set the pace

To the left is a Hemlock Varnish Shelf, the type of ganoderma/polypore mushroom I found yesterday on our little wandering with Lee behind the Berry compound yesterday, staking out the boundaries. Lee took us up toward a few creeks along the way, and I wandered into one without much water but tons of jewelweed filling the bed where the water is right below the top, and when I turned around there was a dying hemlock and this crazy mushroom. It has tiny, very slow-moving beetle things inside of it, eating it from underneath. To the right is a goldfinch, which I've been seeing a lot more often these days. I love them because they always make me look again, grab my attention. Focal point.

This morning waking up in the tent to the sun, I had the very pleasant experience of realizing I certainly am continuing my education, and furthermore I'm gaining work experience in the profession I choose to follow for perhaps the rest of my life. I'm deep in it, now. I know volumes more than I did two years ago, and this life provides me the opportunity to inter-act very deeply and soulfully with the entire world, people and plants all included. Walking through the woods I'm able to orient myself with the trees, and my ability to recognize seems to me a more valuable skill than any you might learn at the university.

And now a word about education. I thank god for the poverty I was raised in for all the bullshit it's allowed me to acceptably ignore and with which I've not needed to participate. I feel as if the shaky, fearful ground beneath me all my life, the grasping need to find something to hold on to that would deliver me from the drowning feeling of me inside this televised society, has led me directly to here. and how fully I am here. I have no need for a degree, no need for a job, no need for a car, no need for a television, no need to impress my parents for the funds they might provide ('cause they ain't got none), no need to wrangle me a man with money. I just don't need anything like that while there is this Great earth beneath me, raising me up like a beautiful cash crop, one stalk of maize amongst the weeds, fully supported by their presence, needing no addition. Thank this beautiful earth for overgrowing empty commercial and residential lots and providing me a million options for work and food. I don't need a degree to plant seeds, don't need a paycheck to eat.

I don't need any man or woman in a suit to tell me anything out of a book. and I thank all of them that might try for making it economically impossible for me to even begin to be convinced that they could teach me anything. I thank this earth for continually providing me the most whole education I can use, for allowing me to know what real fear is for and how to let go of the imposed fears of our culture, and for allowing me to to recognize the incredibly solid ground beneath my feet, all without one single word.