Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Wanderers 2006.3.7
Last night we met with Micheal Sunanda (yes, that's how he spells it, ea not ae) to learn of his adventures in Central America.
He was researching the state of organic homesteading, and ended up spending a lot of time on a coastal permaculture farm, where the infrastructure was good, but staff practices had been rather lame.
Trying to jump start the "humanure" composting system proved difficult because the staff had the usual cultural reluctance to discuss anything relating to poop.
On the whole, Micheal was rather unimpressed with the state of permaculture in Central America, including among "alternative lifestyle" types. People are buying into the processed food economy, instead of perpetuating the older village-based system of complementary growing. Possible costs: loss of self-sufficiency and independence, some deterioration in health.
Micheal sent around little plastic containers of clay plus a mystery substance, which turned out to be cacao steeped in olive oil. He told the story of the centipede "tapping" him on the eyelid (they don't really bite so much as tap), and the screamingly severe pain that caused, ameliorated with clay packs to some extent.
He slept in a cloth hammock, lost in the jungle on occasion. Howler monkeys are really loud.
We had some new faces tonight, mostly friends of Don's, including Chisler, who makes esoteric metal parts for Japanese furniture and such. He liked to interject comments and Micheal got a little testy about that. I appeared to be sleeping through much of the talk, but was actually concentrating or meditating -- I forget which.
Micheal also talked a lot about Earth's magnetic fields (he carries a little magnet on a gimble everywhere he goes) and about "spirology." The conversation then turned to ley lines and the empirical basis for some of this feng shui talk, if any. Art Kohn, back from DC, steered some of this discussion.
Then there was Rob, who wanted to know when he'd be the same age as his dog, so he could have a party on that day. We'd been kicking this problem around for quite awhile (Jon Bunce had actually solved it, but I'd lost the paper) so I finally turned to the open source community just hours before the meeting, hoping to give him a real answer. This proved a success story, as chronicled in a thread on edu-sig.
Still flush with this success, I sent out a call for concentric hexapental spheres to Synergeo, a Fuller School eGroup on Yahoo!, hoping to impress Glenn Stockton with how fast I could get back to him with some images of his Global Matrix.
This morning, I had two relevant images in my in box, plus helpful pointers on how to get more. Tim Tyler's is displayed above, Adrian Rossiter's below.
This was the subject of my OSCON talk last year: how the open source community has made my work as a Fuller Schooler so much easier over time.
Another highlight: Nirel cluing me in to Ashes & Snow.
