Barefoot Running

Pablo Picasso's Painting of Barefoot Runners

painted for a one-act ballet "Le train bleu"  by the Ballets Russes in 1924.

I am glad to see that thebarefootrunners.org is back online. After watching the 'Are we born to run?' video on TED.com www.ted.com/talks/christopher_mcdougall_are_we_born_to_run.html two years ago I started to run barefoot in the hills around Witzenhausen Germany and it has imporved my life in a significant way. In the TED talk Christopher McDougall explores the mysteries of the human desire to run. He asks us to consider how running helped early humans survive and then urges us to look to that physiological need and instinct and go with it.

McDougall learned some secrets of long distance running from the Tarahumara Indians in the Copper Canyon of Mexico. I met the Tarahumara (or Aware) people when I was traveling through there on a hitchhiking journey for my Thesis work at the College of the Atlantic. A runner in the area told us that they run only for life and not for sport. He said it was hard to get them to run in a competition and that he had to do a lot of work to get them to enter in a race, mostly telling big tall tales about Navajo runners who claimed they could run faster.

McDougall's book "Born to Run" has moved a lot of us to start running barefoot. and the Born to Run organization seeks to support the ongoing investigation of the human art of running without shoes. All of it is worth a careful look and could easily change your life as it did mine.

Evolution and Karma

Exploring links between the eastern idea of collective karma for all living beings and the western scientific discovery of evolution. In the San Francisco Zen Center talks on collective karma and Anil Dash's blog about the problems of the western perception of karma it seems we western people understand karma a lot more easily if it is described as being like evolution. Indeed, the understanding of evolution from the western perspective has given rise to much of the modern environmental movement as in David Attenborough's 'Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life'.

At Sterling College in Craftsbury Common Vermont, K. Jeffrey Bickart shared David Quammen's 'The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction' as an introductory ecology course book. At the same time George Gardner introduced us to the work of Thay Thich Nhat Hahn and helped to guide us in mindfulness meditation and shared dharma. We were offered contemplation and compassion as a world view and evolutionary theory for getting closer to the surrounding ecology. The connections that have been arising from these understanding, as well as through the study of Human Ecology, Ethnoecology and the practice of meditation, have been astounding.

As we begin to better understand the mind and nature we become more compassionate toward the rest of life on the planet and we are making our way to a new, more holistic, paradigm.

Refuge of Nocturnal Birds

High on a cliff there's a twisted pine;

intently it listens into the abyss

with its trunk curved down like a crossbow.

A refuge of nocturnal birds,

in the deepest hours of midnight it resounds

with the swift fluttering of wings.

Even my heart has a nest

suspended into the darkness, and a voice;

it, too, lies awake listening at night.

How to Make Kao Fu (kǎo fū, 烤麩)

Here on the lush, banana, bamboo and barge filled banks of the Red River in Hanoi organic and alternative health food is rare. Our friend and local grocer orders bulk, gardens organically, prepares it all in her kitchen and living room and sends out boxes to us. She makes everything there in the house and is always trying to diversify. She acts as our health expert and nutritionist and says that seitan and tofu is not enough for us anymore, we need to go a step further into kǎo fū (烤麩). The best I could do for her was a google search which yielded nothing. The alternative macrobiotic health food movement of Hanoi needed a recipe for Kao Fu and it took many days to get it.

So here is the result of the search. A good simple recipe for Kao Fu. (Translation from this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZfgXOcBdLM&feature=related)

Melt dry yeast in water at 37°C for 10 minutes. 

Mix flour and yeast solution together with a small spoon of salt...

No unit is given for the flour, just make a big dough (best to use high protein content wheat flour, so that you can get more gluten)

Allow dough to grow 1.5 times into a large net-kind structure. 

Wash the dough until it looks like long-chewed gum - at a certain point volume will not be lost through washing, at this point you've got wheat gluten.

cut into cubes

steam or fry.

Julian Jaynes

My friend and fellow blogger recently had an interview with the founder of the Julian Jaynes society.

It is all about a theory by Dr. Julian Jaynes, a nerological scientist who wrote the 'bicameral mind theory' about how the human brain has evolved. According to the theory self awareness is a recent evolutionary physiological brain change, a pressing together of the left and right hemispheres, so that the two halves of the brain can communicate.

Our ancestors would all have been schizophrenics, unable to tell what is real and what is a dream.  Because the left and right brain hemispheres would not have not communicated in the same way as ours they would say things like 'the gods said' because they really heard voices and believed in the hallucinations. Schozophrenia, according to the theory, is just primitive brain showing itself.

If Jaynes is right it is really a paradigm changing idea with implications on the modern approach to religion and the evolution of culture and civilization.  - He has many compelling arguments and has yet to be disproved.

Richard Dawkins once said of Jaynes's work: "It is ... either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius."

Thinking about physiological brain development, theology and enlightenment brought me back to this TED Talk by Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroligical doctor who had a stroke and learned about enlightenment.

I also revisited the Mind and Life Institute which has a lot of really interesting research (cutting edge today) on the mind and well-being. 

Happy Birthday Ed Abbey January 29 (1927)

Today is the birthday of that Reluctant Enthusiast; the Archdruid of Environmentalism; the Half-Hearted Fanatic, Ed Abbey.

Not everyone will agree but I say his work has inspired a move toward a more holistic understanding of fairness and care in the United States. Thanks to his radical views and fantastic writing abilities, millions of young americans have been inspired, supported, and even transformed into environmentalists.

I started reading his work while I was a student at Sterling College in Craftsbury Common, Vermont.  I read this poem for the first time on a Greyhound bus headed north to Maine. I was leaving a summer of sailing on SoundWaters, a little Schooner in the Long Island Sound where I had been working with an environmental education NGO. One of my shipmates had stuffed the letter into my seabag next to Abbey's 'Monkey Wrench Gang'. - It was a long letter and I found it there in my seabag in Massachusetts. I cried like a baby through Rhode Island and New Hampshire and when I finally got to Mid Coast Maine, inspired, I hiked up all the hills in Camden National Park and went right back to sea on the Morning in Maine with Bob Pratt and in pulling boats with HIOBS.

So, here is Ed Abbey's advice:

One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast….a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it's still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.

Truancy in the United States

In his third State of the Union address the President Obama has proposed that all states require that all students must go to high school until they are 18. I loved the speech today.  but I take issue with this point. I am a high school drop out and am very grateful for the experiences I had in the school of hard knocks.

In 1967 Timothy Leary said "My advice to people today is as follows: if you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out." and 30 years later one of my friends in the park in Camden Maine told me the same thing. It changed my life and I started making decisions for myself. They lead me down some crazy hard roads with a lot of hard knocks. Dropping out of High School was a scary and wonderful experience which set me up for a good life. Sailing and doing heavy labor for a few years really taught me a lot about life and helped me to find out who I am and what matters to me. Things I could never have learned in a educational system.

In fact, about seven thousand students in the United States drop out every school day. Many of them are doing it to go to work, to take care of children, or are forced by other hard and unfortunate circumstances. However, there are some of us who do it because we need to go and learn for ourselves. I think what was missing for me in school was the character building of free expression and an openness to my own personal shortcomings and 'failures'. I needed a lot of real failure and self destructive and hard traveling to get to know something about who I am.

Without question, dropping out of high school was good for me. My life is better in every way because of it. If the states are going to start to require Truancy for people up to 18 years they should ensure character building aspects of education. Schools should allow students to do free projects in hard work and hard traveling. Some of us can't just take the teacher's word for things, we need experiential education in getting caught up deep in the consequences of our actions to understand ourselves and our role in the world.


As Mark Twain said: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

Inspiring Speeches on Martin Luther King Day

Listening to the Dharma talks today from both Jordan Thorn at the San Francisco Zen Center and Gil Fronsdal at the Insight Meditation Center I was inspired to watch Dr. Martin Luther King give his 1963 'I have a Dream' speech again in Washington. This in turn inspired me to watch Charlie Chaplin's very inspirational speech in the film 'The Great Dictator' released shortly after the start of WW2. In it he is a Jewish barber and is somehow mistaken for 'The Great Dictator' (In this movie called 'Henzel').