Today, I want to revisit the Inn – and to write about the Inn is inevitably to write about ourselves. Joan and I have poured our lives into this place. It is not a sacrifice – although our kids in a pique might say that it has been.

We care about everything here – the material – from toilet seats (you should see the back-up supply) to beds – we always have a couple of back-ups of each size and only buy the finest available. We care about our guests’ “experiences” – and provide  opportunities to get out of doors – not just walking around, but paddling the beautiful Big River Estuary, mountain biking Mendocino’s many trails and back roads. If you want to learn about the forest or marine ecology, naturalist Ryane Snow PhD will take you for an interpretive foraging hike. If you want to experience art – after perhaps years – Joan, an arts specialist, will provide a joyful “play shop.” Learn cooking – we put a class together; there’s yoga, tai chi, acupuncture. Don’t want to do anything – you don’t have to.

Our gardens are beautiful and inspiring and are continually photographed, painted. Visitors come from many of the other inns to explore them and talk to Master Gardener Dana and her staff.

All of this gets me to the point:
We believe life is inherently joyful. Although many if not most of us often lose sight of it, joy is within us; it is our heritage. The Chinese understood that joy is embracing “what is”. Most of us are caught in the conflict between “what is” and our ideas of what should be. And our notions of “what should be” are essentially the “desires” that the Buddha noted lay at the root of suffering. Similarly, “should be” underlies the conflicts that the great 20th century philosopher Krishnamurti identified as the source of our mental entanglements and unhappiness.

Fifteen years ago, we began offering programs on mindfulness and health, hosting Jack Schwarz’s Aletheia Institute. Today, working with local practitioners – acupuncturists, nutritionists, Chinese herbalists, naturalists, artists, massage therapists – we have created the Center for Living Well that provides life enhancing programs to help assure a joyful life.

Our programs are designed to help our participants deeply appreciate “what is” – their bodies and the world around them. Underlying the practices, techniques and information is an emphasis on becoming deeply aware and manifesting awareness through action.

Our passion is that our guests, diners, canoeists leave Mendocino at ease, but enlivened. Yes, we have desire, and that is that when guests leave they leave with a deeper appreciation of themselves, of their partners, their lives.

Joan and Jeff

That is not true.

Think about the nature of experience: What we experience might be different, but the nature of experiencing is not. I can remember experiences and the feeling of experiencing from 2 years-old onward.  The nature of experiencing is the same. The content of my experience changes and for that matter my experience of myself changes – Now it hurts to walk barefoot outdoors, while I never wanted to wear shoes when I was little.

Time does not wear out experiencing. Yet experiencing is an essential aspect of time and does not suffer the effects of time. It does not wear out. Our feet grow sensitive and sore over time. The pebbles which irritate our soles  become dust. Experiencing continues.

I wonder if we are not of time, are we then time itself – containing all that emerges, expresses, recedes. For with time there is experience. Time and experience are inseparable – each an expression of the other.

And when we realize we are time itself, time stops. There’s no longer experience. There is only nothing: the void that is not knowable: The Void  from which we arise and for which there are many names.

Musings from Mendocino

Void=source↦time.

Investors are free to invest in farmland; however they are removed from the land – its texture, smell. They do not experience the land’s response to hoe or disc harrow. They rarely experience the excitement of the first sprouts emergence from the brown loam or the heartbreaking wilt from a drought.

Today, more than any time before, we are disconnected from the very ground of our being – the earth itself. To create a sustainable lifestyle we must embrace the land – appreciate it. Although it can be treated as commodity, it is far more.

Believing that beauty evokes a connection within us, at the Inn we have worked to make the ground flourish. Gardens at the Stanford Inn range from formal to wild; from landscape to produce gardens. We that is, we AND nature, are creating beautiful gardens with natural breaks to assure habitats for birds, garter snakes, frogs.

But we want to do more to connect our guests and visitors to the land. We want them to deeply appreciate our wild lands and virtually untouched rivers and shores. To do this, Ryane Snow Ph.D. leads nature tours, treks into the forests and along the shore. Ryane explains the intimate relationship of the forests’ living inhabitants – the plants, fungi and animals. Exploring the shore and its tide pools, fellow trekkers learn about seaweeds and their amazing contribution to our health. At the Ravens’ Restaurant we serve foods from our forests, shores and from m Big River Nurseries – our certified organic farm/gardens.

We host the Green Belt project originated by John Jeavons of Ecology Action in nearby Willits. The Green Belt project is based on his research into biointensive farming – a method of farming that can provide enough food to feed family of four for a year on as little as 4,000 square feet of land. We are assisting this project by providing garden space, housing and meals for his interns, who track every plant, every process and every calorie harvested.

With droughts in Russia (the Russian government banned grain exports last year), the United States, China and parts of Europe; localized water shortages particularly in impoverished nations; flooding and other climate issues, the world’s food supply is far less assured as in past generations. The work John Jeavons and his Green Belt interns are doing provides an answer to the agricultural uncertainty, one that conserves water and land and will allow reforestation as we move toward sustainable farming.
We urge visitors to the Stanford Inn and to the Mendocino Coast to visit the Green Belt gardens in front of the Inn’s Barn and adjacent to the horse pasture. For those concerned about the future – these gardens provide a basis for optimism. John’s investment in time and talent will serve the planet.

The Paleolithic diet also includes mushrooms, nuts, and fruit; but not grains, legumes, dairy products, processed oils, and condiments such as salt and sugar. Underlying this theory of diet is the concept that, if it was readily available, not purposely cultivated (potatoes, grain, milk from goats, cows, reindeer), processed (grains and some seeds) it was in the diet of early man.

But, then, why the reliance on animal protein in today’s Paleolithic diet? During the Paleolithic period, animals might have been plentiful – but they certainly weren’t easy to eat. Man had to hunt, kill, and prepare the organs and carcasses

When I first heard of the diet, I found it an excuse to eat meat – an elaborate excuse and one that was not based on a sound understanding of the science of archaeology. I remembered my first university anthropology class: the professor stood before us, trying to explain the experience of early man. He called man’s environment those tens of thousands of years ago “promiscuous”. He meant that man found himself in a world of readily available foods. With little effort required to procure dinner humans had time for leisure and family. He explained that life was not hard as we might have thought by observing groups more recently contacted by the now dominant Western society. These people, he pointed out, had been pushed into marginal areas, like the Inuit, who adapted to the harsh artic environment.
The paleo diet is based on assumptions of what might have been the human diet during the 2.5 million year Paleolithic period that essentially ended 10,000 years ago with the advent of agriculture. However, many of the assumptions are based on thin evidence.

Recent analysis of archaeological artifacts and human remains suggests that early humans were primarily plant eaters and not just greens as our former staff member told me. Neanderthal disappeared from the archaeological record 25,000 to 30,000 years ago and apparently they were not the club swinging animal hunters we have been led believe. Amada Henry at George Washington University scraped calculus off 35,000 year old Neandertal teeth. What she found is not a part of the “paleo-diet” – residues from cereal grasses, cooked starches, “legume like” starches and remnants of date palms. The news here, Neandertal ate porridge! Science quotes archaeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef of Harvard University, “Here you have good research putting nails in the coffin of the ‘meat-eating Neandertals.’”
In school, we were taught that agriculture began 10,000 years ago; perhaps by our ancestors but not all humanity’s ancestors. During the last decade, archaeologists found stone tools used for cultivating yams in the highland forests of Papua New Guinea at a site dated 44,000 to 49,000 years before present. These tools show evidence that they were used to create clearings in the forests to grow yams that were a significant component of the growers’ diet. Another component was pandamus nuts from trees within the forests. There are rodent remains associated with these sites, however, there is no substantive evidence that these rodents were a significant part of their diet.

We do not seem to be the hunters imagined when we think of our early history. A new view is emerging – one of groups living on the land, exploiting the abundant fruits, seeds, grains, tubers, leaves. We were people who cooked their food – making porridge and other cuisine, releasing the plants’ nutrients and enhancing their taste.

Most of us do not understand who we were and not knowing our history may be contributing to our degradation of the planet.

The Stanford Inn engages in sustainable practices. And we are not the only business and family to do so. Nor were we the first. In 1956, the Lolonis family of Redwood Valley chose to purposely manage their vineyards using traditional, sustainable methods – no chemicals and lots of ladybugs. They are the oldest purposely organic vineyard in the United States.

Mendocino County’s story is one of benign neglect – after the heyday of lumber after reconstruction of earthquake ravaged San Francisco 100 years ago, the County was forgotten. Many residents moved to the Bay area for college educations and jobs. In the 1960′s artists and “back-to-the-landers” discovered the County, buying land, building cabins growing their own food and seeking to make a living by creating arts and crafts including food products.

Arts groups and galleries were founded, beginning with what the National Endowment for the Art designated a “rural miracle” – the Mendocino Art Center. Throughout the County newcomers created cooperative galleries and performing arts companies.

Many of the newcomers sought to preserve what they found here. They argued for sustainable logging practices (they lost that one and most of the mills are closed due to over-logging as large scale logging has left the County leaving the forests to recover). They helped lead the organic movement. They initiated the creation of State Parks – in particular Mendocino Village’s Headlands State Park and Big River State Park.

The following is a brief history of Mendocino County Sustainability

• 1978 Real Goods founded to support those seeking to live a more natural lifestyle – often off-grid, growing their own food, producing art, crafts, canned goods, jams and jellies, etc.

• 1970′s Thanksgiving Coffee Company founded to provide “not just a cup, but a just cup” adopting organic and fair trade practices.

• 1980 The Frey family established Frey Vineyards producing organic wine.

• Beginning in1980 – We began our “rural” inn – originally Big River Lodge – in part based on principles I learned as an anthropologist.

• 1982 John Jeavons brought Ecology Action to Willits from Palo Alto, featuring “biointensive” farming methods originally developed by Alan Chadwick. John writes: “Our work grew out of a concern about worldwide starvation and malnutrition. If we could determine the smallest amount of land and resources needed for one person to supply all of his or her needs in a sustainable way, we might have a personal solution to these challenges.”

• 1985 the Fetzer family began adopting organic practices as did The Stanford Inn.

• In the mid 1980′s the Schmitts who created Napa’s French Laundry restaurant began the Philo Valley Apple Farm in Anderson Valley. Tim Bates, their son-in-law ran the farm and has figured prominently in the organic movement, including helping begin Mendocino Renegade – a more sustainable organic certification. By the way, he and his family offer classes at the farm.

• 1998 Solar Living Institute was founded by Real Goods founder John Schaeffer.

• 2001 Ukiah Brewing Company certified organic brew pub.

• 2001 Yokayo Biofuels founded in Ukiah by Kumar Plocher. Yokayo’s biodiesel is made from used vegetable oil.

These and more created an ethos in the County for which it is largely known – e.g.,

• First and only jurisdiction – County, in our case, to ban farming genetically modified organisms – GMOs.

• The Stanford Inn’s Ravens’ Restaurant – One of the first vegan/vegetarian eco-properties in North America.

• First carbon neutral winery, Parducci built on the principle that, “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” (Norwegian former Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland.)

• In 1996 Anderson Valley Brewing created their solar powered brewery.

• Local Sea vegetable harvesting provided products for which The Ravens’ had to create a use – sea palm strudel which led to a world-wide market for sea palm from no market at all.

• Mushroom foraging – Mendocino mushroom entrepreneur, Eric Schramm, found many patches of “candy cap” mushrooms. Although fresh candy caps look like and have an earthy odor similar to many mushrooms, dried candy caps have an intense maple flavor. Eric created an entirely new dessert base – and we have used candy caps for many year.

• Mendocino County is “America’s Greenest Wine Region.” Many vineyards are organic or biodynamic and many of the tasting rooms are manned by the families who grow the grapes and makes the wines.

The County through the authentic activities of some residents is a destination focused on more sustainable lifestyles. The Stanford Inn and its staff are leaders in this. The most sustainable action a single person can take is to adopt a whole food, plant based diet and the Inn’s Ravens’ Restaurant primarily features whole food plant based cuisine – with about half the produce grown on the property. Produce here is enriched with compost from plant and kitchen wastes. Rather than tear through the forests and fields on ATVs, the Inn provides mountain bikes at Catch A Canoe & Bicycles, too! and also specializes in another human powered recreation – paddling. Catch A Canoe’s redwood outrigger canoes are built in the County and provide easy access to the Big River Estuary – an undeveloped river canyon with abundant wildlife.

Sustainability at the Inn is a state of mind that permeates every aspect of life.

There is nothing “new” in making resolutions. Each resolution is a statement regarding ourselves: “I am too heavy.” “I eat too much.” “I am angry.” “I am a workaholic.” “I am an alcoholic.” “I smoke.” This game we play with ourselves has no winner, indirectly affirming what it is we don’t want to do or be through resolutions of what we want. Fundamentally we are in conflict with ourselves.

Acceptance
What if we simply accepted ourselves for who, what we are; what we do; what we say? We have beliefs about ourselves that often are not necessarily true and we figuratively trip over these beliefs. Rather than saying what we want to be, let’s say what we are, who we are. This basic act gives us the footing to change. An example:

The last cigarette
I am a smoker (I am, by the way). When we had kids, we decided not to smoke around them. I decided to quit smoking, but did only for a short time. I believed that I was basically a non-smoker who smoked. I quit many times.

Rather than continue the fiction that I wasn’t really as smoker, I began telling people that I smoked and chose then, not to smoke only one cigarette – that “next” cigarette. I still haven’t smoked that cigarette.

Once acknowledging that I smoked – deeply, truly – I recognized that I could not face quitting forever. But I could deal with smoking or not smoking one cigarette at a time. And, when I reached in my shirt pocket for the last cigarette I decided not to smoke it. Each time I reflexively reached for that cigarette, I chose not to smoke it. I didn’t quit smoking forever. I only did not smoke that last cigarette. I am still not smoking it and now, of course, don’t want it.

Change came when I accepted that I was a smoker and that I was addicted and could not handle quitting altogether.

Wishing all of us a new year of in-side-sight.

Using Facebook troubles us because in a way through our presence we are supporting the concept of virtual social networking. We are plugging into a venue where personal information is shared openly and we are concerned regarding “unintended consequences.”

Through Facebook and other social media more is known about more people than at any time in the history of mankind. We can check each other out – either directly or through a virtual network of “friends”. When we actually meet one another, there are rarely surprises. We know each other: We bring into our “meetings” expectations based on what we’ve learned about one other on social media.

If you went away to college or university and moved into a dormitory, you might remember saying “good-bye” to your family and essentially “good-bye” to your past followed by the “move in”: meeting new people who had no idea who you were. At that time you had an opportunity to totally recreate yourself although you probably didn’t. Rather, like most of us, you asserted who you believed yourself to be: what you intended to major in, where you were raised, went to school, what your parents did, the names of your brothers and sisters, your likes and dislikes, favorite bands and so much more.

All of us regurgitated our pasts, creating expectations of who we were both within the minds of fellow students as well as our own minds. Yet, for the short period identity was in flux, we remained open to self-discovery.

Facebook is misnamed: it is not a book, for once opened, it never can be fully closed. It provides more than a window into our lives – it is a glass house – perhaps a prison of expectation – in which we live.

Expectations control – they are stifling. Spontaneity – arises without expectation. In novel situations we are free to be – where we are not constrained by expectations based on our school, our work, our politics, our favorite movies, books, personalities – by our personal history.

As you post that image of yourself, remember that it is one moment in time that may characterize you for years to come. The concretization of the past on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, even Twitter, makes our pasts inescapable. Like a political candidate whose every action has been recorded, we will not be able to escape the bondage of old beliefs, behaviors, and relationships.

Don Genaro and Don Juan in Carlos Castaneda’s series on their teachings urged their apprentices to obscure their personal history – not to create a lie about themselves, but to create possibilities.

Remember this as you post. Your lives are not commercial enterprises as the Stanford Inn and The Ravens’.

When you book online through a dot.com, you are charged a “bed tax” or “transient occupancy tax” on your accommodations if the property is in an area with such taxes. A good portion of that tax is not paid to the taxing jurisdiction. When the dot.com charges your credit card for a deposit or for the entire stay, they include bed taxes, which in San Francisco are 15%. However, the City only receives taxes on the net amount paid to the hotel. Generally, the hotel receives about 70% to 75% of the the actual amount you pay. For example, if you pay $200 per night, you credit card will be charged $230 including tax. The dot.com will send the hotel the “net” rate of $140 (70%) plus the tax on the that amount for a total of $161. The remaining $69 will be kept by the dot.com of which $9 was received as taxes. Since they did not actually house the guest, they do not pay this to the appropriate jurisdiction.

Transient taxes are desperately needed to provide policing, road repair, and other basic services. This is especially true for Mendocino County (with a total rate of 11%), which has lost three of its main industries: fishing, logging/lumber, and wood products such as Masonite production.

You should also know that just a few years ago most hotels and inns paid 10% commissions to travel agencies. Guests paid taxes on their total stay and the hotel remitted 10% of the overnight charge before taxes, assuring that their city or county received taxes for the actual amount paid by the overnight visitor.

One more thought: the discounted net rate paid to the inn does not save guests money. In fact online travel agency discounted rates are calculated into the rate schedules of hotels and inns which means, taken as a whole, guests are paying more for their accommodations than they would pay if all accommodation were booked directly with the hotel or chain. Hotel guests are supporting huge online travel agencies, their advertising budgets, and profits – at a substantial cost to themselves and to their destinations – the cities, towns, and counties they visit. If the hotel is in business, they are ok. It is the destinations and hotel guests who are paying.

Please support your favorite destination by shopping however you want, but make reservations at the hotel’s website. And call their 800 number if you want the hotel to match an “online special” you find at an online travel agency.

The Stanford Inn at Dusk

We are in Matlock, Manitoba, Canada on vacation or as they say in Manitoba, “on holiday.” Manitobans have it right: a vacation is a holiday – or holy-days – and they are for us. These days are special. There are few interruptions. (When we first are on the road, there are lots of calls from the Inn. They taper as members of our staff get their footing – something we hope they remember when we return.)

Murphy retrieving a stick on Lake Winnipeg

At home, which is the Inn, we work seven days a week providing little time for reflection and meditation. When we are here, on the same short street on which Joan spent her summers as a child, we visit relatives and friends. The family cottage is rustic. Joan does art and I write and we sit on the veranda, listening to birds and our streams of thought. Television doesn’t work well and is not a diversion. We cook and do dishes here. We have time for neither at home. We ride bicycles, throw sticks into the lake for Murphy and Ellie to chase. Today, we are watching a thunderstorm moving in from the northwest.

Ellie dragging a stick onto the beach.

It is during these summer holidays that we write (I write, Joan consults) the Stanford Inn blog. Ironically, it is about lifestyle issues on the Mendocino Coast, yet the best time and usually about the only time to contribute to it is when we are not on the Mendocino Coast. Innkeeping is a fulltime, consuming job. We aren’t corporate. We oversee as much of the inn as we can. We have to: after 30 years, we have lost and are losing staff to retirement and relocation. Finding and training their replacements is not easy. The economy is not diversified and there are fewer qualified people to work.

Forest “liquidation” closed the mills; over fishing has substantially destroyed the once vibrant Fort Bragg fishing industry; manufacturing and distribution business were sold to larger companies and moved east. The service businesses that once serviced these industries are gone. And the economy is now singularly focused on visitor services. The area is shrinking: Mendocino school enrollment is just about ½ of that when our kids were in school.

The Mendocino Coast is languishing in the backwater of mainstream American economic life – pretty much just how we found it in the 1970′s. However, when we moved here in 1980 we were not alone: many others were moving here, too, to work in the woods, fish, make art, create fine furniture, build businesses. Most of our generation of émigrés are still here, but our children have left to make lives for themselves in other areas – ironically in the major cities – San Francisco, Los Angeles, and, surprisingly, New York City and Washington D.C. – many of us left.

Perhaps the Mendocino Coast will experience a resurgence newcomers who will invigorate the arts, create new businesses, and repopulate our schools and villages as in the 1970′s and 80′s.

What if we ended dairy and beef operations today? What might be the possible long term consequence? Felisa Smith of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, may have the answer.

She suggests that 13,400 years ago the Americas were extensively populated by large herbivores particularly 12,000 – 20,000 pound woolly mammoths. This was the end of the Wisconsin glacial period and a time of rising temperatures. By 11,500 years ago and roughly 1000 years following the development of Clovis technology, 80% of these animals were extinct. Dr. Smith postulates in Nature Geoscience that human predation (and a warming environment) led to their extinction which led to a corresponding plunge in methane levels. She calculates that 13,400 years ago, these mega-herbivores produced 9.6 million metric tons of methane per year. She suggests that the resulting drop in methane levels shown in ice cores from 700 parts per billion to 500 was a direct result of extinction leading to a rapid global cooling and a “mini ice age,” 12,800 to 11,500 years ago, at the very end of the Wisconsin glacial period.

If Smith is right, humans have been changing global climate for millennia. Significantly, today, if humans change their lifestyle and diet, eliminating herbivores from our diet, we may have a realistic approach to reversing the warming we have created.