When it comes to reducing our carbon footprint, I find that the ideas and systems that get the most attention are always the big, expensive ones. They are always about electric cars, solar panels, wind turbines and other big ticket items which most of us can’t afford. Often the necessary work of changing how much energy we use gets lost in endless circles of ‘meta’ type discussions and nothing ever really gets done. There isn’t a lot of interesting information out there about what individuals and families can do in their real lives to reduce their personal footprints. Well intentioned people often have little to no idea about how or what they can do on a daily basis to conserve resources other than using compact fluorescent light bulbs and recycling plastic but there is so much more to do than that.

My family and I have been particularly focused on reducing our footprint, conserving resources, and living more simply for the past five years or so. Gradually we have implemented one simplifying and natural system after another with considerable success. Several months ago, my wife came across an incredible way to cook food that uses 20% - 80% less energy, increases nutrition of the food, saves time, space, money, resources, and electricity plus it lets you come home at the end of a long day to warm, well cooked food you don’t have to do anything to but serve. This way of cooking is called retained heat cooking, fireless cooking or cooking with a cook box or hay box. We use it practically every day now and it has made our lives a lot easier.

Scientifically speaking, “cooking” food is not really what most of us think it is. “Cooking” isn’t necessarily boiling or simmering food on your stove top, for instance, because technically food is being cooked whenever it is at 180° or higher. No matter what method you use to keep your food at a minimum of 180°, that food is cooking. You can accomplish this conventionally by setting your pot on a hot burner and continuously forcing heat up from the bottom of the pot over a long period of time until that food is completed cooked OR you can recognize that stove top type cooking is really done best as a two step process. In step one, you create a low insulation set-up in which you add heat to the pot and its contents until they are over 180°. In step two, you transform your set-up into a high insulation arrangement whereby that built up heat is retained in the pot so that it can proceed to cook the food gently and evenly with no additional energy input until that food is completely cooked. All the energy required for complete cooking has already been provided. You are just retaining it within the pot until it has done its work rather than allowing it to dissipate into the surrounding air. In other words, put ingredients in a pot, bring them to a boil, boil for 15 minutes or so, take the pot off the stove and then insulate it in a simple cook box or basket until the cooking cycle is completed. Depending upon what you are cooking, in anywhere from a half hour to several hours later, you can take a pot of piping hot, perfectly cooked food out of your cook box and serve it up just as it is.

My wife has just completed a 50 page e-book about this process entitled Retained Heat Cooking … The Wave of the Future Again: Discover how easy it is to make and use your own off-the-grid cook box to cook uncommonly good food of all kinds. It includes detailed instructions on how to assemble your own retained heat cook box as well as sections on the history behind this method of food preparation as well as the scientific principles behind how it works. She not only includes recipes and other cooking instructions but also a section on the importance of retained heat cooking in developing countries which are so often characterized by deforestation, shortages of potable water and grinding poverty. My family strongly believes that the resources we over-consume here has everything to do with the lack of enough resources elsewhere. So we feel happily compelled to use retained heat cooking regularly in our home as well as any other measures we can manage to reduce our load on the earth’s resources.

Putting together your own cook box can be as simple or as involved a project as you want it to be. Design specifications and ideas are in the e-book. You can make your own from boxes, baskets, drawers, or coolers and insulate with anything from hay, cardboard, or blankets to rice hulls or Styrofoam. Cook boxes are very simple to put together and can be made to fit your kitchen, your wallet and your design sense. You can probably get up and put one together right now from items lying around your house and use it to make a meal right away. That is what my wife did and we are still using that instant cook box she put together months ago. If you have a laundry basket or a similar sized box, an old comforter or sleeping bag or blankets, a few old towels and a trivet then you can can get started right now at reducing your energy bill.

While you are reducing your carbon footprint with retained heat cooking, you will be reducing your energy costs as well. Cook box cooking saves 20% - 80% of your energy costs over stove top cooking, with the most savings coming from long cooking foods like grains, beans and meats. The food in a cook box is cooked slowly over a longer period of time which is actually the most beneficial way to cook many foods. Cooking at a lower temperature preserves nutrients, releases flavor, and increases digestibility. We have learned through personal experience that food cooked by the retained heat method comes out perfectly every time with each ingredient done just right.

The only real adjustment that most people will have to make to use a cook box is to plan meals in advance and start cooking them ahead of time. In the instantaneous microwave world that we now live in, this may appear to be difficult but it really isn’t. Besides it is a small adjustment to make so you that you can help to reduce your contribution to global warming, overconsumption of water and other negative environmental damage. Any little changes many of us make can add up to big changes that can reverse our current disastrous course. All of us pitching in with such small changes is basically mandatory at this point. We are going to have to make adjustments. Making the adjustment to retained heat cooking is easy because it costs nothing to implement and makes the food taste better anyway.

In terms of our 50 page e-book, Retained Heat Cooking … the Wave of the Future Again, it is available at our Bamboo Grove Press website for $5.95. My wife is an incredible researcher and a great cook. Her e-book has all of the information you need about how and why retained heat cooking is the best available method for cooking most of your food. My wife has also released a shorter 10 page e-book about solar cooking entitled On Your Way Towards Solar Cooking:The Why’s and Wherefore’s of Solar Cooking in Brief priced at $1.99. In this book you get a brief overview of solar cooking along with over 50 links to all the information you need about solar cooking, buying a commercial cooker or building your own, solar cookbooks and more.

Please forward this post and links to these e-books to anyone you know who might be interested in cooking with a cook box, improving the taste and nutrition of their food, and reducing their carbon footprint with virtually no start-up investment. It will improve their lives and help the earth tremendously.

Below are two videos we made about our experiences with fuel efficient, retained heat cook box cooking. I hope you enjoy.

All the best,
Paul

Bamboo Grove Press is the publishing arm of Pockets of the Future and today we are releasing our first in a potentially nearly endless series of e-books on a wide range of subjects related to natural living, homesteading, herbalism, homeschooling, old paths/new ways of thinking, innovative building techniques, frugality, preparedness from the inside out and the outside in and so on. I am so excited to have our first two e-books ready for you that as I share this, I am trying to type and jump up and down at the same time!

Our first e-book is:

Retained Heat Cooking … the Wave of the Future Again

by Leslie Romano

Discover how easy it is to make and use your own off-the-grid cook box to cook uncommonly good food of all kinds. This is a frugal, time honored method of cooking that saves time, space, money, resources, nutrition and electricity. Includes sections on the history and science of retained heat cooking, how to make and use your own cook box, tips and suggestions based upon personal experience, recipes, related homeschooling ideas and ten incredible advantages to cooking highly nutritious, perfectly cooked food with this natural, easy to implement retained heat cooking method. Only book of its kind on the market. 50 pages. $6.99

Our second e-book is:

On Your Way Towards Solar Cooking: The Why’s and Wherefore’s of Solar Cooking in Brief
Plus Over 50 Links to Solar Cooking Information, Reviews, Directions for Building Your Own, Places to Buy Commercial, and Cookbooks From Which to Make It All Happen

by Leslie Romano

Once you discover the significant benefits of cooking in ways other than on an industrially made stove in an electrified kitchen, you just can’t stop! Here on the farm, we have become so enamored with retained heat cooking that we are eager to learn more ways to cook alternatively. Solar cooking will be our next endeavor. Become more prepared and more self-sufficient through solar cooking. This e-book will get you started with a brief overview of the why’s and wherefore’s of solar cooking as well as over 50 links to all the resources you need to make solar cooking an effective way to save energy and cook nutritious food for you and your family. 10 pages. $2.50

More titles in the works:
We have several more e-books already in the works on a special herbal tea you can forage yourself that provides surprising benefits, easy to make herbal personal care powders, and the wonderful benefits of raising rare breed livestock on your family farm or homestead. And those are just the titles we have already started writing.

If there are subjects you would like to see addressed by us in e-book format, please leave a comment and let us know or contact us personally.

This is so fun! Come join us. There is much to learn and share.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

A week ago Saturday, I was in the kitchen considering what kind of dinner I could make with the ingredients I had on hand while simultaneously ruminating over fellow bloggers who were suddenly disappearing into the mysterious landscape that lies off the grid (see last post). Interestingly this combination thought process spontaneously resulted not only in my cooking up a new lentil soup recipe but also in venturing into cooking it very efficiently in our living room!

One of my favorite cookbooks of the last six months or so is Eating Off the Grid, Storing and Cooking Foods Without Electricity. (You can get this cookbook on Amazon via the link below but I frankly found it more cheaply at USA Emergency Supply.) It has a very useful array of simple recipes across twelve categories together with interesting historical information, menu plans, nutritional information and other practical information for off grid living with regards to food.

Anyway, I decided to try one of her lentil soups I hadn’t tried before AND to try cooking it in a way she mentions which I haven’t done before. Both were great successes. I will first give the very simple cooking explanation for cooking in an insulated box followed by the recipe.

COOKING INDOORS USING AN INSULATED BOX
(Please view the video linked at the bottom of the post for visuals for all of this.)
I have used this method with great results now with soup, beans and grain. In a heavy bottomed pot with a tight fitting lid, start cooking your dish in the usual manner. Bring it to a boil, put on the cover and cook at a fairly high boil for about 15 minutes. I adjust the heat here depending upon what I am cooking and how big the pot is.

In the living room (and this is simply because it was the only nearby spot I could find that wouldn’t be in the way), I set up a laundry basket. In the laundry basket is an unzipped twin size sleeping bag with the center of the sleeping bag squashed down into the laundry basket. Inside that I put a travel blanket that used to be in the car. Inside that is an old bath sheet (you know those giant bath towels?). At the bottom of all of this I put a flat, stable hot plate.

After the lentil soup boiled for 15 minutes, I carried the pot into the living room and set it into its insulated box. I wrapped the towel around it and then the blanket under it. I then wrapped another heavy cotton blanket around it all from the top and tucked that it all around but inside of the sleeping bag. Then I wrapped the sleeping bag up all around the whole thing. The sleeping bag is nylon so I was careful to have only cotton blankets and towels actually touching the pot. Nylon would melt.

About three hours later my husband unwrapped the pot for me and brought it into the kitchen. It was still so hot that steam was coming out of it and the lentil soup inside was perfectly cooked. And when I say perfectly cooked, I really mean perfectly cooked. This particular recipe has flour in it which could otherwise have easily burned but didn’t at all from being cooked this way. The lentils were soft but still held their shape and yet everything else was tender. It was kind of amazing to me.

The soup cooked up so beautifully (and it was such a balm to my soul to cook something mostly off the grid…) that I have since cooked up a big Dutch Oven full of fava beans and right now have a pot of barley cooking away in there. I can’t say this arrangement adds much to the decor of the living room at this point but it surely feels great to only use about 15 minutes worth of electricity to cook meals that usually cook on the stove top for hours.

Meanwhile, this particular lentil soup recipe turns out to be a nice addition to my repertoire of lentil soups. It is a bit different and a keeper.

NEW YEAR’S EVE LENTIL SOUP
Author Denise Hansen, MS, RD explains that it is a Greek and Italian tradition to eat lentils on New Year’s Eve to “assure prosperity and good fortune.” I figure we can use that any time of year!

This is my adjusted version which does not include soy bacon bits or beef bouillon. I also made it a bit thicker and tripled the recipe. I doubt many readers will want a recipe quite that size so I will try to scale it back a little. You are welcome to scale it back further or freeze the extra from this for another day.

1 large chopped onion
3 carrots
about a cup’s worth of frozen greens or the equivalent in fresh greens (the recipe suggests Swiss chard including diced stalks - I used mustard greens because that is what I had on hand)
oil for sauteing
1.5 cups flour
7 quarts water
2 or 3 potatoes, diced
3 cups lentils rinsed (and soaked if possible!)
5 tsp. salt
4 bay leaves
2 tsp. thyme
about 1/2 tsp. freshly grated nutmeg

1. In a heavy bottomed stockpot, saute onion, greens and carrots in oil until soft.
2. Add the flour, stirring constantly to make a roux. Unbleached flour works best (she says notes this although I used Golden 86 for this kind of thing all the time).
3. Slowly add the water, stirring constantly. Then add the remaining ingredients.
4. Simmer for 2 - 3 hours. (Alternatively put boiling hot pot put into your insulated box and tuck it in for three hours or so.) The flavor improves with longer simmering. Just before serving, remove the bay leaves and add freshly ground pepper.

This soup is thick and saucy. It also makes great leftovers. We ate this soup for a couple of days plus over a week later we are still enthusiastically using our insulated box for long cooking. Try it - it is extremely easy and is just plain common sense once you start to think about it. Besides, if you happen to have a large family and just a regular smallish stove like I do, it frees up a burner. We are so taken with this recipe that I have added it to my menu plan and we are so taken with this form of cooking that we made a video about it to inspire you. Enjoy both!

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

Alas, my adrenal fatigue is keeping my mind very diffuse lately which makes writing very difficult for me. However, I can still read ‘cuz reading is what I do!

I thought I would share two great resources I am reading and studying right now to strengthen what we are doing here on the homestead.

The first is all about food storage. Sharon at Casaubon’s Book conducted an online food storage class last spring which starts here (or click on the Food Storage category on the right and make your way backwards to the beginning). What I most appreciate about her class is that she covers the topic in the way that I personally would approach it which is to say she discusses ethics and local eating and planning for caring for unexpected others and, well, health. No ready to eat meals here of dubious nutritional value. Rather how do we grow, procure and store healthy real foods for family and vulnerable others for the future? All excellent questions with many excellent answers and suggestions provided not only by Sharon but also by her educated, highly aware and committed readers. (In other words, do read all the comments.) I have read through every post, taken notes, copied and pasted, followed up on links and so on. A worthwhile odyssey. In the final post I discovered that she ran a yahoo group alongside the blog posts to allow for more information sharing and deeper discussions of vital issues. Luckily her yahoo group is still running and now I am carefully making my way through that in the same manner I made my way through her initial set of food storage posts.

Secondly, we are very focused now on working towards becoming more self-sufficient with regards to our flock of hens here. Going for months just feeding the hens and getting no eggs whatsoever is… well… for the birds (and not for the humans - get it?). We want to introduce some different breeds here such as Buckeyes and Dorkings and become proficient at incubating eggs and caring for chicks and so on. In other words, we want a closed flock of productive, largely self-sufficient, broody, rare breeds hens so we are going to have to do what it takes to make such a flock ourselves. Furthermore, we do not appreciate being chained to the feed store in order to feed these hens what is clearly not real hen food anyway. So while my husband is madly inventing a way to incubate eggs with equipment we already have at hand, my resource for figuring out the rest of this business is currently The Modern Homestead. I have read articles over the years by Harvey Ussery in Countryside Magazine and have found them to be uniformly excellent. On their web site, he and his wife have an extensive section on raising poultry that includes ways and means of feeding live foods to your flock, peak oil considerations, and many other very interesting and timely considerations for productively and conscientiously raising a homestead flock of hens. In other words, the ways I have always wanted to approach maintaining a flock of hens this couple already knows and put into practice long ago and they have spelled it all out for others eager for such a thoughtful and effective approach. I am thrilled to have such a “nutrient dense” resource available to help us find our way to the next level of husbandry here.

So those are the top two of my current homesteading studies at the moment. I find them so useful and forward looking that I thought I would pause in my mad dash to consider and explore and copy and paste to share them with you all.

Study well and go forth effectively!

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

I am slowly but surely putting together an herbal education program for my young students here at The Lionsgate School. I am pulling from many sources to give them an array of herbal projects, a useful body of herbal knowledge and an intuitive approach to plants, healing and nature that I hope will serve them well in the future. It just seems like the kind of experience and skill base everyone should have and so will be an integral part of our homeschool curriculum over the coming years.

I am personally very pulled to things Appalachian and things Shaker, although it occurs to me that those two cultures are very different from each other. Never mind, both have rich herbal traditions and so have a place in my research. I was taking notes from Blackberry Cove Herbal - Healing with Common Herbs in the Appalachian Wise-Woman Tradition by Linda Ours Rago when I came across this deeply interesting and timely passage:

The four-leaf clover brings good luck. There are faded four-leaf clovers pressed between the pages of my books and painted on my jewelry and china. I collect four-leaf clovers. I give them away, and I do have good luck.

When I was a child I spent long warm summers with my grandmother and grandfather on this farm making gold-fringed memories. The family was a big one, with my mother nearly the eldest of twelve children, plenty of grandchildren, farm animals, dogs and cats, and wide meadows with clumps of mysterious secret woods.

But it didn’t offer a little girl much individual attention. Grandmother Lulu Catherine was the busy matriarch running the place, plus the Methodist Church and the Democratic Party in Mill Creek Valley. Grandfather Osa was a mild gentleman who wore a hearing aid, usually switched to “off.”

My memory vividly conjures up one afternoon when I was about five. Grandfather and I had been pottering, and we eventually ended up sitting near this very spot. He picked an ordinary clover and asked me, “Can you find one of these with four leaves?” I reached over and picked one, two, three. His eyes flew wide, he jumped up, grabbed my hand, and hauled me in to my grandmother.

“We have a Finder?” he shouted on the way in. She put down whatever she was doing in the kitchen to see my little bouquet of four-leaf clovers. “We have a Finder,” they said in chorus. I puffed out my chest and flowed. It was my proudest moment! One of the cousins might be the pretty one, an uncle the smart one or musical one, but I was the Finder.

When the aunts sat outside slowly fanning themselves on light summer evenings like this one, my grandmother or my mother would sometimes say tot he others, “She’s a real Finder. Watch.” Then to me, “Honey, go find a four-leaf clover.” With that kind of motivation, more often than not, I brought back a four-leaf clover or two. I was completely sure of myself. I was a Finder.

A Finder brought pride and honor and good luck to the family, and everyone on that porch knew it. Grandmother read her King James Bible every day, but she also believed in ghosts and tokens and four-leaf clovers. She was Scotch-Irish and Welsh, and of course, Celtic, the backbone of Appalachian culture.

Someplace in the mists between the mountains of Scotland and the mountains of West Virginia the family had misplaced its knowledge that a Finder of four-leaf clovers could see the fairies and foretell the future. A Finder was blessed with second sight, like someone born with a caul.

My love of plants and the details of nature was with me from the beginning, but that recognition from my clan set it as unalterably as the patterns of a leaf.

Driving home this evening I listen to a radio interview with an author about ethnobotany. His new book is about traditional plant uses that are being lost in the Amazon.

“That is what I am,” I say out loud. “An ethnobotanist!” But my tribes are Celtic and Teutonic and Appalachian and West Virginian.

As an herbalist and writer my passion has been finding those green tendrils curling through my own culture and place. I have stalked the few remaining old-time herbalists in the hollows, spent hours over musty books, and let the plants and mountains themselves whisper their secret language to me.

My own culture was once nature-centered. People particularly observant and respectful of the natural world were valued and rewarded. Everyone understood it was important to live in rhythm with the seasons. So even now in our postindustrial age, somewhere inside all of us the old aunts and uncles are tugging, and we feel a little uneasy. If we are cut off from the green and the rain and the cycles, our spirits whither.

I believe it is within the depth of our own heritage and place that we each will ultimately find the clearest vision of our relationship to the natural world.

Now that humankind’s very survival depends upon this harmony, we must all become Finders, looking for the magical four-leaf clover. pgs. 42 – 44

And we must all become Finders, looking deep within our hearts for the path to the natural life we are meant to live.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

It somehow never occurred to me that the seminal Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Dr. Weston Price was in the public domain. But Abby Eagle of Rejoice in Life did figure that out and has a link for a free download of Dr. Price’s book on his web site.

I scanned through the book online from Abby’s link for a little while before getting ready to post this. I happened to read a section on the varying health and customs in Switzerland and became deeply engrossed. It is not just that properly preparing and eating natural foods produced people with singularly healthy teeth. What Dr. Price observes is that societies based upon natural, simple ways of living produce people with powerful physiques, healthy teeth. strong moral character and clear vision both literally and metaphorically. Dr. Price comments upon customs and even styles of clothing as he relays medical/dental information. I found this to be riveting reading and, along with many other people, highly recommend this book to you. You may either purchase a hard copy or download it from the above link.

Living natural lives relatively free of the ravages of the rapacious engine of desire creation follows laws of seemingly unintended positive consequences. Well, really the positive consequences are certainly intended, but not by us. They were intended by our Creator. We have only to follow the natural laws that govern us. The dire consequences of man stepping outside of these laws is what generated the phrase “unintended negative consequences” in the first place. Read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration and discover some hints towards positive consequences. And while you are there, look around Abby’s site. It is loaded with information as is his very useful cookbook Learn How to Cook the Way Grandma Did …

Bon appetit for all that was actually intended for us to have and be!

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

Educating yourself about thyroid, adrenal and other hormonal issues is a powerful step to take towards improved health for many of us. The conventional, pharmaceutical medical industry tends to be poorly informed on these subtle matters of hormones and the endocrine system. Even finding an MD who can properly diagnose and treat the very common hypothyroidism is a rare event. I have paid very dearly over and over again for doctors thinking they know more than they do about how to treat hypothyroidism.

What do you do when you think you are suffering from adrenal fatigue? Most doctors do not even acknowledge the existence of adrenal fatigue as a debilitating and treatable condition. Worse yet, what do you do when you know you are suffering from adrenal fatigue and have a sense of how to treat it yourself? Most doctors do not even know how to accurately test for degree of deficiency, never mind have a handle on how to work with you on treating it. In the words of JH Tilden MD about a hundred years ago:

Professional minds are supposed to be trained into a power of discrimination that enables them to sense truth in anything. But it appears that the principle training today is into accepting authority without question.

This painful truth leaves patients with several problems including where to get effective treatment and how to get appropriate lab work done. Sole access to ordering lab work is one of the chief ways the medical industry holds us hostage. Sometimes it really helps to follow the up’s and down’s of your condition with lab work. Lab work can be an important source of information, if ordered correctly and interpreted usefully. But try finding a doctor who will order saliva testing for monitoring adrenal conditions or one who will monitor thyroid levels in the way you feel they should be monitored. It is almost impossible - especially if you are living in the country where there are fewer choices of physicians.

Most importantly if you are someone who is taking responsibility for your own treatment, you need access to lab work as you see fit. Being forced into the system in order to get this kind of information puts your treatment plan at risk. I have fretted and puzzled over this situation for years but now I am very grateful to have a solution.

Through The Canary Club, you can order your own lab work as you need it. The home page notes:

Hormone Imbalances can have a severe impact on your health, and yet, they often go undiagnosed. We understand the frustration and helplessness that comes from visiting specialist after specialist and never really getting what you need to feel yourself again.

Our easy-to-use hormone test kits can uncover the problem and get you started on the road to recovery.

In fact, our home test kits analyze specific hormone imbalances that traditional testing ignores.

The Canary Club makes it safe and easy to find out if your hormones are functioning properly and to help you find the answers you need to get back on your feet and enjoying life.

You can order the testing you need for thyroid, adrenal, and reproductive hormones levels as well as the all important Vitamin D levels. You can get the PSA test as well as order a panel of tests that detect early risk factors associated with Type II Diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The web site also has articles, testimonials, a page of web links, a gland self-evaluation quiz and links to the book Feeling Fat, Fuzzy or Frazzled - Restoring Thyroid, Adrenal and Reproductive Balance by Drs. Shames.

As the Canary Club founders note:

The Canary Club is a premier resource for discounted home saliva and blood spot testing for hormonal imbalance. A health topics of great concern is hormonal / glandular dysfunction. Over 40 million people in the United States alone are affected - and numbers are rising internationally as well. Hormone imbalance, as impacted by environmental pollution, is a worldwide problem which is growing at an alarming rate. Joining the Canary Club enables you to order testing directly from the lab at a special Canary Club discounted price.

Joining the Canary Club is free and the tests you can order through them are very reasonably priced. Observing and researching your own condition and now having the resources to order the lab work you need and have the results come directly to you is an incredibly important key towards not only eventually strengthening your physical health but also immediately strengthening your confidence, your self-reliance and your ‘power to discriminate which enables you to sense truth in anything’.

May you walk in health.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

We are hesitatingly, hopefully believing that spring is now fully here to stay in the mountains of Floyd County. We have heard repeatedly about the early warming of last year and then the devastating freeze of that April which wiped out local apples, peaches, blueberries and more. A couple of weeks ago we had thought maybe spring was here but then temperatures dropped and it snowed. Would our heating oil and our hopefulness hold out until we can put all of this aside until next year, I wondered?

I think the daffodils have kept me going frankly. There are quite a few planted here around the house by past generations. From the large bay window over the kitchen sink I can see one particularly nice looking clump tucked away between the “granny house” and the outdoor bamboo shower. The heirloom daffodils on the east side of the house, though, particularly exemplify to me sturdiness, persistence, hope, a natural rhythm despite all appearances and the intense color and simple lines of more natural times gone by. Each day I am grateful for their teaching by example.

This past winter (I am going to go ahead and call it “this past winter”) was probably the toughest I have ever gone through in terms of surviving whatever nature dished out with whatever resources were at hand. It was not, by any means, the worst winter ever in terms of degree of cold or inches of snow but it was the toughest in terms of our lack of resources to meet the challenge. For me with a very low functioning thyroid that pitches me towards vulnerability to cold and a perhaps over functioning sense of responsibility about keeping family and livestock well fed, scarce resources with regards to heating oil, food and hay made me feel kind of desperate off and on all winter long. The constant cold both inside and outside wore me down. The constant concern about where and how we would get our next installment of hay wore me down. Winter became what it truly is - a time of testing, endurance, survival. It became a time of looking within to search out the most fundamental levels of energy, strength and faith in order to not only survive the season but to yield to it and draw from it what it had to give.

The warm temperatures, the greening grass, the wildly yellow daffodils are not just the harbingers of “oh, lovely spring” to me this year. No, this year spring is a fall-on-your knees-and-kiss-the-earth experience with a “Thank you, God, for renewing life both this spring on this patch of earth and eternally within the hearts of all people.” As long as we yield to the natural rhythms by paying close attention to them both outside of ourselves in the natural world and within in the spiritual world, spring will come eventually and it is a profound event. It is hard to appreciate the profundity of spring at this time in human history in which we have used wealth and technology to distance ourselves, indeed insulate ourselves, against the rigors of a natural life. So much is lost with this fussy, resource gobbling insulation.

Henry David Thoreau certainly did not insulate himself from the rigors of a natural life. Rather he plunged into them with a fullness that was uncharacteristic of his time, place and station in life. Several years ago, scholar David Robinson wrote Natural Life: Thoreau’s Worldly Transcendentalism to great reviews. Just reading the reviews of this book bolsters my strength and perspective.

To live the natural life meant two things to Thoreau: to study nature by observing and recording natural phenomena in the life around him, and to bring his life into a harmonious accord with all the movements, patterns, and events of nature.

Imagine what human society and the state of the earth would be like today if all lived in this way, with this fervor, with spirituality as the focus, with yielding to nature as a means.

As a professional keeper of a nature journal, it is reassuring to revisit Thoreau’s thoughts on how he used his journals as ‘a calendar of the ebbs and flows of the soul.’ Thoreau’s work speaks across centuries, reminding us that, in Robinson’s words, ‘our continuing kinship with nature will support and enrich our public lives. Such a relationship with nature has been, throughout human history, the source of poetry, wisdom, and moral prophecy.

I have this book on my (extensive!) Amazon wish list and hope I can get it soon. I look forward to reading it and finding companionship with someone else so focused on living a natural life in its deepest sense. I look forward to gaining a deeper appreciation for Charlotte Mason’s insistence upon nature studies for children. There is much more to it, I think, than just preparing their beings for close academic work and a comfortable appreciation for Divine creativity. In the first pages of Chapter One, Robinson notes that a comment Thoreau made about being able to withstand any rigors a New England winter could dish out went

beyond any usual concerns about seasonal conveniences and comforts. We can detect the barest of outlines for what would eventually develop into an arduous spiritual discipline in which seasonal change and other cycles and events of nature became signs and patterns for his own acts and attitudes, a spiritual language that required the most careful and attentive study. This particular Sunday, Thoreau saw the promise of a renewal of life, in which he would be both an enthralled spectator and a committed participant.

I look forward to reviewing what we are doing here on Natural Path Farm and in The Lionsgate School in light of Thoreau’s thoughts and experiences as pondered in Robinson’s book. I have no doubt they will weave together beautifully with the other approaches to living a natural life we embrace here, i.e. Sahaj Marg, a Charlotte Mason approach to education, organic homesteading and so on. The last time I read Walden, I was deep into spiritual life but was living in a city and dreaming about homesteading and homeschooling. It will be a treat to revisit this old friend, Henry David Thoreau, through reading Natural Life: Thoreau’s Worldly Transcendentalism since making such drastic changes towards the satisfactions, challenges and rhythm of a more natural life.

This revisiting, in and of itself, will be like a change of season. Natural rhythms generally have a way of touching on the past while moving towards the future. This revisiting will be like that. I welcome sinking more deeply, nay rising more highly, into a natural life with the guidance of the many who have gone before with so much insight, dedication and inspiration.

When I go outside this morning to admire once again my beautiful heirloom daffodils and look over at the cows who can now graze contentedly on intensely green spring grass, I will imagine many others including Henry David Thoreau and Charlotte Mason and the spiritual Masters all there beside me rejoicing equally at the new opportunity for real life this vibrant, new spring so graciously offers us. May we all loosen our bent over winter postures into the openness of a frolicking spring.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

Mid-morning yesterday while I was up to my elbows in teaching math to three different children at three different levels at the same time, my husband got busy in the kitchen scrounging up something for all of us for lunch. He is very good at putting together whatever he can find and making a good lunch out of it. At some point, I vaguely noticed that he was in the kitchen making a batch of mozzarella cheese.

We make our mozzarella cheese more or less following Ricki Carroll’s instructions in her must have book Home Cheesemaking - Recipes for 75 Homemade Cheeses. The directions in her book are generally the same as the ones on her web site with the bonus on her web page of there being photos included. (I am only linking to the directions for “30 Minute Mozzarella without using a Microwave” because microwaves are bad, bad, bad!) We have made so much of this quick type of mozzarella over the last couple of years that we can do it almost automatically.

So my husband made up a batch of mozzarella cheese and added basil to it. Then he pulled out the leftover pasta sauce from the night before, sliced the bread in the bread basket, fired up the oven and made us some delicious “toast pizzas”, I guess you could call them.

The reason I mention all of this is that we were scrounging. There didn’t seem to be much to eat in the house and we can’t go shopping for a while yet. When we all sat down to eat, I looked at what was on the plate and laughed. What were we eating?

Organic sourdough bread that had risen twice for 12 and 4 hours respectively;

Flavorful homemade pasta sauce;

and fresh mozzarella made from unprocessed, grass-fed milk and flavored with sea salt and organic basil.

In this day and age, such tasty and nutrient dense food is hard to come by and expensive when you find it. But for us on the old homestead, this was what we came up with by scrounging! There surely are some benefits to living like this…

By the way, I recommend trying your hand at making this quick type of mozzarella. It is easy, satisfying and delicious and a great way to introduce yourself to cheesemaking. Go to Ricki’s web page to learn more or better yet, get yourself a copy of Home Cheesemaking.

Bon appetit from the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

Why do I love reading about “old pathways” and past ways of living? I am drawn to the descriptions of lives lived closer to each other and to the land. I am drawn to the hints of useful everyday knowledge of yore now almost entirely lost to us. I appreciate the ingenuity, the self-sufficiency, the common sense, the patience and the contentment I often find in certain kinds of readings from the past. I also just really enjoy learning about other ways of life whether that be from the past or from a radically different culture right here in the present.

I stumbled across A Childhood Reminiscence by Anne Knight in my web travels. With just a few paragraphs and photographs, the feeling of an entirely different way of living is evoked. Imagine this as a way to tell time every evening:

In the evenings he would drive them back to the farm to be milked. The cows plodding along at their own pace, taking their time, and pushing their horns through the hedge in our front garden and munching at the dandelions as they passed. Turning patiently into the farmyard, each one went to its own stall to be milked by hand, patiently waiting their turn.

Imagine receiving your fresh, unprocessed milk this way:

Each day Mr. Mansell, his flat cap at a jaunty angle, would deliver the milk. He rode on a horse and cart, a type of open cart with milk churns at the back. The horse needed no instructions, he stopped and started at all the customer’s houses and Mr. Mansell dispensed the milk from the churns. He would dip in the measure and bring it out of the milk, frothy and creamy, and pour it into the largest jug we had. Milk was rationed, but he always filled our jug and milk was one thing we were never without.

Imagine having bread, fish, groceries and all sorts of other necessities (including “stone bottles of lemonade and dandelion & burdock”) delivered to your house. Imagine knowing the person who grows the food and delivers it to you. Imagine sharing simple vegetables with your neighbors along with seasonal chores. There are so many things to imagine.

Nathan Griffin, author of one of my favorite homesteading books Husbandry - The Sure, Cheap Way to Plenty & Prosperity in the Country, started early in his homesteading career reading old books:

I neglected to mention that my antiquarian-bookselling friend handled mainly religious books, but he also specialized in old agricultural books. In the year I worked for him I read, borrowed, and bought dozens of books. I learned a great deal, things which made life easier in the days before America became petroleum-based. Finding much scientific lore too, I began experimenting with low-cost ways of making a good living with less money, less labor. Little by little, our tiny farm began taking shape. p. 8

One of the ways that I think investigating the old pathways readies us for even a startlingly new future is that it disengages us from modern, conventional mindsets. We become vividly aware that there are other ways of living and that industrialization, rampant materialism, loss of tight family and community bonds and ties with the land, pretend food, too much choice of goods and services as well as a host of other modernities represent a loss. By disengaging from the present ways of doing things, we can think in refreshing ways about how to solve our problems of life. We can rethink what our goals actually are and ply a new course towards them.

Unhooking from present day helplessness by engaging in past modes of self-sufficiency can build the skill sets, knowledge bases, thought force, and inner qualities of intuition, confidence, courage and faith that will be absolutely critical to participating in a radically different future.

So I would say, “Yes, following old pathways is one of the first steps we need to take towards a new future.” The old ways aren’t necessarily an end in and of themselves. However following at least some of them can be a lever that moves us towards a more natural life and a wedge that opens our mind to possibilities beyond what we see in front of us. When we habitually come from the perspective that what is preached by society at this time is not “truth” or “the only way” or even “reality”, then we will have taken a giant step towards becoming more open to the new ways Nature is already mapping out for us.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie