22 Trees That Can Be Tapped For Sap And Syrup | Wild Foodism

maplespilewildfoodism2As winter wanes and spring approaches, wild foodists all across North America tap into the time-honored tradition of sugar production – mainly, the transformation of maple tree sap into maple syrup and sugar.  This process, passed on from the Native Americans to the early settlers, is still quite popular today, and is responsible for one of the few wild foods that can be purchased commercially in most supermarkets.

Most people associate syrup with the maple tree, and although much of today’s syrup does originate from the sugar maple, all species of maple can be tapped.  Even better, many other trees from other genera can be tapped to extract sap, which ultimately can be turned into delicious syrup.

In this post, I won’t be discussing the methods involved in tapping for sugar production.  If you are unfamiliar with the process, there are a variety of great websites, videos, and books to guide you.  Rather, I would like to provide a list of various trees (maples, birches, walnuts, etc.) that you can tap successfully to yield wonderful, sugary products. […]

Read the entire post at its Source: 22 Trees That Can Be Tapped For Sap And Syrup | Wild Foodism

Thistle Soup Recipe – Good Witches Homestead

This Thistle Soup Recipe is made using edible food from the wild.

Make thistle soup by chopping (scissoring would be a better word since an old pair of shears is the best thing I’ve found for cutting up green plants) a pan of thistles. Push them down in the pan and add just enough water to cover the plants. Bring to a boil and let simmer for at least twenty minutes. Now you can season this soup and eat it just as it is or you can add some boiled fish, leftover rice or anything else you happen to have. It’s guaranteed to be good and you can use this stock in a stew. […]

Read the entire post at the Source: Thistle Soup Recipe – Good Witches Homestead

Logic in the Matrix: the Declaration of Independence ‹ Jon Rappoport’s Blog ‹

by Jon Rappoport

Logic, these days, has been replaced in schools with a mind-control apparatus that involves the following:

EVERY POINT OF VIEW IS EQUAL.

EVERYBODY HAS TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE WHOLE.

TRUE CRITICAL THINKING, WHICH IS THE EXCLUSIVE TERRITORY OF THE INDIVIDUAL, LEAVES PEOPLE OUT OF THE GROUP AND IS THEREFORE PREJUDICIAL.

If you favor this new formulation and think it’s useful, I have condos on Jupiter for sale.

The point of modern education, more and more, is the GROUP.

“Good people belong to the group.”

“The Group is everything.”

“If you don’t belong to the Group, you have a mental disorder.”

Why is all this emphasis put on the Group?

The answer to that question also gives you the reason logic isn’t taught in schools anymore:

The independent self-sufficient individual is being phased out.

The independent individual who knows how to think and make lucid judgments on his own is a threat to the EMERGING RELIGION OF GLOBALISM.

The emerging religion of Globalism is a fuzzy image of THE GROUP.

The hive.

The colony.

The nest.

The planet.

Some people think education has been hijacked for the purpose of training children to become robotic workers for the State. That’s partly true, but education is also the proving ground for the religion of the Group. […]

Entire article posted at the Source: Logic in the Matrix: the Declaration of Independence ‹ Jon Rappoport’s Blog ‹ Reader — WordPress.com

Kitchen Cabinet Medicine – Tea Blend for a Cold – Good Witches Homestead

tea-blog-header

Got a cold, sick in bed? Find relief and comfort with this simple tea blend using 3 common culinary herbs.

 

 When down with a cold, a hot cup of tea can go a long way. But it can be hard to take care of ourselves when we feel lousy. Grogginess, grumpiness, and exhaustion can overwhelm our capabilities for self-care. That’s why I often recommend this totally simple (yet very effective) herbal tea that makes use of some readily available kitchen herbs.

Kitchen Cabinet Medicine – Tea blend for a cold 

  • 2 teaspoons thyme leaf
  • 2 teaspoons sage leaf
  • 2 teaspoons fennel seeds – gently broken up in a mortar and pestle or spice grinder

Use high quality, organic herbs. If you’re a cook, you’ll probably have these herbs on hand in your spice rack. Put the herbs into a medium sized teapot or jar. Pour 2 cups freshly boiled water over the herbs, and cover. Let infuse for 10 – 15 minutes. This tea must be covered while steeping, to preserve the medicinal volatile oils in the plants. Strain and pour into your tea cup.  Add 1/2 – 1 teaspoon honey, if desired. Re-steep the herbs with more hot water for another brew. After 2 batches, start again with fresh herbs.

[…]

Entire article at the Source: Kitchen Cabinet Medicine – Tea Blend for a Cold – Good Witches Homestead

Feel Good Sunday: Rescued Donkey Acts Like A Puppy

“Okay, time out, folks. It’s Sunday and all of us deserve a few moments of quiet reflection, a hug, a smile and perhaps even a big smooch. We can ramp back up for the fight tomorrow morning but for now hug each other and above all, scratch the forehead or backside of your four legged […]

via Feel Good Sunday: Rescued Donkey Acts Like A Puppy — Straight from the Horse’s Heart

Crystal of the Week: Apophyllite – Holistic Experiment

Apophyllite is a great stone for Reiki healers because it takes the patient into a deeper receptiveness. It also helps move the healer’s ego aside so that transmission of healing energy is purer.

This stone is especially helpful in healing the Spirit and helps abandon pretenses and breaks down reserve, bringing recognition of one’s true Self. It stimulates the pineal gland, which helps one open up to spiritual awakening by infusing the body with high-vibration energy.

[…]

Entire post at the Source: Crystal of the Week: Apophyllite – Holistic Experiment

Slowing Down the Druid Way: Part III: Time-Honoring Strategies | The Druid’s Garden

This past week, a friend and I were discussing options for starting seeds for a new joint major gardening project (more on that in an upcoming post).  We talked about several options, and deciding we wanted to stay away from plastic ready-made planting pots, opted for a paper pot maker (a little wooden device that makes it stunningly easy to create paper pots from recycled newspaper). This choice, of course, is an excellent one from a permaculture perspective: it takes an extremely abundant waste product and turns it into a resource. Of course, in order to make these pots, you need the time to collect the paper and the time to create them. This simple choice–paper or plastic–along with the investment of time illustrates an underlying principle that seems to me to be near-universally true in my experience: the further away from fossil fuels we get, the more time things take. And here, of course, is the crux of this entire blog post series: if we want to do anything beyond our work (practicing permaculture, developing deep relationships with the land, developing bardic arts, or whatever it is we want to accomplish), we have to find the time to do so.

Starting seeds in recycled materials

In my previous two blog posts, I explored the nature of work both historically and in the present age, which helped illuminate some of the current unbalances we have with our work–and opened up the door for us to consider revisiting our relationship to it. And it is this spirit that today, I talk about re-negotiating and re-envisioning our relationship to work and hence, to our time. As I explored over the last two weeks, historical data suggests that we worked a lot less in ages past, which allowed for more leisure time, feasting, merriment, and the learning of crafts and skills. It also gave our ancestors the necessary time to live without fossil fuels–to do work slower, with more intention, and live at a different pace. In the present age, our time is owned by our employers and continued increases in productivity have occurred with increases in work hours, meaning that we are working more than ever before.  It seems that, in some cases, fossil fuels and the myth of progress is speeding us up so much–and most of sustainable living practices focus in the opposite direction. The tension between them is many things, but one of them is certainly time and different ways of working.

[…]

Entirety of article at the Source: Slowing Down the Druid Way: Part III: Time-Honoring Strategies | The Druid’s Garden

DARK MOON BREWs

Here’s a recipe for a Brew to drink to purify yourself just prior to performing a Ritual or Spell Get the good olde Kettle out some fresh water and start the brew under a dark moon night 1 part lemon verbena 1 part dried lemon peel 1 part chamomile You can add a dash of […]

via DARK MOON BREWs — hocuspocus13

The Covert Op to Neuter The Rebel

Write your own programming … Paula Cas

By Jon Rappoport

If you want to track a civilization as it collapses, watch what happens to the concept of the rebel.

From the 1960s onward—starting with Lee Oswald and the assassination of JFK—the whole idea of “the rebel” with power has been sequentially updated and repackaged. This is intentional.

The objective is to equate “rebel” with a whole host of qualities—e.g., runaway self-serving paranoia; random destruction; out-of-control drug use; generalized hatred; the commission of crimes…

On a lesser, “commercialized” level, the new rebel can define himself by merely showing up at a concert to scream and drink heavily and break something, having already dressed to make a dissident fashion statement. He can take an afternoon off from college classes and have his arms tattooed. All the while, of course, he functions as an avid consumer of mainstream corporate products.

You even have people who, considering themselves rebels of the first order, support a government that spies on its people 24/7, launches military attacks all over the world, and now funds a Manhattan Project to map every move of the 100 billion neurons of the brain, for the ultimate purpose of controlling it.

Going back as far as the 1950s, the so-called decade of conformity, psyops professionals sculpted notions of The Rebel: He was the person who, because he had psychological problems, didn’t want to take part in the emerging bland corporate culture.

He was imagined and presented as troubled, morose; a wobbly unfocused JD Salinger Holden Caulfield, or an unkempt beatnik, a Madison Avenue caricature of somebody who opposed Madison Avenue.

In other words, the people who were shaping the consumer culture were creating the image of the rebel as a cartoon figure who just didn’t want to buy into “the good life.”

Time Magazine ran a cover story on the beatniks, and characterized them as a disaffected trend. Marlon Brando, heading up a bunch of moronic motorcycle riders, invaded a town of pleasant clueless citizens and took it over, wreaking destruction. The 1953 movie was The Wild One. James Dean, who had the same trouble Brando did in articulating a complete sentence, was “the rebel without a cause” in the “iconic film” of the same name. He raced cars toward cliffs because his father couldn’t understand him.

These were all puff pieces designed to make rebels look ridiculous, and they worked. They also functioned to transmit the idea to young people that being a rebel should be a showbiz affectation. That worked, too.

Then the late 1960s arrived. Flower children, in part invented by the major media, would surely take over the world and dethrone fascist authority with rainbows. San Francisco was the epicenter. But Haight-Ashbury, where the flowers and the weed were magically growing out of the sidewalks, turned into a speed, acid, and heroin nightmare, a playground for psychopaths to cash in and steal and destroy lives. The CIA, of course, gave the LSD culture a major push.

For all that the anti-war movement eventually accomplished in ending the Vietnam war-crime, in the aftermath many of those college students who had been in the streets—once the fear of being drafted was gone—scurried into counselors’ offices to see where they might fit into the job market after graduation. The military industrial complex took its profits and moved on, undeterred.

The idea of the rebel was gone. It later resurfaced as The Cocaine Dealer, the archangel of the 1980s.

And so forth and so on. All these incarnations of The Rebel were artificially created and sustained as psyops. At bottom, the idea was to discredit the Individual, in favor of The Group.

Now, in our collectivist society of 2017, The Group, as a rapidly expanding victim class, is the government’s number one project. It’s a straight con. “We’re here to make you worse off while we ‘lift you up’.”

In the op to demean, distort, and squash the rebel, there is a single obvious common denominator: the establishment media are doing the defining; they are the ones who are setting the parameters and making the descriptions; they are the ones who build the cartoons; looking down their noses, pretending to a degree of sympathy, they paint one unflattering picture after another of what the rebel is and does and says; they have co-opted the whole game.

These days, the ultimate rebels, the media would have you believe, are “gun-toting racist bitter clingers who have religion.” Another attempt to shape a distorted unflattering portrait

You can take a whole host of political films and television series of the past 50 years, and look at them for signs of the Rebel: Seven Days in May, Advise and Consent, The Candidate, The Seduction of Joe Tynan, Dave, Primary Colors, The Contender, Good Night and Good Luck, The American President, West Wing, Scandal, The Newsroom…

Good acting, bad acting, drama, message—at the end you’re looking for the core. What do the rebel heroes really stand for? What are their principles? It’s all bland. It’s vague. It has the posturing of importance, but little else.

As I was finishing this piece, a friend wrote with a quote attributed to Robert Anton Wilson: “The universe is a war between reality programmers.”

This is exactly where the real rebel enters the scene. He’s not trying to program people. Freedom means cutting loose from programming.

The Rebel doesn’t go to the market and choose which reality program he wants. They’re all used up as soon as they come out of the package.

“THIS or THAT” is the history of Earth: choose reality program A or B. The choice was always a con.

We’re well into a time period when the experts and scientific authorities are settling on the human being as a biological machine that can only respond to programming. That’s their view and their default position.

It’s sheer madness, of course, but what else do you expect? We’re in an intense technological age, and people are obsessed with making things run smoother. They treat their precious little algorithms for control like the Crown Jewels. They’re terribly enthusiastic about the problem they’re solving, and that problem is us.

We’re the wild cards, a fact which they take to be result of our improper and incomplete conditioning. They aim to fix that.

“Why not stop diddling around and just make the whole thing over? Why not reshape humans?”

Having decided that, the battle begins between competing programmers of the mind. Which program for humans is better?

The rebel is against all such programming, no matter how “good and right” it sounds. “Good” and “right” are the traps.

“Well, certainly we could make a list of qualities we want all people to have. You know, the best qualities, like bravery and determination. Who could be against that? So suppose we could actually program such qualities into humans? Wouldn’t that be a fine thing? Then people would just BE that way…”

The ultimate rebellion is against programming, whatever it looks like, wherever it occurs.

Programming is someone else’s idea of who and what you should be.

It is never your idea.

Your idea is where the power is.

And that’s what makes you a genuine rebel.

Source: The covert op to neuter the rebel « Jon Rappoport’s Blog

New Moon and Solar Eclipse in Pisces on 2-26-2017, Impressions

Jupiter is the defining element of the New Moon eclipse in Pisces. Chatter has already started up about the ugly T-square forming among the malefics, the conjunction of Mars and Uranus hitting off aspects to the big baddies, Saturn and Pluto. The god of war, action oriented Mars in his home field of Aries makes him trigger happy, looking to expend his martial energy and fulfil his purpose.

If you’re like me and Mars owns a good portion of your personal planets, you’ll feel Mars tension and for many, it will manifest in argument and schisms between people fighting to get their way and to satisfy their desires — often at the expense of others. If Mars is subtle for you, you might find yourself full of nervous tension, but most of all, with Pluto in the mix, the physical self frustrates if it cannot find a way to release this energy. Hit the gym, go a few rounds with someone you trust, but most of all, stay in controlled environments where even if something unexpected should occur, you are surrounded by support systems or preparations that will help you weather unfortunate surprises. So if you do go to the gym — make sure there’s a first aid kit with you and you’ve got your boxing gloves laced up right.

What makes Jupiter so key in this eclipse is dependent upon a series of aspects. Not only does Jupiter conjunct with fixed star Spica, but as in the last lunar eclipse, Jupiter is lurching backwards into retrograde. Given the stellium in foggy Pisces where Mercury, Sun, Moon, and Neptune are thrown together, now might be a time when you discover the friends and contacts that you’ve accrued under Jupiter’s expansive influence in Libra are not the people you thought they were — either you fooled yourself about their true nature, or they concealed who they really are. Now might not be the right time to address those issues, however, with Mercury unable to operate with any fundamental clarity in the Neptunian house, and with the harsh aspects occurring between Pluto, Mars/Uranus, and Saturn.

Case in point, I had a dear friend approach me with a problem she has ongoing with a close friend of her own. She discovered this friend of hers had been concealing information from her in and effort to present themselves in a better light, and now she is unsure whether she wants to continue a friendship with this person. The concern is that this person is hot-headed and may react inappropriately if she abandons the friendship, even though they are in the wrong. Sometimes, no matter how right we are, how good our intentions, we should take the time to weigh the possible consequences of our choices. As satisfying as it would be for her to simply cut off her friendship and be done with the confusion and difficulty this false friend presented, sometimes our best course of action is simply to offer neither resistance nor help, but let others choose their own paths without our interference. Taking time away from problem-people and simply withdrawing is a passive strategy that is also, often, a healing one — time reveals yet more things we did not know, and problems that we were upset about before, suddenly unravel themselves while we were busy doing something else. The problems dissipates, and leaves us lighter than when we started.

As an old saying goes — don’t invite trouble to your door, because trouble already knows where you live. This would be a good thing to keep in mind if you find yourself faced with conflicts that you would ordinarily dive into this eclipse period. Take a deep breath and consider dealing with problems in new ways. When faced with a tide, it is pointless to swim against it — consider swimming with it until it ebbs and you can find your feet again and take new direction, instead of exhausting yourself in the struggle.

Saturn and Pluto are in play. Here is where, though it is not immediately obvious that Jupiter is the major player of this chart, as much of the bluster online is being made over the malefics — which are certainly alarming in their own right — Jupiter makes his presence known through rulership and a chain of dispositors.

Pluto moving through Capricorn is giving momentum to Saturn by rulership, as earthy and conscientious Capricorn is owned by disciplinarian Saturn; and Saturn, of course, is in Jupiter’s house of lucky, expansive Sagittarius, meaning that Saturn, already spurred by Plutonian energy from Capricorn, is filtering this turbo-charged force all the way to Jupiter, by rulership. And Jupiter wants bigger, better, faster, more! Is it like a fountain, where several trickles from the top are running down to form a flood at the bottom, where Jupiter is collecting all this potential force from the other planets.

We can follow the breadcrumbs of this chain of dispositors further if we wish, when we realize that if Jupiter is in Libra, that sign of relationships and equality, than where oh where is the ruler of Libra, Venus?

Venus can be found in Aries — also in opposition to Jupiter in Libra!

The goddess of love, rich in gifts of seduction and flattery, may be telling us something about the nature of our relationships and the choices we might make between them while Jupiter is in Libra. Some friends might run away with your heart during this eclipse! But beware, for it is in the myth of Aphrodite — Venus — that she is given a girdle by the gods that lends her the ability to wield her tongue to appeal to vanity. Make sure whoever you might be involved with is not simply selling you sweet dreams and words, pandering to your ego, with no intention of giving anything of value in return. Glamour and charm can be persuasive, but empty when they have lost their power to enchant.

Jupiter is also square Pluto in Capricorn and Venus in Aries, where Venus is at her detriment, and where rammy Mars also happens to be. Since Aries is Mars’ natural home, the presences of Uranus and Venus alongside him are secondary to Mars, who holds primacy over those planets. With the male and female energies in tight configuration, this could make for sparks between lovers, but this sexual tension could also easily manifest as argument, the knock-down drag-out 3 am fight that ends up in a heated reunion. If you live in close proximity with those kinds of romantic entanglements like I have, you might want to invest in some ear plugs to save your sanity. (Or, you might be inspiring others to buy ear plugs.)

Further complicating factors is Saturn in Sagittarius square Pluto in Capricorn and Mars/Uranus in Aries square Pluto. Jupiter in Libra will be expanding these malefics and is pulling at the stellium in Pisces — Chiron, Neptune, Mercury, Sun and Moon — as well as Venus, Mars, and Uranus seated in Aries.

Jupiter forms an anchor point in this configuration. And while the term anchor sounds like a stabilizing force, perhaps this is inaccurate — better to say that in this case, Jupiter’s amplifying power is perhaps best described as a slingshot, in which Mars conjunct Uranus and the stellium in Pisces is going to add expansive force to these planets and signs respective properties. Pisces in his foggy element will have the capacity to lead astray with greater enthusiasm or, at best, inspiring genius and creatives propelled by martial energy thanks to the god of war. Mars with Uranus will lend an intense force in their own arenas, Pluto’s square supercharging all that’s already in play in this clash of malefics.

Good luck everyone, stay safe, stay aware, and keep your thinking clear so you can perceive obstacles and work around them safely. I expect a potential uptick in car accidents (Mercury and Neptune) so be careful when out drinking and driving and navigating with your fellow citizens on the road.

 

eclipse-2-26-2017

 

Source: New Moon and Solar Eclipse in Pisces on 2-26-2017, Impressions | starsbydesign