Rebuilding Bountiful

Hint: the neighborhood pictured on the right is not within my community-of-the-mind called Bountiful. Look down that road between the people-coops, how it recedes in perfect perspective to a vanishing point beyond which lies a lights-out horizon, wastelands, badlands, no-man's lands... but most definitely not the lane that leads to Bountiful.

The "Bountiful" I have in mind is a simple community that was the object of a fictional journey--one might even say pilgrimage--portrayed in the 1986 movie The Trip to Bountiful on which a Depression-era elderly lady wants to return to her childhood home just once more before the Reaper comes a-callin'.

"Bountiful" to me calls to mind the cornucopia, the fabled horn of plenty, rich harvests and rural life. It calls to mind life on the land with trips to town or village, trips made on foot or bike or horseback, trips that provide time to smell the sweet grass, the rich, newly turned earth, ripened fruits, autumn leaves...

Rebuilding Bountiful requires a devolution (yes, you read that correctly: "devolution" with a "d," not "revolution" with an "r") that diminishes the megalopoli and does away with industrial agriculture. Rebuilding Bountiful requires a return to religiosity--I'm suspicious of so-called "spirituality--and a reverence for life and its bounty. My own pilgrimage of the soul led me to Traditional Catholicism, the Social Teachings of which merit much further study than is currently accorded them, but The Catacombs here in the Southern Cone are non-sectarian, non-denominational and non-discriminatory, though the coordinator is firm in his faith and beliefs and pleased to proselytize when permitted.

There is no guarantee that "returning to Bountiful" will provide an idyllic life, but staying behind in the cities is almost certain to ensure that an idyllic life will not be on one's agenda.

Defender el Garbanzo

See the simple chick-pea, the garbanzo in Spanish, a legume now believed to have medicinal properties akin to the widely used anti-depressant drug Prozac: garbanzos produce serotonin, the so-called "happiness hormone," though strictly speaking, it is not a hormone.

The title of this entry translates literally as "defend the chickpea," but it is a figure of speech formerly used in Spain which stood for "earning a living." The garbanzo, you see, was the staple food of country folk, particularly in the south, in Andalucia (though by no means only there), before the advent of the mass tourism, building boom and sea-of-plastic greenhouses that changed the character of the place through a kind of "progress" that has in the final accounting perhaps brought less happiness than the garbanzo.

Never a popular food item in northern countries, the chickpea began to attract attention with the introduction of the Middle Eastern staple hummus, a preparation now often used as a dip. Recipes abound, but in essence, it consists of chickpeas run through a blender with olive oil, garlic, cumin and lemon juice.

Garbanzos are not difficult to grow. I plan to try a patch this year.

Earning a living growing things is no easy matter, less so now that such monstrosities as the Codex Alimentarius are being introduced to eliminate once and for all the independent farmer, the yeoman, the peasant who was the backbone of the West for most of its history. Social engineering has successfully brainwashed most of today's urban and suburban dwellers into believing the peasant was an ignorant, backward brute who led a dreary and brutish life, but this is far from the truth.

A society not based on the land is not a healthy society. One does not have to make much of a leap to conclude based on observation that most contemporary societies--consumer-based societies in particular--are sickening, perhaps sickening unto death, as natural law is flouted and an ever-greater detachment from all that is natural has infected entire societies.

Grow a patch of garbanzos, harvest them, eat them: beats a prescription for Prozac.