Wayfaring Traveler

Papiere, bitte.

2012-02-20T04:57:00.000-08:00

Downsized in a global predator-economy, many are living rough, close to the edge of chaos. Lives reduced to rubble in packing crates, hovels, tents, sleeping in vehicles, or in shelters where available.

I've not forgotten my own cliff-fall into homelessness and tent-living.

When reduced to the terror of uprooting, hunger and cold, power to speak out subsides into shock and muttering. For awhile.

Free speech is a luxury of a free people.

In my teens, I experienced a sort of black hole into archetypal horror. I was the only foreign student among classmates who had grown up with food shortages of World War, who walked shell-shocked through a city rebuilding from rubble, whose parents had been variously complicit in the Nazi era.

The rule of charismatic psychopaths creeps up on a people, who accept the propaganda of terror as a way of life, who bow to "safety."

Till suddenly, it's "Papiere, bitte." (Translation: a demand for identity papers, anywhere, any time, with please tacked on as a formality.) Trapped into immobility and silence--by uniformed goons, chaos and internment camps.

Thrilling reading, the tales of the Resistance to the Third Reich. A failed empire.

The world has long since noticed, and Americans begin to notice, that the 911-Empire crushes life, wealth and community. US government invades at will, and now invades its own continent of citizens.

Any citizen with an attitude is now viewed/surveilled as a suspect, and threatened with specific or inchoate harm. Domestic-Terra-ists-R-Us.

Will there be a control-freak take down of the Net? Regarded as subversive by fear-based government--by the global community, the Net is regarded as a wonder of the Aquarian Age.

I spoke with a grammar school teacher yesterday. Emails of all the teachers are vetted by Feds in the state capitol. Anything suspicious is vectored to her supervisor.

Free speech will not be tolerated in a goosestep-iteration of America. Peaceful protestors are subject to attack, goomba and high tech.

Myself, am finding access-denied, sluggishness of access, oblique muffling of the Bill of Rights. Is it "safe" anymore to have an opinion?

Beware the Ides of March.

We've floated along complacent to election fraud, to greed as the m.o. of "success." Have we also lived, complicit?

How feisty is the American gene pool of contrarians finally?

When my father was a boy, jaunty and a bit of a smart mouth, he returned from school, and stood in the doorway of the parlor, charming the pigeon-breasted, hatted ladies at tea with his mother. They called him "Sonny Boy" with great endearment.

His high-ranking father soon returned from work, and gave Sonny Boy terse marching orders, finally grabbing him by the ear to expedite his exit.

My father waved to the ladies, saying, "Send me lilies."

Tree Silhouettes Ashimmer

2012-02-16T05:34:00.000-08:00

In winter bare-branched deciduous trees stand lace-like against constellations, winter storms and indigo skies.

The shimmer began a week or two ago. Tree crowns seem to tremble with the energy of rising sap, a first hint of buds swelling. Tree tops dance sparkles of light.

Am far away south and west from Maine now, but it gladdens my heart to remember sap rising in the sugar maple trees, the quiet woodlands still deep in snow. Aboriginal forest peoples taught Brits and Europeans to boil down the sap for delectable maple syrup centuries ago.

Nightfall snows are melting here in the mountains by next afternoon, lovely walks in shimmering twilight and first light, footsteps muffled in the swirling white. Yesterday I all but leapt with joy to find spring bulbs emerging, fragrant narcissus, daffodils and tulips.

The snow peaks will send snow-melt waters to gardens and pastures this year, fuller acequias than last.

Tyranny Close to Home

2012-02-01T08:02:00.000-08:00

When I was fifteen and in a foreign school--rote-learning by petty tyrants--I ground out daily hours of homework, enraged at being mind-numbed and browbeaten.

My father proposed a day's outing, an Adventure. Hoorah, thought I, as we had climbed mountains and paddled canoes together. Out of this madness, yes, but to what wilderness?

First trained as a Navy Seal in Florida's Okefenokee Swamp, Father appeared for our adventure in full military regalia, dripping gold braid. What?! He eyed my dismay and offered, "Dress warmly."

We ventured off into northern European winter, low damp cloud, a palette of dun, grays, dirty snow. I slumped in the passenger seat doing glum adolescent ennui.

We "arrived." I lurched into full-bore panic as the topography lay sepia, a nightmare scene of WWII newsreel footage.

"Stand by me," he said, looking formidable, and glaring pointedly at the machine gun guard in the watch tower.

Father asked me to note the no-man's-land, mined and plowed, in front of barbed and razor wire, as we spoke together by the East German border--East Germany, land of crushing tyranny, from Kaiser to Hitler to Stalin.

"Remember this," he said, "and remember the courage of the American Revolution." He spoke to me about the outrage of the Founding Fathers who defied egregious overreach-governance by Great Britain, the superpower of the era. "Study that history."

I did. In the Alps, another foreign school. Our teacher of American History, a fiery black Irishman, spoke passionately about Sam Adams and pre-revolutionary pamphleteering, about Patrick Henry in the House of Burgesses, about George Washington, rawly aware of the carnage of the French and Indian Wars, who yet emerged as a figure of gravitas amongst the hot-bloods.

My father is long dead, but I do remember.

What have we now?---a former professor of Constitutional Law jives with the Declaration of Independence, quill-penned by Thomas Jefferson. His wife, Moochelle does Marie Antoinette impersonations.

And FEMA camps are prepared for impudent citizenry--with prison guard towers, barbed and razor wire.

News Follows Nosebleeds

2012-01-24T08:25:00.000-08:00

Sudden nosebleeds started up again, two weeks ago, a phenom since Fukushima began spewing radiation into planetary sky and sea. A fuku-belch, unreported by complicit media, and I run from the choir room or wherever to deal with a gush of blood.

Jet Stream whooshing over the Rocky Mts., falling as "hot rain" in the Pacific Northwest and Upper Midwest. Europe is long since weary of government lies and cover-up. They're still dealing with Chernobyl, 1986.

Areas of Eastern Europe are still too radioactive for living or eating from the land, mushrooms and berries, wild game, or radioactive lamb meat in parts of Scotland.

I was struck by berries, provender of foragers. Am reading a book sent by a friend, The Lakotas and the Black Hills, about sustenance from land held sacred. The Lakota named summer months for their bounty of wild fruits:

May: Strawberry month
June: Serviceberry month
July: Chokecherry month
August: Red plum month

But what if we dare not eat the berries? Friends in Washington State are growing food under grow-domes, now being recommended by concerned health pros--to shield produce from Fukushima-fallout.

Many of us are washing/soaking produce in bentonite, a white clay used by the nuke industry to cover up its spills and mishaps.

The Japanese power company, TEPCO, responsible for Fukushima and much self-serving obfuscation, now "admits" to 20 % increase in radiation. Can we count on the truth of that figure?

A whistleblower states the containment vessels have undergone meltdown, with rad-horrors dropping out the bottom.

Where are the US Dept. of Public Health and the Environmental Protection Agency?

In bed with GE, which designed the Fukushima reactors. And incestuously entwined with the Nuclear Industry, protected from scrutiny or imprisonment.

What'll it be? CorpGov greedsters, or community and Commons?

I do have abiding hope in the ingenuity of our global peoples, "unto the seventh generation."

Note to Readers: Do any of you have contacts in Japan? Please network updated "NEW Radiation Remedies" of Jan 26, 2012. Thanks to all for getting the word out. www.feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2011/03/radiation-remedies.html

Faux Cirrus Chemtrails

2012-01-12T12:13:00.000-08:00

An early riser, I enjoy last stars, clear dawn. Meanwhile--Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain--strange planes with no known flight pattern go to work--parallel striations, grand crosses, X's.

Good thing I hauled out the solar oven yesterday, under clear mountain skies. Today we have L.A..

The spew-patterns persist--unlike normal jets toodling across the sky. Patterns blur, and by mid-morning resemble smoggy cloud, in an earth arc above a rural population.

People out and about may start coughing; may mutter about allergies or flu. Asthmatics and the elderly may land in the ER. "Chemtrail cough" can persist for months.

What's going on? Hypochondria?

Or Rep. Kucinich's 2001 descriptor?--"an exotic weapons system"--when he introduced a bill trying to stop the op.

If hypochondria, odd co-inkydink that unmarked spew-planes, weird skies and health concerns seem to be a new world feature of the US, Canada and NATO countries.

America, the punch-drunk-bankrupt, is still funding resource wars, and appears to fancy aggression toward its own citizens. Citizens now re-configured as precariously angry and therefore threatening to any greedfest free-for-all.

Citizens the problem? Congress the solution--Draconian laws extrude onto the body politic.

Thinking about life here on the ground, with families bankrupted, homes lost to foreclosure, I wonder about US footprint at home and abroad. I wonder about consensual harm.

Will we foreclose on malfeasance by public servants?

Will government come to its senses regarding public service, public health? Or gut social programs to shore up wars, black ops, and rampaging banksters?

Celebrations in Old Age

2012-01-08T15:00:00.000-08:00

"What is most difficult, in reaching great old age?" I'd asked.

She rocked steadily, my ninety-four year old landlady, pondering sea fog beyond her Maine coast cottage. A grande dame, she still remembered prima ballerina, Pavlova, the liquidly-exquisite, and the Heldentenor voice and heart of Enrico Caruso.

She herself, of the flowing silver hair in artistic swirl, had danced in the corps de ballet at the old Met, worn stays, long kid gloves, and outlived a vigorous young America.

Though generations my elder, she walked daily no matter the weather, when I might wuss-out. She strode through the snow upright, long-legged and formidable, leaning on ski poles.

She had attended to my question, and turned from the sea to look at me, her middle aged renter--but to her, a youngling.

"What has been most difficult in my growing old?... Everyone who knew me as a girl, is dead."

I was to remember the stark loneliness of her words, especially at holiday times.

That first winter in Maine, I created an opulent Christmas for visiting friends, for I'd had a Southern Mother, a Lady Bountiful of celebrations.

I'd also had a Yankee father, who grew up with servants, rather than the generous warmth of hearth and home. Subsequently, father's upbringing prepared me for the cold of the North Atlantic.

By American standards--that brash, infant nation--the island on which I lived had been settled for centuries. It takes several generations of living there, before "newcomers" are fully integrated and no longer regarded as "from away."

The winters can be brutal, nights long, days icy and uninviting. After the Autumn Equinox, friends on the island burrowed into their winter layers and into a sort of hibernation, becoming laconic and insular.

Being from away, I went caroling, made generous-merry and discovered myself isolated in a drafty house, spending Christmas alone. Friends had en-caved. No cup of tea offered, nor chat by the fire. No malice intended, just New England inward.

It made me think about those left beyond the jollity-pale, alone on holidays.

After a pity-party interlude, I decided to make winter-lemonade out of what had seemed a bitter lemon. I snapped out of funk, and accepted that Christmas was private for families that had family. Instead, I made Christmas feast, mi casa es su casa, for those who had none.

Then waited, till the twelfth day of Christmas, when the Wise Men come--or so we hope--as my bleak-of-the-year extravaganza, creating a few "Epiphany Parties." I remember the ambient fragrance of mulled cider, gingerbread and balsam fir, and the joy on children's faces, and one year such music as two of them played violin and piano for us.

A decade older now, and no longer in Maine, am nearer my ending than my beginning, and I recall the grande dame, who outlived her generation and its memories. She felt isolated by old age, her ashes finally strewn at sea.

She had family; many do not. Do we find small ways to celebrate, bring quiet joy? Or pass one another on separate ice flows?

We do seem to be charting new paths of global and local community, as a planetary people weary of divide-and-conquer, and old fart profiteering wars. Frightening times in many ways, as greed implodes on its own ravening, and known structures fail.

Yet good hearts are at work all over the world--Not long before I left Maine, mothers of home-schooled children began a Winter Solstice tradition, which included all traditions within the island community. The kids decorated a Solstice tree, and the large oak-floored room was centered with a walkable spiral of beeswax candles. Music and potluck, on the darkest night of the year.

Homeless Republic: Election Fraud

2012-01-04T02:32:00.000-08:00

My friends lived off-grid--an island in New Zealand's Marlborough Sound--reached by ferry, battered Land Rover, rowed dory, then backpack trek across jagged rock ledges.

I lay on a cot in the garden shed through the night, solar radio against my ear, listening to the BBC reporting on Bush-Gore exit polls, 2004.

My absentee ballot had not offered the category, "none of the above." Hoping for an uncorrupted adult as president, I'd done a Ron Paul write-in.

I could smell rank penguin pee from their waddle to a burrow beyond the house, and orange blossom from the garden. From the exit polls in my own country, I could smell chicanery.

Electronic voting machines reportedly mangling input. Paper ballots going walkabout.

Frat-boy forever-war Bush, not the last embarrassment from Texas, has segued to the Great Dark Hope.

BO, Mr. Hope and Change, has just gutted the Bill of Rights. Domestic terrorists-R-Us. Can we count on honest elections in 2012?

I smell pig-poop.

Solstice Daughters of Eve

2011-12-21T08:33:00.000-08:00

Women carry memory, womb-deep, of being offed by the millions as "Daughters of Eve"--in the Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, or by stoning to death--by zealots of all putrefactions.

In absolute-truth centuries past, black robes and clerical collars crushed midwives and herb women for easing the pains of childbirth!

Birthing women were meant to suffer. Said so in Scripture, black and white. The ancestress, Eve, had hearkened to the serpent. It is she who tempted Adam in the Garden.

Midwives intervening to help women, put their lives at risk. Healers condemned to death

A midwife--administering raspberry leaf tea to relieve panic and child birth rigidity against pain, or quickly giving yarrow to stop postpartum hemorrhage--faced torture on the rack and burning at the stake.

It boggles the mind, yet the pathology happened, and was embraced as dogma.

The kill-them-all and let-God-sort-it-out thought form also writhed into suspicion of any unusual woman, eccentric, non-conformist, impudent, or God-forbid, psychic.

Misanthropes among early church fathers fastened on blame of womanhood as a twist to crushing Goddess worship. Interesting powerplay, potent, deadly.

Yet woman as nurturer, as creative force, as fact of biology lives on. Eventually, cosmology follows.

It's the Winter Solstice, the longest night of the Northern Hemisphere year. Solstice and Yule fires are kindling in snowy lands, the night sky alive with Aurora Borealis.

Knitting in the evening, I've been squinting by 4PM with twilight suddenly, thunk, upon us. Have thought warmly of women round the world, the nest-makers, the many warmths of hearth and home.

Bless the midwives now living, as earth power structures undergo seizure, and new life is somehow a-borning. Full circles and spirals of history, the cosmic-snake biting its tail.

At Advent Lessons & Carols this last weekend, we, the choir, were rehearsing the old haunting melodics to intersperse among scriptural evocations of darkness, birth and redemption--the prophesied coming of Messiah, the avatar presence of light. Genesis onward.

The Music Director, not mincing words, reminded us to have our various song books and scores open and ready BEFORE the conclusion of each reading. Our segues, he warned us, text to music selection, would be Kings-College-Cambridge-brisk.

A Texas tenor drawled, "Yeah, we already know the story about the talking snake."

Sanity and Endings

2011-12-17T09:11:00.000-08:00

"How's it going?"

"Am still sane. You?"

It's Christmas madness time--I've brought my homeless-tent to a thrift shop, letting all that go, to gift another's need. The can-do man who builds and organizes the shop grins and nods.

A strange time altogether. I attended a Messiah performance in the midst of "Mercury retrograde"--think: dyslexia, confusion and Murphy's Law--and as topping to that disarray, a total lunar eclipse!

An awkward timing to perform anything, including coherent conversation, let alone Baroque entanglements--sopranos fainting, wild frisbee-polyphony, and many fine musicians skidding and careening, as though partner-skating on ice.

In the interest of life steady and predictable, we tend to discount being affected or thrown off balance, if it involves energy we may not fully understand.

We've got all that under control, right?--satellites on the prowl; military locked and loaded.

We're beyond paying attention to heavenly bodies. Other than those offered up by sex-sells-Madison Ave. and Hollywood.

Nonetheless, we are creatures electrical; our bodies shimmer. Quantum physics explores cosmology of light, of waves, of ancient understanding. An amazing time to be alive.

A friend and I rallied to watch the December total lunar eclipse at oh-dark-thirty, and freezing cold. It being cold, we decided against struggling with ice on windshield, and warming the car engine for a jaunt to greater wilderness.

We threw the porch swing cushion up onto the chest-high adobe wall and clambered up, straddling the wall, bundled up like Eskimos.

We watched the celestial show as more sensible neighbors lay snugged in bed. And snow lay all around.

Over an hour the moon darkly occluded, nibbles deepening from above. For a wee while, the usual, the vibratory status quo, simply shut down. As though a rebooting were to occur.

Endings of unknown consideration at year's end. Sun and moon and mountains dark below the flowing Milky Way.

You Believe the News?

2011-12-08T08:08:00.000-08:00

"The weather report?--humph--I well remember shoveling thirty-eight inches, of partly cloudy."

The old Mainer, librarian in a small harbor town on the island once my home, looked like a 19th century Father Christmas or a sea captain--mane of white hair, thick Santa beard, rosy cheeks. Nobody's fool. I had asked if he'd heard the weather report?

"Do you believe what you hear on the news?" was his next question to me.

Do I? News touting signs of "recovery" in the midst of pensions being robbed, economies going splat, and perps celebrating the "greatest wealth transfer in history?"

Do I believe blow-dried and botoxed smiley-faces, in the midst of a newly-crafted, boom & bust, Great Depression?

Charities are trying to take up the slack as services are cut to slosh funds into more compelling Potomac Swamp priorities: bailouts, wars, re-election.

Locally, Food Pantry contributions are not as robust as last year. The Pastor at the church where I sing has explained that poverty is increasing while even the generous do belt-tightening.

His Discretionary Fund to help those in sudden need, needs deeper capacity. Strangers come for help. Sixty dollars or so used to tide folks over. Now, winter, people out of work come in, who've had their heat and power cut off, and it takes $180 or $230 or some such figure, to get power back on or firewood delivered.

Food Pantry distribution is once a week, and it's by no means lavish--two cups each of beans, rice, oatmeal per family, a small can of tuna fish, and a portion of whatever fresh foodstuffs have been donated. The lines to get in stretch far out into the cold.

The Pastor had asked for help for hunger emergencies between Food Pantries--for canned goods of protein. I piled some tins of beef stew, ham, salmon, Vienna sausages, hot and spicy, etc. into the back of the church office closet, as per the request.

I had shopped for these at a cheap goods sort of store, foods which would taste hearty to those hungry and were appalling processed-food to me. But get real, it met need and accustomed food choices.

As I crawled into the closet to stack the emergency foods stash, I thought about Wall Street pooh-bahs who had stretched a big sign across the NY Stock Exchange windows: "WE Are the 1%." They toasted one another with fine wines, looking down on the protest-of-excess rabble.

Some wit also suggested, that the great unwashed, "the 99%," could be improved with a shower of champagne.

A Small Wager

2011-11-26T13:20:00.000-08:00

A clear day, I think I can smell snow. I announce this to a friend from the Upper Midwest, who laughs:

"You want to place a small bet on that?"

"What?"

"I'll make it easy on you, 10:1 odds. If it snows, I pay you ten dollars. If it doesn't snow," he looks at me meaningfully, "you owe me a buck."

Sufficiently annoyed out of pneumonia-coughing, I rally with, "You want to make a wager with a woman--who sometimes has non-linear ah-hah's?"

Eyebrows raised, he gives me a put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is look.

I sniff. "You're on."

By nightfall, it's clouded up. By morning, big fat snowflakes are coming down, thick and lovely.

It's unseemly to gloat; I do grin.

Turns out he's strolling my way through winter wonderland with a ten-er to pay his wager, and a deck of cards to further entertain me. He teaches me to play five-card poker, and includes the jokers in the deck, appropriately, as I'm clueless about playing cards.

He empties out his pocket and starts me off with a stash nickles, dimes and quarters. A nickle opens the game.

Pretty interesting actually, deciding what to let go, if anything, to make room for a stronger hand.

After a bit, I'm dealt a jumble of five cards including the two jokers. Am not quite sure what I've got, but I push out a quarter, declining further cards.

"A quarter?!" he croaks, this being big bucks. He folds.

I fan out my hand, "What's this called?"

"Uh, a royal flush."

So, a good friend with robust good health distracts me from feeling awful. I've stopped coughing.

"You whooped my ass," he says. I grin.

Leaf-Fall & New Moon

2011-11-24T05:39:00.000-08:00

Sap is leaving tree branchlets and sinking deep into earth, the November in-drawing to roots. Fallen leaves swirl in the wind and suss-suss along the ground.

Dark mornings have grown nippy. Not a time of sudden bursting out the door to savor Orion and the Pleiades fading, and first light. Many layers and prep, so only rosy cheeks are exposed to rosy cold dawn.

I've been down with pneumonia. Pulling out of it now, thanks to fine needle porcupine prickles, supine, in the adobe clinic of a Doctor of Oriental Medicine. That, and garlic elixir: http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2009/11/garlic-elderberry-for-oink-flu-blues.html

Had intended to help out at the food banks--but was not able to--so poor families could especially have food for their children on Thanksgiving, which is today. Am feeling oddly disembodied from seasonal must-involvements, including Handel's Messiah, dead ahead.

Also disembodied from mad shopping, a worthy avoidance. I have a drawer-full of small treasures, tucked away whenever, for celebrations of friends known and not yet known through the year.

It may just be fever, disorienting me from usual pattern, or having left old Christmas pretties behind in Maine.

It may also be endings of a particular era, with inchoate new beginnings--Golden parachutes for failed CEO's and cutting of social services in communities. Food stamps are being cut locally. The paper writes of a disabled woman relying on $200 a month for food, now cut to $45. She's likely to feed her cat first.

We're at dark of the moon this early morning, stars stunningly vivid in the Rockies. Tonight, new moon, a "super moon" close to the earth, and a solar eclipse.

Tenting homeless last year brought an unexpected blessing of living by natural light--sunrise out and about, and sunset, day's end, crawling quiet into the tent, beneath the stars and phases of the moon.

Anyone who's worked in the helping professions can vouch for the pull of luna. Clients wig out and make emergency calls middle of the night. ER fluorescent-lit waiting rooms fill in hospital.

The moon pulls on the seas of the earth and the ocean of waters within us. All of us on earth together in the midst of endings and beginnings. Leaf-fall, winter and spring.

Oceans Far Away

2011-11-07T17:54:00.000-08:00

My father commanded submarines, often away at sea. I once asked him, haunted by the title, if "Run Silent, Run Deep" were the truest film? He looked up from the paper.

"No," he replied, alert that I would ask. "Das Boot is the most authentic depiction of hazardous-duty life." So, we watched it together.

I was appalled--at the confinement and PTSD potential--and terrified that my father submerged into Capt. Nemo's realm deep beneath the sea. Father countered with the camaraderie and esprit de corps of those who must utterly trust one another to do their part.

I had gone pale, so he told me a story about life on, and in the briny deep. He spoke of learning the particular sonar-signatures of whales and dolphins and schools of fish.

"Really?!" said I.

"Um. And on calm, full moon nights," he added, "we may surface far out at sea. I climb the ladder, stand on the conning tower and watch the moon's reflection. Some nights whales spout and breach or porpoises leap and dance around the boat. I've seen giant squid and the ocean phosphorescing..."

My father could navigate by the stars. He's dead now but I still miss the pole star of his living.

We have entered uncharted waters, we alive now on earth--a sextant, a sextant, my kingdom for a sextant. Starry night before us.

"I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking..."

~John Masefield, excerpt of "Sea Fever."

He Lives Outdoors

2011-10-28T08:03:00.000-07:00

"I live outdoors," he tells me, drawing linen thread around a small bunch of red-dyed deer hair along a string stretched taut--for a Native dance-headdress.

Homeless, he's helping my elderly Trading Post friend with a backlog of roach-headdress orders from the Reservations and Pueblos--the head regalia further stiffened with porcupine hair that bristles in an arc, crown to occiput of the dancers.

A lock of the dancer's hair is drawn through the woven base to hold it on the head, and tied with an eagle feather or two. The warrior-dancers look otherworldly and ferocious.

I watch the old hands, slow at this new craft. It has rained heavily through the night and turned to snow by morning.

"Do you have shelter?" I ask, wondering whether to offer him the tent that was my home last year.

"Yup, I'm setting up my tent for winter camp now under a big tree." He describes the location; I nod. "I'll make things there to sell."

"Do you have a campstove?"

"Yes, but it's propane, way too expensive. I just use it to heat my coffee. I eat my food cold; I'm used to it." I imagine him dipping a spoon into a can of beans.

"You know the Free Box?" he asks.

"Yeah, I do." (It's a shed by the recycling center where folks leave off donations of clothes and useful items. Pretty desperate energy there when a drop-off is made. Families crowd in hoping for winter clothes for the kids and such.)

"Well, somebody dumped off a dog, pretty beat up. Three-breed mutt. Nobody wanted him. I've never much cared for dogs, but he seemed alright and I took him home with me. It kinda keeps things calm with him to look after."

My elderly friend who runs the Trading Post comes back into the thick-walled adobe, after standing in drizzle to get cell phone reception. He's excited to show me the new issue of National Geographic. "The Iceman's eyes were not blue!"

The homeless fellow looks up puzzled. "Iceman?"

"Uh huh," I reply, "a man from long time ago, found frozen in a glacier at high elevation in the Alps, with his clothes and tools intact."

"How old was he?"

"In his thirties, maybe?"

My Trading Post friend, widely read and more precise, lets out a snort: "Five thousand three hundred years ago, and forty years of age!"

The homeless crafter sits quietly. His face high elevation sun-weathered. Still has most of his discolored teeth, a grizzled gray beard. "And they found his tools? And no one with him?"

Gaia Dominion, Quake-Sensitives

2011-10-25T06:09:00.000-07:00

As memes go, "dominion over all living things" has had a long run--a sanctified gang-bang of mother earth and her fruitfulness, her wealth.

Feelings of divine specialness led to--Crusades in land "holy" to many peoples, to blunderbusses in the New World, and Los Alamos ueber alles.

Ancient peoples and wisdom have fallen to zealotry and greed. A wasteland out of various Eden-scapes.

Now, that's one version of history, imposed by the victors--lesser peoples subdued, destroyed by superior mandate. Resources made available to plunder.

It may not be the whole story--predators unleash a never-enough-vortex, eventually devouring everything in their path. And yet the predator, I've-got-mine, wasteland ultimately cannot sustain any living things.

The supposed prey may then rise up and breathe life into a new/old meme, more land- and people-friendly. We are "occupied" with that transition now.

Meanwhile we have Monsanto and sustainable farmers, jackboots and "oath keepers" for whom oaths to uphold the Constitution, hold true. We are in the business of resolving opposites.

We have real people stepping free of media-hypnotics and embracing simpler choices--neighbors, family and community.

We also have earth, moon and sun, rippling perturbations through same-old, same-old. Some of us experience this cosmological uproar on a cognitive level, cycles and so forth. Some us feel it:

Have you ever paddled a kayak or canoe on calm waters, till a big boat passes--lobster, shrimp, or God forbid a cruise ship?

The sharp prow of the big boat cleaves a bow wave, which V's a sloshing wake of wave after wave. If the waves catch a small boat broadside, it's over she goes. Paddlers sloshed by big waves try to turn their small crafts into the oncoming swell.

Earth, she be rumbling, and for earthquake-sensitives level ground can suddenly feel like a boat blindsided by waves. It's an altogether uncanny disequilibrium. Eerie, infra-sonic ringing may stun one ear or both.

The human body may ache. (And for any quake-sensitives reading this, homeopathic Arnica may help.)

Animals respond to these precursor sensations, by fleeing to higher ground, or taking wing.

Earthquake-sensitives all over the world are turning the bows of their small boats into the waves of the big sea.

Sunday Sweat Lodge

2011-10-17T07:15:00.000-07:00

A low entry, we crawl into roundness. The sweat lodge inner dome is ringed round with garlands of fresh cedar, juniper and sage, bent saplings curving over us. Prayer bundles hanging.

Glowing stones are brought one at a time on hay fork tines, and drawn in with paired deer antlers to the fire pit, to the womb of mother earth.

We smell the wild herbal fragrance of high plains and mountains, as the entry flap falls to silence, and a complete absence of outer light.

I have come to my Native American neighbor's "sweat" directly from singing Anglican chanting of psalms, and an anthem set to the old Welsh melody, "The Ash Grove." In its evocative original:

Down yonder green valley
Where streamlets meander,
When twilight is fading,
I pensively roam...

Deep in the lodge, my shift of the sacred thrums into drumbeat and turtle rattle, rhythmic chant.

My neighbor scatters western sage on the glowing rocks; tosses a gourd-full of water. Pungent steam billows into the darkness.

Am sweating profusely. I drink salted water from a bear-engraved gourd.

My neighbor and his wife pray for the Indian Nations and all peoples. We take turns singing gratitude, Algonquin, English, French, Beethoven's German "Ode to Joy." We sit and sprawl, muse and sweat.

I ask my neighbor about Saturday's solidarity protest in our small Rocky Mt. town, in resonance with the global outrage against Wall Street and corporate greed-mongers--Only Anglos showed up.

(Not exactly "plain vanilla" demographics here... Land Grant descendants of colonial Spain, plus adventurers of various European kingdoms, Sephardic Jews fleeing the Inquisition, Pueblo and Apache peoples, more recent Hispanic immigrants, 1970's hippies, and Anglos with 2nd homes, retirees.)

My native friend explains:

"We showed up to protest at Wounded Knee. Our grievance is older, deeper. We pray in sweat lodges for all people to walk the good road.

"We live ancient understanding of cycles and time. We doubt white promises. Some of us still live old ways, keeping tradition, watching and waiting."

Snow on the Mountain

2011-10-10T07:58:00.000-07:00

Slept to clouds low on the mountain and woke to snow peaks, aspens near summits still blazing gold.

A friend and I energize out of routine for a do-it-now jaunt to the high country, up a river canyon through bright yellow cottonwoods toward Rocky Mountain conifers--Douglas fir, Ponderosa pine, Colorado blue spruce. Resinous-fragrant and wild.

Where the great trees have fallen to landslide or avalanche or lightning or bark beetles of drought years, aspen groves rise first to the opening in the forest.

Quaking aspens, they're called, for the tremulous shimmering of their leaves. Populus tremuloides. Ecstasy on the wind.

Leaves now backlit by autumnal light, green-gold, red-gold, doubloon-gold, some soaring free in gusts of wind shimmering all around us, as clouds scud overhead, harbinger of more snow.

My friend has capacity for stillness, as well as sudden-path adventure, and first sees the mule deer just above us, browsing russet leaves of scrub oak. We go quiet.

Mama watches us, ears erect. Her twitch-tail youngling bounds through the grove. Un-threatened, the deer return to foraging nearby.

I wonder about the coming winter. Wild rose hips and kinnikinick berries have already been browsed by deer and probably elk and black bear. This seems early. Perhaps they know, as we may not, to prepare.

We walk the forest path, swirl along switchback roads, and come down off the mountain in advance of storm.

Next morning, the mountain sacred to the Pueblo and all who love this land, looms snow-covered, peak to plateau, and the range northward, wintry, cloud-crowned.

Watching full moon-set this morning--starlit cold--I marvel at the last summer flowers.

Red Sky at Morning

2011-10-06T08:30:00.000-07:00

Spectacular cerise dawn clouds, and the garden's rose-red-gold-indigo-purple flowers, otherworldly--poised and luminous--perhaps their last moments. Snow is expected tonight.

Red sky at morning; sailors take warning.

The deep adobe Spanish-tiled windowsill is lined with Brandywine heirloom tomatoes, luscious and harvested yesterday en masse. A few more today. Have filled the bird feeders.

I staggered indoors carrying the large pot with tall, fragrantly blooming tuberoses, which are scenting the whole house.

Have been tucking various florifications into bed for the winter, mulching with straw. This climate is way-sunnier than cloud-gripped winters in Maine. Solar oven does yeoman service even at Christmastime.

Pansies planted in autumn astonish by blooming through snow melts and resurfacing in spring. Have tucked in bright pansy beds by the porch and along my neighbor's walkway.

Yesterday I also stopped by our large health food store which supports local organic farmers. Found the last of the roasted peppers, a Southwest/Rocky Mountain treat, and a few unusually pushy people, among general kindlier vibes.

First blast of winter headed this way, so stocking up. Funk for some--weather as personal imposition/inconvenience.

It's hard not to wonder how we'll manage if just-in-time (JIT) delivery falters. Supplies come in from distribution centers, for now, rather than being warehoused by stores. About three days' worth of supplies on hand. Shelves can fear-empty quickly in advance of hurricanes and such.

Root cellars with potatoes, winter squash, pumpkins, carrots, grains, beans and apples come to mind.

Had an interesting chat with a county commissioner friend yesterday. He had read
http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2008/06/7-fat-years-7-lean.html and spoke with nostalgia about his childhood--the eleven-member family's three acre garden, milk cows, chickens, their well-filled root cellar.

His industrious mother (and children) harvested their own fruit trees, then went "havers", picking neighbors' fruit, each family sharing in the bounty.

Another friend is enticing me to start up a community garden, come spring. We'll see if currently fallow ground is made available.

And then? How best to encourage folks through grunt work portions of the journey from soil-preparation, seed-planting and mulching, weeding and watering, to harvest.

Seed-Saving & Barter

2011-09-29T04:12:00.000-07:00

All over the world gardeners walk the land in the cool of the morning, noting the best plants of the season. At harvest that seed is saved, and some, but not all, will be planted the following year.

Farmers and gardeners live the generational knowledge that crops can fail, and seed most be held in reserve for replanting.

In human history of turbulent weather and earth changes, peoples forced by starvation "to eat their seed corn" either moved on to richer lands, or stole the crops of others, or didn't make it.

Enter Monsanto, the corporate-blight attempting to destroy locally-adapted heirloom seed stocks, by imposing monoculture of genetically-tortured seed. Which must be purchased anew each year from Monsanto.

Farmers, generally sensible folk, have not lost their minds, though many have lost their independence and livelihood to Monsanto.

Thousands upon thousands of competent farmers in India have lost their hope--crop failure, un-payable debt, and no seed saved, thanks to the GMO juggernaut. They terminate that danse macabre, by drinking Monsanto agri-poisons.

Yesterday I sat on the porch swing with a lap of dried winter squash seed from the Pueblo. Seed saved from time out of mind, through drought and frosts, generations of careful harvest.

I had bought the apricot-colored, soccer-ball sized squash in October, and scraped out the seedy pulp from the orange flesh of the longest keeper--eaten in July!

I rubbed each seed to separate it from the papery covering, and have a jarful of plump, luminous teardrop-shaped seed. Wealth of an ancient sort, which can grow and be shared.

The garden is tumbling bounty of luscious heirloom tomatoes, "brandywines." An old mountain lady, a matriarch of Appalachia, had taught me to save tomato seed by smearing the juicy interior of the best fruit on a paper towel or napkin.

When dry, the paper is tucked into a sealed jar, and (some of) the seed planted in spring. Some will be held in reserve, just in case.

Great splashes of color cascade down the rock wall of the large round center garden--scarlet gleam nasturtiums, much-loved by honeybees and humming birds and an astonishing moth--compact body and wings striped--bigger than a bumblebee, smaller than a hummer. And very busy.

I gathered plump nasturtium seed they've fertilized, and seed of Grandpa Ott's morning glory, royal purple with a burgundy star. Am letting the sweet peas go to seed now after months of delirious fragrance.

Have just had a peek at the Pleiades, and the scent of tuberose fills the garden. When the plants die back, tropical not mountain-al, I'll dig the bulbs and save them as perfume-trove for next spring planting.

A friend with marvelous handyman skills will come today to help me with chores which flummox this female--repairing an old, old, comfy rocker, a thrift shop find; sanding and painting a rust spot on the old car, from my backing into a cottonwood while tenting in Pagosa Springs.

He gawked at the monster fruit tree which nearly buried me, and will help me trellis a massive wisteria, saving me from my own exuberance.

I, in turn, have mended a sweater for him, and have prepared serious "eats." Barter lives.

As governments careen into more obvious bankruptcy and pillage of the Commons, I suspect more and more quiet exchanges of skills and goods will under-gird local economies.

We Steal It

2011-09-24T07:23:00.000-07:00

I know better than to hold grudges. And yet have circled, dog-paddling old cess.

It comes of trusting never-enough energies--a life lesson as shnooks--playing tiddly-winks and patty-cakes, unaware, while others play chess.

On a planetary level, whole groups of peoples are p*ssed--having trusted bureaucrats and CEO's to perform as glitterati public servants for the common good--having trusted predators.

We make money the old-fashioned way: We steal it.

In my own microcosm of that life lesson, I realized I was still doing outrage-visitations to old memory, of costly personal betrayals.

Potentially, a transformative process, from belly-up despair to getting energized...

Occupy Wall Street!.. Start bank-runs... Globally, the ripped-off are taking to the streets.

I took myself, and my logjam of umbrage, to pastoral counseling, a wiser head. I was not only toxing my own heart, but binding others to past behavior, in a bondage of unforgiveness.

Finally, delusions and attendant resents must go, the might-have-beens, with all the paradigm-ripping uproars which follow.

Then we can dream new life, new worlds, into being.

Without vision, the people perish.

Can You Spare Some Change?

2011-09-11T04:09:00.000-07:00

I attended a live theater screening of the Obama inauguration--a thrilling moment in US history--the Statue of Liberty nation now mature enough to elect a black man.

The audience was full of ecstatic, transported progressives, many of them my friends, who had voted for "hope and change" and the end to wars of aggression.

In the (s)election, however, I'd opted for a Ron Paul write-in, likely never counted.

I, too, had marched against the launch of the Iraq war, and had stood felt-lined-booted in snow drifts for weekly Peace Vigil. Held aloft pithy placards dissing Bush malignancies--with Quakers, Buddhists, Episcopalians, agnostics.

A small huddled community meme up against a media imprimatur of terror-repetitions and patriotism.

A guy showed up every week across the street with much red, white and blue, and contempt for peace-wusses. "Support Our Troops" his signs read.

Quaker, etc. echo: "Yes, Support Our Troops; Bring Them Home."

The telecast theater of inauguration, on a cold January day, began with the emergence of underlings onto the platform, the winning team coalescing.

Obama's first appointee, Rahm Emanuel, emerged like a victor, glad-handing and gloating, a fellow product of the Chicago political machine.

Chicago-Obama, pre-occupied with gravitas, gave the country the repetition of "hope" and the relief of oratory skills. After the global embarrassment of Bush, a candidate's ability to form complete sentences was itself celebrated.

Rahm Emanuel's strutting cock-o'-the-morn had seemed to set the carnival-barker undertone, the P.T. Barnum verity:

"There's a fool born every minute."

I watched Obama's slick NLP crowd-manipulation--and the oddly docile mass of spectators--and felt ill with apprehension.

Buddy, can you spare some change?

9/9/11: Lucrative Towers-path to Power

2011-09-09T09:14:00.000-07:00

"My God, it's the Reichstag fire!"

The guy who shot me the graphic of first jet piercing first tower, had shorted the market before the 2nd plane hit. I was in a private cyber-chat with day traders, among much savvier high rollers.

Aghast, I just managed the appalled reply above.

What's the Reichstag fire?... As Hitler was amassing goons and stalking his dark throne of power, the German Parliament building in Berlin was torched.

And blamed on the Bolsheviks... Convenient, timely.

This anarchy and loss of "Ordnung" terrorized and galvanized the German populace, despite those who warned against Hitler's designs.

Save us... Restore order. Take on dictatorial powers. Please. Safety above all.

The US equivalent, being the carte blanche, and Orwellian-named, Patriot Act and Homeland Security

It is now generally thought that Hitler devised an effective, time-tested op: Create-problem/proffer-solution. His Brown Shirts likely torched the Reichstag building, opening the path to absolute power and attempt at world dominance.

Which leads me to the Bush administration:

Shrublet, the monosyllabic, frat-boy president... Cheney whose persona evokes hissing in the catacombs... Rumsfeld, who as CEO of the corporation responsible for Aspartame--the sweetener and neuro-toxin--strong-armed the FDA into approving a poison.

Rumsfeld, as Bush's Defense Secretary, also made a wee announcement late on 9/10/01, after the nightly news, that 2.3 Trillion dollars of Pentagon monies... were unaccounted for. The dual-citizenship Comptroller of the Pentagon suffered no repercussions and is safely ensconced in Israel.

The news of the "shortfall" was safely buried with the imploded towers. Onward in the patriotic march to resource wars of liberation and retribution.

Hitler scapegoated Commies, Jews, Gypsies and political dissidents. The West, in the contorted persons of Bush and Blair, scapegoated Islam.

And political dissidents.

Horse-Whisperer

2011-09-02T05:30:00.000-07:00

Just as "Buck" began, we heard hard, soaking rain on the museum's adobe roof, and it rained the whole time.

People had driven up the river gorge all the way from Santa Fe to see it. One woman arrived on horseback and tethered her mare to a spiraled, wooden portal column in the museum garden.

More people came than could fit in the auditorium; a second showing has been scheduled.

Many men in the audience strolled in wearing Stetsons--quiet way about them, and the slightly bowed legs of growing up, working horses.

Buck, the subject of the film, was consultant to Robert Redford's, "The Horse Whisperer" and served as Redford's stunt double. This documentary of Buck's life won at the Sundance Film Festival.

With his country-quiet-grin, he says Redford showed promise with horses. If the film thing didn't work out for him.

Buck came hard to gentleness. He and his brother were managed as child rodeo and TV stars--by a violent father, an alcoholic grotesque, who beat the boys.

The brothers were rescued by their school football coach and the county sheriff, and fostered by a ranching couple who raised up twenty-three foster sons. The boys were given respect, work and steady love.

Growing up on his foster parents' ranch, Buck made decision to learn gentleness, first with horses, and then with their sometimes troubled people.

He has a loving family of his own now, and community in the wild vastness of ranching country, where he has become all but legend.

When just out of high school, working as a cowboy, he was mentored by the horse-whisperer before him--another surrogate dad--and in turn is mentoring his daughter.

He and horse trailer spend much of the year doing ranch workshops in the high country of the West, helping "horses with people problems."

Dressage big bucks come to learn from him, those who'd tortured their mounts into show ring submission. And working ranchers, who may have to save all year to attend a workshop.

They come to learn "magic"--that a colt can be gentled without the brutality of bronco-busting.

Buck rides like a dancer, horse and man soft-footed on the prairie.

Symbols of Power

2011-08-24T06:42:00.000-07:00

The Washington Monument, that iconic DC-phallus, stands cracked by earthquake, closed for an indefinite time.

Symbols carry emotive power, put to use of course visually and subliminally by Madison Ave--an earnest-looking Bush en-haloed with the stars of office, flags like temple columns around the Commander-in-chief.

Flight deck, leather bomber jacket... Mission accomplished...

All larger than life. And increasingly vacuous in a world of tent cities, and banksters run rampant on a field of greed.

Thinking about the quake-crack in the Washington monument, symbols seem to be giving way all around us. US symbols of power grow less believable.

Rats and bureaucrats fled US government buildings as the 5.9 quake surprised the East Coast.

US peachbacks and stock certificates are looking more and more like 1930's kindling and wallpaper.

Superpower cannon fodder--our young men and women--live grave straits. Sent again and again into the latest sovereign nation targeted for resource-plunder, they serve PTSD, ill-used, as progenitors of horror.

Soldier suicides now exceed deaths in combat.

Does a bankrupt, and increasingly loathed, government dare bring them home? I wonder. A million plus soldiers, trained to battle, dumped into the army of the unemployed?

Long-revered symbols of US power grow less compelling of awe or of comfort (including the WTC imploding into asbestos dust, for starters.)

People count on national symbols as buttress against the unknown.
Symbols need backing by substance, by basics, by food, by genuine hope.

Bureaucrats, brokers, and bankers, those agents of self-aggrandizement, may have over-reached. Hence the funding for jackboots, spying and crowd control weaponry.

Tased and dazed, people are shaken, their faith in the future, in their children's future, appalled. Enter fear, finally rage, and crowd behavior.

...Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free
And the home of the brave...

Tree of Life

2011-08-18T05:54:00.000-07:00

The drumming begins--boomp boomp--heartbeat sound reverberating the morning neighborhood. One drummer, then two, same drum. The tempo increases, a wild almost hoof beat rush, and abrupt silence. Heartbeat paired-drumming begins anew.

My Cherokee/Cree/Algonquin neighbor must be preparing for a sweat lodge.

Am sitting on the edge of a huge hole I'm digging for a flowering tree, my feet on a humongo stone which has to come out for roots to delve deep. I can feel the drumbeat through the soles of my feet.

When I first met my neighbor, I thought, good heavens, The Old Man of the Mountain--his profile reminded me of the New England crags, now fallen, a stone profile which seemed to brood over game trails and native villages of long ago.

He spoke to me in Cherokee, to my great delight, though my blue-eyed self is too far removed from great grandmother time to have learned that lineage lingo.

The tree, twelve feet tall in a twenty gallon pot, towers above me. I sit panting by the elephant pit I've been digging with a pick axe these last two hours. I've clearly lost my mind, though not yet at least, my sense of humor.

(I've taken on a landscaping job; she's decided on a specimen tree. No sapling, no indeed. Quick results wanted.

Things next happen quickly. I've gone reconnoitering to a nursery and walk the tree lines. Pondering said spectacular tree, I trot my sweaty, grubby gardening-self up to the checkout desk, and ask if the crab apple could be delivered tomorrow?

"It can be delivered, now. It's full moon after all, ideal planting time. The truck can follow you back."

"Yes, full moon in Pisces, a wonderful time to plant." Was tired on arrival, and cannot imagine heaving ho again. "But... I haven't dug the hole yet."

"Not a problem," sniffs the tiny elf of a nursery-woman, reducing the price with a wave of her hand as we speak. "Be sure to root-prune after you slide the root ball out of the pot...")

Tree now lies on its side above the hole. Hole freed of its boulder, imbedded a meter down. After pick axe swinging and much grunting.

Note to elf-woman: Tree does not "slide."

I try easing the tree out of the pot, and promptly fall over backwards into the daisies. I try various schemes to extract the tree, Laurel & Hardy flick auditions, and finally cut the thing free with my pruning shears.

New plan: I'll ease the huge root ball over the side of the pit, intending to drop it neatly between my boots, and root-prune as it rests on the bottom--it being impossible to rotate the tree on the horizontal.

The weight angles over me; tree and I pratfall back into the daisies. Now pinned to the ground, I look up at the blue, blue sky. And consider chiropractic care.

Eventually vertical, I fill rich soil around the roots. A hummingbird flits around tree and me, sipping blossom nectar of the scarlet sage and the violet butterfly bush. I see the first and so far only Monarch butterfly, orange and splendid.

The Los Alamos fires are subdued at last, quenched by fire fighters and the thunder gods of the mountains. Sudden wild showers of the summer monsoons, lightning zinging cloud to earth and pulsing below the anvil-shaped massing of cumulous.

I spend the next day inert, a two-legged blob trying not to moan. But the tree looks grand.

Hobbling out to the porch swing the day following--tuberose in ravishingly fragrant bloom--I remember Maine nor'easters and a long, long journey.

Summertime...
And the living is easy.
Fish are jumpin'
And the cotton is high.
Oh your Pappy's rich,
And your Ma is good-looking,
So hush little baby,
Don't you cry.

One of these mornings
You're goin' rise up singing.
Then you'll spread your wings
And you'll take the sky.
But till that mornin'
There's a nothin' can harm you,
With Mammy & Daddy
Standin' by....

Tent Cities

2011-08-11T07:04:00.000-07:00

Living homeless in a tent last year, I learned up close and personal that I was more fortunate than many. Am not as sanguine as I might have been a couple years ago about things being basically jolly-fine.

Tent cities cum shanty towns are proliferating; people are "living" in trucks on country lanes or under Wal Mart parking lot lights, or in packing crates under freeway overpasses. Passed over by the roar of commuter traffic.

In this mountain town, the community supports homeless shelters and Food Pantry, but many folks feel so shattered by their situations that they occupy twilight outskirts of society.

It will soon be Northern Hemisphere autumn/winter. Days are growing shorter, nights cooler, in the mountains at least.

I tented in snow and sleet. The tent leaked in driving rain. All "normal" functions are then conducted in whatever outdoor weather. It is difficult to eat well cooking on a camp stove or camp fire, without refrigeration. I was lithe and did not need to lose weight; I lost plenty.

But I did have something to eat every day. Many folks in America, land of obesity, cannot count on that. Homeless families are scavenging in dumpsters behind grocery stores and restaurants for food.

This morning, mercifully comfy and under roof, I did laundry in the little hand-crank washer, dried it in the two-minute spin dryer, and hung clean sweet-smelling clothes on the line by starlight.

And felt blessed. An elegant solution, low-tech, and I'm no longer washing clothes, dishes, or me out of a bucket. Thanks be to God. Is it easy to be homeless and keep clean? No, not at all. Yet we feel contempt for the unkempt.

A neighbor of mine is on disability, a government program. The government is bankrupt and lashing about in a draconian manner, social programs facing the axe. Though bailouts and bombers hulk sacrosanct, seemingly.

My neighbor cannot afford vehicle or phone. Nor, I've just learned, adequate food--I had invited her to accompany me to a free concert end of last month. She didn't show.

I ran into her yesterday out walking her gentle one blue-eye, one brown-eyed dog. (There's a Pet Pantry for low income folks here, to be able to feed and keep their companions.)

She apologized profusely for not coming to the concert---It was end of the month, and she hadn't eaten for a couple days, and felt too weak to venture out.

Now, I can and will do something about that, but it's grimmer out there--in foreclosure and unemployment land--than we yet acknowledge as a people.

A Pet Skunk; Value of Money

2011-07-30T06:25:00.000-07:00

Before Platinum Cards for kids, not so very long ago...

"I'm not buying you a skunk."

Nine year old bravado replies: "I'll buy it. I'll save up for it."

"Doing what?" Father lowers the NY Times, curious now.

"Babysitting!" (A neighbor had just offered me gainful employment.)

"At what hourly rate?"

"Fifty cents an hour."

"Do you understand how many hours and diapers it will take you to reach your "de-odorized" skunk?"

I sniffed, insulted. And began saving.

I had a child's understanding of a dollar's inherent value: One hundred pieces of penny candy.

My twenty-five cent weekly allowance would only take me so far: one ice cream cone or a set of jacks or a yo-yo.

A child besotted with the natural world, and ready for the big time, twenty-five big bucks, I began the long trek to my pet skunk.

Mother had been good-natured about window sills and dresser top covered with interesting twigs, rocks, lichens, fallen bird nests, speckled eggs left by fledglings, jars to watch butterflies and pray mantis emerge, fire flies phosphorescing in my room at night, pocket with frog, shoe box with small turtle.

She grew restive, however, as skunk arrival drew near.

Still dreamy and "trailing clouds of glory," I was pondering amusing names: "Petunia, Lily or maybe Frangipani." A small pink collar and leash?

Mother suggested, "Stinkweed."

I could not imagine that a company, advertizing in a child's magazine, might defraud a child. Father could imagine it very well. While he did not demand their Dun and Bradstreet rating, he did imply that the company might not be top drawer. He mentioned the word, crooks.

Having done my research at the library, I had filled out the request form: "Baby, Female." Such, I'd learned, could be domesticated like a kitten or a puppy, and would even walk companionably on a leash. I was enchanted.

My sources cautioned against the other gender and an older animal...

We heard scuffling and stamping noises through the drilled holes of the delivered packing crate. Also, a distinctively musky smell seeping into the living room.

Mama: "Out on the porch."

Father went for a crowbar, and prized off the lid part way to a screeching of nails.

I was bouncing up and down to see. "Hand me the fireplace gloves," he said, never taking his eyes off the opening to the crate.

The lid came off. He reached down to the bristling mass of fury with the white stripe down its back, stamping its forepaws, rear-end foremost, tail raised, though scent gland at least removed.

Father lifted out the full grown skunk, all in blur of thrashing, and suggested a flower name which had never crossed my mind:

"You might want to call your skunk, Sweet William."

Critters & Plenty

2011-07-27T17:48:00.000-07:00

Munching a windfall apple, I watch a hawk laze on updraft. A cool, sweet morning in the shade of the summer apple tree. Am watering a neighbor’s garden. He’s away to the high country on business.

His land here is blessed with acequia water-wealth, second growth alfalfa like green-gold across the valley. My neighbor is already barn-rich with bales stacked to the eaves. I remember my farm long ago when I smell the hay.

In this drought world of meager pasture, he’s planning to buy more cattle, cheap, when the glut comes on the market. A lot of dry land ranchers won’t have hay--or be able to afford it--to overwinter their herds. They'll have to "downsize."

What land will support, does change--with seasons and with migrations of people and animals.

Bears have fled their wilderness habitat in the huge New Mexico burn areas and are showing up in apple trees, dumpsters, and a few in people's kitchens. Floods to the north may trigger other diaspora.

I recently “saw a thang.”

Strolling into the farmers’ market-cornucopia this last week, beautiful flowers and melons and new potatoes and peas and beans and beets and greens seeming to spill out of the bounty of the world, I pulled up short.

Little boys were standing in a circle; one was holding the end of a rope. I caught a glimpse of some critter, maybe a big poodle, the fur dark and curly.

Then I saw the hooves! Cloven, and a forehead topped with horn nubbins like the great god Pan.

I put down a bunch of onions, and told the grower, “Be right back.”

The boy with the rope shrugged his shoulders when I asked if I could touch the baby buffalo—a critter so soft, with longer fur than a poodle, the hump at the shoulders starting to form.

Somehow, it just went all over me, the buffalo herds in the millions, slaughtered for sport. And to starve the Plains Indians onto reservations—for rations of maggoty beef.

I seemed to hear horses of the Blue Coat soldiers, the Army of the West, thundering among teepees on a snowy night--homes and buffalo robes and winter food laid by at huge labor, all torched to ruin.

Women and children and knowledge-holding elders run down, shot down, bayoneted, a people dying in the snow.

Sabers opened the way to plowshares and sod-busters, to Conestoga wagons and freight barges, to "virgin" prairie and rivers of commerce.

On one of those rivers today, a nuclear power plant is flooding.

The little boys with the buffalo baby are staying at a summer camp in the mountains. They're learning to tend an organic farm, to weed, hoe, feed critters, ride horses, shovel manure, gather eggs, milk goats.

Learning what it's like to live under starry skies, and wake to dawn light.

What a circle we’ve come round. What journeys.

Oh Shenandoah, I long to hear you.
Roll away, you roving river.

Away, I'm bound away,

Across the wide Missouri...

US Hubris & Hunger

2011-07-12T08:00:00.000-07:00

Hunger, like hanging, focuses the mind. Hunger is stalking a plundered, once bountiful land.

My elderly Native American friend built the straw bale home with her own hands, out on the mesa, back of the beyond. Her grown son came home to help her install solar panels and a rain catchment system.

After months of fire-smoke and drought, the summer monsoons finally swept through last night. Oddly, the rain did not smell good, but will renew their water storage.

It doesn't take much introspection to wonder if their outhouse-poverty stands as veiled wealth in a USA of mal-investment and bankruptcy, HD-TV's and crop failures.

I recently was invited to share an evening meal with them, an adventure into where-am-I?

She had given me very precise instructions, two-tenths of a mile and so forth. My odometer gave up the ghost that twilight, after I'd crossed the gorge chasm and hadn't a clue.

She had assured me I would not get lost; she'd be aware of my coming.

I did arrive, to the smell of drought-dust, sage and juniper, a pinyon fire in the wood stove, and wonderful kitchen smells. We ate rice and beans, savory, as the mother is an herb woman.

Their food budget, mom and big man son, is $20-40 per week. Forty dollars is an exception, a very good week.

They work brutal hours as crafters, in high altitude sun, wind gusts and now downpour. Chatty browsing by customers, little buying. The economy stinks.

In a surreal parallel universe, however:

Banksters have been rewarded in the gazillions for planetary fraud, and burp contentedly in guarded compounds, as many low- to no-income folks live on food stamps.

That program may not last through to autumn. It may be gutted to save money for bailouts and overseas entanglements. In this drought, fire and flood, domestic disaster year.

The government has plundered social programs, including Social Security, and will now try sleight-of-hand tax increases to mask its power-mongering malfeasance. War, war, more profiteering-war and jack-bootery across the Constitution.

Churches and communities try to take up the slack with Food Pantries. Some cities, instead, take draconian measures to drive away the homeless--in an attempt to deny the need and hide the evidence. Hide the affront to well-fed sensibilities.

Kleptocrats in the Hamptons and the Potomac-Swamp may finally have overreached. They may be rousing a slumbering giant out of torpor.

The hunger of many, a more ravening beast than the greed of a few.

Silent Summer; Nature Gone Missing; Addendum

2011-07-03T06:41:00.000-07:00

Where are the hummingbirds, now few to none? Are we somehow reverberating a Rachel Carson echo, a Silent Summer?

A Fukushima cloud of unknowing?

Hummers usually flock to the high desert and Rocky Mountains, hovering in a whir of wings, slipping long tiny beak and tongue into nectar spurs of wild columbine, the tubular throats of scarlet penstemon, and fuchsia and crimson cactus blossom.

I planted a paradise of flowers for them. Hummingbirds, MIA. This happened before the Los Alamos fires.

I've taken down the feeder. Friends report their feeders remaining full, instead of having to refill several each day, the norm.

And where are the migrating monarch butterflies, now that fragrant milkweed is in bloom?

Last summer, living in a tent, I walked in the cool of the morning along the river. Pink milkweed flooded the canyon with exotic fragrance, in a nimbus of flutterbys. Now none.

It was morning, and it was evening. What bodes this new day?

Addendum:

"...Dr. Dave DeSante, founder of the Institute for Bird Population in Point Reyes, California has explained scientific findings on the relationship between Fukushima fallout on the U.S. West Coast...

"After Chernobyl's radioactive cloud over the U.S. West Coast spring of 1986, Dr. DeSante's research uncovered severe die-off of young birds. Later, researchers Gould and Goldman duplicated Dr. DeSante's results using human mortality data from both U.S. and Germany. They found that the "young, the old, and those with weak immune systems were the main casualties...

"His findings included a 63-64% decrease in all bird species during the period that Chernobyl iodine fell in the United States...

Related to depopulation, Dr. DeSante states, "In a simplistic sense, if more than 875 million warblers die, populations will decline."

http://www.examiner.com/human-rights-in-national/baby-death-spike-w-canada-blamed-on-parents-not-radiation?CID=examiner_alerts_article

Los Alamos Wildfire, Murk Update

2011-06-27T07:32:00.000-07:00

Smoke plume seen from space

Wildfires are roaring toward the Los Alamos Nuclear Lab, near Santa Fe (translation: "Holy Spirit.") The fires are leaping ahead 1/2 mile, now one mile from the Lab. The facility and homes in the surround have been evacuated; National Guard called in.

I live north of there in cooler mountains, and woke this morning choking on the smoke. Heavy haze to the south.

The mountains by afternoon have disappeared into fire-smoke-pall. It's difficult to breathe; bronchial seal-bark coughing.

Does the haze carry HazMat substances? Plutonium, for example? Dunno--all's silent on the southern front. Is no news, gov-news? Hush-hush.

Los Alamos Nuke Lab has been wanting to expand its plutonium pits for nuclear warheads--more, more, never enough. Spare no expense--no matter how monstrously the cost may metastasize.

But the "natives are restless"--the facility now, and the expansion planned, squat precariously on an active earthquake fault line. Surrounded by old volcanoes. Big uproar from sensible citizens.

We now learn that 30,000 barrels of plutonium, solvents, contaminated gear are stacked three-high on a cement slab, and protected by--wait for it--fabric tents. The fire is a road away.

Los Alamos has also dumped radioactive detritus in two canyons on the property; the combustible trees are highly radioactive. If they burn, they liberate their rad-burden into the atmosphere--in which we live and breathe.

The Pueblo ten miles distant wonders if their location is safe? Officials paid to obfuscate, do so. No worries, mate. The town of Los Alamos is already evacuated.

The facility itself is endowed with high IQ nuclear physicists. Well-funded and apparently undeterred by much common sense.

Oppenheimer, progenitor of the Manhattan Project--the bomb, the bomb--died of cancer. After witnessing the first above-ground nuclear blast, he quoted the Bhagavad Gita: "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Mainstream news refers to Los Alamos as our "premier" nuclear lab. The encroaching, we hope not engulfing, wildfire may change the dynamic of nuke industry carte blanche--to impose itself on land and people.

Assuming, this particular facility does not burn to the ground--its legacy hubris, bomb building and planetary mayhem.

Later: Closer to home, I have frog-croak bronchitis. The Los Alamos murk blows denser.

I'm checking on visibility across the valley, which is all but nil, when a neighbor appears at the front door, her face puffy with crying.

"Can you lend me three dollars? I saw your green gardening Wellies by the door, and thought this must be where you live."

"Sure, come sit. What's up?"

"I've run out of my prescription. With three dollars, I can get it filled at WalMart and pay for the bus."

"How can that be enough?"

"I'm on Disability. It's for an anti-depressant. I've been on one for forty years."

"Prozac? How about we go get it filled now so you can feel better. I have an errand anyway and can take you. Let's just go."

"No. The system won't let me get it till tomorrow."

"Well, for goodness sake. You know what, it's hard right now. For starters, it's hard to breathe, and it's kind of scary all around. About the best we can do is try to stay grounded, and try for a sense of humor."

She's sitting in the porch swing and looks out at the blooming garden. Wipes her eyes, nods.

We'll go in the morning, probably having to use headlights on the old Wolwo. We'll go after I water the garden at dawn, breathing through a face mask.

Warm Days of Fruitfulness

2011-06-21T09:38:00.000-07:00

When Krakatoa blew, global telegraph cable had just spanned the seas, and wires the continents. It was a globally-telegraphed event with the immediacy of volcano-induced, luridly spectacular sunsets worldwide.

People were linked in shock at the magnitude of the devastation, something more huge than Empire.

A prequel awareness perhaps to the consciousness-jolt of our small sea-blue planet as seen by astronauts from space.

Today is the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the beginning of the warm languorous days--picnics, fireflies, hummingbirds, and burgeoning gardens. Sweet peas are in bloom in my small nook, fragrant roses, and soon regale lilies.

I remember the disorientation of leaving blossoming lilacs in Maine for the winter storms and dark starry nights of New Zealand. Winter Solstice then, in June.

This Solstice is a different critter from any I've known. I've deep-dug my wee garden, enriched it with horse poop and kelp, mulched it with straw. It's fruitful. It is also anomalous, in a time of crop failures comparable to the Great Depression.

The US is gripped by spreading, catastrophic drought, wildfires, and in a cognitive dissonance, river floods from melting snows.

Overarching this continent and spreading, is the jet stream elephant in the global living room, the media blackout and ongoing fallout from Fukushima--an eerie imprinting of our connectedness to one another, while a toxic paradigm works its way out.

And yet, standing stones mark ancient Solstice celebration, the progression of seasons in our time on earth--earth the beautiful, the cyclically bountiful.

http://www.drought.unl.edu/DM/monitor.html

Where Does Plenty Go?

2011-06-10T13:14:00.000-07:00

Much of gardening is metaphor--cutting out deadwood which won't fruit; knowing weeds from flowers; learning the cycles of lean years--snow falls on orchard blossom; rain does not fall on planted seed.

Within that humility of larger forces, gardeners also show up, in the coolness and quiet between night and morning. Owl calls fade and sometimes the dawn-veil thins to land and sky aglimmer.

Betwixt time quiet, watching and listening, an unspoken pedagogy.

Plenty and sudden less-ness cycles are normal, though we forget to prepare for them, and in the thrill of muchness, help the down-slope along.

Wildfires are currently raging through dry land juniper, pinyon and sagebrush. Fire-haze is spreading through the Rockies.

My auto mechanic fumed indignant about fires left to burn out of control: "With so many people out of work, for God's sake send in a brigade. A team pissing on the perimeter would be a start, and better than the nothing that's been happening."

He looked embarrassed. "Excuse me," he added, being a gentleman.

"Aridzona," is aflame, that make-believe of aquifer-watered golf courses and non-native pollen-strewing trees, a harshly beautiful land, where many had moved for the once-clear desert air and mild winters.

"Snowbirds" found winter waiting this year, however, frost and bitter cold. It's hard life-learning for us to grasp that not all can be controlled to suit human whim.

America, the bountiful, the vast, sea to shining sea, led conquering people to believe there were no limits, but those imposed by barbed wire and straight-line planting. Trampling buffalo in the millions had to go, and nomadic peoples. Plains and valleys contracted to fenced quadrangles.

Nature doesn't seem to do predictable straight lines, more like meanders along river banks and roundnesses-- "fairy circles" of mushroom mycelium, or circles of redwoods sprouted from the mother, ancient tree.

It's tempting to dwell on "noble savages," here millennia in "virgin land." In fact, experiments in excess are a cyclical human phenomemon.

In a few generations of unusually bountiful rainfall, Chaco Canyon, rich with trade-able turquoise, built and later abandoned stunning homes and ceremonial structures.

Chaco, burgeoning-populous beyond the land's ability to support, was over-farmed and de-timbered in the time of plenty.

When rains failed again and again, not even turquoise and brilliant crafter skills could magic food out of drought. The land returned to its bottom line reality, cactus and dry washes, lizards and coyotes, rattlesnakes.

Many thousands of years earlier, Native Americans had also hunted big game mammals to extinction, saber tooth tigers, wooly mammoth "heffalumps," a prototype of horse.

As later New Englanders would plunder the seas, for whales. We count on bounty and tend to over-reach.

In our withering twenty-first century economy, my friend at the Trading Post reports that an eleven dollar sale now constitutes a good day. Many galleries are going under. Whoopie-spending has dried up.

"Be sure to check out doings at the church," he said, "though they might put you to work. Yesterday they had so many volunteers, couldn't get a thing done." He laughed. "Busload of college girls who stood around in bunches, and..."

"Uh, talked?" I asked.

"Yeah, that about covers it. Guys mixing the mud got pretty exasperated. Like trying to herd chickens."

The old massive adobe church hulks close by, one Georgia O'Keefe and her confreres had set to canvas.

It's the time of the annual "re-mudding." Straw and sifted brown clay powder are water-mixed with hoes and troweled anew on the walls and buttresses and towers of the church. Doing-love and tending.

Adobe not tended returns to the earth--the mud plaster eventually melts away in summer downpours. Sun-baked bricks are exposed, and they, too, soften back into mound; winds blow and level the dust back to itself.

I walk home along the flowing acequia, overhung with fruit trees, box elder and cottonwood. Native choke cherries (wine and jam) are fruiting bountifully despite late snows. Few other fruits made it in this year's cycle of plenty, and not so much.

Speaking Toads & Diamonds

2011-05-25T15:07:00.000-07:00

"You don't have to go to Kathmandu to get enlightenment; you can find it here. The Gorge is sacred to my people."

I look up startled, at this opening line from a stranger. I had of course lived homeless in the Rio Grande Gorge, tented there.

I am puzzling over the high, fine energy of her turquoise and bead-work when she speaks to me. She is, it turns out, a Native American Medicine Woman.

Not all, as it seems.

As a child, I was much moved by a fairy tale called, "Toads and Diamonds"--we meet a veiled stranger and glimpse energy made manifest--in a child's book of diaphanous Pre-Raphaelite illustrations which had belonged to my mother.

As the tale unfolds, a somewhat repellent, bent and screechy-voiced crone asks a young woman at the well for a drink of water. The girl is gracious and pleased to pour water freshly drawn for the granny-woman.

The crone transforms to a radiant fairy and blesses the girl's sweet voice--from this day forward when she speaks, jewels and flowers will tumble from her lips.

The girl returns home. She attempts to tell her story--in a shower of rubies, fragrant roses and pearls--of meeting a Fairy Godmother.

Her (naturally wicked) sister, enraged at the blessing given another, does not stay to listen to the full account. Snatching up the pitcher, she storms to the well.

Hasty sister is then approached by a crone, whom she rebukes, refusing to give her water. The fairy leaps to life as avenging fury, and curses the girl with like energy. Whenever the girl speaks from this day forward, toads and vipers will erupt from her mouth.

The hidden nature of the stranger had intrigued me, that we may not recognize a guest's nature. Which is part of the ancient tradition of hospitality--to wanderers, storytellers from afar, perhaps angels or mystics, their light dimmed for the moment.

A bit different than being duped or betrayed--more a surprise to the upside--a sort of in-body, here-on-earth rapture.

I once obliquely knew a healer, whose heart lived large and quietly. He was a garbageman in Marin County, California, an epicenter of narcissism.

In my work there, I had clients who devoted themselves to never growing old, never visibly aging, via botox, liposuction and face lifts the many. A land of make-believe and never-enough. A land some thought to be a remnant of Lemuria.

The garbageman and I crossed paths many times below dawn-lit Mt. Tam, in the fragrance of lemon blossom and freesia. We never spoke; we'd nod to one another. My heart leaped to meet him.

He moved through high dollar neighborhoods which were a bit murky with the never-enoughness-vibe and with late night drinking, coke-snorting.

He gathered up the refuse of excess; spoke kindly to bathrobes who came out on the front stoop for the morning paper, who ignored him.

He left an astonishing golden light in his wake.

Passing It On

2011-05-17T17:36:00.000-07:00

"Feral kittens are rolling in the ruby chard. There's less than there was."

"They cook well with chard?"

"Kitty-chard stew?" I guffaw and plop down on a Trading Post chair.

"I've dropped by, Mr Curmudgeon, to ask if you're in a good mood. Are you? Sure seem to be a lot of crummy moods out there."

My old friend lived through the Great Depression; knows how to do old-timey skills and loves to share the doing of things. I wander in when I need a touchstone to good sense. And a chortle.

"Oh I'm in fine fettle. Something wonderful happened.

"What? Tell me--you up to mischief?"

"I may be plotting some."

"Close by?"

"Not exactly--Colorado--may do some archeology this weekend. But that's not my good news."

I settle into the chair, peel out of my parka. Sniff, like I might or might not be interested. Am willing to wait.

A lady doing bead-work on the next table--awl, needle, doeskin--looks at me sideways; winks.

He says, "She like to killed herself with that awl, so I brought in the hammer and section of tree trunk beside her. Show her," he says, "how you do it now..." She lays the soft doeskin on the tree rings, positions the awl for the next bead-hole, and whacks the point of the awl through the hide with the hammer.

"Been doing this so long," he tells me, "you learn six different ways to get anything done."

"Ooh, that's pretty!--those porcupine bristles you've got weaving there for that headdress." I run the palm of my hand just above, shaping the form. Maybe for a Corn Dance coming up.

"Funny you should mention that headdress." Looks at me over his glasses. Takes a sip of tea. "That's my good news, and it's the best in long years of waiting." He arranges some tools on his work table.

"Well?"

"Two boys from the Pueblo have asked to apprentice with me, and learn the old ways. One started a month ago. I have him working on several things, and shift him to a new one every little while, so he doesn't burn out."

"Oh my!"

"The skills won't die with me now."

Seed Woman; Food Pantry

2011-05-13T19:51:00.000-07:00

"You the seed woman?" the Pueblo man asked. I was wearing an apron, a gardener's straw hat, and had come to the Pueblo greenhouses to talk with the real seed woman--a round, red-brown Master Gardener.

"Seed woman?!" I chuckled. "Used to run a farm; I guess that qualifies. Woman you're looking for may be around the farmers' market building, there by the shade beds."

"I've come for saved seed," he said. "Heard she has some for us." He turned toward the Pueblo gardens, old faded jeans, waist-length black hair tied back with rawhide.

Still some snow on their holy mountain, though not enough. The mayordomos--who see to the care of the high desert acequias and fair distribution of mountain spring and snow-melt water--they're plenty worried.

Won't be long before the Pueblo Corn Dances stir across the arid Southwest, the drums like heartbeat. Prayers in the kivas, underground, round ceremonial spaces, singing deep in the earth.

Will their blue corn tassel and fruit this year? The land so dry, and the air so Fukushima'd?

Food and water, a land's real wealth, are closer to the marrow of living, than buy-buy-buy would have us believe.

I had come to the Pueblo after helping out at the weekly Food Pantry housed in the adobe church where I sing. It's community-supported and volunteers show up, snow, wind or whatever to do the grunt-work.

Early week we'd measured two cup dry quantities into little sacks-- from many hundreds of pounds of Shur-Fine pinto beans, enriched white rice, and oatmeal--each sack stamped with "beans/frijoles", etc. Some kind soul does the stamping of paper sacks as a community service couple times a month.

Doing the packaging was a mob scene, and fun. Just a big gathering of warm-hearted people.

Two Down's Syndrome folks helped, and a young wheel-chaired man with cerebral palsy. His hands were bent inward, but he could help hold things with his forward-pointing wrists. Such amazing eyes he has. Hail to thee, blithe spirit. Twisted body.

Doing the distribution later in the week was a larger-scale mob scene, and disturbing, a glimpse into the stressor-states of no work/no food. For some, no home. Close to 2000 people were helped, single elderly, canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and large families, babies in strollers.

A load of frozen pizzas had been donated, but only enough, for each person or each family, to have one. They could have one pizza, or one can of tuna. I stood handing out sacks of mushrooms, next to pizza detail. It felt like a donnybrook, the shoving and shouting, demanding more pepperoni and cheese for various compelling reasons.

All the food was free, and the labor volunteer. A few people said thank you. Some seemed to be newly out of work and shell-shocked. Some seemed to have been working the welfare system for awhile.

Floods and drought are affecting the planet. How will we behave, those of us who've known plenty our whole lives? How will we behave, if the supermarket shelves stand empty?

Rocky Mts Rad-Report

2011-05-10T11:23:00.000-07:00

Fukushima has apparently belched out another blast of... details withheld.

I was out and about yesterday--our usually exhilarating mountain air had gone foul. My eyes burned; throat hurt; choking cough--those symptoms and a headache all night.

Home again, I made soup with sea veggies, and came to a disheartening decision--I had signed on to help one day a week at the regional CSA (community-supported agriculture) the local organic farm.

In 2010, viscerally speaking, I had lived homeless in a tent; had no garden, and traversed that fear and hunger. I know we face crop failures--Will work for food.

In the plenty of gardens is where my heart lives, and much hope for the future. That stands, despite interim dismay.

I have instead sent regrets to my farmer friend for the year, as the safe-eating of fallout-food is in grave doubt--I had already stopped planting veggies in my own garden.

Nor is being outdoors on a bad air day, necessarily sane behavior.

Many of just-us-folks cannot believe that branches of government and government agencies could be actively lying--in an effort to protect their corporate sponsors, i.e., the Nuclear Industry, and GE, who designed the meltdown-Japanese reactors.

We expect benevolent protection of the Commons by corporate entities.

Meanwhile, the EPA has disgraced itself in failing to safeguard public health--by dramatically upping their "acceptable" levels of radiation exposure--and by cutting back on testing for water- and milk- contamination.

They'll report--something--every three months. Next bulletin, August.

A local MD friend is concerned about the radiation-cloud, and the lies by officialdom.

He's ruminating, whether to uproot his medical practice and his family. Should they emigrate to the Southern Hemisphere?

Wrought Iron

2011-05-05T13:10:00.000-07:00

The blacksmith-forging dates from the Land Grant era of Spanish Dons, peons, Indio slaves, Franciscan monks and Jesuits. A squared mandala circle, the eight arms spiraling into fiery curlicue, crossed circle, or fleur-de-lis.

Not a safe time. given Conquista, so windows were elegantly barred.

Removed at some recent point in the past from the hacienda window, I'm doing a stretch of peon-work to clean it up. Grunt work, wire brush and chisel work, to lift encrusted long ago paint and layers of rust, back to beautifully crafted iron.

Beauty being my primary motivator, but my neighbor's stolen cord of firewood, the other. The forged piece was built to protect the window from forced entry. We live in economically fragile times. I'll clean it up; a carpenter will re-instate it.

An odd feeling to be vigilant and not altogether trusting. Ditto, the hammer I tucked under my pillow while the door was off its hinges being primed and painted over a couple days.

In fact, I haven't much to steal, though loveliness is gradually filling the cozy adobe, thanks to yard sale and thrift shop finds. It looks more splendid than it cost.

A sense of safety--which given the times may be illusory--is the theft which is concerning.

Those depressed and brooding, enraged by unemployment, may at some point lose it, lose their sense of common humanity, and lash out. Some have also turned to drugs and drunken bouts, making themselves a wild card in life's game. With apparently nothing left to lose.

The whole predator-based economy has been heavy on my mind--Dons and peons--or today's banksters, foreclosures and indebted servitude.

I learned in Sides' book, Blood and Thunder--vignette accounts of Kit Carson trail-blazing the frontier, when Manifest Destiny overran the West--that New Mexico Territory harbored a dirty little secret...

Slavery.

New Mexicans, both Land Grant and Anglo, loathed the marauding Navajo. The Navajo loathed encroaching New Mexicans. Both camps enslaved the other, stealing women and children.

At the close of the American Civil War, 1865, ending Black slavery, the Federal Army of "Blue Coats" was sent west, into the Plains Indian Wars.

They herded aboriginals into ever smaller territory; or failing that, they exterminated buffalo on which the tribes depended, and starved or exterminated the tribes themselves.

Much was made of white captives, and freeing them from savages, while thousands of Navajo slaves served ranches and households in the High Desert. And Pueblo slaves built the Spanish Missions.

One group of humans savaging other humans--In God's name how is this justified? Comforts created on the cheap? A "superior" race makes chattel of a "lesser" one?

Human-to-human brutality uproils across time and vengefully self-perpetuates--Crusaders impose the cross on the Infidel. Saladin beats them back. Special Forces torture "ragheads."

A bogeyman, a less-than-human, often ethnic, to blame like long-dead Osama bin Laden, the CIA-operative of mujaheddin days. It boggles the mind.

So, the Spanish and beautiful wrought iron will be re-installed, to protect my window on the world, and I'll go on treating my neighbors as kin.

Yesterday I went to close the ranch gate below the house for my neighbor, who was checking on the horses. We leaned on the tailgate of his truck to talk. He knows I enjoy the critters and visit with them, keep an eye on them.

"You watch yourself around that strawberry mare," he warned. "She's got a pecking order thing going. How 'bout I leave you a sack of oats. When you go fool with 'em, you can feed out a bucket to the four. Maybe let that mare eat first, then never turn your back on her."

I laughed; said I would. Grinned.

Not all the fruit trees lost their bloom to the snowstorm. It's spring.

Hummingbirds & Butterflies

2011-04-23T06:47:00.000-07:00

Snow tonight and fruit trees are blooming.

Imagining hummingbirds, I prepare for their annual northward migration. They fly to these high desert mountains for the feast of nectar-spurred columbine, scarlet penstemon, blooming cactus. And they visit the many humans who love them and plant flowers, set out feeders.

I've built a "tepee" of ten-foot heavy poles, "latillas", eight of them, leaning the first against a shorter ladder and securing the top with bailing wire. (Can one woman trudge in with the tree trunk poles, and manage this? Yes, despite slapstick moments of leaning tepee and rickety ladder.)

I've made one spacing between the poles a bit wider for cozy entry--two adults or several children--and when the weather settles, I'll plant scarlet runner beans. The blossoms are a hummingbird attractant. It is then possible to sit inside when the vines have covered the "trellis" and sip tea within a whir of iridescent wings. The males are ruby-throated.

I gathered horse poop for the beans in the greening pasture, with the horses checking my pockets for treats and nickering.

Also preparing table, as it were, for monarch butterflies who migrate to milkweed blossoms fragrant along streams and acequias. They feed on pollen of daisy family plants, as well, which are easy to grow. The skylight is beaming down on small flower seedlings for butterflies.

Tonight, much singing of plainsong chant at the old adobe church in celebration of the Great Vigil of Easter. The church universal and often contemptible was savvy enough to absorb pagan festivals of spring, the celebration of new growth, new life, fertility.

Speechless

2011-04-19T16:58:00.000-07:00

The man touches two fingers, right hand, to the brim of his leather hat, then gives me a thumbs up--I'm picking up road trash.

He's lean and ruddy-cheeked, maybe Anglo, but there's such an interesting mixture of peoples here, it's hard to know--Spanish, Italian, Irish, Indio, Sephardic Jew, Anglos of all descriptions.

Little bit later--I haven't moved far, as the weekend junk-tossers had chucked plenty along that stretch--he strolls back. Raises a hand in greeting. I nod, emptying water out of a plastic bottle, and drop it in the sack.

He stands beside me and pulls out a medallion from around his neck. Pretty. Points to himself.

"You made it," I venture. He nods, pleased.

Shows me a small recatangular sheet of copper or bronze with paper folded over it--a fine series of drawings, with the beginning of transferring the sketches to the metal.

"Is that acid-etched?" I ask. Big grin in response.

By now, I'm wishing I'd learned some ASL, American Sign Language. His right shoulder by my left, he extends his arms in front, and pulses his hands open and closed four times.

"Forty?" He nods yes.

"Address of your studio?" Vigorous head shake in the negative.

Squatting down on his heels, he grabs a twig and scratches, 40 days, in the dirt. Smooths it out with his hand, a craftman's hand, high-energy.

"Forty days till when?" I'm beginning to feel unusually dense.

He writes, day 7, in the sandy soil.

"This is day seven of forty days? Yes?.. Yes. Are you fasting?"

No, he carefully marks down. Day 7 of quiet.

"Oh! You're fasting from noise! Is that right?"

Yes... to quiet the chatter in my mind. He smooths it out, and begins another line. The wind is blustery. I say each letter out loud as he forms it, hoping to understand before a 55mph gust blows the word away.

I want to hear higher... a car drives by and the line is obliterated.

He begins a new word, consc...

"Consciousness?!"

He lets the twig fall and looks at me. With index finger he spells out, Gracias.

"De nada," I smile. We both stand. I dust off the seat of my jeans, as by then I'd settled onto the ground.

The man offers his hand; I pull off my work glove. Taking my hand, he bows over it.

I touch left fingertips to my breastbone lightly, and turning the open hand toward him, say in parting, "We'll meet again."

Planting by the Moon

2011-04-15T08:07:00.000-07:00

My mother's Southern family raised bountiful gardens and put food by for winter. They knew their way around the Farmers Almanac; they planted by the moon.

Now, I had tasted that bounty, and learned what I could as a little girl from my grandfather, osmotically mostly. I showed up; paid attention to the doing of things, and never forgot.

But then, but then--I studied grad school science in its ambiance of skepticism-cum-contempt for any ancient understanding, for generational knowledge passed down the centuries.

"Better Life through Chemistry" being the meme, and Monsanto, the monstrosity.

Nonetheless, I had also read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and taste doesn't lie, though governments do. Organic food tastes better, and just made more land-sense.

I decided to test out the Farmers Almanac, when I started up my organic farm.

Was it valid for food production and harvest, or just quaint? (My neighbors, beguiled into chem-farming and sprays by the County Agents, thought I'd lost my mind to farm land and raise critters organically.)

Each season, I would plant same seed, in the same good and ever better soil, at the right time by the moon, or the wrong time. Then watch to see results.

What does that mean? Broad brush strokes: Waxing moon, above ground crops; waning moon, root crops.

Seeds absorb water to sprout--Water signs, Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces, are fertile. Ditto, Taurus, Libra.

Fire signs, Aries, Leo, Saggitarius, are barren. Ditto, Virgo.

When I planted seed at "wrong" times by the moon--interesting developments, and expensive if done large scale: The planting would simply not sprout at all, or produce few plants, spindly, blight-prone, less yield--plants you end up culling.

Harvesting root cellar crops for winter is best done in a barren sign, waning moon. So, to check this out, I'd also harvest some in water signs, waxing moon--and got rot in storage! I learned my lesson.

Early March, 2011, fruit tree buds began stirring, and so did I--planting spring veggies in Pisces after the New Moon.

Then Fukushima blew, and radioactivity began girdling the globe. I wondered if I should focus on flowers, instead of food?

Lovely sugar snap peas I'd planted, and spinach are up, ruby chard and raab. Heirloom tomatoes have made their second true leaves under the skylight indoors, as the nights are still below freezing.

Meanwhile, the US "Environmental Protection Agency" (EPA) is only checking for radioactive-iodine, not cesium, plutonium and strontium, which have entered the devil's jet stream stew.

US rad-monitoring stations in thirty-seven cities are "down," apparently to remain so. EPA--protecting the "nukular" industry at all costs, fiscal or human.

How will we know if water, milk and food are safe for consumption? Citizen Geiger Counters?

During my long tenting sojourn in the high desert boonies, I had come down out of the mountains at intervals to buy produce at an organic farm. One of the rangers, a kind man, had shown me the way there.

Farmer and I became love-of-land-based friends. I'd recently signed on, to help out on the farm one day a week this growing season. ("Will work for food.")

Had a wee chat with him yesterday about field crops. Will produce be safe to eat this year?

He's a man of hard work and common sense. The farm is his family's livelihood. He supplies wide community with CSA (community supported agriculture) shares; sells at farmers markets, to a big health food store, and to restaurants. A careful and successful business man, doing a work of service.

He'll start planting this coming week: "Maybe I'll just win blue ribbons at the County Fair this year," he said, "if we can't eat what I've planted."

Meltdown

2011-04-06T04:52:00.000-07:00

I have young friends, on the trip of their dreams through Southeast Asia. They and their families continue to imagine that Japan in nuclear meltdown is a local, contained tragedy. The younglings, in remotest boonies, send chirrupy email notes about their great meals and outdoorsy adventures.

Yes, I've tried to get across that we have entered uncharted territory beyond Chernobyl. Radiation levels at Fukushima are now described as "immeasurable" while frantic workers try to stuff reactor leaks with sawdust and newspaper.

It may be that now we're entering a time when edible food, potable water, and healthy children (just ask the DU'd countries) constitute wealth.

Stashed gold and silver might secure some of it. So traders and doomsters have hoped. Priorities are shifting from national incompetence and outright lying, to community, aghast at harm to Commons.

Finally, at the end of the day, do gold and silver build port-in-a-storm security? Or guns and ammo, guns and butter, another hot topic?

Healthy food, water and children may become a more focused global dream. The West has taken those gifts for granted; has in fact, taken them.

In Japan, the mother sea is rendered lethal with massive reactor-vomitus, a nuclear cess. The seas move, and lap other shores.

Ahoy the jet stream---Radioactive water is flowing out of taps in Tokyo, and into kitchen sinks and bathtubs in Canada and the US--first hitting rainwater-monitors at UCBerkeley and now spreading across North America, Europe, Russia, China. We are experiencing a global, not a local event.

Pasture and hence dairy products are becoming contaminated, first noted in Washington state. Will fallout-affected field crops be edible? If not edible, for how long?

In areas of Germany, wild game, mushrooms and wild berries are still too contaminated for consumption, years after 1986 Chernobyl fallout. The UK still monitors contaminated sheep-grazing lands.

My friends, blithely in the thick of it, write back travelogue.

Japan, the EU, and God forgive them, the US Environmental Protection Agency have dramatically raised radiation levels, deemed safe. (There ARE no safe levels.)

This may protect the nuclear industry, and GE, but not the deliberately uninformed peoples of the earth.

US television broadcasts, in a farce of danse macabre, spent days doing breathless reporting on a snake, escaped from zoo-captivity. Journalistic Job One--divert, obfuscate, entertain.

When another regrettable US president was undergoing a zoo of impeachment, he launched diversionary "Monica missiles." Ohbummer orates and obfuscates the global nuclear crisis with resource-war-missiles, coda to his Noble Piss Prize.

A snake let loose, a snake which goes around and comes around, and will bite all our tails.

Strange awakening for us on earth, and long-awaited, that all life is connected. That's the hope, the task--saner choices as global peoples--food, water, healthy children, a decent life.

Long before I understood hubris and the drive to devour all in its path, the never-enough of power-mongering, I was a child in children's choir. We sang:

"Oh be joyful in the Lord, all ye lands.
Serve the Lord with gladness
And come before His presence with a song.
Be ye sure that the Lord, He is God.
It is He that hath made us and not we ourselves.
We are His people and the sheep of His pasture..."

~Cassandra, signing off.

Singing Requiem

2011-03-28T16:08:00.000-07:00

We stood massed in the adobe choir loft, far in the back of the church, to perform the Requiem Mass of Gabriel Faure'.

I had thought to quietly sing for a friend who has just lost her papa, and went still, feeling resonance building. Diva sopranos jostled for visible positions at the balcony rail.

The church was packed, expectant. The Music Director had suggested at dress rehearsal that we create flowing, enfolding sound where the audience might find uncommon rest.

He stepped onto a stool, gathered us all in, nodded to the organist, and pianissimo, we toned the opening bars. A hush fell over the church.

Requiem aeternum... grant them eternal rest... et lux perpetua... and light perpetual shine upon them.

The Latin toning, like the chanting of om, shifted light within the church; walls grew translucent, opening to the whole green-gold, blue-watered world.

I found myself floating above a black-purplish wound, erupting through earth's atmosphere, writhing upward from Japan. I sang planet-requiem.

The audience, startled at the haunting ending of music, sat silent a long while, then stood and turned to glimpse the disembodied voices; applauded.

Euphoria of performance swept the loft. A tide of babbling singers flowed down to meet the audience, and to chitchat noshing at the choir potluck.

I slipped into the choir room and sat on the floor doing tear-fountain till the church quieted, beauty all around.

Quake Precursors

2011-03-16T10:35:00.000-07:00

Note to Readers: Please network--Practical info re quake-radiation: http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2011/03/radiation-remedies.html

On the night of the Japan mega-quake, I lurched awake, face wet with tears.

For an earthquake-sensitive, it was a brooding, anomalous night. Anomalous, in that I had not experienced the usual precursor physical discomforts. Before the Japan quake there'd been only a foreboding sense of dread the days preceding.

A clair-sentient friend in Maine had also startled awake that night in a state of grief.

The apparent lack of precursor earth-rumblings troubled me. Was this an entirely natural event, I wondered?--curious mind activating, and considering the unthinkable.

Currently, people in high office seem to be operating without much moral compass, but the self-serving--a dedication to the retention and clamping down of power. And dear me, an emergency would be helpful about now, to cover the tracks of economic malfeasance.

So, apologies to those who know I have scientific training; am about to enter the weird and the may-be.

Uneasy about the quake, and remembering high level US braggadocio a few years back about "controlling the weather, and earthquakes," I went still. And went looking.

First, had a look at US Naval presence in the region of the mega-quake. I have family connection to the naval world, and grew up singing, "Eternal Father strong to save, whose arm hath bound the restless wave, who bids the mighty ocean deep, its own appointed limits keep. Oh hear us when we cry to Thee, for those in peril on the sea..."

It was difficult for me to hypothecate wrong-doing by Navy-Blue-and-Gold, but something didn't feel right.

For what it's worth, did not pick up an energy-signature of anything, say, dropped into an ocean trench to perhaps nudge a quake into being. That's not necessarily a data-point, but still curious, I turned attention further afield.

So next, aerial scrutiny for any area of darkness. God knows, we have many. I was looking specifically for obfuscation--such as the black-ops, over-funded portion of American governance which employs corrupted psychics. As do other nations. Silly not to, but it's gift in service of what ends?

I found Alaska deeply disturbing, heavily and darkly veiled, where Angels Don't Play This HAARP. Far in the boonies of military neverland, a huge array of HAARP towers operates, electronic blasts from which have been implicated in the generation of super-storms and earth shocks. Australia had erected an array as well. The recent Queensland epic floods were concerning to some watchers.

I would have preferred to quietly trust in the millions of good-hearted who are not in agreement with targeted harm, till this morning's read of urbansurvival.com

George Ure of urbansurvival, came up with an interesting graph overlaying HAARP activity with seismicity. Blasts from HAARP appeared to be synchronous with a smallish 4.8 quake east of Honshu, and then a big blast synchronous with the 9.0 mega-quake

Maybe nothing, but more to the point, maybe not the last word. Earth-natives worldwide are getting restless, and becoming less tolerant of Big-Brother decision-making

To continue precursor experience, animals are known to predict earthquakes. Whether this occurred in Japan, we don't yet know. There's simply too much chaos and anguish there, too much damage to infrastructure.

As regards animal fore-knowledge of impending earth-rupture, I read an extraordinary book a few years back written by a scientist, who grew up in a German community in the Italian Alps.

When the Snakes Awake refers to the observed phenom of snakes suddenly writhing out of winter burrows to freeze to death on the snow. Hibernating curled in the belly of the earth, they apparently sense some sort of vibration in advance of quake.

The scientist's home village in the Alps was flattened by earthquake; he returned home from South America to help his family. While back, he also experienced a paradigm-shift.

Trained as an observer of data, he seems to have been compassionate as well. He listened attentively to the experience of villagers he knew, knew to be sound of mind.

Farmers are keen observers themselves, of livestock, weather, and wild creatures. They reported precursor behaviors--animals fleeing their enclosures, birds screaming, dogs barking hysterically, fish leaping out of streams and such.

The scientist decided to face ridicule from his peers and record this info, which was consistent all through the affected region. He then went into archives of ancient record--medieval Europe, Spanish accounts of quakes in New World colonies, records from Imperial China and Japan. The book's a worthy read.

Which brings me back to today and possible animal behavior predicting further earth-ripping--to fish swarming in the gazillions off Acapulco. Seismologists are muttering about a West Coast follow-up Biggie, which the disturbed fish patterns may presage:

Was the Japan quake an act of God, or possibly high tech-assisted? Or, have we crossed a threshold into violent-onset earth changes? Did Japan have warning at all from animal sentries? I don't know; we may know one day.

Tidal Wave

2011-03-11T07:17:00.000-08:00

"My fisherman father saved us, the whole family. No one could save the house."

The elderly Native Hawaiian lady and I stood by a fragrant fruiting passionflower vine and a Limburger-cheese-stink Noni. We looked out on the red and black volcanic bay.

Hana, Maui--held intentionally remote by a daunting coastline road through jungle and many one lane bridges spanning mountain cataracts; still, old Hawaii.

I had been watching the light on the water and said, hey, as she walked nearby. We smiled; she said, "Aloha." We talked awhile.

She told me about surviving a tidal wave long ago, which scoured the coast. "We had no warning system when I was a child. All we had was stories told by the old ones."

Her childhood home had been sited just up from the shore, convenient to her father's fishing boat.

The air was very still that day and hot. Her father had leaned a ladder against the house and was up doing roof repairs. The children were playing in the front yard.

Suddenly waters of the entire bay whoosh withdrew out to sea beyond the harbor mouth.

Fish were flopping on the exposed bottom. People ran out into the harbor with baskets to gather the huge numbers of fish and squid. She and her siblings longed to go see. They never had a chance.

"My father stopped work as the sea withdrew, and stood silent for a moment on the roof looking out beyond the bay. He shouted for my mother, and for my brother to come back NOW, as the boy started to run to the shore.

"Dad came quickly down the ladder. Mother came out onto the lanai wearing an apron, interrupted from cooking.

"My dad grabbed me and my brother, like sacks of taro in the crook of his arms. Shouted for mom to pick up the two little ones and shoved her up the hill. She fussed, wanted to go back into the house. He began running, keeping pace with mom. Faster; don't look back.

"I could hear mom gasping to keep up. When we reached the top of the steep hill, we heard roaring behind us. My dad put my brother and me down. We turned, and held hands.

"The tsunami my dad had known was coming swept over the people with baskets gathering fish, over my dad's boat, our house, our neighbors, and half way up the hill.

"We lost everything, except ourselves."

Faberge' Eggs & Want

2011-03-07T19:39:00.000-08:00

The party is not Czarist in opulence--no tiaras or Faberge' eggs--but I feel a sense of foreboding, of 1918. Revolution and utter annihilation of the Romanov Dynasty--vast wealth and ineptitude ending badly

I arrive at the choir party on time, which here means early, and wander amazed through formal gardens, past a waterfall, into a sort of magic, the treasures of the house.

Many lovely original Southwest oils and prints, leather-bound books, a grand silver tea set in the formal dining room, dozens of Toby mugs, Wedgwood, a curio cabinet stuffed with silver oddments--eighteenth century snuff boxes, a tiny tea set, a coach and four.

Most of the walls and every horizontal surface display objets d'art, costly beauty. Outside the walled compound, a sign warns that the property is of course protected against unlawful entry.

I feel a bit thrilled at museum-quality splendor, but also uneasy, given areas of grinding poverty nearby.

The opulent feel of the surround, though within stately adobe, is familiar. A side of my family still lived as though it were the Gilded Age, when I was small. Pater familias exuded position and power.

So, finger bowls and best behavior and little bells rung to summon the servants. I remember how lonely it was in that big echoing mansion--how old money, and connections meant more than heart-connection to people. I've walked a different path.

Is wealth inherently vicious? Not in my experience of interesting people. Though it's easy to work one's self into a state about the current economic gang-bang of the nation's wealth.

I've known great-hearted wealthy people, jolly and generous, including the host at the party.

Ruminating wealth, I work horse poop into a flower bed today. I'll plant sweet peas, intensely fragrant ones. It's now snowing on my handiwork.

Wealth and its lack live cheek by jowl here. "Have you heard about the Land Grant mess?" a friend had asked me at the party.

"You mean Spanish Land Grant? Sixteen hundreds? Time of the Inquisition?" I reply.

"Um. Claims have been filed by heirs of the original Land Grant families, declaring rights to enormous tracts of land. It's all but frozen the real estate market. And people living here have deeds to that land; it was sold long since. When you think about it, if anyone has rights, it's the Native Americans, but they're mostly subdued."

A woman listening, retired and well-to-do, looks frightened. I draw her into the conversation. "Are you affected?" I ask.

"Yes, my home is on contested land, but I OWN it." She looks quietly at me, a newcomer, only recently out of a tent, and continues. "We're the outsiders here. We're the money. Do you know the term 'Anglo' includes whites, Jews and Blacks?"

"Really?" I laugh. "Well, that's a delicious lumping of categories. Do you think we'll ever get over ourselves and realize we're all just folks?"

"You don't understand," she replies. "Anglos are not accepted, except among ourselves. The bad economy is making the comparison more extreme."

The morning after the party, I do my weekly stroll down the lane picking up trash and stop at a Hispanic neighbor's place to ask advice about a source for poles---to tepee scarlet runner beans--a hummingbird haven.

His fruit trees are a tangled mess and it's about time to prune, so while I'm there, we ponder what needs doing.

"Do you have clippers?" I ask. "Hm." He disappears into a shed; comes back carrying loppers. I tell him about snipping out sucker growth and tip-pruning to an outward-facing bud. We do it together, cherries, apricots, apples and plums.

He's been hit hard financially in the bankster-bloat-economy; work is just not coming in. He'll plant a bigger vegetable garden this year.

An elderly woman friend has just bought more ammo for her revolver; a neighbor had a cord of firewood stolen. Before ever leaving Maine, I twice had gas siphoned from my car, and bought a locking gas cap.

While I gather horse poop this morning, I throw out hay for my neighbor's horses. If there's no work, no food, do we go feral? Will we remember to be neighbors? Or Lord of the Flies?

Gated compounds of pawn-able art objects, will they remain safe? Probably not safe, for those in the Hamptons.

Signs of Spring

2011-03-01T05:14:00.000-08:00

Daffodils are sprouting and tree buds have begun to shimmer against cerulean skies, roots delving, sap stirring.

Sugar maples in Maine, stolid in the big drifts, are being tapped for their rising sap, buckets collected in snowy woodland, sweet tree sap boiled down for maple syrup and candy. Folks bundled in heavy coats, caps and mittens stamp their feet against the cold and tend the fire.

Dear friends from Maine had brought me the daffydowndilly bulbs as autumnal house-warming present. They had moved a year before me, from Maine raspberries and balsam fir and a rambling clapboard farmhouse near a loon-haunted lake, to an adobe hacienda, desert-landscaped, at a lower, hotter elevation than here.

I found the daffodil sprouts yesterday, a halcyon day, when I was dumping clothes rinse water on the flower beds, the cottage garden having been my first order of business on moving in. Dig down, dig deep, make fertile soil, root in mountain valley far from all I'd known.

The day my friends came, bearing spring bulbs, we bundled up against chilly canyon winds, and went walking out on the Rio Grande Gorge bridge, which shakes with each passing truck and sings in the wind.

We leaned goggle-eyed over the railing, a day of days, startled and delighted to see a herd of Rocky Mt. big horn sheep grazing by the river. Others browsed rougher fare, leaping on ledges of the russet canyon wall. Light rump, tawny hide, the males with massive horns which curl back round, gray and rough.

A solidly-built man from the Pueblo, long braid, felt cowboy hat, was watching them. He comes often, he remarked, for a glimpse, a close look, something few of us ever see. He nodded, "It kind of steadies me to know they're still around."

"Some German folks visited the Pueblo," he said. "They asked if we had to have a visa to go into the white lands." He guffawed, more bitter than jolly. "I told them, it's the whites who need the visa. We've lived on this land for thousands of years."

Kiwi Quake

2011-02-22T04:13:00.000-08:00

Earthquake sensitives pre-sense tectonic stressors grinding in the earth. It's about as much fun as onset of flu.

I fell in love with NZ during my six months there, and still feel connected to Kiwi friends and land.

For a couple days before the Christchurch 6.3 quake, my balance went wonky, waves of dizziness as though the ground were tilting. Heard sudden ear tones related to nothing in my surround. Felt bone-deep ill.

While doing chores "saw" the Cathedral tower crashing into Christchurch square. But it's happened in previous quakes. Get a grip, thought I. Then went online and saw the breaking news.

Christchurch, city of flower gardens and sweet flowing river, now a city of shell-shocked homeless. And those who help. Busy day normalcy to nightmare--it can happen in a heartbeat.

Christchurch lies in a fertile coastal plain by the sea, the snow-capped Southern Alps glinting in the interior of the South island. NZ itself hovers above the Pacific Ring of Fire.

The Cathedral spire has toppled into the square--kyrie eleison--I can still hear voices of the boys choir soaring at Evensong. Many, many buildings have collapsed. Rubble everywhere and people staggering out of the debris. Rubble where seven years ago, I walked.

In the first chaos, people were digging with their bare hands to rescue those trapped beneath fallen buildings. People are donating blankets, tents, plastic sheeting to fend off the rains for those sheltering in parks.

The shearing of the quake, shallow beneath the city, has released streams rising out of lawns, the land undergoing liquifaction, rivers of thick gray silt down roads and gardens.

Aftershocks continue. New Zealander Kiwis are among the kindest people I've ever met. They are moving as community, and as individuals to help.

I remember reading a contemporary earth change prophecy by a female Maori shaman, before I traveled to NZ. The descriptors were terse and vivid.

Recorded before China's Three Gorges Dam was built, the woman spoke of a large Chinese dam giving way. The dam-failure and large death toll would be sign that NZ's super volcano was about to blow, with much loss of coastal life. NZ would rise out of the sea, increasing in land mass, linked to Australia by a land bridge.

I passed through that volcanic region with my heart in my mouth. A land of black lava and deep infrasonics. Scared the beejeebus out of me.

Out of rubble, what rises? Thievery? Bravery? Phoenix-decision for new life? Bless the Kiwis who are helping one another.

Sweet Falling Rain

2011-02-20T06:22:00.000-08:00

High desert dreams of rain, of high thunderheads on the horizon, sky god lightning booming down the mountains. An ancient volcano here rises from the plain, like a rounded breast of mother earth reclining.

Yesterday evening's melodious rain, by morning lies as snow, the clouds misty and deep into the valleys.

If the car will cooperate up the drive, am off to sing Brother James's Air--The Lord's my shepherd, I'll not want. He maketh me down to lie. In pastures green, he leadeth me, the quiet waters by--Lovely harmonies.

Although cold enough to snow, it is fifty degrees warmer than the onset of New Mexico's no-heat debacle. Businesses are still limping back into hoping, well, Easter will recoup losses.

I strolled into the trading post yesterday for a chat. The white haired owner called out, "I made a sale today!" A neighboring businessman came in hard on my heels, laughed and said, "For what? A buck?" The trading post fellow replied, "No, three."

Apple tree buds just beginning to swell a bit. Time to prune old trees to help them fruit more bountifully. I know lily and jonquil bulbs are stirring deep in the earth.

In Praise of Gardens

2011-02-16T09:06:00.000-08:00

When my mother's mother fell ill, Mama went back to Texas to take care of her little brother and her daddy. I was six years old then. The doctor explained to the adults that my grandmother would not recover. My dad put me on a plane for Texas, and I was blessed with life in the midst of that dying.

My grandmother lived love to the very end; my grandfather taught me about gardens. He and I were early risers and greeted dawn feeding the chickens, milking Daisy May the jersey cow, and doing garden chores. We also "took the time" to stand amazed and quiet at the dewy wonder of all a single seed produces, burgeoning out of the ground.

We picked baby carrots, checked on the lettuces, admired beans and peas forming, cukes twining, corn tasseling. All in a small world of honeybees and butterflies and ruby-throated hummingbirds. First light setting the pecan tree leaves shimmering.

Most everyone with a backyard had grown a garden back in the Great Depression, before my time. In WW2 the government rationed food and urged people to plant "Victory Gardens."

After my dad's death, I found his big city mom's ration book from those scarcity days. The still-wealthy in cities also turned to black market. The US government had already confiscated citizens' gold from safety deposit boxes, when it declared its 1933 bankruptcy, state of emergency and force majeur.

People with food-producing land redefined "rich."

My mother's people were small town folks; most everyone grew gardens and gathered wild fruits and nuts to preserve for winter, not knowing if next growing season would be a good one.

Farmers never do know, and so have always saved seed by, a little for next year, in case of crop failure. This millennial wisdom is being undermined by Monsanto--buy our one-season seed, or we'll sue you into perdition.

The living memory of hard times is dying out. I'm no longer young, but I listened while young to those who had lived through the Crash of 1929, the bank failures, foreclosures, famine and Depression. Dust Bowl all but blew the South away. Seed sprouted and died; land was abandoned, and repossessed by the banks.

Crop failure comes thief in the night from drought, locusts, floods, freezes, blight. We have come to believe that supermarket shelves protect us from such vicissitudes--just import it from somewhere else--strawberries for Christmas, grapes from the southern hemisphere when daffodils are still a winter's dream.

It may be one of those watershed moments in time to remember the joy of gardens, growing plentiful delicious food for family and community, and teaching the future, our children. Pantry and root cellar and community gardens.

There are several why-now's.

Queensland, the bread basket of Australia, began the new year with thousand-year-floods, towns and crops swept away. Then came a typhoon. Northern Mexico and the southeastern US have just been slammed with 75-100% utter crop destruction via severe frost.

Animal feed prices will go up, and human food in general. Alaska is apparently already paying incomprehensible sums for one food item, ~$70 for a package of snack munchies, or breaded chicken.

If there is no food to put on the shelves, what food there be will reach unaffordable prices. Ultimately, the hungry riot.

Last growing season, I longed for a little garden. I was homeless and tenting. Now I have a bit of land bounded by adobe wall and high wooden fencing. Am already imagining the soil under melting snow coming alive with blue corn, winter squash, beans, purple potatoes, herbs, a euphoria of flowers. Homelessness feels ungrounded, like the edge of black hole.

Will we blunder ungrounded into oncoming reality? Will we spend whatever time is left to each of us on big-screen TV's, games and sitcoms, stock market charts, and text-messaging?

Valentine Tsunami Dream

2011-02-14T14:30:00.000-08:00

Realized with some dismay while singing yesterday, in the adobe church practice room, that I could work myself into a wee pity-party--Valentine's Day, 2011 would not be a roses and chocolates year.

The music director helped. He had tried the cut motion, on the nasal twanging of the last melodic line, but most everyone had their noses in the score. Voices petered out one by one as they noticed his arm-waving above the piano, "I should rent you out to peel wallpaper!"

After a group-guffaw, I quietly sang my way back through limbic memory to grand bouquets of red roses and to heirloom gardens I've grown, an olfactory journey and refreshing--I had planted at my farm, the apothecary rose, ones known in ancient Rome, in Bulgaria, and in France of the Sun King.

I drifted singing--to Persian rosewater fountains, to Rumi and attar of roses, to lavender and rose potpourri.

More than enough, followed by a yum mug of spicy hot chocolate after singing, and a decision to do a Valentine's spa-day at home.

In between, however, I woke this morning to a haunting dream--of a large population in flight. From an oncoming tsunami.

I don't think it was a dream-pun on Valentine's Day, commercialized to buy/receive roses and chocolates, buy to express affection. Heck of an interesting Madison Ave. cultural pressure meme.

I used to read aloud the story of Valentine each year, the Roman era healer-Priest who gathered wildflowers and herbs for medicine. A different giving altogether.

The Valentine's Day dream was a hovering one, above diaspora--whether a visit to earth change collective angst or glimpse of things yet to come, I don't know.

Seemed to be Pacific NW, looking down on a twilight scene of clots of traffic fleeing north on a coastal highway, conifer mountains to the east. Could not tell if the twilight were a miasma of fear, or the hour of the event.

I watched a man in a VW bug flood and stall his engine, as did many in a driving frenzy of traffic not moving. He was trying to remember which forestry road up into the mountains was his turn to food-stash and hideyhole.

A cop told him to get a move on. The man who'd stalled his car explained his difficulty. The cop, listening to squawking radio with his helmet headphones, warned in a low voice that the incoming tsunami might turn global. Guy had best head to higher ground on foot.

Cop said he'd do the same but wanted to have a job to come back to, assuming the town (Seattle?) still stood. Guy headed out walking, but babbled about what he was up to; was robbed and followed.

Floating above, I could hear apparent rumbles of sea floor infrasonics and sound of a monster wave.

I woke and went small into spa-day, a healing bath, and made unguents of precious oils.

Icy Fear & Fix-It-Now

2011-02-11T06:56:00.000-08:00

"Lawsuits?" the grocer replied. "No, too slow. Revenge. Let's bring back the dunking stool! A couple of dips in icy water would be a good start."

So, pipes burst; we were genuinely cold in subzero conditions; businesses became further stressed and the Texas Super Bowl went on, while rolling blackouts rippled across Texas and gas could not be conveyed northward. A Fellini film in the Rockies.

It's ski season, but for a week in an already struggling economy, natural gas delivery stopped. Restaurants had no heat, no gas range fuel for cooking. They closed, lost income, lost food. Some will have trouble making payroll. Hotels had lights but no hot water. Apres-ski and no bath. Many reservations canceled.

The library went into lock-down of its public service haven for five days. I returned books when heat was restored and that tidy predictable world felt drawn back from the edge of chaos; librarians looked haunted. A whole chunk of a wintry state experienced dislocation, cold and some hardship.

The electricity grid barely held, as most households shifted to electric heaters, crockpots, griddles, microwave ovens, electric blankets.

I was worried about the potential for an all-out infrastructure cluster-fracas, and shifted to bulbous layers, solar oven on sunny days, and reading by LED light. Oh for a cup of honeyed hot tea.

Right now we seem to be in the blame stage--who's at fault, who profited, and who will pay? Deeper rumblings underpin outrage, namely fear, which may be sufficiently riveting to break patterns.

I once knew a ninety-nine year old lady, my dearly loved friend, who remembered the San Fransisco earthquake and fire of 1906. Bright-eyed and still independent, a first generation Swedish-American, her father had owned a prosperous woolens business on Market Street.

Business was so good that a few weeks before disaster--not inconvenience--he decided to invest profits in richer inventory, instead of renewing his biz-owner insurance.

The world they knew shook to the roots, crumbled and burst into flame. They lost everything, business and home.

Survivors were moved into canvas tents in Golden Gate Park. Her father and every other able-bodied man were dragooned by the army. Her dad helped set up emergency shelters and for days, peeled potatoes for soup kitchen fare, cooked in big kettles over campfires.

The Papa gathered up his family and they took ferry across to Vallejo, where he worked as an employee at a woolen goods store. The family went from wealthy to purpose-built frugal, as Father saved up enough, to open his own business again years later.

Something has happened on our way to the current bread and circuses forum. How have we performed an arc from frontier to an expectation to be recompensed and moreover, entertained?

While hunkering down in the recent chill, I thought about the arrival of the Pilgrims to Virginia and rocky New England shores centuries ago. They came from Little Ice Age conditions, something like our current adventures in climate change, hoping for wealth in the New World.

They arrived, with a sense of rectitude, specialness and entitlement, to "virgin land," which had been inhabited for thousands of years. They backed up their right to intrude with blunderbusses and cannon. Given dreadful conditions in Britain and northern Europe, their sense of divine right arrived in persons with rotten teeth and rickets, who considered bathing unhealthy.

They imprinted a certain attitude on their new home--Children should be seen and not heard... Spare the rod and spoil the child... Daughters of Eve must suffer... Christ the true the only light--An attitude which may have bred up a people less kindly disposed to "others."

"Noble Savage" romanticism has been overplayed as an apology for subsequent conquest--brutality can be pinned to both sides of that donkey.

Nonetheless, native peoples lived communally, regarded children as a community treasure, and were drop-dead-gorgeous physical specimens with perfect teeth. They met incoming anal-retentives whose religion despised any deviation from dogma, let alone a whole other cosmology. Genocide and witch trials soon followed.

As gardens go, a rocky beginning, and bitter seeds strewn.

Catastrophic change--no, please not in my lifetime--has come upon us. High tech may meet low tech and perhaps aboriginal wisdom, as we come down to earth.

* * * *

Thanks to Daniel for this deeply appreciated 9. Feb. surprise, his "New Mexico Snowfall" image and creative cyber-leap:
"I had been reading this blog http://wayfaringtraveler.blogspot.com/ the past few days and decided to paint the images that the writing evoked. I’m sure those who endured the loss of natural gas and water did not find their surroundings as picturesque as I have portrayed in this painting."
http://lewispainting.wordpress.com/category/digital-painting/

Warm Hands, Warm Feet

2011-02-08T07:34:00.000-08:00

I'm reading a book with gloves on, layered in winter hat, muffler, sweaters, woolen throws piled on top. Aesthetically speaking, I look pretty much like a stored potato.

Am lying on the sofa hoping for warm legs after bringing in clothes from the outdoor line, rubber gloves fumbling the clothes pins.

Sun's getting low; storm clouds looking serious to the north. Cornbread's about done in the solar oven, when I hear a heavy knock on the door.

"Folks must be greeting you like St. Nick," I laugh, beaming at the big guy with a tool belt and heavy boots.

He looks down, "Yeah, they are."

He comes into root cellar temperatures, nearly a week without heat, wipes his snowy boots and gets right to work on my place and a neighbor's who's left me a key.

"You come from far?" I ask.

"Yeah, we'll stay in the county 3-4 days. I've met crews in from Texas and Oklahoma."

His partner's outside working on gas meters, their big utility truck flashing a yellow light on top of the cab. A woman in a pickup stops; leans on the door frame.

"You getting to the next road up, tonight?"

"We'll get there quick as we can, ma'am. We've got crews working all over. We'll be at it till 9 or 10:00."

"Well, come soon. I can't stand my daughter much longer. My place is small."

Businesses will start to open; choirs will return to churches warm again, and plumbers probably have to-do-lists from here to the moon. Lots of pipes burst. My neighbor's place with the Titanic-rupture has been abandoned.

It may take a day or two for radiant floor heat under my feet to steady into cozy warmth again. It's a whole lot easier to feel cold for a little while, than will it never end?

Many folks with means just drove to towns not affected and stayed in hotels. Others moved to shelters. I'll check on my friend living in her truck with all the rescue dogs and cats; snow's headed this way.

Bless the folks who come at need and repair and keep things running. Our buy-buy and throw-away culture has not really been a model for sound living, though we've exported it, got people wanting it. Planned obsolescence has seemed good for corporate bottom line.

And then, there's landfill.

Maybe we'll start building things to last again. Handyman skills looking pretty good, vocation-wise.

An interesting comment came in about the viability of electric grids, with concerns about 2012 EMP-grid-blowout from erratic sun, (or military.) It's been a great mercy that the grid held, as NatGas-heat failed in this last week.

But just supposin'... are there sources for continued life if the grid goes down?

You bet, including living communities, like the Amish who build to last, and build off-grid. And the Earthships of Taos, hundreds of them, snug as can be. www.earthships.com/

Here's simple stuff, tools for starters. Try Lehman's Non-Electric catalog www.lehmans.com/

There's no laundry here in the old adobe--the hand-crank WonderWash is a cutie, efficient, uses little detergent, not a burden. www.laundry-alternative.com

Hand-crank fresh flour is yum with the Family Grain Mill, and easily ground. www.pleasanthillgrain.com/

Stews, soups, baked veggies, casseroles, breads: www.solarovens.org/

It may be worth learning how to live a little more simply. Just in case.

Pot-of-Gold Neighbors

2011-02-05T13:36:00.000-08:00

Like a scene from the film, Titanic, my neighbor's uninsulated copper pipes ruptured into our compound--The old brown adobe in which I live was once part of an hacienda, now divided into four contiguous dwellings around a commons.

A neighbor-hero came and got drenched, at 10 degrees F, trying to shut off the also-blown valve--The resident was away feeding his horses--We had to close down the water main and wait for a very busy plumber to replace the valve. Still without water and heat, the couple who'd moved in the week before have fled to family.

Community has formed the pot of gold in this natural gas calamity. Young folks across the lane from me have a brand-new first baby. The mother-to-be delivered a couple weeks prematurely--after the shock of her husband getting laid off.

They heat with wood. Neighbors who have chain saws, access to timber and pickup trucks have been quietly arriving with loads of firewood, to keep the new mother and infant girl warm.

Heated shelters have been set up, and are filling up. Shelters for the homeless already serve the community. Neighbors continue taking in family and friends.

Warm refuge has been especially urgent for folks who have relied on gas-heat in trailers, or frame and cinder-block structures. Temperature dropped critically and quickly on the bitterly cold beginning of this infrastructure failure. Or paradigm failure.

I'd been fortunate to rent my old thick-walled adobe after months in a tent. The house (had) radiant floor warmth from NatGas-heated water. (Solar-heated water could still be operational, of course.) VERY low utility bills relative to fuel oil furnaces in Maine.

Now the floor is cold; ditto moi, but the room temperature held at 68 degrees the first subzero day, dropped to 58 degrees the second, and now holds at 52, I hope. Another storm is expected soon. We had "red sky at morning" and all-day cloud cover today, dashing any prospect of solar gain. Or a solar-cooked hot meal.

The hero guy, who got drenched trying to stop the water-rupture, has been dreaming about building a straw bale, passive solar house. His may not be the only gears shifting into action-mode, as we all ponder this breakdown of services.

Other blessing, besides good neighbors--the electric grid has not gone down. Though is it sensible, to assume it's reliable? Infrastructure requires maintenance. And employees.

US wealth has been hemorrhaging into misadventures abroad and bankster-bailouts at home. So, heat shuts down, levees burst, bridges collapse, roads buckle and pot-hole into driving hazard.

Robert Frost, the New England poet, wrote down, "Good fences make good neighbors," which was muttered by the taciturn fellow across from Frost's farm. The two men were repairing a stone wall dividing their properties, each man lifting rock fallen on his side of the land.

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall," Frost mused.

Perhaps crisis does more for us than cause us inconvenience. Walls come tumbling down--the delusionary walls, that things/specialness/wealth can shield us from misfortune.

When walls around the heart give way, we meet one another, face-to-face.

When the Heat Shuts Down

2011-02-03T17:20:00.000-08:00

There's no pressure in the natural gas pipeline from Texas running west and north, given Arctic temperatures and peak demand. In my northern New Mexico nook, it was -20 F this morning; some neighbors in frost pockets woke to 25 below zero. Water pipes are bursting all over the high desert and mountains.

The electricity has failed, just now. Writing this on battery. Probably from all the electric heaters plugged in today. The local hardware store had a mob scene and a fight break out when the last heater went out the door this morning.

Businesses have had to close. NatGas may not be restored for 2-3 more days. Nights will be sub-zero. Those with woodheat are taking in neighbors and family. Those who've invested in solar voltaics are comfortably off-grid and have bought something real, in an economy running on the fumes of gizmos made in offshore manufactury.

Camping skills and infrastructure fixed my supper (solar oven) and heated water (solar shower.) Thank God for sunlight.

Yeehah, electricity just came back on. House lit by beeswax candles in the interim. We are living so close to the bone. Emergencies happen to people, and we've waged resource wars instead of investing in infrastructure repair and innovation.

Vehicle as Home; Shelter from Violence

2011-02-01T10:52:00.000-08:00

A young woman, pretty, looks at me and calls out, "Can you spare a couple dollars for gas?

I look back--fresh bruise on her left cheekbone; eye above appears slightly out-of-focus. "What's up?" I ask. "Where are you headed?"

She glances around, seems frightened. "Up on the mesa. I'm homeless. Gonna spend the night in my car. I need gas to get there."

"What's happened? I ask as she comes closer.

"I can't go back. He's violent. I just ran out of the house." She's wearing a cotton blouse; it's spitting snow.

I pull a couple dollars out of my pocket and tell her, "I was homeless for six months. It's scary and it's cold, but help comes."

"Then you know what it's like!" She throws her arms around me.

"I sure as shit do," holding her and giving soft pats as her breathing slows down. "Bad weather's coming. I know you're in a panic now, but please think about going to the shelter in town for folks who've had the sense to leave domestic violence. Would you do that?"

She doesn't answer yes or no, but says, "Thank you, sister."

It was 5 degrees below zero last night. We're in the midst of a snowstorm, a big one. May drop to -25 tomorrow night, Arctic wind.

I had just come from checking on my friend who's living in her truck, parked by a streetlight in the WartMart parking lot. Her three larger rescue dogs sleep in the king cab--a wolf-dog and 2 Australian blue-heeler hysterics. She and all her gear sleep in the back, with a jacketed chihuahua as hot water bottle.

She says she has enough to eat now with her $8/hour graveyard-shift job. She walks the dogs twice a day and tries to sleep in between, in the bustle of WalMart shopping, before going back to work at night. At least the parking lot will be plowed.

When I wander into the health food store, where I was heading before revisiting the nationwide homeless state, one of the managers warns me that just north of us they're expecting snow in feet, not inches.

I feel shaken by a sense of belonging when he stops to chat. Am pondering the itemized herb ingredients on a bottle. He comes out of the swinging warehouse doors and announces, a twenty pound sack of rolled oats in his arms, "This is not the Christian Science Reading Room! grinning at me.

I fluff up like an indignant hen, grinning back, "I read labels, Mister," touched that I'm well enough known now to tease.

I buy popcorn to pop for hot-buttered, and milk for hot chocolate, not forgetting what it's like to be out in the wind on a cold night, huddled over a camp stove waiting for water to boil or canned beans to heat.

Plain Talk

2011-01-27T13:02:00.000-08:00

My grandfather, a Texas attorney, once inadvertently wandered into a ladies tea my grandmama was hosting. He stood there trapped, raunchy in his Saturday dove-hunting clothes, trapped by Southern ettiquette. My grandmother eyed him warily.

Balancing a tea cup and finally bored witless by a fawning effuser, he turned to the fluttering woman and inquired in professional tones, "Do you believe in the final perseverance of the Saints?"

The ladies went silent, not being quite sure what he'd meant. A theological cum philosophical conundrum? A conversation opener? My grandmother, quite sure, glared at him over her pecan pie, and hustled him out of the room.

Obfuscation as info-delivery has fogged the present world, perhaps as intended. I feel that way about church ritual more often than not, but love singing the plainsong.

Plain talk may be overdue. Political speeches declaimed with oratory skills, finally, but the usual empty posturing come to mind.

I think of Abraham Lincoln, the rustic, who spoke plainly in troubled times.

Grandfather Teaches River of Life

2011-01-08T17:08:00.000-08:00

"All they do," he tosses out a chunk of hay bale onto the snowy pasture, "is eat and shit."

Can't fool me. He loves those critters. I laugh.

"Pretty fine shit, if you love to garden! When I came here to look at the old place back in the late summertime, first thing I knew, was the smell of horses; heard one nicker. It felt like home."

"They're all I have left," he says.

I meander over, and we both lean on the gate watching the horses' furry winter coats and bright eyes.

"Used to run hundred and seventy head of cattle, but drought came and we had to buy in hay. Went on a couple years and we started getting into debt. I had to sell the cattle to pay it down. Still work the horses though. Ride em up into the mountains when I take a notion, and they're good at elk season; they haul out the kill to feed the family."

"Good land down there," I remark.

"Used to be; gone to ruin, most of it. People used to grow most everything they needed."

I ask him about manure for the garden. "Might could spare some. Might bring some by." (If he says so, pretty much bank on it happening.)

He had idled his truck to talk to me month or two ago.

"Been watching you clean up the road."

"Yup, I figure Sunday afternoon's the day to do it, after any mess-makers Saturday night." I grinned: "It's part of my Sunday worship."

He tells me, "I decided to make me a garden last spring. You know, it just came over me. I figured it was time to teach my grandchildren. But it meant I'd have to clear nearly a mile of abandoned acequia to get water to my land! Some of the ditch had even been filled in and leveled, to get heavy equipment across, when folks started building on farm land. I went to the mayordomo first to let him know."

The mayordomo of a district organizes annual clearing of the acequias, irrigation ditches dug way back in Spanish Land Grant time. He or she adjudicates equitable water flow. It's a big community do, grunt labor by families whose farms and gardens are served, and big feast prepared.

Rain is not a given in the high desert. Away from rivers, you'll wander sagebrush, juniper, pinyon, but hard labor for mountain flow water can grow trees, pasture for critters, and farm crops.

My friend was exercising his ancestral water rights. Mayordomo was pleased, but said, "Go explain to all the neighbors along the acequia what you'll be up to, and that I've given you the go-ahead."

He did; the neighbors were curious to indifferent, except one old man, who told him, "I never thought I'd see water flow there again in my lifetime."

My friend went in with a backhoe, re-dug the ditch, and cleaned up the banks for his neighbors. In the years of neglect, old fruit trees, plum, apple, pear, had died. He took them down. They were wildings from trees planted all through this country by Franciscan monks long, long ago.

"Miracle of it was, when I cemented and built the water gate, and opened the flow--that old man watching like it was Christmas--I just thought I'd water that garden. But water is life, and the old fruit tree roots sent up green sprouts! They'll grow and fruit again."

Those grandchildren were in for the adventure of their lives.

"They helped me every bit of the way. They planted seed--beans, corn, winter squash, peppers, tomatoes, greens--and weeded, and just went and admired everything as it came up. So much yield from that manured land, the whole neighborhood was fed from the garden."

The children got to go down and nibble and harvest just whenever. They were eager to be out with their granddad every day.

"We grew blue corn."

My ears perked up.

He continued, "Seed was given to me by a Native American friend over the mountain, and we grew white for hominy."

"Posole?" I ask.

"Yeah, and yellow sweet to eat on the cob. The children and I built an horno, a clay oven, to make 'chicos' from some of the white."

(Chicos are corn kernels slow wood fire-roasted in the husk. Once shelled out, they're delicious cooked in with chili beans.)

"Blue corn?!!" I finally managed to squeak out. "I've looked everywhere for seed."

"I'll get you some."

"Would you teach me to make chicos?"

"Yes. I'll teach you in the old traditional way."

We talk some about little children learning from their grandparents. I tell him about my Texas granddaddy I loved so much and his garden. "He taught me when I was six years old." I look up at my good-hearted friend. "I never forgot."

He nods.

"The Creator sent you this morning," he said, "so we could talk." We had both had places to go and things to do, but settled into talking for awhile.

He was on the way to help his brother whose van had popped a... "sumpthin." That's why he had bailing wire in this hand.

He chuckles; "Way things are right now, you can hardly keep a vehicle running without wire and duct tape!"

He rests a scuffed cowboy boot on the lower gate rail; pushes his black, flat-brimmed rancher's hat back with an index finger.

"If I died this winter, I'd die satisfied. You know why?" I turn to him and listen. "I got to teach those grandchildren how to live."

Way-markers: The Lincoln Cactus

2011-01-05T11:30:00.000-08:00

"The Lincoln Cactus is in bloom; I haven't died!" ...exclaimed to an old musician friend, who has cared for the plant I had to leave behind.

Dear friends in Maine had given me the start of a "Christmas Cactus." Non-thorny, it grows like a fountain--Handel's Water Music--and blooms, bleak of the year, in fanfare-bursts of improbable cerise--Handel's Royal Fireworks!

The plant has been kept alive by descendants of Abraham Lincoln since the time of the American Civil War, which ended in 1865. President Lincoln was assassinated soon thereafter.

The Lincoln Cactus was very dear to me. I, too, rooted starts to share with friends. Instead, I had to leave mother plant and starts behind, when my island life ended a year ago. No way to find winter shelter for it in the stuffed Volvo, heading to parts unknown.

Have just learned that Lincoln Cactus-blooms are opening by a friend's snowy window in Maine, on the eleventh day of the Twelve Days of Christmas.

The twelfth day, tomorrow, celebrates Epiphany, the Feast of the Magi--Wise Men from the East. May they come soon.

It can be heart-crushingly difficult to live on earth, dust ourselves off, love life again and again.

We die many times.

Collateral Damage

2011-01-03T10:48:00.000-08:00

Back when Alan Greenspan and CEO's enjoyed Mammon-worship as cultural icons, financial shills memed lay-off's as a cultural good.

As in, good for business.

Rogue corporations gobbled up competitors, the dainty term being, "Mergers and Acquisitions." Bonuses glistened and golden parachutes, and a few thousand employees bit the dust each "M&A"--to increase share holder value. Stocks rose; all was right with the portfolio world.

Back in the human world of meeting car and mortgage payments, those cascades of employees let go, land--splat--into a contracting economy. Skilled workers eye jobs as taxi-drivers, burger-flippers, WalMart greeters or multi-level-marketers.

Rah-rah media shills then kept quiet about life among the unemployed and under-employed-- the oozing murk of bankruptcies and foreclosures, of homelessness.

In this New Year of grinding bottom line, and few heroes, collateral damage spreads; Damage-R-Us.

A couple friends telephoned in distress this morning. I was packing a box of emergency groceries for the first, when the second called. I juggled phone, cans of beans, and sudden nosebleed, trying to listen.

First friend, homeless, did find a night job at $8/hr. This is insufficient for rental or even campsite and means sleeping days--truck camper, WalMart parking lot. Nights have been sub-zero Fahrenheit. Ice forms on the inner roof and drops on attempted sleep. Living on carbs; unable to cook in current conditions. Has no gas/petrol between paychecks.

This is the highly-skilled, techie friend I feared would off herself. Instead she found menial work, and is living in the truck camper with her rescue dogs and cats. They limit her options and increase the food bill, but abide as comfort.

Second call from friends in Maine--Both husband and wife out of work, with a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young son, whose birthday is this week. They want for him the world; they adore him. They have no job prospects, little in the bank. Debts remain brutal.

Once upon a time, we valued mania--over community, families, and decisions affecting "seven generations." Gears are now grinding on that reckless behemoth.

New Year, No Job

2010-12-31T18:26:00.000-08:00

It's winter wonderland in the Rockies, and dear God, let there be jobs, now that winter sports bring money to the local economy.

"Will you buy a carving?" a couple call out to me. "Cheap?"

I'm walking back from the P.O., after getting bills in the mail, walking gingerly on snow, avoiding ice. Bundled up in Maine sou'wester bibs and every layer I can dig up. Temperature will drop to -10 Fahrenheit tonight. I look rag-tag, having given warm clothes away when I left Maine. Idjit.

The couple are nowhere near as bundled up as I am. The man carries the carving bare-handed, has no gloves.

"Oh shoot, how much you asking for it?" I reply. "Things are tight right now. It's just a hard time of year."

"Twenty-five?"

"Oh, hon, I wish I could. It's handsome work."

"My dad taught me; he was a sculptor, too. I carved it out of cedar fence posts from my grandpa's place. She and I," nodding to his partner, "are both out of work. Can't find work."

"Walk with me a-ways?" I ask. The woman and I put an arm around each other; we fall into step. She says,

"I can do everything... anything. No one's hiring. There's no work."

I tell her about my friend still in a tent, and that I'm not long out of one myself. This woman has had to live in a tepee.

"You know what?" I stop and turn to her.

"This is a national disaster, but we're going to have to come up with local solutions. It may be that folks are starting to get a clue. Businesses have gone belly-up here this year, and everyone let go, because locals have been so STOOPID--Buying on line or driving two hours to buy trash at big box stores."

"Lot of folks laid off in this town," she says.

"Well, tell you what--I can do twenty dollars, and I'm ashamed to offer so little."

"That'd be such help right now." The man hands me the carving. It might have been crafted a hundred or two hundred years ago.

This country is so rich with potential creative fire. People all over this world are the wealth of our future.

How about a New Year--It may be coming up on time to let go--those who've made families expendable, and greed a mantra.

Not All Jolly

2010-12-26T15:16:00.000-08:00

While choirs in all time zones sang Joy to the World, those who loathe the loneliness of holidays self-medicated. And left a trail.

I decided to go walking and follow that trail, as it's a grand day in the Rockies.

First called a friend in Maine whose computer fried this week, with an alert that a "snow bomb" severe blizzard is heading to New England. Where, mercy of all mercies, I will not be shoveling out the path, driveway and car.

I did not mention today's Rocky Mt. cerulean skies, nor the pansies in bloom.

So, went walking through almost viscous grief of those who did not experience "peace on earth, goodwill toward all" these last festive days.

I began to tidy up the neighborhood, its detritus of holiday-depression and eff-you tossing of booze cans and bottles, junk food wrappers.

I was bending to gather up a sprawl of Coors cans outside the adobe wall of a house, when a man's voice called out. I stood upright at the gate--two guys sitting in the sun drinking beer.

"You can take those, too," he said. I looked down at a couple 6-packs' worth of empty beer cans on his side of the wall, and wondered aloud:

"You got a broke leg?"

"Uh...they're aluminum."

"Yeah... Oh... I'm doing this for beauty, not for money. I live here."

"You do? You are? Uh, thanks." I nodded. "I'm going to clean up," waving vaguely where I'd just been, "over there. Next week."

Feeling no pain, booze-lubed, his picking up trash this week or next, about as likely as Holy Week in Jerusalem, but I gave him a thumbs-up. Might happen.

Continued my stroll, beautiful lane. Just a grand day in the mountains.

Salvation Army Bell-Ringing

2010-12-23T10:13:00.000-08:00

"Does it matter how much you put in?"

"It matters that you want to."

"Really?"... I nod to the slender elongating girl, maybe twelve, carefully ironed ruffled blouse, probably done by herself. Strong mother-missing feel coming my way. She balances on one foot like a water bird.

"Pennies add up," I explain. "It all helps. Everything that's given will go to folks here in town. It won't be sent away."

"I'll be back," she says, off to the car's stash of miscellaneous change. Returns beaming, with a look of empowerment at being part of community, her father strolling behind her. She drops pennies and nickles into the red bucket.

I go on ringing the little bell, watching cloud formations, light on the mountains, swooping ravens and doves. Have decided to just quietly wait and nail no one with fork-over-glares--the guilt-tripping zeal of money and signature gatherers being, well, repellent.

When someone stops and fumbles for change, I then engage, interested in who this might be.

Early on before evening shopping rush, am humbled by the giving. Those who look least able to give, seem to be the ones who do--fixed income elderly poor, big family/wage-earner money worries, trying to stretch food stamps to make a festive meal.

If there's a child along, a dollar or some change is put in the small paw, the child lifted and shown how to drop it in the slot. The parent may explain in Spanish or Tewa to the round-faced, button-eyed toddler.

I watch threadbare folks, who've known the fear of hunger, give what they can, and then bless me for standing there in the cold.

A pretty blond woman with five stair-step sons, smallest on her shoulders, stands off to one side, explaining what's happening to her children. Tidy but inexpensively dressed, so many boys will not receive much allowance, and probably help out with chores to get any at all. The mother appears well-organized.

The boys come close and look at me without speaking, look at the bucket. One asks, "Who's it for?"

"It's for people who don't have enough to eat, or a warm bed; people here in town."

"Oh." The eldest boy reaches his right index finger into the little jeans pocket which holds change. Brings out a nickel and a dime. Ponders his worldly goods, draws a shuddering breath, puts in the nickle. The other brothers each drop in a coin.

The mother puts her arms around all the boys, touching and patting them as they move along. The eldest turns back suddenly, fishes out his dime, and gives it away.

Earlier, when I set up in front of the supermarket, the space being their gift to the community, I came shlepping parts of the stand, which had been dis-assembled--to make it easier for me! Slapstick soon followed.

It was a little windy. The Salvation Army sign promptly dis-associated itself from its frame while I was struggling with cotter pin and lining up holes. I chased down the sign and tried to reinsert it in the frame. The stand fell over. The envelope to store cash overflow blew across the parking lot while I righted the sign...

Heard a suppressed chuckle off to the side. A man with kind eyes had been watching the most entertaining thing going on, waiting to see if I'd sort it out, or start to cry.

I grinned. He said, "You'll do fine."

As the afternoon wore on, I watched an interesting pattern. People were now doing big food shopping preparation for the holidays. More disposable income whizzing by, and multiple dollar bills donated. One variety of laden cart consistently had nothing to spare, however--Those who prepared for holiday funk with full carts of beer.

Man in a Harley-Davidson jacket, legs bowed as though he'd spent a lot of his young days doing horseback ranch work, dropped in a five-er and stopped to chat.

"This the real Salvation Army?" Sun-faded eyes crinkle up under his old cowboy hat.

"You bet. The honest-to-God real deal."

Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse

2010-12-21T11:23:00.000-08:00

Night of the terracotta moon, I leaned a chair against a fencepost, bundled in warm snugglies, then un-kinked and lay on the cold cold ground to watch luna long occlude and startlingly re-emerge. She had risen at dusk, huge and ivory-gold above the snowy mountains.

Orion and the Pleiades grew more brilliant as the moonlight murked. At utter darkness, coyote howls went still. Slumbering village felt paused at sudden musical rest, an eerie equipoise... hush, hush...not the same as once we were when this is done.

The sky seemed alive with ancient watching--Mayan astronomer-priests at Chichen Itza, and silent watchers on the ziggurats of Babylonia, cloaked Druids among the snowy standing stones.

What power astronomer-knowledge must have given rulers of those days. There was no light then but sun and moonlight, stars stunning at dark of the moon, torchlight and firelight.

When the sky suddenly lost its sun or moon to eclipse, it brought great fear to the unknowing and in oral memory portended death and endings. The sky was watched for omens.

Mark Twain came in, and went out with Haley's comet. A dragon-like meteor is said to have blazed across the Gobi at the wintry birth of Genghis Khan. Shamans trembled and predicted might and mayhem.

We live in momentous times, and even now remember far and deep more ancient worlds. We long for the numinous, for larger than me-me-now-now; we long to feel awe.

Ten years ago, Y2K was the burning angst-inducer. If not awe, then anxiety over loss of screen-light and cyber-swirls of planetary connectivity. Much scurrying to readiness; much change of focus.

That year, holiday celebrations I'd imagined went poof, as a series of tenuous "left coast" friendships failed. Again and again in long life--the choice to feel forlorn, or embark on life anew.

Participating in a Christmas caroling gig at an old folks home, I fell into conversation with two bright-eyed old ladies.

From my childhood, I've listened to storytelling of elders, having been blessed with interesting ones--Touchstone to wonders past, mentoring to me, and to children yet unborn.

We chatted, the ladies and I. They had no family in the big city; my own mother had recently died. I blurted out an invitation to come to my home for Christmas Day dinner.

The ladies, reared in a gracious era, arrived with a beautiful bouquet of flowers and small sweet gifts, a luminous gathering.

I remember the light of that unexpected Christmas, haunted by this Solstice moon.

Winter Homeless

2010-12-19T14:06:00.000-08:00

Snow and threatening clouds have settled low on the mountains. Wild gusting wind expected.

A homeless friend still tenting has mercifully found a miserable job, night shift, in order to get under roof. Crisis hot line, high stress, but at least safely out of wind-driven sleet.

Have just read news flash headers from the States, England and Wales--Homeless people, desperate at the cold, are committing crimes in the hopes they'll be caught and put in warm jail.

All over the northern hemisphere some of us will freeze this winter, will drift into that hypothermic good night.

Scrutiny, Keeping Watch

2010-12-16T16:04:00.000-08:00

Long line at the Post Office. I was standing to one side slapping "Forever" stamps on letters, when thump, I felt someone bald-faced staring, when I was minding my own bidness.

Looked up--a big cop, bull-chested, armed and probably plenty dangerous if messed with, steady Scorpio eyes. Looked like he never smelled much good in this world. Looked familiar.

I stared back, blinked, and offered: "Butter wouldn't melt in your mouth today."

He sort of snorted; corner of his mouth twitched. "Been busy."

"Hm." I went back to my letters.

Seemed like he was fresh from the firing range or from pumping iron, and he kept right on staring. I ignored him.

"You still camping down in the canyon?"

"No! thank God."

"Getting right cold to be in a tent."

"No sheeut."

Oh, that's where I "knew" him. He had often passed in his patrol car when I was out at dawn cleaning up the river gorge, for weeks of slog. And he's the one who'd slow, passing my campsite at dusk, checking to see if I was alright. He'd touch the brim of his cap, say, "Ma'am."

Haven't seen him since the P.O. But I know he's out there somewhere, keeping watch.

Feasts of Light & Wilderness

2010-12-12T11:57:00.000-08:00

Old gardens, wild country, and sanctuaries---all the same melodic to me all my life---whether chapel, temple, mosque or abbey. When the noise stops, there's common longing and the one commandment: kindliness.

Given that much of day-to-day posturing is very noisy, I have spent more time in the quietude of wind and water and deep earth.

Nonetheless, today I braved an officially religious sanctuary, which does much quiet good in the community.

Intending stoic watchfulness, instead I begin doing tear-fountain when I hear four-part chant from a glory-choir, and at the lighting of Advent candles in the dark of the year.

The woman beside me hears me singing, and asks,

"Are you friends with...?" (a singer.)

"Uh, no. I don't know anyone here. Am newly hatched out of hiding."

"Oh. Will you be my friend? "

"Yes. Will you be mine?"

"Yes. Are you new here?"

"Not exactly. I lived in the area for some months in a tent."

She laughs, "Many people started out here in a tent!"

A flash of met joy, when the music director and I speak. He says, "Yes! Come," without having heard me sing, and it's a fine choir. Am plopped grinning into the midst of chorales and Jubilate.

Have signed on for Salvation Army detail, a first---Santa cap and bell-ringing, collecting small change in a bucket for local food pantry, for widows and orphans. Haunting and ancient holy-books-feel to that purpose.

As I have given away the accouterments of Christmas celebration, and am far from anywhere I've known, have been wondering how to experience festive bounce-to-the-step? How, without ensnarlment in the frantic debt-grief holidays we've meme'd into?

Well, Sing-along Messiah this week! Free and rip-roaring.

Bell-ringing for the poor---I realize a bit shame-faced, that I've given small change each year, but wondered in passing, if the bell-ringer were recently homeless and in recovery!

Ho Ho Ho

2010-12-02T12:22:00.000-08:00

"That would be a Workman's Comp situation?" I ask, with an uneasy feeling that the employee's broken leg would somehow be construed otherwise by the thrift shop's new owner.

"Uh, no," says owner, busying herself and not meeting my eye.

"How did she get hurt?" I like the employee. "What happened? She's always here, your genius friend, daughter of an interior decorator. She's transformed the dusty, neglected store you bought, into high-end-beautiful."

"Oh, she fell," the owner remarks, "after closing up for the night, down there at the foot of the steps."

I know the injured friend and her husband have not recovered financially from her catastrophic oncology surgery, costly chemo and radiation, nor had she recovered her strength.

I pitch in as the owner and I speak, helping move furniture and Christmas doodads out onto the veranda and front lawn. Which work, friend-employee had been doing twice daily, hauling stuff out, and in at closing.

"She's not actually," new owner looks away and then concludes brightly, "an employee."

"Oh?" Have never not seen her talented helper doing yeoman's work about the place.

Ever upbeat, the owner adds, "Fortunately lots of people want to work for me!"

"No doubt, with so many people out of work. But how will she pay to get her leg set?"

"Oh, she has so little income, she'll qualify as an indigent."

I pause mid-task, and re-focus on the owner. I ask for paper and pen and write the friend a note of condolence, suggesting that she consider homeopathic Symphytum (comfrey) to hasten bone healing, and Arnica montana to help ease pain and swelling.

The owner takes the note; I tell her what I have written. "I could buy that for her," she offers, slightly shame-faced.

"Oh? Bless you."

I set out red balls and gold Christmas angels and leave, stunned at her micro-predatory economy. Have imagined thrift shops as a business which can do well in a depression.

Had dropped by the shop after making monthly payment at the dentist office for my post-tent-living gold crown, my unexpected investment in precious metals. The dental receptionist was fielding a phone call from a homeless man as I arrived.

Homelessness being a great and insidious destroyer, he had needed urgent dental care. She had served as go-between and called around to family members on his behalf; an aunt covered the dental bill. He spends nights at the town homeless shelter.

Christmas trees are going up all over town, including one at a bank hung with white paper angels, each listing a child's age, boy or girl---kids from poor families or those taken from their families and put into foster care, who will otherwise receive no gift at Christmas. Many community members are busy collecting presents for these unknown children.

The weekly local rag comes out today, and men in hooded sweatshirts and layers against the chill are hawking newspapers at traffic intersections. Snow dusts the mountains overhead. Paper costs a dollar. I don't know what their share may be.

Jobs are scarce.

Celebration & Sadness

2010-11-25T07:52:00.000-08:00

Kindly Latino hardware man had offered to help me find things yesterday, when he saw me looking lost in the electrical aisle. I followed him, grateful again for male problem-resolving skills.

We talked a bit about today's US holiday of Thanksgiving:

Every year, end of Northern Hemisphere autumn, folks put orange pumpkins and harvested corn stalks by doorways; serve groaning-board turkey dinners. School children dress in costumes from the 1600's.

All to celebrate the generosity of Native Americans centuries ago. They had shared local seed, new continent know-how and harvest bounty, saving British "Pilgrims" from starvation.

Little did they know. Something like camel nose in tent, till camel rules tent.

I asked the gentle hardware man, "You having a big family get-together this Thanksgiving?"

"Not so big this year; it will be quiet. And you?"

"Uh, no, I'm far from family. But it's a good day to give thanks."

"Yes, good to be with family." Realizing that's not always so, he blinked back tears. "A good day to give thanks," he concurred. Kind eyes wished all well.

A shop further north, run by the widow of a pastor, serves as homeless shelter at night, and today will serve Thanksgiving meals to those who have no home.

I left a small donation, remembering tent-living.

US Thanksgiving these last decades had evolved into family pig-out and afternoon football. Our forms of celebration may change--belt-tightening for many, soup kitchens and lowered expectations. A bad thing?

Perhaps not in the learning cycles of boom and bust, end of empire, end of US entitlement to others' resources. Very large camel nose in the global tent.

Day after Thanksgiving--another recent US tradition--the blowout shopping day of the year, as folks maxed out their credit cards at pre-Christmas sales. Buy-buy-never-enough.

Enough may soon be plenty.

As to Christmas celebration coming, I do so love the winter feasts of light in the dark of the year.

In chilly New England, I learned a quiet lesson--create celebration, or count on being alone. Folks of the far north may not be as hospitable as warmer climes. Friends hunker down and invert.

This is not a malicious act; it's simply self-tending in a hard season. That, too, may change in harder times as we feel our way to common humanity and community, soup kitchens being a way-marker.

It is one of the astonishments of being human that often the poorest among us are the most hospitable.

This will be my first Christmas without all the pretty whatnots for holiday magic--Alpen village, creche, lights, heirloom tree ornaments. The spectre of homelessness had urged me to many decisions; much let go.

Nearer the end of my life than its beginning, and childless, I gave "Christmas" away. Have resisted every itch to "buy" replacement treasures.

Home-schooled families will pass them along now on the Maine island which was my home. Their children had been my delight in years of reading stories aloud.

Instead, I watch Rocky Mountain birds, and magic of the season comes to me anew! Have hung bird feeders in a plum thicket outside the living room window where I snuggle warmly to read in the evening.

They have flocked in amazing variety and profusion: rosy finches, chickadees, evening grosbeak, snow bunting, towhee, flashes of magpies, soft mourning doves, glimpses of hawk and golden eagle... and clumsy feral cats.

I laughed, understanding the plum thicket will stand as Christmas tree this year, the birds the ornaments. Beeswax candles at the windows.

Thanks and giving, Hanukkah, Yule, Solstice and Christmas. New Year to us all.

"Mass Ascension"

2010-11-01T06:52:00.000-07:00

At 0-dark-30, I roll out of flannel bedding and down-surround to attend a mass ascension.

Not the Rapture just yet, that rescue from earth messiness, 144,000 soaring.

A pastor friend, visiting the Deep South, asked a colleague about the hole in his church roof. Poor janitorial help? Did they put a washtub under it to catch incoming rain?

Benignantly and with some pity, he explained: "At the last trumpet" his congregation, alerted, would assemble in the sanctuary and rise en masse through the roof hole.

Given the billions on earth, the congregation would represent a hefty percentage of the 144-thou.

Any surviving humans, ah well, left behind to suffering and life as worker bees, rebuilding bridges, planting community gardens. Mostly left to howling in the dark.

Whenever power structures on earth begin distorting and imploding--mongol hordes on the ridgeline, the end of monarchies, dispossession and diaspora, we humans extrapolate the end of the known, to the end of the world.

At some millennial moment, that may be true. Meanwhile the 144,000 apparently exclude Hindu saints, Sufi mystics, Tibetan High Lamas, and kindly agnostics.

I go instead to a meadow before dawn. It being Hallowe'en, my first chortle--a little girl on her daddy's shoulders, dressed all in harvest orange, a pumpkin, with ski cap and wool gloves.

Next a freckled boy-unicorn, white from hoof to pointed crown, with rosy tail and mane. A sunflower! petaled bonnet encircling a round bright-eyed face. A dragon flicking its tail!

The vast balloons lie stretched on the earth like roadkill. They have been transported improbably in truck beds, rolled up boulder-sized, with amazingly small wicker baskets, and gasoline-powered fans to do the initial half-mound inflation.

Trucks and vans have converged to the mountain setting from three states: Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. Firemen and firetruck wait close by, which need soon becomes heart-stoppingly clear. Police warm hands on mugs of hot coffee.

A resonant, wave-like Caribbean voice calls out. The black man begins thrumming a hollow tree drum; a Pueblo Indian joins him, fast tempo, slow. Sun rises over the mountain.

Then, whoosh, burners are tested to carry the balloons aloft. Flames shoot ten feet in the air, propane-powered... (How did early balloonist rise over Paris? Prevailing wind and charcoal braziers?)

It takes a crew to inflate the sky-jewels. Two hold the garage-door-sized opening as the petrol-powered, industrial-strength fan blows billowing into the silks.

Balloons are hollow at the top! Another team member attaches a sort of skull cap across the opening as it inflates. (The air-borne balloonist will later pull on the skull cap to cause the balloon to descend.)

Top-knot secured at each vertical seam, the team member grabs a centrally-attached rope and walks backward holding tension so the balloon fills straight out rather than bulging and billowing all over the meadow.

I stand amazed by a wicker basket--very stout construction, bottom sides reinforced with thick leather, cross-hatch-stitched with rawhide. In the corners, large propane tanks, three, thirty-five gallon each, in the one I scrutinize. Not leaving much room for humans, also three.

Then comes the scary part. The basket with its propane torchiere is lying on its side. Fan is roaring its inflation. Balloon reaches recumbent half-pear dimension.

The balloonist with the most-est then activates the propane flame and sends it shooting into the non-steady opening. Blast upon blast, finessing the angle to avoid igniting the careening balloon itself.

The balloon begins to rise. Balloonist backs into basket; team members tilt it upright, dragon-flame spouting deep into the stained-glass-jeweled interior. Somehow not scorching the splendid folly of the balloon.

Rope handles loop around the basket opening. Balloonist brings the craft to hover-mode. Team members grab handles, shuffle along, trotting the rig to launch coordinates.

Done setting launch site--slightly away from other inflating balloons, set to soar, cheek-by-jowl. Two more humans roll into the basket.

Airborne!! Many rising, gold and rose and crimson, royal blues and purples, greens and turquoise, swirls and colored-angles, pennants fluttering from the sides, as though medieval jousting tents puffed into this century, bulbous and aloft.

Stalked by Winter

2010-10-26T17:05:00.000-07:00

Winter, the final predator, stalks the homeless, hard on the heels of three-piece-pinstripes who off-shored jobs, pink-slipped workers and foreclosed on homes.

Snows will flurry into every alleyway, every packing case and tent where the nameless and infrequently-washed hide and shelter. Snow-wind out of the north and hypothermia, that gentle good night death.

It's no longer possible to leave water in the sun to warm; it is difficult to bathe, wash dishes, wash hands. It is difficult to get warm.

Unemployment checks stop; the still-unemployed enter a bardo of being no longer tallied. Poof. Crying in the wind.

"I ate out of dumpsters when I got laid off," she offered matter-of-factly.

"What?" I looked over the clothesline stretched between trees outside my tent. I was folding bucket-washed shirts. She crossed her arms over her chest, blinked.

"What?" I repeated lamely.

"You wouldn't believe the good stuff people throw away. Only got food poisoning once."

"I think I'll sit down."

"You do that. They fired us without notice, benefits, or severance pay. The head of department had promised me I was senior tech: my job was safe. Just the week before. They told us to clear out our desks. Locked the gates against us."

"No severance at all?"

"Nothing. First good job I'd been able to find. I was using my salary to finally pay off my debts. Hadn't been able to save anything yet."

She was finally at the end of unemployment benefits, pitiful as they were, when I checked in on her last; brought her some fresh food. She hadn't been able to find work.

She had lost weight but looked bloaty around the middle. In Africa, it's called malnutrition and starvation. Anywhere, it's called despair.

She had said she would let me know where she went, when the time came, but she was aggressively pushing me away---before I could even think about abandoning her. That human last-stand against pain.

"I won't go to a city. I hate people. Look what people have done to the economy... To the Gulf of Mexico." She waved an arm in derision.

"But..."

"I know how to live in the wild."

"I know you do. Your daddy taught you well. But how will you eat in winter? At least in a city where it's warmer.."

"I don't... want... to live. Do you hear me? I'll disappear up into the mountains to the deep snows, where no one can find me, maybe not even in spring."

She gathered up her dogs and walked away.

Clapboard & Adobe

2010-10-24T17:38:00.000-07:00

Clapboard houses of early Maine come to mind: 70mph wind gusts are expected tomorrow, and fresh snow above 9,000 ft.

New England was very beautiful in an austere sort of way, many of the early homes built by fine craftsmen, simple, well-proportioned, un-ostentatious.

One year of my near decade on the island, I did a winter rental of an old cape built in the 1830's. Wonderful old home, low dark beams in the dining room, the original fireplace still working, with cast iron hooks for hanging Dutch ovens over the cooking fire. Quite charming.

I stocked in wood, and imagined cozy meals with friends. In fact, I couldn't invite anyone to dine with me, bundled in overcoats and mufflers!

I bought Charles Dickens gloves with the fingertips missing in order to even be able to prepare a meal. The lovely old place was a wind sieve, only suitable as a summer home.

It was also a winter when fuel oil prices shot up. I found myself facing a sobering decision: hypothermia, or regular meals?

I kept dropping the thermostat as fuel bills arrived, finally spending the winter at 48 degress F. in order to keep heating costs at $400-500/mo.

Bathing, I well remember as an heroic act.

Am now tucked into a thick-walled adobe, not, thanks be to God, a nylon tent.

Although it seems obvious that two foot thick walls would not be drafty, it needs to be felt to be properly celebrated. It's been windy today, and I've been warm.

The house does not shake, as clapboards do, though it's a tremulous thing, remembering the long fall into homelessness. Knowing we're not yet done with societal upheaval.

Each Depression-echo loss is personal, but cumulative foreclosures and going-out-of-business shocks begin to impact the country's collective sense of self.

I remain hopeful, but then, hope was the gift still standing when Pandora's Box was done.

First Snow, Aspen Gold

2010-10-22T03:36:00.000-07:00

When I opened the endings door in winter, months ago, I stepped out into gale force wind, ice on the windshield. Shoveled snow in felt-lined boots. Prepared to leave.

It now seems mercifully long ago.

Seasons have rolled round while I've lived a year's life drama---gray storms in the Adirondacks, plum blossom Deep South, bluebonnet spring in Texas, tenting tonight for months of nights, fireflies, spiders, snakes, a cavalcade of people camping or displaced.

And then autumn, not the crimson of New England maples, but gold, shimmering apricot-gold. And now, the start of winter come round again.

Yesterday, I had an errand in another county, up a river canyon through showers and sun, over winding mountain pass, which suddenly opened to wild and whoosy range land, tawny as lion's mane.

Broad valley surrounded by peaks, and the peaks, snow-capped. Sunlight swept across the slopes with massing cloud and aspens flamed, snow glimmering chill above. Snows above treeline for now.

Soon the aspens will flutter and dance themselves bare in winds and rain, till all rain is white, and conifers heavy-droop with snow.

Am learning a land with different animal-road-signs than Maine: Not "Moose Crossing," but Big Horn Rocky Mt. Sheep... and "Elk Crossing," careful now... as they bugle in the night and amble down the aspen groves from high, flower-meadows of summer.

Adobe Curiosity Shop, Taos

2010-10-19T05:28:00.000-07:00

“Come back, darlin." The old man smiles. "Come back soon.”

He closes the tall cabinet of specimen crystals, setting a darkened birch bark moose-call on top, engraved with a subtle pattern of forest leaves.

I had stepped goggle-eyed into his old shop of treasures, drawn by an uncommon Scottish name...

The place settles over me, low-ceilinged, beamed, smelling faintly of cedar and sage, woodsmoke, no mustiness. It's a museum in feel, and cozy as a hobbithole-home, though Spanish-built in 1613 as a fort. (The Conquistadors needed the protection of a fort, as they felt it their right and duty to enslave the Indians.)

The gentle owner of the trading post eyes my straw bonnet with the pink silk rose, and chuckles. Turns out we're related, good heavens, back some generations.

He paints skies and landscapes of the mountain west, and trades with native peoples. Some beautiful old work, basketry, pottery, beading, silver and turquoise, and more recent craftsmanship.

Geology students “tweak out,” he says, when they see his mineral collection. "My daughter can’t walk in the wilderness, let alone a gravel road, without stumbling over crystals."

The specimen cabinet holds a stunner smoky quartz, which had all but popped into her hand on the far side of Pike’s Peak; a huge garnet as though hatched out of a meteor.

He lets me hold everything, even a slice of delicate quartzite veined with pure gold, that he'd found in a stream bed.

Business has been challenging this year, and will taper off to nothing as winter sets in.

I ask him, speaking of biz, what he thinks of candidates coming up for re-election. He gives me a level-eyed look.

“Scalawags and snakes."

I bend over with hands on my knees laughing.

"Worse than useless. They slip into office penniless, and waddle out multi-millionaires."

He sets a water color brush to rest in a glass of blue-green water.

This winter he’ll go on painting in the tree-trunk-beamed, deep-walled adobe, heat with wood, and muse among the centuries of oddments and fine artisanship.

A living-treasure man, a hearth fire kind of knowing, he's still amazed and sharing it, if anyone will slow down long enough to listen:

“Bet you don’t know why there’s less of the red stained glass in ancient cathedrals?” Raises his eyebrows, tilts his head like an old bird, eyes twinkling.

Heh, I have him there, and grin: “Because red glass was made from gold, that's why!”

He is delighted.

“But I’ll bet you don’t know this: What made pink Depression glass, pink?”

"Huh! Now that I don't know. Not gold?..." Shakes his head. "Then, what?"

Pleased, he ambles over to a display case and pulls out some handsome Navajo silverwork set with a lavender...

“Now, this is not a precious stone, but awful pretty.”

“Good Lord, lepidolite?”

“Yes!! And ground up fine, that’s what made Depression glass pink.”

We beam at each other, language met and known.

I promise to come back.

Bankster-ruptcy Oopsie

2010-10-17T16:57:00.000-07:00

People, oh well, people are falling to debt like bowling pins---As banksters stand shielded from repercussions, and the chic of prison jumpsuits.

Three of my friends, intelligent, entrepreneurial, have had to declare bankruptcy,

They live in different parts of this vast country, but their losses are founded on the same under-girding rot of corporate self-aggrandizement and freedom to do harm.

Ben Franklin, emerging from the Constitutional Convention described the form of government chosen to protect us from further Royal abuses: ""We have given you a Republic, if you can keep it."

A Medical Emergency Bankruptcy:

My friend naively offered to care for large dogs belonging to vacationing "friends." She did this in wintry New England.

Dogs bolted on leash and slammed her down onto the ice.

The short of it, was emergency hip replacement and dog-owners feeling no obligation to help.

The long of it, was metastasizing credit card debt to pay medical bills, and much physical pain.

She was forced to move into subsidized housing, while selling stuff on eBay to stay afloat, as she filed for bankruptcy.

Did the credit card companies slap on fines and usurious interest hikes while she was disabled?

You bet.

A Retired, Fixed Income Bankruptcy:

My friend's Social Security income has not kept pace with masked inflation reality.

He had had to use end of month credit cards to buy necessaries till his government check was issued.

Late fees began to accrue, with predatory increase in interest rate. A bankruptcy lawyer managed to fend off repossession of his home.

He is saddled with long-term debt in old age.

A Buy-buy-buy Bankruptcy:

A crafter friend bought into cheap credit and must-have come-hithers. Not trips to Vegas, nothing so lavish---a truck, an inexpensive pre-fab home.

The shaky economy has dried up so much discretionary spending that most customers only window-shop now.

His highly skilled artisan business has been flattened, as in famished.

He and his partner are trying to fix up a used trailer before snow flies, as their home has been deconstructed and repossessed.

Homeless, they have put furniture in storage, and are hoping friends will help them build a small adobe next year. At least they have inherited land on which to build.

Bathing from a Bucket

2010-10-14T17:23:00.000-07:00

I didn't bathe for six months.

I did something, ablution-wise, each day, but never the glory of a sit-down bath.

Many niceties fall away while homeless. A keen sense of smell, if nothing else, ensured that water and I met somehow.

Two months into my four months of tent-living, I set deep well water to warm in the sun for an afternoon's lobster pot splash.

Drove twenty miles to a blink-and-you'll-miss-it small town, which did have a library and public computers.

I settled in next to three siblings on each other's laps, deep into a video game.

"It's MY turn."
"You had your turn."

Doing lightning email replies, vague as to my whereabouts, but hopefully upbeat, I noticed spam folder had bloated up a bit.

Did a quick check before emptying cyber-flotsam:

A former friend wished to assure me of ongoing splendid care of self, including daily full-immersion hot tub clay-bath soaks!

Um. Right.

I worked on not indulging in pejoratives, and managed a crow-croak of a laugh. All will be well, and all things shall be well.

Now under roof, baths happen, manna from heaven, not likely ever to be taken for granted again.

This weekend, I'll travel to a Pueblo a thousand years in continuous habitation. They have no running water, no electricity.

Native Luddites, as it were, they decided, elders and community, to keep to the quiet of the old ways.

They dip sweet water by bucket out of a stream which cascades down from ponderosa forests and a hidden mountain lake.

They heat with wood, read by lamplight. They are regarded as impoverished.

Rocky Mt. Choo Choo, Durango

2010-10-02T06:32:00.000-07:00

Backlit aspens, blazing gold and orange across the mountain passes, have me pounding the steering wheel, doing wolf howls and jubilant mountaineering songs.

Long drive to the high country of the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railway, in service since 1882 through improbably wild terrain.

Chugga-chugga-chugga-chugg... Whooooo-oooo-oo

Hear that old lonesome steam whistle before I see the locomotive. Black, the wheels turning like Vaudeville song & dancers in a line, holding elbows and chugging out the Chattanooga Choo Choo.

Long toot of the whistle and we start up. Behind the coal car fueling the boiler, passenger cars, turmeric-orange and to the rear blackberry-wine, sway and do bump-bump passing over the junctures of the rails.

Charming motion, though by day's end, my tusch marvels at transcontinental travel a century ago.

We travel 45 miles in 3.5 hours, ladies now in sweat suits and baseball caps, but it's easy to imagine corsets and bonnets of pioneer women, lace hankies held to nostrils against coal smoke and soot.

The locomotive takes on 5000 gal. of mountain stream water each way, up and back again at tanks where the spout is pulled down to fill the boiler and counter-weighted to rise and close.

Each morning at 5:30 before early train departure, a patrolman rides a rail car up to Silverton, snow, deluge or mudslide, clearing the tracks, replacing rail ties, shoring up gravel embankment.

Recently had to clear a ten foot deep wall of mud to get the train through.

They follow the train, too, putting out fires started by flying cinders. "They still hand-pound spikes, clear ice from rails with shovels and replace a tie in less than twenty minutes." (The Durango Herald.)

Am rolling along in an open wine-colored car, seats turned outward. We pass through a broad fertile river valley between red and beige sandstone bluffs---cattle, working horses, last cutting of alfalfa.

As valley begins to rise and narrow, ranch families have sold to developers---condo encrustations and a skinny, green green golf course along the river course, beaded with McMansions.

We start up into rocky and wild; roads peeter out. We transition from scrub oak and ponderosa pine to tall river willows, shock-gold aspens against dark conifers.

White House Christmas trees by the gazillion rising straight up from cliff ledges.

Water, jade green pools, Class V white water as the gorge so narrows, we are dangling 400 feet above a cascading wild water chasm.

Brakeman muses:

"Only thing holding this car on the tracks is gravity."

Vertigo'd woman with hand across her eyes manages to croak out:

"That's more information than we needed to know."

Brakeman grunts a laugh, adds:

"Watch for a couple holes in the cliffside just ahead. (We're so close to the wall, a person could bull-slap the red rock. Don't.)

"Building this line, man was lowered on a rope to drill the hole, pack it with powder, light the fuse, and bellow for the men above to haul him up clear of the blast.

"Hoping they were paying attention.

"You can see how much rock they had to notch out of the cliff to make the rail bed."

A rail bed with no guard rail. I peer straight down to the water. The vertigo-woman has her head between her knees, breathing hard.

We see a few rough cabins, when we descend to wider canyon bottom, only access horseback or catching a ride on the train.

We also see a jaw-dropper version of economy-vitality---some passengers have paid, wait for it, $500 to be dropped off at a resort devoted to 'zip-line' adventuring.

They strap into the pelvic rappelling harness used by mountaineers, carabiner same to lines strung between conifers and whoopee whoosh from tree-to-tree.

More economic burblings:

"Well, I'll be danged!" Twangy male voice just realizing his neighbor has been working the foreclosure market, too.

"But listen to this---We sold our home couple years back, before the housing market went cowflop. Come to find out, woman couldn't keep up with her payments to the bank.

"They took it back. We bought our same house for less than half what we'd been paid for it!"

Blast of steam as we pass over a trestle bridge with drop-off to rocky oblivion. The Engineer is venting steam to clear sediment from the boiler.

I've been interested in the mid-thirties woman to my left. She and her husband rest in the soft quiet of a best-friend marriage.

We begin talking about what used to be America's rail system. She startles me with:

"I played trumpet and flugelhorn in the Ohio State Marching Band. Old timers told us they used to take the train out to the Rose Bowl. Now we have to fly."

"Humph," we hear behind us. We turn to a crusty curmudgeon eying us to see if we're worth the bother: Will we listen? Deciding in the affirmative, he begins:

"The US rail system was let to go to ruin, by design."

"What?" says the trumpet-player. The man grins, he's hooked a live one.

"You betcha, young lady." He rubs thumb and middle finger together in the universal gesture of baksheesh.

"Three profit-fired industries, Trucking, Tire and Petroleum, wanted to force their less efficient transportation, and rub out rail.

"We had a huge rail infrastructure back then, big cities, little towns. You could get from here to anywhere by rail."

"They bought themselves into the interstate highway system. Bought? you ask. Sure. They bought preferential treatment from Congress.

"Rail infrastructure began to crumble, rail lines went idle. Now we have dog and bike paths on old railway embankments."

We pass a tumbled-down miner's cabin, roof beams and fallen sluice where he sifted for ore from mountainside torrent.

Coming down into Silverton, the valley broadens out, trees long since felled for cabins and firewood, mountains burrowed for silver and gold.

The bordellos which serviced miners, now just serve food. Town not beiged-out with franchise junk-fooderies.

Old Western storefronts still stand. Rich down-homey smells of steak, fried onions, hot coffee.

I wander off exploring, only hungry for whatever's to be found.

I reach the Historical Society Museum on the edge of town, and gladly fork over five bucks. Place is big, redolent of pine and beeswax.

"I love to support museums."

"Oh, good, we love to be supported! Don't miss the old jail. We got a $500,000 grant to restore it."

"In this economy? Good heavens. And, uh, don't think so. Doubt it's like European dungeons, full of screams and whimpers; maybe just traces of drunks sleeping off a toot, but I'll pass."

Place is a treasure-trove: old fancy parlor stoves, printing press from the frontier newspaper, first telephone switchboard, stage coach, Sharp's rifle with angled outer barrel, red-runnered horse sleigh with green velvet cushions...can all but hear the harness bells.

Down, fittingly, in the cellar: miners' cars, on curving narrow rails, pickaxes, collections of gorgeous crystals, sepia photo of a gaunt unshaven man panning for gold in a barren landscape.

I buy a book, Soiled Doves, about the female demographic which first reached the mining camps, the madams and hurdy-gurdy dancers, courtesans and whores.

Haunting eyes in the old photographs, languid, shell-shocked, world-weary.

"You haven't visited the jail yet."

"Nor will I!"

The train does four warning toots; we re-board. Going downgrade, the open car is chugging through coal smoke from the locomotive smokestack,

We were warned to bring along or buy sunglasses to protect our eyes. We're now enveloped in soot.

Musician beside me begins breathing through her sweatshirt hood, a man through his sleeve. I rummage, and did remember to pack a paper face mask, just in case. Don same, railroad-chic.

Traveling down, most of the passengers are more subdued. There's coal smoke and the swaying, jarring ride, but even more, the enormity of the West.

The hugeness of 14,000ft peaks; that this railroad was ever contemplated, let alone blast-built and maintained; our puniness where bear and mountain lion rule; our electronic-widgets waving into the nothing-reception of wilderness...

It jostles the mall-walker, golf-cart-rider us into some sort of frontier memory.

One group, however, Florida flat-landers have talked non-stop, backing into known experience---their been-there-done-that's: Venice, Louvre, Bryce Canyon yesterday, Albuquerque Hot Air Balloons tomorrow.

They drink steadily, decibel-ing ever higher.

It's not all that easy, deciding each new day to live before we die.

I had planned to make the trip with a friend, leaping Tigger-like at the prospect. It fell through the hour of departure.

What dance do we do on a gray morning?

Join the danse macabre of the nightly news, of Ingmar Bergman's "Seventh Seal...?"

Or:
Choose life, only that and always,
And at whatever risk...
To let life leak out, to let it wear away
By the mere passage of time,
To withhold giving it and spending it,
Is to choose nothing.
--Sister Helen Kelly

And speaking of Vaudeville and the Chattanooga Choo Choo, my mom was great mime!

She sent me a dream-gift of a good-bye, a few nights before I got the call that she was dying:

I stand alone in a darkened theatre just before the stage lights come up.

Sudden spotlight, Mama poised there, grinning-- straw boater, Al Jolson white gloves resting on the handle of a song & dance cane.

She begins doing a soft shoe, holding the cane horizontal in both hands, then waving her straw hat, high-stepping, she laughs and shuffles-off-to-Buffalo, exiting stage right.

Tenting Aftermath

2010-09-29T04:02:00.000-07:00

I have "put my money where my mouth is." I've finally invested in physical gold.

Gold crowns, that is. A couple teeth did not make it through tent living.

Am reminded of my travels through the rural Deep South, the junk food diet and poor dental care, A chronic condition.

Sudden loss of home created an acute condition, an abrupt transition from home-made yoghurt, kefir and freshly-ground baked goods---to no refrigeration and camp stove canned beans.

Have just had a self-hypnosis, herb and homeopathy gold crown installed, a redefining of un-fun.

"Are you sure about this?" asks the dentist.

Well, no, but while self-hypno-otherwhere, I imagine....

When gold reaches the hot air balloon heights of goldbug-dreams, I'll fly with Professor Marvel to the Emerald City, and buy land... With my teeth!!

Another tent-dweller aftermath?

Not tubby when I left Maine, can now turn sideways and not be seen around a paperwhite birch.

You will not see the tent-dweller-diet on magazine covers at grocery check-out. But like those insanities, it's not recommended.

Now leaner, and hopefully not meaner, keen on autumn glory in the Rockies, aspens tremulous-gold, am headed for the high country.

Be back soon.

Unconditional House Pet Love

2010-09-28T04:12:00.000-07:00

Pets seem to offer us the best of unconditional devotion, paws down. They wag, woof, purr when humans return from work, from fellow-human dismay.

Pets become family in lieu of broken family and serve as always-there companion.

Mark Twain said something to the effect: "We get to heaven by grace, not by merit. If it were by merit, your dog would go; you would not."

Dogs, cats and parakeets do not live as long as humankind, hence pet cemeteries.

Humans grateful for pet devotion, and disappointed in offspring, have been known to leave estates to poodles.

A poignant glimpse of Western-world lifestyle and loneliness, pet-centric-affection may become unsustainable.

How?... via climate change, earth changes and the potential for crop loss and food distribution failures.

That said, a fine dog helped me run my farm, patrolling at night, protecting gardens, farm animals and me. Indeed I loved him. Yet I have had no pet since.

I no longer own land for starters, and secondly, am concerned about food for humans, and our general loss of garden and food-prep skills.

I live now in a rural setting, green in high desert, being watered by river and mountain-fed irrigation ditches built long ago in Spanish Land Grant times, still maintained by community.

A neighbor descended from that time tells me that in living memory, people here grew all their own food, and then...

TV-involvement and becoming dependent on supermarkets edged out self-reliance. Much fertile land lies fallow, or has been flood-plain-built.

My homeless, animal-rescue friend is willing to eat dog food if times get tougher.

She and we make largish assumptions---that supermarket shelves will be fully stocked, that pet food in gourmet iterations will fill entire sections of grocery stores, always.

Creature Comforts

2010-09-25T01:58:00.000-07:00

First sit-down meal for her in months, tablecloth, silverware, cloth napkins, little vase of wildflowers.

My hiking friend, still living in a tent and feeding four rescue-dogs from her unemployment check, has come for brunch.

She's brought me a special wilderness rock for the flower garden as a gift.

"It will bring you peace," she says.

Before sitting down, she leans on the chair back, clears her throat. "May I take a picture?" she asks. "Oh sure." She snaps a pic of the plate: omelet and potato pancakes, mug of herb tea,

Homelessness is slimming. She eats mostly oatmeal and peanut butter bread. Ice is too expensive.

She was senior tech at a firm which called an unscheduled staff conference: All techies were let go without severance or benefits.

Management had hired beefy Security, overseers of the hour which techies were permitted to clean out their desks. Security locked the gates behind the shell-shocked departing.

Indeed, homelessness has a PTSD component. My friend is two years away from being eligible for Social Security.

She walks her dogs in the wilderness to regain her footing, as it were, dogs being a more reliable species.

"I won't let my dogs starve. If I haven't found work by the time my unemployment check stops, I'll eat dog food.

It's good nutrition."

Midnight Bread Lines

2010-09-23T12:03:00.000-07:00

The WalMart CEO has unburdened himself of the following:

"I don't need to tell you that our customer remains challenged…You need not go farther than one of our stores on midnight at the end of the month.

"And it's real interesting to watch, about 11 p.m. customers start to come in and shop, fill their grocery basket with basic items – baby formula, milk, bread, eggs – and continue to shop and mill about the store until midnight when government electronic benefits cards get activated, and then the checkout starts and occurs.

"And our sales for those first few hours on the first of the month are substantially and significantly higher."
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/wal-marts-ceo-provides-starkest-visual-modern-bread-line-yet

WalMart, dubbed "WartMart" by a friend, has been allowed to blight local economies with cheap Chinese gulag-shlock, putting long-standing Mom&Pop businesses into bankruptcy.

Meaning: Local layoffs, fear, foreclosures, homelessness.

The US Gov't has given carte blanche to its deep-pockets corporate campaign contributors. It looks like this:

Profits excelsior. CEO's can offshore US jobs to third world sweat shops, clear-cut the American economy.

It feels like: Where's the next meal coming from?

From Monsanto?---the AgriBiz equivalent to WalMart-ization?

Monsanto, that destroyer of heirloom seed stocks, that scourge of small family farms---small being the very size likely to weather economic downturn and serve local communities.

Through the Looking Glass and Down the Rabbit Hole of CorpGov self-aggrandizement, things are not looking rosy.

Best look elsewhere for good news and people-friendly futures. Where exactly?

Locally: Farmers markets, food co-ops, affordable housing efforts, green building, alt-energy businesses.

Above all, and below the noise of nightly news blight, look to young people.

Look to the home-schooled, to brilliant minds emerging. Look to the digerati who communicate globally.

Look to young folks who consider and reject as ridiculous--- horrendous school loans for potentially useless degrees---who apprentice to skilled trades for a workable future.

Real time drama: The predatory-paradigm destroys itself and much else, while new generations are birthing a life-centric world.

Old farts get to mentor---As we find our way from splintered families and latch-key kids to---larger family and community.

Begin Anew

2010-09-21T08:35:00.000-07:00

Now at the turning of the seasons, the Northern Hemisphere's Autumn Equinox, I think of friends in the Antipodes doing spring-planting of lettuces, spinach and English peas!

In western US mountains, leaves just edging into crimson and gold, nipped by cooling nights--apple cider time, potato harvest, roasting of chile peppers.

Back at nor'easter season, leaving Maine, I'd had to execute a Grim Reaper worldly-goods-purge in order to travel light.

How on earth will I recreate home infrastructure, out of tent and under roof?

In the eccentricity of last minute maelstrom choices, I arrive with oddments--jams made last summer, British gardening tools, cooking pots, lace petticoats, essential oils, medicinal vinegar, honey, picnic-ware, cups but no drinking glasses...

Sleeping bag, but where are the flannel sheets? My shoes, other than hiking boots? Muffin tins, oh where? That sort of thing.

With a nod to power grid iffy-ness, am replacing the solar oven I gave away, with a smaller one.

Off-grid readiness in clothes-washing now replaced and in action--a cute hand crank washing "machine" from www.laundry-alternative.com

Did five loads yesterday; not really a burden. Once purchased, psst, no utility bill, free. Clothes line went up first thing.

Still trying to locate the kind of clothes drying rack which does not collapse on itself, scattering wet clothes, if moved.

Also hauling in glass jars, the many, for canning and food storage. Canning kettle of the several I left behind? Will figure that out after winter.

Furniture?... Beautiful, and all gone.

Peace, make peace with endings. Begin anew.

Have found a whimsical old wicker rocking chair at a thrift shop. It sits on the screen porch, where I rocked and watched rain and lightning last night.

Nest at Last

2010-09-13T13:28:00.000-07:00

I wake to sound roof, dry floor, and things findable--instead of pawing forlornly through the car's floor-to-roof-piled boxes and satchels, further confusing any sense of "order."

Much useful/beautiful given away. Am on thrift shop treasure hunts.

Yesterday while doing good neighbor effort, a gratitude of Sunday worship, I shlepped a big black sack to pick up trash along the community road. More than I'd imagined.

Sack soon filled and felt like a hundred pound Santa-sack of aluminum cans, beer bottles, plastic hard liquor flasks; a casino card, lotto slips. The debris of hard times and worry.

I set it down, and was making piles to gather along the road when a truck pulled up beside me:

"Here, ma'am," she reaches out a coke can, "I'll hand it to you, instead of throwing it out." (the window!)

"Uh, okay. This isn't my job; it's just... I live here now."

The husband caught on, said "Have a nice day" and sped away.

Only had room in the sack to clear one side of the road, so beautifully overhung with old apricot and plum trees.

I limped back with the bulbous weight, shifting it from one gloved paw to the other. Several trucks, cars and tractors passed me

Headed out to do errands as bells on the old Spanish-era church were chiming for Sunday Mass.

When I came back, the other side of the street, long littered, had been tidied up.

A rainstorm is massing up.

Am all but prostrate with thanks--I'll be dry tonight, nor will I stumble out of the tent into horizontal downpour to squat-pee under a golf umbrella.

Moonlight Gardens & Monticello

2010-09-09T05:38:00.000-07:00

Now planting fragrance and 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 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.

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 long, 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, 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.

Shangri-La and Monticello somehow as touchstone, am at last under roof, after six months of bewildered homelessness, four months in a tent.

An old earth-sheltered home, two foot thick adobe. And glee be told, there is no cell phone reception through the rounded walls. Solid and quiet.

Before doing inside nestifications, I hang a hummingbird feeder.

Hummers flit like whirring jewels above me as I begin digging deep and wide planting holes for fragrant perennials--honeysuckle, butterfly bush, alpine currant, a fruity-scented rose.

In memory of moonlight gardens in Colonial America and Victorian times, will flood the surround with moon-fragrance--white-flowered regale lilies, and in summer, tuberose* and evening-scented Nicotiana.

Roots and blossom, and dark before dawn, Orion overhead and Seven Sisters.

Snows will come, but not on my leaky tent roof.

I talk to those afraid, not so much for themselves as for... the grandson who just got laid off... how can their children prosper or keep ahead of foreclosure in this now obviously predatory economy?

Families lurch homeless into city shelters, alleyways, roar of overpasses. I've met homeless folks wilderness-camping--the rent's cheap; it beats sleeping on asphalt.

For a woman alone, I recommend places with a campground host. I was often frightened by my circumstances, but felt physically safe with a host on site.

Though I lost much this year, I have been able to start anew. How did I manage that?

I've done my share of gullibility in life, but had smelled a rat during the Nasdaq mania, and began studying markets.

Not believing come-hithers of well-oiled Wall Street sociopaths, I refused credit card debt, was horrified at tech stock insanities, did no house-flipping, began simplifying, preparing. Have more or less landed on my feet.

Will fraudsters be held accountable? I don't know. We learn by doing, and easy credit makes fools of us every couple generations.

*Fragrant heirloom bulbs: www.oldhousegardens.com

Before Snow Flies

2010-08-26T12:34:00.000-07:00

A friend and I walked a narrow river passage among cowboy-flick cliffs, swallows swooping for buglets, trout leaping, and me bug-eyed at all the signs of autumn hurtling our way--asters in bloom, yikes, cat tails well-formed, choke cherries overhanging a waterfall, nearly ripe for jam-picking.

Have also been freezing my *ss the last few nights as temps drop and wind shifts out of the north.

While I may sing the delights of solar-shower-ablutions hidden away in a circle of trees, of stars blazing, and the curve of the earth arcing under vast thunderheads and sudden double rainbows, mountains all around--while I may count my blessings almost as a koan, we're nearing the autumn equinox.

I, be still oh my beating heart, am nearing a roof, an old thick-walled adobe, snug to the wind, with land for me to work, friends.

I feel as though I should now lie facedown in the dirt, arms outstretched, oratorio soaring sounds, incense and holy water. Dear God in heaven this journey has been long.

Last night fear swept the campgrounds--a strange possibly PTSD fellow circling and lurking and asking word salad questions. I was lying in my tent, drifting toward sleep, and felt frissons of alarm.

A friend with dogs came for me at golden full moon rise and said, go to the campground host till this is resolved. I did so. She walked me there with one of the dogs. The host patrolled, and the land's peace filled the night again.

The friend, an elder, has been a startling gift; we speak a language no longer spoken, kept life-long silent. Perhaps from both being mix-bloods; I have no idea.

Perhaps it's via Native American blood that we've both quietly known what it is to "fall through time..." Holding an object and sensing its history, happening on a landscape still resonating with its long ago.

We walk wilderness and pass through shimmer and return, perhaps with a pocket rock or a flint spear point or a hide scraper.

An earth sign, she has no vanity, being pink-slipped into a parallel tent-homelessness, but she does have a prowess--she feels artifacts before she sees them.

Most we touch or hold fingrtips near, and return to their time-nest in the dust.

Graveyard of Empires

2010-08-24T12:16:00.000-07:00

"My daughter's going to Afghanistan." The woman had plopped down at the library's neighboring internet station.

I looked up, startled, from editing an article. She's talking to me apparently--no one else in the room.

"Why?" I ask, turning on my stool. She continues typing and pondering her screen.

"Career Army."

"Oh. Are you concerned?" She goes on typing.

"Yes. The more war zones you enter, the lower your chances of returning home. She's been to Kosovo, Macedonia, Iraq, six tours. Now, Afghanistan, the worst." Turns to me:

"She has three year old twins and a fourteen year old. Her husband takes care of the kids when she's sent overseas." Goes back to typing.

I have a cold sweep of feeling that her grandmother-hood could soon become more active.

Afghanistan has made a rout of of invasion attempts for centuries. The British Empire called that devourer of empires, the "Northwest Frontier."

In more recent memory, the Soviet Empire withdrew defeated. The US-CIA had armed and trained, yes, Osama bin Laden and Mujahadin to expedite Soviet discomfiture--

In an efficiency of resistance, skills now used against the latest imperial hubris, ours.

"How much longer does your daughter have?" I ask, remembering the bankrupt reality of the Wall Street/Fed/Military-Industrial behemoth.

Remembering also that Army grunts already are having to subsist on food stamps, and struggle to obtain promised Veterans' assistance.

"She has two years before she can retire, with full benefits.

"My daughter hasn't told me yet, that she's being shipped out. Instead she calls her sister, who's just called me. Afghanistan, dear God" she mutters, "it's the worst."

Mother of soldier stares out the window at the mountains, hands idle in her lap, till her husband comes and shoos her out to the truck.

Not so long ago, when SuperPower Britain dominated the seas and much of the earth, Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote, "The Charge of the Light Brigade." Excerpt:

'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldiers knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Child's Anatomy Lesson

2010-08-21T12:38:00.000-07:00

I make happy, just-laid-an-egg, chicken sounds--bwaak-bok-bok-bok--a farmyard story. The children titter.

Little pink dress, pink barettes in her hair, chirrups brightly,

"I have a vagina!" pointing between her ruffled panties.

New England library goes breathless-silent.

"Oh?" I settle the book into my lap, children comfy-cushioned in an arc around the reading.

"I have a vagina, too," I offer conversationally. "And so does..."

I glance over at my friend, the suddenly wall-eyed librarian...

"Uh, so do all us girls."

A new word: the children are interested. I hear accelerating footsteps.

"Now, boys are made differently."

A dignified thirteen year old, escort to his little sisters, voice turning baritone, turns green.

"Boys," I continue, "have better outdoor plumbing. They can wee-wee standing up. Not like us girls, who have to squat, and maybe pee on an ankle."

Goofy grins. Children ready for the story, I pick up the book.

A mother bursts through the billowing scarves which form Ali Baba's cave for weekly storytime.

"We're going home now."

"But, Mumma, there's still more story."

"Now."

They pass to the other side of the curtain, voice fading:

"We don't say that word in public."

"What word?" asks little pink dress.

Wild River from Maine; Meteors

2010-08-14T13:40:00.000-07:00

Did not know if I could bear to leave Maine's scent of balsam fir, the smell of the sea, nor pink granite ledges pulsing to full moon tide, nor gathering seaweed at high tide mark to deep-dig into garden.

Before ever returning to Maine, I had visited a friend in Sweden, and returned to Maine through aeons past:

The lands were once joined in long ago living earth--same granite ledges, conifers, white birches, wild blueberries, and Sweden's cranberry, the lingonberry.

I was haunted by that ancient land and returned to New England village green, church steeple and sea skies, for nine full years.

In all the loss and endings of last winter, the dear faces and singers' voices and gardens planted and children story-land times, finally all that passes away, and there's still the land, whether above or below the sea.

How little we knew or respected when we drove native peoples from ancestral lands.

I am now come to high wilderness western lands sacred to native folk, volcanic, wild-rivered. I will somehow delve roots here.

On a night of the Perseid meteor showers, a friend and I hiked briskly, it being gathering dusk, down the switchback trail of a river canyon.

We camped under the stars by cascading trout stream, the roar of it filling the gorge as meteors filled the sky vault above us.

We slept to the scent of ponderosa pine, western juniper, sage, the fierceness of bright water.

Marveling, I slept. Being human and contrary, I wept for the smell of the sea.

Dust Bowl School Marm

2010-08-06T11:11:00.000-07:00

This is my mother's story of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression in a little Texas town. Mama was a child when classically-educated, maiden lady school marms built the backbone of the nation.

I will tell the story--a girl coming late into the school year--as I remember Mama's voice telling me, best I can:

The little girl's mother had lost her mind, watching rain not come and crops wither-die and chickens killed for the soup pot, too pitiful scrawny to lay another egg.

We'd say now, the woman had a nervous breakdown or a "spiritual emergency." She began to cry and tremble; wouldn't talk; stopped doing chores.

Her emergency took her down some long lonesome road with an itinerant who still had wheels and could carry her away, maybe, to the orange groves of Californie. Never seen again.

Little girl and her daddy dropped out of sight. School started; no sign of the girl. Daddy was told she had to come to school. "Her mama's not here to get her ready..." (meaning, she has neither shoes nor school dress.)

So, one morning in the choking light of the Dust Bowl, the little girl ventures into her class where pecking order and seating have already been elbowed out for the class year.

Spinster school marm out on errand; school bell will soon chime for classes to begin.

Class bullies spy prime meat:

"Hey girl, how you goin' walk with your hem adraggin'? You brush your hair with a curry comb?" (Guffaws. Girl turns away small as though from a blow.)

Sudden silence--Their teacher framed in the doorway, thin, righteous. Avenging angel eyes sweeping the school room, noting sick laughter dying out, on which faces.

Teacher takes up her seat behind the desk, at the the helm of good manners.

"Flo dear," she says gently, "the Principal needs these papers this morning, and I need help, getting them to her. Would you do that for me?"

Flo, shuffles to the desk in her too big brogans, no socks, her mama's cast-off house dress hitched up with a length of harness leather and dragging on the floor. "Yes, 'um" she says to the top of her scuffed shoes.

Teacher closes the door softly behind the girl. Her back to the class, she begins in a deadly quiet voice,

"I taught your parents. I have known you since the days you were born." Faces the class. "I am bitterly ashamed of you.

"That child has lost her mama. Her daddy may lose his farm. She's lonely and frightened. And you?--You with your fatter stomachs and nicer clothes--You welcome her with mockery for what she can't help. You laugh at her dreadful need.

"Set this right. Be kind to the child. And know this--If I ever hear any of you rude to her again, I will send you away from school, home to your families to deal with you.

"Now. Who among you has prepared the poem you were to set to memory? I will begin it for you."

Under the spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands.
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands...

"Next verse please. John? You may stand..."

Mama said the children went home ashamed of themselves and told their mothers what had happened.

The women of the town quietly became many-mothers to the child who had none.

A pretty hair ribbon here, a meal shared there, a little hemming, a ruffle, a pencil for her school box. Small things, so as not to harm the Daddy's dignity, as provider, when times were desperate hard.

Elders with Ovarios

2010-07-29T14:05:00.000-07:00

"You'll never guess what happened." The librarian and a friend gathered round. My ears pricked up at the internet station.

"I had an intruder."

"What?!! Did you call 911?" By then I'd joined the listeners.

"No. I'd been sound asleep and heard someone ripping the screen into the dining room window. And to do that, trampling my flower beds. I was too indignant to be sensible."

"But you had a gun?"

"No, no, you don't understand. This was totally out of character. I had spent twenty-six years as a victim--my husband beat me."

We three listeners did rumbling chest murmurs and flashed a fiery eye or two.

"I saw the small kitchen window had been trashed, and turned into the dining room. Before I knew what I was doing, I'd raised my arms like a kid in a Halloween ghost costume, and ROARED."

"You did what? Did you have your cell phone with you? Did you call 911?"

The woman waved aside the interruption.

"The bear looked up, startled as me. He had managed to heave half his bulk into the dining room, muddy forepaws on the carpet, one hind paw on the windowsill."

"The bear?" The librarian looked as though she might faint.

"He moved his hind paw back into my scarlet penstemon and columbine, sumbitch, and squeezed back out the window. Galumphed off into the night.

"It was too early to call my daughter in California, but when I did, she said, "You know he's coming back? Here's what you do..."

"Did you call the game warden?"

"Rhoda, get a grip... My daughter said his next first stop would be the compost pile; get ready. So I draped five small ziplock bags smeared with fave bear food, peanut butter, around the compost fence and went to bed.

"Didn't hear the commotion, nor see him again all week. One of the peanut butter lures had been ripped open--to the ammonia inside!

"And Rhoda, for your information, I did run into the game warden last week and tried to tell him about the bear, but of course he interrupted me."

"How tall was it?" he wanted to know.

"About three feet tall."

"On four feet or two feet? Probably just a baby."

"On four feet."

"Good Lord, woman. Buy yourself a 40-magnum. Call me; I'll come shoot him."

"I'll do no such thing. Bears are cute."

*****

The other woman is not known to me, the lady friend of a friend. He reports that she, small elderly Latina, was strolling along of an evening this last week in a community settled centuries ago by Spanish Land Grant families and more recently by an incursion of Mormons.

Adobe walls of homes come right along the sidewalk where she was strolling. A heavily laden large apricot tree had draped one of its branches over the wall. The Latina plucked two and ambled on.

Out, like an avenging fury, came the Anglo owner of the tree. Began shouting, including, "Why don't you people just go back to Mexico and get out of here?"

The Latina drew herself up to elfin height to reply, "My people have been here hundreds of years. Why don't you Johnny-come-lately's go back to England?"

At which point, the angular Anglo put her hand on the seventy year old Latina's chest and shoved her.

The shovee regained her footing and warned, "You try that again, you'll find yourself on the ground." Anglo scuttled back behind her wall.

Wusses no more.

Life, Before TV

2010-07-22T13:34:00.000-07:00

High-five to the ethers and a little jig, oggling the world map, google analytics. Cheery wave to fellow travelers all over--Zambia?! Thailand?! Oz?..Europe, UK--just a wowza time to be alive.

Am now sufficiently antediluvian to also remember a time of less buzz-- more conversation, storytelling and letter writing.

Letters from my grandmother in elegant copper plate script, from arty friends in large loopety scrawl, bean counters in tight precision. Sense of meaning in the handwriting as well as the eagerly received news from afar.

This came to me as I stood under shelter watching approaching storm. Rain thrummed hard and sudden on the tin roof.

I recall, hot summertime pre-TV, lingering at the supper table to talk, then heading out on the front porch with lemonade or iced tea, sprig of mint, to talk some more and hear the news, and guffaw at stories.

Sitting quiet in rockers, porch swing, waiting for summer lightning to commence, and rain to bring cool sweet scents of honeysuckle and earth.

Phone didn't ring much in podunk Texas, and if it did and no emergency roiling, living storyteller often heard till the end of the story.

Steady eye contact, children chasing fireflies, climbing into laps, listening to old old lineage of talk around the hearth fire, the lightning of evening.

I remember the first TV, wooden cabinet, screen nearly rounded like a porthole. I was allowed to watch Howdy Doody.

The telly gradually became an almost living presence in my family and at my playmates' homes. More shows, more excitement week to week, till TV tables in the den unfolded to supper with Cronkite or Brinkley. Mustn't interrupt with question or anecdote.

More stations, more leisure hours subsumed. Any conversation had to be tried above the more compelling sound of the sportscaster, or news-mouth.

And then sleep and barbiturates, and yeehah the world wide web, paxil and prozac to tone down the 24/7 must-be-there buzz.

All bad? Not on your life; fab time to be awake and alive.

I do ruminate now and then about the sun, a stray coronal mass ejection, or some military blow-away-the-energy-grid toy.

If the grid were to go down, what then? No checking emails or midnight cyber-solitaire, no street lights or nuking the thawing frozen entrees. No water pumped.

At which point, we'll mobilize locally, and perhaps resume quieter doings from deep memory. Will those of us who remember, live to see it? Some will.

In any case, I have such hope for the home-schooled kids, sustainable farmers, inventors, for neighbors.

Lightning now so eerie, am signing off. Good night, Gracie.