guatebuena

Ahh, Guatemala...

Delicious food, kindly folks, beautiful textiles- it is treating me well on this fourth full day of our journey. I bought white calla lilies this morning and avocados for 1Q each ($1=7.79Q), that's 7 for under a buck! Same for garlic. Every third vendor at the market in Panajachel was selling fresh chamomile for 3Q per big bundle, less with bargaining, and dried linden blossoms or hibiscus blossoms. $2 for a beer, though. Weird.

Had an incredible reading with a Mayan astrologer in Antigua, trying to decide if I should take her up on the offer to apprentice, actually trying to find a good reason to pay however much it costs or if I even should. Maybe I need to go across the lake to San Pedro to study Spanish, but the astrologer reminded me kindly that these people have roots- the white people need a lot more help. So there's that. I suppose I am only here to look, listen, hopefully learn. Work off some ego and connect a little more bluntly.

Mike reminds that that this country is more wealthy than the United States because it grows all its own food, and it knows where it comes from, where it's going. Unfortunately, we blancos are lost on those counts. It's beautiful, though, seeing the mountainsides planted in small diverse plots, some with calla lilies dividing the plots. It heals my soul a little just to see it.

More later, as usual, my beautiful friends.

Buenos noches,
abby <3

moving to Guatemala

So, I've been working on this house in Springfield, caulking, priming, painting, etc. The house address is actually 444, but http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&safe=off&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&rlz=1I7GFRD&q=476+chenery+st+springfield+il&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&resnum=1&ct=title is a fun photo of it. Thanks google! Thanks to this work, which I've been doing for Mike's mom and stepdad, I've been able to visit my parents and sisters this Christmas, buy some nice, light-weight thermals, and get my teeth cleaned, which was highly needed after 15 years. Also, I should have a nice chunk left, enough to pay for at least one week of Spanish language classes with a homestay in a Mayan family's home, possibly two if I can find them a bit cheaper when we're there. In any case, the house is pretty cool, it has a hitching post out front from way back when it was built and horses were the transportation norm. It has pleasing trim, old-time pocket doors, a steam furnace with radiators in every room (I <3 radiators), and a very nice wooden staircase that goes up from the front room where you enter and joins the second story kind of loft-like into the first with a landing and window 3/4 of the way up. It even has a lion's head knocker on the front door. :)

We're heading off to Guatemala next Tuesday, the 13th, which is less than a week away, now. I don't think we'll really have that much to bring, either. I'm packing light on clothes, hoping to find them rather cheap once we're there, and there's not a lot else I really think I need. I went to Munich and Amsterdam about 5 years ago, and I couldn't figure out how backpackers did it- now I can't even remember what I brought that was so necessary that I needed a giant suitcase and a huge backpack. Well, it was a little colder there, especially in March... I learned today that Mike's mom went ahead and booked us and his brother, Nick, at this hostel called the Black Cat in Antigua for 3 days once we get there, which I suppose is a good thing. I believe it's one of the more touristy towns, but there's supposed to be really nice German architecture (a little odd, I admit), good markets, and something else I can't remember. After that I guess she's rented a 3 bedroom house in Panajachel, which is on the coast of Lake Atitlan, across from the volcanoes. It's nickname is Gringotenango, which is to say, place where white people flock. It will be beautiful, though, and I'm quite looking forward to low-cost visits to the acupuncturist and tasty vegetarian food on the cheap. Look: http://z.about.com/d/gocentralamerica/1/0/H/-/-/-/Maya.JPG

The place we're planning to volunteer with the second month, after the folks head back home, is called Maya Pedal, where they make bicimaquinas, or bike machines for indigenous agricultural use. and here you can see lots of what they make. They're situated in a town called San Andreas Itzapa, which also happens to be an area where local shamans can be found. or so I hear... I'll keep ya updated.

My tired bones need resting, now, and I'm pretty distracted filling up my new ipod, free from a friend, who got it free when his downstairs neighbor moved out and didn't take anything. !

Have you ever had 3100 songs to choose from? I am in joy-ing.

Send your blessings for our trip, my wonderful friends and family!

all my heart is filled with your names and faces (which I regularly go over in my head so I don't forget how much I have freely been given),
abigail <3

umbelliferaea

This was up on the screen when I got here from an article called "Anarchy is Here," from http://www.newswithviews.com/Daubenmire/dave135.htm : Ben Franklin said “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”

Also, support a leftist radical group in Berkeley, buy a slingshot:
http://www.microcosmpublishing.com/catalog/zines/2604/

I'll be in northwest Florida from December 17 to the 31st. I joyfully return for my once a year or two visit. It seems like I was just there, since we visited my family a lot over the winter until February this year, during the time of the tangerine grove in Citra. I suspect it will be warm and pleasant. I guess it's pretty nice having family in Florida- you get to visit without having to stay! It's enough like a vacation to balance out any minor form of obligation.

Springfield is transforming me, as it usually does. This time, however, I've had a much better grip on how to be here without losing my spirit completely. Breathing, sleeping, cooking, eating as well as possible, spending time with friends and family who are to some extent aware of my life away from here. Only taking baths, and soaking in herbs and clay has really helped, I think. It's allowed me to spend time with my body that I don't always get otherwise, at least not in the same way that I might if I were still gardening. I like gardening more than cooking simply because the garden is so much like my own body, interacting with everything around it, growing, sunning, breathing, stretching, being.
Cooking, however, allows the mind to focus more on transformation. I feel that I've really retained a (mostly)local diet of fruits and vegetables (apples and squash, mmm), whole grains, local cheese (some from raw milk!) and eggs. Also, lots of dumpstered bakery bread! At its best, cooking is an extension of the garden. It allows us to harvest (my favorite thing, after long nurturing!) and bring the fruits of our labor into the kitchen to be blended and transformed into delicious experiences that pass the life of the garden into ourselves, our friends and family. That is how I've most deeply experienced and enjoyed life.

In any case, I'm finally transcribing a notebook full of notes on lots of herbs, spiritual entries, recipes, sketches of useful garden trellises, a Susun Weed talk from Gainesville, contact info, urban orcharding, good shrubs, trees, and vines for western NC, etc, etc. My hope is actually to get them together with some other fantastic things from the loads of books I've been reading and put together a zine. I feel like the likelihood of that happening is high, as a project to stay busy for the next 3 weeks. When I return from FL, there will be 2 weeks before our flight from Chicago to Guatemala, which is a 2 month trip. I look forward to time slowing down a bit around April. It's a little strange to have plans up to then.
OK, so about Springfield- it is a little numbing, a little dulling, especially in the wintertime, but it's also humbling in a funny way. There is a much more concensus idea about reality here, so there is a slight need to conform in mostly social ways. It's sort of nice to go between worlds of complete freedom of expression, and places like the midwest, where thoughts flow in more of a stream. It's easy enough to provoke thought here, if not to sustain it. I guess it's easier to not talk about something different, as if mentioning anything different is a one time thing, as if talking about what could change is thought-provoking, but ultimately forgettable in the flow of house, TV, car, job. I say it's helpful in getting a more rounded understanding of people, and let me tell you, that seems to be my area of interest.

More about that and leaving the country in the next installment.

with l o v e

falling into winter

The leaves are falling fairly quickly today, have been since the first frost a couple of weeks ago. We had two freezing nights that I know of, before which most of the leaves were pretty green, after which most of the leaves sparked into an incredible array of yellows, reds, and oranges. The last week or so has been beautiful, sunny and quite warm. Today is the first day in a series of forecasted gloomy weather, with freezing temperatures at night and very little sun. The next warm and sunny day and night, I think a day-long hike along the Sangamon River or Spring Creek is in order. Sleeping outside will make me so much more at ease.

Time in Springfield is interesting. It's a lot easier to recognize the differences between rural and urban lifestyles. I continue to be amazed at the perpetual choice we have to flow with negative or positive energy. I mean, Springfield gets me down, way down. I find it hard to smile as much as I'm used to doing, hard to not be constantly distracted from myself and soulful interaction with others by just about everything. You can't walk outside and not here industrial sounds or dogs barking. I have long alleys to walk down, but they are mostly fenced, and there are many, many dogs. However, I've been pouring what energy I have into anything I can think of that will offer me returns on that energy, rather than putting it all into destructive behaviors (which I will admit that I continue to do). We only have a bath tub, so I've taken to herbal baths, soaking in chamomile, lavender, rosemary, bath salts, and bentonite clay. It's been endlessly amusing for me to wash my hair with mud, as well, a kind called rhassoul clay. The clay absorbs pollution and yuckiness from the hair and leaves most of the oils intact. Just soaking my head takes away the sweat, and rubbing the clay into my scalp a bit has the same delicious effect as letting it dry on my face, which is also part of the process. Isn't it awesome that mud cleanses and improves skin and hair? Just incredible- and soaking in the tub eliminates much of the need for anything outside of light scrubbing to get really clean.

Chamomile tea has also been endlessly helpful. I pressed out my holy basil, mullein, and goldenrod tinctures the other day- hurray! The biodiversity in my neck of Illinois is rather limited, so the tincturing has been put on hold, though we did gather a bowl full of hawthorn berries from Lincoln Memorial Garden across the lake from the coal plant. Unfortunately, I'm not so sure I want a tincture of anything across the lake from the coal plant. :/ I did purchase some amendments for making slightly better quality and faster fermenting mead, and it will be nice to get a lot more of this pile of honey of ours into process. I decided that herbal infusions or decoctions are better added to mead just before it's bottled for a better tasting mead. I think perhaps having alcohol to begin with helps to preserve the taste and quality of the herbs.

This morning I pulled my first yogurt out of the cooler! I had to special order seven stars yogurt for the culture, but the actual yogurt making process was pretty super easy. I followed the directions from Wild Fermentation, and it made a thick, quite mild-flavored yogurt that will be so yummy with maple syrup. Also poured off some rejuvelac this morning, and capped my fermented ginger carrots, both instructions taken from Nourishing Traditions. Rejuvelac is pretty OK, especially if you mix it with some apple juice!

with love

you sound upset

A message to my family.  A message to share.

---

So I wanted to write this email to y'all (and please feel free to forward
this on to other family members for whom I don't have email addresses)
because I think it's important to share my feelings about the direction of
change in this country, on this planet.  With the bail-outs of Fannie Mae
and Freddie Mac, AIG, Bear Stearns, and who knows who else tomorrow, each
family in this country could owe something on the order of maybe 70,000
dollars- to whom, I'm not sure.  There is a toxic debt pile building up
that I hope you are all aware of, and this is very dangerous.  From what I
understand, there is little to no precedent for this kind of economic
irresponsibility.  Banks are collapsing, being bought out by larger
corporations (thanks JP Morgan) who are then being subsidized by the
Federal Reserve, which prints up so much unbacked currency it's
disgusting.  One friend of mine wants to call and ask for a pittance, a
million and a half, from the Fed- you know, just to pump up his bank
account.  Another good friend has pointed out that property, at least in
her neck of the woods, is at ridiculous lows, and she can't understand why
money isn't being put into land trusts for growing food, especially in
poor areas, where the houses are being knocked down as we speak.

This is a very precarious moment, economically, socially, and family-wise.
Our country has been sucked dry, our fields planted in soy and corn, if
planted at all, our food filled with palm oil and corn syrup, our banks
inflated like floats in a parade, our legislature packed with corporate
ambassadors, filling our ears with backwards talk about war and terror,
our televisions flashing us with images of beautiful mountain streams
before inundating us with meaningless names like DOW, BP, HUMMER,
MICROSOFT, SPRITE, etc, etc, etc.

Our children will have no future here.  That is the truth.  At least not
the way things are right now, and the changes to bring things more into
order are not easy, by any means.  We have little infrastructure for the
rapidly approaching time when food must be grown locally- fortunately, we
have movements like Food Not Lawns who are at least trying to remind
people that we planted this earth for thousands of years before industrial
agriculture decided to start poisoning us, draining our aquifers, and
destroying biodiversity.  It will become very necessary to grow our own
food, or participate in local cooperatives who produce enough natural
foods to sustain us, specifically our children whose brains depend on
healthy food to make the kind of decisions and leaps of faith into more
sustainable alternatives that their parents simply did not realize they
could make.  Our energy, our fuel consumption in electricity, heating oil,
gas, all of this energy will soon be so scarce as to hardly be available
to the vast majority of folk (not just the desperately poor).  Again,
fortunately there are poor people the world over who depend on Drastically
less energy than do we and whose example is more and more being turned to
by people (hopefully myself included) to live more sane, more connected,
more simple lives, without the beeping, humming, vibrating,
compressor-kicking-in -ness of modern homes.

So I'm writing this hopefully not to sound preachy, but to express that I
am genuinely worried.  As someone who spends much of my time exploring,
learning, researching and paying attention, I am telling you, my beautiful
family, that I am greatly concerned about the very-near future.  We are
looking toward a sea-change, and which direction we take it really depends
on how informed we are.  Are we capable of making decisions about our
lives, about the lives of our children, our grandparents, our mothers and
fathers, decisions that will allow us to enjoy the time we have here and
hopefully leave at least Something for the next generations?  Or will we
simply continue to flow with this current, to accept constant corporate
branding, a culture that is not our own being pumped into our brains by
the television, education that preaches irresponsibility, permanent
adolescence and selfishness?  Are we willing to continue to accept our own
discontent and hollowness, our own loss of soul, because we want to keep
driving and working like slaves, and owing more and more debt to
institutions that themselves are being bailed out by the federal
government (that is to say, by us)?  We are in control of every aspect of
our lives until we give that away, which we are generally forced to do
quite early- but we are adults, highly capable human beings who have the
most to fight for, our lives and the future.

I realize that you all know the worst of it because we all operate in a
cash economy where we must pay for everything, even the most basic human
rights (water and food). We all know things are bad because it's so
blatant, I mean the price of everything is rising rapidly.  I'm just not
satisfied accepting that I Must pay to drink, to eat, to travel, to exist,
to stay alive.  I mostly can't accept that because I have had too much
exposure to low-budget lifestyles.  I know that I can take care of my own
food and water needs without money- I know this because I do this.  I want
you to realize that your life is profoundly beautiful and complex, it
includes every moment, and our souls have longed to be here, to occupy
these bodies which are capable of so much more than any of us realize.
Our bodies were not meant to be given away from birth from one institution
to another, to be traded, made into a commodity, beaten into submission
(http://www.submedia.tv), jailed (through school, work, prison), and
confined to our fancy boxes filled with heat boxes, cold boxes, water
boxes, wheeled boxes, etc.  We live in completely unnecessary confinement,
and it's making us completely insane- why else would be disagree with but
accept a military-industrial complex that is costing us trillions?  Do you
even know how many zeros that is?

I wholeheartedly invite each of you to try to be aware, as you move
through your day, of the feeling you get each time you fill your tank,
write a check, pay your bills, hand over your card at the grocery store,
or deposit that check that can't possibly be worth what you put into it.
The only way we can move forward is to turn off our televisions, to focus,
to put our own immense energy (physical and mental) into our own
happiness, our own joy, our own children.  On a planet that might not
allow us to live here much longer, we have to enjoy ourselves now.
There's no more time- our stock market will crash, our jobs will be lost,
our planet will change.  Get to know your neighbor- you might be more
dependent on each other than you think.


With as much love as I have, and as much heart as I can give, I am yours,
each of yours, through and through.  Let's stop trying to put up with this
crazy world and start envisioning our own lives becoming fulfilled and
abundant.  I promise that we can do this, we can truly build our lives
differently, and it doesn't take change from the top down.  Change You,
and the world changes.  Remember the sun, the moon, the plants (who all
have names), the face of your mother, your daughter, your son, anything
that is authentic, is real.  Forget your car, your TV, your microwave,
your refrigerator, your couch, your computer- these are no good reason to
give your life to any one or thing else.  What is more dis-heartening than
being on your deathbed and realizing that your grandchildren may never
know they had a heart because they are born in well-organized,
concentrated urban centers, where there is nothing clean and they are told
every move they can make in order to be fed and watered, like cattle.
Please, let's not let this planet become a farm.  We are not captives,
yet.  Talk to each other.

OK, I'm done because I think this took an hour, and I really should go
eat- I made apple scones from the yummy apples getting super-sweet
everywhere up here.   I mostly want everyone to move up to the mountains
with me and grow this garden with me.  Do y'all know how good food is when
you have to wash off the dirt first?  :)

lapsong souchang

Stephanie really likes caffeinated tea. This is admirable when it comes to introducing others to well-crafted beverages of the actually tea plant, like the smoky black tea I am steeping at this moment. This stuff is kind of like crack when you add honey and milk. It is going to help me make it past the next 20 minutes while I wait for the veggie lasagne to finish. I acquired quite a lot of produce from Joe Hollis' place that was all going to rot. Big chard, medium-sized beets and smalls, sungold cherry tomatoes (the ground was littered with perfectly ripe, orange beauties), two great big daikon radishes that I was very impressed to find (Mahra uncovered them from weeds just before she left, and now these forgotten root vegetables are thriving), and several bell peppers. All but the beets and daikon went into this lasagne- mmm.

I have to recount this story because it was a beautiful synchronicity:
I've been reading this Robert Moss book about dreams and Native American shamanism, and within it there are instructions for active dreaming and soul-recovery using various "techniques." By techniques, I simply mean time-honored ways of healing our spirits, such as finding, nourishing, and being aided by power animals, or spirit allies. This is kind of touchy for me, mostly because I was raised without animals, without pets, without even stuffed animals by and large (aside from two pet fish and a stuffed Flounder from the Little Mermaid, perhaps cosmically-inspired Piscean symbolism; I don't know what to consider the stuffed ALF...). I haven't had a connection with animals for very long, and only recently have come to appreciate cats and dogs. It has become my intention to find an animal ally and figure out how to nourish that being connected to myself.

Yesterday I was walking toward the cabin-site after reading a bit from the dream book in the cool moist morning, and I said aloud, "The next animal I see will be my spirit ally." My intention was that the next unfamiliar creature whom I encountered would help me in any soul-recovery I might wish. I saw a mosquito, the dogs, a rooster, but these were not the beings to help me. Later on in the day, I decided to walk to the mail box, thinking about this spirit ally thing, wondering if I would see a squirrel or a bird. I wasn't expecting any mail, but I went, anyway. At the end of the drive I heard a bird call overhead, and I wondered if this was it- I turned to look up at the bird, and there were a doe and her fawn. The stood still and watched me for a minute, while I watched them, and then they each walked slowly into the woods along the river, nibbling as they went.

So here is a powerful ally, indeed- Deer Woman and her offspring. She is the being of compassion, love, and truth. I have decided to nourish this woman and child in myself, and perhaps Deer Woman will join me for some soul-recovery in our dreams of each other.

---

Goldenrod tincture is good for sinuses and allergies, its oil is great for swelling and wounds. Make sure y'all catch it quick, if you wish to be aided by its generous spirit.

Handlebars

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuK2A1ZqoWs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD5WlQ54Sg0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9FApvqS-3k