Employ Nature. It Works for Free.

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That’s what permaculture does. It eliminates the unnecessary jobs we create for ourselves and gives it back to nature.

Take for example the nuisance of the squirrel. It’s a menace to many nut farmers since they have a habit to collect hard shelled seeds to store for the winter. In many cases the lil guys just hoard more than what they’ll need. At Triple Brook Farm, Steve Bryer developed an ingenious solution.

Squirrels would place his hazelnuts to store in a hollow tree trunk. Instead of harvesting himself, he would go to the hollow trunk and exchange the nuts with sweet corn. As time developed and the squirrels adapted to a better salary, a mutual exchange was developed. Steve gets the best nuts harvested by the squirrels and the squirrels get a better food crop in exchange.

We can employ the same strategies for everything and anything as long as it is mutually beneficial to all parties involved.

Repackaging

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That’s all gardening is, and that’s all people ever do in life.

Take communication as an example. We take our ideas, find the words to sing it to another, and it comes out in a flurry of sound waves that hit our ears. The other person interprets the waves, gathers their thoughts and sends a verbal package in return.

In my opinion, the ultimate form of repackaging is Gardening. Manure (poo, crap, shit) is taken and transformed into a tasty morsel of leafy greens, delicious fruits, or a vibrant display of flowers. In time, the repugnant idea of crap is alchemized into the desired state of good food and well being.

In many ways, gardening is also the ultimate form of forgiveness. Gardeners take the filth of the world and return it in a better state than it was once in. There’s no harsh emotions or feelings. Gardeners willingly take the fermenting pot of vegetables and the stink pile of poo to enrich the soil. It’s a remarkable trait and one that I believe everyone can benefit from.

So. . there are an infinite number of possibilities out there.
Find your passion and Repackage it.

Breaking Boxes

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People find every little reason to box your ideas in. I assume it’s done with the positive intention to inform; however, it most often has the criticism with no constructive value to it. It’s simply there to bog you down.

You have to consider these rules and regulations before doing anything. That’s going to take a lot of money and time. There’s no money in that. and so on. .

This phenomenon of criticizing starts at an early age of a child when parents and teachers are telling us, “NO!,” without explaining why not. From there, it snow balls into an idea that we cannot do anything without someone holding our hands.

My suggestion is to unlearn the idea of “NO,” break down the mental boxes and go for it. We have all the resources and knowledge available to us at our figure types. The only reason you need to move forward is if you love it. You don’t need another reason why.

Don’t Be Afraid to:

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Try

The saying usually goes Trial and Error but if you don’t even try you’ve already failed.
I hear so many people talk about great ideas and dreams to manifest into reality. The sad truth is the mental blocks that prevent that from happening. I’m not sure if it’s a fear of lost or failure, but the common factor is fear.

The realities of a dream are worth infinitely more than a lifetime of failures and they are definitely worth infinitely more than we can perceive. Fear of trying always leads to failure. So why not fail a little bit more?

Everybody needs to fail a little bit more by trying. .

Self-Reflection: Face Yourself

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Do it! As soon as you can.

Here’s the rundown. When we are working on our passions and life legacy, it’s hard to see through our own eyes the areas we really need to work on. It’s easy to see the successes. It’s easy to report our wins and ignore the losses.

The shortcomings and challenges we face hit our blind sides or they blur out around our peripheral vision. It’s hard to face the mountain we have to climb. It’s difficult to face up to the reality of a huge portion of ourself, the failures. Many times, we don’t see what’s happening and it continues to happen because of unconscious ignorance.

The cure to unconscious ignorance? Mindful observation, self-reflection, documentation. I’ve been working as a part time educator and a part time gardener. I reflect everyday on what’s going well and what needs work in the garden. As a teacher, it’s difficult to see myself, what I’m saying and doing in the classroom. I get feedback from other teachers, but it’s difficult to get the reality of what’s going on. To change the paradigm of ignorance, my co-worker and I are going to video our lessons, reflect on what we’re doing well, and find potential solutions to our shortcomings, continually challenging us to become better educators.

It won’t be easy at first, it’ll most likely be humiliating, but that’s what makes it fun. In time, we’ll make great strides through many laughable moments and failures, warriors in the field of education and cultivating yourself.

Learn, Re-learn, Unlearn

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Creating the person you want to be requires a set of skills or learning, relearning and unlearning. Nobody has all of the answers so we seek out ways to find solutions to the problems we face, learning what the world has to offer. As time progresses, we find that we can improve on the model through mindful observation and relearning the finer details of what we’re pursuing. Inevitably, a new model finds its way into the mix and requires a new way of seeing the world and unlearning it all to learn and relearn everything all over again.

The scribe is the perfect example. Knowledge and information was isolated to a singular group of people who could afford books and have the luxury to learn how to read and or write. In time, the Gutenberg press changed that paradigm, then the telephone, and the telegraph, radio, television, and today the world wide web. Scribes are everyone on facebook, their blog, tweeting, and participating in this grand sharing of information that was once a selective luxury.

The choice now is whether you put what you’re learning to good use, relearning it all to make it better, and unlearning antiquated ideas and methods to create new paradigms.

Honor Based Commerce

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It has been a re-occurring theme that has popped up here and there. Here’s a rant on honor based commerce.

The Bagel Stand
As you walk through the door to walk, a bagel stand is sitting idly by itself. No person around or in sight. The aroma of bagels saturates the area permeating soft chewy goodness to your senses. The only sheet to communicate to you is a small kiosk that asks for whatever you can give in return for a bagel with a variety of cream cheeses. Normally, people would go to a stand, pick what they want and pay someone to do those things for them. Instead of doing the simple easy task of cutting bread and spreading cream cheese, people can do it themselves, get it at work, and pay what they feel that it is worth. Yes, it works on an honor based system, but you would be surprised. People tend to be more honest than we believe.

The Bagel Man
Paul F. quit his job, got the approval of his family and set on a venture to sell bagels through an honor based commerce system. He setup bagel stands under the simple agreement of bringing fresh bagels each morning with a cash box and would later return midday to pick up the extra bagels with the money. It turned into an interesting project that measured the honesty of his customers. The least honest payers leaned towards administration who would leave nothing behind but an empty bagel basket, no cash. Read more about it here.

Last Thoughts
Communities require similar needs as a whole. The transactions and means to make those trades possible with our fellow neighbors is open to many possibilities relying on the simple idea of trust. Other examples are barter, donation based services, and time banks. That’s all for now. For now, I’m going to try the honor system out and see how it works.

End Planning First

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the-road-to-beauty-clouds-destination-grass-640x480

or begin in the middle (en media res). It really depends on the story you’re creating for yourself, but they both work well to get you to your desired destination. Here’s a few reasons and steps to plan your life starting at the end.

The Unknown Conclusion of Beginnings
Starting from the beginning in any endeavor is a difficult task. There is no sense of direction taking your journey anywhere. This could be a desired to discover a new potential, find another path, or to recognize new tools. However, without a clear idea in mind getting to a desired state is often lost looking at your next step instead of seeing the paths in front of you. Rather than start without a destination in mind, figure out where you want to go. Then take a step.

imagesStarting at the End
Planning a food forest, a garden, or a meal starts with the end product in mind. We create the image of the ideal before we begin to create. For processes we are familiar with, we go through the motions without much conscious thought. To achieve great feats, such as terraforming a landscape, a logical plan helps to outline goals before the desired outcome. A thoughtful way to approach the task of planning is to go through the processes of dissection, selection, sequencing, and stakes once the end goal is in sight.

DiSSS
Use the acronym to help you acquire those four steps, Dissection, Selection, Sequencing, and Stakes. I learned it reading The Four Hour Chef by Tim Ferris. I highly recommend it. His life is surrounded in meta-learning, creating conscious methods to put information into action while becoming the best at it (top 5% in any discipline, cooking, running, etc). Onward!

Dissection is taking apart the product you wish to create. It’s finding out what are the lego pieces to the puzzle you are about to build. To build a garden, the main components can be taken apart into Time, Soil and Plants.

Selection is picking the pieces that are the most important. Most of the time, we focus on detailed information that doesn’t bring us to any outcome. It starts with discussion and ends with murmurs of words once spoken instead of actions gaining momentum. In the art of gardening, Timing is crucial to determine what process you should be working on first as well as when and what plants to be planting during that time of year. Planting watermelons in Winter got Farmer Chow bad results while learning an important lesson of the seasons. Soil is the shelter and home of plants. It provides everything the plant needs to survive and thrive. Finally, the plants are a product of good timing and great living soil.

From here, we can Sequence our timing to build soil during off seasons and plant appropriately during the growing seasons. Setting up this path will ensure decent results and as long as we continue on the journey of learning and gardening, we can expect better production and quality as the soil continues to be built and our timing is synched with nature.

Stakes. This is the kicker. It gets you to get started whether you succeed, fail, or go nowhere. Placing a bet with a family member, getting feedback from friends, donating to a charity you hate or dislike, it needs to get you motivated to try. When something is at stake, it motivates us to work and succeed at keeping it.

From here, the journey is yours to create. Get lost while you’re at it and find your way back to the legacy you want to leave behind.

“ Would you tell me please which way I go from here?”
“ That depends on where you want to get to”, said the Cat.
“ I don’t much care where…”, said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go”, said the Cat.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Brown Thumbs > Green Thumbs

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The successful gardener is often related to the green thumb, a person who can grow anything. The brown thumb is associated with a person who is best at killing things. The color brown depicts the idea of death and decay. The idea of a green thumb is crap. Every great gardener starts out with the brown. Here’s why.

Survival Thinking
A person can survive approximately 3 minutes without air, 3 hours in a harsh environment without proper shelter (the exception is in freezing water), 3 days without water, and 3 weeks without food. This is the Rule of 3’s in Survival Training.

These Rules are worth knowing because they relate to animals and plants. How? Soil and climate are the shelter of plants.

Soil and Climate
Plants don’t get the luxury of having mobility. A proper shelter though can be created by having the right soil conditions and the appropriate season to plant them. Seasons come in time and you can find planting information from your local agricultural extension, use it and find the planting info for DFW here. Soil is a different story.

Living soil comes with a right combo of clay, silt and sand. However, the most important feature is not in the soil chemistry, but the biology. The life in the soil is a much more complex aspect to grasp and it’s the most essential. In one teaspoon of rich soil is a combo of more than a billion different types of organisms swarming, feasting, having sex and dying all at the same time. With all this activity, nutrients are being exchanged, created, absorbed, and recycled. At the same time, various microbes find shelter around plant roots and create a beneficial relationship with plants known as mutualistic symbiosis. Mutualism is beneficial to both organisms and as a side note not all symbiosis is good.

What does the bacteria get? It gets shelter and essential starches made by the plant. The plant in exchange obtains all the nutrients that the bacteria and soil life are crapping or in some cases regurgitating. Life is beautiful.

Brown to Green Thumb
With all of that said, I’m going to stop on the soil life rant. It’s vital and key to successful gardening. If you’re going to start growing things, grow your soil first and then proceed to planting. Cheers to all of you brown thumbs.

Slow and Small Solutions in a Fast Paced World

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One Week in Chow’s Life

It’s Monday morning, and there are plenty of things to accomplish during the week at work. Mulch needs to be spread, lessons need to be prepared, materials arranged for the lessons, plants watered, meetings to attend, and everything else that pops up in life. It’s becomes easy to get stressed and overwhelmed just thinking of the daunting tasks in one single day.

On the other side of the coin, big dreams and ambitions are lofty and somehow seem more attainable than all the small things that occur in the daily and weekly commotion. Leaving a suburban area to live on a farm out in the middle of no where, building community living centers, creating large aquaponics systems, and growing a food forest overnight.

The problem for me arises when the big dream is automatically pursued without conscientiously thinking about the tasks and steps to reach it. It’s the drive for the instant gratification of reaching the goal and the ignorance that makes it attractive. In a short amount of time, all of the small tasks begin to accumulate and overwhelm me and burn out my passion, energy, and time.

The issue percolates to other realms in society and not just in my own life. The pattern is emergent within teaching, parenting, and in all people who desire to live a better life and in a better world. The truth then lies in the details that connect these disciplines together.

Non-Cognitive Skills
It was about a month ago that I heard the episode of This American Life on Back to School. The episode focused on the concepts and ideas that should be taught in school and at home to ensure future success. The show begins with an economist, James Heckman, who took the task of looking at GED and high school graduates. The initial drive was from the idea that people who obtained a GED saved enormous amounts of time, energy and money.

Heckman began to question though whether the GED graduates were as successful in life as the high school graduates. In a long term study across the board, high school graduates had better paying jobs, were married for longer periods of time, had less divorces, were better in the military, and the GEDs virtually dropped out of everything they started.

This raises the next question, what is it that divides GED students from high school graduates. The test the GED graduates take is supposed to challenge people on the same level as people in high school. The answer is a very elusive one, non-cognitive skills. Heckman defines it as character, social skills, conduct, and skills that are empiracly difficult to measure.

The study continues for another 10 years, and the economist begin to isolate the non-cognitive skills that are the most significant. One that was found to be highly significant is self-control. In the late 1960s, a group of scientist observed children resisting the urge to eat a sweet treat in the present moment, enter the marshmallow test. The child would be sitting down and offered a cookie if they ringed a small bell on a table; however, if they waited 10 minutes to ring the bell, they would receive two cookies. It was literal torture for these children to wait, to delay satisfaction. In the long term though, the scientists tracked these peoples’ lives and continued to study how they would respond to temptations and life, and discovered more than what they intended. The children who were able to resist eating the sweet treat for longer periods of time succeeded far beyond others in stressful situations, maintaining friendships, and simply paying attention.

As an adult now, the significance of learning this one tool is astronomical. As the years go on, the responsibility becomes larger. We are responsible for children learning self-control, are dealt a bigger role in society with access to tools, knowledge, and the future of this planet, and yet many of us have not mastered or even thought about the idea of mastering ourselves.

The trick is to make self-control a habit.

“Keep Your Goals to Yourself”
We’ll move away from self-control for a moment and move our attention to goals in general. Every new year, people create new years resolutions and strive to accomplish that task. The problem arises when people taut about their resolutions and share it with everyone that they talk to. In the end, they feel great from sharing and letting people know while getting positive feedback from their peers.

The issue arises in the mind. Derek Sivers delivers a great TED talk on the issue of keeping your goals to yourself. By saying and sharing, we trick the mind into thinking the task has been accomplished by substituting the real genuine gratification of doing with one that is replaced by talking. Sivers concludes that we should keep those goals to ourselves or if we are tempted to say it we beat ourselves up with the harsh reality of what it’s going to take to complete it so we get no satisfaction from it.

A Few Tools
Overall, there is a reoccurring pattern in the realm of success and conquering dreams, delaying immediate results through self-regulation and control.

Changing behaviors though can require extra work, energy, and time to create a dedicated effort in manifesting a healthy feedback loop of successful results. There is no one singular method in creating new habits. However, the ones that have stayed with me the longest are slowing down, observing, meditating, and writing.

Slowing down is essential to realize of how much time is available to create our dreams. Rushing to solutions or conclusions often results in more work later on. It’s best to give things some thought beforehand. This vital step is crucial for those that follow.

Observations clue us into whether we are headed in the correct direction on the right assumptions. In a fast paced world, this process is easily blurred from an incorrect realization. For example, those who switch from conventional farming to organic may see horrendous results in the first year and come to a conclusion that organic is worse than using chemical pesticides. Coupled with slowing down, the observation may be deduced to a depletion of soil fertility and erosion.

Meditation for me is a method to clear the mind of the ambient noise and clutter from the day. It’s a moment that allows the mind to guide your thoughts, actions, and words.

Finally, writing, drawing, or blogging catalogs your new habits and ideas into a new reality. It tracks the slow progress and shows the mountain that is about to be conquered with hard work and dedication. One my favorite sermons was at Creation Flame, the Church of Awesome which was based on the epic journey. It’s not meant to be easy. Every huge feat that was accomplished was done with strife, hardships, and in the end a sense of accomplishment.

In fewer words, without the journey the end is meaningless.
Live with passion.