Far Beyond The Stars: The Archives

Post written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter

I went for a hike in the forest on Mt. Hood yesterday, where I learned how to find, identify, and harvest wild Chanterelle mushrooms. It was such a great experience, that I thought I’d share it with all of you.

To the right is a photo of the actual mushrooms that I harvested.

I’ve never harvested food from the wild before, and it reminded me of just how important the food we eat is, and how terrible most of the food available actually is. We go into the supermarkets and we’re confronted by all kinds of concoctions born from laboratories, claiming to be food. Vitamin infused wheat cakes. Rows upon rows of bottled bubbly corn syrup in plastic jugs (translation: coke, pepsi, yes, that crap.) Soy-pulp mush.

It’s difficult and time consuming to find and eat foods grown in the wild, but the benefits are worth the effort. Food grown from the forest floor is full of nutrients that over-cultivated soil just doesn’t produce.

A lot of us don’t eat real food anymore, and by doing that we’re alienating ourselves from our potential, and quite frankly killing ourselves.

This summer I read Michael Pollan‘s illuminating book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, which delved into a lot of these topics with a lot more depth, knowledge and research than I ever could offer. I strongly suggest you pick up a copy.

Mushrooms taste amazing, harvesting them myself was an incredibly fulfilling experience, but there are ways you can improve your diet without driving up Mt. Hood and romping around the woods, here are some that I use daily.

Rules for the Minimalist Diet:

1, Eat only food that will spoil.
If it won’t go bad, it’s probably bad for you. Vegetables spoil, meat spoils, bread that is good for you will go bad. These are both real foods. Buy them and learn to cook them.

I commonly only buy food that I’m going to eat that day. This way I can really listen to my body and see what I’m craving. Is today an Avocado day, or do I need mushrooms? I don’t eat meat often, but some days after a really hard workout my body will literally be crying for a piece of chicken.

By shopping for what I’m going to cook that day, I can answer these questions, and also eat fresher food.

2, Shop the periphery of the supermarket.
Most supermarkets are designed with the produce on your right as soon as you walk in, hit this are first. Fruits and vegetables are some of the most wonderful foods on earth, we should all eat them. Meat will be at the back, so that’s safe too.

Avoid the middle of the supermarket, that’s where the food products that last forever and thus are full of preservatives and crap food science.

3, Don’t buy anything that claims to be healthy.
Vegetables aren’t part of organizations, they don’t have public relations departments. This might be confusing, because there are a lot of products in the store proclaiming to be the solution to all of your problems. Like Froot Loops!?

4, Eat mostly vegetables.
Vegetables are truly amazing, they’re incredibly complex organisms that we’ve been thriving on for centuries, but modern food science has coaxed us away from them by tricking our senses with sugars and false promises.

I’ve been eating mostly vegetables since reading Pollan’s book, and the results have been amazing. Before I was constantly struggling with wildly fluctuating weight (mostly my tummy) and energy levels that just didn’t make sense. Now I feel healthy, and most importantly, I look healthy!

Not only are vegetables good for you, they’re also the simplest diet you can eat. There are no wrong choices in the produce section. The biggest challenge for those of us born in the modern age is learning how to cook them properly, but that’s the adventure. And that brings me to my last point:

5, Cook your own food

The best thing you can do for yourself is to prepare all of your food from raw ingredients. Not only is this the most fulfilling wait to eat, it’s also the healthiest, and the cheapest. I do this for almost every meal, unless I’m away from my house.

When you eat food from random places (NYC bodegas come to mind, but also like everything) you have no idea where the food came from. Can you identify all of the ingredients? Probably not. Good food at restaurants is expensive, and most of us can’t afford to eat good food for every meal if we were to eat out.

I’ve found that I really enjoy cooking my own food. Last night I made a stir-fry with ingredients that I had harvested from the forest floor. Can you imagine how thrilling that was? And best of all, the main ingredient cost only $5 (and I still have a HUGE bag of mushrooms), that I put towards carpool gas. The rest of the ingredients cost me under three dollars, and I was cooking for two.

So cheap, so awesome. Go forth and eat well!

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You might have noticed that I don’t have comments. It’s not because I don’t love you, it’s part of the minimalist approach. Comment systems have their upsides and downsides, and I’ve weighed both of these and come to the conclusion that I don’t want to spend time moderating comments on my website. But you can still comment: if you want to reply to anything that I write here, hit me up on Twitter!

Post written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

One of the things that I’ve been focusing on exclusively, since quitting my job in July and moving across the United States to Portland, has been focusing on what’s important.

How does one decide what’s important?

1, Does this positively effect my life in the future?
2, Will this bring meaning to my actions?
3, Will this accomplish something, like furthering my goals?
4, Can I look back on what I did and be proud of myself?

And what do I think about when I am doing something that doesn’t fit my definition of important?

1, Am I wasting my time?
2, Is this really bringing value to my life?
3, Does my body think this feels good?
4, Does my mind think this feels good?

Now, these aren’t catch all answers. You’ll develop your own, based on your own priorities, which vary greatly from one person to the next.

My priorities are very simple:

1, To do yoga daily
2, To live a life of value
3, To take care of myself, and by doing so take care of others
4, To consume as little as possible

So far, I think I’m doing well. I do yoga daily. Every morning I feel like I’m valuing my life, and every night I go to bed feeling like I value my life. I’m taking care of myself by not eating bad things, and in doing so I’m saving a lot of money. I made a healthy sandwich yesterday for 50 cents! Portland is so inexpensive.

I consume as little as possible. Now this is really key, I feel like a big percentage of my re-directional focus is maintaining the sparse and simple life that I’ve been living so far. A lot of the problems that society faces in modern times is due to America’s over-consumption of just about everything.

I feel that by abstaining from this practice of consumerism, I’m both improving the world and becoming an example by which other people can choose to live their lives.

By consuming less, I also have to make a lot less money, and thus have to work a lot less, and then I have free time to do what is important. See the wisdom here?

How you can start escaping consumerism and focus on what is important:

1, Adopt a 30-day watch list for any item that you’re tempted to buy.
A lot of consumer is snap decisions that are based on marketing hype and societal conditioning. I’ve known a lot of people who are subject to this, they’ve every moment of their lives focused on stuff, and getting more stuff, their brains are conditioned to buy buy buy.

You can stop this cycle by, as Leo Babauta suggests in his guest post yesterday on Get Rich Slowly, adopting a 30-day list.

When you’re in the store, and you say to yourself: “gee, I could use that new deluxe sandwich slicer” stop yourself, pull out your notebook and turn to the page where your 30-day list is. Write the date, write the time, write what you want to buy.

After 30 days, return to the list. Do you still want the deluxe sandwich slicer? No? Good, now you haven’t bought it. Do this for everything, except necessities like food, which 30 days from now you won’t really need anymore if you put it on the list.

2, If you had to go today, could you take it all with you?
I always like to think leaving. Maybe there’s a big disaster, and your city is sinking into the ground. Or you find out that you got a job in Cincinnati that is going to make your dreams come true, but they won’t pay relocating fees and you have to be there tomorrow. Or your girlfriend wants to move to Japan, tomorrow. Will it be a big project to move, or will you just pack a bag and go?

I can pack a bag and go, because all of my stuff fits in a bag (well, three bags: one backpacker bag, one computer bag, and one camera bag.) Isn’t that nice? It really is. I can go anywhere, whenever I want.

3, Limit your exposure to advertising.
A lot of buying is the result of ads leading to you to believe that you want something that you don’t really need. By blocking ads, you’ll negate their effects instantly. Cut down on your TV, install Adblock for Firefox, don’t look at billboards (and if you do, laugh what they’re trying to accomplish.)

This is really difficult, and it won’t happen overnight. You’re being subjected to literally billions of dollars of research by advertising firms on how to manipulate people, every time you look at an advertisement. It’s a big battle to fight, but one that is extremely rewarding.

4, Breathe.
If absolutely must buy something, at least stop yourself and take ten deep breathes. Walk around the store and meditate on the item you “really must have this instant”. Do you really need it now? How will it benefit your life? Will it actually hurt your life? Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. It probably will, so think about that has you walk and breathe. You might be surprised what answers come to you.

Post written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

One of the habits that I’ve adopted since moving to Portland, nearly three long weeks ago, has been the daily practice of Yoga. I was doing a lot of Yoga in New York, at the amazing donation based center Yoga To The People, and occasionally at home. It’s a lot easier to practice in the silence of my quaint Portland neighborhood, than it ever was in the noise of New York.

I’m a relative beginner at practicing yoga, I have to admit that. I’ve been moving actively since forever, but the regular practice of Asana’s and meditation is something I’ve been doing for just over a year. I studied dance in Chicago and for three years at NYU, so a lot of the principles of working with the body are the same, but the intention is much different.

In dance the focus is the performance (which admittedly I was always least interested in.) where as Yoga is about working with yourself to bring your mind, body, spirit, and the world all into sync with each other. That’s a giant difference in approach, but everything is related. The internal focus of Yoga really thrills me.

Why am I sharing this? Because I think Yoga is something everyone should try. And now that Far Beyond The Stars has 100+ readers(!), I figured I’d share.

Yoga will make your photos better, because it will make your life better.

Ways that I’ve observed my life improving since practicing yoga daily:

1, My concentration has improved.
I spend less time staring at walls wondering what I was supposed to do with my life, and more time focusing on the things that matter. Like this blog. Or cooking dinner for myself out of vegetables from the farmer’s co-op.

2, Improved flexibility.
I gradually begun to be able stretch and touch parts of my body that I never could before. I’m especially interested in asanas that involve binds, so I end up doing a lot of stretches with my arms behind my back and such. These really open my chest, my triceps, my back. Amazing!

3, I spend less time questioning myself.
I’ve found that regular meditation leads to answers to many of the questions that I’d previously spent questioning for ages while not meditating. These are not easy to discuss in a blog form, but I’ll give an example. Why am I in Portland? Answers to that question come to me in pigeon pose.

Well, that’s a few things. The more time I spend doing yoga, the more I realize how endless the discoveries are from the practice. I could go on listing them forever, but I have coffee to drink.

I think the most important thing I can communicate to you, the readers of this tiny blog in the big universe, is that Yoga is for everyone. The last line of Yoga To The People‘s creed is “All Bodies Rise”. Because their whole goal is to open Yoga to everyone, so everyone can benefit from it.

Here’s a copy of Yoga To The People’s creed, as it’s an important basis for my practice and my approach to Yoga in general:

There will be no correct clothes
There will be no proper payment
There will be no right answers
No glorified teachers
No ego no script no pedestals
No you’re not good enough or rich enough
This yoga is for everyone
This sweating this breathing this becoming
This knowing glowing feeling
Is for the big small weak and strong
Able and crazy
Brothers sisters grandmothers
The mighty and the meek
Bones that creek
Those who seek
This power is for everyone
Yoga to the people
All bodies rise

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