bio men

‘I brought you some biological lemons,’ Margo says. I hear a kind of contentment in her voice and look up at her, a bit confused. For one second, I am trying to figure out what’s so special about bio lemons. Nothing of course, they are just lemons, the way they grow on a tree.

I have seen that confused look in my friends eyes too, when I ask them to get some lemons for in a dish I am preparing.
‘No, no, here, in the garden,’ I tell them when I see them grabbing for their keys. And to tease them I ask if they can bring some laurel too, which grows somewhere at the back of the house, where the forest starts. The expression on their face always makes me smile; the face of a dazed child that can choose a candy from behind the counter. It makes hopeful to see that grown ups can be happy with plucking lemons; We don’t need as much as The Market makes us believe.

Absurd
I used to buy laurel for a couple of euros, in a plastic bag with fifteen leaves,… In the bio shop, ha! More primitive people and highly intelligent aliens must have laughed at me so many times, that’s what I think at least. Maybe, in the future, we will have bio trees, and bio lakes or bio mountains. And when the human race will be living on another planet, shall Earth be named our bio planet?
The more I live on our piece of land with our own water source, the more of my old habits seem so absurd. Like water companies that don’t produce water but plastic bottles. Weird. We got so focused on analyzing, are being guided by algorythms and efficient, economical living that we hardly can shift the attention to what the broader pattern of our life is, of trying to make sense of all of this. What the fuck are we doing here??
We remove ourselves from our only, natural habitat, and this habitat becomes less and less resilient. Earth Shoot Day was already a month ago and last week a report came out saying that one-quarter of the world’s population faces extreme water shortage. One-quarter! Belgium ranks on a bad 23th place while Portugal is not doing much better with a 41^st place (there are 164 countries in the world). Maybe our economic system is not as efficient as we think.

Language manipulation
Honestly, I am still quite surprised when a cucumber suddenly pops out of that dirty soil. I am still a city girl and the sweet sensation of seduction is more tempting than the taste of green thumbs. But it has been this process that made me realise that I was asking the wrong questions and created a mind shift.
How do I give purpose to my life? Small deeds, for example. It’s a bit uncomfy to need green thumbs all of a sudden. But already after one year, the mind shift is there: I refuse all kinds of plastic easily now and the smell of most perfumes make me sick. Eating vegetables out of season feels like celebrating Halloween in June. Eating processed food feels unnatural. And I believe a lemon is a lemon while sprayed lemons should be named non-biological lemons. Wouldn’t that make more sense? Not from an economic point of view,  and bad for the sales of non-biological farmers.
The use of language to trick us into sprayed food; We are never aware of it, and happily pay extre for bio food or eat the non-biological version. It would be good to give it a thought: it would mean a big difference between the negative connotation for the ‘countryside and ‘being mindful’ and a fancy connotation for the concrete city and its many distractions. Manipulative use of language is one of the great causes of bad assumptions & confusion.

Hip is fake
Nature is so generous, miraculous as a newborn child with then toes and ten fingers. Everything we need is provided without steroids, pesticides and manipulation. This. Land. Is. Pure.
Two weeks ago, Manuela planted a stick in our flower pot and now we already have a long stem with big leaves and three cucumbers and yellow flowers on it. I didn’t even know cucumbers had a little flower on their nose. Quite cute. And this while, in Belgium everything I tried to grow on the window sill, died an early death.
In these moments, I know that I can handle the transformation from the city to the countryside. From the outside pleasure to the inner soul.
We have to deny ourselves a lot and need to stay disciplined, but in the meantime this mind shift made us realise that everything fancy & cool feels fake & untrue. Like a bio man who doesn’t remember that he used to be a real men, and is, therefore trying to survive in a hectic, concrete, stinky treadmill that was created 200 years ago. Economy. What is that actually? The big NOTHING eating the real world.

Love and music
More and more, I believe in a life where we give nature a hand, grow a reliable vegetable garden, buy only what we need, trade our food on the market, cook for people, and spend the rest of our time on personal skills & needs, like reading, writing, surfing, cooking better, and so on. And asking myself the right questions of course. It requires some soul searching instead of analysis. Not easy. Jonathan Rowson, a chess grandmaster and philosopher, says: “The better part of us is struggling to be heard in public life.”
Fun, food, fighting, making love, music — and even spirituality or religion (finding meaning) — that’s what is biological and true. And no, it’s not boring. Being able to be myself, to have time to deal with my fears, attachments and bad habits is actually healing and miraculous for my mindset and my body. We have everything we need.  And that’s the true miracle of life.