Indigenous Rice Terraces (Wine) Cultivation, Ifugao, Philippines. Last day photo during my summer long fieldwork and stay there, conducting my grad school research paper on traditional knowledge and ancestral forest and water systems conservation, 2011.

"I loved this country and I felt at home and where a man feels at home, outside of where he's born, is where he's meant to go. It is easier to keep well in a good country by taking simple [measures] than to pretend that a country which is finished is still good. A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives live in harmony with it. But we destroy, cut down the trees, drain the water, so that the water supply is altered and in a short time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out and, next, it starts to blow away as it has blown away in every old country. The earth gets tired of being exploited. A country wears out quickly unless man puts back in it all his residue and that of all his beasts. When he quits using his beasts and uses machines, earth defeats him quickly. The machine can't reproduce, nor does it fertilize the soil, and it eats what he cannot raise. A country was made to be as we found it. We are the intruders and after we are dead we may have ruined it but it will still be there and we don't know what the next changes are. I would come back here but not to make a living from it. I could do that with two pencils and a few hundred sheets of the cheapest paper. But I would come back to where it pleased me to live; to really live. Not just let my life pass. I would go, now, somewhere else and as we had always gone. You could always come back. I knew a good country when I saw one. Here there was game, plenty of birds, and I liked the natives. Here I could fish [and cook]. That, and writing, and reading, and seeing pictures was all I cared about doing. And I could remember all the pictures. Other things I liked to watch, but they were what I liked to do."

~Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa

Read more »

Back on the farm is my neighbor's vineyard and goats (rams, sorry), running. You do not see his vegetable garden and my land's fruits. Just my backyard, this view video. Abandoning my home for so long, you do not see the micro-jungle grown all around. I want you to see the wine country, where the farm is.

My food will someday be here, when I come home: "The energy of the gesture of its making" (invoking Robert Hass' stricture: to enable poem to embody). I cook to live - in the sense, nature grows its own forest and food and interrelationships, and bio-memories...

South and north of my house lies springtime water,

And only flocks of gulls come every day.

The flower path's unswept: no guests. The gate

Is open: you're the first to come this way.

The market's far: my food is nothing special.

The wine, because we're poor, is an old brew -

But if you wish I'll call my ancient neighbor

Across the fence to drink it with us two.

            
                                                                                                  ~ Du Fu, The Visitor         T'ang Dynasty, (712-770 AD)                             
                                                      

Read more »