Seeds, Stars, and the Denial of Shit
Unseen Film Footage, Stephen Corry, and More!
“You’re creating a hungry population that’s leading to more monocropping, of sugar, of processed grains, of soybean oil… this food is literally making a population more hungry, leading to more food production, leading to more food waste.” - Dr. Tro Kalayjian
If you haven’t listened to our most recent episode of “Death in The Garden” check it out above. We share our interview from earlier this year with Dr. Tro Kalayjian. You can find his website here.
We talked with Tro about the journey he took from following all of the nutritional guidelines, yet failing to manage his obesity, where he decided to get into the weeds of the research himself and found that a low-carb animal based diet was the most effective diet in reversing diabetes and obesity – even though that didn’t conform with the mainstream narratives of “eat less, move more” or being plant-based. We talk about the importance of animal foods in diet, the fallacy of “calories in, calories out”, the true culprit of obesity and diabetes - processed foods with high amounts of sugar and vegetable oils (not meat and eggs like animal rights activists want us to believe), and why the medical industry so often fails at helping people lose weight.
We were lucky enough to have a whole host of medical tests done on us to see if our diet-induced “limited lifespan” (as someone on Instagram so delicately put it) is indeed… limited.
Turns out, no. We were and are very healthy, with plaque-less arteries, awesome triglyceride levels, and metabolically healthy insulin levels to the dismay of all vegans.
It was truly the best care we’ve ever received from a doctor. Tro is a wonderful guy, and we’re so grateful we got to do this segment for the film.
For I Guard One Seed
There’s a Palestinian poem I read in Biopiracy by Vandana Shiva that really struck a nerve in me:
Burn our land
burn our dreams
pour acid onto our songs
cover with saw dust
the blood of our massacred people
muffle with your technology
the screams of all that is free,
wild and indigenous.
Destroy.
Destroy
our grass and soil
raze to the ground
every farm and every village
our ancestors had built
every tree, every home
every book, every law
and all the equity and harmony.
Flatten with your bombs
every valley; erase with your edicts
our past
our literature; our metaphor
Denude the forests
and the earth
till no insect,
no bird
no word
can find a place to hide.
Do that and more.
I do not fear your tyranny
I do not despair ever
for I guard one seed
a little live seed
That I shall safeguard
and plant again.
Seed saving is an ancient practice that is gaining in importance as the climate changes and as big multinational agribusiness continues its assault on sovereignty and life – genetically modifying and patenting seeds and pigs and chickens and financializing and commodifying life unlike any other time in human history. These seeds, heirloom and rare, resilient and ancient, are going to mean the difference between a denuded monoculture future and a future of biodiversity and health.
I think this poem has a deeper meaning, though. What is a seed? If we understand it as a granule of fertility: something that will grow and become something else, then we can see the vitality of the seeds that exist within ourselves. In spite of any and all tyranny, we can safeguard the seeds within us – the parts of us which pulse with life, which can never be killed or destroyed.
The seed that was guarded within me, I think, was that I always knew something was wrong in the world and that I needed to do something about it. I always felt responsible in some way to the rest of life around me, and no external assault from society or internal assault from my conditioning could turn that part of myself off.
And once I had a moment of clarity, of peace, of stillness, I was able to plant that seed deep into warm soil, where it could finally be nourished.
What other seeds do we save? And how? Is the process of un-domestication at its essence a seed saving practice? If we take a pig and assist it towards wildness, resilience, and independence, how many seeds do we save? If we learn practical skills like tanning a hide or building a gill net, how many saplings do we plant? If we take the patterns that our parents unconsciously passed onto us, and transmute them into something better – something fertile, creative, and authentic, do we create a forest?
My sense is that the practice of saving seeds, although I’ve never done it, is rooted in something far more ephemeral than I can fully conceive of. My sense is that it is revolutionary – to take something that otherwise seems antediluvian in our modern world and take it incredibly seriously. To believe that there is radical value in the smallest of possibilities: what is a seed other than living potential? Inert without care and nourishment: just like all of evolution. The evolution of the soul is indeed only carried along with proper attention and consideration.
How many forests exist in the human soul?
How many millions of seeds?
What if the world is filled with trillions of seeds, safeguarded and cared for, and despite the destruction and tyranny, and they are just waiting: waiting for an opportunity to emerge?
Perhaps they are waiting for a pig to come along and pull them out of dormancy to become a meadow of wildflowers.
Perhaps they are waiting for the moment of calm after a swell of grief… that moment where the world has ripped you bare and you have emptied your last drop and there you are: a vessel, empty and ready to be filled anew.
Perhaps they are waiting in our willingness to wait, because the seeds know how impatient we humans are.
For if I can guard one seed, or one million, perhaps we can create the world we wish to see.
The Stars and Our Illusions of Control
I am plagued by the concept of control. When did this behavior begin? When did we start defining the living world as something that needed to be tamed, quieted, and ordered? Why do I feel such an urge to control the outcomes of my life?
When did Man the Master, Homo magister, take center stage?
In a moment of quiet today, I thought of the stillness of the air-conditioned room in which I live. I thought of the soft carpet, the straight, white walls, and the ever-flowing hot water and heat and tools with which to cook and wash and be oh so comfortable. I notice the door is broken because it is essentially made of cardboard. I think of the cheap-yet-fancy looking fixtures in this brand new suburban apartment complex and wonder if, as the contractors swiftly erected this building, they did everything they could to make this building structurally sound. I think of how I miss living in my van, though I’m grateful to have a warm shelter to live in.
And then often, as I’m drifting to sleep, I imagine a landslide. I imagine the apartment complex sliding down the hill, obliterating the houses below us, pipes breaking, and flames engulfing us. I imagine the windows cracking and the glass shards splattering me in my bed. Perhaps a landslide would wake us all up to our utter lack of control, at least for a moment.
The world is very strangely distorted when too much time is spent inside a city, surrounded by artificial lighting and concrete, and I am far from the first person to say this. This is a romantic concept, one scorned by those who believe in mechanical, technological progress as the endpoint of our civilization.
Still, unanswered questions and unaccounted losses abound in this artificial world. What is left out when there is so much light pollution that people don’t see the stars anymore? What is left out when the only glimpses of wildness are the odd resilient weed or pigeon? What do we miss when we are so wrapped up in human affairs that we neglect to watch the sunset?
I think something essential, which we have lost as civilization has grown into what it has become, is our relationship with mystery. Imagine being one of the first people to ever see a solar eclipse. There is impossible magic in this experience, which is largely denuded when we explain it as “just” a celestial phenomena, one that can be tracked and traced and predicted. What is hardly ever pointed out, however, is how we have exactly zero control over such an event. We mask this reality through our intellect – implicitly assuming that through our understanding, we are in control. We needn’t fear the little half-moon slivers that cover the ground, or how all at once, at its epicenter, the Earth’s surface moves like water for just a moment, so quick you could almost miss it, like standing in the center of a dark ocean. Then, looking up at the sun and moon conjunct in their totality, with the feeling that every inch of the Self melts into insignificance…
What is lost when I don’t see such magical things?
I can only see a few stars from where I live currently: Saturn, Jupiter, and Venus. Others are only faint whispers of constellations behind the haze of pollution, light and otherwise.
A few days after the pandemic started, an earthquake shook this whole valley. I hope that, for a moment, while people scrambled to remember their earthquake drills in grade school, there was a dawning realization:
“I am not in control here. This house is an illusion. This building is a mirage. This city, seeming to claim the land beneath its roads, is made of nothing that will last.”
Luckily, no one died in this quake. People were terrified, of course, and they were already on edge about a pandemic that we had no information about at the time.
Earthquakes are interesting in that, for the most part, seismology is only useful as a means of measurement. There are patterns and predictions that can be gleaned, but there isn’t an exact science as to when an earthquake will strike or how big it will be. If we view this fact as a problem that needs to be solved, we may miss some crucial understanding about the world: that the Earth is a living mystery.
Keyword: living.
The Earth is alive. Just as coronavirus is a living being, living beings by all accounts are mysterious to us. We are as mysterious to ourselves as coronavirus or earthquakes are to us. We can understand their basic functions, the way they move and why, but what propels them and what their purpose in creation is far less certain. We can understand our anatomy to an extent, but what we truly know of ourselves is basically nothing. We don’t know why we dream. We don’t know why our psychology forms in one way or another, not really. We don’t know what happens when we die. We don’t even fully know how we got here.
The smartest minds of the past 2,000 years and more have been trying to parse out what exactly Homo sapiens is to no universal conclusion whatsoever. Religions of every cloak have attempted to circumnavigate the human soul to no avail. More often than not, their conclusions were so antithetical to what humans actually seem to be that we find ourselves in this space of converging crises we face now.
There is so little in this universe that is tangible, the human soul being one that atheists will try to explain away and many religions try to pin down with absolutes. The reality is that no one knows at all what any of this means, so we cling to fantasies of certainties. We build houses that are in a constant state of entropy the moment we erect them. We try to evade our inevitable demise with this medical treatment or that car, this life-path or that.
We forget that there are stars behind the smog and in that forgetting, we must cling even harder to the fictitious control and certainties we so desperately desire. We pathetically try to control life which is inherently uncontrollable. Anyone who has been in a natural disaster knows this to be true. We create a façade of uniformity, and a flood washes it away. We try to plant trees that we will be able to efficiently log, and the whole forest burns.
What if we sang to the forests instead?
I recently read a heartbreaking bit from Savage Gods by Paul Kingsnorth, where he talks about how we've lost our ability to sing to the forest. Even my computer, just now, tried to correct that last sentence from “sing to the forest” to “sing in the forest” – there is no magic and mystery in this digital machine world that has seemed to erect itself by its own will around us. It wants to make us the subject of that sentence, rather than whom we ought to sing to.
There are cultures today who still sing to the forest. All children do, if only given the chance. And there are moments, like in the above photograph, where we know we are in the presence of something ineffable, and all you can think is, “This is holy. This is where God is.” I was as atheistic and divorced from spirituality at this time as I’d ever been, and those words were the only words in the English language that I could muster to describe what it felt like to be there.
There is something inborn about our relationship to the living mystery. As far as I can tell, we weren’t always so confused about how to live, but something shifted, something changed, and we all are seeking certainty as to what that shift was, and why. We weren’t always disconnected like this. We weren’t always so afraid of the uncertainty of living in a world that is incomprehensible to us.
Even in our questing to understand, we seem to reduce things down and try to control the story of why and how we got here. Why are we so lost?
I don’t know the answer, but my intuition tells me it has something to do with stars and our slow journey away from paying attention to their light. Basking in their brilliance, there is no illusion about what we are as compared to the vastness of the cosmos. We are small, mortal, and in the presence of something undoubtedly divine when we gaze upon the stars in the clear night sky. They are our oldest ancestors, something that, I believe, was less discovered and more likely proved after thousands of years of knowing this to be true. We know these things intuitively. That’s why our Gods always live in the sky.
This universe works on a dimensionality and time scale that we as human beings will never understand. The further we divorce ourselves from facing the mysteries of existence, the further we get from understanding what can be understood about existence. The longer I look at this screen, the further away from truth I get. The same goes for you.
Go outside. Look at the stars.
Scapegoats and Holy Cows: Climate Activism and Livestock
I’ll conclude my portion of this publication by sharing this fantastic article by Survival International’s CEO, Stephen Corry, about the colonial foundations of anti-meat legislation.
When we started this project, we were really focused on the myths of the vegan/vegetarian arguments, and as we went on, we realized that the same story was being perpetuated in the renewable energy world and in global conservation. For a while, I was a little uneasy about how we might be able to string these topics together. It made sense in my head, but I wasn’t sure if we’d be able to concisely delineate the connections between these forces.
This article is a confirmation of our intuitions: there is a link, and it must be highlighted. From the Sami peoples to Seventh Day Adventists to Hindus lynching meat-eating Muslims in India, this article breaks down so much of the complexity of the vegan movement and the danger it poses on a global scale.
We’ll be doing a podcast with Stephen Corry in the New Year, so stay tuned!
On Scooping My Poop or Shit: The Great Philosophical Vortex.
Today I pooped in a fast food disposable tray and with a tiny spoon “from equal part of each segment of the stool”, scooped my own poop into a Medical vial. I will ship this vial along with another 3 medical grade poop vials, to a mysterious lab (at least to me) somewhere in the mid-west next to a soy-biofuel plant. There someone with a University degree in poopology will thaw the remains of what my body had no use for after I consumed gluten-free pastries and holiday Mystery meat. Under microscope, chemical and thermo-nuclear radiation technologies, they will analyze pathogens, yeast and bacteria cultures, whether or not those gluten-free pastries could have been regular pastries, and provide fun graphs about complex biology I don’t understand.
Why is this so funny to me? Why did I just have a novel experience today? I mean the older I get the more I feel the novelty of day to day life wear off, I always welcome some excitement. But even this was new, a little crack spoon delicately swirling far too whip-cream like textured fecal matter (I know, that’s why I'm getting it checked) into a plastic bottle pretending to be a doctor. Why had I never done this? Am I having fun or is this taboo!? Same, Same?
I have pooped many places, outside, inside, next to my van, other peoples vans, in holes, in at least a dozen countries, my pants, I have even been known to occasionally get my poop and other people's poop (albeit very rare) on my person. None of that compared to the novelty of this little poop scoopin affair.
Part of me was struggling with the concept of poop.
“Fuck, there it is, the great reminder, the cosmic joke, the defiler of our angelic selves: shit. What is shit? I mean what actually comes out? My best guess is that it’s primarily fiber. What does it look like under a telescope, I mean microscope? I better keep this clean, I feel bad for the guy who cracks hundreds of these open a day, he has to see my poop on the inside of the vial. I don't want him to have to deal with it on the outside as well. I mean I wanna give him a break, I’d love for my poop to be the one that he thanked.”
“Thank you poop for making this brief moment of my life a respite from the wave of stench of fermented tofurkey and alcohol aided digestion.”
#makeyourshitcount
But my struggling was also about death. Constantly filming and thinking about death hasn’t left me any less vulnerable to the anxiety of death. Especially when confronting my own poop. There it is. The cosmic symbolism. Death, Decay, Putrid, Stench, Ugly, Hilarious, Morbid, Sad. All reminders of a truth that transcends the distance between me and the poopologist. Maybe I would like him to think about death. I would like him to think about green grass and breezes from empty beaches when he thinks about my poop. Life, I want him to think about life. Through my poop. Because maybe if we all just looked inward or downward into the toilet bowl, the symbolic blackhole in which we wash away the important shit of our lives, we could find some truth.
The world really is big, complex, so inexorably weird and specialized. I mean what is the average annual profit for The Great Plains Laboratory, LLC on their shit tests? Can that support 3 families? 10? 100? There is no way 1,000 goddamn families are providing good hard earned American middle-class lives because 1,000 poopologists analize a flow of poop vials.
If I can find for a reasonable price someone to let me mail my poop to them and use the wonders of modern science and engineering to tell me to the breadth of what modern science can tell me about my poop, then what other strange things can money buy? How far have we gone into the modern age?
How many machines, that make the machines, that make the McDonalds toys have we built on our way to the stars?
If we have built the industries and sub-industries of the sub-industries to support the tiny hyper-specialized pieces made by a hyper-specialized factory in the industrial park of a hyper-specialized part of town in a hyper-specialized country competing for dominance in the world market, how will we ever solve the climate crisis? How will we ever turn this shit around? Where do the tiny rubber pieces underneath the shutter button on my camera that makes it feel so tactile yet responsive when I press down come from? How many families are supported by that sub-industry? Maybe one rural Thai Family?
We… are in deep shit.
The story gets better because I have yet to ship off my poop vials... I have a dilemma. The instructions to the at home test told me I needed to fill two vials with the magical philosopher's substance on the same day. I have only filled one. I only had enough poop for one. But the poops need a very specific time between each other and also the time in which they are shipped off to Poop Lab. So tonight I will remove the first poop vial from the freezer that I have placed next to the gluten-free pie crust. And leave it in the sink to thaw overnight (to Maren’s dismay), so that tomorrow I can remove the adorable spoon from the now thawed fiber whip, remove yesterday's poop and replace it with tomorrow's poop, so as to time vial one and two on the same day.
Good! Two more whole days to take my new favorite drug. Poop on a Scoop. Better than micro-dosing LSD. The whole universe – all in the swirl of shit on the end of a tiny spoon.
If we have to call it stool and not shit or let alone fecal matter, what chance do we have admitting when things have gone to shit? I live above a valley, and I can tell you what, I see a whole lot of people poopin without scoopin.
As far as they are concerned, shit don’t exist.
But then again. Today I have only just started this new holy act. But maybe tomorrow you will have your poop on a scoop. And your neighbor and their neighbor, all poopin and scoopin. Then and only then will we find out what this world could be.
“Excreting is the curse that threatens madness because it shows man his abject finitude. But even more immediately, it represents man’s utter bafflement at the sheer non-sense of creation: to fashion the sublime miracle of the human face, the mysterium tremendum of radiant feminine beauty, the veritable goddesses that beautiful women are; to bring out of nothing, out of the void, and make it shine in noonday; to take such a miracle and put miracles again within it, deep in the mystery of eyes that peer out – the eye that gave even the dry Darwin a chill: to do all this, and to combine it with an anus that shits! It is too much. Nature mocks us, and poets live in torture.” - Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
Thank you for reading our Substack publication. Hope that Ernest Becker quote made you laugh as much as we did. Please let us know how you are liking this medium. Sorry for the delay over the holidays – we’ll try to be more consistent in the future!
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We were on a podcast this week and wanted to share it with you all. We had such a fun time talking to Joe and Rob from Teach 2 Dumb Dudes podcast, and we hope you guys enjoy it, too. Listen below or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
Please share this with your people and stay tuned for more!