Cleansing Death, Action, Toxins, Intention
I feel extremely compelled to post tonight, so I will. I’ve had a low key couple of days; today I spent a few hours in the Ravine Park Salmon Hatchery, picking dead coho salmon eggs out of trays, some 2000 all told. We never do manage to pick them quite quickly enough, but do successfully release thousands of coho fry and smolts into Downes, McLennan, Stoney, Willband, and Horn Creeks each year. It’s very rewarding and in an ideal world I’d be more involved. In an ideal world, days would also be around 150 hours long, followed by 5 hours of sleep and some nighttime wandering.
I’ll be doing a detox program starting tomorrow morning; the “Master Cleanse” which I learned about through my friend Jeff. I ought to read the book that it’s based on, but essentially it involves no solid foods for eight days, followed by four days on a severely restricted diet. During those eight days, one ingests only a great deal of water, and a solution of water, lemon/lime juice, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper whenever one feels hungry. This allows the body to take a break from the continual digestion process, and focus on removing toxins. This is the primary function of the lemon juice and cayenne pepper; the maple syrup ensures a sufficient caloric intake to have enough energy to carry on with life as usual. I last did such a cleanse last July, with initially disastrously embarrassing and moderately effective results; dig back to July’s posts if you want the details.
Why am I doing this? While my holidays have not been excessively excessive, they have been excessive and not quite as ascetic as I’d hoped. Asceticism is easier when the pantries are not stuffed with temptations, which is not likely to happen at my house anytime soon.
Today, I also read Thoreau, the book that HH gave me last Christmas and which I’m only getting around to now. I read in the bathtub, and chose Thoreau because I realized I was wasting my time with Barth. Thoreau speaks to me much more strongly than Barth ever has, and though he writes with complexity and adroit use of the English language, he’s not near as long-windedly verbose as Barth, and addresses much less abstract concepts.\
Some Thoreau gems to close off this post. The thing with Thoreau, is you often can’t quote a single soundbite. You need the whole damn paragraph for it to flow and make sense. Oh well.
“What I have heard of Brahmins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heaves over their shoulders, until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach, or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars – even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredulous and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labours of Hercules were trifling with those which my neighbours have undertaken, for they were only twelve and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster, or finished any labour.”
“Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superflously coarse labours of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.”
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
“A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed under even what are called the games and amusements of mankind.”
“What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilising rain on their fields.”
“Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were.”
“I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.”
“One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with’; and so he religously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the day whiles he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle.”
“The greater part of what my neighbours call good, I call bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behaviour. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?”
Off all these quotes, it is the last that my current inner being identifies most strongly with.
