Winter colorland

submarine

Details from a recently finished painting commission, and the finished installation above a sink in a craft room.

Maui or bust

Clouds over the pacific ocean


Below are some photos of our recent visit to a place we will soon call 'home.'
(click image to enlarge)



Arriving with pure joy!



One of the best views on the land


The pacific is only one mile away!



All you can eat coconuts!


The flowers are almost as beautiful as our new friends










See what I mean?


Sunset



Among many other foods in this photo are coconuts, ginger, Okinawan sweet potatoes, squash, beans, ti, passionfruit, bamboo, papaya, etc.


Beautiful, fragrant passionfruit or 'lilikoi' are everywhere. Better than hunting for easter eggs!


YUM!


Cacao, where chocolate comes from. Scientific name Theobroma cacao means 'food of the gods'! The beans were once used as currency even as late as the 19th century. Super high levels of anti-oxidants are present in the raw bean, even more than green tea.



This structure houses a composting toilet. After you do your thing, you throw some wood chips down the hole. After the bugs have digested the material, you have a super valuable, viable compost food for your trees! Also, urine diluted with water and aged for a few days is a vital nitrogen rich plant food. Why flush it down the sewer into your drinking water when you can turn it into plant food? The implications of composting human waste are profound! We waste so much energy, water, and money by handling sewage the way we do. We could really change our futures for the better just by transforming this one process.

I know this will seem to be a strange segue, but I feel it is appropriate. You have been looking at photos of Mele Nahiku. Mele Nahiku is a growing community in the Nahiku region of Maui, near Hana. The members names are Zeoc, Heidi, Jen, Forrest, Micah, and Aurora. They are very sweet, grounded people who are dedicated to each other and are living a life very different from the way most of us do now. They have been kind enough to invite us to visit them and live with them. Now that we have visited them, our intention is to share our lives with them. This is a big, scary, inspiring step to take for us. I think it is one of the most sane and nourishing possibilities I have ever considered. It is not Utopia, but it is beautiful and fun. We want to have children and provide them with a close community of partners to help them thrive and live in excellent health and harmony with each other and nature. It is a perfect step for us to take at this time.

Permaculture is a simple idea which is very profound. It is just one of the guiding principles at Mele Nahiku. You may hear the word 'sustainability' and cringe. There are many institutions pushing this idea and many of us are not receptive. On the other hand watching the price of gasoline triple in the last decade causes us all to pause and question why we are still relying on gasoline for everything. Unless you have a garden, nearly %100 of the food you eat is brought to you by gasoline, form the trucks that transport it, to the petroleum-based chemical fertilizers used to grow it. What happens when gas continues to exponentially increase in price? What happens when our suppliers decide to leverage our dependance against us? Imagine grocery store shelves empty of food, because there is too little gas to stock the shelves or too little money to buy that gas. This is just one strange situation we have gotten ourselve into and we can get out.

Many people have realized that waste is terrible. That means pollution, wasted energy, wasted time, wasted food. Why do we still grow non-native grass lawns in our yards and burn gasoline to mow them, use clear water to water them, and chemical fertilizer to feed them? Think about cars. Picture that dark cloud belching from a diesel vehicle. That stinky cloud is wasted energy. I have talked to people who thought that going to war with Iraq was good because we needed the oil. Talk about waste! INSANITY! The plastic wrappers in your garbage and on the street are waste. The smog above your city is waste. The clear water you use to flush your 'waste' down the toilet is wasted. It is possible to eliminate the very idea of waste. In the forest there is not waste. One creatures trash is another's food. We as humans are wasting so much that it will eventually be painfully obvious to us all. We can do much better by applying the intelligence that God gave us to live much more efficiently. The rewards are infinite.

Imagine living in a house that costs nothing to heat, cool or even power. Imagine a house that grows food and produces surplus of food and energy instead of waste. Imagine cars that run on surplus electricity from your house. Imagine turning the desert into a lush food-growing garden where once was a salty barren earth. These images are already reality for people around the world! It is crazy not to start using our technology to create abundance, not of paper money, but of healthy food, clean air and water, and surplus time with which to enjoy our families and other interesting pursuits. I want to inspre you as I have been inspired.

Please check out some of the following links. You may be heavily invested in your life as you know it, but it is never too late to create new possibilities.

http://www.permaculture.org.au/
(here you will find documentation of many projects including one north of the Dead Sea where the desert was quickly transformed into a tropical oasis. You won't believe your eyes.

http://www.thefarm.org/permaculture/#holmgren

http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC28/Mollison.htm
(an interview with Bill Mollison the Australian who coined the term 'permaculture' {very funny})

http://www.pikespeakpermaculture.org/index.html

Small world

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