a house or two on either side of the road. Ignore them. 3rd, about 2/10ths of a mile further on, at the top of the hill, there is a lay-by on the right, which is the South side of the road. There is a kissing gate with a notice. Now all you have to do is to follow the paths from there to the stones. It takes about 5-10 minutes.