Prairie Tornado

Pssst... 25 May 2013, everywhere: 

http://www.march-against-monsanto.com/

When I was young and stoopid and keen for adventure, I left the basement where classmates and professors had massed and huddled. A warning siren had sent us all sprinting.

The sky had felt oppressive of oncoming storm and still. Then the wind came a-howling, and siren shrieked. Generally panicked, everyone had run for cover. It felt close and claustrophobic in the shelter. I slipped away.

I ran up four flights of stairs, three steps at a time and came out on the roof of the biology building. Weirdest sky I'd ever seen on land, an eerie pulsing green. Leaves were being torn from the summer trees. Wind velocity increased and out across the north Texas prairie, I saw the twister, writhing.

It was like water spouts I'd watched as a child in eerie-skied Key West. Highly charged cloud suddenly grounds into the sea, swirling wildly and draws up a tunnel of ocean, like spiraling stem of mushroom cloud. Woe the small boat in those waters.

The Texas twister came dancing cloud to earth, dark and blasting dust and debris. I gawked, fascinated. Then some vestige of common sense turned my attention to the green house on the roof.  Glass, you idjit. RUN! By now tree branches were breaking, tossed like petals sky high.

I tore down the stairs, and scuttled in among my classmates, sitting hard on the ground. A foolish adventure, but the air in those moments, I'll never forget, wild and exhilarating.

The tornado passed us by. Not so, Oklahoma. Terrifying images of mile wide brute force. http://12160.info/page/live-local-news-video-stream-tornado-cuts-mile-...

We live on a planet, near a sun in uproar, and a solar system bright with meteors and glimpses of more than we know, more than we can guard against or control. Awesome heart-stunning times.

Wherever we are, it's the place to be. 

Hard Journey

In town today, early, I was waiting for an interesting friend. She's also having earthquake symptoms (ear tones, "body all aching & wracked with pain", waves of magnetic sort of dizziness.) A sense of humor helps.

Pretty morning, maybe-rain clouds low on the sacred mountain, lilacs budding. I sat at an outside table; friend was late. (On arrival, she reported sending up Hail Mary's as she headed my way!) But I was content to sit quietly and enjoy whatever.

A young man with heavy backpack and scuffed hiking boots limped across the road. I nodded.  He asked:

"Okay if I sit on the next bench? You mind?" ...a Southern accent.

"No, of course not. Set ye down."  I went back to reading.

"My feet hurt," he said. I looked up, raised my eyebrows, willing to listen.

What a journey: He'd walked hundreds of miles, hoping to hitch, but the US continent is vast. He'd put his wife and little child on a plane, paying with his last pay check. It would have covered three bus tickets, but he couldn't do that to the little guy, a three day bus ride.

Then he hit the road, and ended up walking all day most every day with a few rides in between from the Deep South, with mercifully a long haul trucker taking him across Texas. He'd reached this elevation last night, a lot of it on foot, and was having trouble breathing in the mountain air.

He'd arrived in time to sleep at the free Men's Shelter, free meal and was grateful, as the night had been cold. He had a carpentry job waiting in Colorado and might reach his family by nightfall. Today!

My friend showed up and we decided to boost him along the way, taking him out to the deep river gorge with layers down into eons past and Rocky Mountain big horn sheep clambering and leaping basalt ledges.

The young man was traveling rough, but was tidy of person and talked about teaching his boy man skills and work ethic and never ever leaving him to grow up without a dad. Which had been his own little boy story.

We leave him with views to forever where travelers stop, and give him a hug. The rest area shelter stands open to rain showers and sudden light, fragrance of western sage. Hopefully he's found a ride, and has reached a solid roofed home, his family and a hot meal by now.

We wave goodbye. A hawk soars on canyon updraft against gray cloud.

Wayfarer's Book of Adventures:

Wayfaring Traveler,
Whale Rider of the Tide

www.wayfaringtraveler.com

Tramp Art & Mulligan Stew

Well, I'd never seen anything like it before, a type of handicraft dating from the American Civil War (1861-65) on to the Great Depression of the 1930's. 

Made with a pocket knife, whittling the soft wood of tossed-out cigar boxes, which could only be used once.

Called "Tramp Art", it's the work of homeless tramps or hobos or newly arrived immigrants wanting to apprentice with crafter skills. The homeless aspect thrummed my heart strings a bit. 

The craft work is layered, almost topographical, made into little treasure boxes, small shelves or tables. A neighbor gave me a Tramp Art picture frame. I held it, and wondered if I could be around it.

I seemed to hear a long lonesome steam train whistle, harmonica and fiddle by the campfire in the "jungles" where the homeless lived, and smell the one meal a day simmering, a community mulligan stew. Everyone contributed to the stew pot meal: food, firewood, or cleanup.

Those riding the rails, whiled away the hours crafting intricate whatnots with rough-living hands. Crafters worked of an evening at the woodland camps by lantern and firelight. 

Collector's items now, and a poignant chuckle there. Folks who knew hunger, made beauty.

The western world has forgotten most of that... Hard times come agin no more. 

But they may. What will we do in the new economy?

Wayfarer's Book of Adventures:

Wayfaring Traveler,
Whale Rider of the Tide

www.wayfaringtraveler.com

We Safe Yet?

Oddities of Boston, hoof beats of Paul Revere: 

Simultaneous military drill as in 911, 7/7
Alphabet soup agencies in place
Federal Stormtrooper take-over of a municipality
Keystone Cops
Media scapegoats first Tea Party, then Ay-rabs
Guilty, guilty, no trial necessary
Verdict by Executive decree
Enemy combatant, oh goodie, we get to torture
Changing stories
Police State war games as economy heads south   

The Boston Marathon explosions have re-ignited a prejudice called Islamaphobia, set in motion after 911. The toxic Twin Towers dust cloud had barely settled before newscasters began laying blame as though taking dictation. 

Trauma-telecasts were run again and again, till shock and terror had people believing any voice overlay to the pounding images.  

News sets are structured like entry to Vegas, neon flashing, alerts scrolling, charts, bubble scenes of violence, anguish, interviews of experts, so-called, and government news-mouths.  

A standard mind-control technique: Overwhelm, exhaust, batter down will with now-hear-this. News can function as hypnotic boot camp, a threshold into police state acceptance.  

Save us, oh do. 

The economy is careening. Are we to imagine that perps and enablers will step forward to take the blame? Or is crisis-creation more their style?    

Muslim-American kids are afraid to go to school since the Boston Marathon, due to news-induced innuendo. Crowds can be goaded into mob-think and rampage.

Tabloid-quality journalism varies with the era and the agenda: Niggahs, Krauts, Chinks, or Ragheads are caricatured and demonized as outrage focal point. We need a patsy, a fall guy, a shadow figure, someone, something to despise.

We used to make fun of Pravda “news” coming out of the Soviet Union as dictator-controlled, nothing but Stalin-slop. We in America had the gravitas of Walter Cronkite.  

Newscasters, once known as journalists, now protect corrupt government, banks, and corporate advertising accounts. 

If newscasters demonize a skin color, an ethnicity or a religion, and we parrot it, are we safer?  How much are we willing to give up, to feel safe?

Boston gave up the Bill of Rights, and accepted federal lock-down, essentially martial law to chase down one teenager. 

Nice touch and precedent, the Boston which once rose up against British Red Coats and abusive martial law, imposed by a lunatic Monarch.

Wayfarer's Book of Adventures:

Wayfaring Traveler,
Whale Rider of the Tide

www.wayfaringtraveler.com

Thomas Jefferson's Birthday Today

President Kennedy once remarked, at an intimate White House dinner, that here seated was the greatest gathering of intellect since President Thomas Jefferson ... dined alone!

In honor of the man who wrote America's Declaration of Independence, indeed a Renaissance Man, am bringing back part of an early story, now in the "Mentors, Help along the Way" chapter of my book, Wayfaring Traveler, Whale Rider of the Tide.

Moonlight Gardens & Monticello

Now planting fragrance and my uprooted self in far western mountains, am remembering my father's voice, reading aloud Lost Horizon. 

We had sailed from jasmine and dolphins of the tropics to wild orange bittersweet, concord grapes, and alarming mottled lobsters which thrash claws and shriek as they hit boiling water; turn scarlet. I had never seen snow.

Curled in Father's lap by the fire, he reads to me of a remote hidden valley in the Tibetan Himalayas, the legend of Shangri-La. The story unfolds to an extraordinary agenda to safeguard world beauties and mind-treasures, while the world goes mad with global war.

Evening scent of tuberose rises from Shangri-La's fertile valley to mountainside Lamasery, the haunting "fragrance of moonlight." I was enchanted! Father paused in the story:

"Victorians planted "moonlight gardens" like Shangri-La's, fragrant at night."

"Victorians?"

"Um. Named after Victoria, Queen of England. She lived a long time, and set her stamp on a time of wealth, railroads, factories, England in India, great explorers. She tended to be disapproving and certain of England's right to rule. Your grandparents were born into the last of that era.

"And, little lady, we're going to visit some gardens soon, made nearly 200 years ago by men who fought England's king."

"Before Victoria?"

"Yes, when America was part of England, and not happy about it."

"Tomorrow?"

"No, it's winter now. Flowers are sleeping under snow till spring."

In the fullness of summer, we travel to George Washington's Mt. Vernon and Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. By Jefferson's library:

"Pay attention to the docent." 

I look up dreamily at the solidity of my father. He holds my hand.

"But, I am paying attention."

Holding my other hand: a tall elegant 18th century man, knee britches, embroidered waistcoat, blazing forehead, twinkling eye.

The docent drones on.

I walk away, as it were, into the gardens as they had been, walled, terraced, and fruitful, on a Blue Ridge mountaintop: Hand-in-hand with an Ambassador to the French Court, a President, a yeoman farmer. 

A deeply-felt land, library and sanctuary still visited by Jefferson, its dreamer.

Hearing Father read Lost Horizon had alerted me to the hallowed nature of gardens and ancient wisdom. Beauty is not necessarily protected in a brutal epoch: Guardians protect...

Wayfaring Traveler, 
Whale Rider of the Tide
Amazon Reviews:
http://www.amazon.com/Wayfaring-Traveler-Whale-Rider-Tide/product-reviews/1482520192/ref=sr_1_1_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

Community-Supported Agriculture

Here's a local success story, dance-a-jig, cartwheels and high-fives! It's a story about Middle School kids learning life-long skills. No couch potatoes these:

Each week I get delicious organic produce from my CSA (community-supported agriculture) A Montessori school with 13 kids! They support the school doing 2.5 hours of farm work each school day, milking goats, making cheese, tending greenhouse, gardens and orchard.

They have 5,000 square feet of greenhouse, which keeps production going year round, in "four-season gardening." (Thank you, Elliot Coleman, whose winter produce I used to eat in Maine.)

These last weeks the school kids have been helping birth seventy goat kids (which look dainty and adorable, till old enough to acrobatically escape and do munch-a-thon! I imagine the farm is well-equipped with solar-charged electric fencing as disincentive.)

The students supply health food stores, food co-op's, summer farmers markets and CSA in four cities! It's a self-supporting enterprise of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young people aflame with self-confidence.

The "public" schools, many of which now function as dumbing-down and indoctrination holding cells, have axed the learning of skills other than cyber. Shop classes & industrial arts, music & fine arts, HomeEc, all bye-bye. Kids emerge, those who graduate, bored witless, and may be semi-literate or illiterate to boot.

Interesting social experiment with vital young minds, from many broken families--kids no longer expected to do chores, parents too busy as manic-commute wage slaves, to pass along grandmother and grandfather skills, assuming they themselves were ever empowered by mentors growing up.

The Montessori kids are mentored by elders and young folks who come work as interns with particular skill sets: horticulture, animal husbandry, sustainable living, solar power, infrastructure maintainence. The kids learn how things work, and how to keep them running.

We are living, aghast, in the midst of Grand Theft Wall Street/District of Corruption, and meanwhile new paradigm economy is growing from the ground up in local solutions.

Details: All through the winter I've enjoyed deeply-flavored kale, chard, spinach, lettuce, beets, potatoes, garlic, onions and fresh goats milk, chevre, eggs, half share at $15/week.  Winter family share at $20/week. At Thanksgiving, they had fresh organic turkeys at reasonable extra price.

I've just signed up for spring/summer CSA which is $23/week half share; family share at $33/week. I paid half season up front which gives the farm capital for seed purchase, etc. Weekly fee is more during normal growing season because they'll have gobs of early heirloom tomatoes in this high elevation land, and orchard and small fruits as well. 

These prices are less than farmers market and way less than health food stores. The CSA is keenly aware of the troubled economy and accepts food stamps, so those struggling financially can still eat, and well. 

 In winter I got five items each week, my choice, of staggeringly generous magnitude. I rarely bought food elsewhere, and certainly not produce trucked in from California.  I saved money, lots, and bought local, which gave me hope for the future!

Heck of a success story, here and now, both financial and transformational. More may be happening than we realize, if our sense of the world comes from nightly news-mouths. 

We have creative mischief afoot on the local scene!

Blog Author's Book:

Wayfaring Traveler,
Whale Rider of the Tide

www.wayfaringtraveler.com

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

She was old when I was little, with gentle sensitive hands. She had helped look after my mother and her siblings, and immediately tucked me under her wing.

Her name was Clara. Her eyes were growing milky with old age, but she saw far and played the violin with her eyes closed, and my heart soared up and puddled around my feet till the room flooded with joy.

The very fine violin was all her grandfather could bequeath his only son in those antebellum days. Her grandfather was a white slave owner in the Deep South, but he taught his boy by a slave woman to play the violin, and against all fury of wife and community, had educated the boy in his excellent library.

Mama had spoken her memory and love of Clara, and I was blest to know her the year Mama and I went back to Texas when my grandmother fell ill. Mama told me Clara used to play the violin to settle her and brother and sister into sleep.

"Ask her to play," Mama whispered. "She'll say she can't anymore. Don't you believe it; she plays like an angel."

Clara brought over her newborn great grand baby boy for my grandmother to hold. I was astonished. He didn't look like raw meat. He was pretty as a chocolate drop. She settled him into my arms while the two elder woman friends talked.

She did bring over her fiddle next visit. The case was old and scuffed, but the violin nested in faded blue velvet and had been loved like fine furniture. It sill glowed.

She played Swing Low, Sweet Chariot for me, and Deep River, My Home Is over Jordan. I sat still as can be hoping she'd play on and on.

Long years later, I was blest to hear a friend, a virtuoso, practice Bach's unaccompanied Violin Sonatas.

His immigrant father had watched over his family through the Great Depression, providing the children with music lessons, and seeing his gifted boy through Julliard, all from a small tailor shop.

On this weekend of Easter and High Holy Days, am remembering that lineage of devotion--an antebellum father who loved his black son, and a little Sicilian tailor, through whom I heard the Baroque architectural glory of Bach.

Wayfarer's Book:

Wayfaring Traveler,  
Whale Rider of the Tide

 Amazon Reviews:

http://www.amazon.com/Wayfaring-Traveler-Whale-Rider-Tide/product-reviews/1482520192/ref=sr_1_1_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

Gardens & Neighbors

"Will that keep the critters away?" My neighbor has stopped to chat.

"Doubtful." Am working on a rabbit-high garden barrier, more discouragement than a sure thing. "The secret ingredient is pee." She blinks.

"Human?"

"Hm. Around the perimeter. Male pee works best. There's a commercial product, made from dried blood, but it costs the moon, and well, the other is free." I grin. "And in daily production."

I spread some straw mulch and we talk about the light on the snow peaks and the soft spring weather, and the pleasure of a fire on a cool morning. It's the first time we've spoken; am delighted. Had always waved when they zipped by.

There's something about gardens that slows things down enough to lean on the fence between us and open the garden gate.

I plant some purple Good Friday spudoodles (potatoes) and remember catching the bird seed thief finally in January. Not a black bear; the feeder would have been demolished, and anyway it was snowy and plenty cold. The lumbering ursines had burrowed into hibernation.

No, this was something delicate, but the feeder seed level was going down rapidly. A moocher was about, dark of night.

It was 3AM, snow drifting down, when I saw the mule deer mama reaching as high as she could with her nose and tilting the feeder so her twin yearlings could munch down the fallen sunflower seeds. Cute, and I laughed, but I'd fed them for three weeks.

Now I stand on a step stool to fill the feeder, which can be tricky when the wind gusts. One whoosh up the valley lifted me right off the ladder. I grabbed a crab apple branch and dangled by one hand, till I got my footing again!

Fortunately, pee works for mule deer, too. They got to feeling way too cozy near the gardens this winter.

Wayfarer's Book:

Wayfaring Traveler, 

Whale Rider of the Tide

 Amazon Reviews:

http://www.amazon.com/Wayfaring-Traveler-Whale-Rider-Tide/product-reviews/1482520192/ref=sr_1_1_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

Barter & Cyprus: CASH Only

"I've brought in seven dozen organic eggs." She's carrying an armload of gray cardboard egg cartons.

"Uh, we have some..." say I, that afternoon's volunteer at the Food Co-op.

"Mine are cheaper," she says.

"Oh?" I have a look--some small bantam, a green Araucana or two, browns and speckles. I quiz her about GMO feed and cluck-clucks' access to the great outdoors. We come to an equitable agreement, and she looks around the small shop space.

"How do you feel about barter?" she asks. "I could use some of that Cowboy Blend organic coffee and a sack of blue cornmeal, maybe some of that goat cheese?"

"Now we're talking!" I total up her goodies, and give her a little money from the till. She's happy; I'm happy. Welcome to the new economy, and not a moment too soon.
 

Anyone who's been paying attention to theft-at-large, has suspected that bank fraud "too big to prosecute," might not end well.
 

Now we have flashpoint, and you may not hear about it on the evening news. News-mouths keep their jobs by protecting corporations, by smiley-mouth diversion and obfuscation.

The EU is in a flaming uproar, but who knew?
 

Come meet an island of Greeks and Turks called Cyprus, eastern Mediterranean, our not-ending-well flashpoint.

Bank doors have closed to customers, ten days and counting. ATM withdrawals are limited to a pittance; ATM's are being emptied; one blown up, so far, by a furious depositor. Savers and bond holders wake up to find themselves fleeced, to cover the shortfall caused by the banks.

What does it mean when a "bank holiday" is declared? Well, employers cannot make payroll, or order supplies or groceries; store shelves empty. The economy grinds into rubble.

What happens if the banks open?... The dreaded "bank run" begins, with frantic depositors trying to get their savings back into their small realities of needs, hopes and plans--college, the home addition, and not to put too fine a point on it, food.

Unfortunately, with fractional reserve banking, very little cash is actually on hand; few depositors can be accomodated in a crisis. A bank which opens its doors to bank runs, quickly fails. 1933, again and the generation that lived it, now dead.
 

Cyprus is imposing a 40% "haircut," such a quaint term for outright theft, on larger depositors, many of whom are Russian ex-KGB. (Have they lost their minds?) Spain didn't pause for breath (or for depositors to have time to mobilize.) Some folks will lose everything, others a mere 61%.

So, no one can get at their own expletive-deleted money. Here's the deal: Businesses in Cyprus are now refusing debit and credit card payment, with no guarantee of that being worth squat. It's CASH ONLY, or hit the road.

Europe-wide bank runs and worse may be in the offing. Skimming of bank accounts qualifies as a confidence-shaker. A bad precedent and a reminder of bad times in Fascist Europe.
 

If you think it can't happen here, you haven't been paying attention to crooks laughing it up with their taxpayer bailouts and whoopee golden parachutes and bonuses.
 

That frolic, while banks foreclose on families, and students come out of university to no job, and egregious student loan debt. They move back in with startled parents.

Let's talk FDIC, the US chimera of depositor safety. In saner, "good" times, it can take two years for that federal agency, of a now bankrupt government, to cough up restitution--when banks fail.

Feeling lucky?

*Sneak Peek at Chapters in Wayfarer's Book*

Homeless, Face to Face

Mentors, Help along the Way

Earth Changes & Infrastructure

Power Structures & People

Journeys through Nature, a Love Affair

www.wayfaringtraveler.com