Larch Hanson

Valerie Cooksley, RN, a leading expert on alternative healing, has written an excellent book entitled Seaweed-Nature’s Secret to Balancing Your Metabolism, Fighting Disease, and Revitalizing Body and Soul. She addresses these ailments and more: Cancer and tumors, radiation toxicity and chemotherapy, viral infections, thyroid imbalance, cellulite, arthritis, constipation, gout, hypertension and cardiovascular disease, kidney and liver disorders, osteoporosis, prostate disease, mineral deficiencies, skin disorders and inflammation. There are good recipes for health and nutrition. If I had to have only one seaweed book on my shelf, this is the book I would have.

Last year I was approached by an organic certifier. “Tell me about your harvest methods,” he said. “We don’t know anything about seaweed harvesting.” I replied with these facts:

1. My bay is free of boat traffic from October through May when I start the kelp harvest. In the summertime, lobstermen pursue the migration of lobsters into the bay, but then I’m working away from them on the islands.
2. There are no cities, factories, harbors, or nuclear power plants on my bay. Smithsonian Institute studied my bay and they said that there’s a wide diversity of life forms, indicating low levels of pollution. On a quiet day, I can see down to bottom at a depth of 30 feet.
3. I build my own boats from wood, and I coat them with vegetable oil. They turn dark with age, like old salad bowls. The tow boat has several bulkheads and is powered by a four cycle outboard that doesn’t mix oil with gas. The separate container boats are rowed away from the tow boat to the harvest sites, then rowed back to the tow boat.
4. My hand-selected harvest is brought to bone-dry perfection within 48 hours of harvest at temperatures below 100 degrees F. I use solar and wind drying methods the first day, and a solar/fanned drying room with wood back-up heat on the second day. Long plants are hung up on lines like laundry, small plants are dried on untreated white nylon netting stretched on frames at waist level.

“Excellent” the organic certifier replied. “We could write an organic standard, using the information you have just given us, and then we could certify you.” “And what would it cost me to do that?” I asked. “Three percent of your gross sales, plus annual inspection fees and travel expenses for the inspector.” “Go away,” I said. “Three percent of my gross sales is twenty percent of my net profits, and you are simply picking my brain, then selling my words back to me. I already have my integrity, and nothing that you have said to me is going to increase my integrity. I invite customers to visit me and see what I do. I maintain an open door policy with them. I discuss the problems I face quite candidly. That’s a much more powerful inspection than your once-a-year visit, and it doesn’t force me to raise my prices, as your inspection would. Organic certification is the New Age Mafia, ignoring water quality.

When I was a boy, my father and I went fishing on the lakes in Minnesota, and we caught big fish. I have pleasant memories of him. Then he died of cancer when I was 10. When I was 20, I moved to Florida, and there I learned to love the ocean, swimming in it every day. One summer I went up to Maine, and I discovered that Maine looks like Minnesota!..but with an ocean, and I became hooked on the combinations. As I started to work in small boats on my bay, I noticed that my father’s spirit was close to me, so I opened up to his spirit, through prayer and chanting, and I asked him to guide me. In response, he sent many people into my life who all had my mother’s birthday: May 4th. In western astrology, May 4th is “The Day of Nourishing Support.” Dad was saying to me, “Son, you need a megadose of your mother’s nourishing qualities.”

One of the May 4th people who helped me was Jane Teas, a cancer researcher who had been studying the Japanese dietary link to lower incidence of cancer. (Note: the Japanese are eating brown seaweeds: kombu and wakame are cousins of my kelp and alaria. Dulse is classified as a red algae; kelp and alaria have superior healing qualities.) Jane pulled on a wetsuit and went out in the boats with me in order to select a brown seaweed that could be given to post-menopausal breast cancer survivors in a study of their immune systems. She selected alaria. Later she wrote to me to say that alaria had improved the immune systems of the women in the study. “Keep up the good work!”

After Jane studied alaria, my friend Candace, another person with a May 4th birthday, said, “I’m part of a circle of healers who get together regularly. They don’t know you, but I’m going to take the seaweeds you harvest to their gathering, just to see what they might have to say. Some of them are psychics, some are medical intuitives.” When Candace returned from the gathering, I asked her what had happened. She replied, “When the alaria was placed in the center of the circle, one of the women who is psychic asked me, ‘Does Larch have a father who died?’ I replied, ‘Yes.’ Then she said, ‘Well, I feel moved to say that Larch’s father’s spirit is guiding the group tonight, and he would like Larch to know that the alaria he harvests would have helped to heal his cancer.'” When Candace relayed all that to me, I reflected for awhile and then I said, “Well, I guess I’ll stay at the work.”

There, I’ve said it. This brings you up to date. But what does the future hold? Well, it’s not good news. Here on the foggy coast of Maine, the fishermen have a rather realistic way of putting it: “Cheer up, chummy, things will get worse,” Last month, a researcher in Texas called me and asked for samples of all my seaweeds. He was studying iodine so that an iodine supplement could be developed. “Why?” I asked. “Well,” he replied, “there really aren’t good supplements for iodine available to the general public. Your seaweed flier covers the subject pretty well, but now we have the perchlorate problem.” “Yes,” I said, “I’ve heard a little bit about perchlorate. That’s the chemical that’s associated with rocket fuel, and it’s also released in a car when the air bag is activated. It’s associated with explosives, right?” “Right,” he said, “and there’s a lagoon of stale rocket fuel in Nevada, 250 million gallons, that is leaching into the Colorado River. The Colorado River irrigates the southwest U.S. and Mexico. 30% of this country’s produce is grown in that water system. The broad leaf vegetables like lettuce take up perchlorate, and perchlorate blocks transport of iodine to the thyroid. So we have an epidemic of hypothyroidism in this country, people who are overweight with sluggish metabolisms.” I thought for a moment, and then I said. “So that’s why, when the Columbia blew up and was scattered all across eastern Texas and Louisiana, people were told that if they discovered a piece of the rocket, to report it but not to touch it.” “Right,” the researcher replied. “They were afraid of perchlorate contamination of people and water. They had divers in ponds, searching for pieces. It’s nasty stuff.” I said, “In my business, I encourage people to eat 3-5 grams of seaweed each day, to protect their thyroids. 3-5 grams is about the same weight as 3-5 paper clips. That’s one Family Pack per person per year.” The researcher replied, “Keep up the good work.”

Once I sampled seaweed supplements in health food stores to see what was available. I noticed that the illustration on the label didn’t match the description in the ingredients, and the species was seldom given. When I broke open the capsules and tasted what was actually in them, it was low quality and often it didn’t match either the illustration or the ingredients description. In contrast, I often get feedback from my customers like this: “What a wonderful gift you’ve given me! Thank you for sharing your wisdom and your generosity. I was standing in the ‘health food’ store looking at a bottle of powdered kelp, and was wondering what was really in it. Your stuff is the real thing.”

Greetings to all seaweed friends! I am a new voice coming to you from the coast of Maine. My name is Gwenn, and Larch has welcomed me to work as an apprentice here at Maine Seaweed Company.I have been invited to write this year’s flier, to send warm greetings to all my new friends within the Circle of Friends, and to offer a new perspective on the story that is continually unfolding here.

In order to accomplish this task, I first looked back to the many newsletters that Larch has written over the past 30 years that Maine Seaweed Company has been in existence. The strong relationship between evolving earth and sea and evolving man is apparent. The intention of this home has broadened to incorporate children, apprentices, and a venue where people can grow. I feel thankful to have discovered this place at this time in my life.

I arrived in Maine as the seaweed harvest was gathering momentum. A wonderful group of fellow workers were here to greet me. During the harvest season, we lived together, ate together, worked long days together, and played together. It was intense and we accomplished so much, both in terms of gathering seaweed that will help others live more healthy lives, and in terms of personal life learning.

In April, the harvest season commences with pulling kelp into the boats on frosty-feeling mornings. Time begins to be ruled by the tides. May and early June found us floating in tide pools, gathering digitata. Later in June, we were doing the physically demanding work of wrestling alaria from wave-tossed rocks. In July and August, we were in the rowboats and scampering around island nooks collecting dulse and nori from the rocks. Now it is September. The harvest season is over, the seaweed is dried, and the storage shed is full to the brim. It is all waiting patiently to be packed and shipped off to customers interested in improving their personal health.

I am extremely thankful to be here. . . thankful to all of you who support this business, and thankful for Larch for all he is teaching me. I am thankful for this place. Beautiful doesn’t do it justice. I know now that wherever I go from here, I will continue to live near and work with the water. That realization itself is a gift from this place. If any of you ever find yourselves in Maine, come visit!

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A Message From Larch

Dear Friends in the Circle,

This past summer, I often counted ten or twelve people at table. Gwenn was one of them. She connects with me in the heart space just like one of my own daughters. Now it is fall, and the house is quiet. I’m happy to report that there is a good retreat space here for an individual retreat. If you’re interested in discovering this place, please get in touch with me. You could come here today and find a large sunny bedroom with a woodstove waiting for you, with plenty of space for yoga, and a good Bose sound system for relaxation, movement and bodywork. There is a fine white cedar hot tub outdoors (unchlorinated!) for softening up before you receive bodywork. You can walk a forest path along the granite shoreline (we’re located 30 miles east of Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park), you can paddle a kayak, or we can go out together in a boat or a canoe. You are welcome at table as I cook for my 14 year old son, Jay, and other folks who drop by from time to time. Last week, my 21 year old daughter Sarah was here for a two months visit. Sarah is a massage therapist, she has worked at Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California, and she is coming back to New England for the winter.

Besides offering healing retreat, this place is shaping up to provide a communal living experience for six adults plus children. I use five guidelines for evaluating the growth of communal relationships:

1. Do we agree upon a definition of enough in the material sense, and do we agree about how we will give back to the world, once we have enough?
2. Are we becoming healthy, skilled, and dependable people for each other? (If you enjoy gardening, woodworking, cooking, baking, parenting or helping people to heal, that is a plus. If you know how to create order and maintain it, that is definitely a plus in any community! In a stable community, people know how to do many things well, so if one person is missing from work, other people can continue the process anyway.)
3. Are we giving each other room to differentiate as individuals, and encouragement to grow? (Everyone needs time and space for this.)
4. Are we remaining immersed in the realm of affectionate talk and sensuous touch? (There are seven massage tables here. Would you like to live in a community where people are learning how to establish relationships of trust and becoming able to touch each other in a competent way? I like to teach that process!)
5. Are we transcending gender differences and bringing our relationships into the realm of the heart? Are we encouraging and supporting each other in developing a spiritual practice? Are we deepening our potential for contemplation and profound presence?

If this interests you, please get in touch with me. Winter is coming. The seeds that we plant now in our consciousness will come to fruition next spring. I look forward to some long winter talks with people. I have unlimited calling, so phone access to me is easy. Please drop me a note first. After all, I started this conversation with a thoughtful note to you.

Rest in the Light, abide in the Heart.

One in ten adult American women have been diagnosed with thyroid disorders, and perhaps as many as 25% of adult American women have clinically detectable thyroid disfunction. The American diet is deficient in iodine because most factory food does not contain iodized salt. The American lifestyle exposes us to the halides: fluorine (in water and dental products), chlorine (in water that is chlorinated), and bromine (in pesticides, bromated dough conditioners, disinfectants)– and all of these tend to displace iodine in the body. Living in America, we are also exposed daily to radioactive iodine 131 which is released from nuclear power plants. Iodine 131 has a short half-life of about eight days, and thus a radiogenic life of about 60 days. This makes it very dangerous, especially because a human being who doesn’t have enough iodine 127 (the normal form of iodine) will absorb iodine 131, and this radioactive isotope will damage the thyroid. The way to remedy all of this is to eat three to five grams of kelp each day. This is a good preventive measure. In the event of a nuclear catastrophe, there is another feature of kelp which comes into play: Kelp contains sodium alginate which is capable of binding with ingested particles of toxic strontium 90, cesium 137, and various heavy metals in the digestive tract, thus aiding the body in excreting radioactive fallout. After Chernobyl, the Russians isolated the polysaccharide U-Fucoidan in kelp, an excellent absorber of radioactive elements.

Dr. Tatsuichiro Akizuki, M.D. and the staff of his hospital survived the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki on August 9th, 1945. The hospital was built of bricks, it was located about a mile from the epicenter of the explosion. Dr. Akizuki and his staff had been eating a diet that included brown rice and miso soup and seaweeds. Sugar was excluded. After the bombing, rice balls, seaweeds, salt, miso and other good-quality strengthening foods were fed to all the patients and staff.

I would recommend laminaria longicruris or laminaria saccarina as a good daily food for maintaining adequate levels of iodine 127 in the body, but in the event of a nuclear catastrophe, I would recommend laminaria digitata.

People will sometimes ask me if they should be concerned about radioactive iodine in seaweed. I reply, “No, I don’t live near a nuclear reactor, and since my kelp is stored for 80 days before being put on the market, all iodine 131 will have radioactively decayed anyway. As long as the body has adequate iodine 127, it won’t absorb iodine 131.”

NOAA Weather Radio has a new computerized voice called “Donna” and she seems to like saying the words “partly cloudy” a lot, except that the skies over Bar Harbor (summer tourist mecca) are always described as “partly sunny”. I live 30 miles east of Bar Harbor, as the crow flies, in the area that is definitely termed “downeast Maine” . . . more lobstermen, less tourists . . . and Donna tells it like it is: partly cloudy and always a “chance of rain”. Donna seldom says that about Bar Harbor. “Downeast” is a term from sailing days when schooners on my part of the Maine coast sailed downwind, going east. Those days are gone. On the other hand, my bay is empty and peaceful at this time of year. In fact, my bay has been undisturbed since last fall when scallop draggers worked for a week and then were gone. The summer migration of lobsters from deep water into the bay hasn’t occurred yet, so this morning the crew and I had the bay to ourselves…. and that’s the usual, not the unusual, way it is. When the summer lobstermen come up into the bay, we will be headed toward the offshore islands, kelp season accomplished, alaria season accomplished, dulse season yet ahead of us to do.

So what has the weather actually been like this year? Well, I ate kale from the garden all winter long, and I was actually transplanting kale plants from garden to greenhouse in January! I had to chip through an inch of frost. In the ocean, there is more kelp than usual, but less alaria in the upper annuals zone. The deeper perennial alaria zone seems as full as ever, but I do not harvest this zone because that is my spore stock for replenishment of the upper zone.

Spring drying weather has been damper than usual. I have yet to hear Donna announce a three-days-long ridge of high pressure which would mean, “Fill up the kelp lines; it’s going to be sunny and breezy.” Nope, instead she gives us her cheerful but shallow-voiced “partly cloudy” predictions, and I wish she would just come out and say it like the downeast fishermen do: “Cheer up, chummy, things will get worse.”

Out there in the world beyond my peaceful bay, it would seem that situations are definitely getting worse. A Gallup poll of 2000 Americans asked the question, “Do you think there will be a nuclear catastrophe in this country within the next fifty years?” and 60% replied “Yes.” It is my opinion that the other 40% do not read the newspapers: “Only a thin, noncorrosive, stainless steel membrane kept the hole at the Ohio reactor from bursting open.” ” A nuclear reactor in Ohio is found to have a large hole nobody thought possible, burned almost through its 6-inch protective steel cover.” Former NRC Commissioner Victor Gilinsky wrote in a recent commentary in The Washington Post, “If this occurred in Russia we would be saying it could never happen here.” Well, we have 103 aging reactors in this country, and it IS happening here.

Bill Moyers recently explained that the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center could easily have destroyed the two atomic reactors at Indian Point, about 35 miles up the Hudson River. The resulting meltdown would strike the Hudson River and raise clouds of radioactive steam that “would render thousands of the world’s most populous and expensive square miles permanently uninhabitable.” Cheer up, chummy. Even the May 2002 issue of Reader’s Digest, the mainstream equivalent of cheerful NOAA weather radio, includes an article, “The Nuclear Bomb Squad,” which is based on interviews with current and former members of the Nuclear Emergency Support Team, 1000 members of a volunteer “army” who are deployed when there is a threat of a nuclear “dirty bomb” in our country. Dirty bombs use conventional explosives to spread radioactive materials into the environment.

So why do I bother to tell you all this bleak news? Why do I choose to “tell it like it is”? My crew, warming up in the hot tub before a morning harvest in 45 degrees surf, jokes with me: “Larch, put a picture of us in the newsletter. Sex sells!” And I reply, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re supposed to feel good, and I want the Circle of Friends to know that you feel good, doing this work, but more important, I want the Circle of Friends to know WHY we are doing this work.”

It is because kelp contains Iodine 127 that we do this work. Iodine 127 will prevent the body from absorbing radioactive iodine 131 which is constantly being released into our atmosphere by so-called normal operations of nuclear power plants and weapons facilities. Homeland security is a joke unless you have true security of good nutrition that includes Iodine 127 in your daily diet. This is specific protection for the thyroid gland, and you need to be aware that most nuclear pathologies in a disaster like Chernobyl are related to the intake of radioactive Iodine 131 into the thyroid gland. Rather than wait for the government to dispense potassium iodide to the population after a disaster occurs, eat kelp as part of your daily diet.

We also do this work because Dr. Tatsuichiro Akizuki, M.D. and the staff of his hospital, survived the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki on August 9th, 1945. The hospital was built of bricks, it was located about a mile from the epicenter of the explosion. Dr. Akizuki and his staff had been eating a diet that included brown rice and miso soup and seaweeds. Sugar was excluded. After the bombing, rice balls, seaweeds, salt, miso and other good-quality strengthening foods were fed to all the patients and staff.

Kelp contains sodium alginate which is capable of binding with ingested particles of toxic strontium 90, cesium 137, and various heavy metals in the digestive tract, thus aiding the body in excreting radioactive fallout. After Chernobyl, the Russians isolated the polysaccharide U-Fucoidan in kelp, an excellent absorber of radioactive elements.

Here are sources for good quality salt and miso:

South River Miso
888 Shelburne Falls Road
Conway, MA 01341
Phone: 1-413-369-4057

Natural Lifestyle Supply
16 Lookout Drive
Asheville, NC 28804-3330
Phone 1-800-752-2775

I suggest that we all practice being a world community. I have always relied on word-of-mouth to sustain this work. This time, I am enclosing two fliers in my mailing: One for you, a member of the present Circle, and one for someone who is more at risk than you whom you would like to invite into the Circle. If you can afford to copy this flier and distribute it more widely, please do.

Once you have secured your supply of miso (see above) and seaweed, and once you have decided where to live (make this an intentional spiritual decision), here are some words to put up on the wall, for the growth of your spirit:

“Relax. Pay attention. There is nothing to be done. It is all covered. You do not need to worry. You will get exactly what you need, in every moment of your life. Your Great Perfection, liberating you into the Light, is already accomplished. Relax, stay in the Heart with the sound of “Ahhh” and be grateful. Trust Spirit, put “other” in place of “self”, and breathe deeply, relaxing into the Great Presence.”

I love you all very much.