Humans Inspired – Chapter 5: Tuning In With Macrobiotics
As a Millennial, the hand-me-down Baby Boomer program of going to college and getting a professional job had been driving me for years. Even in China when I was being offered a life of luxury that never required a thought about money, there was always the underlying question of careerism. The loud voice in the back of my awareness screaming for freedom in the form of a job had never left me and now it was leading me to a turning point. If Morgan hadn’t been in a position of offering gainful employment and a perspective on successful entrepreneurship, I would have never considered his proposed idea of focusing on healing. I was like a dog chasing a ball, and now Morgan was about to throw it in a completely different direction. Time to fetch a new perspective.
Morgan was very charismatic, so much so that he had apparently already convinced my Mom to write a check for a healing program in Nashville. He basically told her that the only way I could achieve career success was for me to go and live with a woman who helps people regain their health. Her name was Virginia Harper and she wrote a book on how to cure Crohn’s Disease by changing your diet. Despite not having Crohn’s Disease or any experience with Morgan, I chose to trust him and the direction he was proposing. Virginia went by “Ginny” and despite being nearly twice my age, she was very much a young soul carrying herself in a familiar youthful way. What I didn’t know at the time was that her program was based on a Japanese lineage called Macrobiotics.
I caught a free Southwest flight to Nashville the following week on accumulated credit card miles and Ginny picked me up from the airport in her white Toyota Camry. This was routine for her. Her book was about her experience growing up in the South eating her way into and out of an autoimmune disorder. Apparently enough of her readers were going through a similar enough experience that they often find their way into her living room. She was always helping someone recover. So why they hell am I here? I don’t have Crohn’s disease. I was still mostly just a guy looking for a job, but since I had already made it out to Nashville, I was going to try whatever she asked me to.
When we got to her golf course home in suburban Nashville, Ginny pointed out an infrared sauna in her garage alongside a clay crock used to ferment Sauerkraut and a water filtration system for the whole house. When we sat down for dinner to talk about what we would be doing over the next few weeks, she served a plate of Millet (commonly known as birdseed), a Japanese Miso Soup with Daikon Radish, a generous portion of blanched leafy greens, and some Sauerkraut from the crock in the garage. The food tasted bland, but she had some organic Tamari soy sauce to flavor things up if needed. After dinner she made sure I drank a hot Apple juice with something called “Kuzu” root in it. Basically her program was just to live with her and eat her food for a month, nothing else. I had already tried every strange food from fried insects to congealed duck blood while living in Asia. Why not try something healthy for once?
Over the next few days I was encouraged to sleep as much as I wanted, sit in the infrared sauna, and to show up at the dining room table for meals. Each day she would serve something slightly different, but it was all basic to the same idea. The meals consisted of some kind of grain in abundance (Brown Rice, Millet, Barley, etc.), beans or bean products like tempeh and Tofu, a medley of new and changing organic vegetables, greens, homemade sauerkraut, a sea vegetable like Wakame, and a miso soup. Sometimes she would make a combination of the same ingredients into something resembling a pizza or a sandwich, but ultimately I was now eating like a healthy Japanese person. The chopsticks made it more fun.
It turned out most of the books she had on diet and food were written by Japanese authors as they all followed closely with a guy named George Ohsawa. Ohsawa was an interesting Japanese figure who spent time as a political prisoner for his outspoken stance against Japan’s involvement in World War II. Apparently he cured himself of Tuberculosis at the age of 19 after applying the Chinese medicinal concept of Yin and Yang to his diet. After intentionally going on to do the same thing with other viruses in Africa, he wrote a number of subsequent books about how to cure disease naturally with food. His books gained him a notable following of disciples who brought his concepts to the West. This body of work became known as the Macrobiotic diet. A comprehensive 2000 year study of the medicinal effects of food on the human body. Unlike myself, most people find out about it through actually having some kind of serious illness.
After about 10 days of drinking and showering in filtered water while eating Ginny’s food, I started to observe a noticeable difference in my thinking. I was freshly calm. As my perspective shifted, I could see how high strung the life I had been living really was. While I slowed down and became more relaxed, I read bits and pieces of books Ginny showed me. Despite having seen the yin/yang symbol countless times throughout my life, I had never thought about applying the yin and yang framework to food before. Some vegetables grow up and out of the ground like Broccoli and greens, and some down and into the ground like Carrots and Turnips. It seemed so obvious and simple. When I saw how that concept universally applies to men and women, the moon and the sun, democrats and republicans, war and peace and everything else, I was just as confused as I was intrigued. Why aren’t we taught something so basic to the fundamental perception of reality itself as part of our elementary education?
While thoughts about Yin and Yang were ruminating in my mind, Ginny suggested we go out to eat somewhere. I thought for sure we would be going to a health food joint of some kind, but she and her boyfriend wanted to go to a normal restaurant on the water. I was in Nashville to be healthy so rather than the usual burger, and beer I ordered a glass of white wine and a salmon plate with vegetables. My Dad the heart patient used to eat that all the time, so to me that seemed healthy enough. When we got back to Ginny’s suburban golf course house I was noticeably uncomfortable from the food I had eaten. This kind of discomfort was something new. One glass of wine, some salmon and broccoli and now I was having intense hot flashes. My nose became a faucet. I had never experienced such a high volume of liquid pouring out of my head before and it wouldn’t stop. As I struggled to plug the flow with a pile of tissues, Ginny put another Japanese looking book in front of me. She opened it to a page that had been dogeared and pointed to a specific paragraph. “Read this,” she said. It was three paragraphs about how the first thing that happens when you introduce toxins into a healthy body is a heavy discharge from the nose. An entire book written specifically about the physiological phenomenon of discharge. After 10 days eating clean, Ginny knew it was coming. The whole evening was a planned experiment, and the discharge I was experiencing didn’t stop there.
I had the sudden realization that the past 10 days was literally the only time in my entire life that I had consistently refrained from putting anything toxic into my body. As I went through childhood memories of eating sugar by the spoonful to drunken late night Whataburger runs in college, I knew for the first time in my life that the damage I had been doing was cumulative. The thin discharge coming out of my nose soon turned to sweat and then to tears. I went upstairs to the simple guest room I was sleeping in. As I lay in bed staring out the window at a full moon, the tears kept coming. Every emotionally negative thing that I had ever been exposed to seemed to be coming out now. The words “I’m sorry” repeated over and over again in my mind as I apologized to myself for all the neglect and abuse that I had put my physical body through. There was no yogi, there was no therapist, it was just me, the moon, and a toxic river of discharge. My mind was connecting with my body in a way that had been a long time coming. I was healing for the first time in my life.
After the deepest sleep I can remember and vivid dreams about childhood to boot, something really clicked. When I came downstairs the following morning I happily slurped down another miso soup with Daikon Radish for breakfast. It felt like the two sides of my brain had been disconnected up until this point in my life. Now that my mind was connecting with my body through the framework of Yin and Yang, the outside world began to make more sense. I could see that I was still holding onto a deep resentment of reality itself. For the way the West treats the East, the way the Israelis treat the Palestinians, the way the cops treat black people, but not that I could finally see it’s all one thing, it wasn’t killing me anymore. All of the heavy things I had been almost obsessively attached to in my awareness were simply part of a spectrum of constant happenings. I could also see myself along that spectrum for the first time, and I knew the person I was seeing was in the process of waking up.
Abruptly inspired by and grateful for my physical body, I found myself grinning and running laps around the golf course. I ran and ran and ran some more. Yesterday I was a devout academic minded atheist, hell bent on getting a job and absolutely certain world is primarily composed of injustice. Today I’m rethinking everything I thought I knew to be true. If I’m awake now then I must have been asleep before, so it was time to leave yesterday behind. As I kept running, one thought persisted. Up until now I had been certain that God didn’t exist. I had always thought that if God does in fact exist then he (or she) must be well overdue for some jail time. How could any intelligent creator allow so much constant suffering in the world? But my concept of God was changing too. I didn’t have words to define it yet, but I knew I had missed something. All of this from eating vegetables on a golf course?
After another couple weeks with Ginny, I was having the happiest identity crisis of my life. I was excited to leave my old self behind. Some of the bits about Chinese medicine I had read out of her books gave me a sense that the health of our organs governs the health of our emotions. Perhaps I was just feeling high from giving my body a month-long cleanse. All I knew was that I never felt this good before, and maintaining that was quickly becoming my priority. I forgot all about the job I thought Morgan would have waiting for me. I found a new way of life that costs roughly 20 dollars a week to live on, and I knew that when I got back to Austin I already had everything I would need to live this newfound freedom. I just needed to buy some stainless steel pots and pans to cook with and a water filter. As we said our goodbyes at the Nashville airport, I told her I’d be in touch.
Back in Austin, the velvet rut didn’t feel so much like a rut anymore. My downtown studio apartment gave me the space to pursue health and simplicity, and my dog Bailey would make the perfect companion for the venture. I found her some dog food made from wild animals that read “biologically appropriate dog food.” Despite abruptly becoming vegan, I couldn’t imagine a happy dog not eating meat. My piano tuning website had paid off and I was receiving two or three requests per week for piano tuning appointments. I had an appointment the following week down at Casa De Luz to meet with Morgan about work, but now that I was able get by on my own terms, I was having trouble imagining taking a job if it were offered to me.
There are 240 strings on a piano and it usually takes me about an hour and a half to finish tuning one. After a brief conversation with my client, I play something major and something minor to get a feel for how much work the piano is going to need. By the time that’s over, the client is confident I know what I’m doing, and usually interested in whatever else I’m selling. But I’m not selling anything else. I’m living on $20-$30 per week, literally spending all of my money on gas, organic vegetables and rent. I’m not here to hustle anybody and they know it, and that seems to make people even more curious. Who the hell is this skinny happy healthy guy in my house? Most people had a vague ambiguous sense that I had figured out something they hadn’t, and my piano tuning business was becoming a small platform of influence. I really didn’t know what to do with other people’s curiosity. If I hadn’t seen how miserable the wealthiest people can be a couple years ago in China, I might have been more driven to capitalize. I could have easily gotten a real estate license and tried to sell everyone I met a new house. Instead I began sending them down to Casa De Luz one by one, preaching the fountain of youth I thought I had discovered through macrobiotic food.
I bought carbon block water filters for my kitchen and shower, stainless steel cookware, and was now exclusively shopping at the farmers market for local organic vegetables. The Whole Foods flagship headquarters was just a 10 minute walk from my studio apartment where there was a great bulk section of organic grains and beans. I started filling up my new collection of glass jars there. I was becoming a full blown hippie vegan and my body felt so good that I lost all interest in smoking or drinking anything. When I finally met up with Morgan again at Casa De Luz, for some reason he had brought a tent and solar shower bag. He said he was sad that he couldn’t make it to his favorite macrobiotic summer camp next week out in California, but that I would need to take his place because he had already paid for it. At this point it was clear that Morgan never intended to give me a job. Now that he was sending me off to an event with macrobiotic teachers from around the country, I could see the new lifestyle I had stumbled into was just beginning. A few days later I hopped another free Southwest flight to Sacramento. When I arrived, I threw my backpack into somebody’s green camper van and fell right asleep. When I woke up to the smell of fresh pine, I was surrounded by what seemed to be a lot more camper vans and tents, deep in Tahoe National Forest.
Like most events in the macrobiotic world, the camp was set to last for 10 days. Apparently it takes eating this way fore exactly that amount of time for the red blood cells to regenerate in your body and completely replace the old ones. Something really does shift, and the folks at this camp had hauled a moving truck filled with organic food out here to do exactly that. I was learning for the first time is that what you eat literally becomes your blood. That old expression “you are what you eat” is apparently so fundamentally true, that I wondered again why we don’t learn this in elementary school?
While sleeping in my tent and showering in solar heated river water, I felt like a snake shedding a layer of old skin. I felt so much better by the day that I couldn’t imagine anything better than a bunch of people camping and relating on the common ground of health. But after a few days working in the open fire kitchen, the kind of people that the macro world often attracts was becoming rather obvious. Indeed, what you put into your mouth is something that you and you alone have ultimate control over. It’s empowering to make the choice to eat things that literally heal your body, but what about the absolute correct way to chop vegetables? To use chopsticks? To chew your food? To light a fire? Why not be intentional about how you live all of your life? That’s what macrobiotics is all about right? I thought the same thing until every time I tried to do something (anything) in that kitchen, someone would immediately demand I do it differently. By the 5th day I was missing the creative freedom in space of my own kitchen, free of any and all control freaks.
On the last day some friends I had made, a progressive macro family of three, invited me to stay with them in Berkley. They said they had a garden filled with organic vegetables in their backyard that they were always eating right out of. They were also sitting in the parking lot drinking California craft beer. I had found the cool kids at macro camp, and since I was already planning to pay my friend Anna a visit in San Francisco, I told them I’d come see them in a few days. Anna had migrated up to the Bay Area from LA for a new job in San Francisco. She was living with two friends in Oakland so after catching a ride back to Sacramento and a first time train ride down to Oakland’s Jack London Station, Anna was there to pick me up with her crew. No matter where I seemed to show up in California, she was always down to connect. I always appreciated the kind of friend Anna was to me. Her friends were a little wild and crazy, but after being around a bunch of controlling people in the woods for 10 days, the smell of lit cigarettes was actually a nice change. 6 months ago I would have lit one up with them, but now I was asking for a ride to Whole Foods to hit the organic food bar and find some spring water. I was the most straight edged person in the car and I was definitely feeling a little out of place.
Anna and her friends were planning on staying out all night in San Francisco and had a winery trip in Sonoma in mind for the next day. Of course I was invited. I was experiencing the first temptation of saying fuck it to all of this. I wondered what my new macro friends in Berkley were doing and if their son Ray, who was a couple years younger than me, would make the choice to stay out all night with the people I was now with. I hadn’t thought about it until now, but if I were to strictly adhere to this lifestyle for the rest of my life, I might never hang out with great people like Anna again. Health is great but losing connection with friends that I love? Nope.
The night started out at a bar called Tupelo in North Beach. The guy who started the joint used to be in a rock band in Mississippi but he found his calling hosting a lineup of Bay Area musicians at his own bar. It was an all night southern style jam session in the middle of San Francisco, a perfect place to knock back a pint of California pale ale with Anna. our glasses connected as I put the macro life on the shelf for the first time in a few months. When the first sips went down, the taste reminded me a lot of trying beer for the first time as a kid. Well into a 3rd pint, I started to notice everyone catching the usual buzz that comes along with a few drinks. But not me. After months of not drinking I thought my tolerance for it would surely be gone, but I couldn’t feel a thing. Next stop: Tiki Bar. Since I couldn’t catch a buzz with beer I figured I’d try my luck with Scotch. Again, nothing. By the end of the night we were all on the roof of Anna’s friend Ron’s apartment building in North Beach watching the sun come up, and I was still as sober as a judge. It made no sense.
Turns out the goal of eating macrobiotic food is to create Alkalinity in the body. When you eat mostly alkaline foods for an extended period of time, the pH content of your blood changes. Once the body is predominately alkaline and no longer acidic, the normal effects of alcohol cease to create euphoria. In other words, if you’ve been eating 100 percent alkaline food for a while, your brain still shrinks when you drink, your blood still becomes thinner, and your neurological system still gets poisoned, but you don’t feel shit. After experiencing the same phenomenon the next day on our wine trip to Sonoma, I had Anna’s crew drop me off with my new macro friends back in Berkeley. It was great to get a taste of the old life and even better to catch up with Anna, but I was happy to be back in the world of food conscious people.
The macro family in Berkley lived right by the university and their backyard food forest was nothing short of impressive. There was harvestable Daikon Radish, various kinds of Kale, Carrots, Bok choy, Cherry Tomatoes, lots of herbs, and a large Apple tree in the middle of it all. I showed up as they were about to serve a fantastic and simple dinner. It was an organic Brown Rice pasta drizzled with Olive oil and Cherry Tomatoes from their garden. There was a side of greens and the pasta was topped with a mixture of ground Dulse and roasted Pumpkin seeds, their version of a macro Parmesan cheese. I hadn’t eaten any oil or Cherry Tomatoes in months because I had read that nightshade vegetables like Tomatoes and Eggplant leach nutrients from your body, and that oil of any kind clogs up your whole system. But these folks had a different perspective. They even offered me a beer with the meal as they labeled themselves “recovering macrobiotics.” It was a relief to downplay the seriousness of it all, especially after being around the many overly controlling people we now both knew from last week’s macro camp.
In the morning their son invited me to a yoga class in downtown Berkeley. I had never done yoga in my life and really didn’t see the point in doing a bunch of stretches in a room full of other people, but a new place calls for new things. When we walked into the studio off Shattuck Avenue, a simple fast paced Vinyasa class was about to begin. Random Rab was playing in the background. I had never done yoga in my life so I just followed what the 30 or so mostly women were doing around me. They were all beautiful and fit, and the teacher was painting an increasingly intriguing picture of the Bay Area vibe alongside her instructions. I could see the style which people were communicating was of a higher level of consciousness. This was the California I had been waiting for. After an hour of heart opening positions, I genuinely felt high by the end of the class. Standing outside with a light sweat and a newfound connection with Berkley, I thanked my new friend Ray for the invitation.
Following another free Southwest flight back to Austin from Oakland, I found myself sitting in front of Morgan after a morning Yoga class. He introduced me to his new girlfriend. She was at least half his age, a young woman from Germany who was apparently just getting into macrobiotics as well. Morgan said he wanted to hire me to be their macro chef, but that I would need to go to the Kushi Institute first to get better at cooking. He had already signed me up for their level 1 course in Becket Massachusetts, another place I had never been before. The course was set to begin in a couple weeks and a check had already been written. Here we go again.
When I got off the plane in Hartford Connecticut, a long haired fellow named Dharma picked me up from the airport in the Kushi Institute van. As we drove through the Berkshire mountains on the way to Western Mass, we theorized about why the governments of the world are so invested in keeping the world unhealthy. When we arrived at the “KI” as it’s called, a once summer camp for overweight youth converted into a macro school, there was a tall man with an eastern European accent crying in the front entryway. His wife hugged him and I noticed she was smiling happily. Dharma told me the Croatian man had been staying at the KI for a couple weeks, and that his tears of joy were well justified. The man had come to the KI after being diagnosed with a terminal cancer that had caused a blockage in his intestines. Apparently after two weeks eating meals at the KI, he had just taken a shit for the first time in months. Holy shit this shit really works!
The food was comprehensive and fantastic. After having lunch with Dharma, it was time for orientation. The school was mostly managed by three rather well known macro teachers named Ed Esko, Alex Jack, and Bettina Zumdick. They had all written books on physical healing. The kitchen was being run by two Chinese brothers named Joel and Arthur who grew up in India. The dining room served three macro meals per day and there was always a mix of people in the dining room. It was usually sick people trying to heal, former students returning to visit, tourists, macro teachers, and new students doing a program like the one I was about to start. Michio Kushi, the Japanese founder and disciple of George Oshawa, had retired in his old age but lived closeby. It was the antithesis of Western medicine and education, a formal institutional approach to teaching people how to use food as medicine, and the overall life concept of Yin and Yang. On top of cooking classes and lectures, the curriculum also included a crash course in Shiatsu massage wherein students practice daily on fellow classmates. At the time I thought all of it was some huge movement, but with a class of only 10 people and talk of the KI closing soon for lack of demand, I could see I was catching the tail end of the macro phenomenon.
The following morning I woke up in a summer camp style twin sized bed, threw on some pants, and made my way down to our first lecture class. The class was led by Alex Jack, a skinny older man who had a rich history as a journalist in Vietnam during the war. His story really inspired me. He talked about how the US military intentionally burned the rice fields to starve out the Viet Cong, and how the civilian population in Vietnam became severely ill from eating rice from Texas. Apparently president LBJ made a deal with his rice producing buddies near Houston about supplementing the wartime food shortage there. In Western countries rice is a side, but in Vietnam and Southern China, it’s the main course. In this case, the daily main course contained high levels of arsenic. Having grown up in Austin, upriver from where all that rice had been grown, I knew exactly where that arsenic had come from. I couldn’t imagine how toxic our Texas rice is now 50 years later. Alex Jack’s journalistic story about poisoned rice in Vietnam planted a seed of awareness that was about to start growing. For the first time, I could see the interconnectivity between the way that we treat the land and our bodies. It’s a mirror. The mind is connected to the body, which is connected to the food, which comes from the earth, which feeds us… Holy shit, we really are what we eat, and most of us are eating poison!
The lectures weren’t about what to eat and what not to eat. The topic at hand was how our food system works. Now that I was absorbing a wealth of information about the industries that produce our food it was all beginning to make sense. Turns out the food pyramid that we were all taught in elementary school, the one that basically tells you to eat a little of every food group three times per day, was created by the dairy industry and their lobbyists in Washington. A more biologically appropriate food pyramid might look something like this:
Back in the 60s when George Ohsawa’s disciples were spreading his teachings around the Western world, it was rather common among healthier young people to live a macrobiotic lifestyle. Nowadays macrobiotics is mostly known as a vegan brown rice based diet for sick people. Michio wrote books on how to cure anything from AIDs to cancer through food and had been spending his later days trying to convince world leaders to model the macrobiotic diet to their respective publics. He was rarely if ever around anymore, and the majority of people taking courses at the KI had recently overcome a disease or were trying to now. Apart from Morgan and the macro family I had just met in California, I was lacking anyone to share the experience with. With all but one person in my class being women, that was about to change.
Andre Deluiggi was from Brazil, and he was on a mission to become a leader in the next iteration of macrobiotics. Apparently he had become so overweight drinking and eating lots of meat in his younger years that he developed a hip problem that necessitated the use of a cane. His friends in Brazil called him penguin because of it, and the shame drove him to find his own solutions. He began reading George Ohsawa’s macrobiotic teachings while spending the past few years working a corporate job in Panama. While there he lost the weight he had put on and essentially healed all of his health problems through the books he was reading. It was an impressive success story, and he seemed happier than anyone else to be at the Kushi Institute. After using his body as a holistic health experiment based on a self education, he was now here to get a formal education in what he had been practicing.
Albeit new and fascinating, staying immersed in the macro world can feel like the same imbalance the books themselves teach us to avoid. The closest and maybe only place to get away from the Kushi Institute was a bar called the Dream Away Lodge. Bob Dylan had been a frequent patron and it was filled with musical instruments for anyone to play. After a few weeks studying at the KI, Andre and I hitched a ride over there. When I walked in I picked up an old acoustic guitar and started strumming. As I watched a couple rather obnoxious volunteers from the KI start banging on drums immaturely, I knew Andre was probably going to be the only friend I would walk away with. I had already reached a point of health that I never knew existed, and I was satisfied with that. Now that I had a macrobiotic friend in Brazil, I knew my next macrobiotic related stop would be South America.
When I got back to Austin I basically turned into the person I had seen Andre become through macrobiotics. I almost exclusively ate food that I made in my own kitchen. If I went out it was to Casa De Luz. My dog was my partner in health, and I had lost touch with most of my friends because I completely stopped hanging out in bars. People would ask “How did you quit smoking?” Well, “I quit drinking.” Then they would ask, “how did you quit drinking?” and I would tell them “alkaline blood through eating macrobiotic food.” . I used to drink a beer and feel something good that made me want another beer, and maybe a burger later. Now when I drink a beer I just feel bloated and tired. The natural feeling I had created in my body through practicing this diet far outweighed the now pointless consumption of alcohol, and maintaining a natural high had become the desirable path to take. I was 15 pounds lighter, my skin was glowing, and I even stopped wearing deodorant because no matter how much I would sweat, I didn’t stink. I was as clean as it gets, and despite being alone most of the time, I was happy.
One day down at Casa de Luz, Morgan told me about a macro family that grows their own food. The woman, Alison, had been a sort of disciple of Morgan’s macrobiotic mentorship in the past. Now she was raising a flock of macro children on a piece of land outside of town. He said he wanted to find somewhere exotic to eventually start something like the Kushi Institute, and we were his prospective community to do it with. He suggested I help her and her husband Jeremy move across the country as they were about to leave Texas to live in Asheville, North Carolina. Apparently her husband was set to drive a big truck to North Carolina from Texas with all of their Waldorf style belongings in it. She and her kids needed some help getting through the airports to meet Jeremy in Nashville where they planned to finish the trip by car. Despite never having met them before, I was happy to help. When I pulled up to their land, I was greeted as a brother by an industrious couple with long braided hair. They were as close as it gets to an Amish family without actually being Amish. After all, we were about to fly across the country together on a not very Amish Boeing 737. OK, let’s go.
As we made our way through the airports, I was amazed at how people responded to her kids. The two little girls, Laya and Kaya, were dressed in matching clothes their mother had made herself. Something about uniformity seems to grab people’s attention, and this little tribe stuck out. I was there to help, but every time I got a chance to, other people seemed so eager to serve their needs that I never got the chance. Airport security seemed to just wave us through and by the time we made it on the plane, her kids were confidently getting whatever they wanted from the flight attendants. There was something tangibly different about the kind of power her family seemed to carry and it made me curious. Chatting at 35,000ft, Alison told me she was jealous that I had gotten to go study at the Kushi Institute. As we shared our experience with macrobiotics, she told me about the years that she spent working at Casa De Luz. Apparently we had also both spent time with Virginia Harper (Ginny) in Nashville, and now we were on our way back to the same suburban golf course house that I had woken up on 6 months ago.
When Ginny picked all of us up from the airport, Alison’s husband was just a couple hours out in their newly rented Uhaul truck. After settling in once again at Ginny’s house, everyone sat down for a macrobiotic dinner. Alison and Jemermy talked with Ginny about something called 9 Star Ki. At the Kushi Institute I remembered multiple instances of other people asking me “What’s your 9 Star Ki?” I had no idea what they were talking about and I didn’t bother to ask because I was always skeptical of anything along the lines of astrology. If it wasn’t scientifically quantified, I just wasn’t interested. Six months ago I could never have pictured myself sitting around talking about Japanese astrology with this crowd, but here I was, fascinated by all of it.
Apparently 9 Star Ki is a Japanese divination system based on the solar calendar. The system applies 5 element theory to 9 year cycles. I knew what 5 element theory was because we studied it at the KI. Chinese medicine, Tai Chi, Qi Gong, and acupuncture are all loosely based on it, and 9 Star Ki applies it to your date of birth. Acupuncture is a mystery until you try it and see that it really works. If that’s based on 5 element theory, could there really be something to applying elements like fire and tree to your birthday? I was curious.
In the morning we all took our positions to drive six hours to Asheville. Jeremy’s childhood friend had followed behind in their family minivan, which now followed behind Jeremy and I in the big U Haul. Ginny had made us macro sushi to travel with so we wouldn’t have to stop. It was all rather well planned, but about halfway there, I began to feel nauseous. At this point in my pursuit of health, I really believed that getting sick was going to be a thing of the past, but that notion quickly faded away as I hugged a pitstop toilet on the I-40 frontage road. Another 3 hours down the road as we pulled up into the mountain driveway of the macro family’s new home, and the kids were throwing up too. It was an intense flu, complete with high fever and vomiting. We needed to unload the truck so that it could be returned, but now that everyone was sick, getting situated for survival mode became the priority. After moving some essential furniture out of the truck and into the house, Jeremy chopped enough firewood to keep us warm. In times of illness, macro people refer to a universal remedy called “Ume Sho Kuzu.” It’s a combination of water, dissolved Kuzu root, Umeboshi plum, and Shoyu. Jeremy made one after another with chopped ginger for all of us. The fireplace was now our much needed refuge from the cold mountain air. As we shared stories over holistic remedies around the fire, we bonded.
At the time I thought for sure we would all go and live an alternative way of life somewhere exotic in the near future. Morgan seemed to have the money and the direction to get something like that going, and these people really were cool. I had just met them and I would have bet my last dollar this fitting group of people could manifest it, but something else began to peak my interest. Alison told me all about a dynamic community of people in Austin that I had never heard of. I could see that whatever she had taken from it held a higher place in her awareness than Morgan’s ecovillage pipedream. She told me to go check out a kid’s camp called Camp Indigo. I hadn’t done much volunteer work with kids before, but Alison carried a unique sense of empowerment that I hadn’t seen before. When she said I would find what I was looking for there, I believed her.
Towards the end of our time together I went to visit an old friend. Growing up back in Austin I used to get into all sorts of trouble with a rather feisty fellow named James. He ended up losing one of his legs and almost his life in a boating accident when we were teenagers. I hadn’t seen him in years but there he was in downtown Asheville on crutches, running an underground party bar with the money he got from the insurance settlement. The kind of trouble we used to get into ultimately led us in separate directions, and the pints of beer we were now well into at his bar felt no different. For me James was always a case study on self preservation. Every time I ran into him he wanted to prove me wrong, mostly coming from a place of wounded ego and self preservation. Understandably so, the guy lost his leg after all. I spent the night trying to describe how I had discovered macrobiotic food and woken up, but as usual the experience wound up blurry and filled with meaningless left vs. right conversation.
After crashing on James’s couch he offered to take me to the airport the following morning. On the way to catch a flight back to Austin he told me how much he missed it and wanted to move back, but I was bored with Austin. If I was going to stay there I needed something new, and it wasn’t going to involve any of the bullshit we did last night. I told him all about the people I was staying with in Asheville, the trip I was about to take to Brazil to visit my new macrobiotic friend Andre, and the joy I had discovered through practicing an ultra healthy diet. As much as I wanted to show him the world I had tapped into, I could see that it was my path and mine alone. Who was I kidding, I was thriving and I couldn’t even get my Mom to do it with me. Food consciousness is a lonely path!
After I left the Kushi Institute, Andre stayed for another 6 months finishing all 4 of the learning levels there. We had been talking about meeting up in Brazil ever since. Now that he was back in Sao Paulo, I decided to earn some extra money driving for Uber to go visit him. If it weren’t for the solace I had found in the simple lifestyle I was now living, going from a billionaire kept man to an Uber driver might have felt like a step backwards, but I was genuinely happy to do it. Each of my customers received a business card for my piano tuning service, and after a couple weeks I had enough money for a round trip ticket to Brazil.
When I got to Sao Paulo I was still happily living on brown rice and vegetables. Andre picked me up from the Airport and took us to a Japanese macrobiotic restaurant in his neighborhood. I never realized it in my prior travels to Brazil, but apparently Sao Paulo has the highest population of Japanese people outside of Japan. Andre even had a very cool new macrobiotic Japanese girlfriend named Julia. It was a side of Brazil I had never seen before and at the time I was fascinated. The next day the three of us drove out to Andre’s father’s country house outside of the city. The land was taken care of by a woman who maintained an impressive organic vegetable garden. Over the following week we lived on food from the land and clean well water, rendering all of us in an elevated happy state of mind. It was my new high, and I was beginning to see the future I wanted. I knew I wanted to grow food and live off the land like we were doing that week, I just didn’t know where yet. What a great excuse to be in Brazil.
When Julia had to go back to work the following week, Andre and I decided to take a road trip to Rio De Janeiro. He had an uncle there we could stay with so it would be cheap. I also knew Trindade, the coastline paradise that made me fall in love with Brazil in the first place, was halfway between Sao Paulo and Rio. Our trip was coming together nicely. After jamming 90’s rock for 5 hours down the lush rainforest mountains, we arrived in Trindade complete with Umeboshi Plums, Brown Rice, Miso, and a box of organic vegetables. We met a guy named Osmar who owned a teak yoga platform in the rainforest alongside a cheap hostel. After checking into a bunk room and hitting the beach for a few hours, we met a couple who were both sick from eating bad shrimp. Andre convinced them to try Umeboshi plum and within a couple hours their food poisoning completely resolved. The following day we met an American man from Florida and his 12-year-old daughter on the beach. The man’s daughter had been diagnosed with bone cancer. The two of them were attempting a break from the food system in America as their doctor had told them her diet was likely the cause. After an hour-long macrobiotic consultation on the beach, Andre seemed to be able to give this man the answers he was looking for. Holy shit we’re healing people!
When we got to Rio we went to a macrobiotic restaurant called Metamorphose with his uncle. Even he was trying to eat that way, mostly according to Andre’s recommendations. I could see that despite the small percentage of people who even know about macrobiotics, I could find pockets of awareness about it in any Western city. For me, it was just a way to feel good and escape the health dilemma of the American food system, but Andre genuinely wanted to help people. I decided I wanted to help him by making a video for what he was doing. This is what you see at the beginning of this chapter. We talked a lot about posting it online and doing health retreats together, but that idea lost momentum. Our retreat program may have been just another pipe dream, but a macrobiotic practice can empower the body to heal most diseases, and the world ought to know it.
When I got back to Austin I was glowing from a month on macrobiotic food in thriving natural settings. When I walked into Casa De Luz, even Morgan wanted a piece of whatever it was that I had. He was always poised as the most healthy person in the room, ready to mentor anyone else around him, but not this time. I was in the best physical state I had ever been in, and even he could see that. Alongside countless other blessings, somehow anytime I left town I could figure out a way to finance it and someone else was always willing to watch my dog Bailey. Now that I had found ways to couple my own freedom with health, the wanderlust I had always pursued had taken a new form. I was lucky.
I was spending nearly all of my time riding my new commuter bike down to Casa De Luz and Barton Springs pool. In the empty corner lot down the street from Casa De Luz, Jordan had gotten a job working at his uncle’s Lebanese food truck. Now that I had turned my kitchen into a healing lab for using food as medicine, I decided to start sharing my food with him. Jordan was my smartest friend, and he was always eager to learn something new. A few nights a week I made an extra to-go meal and pedaled down to where he was slanging falafel to hand it off to him. Within a few weeks of regularly bringing extra macro meals down there, he was well on his way down the dietary health rabbit hole with me. He totally got it. Up until now, the only downside to living a macro lifestyle was that I couldn’t get anyone else to do it with me. Now that I knew I could solve that problem, I was a true believer.
It was summer 2015, and one day something popped up on my Facebook feed that read “Volunteer at Camp Indigo.” It was the Austin kids camp Alison had told me about back in Asheville. The month-long program had been going for 3 out the 4 weeks it was scheduled for. Once again, I was catching the tail end of something I was just finding out about for the first time. The program was being hosted by a small non profit called The Amala Foundation, and the piano tuning job I was now living on gave me lots of free time. After a short email conversation with someone named Aliya about doing a background check for volunteering, I found myself surrounded by young children at a closed charter school on the other side of town.
The building reminded me of the public schools I had attended in Texas, but when I walked in the front door I could feel something was different. The kind of diversity among the youth there was unique, and the people working there seemed to have a sense of awareness that superseded my long history in Austin. I thought I had seen it all, but this tight-knit community was doing something I knew I hadn’t before. The adults were apparently there to learn from the kids! It was a complete reversal of the education system I had grown up in, and without fully comprehending it, I knew it was special.
When a striking olive skinned woman caught my eye in the hallway, without a thought I said “Hola.” Her name was Vanessa. I didn’t know what language she spoke, but for whatever reason we were now speaking Spanish to each other. She asked me if my blood was Colombian like hers, and before I could answer she smiled and led me into a nearby room with a handful of other people on laptops. She introduced me to an older man in the background named Michael who she was now talking quietly with. When I tried to enter the conversation I could see that my interest in doing so was belittled by their connection. Michael handed me a business card that read “9 Star Ki” with his phone number on it, as if to say “let’s talk later.” It was the same Japanese astrology that I had heard Alison talking about with Ginny in Nashville. I knew he was who I was supposed to meet that day. I had found the right people, and based on the connections that led me there, I thought for sure this kids camp must be based on macrobiotics.
Pretty quickly I learned that Michael and one of Michio Kushi’s son’s had started an off-grid macrobiotic community in Alaska called Ionia. He had been involved in everything there, including raising 9 kids on macrobiotic food. For me at the time it was like meeting some kind of celebrity. Macrobiotics was my belief system, and Michael was the personification of that kind of knowledge. So why the hell is he here at Camp Indigo? Apparently after 30 years off-grid in Alaska, Michael had come down to Austin a few years ago and met Vanessa Stone, founder of a nonprofit called The Amala Foundation. I had never heard of a nonprofit like this before, and clearly their main focus was youth programs. A community had clearly formed around all of it long before I had shown up that day.
Here I was meeting one of the most credible old school macrobiotic people in the world, and there he was eager to learn whatever he could from Vanessa, a woman half his age who I was meeting for the first time. As I watched Vanessa conduct the closing ceremony for the day, I was blown away. She embodied a kind of power similar to what I remembered experiencing with Alison and her kids while we were traveling through the airports, but still nothing I had ever seen before. After the ceremony was over I approached Vanessa and I asked excitedly “I want to know what ya’ll eat!?” She stood and stared at me. Then she laughed. “Why?” she said. “Camp Indigo is a macrobiotic camp, right?” I said. She smiled a simultaneous smile of love and invalidation. “No,” she said confidently as she walked away illusively. I was immediately shifted.
