How to Make Peace with Nature: Part II by Dawn Downey, Guest Blogger

 On the way to the mailbox, I leaned over to pull out dandelions popping up through the cracks in the driveway. I grabbed sturdy leaves in a bunch, my knuckles scraping concrete, and I yanked. Another plant seemed to pop up every time I plucked. They were cartoon dandelions, each tap root connected to the top of another dandelion in the ground beneath it, whose tap root was connected to the next, an endless chain all the way down to China. That's it. Time for reinforcements.

Give me fungicides, pesticides, herbicides, and any other cides on the market.

The idea shriveled up, dead on the vine. A sensation I'd never felt before crept across my sweaty palm, informing me I would not be using any weed killer. It stopped my bomb-'em-back-to-the-stone-age plans as effortlessly as a red light stops my car.

I quit using chemicals in the yard a couple years ago, because of the environmental impact on ground water and pollinators. Blah blah blah. This new feeling didn’t give a hoot about all those fancy words. It was unimpressed by my intellectual prowess and unconcerned with ecological issues. It simply zapped away the distance from between Dawn the Gardener and Betty the Bee.

I'll pull weeds by hand. Spraying poison would be shooting myself in the foot. Lesson two: disarm. 

12 Fruits and Vegetables You Really Should Buy Organic

According to Andrew Weil, there are 12 fruits and vegetables you really should buy organic, due to the heavy pesticide loads these non-organic produce carry:

• Apples
• Strawberries
• Grapes
• Celery
• Peaches
• Spinach
• Sweet bell peppers
• Nectarines (imported)
• Cucumbers
• Cherry tomatoes
• Snap peas (imported)
• Potatoes

 No matter how much you wash these vegetables, you can't wash the pesticides out of them. And when you start thinking about potatoes--potato chips, french fries, hash browns--just how much pesticide do you want to eat?

Saying "No" to big beautiful California strawberries is not easy. Our sensual desire overwhelms us and whispers delicious rationalizations into our ears. We suddenly want to treat ourselves; we don't want to deprive ourselves of a big, beautiful, pesticide strawberry.

Sensual desire hinders our meditation and hinders our best intentions. But we want to see things as they really are. Look closely. And look again. Feel desire in your body.

You may be saving money by buying non-organic, but you are spending your health, your immune system, your very body.