“Society is full of people chasing stuff that will kill them. Each day we decide to wake up or go to sleep; to engage in life or escape it; to grow a garden or go to Vegas.” Aaron Yaris could be a preacher, maybe even a prophet. He’s a big man with a booming voice who intones memorable phrases with pronounced certainty. Like the Prodigal Son, he’s visited the edge of excess and returned to testify how life should be lived. In Aaron’s case, excess took the form of overeating. He keeps a photo of his immense girth before his epiphany. Aaron lost over 200 pounds, took up exercise, and became a raw vegan. Now his fitness and food regimen is his way of life. “Meat makes you feel sated. But I overdid it. I ate like eight hamburgers. After I lost weight I had energy. I walked, then started biking. I was empty-minded in the beginning. I felt invincible. Then I found obstacles, but I just kept getting back up.”
Aaron met his partner Marian at the Hog Farm, Wavy Gravy’s commune, “a place where people are expressing themselves without outside interference; no money, no mortgages.” Marian grew up in a Lesbian community outside Portland, OR; Aaron was born to hippie parents and adopted by a pair of college intellectuals. They lead a home-centered life. Their living room is home school classroom for their five children, ages one through nine. Their kitchen looks like a lab; jars raw vegan food in various stages of fermentation. Their spare bedroom is an office; they both work from home in the medical marijuana business. Despite somewhat unorthodox backgrounds, Marian feels unsupported by how her family lives. “My parents have offered to pay tuition for the kids in private school, but they won’t help us home school.”
“My body is a gift.” Aaron has a keen appreciation for his trimmer self. “I had to learn to eat well because my metabolism burns energy slow. When we cook our food, we have a physical degradation of our bodies and a mental degradation of our psyches. Cooking our food is an extension of eating the apple in Eden. We will go to great lengths to have cooked food.”
Aaron is also aware how his new way of being moderates his labile temperament. “I am an extremely unbalanced person. I’m celebratory, high energy, then depressed. I have this Joseph Campbell thing to ‘follow your bliss’. I find it on my bike. The bike is more than a means of transportation. It is a form of enlightenment.”
Aaron is proud of being radical, “You’re not going to meet anyone more ‘out there’ than me.” Yet, because he and Marian live in opposition to so many norms, their family is bound tight. “Americans have more stuff and artificial choices, but we are actually the most oppressed people in the world.”
Aaron and Marian also believe that their way of living is ultimately sustainable. “The ecological impact of meat is immense. One pound of beef takes 2000 gallons of fresh water to produce. California is the canary in the water mine. It hasn’t hit the rest of the world yet.” But when it does, being raw vegan won’t seem radical. It will seem prophetic.
How will we live tomorrow?
“We are going to live in proportion to how we want to live. What does it mean to say, ‘we will live better’? That’s meaningful? The will is the key word. We will live as well as we prepare.” – Aaron
“If I said how could we live, I think it is going vegan. The world isn’t made peaceful by wearing an Ohm tattoo. Check your carbon footprint and change.” – Marian
The most common fable I heard goes something like this: ‘we grow the nation’s crops, so the country has to provide us the water the we need, and by the way it’s uncomfortable in this desert, so we also need to keep our lawns and foliage.’ As I witnessed less conservation in the Central Valley than in the Pacific Northwest or along the California coast, my empathy dwindled to a trickle.
, fractured nation. ”India is like the European Union. We have so many different languages and cultures.” India has fifteen official languages, rooted in two distinct linguistic trees. The Dravidian root in southern India is tied to Java and Indonesia. Islam influences the northern, Indo-European, tree. Hindi is called the ‘Normal Language’, although only a portion of Indians speak it. “All Indian states divide their functions into three categories: 1. Hindi for everything. 2. Hindi or English for everything. 3. Hindi or English or the local language.”
Somesh studies soot, an unclean by-product of combustion. Most of combustion takes place in a gas state, but soot, some of which comes from the yellow part of an exposed flame, other from beyond our visual range, is solid. Although combustion has been around for hundreds of years, there’s a lot we don’t know about soot. “Ideally we would understand the physics of soot and then apply it to combustion engines. But we can’t wait, so there is a lot of research to tinker with combustion engines and from that, maybe, inform our understanding of the physics. Combustion engines are everywhere and are not going away. A small improvement could have a large effect.”
Since the last group of Hmong refugees arrived in 2005, Healthy House’s work has expanded beyond direct medical services to include cultural and language classes for young Hmong. “We want to give them the tools to appreciate Hmong values – like respect for elders – in the context of the United States.
Flynn Gabriel has Asperger’s Syndrome. “My son get diagnosed with it, so I started investigating it on the Internet and I realized, ‘Hey, that’s me’. That’s why I like scrapping. I can do it by myself. The diagnosis doesn’t change anything. I’m still me.”
Although Savannah has a paid job in a thrift store, the family lives beyond the world of banks. “We have our pawn pile; rings we’ve collected, our Wii, our projection system. Things we like but don’t need. They are our savings account. When we need money we pawn something. It doesn’t cost much. Say the pawnshop gives us $90 for the Wii. We have ninety days to retrieve it, for $120. If we don’t have that yet, we just pay the interest and they hold on to it.” In reality, pawning is a costly savings account. But traditional loans aren’t available to folks like Flynn.
“Savannah went to her first appointment. “The doctor just wrote ‘obese’ on her form without even talking to Savannah about it. Look at her, she’s a big girl but she’s active, she moves all the time.” Flynn was clearly hurt that this outsider slapped his wife with an offensive label.
How Will We Live Tomorrow? 