My fruits of labor on the desert orchard in Africa

A few of the obstacles, grounding & sun gazing, exercise and my dreams for the restoring the korongo (a massive gully in the valley due to erosion). And a bit about the tech body.

They said, ‘You can’t start an orchard here; it’s a desert!’ But I did.

‘OK, maybe Mangos, but not Bananas!’ But I did.

And then, ‘you can never grow organic tomato’s on the vine here without chemicals and poisons, never!!’ But I did.

Tropical farm produce

But the biggest naysayer of all was my mind:

‘You can’t start over with a new life now. You are 60 years old.’

‘You can’t stop cultivating your online life, you’ve been wired since the mid-90’s, no way!’

‘You can’t leave everything behind and move to Africa!’

But I did.

If it were only that easy… but it’s gotten more difficult. I started building a house. I was staying in a nearby Inn and decided to go for it and move onto the land now!

‘You can’t live in a tent for five months and cook outside, mostly eating fresh fruits and vegetables grown!’

‘You can’t live like you did in your 20s as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone, take bucket baths, and use an outdoor hole for your latrine!’

I am still doing that last part, reluctantly, haha. The house is about a month away from being finished. Just in time for the big rainy season. 2024 showed us having the most significant rainfall in over a decade. I survived the short rainy season of November to December in the tent, but I must move in before March. The house started as a single floor, then went to a second with an outdoor deck, then a third with a wall of windows to view the land… I stopped my local contractors from building a fourth with a loft and top-of-the-house deck.

‘I have to build other things!’

I will have a video update of Year Three on the orchard soon— am just waiting till we chop and drop all the vegetation around the trees. Here are a few short notes of things I’ve written here.

Grounding is the key!

As most of my readers know, I left the USA on November 2nd, 2020, for Tanzania. I lived in Dar es Sallam, Zanzibar, and Arusha for a while before finding a piece of land off the grid but with a mostly Massai & Ex-Pats community. All around us are Tanzanians, but we have a bit of an insular bubble in our community, not just in terms of the grid but also lifestyle. We do have a bit of conflict. The Massai want their goats, and we want wild animals, but it's a large valley, and we work together to satisfy both of our needs. I moved here permanently last August and am building a house, having started a fruit and nut orchard of over 300 wholly irrigated trees. But that all seems a prelude to me and that I’ve come here to ground my body.

The invention of the plastic sole is a coup. It’s taken the flight out of our step. There’s a compelling argument that, in the old world again, people were so flighty and weightless that they walked using the front of their foot, not the heel. And if you study qi gong, it will tell you that grounding works the best when it’s weighted outward from the ‘bubbling’ point that resides in the middle, directly under the toes. But nowadays, we’ve all been backed up onto our heels with rubber insulation that is not grounded and, therefore, not conductive.

The tech body overlords want you to be conductive, but it's an entirely different matter. I’ll go there a bit.

There’s this ancient enemy, which we say either we don’t know, it's everything, or it’s something in particular. I remember when Melbourne fell. It succumbed to a totalitarian regime that was the same as what Berlin was like before 1987. I visited Berlin in the 80s, and seeing that happen over the internet in a free society was a shock.

“I guess it can happen anywhere,” was my thought, and it pretty much did across the world, except for States in the USA, like Iowa or Florida, and remote places abroad, like Tanzania or parts of Eastern Europe and Sweden. But even the examples faltered at the beginning, and the latter was the outlier, they said.

We fought a lot over Sweden on Twitter and Facebook, but I always said, ‘It's because they are already there; they are the future as far as adoption of the economic system without money. I remember being there a few years straight in the summers. The first time, getting a ride for cash in a taxi, but the next day I couldn’t buy anything at the village grocery store. I had to go into the nearest city and exchange it for a card to buy anything. That was by 2017, so they were meant to be the model behavior to eliminate the mask-- subliminally, ‘be like us!’ Brain-chip dudes.

Grounding and standing connect the frame in a way that isn’t happening while or with anything else propped up against something. That’s why it's one of the four postures of the Sattipattana Suta, along with sitting, lying down, and walking. But each is needed. Each has its own mode of consciousness—just like the sense doors.

What is the first thing this enemy went for in the body? Shutting down our sense doors. Masks close down smell. And with earbuds that close down hearing. Phones close their eyes, and they envision themselves close down in touch with virtual reality. These sense doors, if you read the Sattipattana Suta, are where consciousness resides-- in the five sense doors, each has its own consciousness. The mind is the sixth door of consciousness and the actual gift or prize for tech. But to get it, they must first shut down all the others.

So, getting back to grounding, there are already six ways of consciousness and four ways of body posture, so that’s 24 exercises. That’s a lot of practice. It feels like I am starting over with doing it all shoeless. And there’s not much else to say about it, as it’s all internal.

Sun gazing

This is something like the light fantastic plasmatic. It’s like having acid in the body of lsd style. Visually, afterward, my eyes can be wavy in the various vibrations or thresholds of light, seeing them be vibrant, but my mind is not thinking in that spot or a concentration, so it can’t be the focus, just on the periphery. Then, there becomes a possibility to really focus the eye in on a distant place, in one or the other, like a telescope lens through one then the other eye—haha, my lame attempt at describing the experience. This happens right after the Sun goes down, especially when I am in a lower elevation, in the valley on the land here. Its also available at sunrise.

The Korongo

I said valley above, how quaint. The truth is it’s a massive erosion ditch. But it is remarkably clean too, without any pollution or trash— the Maasai bomas are commendable in that regard, despite being off-grid and in poverty. I can only start to explain the korongo. It’s too massive and not designed to be in the mind, at least mine. But I could see making a documentary about it. I’d need to work out a good description of what it is and where it is happening here.

A drone and maps would be needed. It would put the spot on the map and raise the funds to make it happen. Or I could fund it myself, as it's not that expensive, and I can buy an acre and a half of the worst spot for about $3,000. Then, I will fill it with Sisal and native grasses. I have only briefly mentioned this next step to my wife, my biggest supporter, because it’s crazy. About my wife, Shashikala, I’ll say this. I now know what it’s like to have someone in your life who has had your back for 30+ years and knows how to raise children while re-educating you not to traumatize them like you were. The most significant part of my life in the last twenty years had nothing to do with my career but that success at family.

I did a short video on Korongos before, and here’s Google Maps looking at it (and the nearby Maasai Boma— my land is to the right), but it will deserve its post in the future.

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The Land

In one of the first pieces I wrote about this place, I mentioned Godfrey and Stefano and how I let Godfrey replace Stefano as the caretaker. But I lost half my tools, so now I have a Maasai man working for me, Esaya, who is learning to handle everything. And I have a Maasai guard who is part of the family I bought the farm from. They probably make more from that than they did farming, and it's not like it's necessary, but I like the connection, and it’s good to have for my neighbors and Godfrey’s animals. He’s got cows, chickens, and dogs. The dogs come over to my place All The Time. I have to kick them out at times, not literally. People toss rocks here, not to hit them but to get them moving along or scare them away. Particularly, the Maasai do not like dogs overall unless they are quiet and out of the way but make noise when predators near their goats or cows. Otherwise, find food elsewhere too. Tanzanians in more urban areas love their dogs, feeding them daily and letting them bark way too much at night.

I will not have dogs; I cultivate wild animals, so I like the idea of a place in the Korongo except for wild animals outside. No lions, just cats, but they could come. It has jackals and hyenas, foxes, and other wandering foot animals. The dogs go out there together. I have never seen a dog alone out there the few times I have seen them. Guinea fowl, dik-dik (a small antelope), and ground animals like mongooses (my secret ally against the mice eating tomatoes) are around. And lots of snakes, lizards and frogs. It’s a food chain at night, a real purge. That’s everywhere if you let vegetation grow. I do, and I have had my share of run-ins with snakes, having spotted both a green mamba and a common krait recently. We have bees, too. I have never been stung but have been chased away a few times. They are very territorial if you come within range of the front entrance of their hive. Walking on the other side of them is no big deal.

Exercise

Whatever floats my boat. Change is good too. In the Vayama texts of the Ayurvedic library written in the time called the Vedic, the Vedas said that exercise should fluctuate with the seasons. There are specific types of exercises (none are spelled out as it would have depended on the individual being prescribed), corresponding with duration, strenuousness, and heat-induced, depending on the condition desired or directed per the seasons. It also relates exercise to the type of food that you eat. For instance, if you eat a lot of sugar or meat to make up a sweat working out. However, primarily, such types of activities were not needed. Only if prescribed.

It's just a few instances that are explicated within the texts specifically related to the exercise of the body. The main focus is yoga and the mind’s role in creating health. Disease happens when the body is not in sync with the mind, and there is an internal conflict that isn’t being dealt with, ignored or not known, devoid of sense consciousness, so sickness and death should be avoided! And, too, in the world today, we have so many external poisons thrown at us and into our food and water.

Move, stretch, push, and hold to limits and beyond. More importantly, the posture should be maintained for a significant duration— four minutes is good, focused on breathing and alternate nostrils internally, which can be practiced if learned. It is like learning how to ride a bike, figuring out the legs move in sync with the speed, and you are the rider in control of it all. It is the same with your breath; you have an internal gear mechanism that allows you to alternate nostril breath without using your fingers. Ida, Pingala, Shshuma. The two sides of the mind and body are intertwined in the linkage and intersection. The right and left brain and the vagus nerve. It’s all internal and has to be found, like treasure-- mere hints of it in text.

Sattelites & Airships

Next post. I am blown away by what is happening in this area of our life.

The next generation of satellites, mostly on Starlink but also others emerging, will transform our world— it will change how people think! It already is, but few, except for the techies and truth seekers, are talking about it. Whenever I bring up Starlink and these lower orbit satellites, I get blank stares or even a response that it's fake; they are all running on balloons. And that’s part of why I am writing this: to pop that balloon of false assumptions so that we can figure out what is going on and what we can do about it.

And I hope to get back to the Moorish paradigm of research again;

but that will have to wait until I have a house and can get settled here for the long haul.