We are no longer living in the present; we are living in the future.
There is no more time.

I recently met Rosiema Saravia or “Chita” (chee-tah), as she likes to be called, at a year-end celebration of Transition Colorado and its permaculture and Bioneer partners here in Boulder. Later, I sat down with her to learn more about the catering business she operates here in the Boulder area.

Chita was born in Morazan, El Salvador in 1967 shortly before that nation erupted in civil war. Most Salvadorans were campesinos, indigenous peasants living at subsistence level without running water or electricity, while a tiny privileged minority lived in wealth and opulence. It was in the 1960s that reformers began challenging the alliance between the right-wing military and the oligarchy. Caught in the middle of rampant violence were tens of thousands of indigenous Mayan-Pipil people who lived off the land—land that was being destroyed by war and usurped by the ruling elite. Chita was one of those individuals.

She carries the emotional scars this turbulent time caused her people and doesn’t like to talk about it in depth. Her trauma began at the age of eight, but later as a young teenager, she was taken to San Salvador, the nation’s capital, where she lived working to sustaining her mom and little brothers and sisters—farther away from the violence that marked her life and the lives of more of hundred and thousands of Mayan-Pipiles en El Salvador. During that time she found solace in both her native religion and the community support and resistance groups of liberation theology, which were community-based groups, formed for and with the people and later supported by the soon-to-be-assassinated Archbishop Romero, a person who had been transformed from seeing the peoples pain and suffering, the pain of his people.

For what it’s worth, on the morning of the day I met Chita, I awakened with two Spanish names in my head: El Mozote and Acteal—the locations of two heinous massacres, the first occurring in El Salvador during the civil war and the second in Chiapas in the late 1990’s. When I finally heard Chita’s story, the re-appearance of these names in my mind made sense and reminded me again of the pervasive violence in Central America during the last half of the twentieth century—violence which continues today in other forms and places in Latin America such as the current carnage in Mexico. It also reminded me of the mystery of connection we have with all of the community of life, whether we are consciously aware of it or not.

Chita came to the United States in the late ’80s, arriving in Los Angeles and living there until 2009 when she moved to Colorado.

During those years she married and had three children, one attending college now and two in elementary and middle school. She raised them and made sure they received an education during Chita’s daily hard-working hours. She and her children have been an example to a lot of United States citizens that a Mayan-Pipil woman, who came to United States and who made big changes, by changing her family and community’s destiny with her commitment to life. Chita was active in numerous social justice projects in Southern California from the time she arrived.

In 2000 she had a dream about two towers in some large city becoming inflamed and collapsing to the earth. When 9/11 occurred, she was deeply shaken and realized that she must keep in close contact with her Mayan-Pipil elders and her way of life—her abuelos and abuelas (the Spanish words for grandfathers and grandmothers) and listen carefully to them, to her dreams, and to the earth for instructions about where to live and what her work on this planet must be. Making many trips back and forth to her place of birth in Central America and consulting with people of conocimiento y sabiduria (knowledge and wisdom), and with the sacred help of her advisors, she gained clarity about her mission and purpose.

In 2008 she became convinced that she must leave Southern California and do something related to growing and cooking food, something she always did as a child of the earth. A series of vision quests and ceremonies guided her to Colorado, and the abuelos suggested Boulder because it had been voted the healthiest and the smartest city in the United States. It was then that she formulated the vision of Grandmother Earth’s Kitchen, which is now a catering business but which Chita and her advisors want to expand to a full-service restaurant in Boulder.

The Mayan elders have told Chita that we are no longer living in the present. The future has begun, and there is no more time. We must live with our ears and our hearts close to the earth, and food is one of the most important aspects of this because as Chita says, “food is medicine.” By this she means that food has healing potential, but even more so, food is power. “Medicine”, a term frequently used by native peoples, is synonymous with the particular kind of power a person carries in the world which often relates to his or her life’s purpose. Clearly, Chita’s medicine is the growing and cooking of nourishing food.

In order to grasp the significance of her mission, we must understand the Mayan concept of food. Food either heals us, or it kills us. We can have toxic “happy meals” a la McDonalds and others food services in the world, or we can have nutritious, living, healing “happy food.” The Mayan-Pipil saying about food is, “From the land to the stove, and it returns to the land to be a nutrient for itself.” Chita says that we must “practice what we say and live with a conscious heart and soul”. Happy and living food would also have to be local food, for how can food transported long distances, sometimes frozen and replete with preservatives, be truly alive?

It’s also crucial to understand the Mayan-Pipil woman’s attitude toward cooking which is about much more than just preparing food.

Cooking food is a ritual—a ceremony and a celebration, and what Chita has been taught is, “The kitchen should be filled with women talking about love, sensuality and sexuality, and they should be dancing. As the protagonists of life, as life givers we need to sing, dance, pray and be happy when we plant, harvest, and cook for our families and people. Women’s body language is very important in our way of life; when they cook, they express themselves as goddesses—showing that they are in tune with the love and life of our mother earth.”

At the end of our conversation, Chita gave me generous portions of her wonderful brew of amaranth and chocolate—a traditional sweet Maya-Pipil abuelas beverage which warms and soothes the body. After consuming several cups, I was sent home with a delicious cinnamon tea which enhances the healing energy of the amaranth and chocolate potion.

For me, my time with Chita confronts me with the medicine of food in my life and what I must be doing with my life to serve and protect Grandmother Earth. I also long for the opening of Grandmother Earth’s Kitchen restaurant here in Boulder, a project for which Chita works daily and is actively seeking resources. She wants it to stay in the hands of the people who work hard and who have inherited these traditions—those who believe in alternative ways of living and in communality with the land. People are welcome to be part of Chita’s and abuelos non-profit organization for a sustainable and ambitious project of life, or the for-profit business. Even in these economically challenging times, I believe their dream will manifest.

In fact, it must because “We are no longer living in the present; we are living in the future. There is no more time, one mind, one heart, one purpose—the hope that the Mayan-Pipil have kept for thousands of years—the sacred seeds of life. What the foods of the Mayan-Pipil are bringing is light and love for generations to come.”

Chita may be contacted at grandmotherearthskitchen@gmail.com.

Last weekend in Boulder, the renowned eco-activist, Vandana Shiva, spoke and dropped a bomb on the audience which has kept many people who attended buzzing about the one take-away statement that gave them insomnia most nights since then. Shiva said that if the human species continues its present destructive trajectory, it has no more than 100 years left on the planet.

Around the world, today is an international day of climate change demonstrations championing the number 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide it considers safe for our atmosphere. I really hate to tell all those well-meaning people, but the real deal is that NO part per million of carbon dioxide is  safe  in our atmosphere at this moment given the dire state of polluted plunder it is already in.

In an article entitled  The Fallacy of Climate Activism, by Adam Sachs, posted in Truth to Power’s Daily News Digest last month, Sachs tells us that global warming is a symptom of a cultural reality that must be addressed. Sachs writes:

“The root cause, the source of the symptoms, is 300 years of our relentlessly exploitative, extractive, and exponentially growing techno-culture, against the background of ten millennia of hierarchical and colonial civilizations. The second error is our stubborn unwillingness to understand that the battle against greenhouse-gas emissions, as we have currently framed it, is over. It is absolutely over and we have lost. We have to say so.”

Then comes a story this week from Pew Research that says that fewer Americans believe in the reality of climate change than did in 2007 and 2008. Well, if you’re laid off, a father/mother of five, and out of food, why would you want to add more to your worries plate, especially something as distant and remote  as global warming?

In Clive Hamilton’s article, How To Deal With Climate Change Grief, posted yesterday on the Truth to Power website and sent to all of you, he notices the various ways we deal with the bad news about climate change, but he also manages to find the  good  news underlying most of our responses to it:

“Although perhaps performed unconsciously, the process has therapeutic and thus adaptive value. A number of psychological studies have shown that, in the same way that traumatic events often lead to personal growth, considered reflection on death tends to bring about a shift in personal goals away from materialistic, self-focused pursuits to an intrinsic and other-directed orientation.”

In other words, all this bad news, as I stated repeatedly in Sacred Demise, is calling us to look long and hard at death our own and that of the ecosystem. But even more fundamentally, to ask the question: Why am I here at this particular moment in history as these particular events are unfolding? Am I simply a pawn in some cosmic chess game? Did I just drop in here when I did for no reason? Of course, everyone has a right to embrace the later, then reach for the Jack Daniels and/or the razor blades.

The irony is that what is most important in the face of death is to be fully alive or so the West African indigenous tribes tell us. So does the American poet, Mary Oliver.

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;

when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy
me, and snaps the purse shut;

when death comes
like the measles-pox; when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is
it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything

as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,

and I look upon time as no more than an idea,

and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common

as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth

tending as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something

precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it is over, I don’t want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

The best way I know to be fully alive, whether homeless, unemployed, or trying to feed five children with no food on hand whether terminally ill or choking on sandstorms left in the wake of climate chaos, is to open to the purpose and meaning of these experiences.

That is not to say that tangible solutions should not be sought; indeed they should and must be, but tangible is only temporary. The soul has its reasons for showing up here when it did, and those reasons will outlive everything else.

Carl Jung had this to say about suffering: He identified two forms of suffering: meaningless and meaningful. Meaningless suffering is everywhere, being part of the human condition, as the Buddha recognized. This existential suffering is the result of our trying to avoid pain, by denial and repression.

None of us wants pain. We naturally shun it. But doing so is like the spleen refusing to do its job. It leads to big trouble, dis-ease, and real problems. In the realm of the psyche, these are called neuroses.  Jung identified the long-term habit of repression (our stuffing  unpleasant feelings, facts, etc. within) as the cause of neuroses.

Because we all do this, we are all  neurotic  to one degree or another. This is  meaningless  suffering because it makes no sense, has no significance, and gives us no benefit. This form of suffering, in other words, is not a gift.

The form of suffering that is meaningful comes when we stop repressing and take up our moral task as humans to deal consciously with our pain. In this process, we take up the pain that is endemic to living and work with it, in the knowledge that pain has a purpose.

It is a warning, with an intrinsic message. We need to listen to our inner voices to learn this message.

To do this, we allow the full range of emotions to flow through us, without putting up resistance to the process. We set the intention to experience the full range of feelings be they good or bad. This requires moral courage, but, while it is uncomfortable (especially in the early stages), it affords the same benefits as a well-working spleen: We are more resilient. We have more energy. Our spirit is purified. And, most of all, we begin to be aware of the meaning behind the pain we experience.

For the past 18 months people have been calling Tasch’s work a “movement.” Indeed it is a movement, but this is a movement about investing, not protesting. Recently when he gave his presentation in Santa Fe, it was attended by legislators, members of some of America’s wealthiest families, and many farmers.

So who is Woody Tasch, and from where on the economic landscape did he arise? He was formerly treasurer of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, and he’s an experienced venture capital investor and entrepreneur who has served on numerous for-profit and nonprofit boards. He was founding chairman of the Community Development Venture Capital Alliance, which supports venture investing in economically disadvantaged regions. Slow Money is an effort to create a new way of steering capital in support of local food systems. It is in part a reference to Slow Food, and it is also a reference to slow money as opposed to fast money—everyone is beginning to understand what that is.

In a Mother Nature Network interview with Tasch, he states:

“E.F. Schumacher said that economics is a tool not an end, but we live in a time when economics has been made an end. In order to make it a means again we have to reassert meta-economic values. So you ask what are those values? Well they aren’t that hard to articulate. 99 out of 100 people would agree to what they are: It’s like motherhood and apple pie, it is healthy communities, healthy families, a better world for future generations, ethical behavior, moral responsibility.”

According to Tasch, here’s how behind the eight ball we are: The aggregate of private foundation assets in U.S. is about $5 billion. How much is given each year is given to sustainable agriculture? One thousandth of a percent or $50 million. That is, one half of one percent of U.S. land is invested in organic farming.

“The only prayer we have of saving ourselves is a radical sea change in how we do money,” says Tasch. Clearly, Slow Money isn’t springing from traditional economics.

Is this a movement or is it an industry? Tasch says it’s a movement that includes an industry—agriculture.

According to Tasch, this is the last chance we have as a species to finish the argument Malthus started 250 years ago. “His arithmetic was wrong, but his overriding principle was correct. In other words, food security and money are inextricably connected. You have to decide what is happening on the planet, and then you have to live accordingly.”

Many people do not really comprehend the profound difference between “millions” and “trillions”.

Financially, this is where we are right now, according to Tasch: $30 trillion has been poured into stimulus globally. The total global economy is $65 trillion. $50 trillion dollars of derivatives were bought in just this decade. Or, think of it this way, says Tasch: A million seconds equals 12 days. How long is a billion seconds? 12,000 days or 32.8 years. How long is a trillion seconds? 32,800 years. That’s how much more a trillion is than a billion.

Present-day economists are constitutionally incapable of getting us out of this mess. The architects of our modern financial system have no idea what’s going on. All they’ve been trained to do is to keep growth going as fast as possible. They are incapable of producing any solutions. They are trying to apply macroeconomics to everything which is like looking at their feet through a telescope.

The very earth beneath us is depleting at a breathtaking rate. Hundreds of millions of tons of topsoil go down the Mississippi each year, and Monsanto now owns 95% of all the sugar beet seeds in the U.S. One half to one percent a year of topsoil is eroding around the planet. So, how many years can you lose this much topsoil until you have none?

According to Woody Tasch: “It’s like we have 1/8 of tank of gas and we’re driving 75.”

Mainstream media, not environmentalists, are revealing mind boggling details of how broken our economic and food systems are. For example, a recent Economist Magazine cartoon depicts a textbook of modern economic theory melting. On the August 31 cover of Time Magazine we see the caption: “The Real Cost of Cheap Food” which according to Tasch is the most stunning non-liberal account of how broken our industrial food system is.

In the words of Tasch, “As it circulates the globe with ever-accelerating speed, money is sucking oxygen out of the air, fertility out of the soil, and culture out of local communities.”

In the past, investment and philanthropy were supposed to be completely separate; slow money is about putting them back together. This is all about how people think about money and how they live accordingly. This a radical re-calibration of what it means to be an investor. We cannot “grow” our way out of the current nightmare. We must move from a mentality of “venture” capital to “nurture” capital.

The field of ecopsychology uses the term biofilia—the innate affection that human beings have for other organisms. What’s worse, asks Tasch, than living out of sync with natural systems? What does it do to us long-term?

One thing everyone can do right now is join a Community Supported Agriculture group because CSAs connect people to place and principles. Sadly, the United States is far behind Europe in the utilization of CSAs. For example, in the U.S. about 100,000 families get food from CSAs. In the city of Copenhagen, Denmark, 50,000 people in that city alone patronize CSAs.

Tasch has developed six Slow Money principles which he is asking people to sign and support. The rationale:

“To enhance food security, food safety and food access; improve nutrition and health; promote cultural, ecological and economic diversity; and accelerate the transition from an economy based on extraction and consumption to an economy based on preservation and restoration…”

The intent is to obtain one million signatures in order to begin organizing legislators and influencing public policy in the direction of applying Slow Money principles on local, state, and wider levels. Please click here to sign the principles.