Acorn Harvest 2008

So every time I think about updating my ecopsychology blog, I am presented the choice: I can blog about being outside, or I can.... go outside. So that's been Dreamcrisp's fatal flaw for the last few months.

The rain's have started in Northern California, not in earnest, but at least enough to knock the pollen down and enough to start greening some of those fabled California over-grazed hillsides.

Here's an image on the abundant food source outside Mickey D's. It's not a mast year for acorns, but this red oak variety has made sure many a squirrel has got its snack on.



We processed some too, thanks to FeralKevin's acorn workshop. Acorns were a big part of the diet for the indigenous folks, the Saclan, who used to live in the hills around Mt. Diablo.

We shelled the acorns the old-fashioned way,


but used a more modern leeching technique:

Gotta leech out those bitter tannins. Three or four rounds in the coffeemaker made the mash bland and but still hearty.

We eventually ended up with some delicious acorn muffins.


Our recipe was pretty tame; we just substituted acorn flour for cornmeal in the typical cornbread recipe (unless you come from the South, in which case cut out most of the sugar and the lard too). Delicious! But next time we'll experiment with more acorns and less wheat flour.

Nature Meditation and Creepy Crawlies

I just wrote an a quick n dirty guide about nature awareness on my dream studies blog. Really I should publish it here on my ecopsychology blog, but Blogger disallows pages outside the blog hierarchy. So it goes!

Spending time at my secret spot outside (a la Jon Young) is kicking my butt because the ticks are getting brutal. There's not a lot of lyme disease around these parts, luckily, but still I have to be vigilant about making sure none of the buggers are tapped in for longer than 24 hours.

It's all about: take a hike, sit for half an hour, hike back home, strip down, throw clothes in the hot wash immediately, body check, shower, body check, get dressed and then proceed to have the heebie jeebies (or more accurately the creepy crawlies) the rest of the night as imagined ticks swarm all over me.

And, inevitably, I find one the next morning, sunk in and kicking back.

Repelling mosquitoes is easier. I admittedly have gone the Deet route, but it creeps me out. Skin-so-Soft? Not-so-much: it doesn't works for long against the serious mosquito clouds I encounter in the North Florida forests. Recently I found this great advice about natural bug repellent on the Fabulous Forager. But I'm lazy, and haven't concocted my own homemade bug repellents yet.

However, something that does work is lighting a stick of incense or two around me. The incense smoke keeps the mosquitos away and also reinforces my own meditation practice. Purists may argue that this is making too much of a human footprint. My goal is not to be invisible in nature, but to be recognized by the non-human others and accepted. And, by way of verification, the squirrels haven't alarmed me in over a month.

Anyone got more advice? My skin will thank you.

Academic Rewilding and Febreze

I'm fresh back from Yale, where I attended the annual Anthropology of Consciousness conference. It was cold and rainy, and I didn't bring enough woolens. A friend offered to Febreze my socks after I wore them for three days straight. She apparently carries Febreze around with her, so it wasn't a specious, or malicious, offer. I declined but changed my socks and had cold feet for the next few days.

The picture to the right is of the circulation desk of the Yale Memorial Library. At Yale, library workers are likened to priests. The flow of Dean Koontz novels occurs at the chancel of the structure, where celestial energy has historically flowed from the heavens through thin tasteless crackers onward to parishioners. I think I still would be working in libraries if I peddled books/Christ under those conditions.

My lecture about nature observation as a field technique was well received. Rather than going on about my own research I took to the podium to share the method of nature observation. I learned this from Jon Young's lectures, and merged his technique with a focusing technique established by Eugene Gendlin. I guess you could call this academic rewilding.

We spend so much time lamenting human separation from nature that we forget that we have the power to re-pattern our minds on the natural world simply by going outside now and then and building relationships with our non-human neighbors.

Hey children what's that sound, everybody look what's going down....