A few years ago, I studied holistic nutrition and the same year, I became lay ordained as a Buddhist teacher. During my studies, I found that there was a direct connection between the two disciplines.

In my nutrition class, as my final paper, I looked at the loss of nutrients in non-organic soils.

As a general rule, an organic farmer feeds the soil during and after each harvest by planting a cover crop and through other methods that enhance and build healthy soil, such as applying compost. In fact, soil management is a requirement under federal organic guidelines.

Non-organic farmers on the other hand, instead of the soil, feed the plants, and that is usually done by applying Nitrogen, Phosphorous and Potassium – NPK.

However, plants absorb a much greater variety of elements than those three, and as a consequence, soil, over time, gets depleted of essential nutrients.

So in my final paper, I wanted to know if there is any correlation of what is missing in non-organic soils and the most common diseases in the US. I picked the ones that cause the most deaths: heart disease, cancer, diabetes, stroke, and a couple of others – and what I found was amazing:

Heart disease, for example, the number one death-causing disease in the U.S. with 50% of all deaths. One of the most beneficial nutrients for optimal heart health is Selenium – a nutrient that is one of the most depleted nutrients in non-organic soils throughout the US.

So while all diseases are caused by a variety of factors such as lack of exercise, an unhealthy diet, or smoking, I found that exactly the nutrients that are known to be beneficial to prevent these diseases are the ones that are missing the most. Even the exact order of their depletion rate correlates directly with the order of the diseases that kill us the most.

So for me, there was a direct connection to Buddhism, a teaching that is anchored around happiness and kindness.

In relationship to soil it became clear that she gives us clothes, and food, and nourishment, and that when we are unkind to her, when she is incomplete, when she is hurting – so are we.

On a walk with my dog last week I realized that change is in the air. There was a sense of – dare I say it – fall in the air. I don’t want to create any kind of year-end overwhelm here and I am the greatest critic when the Christmas decoration in department stores goes up already at the end of October – and yet, in this case, I could swear I felt a tad of fall last week.

Maybe it was the light, which right now is as golden in the morning as it gets as we are only three weeks past summer solstice.

Maybe it was the wind and the way it made some dry leaves shuffle against each other

Maybe it was my memory; maybe I remembered these days and somewhere deep down I knew that summer is right here, right now, and that after the summer, fall will come.

I was reminded of the seasons, of this year, of time passing, the celebration of what is yet to come this year, the harvest, the bounty, the flavors of 09, the progression from spring to summer, from seed to carrot, from caterpillar to butterfly, from boy to man, from summer to fall.

And it is such an interesting little struggle – in my anticipation for the opening of the Point Reyes Farmers Market every year I can also hear the voice in my heart that says, “no, please don’t let that day ever come” – because that day will also be the beginning of the end.

So as we are seeing tomatoes and summer squashes ripen, and boys graduate, and girls become women, and dogs get older, I am walking into this season with a somber sense of gratitude – for the seeds that have become food, for the grapes that will soon be wine, and for the courage to accept that we can’t do anything about it, that this is just the way life is.

A good friend send me the following article:

“Why do leaves burst into color exactly? It’s a sort of magic trick, a sleight-of-leaf maneuver, in which the tree, sensing impending autumn, yanks the green from the leaf, thereby exposing the leaf’s true color. The “real” color of deciduous trees are the ones you see in autumn. Spring and summer are one long green disguise, a cacophony of chlorophyll.”

So the beauty, the color of fall, is not something that happens “to” the leaf, but is a revelation of what has always been.

Just as the leaf, the carrot, or the cherry, the boy, or the girl, life is about expressing our true innermost beauty, which is always inside of us. May this year’s harvest be abundant and full of wisdom.