"SEIKEN WAY" -- a new book by Barton Boehm

BOOK REVIEW

“Lessons from a 21^st Century Samurai.  SEIKEN WAY.  Completing the Circle, A True Story” by Barton Boehm with Don Howell.


[“Seiken Way” is available as a paperback from Amazon.com, or as a Kindle download].


In the late 1970s, when I first moved into Highland Park,  I could count on one hand the three individuals who “knew everything,” mentors who I could go to with questions, concerns, problems.   Two of them have since passed away.


The third is Barton Boehm (pronounced “beam”).   I met Boehm through my association with the non-profit WTI. Boehm was introduced as a friend of the non-profit’s founder, and as a martial arts master.   


After the Korean War, Boehm found a master living in Japan, and moved into the master’s home and became his full-time student for five years.  His story is remarkable!


As I got to know Boehm better, I became his student, taking classes in his home dojo. There, during my private evening classes,  I learned about holds, and getting out of holds, and falling, and punching, and all the ways to quickly avoid a fight, or to never start it in the first place.


“You don’t want to fight,” Boehm would tell me in his gregarious voice.  “People get hurt when you fight.  You want to end a fight as quickly as it begins. You want to dispatch your opponent as rapidly as possible, and get out of there.”  Needless to say, Boehm was not a fan of the martial arts movies where fights go on for 30 minutes, with actors flying from rooftop to rooftop, breaking bricks, and continuing the battle in every possible position.


When we discussed the popular Kung Fu TV series with David Carradine, Boehm pointed out how “Caine” often had many opportunities to avoid a fight, and when he did fight, it often went on way beyond what was necessary to end it.


We had many discussions every night after our practice sessions.  I particularly enjoyed the stories Boehm shared about his training with his master, Peter Kiyoshi Suzuki.  I taped many of those conversations because they were so full of insight. Plus, they were highly entertaining: Some were funny, some deeply profound, and all had a highly pragmatic nature.


I taped all my conversations with Boehm, with the goal of working with him to one day produce a book of his experiences and insights.  I knew it would be a book like no other, for Boehm’s five years of daily training, living with the Master, was unlike any I’d ever heard.  But we never finished the book project. Then I got divorced, moved, and re-married.  Years went by. My second wife and I sponsored stick-fighting classes with Boehm in our backyard where he shared the psychology of the Samurai, and ways to stop the fight before it gets started.   More years went by. My second wife died, and that was 10 years ago, and Boehm now lived too far away for regular lessons.


Imagine my great happiness at receiving a package in the mail with Boehm’s book!  He did it!  The book is an incredible introduction to his Master’s system, Seiken. The book’s full title is “Lessons from a 21^st Century Samurai: Seiken Way, Completing the Circle, A true Story.”


During my off and on training with Boehm, I got glimpses of how Boehm met his Master after the Korean War, Peter Kiyoshi Suzuki, and how Boehm then lived with the master for about 5 years, sleeping barely more than 4 hours a night, 7 days a week, and losing 50 pounds after his first two years.  It was a story of a man desiring “Power,” but, as Boehm told me, “I didn’t know what that meant at the time.”  Boehm’s stories to me were filled with how Suzuki trained Boehm to repeat endlessly until a new technique was mastered, and to always “feel” what you were doing, and focus on the goal, so you don’t get lost in roteness. Boehm’s stories were also filled with fascinating stream of people that he met through his master, who was blind.


“The Seiken Way” fills in a lot of the gaps in Boehm’s training that I never heard, such as the early days of meeting Suzuki, and how Suzuki’s wife and two children responded to having a hakujin, or white man, living with them in their small barracks-like home in a low income part of the town. 


“The Seiken Way” points out that the full system taught by Suzuki is not just training the body, but also training the mind and the spirit.  Boehm’s book explores all the major aspects of his training, and how a blind man developed and mastered several entire systems; this book focuses only on Seiken, meaning “kind hand,” the system taught to Boehm.  The full name of the system is Wado Goshin SeiKen Jitsu, the wide, deep, kind hand system.


If you’re looking for a how-to book on martial arts systems, this is not that book.  (In fact, no one learns martial arts from a book – you must learn directly with a teacher).  But this book shows how the dedication of one man led him on the path of his own self-awareness, where he realized that he could and would even kill for his Master. Eventually, Boehm saw that his relationship with Suzuki was unhealthy, and he came back to his home in the United States.  He realized that he’d become a Master in his own right, and his book is one of his ways to pass along that hard-earned knowledge that he gained through his unique and painful experiences. 


Boehm is now 71 and retired from an engineering career, and continues to teach the few students who’ve stayed with him.


His book is highly recommended to anyone seeking an insight into the world of Japanese martial arts.  I regard the book as both a standard, and a classic.  Interestingly, in a disclaimer in the beginning of the book, Boehm states that the writing is biographical based on real events “but is a work of fiction” because the actual conversations and details of the interactions were necessarily re-created from memory or imagination in order to re-tell the story.  This admission does not diminish the quality or the significance of this work.


[Nyerges is an author and teacher, and can be reached at www.SchoolofSelf-Reliance.com]

On Thanksgiving

[Nyerges is the author of “How to Survive Anywhere,” “Foraging California,” “Enter the Forest” and other books.  He leads courses in the native uses of plants.  He can be reached at Box 41834, Eagle Rock, CA 90041, or www.SchoolofSelf-Reliance..com]

I was at a local coffee shop and met a man who had read something I previously wrote about the historical origins of Thanksgiving, and what happened, and what didn’t happen.

“I was a little puzzled after I read it,” Burt told me.  “I understand that the first historical Thanksgiving may have not happened the way we are told as children,” he told me, “but how did we get to where we are today?  What I understood from your writing that there are historical roots, and that we today remember those roots and try to be very thankful, but the connection was unclear.”  Burt and I then had a very long conversation.

A newspaper column is typically not long enough to provide the “big picture” of  the entire foundation of such a commemoration, as well as all the twists and turns that have occurred along the way. But here is the condensed version of what I told my new friend Burt.

First, try reading any of the many books that are available that describe the first so-called “first Thanksgiving” at the Plymouth colony that at least attempts to also show the Indigenous perspective.  You will quickly see that this was not simply the European pilgrims and the native people sitting down to a great meal and giving thanks to their respective Gods, though that might have occurred.  In fact, both the indigenous peoples and the newcomers had thanksgiving days on a pretty regular basis.

As you take the time to explore the motives of the many key players of our so-called “first Thanksgiving,” in the context of that time, you will see that though the Europeans were now increasingly flowing into the eastern seaboard, their long-term presence had not been allowed – until this point. Massasoit was the political-military leader of the Wampanoag confederation, which was the stronger native group in the area.  However, after disease had wiped out many of the native people, Massasoit was worried about the neighboring long-time enemies – the Narragansett -- to the west. The gathering of the European leaders of the Plimouth Colony and Massasoit and entourage had been more-or-less brokered by Tisquantum (aka Squanto) who spoke English. 

Yes, there had been much interaction between the new colonists and native people for some time, and this gathering of 3 days in 1621 was intended to seal the deal between the colonists aligning with Massasoit.  The exact date is unknown, but it was sometime between September 21 and November 9.

Yes, historians say that a grand meal followed, including mostly meat.  The colony remained and there was relative peace for the next 10 to 50 years, depending on which historians were correct in their reading of the meager notes.  The historical record indicates that the new colonists learned how to hunt, forage, practice medicine, make canoes and moccasins, and much more, from the indigenous people. Even Tisquantum taught the colonists how to farm using fish scraps, ironically, a bit of farming detail he picked up during his few years in Europe.

Politicians and religious leaders continued to practice the giving of thanks, in their churches and in their communities, and that is a good thing. They would hearken back to what gradually became known as the “first Thanksgiving” in order to give thanks for all the bounty they found and created in this new world, always giving thanks to God!  But clearly, the indigenous people would have a very different view of the consequences of this 1621 pact, which gradually and inevitably meant the loss of their lands and further decimation of their peoples from disease.  Of course, there was not yet a “United States of America,” and it was with a bit of nostalgia and selective memory that we refer to this semi-obscure gathering of two peoples as some sort of foundational event in the development of the United States. And it is understandable from the perspective of a national mythology that the native people were forgotten and the “gifts from God” remembered. 

My new friend Burt was nodding his head, beginning to see that there was much under the surface of this holiday. I recommended that he read such books as “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus” by Mann,  “Native American History: Idiot’s Guide” by Fleming, and others.

As I still believe, giving thanks is a good thing – good for the soul and good for the society.  Just be sure to always give thanks where it is due!

Eventually, in the centuries that followed, Thanksgiving was celebrated on various days in various places.  George Washington declared it an official Thanksgiving in 1789.  However, the day did not become standardized as the final Thursday each November until 1863 with a proclamation by Abraham Lincoln.

The gross commercialization of Thanksgiving is a somewhat recent manifestation of the way in which we have tried to extract money from just about anything.  One way to break that cycle is to just choose to do something different.

When I used to visit my parents’ home for annual Thanksgiving gatherings, I disliked the loud arguing and banter, the loud TV in the background, and the way everyone (including me) ate so much that we had stomach aches!  I felt that Thanksgiving should be about something more than all that.  I changed that by simply no longer attending, and then visiting my parents the following day with a quiet meal.  It took my parents a few years to get used to my changes, but eventually they did.

These days, most holidays have a whole host of diverse symbols, and Thanksgiving is no different.  And like most modern holidays, their real meanings are now nearly-hopelessly  obscured by the massive commercialism.  Nevertheless, despite the tide that is against us, we can always choose to do something different.  Holidays are our holy days where we ought to take the time to reflect upon the deeper meanings.  By so doing, we are not necessarily “saving” the holiday, but we are saving ourselves.  As we work to discover the original history and meanings of each holiday, we wake up our minds and discover a neglected world hidden in plain sight.

Poor Man's Quinoa

Learn to recognize and use this valuable plant

[Nyerges is the author of “Foraging California,” “Nuts and Berries of California,” “Guide to Wild Foods and Useful Plants,” and other books on self-reliance. He has led foraging walks since 1974.  He can be reached at www.SchoolofSelf-Reliance.com.]

These days, everyone wants to eat the hip “new” nutritional foods: kale, chia, quinoa, and many of the others that are found in the latest chef’s restaurant where all the beautiful people go. 

Quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa)  is a seed that has been used for centuries in Mexico and S. America, and it’s a great food. The seeds and leaves have been used in countless recipes and the plant was highly revered.  The use of the quinoa seeds took on a near-religious quality during the height of the Maya empire centuries ago.

But did you know that there is a close relative to quinoa that grows wild just about everywhere today in Southern California, and throughout most of North America? In fact, it grows pretty much everywhere in the world these days, and is more often regarded as a weed to be pulled and discarded.  It’s probably growing in your yard right now!

LAMB’S QUARTER

I’m speaking of lamb’s quarter (Chenopodium album), a European native that is today found  world-wide. Though this spinach relative is an extremely common cosmopolitan plant, it rarely gets the respect it deserves.  In fact, it is typically regarded as an agricultural pest and an urban weed.  Gardeners pull it up and poison it and throw it into the trash can.  This is another example of our culture's chosen ignorance, because lamb's quarter is possibly the most nutritious green plant you can eat! It’s a true “superfood.”

NUTRITIONAL ANALYSIS

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 100 grams of lamb's quarter leaf contains 4.2 grams of protein, 309 mg. of calcium, 72 mg. of phosphorus, 80 mg. of vitamin C, and a remarkable 11,600 International Units of vitamin A. 

Another analysis (Duke and Atchley) shows 684 mg. of potassium per 100 grams of leaf.  And 100 grams (1/2 cup) of the seed contains 1,036 mg. of calcium 340 mg. of phosphorus, 64 mg. of iron, and 1,687 mg. of potassium. The small black seeds are also an excellent protein source, used just as you’d use the quinoa seeds sold in many markets.

           

Even if you're not concerned about the vitamin and mineral content, you'll find that lamb's quarter is a delicious, hearty plant that can be used in many dishes.

Generally, you use lamb's quarter in any way that you'd use spinach.  Lamb's quarter leaves can be picked and added to green salads.  The flavor is similar to spinach.  The leaves can also be steamed as you'd steam spinach, and then seasoned with butter or herbs.  Most of your guests won't detect that they're not eating spinach.

Lamb's quarter leaves can be added to soups, stews, omelettes, bread batter, and even quiche.  The leaves can be steamed, and cheese grated over the top before serving.  The tender stems can be steamed, and served as you'd serve asparagus or string beans.

Lamb’s quarter is a late spring and summer weed, and so I use all that I can during the season. I also dry some which I then can store and reconstitute later. However, for storage, I prefer to blanche and then freeze as much as I can, which I then add to soups and stews throughout the year when the plant has died back.

As lamb's quarter goes to seed and dies back, you can easily collect the seeds.  I generally rub my hand along the stem and collect the seeds into a large salad bowl.  When all the seeds are dry, I rub them all between my hands, and blow off the chaff until I am left with only the black seed.  These seeds are then added to bread batter, pancake and biscuit batter, and soups.

This is such a common urban plant world wide that no hobo or homeless person should ever go hungry where lamb's quarter is found.  It grows all over Pasadena and nearby areas  in parks, in back yards, in fields, in vacant lots, along railroad lines, and often in the wilderness areas along trails.  When I harvest lamb’s quarter, I just pinch off the tips and never uproot the plant. This way, it lives longer and I have an extended supply of the greens.

When I first learning ethnobotany in the 1970s, I once spent a week in the Angeles National Forest and my only food was lamb’s quarter, making just about every dish possible with this plant. 

IDENTIFICATION

Lamb's quarter is easily recognized by its roughly toothed leaves that are somewhat triangular in shape.  The leaves are covered with a fine white mealiness which causes water to bead up on the leaf surface.  The older stems often have red stripes and red in the axils. 

If you’re not sure of the identity of a wild plant you intend to eat, don’t eat it!  Take the time to send someone a picture of the plant, or take the plant to a specialist.

DESCRIPTION: An annual plant which generally grows up to three or four feet tall, but much taller in ideal soils.  The leaves are roughly triangular in shape, with a white filmy coating to each leaf which causes water and raindrops to bead up.  The leaf shape has been described as similar to a duck’s or goose’s foot, hence another common name, goosefoot.

The stalks are typically streaked with red, and there is usually a bit of red in the axil of each leaf.

The green flowers are inconspicuous.

WHEN TO HARVEST/ AVAILABILITY: Lamb’s quarter is an annual plant which sprouts up in late winter or spring, depending on the rain fall and temperatures. You can harvest the early leaves by pinching off the tender tops, and leaving the plant to continue its growth.  Since the leaves do not go bitter, you can continue to pinch off the leaves through its growing season.

Seeds are harvested in the late summer when the plant has finished its growth and is dying. It’s best to wait until the plant is browning before harvesting the seeds so you know they’ll be mature.  Seeds can be harvested en-masse, allowed to dry, and then winnowed in a shallow bowl.

FOOD:  Think of lamb’s quarter as a wild spinach which can be used raw or cooked in any of the dishes you’d use spinach.  The young leaves are tender enough to be rinsed and added to salads.  The leaves can be cooked like spinach, and served plain, or with butter or other seasoning. The broth from this cooking is delicious.  Lamb’s quarter leaves and tender stems can also be added to soups, stews, egg dishes, stir-fries, and any dish where you might add spinach.

The mature black seeds, winnowed, can be added to bread and pancake batters, and to soup dishes, akin to the use of quinoa seed (a close relative of lamb’s quarter).

ADVICE FOR GROWING:  Lamb’s quarter is one of the easiest wild plants to grow.  They will grow simply by scattering the seed in a garden area, or along paths.  You can also plant the seeds in flats or pots.  If you allow a few to go to seed, you’ll find that you have a continual supply of the lamb’s quarter plants.

SOURCE:  If you’re still uncertain what this looks like, you can obtain the seed and grow it yourself.  Each seed packet with instructions is $3.99 from Survival Seeds, P.O.Box 41834, Los Angeles, CA 90041.

CAUTIONS:  Though lamb’s quarter leaf can be eaten raw, it is best eaten in a salad with a dressing.  If you simply pick a leaf from the plant and eat it, the high mineral content of the leaf can cause an irritation in the mouth and throat.

RECIPES:

SOUR LAMB

2 quarts lamb’s quarter leaves

1 pint sour cream

Garlic powder

            Steam the lamb’s quarter leaves and tender tops until tender.  Strain and chop fine.  Stir in the sour cream, add a dash of garlic powder and serve warm.

GOULD MESA DELUXE

3 cups lamb’s quarter leaves and tender stems, rinsed, diced.

1 onion, sliced

Butter, as needed

Seasonings to taste (Suggestion: use a dash of paprika and kelp)

            Warm the butter in a cast iron skillet.  Add the onion and cook until tender.  Add the lamb’s quarter and cook until tender. Add seasonings and serve.

EARTH BREAD

1 cup lamb’s quarter seed

1 cup flour of your choice (try acorn, or wheat, or amaranth)

3 tsp. baking powder

½ tsp. salt.

3 Tbsp. honey

1 egg

1 cup raw milk (can substitute almond milk)

3 Tbsp oil.

            Mix all the ingredients well, and bake in an oiled pan for about 30 minutes in a 350 degree f. oven. You can also thin the batter with extra water and make pancakes.