Gardening is not trivial. If you believe that it is, closely examine why you feel that way. You may discover that this attitude has been forced upon you by mass media and the crass culture it creates and maintains. The fact is, gardening is just the opposite - it is, or should be, a central, basic expression of human life.
— Andrew Weil
Anyone who knows me will attest that at any time during the day, you are most likely to find me picking tayberries, 'deadheading' peppermint, or succession-planting shallots. There is almost nothing, really, that I would rather do.
Each day as I travel through downtown Tucson, I am amazed at how quickly the most ancient of human behaviors have changed. For as long as there have been Homo sapiens - roughly 200,000 years - people have filled their lives principally with two activities: talking directly with other people, and doing physical things.
Remember that breath walking - as with any meditation technique - should not be pursued with a grim determination to 'get it right.' The point is to cultivate openness, relaxation and awareness, which can include awareness of your undisciplined, wandering mind.
I'm still not comfortable recommending that people eat saturated fat with abandon, but it's clear to me that sugar, flour and oxidized seed oils create inflammatory effects in the body that almost certainly bear most of the responsibility for elevating heart disease risk.
There's a great deal of scientific evidence that social connectedness is a very strong protector of emotional well-being, and I think there's no question that social isolation has greatly increased in our culture in, say, the past 50 years, past 100 years.
I am not against all forms of high-tech medicine. Drugs and surgeries have a secure place in the treatment of serious health conditions. But modern American medicine treats almost every health condition as if it were an emergency.
Get people back into the kitchen and combat the trend toward processed food and fast food.
Pay attention to your body. The point is everybody is different. You have to figure out what works for you.
In the world at large, people are rewarded or punished in ways that are often utterly random. In the garden, cause and effect, labor and reward, are re-coupled. Gardening makes sense in a senseless world. By extension, then, the more gardens in the world, the more justice, the more sense is created.
The world is beset by many problems, but in my opinion, this hijacking of our brain's reward centers by electronic media is potentially one of the most destructive.
As an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1960s, I was fascinated by my visits to psychologist B.F. Skinner's laboratory.
For many in the modern world, carving out time for both traditional seated meditation and exercise has become close to impossible.
Most American diets, even bad ones, provide more than enough calcium for bone health, especially for men.
The more people have, the less content they seem to be. In America, the cultural expectation that we're to be happy all the time and our children are to be happy all the time is toxic, and I think that really gets in the way of emotional well-being.
I have argued for years that we do not have a health care system in America. We have a disease-management system - one that depends on ruinously expensive drugs and surgeries that treat health conditions after they manifest rather than giving our citizens simple diet, lifestyle and therapeutic tools to keep them healthy.
The best way to detoxify is to stop putting toxic things into the body and depend upon it's own mechanisms.
It is more important to eat some carbohydrates at breakfast, because the brain needs fuel right away, and carbohydrate is the best source.
My passion for gardening may strike some as selfish, or merely an act of resignation in the face of overwhelming problems that beset the world. It is neither. I have found that each garden is just what Voltaire proposed in Candide: a microcosm of a just and beautiful society.
If the only way you could read an email was to run a mile first, the urge would quickly die. Human beings constantly do subconscious effort/reward calculations. Tapping a screen is the easiest of physical tasks.
Meditation while walking has a long, noble history in ancient spiritual disciplines.
The bottom line is that the human body is complex and subtle, and oversimplifying - as common sense sometimes impels us to do - can be hazardous to your health.
Human beings have survived for millennia because most of us make good decisions about our health most of the time.
Genuine happiness comes from within, and often it comes in spontaneous feelings of joy.
By keeping my hand in that, it's the way I keep learning. The main way you learn in medicine is by practicing and working with patients.
You've got to experiment to figure out what works.
