Co-fathering Kraut and Kvass and World Peace

If there is to be peace in the world,

There must be peace in the nations.

If there is to be peace in the nations,

There must be peace in the cities.

If there is to be peace in the cities,

There must be peace between neighbors.

If there is to be peace between neighbors,

There must be peace in the home.

If there is to be peace in the home, 

There must be peace in the heart.

-Lao Tse

I've spent the last several weeks blissing out-- like I've become privy to surfing one of the Universe's best and biggest waves in a long while. Maybe it's what psychologists call being in the flow.

Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. [1]

Except, I don't feel like it's exclusively my own flow, but a LARGER Flow that I'm lucky enough to be caught up in.

Bethany Hamilton-- back in the flow after a shark ripped her arm off. [Photograph: Getty]

In spite of the feelings of Flow, this election season's to-do list of American moral imperatives feels like swimming with sharks. As you may have picked up on, one of the underlying themes of this blog has been the study of what I like to call kick-em-in-the-dickenomics. Kick-em-in-the-dickenomics was born out of an existential angst I feel toward participation in a cultural system that I feel just doesn't hold much promise of Flow for me. The wonky, gnarly system is the proverbial "man" and I really want to stick-it-to-the-man, smear his face in it, and then kick him in the dick for good measure. Practically speaking, I pre-occupy myself daydreaming of righteous-anger voting, or frustrated food choices, or Facebook friend-deletes. But these feelings are not Flow-worthy either.

Thankfully, there are an influential handful of people in my life whose unwavering commitment to love and a more hopeful vision is proving itself way more infectious than my own vision.

For example, two weeks ago, I was gifted a scholarship to the World Peace Yoga Jubilee--
CHA-CHING!!!! It was my first ever Jubilee. (Thank you Anna Ferguson!) Yoga has always been for me a brilliant idea-- and I'd recommend it to everyone. But if yoga is a matter of being compassionate to one's self, then NOT doing yoga is the form of yoga I practice daily. (Running 20 miles per day is somehow a more compassionate form of mediation in my world.)

Does it look like we support the military-industrial-petro-agro-pharma-animal-exploiting complex?

Nevertheless, I participated in my first ever group yoga class. I didn't understand a word of the instructions... so I just kept making my own shit up, clearly caught up in some kind of flow.

Non-violence in thought, word, and action is truly a Herculean experience, not for the weak. But neither is it a matter of brute strength, as I'm discovering. The days of Newtonian forces are numbered and dying-- when life is merely seen as action-reaction force pairs across an empty Cartesian grid of disconnected atoms. Instead, the awareness of our connectedness grows. The illusion of our disconnectedness dissolves.

The Jubilee was the perfect mixture of summer camp, yoga intensive, vegan pot luck, concert, drum circle, educational conference, and the scene from the Blind Melon video where the tap dancing bee finally finds a meadow of fellow bees. Unfortunately, I could only attend the Jubilee for one day. Had they served fruit, it would have been my World Cup of high holy days. Now I can't resist posting the Yoga Girl video. 

Riding the momentum of flow, when Susie was overcome this week with an upper respiratory infection, our friend and neighbor Dan came by the house with a batch of his homemade hardcore hippie beet kvass. I didn't think Susie would touch it in a million years, but something about the garlic, ginger, and beets appealed to her senses and she went totally bonkers for it.  

Then, like the hardcore hippie peace-pushing Marine he is, Dan invited me over to teach me how to make my own saurkraut and kvass. These are old time preserved foods that families could harvest in the summer and fall and store through much of the winter by "pickling" them through lacto-fermentation. It doesn't sound all that sexy to store cabbage in the basement for winter, so Dan likes to be ready at all times for his Zombie Apocalypse. Meanwhile, my excuse is I'm planning ahead for the collapse of the oil age. 

He was quick to point out that it is a little unusual for lacto-fermentation bacteria cultures to have two dads, but what a dad he's turned out to be. Please be open minded about non-traditional cultures. 

~2 dudes, 7 chopped beets, 1 head of garlic, 1 root of ginger, turmeric, and some salt water

Two 5 pound cabbage balls

Dan making use of the Ginsu-weapon of mass destruction.

Dan likes to chop the cabbage in noodly strips. But I hate chewing anything bigger than a toe nail.  This was our first domestic dispute. 

Every pound or so of chopped cabbage gets thrown in the mixing bowl and sprinkled with salt, juniper berries, and caraway seeds. 

Punch that cabbage, Dan! Salt + Dan's muscles squeeze the juices out of the cabbage, forming a bath of brine. 

The kvass is held submerged by a big cabbage leaf.

Wow, it's exciting watching that culture grow up. 

Fraternal twins! Kvass on the left. Sauerkraut on the right. 

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

The Cincinnati Michael Jackson Society of Awesomeness

Cincinnati Observatory

My head is still abuzz with amazement at what I heard and saw and the Cincinnati Observatory Friday night. The cloud cover made for lousy star-gazing, but the history of Cincinnati had me and John Quincy Adams grabbing our crotches Michael Jackson-style, soaring through the cosmos with pride.

CINCINNATI, I LOVE YOU. HO!!!!!!

The history that I heard is so crotch-grippingly-sweet that I became enraptured by the key players and the badassness of those early Cincinnatians. Ormsby Mitchel, John Quincy Adams, Nicholas Longworth-- you are bigger than the Big Red Machine. What their efforts must have meant in those days!!

I'm not sure we even know how to think along such heroic lines any more. Where could we draw the parallel between what got done in 1842 Cincinnati and what its equivalent would be in today's terms?

A future parallel...
In 2018, Cincinnati changes the name of its Hyde Park neighborhood to Billclintopia. Because that would happen easily, right? If you know Hyde Park, then you know that would be paramount to calling 2012 Georgia Obamaland. How could an ex-president possibly, and so convincingly, transcend partisan politics to get some REAL QUALITY LEGACY shit done that everybody likes and needs?

In his last public appearance, Clinton lauds the Cincinnatians gathered at the Wasson Way Amphitheater for helping him manifest his lifelong dream. He calls it "one of his finest life achievements", after spending two terms as president, failing to ignite Congress to sieze the greatest humanitarian opportunity a nation ever had. America couldn't do it, but Cincinnati did. This is basically what John Quincy Adams did with our help, led my Ormsby Mitchel-- the Bill Nye/Michael Jackson of his time.

A recent historical parallel...
In 1993, after spending $2 billion on construction and planning, Congress pulled the plug on the Superconducting Super Collidor in Texas, that would have been five times more powerful than the now world-famous CERN particle accelerator in Europe. Can you imagine if Cincinnati would have been there to say, "You know what-- screw you Congress, we want the world's most cutting edge science and we want our citizens to not only own it, but use it-- men, women, and children."

...Except this parallel would fall short on many levels:
1) as bitchin' as a particle accelerator is, it's not as universally FUN for people of all ages as the Observatory;
2) its scientific contributions aren't as immediately applicable to ALL facets of daily life and safety (time keeping and weather predicting);
3) it would have to have been built by donated time and materials from locals who believe in the mission and act out their commitment to the values of the Republic;
4) its architectural beauty would have to be enduring and worthy of hosting a wedding 150 years later (as it hosted mine);
5) and perhaps most importantly, it would have to meet humanity's most threatening identity crisis.

I'd just like to give a shout out to the volunteers of the Observatory. They number over 100 strong. They are geeky and proud and they just want to share the passion for planets. Our host for the evening was Leo, who remained true to the spririt of Omsby Mitchel, the Observatory's founder. The Observatory's website had this to say of the man whose passion made it all happen:

Ormsby Mitchel

Mitchel's enthusiasm and clarity impressed his audiences. As one person who heard him has said: "In New York the music hall is thronged night after night to hear his impassioned eloquence poured in an unbroken flow of 'thoughts that breathe and words that burn' on the excited thousands. A sublimer spectacle in lecturing was never seen. The theme, the orator, the intellectual audiences, the rapt attention, the almost painful intensity of feeling, all crown him the prince of lecturers." The great expansion of interest in astronomy, and the proliferation of observatories during the next few years owes a great deal to the efforts of Mitchel, who has sometimes been called "The Father of American Astronomy.