…fi­nally I drew a pic­ture of Don Quixote’s don­key. On its back were a blind Bill and a deaf Wes both rid­ing back­ward, and me hang­ing des­per­ately on to the don­key’s swish­ing tail. The three Don Quixotes, hop­ing to re­turn to na­ture, were try­ing to stop the don­key from rush­ing wildly to­ward the brink of dis­as­ter, but it seemed hope­less. Some­one asked what was go­ing to hap­pen, so I drew Pres­i­dent Rea­gan sit­ting front­ward on the don­key’s back dan­gling a car­rot in front of the don­key’s nose. When I asked, “What do sup­pose the car­rot is?” some­one cor­rectly an­swered, “Money.”
  Continua a leggere→

On the ideal nat­u­ral farm or ur­ban home­stead, there would be a mix­ture of fruit and nut trees, and be­neath them veg­eta­bles, grains, and berries. Chick­ens would run around in the weeds and clover. When I talked about such things in Japan, I was con­sid­ered un­re­al­is­tic, but in the United States this idea is eas­ier to un­der­stand for most peo­ple, and eas­ier to carry out. When I sug­gested that it would be a good idea to plant fruit trees to line the streets in towns and cities and to grow veg­eta­bles in­stead of lawns and an­nual flow­ers, so that when the towns­peo­ple were tak­ing a walk, they could pick and eat the fruit from the road­side, peo­ple were sur­pris­ingly en­thu­si­as­tic.
 Masanobu Fukuoka, “Sawing Seeds in the Desert”

This draw­ing was in­spired by Mr. Fukuoka’s ex­pe­ri­ence at the sum­mer camp at French Mead­ows in the Sierra Nevada Moun­tains. It shows peo­ple camp­ing out, de­light­ing in the for­est, the river, and the fresh moun­tain air. The cook­ing pot over the fire pit is sus­pended by the moon.
 In the place where there is noth­ing, ev­ery­thing ex­ists.