rain

It's suddenly raining very heavy, lightning started around 10, and thunder is echoing slightly. We haven't had too much time between rain lately. Fay came through and brought us maybe 2 feet of much needed water, then there was more rain after those three days, and the ground might have just been drying on the top. The air running along the floor feels so cool to my feet after being so hot and humid all evening. I hope the humidity helps my throat stay moist through the night- I'm tired of my body being sick, first pouring sinuses, then clogged sinuses and pouring, then sneezing and coughing, and today mostly just a righteous croup remains.

I have been reading White Noise by Don DeLillo, my first DeLillo novel. I'm perhaps halfway through this book that is one-third set-up for this middle-class, white family made up of children from previous marriages, insecure parents and the "white noise" of everyday materialism. One chapter the main character just decides he wants to go shopping, and his wife and daughters become caught up finding him things to buy at the mall, and he just basically has this pseudo-religious experience with his family while spending money without care. He actually says he comes to realize that he is above money, doesn't need to worry when spending it, has credit to back him up! Anyway, here is a quote, as it relates to the other book I'm currently working through (Dreamways of the Iroqouis):

"The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream."

This other book by Robert Moss is called Dreamways of the Iroqouis, in which he explains the cosmology of these specific Native North Americans, as well as active dreaming and a return to the dreamworld as our connection to the rest of reality. To the Iroqouis, dreams are communications from our souls to our thinking selves, to our bodies- they are meant to help us, heal us, to show us what we really desire and need. They are reminders of things we already know, and our ancestors speak to us through them. The Iroqouis practiced dreaming religiously, and all dream wishes and desires they attempted to fulfill as a means of keeping the community in harmony as much as fulfilling each persons needs on this planet, on this journey, in this life. They dreamed deeply and often spoke to animal familiars and ancestors. Adept dreamers found deer in winter and acted as sort of psychologist/healers.

I will now attempt to tell the story of creation among the Iroqouis, as I recall it from my one reading of the oral history in writing, and once telling it all the way through for Mike. This may be long. :)

Long ago, there was a village of folks who dreamed. The father of one woman had died, he may've been a chief, and she dreamed that he was placed in the branches of a tree. When she woke, they did this, and his soul inhabited the tree. From then on, she spoke with the tree as her father, and he spoke to her with the moving leaves and branches, in the swaying of his trunk. He told her to go and prepare food for her husband-to-be, a very powerful being in a far-away land.

The and her mother painstakingly made a perfect loaf of bread, and she set out on the journey, remembering her father's words that it would be a long, treacherous journey, and that she should stay strong and remember not to express any pain or suffering. She moved from the hip, running across the land, and she quickly arrived in the place her father had described, much more quickly than she ever got to the berry patch outside her village, so she went back. Her father said, yes, you arrived in the right place, and you are coming now into your true powers.

She set out again, once more arriving very quickly, and found this being who was her husband-to-be. He was the most beautiful wild cherry you can ever imagine, not unlike the Tree of Life in Kabbala, he was a tree of Light and so old you could no longer tell if he had any gender at all! He was unimpressed with the woman and her dinky loaf of bread after having lived so many years and having had so many wives, said she must make him corn soup, enough to feed a mid-sized village. She set to the task, finding all the chores of harvesting and pounding the grain to be easier and easier when she put her thought to it.

She made a giant vat of corn soup, chunks flying out and making huge wounds in her arms and legs- but she did not wince, not once. The Tree of Light was a little impressed by this, and he told her to strip naked so that his servants could heal her wounds. She did, and men like dogs, dog-headed men, came out and began to lick her violently from head to toe with their sand-paper tongues. Eventually this became a sort of voyeuristic experience for the Tree of Light, perhaps, as the dog-men healed her wounds and moved onto more intimate licking. When the orgy ended, he made her a bed and did not touch her, only breathed deeply on her.

The next morning, the Tree had the woman fill a magic deer-skin bag with dried and quartered deer meat for her people. This she did, herd after herd of deer going into the bag, and when it was close to full, the Tree had her push hard down on the contents. When she did, they slipped back down to halfway, and she continued to fill. The Tree told her before she returned to tell her people to remove their roofs that night. When she returned, extremely tired from lugging the mountain-heavy bag, she told the people to remove their roofs. Having seen the enormous gift from the Tree, they did, and that night the stars seemed to come down and hover above their homes. Those stars began to fall softly into them, like light hail, until everyone's house had been turned into a grain silo filled with the most beautiful white corn kernals.

When the woman returned to the Tree of Light, her husband, his leaves had begun to turn yellow, and he said, "You are carrying the gift of life inside you," and he went to dream. When he awoke, he said he had dreamed the most preposterous thing! and he started to dig around the roots of the Tree of Life/Light, and his dog-men began to help, as the woman stood and watched in disbelief at the beautiful tree being uprooted in front of her. It followed that she began to help dig, and eventually they arrived at an opening! The space was not unlike a tunnel, midnight blue and empty. He told the woman that she had to jump into the hole beneath the tree. So she did, into the void, carrying with her the baby she had already given birth to, but returned to the amniotic fluid of her mother's womb for this journey.

She fell a long, long time, and for this we'll call her the Woman Who Fell From the Sky, or Sky-Woman. A long, white light helped her for most of the fall, a white lion being, who assisted this beautiful woman being. Soon she came to Earth, where all the creatures of the water already existed, like beaver and otter and turtle. She asked the creatures if they knew where to find any earth, and they asked her what the hell that was. She motioned as if picking up clay and forming it into balls, then patted her stomach and grabbed her breasts. Beaver and Otter both said their ancestors had each once gone so far under the water that they'd come to something they couldn't identify that seemed like this thing called "earth." After several attempts to dive down to the bottom and a few near-death experiences, I believe it was Beaver who came up, almost dead, with just a bit of clay lining his limp hands. Sky-Woman took this earth and asked where it might go so that she could build land and grow a child. Turtle said, "Use my back, as you're using it now to stand upon." She rubbed the clay on his shell, then danced a beautiful, spiral dance, quickly making land spread out before them.

Here she raised her daughter, who became ripe and harvested many things. This woman was one day visited by a cloud-being, an enormous and charming being, who rightly seduced her with two very capable penises, making her body explode with pleasure. From then, she was pregnant with twins - one light, one dark. The light one said one day, to the dark one, "It's time we left this place, I think I see a river out of this amniotic ocean where there is a waterfall at the end- I'm pretty sure that's the way out," and he left. The second on, the wily, crooked one, with shards of glassy ice circling his head, not to be outdone, decided he would just break right out of this place by boring a hole from where he was. This worked, however his mother was dead on his arrival.

Their grandmother, Sky-Woman, asked who had done this horrible thing, and the dark twin said it was the light, Elder brother who had actually taken the right path out. She believed him and coddled him from that day forward. However, the Elder twin was the Light brother, the Sky-Holder, the one who remembered where they had come from, from the sky, and he was thus endowed with the gift of Life. He created valleys and fields, deer and humans of all colors, while the second twin could only create fucked up shit, and needed to steal the gift of life to give life to his warped creations. They, however, led to the increasing complexity of life.

To sum this up, the Light brother eventually kills the Dark through a sort of too-much-righteousness thing in conjunction with a request that they duel from his father (who turns out to really be turtle/the cloud being!). The Light brother gives life back to the Dark eventually, and they end up being married in a sacred ceremony where they realize that they are actually one being, and the source of all their disharmony came from the separation they mistakenly felt.

This is the first part of the story. The story of the Awakened being and Hiawatha waits for another day.

The aim of all religion seems to me to be, by and large, the spiritual freedom of folks. Let's remember that and strive toward this freedom in the deepest parts of our souls and psyches. We are free, and that is what Jesus and Hiawatha came to tell us.

a new link:
http://www.submedia.tv

democratic national convention

ha ha- this ain't about the DNC.

Part of my reasoning for listing meads and tinctures, etc, is so that I have a record outside of my log book. Sometimes I lose those things. So, yesterday I made calendula, dandelion root/burdock root, and lemonbalm tinctures. It's fun. I also found another half gallon of moonshine. :D

It's raining today, in other news. I thanked the sky.

A very good book I'm reading is called Ancient Futures, it's about a Himalayan culture called Ladakh that is similar to Tibet where they live around 10-11,000 ft and pasture their hybrid dzos (yak and cow, I think) at 15-16,000 ft, away from their small fields of barley. The dzos love it up there, but the land is fairly barren, so they eat the vegetation that grows around the glaciers and high mountain valleys. The Ladhakis collect all the dung and use it for cooking fuel. They live in thick mud and stone houses on basic diets of including local "weeds," barley, yak butter, apricots, and a lot of chang (barley beer). They get very little rain, as they're in the rain shadow of the Himalayas, so they have intensely managed canals and shared irrigation canals that are small enough to allow just enough water onto each field. The women are strong and independent, and all are allowed to choose not to have children and/or leave their children and join the monastery. This usually means living at home still, but as a Buddhist nun or monk. The families are important social units where the children are given loads of affection and tender attention, and they take responsibility at a very young age for whatever they can, including younger children. They have beautiful smiles, and 95% belong to the same class of subsistence farmers without any money. The worst transgression within their culture is to get angry, and they often respond when one inquires why they aren't angry about anything, "What's the point?" Cooperation has been necessary and paramount to survival in their harsh surroundings, but in 1974 their thousand-year-old culture was opened to tourism by the Indian government in an attempt to bring them more into the fold as a part of India. This has caused great problems. Television and movies have entered the culture, luring young people away from farming and training them in English and giving them poor quality "educations." They leave their villages to go to school, finish school, have no idea how to farm, then have to move to the city center in Leh (a town of 10-15,000 people) to find one of the very, very few jobs in the region.

Anyway, the book is great, gives a very accurate and complete view of the "global village."

I would like to also say I feel very odd about the passing of Masanobu Fukuoka. The man is a sort of folk-hero, and I refer all of y'all to the zinelibrary.net website to read "On Green Mountain," which pretty quickly summarizes his ideas and integrities in regard to natural farming, no-till and balance.

I surely hope so

Women in the United States who are spiritually free to move about could change the world by expressing their disapproval of this farcical machine to their children. They could continually discover ways not to participate, thus providing for their children's future spiritual freedom (which guides all of our body through its own energy) and for the freedom of more in the future.

I think mothers can become very serious about spiritual freedom because we as women can be acutely aware of he emotional shackles that come with corporatism, globalism, market economy, school, jail, church, television, and other conceptually similar confining institutions and standards within our society. Hopefully, we as mothers, who are supreme artists by virtue of our task as mother, can offer our children freedom, love and hope for the future. Or there will be no future. We have to set our children's mind alight with wings we weave for them, and in turn our spirits will be set free.

Why do we not think of our children as future? Or do we, but we are too busy to consider the future? If we don't care about ourselves, we don't care about anything else. Why are we so ill? We are the future, because we are the only example our children have. If youth is always at the lead a few years down the road, then our lives lead them. We must continue to act our part as mother to the future, to lead in the manner of the strong heads of family who have led us to breakfast, lunch, and dinner. (May we all be fed.) More than lead, we should listen and learn by example.

The television is not an example. Let us recognize tradition, again. The oldest tradition is that of a mother feeding her child, in honor of continuing the cycle. She did not question the cycle, had no need or desire to alter or interrupt the cycle. She fed, and in turn all of the children who fed us have been fed.

This continues in my mind about home, children, future, inspiration and hope. I see the progression that comes with letting go of fear, opening your mind, settling into a space, and moving forward. Lately I can't stop thinking about the motivation that a child gives a home, the responsibility she or he requires of another, the constant humbling and frustration and joy they inspire. They are our path to somewhere, wherever we decide. This may be a good way to describe our interactions with the earth. We are children, she is mother, providing so much abundance and allowing us to live. We are the future of the earth, and we must also act as stewards of that ultimate gift, or we'll lose our home.

~~~

In other news, I've started white peony root, angelica sinensis root, red clover blossom, and schizandra berry tinctures, blueberry jam mead, and red clover/raspberry leaf mead. I've been trying to use up the moonshine and wildflower honey... down to half a gallon of moonshine, 1 1/2 gallons of honey.

Stephanie, Mike, Denali and I went on a hike yesterday to Singe Cat Ridge and checked up on the elderberries for future mead/tincture/syrup/wine/jam. They've got a bit to go until they're big and fat. The hike was nice, though. It's always beautiful here, and hiking always feels great on the body when you get home afterward.

Pray for rain.

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.

i was born right in the doorway

I have had too much good coffee this morning- what better way to find the headroom for blogging?

Making the transition to the Berry's, moving our little boxes and trying not to think too much about the sadness of leaving Mountain Gardens. My home has been this beautiful little garden in which I've had the opportunity to play out my beautiful green fantasies, been willing to be open more to everything, have had room to love my incredible co-working rock star community pardners. I've fallen in love six times this season, a few times for the second or third round. It's amazing how green will do that to you. We spent our last week at Joe's cooking beautiful lunches for his Peace Corps reunion/yurt workshop with Bill Coperthwaite. I am now in love with Bill, and I'm trying to think of reasons to go to Maine and hike the hour through the woods to his house after getting there by canoe. Anyway, it's a beautiful little round wooden structure with a big skylight circle in the ceiling, cedar shingles and windows all the way round. I whittled the top shingles with Bill's really good knife, and they fit perfectly, I hear. Mike did a lot of work on shingling and putting the boards inside the walls, and I hammered so much! I also sawed singles (which is nothing) and contributed significantly to the meals. I am beginning to realize how great it is to make delicious, nutritious food for folks and have them compliment and appreciate it. You don't get that so much with room-mates.

To report on recently practiced foodways, I've got almost a half gallon of blueberry jam preserves made with a little bit of raw wildflower honey stocked up now, as well as a half gallon of watermelon rind pickle preserves, a pint of pickled purslane, half gallons of dried red clover, a mix of red beebalm flowers and dried mountain mint, dried raspberry leaves, a gallon of mountain mind mead, 3 of red clover/lemonbalm/borage mead, and I spent all day running the still over the fire on the deck yesterday for nearly 2 gallons of 92% alcohol for tincturing. I guess this runs over into medicine, but if I've learned nothing from Susun Weed it is that medicine and food necessarily blend. I suppose I've also picked that up a little more strongly watching and tasting Jesse's beer brewing- I've never had "Wood Tea" Chinese tonic cider before this season. In any case, this season I've made tinctures of black haw, motherwort, goji/schizandra/licorice, borage and mimosa flowers. With the alcohol we made I'm planning to tincture siberian motherwort, california poppy, maybe more mimosa flower, holy basil (if possible), more borage, and more I have not yet decided. The fact that I have so much alcohol hadn't hit me until the still finished running yesterday. I'm still a little in shock.

Plans for the future! Me and the boy are going on back up to the midwest for October for wedding, birthday, end of the harvest, working, etc. I think from there we may head to this fella in Tennessee's abode, a kind older man with an orchard and berry production. Joe Hollis thinks highly of him, as the Hidden Springs nursery he began specialized in unusual varieties. I'm actually pretty excited to meet him and his wife, to spend time with them- we'll most likely be stopping to meet them on the way up to Illinois. I'm putting my eggs a little bit in that basket, as I'm not so keen to experience the North Wind through these great big mountains this winter. Perhaps we'll leave the country to visit central America beginning of next year, perhaps I'll make some money and somehow arrange to go to the Chestnut herb school in Asheville next season, maybe we'll work in the piedmont biofarm/biofuel coop for a bit, maybe we'll stay with the Berry's a bit this winter, maybe next spring. This world is our little oyster clammy.

I miss my friend Katie. Worth mentioning. She is in southern France enjoying the Mediterranean and doing it with her long-haired Frenchie boyfriend. :D Maybe she'll come back to go to herb school with me, then stash me in her luggage to go to Nova Scotia. O! We'll meet Jesse there in his little yurt mushroom paradise. Also! We can go to Bill's place and look at his incredible yurt in the quiet forest and check out the fjords. I think I just made a life plan.

To finish this up and shoot off this little missive, we went to the Permaculture Gathering drum circle/ritual/Goddess dance party last night, and it was nice to see folks I've taken workshops with and from, as well as conference folks, and a few neat people I met last year at the gathering. This year was much less intense for me- for one thing a middle-aged couple didn't smoke me up with herb too good for me this year. We stuck around 'til the end, the boys explored their inner depths with some sort of fungi, I held the stray puppy Mahra found and hung out with a little girl who walked her around a lot, and we made fun of the white people dancing all funny. It was pleasing. The after party was fun, too, but I was too tired to repeat details accurately, and for the protection of certain fellows I won't attempt to recall.

Good day, and be well, friends.

home land

I have been reading a number of books lately, and they have come to an interesting intersection. I have this past 6 months been reading through the 10-ish Little House on the Prairie books, and in them part of the whole story is moving around to different frontier lands and building stick-frame houses. They use pine, and they are on the edge of white settlement, at the very tip of the railroad at the time that was rapidly being built to cross the continent around the 1880s. So, everyone is building from pine, talks a lot about the smells of the pine resin and the changing colors from yellow to steadily more grey. These folks live on the prairie, which is a vast open land of grass and flowering herbs, and part of their settling of this place is to plant trees, break up the sod and plant large crops of wheat and oats. They essentially move in and start destroying immediately, but the stories are good for reading about frontier life, typically the woman's role is what interests me, the cooking and housekeeping and caring for each other.

Another book I've read is Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, which is about growing up poor in the south in this century, after the devastation of the long-leaf pine forests. I did not know that such trees existed, although I have learned from this book that one of the largest reserves of long-leaf pine is on a reservation within the Eglin Air Force base, right down the road from the little city where I grew up in northwest Florida. I'd always known there was a large reservation of pine there, perhaps the largest air force base in the world, but I had no idea why they held them in reserve or why they had controlled burns within them. Now I understand that these trees were the best outfitted for surviving in the south- in fact they monotonously filled the south from central Georgia on down toward Ocala, west toward the Mississippi River and along the east coast up toward Virginia. My brother Josh lives in southeastern North Carolina along the coast, and it is covered in pines with a strikingly familiar environment to that in which we were raised. The lightning in the south where all the big thunderstorms form has burned out all the other trees that grow up there, or at least it used to, and most of the animals in the forest would run into gopher tortoise holes built under the savanna-like sandhills. Wiregrass grew beneath the trees and was also resistant to fire. The long-leaf pine has extremely flammable leaves which keep fire moving quickly through and not burning the dense trees, which are very hard. Apparently they are beautiful. I can't say that I've seen, except in Citra this winter when I saw a baby pretending to be grass. They grow like grass for a while, then shoot up tall very quickly when they're old enough as another fire-protection method.

Between the late 1800's and now the long-leaf pine forest has been reduced by 99%. A lot went into the construction of the American West, from the Appalachians onward. Laura Ingalls Wilder got to smell the blood of the forest I've never known that grew where I was born and raised in its own kind of prairie.

So this brings me to the last book on this list which I found somewhere, Trees Every Child Should Know, from 1909. The entry for the longleaf pine is as follows:

The longleaf pine is one of four hard pines whose lumber is not distinguished by ordinary carpenters, but is generally called "yellow pine." This is the chief source of turpentine, pitch, and tar, as well as one of the very best lumber trees of the pitch pine group. The most ornamental wood is that with the curliest grain, and the narrowest bands of alternating dark and light colour. It grows slowly in hard, sandy soils on the damp coast plains near the Gulf of Mexico.

We shall know this tree from all other pines by the length of its needles. They are twelve to eighteen inches long, flexible, dark green, shining, three in a bundle, enclosed at the base in long, pale, silvery sheaths. They remain on the tree but two years, therefore the tree top is bare except for thick tufts of these drooping leaves on the ends of the branches. If you have never seen these trees growing in their natural forest belt, that ranges from Virginia to Florida, and west to the Mississippi River, or in small scattered forest patches in Northern Alabama, Louisiana, or Texas, you may have seen branches or small trees shipped north to be used for Christmas decorations.

The popularity of these pine shoots is growing, and those who cut them seem not to realise that they are killing the forests of the future. Trees grow from seeds which fall in the territory cleared by the lumbermen. If these little trees that Nature plants are cut as fast as they show themselves above the forest floor, how are the longleaf pine forests to be restored? It is a great problem, for a great part of the natural wealth of the South is in these lumber tracts, now being cleared at a terrific rate of speed, and the land left practically worthless when stripped.

the infrastructure will collapse

So, I have probably heard every person I love play the new Radiohead album. twenty thousand times. :D It's fantastic, clearly. A shipmate in the garden had an experience while hallucinating last week. I love my partners up here, for many and varied reasons.

Last night's full moon party was rather fantastic, as usual. Steve about punched everyone in the face. We're slowly talking it through, and he continues to refer to this place of green and young people as being covered by his holistic health care plan. The hot tub was fantastic, and as Joe says, "so oriental," with the moon passing through the bamboo. Guitar players and drummers played in the garden and around the fire pit on the deck, and Steve told his stories. I saw a really very nice moth in the green house some time, too. It was orange and brown, but you could see through the orange. Hm- the gooseberries are bigger, the blueberries tinging red and purple, the mulberries still small, and the valerian is forming buds below the bedroom window. We planted cucumbers and pepper plants today, and Mike, Mahra and Katie worked on trellises for our tomatoes. They're looking really good, one round and one woven straight up. The nasturtiums I planted are coming up beautifully, and it's more exciting to see because I haven't been able to find the seeds to plant more throughout the garden. (I'll move them, fish emulsion and fertilize them.)

There's a proFessional photographer interning with us this season, Jesse. He's gone this week as part of his dumb well-paying job. He is part of a project where six photographers take a snapshot at 7:15 each day. the web site is www.sametime715.com and it basically gives pretty pictures around the garden each day. Mostly from the garden.

Sittin' in my wool sweater after another windy week, after the Mother's Day Tree Massacre with 65mph winds through the mountains. I was worried that night, but I got to sleep after I figured the hemlocks behind the pavilion didn't want to fall on us. A maple fell down a path without hitting any of the cabins, or destroying much in the way of plants, except a few small treetops. Now it blocks off the wasabi, and we have to jump over it. It's pretty big.

and... today I stared at the bullfrog for a really long time, right in front of it, and I thought about eating a frog, and who would think to eat a frog, and how good frog legs can taste, and then I tried to walk away after watching it move its eyes around in its head, and it jumped back in the pond really fast. But I was trying to leave, anyway.

be well, y'all.

ps- The Education of Little Tree is perdy near the greatest book I've read lately. Check it out at the library. !