I’m working on taking pictures that are worth looking at, and maybe even tell a story, without needing captions. Here’s some of the things that I saw at the Puyallup Fair this summer (different and larger and more crowded than the Thurston County Fair, which was earlier in the year).
This last year, I’ve torn some tendons and damaged some cartilage in my knee, developed carpal tunnel syndrome in my wrists (basically a fancy kind of tendonitis), and stopped wearing glasses. As I’ve been researching herbal and nutritional ways to support my various issues, I’ve been noticing something interesting. Many of the things used to support cartilage and tendons also have a beneficial effect on eyesight (i.e. bilberry and blueberries). And it seems like everything that I come across that benefits either one (eyes and/or tendons) also has a beneficial effect on blood sugar levels. All these connections make me wonder if there’s some connection that I don’t know about. I’m putting this out there in case any of you have any sort of ayurvedic training or otherwise are familiar with a more eastern-style approach and have any ideas about these connections that might help me out. Thanks!!
Last weekend, I went to the Breitenbush Herbal conference. Both the resort and the conference were really great and I learned a ton. I have been hearing about the resort for years and years. People have been telling Preston and I about how magic it is and we should totally go there. Then I got a flyer for the conference held there and decided what the heck, I’d give it a try. The conference was marketed to herbalists and folks who know quite a bit more than I do about alternative medicine and health, so I knew I would be overwhelmed by all the information and classes. I went with the goal of just remembering one thing from each class. That worked out pretty well. There were classes where I probably picked up a few things, but I got at least one from each class. Here’s what I took, and what I learned:
Our Peace Corps interview is next week. The preliminary application stage is approved, but there are still a lot of hoops to jump through before we’re really in. Based on the preliminary stuff Preston is qualified for the following types of positions:
Based on the prelim stuff, I’m qualified for the following positions:
It totally freakin’ rocked. I’m really excited about it, and can’t wait to offer the next one (February maybe?). It was a small crew, which is good, and also what I expected (it being late notice and Labor Day weekend). There were 6 of us all together. That was a great intro number, and I also feel like I’d be really comfortable with a few more people also. Here’s a little slideshow of the weekend. (Many thanks to Sarah and Katie for sharing the pictures they took.)
Here’s my self-review:
Food
I think there was a good amount of food, and the food was good. It would be fun to offer really gourmet meals, but I would have to charge more. Folks were a little sceptical about the Dessert of Wonderness and Delight at first, but everyone seemed happy after they gave it a try. (Bananas stuffed with chocolate and roasted over the fire, or apples drizzled with brown sugar and roasted in foil in the fire.) People seemed to have plenty to eat without too many leftovers. I did come home with a lot of snack food, so next time I probably don’t need to buy quite so many apples and bananas and cookies and stuff. Food was mostly vegetarian, but had enough plant proteins (avocados, cheese, lots of nuts, etc.) that no one seemed to notice or mind. Doing just one overnight made it possible to bring lots of stuff like milk and salads and eggs so that most people said they ate better in the campground than they usually do at home. The new Colman cookstove worked like a champ. The Indian food dinner was the biggest hit, and people were happy with the various breakfast options.
Location
Preston pretty much saved the day on this one. I was really worried that we wouldn’t get a good spot at the campground. It’s a first-come first-served campground, no reservations. And we were planning to get there on Friday night of Labor Day weekend. Yikes. So Preston went up on Wednesday and staked out our spot for us. He stayed for two nights to make sure we got the best spot. This campground has one spot quite a distance from the rest of the camp, maybe as much as a quarter mile? And the spot is right on the river with a beautiful view of the Skokomish River Canyon as it heads up into the Olympics. We could watch the weather roll down from the mountains as we knit. Amazing and beautiful. We also lucked out with the weather. Rain was predicted all weekend, but it didn’t actually come down until we were packing up on Sunday afternoon. Perfect. The campground was only an hour from Olympia, so it was easy enough for people to get there from locally, while still being in the Olympic National Forest, which is where I wanted it to be. Really couldn’t have asked for anything better in this category.
Content
I was really winging it here, never having been in a class where someone combined knitting and nature awareness. I wasn’t sure what level each participant would be at, and how much people might want to just sit around and knit. I think next time it will help a lot to let participants have a heads-up about the plans for the day. Not necessarily all the details, but just a general roadmap for when they can expect to have knitting time versus active time. I got feedback that people wanted both more knitting time and more activity, which I take to mean that I balanced it just about right 
The next class will probably be a two-nighter in order to accomodate room for more of both.
People were really happy to learn about the native fibers that we worked with (nettles and western red cedar). I also got some good feedback about content in general that I will lump together in the category of “better lead-up and follow-through”. People wanted to know more about the beginnings of the process, maybe collect some of their own materials and they also wanted a more clear project to do with the finished project. Nettle cordage isn’t really knittable, so some finished project ideas for them would have made the process more meaningful. I need to do some research about projects to do with small amounts of cordage. One of my favorite parts of the weekend was Margaret holding up her first bit of nettle cordage and exclaiming, “Look! I made string! I made string out of nature!”
Overall, I think people were really excited about what we did. I got a lot of positive feedback indicating that people felt connected or re-connected to nature and to their own capacity to be in nature in the future without an organized event. Hurray! There was also a lot of personal connection. Partly this is because it was a really cool group of people, and partly I think it’s the magic of the 8-shields model. Folks actually got a little teary at the closing, and I was sad to see people go. Many blog addresses were exchanged.
Sit spots seemed to work really well for people, and seemed like a really good way to combine knitting time with nature time. There was a fair amount of sitting around in camp knitting and chatting, which was good, but didn’t feel like it addressed the nature awareness part, so I’m glad there was plenty of sit spot time worked in. I’ll have to think about how to incorporate this in a winter class. Will people be willing to sit outside in their raingear and knit? How to do sit spots in bad weather and keep it fun? I’d also like to be able to push the whole Fox Walking/Owl Eyes/Sit Spot connection more. We did those three things, but I think I could do a better job of making the connection between Owl Eyes and knitting and just between all of those skills in general.
Overall, this weekend rocked. And I can’t wait for the next one which will be a whole step better.
Back at the beginning of the summer, I had an interesting conversation with a couple of summer camp instructors, during training week, about the brain’s untapped capacities. I am very good at using my intellect to control my emotions. I can choose to be happy or sad or jealous or whatever. I can’t always do it at the push of a button, but a long time ago I decided not to be jealous any more. And then I did a lot of research about jealousy and how it works, and spent a lot of time deciding how I would choose to respond differently to situations that had in the past made me jealous. It worked, and I rarely get jealous, and that was a completely intellectual choice. So this conversation kind of blew me away when I realized that lots of people are doing this very same thing in order to change the way their bodies actually work. Like, I had already figured out how to use my brain in that way, and it had oddly just never occurred to me to apply it to this other arena.
The actual conversation was about gluten allergies, which I might have but not severely enough for me to want to give up bread. The guy sitting next to me said, “Ya, I used to have a pretty bad gluten allergy.” And that phrasing isn’t common…you know, people usually either have an allergy or they don’t. So I asked him about it. And he had just made an intellectual decision that he wouldn’t have this allergy. And then he did a lot of work in order to exercise that decision, using his mind to explain to his body that this substance that it didn’t recognize (the gluten) wasn’t harmful and didn’t necessitate an allergic reaction. And it worked, and now he eats wheat whenever he wants to. Someone else chimed in on the conversation and seconded this idea of the body’s ability to change its basic functions. I was particularly interested because I was still recovering from a partially torn ligament in my knee, and was worried that I would re-injure it during summer camp. This second person (whose name is Richie) said, “I hope you can focus on the recovery and not the injury.” Which was precisely what I needed to hear, but this story isn’t really about my knee (although it’s doing fine, thanks).
So this story just sort of stewed around in my brain for a little while during the summer without me really thinking too much about it. Then a month ago or so, I started thinking about my inconvenient caffeine addiction. I like coffee, and I like to drink it every day that I have a chance. But I don’t like *having* to drink it in order to avoid the looming specter of the Caffeine Headache. So I was gathering my courage to do the semi-annual detox, when I mentioned that to Richie. “Nettle tea,” he said. Apparently, long-term use of caffeine messes up your adrenal system, and nettle tea is really good for your adrenal system. As well as being good for, well, pretty much everything (allergies, histamine reactions, arthritis , rheumatism, anti-inflammatory, dandruff and psoriasis, lowers blood pressure, and also contains all sorts of vitamins and minerals and amino acids, and even seratonin). So I fired off an order to Mountain Rose Herbs, where you can buy a pound of dried nettle leaf for about $8. Nettle grows wild and abundantly around here, so I figured I’d start with an order to make it simple, and then if I really liked it, I would go to the hassle of collecting and drying it myself. So I quit the coffee cold turkey, and drank a quart of nettle tea a day for about a week. No headache. Not even a little bitty one. No real withdrawal symptoms at all actually.
The nettle tea is super easy to make. You scoop about a cup of the dried herb into a quart jar and then pour near-boiling water over it to fill up the jar. Then you leave it to steep for 4-8 hours. I would just make it at night and it would be ready in the morning. Then you could strain it if you are less lazy than me. Or you can just drink it out of the jar and swallow any little bits of nettle that come along. The nettle sort of falls to the bottom and is great for the compost pile.
nettle tea
Okay, so I was pretty sold on the nettle tea idea. But, wait, we still aren’t around to the point yet. Where was I headed? Oh, right, my eyes. This post is actually about my eyes, which I know I haven’t mentioned yet, but sometimes you just gotta wait for it all to come around, you know. So anyway, I wear glasses. Don’t worry, this is all connected.
So I’m at knitting group a couple weeks ago, and there’s a knitter there who normally wears glasses, but she wasn’t this one day, and she was holding the knitting really close to her face to see it. Someone asked if she lost her glasses. She explained that she had broken them, but it was really good timing and she decided to not replace them. She had been reading this doctor’s writing about the medical community’s tendency to slap eyeglasses on everyone at younger and younger ages and how we basically train people’s eyes to work with glasses, rather than teaching them to exercise in ways that will increase their eye strength. So she had been going without glasses for about two weeks, and she was noticing a significant increase in her vision. She had a back-up pair of prescription glasses that she would occasionally put on, and in just two weeks she was to the point where putting on the prescription glasses hurt her eyes, like the way it hurt when you put on your grandma’s reading glasses when you were a kid. During this conversation, I started remembering how I came to get glasses.
I was in 7th grade, and I was complaining about headaches a lot and missing school, so my stepmom took me to the eye doctor to see if vision was the cause of the headaches. The thing was, I *wasn’t* having headaches. I was claiming them in order to get out of going to school, but I wasn’t really having headaches at all, except for the ones that you get from extreme boredom. But it wasn’t like I could back out of it, so I went to the eye doctor, and felt very vindicated when he said I needed glasses (my stepmom was suspicious of my headaches already, so I could rub it in her face that I *did* actually need glasses). I wasn’t yet skeptical enough that I would question the prescription of a doctor based on my own experience, so I wore the glasses from then until now. Or rather, until about two weeks ago. When I decided that if I didn’t need them back then, I don’t need them now either.
I have decided that I will have clear vision without glasses or surgery. This is a similar process to deciding that I won’t be jealous. I don’t expect the change to happen overnight, but I feel good that it is already happening. I’ve done a bunch of research about the particular kind of correction my eyes are supposed to need. Actually, I had forgotten that the main thing that’s wrong with my eyes is an astigmatism until yesterday, when I really started to feel that I could tell the difference between the way each eye was acting. I could actually feel the eye muscles pulling in different ways that felt a little odd, so I started researching astigmatism. I learned that something I’ve suspected for a while is probably true. Astigmatism can be created by the way one uses one’s eyes. I developed the astigmatism after 2 years of wearing my bangs completely covering my left eye, in 7th and 8th grade. (Hello Aqua Net and the ratting comb! It must be the 80’s!)
And I’ve learned some really interesting things about astigmatism and the way people’s eyes work. It turns out that, depending on the direction that the lens is skewed, either vertical or horizontal lines will be blurry, while the opposite will be clear. I hadn’t noticed this before, but when I tried it out, I can totally see vertical lines much more clearly than horizontal lines. The blur is actually created by a slightly doubled image hitting the retina. And I noticed the other day, as I was watching a seagull fly towards me, that there is a certain point in the distance where I actually see a distinct and clear double vision. At first, I thought there were two seagulls flying towards me. This has made me think about the idea of “standardized” vision in general. Who decided that everyone should be able to see the same, anyway? Might there be benefits to seeing the way I see?
So, I imagine that my eyes were more malleable when I was 13 than they are now, but they are certainly still changing and developing. I’m choosing to develop them to see without glasses, rather than continuing to train them to see with glasses. I’m doing a couple things to support that process, including using wide-angle vision as often as possible (this also makes me more aware of my surroundings while I’m driving, so has some nice side benefits). And then I’ve done some research on herbal support for vision….whadya know. Nettle tea is good for your eyes too! I haven’t had my glasses on in two weeks, and while it’s definitely an adjustment to seeing differently than I’m used to, I also don’t feel at all disadvantaged. I work in front of a computer most days, and I haven’t had any headaches nor experienced any more eyestrain than I usually do.
I wonder what I will be able to see in a few more weeks. Do you think that you see differently than other people? Do you think that you actually see different things than other people? How would you know for sure?
I’ve actually had a photo site online for longer than I’ve had a blog, so it’s not like it’s really new. But it is way more fabulous than it was before. I’ve totally updated all the galleries, added new pictures (particularly in the Nudes Galleries) and made it possible to purchase prints online (you used to have to e-mail me). Check it out! The Grand Re-Opening special is $20 for any size print (up to 12×18) and free shipping.
I’m not usually that into the fair, but that was before I had a kick-ass camera!
When you click on the album above, it’ll take you to a page of thumbnails. Just click on the first one for the better viewing system. Except that for some reason, the captions work sometimes and sometimes they don’t. If they aren’t working for you, well, there’s some pretty good pictures here even without the captions.
click for bigger
