Mr. Kraft does life

These sounds emote deeply.

Realizations:

Joining my guest, I spent one night inside and had a powerful and overwhelming experience of gratitude. While I greatly enjoy sleeping outdoors and value much about it, the previous night had been 20 degrees F and made for a cold sleep. Spending this following evening in a bed with crisp, dry sheets, without needing to bundle up considerably, and to have a bed to stretch out in, moved me.  It was another reminder to realize how much I had been taking for granted, in regards luxuries in our society that have become expectations for so many people. Gratitude further overwhelmed me for the community and support and abundance surrounding me.

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Little to no purchasing from stores was part of life here.  Similarly, money was not a strong focus.

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“The earth doesn’t need you at all.”  -Old Turtle

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The earth keeps giving; over and over.

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One can turn on the tap here and never have to think about water quality.  This is not the case now in many places.

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After taking the tent down and sleeping indoors for two evenings, I woke up congested, with snot in my nose, and a hoarse, dry throat.  If the surface and the bedding are comfortable and warm, sleeping outside seems to be preferable in most situations.  Particularly in a wall tent.

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Seeing the Forest Rd. neighbor’s property with its architectural gardening and elegant layout has a dramatic and positive effect on me.  The contrast between how properties like this feel in comparison to those with scrap vehicles and unkempt houses, is marked.  I would like to learn how to create spaces like this, and bring that creative process into my life.

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Bike rides feel so much different than driving in a car.  The pleasant yet invigorating experience is reinforcement of my desire to live in a place where car-free life is possible.

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Regular aerobic physical activity is critical to my balance and well-being.  Even dragging heavy logs, chopping firewood, a long day of butchering, or a similar energy-intensive experience is different than an aerobic one.

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I can build a small, cozy, ample place to live. No need to worry – just do it.

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Having a natural body of water in which to bathe improves the quality of my life greatly.  Even a small pond is amazing.

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While awake,
while asleep;
we’re all dreaming.

it’s all a dream.
it’s all a play of mind.

The dream is happening incessantly.
Look  into your thoughts – now.

Each one temporary.
Each, an imagination.

Being unreal and transient,
it would be foolish to  deem them reality.

What would happen,
if I let go?!

Release!
I am free.
No one is bounding me.

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Too much imputer.

• Cow hide dry scraping and scraper sharpening
• Community-wide wireless internet extension and repeating project
• Listening to a stranger to provide moral support
• Ongoing daily reading of “I Am That” with notes and reflection
• Work-trade of carpentry and building work on a neighbor’s house in exchange for a week’s share of vegetables from the CSA
• Sun-bathing
• Custom-crafted two black walnut, hardwood handles for knives, from scratch
• Assisted Noah the baker for evening bake shifts each Friday night in work-trade for farm-stand credit and more
• Picked up a few road-kill squirrels
  • Skinned and butchered
  • Turned meat into a stew for a potluck
  • Scraped and tanned the hides
• Enjoyed a community member’s birthday – DJ’ed in our friend’s house in the woods – what a surprise!
• Visits from an old friend
• Designed, planned, wired and installed a high-quality audio system at the bakery to replace the dinky portable speakers that had been there for years.  Whee!
• Acorn flour milling by hand; leaching acorn flour by various methods
• Grinding and mixing spices
• Watched Nate and learned about how to burnish and fire primitive clay pottery
• Meals from the garden
• Compound bow tuning and repair
• Hanging slate, rabbit and pig feeding for CSA work-trade
• Began to get an education of the types of guns, various caliber sizes, and their applications
• Continued to raise awareness of wild animals, and to grow a sense to more often look out for them in their various habitats
• Prepared a very large soup stock for the fall Harvest Fire festival, with Noah.  We roasted veal and pork bones in the wood-fired oven, and then stocked them with fresh herbs from the garden, along with turkey, duck and chicken feet from Marty and Ellen across the street.  Yum.
• Harvested, cut and dehydrated apples
• Deep conversations with friends on topics ranging from food and nutrition to the meaning of it all…
• Setup event tents and did a lot of vegetable preparation for Harvest Fire Festival
• Enjoyed Nate’s acorn flour-beaver fat-black walnut-butternut-butter biscuits he prepared for his week-long bowhunting trip.
• Strolled the woods to a special spot where we harvested Hemlock boughs to lay a new floor for Nate’s tent.  Learned how to fashion a functional, pleasant smelling, biodegradable, free flooring solution for outdoor living
• Practiced setting dead-fall traps
• Lived in Nate’s wall tent while he was away.
  • Tended to the space, cleaned and re-organized many things.
  • Burned two fires a day, to keep tent dry.
  • Harvested, cut and stacked firewood.  Here I learned a lot about how to identify what wood from the forest will be best for firewood that is easy to carry out solo and buck up, that is dry and will burn well.
• Conversations with neighbor Jim who, among other things, has experience and knowledge about how to cure meat into sausage without nitrates or refrigeration.  Wow!
• Learned about poultry processing and helped neighbors by plucking a Peking Duck and gutting four chickens.  Enjoyed their conversation and fresh chicken and garden-herb sausage afterwards.
• Enjoyed the pleasures of a thin-skinned structure when sleeping and working.  The canvas tent allowed me to hear coyotes, owls, wind and rain, the chuckling of the red squirrel, and the presence of passers-by…  And of course the pleasant ambiance of candle light.
• Eating large quantities of local, raw, heavy cream.
• Lots of squash and root vegetable roasting in the latent heat of the wood-fired oven
• Garden tool repair
• Cleaned and reorganized farmhouse wood and workshop
• Shotgun target practice
• Enjoying pumpkin-miso soup by candlelight in Nate’s tent
• Joined Nate for a successful wild turkey and Canada goose hunt.  Plucked and butchered the birds, and served a community meal with all local food.
• DIY Yurt construction project.  Nate wants to build a yurt… from scratch.
  • Found and cut down gray birch trees for poles
  • Limbing poles with axe
  • Making a master log, cutting poles to length
  • Taking split poles and using a pattern, drilled holes for lattice ties
  • Tied lattice poles together for wall support structure.
  • Cut pine boards with chop saw and band saw, created two rings, layered them and assembled a roof ring.
• Rendered lard from a friend’s piggy
• Wall-tent breakfasts on sheepskin rugs atop fresh hemlock bough floor
• Enjoyed the ever-changing northern New England foliage
• Star gazed on clear nights
• Moved and installed a composting toilet into the orchard
• Picked and mashed apples, pressing them for raw cider.  Lacto-fermented some cider for long-term storage
• Began cutting out leather for a knife sheath
• Rebuilt Liv’s yurt floor
• Spent time in a neighbor’s 330 square-foot woodland cabin.  Inspired yet again by small spaces and what it takes to make them possible.
• Belt repair.  My belt tore, so Nate and Ginny walked me through mending it.
  • Learned to awl, and sew buckskin
  • Sewed together Nate’s bark-tanned buckskin to leather belt with glover’s needle
• Ongoing exploration of food and it’s interaction with my body, energy and mind
• Pond dips continued even through the end of October.
• Running on deep hills, upon dirt roads, in moccasins.
• Computer repair at the Orchard School
• Stretching, movement, and meditation
• Solo late-night sauna
• Took down canvas wall tent
• Riding bikes on empty New Hampshire roads, feeling the wind in my face.  Loving the pace.
• My sister came to see the community in which I’d been living.  To meet my friends, to taste my world.  How different it is from hers.  The contrast sparks so much curiosity.

Sleeping outside continues to teach me so much.  I’ve also found that my sleep is of a higher quality when I stay in tents or other thin-skinned ‘structures’.

Having enjoyed spending the majority of the nights this summer in a tent, I’ve been at my parents’ place this past week or so and when I arrived I immediately set it up again.  Leaving the house each night, walking through the yard and into my little nook in the woods was a great separation in many senses.  Electronics, air conditioning systems, and artificial light are not present.  Instead I am gifted the sounds of the insects and animals around me, or the tattering of the rain on the tent’s surface.  The bed of oak leaves below me is a welcome place to rest my body.  Waking up to a sky that brightens so smoothly, without the din of the alarm clock, makes for a kind rising experience to start the day freshly.

Thanks.

_S

One of the questions that I’ve been asking of many ‘things’ in our world is: “how did people do this before modern technologies came along?“  This question has led me to some very interesting ideas, and has led to the exploration of and modification of my behavior in many cases.  This post is particularly concerned with dental care and hygiene.

First and foremost, the diets of humans was composed of things that did less damage to our teeth, for most of our history.  This likely made the issue of cleaning the teeth far less of an issue than it is today.  Without processed sugar and and refined foods, people were not at as great a risk of damaging their teeth.

But this still does not address the tools or methodologies used to tackle the problem.  My searching has led me to find a few different ideas.  Mainly it seems people used roots, branches and leaves.  Some of these took the form of the chewing stick or a simple toothbrush, and were chewed and swished around the mouth to spread the plant matter around the mouth, teeth and gums, and some were used as a toothpick.  Perhaps there were more that I haven’t learned about or used intuition to “rediscover”.

The chewing stick is something that I experimented with in the middle-east, and have been using exclusively for my own tooth care, in combination with flossing, for the past month.  I was most inspired by Nara Petrovic, a fellow who has some funny and inspiring videos, and an excellent blog, too.  If you are interested, he has written an excellent document on the natural toothbrush, which you can read here.

Here in the Genesee River Valley in Western New York, I’ve been enjoying the willow (Salix) tree, and have experimented with peach and black ash, too.  I find that this chewing stick provides me with a very satisfactory result after using it.  I enjoy that it brings me outside to the riverside to get my toothbrush (which I only do every week or so) instead of having to travel to a store, that this is free, creates no waste or garbage, is perfectly ‘green’ and prevents me from putting toxic chemicals or plastics into my body or the environment.

I do highly recommend you try this.  Depending on your bioregion, there will be different solutions for you.

To your health and frugality,

….

_S

Biking to the University of Rochester today I saw a young woman lowering a pail from the footbridge into the water of the Genesee.  She was a graduate student at SUNY Brockport taking samples of this part of the liver for bacterial levels and water quality.  Specifically she was looking at how the river’s bacteria levels change from the storm water runoff from the streets.  Apparently some of the water from the road drains goes into the river while some goes to be treated with the rest of the municipal waste.

I told her that I swim in the river almost daily and she said it wasn’t an issue.  The only time she said bacteria levels are higher than normal is after a rain.  So ‘hot dry days are great fod a swim’ she said, or something to that tune.

Happy swimming.

For some time I have been into making blended drinks, or smoothies.  Winning combinations often include frozen deeply ripe bananas, nut butters, and seem to successfully incorporate many other additions.  I’ve used miso, flax seed meal, hemp seed meal, raw ginger, almond butter, chia seeds, butter, and other fruits, to name a few.

Recently I’ve been into eating oats after letting them ferment, as per the descriptions of Sandor Katz and Sally Fallon. I put oats in a large bowl, and cover them so that there is at least a half-inch of water above them.  Placing a loose-fitting lid atop the bowl, I will let them sit for 24-48 hours at room temperature.  After this soaking, they have begun to ferment slightly and now have a gently sour taste.  This soaking makes the oats more able to be digested.  I make enough of these that I can then use the oats for days, in various recipes.  One could easily let them go longer if they prefer a more sour taste.  At this point I refrigerate the bowl to slow down the fermentation.

One thing to do with the oats is to separate some for your meal, cook them in water gently and let them cool on the stovetop.  Once cool enough to stick your finger in without burning it, drop in a tablespoon or so of miso (raw, unpasteurized).  Leave them with a loose lid, covered, overnight.  The oats will thicken up and the miso will break down and pre-digest the oats.  I do this with oats that I’ve already fermented as described above.  Reheating them very gently only to be warm enough to eat in the morning, you’ll have yourself some delicious porridge.

Here comes the kicker.  Make a smoothie or a pudding, with your double-fermented oats, frozen bananas, nut butter, and some flax seed meal.  (I even use butter in my blends).   After blending all of these together with a touch of sea salt, I pour it into a glass container and let it ferment overnight.  Mine this morning became almost like a yogurt, and was tremendously delicious.

Get creative and have fun.

_S

I just received this email from my good friend, this evening.

“just shot a wild turkey while hiding behind a manure pile at my
friend’s farm while he ran a call from the asparagus patch
having a feast tomorrow:
roast turkey legs and breast
ramps, fiddle heads and nettles stir-fried with beaver tail
turkey stock with acorns

come on over”