Roger Pye wrote:
> > > "There's a lot of questions there, more than I could answer over a > coffee," the dowser man said wryly. "Mind you, I don't know all the > answers either." He paused to sip his coffee, looking at the old church > up on the hill opposite, wondering how Amanda knew he liked his coffee black Roger, I didn't answer your previous email straight away because there was so much in it and I couldn't grasp it all just reading it casually. I must have spent six hours on my reply. I put your story on reply just like I'm doing now and went through it paragraph by paragraph asking questions. When I got through there was a very long email, and I knew that it was too long, so I printed it off and then sat down with pen and paper (I do creative writing by hand) and wrote what you answered yesterday. Then I typed it into an email and it was short enough, but it had everything in it. The whole thing is fiction. My husband drinks black coffee. I have no idea what the Australian countryside and the houses look like. I just made it up. The cafe is actually the cafe in Oregon. A long time ago I used to take trips across that area because to me it was so beautiful--rolling hills--many buildings and houses that dated from probably the 30s that were untouched. The feeling in that description was a feeling I actually felt 10 or 15 years ago when I wound around on those narrow windy roads, past snow fences on top of rises, and came into a town at lunch time when all the farmers were there. I am rereading RS's ag lectures and he speaks about spiritual science. His idea that oxygen brings in spirit (to paraphrase--I'm not comfortable with throwing around etheric and astral.) has helped me deal with my anger and fear because all I have to do is breathe in the oxygen/spirit through the top of my head to my heart and breathe out the anger. I want so much to get rid of that fear and anger. > and if he could explain without going through everything > point-by-point. He thought he could. "There are nuances to 'knowing' > something. There's knowledge that comes through reading or school or > work or doing something, and that sort of knowing begets research which > produces more. That's where all the numbers come from, I guess; someone > sat down one day and calculated the percentages of this and that > nutrient required to produce this and that standard. Then of course > he/she had to have a name for it which was then shortened to CEC." > > Charles fell silent again for a moment. "I don't mean to denigrate > anyone's efforts when I say that, I know (there's that word again!) that > research is valuable. But the figures don't mean much to me either. > There's a reason for that, I think. > > "I want to take you back a bit. In 1611 a guy called Lawrence Pye > established a farm near the confluence of two streams in Wyresdale in > Lancashire, England. The old english for confluence is 'eahomotu' or > some such and he named the farm Emmotts after it. That was ten > generations ago; I'm a direct descendant of Lawrence, I have that > descendancy on computer. Now it may be that before then he wasn't in > agriculture at all, maybe a tanner or fisherman or gamekeeper, but I > think he was a farmer because the farm is still there in (Over) > Wyresdale today, still farmed by my Pye cousins. All that has changed in > four centuries is the name (to Lower Emmetts), the ownership (the modern > Pyes are tenant farmers) and mechanisation. Roger, my father, William Ray Higgins, was one of twelve children whose father was a farmer in Chattanooga, Tennessee. When I was a little girl, we used to visit that house with its big Bible on a stand in the livingroom and the player piano that I loved to operate, the big wood cookstove in the kitchen and the the outhouse out back. My father had to hoe strawberries every afternoon when he came home from school when he was a boy, and he had nose bleeds. He didn't want to be in the farming business and took a business course and bought a Model A Ford. I have pictures of it in my memory...pictures of the young couple holding the baby (me) in front of an old car. My father loved to garden. We lived in Mobile, Alabama, and he had huge camillia bushes. He must have been organic. He had bags and bags of leaves that he shredded up and let compost. He spread his centipede grass by digging out a clump and planting it somewhere else. He raised tomatoes in the only really sunny spot in the back yard under the pine trees. When I was very small, in another house, he had a garden in the whole back yard. He always had special trees--fig, dogwood, magnolia. It's just in your blood, as you say, and rubbing shoulders with BD farmers at the Mid-Atlantic conference brought it out in me...just meeting people. > > "Now what I know about agriculture in the sense of knowledge learned or acquired >this lifetime would > get lost on the head of a pin but knowledge through racial memory is something else >again. I believe > we all have that but unfortunately in most people it gets swamped by modernity and >day-to-day > nitty-gritty. The indigenous tribes had agricultural racial memory which went back >alnostto the dawn > of time, certainly back to Cro-Magnon when they were hunter-gatherers as the >Australian aborigines > were when they first came here somewhere between sixty and one-sixty thousand years >ago. To survive > they had to know where and what to hunt, where and what to gather. Over time they >came to learn what > the majority of us have forgotten - that it is the soil that dictates what plants >grow where, not > that plants grow where they do because they 'like' or dislike the conditions. My husband says it's cultural memory. Kids lose their connection when they're raised in the city. I can remember being a kid playing hide and go seek in the yard barefooted. At dusk the whole sky and the whole atmosphere turned pink. Nature was palpable. I can call up that feeling and picture that scene any time I want to. The atmosphere here in the western US is very different. The soil is not humusy. It's glacial till--sandy dust with rocks in it. It's taken us years to build up our garden soil with BD compost. Yet many plants grow in this soil without watering. The untouched forest has a floor of old softwood tree branches. It's a wilderness of fallen trees with bogs from springs that elk and moose use, and ancient earthquake fissures in glaciated granite with great big exposed rocks all tumbled together. We find knapweed growing in such a place too along with the native plants. We also find roads straight up the hills made by jeeps. The incursion of man. > "Like time, numbers are a man-made phenomenon. To a soil physicist working in a >laboratory funded by > an agri-business multinational company, the parts per million ratio of calcium to >magnesium may > becrucial to maintaining the bottom profit line - or even to keepinghis/her job. To >a person > directly reliant on the veggie patch forsustenance, that importance isn't there - >one doesn't need > to know howmuch Ca the soil has to grow carrots provided the instructions on >thepacket are followed. God gave me a gift for language and art and a grudging basic ability to add, subtract, multiply and divide. If my grammar school math education had been different, who knows, maybe I could have been good at algebra. When I was studying solar energy, I learned the math I needed to know. I could figure heat loss and gain. I even did a calculus equation out of a solar book once with concentrated effort. > > "It has been known for centuries that dowsers work with tools which > detect, receive and amplify or focus energy. Some have the ability to > transmit it as well. The devices they use may be as simple as the forked > wooden stick or as complex as the latest radionic machine - or even > their own bodies. In theory, sticks, stones and metals are inert > substances. In practice, nothing could be further than the truth. The > Universe is composed of energy, so are we, so are they. Everything gives > off energy; whether it is measured in parts per million or percentages > or pendulum swings is relevant only to the person detecting it or the > reason for so doing. I am going to learn how to dowse. I'm going to make me a ceramic piece for the end of the string. I'm going to dowse soil tests. > > "The soil in the draw beside Rapid Lightning Road is acidic and has been > for many many years so the medium maintains conditions which ensures > that plants will grow there which will dilute or absorb enough of the > acid for it to survive. We have great acid-loving plants around here: Oregon grape, snowberry, kinnickinnick, pearly everlasting, heal's all, all kinds of grasses, black medic, clovers, plantain, red sorrel, mosses, twinberry, black raspberry, wild rose, large shrubs like thimbleberry and ocean spray. Common tansy came here as a garden herb, but it is so successful with its woody root that it grows everywhere and they've named it a noxious weed. Who knows, maybe these plants are balancing the soil...at least making it hard for the rancher to overgraze his cattle. But that's the source of calling it a "noxious" weed. The rancher doesn't know enough to control the length of grazing time for his cows and the grass doesn't have time to recover. Then the weeds come in. With good management, it's possible to have an organic weed-free pasture. What we need to do on the right-of-way is form a thick thatch of grass, clover and all the other plants too to make it very hard for a weed seed to get to the soil at all. Heck, that won't stop the weeds. Someone has to patrol the road and rogue out any new plants before they take over. I wish I could sit and philosophize about the whole problem with the Weed Committee, but they just want to quickly go through their agenda and get out of there. I can try. We have a meeting tonight and one of the topics is "What would you like to see changed..." What that's all about is hiring an extra person to wield the spray truck so Brad has time to go after "new invaders." > Treat (spray) the area with BD500 and BC > followed up with a bacterial compost tea at a minimum rate of 150 litres > per hectare to neutralise residual chemicals in the soil. Wait until the > plants have seeded (thus ensuring 'cover' for the next season) then > slash them to six inches high. Leave the slashings as mulch. Repeat the > spray treatment adding BD501 to begin to release nutrients locked up in > the soil and substituting a fungal compost tea for the bacterial one to > encourage growth. Absolutely!! That's why I'm making 500 and BC. I will take special note of your recommendations for sequencing. > Direct drill seed competitive 'acid-loving' plants > there which are (more) beneficial or attractive to the general populace, > let them grow to a few inches high then slash the existing 'weed' growth > down to that level before seeding. Repeat the second spray treatment > every 10-12 weeks for the next year. By then the acidic condition should > be well on the way out, the soil will be happier and will allow a > greater variety of plants. Amen!! This is why we designed our own spray rig and bought three 55 gallon plastic barrels. > > "I suppose what I'm saying there is that if we substitute the soil's > needs for our own, we throw up a whole new variety of answers. I have wondered about the concept of balancing the soil--I wonder if this western soil has ever been "balanced" in the Albrecht sense. Should that be the goal for the right-of-way? > Or maintain the condition the soil has initiated or adapted to whilst > changing it to one we can handle easier. Or change it a little bit with the peppers so that it's hard for particular plants to get a foothold. Brad, the Weed Supervisor, says that changing the soil is a long range job. You put calcium, etc, on it and it changes it for a little while and then it goes back to what it was before. Is he right? > Or compare your own condition with that of the soil to find answers - what do you do >for acidity in > your system? I take chamomile tea - it works for me so it should also work for the >soil. If I eat my green vegetables, I don't have any trouble. With meat, I take Michael Tierra's Bupleurum Liver Cleanse. It contains wild yam root, oregon grape root, Cyperus Rhizome, Dong Quai root, Peony root, fennel seed, ginger root, green citrus peel, dandelion root, lyci fruit extract and Dong Quai root extract. Michael Tierra lives in Santa Cruz. His concoctions are called Planetary Formulas. I like this product better than enzyme tablets. When Elaine tested Chamomile Prep, it was full of microorganisms. It really had a high count. I drink chamomile tea too occasionally, especially at night, but I use Kukicha Twig tea from Frontier Herbs to change pH. My original intent was to simply use BD on the county road. I have been side-tracked by Randy, Brad and the Weed Committee to do all sorts of other things instead which take up much more time and which I'm not deeply interested in like I am BD. That's why I want to pull back onto my own land as soon as I can. I have to spend time working with other residents to motivate them to take over the county right-of-way. If I could just interest them in doing hands-on work, after I've mapped and tested and designed a good program for them to follow. > "The spiritual aspect is simple or difficult or even impossible > depending on one's perspective. I'm not talking about religion or > religious dogma here. In terms of belief I don't think it matters what a > person believes in so long as it's good. I believe there is one Source > which goes under many, many different names; I call it the Power of the > Universe, it visualises as a woman or a tree, certainly it speaks with a > woman's voice. It has guided me fully for seven and a bit years and the > only times I have gone wrong have been when I tried to go my own way. > I've met a lot of wonderful people and learned many things in these > short years and I wish so very deeply that I had come to this Truth > earlier in my life. Maybe next time it will be. Agreed. > > > "When I apparently talk to the rods or the pendulum, I'm really > communicating directly with the energy but the words are for my own or > audience's benefit. So out loud I might be saying 'What is the nitrogen > component of this soil, is it more than 6, 7 etc' when in reality the > actual communication is more direct and probably very different - just > not understandable without translation, I guess. > > "The energyprint is something else again. It's the abstract columns - > untitled on the sheet you saw - which contain the heart of the print, > not the nutrient levels. They record such things as environmental > commitment, indigenous quotient, empathy, compassion, love - dare I say > that? There needs to be a physical element as well, like a photograph. I > have the pebbles you handled. My desire to make Rapid Lightning a sacred road. > > > "You spoke about field broadcasters. With the energyprint I have of you > and as long as we both have a pyramid like James makes, I can use you as > 'witness' to any condition anywhere you happen to be and provide an > answer to it either direct or through your device. I would like some direction to build a pyramid. I read about it recently somewhere--I think, on the website of the woman from Australia who is teaching dowsing in the U.S. this month. Remind me of her name and URL and I'll look at that again. If you have any references, send them to me. > > > "I'll stop there for now. I'm interested in your thoughts on those few > things . . .. > > Roger Thank you so much, Roger Pye, for your advice and your narratives. Merla
