Living on the Road Part Two: Nelson and Mystic Community and Interview with Dyfed

Nelson is a town built along a steep mountainside that falls into the narrow and meandering Kootenay Lake. It's a quaint town with a deceivingly large population of ten thousand. Many people live in the wooded environs. A generation ago Nelson was known to have attracted draft dodgers from the United States. While walking the streets I noticed many interesting looking people, including a man with a Mexican poncho and wooden staff and a young man dressed like a wizard with a blue conical hood. Dread locks seem to be all the rage. People dress differently in Nelson and with stores like The Still Eagle Hemp Store, (557 Ward Street) it's no wonder. It’s one of the few places in Canada where you can pick up an official WWOOF (willing workers on organic farms) booklet. It's also one of Canada's first hemp stores wholesaling the best hemp products they can find. Today they carry everything from twine, to food, to rope to clothing to bags, body products hats, socks, jewelry, rolling papers, posters, books and information.

Nelson is a place where counter culture is culture, where the bookstores all have books on display which you wouldn’t see on display elsewhere, where people smoke pot out in the open. People hang out along the far stretching outdoor concrete stairwells that cut through junk ridden alleys. It is ahead of most other places in embracing free range, organic, local, raw, fair trade and not for profit products. Other then a "chubby chicken" there are no chain stores in the main part of town and there is none of the brand name craze that runs rampant in city marketplaces. There is a greater interest in alternatives in general- everything from education like the Waldorf school system and "The Block Plan", to homeopathic medicines.

Tibetan Prayer flags can be seen around town and the Kootenay Shambhala Meditation Centre (3rd Floor - 444 Baker Street) provides free teachings. It's part of an international community of meditation centers founded by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. He is widely known for his popularization of the Bardo Thodol a.k.a Tibetan book of the dead and now the center is led by his son and lineage holder, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche. They offer free meditation instruction, according to "a clearly defined path of practice and study" (from their website: http://nelson.shambhala.org/).

While walking around town with my backpack and black hard case enjoying the novelty of complete anonymity I visited the Preserved Seed (202 Vernon Street), which is also, a self professed community of people living, working, and learning together. They run a farm in South Slocan called Mt. Sentinel Farm. A lot of their ingredients come from the gardens there. There is a keen mindfulness for how healthy their food is and the ingredients used. Other then the many eccentrics there are also a lot of young down to earth sporty families who enjoy the fresh air and surrounding wilderness. It's a great place to stay active whether in the winter when there is lots of skiing and snowboarding, rock-climbing, ski doing along backcountry. On a typical summers day you can soak up the sun by the lake, water ski, rent a canoe, mountain bike through the forest or just bike through town and see all the old brick laden buildings. For a small community there are lots of events happening like drum circles and local concerts.

After wondering around up hill and down past restaurant patios with holiday skiers enjoying a lofty view of steep mountains banking Lake Kootenay, I continued past narrow streets with old beat up hippy vans and discarded winter equipment down the main bustling street to the Kootenay Bakery Cafe (377 Baker Street). It was packed and I had to take a number from the big red whistle. The bakery was well stocked with fresh delectable and creative foods. Dyfed his partner Janette, their three girls and some of their young friends arrived not too long there after. Introductions were brief and after eating there were some more errands like groceries at the Kooteney Co-Op grocery store (295 Baker Street), which holds cooking classes and supports local farmers. From there it wasn’t long before we all packed into a blue van for the ride home.

The sun was sinking to the diffusing tops of the mountains lacing the clouds with gold. We headed North out of Nelson around the winding mountain roads overlooking Lake Kootenay. The kids sang songs and after I mentioned to Dyfed that I was surprised to see the “Flower of Life” book on display he expressed his own surprise and told me:

“I think you may have come to the right place.”

It was lightly snowing as we entered the small town of Kaslo all covered in white blankets. In passing the trees were a noticeably darker shade of green, and were tightly packed and weighted down with snow. We passed deer after deer as they darted across the road about eight in a half an hour. Dyfed joked that just the other day they had had crashed into a large buck. We drove up a steep driveway to drop off the visiting girls at their parents. It was so snowed in that Dyfed had to stop the van and walk the girls the rest of the way home, waist high in snow. We then continued to the outskirts of Kaslo to the driveway of Mystic Community. This driveway made the previous driveway look tame. This one looked more like a luge course that zig-zagged down a hillside. The slope evened out into a flat orchard on the edge of a forest that lowered toward Lake Kootenay. At the edge of the orchard is the lakeside forest which is back dropped by snow capped cliff faces.

Mystic Community has 21 acres of spectacular rural land encompassing field. There are two creeks running through the property, two wells, and an orchard with hundreds of fruit trees. There's a woodshop, a chicken barn and a large cattle barn that was being renovated to include a woodshop downstairs and a large workshop/performance space and an apartment upstairs. From time to time they offer a variety of holistic workshops as well as hosting events for the local community of Kaslo, the oldest incorporated community in the Kootenays. Dyfed bought the land four years ago. He's been in and out of community attempts for nineteen years and has felt that living on a self-sustainable community is more conducive to a healthy way of life. In the summer time, for income, they offer their three lodges to tourists and visitors.

The room I slept in was situated in the main lodge, which with four spare rooms was the largest on the property. It's where Dyfed his family and a German Lady live. The German lady sought out a community to settle down at after divorcing. She helps out with the housework and childcare. She also made great apple juice with apples from the orchard that she had stored many months earlier. The room I stayed in was a large single room that was also used in the summer time as a kind temple. There were tables, guitars and a cauldron sized tuning bowl. Adorning the walls were Alex grey paintings such as "Oversoul."

Dyfed and Jeanette have three bright girls who are mostly home schooled. Time is taken each day for the development of various skills. They were always carrying around a camera and took lots of photos. When they weren't learning, much of their time was spent make-believing and thinking up their own stories. There was another man staying at the community- an old friend of Dyfeds. He is a skilled electrician but was sick with the flue when I arrived. He quarantined himself so I only saw him a couple of times toward the end of my stay. He told me that a doctor once examined his ears and then asked him if people ever thought he sounded drunk. During my stay, Jeannette who had studied herbology and cleansing was on a special diet to get rid of "Mucoid Plack" which is a build up of heavy metals in the body.

Breakfasts were usually pre-soaked oats or millet with a myriad of delicious homemade jams and spreads. There were also buckets of coconut butter imported from the Philippines. It tasted much better than butter and had a novelty that was priceless; Coconut butter is very stable, ideal for sauté cooking and baking. It's un-hydrogenated, unrefined and contains no trans-fatty acids and no solvents. It is made up mostly of medium chain fatty acids, which the body metabolizes efficiently and converts into energy, rather than storing as fat.

The green house at Mystic Community is conveniently connected with the kitchen. On several occasions Dyfed took treys of wheat grass and clipped the tops. He put the tops into a magnetized blender, which turned out a dark green liquid looking very much like an acquired taste. He would describe its many cleansing properties while serving it. I tried it and was surprised at how strong it was. It dropped down like an anchor wheedling to sip slowly. I had the circuitous thoughts: "I’m really drinking grass!" The kids had only a taste of the grass while Dyfed had a glassful. At Mystic Community they also grew spicy Elephant garlic and sold it at the farmers market in Kaslo and which we had for dinner most nights. I spent some time in the garden planting seeds making sure to add a layer of minerals. The children were often in the green house having fun tending the plants, turning up soil, snatching aphids and planting here and there.

Mostly I volunteered my time chopping wood. Now in the Kootenays chopping wood is more difficult because the trees are humongous. It took a while getting use to the motion of chopping as I grew up in the suburbs but eventually it became as natural as turning up the heat on a thermostat. Some of the logs had frozen moisture inside and a sledgehammer and wedge were required for splitting them. While chopping wood Ruke a broad shouldered Rottweiler would sneak up behind me in anticipation for a newly cut piece of wood to fetch. The other dog was part wolf; she was only interested in the stray pieces of wood when they were in Ruke’s mouth. She would pounce on him and assert her dominance. Ruke would submit every time not aware of his full strength.

After misaiming a few times, hitting the neck of the ax against the log instead of the blade, the blade had come loose. The glue needed to be chipped out so that the handle could be re-fitted. When talking about self-sustainability it’s easy to forget how much elbow grease and good old hard work is needed to keep things afloat. Dyfed's message was to stay focused and not start too many projects at once- a valuable lesson for any community.

On the orchard the apple trees hadn’t been properly pruned in years so when I was put to pruning them it was quite a make over. Pruning involves snipping branches that grow upward to encourage trees to grow outwards. The first tree I attacked was the largest. It would shake as I maneuvered the boughs to get at the hard to reach branches. As I did rotten apples still attached at the stem fell and as they did Ruke would try to swallow them whole. His friend, the half wolf would nip him in the snout when he did catch them. It’s easy to get jobs pruning by doing a little research on the internet and making some calls.

Every night everyone ate together around a big wooden table and held hands to bless the food in an original way- with a pretty song. There were usually plenty of dishes of vegetables and fruit served afterwards. Food groups were separated for easier digestion. Deserts were never processed and often fermented and always delicious. After dinner Dyfed and I would often talk about philosophy and the state of the world. It seemed that he was always able to go to his library and find a relevant book on a given topic. A collector of books and media he was always interested in gathering and archiving more. The library in the main lodge has material on everything from world religions to alternative agriculture and sciences.

During my visit it wasn’t only the carpenter that fell ill, the girls came down with the flue also. It was going around the Kootenays as I heard people murmuring about it here and there. One night toward the end of my visit after having my fill of homegrown alphafa sprouts I found myself burping, bringing up the remnant gaseous aroma of half digested sprouts. That night I kept waking up with a heaving feeling in my belly, and I must have thrown up in the toilet ten times. I brushed my teeth every time and so needless to say my teeth were really clean the next day.

It wasn’t until the end of my stay that the tops of the mountains become fully visible. Jeannette related a story of how surprised another visitor was to see a "whole other level" on a clear day. I went walking down the orchard to the lofty forest, down a winding path, past livid undergrowth, to the snowy shores of Lake Kootenay. The dogs ran by me a number of times and on the shore Ruke ran chest high in water. On returning to the main cabin Ruke had to warm his bones by the wood-burning furnace.

Social dynamics are the most important thing for a successful community so naturally those invited to live on a community are assessed for what skills they can offer and for many people like myself who grew up in the suburbs it's a reminder of how fragile our society is- having become so disassociated with the basic skills of survival like building a shelter and living off the land.

I interviewed Dyfed towards the end of my visit before being dropped off in Nelson once again to visit another community called Mulvey creek community.

Interview with Dyfed

Click here to download/listen to the interview. What follows is the transcript.

Dyfed: Well there wasn’t an inspiration moment other then an accumulation of looking at how things were working as I just vagabonded around all them projects up and down and I didn’t like what I was seeing out there in a societal structure so I kind of thought it was going to be more of an egotistical vision of the rebel and wanting to go to South America and follow the footsteps of other people. But also, I thought it was South America because I was pretty disillusioned with Canadians, or what we’re calling Canadians; European descendants which have been pressed here and I believe that we’ve gone though a lot of propaganda, experimental propaganda wars to make us very passive and we have the opportunity to change so much and we’ve changed so little. So I thought South America, Central America. I may live a little shorter but I thought at least I wanted it to mean something rather than buying a house - cause visions of community can mean just a bunch of people living on a farm together and not having our greater idealistic vision and again I’m judging according to my idealistic vision compared to other peoples so I don’t know if that’s a fair judgment but I can only judge that from my point of view and I wanted my life to mean something even if it was shorter or not. So I was off to join the frakess of where people were fighting just to grow food and for their existence and for freedoms and we just let it slip away so quietly here, afraid to let go of our comfort zone. You know we don’t want to get a nose bleed.

Devin: So to a large degree mystic community was born from your dislike of the societal structure?

Dyfed: I wouldn’t say it was dislike, it just wasn’t fulfilling - whether it be the rebellion need in me, some need where I wanted to actually participate more. I don’t really dislike it it’s just I just want it to be more action as here I really didn’t form it, it kind of did it itself through my desire. I’d put it out there enough times through creative visualization - you know Shaki Gawain I got I read that a long time ago - and I thought I was in more control your questions seem to be coming from the line like this was me. Most of my life I thought I had more control, long-term even. I thought I was directing me more but I find the more that I try and give it to the universe and to be lead by spirit the less control over it I have, it seems to have taken it’s own life.

Devin: Why do you think so many communities fail?

Dyfed: A lot of messy actions you know illegal base of how they’re trying to make a little bit of money it’s a lot more difficult to make money in the States, and Canada doesn’t have a great success rate and some communities here, most of them here are forming and falling apart, and trying to structure the best ones that work in Canada are either religious based or co-housing. We’re so not into opening up. We’re "My. My. My money, my car my bank account", we’re still not willing to release to work as a tribal unit.

Devin: Healthy living is a very important part of mystic community can you talk about some of the aspects, some of the ways in which you live healthily, some of the ways in which you prepare your food and such things.

Dyfed: The word healthily is a term that...it means different levels to everybody. the more I pursued my health the more I’ve realized how I’m not in what I would call a balance. So many people would say that I’ve gone this great distance and I can see that I have such a large distance to go yet. Like today I was having my NVC group meeting and was having quite the flatulence going on so I was you know trying to grasp that. I’ve had it for quite some in and out vegetarian or not and I had a reading done when I was a kid and it said you’re going to have gastinal intestinal issues - not sure if it was a complete disorder or not, can’t remember exactly, what it was but I was going to have some problems I was going to have to deal with. So I’m looking at this flatulence and I think at the moment here: I have to chew my food it’s as simple as that. We go through a lot of different aspects: grain chewing the food is a really really big one. You're given a lot of grace when your younger but by the time you start to realize you have issues you were already developing them when you were younger and I can see that your digestive fluids would properly have a greater ease of breaking it down if they have a closer proximity to the cellular structure of the material you're eating. You really need to puree it with as much saliva as possible otherwise it’s not possible to get into the center and it starts fermenting in you. There's different forms of fermentation, good and bad, and bad fermentation is going to cause gaseous buildup in you. Now professor Earhart - not sure how to spell that for you so you can look him up there from 1906 I guess - He had books on mucousless eating and he had determined that a lot of the gaseous build up was because you have gases your intestines are programmed to absorb, so if you’re having gas in your intestinal track then it’s also absorbing a lot of the gas - properties of the gas, maybe not the actual air quality of the gas but properties out of the gas - which may be a bad fermentation. A lot of these negative properties still had to get back out of your blood now that they’ve been re-absorbed by the function of your intestinal track. And so these properties, how they get out of your blood? One of the ways they get out is through your skin, which is your biggest elimination organ, and he seems to see the graying of hair, loss of hair and a lot of other areas - negative responses to your teeth and others - well he said it was definite but I can’t prove it - that it’s coming through your blood stream and getting out in different ways.

Devin: How about food mixture and the idea of not drinking?

Dyfed: Drinking in a small dose and drinking over two ounces of fluid is gone over the degree while your consuming food and before due to the fact that you're diluting your stomach acid at whatever rate your guzzling down liquid at. Your hydrochloric acid has a great need to be as strong as possible at this point and due to my intestinal... As I go in and out of all different phases and think - oh that one is causing gas that one isn’t this and that - and go in and out of stuff so I usually ingest hydrochloric acid before hand. Check into some health books “Healing with Whole Foods” is one of the best health food books for generalization of what’s going on there’s a lot more specifics in other books but “Healing with Whole Foods” is massive and got a lot of stuff in there. Sprouting grains is crucially important we’ve got all sorts of books that have talked about it we’ve been experimenting with it ourselves. Sprouting and fermenting them into sour doughs - so it’s a predigesting - sprouting them can bring it anywhere from ten to twenty times the health benefits up. Sprouting at least rinsing nuts and seeds over night, soaking them so they absorb water you can easily digest, but all seeds have an enzyme inhibiter on it to give it a higher chance of sprouting in nature as it wants sprout and grow. So by sprouting seeds or soaking them over night you usually disable or rinse off the enzyme inhibitors because you digest enzymes as well, and this is also causing a bunch of issues. Now grain seems to not been, so this is a healthy exercise for humans - a low to no grain diet seems to be and sprouting it at that, so we’ll sprout it give it a few days little spider legs come out of the seeds then we dehydrate it and then grind that into a flower type substance changing the whole compound from stored nutrients into seed qualities to the type of... It’s now a plant product and as the sprouting begins. Of course like all restaurant food is rarely going to be organic or cooked in good oils or cooked in good cookware or overcooked. You end up carrying more and more food around with you wishing I had a fridge in the van there. Wheat grass seems to be the unbelievable answer to a lot of issues a wide spectrum of enzymes. Massive chlorophyll out of 109 possible minerals you get like 92 possibilities out of wheat grass depending on your soil contents. One other thing it does: by eating your minerals from a plant source by eating mineralized food it’s changing the minerals into an organic nature rather than the mineral from mineral source. Minerals from an organic nature like plant product as heavy mineralized so it has a higher chance of uptake by your body being organic structure as well. And another big one is a thing called rejuvelac. Rejuvelac is just fermenting wheat seeds after you’ve sprouted them - don’t dehydrate them just sprout them and you can make a different types of seeds but people usually use wheat. You just submerge them in water, you can look up recipes online but it’s again a bacteria not an enzyme they don’t all get through your digestive track but a small bit will get to your digestive track and hopefully culture...innoculate your digestive track and take their own life by breading it because if you don’t have a wide spectrum and strong population of the healthy bacteria, intestinal flora, ones that are going to have negative affects, adverse affects to your health are definitely going to populate very greatly in your digestive track resulting in undesirable effects. If your digestive track is where most of your energy is coming from you do manage to live off some etheric fourth dimensional ones which we don’t like to pay a lot of respect to the… That were receiving that but we all interact with that and if at some degree we started to focus more on that it would be of great benefit to us but the small amount of bacteria gets in your digestive track and cultures itself and will start to combat for space in your intestinal track and hopefully overwhelm the negative ones. So your digestive track is a big focus here as my partner Janet she has her colonics ticket Janet Pearson and writing a book on different forms of cleansing we’ve been experimenting with all different sorts of intestinal cleansing here on a thing called mucoid plack - another Google sign there - mucoid plack a great thing to remove from you first if you can prove to yourself that it exists and if you have gone to that point why would you want this stuff in you, it’s pretty crazy. Re-mineralization of the food is a big step. If we grow our food and our vegetables in one field and our livestock in this area over here even if we move it from one field to the other it’s still in the same field area, just divided, and to grow our food for our livestock in the field right beside it usually that the trace minerals are going to be removed from there and that key essential is getting a lot of these trace minerals in there. It seems to be that there’s a good book Ishmael that talks a lot about that: 10 000 years ago they were starting to strengthen the bond that the task master and the slave and to weaken the weaker slave in order by slowly weakening - a lot of experimentations have gone too far and damaged the slave too far from beyond the production state but there's a fine balance to weaken the slave and accept some work loss but the fact is if we get too strong in the head and we're physically adept we like to rebel more to try and change things. And they don’t like that so much, whoever’s in charge, the higher uppers. The European farming practices which I think comes further back obviously but we’ve carried this on over here to North America and it doesn't seem to be the perfect balance for us - it keeps us alive but not truly living. So the re-mineralization of your food - so restaurant standard non-organic grocery store food, this is going to cause damage. By consuming this food, as you lose ten thousand skin cells in two minutes and you're rebuilding most of your organs in three years, your bone structure in seven years, including your brain mass. You're able to do through a series of cleanses and hitting high grade really good foods that have been remineralized, and if you're going to use the word organic then you're still back in the...organic should be a step in the right direction because even "organic" you're putting yourself in that three field tier that we’ve been looking at. I think it’s got to go a lot further for the RNA and DNA to repair RNA and DNA damage, and a lot of the damage comes from the food we’ve been eating not having the proper mineralization and radiated and sprayed with all sorts of whatever-cides: herbicides pesticides whateversides and so even if it’s still organic without those -cides on it it’s still having demineralization a factor. So you're rebuilding these cells if your loosing them your rebuilding them at the same time at that speed so your going to be having some RNA and DNA difficulties for true progression in your spirituality.

Devin: So can you talk about some of the devices that you have?

Dyfed: I have a wonderful John Deer forty-horse tractor; it’s not four-by-four, it’s about twenty-five years old, and I’m really happy with that tractor.

Devin: I should have done my research I can’t remember what it’s called...Radio frequency radion ozonator...Those things.

Dyfed: Right radio magnetic frequency admitting light plasma tube.

Devin: Ya.

Dyfed: Right. Well it stems from a fellow by again Google, this Roy Rife or Royal Raymond Rife was able to change things at an energetic level. There's different versions - you don’t have to use the light plasma tubes, there's cheaper versions. Sweeping function generator can be just bloody amazing against viruses, illnesses, poisonings in your food and stuff and costs a lot less. A good sweeping function generator costs about $500. A good light plasma tube is going to run you up near five grand. So we have ozone generation devices, we have electrostat and UV ozone generation devices.

Devin: And what does that do?

Dyfed: Well on the oxidization of something like I usually buy 210. I just poured out the last of it today as a matter of fact. My 210 liter barrel of 35 percent hydrogen peroxide - food grade of course. You can get technograde a lot cheaper - it just has different buffers in it which is ok if you're using it for pools or hot tubs but for oral consumption I prefer the food grade, it’s a little more expensive but it’s a healthier grade. It’s a little difficult to get in large, but biocarbonate companies can get it at a larger scale to buy it at nurseries or hydroponic stores on a smaller one gallon or litre jugs can be very expensive. I’m able to get the 210 liter barrel for like about 220 bucks which is pretty affordable. So oxygen therapies - Ed McKabe has a flood your body with oxygen, his new one is oxygen therapies by Ed McKabe. And again it’s a long conversation your trying to brush on, but we do oxygen therapies on different levels here right now I’m just doing it once a day peroxide and it speeds healing up in your body greatly. It has to be respected greatly and some knowledge has to be...you're not going to just go out and try that one alone and you have to study that one a little bit before your practice that.

Photography by Devin Tanguay

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