Pilgrim Farmer John, our own Heartland Bureau Chief, came through bigtime with a comment on abundance Iowa style. I am pasteing it here in the blog for you. We are trying to demonstrate the phenomenon of abundance in our physical world. And once we have that we can say that there must be something similar going on with our minds and spirits although maybe harder to glimpse. We don’t have any formulas but there must be potential.

“Hola, Amigo Felipe!

I just love it when you “talk farming” 🙂 And corn is such a fertile topic (puns may abound in this reply). Using the generic term “corn” and expecting all corn to be the same is like saying “pilgrim” and trying to picture all of them (us) as homogeneous. It just ain’t so, McGee!
The obvious starting point point, of course, is that PFFelipe’s corn is “sweet” corn. PFJuan’s corn is “field” corn. PFF’s goal when planting his corn is to produce the sweetest ear of corn and in a population adequate to supply his needs for himself and neighbors to eat as well as some to sell on the market. PFJ’s goal is to produce the most “economic” quantity of bushels per acre. Note I didn’t say, “maximum” bushels per acre. You can pour a nearly endless quantity of inputs into an acre inching up that yield until you get to the point of “negative return”. I aim for the point where the last dollar’s worth of input just pays for itself, and that occurs well before the point of “maximum” yield. I think that’s where your “abundance” comes in. Maximum, to me, equals “greed”. Optimum means a balance between what we want to get and what that will “cost” our soil and resources.

If I’ve done a good job of matching up my hybrid selection to the field it’s planted in and chosen the optimum population to plant (around 30,000 seeds/acre for most, but with a wide range possible), each of my corn plant’s ears will have 16 rows of kernels. and around 800 kernels per ear. If I “overplant”, the individual plant responds by producing fewer rows-14, or even 12. “Underplant” and the response is more rows, maybe 18 or even 20. It’s all about balance. A legal bushel of shelled corn is 56 lbs, around 27,000 kernels, more or less depending on depth of kernel. Each of those kernels came from a single “silk” that was fertilized by one of the 5 MILLION or so “grains” of pollen produced by a single tassel. If that sounds like “overkill” keep in mind Michelle’s 1000 seed dandelion, or the 350,000 seeds on a fully grown red root pigweed plant! There’s a lot of competition out there. Abundance, again, in all things of Nature.

And the Spiritual Abundance of which you speak is even more awe inspiring. It’s a “field” where numbers are meaningless. It’s all around us daily in the people we love and the people that love us. You sow that love in your daily Blogs to us, and I can attest to the fact that you have an endless crop of “good” that is being harvested by all of us. We are beholden (a word not used much anymore, but apropos nonetheless) to you for that, Amigo!

SF,
PFJ, MWBC”

And we go on down the trail. We have a winter morning walk in moments. Abundant loves, Felipé.

The opening of Advent today. Officially the Christmas season according to the Church. And our Padre was right there with a great homily, To Live the Usual Unusually Well. OK, we can do that.

Yea, there is a broken sky here with the sun coming and going. It’s chilly and we are going through firewood at a pretty good clip. Comes with the season. So we will hunker down as usual. Oh, there’s that word again.

Catherine and I did our weekly tailgate session after Mass. We were talking poetry and that attracted attention. Like people listening for stock market tips. Maybe that is a sign of changing times. Or maybe that is just usual for unusual Vashon Island.

Just have another minute to be with you. But I had an image just there of hanging Christmas lights around in my mind. Let me see if I can color my doings with the addition of that cheerful ambience. Mind ambience, decorating the mind.

Alperfect today loves, Felipé.

I miss my corn buddy. I gave him to Dr Asher in LA. He will have a good home there. Maybe I will make another next year at harvest time.

My Rebecca and I did try and take a stab at figuring out how many kernels were in the corn buddy jar and came up with the number 800, give or take. If you need a number, there it is. Or we passed it around with the folks at the patient’s meeting and the weight of it was impressive. One way or another we need to be impressed with this abundance thing.

I wish Pilgrim Farmer John were here at the moment to talk to us about this phenomenon. Maybe he will contribute when he reads this. Farmer Michelle said that dandelions have a 1000 seeds. Farmer gallows humor there.

I challenged the patient’s group to pay attention and see whether they couldn’t discover abundance in other areas of their lives. Surely there are productive avenues in our minds that are waiting to be discovered that will yeild answers to some of our problems. Surely our spiritual roots are connected to riches galore ready for the taking.

That’s what is on my mind today. Thanksgiving really took a hold of me this year and won’t let go! And Advent starts tomorrow. What a season loves, Felipé.

Back here just in time to watch Washington Husky Football. Big game tonight. Playing Utah and the winner gets to go to the Rose Bowl, so pretty darn exciting.

I want to let you in on what I have been doing these last few days. Went down to LA to work with the staff at the Cedars Sinai Cancer Rehab Department. They have developed this wonderful program called GRACE to teach resiliency to cancer patients.

They have been using Phil’s Camino, the documentary as part of this class. So Annie and I showed up down there to do a showing for a reunion of the students and then a QandA. We were told that maybe eight would show up and really there were thirty five. It went really well.

We did a luncheon showing for hospital professionals and following a QAndA. That was supposed to have eighty and one hundred and forty crowded in for that. Another success.

I really don’t know what all this means for the future but we got a start on something. This is cutting edge in the world of cancer treatment, that’s important to say. We are in the process of putting together some amazing new stuff.

OK, back to football for now. See you tomorrow. Amazing new love, Felipé.x