I can only venture guesses on the white crystals that show up in my water; I can only hope the filtering tank on the counter takes care of whatever is wrong with it. I can only hope no corporations are overdoing it on the daily dump of poisons they unload into the water table. I mean, aside from the stuff that's a part of the rain, by now.

Politicians pretend we have forever. Sometimes you and I do, too. We talk and vote and live as if we have unlimited space, unlimited time, and unlimited resources. Deceptive discussions on parts per millions clouds our thinking. Acid leaks down from our Better Mousetrap and nourishes convoluted camoflaging conversations on what "natural" or "organic" or "pure" means while shortcutting companies rush grains of harm into our food. Rubber and plastic has its DNA-tainting fingers deep in even our most delicate pies; insecticides, preservatives, genetically modified food, toxins, and magnetic fields sweep their neon-blue fingers over and through your aura, adding to it, rearranging it. Playing fingerpaints with your destiny.

One day you may come down with cancer and wonder where it came from. There'll be no way to know, exactly. Maybe it was your childhood vaccines. The fluoride in the water. The shit they stabbed into your veins. Maybe it was the factory dumping junk into a nearby river, or the government burying radioactive waste nearby, the shit we stab down into the Earth. Maybe it was the cathode rays every single day. Or the tanning bed you thought was a good idea for three winters straight...or the supplements you ordered, or the steroids, the myriad food additives, that fake banana taste, the Diet in your Coke—the shit we stab into our own selves. Maybe it was all those power lines overhead. Maybe it was the ozone layer wearing away from so many bombardments of man-made chemicals. Your cell phone. The Prozac. The Nutra-sweet. The alum-suffernoxilate, or polyethylene glycol, or whatever the hell else holds your deodorant in one piece, seeps into your after-shower, steam-opened pores. Those eighty-letter words in your list of ingredients you can't even pronounce. It's anybody's guess. We ignore potential harm faster than it comes at us. We never tire of inventing reasons and justifications for additional compromises of our health.

We're funny creatures, aren't we? We often drink things on trust, pay for things on trust, eat things on trust; swallow things on trust that we know is not earned. What little the average person does know about regulatory safety boards, country, government, animal slaughter, feeding, crop collection, workplace conditions, food handling, food additives, substitutes, preservatives, sprays, and profit-influenced decision-making should steer us far, far away from the mainstream food outlets, and toward alternate models! Like more of us growing more of our own food instead of relying on a massive chain of others to do it all for us. I know on a small scale it works well...and that the rest was good intention, but I really think that we went astray somewhere back there. Somewhere between "make it a little easier," "have more of what I went when I want," and "do no work at all."

I walk down the street here and note all the hoses on. All the sprinklers. All the people dumping tons of water and electricity into feeding their grass, into getting their lawn that perfect shade of Mister Jones Green. And then I think of what we grew from our garden this year. And wonder why I don't see a garden in every single yard. Think of how much healthier the food would be in the refrigerators in this nayb. Think of that many less trips on the road, that many less gallons of gas vaporized. Think of that all over. A little farming, a little canning, a little planning. You and Mother Nature, working hand in hand. And no middleman. You don't need to wonder for a moment what caressed your food, what mists settled down upon it, what "nutrients" flooded its tissues before it reached you.

Granted, a few yards around here actually do grow gardens, and that's very good to see. But for the most part, it seems we are completely disconnected from our food. How it got here, how it was raised, if it is any good for us.

I've spent a lot of time in my life, thinking about food. I was raised vegetarian. I didn't start eating things like "Pork Chops" until I was about 17. I had no idea what they were. I was not allowed candy, and we did not have sugar in our house. Sure, I rebelled for a handful of years when I got out on my own (16). And I wasn't happy about that diet when I was younger! I hated (and I mean hated) the endless dosings of lentil soup, tofu, brown rice, lentil loaf, barley soup, broccolli, lentil burgers, tofu, brussell sprouts, and lentils. Today, though, I am very grateful for those years of non-polluted foods. That was a gift I cannot imagine paying back. That is my mind, my hands, my bones, my feeling, my lungs. That health I was given was a room stuffed full of other gifts. This is only one of the things we owe the children of tomorrow. A healthy body while they make their way to a mind that can think clearly about how to treat itself and the rest of the world.

When a meal consists of simple elements you have put together yourself, every swallow has a meaning. It's not hard to make the connections between what you are eating, and Nature and human society in general. There was corn growing, people harvested it and ground, packed and sold the grain, and now you eat it. There was a carrot, you pulled it from the ground and now you eat it. The sun radiated energy that flowed through space, bathed the Earth, the corn and carrot used that sunlight energy to convert air, water and nutrients into substance, and now you eat that substance. One eats with feet flat on the ground, in a knowing communion with the Universe's broad patterns."

—Natchez Naturalist Newsletter, November 10, 2002

Mass production has become like all the other child-servants of Capitalism, a cyclone enamored of itself, forgetting its purpose and eating its own wake. Perhaps there should be a ceiling. Perhaps if you need machines or processes that cause harm in order to raise the level of production, you are going too fast. Or perhaps you need people to consume less...or move to a new area and grow their own food. I don't know. But I believe we do have an intuition that can be trusted. An intuition that could guide us in these decisions, decisions about when to forego "advancement" when it means the decay of a systems' integrity. Though Stephen Colbert has made a joke of ascribing intuition any relevance in the light of the Deciders' anti-analytic/anti-education/anti-hunger-for-information attitudes, I do not speak of the wracked and mutated "gut" sense of a dry-drunk, pill-popping, violence-hungry sociopath like General Danger Bush, a man who was already in his earliest years a victim of our national greed-eroded and poisoned moral sense; a recipient of everything money and power and the fruits of capitalism could buy and thus separated from a life that could nurture his true sensitivities; I speak of an intuition we are born with, something that might thrive, were we not to wear it down with an endless procession of days filled with denial, distraction, comfort, intellectualization, self-loathing and haste. It is that sense of communion we feel with nature around us when we choose to. Surrounded by deep forest, or earth to dig, or fruit to harvest, or a still lake, or a tender plant.

But I am sure I give too much credit. Sadly, I know for a fact that some humans can walk by a still lake and think nothing of throwing trash in it. Some can see a fragile shoot of a new tree, and want nothing more than to crush it. Some of us can ignore a moan of pain, or the soothing power of a warm wind moving over tall grass, or the thought that the creature on our plate died a horrible and lonely death with no respect and no reverence. We are many types of humans, here. I suppose I have no answer for the People. The People could quibble endlessly. They could argue for their own harm until there was nothing left but a pockmarked parade of brittling jawbones clacking away in the nuclear dusk. Perhaps I only have these answers for myself.

For a time, I lived in the country. In a rural, mountainous region in Upstate New York. We were the caretakers for a family. In this time we lived on 89 acres of land. It was a lot of streams, fields, woods, and some small foothilly mountain type of land. It was beautiful. I would often walk the length of the property, along the road, and be dismayed to see trash left by people who had hunted or camped without permission. It was the first time I can remember my family ever "having land" of any sort. I felt responsible for it. I would fill my hands with the dirty diapers, broken bottles, cans full of cigarette butts. Carry them home. I was constantly drawing a blank. Baffled and angry. I could not understand how people could throw garbage into nature, so very blatantly. And this was before I even knew that my own father's young life was made of farming, and living off the land. Helping it grow.

This summer, the garden was small, but it still bore us much fruit. I am actually amazed at how much food you can make with a small amount of seeds and care. Sweet, pure, bursting with flavor food. Not food dulled by ten trucks that traveled over twenty states while soaking in clouds of exhaust. Not food made flavorless with preservatives and artificially-extended lifespans. Food as it is meant to come to us. From the earth, pure, real, immediate. Full of sunshine, water, flavor, and love.

There were large tomatos and small tomatos. There was squash. Even small watermelon. A handful of huckleberries. I tilled two larger gardens by hand, but in our post-moving schedule, we didn't get those planted in time. So those ones will be our winter gardens.

We went to a local farm, yesterday. Bought some fresh jalapenos. Some fresh apple juice, some homemade hot sauce. Man, the sweetness of that apple juice! It's so alive you want to cry with a mouthful of it. And the chile peppers were so hot everyone in the house was coughing when we fried some up on the stove.

At the farm, we took Lunita to the pumpkin patch, so she could pick out a pumpkin. She was too small to do much more than hug it like a tiny planet, so we let her do that.