Noble Savagery

Occupying Main Street

2011-09-25T22:59:00.001-04:00

It is evident that across our nation, people are frustrated and angry. Democrat or Republican—it makes nary a difference which corporate puppet is elected. Our nation will continually be at war to make money off far-away natural resources. In these hard times of the Great Recession, the rich continue to get richer, and it’s no surprise where that wealth has trickled up from. Many people are out of jobs and unable to find work. They are losing their homes and gathering impossible debt. They are figuring out how to cope as they no longer have access to the money economy.

The protests in Egypt earlier this year were more widely reported in mainstream American news than the protests on Wall Street. It is a challenge to find news reporting on what is going on in my own country, and I imagine if I was not seeking it out, I may never know that people were protesting on my behalf. They call themselves the 99%--those who can’t afford lobbyists, who don’t have influence in politics. They are the unemployed, often over-educated—those who listened to talk of the American dream, pursued it vigorously, and found it dissipated once they arrived prepared and ready on the scene. They are often young, wondering why no one bothered to fix the broken system they are inheriting. (I should note, I am nearly 40, and I’ve wondered the same thing the last 20 years.)

It comes as no surprise that our government is heavily influenced by those who hold the purse strings. We all know this. It comes as no surprise that our media is heavily influenced by those who hold the purse strings. We all know this. Does it surprise us that a handful of tea party protests are heavily covered in the media while a massive peoples’ demonstration in the heart of the beast is largely ignored? It’s disgusting, but no surprise.

We look at those who profit from the actions of corporations—those who continue to benefit. It seems they feel themselves invincible, and that is an incredible weakness and shortcoming. Traditionally, when revolution is imminent, those in power capitulate in order not to lose total control. The New Deal is a good example. In the 1930s, the Wobblies and the anarchists were growing in numbers, as were the poor and unemployed. Massive protests encouraged lawmakers to parcel out funds to provide jobs and food in order to quell uprising. Our nation can no longer afford that route, as the tea partiers constantly remind us.

What can our government do? They have merely the illusion of control, as we find out, the more of us that step up and speak out. There is not enough in the way of resources to control us all. As more of us drift away from our brainwashing/upbringing as Patriotic Americans(tm), we find ourselves more aware of our actual circumstances. We find ourselves operating in an economy based on what we have in abundance—our time and our willingness to share what we have. This is the basis of the economy of the community.

We stop listening to the rules and regulations of the corporate government that benefits from controlling our actions with the threat of violence (whether this violence is mace in the eyes during a peaceful protest, or an eviction from a home we could afford if only access to the money economy—jobs—were available) and instead listen to our consciences. There is a large number of surplus homes as the numbers of homeless swell. Any person with a bit of common sense can hook together this supply and demand conundrum that those on Wall Street can’t seem to figure out. This is a mere drop in the bucket of common sense measures that our government can’t seem to grasp. (Whoever started buying up debt because debt is an asset deserves a $100 billion bonus, heh.)

We demand honesty from those in our circles of interaction, especially from ourselves. Our way of life is disintegrating in front of our eyes. We welcome this, knowing that this crisis will give birth to something more meaningful. As we look around what was formerly the most wealthy nation in the world, and see utter poverty while also seeing those who benefit from the control of corporations sipping champagne and smirking while protected by the public police, something is stirred deep within us.

I do indeed consider myself a patriotic American, though not in the way of throwing more money after unjust wars and standing up for the rights of corporations to throw money at politicians because that’s all free speech means anymore. I have always rooted for the underdog, and to me, that is what America is about. We ourselves are freedom fighters, throwing off our blinders and blazing trails anew. This opportunity arises on occasion, and the invitation is extended to us. We can see through the illusion of control, and disregard it. We can find out for ourselves what freedom means—not relying on tea partiers to define it for us. We can take it upon ourselves to develop the responsibility to each other that makes our near-useless government completely so. We find security in our freedom and responsibility to each other—way more than Social Security could ever give us. We can realize what it is like to have our nation for, by, and of us, not for, by and of those who benefit from corporate profits.

Yes, I’m a revolution cheerleader, and I’m not the only one. I am eight months pregnant ,and it is my hope my child will be born free and raised in a new paradigm. I am doing what I can to enable this to happen, and I invite you to join me and the other 99% in reclaiming ourselves and our country, creating together lives worth the effort of living. We may not have much in the way of money, but we have each other, and that is enough.

How to not smoke when you thoroughly enjoy tobacco

2011-03-24T10:31:00.003-04:00

I love tobacco, but I decided from the beginning that I was more of an autonomous human than could be dominated by her. With that mindset, cutting back and quitting can be fun: strength training for your will. When you get a craving, acknowledge that you have it without wallowing in guilt or any other emotion that arises. If it's really intense, drink some water and go for a run. If you have to stay away from other people when they try and smoke, that's fine for a while but eventually one learns to deal no problem.

I like to chew cinnamon sticks for the flavor, they're soooo dank. Some people prefer licorice roots. Cinnamon's kind of an upper, and licorice is for mellowing out. They are both healthy and can be ingested in large quantity, so I suggest BOTH to you. You can find both at a health food store, or your preferred online distributor.

Actually SMOKING when you don't want to give in to tobacco is another option. You can wild harvest and smoke these herbs. There's nothing with nicotine that's typically grown around here except tobacco. They taste good without being so poisonous, and some of them are actually supposed to be good for you.

Mullein/Verbascum thapsus
This is a great herb to smoke as you quit tobacco, because it will help your lungs heal and feel strong. Dry the leaves and flowers in the sun, crumble it up, and smoke it out of a glass pipe. You can find it growing in a lot of places. Primarily dry places next to paths and railroads.

"Indian Tobacco" Lobelia inflata
Amazing because it has the same feel on the tongue and throat and lungs as you smoke it. It also has lobeline in it, so you get a bit of a buzz without any of the addiction.

People will put catnip, spearmint and licorice in there for more flavor. If you want to get frisky with another human, damiana is a good smoking herb too.

Another good thing to help is this part of yoga that is about breath control. Part of the appeal of smoking for a lot of people is taking deep breaths- this will help you do it. I particularly enjoy the Nadi Shodhana.

what does a holy guardian angel look like? a mouthpiece for your ideals

2011-02-22T21:13:00.006-05:00

If you could have an emissary to the source of existence, to keep you linked up while you were sober and before you became an adept, would it matter what it looked like? I'm talking about the holy guardian angel from Hermetic Kabbalah, yes; but the use of a daemon, a guiding spirit, is not restricted to the initiatic line that has brought us to this. So yes it's appearance matters, and its character- but only to you, unless people could be said to derive meaning from the art you produce under its direction.

I thought for a long time that my HGA's appearing clearly different, and separate from everything else, because it is such a special thing that it would have to be above the rest of it? Sacred and profane, you know? This, however, was a misguided assumption. I could have guessed! I'm a mystic- I don't turn off my high vibrations deliberately, and I work to re-attune them efficiently when I fall off my horse. The overblown thirst for novelty is another possible source of misconception, god bless it.

I was hands off on this one. I desired for the spirit helper to just appear to me, as it seemed that developmentally I am ready for it but too busy to write a big ritual- and besides, I wanted to give it room to make an entrance as it would, once I put it out there that I was in the market. It did show up, then, just like that, and in in the most meaningful context it could: while I was doing impassioned work that had the force of my idealism behind it.

I was sitting at the library. It was about 3:30 AM, and I was enthralled with a lab report that had all my enthusiasm pouring into it. It was a demonstration of the "stream continuity concept", basically just that something that happens upstream happens downstream, too. The amount of dissolved oxygen, organic sediments and creatures at any given point in the stream are a result of what was happening in the direction from whence the water flows. Playing in streams is what I remember most clearly from my childhood experiences in nature. The fun there made me connect as much with nature as I did human culture, if not more. So besides being fascinating to me, and possibly assisting in job prospects as a stream quality monitor, the subject of the studying was near and dear to my heart from childhood.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a little angel flitting around. It was clearly in my imagination, and very high up: visible as someone on the other end of a soccer field. They were wearing robes (sometimes they seem to be orange and green in my memory, and at other times blues and reds and purples), and had big strong wings. It did some lazy, looping laps above my head. I smiled at it, wondered if the prescribed amount of adderal I had taken was helping to coax the critter down, and it flew back above the range of my vision.

The next time I heard from it was during meditation, two months later. I was at a Vipassana retreat, and after the dross emotional had burned away in the furnace of focus- just attending to the spot on my upper lip where breath passes over as it exits the nostrils- it started speaking to me. I was so unusually quiet, that the tathagatagarbha spoke up clearly about what I could do that would be worth stopping the sitting for.

It is difficult for me to write to an abstract audience, for some reason. I will just quote what I told my friend the other day about what I heard:

"Over winter break, I decided to grow mushrooms during a marathon meditation sesh with a Goenka Vipassana school. Theravedan Buddhism is cool, but it's pretty outdated and rough if you ask me. Still, I have to say that the visions of mushroom growing- really inspired ideas, like I had an artistic angel sitting in my brainstem, tossing paper airplane notes to my frontal cortex- were worth the suffering. My idea is to chip these damn bush honeysuckles that grow all around Cincinnati, OH. Coppice them, and put their chips in swales on the less steep parts of the steep, slippy hillsides- and grow oyster mushrooms in the chips! That way, when it rains they'll be sure to flush, and as they devour their substrate, I can just keep adding chips at the end of the ditch. At the end, organic matter will have been worked into the hillside as terraces, and I can plant persimmons and hardy pecans. Yum. Permaculture!"

The angel or whatever wasn't telling me anything I wasn't already desperate to hear- it just came up from deeper than I am used to coherent thoughts coming from, and it was charged with such ecstatic excitement that it sticks with me, even after that gnarly meditation retreat was over.

Emile Durkheim said that totems, gods of tribes, are living symbols of everything that the tribe stands for- our ideals. Let us assume that Durkheim is right- God serves as the embodiment of a culture's ideals, and is imbued with enough of the groups moral authority to act upon the command. So, when the little voice inside says "do this, don't do that", then you believe it- even if it's exactly what the rest of the culture says you should do, it is the internalized voice that you HAVE to listen to.

But what about the totem of someone who is a culture of one? You have to make your own god, period, we all do- sometimes people try and Xerox from the Bible, or some sutra, and say its theirs. But they didn't write it! You god has to be more than you are, and of the best of you- it has to be open ended enough to pipe through innovative thoughts, like these, but coherent and discrete enough to be credible for you to act on your intuition. I'm making meaning up as I go along, with the best praxis I can glean from diverse groups that have pieces but not the whole of what I am to embody.

I'll post pics of the shrooms once that happens. In the meantime, my brother Ben and I are in the brainstorming stages of establishing a homebase in Athens for post graduation. Read about it as it unfolds, here

BTW, I am calling my HGA Raphael. THE Raphael is alleged to be a healer, and the personal guide and guardian of Tobit from tradition who normally is the Semitic angel that lives in the Sun. Also, supposedly he is watching over and tending to the tree of life in Paradise. Maybe I can bum some seeds? :) The name just came to me, though. Sometimes words just pop into my empty mind like that. I stopped discarding them when I realized they might be significant, back at Mountain Gardens in '07. Belief in Fortune is a reality I've created for myself. Believing life matters because I have agency and direction, the path opens up ahead of me as I cultivate insight and act on it.

Ran Prieur: For any system to control you, it must...

2011-01-01T21:44:00.006-05:00

Don here. Sorry to be lame and just copy someone else's work. Rare weekend of full-time net access. Catching up on some stuff.

Ripped straight from the archives of Ran Prieur: April 12, 2010.

I've been thinking more about Anne's provocatively pessimistic statement (in this post) that without any tech crash, just a financial crash will have us all standing in line for coal mining jobs. If we ask why, we open a deep hole that leads to the enclosure movement, massacres of Indians, and every repressive system in history.

For any system to control you, it must stand between your work and your food. I know there are other needs like shelter and water and warmth, but in most regions, food is the big one. In a forager hunter tribe, or a family of subsistence farmers, your work directly creates your food. You might be poor, but you're free. In industrial civilization, you probably have a job that has nothing to do with producing food, where if you challenge your superiors, you'll be fired, and no longer receive the tokens that are required for food and shelter. You might be surrounded by dazzling technology and comfort, but you are owned.

Now, if this system collapses, you're free but you're hungry; your need for food, and your ability to work, are like two poles of a battery. If you can't connect them yourself, you need something to connect them for you, a social machine that can use your work and give you food. This could be a nice community farm, a crime gang, or a new complex domination system that's worse than the old one.

I'd like to imagine a new complex system that is much better. We can tell wonderful stories about a gift economy information utopia, but at some point we have to ask: where does the food come from? Is it grown by slaves? Suppose it's grown by free people -- and I don't mean free in the watered-down American sense, but economically free, where they could easily not work for anyone but themselves, but they choose to grow extra food because they get something in exchange. What do they get? Lots of money? Which they then use to hire farm workers who are not economically free? And then, when the people who do the actual work want to own the means of production, they have a revolution? We've been through that, and I fear we're going to keep going through it again and again.

I can see only one way to have a non-repressive society of any size. Every person has to have the ability, whether or not they use it, to connect their work (or the work of their close friends and family) directly to their food (and also shelter). And on top of that foundation, if we want universities and airplanes and computers, those functions are bought by autonomous food producers with surplus food.

I touched on this a few years ago in a post on Malthus: "How can we have a dense population center that does not grow all its own food, but does not deplete the land that its food comes from? The answer is simple: the people in the city must not own the land, or otherwise control it." An unsustainable city owns the farmers around it, and a sustainable city is owned by the farmers around it. So the question is not, "What do we give the farmers to make them feed us?" It's, "What non-food jobs do we farmers want to create?"

repotting the tree of knowledge

2010-11-18T19:02:00.005-05:00

Henceforth I shall blog with a community of other writers at THESE OLD NEW TRADITIONS. Solve et Coagula, my voice is over there now. Peep it =)

The son of the Sun will be born in France

2010-09-11T14:31:00.002-04:00

It seems like it could really happen: everybody's putting up the cash to make infinite energy a reality. The being's lifecycle involves temperatures so high that no earthly metal can contain it. So, the magicko-technicians will be housing it in donut shaped super magnet, where it can float freely as it's Hydrogen atoms fuse.

You are now leaving the State of Ohio

2010-09-02T16:00:00.006-04:00

Bezahn, friends! I invite you to listen to music during your stay here. As I wrote this, these tracks are two of what I listened to, when I wasn’t sitting in silence.

When I stop thinking about my story, I feel even more like a character in it. My strange and illimitable will and desire for the Good dictated that I write myself into the story of the Shawnee United Remnant Band three years ago. The experience of this quickly evolved past the visible, original tobacco-seed extraction parameters into learning about a different culture, and the development of a cluster of friendships. This is an account of my third encounter with my Shawnee friends, whose company I enjoyed for the third time over this past weekend.

One thing you need to know about the Shawnee is that they love alligators. They have an alligator on their flag. This is because of the crucial role those crocodilians played in their nation’s history. We have to go back to the beginning of their oral history for this; I have yet to receive the full story, but here’s the start: about one thousand years ago, the Shawnee were part of the warrior/worker class of the Mayan Empire. The Aztecs invaded the Yucatan, and the Shawnee decided they’d rather not fight that battle so they dipped out. Half of them skirted Northeast along the Gulf Coast, and the other half paddled straight across to Southern Florida. Two years later, the groups reunited. Having been foraging and fishing in unfamiliar ecosystems during that time, they were very hungry by that point. So they devoured all the alligators they could find; caymans had been a delicacy back in the rainforest, and they were easy big scaly meat lockers. The gift of the alligator was reverently appreciated for renewing their energy level and putting a little meat back on their ravished frames, so they carried the eggs farther North into Okeefenokee Swamp and beyond, extending the alligators’ range beyond what it had been previously as a show of thanks.

The alligator shows up again in a cave underneath their parcel in rural Ohio. The cave is how I found these “Indians”, via the internet, back when I wrote this post. The cave tours are fun, all the people tell slightly different stories as they move through them. The cave itself would tell this story: a million years ago, a meteor hit the Earth nearby to this place, fracturing the bedrock in jagging rays. The water circulating through as it does, did gush through these cracks and carve out grottos that no human has ever fully fathomed, for the danger of it. The inaccessibility of breathable oxygen to this immense aquifer would not be a problem for underwater panthers. Going down 200+ feet and hitting water, and then another 100 feet to the bottom did sweep away the only diver who ever attempted descending into what “the bottomless pit”. Supposedly he washed up 6 miles away out of a seep hole in the side of a ditch. Anyway, when the Shawnee made it up to the Eastern Woodlands, they embellished a feature in the cave to accentuate its alligator shape in honor of their beloved sustainer. The alligator is not the same as the underwater panther, however, which I think is probably still living down there in the buried ocean.

They have a campground, and they give cave tours, on the summit of the Bellefountaine “Outlier”. The rock here juts up so hard (dolemitic limestone) and so high (peak of Ohio at 1550 feet), that the last glacier broke itself over the place and jutted up a mile high into the sky. When the climate warmed up, the glacier fell and smacked the top of the mountain and broke two of the cave systems. Hence the deep drainages on the top of the mountain, complete with rocks from the tops of their former roofs.

The Indians are paying off their land, which they bought back from the dominant culture’s inheritors. Who’s ancestors stole it from them. FUCK. They aren’t bitter towards me, though. Only those who trash the land and hold people and planet as profane can raise their bile to froth. They host hippy jam band festivals during the summer to pay off the bank. Soon they’ll have washed their hands of this, and then more attention will be turned towards the regeneration of their culture. In the meantime they have been starting that task. They experiment with gardening, preserving their pristine woodlands, hosting pow wows, getting their tribe recognized by the State and telling their stories. They like the 3 sisters idea, but from what I saw there is a missing link they need before the system will work. Perhaps I can connect them with the successful permaculturalist Susana Lein, who has mastered co-creating the corn beans and squash as a flourishingly productive, no-til polycult.

I have yet to attend a pow wow, but as I gain in appreciation for what the elaborate costumes signify and what the people are dancing for, I’m staring to wonder why I haven’t! Hahaha. I found blue cohosh and spikenard on their property, in the middle of this sea of corn and soybeans, like wo-OH! There is something special about this land. There is a family of wild badgers living here, and an extinct species of raccoon, and a light bulb that is not connected to electricity that illuminates the community center all night every night. Perhaps related to the fact that the cave underneath the community center drains your cell phone battery if you leave it on during the tour?

Some details from a plant walk with the clan mother Melassa: they use the root of spicebush to make a tea. They eat the whole violet, saying it’s loaded with vitamin C. They suggest eating the roots of waterleaf in the autumn as a potato. They call plants “green people”, or ahnzahnzaki nawbe in their Algonquin language.

For efficacy of understanding, I hit the zen/pause button on my internal narrator frequently while I was there. Letting my heart receive every gift and scrap, soaking it up and enjoying the ride as it hit me. I engaged my agency to let the Band people know of my appreciation for their hospitality, and to link my story and those of the other college students with theirs. That kind of active listening builds bridges of affection and understanding, and it is also very tiring. I guess I was unconsciously feeding on the vibe of extreme receptivity, though I had to push myself to remain more of a vessel than a torch. It takes both yin and yang, but in anticipation of the upcoming autumn of self-directed research, classes and crusading for Gaia it was more yin than those activities. Learning to moderate my Mars aspect, active-ism will become a greater portion of my balanced modus operandi than it has been this summer. Now, after visiting these Indians who have been keepin comin on for so long, I feel ready to stay strong and steady.

because sometimes facebook status updates have to exceed 420 characters!

2010-08-06T14:25:00.001-04:00

initiates of the mysteries may hone their skilll and accelerate, by probing more deeply into the meanings contained within the myth cycles we have been given by nature, god and the evolution of our ancestors. i ponder this, now: when herakles the hero was climbing a mountain, he came upon poor chained prometheus. the hidden father had punished prometheus for bringing the fire of creation to earth, and teaching the previously unenlightened humans its use. prometheus was punished for acting out of turn, by being chained to a rock and having a great eagle tear his belly open and eat his liver. since he was a titan, he regrew his parts at night, but had to experience getting murdered everyday. herakles saw the eagle and bashed it to pieces with his club, and tried to cut prometheus free. however, an immortal had to sacrifice themselves for prometheus' freedom. so chiron, the centaur who learned perfect medicine by treating an incurable wound, came forward and committed sepuku. the light-bringer arose from punishing torment, the wounded healer was laid to rest, and the hero went on their merry way.

part 3: smiling with dragon eyes, through the madness and into the heights of clarity

2010-08-05T13:34:00.004-04:00

So last post explained gaining control of my lunar energy, through zealously pursuing self-regulation and respect via ritual and journaling. This entry will touch on the later, Solar heart-opening experience. This description is pulled mostly from a letter to my pen-pal C.D.

My recent banishing of the fear of being queer was accomplished at a festival, called Starwood, with the help of my gay friend N. Having ingested soma w/ bff B.K. and new gf C.G., I wandered out into the world as they focused on grounding themselves. I adopt a shaman's outlook on these processes, for it helps to remain inquisitive and positive within a carefully chosen setting. I walked down to a fire, and cuddle up with N. beyond the fire, beyond the rings of dancers and drummers. He layed his head on my chest, and the Victorian fear of queerdom and I squared off, Eyeball to cloud of smog. "I shine like the Sun, and I will not be afraid of erotically admiring hot yang energy embodied in male humans." The cloud inside me, palpable and thick in my torso, dissipated and lingered only in my extremities as I pursued the intent of the declaration. My qigong training has cleared my inner vision somewhat, so such precise and literal pictures are not so rare for me as they once were.

All of a sudden, I saw the number 666 (which in Gematria, one may deduce from the numberical values of the letters in Christ's name, and that of the Great Beast) and felt a being of light descend from above and behind me, to live in my heartspace. This was beautiful, and with that white radiance I drove out the last of smoggy fear, and hugged N. That in itself was the unabashed confrontation that I have sought for some time, the victorious uniton with the unassuaged intelligence of my heart's will. The heart mediates between the lower worlds and the higher, & I could not feel like traversing all the Heavens that I would if my Merkabah had a trunk filled with fear of the pure, unadulterated yearnings to LOVE that I have felt, towards men and women. I gave my lover a kiss, and received his to seal the deal, and then went back to the tent and slept by my lovely lady friend.

part 2: you got there without drugs?!

2010-07-25T23:23:00.014-04:00

I don't know if I ever told you, but the reason that I went back to school is that I got a message in my heart. The message was a response, from a force that answered to "God". It was summer 2008, and every day I was doing the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, the Middle Pillar exercise, meditating, plus those 5 Tibetan Rites I posted about. These are energizing practices, practiced and designed to bring one's concentration to a quiet focus. I had the confidence to catalyze growing into my inner life, because I wanted more success in seeking my fortune in this world that felt like cruel and unforgiving. I could see, dimly, that those were both qualities within myself that I expereinced as coming from my environment. But more than from my mind, I also could see that the world can be a tricky place and that I needed some subtle power to penetrate and unlock the precise reality for which I feel seeded to blossom with. So using these techniques, passed on from sibs of the blossoming tree/rosy cross, I hacked out a free space for standing and channeling light.

It was spiritual calisthenics. Every day. Going to a forest clearing at the pinnacle of Enright ridgeline, to bellow the sacerdotal words of some barbarous semitic language. It was psychological isometrics in the basement of my girlfriend's apartment during the coldest months of winter. Bringing illumination into arenas of my being that I would no longer tolerate being isolated. I would stand in the snow by a frozen creek and guide LVX to stream up through my feet, all the way out the top of my skull. These exercises provided an opening for novel decisiveness to my yinned-out, self-critical personality.

excerpt from my journal, Thursday April 17th (2008)

"...God spoke to me today. I came through to him at the end of the Middle Pillar. My question: What to do with my life? Horticulturalist and shaman. Do the Work of Creation- express the Divine ideal by bringing forth permaculture lifeforms. This with the alchemical quintessence so well expressed that just being in the garden will resonate with our desire to pierce the veil. Awestruck by the Fathomless Beauty that'll be expressed at the scene, people will be be freer to transform themselves and manifest thier best in brightest in the vocation that speaks to them..."

It felt right to proceed farther, sometime around my birthday (5/13), with an experiment. I would address the source of my shift, which may have simply been the soothing seepage from my light-sensing pineal gland, as if it were a discrete, though completely interdependent, being of omnisentient benevolence. The question: WHAT I should be doing with my life to characterize its next phasze?! Cuz I had no fucking idea how to more fully manifest the Mars Silvanus, Greenman energy in my sphere of sensation. On the field of endeavor, I was feeling impatient and exhausted at what felt like a mighty effort and what looked like lolly-gagging on my destiny. I agreed that I would sincerely and fully explore whatever God told me directly was best for me to do, and that if the question needed further qualification, unforseen nuances and details could sort themselves out.

This is the stage that was known as Neophyte in the Golden Dawn. Probationary, testing you out to see what you're made of and whether you wanted to go on with more rigorous training. That's what being a Neophyte is about.

Eventually I was ready for the big mojo. In an epic session out by the overlook, beyond my momma's Eco-Village, did I span the inner space. Pentagrams on the pinnacle. "God, I've reprogrammed myself to believe that you, as a diffused benevolence that created the Universe and continues to act as the Prime Mover, truly enough exist to give me an answer. The ground of my being is enflamed with prayer, and the question is sincere. So even if it were only that part of my psyche which has the characteristics that I ascribe to you, I would still listen to you, because you have access to knowledge that normally now I can only dream of. So please tell me, what am I to do with my life at this stage so that I may fulfill my mission on Earth and enjoy myself to the fullest? I'm ready to execute whatever plan it is, and I'm ready to adhere to your version of it."

The answer was immediate, and very simple. "Go back to college."

"FUCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKK"

Whatever, I should have known that was coming. On some level I did, and it was unavoidable. I needed credibility, training, social skills wisdom experience. Connections and knowledge.

College. Getting there was Neophyte. That fall, I stood on Bong Hill, overlooking Athens and wondered what further progress was going to look like. Would I became a minor adept by the time I graduated? What would that feel like? What would that look like, and what would I be doing from an exhaulted station where the energy of the Sun could heat me and ray out of my heart to illuminate the world? I felt that it would happen. Then I plunged into a dark night of the soul, as I came to terms with the fact that I could not contain a successful student life in the container of poetic madness.

Fast forward through my life chapters that were shaped mainly by academics, qigong and N*. We may peer into my recent journal to read why now, I am calling myself Zelator, the task of whom is to zealously gain control of the foundations of one's being.

This is a journal entry that has been groomed for public consumption:

6/28/10

I experienced a kundalini awakening last night, at J!'s place. He is a recipe master of the sweat lodge.

There were 4 gates, corresponding with the four directions. We stripped off our outer garments and prayed by a blazing fire. Following that, we then went inside the towel-covered frame of woven boughs. We sat in a circle, our butts resting on boards over a sand floor. Sunken into the middle of the place was a brick invagination, where J! would lay down red glowing stones, saying "Welcome, all my relations" in Lakota/Sioux.

"Find your prayer", and "let the steam and the stones help you carry it up". These were my instructions… Opening to the possibility of transformation, I asked spirit to guide me and I vowed to follow its lead. The need to heal my Martian spirit, the body god of the heart, occurred to me. I saw that I had allowed my wholistic sense of self to be warped as I sacrificed balance to continue Beyond Coal battling through the Spring quarter, especially. I asked that my inner warrior be equilibritated with my ideally balanced and masculine self, so that I may laugh and feel the simple joy of living without feeling a constant desire to vault through life, driven always and solely by the battle daemon of Mars and instead welcoming in the equilibrating influence of, who would it be, Khamael according to the Big Tree Chart. I could feel this happening, as I experienced the thought in its fullness. Later, when the steam was burning my face and sweat poured from my chin, I began offering a verbalized prayer. J! opened the door to the lodge as I began, and I paused. A! sat to my left, and urged me to finish. Thank you, A!. It was my truth in the moment, and was an admirable declaration. When we emerged from the womb, there was lightening flashing in the sky and it continued for the rest of our time. Mars had heard me and showed his response with the flashing bolts of Thor. We talked about stars outside for a bit, me mentioning Astraea to the Scorpio and Libra audience. A! informed us about a cluster of guardians who live out by Titan, saying that a "mothership" is out that way also which can be seen with the naked eye.

I decided to do a ritual whereby I would fill myself with the pure planetary energies to experience them, and then wash myself clean with Lux. I had already gotten this experience with Mars, who is very close to home and responded with a happy, care-free side of me that I had not thought before as being the same part of me that can deal with conflict…. pause to read and rest…

God I have a killer stomach ache! I feel like a different person than whose consciousness was merged with such larger patterns last night. However, I know that the pain is something I need to work through... By recording this story, faithfully detailing the evidence of this truth that is no longer in the forefront of my thinking, it can find a home by integrating it into my habitual self. That will make the surface of this pond as good as clarified, because I know what lurks beneath and what is reflected from above (the daemonic and the angelic). The mead of inspiration hath ceased flowing, but fills my cup.
I'm indebted to Alan Chapman (page 25 Advanced Magick for Beginners) for elucidating this for me. I'm used to thinking of doing what has to be done in the ephemerally appropriate now as a chore, but the small haze of pain won’t keep me from harmonizing with the Dao. Doing so is easy and more richly gratifying than I previously realized.

Lodge. Returning, I filled myself with Venus, which I pictured as emerald plumes of color descending throughout my pa hui/jew cap area of the dome, and expanding into my whole body. Self-induced experience, the energy I was picturing introducing seemed to respond (remember to keep an objective tone, it will help you maintain an objective outlook) to my invitation as I felt: 1) a sentimental love, 2) generalized erotic loving for my self and 3)other, as if I and all were one unit of pleasing flesh. Truly a yummy feeling! I remember feeling this before, looking at myself in the mirror after a shower last week or the week before, and exclaiming that "Nobody's got curves like this!" in affection for the way my lower back transitions down. Then I purged the eroticism of Venus with white light followed. It took more work of will than flushing out Mars, and it seemed that I was aware of some other part of me that was there without filling with Venus energy, like part of the hardware of my physical makeup is governed by Venus and that I had stayed tuned into it after being completely awash. As I would write in my journal if I didn’t have the focus to be scientific, “But the excess energy did dissolve, overpowered by the Ain Soph.”

Next was a non-aroused Jupiter energy. It is happy, mild, not a boundary setter, but an affirmer. I felt myself bestowing a personal blessing on my experience as a whole; it was of the blue sphere based on the Kaballistic imprint. I did not feel uplifted by Jupiter, which surprised me at the time. I had expected to feel Jovial Green Dragon I've felt in my liver before, but did not. Silent mirth, happy in solitude, an inner chuckle is the kind of happiness if I had to personify the satisfaction. At this stage, J! began talking, and I had to interrupt my focus to pay attention to him, and when I focused again it was to do Mercury.

Mercury is the Magician archetype, by my reckoning: able to make connections before they are fully felt by communicating between disparate parts. I felt an orange energy down through my crown, the color I've seen in pictures of the planet's surface. The intellect. I felt more at peace with the Mercurial energy than I had during my first year at OU, because I am more fully developed and thinking is better complimented by emotional and social activity. Nonetheless, the 3 sisters project and the bioremediation I am thankful for, and I recall as I write this another experienced truth of appreciating this function earlier this year, which was a milestone I suppose- hopefully I wrote it down at the time and can transcribe it an put it on a timeline- spiraled on the wheel of the year?!!! See what I mean! While Jupiter's humor was slow and subtle, and Venus's was like a ink spreading blue dye from the chemistry lab spreading through a solute, Mercury I felt as the energy around my spinal column. THat seems to correspond with the central nervous system…

The steam got really intense after Mercury, and I realized that the Moon would be next, because there was just a full moon lunar eclipse on Saturday morning. It was so hot, my nostrils felt like they were burning, and so did my nipples.

I came outside and thought about the Moon- and suddenly it was connected to my sexuality! I did not continue the formula of inviting it in and then purging it, there was a truth happening in me of its own accord. In "The Mystical Kabbalah", Dion Fortune says something about how all the other energies are reposted in the Moon's, which brings it down to Malkuth, the Earth, the 4 directions that Amerindians use as a soul compass technology. I imagined different colored beams of light, the green, orange, blue and red that I had seen, entering into the Moon in a rainbow, that arced down into the sphere of my lower belly. Then yellow light appeared as the pre-eminent light, and the blue faded, and it was strengthened. The rainbow covenant was renewed, I realized: I do not need to hurt and strangle my body or emotions to grow and evolve them, and I vowed upon seeing the Rainbow that I was too beautiful to extinguish, ever.

I feel less certain of the chronology of the following events, but I will record them from memory as faithfully as possible, and perhaps return to offer elaborations and corrections later. Inside the tent for the third portal, the East, Rosco tells us that this is the place of beginnings, this is the direction which we evolutionarily are coming out of Dark Age in the heated South and getting more enlightened, so that space alien gods will return to conscious communication with our society and help us clean up the ecological messes we've made. I remember offering a homily to the Moon. I offered thanks to the Moon for her gifts of shaking and strengthening our imagination, so that we as earth poets could connect with the other energies too and figure out the work we need to do, and be the Gods who don't have to destroy everything to create anew! We remember, it is renewed, the Rainbow Covenant, I said. It was powerful, and I did not falter. A! offered a prayer to our DNA and ancestors and teachers before that; M! or Stephan-Eye offered something brief after. J! thanked us and said we should go into spontaneous singing. I began "Humble myself to the light of the Moon", but he overpowered me and the others with his voice, and asked us to "get low" as he dumped a ton of water on the rocks. I felt intensely angry, but then did not allow myself to retain the anger. This was a very important part of the process. I let anger pass through me, and out again like a barnacle goose’s acorn sinking through an uncovered well, and being carried out to sea on an underground river. Bending my forehead to the ground, the cord from base chakra to top chakra that my pal Farinacci suggested becoming aware of, became an upwards flowing motion. I could feel it move through me from base to top as I bent over and it flowed from I don't know where, it felt like, into the Earth, like I was a hose which somebody had dunked in water and then sucked on for some siphoning action. I was totally bent over my crossed legs. I stumbled out, my conscious mind a total annihilated blank.

J! and his interruption, what a coyote, setting me up to realize my higher need of allowing anger to pass through and back out again instead of into my sword arm.

After that third portal, I just lay in the grass. I could barely move. I was nauseous, feeling like the heat had done me in. I did facial massage but without the heat. A! came over and I took a hit of some smoke, which seemed super appropriate. I administered a resuscitating nose bridge rub. My fingers that meandered over to the left brow ridge, below my off-center third eye. I felt it quiver, and I blasted off!

This was the weirdest and most intense of the experience.

There was all this exchange between above and below energies, via the heart, and SOOO much imagery. I remember being reborn as a lux shen baby and being rocked by the virgin mother; I remember burning to a cinder and rising as a phoenix from heart to throat. I thought, "I should read Chuang Tze to see about his thinking on this. I remember INRI, strangely enough, and YHVH, and I felt the fire of creation sweep from letter to letter left to right. There were three consecutive serpents that took three paths from root to crown, each with fierce different face and temperament. One was definitely an asp or some venomous looking green snake with maroon banding, another was grayish. The first two I could feel as blazing verically, the green one kind of meandered. It got overwhelming after a while. I realized on the comedown, as others came out and started adjusting from their forth portal, that I loved this Gnosis and that I was salty to have to ever move again, because I could not express what I felt to the others and that living into it would be difficult to achieve and even more difficult to understand. Perhaps with further study, these super-dense experiences can reveal further meaning. That's a definite possibility! Anywho, when it got overwhelming, I said "These evolutions are what have happened to the World as a Whole, and I would be deluding myself if I was to view these events as my exclusive domain. The visions were of monumental, transpersonal transformation and I will learn and grow from integrating them into what I am, but on a human scale. I can’t get shredded by all this God energy."

I was rather discombobulated and couldn't communicate what happened to me to those around me, so much, but it was good. The next morning, this Monday morning, I cried after a belly rub, both for how intensely good it had been, and the great disconnect I felt between the mundane and the journey I had just come back from. I offered thanks, and remembered the Rainbow Covenant and the peaceable Martian were there supporting me.

On my way to 8 am Spanish class the morning after voyaging, I found my red bike, which had been stolen. Lavishing it with maintenance and riding it hard, I exercised the newly integrated pieces of my philosophy. I am feeling fucking amazed, enlivened and invigorated by it all.”

That bike will never have a rusty chain again. I am taking care of it from then on out, and moving straight from a stilled point, amidst the powerful fluctuations of the Lunar Flame, is what constitutes gaining control of your being. Here's to

__________________
This is what my old teacher C Duke said upon hearing my newly adopted title

"You are *not* a Zelator - you are always and only ever were *Ipsissimus*...
Enlightened and *Self-Initiated*

*Everything else is just someone else's hierarchy.*"

--------------------
Next I'll talk about the Solar achievement. After all this heavy duty focus on me, the next posts will be about girls and beer and la vida dulce.

standing on the moon, Zelator Werebrock is consoled and harmoniously returns to vehemence (part 1)

2010-07-15T10:54:00.010-04:00

My last 45 days have have been an unusually well-documented wildride. I kept a journal the whole time, and took alone space for self-intimacy on the as-needed basis. This wakened restfulness catalyzed meticulous self-cultivation, and unusually strong shocks to my system were integrated instead of being cause for disintegration. It has being enchanted, and in this post I will begin to relate the experience.

I hope you enjoy the music along with the other content.

The night after I wrote the last entry, I was feeling worn-out. Tired with finals, activism and emotional confusion while keeping an expansive, effective personality had been taxing. The exhaustion was all of spring and part of winter, and after reflecting for that last post on May 30th, my awareness grew into how hard I'd been slammed by cumulative stress. It was ostensibly for Beyond Coal's sake, but it was actually for my sake. Working effectively for real justice has kept my passion inflamed since last autumn. Then, I had found something important that was bigger than myself and was suddenly bestowed the energy to split outta a dysfunctional, romantic human partnership. No surprises there, before I could walk my parents already set me on an Earth Warrior path, and since puberty I've adoringly followed in the train of goddess Astraea/Justicia. In a way I didn't understand before, pursuing justice has become as captivatingly meaning-generative as Eros; also, this orientation towards the Lady who is Virgo, Libra and Scorpio, awoke Mars energy in me and I RAGED with it. After campaigning so hard and getting myself burned down along with the enemy, I still had to make this one showing, at this one party, as part of this external manifestation of the Great Work. It came clear that strong-arming my way through the way I had been would require neglecting self-care, as the destination lay some miles outside of town and it was me, exhausted without a ride or a bike. Needing to get there, "How am I going to do this?"

I told myself that I would sleep in the next day. I reasoned that if I was truly aligned with the will of the gods, then I should have near limitless access to willforce and animating energy. I ate a bit of dark chocolate, for I was peckish, and suddenly I saw an ouroboros and felt my engine revving. "Mwahaha! I am born anew, I vibrate forever and am completely imperishable." Feeling the whirling light above and behind my belly button, I ran for a long time through the darkness on country roads, before getting carried the rest of the way by a kindly meth afficionado who happened to be driving my way. I did not indulge in his substance, and would not have even if there were no detrimental side effects, because it was QUITE apparent at this point that methamphetamine would be completely superfluous.

That was an interesting little episode.

A few other things, I'll just mention in passing.

The desire to connect with and rely upon another human outside of myself, for solace in dealing with exhaustion, was strong. Eventually I realized this was simply not the path for me anymore, and wouldn't be. So while I was driven by lusting on life for a hot minute, backing out of some romantic foibles with dear friends and avoiding a couple more became imperative. The original meaning of the Fortitude card was revealed: neither seeking nor avoiding conflict, and overcoming your adversaries (conflicting desires and fear) as they appear through inner strength.

For the self-Chosen People out there, Frater Achad put this card between Sefira 7 and 6.

Another thing I did was to stand up at the OU board of trustees meeting and spake our piece. Since they wouldn't meet with us, I had to take the drastic step of inserting myself into their reality tunnel. The president of the University did not like it, but there was nothing they could do. I only spoke the first two sentences, because they refused to be publicly acted upon, so I handed the typed message off to their secretary and left. When we back up the promise to hold them accountable, I predict that they will be salty they avoided us when we were playing nice.

"On behalf of the 2,000 students and faculty who have signed a petition
to show they want Ohio University to move beyond coal, good morning.
Mr. President and members of the board of trustees, my name is Badger
Johnson, I am a student at Ohio University and I am here today to
bring you an urgent message.

As students, we are told that Ohio University community members  should take great pride in our institution. We certainly are  accomplishing many great things for which we feel pride, and we are  also the beneficiaries of past struggles and for this we are thankful.  However, in a modern world where we can quantify the number of human  deaths caused by each additional coal-burning facility, it is time to  acknowledge that burning coal is a backwards and irresponsible  operation.

The Lausche Heating Plant burns coal, to produce steam for heating and  cooling the buildings on campus, less than half a mile from where we  are gathered here. As we speak it could be emitting pollutants that  are known to cause asthma and trigger asthma attacks, such as sulfur  oxides. We are letting this happen right beside the fields where our  athletes train. What value does the board of trustees put on the  health of the student community?

There are alternatives to coal, and they need to be expediently  explored because the Lausche plant was due to retire years ago and we  need something cleaner to replace it. Currently the University is  reviewing its options, but it is actually well behind the timeline the  president McDavis committed us to in March of 2007. Tardiness is not a  hallmark of excellence, and it’s high time to admit that we cannot  meet the President’s stated goal of carbon neutrality while we’re  burning coal! And why would we try? Renewable energy pays for itself  in the long run, and it represents a lucrative investment. It also  helps demonstrate the commitment to environmental citizenship that is  part of our core value statement.

Are you, board of trustees, willing to change the damaging energy  course your predecessors have chosen for us? History demands that you  move beyond coal now! We need executives of character, who are  responsible to both the wisest council of our alma matar’s research  scientists, and to the desire of your customers, the students. We have  spoken: thousands of students have signed the petition to move beyond  coal now. We are here to help you hold you accountable. Beyond Coal is  here to hold you accountable. There will be positive consequences if  you rise to the challenge we’ve laid out before you, and further  negative repercussions for all of us if you procrastinate. Thank you."

Later that day, June 25th, I had a vivid dream that's too personal to share. Also, I was shocked by a thunder bolt after reading 1491, which I cannot recommend highly enough to you if you want a tour-de-force of the archaeologically supported awesomeness of cultures that existed in this Hemisphere prior to European invasion. I have been learning about Mayan and Eastern Woodland cultures from the book, after having learned from the oral traditions of these peoples that they shared space until the Shawnee left the Yucatan about a 1,000 years ago. The thunder-clad idea was that I can reconnect the Shawnee with recent Mayan emigres, who are now making their way to the Midwest to escape political turmoil, just as the Shawnee did. The Shawnee carry seeds of the 3 sisters garden, which may offer a key to grounding and continuing the indigenous lifeway of those newly arrived. Picture this: Shawnee, Forgot~urbans and Mayans from the Yucatan collaborating on an acre of 3-sisters community garden. Picture 5 acres, 25, and 64, once the right relationship and gardening techniques have been shared and thanked for. The Neo-indigenizing current being expressed through formerly dispossesed, born again pagans. The Guatamalan's culture could continue directly to their children in this new land, and not worked to be worked into oblivion from the alienation of their intensely-scheduled labor, or the by the prison-school adaptations that their kids are promoted to make. Again I marvel, think how the Earthway continuity would not sink completely underground, and with the solidarity of privileged folks with available education and attention, food could shared at the new table, the kind of table that hospitable Shawnee people had tried to teach to the Whites, the kind of hospitality that some awakening Gnostics are ready to learn now! I talked with the clan mother of the Shawnee Nation United Remnant Band, and she's open to me starting and facilitating this process, so now progress on the project is simply a matter of responding appropriately as the time table occurs to me.

There's more to be said. That brings us up to 3 weeks ago, and I'll try to finish out describing the episode soon. Until then, with open hearts we sail on the breath of God.

recognizing the usefulness of a public face/private face dichotomy as i wander through nebulous cloudscapes

2010-05-30T22:32:00.010-04:00

Readers: sometimes I make more polished work than this, for both of our benefits. If I come back to this and it doesn't communicate effectively the ideas that have come to roost in this mind, than I will edit it. Otherwise, the scatteredness is just where I'm at: imagining new shapes and patterns and living them with intention. Their trend is from fertile chaos towards greater coherence.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I have been wondering lately, about becoming steeped deep down towards my core, steeped in self-knowledge, vs being active in society and all that demands. I have experienced those two as contending poles, but I can anticipate this duality slackening as my wisdom and understanding deepen. Especially now that I am swinging back towards the pole of solitary pursuit, I can be my own strength as opposed to being fueled and ignited by what I sense and do on the public stage. This is the balanced middle pillar of Kaballah, and it is also the thrusting and governor's channels in the qigong that I am picking back up. I shelved it sometime in the autumn, I guess. The balance to be struck here won't be only the result of pragmatically using adderall to goose my mind into comprehending genetics homework, though that balance between school work and Beyond Coal was my challenge earlier this quarter. I must take stock of who I am and want to be now, because I've experienced so much since February that integration needs to happen so I can experience myself in fullness.

With the summer's being almost here, and so much change that it promises, I pay attention to the viscera's and subconscious promptings, training in self-knowledge even as activities would monumentally build my excitement and draw inner smile outwards. Welcoming back the light of my higher self, so the playfulness of the various daemonic energies, old and new, can work together in this cauldron of creation. O ho! To what collaborative effects I cannot yet say, besides that I am an ouroborros who regenerates faster than can be destroyed. Kan and Li in harmony. Seriously, beyond the self-affirming platitude, I have a confession. When who I was seemed painful- being alone with nothing but that shining cord at my chest, stretching into the distance but freshly severed and leaking the tears that I didn't want to shed- throwing myself into other pursuits was easy and attractive. As of most of winter quarter, and to a deliberately diminished degree this quarter. Now that I am returning to center, Gardening! Brewing! PAID UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH doing soil ecology, and the qigong practice that recommenced anew, tonight at sunset, are not escapes. They are the maze that I meditate in. I study and I learn.

The gist of this is, I am human and I'm done feeling immediate obligation to all that I love, because the love is way bigger than I. Bringing consciousness to a point to create an electromotive force to open my small circulation/microcosmic orbit demands this, and my latest notion is that it will eventually be emanated from the same source in my career work as a bioremediator so others will get a taste of the fruit of my discipline, a more genuine taste than I feel twas able to give through the following facebook post.

This one, that I just deleted from my wall; I remove it to here for the enjoyment of friends who would follow my thoughts. I intend for you to enjoy the music while you read.

"Started Bodhidharma's *Tendon Change Classic* today. Plant and Graft Division represent! It feels so amazing on all levels to be returning to Nei Dan training :)

p.s. a hug to anyone in my community, known or as yet undiscovered, who knows what I'm referring to. Would love to connect with fellow travelers if there be any in Southern Ohio or surrounding area."

Why did I delete this? I realized that I have 1,100 facebook friends, and it suddenly dawned on me that this is TMI (too much information) for that motley cast of characters. It is wonderfully specific by comparison to what could have been their varied responses and non-responses which I would in turn feel more self-conscious about than I want. I will undertake more specialized interaction with smaller, more select groups of people on this journey. Hahaha, this event of posting and unposting was the impetus for this burst of sharing.

Pulling attention inwards is not a matter of being shallow in public, or selfishly not sharing what's precious to me (I originally typed "shelfishly", haha). The costume is removed when there are meaningful, mutual exchanges taking place between I and Thou. Keepimg it vibrant and funky with inner circle, classy and true with all folks, and employing a mild and detached propriety towards those on distant wavelengths. Ahhhhhh, I feel more at peace having articulated my truth. Thank you, all and none, for receiving.

open letter to Students for a Sensible Drug Policy

2010-05-29T19:27:00.002-04:00

this group has advocated opening the legislation so that we may enjoy drugs without interference. this is a worthy goal, but i feel we would do well to undertake some personal alchemy first in order for us to be more effective. i would challenge us to consider what responsibility looks like on a personal level, and share the story of how we are responsible drug users with the general public. if indeed we are. we are not a homogeneous group.

this is the essential story to combat their narrative of fear and loathing: responsible drug use is possible, and further it is HELPFUL. my question for OU SSDP is, are we up to this? my sense has been that i have a more limited view of responsible drug use than my SSDP fellows. that is partially because i have a more limited experience-based knowledge, and partially because i cannot help but note that our group has suffered from lack of action. i take some share in this, and left the group to find more action-inspiring energy elsewhere. now i find myself somewhat strung out on stimulants, and looking for community to be studious, effective and also cut loose in dyonesian revelry on occasion as a counterweight. or something.

*~#what am i looking for? basically i just miss you guys and feel like i don't use or go to enough shows to connect anymore, and it doesn't have to be like this. so i'm looking for you, and heart to heart discussion, and whatever comes of that#~*

now the reading that inspired me to contact y'all. and btw, i'm here for the summer please please hit me up

"4. The Preparation of Medicines

Herbs are the finest energy of mountains and streams, the essential florescence of grasses and trees. They may be warm, or they may be cool; one uses them to supplement or drain energy. They may be thick, or they may be thin; one uses them externally or from within.

Studying herbs in their essence allows you to support your inner nature and destiny. On the other hand, if you apply herbs blindly, you will waste your body and phsysical constitution.

All those who study the Tao must penetrate herbal lore. If you do not do so, you have no means to support the Tao. Yet in doing so, you must not develop attachments, for they will diminish the hidden merits of past lives. You will then hanker after mateiral goods on the outside and waste your efforts at cultivation within.

Not only does lead to grave transgressions and errors in this life, but it will also cause retribution in the lives to come. Oh, noble disciples of my teaching! Heed this and be very careful!"

~Wang Chongyang in their 'Fifteen Articles on Establishing the Teaching', circa 1150 CE

DMT

2010-04-25T11:21:00.006-04:00

DMT is an ichor that your pinneal gland constantly secretes. Particularly during birth, death and dreaming you can find trace amounts of it circulating through your flesh. It is available in the bodies of many plants and animals. Today, its extraction is a feasible work for anybody aspiring to meaningful laboratory-alchemy.

It is the pharmacological basis of ayahuasca, the Amazon jungle brew whose initiation unites an unusually engaged segment of the shamanic community. I have noticed that these people who have done DMT are often passionately invested in this very solid plane. Now I realize their motivation comes from putting the pedal to the metal as one flies through higher energies and encounters *far out* personalities, the machine elves who one can usually not relate to directly during two eyes open consciousness. After the third eye closes, we must acknowledge that the veneer of mundania that World dawns as she struggles through our senses is simply an expression of the current reaches and limits of our perception via a nominally engaged nervous system, and that we can live for much more even if we can't always feel it, because it is DEFINITELY there.

The experience of DMT is supposed to be very validating of shamanism that doesn't use an ingested entheogenic sacrament. Kabbalah, subtle energy bodies and chakras, the transcendent personalities that animate all things and not just those which are biologically alive, all these and doubtless many others can be seen from the other side of infinite space, and knowledge and practice of them obviously DOES lead towards a huge extension of the light of consciousness. With that kind of software uploaded into your psyche, you'll be better prepared to get the most out of your journey. And that's my plug to the right-brained activist community to study practice mysticism like you would any critical theory.

The ostentatious Legalism which people wield and submit to in this World even extends to the banning of DMT! No wonder, those who are awakened from the trance are like the free radicals in the body that give rise to cancer. Free radicals are usually just oxygen, the chemical basis for prana, which are in a place that they find themselves interrupting and mutating the DNA as it replicates. The body of Empire is stricken with age as a result of free radical activity, and certain other cells gain an interdependent immortality that doesn't know or desire rest until the whole body can't take the competing energies, and it all disintegrates. Usually we talk about Industrialism like a cancer, but in the context of Babylon and the anarchists it's certainly the other way around. People are enlightening through trans-human trips and dancing to the beat of a drum that the Archons cannot hear, the useful resources which are being held captive in the belly of the beast will soon enough be returned to Nature's cycle of abundance. In that context we can manage the gifts with even more joy and gratitude; we will have a super abundance of recycling materials like scrap metal and open sky and sunlight and chlorophyll.

So living a Great Turning of the tables is for us! This vale is the proving ground for our ideals and we have only to go higher, to shine brighter. The detached, ideal-driven engagement of the masterless warrior-sorcerer will be washed in on the tides of a bliss ocean. Every time someone climbs in that rocket ship whose fuel seeps out of the middle of your brain, it's like the Moon pulling tugging water through an underground river that nobody even knew was eroding the foundations of the White House. And some of us had thought the subterraneans were all demons, ha! what paranoia.

Eyes closed Free writes let it all hang out: how Werebrock’s left brain abdictates for balance

2010-03-06T18:29:00.006-05:00

*Some not all spelling irregularities, included links and name abbreviation=partial anonymous status of peeps

Innovative Farmers of Ohio convention was a bunch of booths from orgs around the state, people on different trajectories through the ever rapidly transforming workfield and paradigms of agriculture. Double A Willow growing new Strains of willow for profit and fun and it’s out of New York University it grows so Fast it’s like bamboo and it’s carbon netural, they burn it in coal-designed power plants that do not require much modificaiton. At least, no ancient carbon is being realeased into the atmosphere. Finally, a biofuel that feeels like it’s on my side of the line! So many vacant and empty fields around here that could grow it locally for OU’s facility. Other promises include, tantalizingly, this Third Frontier collaboration with Ohio University, other schools and private firms to create Jobs for chaning the energy tech that’s known and implemented. We can stop burning dinosaurs and dance in the sun. Very successful investment of Money for state, builds economy and produces alternative energy. If some contractor Could work with OU’s Russ School of Engineering and develop a plan and implementation for the geothermal or willow energy sources, that would mean there’s all this infrastructure in place institutionally to support it. A lot of Money coming in to make it happen in certain other areas and we Could have a sustainable alternative piece of the pie homegrowing in this quadrant. So exciting.

Ah, Hasi. Hang out with her, being honest about my feelings and just sharing this: I am not over Nala, am now working on this while being interest into her. You can see other people and do whatever you like, just know that I will be back. She smiled and thanked for honesty, we are hanging out tonight.

“Yesterday I heard you say
Your lust for life has gone away.
It got me thinking, I think I feel a similar way,
And that’s sad (that’s sad).

So let’s make a decision, start a new religion.
Yeah, we’re gonna build a temple to our love.
Orgiastic dances, nymphs in trances,
Yeah, we’ll be the envy of the Gods above.

I’m feeling devious,
You’re looking glamorous.
Let’s get mischievous,
And polyamorous.
Wine and women and wonderful vices
Welcome to the cult of Dionysus.”

Beda’s hanging out too, volunteering, funneling supplies to food kitchens since they went underutilized. The two girls hung out. I have affection for them both. They seemed to hit it off. Practicing non-possessiveness “Aparigraha” hardcore for this next two week period, as per homework of Michelle’s powerful yoga instruction of last night, suddely things seem Kaiserm nedutatuibm nideratuibm gibesty, non-violence pu, enlightenment all easier with this new boost. (leaving that in there for flowingness) Beda gives me head massage and I enjoy it, Lester give me walking onions and I plant in the Earth reside Mikn’s bedroom door. Food there’s amazing, and we get to take a lot home including dank Crumbs' granola . Perhaps some final highlights, Could spend hours on this and perhaps will, that is Mr V of Mushroom Harvest offered some positive feedback to my sugestión that i be his wage=slave minion over the summer. Joph and I may team up for that job. Beka, my dear brother suggested I stay here in Athens over the summer, and join him at Wisteria With a solid gig like Mushroom Harvest and divine revelry there’s no reason I’d leave my friends, even if there were cool opportunities else where whcih of course there are. But BE HERE NOW with sense of place and all the joya n growth happening, but but… the World isnt a sad place? Ah glorious RA! Hathor! Doynysis and Dianna! Thank you for being with me, and YHVH o, bringing me all together dear pantheo to a place of coalescing… solve et coagula’s second stage? (BTW, I'm gettin' that motto tatted on the back of my neck maybe)

Speaking of alchemy, there’s this alchemist Cost who’s living in our house now. He’s a bit damaged from crack and the Enochian magick he’s fucked with, but it’s so nice to have an anarchist Adeptus Major around who I can just love on and he loves me back. We are probly gonna make some colloidal gold in the next month or so.

Oth.

Beyond Coal’s power dyanimcs: I was the leader and facilitator for a while. With the help of my friends, I am stepping down and facilitiating it…. Opening up to other facilitators! I no Langer solely channel the warrior energy of the zelator exclusively, as I did in the month and a half alter the breakup with Nala Where I am now is here, … “Lessons in love we’re learning here, Goddess guide us beyond our fears” (AH THEE NAH=Imbolc Mother Goddess from that rit griten about last time)

School’s goin’ well; just aced my final Spanish oral exam of the quarter. Had a shpiel about my favorite recipe of the spring. Well one of my favorites☺

“Los ingredientes son sal de mar, chiles picantes, cebollas salvajes, brócoli, salvaje, agua, raíces salvajes

Ve al bosque en la primavera. Busca por un grupo grande de cebollas salvajes, y toma menos de la mitad, porque vas a querer regresar a este lugar en el año próximo. También, recoge raíces de burdock, de dandelion, o de ginger salvajes, y todas las otras raíces medicinales y comestibles que están en época.

Ve al campo en la primavera. Usa una cuchilla para cortar el brócoli salvaje. Pregúntale a un amigo que observe en caso que el granjero no le guste compartir. Toma tres galones de los flores de brócoli salvaje, y regresa a tu cocina. Trae los ingredientes del bosque al mismo tiempo. Necesitas los ingredientes muy frescos.

Lava y corta los legumbres salvajes y ponlos en una taza grande. Añade muchos chili picante, y añade sal para que el sabor esta casi como el mar. Maja los legumbres hasta que el caldo sale de las plantas. Pone en unas jarras de cristal, y entonces añade bastante agua para cubrir todos los ingredientes. Espera siete días antes que lo comas.”
- Lección 6A y Lección 6B: El nombre del plato es Cortido de Athens (Werebrock 3/5/10)

Funny, a sad face popped up when my fingers jitterbug accross keyboard eyes closed. The process of replacing it with a smily face is coming naturally now and I breath deep.

Cool Project for next quarter is, The United Shawnee Remanat Band is trusting us with their pedigree of Nicotioana rustica, and we are going to Estbaliz a Oyster mushroom patch on their land via a Workshops. Wonder how the ginseng I started in the fall is too, wrote a presentation on that for PBIO 305

Paying more attention to the planets these days. Mercury zips through the sky just alter sunset; i have tentatively signed up for a 28 week Kabbalah course staring april 15th. Rejected for the undergraduate research position applied for; not sure whether; very sure actually, that there is no set course for me, that it is fluid, and i will flow the way of a channel that Providence lays out befote me. Like that pic of C.R. in Green Hermeticism, looking like Christ with moonshoes striding lightly through the forest.

The people thanked me I thank them! Give more than your fair share and you’ll get enough to wash you in an ocean of bliss

There will be gyropters on my commune. Speakin' a which, Joow from our stint at Mountain Gardens has now started, what's it called, kiteboarding?! Fulfillment of prophecy, yo, and that’s all of typing fo now.

hiya all

2010-02-23T20:30:00.002-05:00

It's been a long time, and to catch up would take an even longer time. I just wanted to point out a site I've been writing for, for a wee while. It's called these new old traditions. I recently wrote about my wabi sabi life. Here's the first part:

Wabi-sabi is a Japanese term that does not translate well to English, but using a thousand words, perhaps we shall begin to understand. Wabi originally referred to the loneliness of living in nature, but now reflects a meaning more of rustic simplicity, freshness, or quietness. Wabi also refers to the quirks and imperfections that arise during the creation process. Sabi refers to the beauty which comes into being as something ages. According to wikipedia, “if an object or expression can bring about, within us, a sense of serene melancholy and a spiritual longing, then that object could be said to be wabi-sabi.” Also, wabi-sabi “nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.”

You can read more about wabi sabi in operation in Springfield especially.

I've recently been infused with divine RRRRAAWWWWRRRR!!!!! I think it is because spring is nearly here, or possibly, I'm just crazy. I got my seed order done today, and finally, FINALLY, found a 3-prong adapter so my grow lights can be powered by coal. Cabbage and broccoli sprouts, here we go. I'm re-learning how to prune as well.

Life is pretty sweet in Springfield, having many friends who moved into the neighborhood, all with an eye for community, beauty, gardening, all that good stuff.

sharqi

winter quarter in the days before Imbolc

2010-01-25T10:40:00.004-05:00

I am excitedly stepping up to the plate of on-campus community organizing. The Sierra Club's "Beyond Coal" campaign touched down here last quarter, and I worked on it under the supervision of friend and experienced organizer CL. A project that is radical, tangible and together enough that my heart is feeling the fiery tongue of glory once again. Our goal is for OU to stop burning coal on campus (can you believe it, are we in Victorian England or what?) Now that our friend CL has left I have stepped up to lead the group. This is challenging in more ways than one, and it's relishing to have to stay on my toes, for it makes living turgid with qi so easy. The kick-off event for will be a panel discussion by alternative energy researchers. We will be exploring which energy technologies are hypothetically best for replacing fossil fuel immolation to heat campus buildings. Through this discussion we offer views of a route this school can take to energy interdependence with living processes. The administration and board of trustees is beginning to hear our message.

Groundhog's Day is Tuesday of next week! The USAian holiday, featuring Marmoda monax as chief weather prognosticator, is based off of European traditions that came before it. Badgers and serpents used to be the reporters. The notion was that the hag of winter would either stay in and finish her snooze, thus spelling no more winter; or, she'd come out and make it nice for a day so she could gather more firewood! Those astute badgers would see their shadows and know exactly what was going on. Don't hate the hag, love her: without winter, would we experience the renewal of spring vigor with such joy? You might ask the hag to shorten the winter a bit, even though you like her gift well enough. You can vote with your CO2 emissions if your mind is made up.

Imbolc is the name neo-pagans have remembered for the holiday, halfway 'tween winter solstace and vernal equinox. The word means either "milk" or "in the belly", depending on whose translation of Gaelic you go with. The time was a celebration of the coming of nature's spring quickening, and farm animal lactation in particular because it arrived early, around this time. There'd be bonfires, herbed beer, and the desire to relieve from whatever psycho-somatic constipation you might have incurred while bundling up against the cold. My Athens-based, anarcho-pantheist discussion circle the Philosophers' Club designed a rite to celebrate Imbolc. We played a riff off of Campbell's "Belly of the Whale" archetype. This means disappearing off the face of the Earth for a time, and coming face to face with your shadow side. The objective here is to face the monster with a loving heart, so as to include more of it which is who part of who you really are, (the hurt and divine gifts that got put on the shelf), into who you act like you are. Our method is jumping in a freezing lake. The shock of submersion has the tendency to rip your etheric body from your astral, and when you come back to your psyche you briefly notice it as if you are a newcomer. New management, new policies. It's a good way to start the long spring cleanse cycle. Last year we chanted around a fire and then dunked through a hole in the ice, taking turns getting naked, cold and then warm again. 11 or 14 of us in a row, with many spectators, made the plunge into "Sophia's womb".

Other news: Naomi is getting interviewed for two nature-based curriculum design gigs. One in Cincy at Imago, next to Enright Ridge Ecovillage. Go on with your savvy self, dear woman. I am taking Spanish, SCUBA, plant classification, and propagation. My home DIY ambition for this quarter is starting to grow Pleurotus ostreatus (oyster mushrooms), and to make another batch of miso. I made some bombin' sourdoughed granola last week. Soak culture then drain 48 oz oats, mix in 16 oz shredded coconut, plus 24 oz soaked nuts, 12 oz raisins, 1/2 c. honey, 1/2 c. olive oil, tbs. cinnamon, tsp salt. Dry on low in oven or in dehydrating contraption.

finally, ginseng!; questionable cucumber internet meme still intriguing

2009-11-12T21:51:00.002-05:00

i am buying a sack of ginseng seed and setting up some guerilla gardens around certain of my communities' centers. it's $75/lb. i got a hookup through rural action. the king of the forest returns to share adaptogenic immortality with those of us savvy enough to respect! i cannot publicly divulge the sites, lest rogues come and stake out ground zero and sneak off with the roots. not that they'll be ready for a few years yet.

in other plant news, there is this rumor that cucumbers are not just the poor semite's bitter watermellon. this information is questionable (it claims to be from the NYTimes but it ain't on their site) but i do find munching on fresh cukes is a good way to keep cool and hydrated in the summer months

http://www.lankanewspapers.com/news/2009/10/49154_space.html

This information was in The New York Times several weeks ago as part of their `Spotlight on the Home` series that highlighted creative and fanciful ways to solve common problems.

1. Cucumbers contain most of the vitamins you need every day, just one cucumber contains Vitamin B1, Vitamin B2, Vitamin B3, Vitamin B5, Vitamin B6, Folic Acid, Vitamin C, Calcium, Iron, Magnesium, Phosphorus, Potassium and Zinc.

2. Feeling tired in the afternoon, put down the caffeinated soda and pick up a cucumber. Cucumbers are a good source of B Vitamins and Carbohydrates that can provide that quick pick-me-up that can last for hours.

3. Tired of your bathroom mirror fogging up after a shower? Try rubbing a cucumber slice along the mirror, it will eliminate the fog and provide a soothing, spa-like fragrance.

4. Are grubs and slugs ruining your planting beds? Place a few slices in a small pie tin and your garden will be free of pests all season long. The chemicals in the cucumber react with the aluminum to give off a scent undetectable to humans but drive garden pests crazy and make them flee the area.

5. Looking for a fast and easy way to remove cellulite before going out or to the pool? Try rubbing a slice or two of cucumbers along your problem area for a few minutes, the phytochemicals in the cucumber cause the collagen in your skin to tighten, firming up the outer layer and reducing the visibility of cellulite. Works great on wrinkles too!!!

6. Want to avoid a hangover or terrible headache? Eat a few cucumber slices before going to bed and wake up refreshed and headache free. Cucumbers contain enough sugar, B vitamins and electrolytes to replenish essential nutrients the body lost, keeping everything in equilibrium, avoiding both a hangover and headache!!

7. Looking to fight off that afternoon or evening snacking binge? Cucumbers have been used for centuries and often used by European trappers, traders and explores for quick meals to thwart off starvation.

8. Have an important meeting or job interview and you realize that you don`t have enough time to polish your shoes? Rub a freshly cut cucumber over the shoe, its chemicals will provide a quick and durable shine that not only looks great but also repels water.

9. Out of WD 40 and need to fix a squeaky hinge? Take a cucumber slice and rub it along the problematic hinge, and voila, the squeak is gone!

10. Stressed out and don`t have time for massage, facial or visit to the spa? Cut up an entire cucumber and place it in a boiling pot of water, the chemicals and nutrients from the cucumber with react with the boiling water and be released in the steam, creating a soothing, relaxing aroma that has been shown the reduce stress in new mothers and college students during final exams.

11. Just finish a business lunch and realize you don`t have gum or mints? Take a slice of cucumber and press it to the roof of your mouth with your tongue for 30 seconds to eliminate bad breath, the phytochemcials will kill the bacteria in your mouth responsible for causing bad breath.

12. Looking for a `green` way to clean your faucets, sinks or stainless steel? Take a slice of cucumber and rub it on the surface you want to clean, not only will it remove years of tarnish and bring back the shine, but is won`t leave streaks and won`t harm you fingers or fingernails while you clean.

13. Using a pen and made a mistake? Take the outside of the cucumber and slowly use it to erase the pen writing, also works great on crayons and markers that the kids have used to decorate the walls!!

water quality and the Temperance card

2009-10-30T00:16:00.008-04:00

If you don't like the taste of a halogen gas that's toxic in micrograms, Bottlemania author author Elizabeth Royte advises for dechlorinating your tap water. The quickest way is to pour a body of water between two containers, back and forth for 5 repetitions. Tastier, purified water then remains after chlorine has evaporated out at an accelerated rate. The sound and tones of water falling in on itself as you practice guiding all the water in or between the cups. The scene reminds me of tarot card 14. I have been wanting to talk about tarot more and now it's time to start the conversation.

Successfully interpreting wisdom from a tarot card is based on, among other things, having thoughtfully lived through experiences that intuitively relate to what's on the card. Back in your past, (or in a story), is an experience that can serve as an entrance for your imagination to the event on the card. This information gets transmitted to you as impulses, thoughts, feelings, etc. As Buhner admonishes, don't tdiscount any data that comes to you during your seance. Lately when I offer a reading, I ask the querent to verbally describe what they observe happening on the card as a starting point. Then we discuss what both of us are feeling in response to the card. There never fails to be an outpouring of incite. Examining the symbol lore increasingly enriches theses discourse as I've heard more and more versions of the "Fool's Journey" from seasoned bards of various stripes.

"The Fool" is the first card in the major arcana sequence. Actually it is card 0, and in that sense eternal and utlimately non-existent. The picture usually shows a light-stepped traveler, walking down from the top of the mountain with a rose they've picked to give to the world below. (It's the path from Keter to Hokma) A small animal barks around their feet, perhaps just excited to be starting the journey, maybe trying to warn them of the noise and pain they will experience. Either way, the eternal boddhisatva Fool is cheerful and unlikely to be shocked into haulting.

"Continuing on his spiritual path, the Fool begins to wonder how to reconcile the opposites that he's been facing: material and spiritual (which he hung between as the Hanged man), death and birth (the one leading into the other in the Death card). It is at this point that he comes upon a winged figure standing with one foot in a brook, the other on a rock. The radiant creature pours something from one flask into another. Drawing closer, the Fool sees that what is being poured from one flask is fire, while water flows from the other. The two are being blended together!

"How can you mix fire and water?" the Fool finally whispers. Never pausing the Angel answers, "You must have the right vessels and the right proportions." The Fool watches with wonder. "Can this be done with all opposites?" he asks. "Indeed," the Angel replies, "Any oppositions, fire and water, man and woman, thesis and anti-thesis, can be made to harmonize. It is only a lack of will and a disbelief in the possibility of unity that keeps opposites, opposite." And that is when the Fool begins to understand that he is the one who is keeping his universe in twain, holding life/death, material world and spiritual world separate. In him, the two could merge, as in the vessels that the Angel uses to pour the elements, one to the other. All it takes, the Fool realizes, is the right proportions....and the right vessel."

On the Tree of life, Temperance represents the path between Yesod and Tiferet, the lunar and the solar aspects of God. Using your positive emotions (party to the 6th Sephirot, Tiferet) be the guiding force on your expression of erotic desire (housed in 9th Sephirot, Yesod) the path from the moon to the sun and it is part of the straight shot to Ultimate Reality. Submitting to desire out of love is the archetypal example. The other way I have found to look at this is, intelligently paying attention to one's instinctual impulses and following them through. BEING HONEST WITH ONESELF BECOMES MANDATORY DURING CRISIS, and after you get there lies an opportunity to make a holy habit of self-accountability. Exploring that subject is leading me into another path (that of the Hermit), 'tween Tiferet and Chesed. Outwardly that seems comically paradoxical, because I'm more intensely and convivially engaged with other humans than ever. It's internal alchemy of the psyche we're talking here, so no paradox. Talking more about that now would be an unwise decision, because over-analyzing a living prcoess over-emphasizes the intellect sphere (Hod) above the other means of experience, and that has been a blockage to further attainment for me that's decisively been removed to the composter.

Badger -----> Athens

2009-09-25T00:31:00.003-04:00

In a house with two buddies, gettin' exceedingly tight with 'em. Naybot comes to visit on the weekends, and time's such good repast midterms are here in the blink of an eye.

Michael Seiser turned me onto a concept from Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen : that is, run barefoot on loving, living turf and running becomes a tool of bliss knocking on the spillway of your bubbling springs of endorphins. Come in, come in! Having not run for awhile, yesterday I ran, quickly and with enough attention to smell the plants I ran by with new running partner Leia, for an hour plus! Was barefoot on the grass next to a rails to trail path that leads past campus and into the forest. My legs feel good, and yearn for stretching and more action. I'm giving 'em what they're asking for.

The newest fermentation creation is "natto", cooked then soybeans then fermented with Bacillus subtilis. That strain is from GEM Cultures:, and it costs less than the price of a decent fish taco. The critters pump out, among Vitamin B12, long-coveted by health-conscious vegans. The product itself is savory, strong, and smells bad to my unaccustomed nose. The golden, organic soybeans cost just over $1/lb. Throw it on that brown rice with a banana and soysauce and you got yourself a blissfoolish feast. It's gettin' pressed omnidirectionally onto all my friends, see me and you can be next in line.

namasteX93

while exploring my body, I observe bipolarity, and a gestalt of info on future dwelling space comes through

2009-08-11T20:47:00.012-04:00

At work and at home, I have been expending some effort at coaxing my mind to stay on task and in the present. I've also brought my heart and emotions to the game at the same time, like I've been talking about in the post before last. I find that more of my attention flows towards how I am feeling. I have big ups and downs. During my highs I access spurts of energy which I automatically, creatively channel, often to have conversation or go deeper into hobbies. Whether I am processing inside or dialoguing, it comes freely and clearly and cleanly. I imagine maintaining around where the mood feels great, as the upswing is stabilizing to a plateau. Dancing around that spot without going past there. Stress could be used to keep me in the zone even as I pedal forward, providing resistance so I pulse in that levitated state. In the past, though, I have repeatedly sped up with the gushy feelings, all the short way to a point of frenziedly propelling off-course. Nose diving, my integrity and willforces would scatter and the skeletal root of my ego gets exposed. The nourishing medium for my attention seemingly evaporated, Nuit's tits run dry and a void yawns from which all sensation begets a bafflingly intense mental anguish.

Am I bipolar? From reading "Bipolar Disorder Demystified" and learning about the symptoms, it seems that I may be. Knowing about dopamine deficiencies and such is the opportunity for developing a more effective treatment regimine. Looking back, I can crow at freeing myself from a threadbare, self-fulling belief. Painfully gasping for life like a fish out of water most of the time DOES NOT buy or earn feeling fresh or groovy. I'm gunning for that without detouring to hell. "The light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not." Everyone has to deal with mood swings. I am and shall be tasting of this triumph! so mote it be. Zen Master Bo Mun's words are pertinent:

"There are two formal aspects to Zen practice: the killing sword and the sword that gives life. The killing sword means, how do we give ourselves to the situation? How, without repressing, do we let go of our condition, opinion, and situation and really offer ourselves to what's going on in the moment? For most of us that requires a fair amount of hard work. Sometimes it's painful and difficult. If we try to live that way all the time, only being "good" or only taking certain roles, most of us find that it doesn't work. We become brittle, irritable, out of balance. We do many things with such a charge behind them that we put ourselves in precarious situations.

The other aspect is the sword that gives life: the experience of empowering ourselves, doing things which come naturally, that we love to do and find fulfillment in. When we do too many of these things, most of us get a certain softness or flatness. There's no keen working edge to our practice. It's hard to believe in ourselves if we go too far to that side."

I like that: my mind has a cutting edge, and I ain't lettin' it slap and slash my thigh brain. I am working at a job whose results I ain't particularly attached to, and it is providing an arena for practicing with the killing sword. Turning it around and clearing my space for free loving happens at home, during play, at the beach, in altered states of consciousness...

With that, let's turn to the other topic. Lately, the structure of my future habitat is becoming clearer. Naomi's uncle Mark rented Garbage warrior, a documentary about the architect Mike Reynolds and his life's work, "earthships". Watch the vids below.

After seeing Garbage Warrior, I was wondering about homescale windmills for powering your home. This fella from Malawi, William Kamkwamba, is inspiring me. "When he was 14, he built an electricity-producing windmill from spare parts and scrap, working from rough plans he found in a library book called "Using Energy" and modifying them to fit his needs. The windmill he built powers four lights and two radios in his family home." Kudos, dude!

Tami Brunk's astrology

2009-08-05T22:36:00.004-04:00

I've been wanting a decent Occidental astrology page to peruse, and now, due to what I see as an allignment between the post on my July emotional growth, and her view of the cosmos's energies and their impact on human life, I'd like to link Tami in the sidebar. Except she doesn't have a page with her newsletter on it right now, so you'd have to e-mail her to get on her list at tamibrunk@yahoo.com This is what the passage that seems to correspond truthfully with my post:

"Venus Enters Cancer and Galactic Edge—What is Being Birthed Through Us?

Just yesterday, on July 31st, Venus moved into the Sacred Hoop at 0 degrees Cancer. This area of the sky is Galactic Edge, marking the intersection point of the ecliptic and the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. It is the space in the sky that looks outward from the center of our Galaxy into space. It is understood as an origination or birthing place—appropriate for the beginning stages of the Cancerian Sign of the Great Mother.

It is a beautiful time to take note of what aspects of your being are being birthed right now. July’s eclipses brought a lot of old shadow material up for many of us, hurt places from our past, old scars and fears that we have allowed to limit us and our experience of joy for far too long. We have worked so hard to release these things, we have done so well!

Now is the time to celebrate and nurture the vulnerable, unfolding newness emerging within us. What new spaces are opening up in our hearts, in our minds? How do we FEEL ourselves to be new and different at an energetic level? It is a good time to provide ourselves and those we love with plenty of nurturing, compassion, and tenderness. We would do well to apply the essential wisdom of Cancer—the innate knowing of how to nurture something—whether it is a child, a new aspect of self, a new desire, a new understanding—to develop into its fullness and uniqueness. Be kind, pay attention. We are growing into maturity in our own perfect time."

"Farmer planning diesel tree biofuel"

2009-07-26T12:07:00.004-04:00

September 19, 2006 - 2:54PM

So now there is no-til biobiesel, a gift from a tree. Maybe horses or oxen are better than the tractors this article imply. A tractor doesn't need to be fed every day because it's not alive, but maintenance is expensive on machines, they don't reproduce or make manure, and humans can have wonderful relationships with farm animals. That the trees are still alive and growing throughout being harvested amazes me, though. -BBJ
-----------
They say that money doesn't grow on trees, but a Queensland farmer believes fuel does.

Mike Jubow, a nursery wholesaler from Mackay, has begun importing seed from Brazil to plant diesel trees.

The tropical trees, which have the botanic name copaifera langsdorfii, produce a biofuel that can be tapped, filtered and used to power machinery such as tractors.

It is estimated a one hectare plantation could produce 12,000 litres of fuel a year - enough to make a small farm fuel self-sufficient.

Mr Jubow, who operates the Nunyara Wholesale Forestry Nursery and has been in the industry for 14 years, said he had heard about the trees from a colleague attending a forestry conference.

"I pricked my ears and thought 'This guy is having a go at me' but when I came home I got onto the net and typed in diesel tree and there it was," Mr Jubow said.

"I thought 'I've got to get seeds for this thing' and it's taken me three years to track them down."

He sourced the seed from Brazil and says the first seedlings would be available in late January.

The recommended method of growing them is to plant 1,000 trees on a hectare of land, preferably in a tropical area, then test them for their vigour, growth and yield about three years later, which ordinarily would lead to culling about half of them.

About four to six years later they would be measured again before culling them down to between 250 and 350 of the best trees, which would be inter-bred and harvested for seed.

Mr Jubow said a large mature tree would yield about 40 litres of diesel a year, which equated to about 12,000 litres per hectare of trees.

"It becomes astonishingly viable for a farmer to have a piece of his most productive land to get the tree up and running and then he can be independent from the fuel companies for the rest of his life," he said.

They are known to produce fuel for 70 years.

While the fuel cannot be stored for more than a few months it can be tapped.

But even if it is left too long, it thickens into copaiba oil, which is used in alternative medicines and fetches around $100 a litre in the United States.

And at the end of the tree's life, it can be milled to produce a light brown timber favoured by cabinet makers.

"There's nothing wasted on the tree," Mr Jubow said.

Love, darkness and light, and truth too

2009-07-18T13:39:00.006-04:00

It's Saturday afternoon, the sky is grey but the flowers are bright on the lawn. Especially the Sonchus arvensis pictured here, which grows in everyone's lawn and is considered a nerve tonic. Naomi and I are relaxed and hanging out together in the upstairs study. Neither of us have work today, and we're both doing little personal projects and talking about them to one another. Pampering ourselves. It's very nice, and very chill.

Having fun while being relaxed has been a rare privilege in my life, recently. I have worked really hard in this relationship to be true to both people, and it's taken me into new inner territory where being truthful is scary. Scary, because I am being shown my scary, disowned faces and having to feeling their pain. Because I deeply love Naomi, any time that I act from a non-loving place or disconnected place, we both notice and I have light shown into whatever dark place inside me that the numbness or hate came from. Also, my qi kung practice has gotten to the point where I medidate on my different organs, each of which is a generator and storehouse of emotion. Djinns of the body, that communicate more easilly than plants when I thank and extend my love to them. I voluntarilly am extending my hand and my love to the freaky Badgers inside, and finding out what they need to reemerge as viable facets of my personality. It's given me fresh perspective on life.

Before this relationship, I thought that when I found my calling and followed it I would automatically be in the clear, because self-development just happened unconsciously. So I would stop being stressed out and individuate/evolve without having to pay attention and accomplish my life's mission. That was just the idea of my life, though, and no matter how much energy I pumped it up with it couldn't be corporeally real. That was when I was really depressed and I didn't want to look inside. Now I'm learning to paddle in emotionally choppy waters without capsizing, so the fear of intimacy with self and other is not so intense. So life is more intimate, and I have attention to give to other people and projects. Yes!

Staying in my head, even scheming planetary permaculture enlightenment, eventually leaves me in the darkness of my skull- besides the fleeting brilliance that dances over my third eye, who only sticks around if conditions are right. Opening my heart, to emotionally engage in communication with Naomi and other humans, not only analyzing with my intellect, that's what brings the light of the world inside. With the heart's fire, the Third Eye's light dances and pulsates into manifesting all change I wish to see.

God, I am thankful for Naomi's existence, and thankful too that I am so intimately sharing in it. Really connecting with her unique and beautiful experience, makes me understand its independent and equally valid and precious relaity. The ah-hah moments here have been hilarious and humiliating. Heart-stretching. I'm feeling more confidant and optimistic for settling down with community.

It's so interesting, Carrie, that you are into Stephen Buhner @ the same time I am. His words have helped me bring these ideas to consciousness and articulate my experience. Also, it's good to be writing again.

semen

2009-06-09T21:26:00.002-04:00

Semen is Latin
for a dormant, fertilized
plant ovum--
a seed.
Man's ejaculate
is chemically more akin
to plant pollen.
See,
it is really
more accurate
to call it
mammal pollen.

To call it
semen
is to thrust
an insanity
deep inside our culture:
that men plow women
and plant their seed
when, in fact,
what they are doing
is pollinating flowers.

Now.
Doesn't that change everything between us?

--by Stephen Harrod Buhner, from the book the Secret Teachings of Plants

It's yet another book that is blowing my mind, makes me feel like I'm on psychedelic drugs, clears and calms me like the tao te ching, explains chaos and fractals so I can see how mountains are alive and the possibilities are infinite, as are our responses to them. Yep.

carey

What Makes Permaculture Different?

2009-05-15T10:42:00.003-04:00

Someone over at the new Midwest Permaculture networking site asked, What makes permaculture different? Well, it's something I like to talk about (and if you know me, I don't talk much). So I tried to wait and give others a chance to chime in. But no one did, so there ya go.

I often feel like I'm gushing (virtually) when I start talking (typing) about permaculture. (And my daughter's tired of hearing about it!) But it IS terrific. Maybe we've just been programmed by our culture of blandness and disappointment to distrust anything that promises something better. And, permaculture is an OPEN system. It's not a one-size-fits-all solution. It can include any type of sustainable, life-affirming technique for doing stuff. It's a way of looking at things and thinking about things. It's not a farming style, not a gardening technique, not LEED building. It's all that and more!

Egypt orders slaughter of all pigs over swine flu

2009-05-08T14:36:00.007-04:00

My brother Essam was telling me about this. Apparently, the people who raise the pigs are Coptic Christians. This community of Zabaleen, (which means "garbage people" in Arabic) lives in the shanty towns of Cairo; they sort out the organic refuse and feed it to their pigs for their food, and get money by sorting the rest of that 22 million person city's garbage. Of course the Muslim authorities in Egypt don't like their religion or their pigs, and Essam suggests this order is a political maneuver to make the Zabaleen disperse or starve. Bastards think they're gonna get rid of the Copts? They've been there a lot longer than the Muslims, and why the intolerance? That city's gonna get really trashy really quick w/o them, so besides being immoral it seems a very myopic decision. Essam is a fair trade burgher, and sells tote bags made out of recycled carpet from his Zabaleen brethren.

Egypt orders slaughter of all pigs over swine flu
By MAAMOUN YOUSSEF, Associated Press Writer Maamoun Youssef, Associated Press Writer Wed Apr 29, 4:49 pm ET

CAIRO – Egypt began slaughtering the roughly 300,000 pigs in the country Wednesday as a precaution against swine flu even though no cases have been reported here, infuriating farmers who blocked streets and stoned vehicles of Health Ministry workers who came to carry out the government's order.

The measure was a stark expression of the panic the deadly outbreak is spreading around the world, especially in poor countries with weak public health systems. Egypt responded similarly a few years ago to an outbreak of bird flu, which is endemic to the country and has killed two dozen people.

At one large pig farming center just north of Cairo, scores of angry farmers blocked the street to prevent Health Ministry workers in trucks and bulldozers from coming in to slaughter the animals. Some pelted the vehicles with rocks and shattered their windshields and the workers left without killing any pigs.

"We remind Hosni Mubarak that we are all Egyptians. Where does he want us to go?" said Gergis Faris, a 46-year-old pig farmer in another part of Cairo who collects garbage to feed his animals. "We are uneducated people, just living day by day and trying to make a living, and now if our pigs are taken from us without compensation, how are we supposed to live?"

Most in the Muslim world consider pigs unclean animals and do not eat pork because of religious restrictions. One Islamic militant Web site carried comments Wednesday saying swine flu was God's revenge against "infidels."

Pigs are banned entirely in some Muslim countries including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Libya. However in other parts of the Muslim world, they are often raised by religious minorities who can eat pork.

In Jordan, the government decided Wednesday to shut down the country's five pig farms, involving 800 animals, for violating public health safety regulations. Half the pigs will be killed and the rest will be relocated to areas away from the population, officials said.

In Egypt, pigs are raised and consumed mainly by the Christian minority, which some estimates put at 10 percent of the population. Health Ministry spokesman Abdel-Rahman Shaheen estimated there are between 300,000-350,000 pigs in Egypt.

"It has been decided to immediately start slaughtering all the pigs in Egypt using the full capacity of the country's slaughterhouses," Health Minister Hatem el-Gabaly told reporters after a Cabinet meeting with President Hosni Mubarak.

Global health experts said the mass slaughter of pigs is entirely unnecessary and a waste of resources. But Egypt's reaction was colored by its experiences with bird flu.

Bird flu started sweeping through poultry populations across Asia in 2003 and then jumped to humans, killing more than 250 worldwide.

Egypt was among the countries hardest hit. According to the World Health Organization, it has the world's fourth highest death toll — after Indonesia, Vietnam and China — and the largest outside of Asia. WHO has confirmed 23 deaths in Egypt and Egyptian authorities have reported three more deaths in recent weeks.

Chickens used to roam every dusty street in every village across Egypt, and many of its city alleys too. But when the disease first appeared here in February 2006, 25 million birds were killed within weeks, devastating the poultry sector and particularly the family farmers. Chickens nearly all vanished from sight, slaughtered, abandoned or locked away by a population increasingly aware of, and frightened by, the disease's stubborn grip.

The latest measure appeared designed to avert a similar panic.

Swine flu is blamed for more than 150 deaths in Mexico and U.S. health officials reported on Wednesday the first known death outside Mexico — a 23-month-old Mexican boy in Texas. It has spread to Europe, Asia and Israel, which shares a border with Egypt.

Experts suspect swine flu, a strange new mix of pig, bird and human flu virus, originated with pigs then jumped to humans and is now spreading through human-to-human contact. Health authorities have said you cannot contract the flu by eating pork.

"It is unfortunate," the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization Chief Veterinary Officer Joseph Domenech said of Egypt's decision. "The crisis today is in transmission from human to human. It has nothing to do with pigs," he told The Associated Press.

In the northern suburbs of Cairo Wednesday, health authorities killed 250 pigs and buried them. Angry farmers demanded compensation and provincial governors paid them around 1,000 Egyptian pounds (about $180) per head. The farmers asked for an official government decision to set a price for each pig slaughtered.

Agriculture Minister Amin Abaza told reporters that farmers would be allowed to sell the pork meat so there would be no need for compensation.

Pakistan's Sufis Preach Faith and Ecstasy

2009-04-13T13:33:00.002-04:00

The believers in Islamic mysticism embrace a personal approach to their faith and a different outlook on how to run their country’s government

* By Nicholas Schmidle
* Photographs by Aaron Huey
* Smithsonian magazine, December 2008

In the desert swelter of southern Pakistan, the scent of rosewater mixed with a waft of hashish smoke. Drummers pounded away as celebrants swathed in red pushed a camel bedecked with garlands, tinsel and multihued scarfs through the heaving crowd. A man skirted past, grinning and dancing, his face glistening like the golden dome of a shrine nearby. "Mast Qalandar!" he cried. "The ecstasy of Qalandar!"

The camel reached a courtyard packed with hundreds of men jumping in place with their hands in the air, chanting "Qalandar!" for the saint buried inside the shrine. The men threw rose petals at a dozen women who danced in what seemed like a mosh pit near the shrine's entrance. Enraptured, one woman placed her hands on her knees and threw her head back and forth; another bounced and jiggled as if she were astride a trotting horse. The drumming and dancing never stopped, not even for the call to prayer.

I stood at the edge of the courtyard and asked a young man named Abbas to explain this dancing, called dhamaal. Though dancing is central to the Islamic tradition known as Sufism, dhamaal is particular to some South Asian Sufis. "When a djinn infects a human body," Abbas said, referring to one of the spirits that populate Islamic belief (and known in the West as "genies"), "the only way we can get rid of it is by coming here to do dhamaal." A woman stumbled toward us with her eyes closed and passed out at our feet. Abbas didn't seem to notice, so I pretended not to either.

"What goes through your head when you are doing dhamaal?" I asked.

"Nothing. I don't think," he said. A few women rushed in our direction, emptied a water bottle on the semiconscious woman's face and slapped her cheeks. She shot upright and danced back into the crowd. Abbas smiled. "During dhamaal, I just feel the blessings of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar wash over me."

Every year, a few hundred thousand Sufis converge in Seh- wan, a town in Pakistan's southeastern Sindh province, for a three-day festival marking the death of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, in 1274. Qalandar, as he is almost universally called, belonged to a cast of mystics who consolidated Islam's hold on this region; today, Pakistan's two most populous provinces, Sindh and Punjab, comprise a dense archipelago of shrines devoted to these men. Sufis travel from one shrine to another for festivals known as urs, an Arabic word for "marriage," symbolizing the union between Sufis and the divine.

Sufism is not a sect, like Shiism or Sunnism, but rather the mystical side of Islam—a personal, experiential approach to Allah, which contrasts with the prescriptive, doctrinal approach of fundamentalists like the Taliban. It exists throughout the Muslim world (perhaps most visibly in Turkey, where whirling dervishes represent a strain of Sufism), and its millions of followers generally embrace Islam as a religious experience, not a social or political one. Sufis represent the strongest indigenous force against Islamic fundamentalism. Yet Western countries have tended to underestimate their importance even as the West has spent, since 2001, millions of dollars on interfaith dialogues, public diplomacy campaigns and other initiatives to counter extremism. Sufis are particularly significant in Pakistan, where Taliban-inspired gangs threaten the prevailing social, political and religious order.

Pakistan, carved out of India in 1947, was the first modern nation founded on the basis of religious identity. Questions about that identity have provoked dissent and violence ever since. Was Pakistan to be a state for Muslims, governed by civilian institutions and secular laws? Or an Islamic state, governed by clerics according to sharia, or Islamic law? Sufis, with their ecumenical beliefs, typically favor the former, while the Taliban, in their fight to establish an extreme orthodoxy, seek the latter. The Taliban have antiaircraft weapons, rocket-propelled grenades and squads of suicide bombers. But the Sufis have drums. And history.

I asked Carl Ernst, an author of several books about Sufism and a professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whether he thought Pakistan's Sufis could survive the wave of militant Islam sweeping east from the region along the Afghanistan border. "Sufism has been a part of the fabric of life in the Pakistan region for centuries, while the Taliban are a very recent phenomenon without much depth," he replied in an e-mail. "I would bet on the Sufis in the long run." This summer, the Taliban attracted a few hundred people to witness beheadings in Pakistan's tribal areas. In August, more than 300,000 Sufis showed up to honor Lal Shahbaz Qalandar.

Qalandar was an ascetic; he dressed in rags and tied a rock around his neck so that he was constantly bowing before Allah. His given name was Usman Marwandi; "Qalandar" was used by his followers as an honorific indicating his superior standing in the hierarchy of saints. He moved from a suburb of Tabriz, in modern-day Iran, to Sindh in the early 13th century. The remainder of his biography remains murky. The meaning of lal, or "red," in his name? Some say he had auburn hair, others believe he wore a red robe and still others say he once was scalded while meditating over a pot of boiling water.

In migrating to Sindh, Qalandar joined other mystics fleeing Central Asia as the Mongols advanced. Many of them settled temporarily in Multan, a city in central Punjab that came to be known as the "city of saints." Arab armies had conquered Sindh in 711, a hundred years after the founding of Islam, but they had paid more attention to empire-building than to religious conversions. Qalandar teamed with three other itinerant preachers to promote Islam amid a population of Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus.

The "four friends," as they became known, taught Sufism. They eschewed fire-and-brimstone sermons, and rather than forcibly convert those belonging to other religions, they often incorporated local traditions into their own practices. "The Sufis did not preach Islam like the mullah preaches it today," says Hamid Akhund, a former secretary of tourism and culture in the Sindh government. Qalandar "played the role of integrator," says Ghulam Rabbani Agro, a Sindhi historian who has written a book about Qalandar. "He wanted to take the sting out of religion."

Gradually, as the "friends" and other saints died, their enshrined tombs attracted legions of followers. Sufis believed that their descendants, referred to as pirs, or "spiritual guides," inherited some of the saints' charisma and special access to Allah. Orthodox clerics, or mullahs, considered such beliefs heretical, a denial of Islam's basic creed: "There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his Prophet." While pirs encouraged their followers to engage Allah in a mystical sense and relish the beauty of the Koran's poetic aspects, the mullahs typically instructed their followers to memorize the Koran and study accounts of the Prophet's life, known collectively as the Hadith.

While the tension between Sufis and other Muslims continued through history, in Pakistan the dynamic between the two groups has lately entered an especially intense phase with the proliferation of militant groups. In one example three years ago, terrorists attacked an urs in Islamabad, killing more than two dozen people. After October 2007, when former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto—a native of Sindh province with roots in Sufism—returned from exile, terrorists twice targeted her for assassination, succeeding that December. Meanwhile, the Taliban persisted in their terror campaign against the Pakistani military and launched attacks in major cities.

I had seen the extremists up close; in the fall of 2007 I traveled throughout northwestern Pakistan for three months, reporting a story on the emergence of a new, considerably more dangerous generation of Taliban. In January 2008, two days after that story was published in the New York Times Magazine, I was expelled from Pakistan for traveling without government authorization to areas where the Taliban held sway. The next month, Bhutto's political party swept to victory in national elections, heralding the twilight of President Pervez Musharraf's military rule. It was an odd parallel: the return of democracy and the rise of the Taliban. In August, I secured another visa from the Pakistani government and went back to see how the Sufis were faring.

Over dinner in a Karachi hotel, Rohail Hyatt told me that the "modern-day mullah" was an "urban myth" and that such authoritarian clerics have "always been at war with Sufis." Hyatt, a Sufi, is also one of Pakistan's pop icons. Vital Signs, which he founded in 1986, became the country's biggest rock band in the late '80s. In 2002, the BBC named the band's 1987 hit, "Dil, Dil Pakistan" ("Heart, Heart Pakistan"), the third most popular international song of all time. But Vital Signs became inactive in 1997, and lead singer Junaid Jamshed, Hyatt's longtime friend, became a fundamentalist and decided that such music was un-Islamic.

Hyatt watched with despair as his friend adopted the rituals, doctrine and uncompromising approach espoused by the urban mullahs, who, in Hyatt's view, "believe that our identity is set by the Prophet" and less by Allah, and thus mistakenly gauge a man's commitment to Islam by such outward signs as the length of his beard, the cut of his trousers (the Prophet wore his above the ankle, for comfort in the desert) and the size of the bruise on his forehead (from regular, intense prayer). "These mullahs play to people's fears," Hyatt said. " ‘Here is heaven, here is hell. I can get you into heaven. Just do as I say.' "

I hadn't been able to find a clear, succinct definition of Sufism anywhere, so I asked Hyatt for one. "I can explain to you what love is until I turn blue in the face. I can take two weeks to explain everything to you," he said. "But there is no way I can make you feel it until you feel it. Sufism initiates that emotion in you. And through that process, religious experience becomes totally different: pure and absolutely nonviolent."

Hyatt is now the music director for Coca-Cola in Pakistan, and he hopes he can leverage some of his cultural influence—and access to corporate cash—to convey Sufism's message of moderation and inclusiveness to urban audiences. (He used to work for Pepsi, he said, but Coke is "way more Sufic.") He recently produced a series of live studio performances that paired rock acts with traditional singers of qawwali, devotional Sufi music from South Asia. One of the best-known qawwali songs is titled "Dama Dum Mast Qalandar," or "Every Breath for the Ecstasy of Qalandar."

Several politicians have also tried to popularize Sufism, with varying degrees of success. In 2006, as Musharraf faced political and military challenges from the resurgent Taliban, he established a National Sufi Council to promote Sufi poetry and music. "The Sufis always worked for the promotion of love and oneness of humanity, not for disunity or hatred," he said at the time. But Musharraf's venture was perceived as less than sincere.

"The generals hoped that since Sufism and devotion to shrines is a common factor of rural life, they would exploit it," Hamid Akhund told me. "They couldn't." Akhund chuckled at the thought of a centralized, military government trying to harness a decentralized phenomenon like Sufism. The Sufi Council is no longer active.

The Bhuttos—most prominently, Benazir and her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto—were much better at marshaling Sufi support, not least because their hometown lies in Sindh province and they have considered Lal Shahbaz Qalandar their patron saint. Qalandar's resting place became, in the judgment of University of Amsterdam scholar Oskar Verkaaik, "the geographical center of [the elder] Bhutto's political spirituality." After founding the Pakistan Peoples Party, Bhutto was elected president in 1971 and prime minister in 1973. (He was ousted in a coup in 1977 and hanged two years later.)

As Benazir Bhutto began her first campaign for prime minister, in the mid-1980s, her followers would greet her with the chant, "Benazir Bhutto Mast Qalandar" ("Benazir Bhutto, the ecstasy of Qalandar"). In late 2007, when she returned to Pakistan from an exile imposed by Musharraf, she received a heroine's welcome, especially in Sindh.

In Jamshoro, a town almost three hours north of Karachi, I met a Sindhi poet named Anwar Sagar. His office had been torched during the riots that followed Benazir Bhutto's assassination. More than six months later, smashed windowpanes were still unrepaired and soot covered the walls. "All the Bhuttos possess the spirit of Qalandar," Sagar told me. "The message of Qalandar was the belief in love and God." From his briefcase he pulled out a poem he had written just after Bhutto was killed. He translated the final lines:
She rose above the Himalayas,
Immortal she became,
The devotee of Qalandar became Qalandar herself.

"So who is next in line?" I asked. "Are all Bhuttos destined to inherit Qalandar's spirit?"

"This is just the beginning for Asif," Sagar said, referring to Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto's widower, who was elected president of Pakistan this past September. "So he hasn't attained the level of Qalandar yet. But I have great hope in Bilawal"—Bhutto and Zardari's 20-year-old son, who has been selected to lead the Pakistan Peoples Party after he finishes his studies at Oxford University in England—"that he can become another Qalandar."

Musharraf, a general who had seized power in a 1999 coup, resigned from office a week into my most recent trip. He had spent the better part of his eight-year regime as president, military chief and overseer of a compliant parliament. Pakistan's transition from a military government to a civilian one involved chipping away at his almost absolute control over all three institutions one by one. But civilian leadership by itself was no balm for Pakistan's many ills; Zardari's new regime faces massive challenges regarding the economy, the Taliban and trying to bring the military intelligence agencies under some control.

In the seven months that I had been away, the economy had gone from bad to worse. The value of the rupee had fallen almost 25 percent against the dollar. An electricity shortage caused rolling blackouts for up to 12 hours a day. Reserves of foreign currencies plunged as the new government continued to subsidize basic amenities. All these factors contributed to popular discontent with the government, an emotion that the Taliban exploited by lambasting the regime's perceived deficiencies. In Karachi, the local political party covered the walls of buildings along busy streets with posters that read: "Save Your City From Talibanization."

Perhaps the biggest challenge for the new government is reining in the military's intelligence agencies, particularly the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. The Pakistan Peoples Party has long been considered an anti-establishment party, at odds with the agencies. In late July, the PPP-led government announced that it was placing the ISI under the command of the Interior Ministry, wresting it from the army—then days later, under pressure from the military, reversed itself. A uniformed president may symbolize a military dictatorship, but Pakistan's military intelligence agencies, ISI and Military Intelligence (MI), are the true arbiters of power.

In August, I got what I believe was a firsthand indication of the extent of their reach. Two days after Musharraf bid farewell, I began my trip to Sehwan for the urs for Qalandar, along with photographer Aaron Huey; his wife, Kristin; and a translator whom it is best not to name. We had barely left Karachi's city limits when my translator took a phone call from someone claiming to work at the Interior Ministry Secretariat in Karachi. The caller peppered him with questions about me. The translator, sensing something odd, hung up and called the office of a senior bureaucrat in the Interior Ministry. A secretary answered the phone and, when we shared the name and title our caller had given, confirmed what we already suspected: "Neither that person nor that office exists." The secretary added: "It's probably just the [intelligence] agencies."

We continued north on the highway into the heart of Sindh, past water buffaloes soaking in muddy canals and camels resting in the shade of mango trees. About an hour later, my phone rang. The caller ID displayed the same number as the call that had supposedly come from the Interior Ministry Secretariat.
"Hello?"
"Nicholas?"
"Yes."
"I am a reporter from the Daily Express newspaper. I want to meet you to talk about the current political situation. When can we meet? Where are you? I can come right now."

"Can I call you back?" I said, and hung up.

My heart raced. Images of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and beheaded by Islamic militants in Karachi in 2002, flashed through my mind. Pearl's last meeting had been with a terrorist pretending to be a fixer and translator. Many people believe that the Pakistani intelligence agencies were involved in Pearl's killing, as he was researching a possible link between the ISI and a jihadi leader with ties to Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber.

My phone rang again. An Associated Press reporter I knew told me that her sources in Karachi said the intelligence agencies were searching for me. I had assumed as much. But what did they want? And why would they request a meeting by pretending to be people who didn't exist?

The car fell silent. My translator made a few calls to senior politicians, bureaucrats and police officers in Sindh. They said they were treating the two phone calls as a kidnapping threat and would provide us with an armed escort for the rest of our trip. Within an hour, two police trucks arrived. In the lead truck, a man armed with a machine gun stood in the bed.

Another phone call, this time from a friend in Islamabad.
"Man, it's good to hear your voice," he said.
"Why?"
"Local TV stations are reporting that you've been kidnapped in Karachi."

Who was planting these stories? And why? With no shortage of conspiracy theories about fatal "car accidents" involving people in the bad graces of the intelligence agencies, I took the planted stories as serious warnings. But the urs beckoned. The four of us collectively decided that since we had traveled halfway around the world to see the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, we would do our damndest to get there, even if under police protection. After all, we could use Qalandar's blessings.

That evening, as the setting sun burned the color of a Creamsicle as it lit the sugar-cane fields on the horizon, I turned to the translator, hoping to lighten the mood.

"It's really beautiful here," I said.

He nodded, but his eyes stayed glued to the road. "Unfortunately, the fear factor spoils the whole fun of it," he said.

By then we could see buses clogging the highway, red flags flapping in the wind as the drivers raced for Qalandar's shrine. The railway ministry had announced that 13 trains would be diverted from their normal routes to transport worshipers. Some devotees even pedaled bicycles, red flags sticking up from the handlebars. We roared down the road in the company of Kalashnikov-toting police, a caravan of armed pilgrims.

The campsites began appearing about five miles from the shrine. Our car eventually mired in a human bog, so we parked and continued on foot. The alleys leading to the shrine reminded me of a carnival fun house—an overwhelming frenzy of lights, music and aromas. I walked beside a man blowing a snake charmer's flute. Stores lined the alley, with merchants squatting behind piles of pistachios, almonds and rosewater-doused candies. Fluorescent lights glowed like light sabers, directing lost souls to Allah.

Groups of up to 40 people heading for the shrine's golden dome carried long banners imprinted with Koranic verses. We followed one group into a tent packed with dancers and drummers next to the shrine. A tall man with curly, greasy shoulder-length hair was beating on a keg-size drum hanging from a leather strap around his neck. The intensity in his eyes, illuminated by a single bulb that dangled above our heads, reminded me of the jungle cats that stalked their nighttime prey on the nature shows I used to watch on TV.

A man in white linen lunged flamboyantly into a clearing at the center of the crowd, tied an orange sash around his waist and began to dance. Soon he was gyrating and his limbs were trembling, but with such control that at one point it seemed that he was moving only his earlobes. Clouds of hashish smoke rolled through the tent, and the drumming injected the space with a thick, engrossing energy.

I stopped taking notes, closed my eyes and began nodding my head. As the drummer built toward a feverish peak, I drifted unconsciously closer to him. Before long, I found myself standing in the middle of the circle, dancing beside the man with the exuberant earlobes.

"Mast Qalandar!" someone called out. The voice came from right behind me, but it sounded distant. Anything but the drumbeat and the effervescence surging through my body seemed remote. From the corner of my eye, I noticed photographer Aaron Huey high-stepping his way into the circle. He passed his camera to Kristin. In moments, his head was swirling as he whipped his long hair around in circles.

"Mast Qalandar!" another voice screamed.

If only for a few minutes, it didn't matter whether I was a Christian, Muslim, Hindu or atheist. I had entered another realm. I couldn't deny the ecstasy of Qalandar. And in that moment, I understood why pilgrims braved great distances and the heat and the crowds just to come to the shrine. While spun into a trance, I even forgot about the danger, the phone calls, the reports of my disappearance and the police escort.

Later, one of the men who had been dancing in the circle approached me. He gave his name as Hamid and said he had traveled more than 500 miles by train from northern Punjab. He and a friend were traversing the country, hopping from one shrine to another, in search of the wildest festival. "Qalandar is the best," he said. I asked why.

"He could communicate directly with Allah," Hamid said. "And he performs miracles."

"Miracles?" I asked, with a wry smile, having reverted to my normal cynicism. "What kind of miracles?"

He laughed. "What kind of miracles?" he said. "Take a look around!" Sweat sprayed from his mustache. "Can't you see how many people have come to be with Lal Shahbaz Qalandar?"

I looked over both of my shoulders at the drumming, the dhamaal and the sea of red. I stared back at Hamid and tilted my head slightly to acknowledge his point.

"Mast Qalandar!" we said.

Nicholas Schmidle is a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. His book, To Live or To Perish Forever: Two Years Inside Pakistan, will be published May 2009 by Henry Holt.
Aaron Huey is based in Seattle. He has been photographing Sufi life in Pakistan since 2006.

the lung sound is "zzzzz"

2009-04-07T06:50:00.003-04:00

When Naomi and I got up for qi gung this morning, we were both feeling ill. Speaking for myself, I have a flu+sore throat with lots of phlegm and the toning the lung healing sound was helpful. Trying to balance between superman and leisure king, I pendulumed too far in the highly structured, active direction and got sick.

I became acquainted with the "six healing sounds" in our excellent intro book 100 Days to Better Health, Good Sex and Longer Life by Eric Yudelove. However there is a Zen nun in town who teaches free qi gung community and they suggested I go on youtube to hear how people who heard the sounds with their ears are making them. What good and simple advice it has turned out to be!

The lung healing sound, which I had been making as a soft "ssssssss" because I hadn't really grasped the sound sifu Eric was trying to pass on, is portrayed by Kemeticist Antiba King as "zzzzzzzz", pronounced as low as you can go. KC the Zen nun said you have to just find the lowness or highness of the syllable that makes you organ vibrate. Try "zzzzzzz" really low and you can feel your lungs vibrate.

When I did it, the most amazing thing happened. That damnable wad of plegm, rock solid and really gross and impossible to cough up, vibrated loose of its own accord! It worked like magic, now I can swallow without the acute pain of before and my body, +herbal cough drops and more rest tonight, will be back to spring in a jiffy

BTW, what is qigong? Wikipedia:

"Qigong (or ch'i kung) refers to a wide variety of traditional cultivation practices that involve methods of accumulating, circulating, and working with qi, breathing or energy within the body. Qigong is practiced for health maintenance purposes, as a therapeutic intervention, as a medical profession, a spiritual path and/or component of Chinese martial arts.

The qi in qigong means air in Chinese, and, by extension, life force, dynamic energy or even cosmic breath. Gong means work applied to a discipline or the resultant level of skill, so qigong is thus breath work or energy work.

Urban Coyote Attacks Fnord

2009-03-29T18:57:00.005-04:00

The headline says, "Urban Coyote Attacks On Rise, Alarming Residents" but if the coyotes had their own wire services, their headlines would point out that "The U.S. Agriculture Department's Wildlife Services killed more than 90,000 in 2007." Funny, that statistic comes just after the statement, "Reducing the number of coyotes doesn't work, ... because the animals breed more and have bigger litters when their population declines."

But actually, the article is pretty sensible, and the experts point out that it's we hominids who are expanding into the coyotes' ranges, and that populations of their competitors, the wolves, "have shrunk." (No mention that we oh-so-civilized Americans enthusiastically tried to exterminate all the wolves!)

So then ... it sounds like we should learn to live with coyotes. After all, they've learned to live with us! There has only ever been ONE fatal coyote attack in the US--of a toddler in the 1980s :( --how many fatal DOG attacks have there been? How many fatal car attacks, I mean, accidents?

Speaking of synanthropic species, check out this video about crows. Fascinating.

Might noble savages of the new millennium learn from, and perhaps mutually benefit with, our wild animal companions?

for the IRISH-Moorish-Orthodox-American

2009-03-14T18:16:00.003-04:00

I was thinking about this document earlier, as a result of K and I attending the St. Patrick's Day Parade and High Fructose Free For All. It bears rereading. Of course, see also Ploughing the Clouds: the search for Irish soma--fascinating. Links: Google Books; Erowid Library; Council on Spiritual Practices.

--Donald D. Lollard

(*O7*)

Manifesto of the BLACK THORN LEAGUE
by Hakim Bey

According to orally-transmitted teachings of Noble Drew Ali, founder & Prophet of the Moorish Science Temple of America: -- Ireland was once part of the Moorish Empire; that is, the celts were Moslems, & there were black moors from N. Africa also present in Ireland. But the moors were expelled by militant Christianity -- this event is disguised in the legend of St. Patrick's expelling the snakes - for which reason the MST celebrates St. Patrick's Day, in a mood of irony perhaps, in expectation of an eventual Return.
In Noble Drew Ali's system, celts are considered an "Asiatic race", & thus potential converts to Moorish Science. We consider NDA's theories to be racial but not racist, because (again according to oral tradition) they were based (at least in part) on spiritual affinity. "Europeans" who wished to Join the MST (including some of the later founders of the Moorish Orthodox Church) were declared to be really celts or "Persians" -- (which may have something to do with the oft-remarked similarity of Eiran and Iran).
NDA's hidden history of Ireland may be taken as an esoteric metaphor -but it is supported in some surprising ways by archaeology & even "official" history. In the first place, the celts are an Asiatic race, or at least the most recent arrivals in the west from the mysterious "Hyperborean" heartland of the Aryans -- last of those nomadic migrations which settled India, Persia & Greece.
Second: What is one to make of those early Celtic crosses inscribed with the bismillah ("In the Name of God", opening words of the Koran) in kufic Arabic, found in Ireland? The Celtic Church, before its destruction by the Roman hierarchy, maintained a close connection with the desert hermit-monks of Egypt. Is it possible this connection persisted past the 7th/8th centuries, & that the role of the monks was taken up by Moslems? by Sufis? in contact with a still-surviving underground Celtic Church, now become completely heretical, & willing to syncretize Islamic esotericism with its own Nature-oriented & poetic Faith?
Such a syncresis was certainly performed centuries later by the Templars & the Assassins (Nizari Ismailis). When the Temple was suppressed by Rome & its leaders burned at the stake, Ireland provided refuge for many incognito Templars. According to The Temple & The Lodge, these Templars later reorganized as a rogue Irish branch of Freemasonry, which (in the early 18th century) would resist amalgamation with the London Grand Lodge. The Islamic connection with masonry is quite clear, both in the Templar & the Rosicrucian traditions, but Irish masonry may have inherited an even earlier Islamic link -- memorialized in those enigmatic crosses!
It's interesting to note that Noble Drew Ali's Masonic initiations may not have been limited to Prince Hall or black Shriner transmissions, but may also have included some hidden lines connected to Irish masonry, & dating back to Revolutionary days in American history. It is known that many common soldiers in the British Colonial Army were masons affiliated with the Irish rather than the London Grand Lodge. This "class" difference -was reflected in the American Revolutionary Army, whose officers were "official" masons but whose private ranks tended to be "Irish".
Historians sometimes forget that in the 18th century, in America, the Irish were generally considered "no better than Negroes". In 1741 on St. Patrick's Day in New York a riot broke out, involving a conspiracy which included Irish, African, & Native American men & women -- naturally "of the meanest sort." Some Irish conspirators were overheard to swear they'd kill as many "white people" as possible. The uprising failed & the plotters were executed. As the bodies of two hanged in the open air decayed in an Iron gibbet, "observers noticed a gruesome, yet instructive, transformation. The corpse of an Irishman turned black & his hair curly while the corpse of Caesar the African, bleached white. It was accounted a 'wondrous phenomenon'" (Linebaugh & Rediker, "The Many-Headed Hydra").
Clearly the Celt & African were linked not only in the gaze of the oppressor class, but also in their own world-view -- as comrades, as somehow the same -- in a solidarity which extended to Indians & to other "Europeans" who fell beneath the level of the "respectable poor" into the category of slaves & outcasts. Racist feelings did not divide the 18th century poor & marginalized -- as would become the case under later Capitalism. Rather the marginalized of all races constituted an underclass & moreover, an underclass with some awareness of itself, hence with a certain power (the power of the "strong victim"). This consciousness might well have been developed in part by Irish-black "masonry" of some sort. And Noble Drew Ali might have known of this tradition, which he masked (or perhaps unveiled) in his parable of the snakes - & celebration of March 17th.
In another interpretation of St. Patrick's anti-reptilism, the "snakes" he banished were in fact "druids", i.e. Celtic pagans. The snake may have been an emblem of the Old Faith, as it is for many forms of paganism, including African (Damballah) & Indian (the Nagas) -- & even for the Ophite Christianity of Egypt (Christ himself depicted as a crucified snake).
Celtic pagan lore was embedded in the Romance traditions especially in the Arthurian material -- & here once again. we find ourselves in the world of the Arabo-Celtic crosses. For the romances are permeated with "Islamic" consciousness. In Malory's Morte dArthur & Eschenbach's Parzifal many Saracen (i.e. Moslem/Moorish) knights are depicted not as enemies but allies of the Celts -- & in the latter book the entire story is attributed to Moorish sources (which are now lost). Saracens, Christians, & crypto-pagans are united in a mystical cult of chivalry which transcends outward religious forms, & is emblematized not only in pagan symbols like the Grail & the Questing Beast, but even in such cultural borrowings as the lute (al-'ud in Arabic), or indeed the cult of romantic/chivalric love, transmitted from Islam to the west by Sufis in Spain.
Ireland's contacts with Spain certainly extend back into the Islamic period, & the so-called "Black Irish" may have as many Moorish as castillian genes. Medieval Irish monks probably absorbed Sufism & Islamic philosophy along with the art of the illuminated manuscript -- witness the extraordinary stylistic resonance between the Book of Eells & the Kufic Korans of Omayyad Spain. If St. Francis could visit N. Africa & come back to Italy wearing a Sufi's patched cloak, so the Irish might easily borrow from Egypt & al-Andalus.
All speculation aside, the Moorish Orthodox Church entertains its own esoteric interpretation of NDA's teachings on these matters. We heartily endorse his "elective affinity" theory of affiliation with a greater spiritual Celto-Asiatic "race". DNA counts for something, but soul for a great deal more. "Every man & woman their own vine & fig tree" (one of NDA's slogans) is not a matter of fate but of character, not of birth but of choice.
In our historical/imaginative exegesis & unfolding of NDA's parable, we have uncovered a complex of heretical Islamic & Moorish cultural strands linking Celtic neo-paganism, esoteric Christianity, & the Arthurian cycle, thru Sufism & masonry, to the perennial libertarian struggle of the marginalized & oppressed peoples of the "Atlantic" world.
We propose to embody this poetic complex in a popular chivalric order, devoted symbolically to the cause of "bringing the snakes back to Ireland" - that is, of uniting all these mystical strands into one patterned weave, which will restore the power of its synergistic or syncretistic power to the hearts of those who respond to the particular "taste" of its mix. We have borrowed this slogan from contemporary neo-pagans in order to symbolize the special mission our order will undertake toward Celtic-Moorish friendship. The BLACK THORN LEAGUE will be open to all, regardless of whether they are MOC members or not, providing only that they support this particular goal.
"Black" in our title signifies not only the black banners of the moors but also the black flag of anarchy. "Blackthorn", because the tree symbolizes druid Irelands & is used to make cudgels. "League", in honor of the various Irish rebel groups which have organized as such. Other organizational models include such Masonic-revolutionary groups as the Carbonari, or Proudhon's anarchist "Holy Vehm", or Bakunin's Revolutionary Brotherhood. We also emulate certain anarcho-Taoist Chinese tongs (such as the Chaos Society)~~ & hope to evolve the kind of informal mutual aid webworks they developed.
The League will bestow the Order of the Black Thorn as title & honor, & will hold an annual conclave & banquet on St. Patrick's Day in memory both of Noble Drew Ali's vision, & of those rioters of 1741 who conspired in low taverns to overthrow the State.

Bring The Snakes Back To Ireland!

2009-02-26T23:56:00.006-05:00

You readers of N.S. may not know that I Badger am in a loving, romantic relationship. May you have the blessed pleasure of meeting her, my dear Naomi Larsson. I could see myself with this woman for ??,???, if fantasizing about distant futures was what I did for fun. In the meantime, here is an image. We are going to PowerShift and I can't wait to see her! Do not despair radixals, we will be planting trees in the spring and realize the self-defeating underefficacy that student activists working through the American political system so often implies. 10,000 youth getting psyched about a green economy is good vibes, though, will be interesting to observe and the Roots are playing! I anticipate standing up in the forums and sounding the call for increased leisure in our *new* economy. I had an ANXIETY attack with all my workload at school today. Minor anxiety. Got over it, took a nap. Leisure must be defended in this talk of helping poor people out of poverty with green jobs. Can you imagine working on the line at a fucking recycling plant?

The ground this time of year opens up to be filled, really it does. How else do you explain frost heave?! Well, here's another way that works but seeing this curious phenomena does get me excited, seeing the lawns erupting in boils that beg for innoculation with more lively seed.

Also, the pink lady slipper looks very much like a *coochie*. Just saying, and pretty much it serves a similar purpose in biological reproduction. Men, never mistake your semen for *seeds*... it's pollen if its anything. There's a fabled ginseng patch/PLS patch in some nearby woods and this May, the search is on! In secret. Also, mushrooms are big around here. Morels any minute now, maybe.

Scientists self-censor in response to political controversy

2009-02-18T03:07:00.002-05:00

I was upset that people are being prevented from researching controversial topics by the stupid politics of our day. Also, Andrea Lafferty of the Traditional Values Coalition saying that "scientists overall don't believe in God, and they don't want to be questioned," is irrelevant and misleading. Irrelevant because her conception of god excludes anybody else's metaphysical structure from legitimacy, and misleading because scientists do want to be questioned. That's the scientific method- you make a hyptothesis, test it, support or deny it with your data, and then submit it for peer review. Ignorance is her number one traditional value, hahaha. I'm tired of writing this fricking paper.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Politics/Story?id=6273751&page=3

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2008/11/18/scientists.self.censor.response.political.controversy

thesis freewrite

2009-02-16T13:54:00.002-05:00

I am choosing to answer "Should 'hate speech' be censored by universities?" with this assigned rhetorical argument essay.

When students make arguments that seem hateful and threatening to any population of the the student body, the university's responsibility is to facilitate intelligent dialogue rather than censor, except in the case of genuine threats to the physical and intellectual integrity of students. One argument is that people who hold reviled positions on controversial topics often will mention taboo facts that need to be heard. "Hate speakers" need to be invited into and trained in the art of rhetorical argument; if they are not emotionally mature for this task, they could be assigned to academic probation along with something like Outward Bound.

from wence came this hallmark holiday?

2009-02-12T09:44:00.002-05:00

reprinted from From Werewolves With Love - History Of Valentine's Day
By Brad Steiger
FATE Magazine - February 2006
2-11-6

Everyone thinks they know the origin of Valentine's Day. According to the most commonly accepted story, Emperor Claudius of Rome issued a decree forbidding marriage in the year 271. Roman generals had found that married men did not make very good soldiers, because they wanted to return as quickly as possible to their wives and children-and they didn't want to leave them to fight the emperor's battles in the first place. So Claudius issued his edict that there should be no more marriages, and all single men should report for duty.

A priest named Valentine deemed such a decree an abomination, and he secretly continued to marry young lovers. When Claudius learned of this extreme act of disobedience to his imperial command, he ordered the priest dragged off to prison and had him executed on February 14.

Father Valentine, the friend of sweethearts, became a martyr to love and the sanctity of marriage, and when the Church gained power in the Roman Empire, the Holy See was quick to make him a saint.

The early Church fathers were well aware of the popularity of a vast number of heathen gods and goddesses, as well as the dates of observation of pagan festivals, so they set about replacing as many of the entities and the holidays as possible with ecclesiastical saints and feast days. Mid-February had an ancient history of being devoted to acts of love of a far more passionate and lusty nature than the Church wished to bless, and the bishops moved as speedily as possible to claim the days of February 14 through 17 as belonging to Saint Valentine, the courageous martyr to the ties that bound couples in Christian love.

February Is for Mating

Actually, there is no proof that the good priest Valentine even existed.

Some scholars trace the period of mid-February as a time for mating back to ancient Egypt. On those same days of the year that contemporary lovers devote to St. Valentine, men and women of the Egyptian lower classes determined their marital partners by the drawing of lots.

But the time of coupling that comes with the cold nights in February before the spring thaw likely had its true origin very near where Valentine supposedly met his demise.

Among the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Wolf Charmer was called the Lupicinus. Perhaps hearkening back to prehistoric times, the Lupicinus may well have been an individual tribesman who had a particular affinity for communicating with wolves. As the tribes developed agriculture and small villages, it was necessary to have a person skilled in singing with the wolves and convincing them not to attack their domesticated animals. The Lupicinus had the ability to howl with the wolves and lead them away from the livestock pens. In some views, because he also wore the pelt of a wolf, the Lupicinus also had the power to transform himself into a wolf if he so desired.

Rites of the Lupercalia

The annual Lupercali festival of the Romans on February 15 was a perpetuation of the ancient blooding rites of the hunter in which the novice is smeared with the blood of his first kill. The sacrificial slaying of a goat-representing the flocks that nourished early humans in their efforts to establish permanent dwelling places-was followed by the sacrifice of a dog, the watchful protector of a flock that would be the first to be killed by attacking wolves.

The blood of the she-goat and the dog were mixed, and a bloodstained knife was dipped into the fluid and drawn slowly across the foreheads of two noble-born children. Once the children had been "blooded," the gore was wiped off their foreheads with wool that had been dipped in goat milk. As the children were being cleansed, they were expected to laugh, thereby demonstrating their lack of fear of blood and their acknowledgment that they had received the magic of protection against wolves and wolfmen.

The god Lupercus, represented by a wolf, would next inspire and command men to behave as wolves, to act as werewolves during the festival.

Lupus (wolf) itself is not an authentic or original Latin word, but was borrowed from the Sabine dialect. Luperca, the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus, may have given rise to secret fraternities known as the Luperci, who sacrificed she-goats at the entrances to their "wolves' dens." For centuries, the Luperci observed an annual ritual of chasing women through the streets of Roman cities and beating them with leather thongs.

Scholars generally agree that such a violent expression of eroticism celebrated the ancient behavior of primitive hunting tribes corraling captive women. Once a wolfman had ensnared a woman with his whip or thong, he would lead her away to be his wife or lover for as long as the "romance" lasted. Perhaps, as some scholars theorize, this yearly rite of lashing at women and lassoing them with leather thongs became a more acceptable substitute for the bloodlust of the Luperci's latent werewolfism that in days past had seen them tearing the flesh of innocent victims with their teeth.

As the Romans grew ever more sophisticated, the Lupercali would be celebrated by a man binding the lady of his choice wrist to wrist, and later by passing a billet to his object of desire, suggesting a romantic rendezvous in some secluded place.

Christian Marriage

One can easily see why the early Church fathers much preferred the union of man and woman to be smiled upon by St. Valentine, rather than the leering wolf god Lupercus. And, of course, they encouraged a knot tied securely by the sacred rite of marriage and blessed by the priest, rather than a fleeting midnight liaison.

By the Middle Ages, the peasantry in England, Scotland, and parts of France honored St. Valentine, but their customs seemed very much to hearken back to ancient Egypt and Rome. On the evening before Valentine's Day, the young people would gather in a village meeting place and draw names by chance. Each young woman would write her name or make her mark on a bit of cloth and place it into a large urn. Then each of the young men would draw a slip. The girl whose name or mark was on the piece of cloth became his sweetheart for the year.

This method of celebrating St. Valentine's Day quite often led to circumstances and situations that encouraged long-term and lasting relationships, blessed by the recital of marriage vows in the local church. If the young couple did not take the necessary steps to become bound in a church-sanctioned union, the parents of the respective "bride" and "groom" would actively arrange for the marriage sacrament to be observed.

It wasn't long before the peasant method of utilizing St. Valentine's Day to guarantee the next generation of field hands, construction workers, and merchants reached the ears of the upper classes, and the custom became popular among the young men and women of the aristocracy and the landed gentry. Since the prospect of arranged marriages between successful families meant far more to the upper classes in Europe than to the peasantry, parental supervision most often limited the interaction between their children to be "sweethearts" during Valentine's Day parties.

By the late 1400s, the upper classes of Europe and England would come together in homes to celebrate Valentine's Day and allow their young men to draw a "valentine" with the name of a member of the opposite sex, beside whom he would be seated at a lavish dinner party. Hostesses took advantage of the holiday theme to express the tradition in colorful decorative schemes.

Gradually, Valentine's Day came to be synonymous with the exchange of pretty sentiments, written in flourishes on scented paper and decorated with hearts, arrows, doves, and cupids-those little pagan deities maintaining their hold on the ancient holiday. By the early 1800s, young men were taking care to create symbols of their passion on elaborate cards that they could offer to "My Valentine."

Today's Customs

By the 1850s, Valentine's Day cards were being manufactured and sold commercially in England, and the custom of observing the holiday with cards to one's sweetheart became popular in the United States in the 1860s, around the time of the Civil War.

Today, of course, we have vast commercial enterprises centered around St. Valentine's Day, insisting that callow young men and seasoned husbands must buy their sweetheart a box of candy, a dozen roses, a diamond ring or necklace, or at least a five-dollar card. But don't let the slick advertisers fool you with all this talk of a saint named Valentine who was martyred for love. Remember that it all began with a hyped-up wolfman smeared in blood chasing the object of his desire with a leather thong.

One last word of advice: Forget the whip and stick with flowers and candy

Brad Steiger is a professional writer who deals with the strange and unknown.

Thinking Critically about "Paintball: Promoter of Violence or Healthy Fun?"

2009-02-11T09:54:00.004-05:00

1. My own view of paintball has been this: it's a militaristic rich kids sport that fosters a social acceptance of war in children. It does this by glorifying the physicality and the adrenaline rush, the strategy and the comraderie that soldiers must engage if they want to survive. This is my position, personally informed by the support of America's foreign policy and a fascination with killing machines in general, exhibite by my economically priviledged, paintballing classmates during highschool. Also I have played the sport, once, and succeeded in grasping some of Taylor's well-spoken examples from that experience. Ross Taylor's essay did little in moving my understanding over to his position, however. The largest addition to knowledge that I took away was new appreciation for why people are attracted to the game. "Paintball is a fun, athletic, mentally challenging recreational activity that builds teamwork and releases tension," says Taylor. So are a lot of other sports that do not precisely glorify war. Taylor offers no rebuttal to this. The points and evidence of what they enjoy about paintball were relatively strong, especially the around it being mentally challenging and building teamwork. However, the teamwork building of Fortune 500 companies who bond over paintball is a joke in that it buries his poorly thought out attempt to wrestle with the main controversy nagging the sport. Fortune 500 companies are an exemplary part of the military industrial complex that paintball trains us to live for. For Fortune 500 employees, paintball reinforces the twisted Social Darwinism that our economy is paritally based on.

2. Taylor's appeals to ethos are often strong but not entirely consistent. The strength of their tone and depth of experience lend credibility. He holds fun, competition, physical fitness, collaboration and mental challenge as values, all of which are easy for Americans to relate to. He also seeks to address certain criticisms, the two which he claims that opponents of their position commonly cite. These are the possible dangers and violence of the sport. For the safety issue,Taylor gives strong examples of why paint ball can be very safe. For example, reported eye injuries are very rare, and most people who are hurt this way were not wearing the appropriate eye protection. However, they stop thinking straight when it comes time to thoughtfully reflect on the violence issue. That paragraph is a jumbled mess, and it's the most important paragraph for defending the pro-paintball position. Taylor does not mention how paintball is used as a tactical exercise in the American military, which clearly indicates that it is used to promote violence. If I ever bear offspring, I would strongly object to them marrying anyone who doesn't understand the nature of violence. It should be obvious that forms of play which mimic mortal combat are instilling violence as a value in children. This lack of clarity really disrupts the ethos of Ross Taylor.

3. Pathos, the appeal to reader sympathy, is very effective in this piece. Taylor "goes there" with drive-by paintball shootings, which are probably sensationalized television news stories. He calls such individuals rare, bad apples. During my reading of Taylors description of the physicality of their sport, I found myself getting pumped up. The chest beating and "splendor and glory" Taylor feels is contageous.

4. The Logos of the argument (the appeal to reason with evidence)is mostly solid in this piece. Taylor clearly demonstrates that paintball can have the beneficial, positive characteristics of other common team sports, like soccer, ultimate frisbee, and pickup baseball. The problems grows from the critical lack of support for how paintball doesn't usually reward violence. One result of fragging somebody is "a nice dark bruise" (my emphasis). Purposefully damaging another organism is usually, rightly considered violent behavior. I realize the players agree to this, but a lot of humans and non-human organisms living in a war zone don't have the choice to opt out of their location, and this sport encourages war more than probably any other that's commonly played in this country.

5. Ross has validated half of their argument- paintball is a sport, sharing the essential, beneficial characteristics of other American sports. Paintball is not much more dangerous than any other contact sport that result in bruises. However, the rhetoric comes apart when Taylor defends paintball as aloof and separate from other violent human expressions.

Homework for Monday, January 26 freewrite coming into knowledge, understanding and wisdom

2009-01-25T17:32:00.005-05:00

i want a lot of things from life. i have begun to question whether that is the best thing or not, and furthermore i am now questioning my question and my questioning. i want to evolve my life so that it is as happy, harmonious and sustainably so.

The hurdle to get to these is that i am hard headed. I bullishly pursue certain courses of action, and feel hapless sometimes in changing how I do things. Like the patterns of actvitiy in my past sometimes dictate what I do more than what i figure out is the best thing to do. Also, I feel like the environment I am in plays a huge roll in how I behave. So how does one get outside their old thought patterns and achieve, findoneself in, get to know and appreciate new thoughts? Creativity getting uncorked, if the soil is compacted, how can water and air get down into the non-existent pores of the soil? If my somewhat hard-headed, more robotic thinking may be compared to this soil, than it's obvious to me as a gardener. A hard clay pan of soil will benefit from nobody walking on it, compacting it further. In otherwords don't push on the hardheadedness further by applying more of the same thinking that has got you acting in rigid patterns. Next get some good, dead and decomposed organic material from and cut it into the parent soil, with a hoe or digging fork or shovel. And then get some plants in there! The new soil getting cut into the old clay is new experiences, being consciously intruded into the old experience and directly contradicting parts of it by its presence. Then plants coming into the soil, independent freely living organism, sunloving plants, captures Carbon from the air and builds roots with it, which push down into the new soil and eventually start to penetrate down deeper into the clay layer. Little cracks are opened, where the basic elements of water and air can bring the fire of oxygen respiration down into the soil. These new roots, what kind of plants should we plant in our head?

Other people seem happier and more harmonious even as they react novelly and appropriately to the situations of life. Schooling, what kind of pedagogy, what kind of teaching is going to make students come to vibrant inner life? Specifically, should certain books be censored from the curriculum and if not, why not?

2009-01-21T15:56:00.001-05:00

Names and URLs for my English 151 class blogs

Wendy VanDellon http://wendyv151.blogspot.com/

Chris Brausch http://brauschreport.blogspot.com/
Kyle Damron http://kyledsblog.blogspot.com/
Daron Disabato http://dd371207.blogspot.com/
Peter Gaglio http://petesblog123log1.blogspot.com/
David Ginley http://davidsblog151.blogspot.com/
Badger Johnson http://noblesavagery.blogspot.com/
Kyle Kaethow http://kylekaethow.blogspot.com/
Kendall Kidder-Goshorn http://kendallk-g.blogspot.com/
Kevin Kretz http://kretzer719.blogspot.com/
Justin Marcinizyn http://jm283508.blogspot.com/
Michael Messmer http://michaelsblog12.blogspot.com/
Brian Muehlenkamp http://bm179707.blogspot.com/
Kyle Raffel http://raffdaddy.blogspot.com/
Jacob Richardson http://jr192307.blogspot.com/
Jeff Scarbro http://jeffscarbro.blogspot.com/
Jason Shaffer http://jasonenglish151.blogspot.com/
Tanner Smith http://eng151tsmith.blogspot.com/
John Stewart http://stewcat80.blogspot.com/
Mitch Wilcox http://mitchwilcox151.blogspot.com/

The Intention Economy, by Daniel Pinchbeck

2009-01-19T09:34:00.003-05:00

While exploring shamanism and non-ordinary states, I discovered the power of intention. According to the artist Ian Lungold, who lectured brilliantly about the Mayan Calendar before his untimely death a few years ago, the Maya believe that your intention is as essential to your ability to navigate reality as your position in time and space. If you don’t know your intention, or if you are operating with the wrong intentions, you are always lost, and can only get more dissolute.

This idea becomes exquisitely clear during psychedelic journeys, when your state of mind gets intensified and projected kaleidoscopically all around you. As our contemporary world becomes more and more psychedelic, we are receiving harsh lessons in the power of intention on a vast scale. Over the last decades, the international financial elite manipulated the markets to create obscene rewards for themselves at the expense of poor and middle class people across the world. Using devious derivatives, cunning CDOS, and other trickery, they siphoned off ever-larger portions of the surplus value created by the producers of real goods and services, contriving a debt-based economy that had to fall apart. Their own greed — such a meager, dull intent — has now blown up in their faces, annihilating, in slow motion, the corrupt system built to serve them.

Opportunities such as this one don’t come along very often and should be seized once they appear. When the edifice of mainstream society suddenly collapses, as is happening now, it is a fantastic time for artists, visionaries, mad scientists and seers to step forward and present a well-defined alternative. What is required, in my opinion, is not some moderate proposal or incremental change, but a complete shift in values and goals, making a polar reversal of our society’s basic paradigm. If our consumer-based, materialism-driven model of society is dissolving, what can we offer in its place? Why not begin with the most elevated intentions? Why not offer the most imaginatively fabulous systemic redesign?

The fall of capitalism and the crisis of the biosphere could induce mass despair and misery, or they could impel the creative adaptation and conscious evolution of the human species. We could attain a new level of wisdom and build a compassionate global society in which resources are shared equitably while we devote ourselves to protecting threatened species and repairing damaged ecosystems. Considering the lightning-like pace of global communication and new social technologies, this change could happen with extraordinary speed.

To a very great extent, the possibilities we choose to realize in the future will be a result of our individual and collective intention. For instance, if we maintain a Puritanical belief that work is somehow good in and of itself, then we will keep striving to create a society of full employment, even if those jobs become “green collar.” A more radical viewpoint perceives most labor as something that could become essentially voluntary in the future. The proper use of technology could allow us to transition to a post-scarcity leisure society, where the global populace spends its time growing food, building community, making art, making love, learning new skills and deepening self-development through spiritual disciplines such as yoga, tantra, shamanism and meditation.

One common perspective is that the West and Islam are engaged in an intractable conflict of civilizations, where the hatred and terrorism can only get worse. Another viewpoint could envision the Judeo-Christian culture of the West finding common ground and reconciling with the esoteric core, the metaphysical purity, of the Islamic faith. It seems — to me anyway — that we could find solutions to all of the seemingly intractable problems of our time once we are ready to apply a different mindset to them. As Einstein and others have noted, we don’t solve problems through employing the type of thinking that created them, but rather dissolve them when we reach a different level of consciousness.

We became so mired in our all-too-human world that we lost touch with the other, elder forms of sentience all around us. Along with delegates to the UN, perhaps we could train cadres of diplomats to negotiate with the vegetal, fungal and microbial entities that sustain life on earth? The mycologist Paul Stamets proposes we create a symbiosis with mushrooms to detoxify eco-systems and improve human health. The herbalist Morgan Brent believes psychoactive flora like ayahuasca and peyote are “teacher plants,” sentient emissaries from super-intelligent nature, trying to help the human species find its niche in the greater community of life. When we pull back to study the hapless and shameful activity of our species across the earth, these ideas do not seem very farfetched.

In fact, the breakdown of our financial system has not altered the amount of tangible resources available on our planet. Rather than trying to re-jigger an unjust debt-based system that artificially maintains inequity and scarcity, we could make a new start. We could develop a different intention for what we are supposed to be doing together on this swiftly tilting planet, and institute new social and economic infrastructure to support that intent.
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Daniel Pinchbeck is the author of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism (Broadway Books, 2002) and 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006). His features have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Wired and many other publications. reposted from http://consciouschoice.com/2009/01/pinchbeck0901.html

Summary/Strong Response Essay: Neither sex can be freed in the exploitation of the other

2009-01-18T23:52:00.008-05:00

Who are you? You are a unique individual, who is constantly expressing original behavior in all of your interactions with the rest of the universe. Every self-organizing body acts on this principle. Human are subject to this freedom, constantly thinking and moving out of the same unrealized potential. Simply put, our social contract is this: mutual respect for universal self-expression. Unfortunately, many people assign and coercively enforce behavioral expectations on one another that severely limit our ingenuity. At times, these expectations seem as great in scope as the limitless paths they are blocking, but rest assured that division and subtraction cannot really destroy it. One current trend expectation is designed to micromanage everyone's behavior, on the basis of which of two roles your body is predisposed to play in biological reproduction. Since it is unnecessary and oppressive to the open-ended structure of our beings, we should examine this and all other pervasive cultural demands. When we have come to understand them, we will freely reject or accept them to our taste. Current thought blockages demand adherence to a rigid dramatization of our relationships, the parts of which are cast based on gonads and ovaries. Rest in the fact that these social demands are not humans, but ideas, and humans need feel no compassion in dismantling harmful thoughts. In “There Is No Unmarked Woman”, Linguistics professor Deborah Tannen observes and criticizes a particularly offensive demand that society places on female-sexed people.

Tannen reports how in the academic workplace, women are expected to unceasingly project a positive identity, using their physical appearance as a medium. The author objects to this expectation for a number of reasons, mainly because it is a social inequality set up between equals. Tannen makes a linguistic analogy to this expectation , comparing it to a “mark”. A mark is a language particle which tweaks the commonly assumed, basic meaning of a word but remains impotent when not assigned to a root expression. The effect of how women are marked is described through the story of an academic conference. “Each of the women… had to make decisions about hair, clothing, makeup, and accessories, and each decision carried meaning” (411). Tannen proceeds to describe how none of the men present chose to express anything unique about themselves through their dress. In fact, they seemed to be wearing an interchangeable uniform. Tannen makes another objection to the mark, describing how some observers punish women who choose to convey little or nothing through bodily presentation. Finally, Tannen entertains the idea that men are biologically more comparable to a linguistic mark, noting among other things that the default sex of non-reproducing worker ants is female. The author concludes regretfully how the essay’s content may qualify them as a male-bashing feminist, and that being an unmarked woman seems impossible. I agree with Tannen that treating women as marks, who only gain meaning by wearing beautiful accessories, is grotesque and unfair. I also appreciate how well the text flows. But Tannen is overlooking the mark society puts on non-conforming men, and misleads us by suggesting we might solve the marking problem by marking men instead of women. We start moving past the mark by appreciating how broad and mutable our identities are and can be.

Deborah Tannen has observed, recorded and criticized patterns of oppressive behavior. For this they are applauded. Furthermore, Tannen earns more credit for the outrage they muster against the less-than-wholesome role women are brainwashed to enact in the academic workplace. Though the right to dress provocatively remains ours, we must also be able to rely solely on other communication mediums and say nothing particularly with bodily adornment. The ideas we express in vocalized words and gazing could be further explored as alternatives. Reacting to societal expectation requires the use of a person’s energy, time and creativity, and to always be performing a spectacle is wearying. The right to remain silent is supposedly the law of the land, yet women who withhold biography from costume are ostracized. Tannen reports that “a woman whose hair has no particular style is perceived as not caring about how she looks, which can disqualify her from many positions, and will subtly diminish her as a person in the eyes of some” (412). If my English professor embarked on the quest for tenureship at Ohio University, dressing professionally without making her suit an expressionist art piece would unfairly hurt her prospects. If they were a man, they could dress in a uniform suit and tie and be considered perfectly acceptable by the selection committee, instead of inviting scorn for being uncreative or emasculated.

Content considerations aside, this essay effectively unsettled me with its thesis and made for an easy, pleasant read. Tannen’s use of repetition was effective at illustrating her problematic thesis. Each category of a female’s personal accessories was shown as a response to society’s mandatory female expressionism. The essay also utilizes imagery to evoke strong feelings, coherent pathos, early on in the narrative. The description of the conference women, on pages 409 and 410, does a good job weaving the objectively described details about the women's appearances with subjectively experienced qualities about their personas. “the hair robbed her of bifocal vision and created a barrier between her and the listeners”, Tannen astutely observes, noting how the particular woman was “full of dignity and composure.” That description also sets up a strong contrast with the next woman’s appearance, who is portrayed more as an image-sensitive bimbo. These two women are symbolic of the competing needs Tannen describes having, the needs for privacy and self-expression. "Some days you just want to get dressed and go about your business. But if you're a woman, you can't, because there is no unmarked woman." (415) We infer and agree that on any given day, making the choice of broadcasting your personal vibe semiotically, non-verbally, is desirable. Why then did all of the men at the 3 days of conference dress in exactly the same manner?

Tannen shows how all eight of the men were remarkable in their unified plainess. "There could have been a cowboy shirt with string tie or a three-piece suit or a necklaced hippie in jeans. But there wasn't. All eight men wore brown or blue slacks and nondescript shirts of light colors. No man wore sandals or boots; their shoes were dark, closed, comfortable, and flat. In short, unmarked." Would a man be judged unequally if they got more creative in dressing? Is there an expectation of men to be less visually self-expressive than women? The men may have been unremarkable, but were they unmarked as Tannen says? Tannen demonstrates that a large, burdensome amount of personal expressiveness being forced onto women yields an inequality- women are marks without their costume. "The men in our group had made decisions, too, but the range from which they chose was incomparably narrower. Men can choose styles that are marked, but they don't have to, and in this group none did." (411) If only one of these men had chosen to express themselves with more semiotics, they would have been an exceptional case. None could report that this hypothetical, exceptionally dressed human male was completely normal.

Depending on the nature of their deviation, a man's sexual orientation, values and mental balance are intrusively up for question in ways that won't be applied to women. A good example of this is wearing bright, colorful clothes together with a smile. On a woman, bright colors and a smile are perfectly acceptable. However when a male walks into your lecture hall class encased in a pink polo shirt with an indulgent smile on their face, it is stunning, and some people will assume they are homosexual. The guy could be smiling because he thinks the tendency to make major characterizations based on clothing is immature, and is having a private laugh at the expense of his classmates. If people are pigeon-holing such guys as homosexual for utilizing a range of color and facial expressions that are acceptable for females, than they are being judged less fairly than women. Expressive men are judged to be absurd when they stray from their prescribed range of stylistic choices, and yet their range is "far narrower" than that available to women. Men’s prescribed range of expression is more outrageously restricted than women.

For men, dressing uniquely is frequently and incorrectly assumed to exclusively be a targeted attack on common identity. When I wear a kilt to Alden library, some regularly-dressed men glare at me, or cut the sweep of their gaze short when they see the pleats of cloth swishing around my legs. It's true that I do mean to insult the plainness to which they hold themselves. I object to their plainess for two reasons. For one, it demonstrates a stunted version of what masculinity can look like, an immaturity to sees oneself and others as insufficient on their own. Men need women, women need men, and we need to express this as a stylistic codependence to mimic our symbiotic roles in biological reproduction. That is what I see when a guy looks like he's trying to blend in with a bunch of other guys who are trying to blend in. Another part of what I'm objecting to with my kilt is their tense hold on what is acceptable for men to wear. By agreeing to all wear pants or shorts, wearing a kilt makes me look like a wingnut. I am also expressing a positive message with my kilt. The range of possible expressions that we can accept as normal becomes infinite as we accept the infinite expanse of the universe as normal. My kilt expresses that I as a "white" person have ethic roots that I treasure and can use to relate to oppressed minority groups. The native cultural wisdom of my Celtic ancestors was destroyed by the invasion of the Roman empire, and continues to be degraded by the British occupation of Wales, the Isle of Man, etc. We can see what Tannen disregards the mark of socially reinforced, unfairly restricted self-expression on males. Unfortunately they also go beyond this and enter into tired, feminist male-bashing. This detracts from the coherency of the message.

Tannen uses a faulty interpretation of biological phenomena to weakly justify socially marking men, instead of women. They were “intrigued to see Ralph Fasold bring biological phenomena to bear on the question of linguistic marking”. (413) Fasold “stresses that language and culture are particularly unfair in treating women as the marked case because biologically it is the male that is marked.” (413) Tannen is extremely misleading with this argument. Implied is that marking men can be more fair than marking women. I believe that the injustice of marking humans stems from how these coercive, limiting social expectations stand violently in the way of self-expression. Differences in our anatomy, such as whether we have either gonads or ovaries, do not cause our social marking of either sex because people are marked in the mind. From our mind, and not necessarily the particular layout of the sex organs, do we muster the will to express sexist grudges. The injustice of marking females and males is unqualifiedly unfair, and is not essentially why violence against us is wrong.

Tannen questions whether their own activity can objectively be labeled “male-bashing” (414), and concurrently argues for linguistically casting males as superfluous to females. In male-bashing men for an identity that is legitimately beyond their control, Tannen is only insulting one person. A better question that Tannen does not ask is: where do we go from here? As I see it, our task now is growing a society that is more respectful of our own and each others’ freedom, which will lead to more self-expression. That way, people may choose to live out their existence in community that is more beautiful and tricky than a pre-scripted diatribe across some sex binary.

Being socially cast as half of a co-dependent, biological relationship places unnecessary restrictions on one’s range of self-expression. Getting out of this bind can take two routes. The immediate need is to de-attach ourselves and develop a sense of self- worth and that is not sex-dependent. We create the reality of our persona from our self-worth through our words, thoughts and deeds. When we choose how to act and sensibly define who you are, other people must live alongside you in that self-defined reality, and you are free from their social pressure. If they reject you and you do not violate them by accepting their behavior as legitimate, or mark them as less than human because of their unkindness, than you are free during and after you part ways too. The other route that we are using to escape the shackles of our physiological limitations is wrestling them to the ground.

If you were capable of reproducing without anybody else’s assistance, it would put you outside the consideration of the two-sexed reproductive cycle and therefore the precise marks that are reserved for men and women. This is a path that is already being explored by humans today. Women choosing artificial insemination over a man ejaculating inside their uterus are already in this territory. Despite marking being a mental activity, there’s no sense ignoring the current requirement for intersex cooperation to make new babies. Tannen sites that asexual lizards of the Cnemidophorus genus create fertile eggs in their ovaries, without insemination. They make a poor analogy between the lizards and human females: “Thanks to parthenogenesis, they have no trouble having as many daughters as they like. There are no species, however, that produce only males. This is no surprise, because any such species would become extinct in its first generation.” (413) Though the lizards have ovaries and can technically be considered “female”, these lizards are not subject to the duality of the sexes that humans are because there are no males in some of these species. The sexual abilities necessary for reproduction of Whiptail lizards are not divided between two genotypes. All the necessary parts and abilities are united in one being, which can reproduce without help from another being. We have a ways to yet to go on this path, yet. The word “hermaphrodite”, which describes the lizard as analogous to a self-pollinating flower, comes from a mythological concept we have yet to achieve. The male trickster god Hermes, merged with a female sex goddess Aphrodite, into one composite, self generating organism. The gods did it for fun, and medieval European alchemists strove to this ideal in their search for immortality. Will we become de-attached hermaphrodites and realize our destiny as truly sovereign individuals?

Works Cited
Tannen, Deborah. “There Is No Unmarked Woman.” Blackboard. 20 Jan. 2009. Path: WRITING AND RHETORIC I ENG_151_A20_winter_2008-09; Course Documents

Log #2

2009-01-12T02:53:00.000-05:00

The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing introduces four new concepts in Chapter 2. The first of these is that we students must memorize whatever basic material we sign up to learn, and then bring the knowledge to new situations and apply it. This deepens our understanding of the lesson, because as we are “wallowing in complexity” our minds are grasping at the material and, finally, getting a hold of it and making it ours. Professors value this probing into the messy (read: apparently contradicting) details that surround problematic situations. The text cites six critical thinking skills to for “wallowing in complexity. Start by posing problematic questions and analyzing the different dimensions of your stated problem. After assimilating, one is charged with making sense of the available facts, imagining alternatives to the problem and then finding an answer which one can defend to satisfaction. Harvard professor William Perry has described that college students come to proficiency in these practices over time, as their experience teaches them that there can be more than one well-argued, satisfactory answer to complex problems.

“The very act of writing- often without concern for audience, structure, or correctness- can stimulate the mind to produce ideas.” This is valuable to understand, because it leads aspiring writers to pen and paper for writing’s own sake in the reasonable expectation of it leading to better writing for an audience. “Good writers use exploratory strategies to think critically about subject-matter questions” is the fifth concept. The strategies that Allyn and Bacon describe are called freewriting, focused freewriting, idea mapping, dialectic talk and “playing the believing and doubting game”.

Freewriting is getting a stream of thoughts down on paper, which can be very general or focused on a specific problem or question. Idea mapping is a similar technique that that utilizes your optic nerve pathways, too. Both of these would be good for exploring what you know about a situation and begin the sensible organization and assimilation of data. The believing and doubting game is pretending to believe and also doubt a thesis and supporting your pretend position with the details that you can entice to mind. This seems like a good strategy to use for assimilating the facts once you have brought them into your mental viewfinder. The dialectic talk strategy seems like it would be really good to undergo between a rough and final draft. Once a framework of ideas is set up in the draft, you can offer it to colleagues and look for contradictions in their work in exchange for similar attention on yours. Holding your mind open to receive dialectic incite sounds helpful in crafting your solutions to be more effective.

Concept six states that a persuasive position statement catches your reader by surprise. Your thesis challenges them by constructing obstacles between them and their opinion with surprising facts, and showing them a different way through the problem. To sustain the effect of surprise, writers hold their reader in tension with ideas that pull them away from their point of view with a “surprising reversal”, a thesis that acknowledges their incite and shows how its problems demand further examination.

The second chapter of The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing comes to a head describing the basic paragraph structure of persuasive, closed-prose writing. We make a point, or rather share our idea, and when we’ve stated this position we must fill in representative data that enforces the idea until it feels well-supported. When the point of opinion has the weight of substantially observable phenomena logically associated with it, the reader can easily begin to play with. Towards the end of a writer’s initial research phase, we begin to assimilate the data and points occur to us. Once we have a few points, we begin figuring out the direction in which a solution lies and our task becomes reporting specific information and developing further points that support our thesis.

Our class read Sean Barry’s sample essay, titled “Why Do Teenagers Get Tattoos? A Response to Andres Martin”. Barry introduces the first paragraph by referring back to the title’s phenomenon, taking takes in a view of it in one, panoramic glance. He concludes the introduction with a thesis statement that I found unsatisfactorily broad. The thesis is a run-on sentence with little tension. For instance, Barry accuses the psychiatrist author he is evaluating of romanticizing the act of getting a tattoo. He cites the psychiatrist’s use of two, identity-seeking Moby Dick quotes as evidence for this. That Herman Melville’s Ishmael character was searching for identity and got a tattoo for it doesn’t address how leaving a visible, symbolic mark on one’s skin has intrinsic deep significance. Since a tattoo will always be with you, even if it’s only as a burn scar from laser surgery removal, Barry has insufficiently supported the point.

I admire Barry’s writing structure, though. It strikes a pleasing rhythm, by smoothly transitioning between the different paragraphs. The paragraphs contain distinct genres of strong writing response that he blends nicely. Going “with-the-grain” of the psychiatrist’s thesis was an effective way of demonstrating that he had read and appreciated certain strengths of his opponent’s thesis. Relating it back to a personal anecdote makes me believe that he opened himself to the psychiatrist’s ideas and simply found them wanting, given the greater bulk of his own experience.

Summary of “There Is No Unmarked Woman”, Badger Johnson

2009-01-11T20:00:00.002-05:00

(note: I will be writing a strong respone essay on either this one or August's. which one would you rather read about? both have me pretty stimulated and ready to write, YAY!!!)

Deborah Tannen is a Georgetown University linguistics professor who studies conversation. She gives explanation of the meaning, and motivation, for what we say to other. Her essay “There Is No Unmarked Woman” was published in an anthology on language. In that essay, she describes how normal it is in this society for women to be superficially judged for character on the basis of appearance. This is in contrast to men, who are given the social option to remain “incomparably” unremarked by attire.

The context for Tannen’s thesis is an academic conference, at which all of the men wore similar unremarkable suits, and the women expressed their personas through clothing. The men could have worn more individually expressive costumes but they chose an anonymity of uniform. The women all said something with their clothes, and therein lies Tannen’s thesis: women currently must choose what message they want others to interpret from their appearance, because their character is judged, based on appearance.

“Marked” qualifies an alteration in the basicly assumed meaning. Marking is done by adding extra something to the expression, something extra that only has meaning in the context of the root expression. Tannen brings our attention to what “marked” means for expression of your personality. She uses personal examples of how she is marked: “merely mentioning women and men marked me as a feminist for some.” (My emphasis added). An important observation that Tannen foraged from her conference experience, is how women are expected carry off an expressive visage. “Each of the women… had to make deciscions about hair, clothing, makeup, and accessories, and each decision carried meaning.” They went on citing how the desire to look attractive is often, frustratingly interpretted as acommpanying availability for sexual availability. When a female-bodied person eschews style, for whatever reason, people may well wonder what message the curious person is seeking to communicate. How probable is it that an observer will first conceive that the person being seen wishes to remain unmarked? That the observer will not mark the person in their own mind is possible but less likely. In “There Is No Unmarked Woman”, Tannen highlights the scenario that is more likely and much more problematic: “no makeup is anything but unmarked. Some men see it as a hostile refusal to please them.”

Tannen cites how in the workplace and popular human imagining, men may choose unmarkedness. This is accomplised in these social circles she mentions by wearing suits, slacks, and “nondescript shirts of light colors”. Such uniform does not disclose biographical information, besides a temporary compliance with this currently enacted operating principle of mainstream society. The author cites biologist Ralph Fasold’s conclusion that outside of human society, the female sex can be considered as a biologically “unmarked” sex. She cites the chromosonal basis of sex division: “While two X chromosomes make a female, two Y chromosomes make nothing. Like the linguistic markers s, es or ess, the Y chromosome doesn’t ‘mean’ anything unless it is attached to a root form- an X chromosome.” The point Tannen makes is that if we were to pattern our language after vertebrate zoology, than we might assign males to marked status, females unmarked, which seems like essentially the reverse of the current tendency. She ends the essay with a simple summary conclusion.

Log #1

2009-01-07T04:18:00.001-05:00

To successfully stimulate thought, authors often begin by presenting a problem (or opportunity) that their audience shares in. This immediately develops affinity between the two parties. Now on friendly terms, the author will proceed to show a tantalizing glimpse of their personal grapple with the challenge. It’s an offer: the author promises to entertain and pursue the thesis, if the reader continues reading. This literary device is called a “hook”, and a laudably effective example is contained in Allyn & Bacon guide to writing. The authors suggest that engaging their textbook as instructed “will bring you the personal pleasure of a richer mental life”. This is exciting me and so I will describe why it is one of my hot spots.

The brain’s agency can be strengthened with regular use, yet my educational experience is characterized by a derth of original thinking. I used to blame the depersonalizing commoditization of learning (and other abstract forces that I could not deal with directly) for the poverty of my thoughts. After abdicating personal responsibility for the quality of my mental life, I didn’t bother much with keeping my awareness regularly collected enough to ask questions or develop lively ideas. Many times I’ve felt them knock on my door, and slip back away for a lazy want of admittance. Because I am committed to taking 100% responsibility for creating my reality now, this story is changing up.

Through conscientious, rigorous practice, writing as a strategy becomes a reliable tool for powerful, penetrating thought. Committing ideas to paper or screen creates an independent impression of them, which you can then engage in to spur on more, new thinking. In this way, using the writing process one may explore a predictably vast range of previously unknown thought. It’s occurring now in this assignment, my thinking organs are galvanized.

On pages 16 and 17 of Allyn and Bacon, there is a table of writing strategies, which when considered together constitute another hotspot. Asking a question is an invitation to think, and writing to explore a question is a popular means of navigating a topic. The authors have usefully paired strategies for developing a guiding question with tactics for sexing up whatever question you develop, which reminds me of Jeff’s salad bar. The proximate vegetables, olives, fruits and dressings ensure that lunch is always vibrant and balanced. The convenient access to useful ingredients is their main similarity. An example: reporting sudden dissatisfaction with your former opinion begs a guiding question, and describing how divided you are makes it interesting. I will be referring to these pages when writing my strong response essay.

The main point August is making is that there exists a violent cliché in contemporary thinking which excludes, restricts and villanizes all men. In describing the undesirability of this, a call for change is implied. In contemplating August’s observations, I am monitoring and including men, women and transfolk in statements about heterogeneous populations of humans instead of a limited subset. August would doubtless council examination and thorough disintegration of whatever gendered behavioral expectations we carry, towards males in particular because of the misandry embedded in English. Finally, he would kindly demand that we challenge everyone’s assumption that men are evil because of their testosterone or what it says in the Quran.

The first hotspot to discuss from “Real Men Don’t: Anti-Male Bias in English” is how using the term “patriarchy” turns off critical analysis. I wonder who consciously manipulates people through the use of these words, and why they are personally doing so. “The give-away of this ploy,” he says, “can be detected when patriarchy and its related terms are never used in a positive or neutral context, but are always used to assign blame to males alone.” The other hotspot comes for me with the description of what it means to “take it like a man”. Basically it means, degrade your intelligence by deliberately not avoiding pain that someone else unnecessarily upon oneself. We should be way over that because it’s obviously damaging us as individuals, yet we are not over it.

2009-01-07T04:16:00.002-05:00

must blog for English 151. newfangled blogger version apparently does not allow cutting and pasting from word, so I'll be posting some stuff on here for this winter quarter. wassail and wassup, N.S.?

big sprouts in big pavement

2008-11-27T01:06:00.028-05:00

Susan Freinkel's American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Treet is an easy primer on the situation. Castanea dentata was decimated by a fungus in our great-grandparents' time. Since then, humans who appreciate it's amazing fecundity and generosity have struggled, pulling it off death row and now back into the forest. One way they are doing this, now that the tree is close to having been selectively bred for sufficient blight resistance, is to reclaim abandoned mines by starting chestnut groves on top of the rubble. According to the author, these experimental plantings are growing with tantalizing success. However, she feels that working in tandem with "King Coal" is morally dubious.

Sometimes when idealists get passionate, our eyes lose focus and cause and effect run together. This is useful for seeing that humans have colonized every terrestrial ecosystem on the planet, and in too many cases degraded their productivity (a big idea). Retooling for an energy industry that isn't radically unbalancing, and instead is regenerative and extropian, requires planning for the processes that are certain to occur. This applies to small-scale biofuel like our woodburning stoves- timber stand management for the good of all in suburbs- as well as coast-hugging windfarms, and possibly to nuclear reactors whose waste gets pitched into the sun. People at my school are doing scientific legwork on chestnut mine reclamation, and since I want to play with the tree this is interesting work whenever ethical.

Environmentalist get very upset about MTR, and with reason. The local impacts of mountaintop removal are equivalent to carpet bombing. A mountain gets cut in half and out goes the deep seem of coal. Naturally, the absence of any kind of ecosystem will pull down biodiversity in the surrounding forest. The mountaintop gets dumped in streams that were formerly on the mountain's side, and when sulfites decoct out of the tailings, these streams undergo acidification to the point of undrinkability and sterilization. Sludge ponds from coal processing are left behind and pose long-term health hazard to local humans. Also, consider the coal's intended combustion releases serious atmospheric pollution. Katuah coal is high in sulfur, so burning it releases gaseous sulfur oxides resulting in acid rain, carbon dioxide and particulate matter that triggers asthma. A volcano may as well have erupted, except that the fire is in hydrocarbon-burning factories. There are many other effects to consider, but that's a start: a stretch Earth of gets totally wrecked by this resource extraction.

The mining industrialists would like to ignore these problems, in practice. They attempt to meet shallow government-mandated atonement standards, such as planting lawn grass over abandoned mines. In good conscience, we cannot condone MTR until it is has been ceased and made up for. We can't yet forgive them for the what they continue to do. King Coal defends its actions on the basis of its contributing role in domestic energy production, but that's not nearly good enough- didn't keep us out of Iraq! The type of restoration they must undertake is in kind: to truly make amends requires powering the switch to green energy. That's why chestnut restoration should be treated as an honestly separate process. There's a big forest opening in the wake of MTR's ruin, and Nature will take a long time to scab it over. We'll expedite that function, and benefit mutually from a new woody friend. The process is hopeful. After decades of thoughtful work going into this, culmination should be wholesale "green job" creation around chestnut's gifts of nuts and timber. That our Victory occurs on what was once an old killing field shouldn't disgust us- our own bodies are made of recycled material.

Iron John

2008-11-24T19:20:00.012-05:00

Just finished reading Iron John, by Robert Bly. He starts off describing most guys today as not having a well-established sense of identity. To change that situation, he reads a Grimm's faerie-tale as an archetypal male initiation sequence which was in effect since the Neolithic, and then unpacks his understanding of it.

I suppose that contemplating these ideas and progressively applying their principles into life, is supposed to catalyze one's personal development comparably to Iron John's initiation. These days, when I feel the force of an impersonal force from without or within I pay attention to it and see what I can learn. That's why I appreciate personal truth in much of Robert Bly's thinking and really enjoyed this book. The names of the days of the week come from Norse and Roman deities, + the 7 ancient astrological planets. Bly's roundup of male archetypes (The Wild Man, the Magician, the Warrior, the Trickster, the King, the Lover, and the Grief Man) enriches that understanding for me. Every day, I am reminded by cosmology to stir up and sip on and embody these previously ignored, hidden or forgotten qualities in my self.

I am also thankful for the literary criticism provided by Paul Wolf-Light, and Charles Upton. Society has changed a lot since the Neolithic; that the Wild Man has been going MIA in white culture since the rise of asceticism several thousand years ago reflects it. If there were bad reasons for his disappearance, I assume there were also some good ones. Inequality between the sexes has been rejected, so sexed archetypes that apply to both sexes can seem ridiculous. Also, if you're like me you got sick and spit up lots of the initiation/indoctrination of our native society. With climate chaos, zombies and robots running towards us, we have our work cut out! We are reinventing culture, keeping our subjective reality based on truth, and in the end passing a beautiful, sufficient way of life to our kids. I know my friends in the Little House in the Ghetto are doing this, anyway- investment analysts could learn a lot from you guys! Happy Thanksgiving!

brass jug wonder and a famous Christian reactionary

2008-11-03T23:38:00.002-05:00

Talking about sacred use of metals, here's a cool anecdote empty vessels:

"Scientists from Britain and India recently investigated a long-held belief among people in India that storing water in brass pitchers can ward off illness. (Brass is an allow of copper and zinc.) They filled brass pitchers with sterile water inoculated with E. coli bacteria and filled other brass pitchers with contaminated river water from India. In both cases, they found that fecal bacteria counts dropped from as high as 1,000,000 bacteria per mililiter to zero in two days. In contrast, bacteria levels stayed high in plastic or earthenware pots. Apparently, just enough copper ions are released by the brass to kill the bacteria but not enough to affect humans." pg. 327 Chemistry and Chemical Reactivity, 7th edition

In other news, I speculate that Chronicles of Narnia author C.S. Lewis was a reactionary by the most basic definition of the word. Unless I miss my mark, Narnia books were created to counter Robert Graves' theories about pre-modern, matriarchal Middle Eastern and European societies which primarily honored female deity. Lewis' first Narnia book was published to years after Graves', in 1950 C.E. Here's my evidence, you be the judge.

"Graves' thesis was, among other things, that greatness was a pathology; “great men” were essentially destroyers and “great” poets not much better (his arch-enemies were Virgil, Milton and Pound), that all real poetry is and has always been a mythic celebration of an ancient Supreme Goddess, of whom Frazer had only confused glimmerings, and whose matriarchal followers were conquered and destroyed by Hitler's beloved Aryan hoards when they emerged from the Ukrainian Steppes in the early Bronze Age (though they survived a bit longer in Minoan Crete). In a book called The White Goddess: An Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, he claimed to map out the rudiments of her calendar rites in different parts of Europe, focusing on the periodic ritual murder of the Goddess‟ royal consorts, among other things a surefire way of guaranteeing would-be great men do not get out of hand, and ending the book with a call for an eventual industrial collapse."
(pg 9-10, "Anarchist Anthropology" by David Graeber)

The first novel in C.S. Lewis' series of 7 is titled "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe". In his story, 4 Earth children are transported to a fantasy land of Judeo-Christian humans, animals, satyrs, and centaurs. There, the creator God is a lion named Aslan who deems to leave Narnia to its own devices after he's finished making it. His exit is followed by the inauguration of dictatorship. A near-omnipotent being simply known as "the White Witch" has the place under martial law, and keeps Narnia's seasons from progressing past the heart of winter through her magic. (Later, we are to learn that she is an alien from yet another parallel world, who committed planetary genocide by uttering a forbidden magic word and escaped into Narnia at the beginning of history with Aslan's permission.) Aslan comes back and with the help of the Earth children, kills the White Witch and sets up the 4 children as rulers in her stead and leaves again.

I'm feeling very un-Christian today.

Bone Singer Studio

2008-10-26T19:58:00.005-04:00

Loving Susanne Iles' art and prose. For better/worse, "fine art" purchasing is not in this life's budget.

From Susanne's essay "The Dragon and Creation: Reclaiming the Sacred":

"When the work was finished the world was bountiful, but heavily laden with trees and large animals, mountains and villages. The Creator feared the Earth would collapse under its own weight. Aido Hwedo offered to support the world by coiling under it in a circular fashion, its tail in its great mouth. The Creator knew Aido Hwedo detested the heat and created a great cosmic ocean for it to sleep in. Red monkeys who lived in the sea were directed to attend to Aido Hwedo’s needs by feeding the dragon iron bars whenever hunger came. In this myth it was important for the monkeys to keep the dragon eternally fed, otherwise it would start to eat its own tail and the world would surely be destroyed."

I enjoyed the whole essay, and appreciated some dragons. Particularly for us, think about Aido Hwedo's diet.

Suppose we are subject to a growing surplus of iron/war/strength during this Kali Yuga. Doesn't feeding it to the foundation of the world, so we can support life and continue the unfolding of existence, sound like a good idea? Better than creating the Military-Prison-Industrial Complex, and more generally straight-jacketing our viewpoints and activities to that of zombies. The Fon people who generated this myth live on the old "slave coast" of Africa, which kind of distracts from the humorous subterranean monkey image.

Hello -- Liberty Is a Pagan Goddess

2008-10-15T14:40:00.003-04:00

Filed by: Patricia Nell Warren
October 5, 2008 6:00 PM

o the creators of that Republican campaign commercial that appropriates the Statue of Liberty -- I've got news for you. You're hawking the wrong symbol. In fact, you're stealing a symbol that actually shoots a big hole in all the fundamentalist churchy propaganda put out by your party during this election.

Liberty is a pagan goddess. Obviously you weren't paying attention in history class. It's spelled G-O-D-D-E-S-S. There's a test on this tomorrow.

The Goddess of Liberty isn't found in the Bible. (If you really studied the Bible, you'd know that.) She comes straight out of Greek and Roman pagan tradition, complete with that toga and sandals. Under the name Libertas, She appeared on Roman coins as an emblem of the emancipation of slaves. She often wore a liberty cap that the newly freed Roman was allowed to put on in a special ceremony at Her temple.

Devotion to Her was revived during the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment, when Europeans began to kick off the shackles of state Christianity. Finally Liberty made the leap to the Americas with colonists and founders who were educated in that classical tradition of government by republic. Her image was stamped on the very first coins minted by the new republic of the United States, along with the old liberty cap and our new national motto LIBERTY. And She was on our money for nearly two centuries. It took your Bible-believing friends nearly a century of lobbying to get the motto changed to "In God we Trust" (Act of Congress, 1865).

Next it took your Bible lobby nearly another century to to get that "heathen" (as the lobby called Her) removed from our coins entirely. It was done so stealthily that -- even as She became our national icon, with the Statue of Liberty going up in New York Harbor in 1886 -- the public didn't notice. She was off the cent by 1857, off the nickel by 1912, off the quarter by 1930. The last Liberty dollars to be minted for circulation came in 1935. Wearing Her liberty cap, She was still on the dime till 1945. As the Walking Liberty, She was on the half dollar till 1947. How appropriate that She saw us through World War II and the victory over fascism. But our government was evidently not grateful to Her for the victory. After 1947 -- poof! She was gone.

Nations always put their most important symbols on their money. Nearly two centuries of a pagan goddess on our money is proof that the United States of America was not "founded under God." If it was -- if your Bible buddies had that kind of clout in 1776 -- our coins would have showcased Jesus from the start.

Yes, Liberty is a pagan. She keeps company with Isis, and Juno, and Tara, and White Buffalo Woman. She wasn't recommended in any Catholic encyclicals. She wasn't touted by Martin Luther, or Cotton Mather, or R. J. Rushdoony. Anywhere that the love of liberty finally awoke in the hearts of thinking Christians in Europe and the U.S., it was because they borrowed the idea of Her from the pagan ancients -- and they knew it was an idea whose time had come because they'd seen the abuses of non-thinking religion up close. Yet some fundamentalists today are even talking against Her statue in New York Harbor, calling it the "Whore of Babylon." One day, that magnificent monument to the most human side of our history -- immigrants who came here to find liberty -- may also be demolished.

In your ad, the book that the Statue carries in one arm is not the Bible. It's the pagan Book of Knowledge -- the schoolbook of thinking statespeople who were freeing themselves from coercive belief and enslaving government. The Latin word for book is liber. That's because the great minds of Greece and Rome had figured out that there is no emancipation without education. The torch She carries is another symbol of education. It takes data, not dogma, to shine into the darkness and make things clear for us.

Maybe that's why your party has let American education go to the dogs -- graduating more and more Americans who are ignorant enough to believe all the religious lies and propaganda that they're fed -- including the myth that "America was founded under God."

For us in the LGBT world, the Goddess of Liberty is a life-saving, sanity-saving symbol -- the ultimate icon. To come out, to be honest with ourselves about who we really are, we've had to educate ourselves, little by little. We've had to crack that Book of self-knowledge. We've had to shine that torch into the terrifying, fearful darkness of the closet where we spent so many years.

During LGBT History Month, we deal formally with the tons of old religious dreck that the conservative religion-mongers like you are still try to pile on us -- all the old corrosive, coercive, dark beliefs and misinformation about sexual orientation and gender identity that made each of us live in waking nightmares during childhood and youth in different religions -- that each of us had to leave behind and burst out into our own personal daylight..

It's too bad about you folks who created that campaign ad. You say you want to lead us, but you aren't even free yet.

reprinted from the Bilerico Project: daily experiments in LGBTQ

if your only tool is poetry, all your problems look like

2008-10-13T23:40:00.002-04:00

And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
What wine does one drink?
What bread does one eat?

Wallace Stevens
The American Sublime

madness

2008-10-07T22:23:00.005-04:00

It's driving me MAD, this cartoonish empire.

There's this martial law stuff;

The prisoner in his own free country being intentionally driven insane by policies being carried out by people who are alarmed at what they're carrying out;

More prisoners, Muslims of Chinese origin, whom a judge orders MUST be released LIKE, RIGHT NOW! They were cleared for release in 2004, but the institutions headed by our elected representatives won't release them to their home country cause, you know, they might be persecuted over there. The judge ordered they be released into good ol' America, and also ordered that on release, they MUST NOT then be detained by immigration officials.

It's such a cartoon of itself, it's too much like Radio Free Albemuth, it's like RoboKeystoneCops. Kafka wrote about stuff like this generations ago. And so did Orwell. Terry Gilliam made a movie of it in the 1980s. And so on and so forth ...

I'm sure if I started voting again, essential change and the triumph of justice would occur before it's too late. But seriously, I'm confident that the Democrats would not hesitate to use that martial law stuff against whomever they deem deserving. I remember learning about the Stanford Prison Experiment and other experiments where ordinary people abuse authority because they're given tacit permission. That seems to be a major part of this whole authoritarian-culture-destroying-the-world-for-10,000-years problem.

So, about 45 minutes ago, I was about to start blogging angrily, but it was time to put dear daughter to bed. I return to the computer and see the weather prediction: highs in the 70s (F), partly cloudy, lows in the 50s, all week. Focus on the positive! Appreciate the abundant blessings of the unnameable divine source!

"Continue planting things that you can eat" still seems to be the most sensible thing to do, no matter what happens in the disconnected consensus realities of finance and government. Trillions of dollars--gone!!

And maybe go get another glass of homebrew.

"Jesus said, lock up all the Muslims!" --Appendix to the Bible, by Brother Mark

physiological importance of the pinneal gland

2008-09-19T14:34:00.002-04:00

The Principia Discordia tells us that the pinneal gland is very important. Cool but I didn't really understand the reference. Why people would place this supposed third eye in a gland? Wikipedia said that the cells you'd find in a dissected pinneal gland seem to be closely related to eye cells. I let it go.

Two days ago while taking a nap, I had a vivid dream. The viewpoint appeared in a sunny graveyard, next to an empty hole in the ground that occupied the space directly in front of an old, granite headstone. I found myself there, besides a stooped, hooded figure w/ wide-brimmed hat. He gestured with his left hand to a space in front of us, where a small ball of living, pink flesh appeared. It hung steady 6(ish) feet off the ground. As my mysterious companion wiggled his fingers, it unfolded like a flower. This unfolding revealed that the ball had a cavity inside, a cavity which was filled with black, aetheric vapor.

Recently, my hermit time has brought on deep, midbrow sensations that I had never felt before. More lately, these uncanny vibes have occurred while I sit typing, or contort my body into yoga poses. I decided that perhaps, this third eye activity had a known physiological manifestation. Pinneal gland? I trust the Taoist hsien's wisdom, and they do indeed have much to tell us on the subject.

From what I've read so far, they call the pinneal gland one of "9 gems that distill essence". The melatonin it synthesizes, late at night and early in the morning, is one of the self-begotten longevity medicines that Taoist sages cultivate. Hmm. Melatonin is a powerful anti-oxidant, which means it dismantles "free radicals" and prevents them from destroying one's DNA. What an evil thing to call those troublesome oxygen molecules. Melatonin is also a hormone that keeps you happy.

I have been skipping sleep, lately. This first chapter of Ohio University has important distractions- homework, fun, etc.- and it felt like I had to just keep going. Now I am re-prioritizing. For purposes of life improvement/extension, I have to maintain a core period of darkness and relaxation so my third eye can distill more essence.

They Live (the movie)

2008-09-15T19:31:00.003-04:00

Greetings, Noble Savages.

The other day someone linked to this article on the Monkeysphere, which is funny and cute and still explains a lot about homo sapiens sapiens sapiens. The Monkeysphere happened to mention They Live, a film about learning to see the "real" reality and the subtle forces of control controlling us ignoramuses. (Ignorami?)

I had had a hectic day bucketing tropical depression water out of the sump and pouring it down the sewer drain in the basement, and then installing the new sump pump Sharqi got at the hardware store (taking a taxi there, as the buses don't run on Sundays). Then, I helped spread gravel that a friend brought over into the puddles out by the street--to make a less muddy parking/walking surface, and give our friend something to do with the gravel they didn't want. (Even better than freecycle, it's friendcycle!)

Late that afternoon, I had a couple hours to recharge, with the house to myself even! As I've been craving movies lately (I think my brain is tired), I took the opportunity to watch They Live. It was OK. Not a must-see, but still entertaining. It's too simple to be very intellectually engaging, but an interesting and fun portrayal of a Philip-K.-Dick style "learning to see the Matrix" kind of story. It owes a lot to PKD! A lot of the acting is that kind of pseudo-acting sometimes put on by soap opera actors & professional wrestlers. There was an absurdly long drawn out brutal fistfight between two of the main characters. I get the feeling the director meant it to be absurd, but a lot of troglodyte ignorami would just cheer and/or groan in sympathy as they beat the crap out of each other. All to get him to try on those sunglasses.

Wouldn't it be nice if it were so easy to "wake up" that we could just put on special sunglasses, and see that all the signs and ads everywhere really say things like "OBEY" or "NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT" or "CONSUME", or one of my favorites, "MARRY AND REPRODUCE"?

The movie does have some subversive content; pirate broadcasters who've learned to "see" hack the TV signals and try to spread the word about how there's no middle class any more, and we're all under the control of the secret power elites. In the 20 years since They Live came out, though, I see that not much has really changed in society. Except, the 80s are back in fashion.

The most fun stuff was seeing the difference between "normal" reality and the real reality, where the ads and products are all full of mind control messages, and the uptight rich people turn out to be ugly aliens. The second most fun stuff was the glorious, totally naive/not ironic, 80s-ness of all the fashion. Whew! Those were the days.

od arises

2008-09-03T22:39:00.002-04:00

Randoming through the internet, I see a post by some delusion person:

As leader of the Zombanian delegation to your planet, I am hereby announcing my people's endorsement of Barack Obama as the nominee for the Democratic party.

When he makes his first state visit to Zomba, I will be proud to crown (then) President Obama with the Golden Colander as well as the equally coveted platinum egg-whisk.

"Zombans unite! You have nothing to lose but your marbles..."

----

If President Obama ever makes it to central zomba proper, he'll be more likely welcomed with rotting tomatoes. Unless he makes the ice caps stop melting. Then I'll part with my golden colander. I refuse to give up the platinum egg-whisk, however.

rah rah blah

2008-08-23T08:43:00.002-04:00

Today a rich guy with a lot of secret service personnel is visiting our town, to have lots of pictures taken with some other rich guy. There's expected to be a crowd--possibly more than the daily number of commuters on a weekday. I'm not going anywhere near all that. Don & Kaleigh braved the circus and are now downtown at the bus transfer station, heading to the farmers market, because we need eggs. Don is wearing is homemade BLAH BLAH BLAH t-shirt. It's protest, art, humor, and fashion, all tied up into one. And he's taking some food not lawns propaganda to a vendor who makes great soap. That's it for protest from us. Maybe it's that we're old and boring. I don't know as that I have that much to say about it, especially to tv cameras and enthusiastic people who like to yell and who forget every four years that politicians are not to be trusted. But I think getting some chores done around the homestead and playing with my kid will accomplish a lot more than voting, or not, or whatever. I'm very very glad the deciding spectacle will be ending in a few months, and then we can commence on the doing spectacle. Woo.

I read the local paper online today, and it had a story in it about how the only low-cost dental provider is unable to provide dental services to anyone over the age of 20 anymore due to lack of dentists. And you have to go there and stand in line at 6 in the morning on Fridays only if you want to get an appointment for your kid. If this isn't ridiculous enough, Springfieldians are lining up at the reader forums to bash poor people who need dental health care, and making fun that they have insurance and poor people do not (and do not deserve it). We do have insurance, a medical card, guaranteed by our state, but it's basically not worth the paper it's printed on. No one takes it.

Back to self-health care, and thankfully we have good friends (like yarbwoman Abby) who are learning them up many non-college degrees in areas that actually matter.

sharqi

raw flax seed dehydrator crackers

2008-08-17T17:05:00.003-04:00

are amazingly delicious and healthy. Do some research, make some and see how you feel :)

Flax seeds seem to go for about $4.50-$5/lb. This is kinda pricey, putting them raw at about the price of gourmet chocolate bars or peanut butter. However, to make the crackers one adds a lot other less expensive ingredients- whatever culinary herbs you're growing, and in season vegetables. They are a wonderful way to utilize bumper crops of tomatoes, for instance.

This is how we made the crackers.

First, Mr. Mark Seimer and I ground some flax (and sesame and chia) seeds in the coffee grinder. Then added an equivalent volume of water, and stirred the bowlfull up with a spoon. The seeds soak up a lot of water, and become mucilagenous. It's this quality, among others, that make them so desirable for cracker making- it holds all the ingredients together. I swear, you bite into one of these crackers and it doesn't break except where your teeth pleasingly crunch. There were a lot of times this afternoon when I'd bite down and be left with a crescent moon of cracker! They're also high in fiber, which might have something to do with the flax's binding ability.

Leave the ground flax to soak awhile, and make your veggie smoothie. One can add nuts, oils, and spices. We added curry powder, cayanne, three roma tomatoes, a bit of greens (kale/lettuce/chard), purple cabbage, half a small onion and 4 cloves of garlic. Garlic seemed to be important for flavoring, as was the sea salt.

Now once you've got your smoothie, mix it into the soaked flax. This you spread onto your dehydrator's pan, or if you live somewhere dry and sunny, perhaps you'll rig up a way to do it outdoors. The cracker will be in the box for 10-12 hours, then Mark will flip it over and do it again on the other side. For moister, breadier crackers you can shorten this time. However, Mark is experimenting with shelf life for these fabulous raw food staple. Hit up google and see how other people are doing it.

Fluid Universe

2008-08-14T16:12:00.002-04:00

While digging through and organizing some old personal papers, I ran across this poem. It's scribbled down from a siting at the American Visionary Art Museum. Enjoyed the feeling of connection with the Chesapeake Bay, which one could see out the window opposite the original inscription.

"Oceana (a poem from the Ocean to Humanity)"

One breath away from mother Oceana
Your nimble feet make prints in my sands
You have done good for yourselves
Since you left my wet embrace
And crawled ashore.
You dance by my side
Children sublime
You show me continents
I see islands
You count the centuries I blink my eyes
Hawks and sparrows race in my waters
Stingrays are floating*Across the sky
Little ones, my sons and daughters
Your sweat is salty
I am why
I am why
I am why
Your sweat is salty
I am why
I am why
I am why

Plant Up Babylon

2008-08-05T23:37:00.003-04:00

Chant down Babylon, plant up Babylon, the vining gardens of Stanistan: Food Not Lawns. Terraform the Earth!

"That was what they were saying, really, when they talked about the impact on humans: they would lose the support of the domesticated part of nature. Everything would become an exotic, everything would have to go feral." --Kim Stanley Robinson, 50 Degrees Below, p. 55

The big question seems to be, how do we make life livable (humane, sustainable) in this "matrix" (system conditions) of industrial-scale devastation that the majority are still participating in on an ordinary everyday basis?!

If you are not designing for sustainability, then you are designing for catastrophe (disaster, chaos, crash, woops, etc.). As long as what is is unsustainable, that means, sooner or later, all of us will be vagabonds, as system failures (the missing information) set in. We'll be forced to "leave," probably not under the best of circumstances. So, hopefully, we'll find that many have left already and figured out ways to survive and thrive--humane, sustainable ways of life. Positive feedback the empirical goods--our rhizomes will crowd out Leviathan's!

"Perhaps all that is left of the world is a wasteland covered with rubbish heaps, and the hanging gardens of the great Khan's palace. It is our eyelids that separate them, but we cannot know which is inside and which outside." --CrimethInc., Expect Resistance, p. 263

Anywhere rain falls or dew collects, plants can grow, there is hope.

Topsoil tops oil. A weedlot is doing more to save the earth than a voter.

Sorry for the disjointedness here ... this is more like random notes from the notebook than a coherent blog entry. Powered by strawberries + cane sugar + yeast.

hm

2008-07-31T22:25:00.001-04:00

I can't seem to stop spewing forth over at the Little House. If anyone wants to come for a visit and engage in some dialogue with me, come on over.

sharqi

Sinicuiche

2008-07-31T12:57:00.002-04:00

VFD also has several specimen of this little known Heimia salicifolia. Seems like a more benigh drug. Going again to Ratsch,

"Preparation and Dosage

Sinicuiche, the Mexican "magical drink causing oblivioun," is made from the leaves:

'The preparation of the drink involves laying the slightly wilted leaves in water for a day and then pressing these thorougly the floolowing day. The juice obtained is allowed to ferment. In this way, one obtains a peculiar, not unpleasant-tasting drink whose effects, however, are certainly not due to the only low quantities of alcohol that are present but are derived from other substances that are produced during fermentation. (Reko 1938, 1428)

A more modern recipe calls for adding one handfull of freshly crushed wilted leaves per person to water and allowing this to sit in the sun for a couple of days, whereupon the liquid will begin to ferment slightly. One cup of this is said to induce yellowish vision and mild euphoria (D. McKenna 1995, 102*). The cold-water extract of the leaves is sticky. Even with dosages as high as 15 g of dried leaves, no psychoactive effects could be observed (Martinez 1994, 295*).

The fresh or dried leaves can be brewed into a tea, both alone and in a combination with other herbs.

The fresh herbage can be added to 60 to 80% ethanol to produce an alcoholic extract (tincture). Twenty to 25 g of this tincture is said to be an effective psychoactive dosage."
(next page, 268)

"Effects

The drink brewed from Heimia salicfolia produces only mild psychoactive effects:

'Sinicuiche has a weak intoxicating effect. It induces a pleasant, slightly euphoric dissiness and numbness, and the surroundings are percieved as being darker. Auditory hallucinations occur as the inebriated person hears indistinct sounds from a great distance. The world around one shrinks. No unpleasant aftereffects are known. (Scholz and Eigner 1983, 75*)'

There have been repeated reports of yellowish vision and mild auditory hallucinations, tunnel effectts, and tunnel vision (D. McKenna 1995, 102*; Rob Montgomery, pers. comm.). Chills and shivering have also been reported (Bob Wallace, pers. comm.).

Animal experiments have demonstrated that the alkaloids have anticholineregic and anti-spasmodic effects (D. McKenna 1995, 102*). The pramacology of vertine (=cryogenine) is said to be identical to that of the whole extract (Kaplan and Malone 1966). Self-experiments with the alkaloids vertine, lythrine (310 mg, corresponding to 36 to 156 g of the dried branch tips), and acetylsalicylic acid did not result in any detectable psychoactivity (Malone and Rother 1994, 142)."

henbane

2008-07-31T12:36:00.003-04:00

my VFD affinity group has a big, happy, healthy, flowering, black henbane plant. what are we gonna do with this herb? i went to a trusted expert (how many of those do we noble savages have?) and here's a little of what's been said for us

from page 275 (around Hyoscyamus muticus, black henbane) of The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants: Ethnopharmacology and It's Applications by Christian Ratsch

"Preparation and Dosage

Either the fresh leaves are used as a poultice or the dried herbage and seeds are used internally. When taken internally, a single dosage should not exceed 0.25 g; the totla daily dosage should not exceed 1.5 g. Because reactions to tropane alkaloids can vary significantly from one individual to another, it is difficult to provide dosage guidelines that apply to everyone. Anyone who wishes to experiment with Egyptian henbane for therapeutic or psychoactive purposes should exercise great care and begin with a very small dosage, whcih then can be slowly increased.

The dried leaves and seeds are suitable for use as ingredients in incense and smoking blends. The herbage also can be used to brew beer (see recipe under Hyoscyamus niger).

In Morocco, twenty seeds from the subspecies falezles are taken orally in a date (cf. palm wine), chewed thoroughly, and swallowed to induce hallucinations. They are also used as an ingredient in majun (see Oriental joy pills) (Vries 1984*; 1989, 39*)."

later, in the Ritual Use section

"The Arabs like to spice their coffee (see Coffea arabica) with crushed henbane seeds. It is possible that the plant also played a role in the secret rites of the dervishes or Sufies. In the twentieth century, the Towara Bedouins of the Sinai Peninsula were still smoking the leaves to produce "an inebritation with delierium" (Lewin 1981, 177*).

from page 279, on Hyoscyamus niger, black henbane,

"Preparation and Dosage
The chopped, dried herbage can be used as an ingredient in incense and smoking blends, for brewing beer, to spice wine, and as a tea (infusion, decoction). The seeds are most appropriate for use in incense recipes.

Dosages must be assessed carefully no matter what type of preparation is being considered. According to Hagers Handbuch der pharmazeutischen Praxis, the therapeutic individual dosage of prepared Hyoscyamus (with a standarized alkaloid content of 0.05%) is 0.5 g, and the daily dosage 1.5 g (maximum 3 g) (Lindequist 1993, 469). Apart from this, see the guidelines given for Hyoscyamus muticus."
below the following recipe

Oleum hyoscyamin infusum (henbane oil) is obtained by boiling the leaves in oil. It can be used externally for therapeutic or erotic massage."
-------
"Recipe for Henbane Beer

40 g dried, chopped henbane herbage
5 g bayberry or another Myrica species (this aromatic ingredient is optional)
approx. 23 liters of water
1 liter (approx. 1.2 kg) brewing malt (barley malt)
900 g honey (e.g., spruce or pine honey)
approx. 5 g dried top-fermenting yeast
brown sugar

Boil the henbane and bayberry (if desired) in 1 liter of water ( to ensure the necessary sterility). Leave the henbane in the water until it has cooled.

Sterilize the brewing vessel (plastic bucket) with boiling water. Then add the liquid malt to the bucket along with 2 liters of hot water and the honey. Stir until the ingredients are thoroughly dissolved. Add the henbane water together with the herbage and the bayberry. Stir thoroughly. Add cold water to make a total of approx. 25 liters of liquid. Pitch the yeast into the mixture and cover.

In order for the top-fermenting yeast to be effective, the wort should be allowed to stand in a warm location (20 degrees to 25 degrees C.) Fermentation will begin slowly because the tropane alkaloids will initially inhibit the yeast. The main fermentation will be over in four to five days, and the after-fermentation will then begin. The yeast will slowly settle and form a layer at the bottom of the bucket.

The beer can now be poured into bottles. A heaping teaspoon of brown sugar can be added to each (0.7 liter) bottle to promote an additional after-fermentation. Henbane beer tastes best when stored before use in a cool place for two to three months."

Effects, pages 281 and 282

"The parasympathicolytic effects of the drugs and of preparations of black henbane are due to the principal alkaloids hyoscyamine (or atropine) and scopolamine. Peripheral inhibition with simultaneous central stimulation is characteristic. The primary effects last for three to four hours. Hallucinogenic aftereffects may persist for as long as three days. The alkaloids can cross via the blodd into the placenta and have also been detected in breast milk (Lindequest 1993, 469).

Among the unpleasant side effects are severe dryness of the mouth, locomotor disturbances, and farsightedness. Overdoses can lead to delirium, coma, respiratory paralysis, and death. However, only a very few instances of lethality are reported in the toxicological literature (Lindequist 1993, 470). For this reason, the actual lethal dosage is not known precisely. The plant is also toxic to graxing cattle, deer, fish, and many species of birds. Pigs appear to be immune to the effects of the toxins (Morton 1977, 305*) and actually appear to enjoy the inebriating effects. This may be the source of the ancient name hog's bean.

Low dosages (0.5 to 1 liter) of beer brewed with henbane have inebriating effects, while higher dosages (1 to 1.5 liters) are aphrodisiac (henbane beer is the only beverage that makes one thirstier the more one drinks!). Very high dosages (more than 2 to 3 liters) can induce delirious and "inane" states, confusion, memory disturbances, and "crazy" behaviors."

letter to M.M. "Activists Save Water from Corporate Control"

2008-07-29T16:49:00.005-04:00

Dear M.,

When this headline came onscreen, the memory of your activist legacy sprang to mind. You old stalwart! Nestle has successfully been banished from Wells, Maine, and now it's moving on to other communities, peddling Lies and vampirism. Doubtless they are pouting from the stinging bitch slap of forcible ejection.

It's been in the news lately, some humans out West are prohibited from catching the rain that falls on their roofs! The Evil Machine of the State has declared that rain belongs under its dominion. After the rain percolates underground and into rivers, pipes suck it up and divvy it out to food factories.

Earlier today, I imagined a conversation going on between two undines, elemental beings of water. They were talking about humanity's and hanging out in the clouds above Denver. "People are getting so dense during this part of the cycle," one complains to the other. "What a crappy way to go! Their agricultural paradigm reflects backwardness and greed. It's gotten so bad, they might desertify the whole planet." The second is inclined to agree. "Some of them say claim that they are inventing their way out of their ignorant practices, while at the same time continuing on the same self-destructive course. It's a Hell of a big lie to let yourself believe in." It's voice is choked up and water begins to precipitate as tears, falling to Earth. "Ah, cheer up, this part is always enjoyable!" says the first undine. "Sure, many of them are living like fucktards, and that's part of growing up. They are falling on their face, so they can learn the invaluable lesson of picking themselves back up again. Soon, many of them may learn wise stewardship of the World." They splash together on a homesteaders' roof, and are funneled into an underground cistern. Later, as their liquid is sprayed out of a watering can onto the homesteader's indoor marijuana patch, they shout together, "See, it's happening already!"

Your root balls have been delivered to R. Robust and vital rosemary, sage, oregano and lavendar are coming your way! I mixed additional compost and sand into holes where your plants were dug out. Your soil was not so desirable, typical stuff of Cincinnati, a hard pan of acidic clay. Those herbs seem to thrive on adversity, though, and your more Northernly Garden is about to be enriched.

Over the last few days I've done some good reading into the Western Esoteric Tradition, and I wanted to share my take on the Rosicrucians with you. I think you'll appreciate their story and find them to be kindred spirits.

Rosicrucian translates as "of the Rosey Cross". Conjure up a picture of a flower, sitting on an elemental cross of the 4 directions. It immediately sheds light both on their unusual monotheism, and their work of healing the perceived rift between humans and Nature. Jesus being equivalent to a rose bush without thorns, I suppose

Times were dark when the Rosicrucians got their start. The Church was actively hunting down and murdering rural wise women, and declaring all free thinking (to say nothing of smoking pot and running around in the woods naked) to be thought crime, punishable by indentured servitude or publicly burning to death at the stake. In their times, the first corporations were going on State-sponsored expeditions to America; America, where people's civilizations were quite sophisticated in sustainable cooperation with whatever bioregion they occured in. For this, the indigenous humans were uncomprehendingly laughed at and slaughtered!

Rosicrucians were Christian, European men who answered the call to shamanism starting 500 years ago. Through meditation, studying alchemy with Muslims in North Africa and the Middle East, and learning about the Tree of Life from Jews in Spain, they realized that they as humans were part of Nature. They realized that the alientation we suffer from Nature stems from a primal disconnection from our higher selves, from "God". So they sought and achieved conversation with the Divine, which is an understanding of the animating spirit of Nature, of all the beings: our fellow humans, animals, plants, fungi, bacteria and elementals like the undines. Also, seeing the Divine in the interconnecting relationships between everything, which makes existence more than the sum of its parts.

Their wisdom, their Gnosis, and the exercises they developed for its attainment, has living, contemorary versions in many other cultures- Taoist sages in China, Lakota medicine men- but that kind of knowledge has died in the minds of European intelligentsia. The mythical founders of the "Fraternity of the most Laudable Order of the Rosy Cross" stole around Europe, secretly relating their revelation to every dissenter they could find. Their goal was to ferment a great reform, to bring us out of the madness which is still embodied by the international elite and the spectacle-bound masses. Those crafty prophets of love, the Rosicrucians, sought to resurrect a WORKING, practical understanding of the unity of all things. The unity Nature and God, of humans and Heaven and Earth- they rekindled this in the hearts of many of their countrymen. Their heirs are still failing, and still succeeding. I see their ethos gettin' replayed out by "CrimethInc." and it's anarchist culture jammers, for instance.

I love writing letters. They afford a rare, social opportunity for taking time, getting one's thoughts together, and sharing them with a friend in developed form. Getting one's creative juices flowing, laying down the ambrosia on paper or pixel.

Traditionally, I have experienced debilitating difficulty with inspiring myself to write. This may stem from the fact that my favorite writing is usually done in letters, and I lose them when I send them. A.A. mentioned that you are reading the Artist's Way together and cheering each other on. I'm feeling the urge too, and I am embarrassed to say that my blog lies mostly empty. Writing letters this week has been as Cerridwen's cauldron of inspiration, a self-renewing source of fermenting fuel, with which Brigit is sparking a creative fire in my head. I had this idea, and I want you to give it thought and tell me what you come up with.

Instead of trying to pull teeth by writing random shite on noblesavagery.blogspot.com, (for instance the latest post about getting randy after eating too many plums), I could duplicate my best letters and anonymize people by using peoples's initials. That way people who know of the events from direct experience could know exactly what and I'm talking about, but noone else would. Of course, discretion would be necessary for any private matters. Discussing peoples' comfort and gaining consent before publishing is necessary. This would become second nature.

Do I have permission to republish this letter on Noble Savagery? Your name would be M., or M. M. Please let me know.

Be well M.! I hope you enjoy your herbs, and please struggle to maintain a positive attitude about your situation.

Yours in Love for the Earth,

Badger

2008-07-23T14:55:00.003-04:00

I love writing letters. They afford a rare, social opportunity for taking time, getting one's thoughts together, and sharing them with a friend in developed form. Getting one's creative juices flowing, laying down the ambrosia on paper or pixel.

Traditionally, I experience debilitating difficulty with inspiring myself to write. This may stem from the fact that my favorite writing is usually done in letters, and I lose it as they're sent out. So here's an idea to reap the richness.

Instead of pulling teeth by writing randomness, I would duplicate my best letters and anonymize people by using initials. That way, people who know of any events discussed from direct experience could appreciate my view, but for most people it would just be news and views.

Discretion would be necessary. I would come up with a list of rules to keep me from falling into grey areas of discussing confidential matters. Discussing peoples' comfort and gaining consent before publishing is necessary. This would become second nature. Kinks would work themselves out, and I'd be careful.

What say yee, co-bloggers? Please consider and share your thoughts. You too, anyone else who is watching.

going native

2008-07-20T12:17:00.002-04:00

The settlers have been caught as unaware as the natives were. Sure enough, family by family, the modern descendants of settlers have been lured by wads of wampum and shiny store goods to sign their names on the dotted line, to give away their traditional lands and the familiar lively rural culture that goes with it.

Manifest Destiny once again appears with a smile on its face, good news of a glorious new future spouting from its lips, and a reassuring pat on the back. Goodbye vibrant rural culture; hello industrial mega-ag! And if your rural town is especially worthy, a company store in a strip mall. Granted, modern Manifest Destiny cannot always lure a farmer to abandon his family's future with wealth. Sometimes Manifest Destiny has to use banks (debt) and justice (the law) to enforce their legal right to rural lands. Why fight it? It's Manifest Destiny! It's progress! It's meant to be! It's going to happen anyway, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Rural Americans are shuffled off their ancestral homes and forced onto reservations, usually bombed out small towns with a trading post (Wal-Mart) on the edge of town. They rely on government handouts to survive, or if they can, they hire themselves out, often for low pay and travel far away. Many cannot cope with the loss of their livelihood and their familiar culture, and turn to tv (or video games) and liquor (or crack or meth) to alleviate the suffering.

Many emigrate to big cities, assimilating into the quick pace of urban american culture and its relentless demands of the total work and consumption lifestyles. A few ex-pats "pass" and survive. Many alleviate their sufferings as do their compatriots back home--drug and screen addictions.

And so here we are, corporations of America holding the deed to the land, the heart and soul of the american way of life. Sure we don't have to choose to participate, as long as we don't mind homelessness and starvation. It is strange that we have been forced into economic slavery by corporations backed by linear feet of legal code and our own government that is supposedly by, for, and of, us. In fact our governments and corporations exist only because we believe they do, because our consensus reality rituals reinforce the ever-increasing literal concrete-ness of their presence on a daily basis. We drive the wheels of Manifest Destiny.

Well, bullony.

The call is out for a 10,000 Year Jubilee, one to match, undo, and heal the toil of civilization. Let us cast off the expectations of slavery and consumption, and replace these cultural memes with ones that make some sense. Let us rediscover our human roots and scout the trail back to the gardens. Let us replace corporate government bullony with community and the gift economy. Let us replace education with curiosity and learning, health care with good health, punishment-style tax-dollar justice with community care and forgiveness, fossil fuels and energy slaves with the sweat of our own brows, prozac with a life filled with love and purpose, moral obedience to authority with loyalty to self and tribe, reason with intuition, wealth and success with contentment, rational science with alchemy, toxic industrial food with blessings from the garden and the entire community of life. May we have the blessing of feeling filled with just enough.

Let us replace Manifest Destiny with usufruct. The land belongs to itself, and all that is on it belongs to itself (including humanity). We take for our needs, and provide a continuing future for our children, for humanity, as well as the rest of the community of life. We may well have plastic for the rest of human existence on this planet. Let it serve as a sign of (rich white) man's hubris, of a time when we thought we were gods, and we thought we had acquired the knowledge of good and evil. Let us search out the tree of life in the gardens, and remember.

Reservations for none, paradise for all. Emigrate to a culture of life.

"There is no wealth but life." --John Ruskin
"Justice... is the strength of love in making a world that is deserving of human beings." --Curtis White

2008-07-14T19:31:00.005-04:00

The Japanese plums are ripe. A couple of buddies and I gorged ourselves on the sweet, juicy fruit last night. We had been looking for Cornelian cherries, fabled as a Persian male aphrodisiac, but then we just ran into this loaded tree on the median strip. Now Werebrock has a new favorite fruit. If you know of any midsize all purple-leafed trees in peoples' front yards and it's not a maple, look closer. It may be a Japanese plum and if so, it's probably frickin' loaded.

The reason we're looking for Cornelian cherries, is that my body is telling me it's time to mate. I suppose it's so I would have babies in the spring? So I'm just like "Pff, whatever body. No babies this decade." But if you follow your Nature-given seasonal inclinations instead of insullating yourself from everything in your HVACed office, car and condo, life's always more fun. I've been sleeping 6 hours a night, lately, instead of 8 or 10. Maybe that's cuz the moon is gettin' fuller.

So the story, right. Last night after gettin' all pumped up on plum juice and making my guys friends at frisbee perhaps slightly uneasy with my unusually brightly twinkling eyes, I was out huntin' the woods for elderberries. After finding way more than I could have hoped for, I'm just lyin' down to meditate when these two giggly hippy chicks stroll up and start complimenting my aura. I was thrilled. There have not yet been any scintillating details to relate and I'll keep 'em to myself when there are, but I just want to make a plug for making it a habit to follow up on as many of the the spontaneous, wonderful gut intuitions that one gets as ya have time for. The normal, waking consciousness ego can use all the help it can get.

yarrow

2008-07-09T01:06:00.003-04:00

is the plant of the week. Achillea millefolium in the Latin.

qualities and uses:

It's a good bitter. According to Joe Hollis, the Chinese always eat a little bit of some wild, bitter herb (like yarrow, or wormwood) before starting on dinner. The bitterness you taste are tannins and saponins, which augment the bile and prime it's release in the stomach, making digestion of heavy peasant food a breeze.

Also should be used as a poultice for battlefield wounds. The scientific name comes from the Illiad, where monster-hero Achilles heals some of his downed comrades at Troy with the miraculous herb. And while the path of the forest gardener is somewhat less dangerous that that of other eco-anarchists, this time of year we all have to deal with small nicks and cuts on our legs and arms as we wade through wild blackberry patches. To self-heal with a yarrow poultice, just chew up a leaf, and spitooey a fairly dry loogy of the herbed spittle onto your fingertip for application to superficial knicks.

Now is the time to harvest yarrow for drying, you can tell because it is flowering and that's the sign. I'm going to be harvesting a bunch today in Melbourne, in the vacant field abbutting my Kentucky Kibbutz. Linnaeus reported that it makes a decent and highly innebriating bittering agent in beer, when substituted for the more standard hops.

Permaculture and Explosives

2008-07-06T10:28:00.004-04:00

from Permaculture: A Designers' Manual, Bill Mollison, 1988, Ch. 9: Earthworking and Earth Resources, sec. 9.8: Moving of the Earth, p. 247:

Explosives

Explosives are of most use to assist auger holes in hard ground, to make holes in otherwise unstable ground such as marshes, or to loosen rock in quarries. With the advent of the swamp tractor, marsh blasting is less common, but the basic ease and effectiveness of explosives should not be overlooked where they can solve some otherwise intractable problems.

Nitroglycerine (cellulose treated with acid, in glycerine, absorbed into wood dust or clay earths) as gelignite, dynamite, or plastique is an inexpensive way to solve some earth-moving problems. Even cheaper is the mix of ammonium nitrate fertiliser and dieseline known in the trade as "chickenshit" (nitrates have from ancient times been gathered from manures, around the soil of toilet pits, or extracted by washing and evaporation from guano).

Old "recipe" books give dozens of reliable recipes for cheap explosives, and even custard powder, flour, or face-powder will blow a room apart, as will the fumes from ether or domestic gases. I once worked as a scientific glassblower, and managed to remove all doors and windows from my room by allowing ether to evaporate from a bottle. Earlier, as a baker in my father's business, I created some spectacular flashes using plain flour near open flames.

Today, we must take a course to obtain a "powder monkey" certificate in order to set our own explosives, or we should hire skilled people. Yesterday (pre-terrorist), we simply made the stuff up and let it go, with unpredictable results and often too much effect.

(end quote) Yeah that's right, ol' Bill Mollisons likes to BLOW STUFF UP!! "The basic ease and effectiveness of explosives should not be overlooked where they can solve some otherwise intractable problems." LOL!!

I Pledge Allegiance

2008-07-04T23:40:00.003-04:00

I pledge allegiance
to liberty and justice for all

The Dreaded East Side of Springfield is ablaze with highly illegal fireworks, probably from Missouri and Indiana. Autonomous fireworks shows in all directions rival the centralized government-sponsored spectacle. We love it when people celebrate their freedom with illegal fireworks.

I rode my bike to SIX places today looking for sparklers for Kid Khalila. How can we have an Independence Day without sparklers?!!?!! How can stores be open for business on this holiday, yet not sell us the traditional tools for celebration? Just how lame can Springfield be? Nevertheless, neighborhood displays have evoked loud primate woooping from us on the front porch of the chaos house.

If we are truly a free country, could we drop The United States and just be America? With every neighborhood, every household, different yet included in the endless open play that is post-civilliesed pioneering?

And the irony continues--how much of these fireworks were made in China?!

In other news, we're enjoying Badger's kim chee. It has Badger chi in it, I think.

2008-07-02T12:56:00.004-04:00

Getting off the plastic bags would put us ahead of the game. It's true that they're very handy, but come on. Canvas tote bags, or woven reed baskets, aren't that hard to come by and make a lot more sense. Plastic bags do not recycle well and usually degrade into toxic clutter. Whenever I find one, I like to fold it into a paper football shape and drop it in the nearest kitchen drawer.

I love Jujubes. Forever. If you know where I can get dried out, decent bulk jubjubes I will love you forever, too.

In other news, if you were thinking about wandering around the globe to get your hands and feet dirty, now is a really good time. Americans have this freedom of mobility that we should appreciate, because it ain't necessarily gonna be like that forever. Check out this place in Tennessee. If I had a partner and we were madly in love, we would run away to this place.

Contact: Hector Black
Location: 170 Hidden Springs Ln
Cookeville
Tennessee
38501
Map of area available
Phone: 931-268-9889
Activities: composting toilet, peace activist, farming, gardening, activism, permaculture, cottage industry, community, orchards, forestry, education, energy, retail, marketing, research
Description: Fruit/nut orchard, 12A, very scenic location.
Hidden Springs is located in a narrow valley cut 300 ft. into the Cumberland Plateau by a state scenic wild
river. The orchard covers about 12 acres of food producing perennials - trees, vines, shrubs. We have collected plants from many parts of the world. The main income crops are blueberries, black and red raspberries, blackberries, hardy kiwi and chestnuts, but the field also contains Cornelian cherry (an edible dogwood), Cudrenia, Mayhaw, Azarole, honey locust, pecan, black walnut, aronia , pawpaw, persimmon,mini-kiwi and many more unusual fruits. The area is quite beautiful with 5 waterfalls within easy walk of the house.
We are looking for a single person or couple to take over the orchard
Program: We provide room and board in return for about 35-40 hours of work per week. Most helpers eat with us and take part in food preparation or cleanup. There is a possibility of earning money picking fruit in season. A $50 per month stipend is possible for longer term volunteers. We can accommodate most diets. A small permaculture garden helps with fresh vegetables. Accommodation is in our house for the most part, although camping and trailers are a possibility. The work varies greatly depending upon season. We mulch, fertilize, harvest, weed, mow, prune, plant, propagate by cuttings and grafting, depending upon season. Every Saturday morning is spent at the local farmer’s market during the harvest season. (May-October) There is a Land Trust operating on what was once part of our farm, and an organic nursery next door where extensive grafting a propagation takes place with edible landscape plants. We need help at any time during the year and can meet busses in Cookeville, TN.

Area: 380 acres
Space: Can accommodate 4 people.
Organic Status: 29 years without chemical fertilizer, pesticides or herbicides. None nearby
Active: Year-round

when all hail breaks loose

2008-06-27T21:21:00.004-04:00

For a moment, the story flashed on yahoo's news page--the arctic could be ice-free this summer. When I went back to read it, this story had been replaced by one in which an American baseball pitcher was placed on the disabled list in a freak pillow accident. I didn't read that story. In trying to find the arctic ice story online to follow up on it, I ran across the following:

http://www.livescience.com/environment/050823_ice_free.html
from 23 August 2005
prediction: the arctic will be ice-free by 2105

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7139797.stm
from 12 December 2007
prediction: the arctic will be ice-free by 2013

And the story that caught my attention today:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20080627/sc_livescience/northpolecouldbeicefreethissummer
prediction: the arctic will be ice-free this summer (that would be now, right?)

I get the feeling we can't really rely on science to give us accurate predictions of how we will be affected by global warming, and when. I read a story a couple of weeks ago about flooding in Iowa, where the crest of a river was a foot (!) higher than predicted. The weather forecasters lamented that the rain that had fallen had overwhelmed their models, and so they could not accurately predict the river crest. It was unprecedented. As was the dry lightning storm in California that was responsible for starting over 800 forest fires. Rare. So far. But not really.

So anyway, what can we do except deal with it? Floods, droughts, severe weather--this is common now, right? My daughter has personally seen a flood, suffered through droughts, ice storms, tornadoes, and even felt an earthquake, and she's just a kid. She's never seen hail, though. That should be a treat for her. We are fortunate right now to live on the higher flat land, away from abundantly overflowing rivers (smartly designed by the Army Corps of Engineers). We are having a good time gardening, watching the raspberries ripen over the course of a morning, and seeing the tomatoes grow a foot in a day. So far, so good.

Tomorrow, we spend time with our farmers at the market, and tomorrow afternoon, we commune in potluck with our food not lawns friends. A toast, to mother nature, wherever and whenever her furies fling us, we still take shelter within her restful arms. We drink of the bounty, and live out our lives in beauty. Adaptation is our hallmark.

sharqi

coming home from the Zomba Zone

2008-06-15T14:40:00.002-04:00

Hakim and Sharqi, my friends here in Illinois, thou have been most wondeful hosts. Little House in the Ghetto, like a Sufi garden of enlightenment and ease. It's a sacramental reality, here. Doing whatever we can to facilitate that most convivial of communal points of view- hanging out. We cooked together, gardened together, shared qafue and sat with our backs to the Tree of Life.

I am enjoying a certain article in the Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult. It's called "Are You Illuminated?", and discusses the path of reoccurring initiations that happen with all those who tread on the path of spiritual Adepthood.

After reading the article, I think of tree out in the front yard. Humongous Ulmus americana, American elm, shades the whole yard sometimes and contributes much to the Arcadian mystique this place now holds for me. It looks like Yggdrasill, the crux tree in Norse mythology. Odin has to hang from the trees branches and die before going on to knowledge.

Kind of feels like going back to college?

the poppies have arrived.

2008-06-07T22:15:00.003-04:00

Today is the eldest Bears' daughter's high school graduation party, and it is really very nice. It hasn't rained in many days, but today there was a heady storm (which we drove through), and mist rose from all the ridges. At some point the magic light arrived, which is a sort of joke on Joe. One day he was smoking too much or something, and an intern from George's place wanted some trilliums. Joe started to walk over and suddenly whistled loudly and rushed everyone into the garden to look at something he described as much varied and lasting no longer than 5 minutes. So we always go out to look at the magic light when the sun makes evening clouds pink and separates all the green into different shades of blue and yellow.

Anyway. We walked down the road to the low-water bridge and the foot bridge above it. The sky behind us was filled with a 3-day old moon set all in pink and mist settling into all the purple valleys along the ridges. The trees looked moist and happy and dark along the walk back, and the sound of the creek threatened to put me into a state of bliss.

So. Here we go to Illinois tomorrow!

mudslinging, and curious groundhogs

2008-05-27T16:19:00.002-04:00

The straw bale hut seems to be approaching completion. We've Christened it "Chapel Perilous".

With such organic structures, dead lines are pretty much irrelevant. After all, the structure's life cycle could extend beyond any of our rational speculations. We are wise enough on our foolishness to allow for factor x.

Building Chapel Perilous has been totally worthwhile. Uncertainty in method and indefiniteness in timeframe are the Chaos that we bring our Work out of. WHAT AN ADVENTURE. I've been having an identity crisis which extended into this work season, a crisis which has been stomped into the mud along with the signature blood, sweat and tears. It's been hard to talk about- the connection between identity and voice is very strong. My relationships with myself and family and friends have been under pressure from the uncertainty, but I can talk again now. This, because I have the authority of knowledge that my journey is this 10x12 hermitage, and beyond. By the season that some lucky forest gardener WWOLFers find a way to crash here, I will be gone, like the offed gas of our bodilly fluids from the mud.

We wait, the cob is drying on its own. I am so glad, because it's been a long work spell and my Sabbath is right now. See, this weekend past, Griffin, Kat and I led workshop on the whole holy process of making and applying earth plaster. First, we made a watery clay mud mixture and pressed it into naked bales. These dry, and act as a sort of glue for holding on the next layer of mud. After lunch, we mixed up cob and applied it as a second coat. It held on there nicely, and is functioning much as your hide does, keeping vermin from the bales and breathing out moist air.

The last stage is applying da finish coat. It's gonna be really sandy, with special colored clays and some borax to keep the critter populations down.

I don't begrudge the critters, I just want to be the Acidopholus in this yogurt. They are keeping court there, now, in a mellow and balanced way. I saw a cricket and some ants, which attract big wolf spiders just like in Fukuoka's primordial rice paddy. Another critter was the mold. The cob layer coughed up a bit of that white, furry stuff. I would have known that the gliding undines were scheduled to muck around with the aesthetics if I had checked a weather report. However, I don't bother to get on the T.V. or computer these days, not even for facebook. Some things just don't matter. You could also say they don't soul much, or spirit either. We got the air moving through with a window fan, and the final coat will go on in a few days.

O yeah, about the groundhogs. We've known there's a big one living in the Sweet Annie patch. Yesterday, for the first time, it showed its four babies to us. They were so cute. Totally "Indigo", the kits crept up the hill, very curious, and stared into our eyes from five yards away, at most. Wild animals coming near you is an interesting indication of some peaceful piece of mind- like finding the meaning in a dream, such occasions can be good times for personal reflection. The kits eventually left us, and played in my tobacco patch.

food not lawns

2008-05-17T21:58:00.002-04:00

Today we held a plant and seed swap, attended by scores. An abundance was given, an abundance was taken, and an abundance was left over. Offers of donations were refused, on account it cost no money to put on the event. Flats of tomatoes, many heirloom varieties, were enjoyed by many, especially the people who were having a cookout after our event; they left with the last flat, with glees of joy. I brought home three black raspberries, many black eyed susans and coneflowers, mint, garlic chives, and miscellaneous others. We also have a box of large canisters of 2006 seed, donated by a local greenhouse--one that sells their heirloom tomato plants three for a dollar, affordable for we masses. The flats of tomatoes were purchased by a member of the group who offered them to everyone with encouragement to save their seeds. I talked to a reporter who is really interested in environmental issues, and gardening.

There were so many people, of different races and castes and experience, that attended. It was amazing to see. What a beautiful sense of sharing and community, people bringing their abundance, and taking home treasure, all blessings. We as a city will be that much richer as the growing season progresses, an abundance of fruits, herbs, vegetables, flowers--enriching the bodies and souls of Springfield's citizens, all sharing it with their neighbors, with promises of starts next spring.

Ah, it is so beautiful being part of this paradigm shift, this new way of looking of things that doesn't shortchange our grandchildren's grandchildren. What a legacy to leave behind, an inheritance beyond money, a thriving relatively self-sufficient community in a larger community filled with biodiversity. It can be realized. It can be the birthright of the future, instead of a giant mess swept under the bulging carpet.

And tomorrow, we dig. We think about making seedballs out of these giant canisters of seeds. Hakim is thinking of vines, and next year we will have grapevines (and seeds) to share. The pushing up feeling of the verdant present has pushed up my soul, cracked the mortar forever holding up this cracked civilized worldview. This feeling is the opposite of the ineffable mystical experience; it's one I can't shut up about.

So yeah, incredible plant and seed swap. Next up, farm/garden tours and vermiculture with free worms, courtesy of the abundance. If you're interested in learning more, we have a blahoo group you can join if you're so inclined.

Love to gardeners everywhere,
carey

Jason wants me off the computer for UTube

2008-05-10T15:40:00.002-04:00

The wild irises are losing their blooms while the rhododendron blossoms get a little larger. It is ten times greener after every rain. The creek beds are thick with moss and waterbugs, and I have discovered that my piscean senses require me to put my feet in that cold ass creek as often as possible. The weather makes me tingle. :D

Mike is helping Jason build a pentangle structure for his oldest daughter. Jason is also employing the daughters' AWOL marine boyfriends, exchanging labor for their right to hang out with the daughters. It's called permaculture. The problem is the solution, folks. Also, we maybe might live in North Carolina a while. You know, whatever.

We have planted broccoli, onions, garlic, cabbage, chinese cabbage, greens of all sort, sugar snap peas, scarlet runner beans, poppies!, calendula, bee balm, lettuces, chard, beets, carrots, parsley, cilantro, savory, salad burnet, dill, etc etc. I stopped because it gets boring to read. and there are about a million other plants! I wish all could live amongst the world's oldest mountains in this crazy rain forest. The smell of sassafras and birch should convince anyone.

Time to go eat real food at the crib. Also, this is the last night for the kung fu/t'ai chi teacher and his wife. They're pretty rockin'. Trading labor for produce at Firefly farm, too, so the foods are quite tempting at the moment.

love, too much and all

so much beauty it can make you cry

2008-05-07T18:59:00.002-04:00

I was voraciously reading food not lawns the book by Heather Flores on the bus when the driver said, "Oh, I'm so sick of rain." This was surprising, because it hasn't been all that rainy here lately. The other guy on the bus agreed. I guess I had some kind of telling look on my face because he swung his mirror around to where he could see me and said, "You look pretty happy about it." I said I was, because I had a garden, and it could surely use the rain. "A flower garden, or a real big garden?" asked the driver. I answered that it was indeed a real big garden, and that I had flowers growing also. The driver told me how I was saving money by doing that. "Yeah," I said, "saving money, and eating food that actually has nutrition, and that tastes good." The other bus passenger chimed in and said, "Nothing tastes better than a real garden tomato. Can't buy that taste in a store, anywhere." Well, it might as well have been a revival meeting at that point, with the amens and uh-Huhs, even though it was just us three.

The driver said he was thinking about planting a food garden, because it was less to mow, and with gas getting more expensive all the time...well, he thought he might have to get one of those old-time push mowers. I mentioned that I have one of those, that it isn't that much harder to push than our old mower. Our old one was stolen, and what was the point of getting another one? He asked me, "Are you going green or something?" I wasn't sure exactly what he was talking about, and he said, "You know, riding the bus, growing your own food, using a push mower..." I wasn't sure about that, but told him it might be more of a consequence of being poor. But it does take less natural resources, uh-Huh.

Walking home in the gentle rain, I think about these conversations, connections with human beings that aren't on a screen. It's all good, as Dorothy says, Dorothy being the almost-elderly woman who rides my bus all the time on her way to work at McD's. It's all good. It is. It's so beautiful, connections with FEELING with human beings and plants and everything in between and outside of and inside of all of it. It's indescribable, undeniable. I think the dirt has given my soul a new religion, one without words or feelings of right and wrong, just pure joy, pure appreciation of this world given to us without blemish, in perfect order (being chaos).

Exquisite poverty doesn't exactly describe it, as it focuses on the lack of money in the old perception of life. More an exquisite abundance, of community and life and joy. I'm so blessed. There is so much beauty it does indeed make me cry.

I am so blessed.

sharqi

2008-04-23T19:16:00.003-04:00

i've got a job that's so so, as far as jobs go. there are no police. there is sunshine and forest scents when i walk between buildings. there is the figuring out how to really efficiently manage short bursts of time then do slow times- night between work days- kind of like high-stakes agriculture. washing glassware can get pretty crappy, though.

sometimes, when nobody's in the lab, i cry. just a little bit. the tightness of my goggles hurts my head while the constant machine noises affront my vibrational senses.

however.

sometimes, when nobody's in the lab, i dance. and whoop. there is no stopping me, and the destiny unfolds with great beauty.

this site inspired me today: commercially produced, in-bottle, wild ferment fruit wine

and Lee was inspired by http://www.miqel.com/

This Machine Kills Fascists

2008-04-14T22:23:00.005-04:00

I walked in and the computer was playing a funny song that went,

Now as through this world I ramble, I’ve seen lots of funny men,
Some will rob you with a six gun, some with a fountain pen.

And as through your life you travel, wherever you may roam,
You’ll never see an outlaw drive a family from their home.

I thought it was probably The Woodbox Gang, given to us by Abby when she was here, but no it was Woody Guthrie. (Also an investigation due to Abby!) So I had to look up the lyrics (found here), and it was pretty cool.

"Pretty Boy Floyd" by Woody Guthrie

If you’ll gather round me children, a story I will tell,
About Pretty Boy Floyd , an outlaw, Oklahoma knew him well.

It was in the town of Shawnee, it was Saturday afternoon,
His wife beside him in his wagon, as into town they rode.

There a deputy sheriff approached him, in a manner rather rude,
Using vulgar words of language, and his wife she overheard.

Pretty Boy grabbed a log chain, and the deputy grabbed for his gun,
And in the fight that followed, he laid that deputy down.

Then he took to the trees and rivers, to live a life of shame,
Every crime in Oklahoma was added to his name.

Yes, he took to the trees and rivers, on the Canadian River shore,
And Pretty Boy found a welcome at many a farmer’s door.

There’s many a starvin’ farmer’s the same old story told,
How this outlaw paid their mortgage, and saved their little home .

Others tell you of a stranger , come to beg a meal,
And underneath his napkin left a thousand dollar bill.

It was in Oklahoma City, it was on a Christmas day,
There come a whole carload of groceries, with a note that did say:

“Well, you say that I’m an outlaw, you say that I’m a thief,
Here’s a Christmas dinner, for the families on relief.”

Now as through this world I ramble, I’ve seen lots of funny men,
Some will rob you with a six gun, some with a fountain pen.

And as through your life you travel, wherever you may roam,
You’ll never see an outlaw drive a family from their home.

-------

I'll also mention the new Little House in the Ghetto blog for goings-on in our little corner of the wide wide world. And we're excited about starting a Food Not Lawns Springfield.

2008-04-07T10:38:00.005-04:00

I write to you, as always, from the kitchen table. This physical kitchen table that my laptop (and elbows) rest upon is in the Warehouse. The Warehouse is in the Ghetto. The Ghetto is at the foot of a steep hill, and on that hill is a soon-to-be garden. There's also a garden right next to the Warehouse that VFD is about to go clear of fallen limbs, which will be chainsawed, brought to the pub and burned behind in a community firecircle.

My elbows are connected, by way of shoulders, back to my center. The physical center of all human beings is the root of their Chi, (sometimes spelled Qi). I was reminded of this experienced fact by the interesting book "ChiRunning: A Revolutionary Approach to Effortless, Injury-Free Running", by Danny Dreyer. I am not suggesting that the base of consciousness is above the pubic bone and below the navel- I tend towards the Celtic view that it's behind the face on your head- but it's certainly true that, with your physical body, acting from the center Dan Tien makes a lot of sense. There will be less hurtful stress, more grace, and easy laughter if you pay attention to your center line, between the top ur head and the bone we monkies used to hang a tail on. Orient your extremities around your core- imagine if the Moon decided to move in disregard to the position of Earth, who she naturally spins around!

I am growing in awareness not only of this whole outside world, but also my inner worlds. I've been thinking about the "Tree of Life" a lot lately, and doing a fair amount of climbing. It's interesting to see that there's actually a Tree of Life at the Center of Judeo-Christian mysticism. This past autumn I thought that maybe, initiating into the HOGD would be useful for the Valiant Foresters' Debauchery effort. It's been a few months, and I can say that yes, studying and practicing magick is useful for permaculture. I'm starting to appreciate unseen entities more, and also opening to the experience of direct communication and therefore, cooperation, with wild plants. Trees in particular- my hunch was right, and the fringe benefits have been more than I hoped for. Like, the onwards and upwards, disciplined magickal practice has been immensely useful in steering my course way outside the dominant, "swimmingly fetching cultural milleua", towards the heart of Noble Savagery. To be more specific, with my attention on the ultimate source, the all-encompassing unmanifested potentiality that we can tap into consciously for greater effect in this realm, I get my bearings on aspects of myself and may focus on correcting glaring imperfections in the process.

Okay, VFD's gotta go chop that wood. Love and light always.

websites for you and for me

2008-03-25T12:47:00.003-04:00

Well, I met this nice guy who knows a shitload, and his websites (some of them), are as follows:
http://www.brainsturbator.com/
http://www.humpjones.com/
http://www.skilluminati.com

and the others are linked up from there. They are good. They are scientific and hilarious at times. and some are awfully sexy. :D

the long war of no reason

2008-03-22T21:23:00.004-04:00

I read recently of the five-year anniversary of the war in Iraq. That surprised me, because I remember being in Wal-Mart when I worked there, and watching the invasion on the teevee. Within a couple of days, we had Desert Storm T-shirts, and sold out immediately. Gas mileage entered my worldview, as gas climbed to $1.50 per gallon for the full-service (rural county) fill-up, and my very old and big car got 7 miles to the gallon. That was 17 years ago, half my life exactly, our government's robot soldiers (funded by all our good middle-class tax dollars) killing citizens of this little desert nation, formerly the Fertile Crescent, possible home of the Garden of Eden, as ordered by the original King George, the slightly smarter elder one.

Bill Clinton doesn't get let off the hook either. The sanctions imposed and held in place during his ridiculous reign killed about a million Iraqi citizens, disproportionately children. Horrible.

People who have come back from serving in Iraq over the last 17 years are scarred, much like the veterans of the last dumb war of no reason in Viet Nam. Tim McVeigh could tell you all about it, if he were still alive. So could all the other people who have lived with mental illness, homelessness, and diminished physical and mental abilities. One in every four homeless people in my town is a veteran. I forget the stats for what percentage of veterans become homeless, but it is quite a lot.

W can be held responsible for his actions, fabricating a war for no reason, except to create democracy for our oil that is currently under Iraq soil. Not for long. But giving money to Halliburton to run a war for us hasn't worked out all too well. More graft than ever, more bribes, more scandals, more ridiculous behavior and lost tax money. I saw an estimate of $2 trillion spent for the Iraq war, for the current mess of affairs. More than our mis-spent taxes, there's more torture and death for Iraqis, more disease, scars, orphans (35% of Iraqi children are orphans). It goes on, and what next president is going to order any order and get our interests elsewhere? None.

When will enough be enough? What brought on the end of the Viet Nam war? Nixon? Wow, we can't even find someone as nasty as Nixon to elect to end this useless war? I don't know what to do, other than talking to people about it. Of course, that is mostly places like here, where there is a willing ear. Also, on the bus, and poor people of this town get it. They know there is nothing to gain, except the loss of a family member who needed a job, and found one in the service.

Sad, and nothing to do but grieve and sympathize.

--

On the other hand, happy easter! We are celebrating the holiday named for the Teutonic goddess Eostre, woo hoo, and no plastic grass in sight. We made a happy easter banner, and filled it with budding trees, robins, bunnies, spring flowers, sunshine, rain, and kids flying kites--what spring means to us. I asked my daughter what she knew of, of Easter, and she replied that she knew it had something to do with Jesus. But since we just celebrate the spring worshiping context, why does Jesus need to be a part of it? We saw the first robin today.

sharqi

Support Marie Mason!

2008-03-15T01:38:00.001-04:00

Marie is my friend and comrade. Solidarity if you can please. -Werebrock

First we want to thank you for expressing interest in supporting recently
arrested Eco defense organizer Marie Mason. Below you will find the an overview
of what we know as well as the latest updates about Marie's case and current
situation and ways you can help support Marie. If you wish to be removed from
this list drop us a line.

Send Marie your letters of support!
MARIE MASON #134001
Butler County Sheriff's Office & Correctional Complex
705 Hanover Street
Hamilton, Ohio 45011

If you send Marie a letter and it gets returned to you, please let us know
about it so we can add any other restrictions to the guideline list. When
writing please use your common sense; don't write about anything that is
likely to get a prisoner in trouble in any way. Avoid discussing any
details of her case and/or any potential charges against her.

Please do NOT send in any books/zines to Marie yet. We are in the process
of getting a system going for her to receive books. If you would like her
to receive books we would prefer you donate money. We will be releasing a
list of books Marie would like in the very near future.

When writing Marie, Do NOT ever write "legal mail" or anything implying
that you are an attorney unless you are.
Complete jail mail rules can be found
http://www.butlersheriff.org/divisions/corrections/corrections_inmate_info.htm

UPDATE
We were able to briefly speak with Marie Monday night (3/10/08) and that is
when we found out she was in the Butler County Jail and was promptly placed on
suicide watch on arrival. We were able to assure her that her daughter was safe
(her 16 year daughter was at Marie's home when the FBI, Homeland Security, and
local Police served a search warrant and detained her for over an hour), that
her pets were being looked after and several other personal affairs would be
attended to.

Several of us drove to the Butler County jail the next day (3/10/08) with the
intention of putting money in Marie's commissary account. Apparently prisoners
with the first letter of their last name k-z can only get visitors Thursdays
and Sundays. To make things more difficult the prisoner must add visitors names
to a pre-approval list prior to the visit and prisoners are only able to update
their visitors list once every 30 days. We quickly wrote Marie a letter
detailing all this and that we had deposited funds into her commissary account
as well as a list of friends #s she can call collect at any time and dropped it
off at the post office a few blocks from the jail in hopes she would get the
letter before visiting day.

We got a call from Marie's Mother (3/12/08) today who had received a collect
call from Marie. Marie told her that she needed funds to obtain vegan food as
well socks and basic toiletries in prison. She asked her mother to contact us
to and request we put money in her jail commissary account. This news was
frustrating to us as we had already driven up to the Butler County Jail and
deposited ample money in her account and was told she would be given a receipt
of its deposit detailing her current balance and she would have access to it by
3pm of the day of deposit. Since we have not heard from her since Monday we
assume she has not gotten our letter with all the contacts yet and that as of
2pm today had not been given access to the funds we placed in her commissary
account. The last thing we want is Marie to feel alone during all this. We will
be driving up to the Butler County jail tomorrow in hopes of seeing her and at
the least depositing more money into her commissary account. We will keep
everyone posted.

How you can help

1. We are currently collecting funds for Marie's legal defense. One lawyer told
us it will likely cost between $20,000 - $60,000 to represent a case like
this. Its important we begin our fund raising immediately. We are in the
process of setting up a website (freemarie.org coming soon) where folks will be
able to use PayPal to donate direct but until then ask folks to send funds in
the form of a check or money order made out to “Books for Prisoners”.
Please put in the notes section Marie and/or include a letter detailing that
the enclosed funds are for Marie Masons defense.

We are grateful to have been contacted by an anonymous donor who will match
dollar for dollar up to $1000 for Marie's legal defense fund. This offer is
good up until April 15.

2.We are looking for artists who are willing to donate their talent and time to
the cause.

3. If you know of any activist attorneys in the Grand Rapids, MI area please
pass along their contact info ASAP.

4.Write Marie! Mail will be a life line for her during these troubling times.

Its all about the Struggle,

Got Your Back
Friends of Marie Mason
P.O. Box 19065
Cincinnati, OH 45219
freemarie@riseup.net

can't see the forest for the pavement

2008-03-13T14:43:00.002-04:00

At my daughter's gym class today, a woman said (with disgust), "Those environmentalists! We can't even use our natural resources thanks to them." I didn't have anything to say to that, but we needed to leave anyway to catch our bus. I assume she was referring to gas prices, which are about $3.45 a gallon here in the flat land of corn to be.

And to switch gears, I should warn you: spoilers ahead! I am still reading books by Kim Stanley Robinson, specifically the D.C. series. In the first book called Forty Signs of Rain, you meet the cast of characters, people in offices, in labs, in government, doing what they can to change laws to avert drastic climate change. This book was written in 2004, and I think it is supposed to take place in the near future. We get in touch with how frustrating it must be to be a scientist or a bureaucrat, and knowing what the future may bring, and unable to change it. I know how frustrating it is to be an average citizen, blissfully unaware of what I do not know. At the end of the book, Washington, D.C. is inundated with something like Hurricane Katrina--massive rain, high tides, hurricane moving up the coast. This book was written before Katrina happened, but he has a good synopsis of what could happen.

The second book of his trilogy is called Fifty Degrees Below. Oops, the gulf stream has stalled, and the president and his cronies are still denying global warming exists. People are still in committees, still trying to pass laws, and whaddyaknow, the winter turns out to be about 30 degrees below "normal" winter temps. Weather disasters abound. I'm still in the middle of this book, but I have been so pleased reading it. I feel like I'm in this weird time warp, because some of the ecological nightmares he imagines have happened since he wrote the book a few years ago. Some are yet to come. But, yeah, I can see, if the gulf stream ever stopped, the president would still be denying it, and life would go on as normal as it could, until...

There were a few parts in the book I specifically had to share, and the first is about economics: "The economists should be trying to invent an honest accounting system that doesn't keep exteriorizing costs. When you exteriorize costs onto future generations you can make any damn thing profitable, but it isn't really true. I warn you, this will be one of the hardest things we might try. Economics is incorrigible. They call it the dismal science but actually it's the happy religion." And if you've ever debated an economist, you have heard the objection of Externalities!!! But, really.

I'm a big fan of permaculture. I think permaculture just makes common sense. In the book, there's a Democrat running for president, and he's at the (ice free) north pole, and announces his candidacy, and says: "So we have to grow up. If we were to turn into just another imperial bully and idiot, the story of history would be ruined, its best hope dashed. We have to give up the bad, give back the good. FDR described what was needed from American very aptly, in a time just as dangerous as ours: he called for a course of 'bold and persistent experimentation.' That's what I plan to do also. No more empire, no more head in the sand pretending things are okay while a few rich guys wreck everything. It's time to join the effort to invent a global civilization that we can hand off to all the children and say, 'This will work, keep it going, make it better.' That's permaculture, as some people call it, and really now we have no choice; it's either permaculture or catastrophe. Let's choose the good fight, and work so that each generation can hand to the next one the livelihood we are given by this beautiful world." Yeah, well, if I ever heard a real candidate for president say something like this, I'd probably pass out! I see no major presidential candidate has said anything substantial about climate change, and no one has even promised to end the war in Iraq that has been waged for half my life (I watched the invasion 17 years ago on tv in the electronics department when I worked at Wal-Mart). Not that electing anyone will make a dent in solving any climate problems, but it was fun to read and imagine!

I'm not a fan of bureaucracy, so it was fun to read of a scientist collecting the names and ideas of any group working to mitigate climate change: "Anna had waved a whole sheaf of lists in her hand, not appalled or angry like Frank had been, more astonished than anything. 'There's so much information out there. And so many organizations!'
'What does it all mean?' Frank had said. 'Is it a form of paralysis, a way of pretending?'
Anna nodded. 'We know, but we can't act.'"

And lastly, I liked that one of the characters (a middle-aged man) had read the Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and declared it the best book ever. Of course, living through a winter of temperatures thirty degrees below normal might make you appreciate something like that.
---
An aside to explain climate change, and sorry if this is old news to some of you. I had the fortune of attending a talk by a climate expert for our local museum, who explained it very clearly. There is a river in the ocean that circulates cool and warm water mostly in the Atlantic and Indian oceans called the gulf stream. It brings warm water up from the Caribbean, and goes up to northern Europe, where it sinks to the bottom of the ocean and becomes cold, and then circulates around Africa, almost to the Pacific, where it warms, and then rises and then comes back to the Caribbean. This gulf stream keeps northern Europe warmer than it should be, given its latitude.

So, now we're in the age of global warming, and what does that have to do with anything? The ice caps at the poles reflects light and heat, but as the world is warming, the ice is melting and calving, and more heat is absorbed, and more ice melts. This cold fresh water is pouring down into the north Atlantic ocean, where it is presumed that one day there will be enough cold unsalty water to shut down the gulf stream. This has happened many times before, resulting in an ice age. If the gulf stream gets shut down, northern Europe and north America will be colder, allowing the water that now makes up the great lakes to freeze, allowing our general climate to be cold, allowing glaciers to grow, and voila, ice age! As you can imagine, it might cause quite a consternation if suddenly rich white people were flocking to poor warm countries in an effort to stay alive. You might also imagine how hard it will be to feed 6.something billion people when we don't have nearly the land mass to grow food. Add to that a population that is still growing, and a grain production that has plateaued.

And this is all terribly depressing, right? Depressing for us if it happens in our lifetimes, awful to think of our children and grandchildren living through it. But really, the future depends on us, which makes it not depressing at all. If we want to mitigate climate change, we need to examine our own choices, be responsible for our own waste and consumption. It is relevant. We can also chuck those anti-depressants that don't do anything anyway except enrich pharmaceutical companies, and go on our own vision quests, have fellowship with our communities. It's up to each of us, and I don't think of that as depressing at all, but terribly, awfully exciting!!! Way more exciting and relevant than voting.

love to all my friends far away,
sharqi

Food To Be Harder To Get. Or Maybe Easier.

2008-03-10T23:38:00.003-04:00

Yikes.

Food is rapidly becoming more expensive. Like, even for spoiled Americans. Becoming unspoiled could be unpleasant. Or it could just mean more fresh local wild chaos food.

I heard about a greenhouse operation in Milwaukee, Wisc., where they lay down a lot of active wormy compost, lay down some finished compost on top, and plant in that. The active compost underneath helps warm everything. Big piles of compost in the corners also warm it up. Worms everywhere. No other power or heat source.

getting back into writing can take all night

2008-03-08T05:44:00.002-05:00

I respond to this fellow underneath his short topic post:

Anthony H
View profile
More options Mar 6, 6:42 am
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/04/AR200...

I am writing an email to the folks at earthliberationfront.com

i...@earthliberationfront.com

If you care about liberty and freedom in this country I suggest you do the same.

Explain to them "pressure from above and below" explained by Colonel Edward Mandell House in his book Philip Drew: Administrator or another term known as "problem reaction solution"

We all know how the establishment use these attacks and crisis to further their police state big government agenda. These folks are well meaning but all their actions do is fuel the other side. More of our rights will be destroyed because of events like this.

"All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order." ---David Rockefeller

---------------------------------
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Reply Reply to author Forward Rate this post:

werebr...@riseup.net
View profile
More options Mar 8, 4:36 am
What an excellent discussion topic! Looking ahead from Highschool, who
would have thought I'd be dining with the conspiracy theorists this
winter? I'm glad to be part of your community, and to whom and how do
I give money for flyin' that airplane banner?
Anyway, looking at

"We all know how the establishment use these attacks and crisis to
further their police state big government agenda."

I completely disagree with your opinion of the ramifications of this
ELF action. I'm going to argue that the tentative theme of your
upcoming letter is unwise; your time is better spent on other
projects. I write to you as someone whose personal history includes
anguish at seeing my favorite greenspace in Northern Kentucky
destroyed for development. I've thought about the ELF a fair bit, and
have a different perspective from yours that I'd like to share with
the group.

The ELF does not deserve to be blamed for giving ammo to Big Brother,
because Big Brother makes all his own ammo! Evil is as evil does. So
while sure, yeah, BB might use this ELF action on Fox News to make
McMansioners shake their heads in self-righteous consumer smug
assuredy, it's not the ELF's fault. When Big Brother needs an
increasing amount of fuel for his big, fiery LIE to keeps his iron
manacles hot (and he always does), than he reaches out and just tries
to take it. The current big obvious example is how he's ordering the
American economy into more than a trillion dollars of debt for fuel
oil, by haphazardly occupying what's left of the dessertified Fertile
Crescent and turning it into something out of Dante.

With that kind of psychological, unlimited need for power and the will
to chase it no matter the costs, why say that the ELF's arson is
adding fuel to its fire? Nothing we do except grovel, slave and die
gives any satisfaction to this faux-Illuminati scum! The ELF is an
element in the same system this Big Brother operates in, so naturally
they have a relationship- same as we all have relationships with each
other- but the relationship is decidedly antagonistic, not
synergistic. I'm not gonna go into that, because other people have
done an excellent job. For a superb story of how people used non-
violent ecotage to effectively smother BB's fire in the '90's in
Britain, read http://www.eco-action.org/dod/no10/empire.htm. It
changed the way I look at the world.

I've established that the ELF is not responsible for Big Brother's
oppression because oppress is what BB tries to do, no matter what we
choose to do or not do. So, what harm is there in the ELF's ecotage?
The only harm I can think of is that a) it's illegal and people should
NEVER do illegal things, (sarcasm) b) there's arguably some hazard of
smoke inhalation to Seattle's denizens, to the limited extent that the
smoke reduces already compromised urban air quality. This is a small
price to pay for anything, relative to anything. Compare to the
emissions one meat-eating car driver is irresponsible for in a year,
it's probably peanuts. If you choose to invalidate their actions by
thinking them juvenile, consider that they might have been juveniles
and idealistic is how juveniles are supposed to act. Speaking of
youngsters, if this civilization, this bastard son of Gaia,
meaningfully makes it off the planet than I hope somebody else (maybe
the Greys?) shoots it dead. That's neither here nor there, though.

Is there any good coming from this latest ELF action? I suggest you
choose to be inspired by them instead of thinking they're well-
intentioned dumbasses. If you're inspired, than they're accomplishing
much of what they set out to do. A lot of Sierra Club people would
have no heart to participate in bureaucracy, if they didn't think
there were folk who were passionately acting on their Deep Ecology.
But following your own inner, guiding stars is courageous and probably
seems absurdly romantic to a lot of environmentalists. After all,
putting one's despairing soul under the ELF banner comes at a
tremendous risk of self-sacrifice in prison. But if you try and see
it from their angle (though I'm not suggesting anybody walk a mile in
their shoes), what the ELF does takes a lot of compassion for
humanity.

Do you see a problem of approaching environmental oblivion? You
probably do, and so you're already in their ballpark. Who is taking
the problem seriously enough to radically alter the unfolding of world
events and avert future devastation? It seems like almost noone else
is seriously considering HOW to get us through this, so you
hypothetically might start to think you're responsible for the weight
of our collective sins because if you're not, who will be? What do you
do?! The signature ELF answer is torching McMansions and other gross
despoliations to symbolically say that, heavens no, we are not gonna
let these gobsalves carry us all to hell. Not to praise them too much,
but to put yourself on the line for arson but rule out killing the
owners of those "green" McMansions and making an example of them like
AK-toting Jihadists do, when they have public American G.I.'s
beheaded, this takes a lot of compassion. The Viet Cong tortured and
died by the millions and suicided and abandoned individual identity,
until even the American Leviathan had to go back to the drawing board
and opt to let Ho Chi Mihn have a go- and yet people with the same
radical understanding of how bad things can get, the same drive and
willingness to self-sacrifice, plus a vision of how good things can
be, these elves foreswear any significant personal violence against
our fellow humans. Who does this remind you of?

The Roman Governor Pilate had similarly mythical, non-violent,
revolutionary Jesus Christ (JC) killed a long time ago. Not that I'm a
scripture buff, but to paraphrase Matt. 21:12, JC went into the Temple
and famously disrupted the operations of international bankers' who
were sacrilegiously conducting capitalist commerce in the one place
you're supposed to be able to completely get away from that shit.
First the Pharisees dismissed this as foolishness, buts as legend has
it they eventually saw that he was popular and talked shit about him,
and then they agitated for him to die. Their Temple got destroyed and
Jesus' cult spread so quick that it eventually had to be co-opted to
be contained. Some people twist what he did into supposed
justification for fascism (because they're evil fucktards,
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/4/4/202358/4778), but some people
are still tremendously inspired and uplifted by him today, even though
historians don't even agree that he existed. Was that mythic hero
responsible for the repression he suffered? I'd argue that's not an
important part of his myth, and if you focus on that you be missing a
lot of the good stuff. It's natural that the Romans saw him as a
credible threat to their consolidated power, because if everyone
started feeling the contagious motivation to act on their love for one
another, as strongly as the central figure of America's dominant
religion did, then soon that Empire would have been turned on its
head. Maybe we wouldn't have spent so much of the last two millennia
turning Earth into Hell. We can take heart now, regardless of past
errors, and spread the good word with 9/11 Truth.

HOW YOU MIGHT DO INSTEAD OF LOBBYING A MYTHICAL ELF

"There has got to be a better way for us all. It's a challenge, but
we're human. We have big brains and we can use them. Changing seems to
be a key. If we keep doing the same things as previous generations,
what are the odds that we'll wander out of the black iron prison that
is also the cave of treasures? Either way you look at it, we're
trapped. But we can smell the paradise outside the prison walls. We
know there has to be a way out."
-Sharqi

Next time I write my ELF pen pal in federal prison (check out
http://www.spiritoffreedom.org.uk/addresses.html for addresses of such
folk that sorely need loving attention) I'm going to point out that
targeting slightly eco-friendly, hypocritical luxury housing actually
IS terrorism, since it scares people, though I imagine he'll counter
that shock value is helpful in waking people up. I might also argue
that it's a drop in the bucket and can't put out the really real fire
that's torching the revolutionary, Enlightenment ideals that you can
see half-heartedly put into practice in the origin myths of this
country. He will probably counter that the Constitution got torched
before it was half-written and that America has been fish shit from
the beginning, to which I might counter that as more and more of us go
for technologically informed, permaculture gardening lifestyles, we
are able to use the antiquated apparatus of oppression that he
described as "fish shit" for spare parts and fertilizer for a truly
new world order. Let's finish out the Eon of Pisces not with a
(nuclear?) bang, but a whimper- a collective moan of pleasure! Then
he'll say "Well of course, that's probably what I'm gonna do when I
get out of prison in a million gazillion years."

If somebody wants to be the change like Jesus or the ELF there are a
lot of ways I see people doing it. Go all the way with alternative
renewable energy, and adopt a raw food diet sourcing only from local
farmers, and live in a home that pays more than lip service to being
natural. If you're in Cincinnati, go take Braden Trauth's upcoming
Permaculture Design Course, or at least come to what's surely going to
be an amazingly enlightening, free introductory seminar (http://
www.civicgardencenter.org/HTML/Education.html). Come participate in
Name: THE REALLY FREE MOBILE MARKET
Tagline: obliterate capitalism through generosity !!!
Host: meg sommer & friends
Type: Causes - Rally
Time and Place
Date: Saturday, March 15, 2008
Time: 12:00pm - 3:00pm
Location: fountain square !!!
City/Town: Cincinnati, OH
Contact Info
Email: iambu...@yahoo.com
Description
it's a market that operates on principles of gift-giving !!!

this saturday and every second saturday of the month.
fountain square !!!

bring a basket full of clothes to give a way
bring a wheelbarrow full of books to share
bring a tray of sandwiches for anyone and everyone.

bring something or bring nothing.
take everything or take one thing.

it's just about free. no trades. free everything.

come come come !!!

(( you don't have to bring anything, but you can !!! ))

more info:
http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/atoz/reallyreally.php

Hope to see you there!

I think I made my point, but to finish off: please, Anthony, don't
bother the revolutionaries with negative-Nancy nay saying. If you want
to contact the ELF, hit up its fallen warriors and show 'em some love
and solidarity. If you establish a repoire with 'em, you might have an
opportunity for dialogue. A warning to everybody: don't overly
identify with targeted hypocrites who are making a bunch of money in
the death-dealing rat race to buy a humongous greenwahsed luxury
house. You're better people than they are and they deserve your
compassion, not your adoration. Their co-opting of the good, green
ideas for ignoble, half-assed solutions (http://gristmill.grist.org/
story/2008/3/4/161419/8700#comment4) to our humongous problems is
exactly the kind of behavior what's gotten us in trouble. -Badger

the years of rice and salt

2008-03-01T23:52:00.001-05:00

This is a book I read, that Hakim is reading now, by Kim Stanley Robinson. Love history, sci fi, and feel an overwhelming need to change your self and the world? You will enjoy this book, and 600 pages will not be enough. The premise is that Europe's population has been wiped out by plague. The rest of the world keeps happening, and in a much different way than white people taking over everything. The characters are a band of souls, inhabiting different but same characters though a journey of reincarnation, learning and changing, always attempting to live life to the fullest, and giving the human spirit a lift from civilization's never-ending oppression.

I went to a small school, and my knowledge of world history, excluding Europe and America is scant. I felt like I learned a lot, even if much of it didn't happen. The book is definitely plausible, and because it brings up the same themes of this life in this time, it also provides for a lot of brain-poking questions. What are the keys out of the black iron prison? Passion, bravery, love, care, nurturing, knowledge, experimentation, slyness, being true to one's self...

We are illuminating the walls and trying to find what we are seeking: our escape into the world we know is possible. I am sure many of us can feel it in our bones. There has got to be a better way for us all. It's a challenge, but we're human. We have big brains and we can use them. Changing seems to be a key. If we keep doing the same things as previous generations, what are the odds that we'll wander out of the black iron prison that is also the cave of treasures? Either way you look at it, we're trapped. But we can smell the paradise outside the prison walls. We know there has to be a way out. But I am getting very off-topic from discussing the book.

If you have read The Culture of Make Believe by Derrick Jensen, you will recognize it in this book, as it catalogs civilization's wars, and all the cruelty and depravity they engender. It is simply history. I also was reminded of Fredy Perlman's Against His-Story, Against Leviathan, in that it was a history of some of the same places in the same times, and the themes show a cycle of war, suffering, empires rising and falling, which also is simply history. Not that this book is anything like those, but you will see some of the same themes.

I think I recognized my friends in the characters in this book--the magicians, the jesters, the sly foxes, the lovers, the mothers, the warriors, the engineers, the healers, the wise women and men. Did I forget anyone? I have always felt like an underdog, living life against the odds. My own mother will tell you that I have a really rotten birth star chart and it's no wonder I'm not a raving success. When I was a kid, I always rooted for the Indians to shoot John Wayne, and that was before I found out I'm only about 90% white. This book was written for me, for all of us who find ourselves at the bottom of the pyramid, wandering around and thinking there's got to be a better way, while rowing the galleys of MacDonalds and getting coffees and credit cards, watching tv when we get home because we're too tired to think about it, likewise for our fast non-nutritious food.

There is a better way, many of them. There are so many paths, I can't even begin to tell you of them. Actually, I can only see my own fairly clearly, and it has something to do with throwing of the shackles of not good enough, something to do with nourishing my body with nutritious food, laughing heartily, and caring a whole lot, sharing my everything with everyone I love. I still reside in the black iron prison, but I can see the garden popping up here and there. Fractals! as my daughter would say. There's the rise and fall of empires, bell curves of empires, empires of civilization. And here's the big 10,000 year long bell curve of civilization that is skidding down on wars, their technology, and our ignorance in killing off our host.

It's not going back, but forward, on the path that will take us into...something so beautiful maybe we'll never be able to name it.

Yesterday's quote from the zomban calendar, from February 29:
When the day comes that the sky is emptied of stars, and the sun is black, and the distraught winds have only the void for their lament, I am sure that somewhere [people] will be merry together, somewhere good hearts will greet good hearts and somewhere our dreams of unbroken love and good talk and laughter will have come true. This is a glorious Somewhere, and it is nearer to us than the stars.

sharqi

what are you, some kind of pioneer, or sumpin?

2008-02-22T22:14:00.002-05:00

Yes, or sumpin. Not back to repeat the past but forward to create a future for ourselves. Souls out, hands to help, mind to dream and guide. We're spirit beings in a spiritual world. We're also made of dirt, and eat dirt and sunshine and rain. We're pioneers, venturing into spaces unknown, in cities and suburbs and farmtowns across america. We're blazing new paths, recreating our constellations, getting to know ourselves, getting used to being alive again. It's new. We don't always know what to do, and mistakes, sure they get made. And we learn.

We continue to dream, and awakening from each dream, another veil is lifted. We may never know how clouded our vision is, but always we are in search of the clarity of delerium. Surely, gobbling prozac and sitting in cars and in front of computers is not the way to keep a soul alive. The path well-worn, the rut of working Americans, working their way between shopping, slavery, and mortgage (the literal death-pledge), has lost its appeal. Surely, there has got to be another way, or many other ways.

Are our human brains smart enough to figure this one out? We have found the cave of treasures, the black iron prison. They are the one and the same. Can we let go of the delight in our grasp in order to remove our hand from the irresistible trap? Maybe we could if we were monkeys.

My monkey brain knows it would rather carry wood and haul ashes than to work in a gas station to earn money for natural gas central heat that leaves me cold. I know I'd rather spend some time and energy in using my body to plant my own food rather than work in a grocery store to pay for illnutritious food from far far away. I know I'd rather spend my days hanging out with my kid, my spouse and my friends than with coworkers I don't enjoy. I'd rather spend time in joy, taking care of my self and my community and the jardin zomba. That's so much more fun than going to work and the mall!

So, are we pioneers, or sumpin? You got it, a pioneer, a race traitor, an uncivilized ill-mannered well-fed quarter-drunk loving mother who imbibes this life in the garden of eden.

sharqi