Body Building

A blogger on 2013.net re-posted this, calling it, "a nice study of the wonderful relationship between food, foodcells, vegetables and our body and body cells. One of these messages going 'wild' on the internet..." I like it.

Clues

A sliced Carrot looks like the human eye. The pupil, iris and radiating lines look just like the human eye... and yes, science now shows that carrots greatly enhance blood flow to and function of the eyes.

A Tomato has four chambers and is red. The heart is red and has four chambers. All of the research shows tomatoes are indeed pure heart and blood food.

Grapes hang in a cluster that has the shape of the heart. Each grape looks like a blood cell and all of the research today shows that grapes are also profound heart and blood vitalizing food.

A Walnut looks like a little brain, a left and right hemisphere, upper cerebrums and lower cerebellums. Even the wrinkles or folds are on the nut just like the neo-cortex. We now know that walnuts help develop over 3 dozen neuron-transmitters for brain function.

Kidney Beans actually heal and help maintain kidney function and yes, they look exactly like the human kidneys.

Celery, Bok Choy, Rhubarb and more look just like bones. These foods specifically target bone strength. Bones are 23% sodium and these foods are 23% sodium. If you don't have enough sodium in your diet the body pulls it from the bones, making them weak. These foods replenish the skeletal needs of the body.

Eggplant, Avocadoes and Pears target the health and function of the womb and cervix of the female - they! look just like these organs. Today's research shows that when a woman eats 1 avocado a week, it balances hormones, sheds unwanted birth weight and prevents cervical cancers.

And how profound is this? ....It takes exactly 9 months to grow an avocado from blossom to ripened fruit. There are over 14,000 photolytic chemical constituents of nutrition in each one of these foods (modern science has only studied and named about 141 of them).

Figs are full of seeds and hang in twos when they grow. Figs increase the motility of male sperm and increase the numbers of sperm, as well as to overcome male sterility.

Sweet Potatoes look like the pancreas and actually balance the glycemic index of diabetics.

Olives assist the health and function of the ovaries

Grapefruits, Oranges, and other Citrus fruits look just like the mammary glands of the female and actually assist the health of the breasts and the movement of lymph in and out of the breasts.

Onions look like the body's cells. Today's research shows that onions help clear waste materials from all of the body cells. They even produce tears which wash the epithelial layers of the eyes.

Baghdad Fun Park

Sagittarius Horoscope for week of May 22, 2008

During America's first war on Iraq in 1991, I prophesied that one day there'd be a Disneyland in Baghdad. It was a surrealistically sardonic send-up of my native country's imperialism. But now, 17 years later, my absurd prediction is coming true. The same American company that designed the original Disneyland has announced plans to build the Baghdad Zoo and Entertainment Experience. If workers survive bombing, looting, and sniper fire, the first part of the 50-acre amusement park will open this year. While I question whether building a monument to fun is a good idea in an actual war zone, it's an

excellent metaphor for you to apply to your personal life. Even if you can't extinguish a certain conflict that has been raging, try to introduce a spirit of play into the proceedings.--Rob Brezsny's Free Will Astrology

Surprisingly I can see the possible point of this undertaking. If anyone needs to just have fun, its gotta be the people in Baghdad, and other war zones world wide. What a plan!

Bringing the advise home is timely. I mentioned here earlier that my oncologist and a day later another healer both advised fun. His words, while giving me a two month conditional break from chemotherapy were, "Give you a chance to have some fun." The other advisor, a Matrix Energetics practitioner, Barbara Joy West, bowing to my past lives of traumatic social and political involvement, informed me that's all over and I need to bring sweetness into my life, have more fun. Be joyful.

It keeps coming up. What a sober sides I am. Not at all like the grinning mischievous child I remember. I feel a twinkle in my eye though, I suspect all is not lost. Take me to the circus!

Vegetables

Are discipline and asceticism the hallmarks of a necessary, life saving, change in my dietary habits? [Just try a raw foods diet for a while!] Contrast the comfort level of that cold asceticism, with childhood memories of being nurtured by mother's goulash, her tuna casserole, homemade bread and cinnamon rolls, potato salad, pancakes with butter and syrup, frosted cakes, apple brown betty, bread pudding. With the exception of a brief summer garden, our vegetables were canned and served in tiny side dishes.

My body mind demands that level of comfort. My healing program mandates learning to prepare healthy food. Not knowing how, I find my choices limited to carrot and celery sticks, blanched broccoli, baked potatoes. When I have had food prepared for me, or when I have eaten out, I've encountered truly delicious vegetables. Now I need to learn how to do that for myself, to save my life.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/health/nutrition/20well.html
In an article on how to prepare all the vegetables (for me 9 servings a day) we now know are optimal for our health and feeling good, there is a bit about fat served with vegetables. I remember my sons liking to eat salad. When I expressed delight at this, one of them quipped that it was simply an excuse to eat salad dressing. Not to worry then, this health writer reports that, "When the salsa or salad was served with fat-rich avocados or full-fat salad dressing, the diners absorbed as much as 4 times more lycopene, 7 times more lutein and 18 times the beta carotene than those who had their vegetables plain or with low-fat dressing. Fat can also improve the taste of vegetables, meaning that people will eat more of them."

After discussing the effects of various preparation methods--raw, steaming, boiling, pressure cooking, and even microwaving--the conclusion is that vegetables are best prepared in a variety of ways. "Boiling carrots, for instance, significantly increased measurable carotenoid levels, but resulted in the complete loss of polyphenols compared with raw carrots." So, some carrot sticks, and some cooked with the roast.

The image I'm after is not the ascetic:But the vibrant:

Change You Deserve

Best Belly Laugh Of The Day award!

“...their failed policies have messed up the world to such an inhuman extent that many Americans now live their daily lives in a state of free-floating panic and paralyzing anxiety.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/12/gops-new-slogan-already-b_n_101376.html
Jason Linkins writes in The Huffington Post:

"What the GOP doesn't seem to realize, because they are idiots, is that "the change you deserve" is the registered advertising slogan of Effexor XR, a drug that many of you might have started taking as a result of all the...you know -- terrorism. (Hat tip to Bluestem for catching this gem.)

Effexor, also known as Venlafaxine, is approved for the treatment "of depression, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, and panic disorder in adults." Its common side effects are very much in keeping with the world the House Republicans have striven to build: nausea, apathy, constipation, fatigue, vertigo, sexual dysfunction, sweating, memory loss, and - and I swear I am not making this up - "electric shock-like sensations also called 'brain zaps.'"

Its less common side effects are equally awesome in their appropriateness.

And when the Food And Drug Administration reviewed the ad copy that included the tagline, "The change you deserve," it took issue with Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, which manufactures Effexor, saying that the company made "unsubstantiated superiority claims." Sounds like the GOP have picked an ironically accurate tagline for their efforts!"

Special News Link: http://www.mindfreedom.org/

Saturday, yesterday, I was downtown at the Ken Kesey plaza to participate/play with my mind freedom, mad pride group of friends. You might catch a glimpse of me here, worshiping the giant pill. How funny, the proximity of these two stories!

Brave New Films

"Pay Attention"--Aldous Huxley

Whose Issues?

“We can’t let the Democrats take our issues. We can’t let them pretend to be conservatives and co-opt the middle and win these elections. We have to get the attention of our incumbents and candidates and make sure they understand this.” -- Robert M. Duncan, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, in a New York Times article published May 15, 2008.

But they are conservatives Mr. Duncan.

Have you seen the Political Compass? http://www.politicalcompass.org/usprimaries2008

and http://upword.blogspot.com/2006/11/left-or-right-liberal-and-conservative.html

All of our candidates with the exception of Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich on the Left and Mike Gravel on the Right fall in the Right leaning Authoritarian (North East) quadrant of the compass. Heroes like Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Ghandi, and the Dalai Lama, are solidly in the South West quadrant.

And anyway, “our issues”? Humanity has issues. This country has issues. We, the people, have issues. The ways the powerful have been addressing our issues has been disastrous to all but the very wealthiest, and now, the wrongdoing is beginning to catch up to the bottom ranks of the wealthy and powerful.

I never did believe in “trickle down”. Guess what guys! The problems of the poorest of the poor have been moving up as in a capillary tube affecting the ranks of humanity that have felt safely above things like homelessness and hunger, and loss of dignity. The blood stream of America is feeling the illness of our economic and environmental policies--policies that favor the corporation over Mother Earth. How long did the greedy extractors of resources think this could go on?

Its OK though. We got your back, people. It turns out that in this country at least we still have control of our own back yards. We can grow uncorrupted food and eat well. We can collect, store, and use clean water. We have the social freedom to gather together and share these skills. We can object and occasionally have an impact when our air is polluted and our children suffer from asthma. We are so much better off still than those whose homelands, gardens, water, and voice have been taken from them by our and other corrupt governments.

This good life however is going to begin more and more to engage the work of our own hands, the person to person networking, local economy, and community cooperation that we been leaving to “activists”. The rest of us are going to have to get involved, open our eyes and find out what's going on. Where will your food come from, where will your prescription medications come from, where will your clean water come from, where will you get medical care, when we can no longer do business as usual with trucking and shipping, and big corporate processing of everything that comes into our homes?

My granddaughter Deija posted this link on her blog. Its simply powerful. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-_LBXWMCAM

Real Danger

The I Ching, Book of Changes, answering my question about my own right action and right involvement with my community, gave me some good thoughtful advise about following my own true nature and enthusiasm, then, through changing lines, arrived at this rather ominous statement:

"The situation is one of real Danger, caused by and manifested in the affairs of man."

I have been unable to imagine how I personally could be in any real danger, the most dangerous activity I'm involved in on a daily basis is crossing the street to the mailbox.
"Hello-o" a friend of mine laughed when I told her this. She didn't have to elaborate, I had already been reading up about the invasive little process going on in my body and with the new information feeling rather sobered.

My reading and research are leading me to believe that I can not be as smugly confident of my survival as I have at times expressed. The disease that has manifested in my body has causes rooted deep in our common western lifestyle and in our management of our planet's resources.


We desire safety, shelter, comfort, and readily available food. Our standards for these necessities have risen to a level that makes mere supplying of our needs appear to be poverty. Real poverty results however not only in the absence of the things we need, but in the supplanting of good food and adequate shelter with fake look-a-likes, and in the manipulation of our need for safety to control our responses to the misappropriation of resources that we require for our survival and dignity.

That was a mouthful, and there's more of that rant where that came from. Essentially though, what I'm on about today is that if I'm going to overcome dangers through correct behavior my actions start right here in my kitchen. I've learned a lot about eating right, and I have recently gone off plan big time feeding my rampant want for sweets. To correct my response to that "hunger" I want to eat lots of good fresh organic safely produced food. Coupled with my consciousness about community action I have this to share:

Eat Here Now is an event happening in Eugene, Oregon, on Saturday May 17th. First Methodist Church, by the old library 6:30-9 Eugene Permaculture Guild event.
When you go to that site you'll find a calendar of related events. Show up and begin to help yourself to life saving food and planet saving knowledge.

We do live in a situation of real Danger. Correct behavior, acting with integrity and confidence overcomes these dangers within our own circle of influence and protects us. Besides it just feels good.

Feed Your Soul

Work Spaces

What why when and where of work holds a lifelong fascination for me. I've experienced work satisfaction, though not in a sustained way. To create that sustained satisfaction in productive daily activity would be a blessing, a sunshine in my life. I see others who seem to live in this state of grace, and many many more who clearly do not. Please send me your ideas on work. What is the most important work to be done today? Who's doing it? Can we help? Would it be fun?

Some more questions about work. Should it be work that is somehow 'true to one's nature'? Should it be work that one's community values enough to pay a living wage for? What if it is not both? Clearly work must be done that is just work, just cleaning up the mess, just maintaining the structure. What is the one most important quality or function of work?

Photo at left, by the way, is Gypsy Rose Lee, at work on her memoirs. I love it.

Sweetness

Two wise health and wellness persons have told me in the past two days to , "have fun"--"bring some sweetness into your life". Even my oncologist spoke of giving me a chance to "have some fun". That I've not yet thought how to do that speaks to the necessity of reminding me.
The world's a pretty serious place, the decisions to be made in our local and national elections are very serious, addressing wrongs done to other nations--including especially those within our borders, is very sobering.
Watching documentaries, even historical movie dramas, make me shudder, make me cry. I want to do something, but what? And how am I to do that while having fun? The realization that came to me the other day while glancing at the "devastation as usual" newspaper headlines might be a starting place. I wondered, "What would be printed here if we were all happy and at peace, tending our gardens and our homes, exchanging our labor and goods in a neighborly and humane way, raising out children, enjoying the earth?" I realized that there would be nothing printed there. We are accustomed to a steady diet of greed, conflict, disharmony, desperation...and the global and environmental results of those ways of life. A world without such headlines to print...try to imagine...the magnitude of change that would create such a world.
Do something? I'm being told to do something--something fun, something sweet, to bring joy into my life. OK. I'm open to it. For starters I baked a Cypress Point Carrot Cake for my son Arlo's birthday, the first one I've made in decades. This evening he and Marina and Deija will be here for supper. That's sweet. That will be fun.

Cinco de Mayo = Arlo's Birthday

Journey of Souls

My current circumstances--the life and death health challenge of "cancer"--prompted me to reflect on what I've been doing here on Earth. If I take my incarnation seriously, particularly if I regard it in the light of being one in a series of lives on Earth that I have considered and chosen during my time in "heaven" between lives, there arises a pathway of remembrances and unveiling's of, at least, who I have been in this lifetime. Also I see possibilities of some of the more obvious close connections I have had. Perhaps I'll go into that at a later time, for now I just enjoy the new understanding of some very wonderful things that my life has held.

When I first knew of this diagnosis I looked into myself for the answers to "why did I manifest this possible fatal disease in my body?" "Am I done with this life?" "Am I that tired of it, that frustrated?" "Have I failed darkly at fulfilling the possibilities of who I am?" At times in my fairly recent past I have had some of these thoughts consciously, I've gone through dark periods of believing exactly that--that I had failed, let slip away opportunities to do some big wonderful thing in this life time.

My friends, and teachers, on this journey with me, have reminded me that this life is not about "doing," that it is simply about "being." Odd, at times I have been given the feedback that simply being with me has been good for someone, helpful, a blessing. I didn't take that with a lot of ego. At times I found it frustrating, because I was searching for what I should be doing, and one of the requirements was that I be doing something that would support me financially as well as be a blessing to others. I've gotten quite hung up in my life, in my entire life it sometimes seems, trying to solve this dilemma without giving up certain qualities that I hang on to. I want time in my life for reflection, I want freedom to go away, visit, be other geographical places, spend time with my children (always, since they were babies and still now!) I held out for jobs that would give me some of this, jobs that I hoped would leave me time for creativity and for community involvement...if not actually be the vehicle for those pleasures.

This is all looking different to me now. My perspective has changed. With meditation, prayer, reflection, music, reading, visions of my life have been flowing through me, remembrances of who I have been at times in my life. Great wonderful blessings are coming to me. For example there is a time in my life that I have sometimes wished to have continued, have wished I could have back, have considered 'the best years of my life.' When that time of my life comes back to me now, in clear, clear, images, I realize that it never ended--it didn't start and then stop--it is still part of my life, as if it always was and always will be. The "bad" things that happened during that time are almost amusing, or are intensely interesting, just part of it all.

In terms of being who I am, who I came here to be, I see that I am who I am. I'm no longer unhappy with it, I no longer feel I failed. I'm aware of many recent years of a sort of black out, a not actively engaging with life, a drifting which I sometimes think of as weariness and sometimes think of as laziness. My diagnosis has held up a mirror to me, asking, "Oh yes? You think you're tired of it all? You think you're done? Well here's the door, want to go through it? Want to bail?"

Quite suddenly, given that opportunity, I don't even see it as being a door, I have no sense that I'm anywhere near going through it. I'm still here. I'm being lifted out of any disappointments in which I've been wallowing. I'm curious what lies ahead. I'm curious what the next manifestation of me being me eternally is going to be during the time I have left on Earth.

Kate

PS: Some of these reflections have been facilitated by my reading Journey Of Souls; Case Studies Of Life Between Lives, by Michael Newton, Ph.D.