A few of you think I am being too quiet. It happens. Mercury is retrograde along with other celestial and terrestrial dramas. I need some time to take a new survey of the Planet.

There is a lot of information, and of course disinformation, on the radiation exposures that ultimately have the potential to affect everyone. For instance, last night, I watched a video film by some daring Japanese journalists who went into the evacuated area to within 1.5 km. of the Fukushima reactors. There were no checkpoints as they drove through an eerie mixture of wreckage, abandonment, ghost towns, and stray animals. The flood of emotions that cannot be contained allow for responses that can go any direction. I was impressed by the fitness of some dogs, four of them, and a group of black cows that were, probably for the first time in their existence, roaming absolutely free in a world without people. Of course, there was evidence that people used to be there: streets, buildings, farms, and signs but the animals seemed amazingly content. The journalists had radiation detectors mounted on the dashboard and the levels set off alarms, but the dogs did not seem agitated or hungry and the cows seemed relaxed and almost interested in why visitors were encroaching on an area they clearly felt free to roam. I never saw cows with such freedom and this triggered amazingly profound reactions. Can we imagine a Planet where cows are not exploited?

Unfortunately, this video played against the backdrop of what I had read about Chernobyl so I don't know the fate of the animals, but I was deeply impressed by the quiet. If only the geiger counters could be as silent as Nature!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp9iJ3pPuL8

Other stray thoughts intruding into my mind space have to do with what is viable in the face of mounting radiation. Ever since my rendezvous with mold, it has seemed to me that humans are oblivious to the truth which is that long after our footprints have vanished, fungi are having the last laugh, maybe sharing the conquest with some bacteria. In fact, in the dead zone around Chernobyl, melanin-rich fungi appeared inside the reactor itself and after some years, life returned to an area that was deemed uninhabitable by humans, not for a decade or century but 400,000 years. This is the magnitude of our folly. For the benefit of a few pockets and some decades of intoxication with the evil brew concocted by sociopathic scientists and their cohorts in the powerful elite enclaves of human society, we will risk a situation in which we are not able to survive.

These are the unwelcome thoughts flitting through my mind and they challenge my conviction that our guardians from other star systems will intervene before midnight. The question I have not been able to put to rest is whether they will show us how to get our act together on Earth or evacuate some to other places where we can continue our studies of how to live in harmony with the Divine and yet walk in a manifest reality. With thoughts such as these, you might be grateful for silence.

However, Dr. Yuri Hiranuma and I have exchanged emails all day long for several weeks now and we are both trying to be as practical as possible. First of all, we have to recognize that the challenges of nuclear contamination are by no means restricted to Japan. We knew this from the outset, but we have to look at two radically different scenarios: short-term and long-term.

Short-term, we need to minimize our exposure and fill as many "receptor sites" as possible with good nutrients so as to limit the amount of radioactivity we assimilate. We are also looking at what can be grown indoors, such as sprouts and certain vegetables, already ably presented by Phil and Nadamayi on landscapingrevolution.com.

http://www.landscapingrevolution.com/sprouts/sprouts_toc.html

In addition, we can consider window gardening, greenhouse plants, polytunnels, and much more. Again, some of these ideas have already been introduced on landscapingrevolution.com. In addition, we are looking at various ways of washing and cooking food that will prevent radiation from being ingested, and we now have the benefit of an additional team member who is pulling together information on plants that purify soil and water or render food safe to eat despite where the plant was grown and the plant's exposure to fallout. We are also looking at how to remediate soil. It is a lot of work, believe me. Networking with people, learning how to present their expertise succinctly and clearly, and giving some support for condensing years of technical expertise into user-friendly sound bytes and jpgs is taking lots of concentration on my part. At the moment, I need all the help that is offered plus longer days.

This said, when we look at Europe, we see that while there are still scars from Chernobyl, the continent is bustling so stray animals did not take over space that was peopled. I am sure the same will eventually be the case this time except for a few differences. First, we have the internet and therefore much more sharing of information (and disinformation). Second, we have so many conscious individuals who are fully prepared to introduce alternatives to modern industrial approaches to agriculture and energy. Third, there are countless people ready for change who are eager to implement what others have been quietly developing in the last decades so I believe the outcome will be better than most expect. Still, we have to get from the present to the future but only by taking one step at a time, as deliberately and responsibly as possible.

The intellectual part of me is sometimes excited because the mind, being the toy that it is, can get pretty high on ideas so as the pieces of the puzzle start coming together, a really beautiful potential is unfolding. I believe that we create from ideas so the process of making possibilities become realities takes practicality and patience but occasionally, I see glimpses of where we are heading and it's exciting even if the challenges are depressing.

At the moment, I am paying closer attention to Nature than ever before. This has been a really steep learning curve for me, but so far, the garden looks fine. I did have some lengthy dialogues with some giant ants who decided they preferred my desk to wherever they used to live. I watched them carefully and realized they are determined to do things their way so I might as well try to learn something from them. Being old, I have a magnifying glass on my desk and I got some very good close up views of some of these visitors and then they left as I had requested they do. I figure they have a plan and they watched enough youtube videos with me to have osmosed what is relevant to their planning.

Meanwhile, my sea buckthorn is germinating so I need to find a sunny but barren place for it in a few months time, a cold place! No ginkgo stories of germination have reached me yet, but I have some under observation.

Long-term, we need to prevent degenerative conditions caused by free radicals. We have years to work this out but antioxidants are the place to start and why not now? Of the nearly 200 PubMed studies plus other odds and ends, black cumin was the most heavily researched. I am not going to say that it is the best. Sometimes the reason something is researched is that the substance is already on the radar. Several books and many research publications have assured Nigella sativa a place of prominence. This doe not necessarily mean that it is better than gotu kola or ginkgo or turmeric or any of hundreds of other plants, merely that it might be easier to get funds to study something that looks promising than something that is more of a gamble. Nevertheless, I can hardly keep enough in stock and yesterday I added one gallon containers of black seed oil:

http://www.blackcuminseeds.com/blackseed_oil.php

Lastly, I am well aware that some of you want to garden indoors. I plan to sprout, but I want to remind you of Hannah and Howard's year-round project:

http://www.landscapingrevolution.com/food_production/santa_fe.html

If I were starting from scratch — which to be honest sometimes I want to do — I would consider very large greenhouses or polytunnels with geothermal heating, at least for cold climates such as this. We can, at this transitional time, look at foreclosures and other "disasters" or we can look at a failing financial system, failing agricultural system, and failing approach to life on Earth and see opportunities to pick up property for a fraction of what the same property might have cost five years ago. As we reinvent local banking and farmer's markets and community, we will pool knowledge in a way that is rooted and strong and therefore also coherent and sustainable. This is our goal. If we fail, we won't overcome the challenges. It's in our hands and I pray that millions of people find the energy and courage and create a better world.

Many blessings,

Ingrid
http://www.zerorads.com