Liquid Feasting - Days 9-12

I’ve been hopeless at writing this feast up. I write snippets of posts and then fail to bring them to a logical conclusion. Here are some ...

Written on Friday (Day 10)
I have been working every day so far of the feast (including the w/end). I would far rather work a little a day and create a balanced week, than work all the hours under the sun and then ... collapse every w/end! I’m sure these wild ‘lost w/ends’ of binging (whether drink, food, drugs or sex) the media constantly report upon are at least in part because people systematically ignore their bodies throughout the puritan working week and then bodies, being what they are, scream out, nay demand pleasure after such long periods of neglect and look what results ... A little bit of balance is what’s needed. We don’t need to save our meal of the week for ‘Sunday lunch’, and we don’t need to slog our way through a ten mile run because we keep missing our exercise ‘slots’ during the week. We simply need to listen to our bodies and introduce the pleasure principle every day of the week. It’s not about having lots of money or time either. How difficult is it to schedule in a half-an-hour slot to wander around your locality, to prepare a seasonal, fresh local meal? Perhaps it’s just me, but I like having things as pleasurable and simple as these to look forward to every single day.

Written on Saturday (Day 11)
I am still juicing purely with the ‘Twin Gear’ for optimal nutrition and am spending almost as much time washing-up as I am juicing! I picked up an ‘Old Hall’ pint jug in Cambridge at the beginning of the week for mere pennies. A vintage 70s French Connection denim jumpsuit arrived via ebay during the week too. I’m going for the industrial look. I’m now fully equipped on the juicing production line...

It’s not much of a leap from production to economics. How cheap is this feast? Cheap! Nettles are picked for free and a kilo of organic hemp seeds costs £7.50 per kg. This is day 11 and I’ve only got through 1kg of hemp so far. The only thing I’m buying are the apples and the celery...

Written today (Day 12)
Not quite there yet but this is surely the destination?

From Dick Gregory’s Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat: Cookin’ With Mother Nature (NY, 1973), p. 97:

‘The long fast puts the entire body through a cleansing. That also includes toxic accumulations in the brain. And as the brain is cleansed the mind is released. During a long fast you will notice a heightening of ethical and spiritual awareness.
One of the things that happens during a long, cleansing fast is that you lose the six basic fears which plague humankind:

Fear of poverty
Fear of death
Fear of sickness
Fear of getting old
Fear of being criticized
Fear of losing your love

All six, or some combination of these fears, haunt everyone who is captive to the usual nervous imbalances accompanying toxic diet. But when those fears disappear you are really at home with Mother Nature and happily at peace with life in Mother Nature’s world’.

The Great American T-Shirt

Sometimes you want to mix it up and sometimes you want to keep it simple. The same goes for clothes as well as (raw) food. In summer, vest tops and t-shirts or a blouse? I’ve always gone for the (vintage) latter. Skirt or shorts? Again, the latter. Recently, that’s changed (or at least the former choice has), perhaps because it’s so much easier to now buy organic cotton t-shirts.

I’ve come to a realisation that I really am a child of my decade (the 70s). I’m more than happy to veer between mixtures of earthiness and glamour, which is in essence my summing up of the decade. The 70s book The Great American T-Shirt makes the case for both ends of the spectrum. A cornucopia of folks, known (for example, Lauren Hutton, Patti Smith, Martin Scorsese, Angelica Huston, Betsey Johnson...) and unknown wearing t-shirts . What really made the book for me was another of those ‘raw moments’: a whole page devoted to a Dick Gregory t-shirt advertising his ‘Food Fun’...

*** On the subject of clothes, the autumn edition of Permaculture has a review of this book (out on the 17th of this month) which looks like a good read ...