Hope as an obstacle

As someone who often gets paralyzed in just trying to suss out possible outcomes, both good and bad, this passage from Thich Nhat Hanh's Peace Is Every Step really resonated with me.

Hope is important, because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today. But that is the most that hope can do for us - to make some hardship lighter. When I think deeply about the nature of hope, I see something tragic. Since we cling to our hope in the future, we do not focus our energies and capabilities on the present moment. We use hope to believe something better will happen in the future, that we will arrive at peace, or the Kingdom of God. Hope becomes a kind of obstacle. If you can refrain from hoping, you can bring yourself entirely into the present moment and discover the joy that is already here.

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Western civilization places so much emphasis on the idea of hope that we sacrifice the present moment. Hope is for the future. It cannot help us discover joy, peace, or enlightenment in the present moment. Many religions are based on the notion of hope, and this teaching about refraining from hope may create a strong reaction. But the shock can bring about something important. I do not mean that you should not have hope, but that hope is not enough. Hope can create an obstacle for you, and if you dwell in the energy of hope, you will not bring yourself back entirely into the present moment. If you re-channel those energies into being aware of what is going on in the present moment, you will be able to make a breakthrough and discover joy and peace right in the present moment, inside of yourself and all around you.

Seed: From biotech giants' patents and lobbying, to my thankfulness for local organic growers

According to Forbes, Monsanto spent $1.3M on lobbying, just in the first quarter of this year. They lobbied ''Congress, (the) White House, (the) US Trade Representative's office, (the) Federal Trade Commission'' and the ''Agriculture Department'' on ''farm bill provisions and biotechnology'' as well as ''organic standards, patent reform, theft of agricultural seeds, endangered species, timber, greenhouse gas emissions legislation, international trade, ethanol production'' and other things. The crazy thing is that $1.3M to them is spare change.

In other news... It seems the rush is now on for companies to patent plant genes for crops that are tolerant of climate change. As biotech giants continue to buy up more and more seed companies, and farmers' and gardeners' GMO-free options become increasingly scarce, somebody's going to be making a whole heap of money, and it's not gonna be farmers. The time to start saving organic seed is now; I'm putting it on my list of things I need to try out this season.


On a related note, I popped by my local organic health food store, True Food Organics, yesterday and noticed for the first time that they were selling seed. They were kinda buried behind some dried shiitake mushrooms at the back of the far end of the counter, so I'd never noticed them before. That sucks, since there were tomato, basil and pepper seeds I would have loved to have sown, but it's too late in the year now to start from scratch for those. So I picked up some lettuce seed (arugula, Jericho and Black Seeded Simpson) and beans (Contender green beans) from Hope Seeds, as well as some wax beans from Mapple Farms. I couldn't help but bemoan the small selection available; I sure as heck hope to have more luck at the Farmer's Market tomorrow. I wish I knew more local vegetable gardeners.