Miami shows where it’s heading with climate change on a vacant lot in a vicinity where today’s city took shape almost 150 years ago. Normally, a vacant lot in Miami prompts the question, What’s that going to become? This one does too.
Meanwhile, for a few thousand visitors each Saturday throughout the year the wooded half-acre checks a lot of boxes for climate action in the form of the Coconut Grove Farmers Market.
As I wrote in my last posting, market vendors and visitors come from around the world. Accents, languages and races show the city’s diversity.
The market is all about plant-based foods, most of it organic. It’s more than just because market proprietor Stan Glaser and his companion Tracy Fleming also operate Glaser’s Organic Farm on 20 acres in nearby Homestead.
Chat with any vendor and you learn that this pop-up market forms a community suffused by heritage and by spiritual searches that attracts visitors not just for their weekly kale and seasonal pumpkins.
The entire commitment to plant foods enables visitors to approach spiritual renewal that, as climate action, requires new protection for animal and plant realms. Climate action challenges us individually and as global stewards.
Jamaican-born Lamoy Andressohn was one of the first 3 vendors who Stan chose when he had to relocate the Coconut Grove Farmers Market to its current site 20 years ago. Lamoy and her husband Joseph had been prosecuted by the State of Florida for manslaughter and child neglect when their daughter Woyah, at 5 1/2 months, “transitioned” as a result of a birth defect that the state blamed on their raw vegan diet. They faced 50 years in prison before the charges were dismissed 13 years later and while Lamoy tended to her current business, “Lamoy’s Living Foods. At the market, she
writes by email, feeding her prosecutors. Their son Yahshwah “transitioned” at 22 from a car crash that devastated the family again.
Lamoy writes, “Our family was able was to rise from the ashes like the phoenix when Yahshwah and Woyah channel[ed me] from spirit and we were able to write a book called Trekking Straight outta Sirius.” Another of Lamoy and Joseph’s children has grown up at the market climbing trees. He’s now a Future Arborist. Books & Books in Coral Gables sells the book. (See Notes.)
Burgit and Peter Luu were born respectively in Haiti and Vietnam
They met at Baptist Hospital South Miami, Burgit the supervisor of radiation and Peter in IT, where he remains employed. Burgit is working on their food truck that will vend what they already sell at the market, she tells me by phone. That’s a vegan fusion of spring rolls, papaya mango salad, Pho soup, a broth with stir-in bok choy, sprouts, Peter’s own tofu, and rice noodles. She’s been at the market for 5 years, says Burgit, who says they’re “very loyal to Stan for having organized our lives.” Her kids with Peter blend Cuban, French, German, Haitian and Vietnamese.
“I feel at home at the market. I’m among people who like nature, who are going back to organic. They talk about their problems, they become family. We like to bring out peace.”
Visitors spend hours at the site.
When we last left Stan
He was exiting 4 years with the Peace Corps in Iran having learned business on the streets, with saved cash, a consulting contract and a free ticket home that he chose to reach by traveling east. When he reached India, he settled in. His search deepened.
By then, 3 influential authors at Yale had published 3 books that each viewed the emergence of hippie culture as either normative or socially disruptive in a way that could be embraced. Social psychologist Kenneth Keniston asked in The Uncommitted (1965) how a wealthy society could fail to attract the commitment of its college-educated young?
Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, who coined the term identity crisis, wrote Identity: Youth and Crisis in 1968, that viewed young people’s alienation as a normal part of adaptation to changing community life.
Charles A, Reich 2 years later would publish The Greening of America, a bestseller, with its 3 levels of consciousness, the highest level manifest in the counterculture.
My friend Tom Dennard, the attorney in Brunswick, Georgia, would soon turn his own Himalayan explorations into the Hostel-In-the-Forest, where travelers could find everything off the grid including self-sufficient gardens for organic meals. He would influence tens of thousands.
Spiritual seekers and hippies came from everywhere
Stan moved among the northern states below the Himalayan rise.
Learned men — saddhus — traveled to ashrams here to encounter the Buddha. Stan lived among the people. They were poor but welcoming. Stan remembers spending $500 during an entire year. He could buy 10 bananas for a penny. He lived in crowded hostels or tents.
“It makes you a different person when you have so little,” Stan tells me by phone.
Stan remembers how the Guru Maharaji (Prem Rawat), who was another incarnation of the Buddha, then only 16, inspired a worldwide system of ashrams that taught the Knowledge that would guide Stan’s moves going forward.
He tells me, “We are all disconnected. Some try to get back to our spirituality, to the ‘Knowledge’ of reaching the God inside us, to locate the infinite part, no duality, to the sense of wellbeing and peace.”
A new crop of researchers found the holy man’s young followers “had a spiritual experience which deeply affected them and changed the course of their lives. It was an experience which moved many to tears of joy, for they had found the answer they had been seeking,” according to the sociologist scholar James Downton. “[T]he students had changed in a positive way, more peaceful, loving, confident and appreciative of life.”
Otherwise, Stan rode the ubiquitous cheap trains and buses. His walks help him find the most potent wild growing poppies. Friends and he converted the poppies into hashish, widely used at saddhu gatherings.
Back in the States
Stan tried Provincetown for a summer, and Key West for a winter. He lived among “semi-outlaws” for a year near Santa Fe, New Mexico. He learned Spanish but was already inoculated against fast-money schemes. He found plenty counter-culture but little spiritualism. A woman there led them hitchhiking to Ecuador, where they split, Stan remaining in a huge house of squatters near Quito who lived by candlelight and rain barrels next to a community of raw food eaters. They lived by selling dried fruits.
Stan tells me by phone, “I learned the necessity for the right food in your mouth.” Raw foods would become the staple of the farm he would establish.
The group had access to a city library. “I read almost a book a day, mostly about herbs, organic farming, and about spirituality.” Again, he lived from local markets. He left only when the promise of investment money fell through.
And again
All comes together Saturdays. His staff of 25 to 50 gather at 5:30 to set up the market 30 miles away. Stan gets there around 9:00, an hour before the market opens. “We see an amazingly healthy group of people. Compared with Publix? There are no shopping carts full of junk. If we don’t have it? Don’t eat it. It’s not our fault. Stuff gets pushed on us.”
Stan, Tracy and the rest are doing their part.
NOTES
https://trekkingstraightouttasirius.myshopify.com/products/trekking-straight-outta-sirius?fbclid=PAAaYumNs1lMFz72worPnQqAesxaONvBC0b3FSU4IsFYHLtoi2G5jk37FdxA8_aem_AZOHDhUYpkMXFlisuNqu506ivc8SeHfbMpc1ZjDGliBnB1UhfXITJuq9jmw7ZRYAwzY https://trekkingstraightouttasirius.myshopify.com/products/trekking-straight-outta-sirius?fbclid=PAAaYumNs1lMFz72worPnQqAesxaONvBC0b3FSU4IsFYHLtoi2G5jk37FdxA8_aem_AZOHDhUYpkMXFlisuNqu506ivc8SeHfbMpc1ZjDGliBnB1UhfXITJuq9jmw7ZRYAwzY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prem_Rawat, under “Following”.
