The other thing that didn’t happen in February was any tree pruning. In the past, energy permitting, I have gone out in February and done fruit tree pruning but with all the snow, that would have been difficult this year, and my macho younger self that may have bulled through it anyway is but a distant memory.

It is still time in March to prune but best to get it done before trees break dormancy and we are now having a string of well above average temperature days where you can almost see the snow melting in front of your eyes and if this continues it will be a narrow window to prune in.

This is complicated by my physical limitations where I only have a little energy and don’t really accomplish all that much in a given day. There is practically unlimited trees to prune around NV given that restriction. If anyone is interested in doing some pruning let me know and we can go out and do some.

I have also made commitments to individuals to help them, besides the trees I have myself. Once April arrives so will a lot of trees, berries, and fragrant perennials so even if the weather turns cold again, I won’t have time for pruning.

I have some odd jobs to do around the garden to make life simpler when the season hits, so I have been getting out in the good weather and getting some stuff done.

Today I am going to strip some old rotting mesh wire off a still good frame that is no longer useful in its current condition. It is like a low table we have put plants on while waiting to transplant them, something I recycled from I can’t remember where. Unfortunately it has about a zillion staples on it so it will take some time, but once the wire is removed I am going to reinforce the frame and use it as a portable cold frame, just throwing some plastic, old windows or floating row cover over it to bring some greens on early and then as a season extender in the fall.

I also have received some 2 oz. and some .55 oz floating row cover I can use for the same purpose without a frame but cold frames are nice.

One thing about having a garden is there is always something to do.

“Prabhupada: And the bulls are being killed. Why they should be killed? Engage them in tilling the field. They will have occupation. And the man also will have occupation. There is immense land. So there will be no question of unemployment. And the machine, it works hundreds of men’s labor and hundreds of men become unemployed. So unemployed means devil’s workshop.”

Room Conversation with Scientists — July 2, 1974, Melbourne

• Pe

Mysticism is dying, and taking true religion with it. Monasteries have dwindled. Contemplative orders have declined. Our religious leaders no longer preach the renunciation of the world; our culture scoffs at the idea. The closest most Americans come to real asceticism is giving up chocolate, cappuccinos, or (in my own not-quite-Francis-of-Assisi case) meat for lunch for Lent.

Yet by some measures, mysticism’s place in contemporary religious life looks more secure than ever. Our opinion polls suggest that we’re encountering the divine all over the place. In 1962, after a decade-long boom in church attendance and public religiosity, Gallup found that just 22 percent of Americans reported having what they termed “a religious or mystical experience.” Flash forward to 2009, in a supposedly more secular United States, and that number had climbed to nearly 50 percent.

In a sense, Americans seem to have done with mysticism what we’ve done with every other kind of human experience: We’ve democratized it, diversified it, and taken it mass market. No previous society has offered seekers so many different ways to chase after nirvana, so many different paths to unity with God or Gaia or Whomever. A would-be mystic can attend a Pentecostal healing service one day and a class on Buddhism the next, dabble in Kabbalah in February and experiment with crystals in March, practice yoga every morning and spend weekends at an Eastern Orthodox retreat center. Sufi prayer techniques, Eucharistic adoration, peyote, tantric sex — name your preferred path to spiritual epiphany, and it’s probably on the table.

This democratization has been in many ways a blessing. Our horizons have been broadened, our religious resources have expanded, and we’ve even recovered spiritual practices that seemed to have died out long ago. The unexpected revival of glossolalia (speaking in tongues, that is), the oldest and strangest form of Christian worship, remains one of the more remarkable stories of 20th-century religion.

And yet Johnson may be right that something important is being lost as well. By making mysticism more democratic, we’ve also made it more bourgeois, more comfortable, and more dilettantish. It’s become something we pursue as a complement to an upwardly mobile existence, rather than a radical alternative to the ladder of success. Going to yoga classes isn’t the same thing as becoming a yogi; spending a week in a retreat center doesn’t make me Thomas Merton or Thérèse of Lisieux. Our kind of mysticism is more likely to be a pleasant hobby than a transformative vocation.

What’s more, it’s possible that our horizons have become too broad, and that real spiritual breakthroughs require a kind of narrowing — the decision to pick a path and stick with it, rather than hopscotching around in search of a synthesis that “works for me.” The great mystics of the past were often committed to a particular tradition and community, and bound by the rules (and often the physical confines) of a specific religious institution. Without these kind of strictures and commitments, Johnson argues, mysticism drifts easily into a kind of solipsism: “Kabbalism apart from Torah-observance is playacting; Sufism disconnected from Shariah is vague theosophy; and Christian mysticism that finds no center in the Eucharist or the Passion of Christ drifts into a form of self-grooming.”

Most religious believers will never be great mystics, of course, and the American way of faith is kinder than many earlier eras to those of us who won’t. But maybe it’s become too kind, and too accommodating. Even ordinary belief — the kind that seeks epiphanies between deadlines, and struggles even with the meager self-discipline required to get through Lent — depends on extraordinary examples, whether they’re embedded in our communities or cloistered in the great silence of a monastery. Without them, faith can become just another form of worldliness, therapeutic rather than transcendent, and shorn of any claim to stand in judgment over our everyday choices and concerns.

Without them, too, we give up on what’s supposed to be the deep promise of religious practice: that at any time, in any place, it’s possible to encounter the divine, the revolutionary and the impossible — and have your life completely shattered and remade.

INFORMATION EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW………………………
Blood Clots/Stroke – They Now Have a Fourth Indicator, the Tongue

I will continue to forward this every time it comes around!

STROKE:Remember the 1st Three Letters…..S.T.R.

My nurse friend sent this and encouraged me to post it and spread the word. I agree.

If everyone can remember something this simple, we could save some folks. Seriously.

Please read:

STROKE IDENTIFICATION:

During a BBQ, a friend stumbled and took a little fall – she assured everyone that she was fine (they offered to call paramedics) .she said she had just tripped over a brick because of her new shoes.

They got her cleaned up and got her a new plate of food. While she appeared a bit shaken up, Ingrid went about enjoying herself the rest of the evening

Ingrid’s husband called later telling everyone that his wife had been taken to the hospital – (at 6:00 pm Ingrid passed away.) She had suffered a stroke at the BBQ. Had they known how to identify the signs of a stroke, perhaps Ingrid would be with us today.. Some don’t die they end up in a helpless, hopeless condition instead.

It only takes a minute to read this…

A neurologist says that if he can get to a stroke victim within 3 hours he can totally reverse the effects of a stroke…totally. He said the trick was getting a stroke recognized, diagnosed, and then getting the patient medically cared for within 3 hours, which is tough.

RECOGNIZING A STROKE

Thank God for the sense to remember the ‘3′ steps, STR . Read and Learn!

Sometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify. Unfortunately, the lack of awareness spells disaster. The stroke victim may suffer severe brain damage when people nearby fail to recognize the symptoms of a stroke.

Now doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking three simple questions:

S *Ask the individual to SMILE.
T *Ask the person to TALK and SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE (Coherently)
(i.e. It is sunny out today.)
R *Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS.

If he or she has trouble with ANY ONE of these tasks, call emergency number immediately and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher.

New Sign of a Stroke ——– Stick out Your Tongue

NOTE: Another ’sign’ of a stroke is this: Ask the person to ’stick’ out his tongue… If the tongue is ‘crooked’, if it goes to one side or the other, that is also an indication of a stroke.

A cardiologist says if everyone who gets this e-mail sends it to 10 people; you can bet that at least one life will be saved.

I have done my part. Will you?

And between the new macadam and the Scalp Act
They got him by the short hair; had him clipped
Who once was wild—and all five senses wild—
Printing the wild with his hoof’s inflated script
Before the times was money in the bank,
Before it was a crime to be so mild.

But history is a fact, and moves on feet
Sharper than his, toward wallows deeper than.
And the myth that covered all his moving parts,
Grandfather’s time had turned into a coat;
And what kept warm then, in the true world’s cold
Is old and cold in a world his death began.

A factory farm housing more than 8,000 ‘battery cows’ will be built in the English countryside.

Under the controversial plans, Britain’s largest ever dairy herd will be kept in industrial-scale sheds with little access to pasture or sunshine.

The cows will be milked around the clock to produce 430,000 pints each day  -  while their slurry will be recycled to generate power for the national grid.

The complex is the first ’supersize’ cattle factory planned for Britain and follows growing concerns about the spread of ‘zero-grazing’ farming.

Justin Kerswell, of animal rights group Viva, said: ‘This is factory farming  -  and it blows out of the water the pastoral image the dairy industry likes to portray.’

The £40million farm will be built near Nocton, Lincolnshire, later this year. It will have eight hangars for 8,100 cattle and two 24-hour milking parlours.

The animals, fed on fodder, will spend most of their days inside where they will stand and sleep on sand rather than pasture.

And they will be milked three times a day, while a typical dairy cow is milked just twice.

Waste will be removed each day and fed into an anaerobic generator to produce enough electricity for more than 2,000 homes.

Robert Howard, a farmer behind the Nocton Dairies project, said the farm will be the largest in Western Europe and help the dairy industry compete against imports.

‘Campaigners think cows should be like in the Anchor butter advert, with 50 to 100 cows dancing in a field,’ he said. ‘It is a lovely idea, but not the reality.’

His colleague Peter Wiles said the cows would have access to open pasture when they were not producing milk. The sheds would have open sides, he added.

‘We will have a visitor centre to show the public around,’ he said. ‘We are aiming to have exceptional standards.’

The company’s website played down the industrial scale of the farm, saying: ‘The layout is designed so the cows get plenty of exercise and fresh air.

‘A vet will be on site 24 hours a day, seven days a week to support the trained dairy staff in their daily inspections of every single cow to check they are healthy and happy.’

But animal campaigners are fighting the plans. Linda Wardale, of the group Vegan Lincs, said the conditions would be akin to ‘ battery farming for cows’.

‘Cows should be in the fields, nibbling on grass, but here they’re going to keep them in sheds,’ she added.

And Patrick Holden, an organic dairy farmer and director of the Soil Association, said the farm was a wake-up call.

‘Will consumers be happy to know that they are drinking the milk from one of 8,100 cows that will never get out to grass?’ he asked.

‘There is also a greater risk of disease  -  and the spread of new diseases, as we saw with BSE.’

In addition, the move away from family farming would make Britain more vulnerable to rises in energy prices and trade crises, he added.

The Nocton Dairies’ farmers hope to have planning permission by the end of next month and milk the first cow by September.

?

But perhaps the greatest threat to the devotees who flocked to Haridwar, India, on one of the most auspicious days of the triennial Kumbh Mela festival, was the water itself.

The river is intensely polluted with sewage and industrial waste. Water-treatment facilities have been unable to keep up with India's rapid growth, often held back by a shortage of funds and other resources.

Now, the spiritually cleansing waters of the Ganges are about to get some cleaning of their own. The Indian government has embarked on a $4 billion campaign to ensure that by 2020 no untreated municipal sewage or industrial runoff enters the 1,560-mile river.

Only 31% of municipal sewage in India undergoes treatment, according to the Central Pollution Control Board, a government agency in New Delhi, while the rest gets discharged into the country's rivers, ponds, land and seas, contaminating underground and surface waters. More than 500,000 of the 10.3 million deaths in India in 2004 resulted from waterborne diseases, according to the most recent comprehensive mortality data from the World Health Organization.

The filth in the Ganges holds special resonance for this majority-Hindu nation. The Ganges basin supports more than 400 million of India's 1.1 billion people, the majority of whom are Hindus, who revere the river as "mother" and "goddess."

The cleanup initiative, which is supported by the World Bank, includes the expansion of traditional treatment facilities and, for the first time in India, the introduction of innovative river-cleaning methods.

Veer Bhadra Mishra, a 70-year-old priest and hydraulics engineer in Varanasi, the holy city downstream from Haridwar, has been a prominent advocate of treatment methods used abroad but not yet in India. His plan: to introduce a system to divert sewage and effluents, before they enter the river, to a series of specially designed ponds, for treatment and ultimately to be used use in irrigation or directed back into the river.

His efforts were mired in court and by opposition from local bureaucrats. The bureaucrats had a "difference of opinion" with Mr. Mishra about the best way to clean the river, says Ramesh Singh, general manager of Ganga Pollution Control Unit, the local government body charged with running government treatment facilities in Varanasi.

Mr. Singh says the technologies already in use were time-tested and reliable, but suffered from a lack of trained manpower and proper infrastructure, and a shortage of funds for equipment maintenance.

Last summer, after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh identified cleaning up the river as a national priority, the government in New Delhi increased funding to operate and maintain conventional treatment facilities, and also approved Mr. Mishra's plan—giving $184,000 to his organization, the Sankat Mochan Foundation, for the design of a new sewage treatment plant.

The foundation is working with GO2 Water Inc., a Berkeley, Calif., wastewater-technology company. In the plan, 10.5 million gallons of sewage a day—13% of the daily output from Varanasi's 1.5 million people—will be intercepted daily at the riverbank, and diverted. In a nearby village, water will pass through a series of ponds, where sunlight, gravity, bacteria and microalgae will clean the water. A larger pond system is planned, to process 33% more of the city's sewage.

View Full Image

Olivier Culmann/Tendance Floue for The Wall Street Journal GANGA

Devout Hindus come from all over to cleanse themselves in the Ganges for the festival of Kumbh Mela, celebrated every three years. The government has started a massive campaign to clean up the polluted river itself.

The treatment system "will be the best solution for dealing with huge amount of domestic sewage being discharged into Gangaji and other rivers in India," Mr. Mishra said, using the honorific "ji" with the river's local name, Ganga.

In Haridwar, the National Botanical Research Institute is developing a wetland with local species of reeds to absorb the polluting elements from the wastewater, according to U.N. Rai, a scientist heading the project. Other wetlands will be developed in other areas "to ease the current pollution load in the river," Mr. Rai says.

The load is heavy. On a recent winter morning in Varanasi, lab technician Gopal Pandey descended the stone stairs of Tulsi Ghat, one of the holy city's 84 bathing platforms, to fetch some Ganges water for testing at the Sankat Mochan Foundation, an organization run by Mr. Mishra.

In the laboratory, Mr. Pandey found that each 100 milliliters of the river's waters were laden with 29,000 fecal coliform bacteria, which potentially cause disease. India says a maximum of 500 per 100 milliliters is safe for bathing in the river. Another sample from downstream, after the Ganges meets a tributary carrying a black mass of thick industrial effluents, showed 10 million bacteria—mostly E-coli—in the same amount of river water. Mr. Pandey's verdict: "The pollution is at very, very dangerous level."

Write to Krishna Pokharel at krishna.pokharel@wsj.com

His consciousness has developed affinity
But being a lost and lonely entity
He is compelled along the railroad
The train goes on making immemorial arbitrary connections
On an inconceivable network of tracks, side tracks, spurts and traces.

To terminate the wearisome trek is to attain the end of the line
The one central turn table radiating all the strands will attract
The homesick adventurer in the sequence of spiritual evolutions
Or Transmigration of the soul.
The approach to the cynosure draws out the trek beyond the barriers of time
Onto transcendental lines.

In the supreme station the atmosphere of insensate beauty
Offers relief in the company of the chief controller, your God.

Now dawn is breaking down the metaphysical carrier
Look out at every day!!!!
There is no other excursion to make!!!
Try and locate the real objective
The real and essential trek is above the suffocating—
Pleasure trips advertised by the phenomenal billboards.

A linear odyssey through plastic form is a diversionary movement
Offered to superficial and coarse creatures
For the captivation of their whims,
While the ultimate freedom—Love ride express is running
Unnoticed into the kingdom of God.

ALL ABOARD!!!!

(Submitted by Rsabdev. It appeared in Columbus, Ohio around 1969 on a flier inviting people to the Sunday feast.)

BRUSSELS — Delegates arriving at the gates of the climate conference in Copenhagen last month were met by women in furry animal suits holding placards showing pictures of lambs, cows and pigs and warning, “Don’t Eat Me.”

As they lined up for hours in freezing conditions, many of the delegates seemed grateful for the neatly wrapped snacks — meat-free sandwiches — that the women were handing out free.

Followers of Ching Hai say that one of her principal goals is to fight environmental disasters, and her representatives in Copenhagen appeared eager to spread the message that methane, which is belched in large quantities by cows and other livestock raised for the meat and dairy industries, is among the most potent planet-warming gases.

But the virtues of vegetarianism as part of the battle to curb climate change are far from being an issue just for the spiritually inclined.

Long before the summit meeting in Copenhagen, rising demand for meat and dairy products, particularly among the burgeoning middle classes in countries like China and India with fast-developing economies, meant that links between climate change and food policy were becoming an important element in the debate over what to do about the rising levels of greenhouse gases.

The issue appeared to have gained traction in the weeks leading up to the Copenhagen conference, with prominent figures from the worlds of science and entertainment stepping into the fray.

Speaking at the European Parliament in early December, Paul McCartney, a former member of the Beatles, said there was an urgent need to do something about meat production, not only because of its effects on the climate but also because of related issues like deforestation and ensuring secure supplies of water.

Mr. McCartney, who has long advocated vegetarianism, urged European legislators to support policies like encouraging citizens to refrain from eating meat for one day a week, something that he said could become as commonplace as recycling or cars that run on hybrid technology.

Civil servants in the Belgian city of Ghent and schoolchildren in Baltimore already observe a meat-free day each week, he said.

Mr. McCartney was joined at the parliament by Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is the main United Nations body studying the climate.

Public awareness of the problems linked to meat is low, and the authorities might have to consider levying a surcharge on beef to discourage consumption, Mr. Pachauri said in comments reported by Agence France-Presse.

Meat farmers immediately branded the comments as an assault on the industry, and criticism came from as far away as New Zealand.

“Cutting out meat one day a week might seem a simple solution, but there is little evidence to show any benefit,” Rod Slater, the chief executive of Beef and Lamb New Zealand, told the country’s press association.

“Suggesting meat’s not green is an emotive slur on an industry which continues investment in ongoing research, striving for further improvements,” added Mr. Slater, who said people living in New Zealand obtained daily nutritional necessities, and most of their protein, zinc and vitamin B12, from beef and lamb.

In fact, like a number of other areas of research in climate science, the greenhouse gas intensity of meat production is contested.

When a study in the November-December issue of the magazine World Watch claimed more than half of human-produced, planet-warming gases were caused by meat industries, a research group for the livestock industry countered that a study by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization already had shown that the relevant figure was closer to 18 percent.

The study published in World Watch failed “to enlarge on any counterfactuals, such as what a world without domesticated livestock would look like,” Carlos Seré, the director general of the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, wrote to Green Inc. in November.

“Would, for example, wild herbivores and termite mounds take over many of these environments, and end up producing as much greenhouse gases as domestic ruminants?” Mr. Seré asked. “We frankly don’t, and can’t, know that yet.”

Certainly the issue may be more nuanced than some commentators have suggested.

For example, cattle fed on grass may have much lower carbon footprints than those fed in feedlots because animals in pasture lands require fewer fossil fuel-based inputs like fertilizers and because they help the soil sequester carbon.

Renewed efforts are under way to get to the bottom of the matter.

Early this month, the Paris-based World Organization for Animal Health said it would study the effect of meat output on climate change in light of requests from its member countries.

“It’s a question that needs to be studied with a lot of distance,” Bernard Vallat, the organization’s director-general, told a news conference, according to Reuters. “We want to make a modest and independent contribution,” he said.

Mr. Vallet said that one of the thorniest issues was how to involve agriculture in efforts to reduce gases while maintaining food security.

Mr. Seré, of the livestock research institute, acknowledged the need to develop a form of livestock production between factory and family farming that would ease poverty without depleting natural resources or hurting the climate.

He said environmental campaigners should keep in mind that the “biggest concern of many experts regarding livestock in developing countries is not their impact on climate change but rather the impact of climate change on livestock production.”

The “hotter and more extreme tropical environments being predicted threaten not only up to a billion livelihoods based on livestock but also supplies of milk, meat and eggs among hungry communities that need these nourishing foods most,” he said.

“Look!” she said.
“See what I have found. Who will help me to plant this grain of wheat?”

“Not I,” said the duck. “I must go down to the pond for a swim.”
“Not I,” said the cat. “I have some visitors coming in a few minutes.”

“Very well, I will then”, said the little red hen, and she did.

After a while some weeds appeared among the stalks of wheat.
One day the little red hen asked:
“Who will help me to weed this wheat?”

“Not I,” said the duck. “That sort of work doesn’t agree with me.”
“Not I”, said the cat. “I would not be able to tell the weeds from the wheat”.

“Very well, I will then”, said the little red hen, and she did.

After a while the wheat began to ripen:
“What fine wheat we have,” said the cat and the duck.
“Yes, indeed, it is time to reap the wheat,” said the little red hen. “Who will help me to reap this wheat?”

“Not I”, said the cat.
“Not I”, said the duck.

“Very well, then I will”, said the little red hen.

She cut the heads off the grain very carefully and put them in a bag.

Then she called to the cat and the duck and she asked, “Now, who will take this wheat to the mill to be ground into flour?”
“Not I”, said the duck.
“Not I”, said the cat.

“Very well, then”, said the little red hen, “I will take it myself”.

So the little red hen trudged off to the mill, and in a few hours she was back with a sack of fine flour.

“Now, who is going to make this flour into bread?” asked the little red hen.

“Not I”, said the duck.
“Not I”, said the cat.

“I will, then,” said the little red hen, and she did.

Soon the loaf was ready for the oven.

“Now, who is going to bake this bread?” asked the little red hen.

“Not I”, said the cat.
“Not I”, said the duck.

“Very well, then”, said the little red hen. “I will do it”.

So the loaf of bread was baked and it was baked, and it was beautiful, golden and crusty. The little red hen put it on the kitchen table, and the cat and the duck came into the house and looked at it longingly.

“Well now, who is going to eat this loaf of bread?” asked the little red hen.

“I will”, said the duck quickly.
“I will”, said the cat stepping close.

“Oh, no, you won’t”, said the little red hen. “I am going to eat it myself”.

Then she called her little chicks together, and they ate the whole loaf of bread. Not a crumb was left for the duck and the cat.

“Of course, animals and other lower species are not capable of understanding this movement, but if even a small number of human beings take it seriously, then by their chanting loudly, all living entities, including even trees, animals and other lower species, will be benefited. When Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu inquired from Haridasa Thakura how he was to benefit living entities other than humans, Srila Haridasa Thakura replied that the Hare Krsna maha-mantra is so potent that if it is chanted loudly, everyone will benefit, including the lower species of life.”

Adi 9.40

Merton’s Voice: “The trees indeed love You without knowing You. The tiger lilies and corn flowers are there proclaiming that they love You, without being aware of Your presence. The beautiful dark clouds ride slowly across the sky musing on You like children who do not know what they are dreaming of, as they play.

“But in the midst of them all, I know You, and I know of Your presence.”

Merton, Thomas. Thoughts in Solitude. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999, p. 99.