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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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!