I really enjoyed reading your sweet essay and your reflections on how we have become so alienated from Nature and from our Creator. So important to re=establish a mindful relationship with where our food comes from, and not take it all for granted as we mostly do.
On a practical note, I was surprised you included Japanese Knotweed in your wild food. Here in West Cornwall in the UK, it has taken over whole valleys, and is considered a huge problem, as non-native plants sometimes are. I have never heard that it is edible.
Dear Mark--thank you for this wonderful epistle....I just got back from our home in Italy where so much of what you describe is a way of life. I was unable to sleep and got up and there was your post to give my churning mind some rest. Thank you my precious brother. george
This is beautiful, Mark. Your relationship with the land as a source of abundance reminds me of the work of Candace Fujikane. She's a fourth-generation Japanese settler of Hawai’i, and a scholar of the Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) and their familial relationship with the land as a source of abundance. She writes about this in her book, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future. For the Kānaka Maoli, the land is something to relate to, something that has a will, and you can communicate with it through the wind and birds and your inner knowing. She contrasts this relationship to the settler’s way of commoditizing and exploiting land. She differentiates between capitalism’s “rhetoric of scarcity” and what she calls “Indigenous economies of abundance.” She writes, “Capital produces a human alienation from land and from the elemental forms that constitutes a foundational loss. Humans compulsively try to fill this emptiness through an imaginary plenitude that commodifies land.” It's a dense book, but maybe of interest to you. Thank you again for a beautiful essay.
I really enjoyed reading your sweet essay and your reflections on how we have become so alienated from Nature and from our Creator. So important to re=establish a mindful relationship with where our food comes from, and not take it all for granted as we mostly do.
On a practical note, I was surprised you included Japanese Knotweed in your wild food. Here in West Cornwall in the UK, it has taken over whole valleys, and is considered a huge problem, as non-native plants sometimes are. I have never heard that it is edible.
Dear Mark--thank you for this wonderful epistle....I just got back from our home in Italy where so much of what you describe is a way of life. I was unable to sleep and got up and there was your post to give my churning mind some rest. Thank you my precious brother. george
This is beautiful, Mark. Your relationship with the land as a source of abundance reminds me of the work of Candace Fujikane. She's a fourth-generation Japanese settler of Hawai’i, and a scholar of the Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) and their familial relationship with the land as a source of abundance. She writes about this in her book, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future. For the Kānaka Maoli, the land is something to relate to, something that has a will, and you can communicate with it through the wind and birds and your inner knowing. She contrasts this relationship to the settler’s way of commoditizing and exploiting land. She differentiates between capitalism’s “rhetoric of scarcity” and what she calls “Indigenous economies of abundance.” She writes, “Capital produces a human alienation from land and from the elemental forms that constitutes a foundational loss. Humans compulsively try to fill this emptiness through an imaginary plenitude that commodifies land.” It's a dense book, but maybe of interest to you. Thank you again for a beautiful essay.