6. three grains of rice

Ease Cafe gardens from where I sit

Dear friends and family -

I am sitting in my favorite garden oasis cafe, sipping some jasmine tea, listening to the soft sweet voice of Brudda Iz singing somewhere over the rainbow --- and I couldn’t help but think how ‘feeling so bad’ can so quickly turn into ‘feeling so good.’ There is one culprit and solution in all this: food. In the last two weeks I’ve been eating like an Okinawa peasant (I’m reading Tolstoy) - you know - rice, seaweed and sweet potato. Yum. Last week I mentioned going to Hunza where people are healthy for one hundred years. Their secret--mineral rich water and a very simple organic diet.

I have lots of food stories, but this one in particular comes to mind:

temple doors

Thirty-six years ago I met a remarkable healer by the name of Doris Williams. Doris was a shaman medicine woman, as well as a medical doctor, an ND, RN, PhD in several things, and had at least twenty-five other profession degrees. Sara, my pregnant wife at the time, and I met her right after the State of Alaska fired Doris as a public health nurse. They alleged she used the RN as a front to fly herself all over Alaska in her small airplane, healing people as a medicine woman. OMG! I remember one story she told about a young girl in a rural village many hours away from Anchorage, who had fallen through the ice and was dying of hypothermia. Doris saw it in a vision, got in her airplane and flew north, the whole time covering/warming the little girl with her etheric body. When she finally arrived at the village she rushed to the hut--there had been no telephone calls or ways of prior communication--to find the parents hovering over their daughter, whose body temperature was now returning to normal.

rice farmer

Doris was my friend and doctor for fourteen years. Around 1980, I became anemic while running a restaurant--I think due to my vegan diet/lack of protein. (Doris’s  diet cure=raw organic calf liver pineapple shakes). Not knowing what to eat (a life-long mystery) I asked her about how people stay healthy with limited diets--sadhus and saints who exist on almost no food at all? She told me her story of being a young teenage girl on the island of Samoa during World War II. The Japanese invaded her village, killed her parents in front of her and used her as a sex slave for two years. She escaped and hiked to the other side of the island where she found refuge in a Buddhist monastery. She spent several years there training to be a Zen master, as it appeared to be her dharma. At that point in the story she paused, and then told me that as a discipline she had to survive for one year on only three grains of rice a day.

Your mind is probably going, “No way!” Doris was not the type of person who would make up stories. Her point being--we don’t need food to survive and we can get all the nutrients we need from three grains of rice. Well . . . I’m certainly not going to give up food, not suggesting it, and it’s a story worth contemplating.

                                    

I’ve been extremely blessed to be in friendship with many incredible women over the course of my life—goddesses indeed—many receive this blog. Today in present time I'd like to acknowledge one in particular--and publicly express my deep love, gratitude and respect for Latifa Amdur. From Austin, Texas to Chiang Mai, Thailand she didn’t hesitate with an outpouring of caring, health and diet advice at a time when I didn’t know which direction to turn. If you benefitted from her years of dedicated service as a Doctor of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine on Kauai, please take a moment to somehow thank her. And if you don’t know her there is probably someone in your life who will go out of their way to comfort you when you’re not feeling so good. A simply thank you 'for being you' does wonders.

new kiosk

The rhythm of life, the heartbeat of humanity inspires me. Every morning I sit at my sixth story window and watch the man down below sweep the sidewalks and gutters, keeping his little part of Chiang Mai clean. City workers came by yesterday and set up a bamboo kiosk at the intersection below, and filled it with flowers. This morning I made my banana coconut-water ginger smoothie then took off and rode my Mary Poppins bike here, wrote this blog and listen to Norah Jones or Jack Johnson, and will spend the day working on my novel. Pe, the sweet man who runs the oasis cafe, anxiously awaits to love and serve.

Leo Tolstoy
(1828-1910)

I feel good--happy to be alive two days before my sixty-fifth birthday--grateful for all my wonderful friends and family and this incredible earth we live on. Reading Tolstoy last night I realized it doesn’t matter what day and century were in, what country--the issues are always the same: how can we express love and live our true life purpose? I will contemplate that, as Leo did, as I sip my jasmine tea under the canopy and smile . . . knowing that all is good and all is God . . . and love is all there is.

With continuing love and blessings,

David Dakan Allison

Resisting the magnetic pull . . .