The Day for Sowing
Sending one person's experiment out into the world
Today I sowed a seed — a book.
Self-Sufficiency 2.0: the record of the experiment I’d been writing, gathered into a single volume and published in Japan as a Kindle e-book.
There’s a small reason I chose this particular day.
The farmers around here still read the old almanac closely. Some days, it tells you, you don’t turn the soil at all. And when it’s time to sow, you wait for what the almanac calls ichiryū-manbai-bi — “the day one grain becomes ten thousand.” A single seed, it promises, will come back ten-thousandfold. Whether there’s any science in it, I couldn’t say. But something that people with their hands in the earth have trusted for centuries carries a weight that reason doesn’t quite reach. Today was that day. So today, I sowed.
I wrote it honestly — what worked, and what failed. It’s not the gospel of someone who made it. I’m still on the road myself; it’s a book in which someone still walking wrote down the scenery of the walk.
The book is in Japanese, so for most of you here it isn't really something to buy. Think of it instead as the seed this English newsletter grew from. (If you happen to read Japanese, it's on Amazon's Japan store.)
How far a seed travels, you never know. Maybe it won’t reach at all. But nothing begins unless you sow.
I’d be glad if it found its way to you.
From the foot of the Southern Alps. Yuki Hattori