Halloween!

How could I miss the chance to include some pumpkins in my posting!  I have always loved pumpkins and that is one thing that hasn’t changed.  I had one year where I wasn’t involved with growing them and this year I went all out again.  My kids and my nieces had a one acre plot of pumpkins, their intent was to sell them this fall and they did.  I think when it’s all said and done they took in close to 1500 dollars!

One of the perks of having your own private pumpkin patch is that you get to keep pretty much whatever you want.  So I’m going to show you a few and leave the deep philosophical musings for another day.  The first pumpkin is about the most perfect a pumpkin can be.  I didn’t want to carve this one, it will get eaten in a few days!

The second is one that became known as buttkin, it is two pumpkins that grew together.  Ugly compared to the first, but beautiful in its own way.

The last two are carved up pictures of the ones we did.   The very last is a closeup of buttkin, so you can see how I made it have a happy and sad face.  We won’t win awards for carving, but we had a good time and froze our fingers as the pumpkins were nearly frozen when we cleaned them out.  Happy Halloween everyone!

Starvation and blown tires

Yesterday was a fun day, until it wasn’t.  I drove a truck full of food to a food packing event that it produces meals for those who need food.  This food goes all over the world to where ever it is needed.  Africa, Haiti, anywhere a hurricane strikes or just down the street at the local food shelf.  This is a fun way to get this food ready in mass quantities for groups who are wanting to help out those in need.  The first picture is the back of the truck with the extra ingredients.  The brown and yellow bags are soy protein and the white and green bags are rice.

What you see in the picture is enough food to make 40,000 meals.  There is also some flavoring and vitamins that are added to the mix and each bag has six servings in it.  It is designed to be the right mix of nutrition for a person who is starving and hasn’t eaten for a while.  Of course anyone could eat it.  It is quite tasty and has a chicken soup flavor.

The company that my friend runs also makes a rice and bean mix and oatmeal.  He does this by buying bulk ingredients and then working with groups to host these events.  Yesterday the group I delivered to packaged 9000 meals.  Not a huge amount compared to some, but still enough to feed a lot of people!  The end product was a full pallet of boxes all ready to go.

Here you can see a bit how they set up I had some other picture, but there were a lot of faces and as I don’t know any of these folks I didn’t want to post them out of respect.  They had a group of about 70 people and they knocked out their packaging in about an hour.

We loaded up after that and I headed to another town to drop off the finished food at a trucking warehouse and then home.  I should also add at this point my friend runs his operation using inexpensive tools, old trucks that have been fixed up and his headquarters is an old school that was closed.  He puts the maximum amount of money into his food in order to get the most bang for people’s money.

The problem with this is that things tend to break.

On the way home I blew out both back tires and barely kept my overloaded truck on the road.  The police that came to check on us was amazed that I was able to keep the truck out of the ditch.  My friends came down pulled the tires off and changed them on the side of the road.  We finished up and I got home at 3 am.  One interesting thing I learned was how to seat a truck tire using ether starting fluid and a torch.  It was cool to watch, I wish I would have taken a video.

There are not enough people like my friends in the world.  He has pretty much dedicated his life to this program and feeding the starving people in the world.  There is such a huge need for this, but the funds are limited and the means to move massive quantities of food in a usable form from this country to another are not cheap.  Yet he keeps pushing forward and has packaged countless millions of meals for others and he only has a small staff of a few paid employees and a fleet of run down trucks to do it.  He doesn’t buy tv commercial time, he doesn’t spend his money on fancy buildings or even wear nice clothes.  He is a saint who wears plaid.  He’s been an inspiration for me since I’ve met him and he is pushing me in this direction.  I have liked to help his causes with help and by giving him money.

I’ve come to the conclusion that doing selfless and mostly thankless work like this is where my life is going.  I’ve had some ideas lately about starting a program that helps people in need.  He has the corner on the food market and I don’t think I could do it better.  What I want to explore is the need for another human need - shelter.

I was shocked to learn that in Minnesota when prisoners are done with their sentence they are now booted out of prison whether or not they have a place to go.  This isn’t a huge problem in the summer as it’s pretty nice, but there are limited places to go when it’s cold.  The system already stacks the deck against felons and criminals and many times they are forced to return to their life of crime just to make ends meet.  To me if someone has done their time, it’s time to move on and give them another chance at making a better life for themselves.  This just doesn’t happen.

I’m going to work on a plan that helps this group of people, the people that society would rather see locked up and stay out of sight.  Sometimes all they need is a chance.  Sure some of them will go back and reoffend, but most just want to get on with it and be normal.

I’m not sure how all this will work out, but what I want to do will help these people meet a basic need.  The need to have a place called home.  If they don’t have that to worry about, they can find a job, they can help their families and communities.  They will have one less major worry that will allow them to keep working in a good direction.  There is a few ways this could happen and a nearly infinite amount of variables that could be used to help.

I am planning on going big with this and making a plan that could be copied by others to help spread a sustainable way to help the ridiculous number of people than cycle through the prisons in this country.  More to come here, but I need to get these ideas out of me and into the world.

Irregular symmetry

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that we see ourselves reflected in the world.  There are a few quotes that come to mind that get me going.  First is one by Carl Jung, “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves”.  Another is from Hermann Hesse “ If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.

These two quotes together are ones that have really helped me to contemplate my actions.  I really try to think of those ideas when I find myself worked up about something.  When I want to lash out at someone who has said something I think is ridiculous or stupid.  If I can do it, pausing when that anger rises up and remembering this is often enough to prevent me from saying or doing something stupid.

The tricky part of this comes into play when we look at nature.

This picture is beautiful, I took it after one of our late season snowstorms in April this year.  Take a close look at the trees.  The trees here aren’t ones that show perfect symmetry, they are leaning and some are growing into each other, but overall they do have balance, they held up all that snow and didn’t fall over.  If I were able to single a few of them out when they are fully alive in the summer they would look fairly symmetrical.  The part you can’t see is the root system.  While it doesn’t look exactly like the tree tops, there is some reflection in how roots spread underground.  None of this is like a perfect flower that has amazing symmetry, but that brings me to the point of this post.

The reflection mentioned by the authors above is not perfect.  It is not a total mirror image,  it is like the reflection seen between tree tops and the roots,  there is symmetry, but it’s not obvious with a quick glance.  To me it explains some of the divisions in this country, if you read the same account of current political events going on (current or historical) you might wonder what is going on because each side of the story is so different and so far apart that it hardly makes sense to an outsider.

What I noticed is that the interpretation of the event depends on what mirror is being used,  if you are on one side of a political argument you would tend to believe the storyline from that side.  If you are a more neutral observer like I have become, you wonder how each side is able to sleep at night because one accuses the other of doing something they are ten times more guilty of doing and ignores the criticism that they are also guilty of the same thing.

 The issue arises because we think we are looking out a window, but it is in fact a mirror.  However, the reflection we see is distorted.  It’s like the difference between the roots and the treetop.  Very different but the same.  Like a just about every treetop, one side may be a little lopsided but over all if you divide any tree right down the middle, one half will be roughly the same as the other.

This distortion I think is the cause of the anger or irritation.  This is also behind hypocrisy, which is probably going to be a future topic for a post.  If you are looking at a distorted mirror you can’t see that in most cases you’re in fact looking at the problem.  Most often assigning blame or accusing someone else of some wrong (except for the most part  if the person has actually physically hurt you), comes from the blurry mirror you look at.  This is all very sneaky though because being humble and admitting you might be wrong is so difficult for humans.  

Over the years that I have been able to think about this, I have yet to be able to find a good rebuttal that is able to disprove the two quotes at the top.  The more I think about it, the more I am able to see that this tricky character trait of humans is constantly causing problems for people.  The only solution I have found is to take a short pause or deep breath and then focus on what is going on inside me.  It has taken time, but it has lead me to some very serene times in my life and the more I can practice this nonjudgmental approach to life the better my life becomes.

What’s really important in this world?

I don’t know the answer to the title of this blog.

I don’t think there are a lot of people giving this question a lot of thought these days.

It’s really too bad, because if more people were thinking of it, perhaps we wouldn’t have some of the problems we are facing in this world.  Money is something that seems to be important.  It is important to many people for a variety of reasons.  Some noble reasons for sure, but the majority of people’s reasons to get and have money are typically selfish.

Maybe that last sentence gets at the heart of the issue.  When looking at how big and important events or things are it depends a lot on perspective.  It’s incredibly important for me to be able to provide food, safety and some fun for my family.  For a town it’s probably very similar as well as a state or even a country.

Popularity, fame and luxury seem to be important, but would my life end without the next big Fast and Furious movie or another season of Modern Family?  Would I cease to exist without hearing the latest gossip from Hollywood?  Would I be able to survive without new curtains in my bedroom that aren’t as ugly as the ones currently hanging there?  Would I be able to survive with only two cars instead of three?

I most certainly would be able to go on without the list of things above, life may not be quite as enjoyable as it currently is temporarily, but I think we would all be able to adjust without those things.

So we can go a level deeper, what is important is only what you need to survive.  In Minnesota that looks a bit different than what that might look like in Brazil, but food, clothing, shelter and safety are what they are.  There are so many people who lack these basic important things in their lives, but yet this country is consumed with celebrity and materialistic pursuits.  It’s perhaps the not wanting to look or think about all those who have it so rough where these basic important needs aren’t met.

It’s becoming more and more difficult for me to ignore these people.  People who have life so tough and would be jealous of what I have because they have so little.

No matter what you happen to believe about the events that take place after you die, there seems to be a few truths that also help me get to the bottom of my question.  You can’t take any money with you when you are dead.  I suppose you could, it is a fact archeology has proven that a lot of people were buried with their “stuff”.  The only things you keep are those you give away.  Goodwill and charity lives on much longer in the memories of those you have helped.  Money and possessions are sold or divided up and soon forgotten.

I have a great friend who lives to make money, but only because he likes to give it away.  He also hates to be recognized for it.  That is who I think I would like to be, someone who has the ability to see all of the things I have been writing about and who lives it.  I don’t want to live my life any longer making more stuff for people who don’t need it, I think the most important thing in life is to help other people.  While I may not end up doing it the same way my friend does.  He is mostly interested in feeding hungry people.  I will find a way to meet the needs of those who are having a rough time and do it in a way that brings no attention to myself, only the way it is done.  Hopefully it will allow those people to be better people to each other and to the world.