Blue

"...the roaring of tides is converted to peace

The lake is like glass, the waves are all gone

and the quiet is soft like velvet, like love,

Like the blue egg of day before dawn...

-This Too Shall Pass"

     I love blue. The odds are high that you do too, as it is the most popular color in the world. Blue is true. If you add light or dark to blue, it is still blue. But if you add light to red, it becomes pink, the warm colors turn brown if you add dark. Only blue stays true.

Oh the joy of a patch of blue, bursting with light, when the clouds finally part!

Blue is perceived as receding away from us, compared to red, which seems to advance toward us. It is a color of peace and calm, but red light would be a better choice for late at night if you want to get to sleep soon, because blue light is stimulating! 

And blue flame and blue stars are hotter than the ones we call hot colors, the reds and yellows. Get the abundant blue light of the daytime early to set your body clock to the natural light cycle.

In early historical writings, blue has been written about as if it were some form of black. Perhaps this is because blue is the color of the sky, which goes on infinitely and seamlessly into the the indigo star fields of night. Surely blue is a color of mystery, expansion, and wonder.

And really, could you imagine if everyone went around all the time in red jeans?

(All about Blue:)

Spirit of Oak

“Let not the simplicity of this method deter you from its use, for you will find the further your researches advance, the greater you will realize the simplicity of all creation”-E. Bach

I work with flower essences in the Bach flower system of 38 remedies. Bach emphasised that "there is no true healing unless there is a change in outlook, peace of mind and inner happiness." His remedies work on the level of our emotions and thoughts, although physical changes often follow as a result. I have met the oak tree spirit. Oak is a medicine tree. I love the oak deva, and the oak deva loves us. 

Dr.Edward Bach prescribed oak for very strong patients who had nevertheless reached their limits. Is this not one of the great maladies of our society? The oak tree wants to help us westerners not be so driven. It is here to balance our workaholic tendencies with relaxation and introspection. If you are the type of person who really needs oak, you probably feel you can't even afford to take the time! Unless you have been knocked down by some great force. When you are completely exhausted, flattened by your busy life, oak comes to the rescue. Like a wide branching strong tree, oak is a haven.

The magical enchanted land of the heart of oak is a vast oak forest. It may not be a place on this planet right now, but you can go visit in your imagination. It is covered with snow, quiet and still, as you gently glide in from above. But deep below the snowy treetops, a secret entrance leads to a warm golden, glowing, passageway down to an entire second forest below in some sort of magical, impossible, understory. It is bright with warm fire light and cozy colors. Here, the people are gathered, feasting, dancing, and playing until spring arrives.

You can go and commune with an oak tree and feel its magnificence. You can carry an acorn, a bit of oak magic, in your pocket. You can also get the oak flower remedy at you local natural food store and just observe your responses.  Don't worry, the Bach flower remedies do only good, cannot cause harm, and are primarily designed to be a self diagnosing and administering system for everyone to use. (More on the Bach Flowers:)

Go Barefoot!

      "Barefoot walks help tone the muscles of the feet, keeping them young and strong. An early morning barefoot walk on cool, dewy grass is refreshing and invigorating for the entire system, not just your feet. -"Walking Barefoot"

My grandmother once took off her shoes to show me her knarled feet, with twisted and contorted toes tumbling off weirdly sideways.  "See?! That's from wearing high heels!" she warned. Frightened, I looked down at my perfect little feet, and shuddered, hoping to avoid that unhappy fate. But avoiding the fate of the feet has been no facile feat.

One day, while I was recovering from an ankle sprain, my right foot just went flat. (I've always had high arches.)  In the several years that followed, walking gradually became more and more painful. I responded with more and more supports and orthotics. I could no longer walk without pain unless I was laced up tightly in padded running shoes with stretch bandages all around.

The foot doctor could only offer more orthotics, or surgery that requires you to be off your feet for many months, and might not work. I began to google around and only found more of the same. Except one little article...

...Which said that foot problems are caused by wearing shoes! 

It suggested an unusual therapy: walk barefoot every day in the morning dew! 

This works! 

Within two weeks of shedding the shoes, and daily walking barefoot in the morning dew, the pain was gone. This was in the spring, and I was able to stay out of shoes all summer and well into the fall. But come November or so, I began to feel reluctant to leave the house. I can handle going outside barefoot down to about 40 degrees. The cold feels good to there, but colder than that, the feet start to go numb.

 So I found some barely there flat shoes to keep warm in. The next year I also had the extreme good fortune of finding a good physical therapist who could support me through the changes my feet were going through in the process of healing.

Now I wear comfortable shoes around in the world, but still go barefoot a lot when and where I can. And almost always nowadays I walk freely, normally, and without pain.  (125 Reasons To Go Barefoot:)

"You learn a lot when you're barefoot. The first thing is every step you take is different." Michael Franti

  

Omni's Healthy/Healing Green Way of Eating

 “Your body is a temple, but only if you treat it as one.”  ~Astrid Alauda

Omni's simple healthy healing everyday foodist practice:

So many people feel confused about what is and how to eat a healthy diet, even when they do feel they can eat any way they like. Often one feels they must choose what they eat according to what they feel they can afford, and this is the first hurdle. We humans tend to have a lot of rules and taboos around eating. In our culture, there are also a lot of rules around money and food, like "cheap is better."

But cheap food tends to be too expensive for our common good, such as our health and our environment. So, up front, every day, I invest in the future that I want. I support my local and organic food makers and farmers by giving them all of my food money!

 I have a few ground rules. All whole foods, with as little packaging as possible. That means I start with whole grains, beans, seeds and nuts, as well as all fruits and veggies. I make a lot of food from scratch. Also, I eat as much as possible of the ones that can be eaten raw. And I avoid eating at restaurants. When traveling I seek out natural food stores. All of those rules add up to a lot of money saved anyway without even trying. I just go on doing this, day after day, year after year. It's a lifestyle, a habit. It is really, really, easy. And so yummy!

The most important rule of all is, I listen to what my body wants and needs. I don't eat unless I am hungry and there is something available that fits my criteria. If not, a short fast is in order, and if I find I live too far from real food, I move!

Now for the actual diet, "Omni's all green diet for healing and half green diet for health": 

It is very simple. Green food is medicine. The all green diet for healing means, if you are working on healing a particular condition, every meal you eat should be built around a green food. Use a wide variety. The half green diet for health means, if you want to stay healthy, every other meal is built around a green food, or half of every meal. Actually, any brightly colored food can be used. That's it! Simple living color. 

(Some recipes:)

Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food”  ~Hippocrates

Is My Paper Obsolete?

“I like the New York Times. I only wish it were softer, and more like toilet paper.” 

― Jarod Kintz

I love my morning paper, but lately, since getting my ipad and going digital, the paper is starting to feel, well, dirty? My fingers get smeared with ink when I read it. Then there's that pile of already read paper I'm responsible for disposing of, somehow righteously. If possible... 

What can you do with old newspapers? They do come in handy for dirty projects of all kinds, and we do need a few around for that. Beyond that, you can fold them in creative ways and contrive crafty creations such as lamps and trash baskets, and funny hats. (For an illustrated list of things you can make with newspapers:)

Experiments in making bricks with paper pulp and cement have so far been challenged by the downsides of needing a lot of added cement, lack of strength, and spongelike water effects. So far, not so good. 

But you can wet down the paper in molds or rolls, press it, and then slowly dry it out into fire logs. Some people have even made furniture out of these paper logs. But paper seems to be most suited for making, uh, more paper. So I recycle. 

 Then there is the matter of all the ads. More than the weight of the ever shrinking rest of the paper, usually. None of which I read, another waste. 

And lately I keep trying to pinch open the things in the paper that I want to see better. But that only works on my ipad.

Sigh. I still can't give up my paper. I feel it connects me to my local community, in a way no other media does. And I'm afraid if I give up on the paper, I might be the last straw. Local newspapers are folding all over. I'm just not ready to hasten that...just yet..

Catching Biophilia Down at the Pond

“And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair” 

― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

After the pond had gone dry for the umpteenth time again, last summer, I was finally ready to try the liner idea. All of the natural clay treatments hadn't fixed the slow seeping away of the water, so my friend brought out his salvaged used red lion inn billboard liner, and we rolled it out and lined it with rocks. It fills to about knee high in the middle at the deepest part, and slows down the run off from the large forested area above it when it rains.

It is a sky mirror! It is also a beautiful living breathing screen, displaying all sorts of complex interacting vibrations going on all around it. A new mini ecosystem is coming alive.  The first visitors to the mud and plastic, rock lined disruption were the bugs. Majestic dragonflies hovered around in jewel tones of red, sky metal blue, and secret helicopter black.

Next, after a few days, some wild bees colonized one end of the pond, while yellow jackets hunkered down with a nest a few yards off the other end, where they were joined by various other waspy types. The chickadees were all over the news and set up camp in the willow tree above the pond. The stellar jays couldn't resist the temptation for very long. Within a month or two, birds were taking baths. 

The deer were quite suspicious at first, but as the new grass grew, they tiptoed through. Now they spend time here every day. One day I was astonished to find a huge pair of ravens at waters edge, my first confirmed sighting in my life. Another day, I saw what I thought at first was the reflection of a deer in the pond, no, it was a great blue heron!

I do not think the pond will ever support fish as it is so shallow, but the water bugs of all kinds skate and dive here now. They keep the screen of my 'pond app' full of inter penetrating expanding circle patterns every time the surface goes still like a polished mirror. 

You can get an app like mine. Just go out and commune with you local area of nature. Do it today! Sponsored by your local dreaming planet...(biophilia):

Baby Steps

"Two less likely members of a relationship can hardly be imagined -- the technological apes and the dreaming planet. And yet, because the life of  each depends on the other, [we have] a feeling towards this immense, strange, wise, old, neutral, weird thing, and it is trying to figure out why its dreams are so tormented and why everything is out of balance."

- Terence McKenna

Congratulations! You are the proud owner of one spinning, smoking planet, going critical. We won! We have completely subdued nature. We took over the world. Now what?

We broke it. We get to fix it.

And we can. By chipping away, one little bit at a time. Today I heard we are putting a million pounds (or is it tons?) of carbon into the air every SECOND. How can we even start to go the other way without first stopping?

Actually, we don't need to totally stop polluting before we can start going the other way. We can stop it the following way. The only way to get to stop IS to go the other way, now, in baby steps. In this way we inexorably approach a critical mass...

 

When a flock of birds standing around makes a decision, they don't need to think about how to do it. One at a time, each bird begins to face in the direction they would like to go. After a certain majority of the flock is reached facing the same way, the flock lifts into the air as one.

 We each know what baby step we can take today. Many baby steps taken by many people in the right direction is called a trend. If we then realize we want this thing, we form habits, lifestyles, then this becomes a cultural shift. When this transformation is complete, it will be known to have been a turning of the ages!

Aren't we lucky to get to be here for that! And all it takes is baby steps, because all we have is baby steps...

Photo art above by Omni with help from Brenda Ewing!

(More on the More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible)