love and forgiveness

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Every being has an identity and a purpose. To live up to his purpose, every being has the power of self-control, and that’s where spiritual power begins. When some of these fundamental things are learned, the time will be right for more to be revealed and spiritual power will come again to this land.

- Rolling Thunder

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Tantay relatives!

This post is for the many good hearts I was lucky enough to meet and share 5 days (for me) "camping" in the wilds of New Mexico.

First, thank you to you all (and you know who you are;) for one of the most profound weeks in my life (I'm 67teen). Seriously...

I was honored to be asked and delighted that creator provided me with another opportunity for an adventure in my life. Opportunity often won't wait long for a reply so I'm glad this came together so quickly.

Way back when, I was breaking up with a woman I had lived with for years. It was a really foggy day (San Joaquin Valley tule fog) in Fresno and I knew if I headed east to the foothills I could get me some sunshine.

I know a spot that has some fine rock gardens on one side of the road and on the other side a cluster of bedrock mortars - maybe 100 or so - were perched on this fine, oak studded knoll. 

It always saddens me to visit these old family sites knowing that once families lived on and near this beautiful spot. A small creek flows nearby all year and the oak grassland landscape is like home to me. 

But even there that day, the fog didn't want to clear. And I could relate. 

So I sat down on a rock and soon started to talking to those that aren't, but are, there. And then overhead a patch of blue opened up and a bald eagle flew through the opening and I made a mistake, one probably more than a few us have made, I asked for something.

Lordy. 

My life was in turmoil, not in a bad way but just... well, tumultuous.

And what I asked for? Change.

I know, "oops."

But...

... it all has worked and here I am in a place that my need for change has lead me. I've moved from Oregon after 30 years and I'm now living in California with my family in an inter-generational household, from 1 to 71.

And it is here and the change it took me to get here that lead to my being at that ceremony in New Mexico. And it was there that almost all of y'all came into my life. From my first meeting of Grandfather Semu at Redwind until now I found myself totally at home with strangers that were almost instantly not strangers but family. 

What I know of the native people of Turtle Island I know both from book learnin' and life experience.

I am a far different man today precisely because I took the step of introducing myself to a man I didn't know and found myself with another brother. I usually say 1/2 brothers because we do really have the same mother... I mean really...

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and here's the shot I was bragging on to some of you

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To ALL my relations

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A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the Sun and how the Sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our Galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said, "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady, "but it's turtles all the way down!"

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Landing on Revis

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Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.

~ Edward Abbey

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This is just a drive-by posting...

... and I will return with more about my current situation but wanted folks to know that yes, I'm still kicking.

I'm back in Califas after spending 97% of the last 30 years living in Oregon. I had no idea when I left CA in 1990 what a trip that would be. And then some!

I am currently situated 300' below the 2080' summit of Revis Mtn in the Sierra Nevada foothills. I hike the mountain nearly daily and have fallen deeply in love with this little island of wild California. No cows. No off-road vehicles.

I must say that hiking California's foothills without cows is a rare experience but the thrill of no cow pies and the attendant hordes of flies makes this spot a true delight. And, as I've declared more than once while watching the day's light play across the trees and rocks, this place is crazy beautiful.

Well, here, have a look for yourself:

 

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And please, have a visit to my photo art for sale over at Fine Art America and maybe you'll be inspired to spend a few bucks and help support this old phart in his dotage.

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Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

~ Albert Einstein

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saying goodbye...

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Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.

- Will Rogers

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Well, my run here at the old farmhouse has come to an end.

I've live here for 13 years, longer than anywhere I've ever lived. Unfortunately I ran into some medical issues last summer, both to me and one of the dogs.

Then my roommate lost her ability to pay her share of rent last fall after she lost her job. She stayed on thru to the spring of this year with her newborn son. Because she had no work I was left with keeping the utilities paid, plus all my other bills (including the medical bills) and I was lucky I was even able to afford food.

As a single dad I raised my 2 kids here. There was no way I was putting a new mom and her newborn baby out on the street. Plus she was a great roommate, a friend and I loved her and her baby like family.

When I was raising my children here my daughter was always on me about getting food stamps. Call me stubborn, call me a masochist, heck! call me a hard-headed Swede. But I was an able bodied male and damned if I was going to let Uncle Sugar get into my life any more than it already was.

So it is that at 67teen I find myself once again with major life decisions to make and new changes - in whatever form they take - to deal with.

If you be of a mind to help I've started a self-fundraiser to help pay off my medical bills and to maybe help my transition into the next phase of my life.

Ideally... I will find someone, an organization or an individual, somewhere, that will find me the perfect fit for their need of a resident caretaker.

It's my perfect job. I do carpentry, plumbing, household electric, painting, gardening and I'm a photographer and writer. I've been a medical amateur professional for 2 decades as an events medicine volunteer. I did wildlife rehab in the early '80s. I am a published writer. I am a  published photographer.

And I love the land.

Living in nature is where I need to be. I've lived off the grid. I love isolation and quiet.

I've spent 60 years being squished and squeezed by the forces of conformance. But I DON'T fit. Sure I've muddled through, going where the universal winds of whim carry me, but "civilization" is all just too much.

I am not a consumer. I am a warrior for my people (friends, family and community) and for the earth's living beings without a voice. I am a teacher, perhaps even a bit of a healer. I am an artist.

I am an elder and there is still strength in my wings. I know I shall fly but where will I land?

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“It’s clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it’s not easy.”

- Terence McKenna

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Christmas 2015

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You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.

- Terence McKenna

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For me, over these 6 decades come and gone, this season is a triad of "holidays" (holy days). Dec 21 is both the day I mark as the Winter Solstice and my mother Vivian's (RIP) birthday.

Of course these days my mom's birthday is kinda sad as I do miss her, very much. She was such a good soul and having to raise me along with my 2 1/2 siblings must have been quite the challenge.

The Winter's Solstice... aaah... this is me. Long ago I slipped into the life stream of the natural world. And that world is one that exists not just as material but as the core of my heart, mind and soul. 

I love the earth. More than my mom, my family or my friends. 

Nature is all. It is all we have and all that we have has come from her. The life here on our planet is absolutely connected to life everywhere. There is no other, there is but here. Infinite life expands in all directions - macro and micro.

But Christmas... sigh... 

... Christmas was great as a kid. Innocence makes so much believable. But Christmas is like the Kachinas. It dances into the village costumed and caricaturized. Dancing a lie, a myth but telling the story. Only when an individual is old enough are they made aware that the Kachinas are their relatives, their neighbors. The masks come off.

For me the mask came off Christmas when I started doing sweatlodge and traveling with the plant medicines, the entheogenic spirits. 

I can't in good conscience share the "joy" of giving. Our consumption will be our doom. It's as simple as that. While many of my friends understand this, the majority of modern humans are clueless. For 40 years I've been at odds with the society around me. Heck, I've flung my body at that wall more than once.

And it's never been easy! I mean I sure don't want to be the Grinch. I don't want to spoil anyone's enjoyment, especially the children's. So my kids were raised celebrating Christmas. But once we moved into the farm celebrating Christmas became an enigma. It was mid-winter, energy bills are high, I'm raising 2 kids (teenagers!) by myself and I don't believe in it. 

Luckily (?) I've never had an issue being a bit different. It was tough maturing into it but the same process was always involved - "how many sheep does it hold?" Because of me being me fighting to save an old growth forest or being a hippie working for an environmental organization in the middle of conservative ranching country or driving a truck with pot leaves painted all over it when pot was still illegal (ughhh, gross!) takes a certain amount of crazy. The rewards tho'... that's the kind.

AND driving that truck (20' flatbed loaded with tons of lumber) for almost 5 years with no violations shows a certain level of skill. 

I'm not trying to change anybody. I do work hard on occasion trying to change minds - and hearts - but mostly I want to enjoy this lifetime's sojourn on a beautiful planet. A planet I call home and mother.

Merry Christmas!

(self portrait)

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Please, if you like this, visit my other blogs as well:

AE, photographer (my photography)

Good Dog (drug war) (drug war)

Eugene Emeralds at Civic Stadium (Eugene Emeralds baseball)

for those who enjoy my work with Courtney

My Oregon Muse (adult content)

and my Facebook

My photography on FB

Thanks for visiting, feel free to leave me a comment or share with your friends.

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Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.

- Terence McKenna

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aaah... summer - or why the hell are you killing my elephants? (and whales and sharks and lions and rhinos and humans...) Part 1

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And I say the sacred hoop of my people was one of the many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father.

- Black Elk

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Trying times my friends, trying times. Hang on to your hats 'cause this shift is just starting to get interesting...

... or not. All is illusion. Matter does not matter. At least it must not because we have been such shits as stewards of our little globe of matter.

Over the decades I've fought many battles, stood with many of my relatives on this line or that. I've made great friends - and few enemies. I've managed to maneuver the morass that is this pit some call civilization with more than my share of luck.

  

And I don't like it. When I was a kid outside is what mattered. Lizards and bugs and birds and reptiles and all the critters and leafy ones. My curiosity kept me busy turning over rocks and peering into water and learning about the life around me. 

And I was lucky to have great parents and a world that didn't consider children walking without adult supervision a crime. We came and went. We rode bikes. We played games and sports. The school playgrounds stayed open after school... ice cream was a nickel a scoop.

Then one day I ran into civilization head on.

I was probably 10, maybe 11 and collected butterflies and other winged things. I knew their life cycles, their Latin names and where they roamed. I could draw them with skill and a knowing eye.

Until... the day I was discovered by 3 older boys while I was chasing butterflies in one of our local parks. I don't remember much other than I was scared shitless. I'd been picked on - heck I had an older brother - but this was 3 bullies. And they bullied me of my innocence, shamed me for my curiosity and study and they pushed me around for their amusement.

I never chased another butterfly. I stopped catching tadpoles and watching them grow to become frogs.

I mean in one sense it was ok, all cultures have their coming-of-age initiations. Mine was just not ceremonial, kind or honoring. But it certainly filled the bill for the civilization in which I would grow up.

to be continued...
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I would rather be a little nobody, then to be an evil somebody.

― Abraham Lincoln

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some more o' this, some more o' that...

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“Anarchism has but one infallible, unchangeable motto, 'Freedom.' Freedom to discover any truth, freedom to develop, to live naturally and fully.”

- Lucy Parsons
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OK, bare with me here... I have absolutely no idea where this is heading. But I suppose we should find out, eh? (Do you like the way I can type with a Canadian accent, eh?)

And why not start with Lucy Parsons. Imagine... a black woman (woman!) standing up for what is right, standing up against what is wrong. In the late 1800s no less.

The word anarchy...

Pronunciation: \ˈa-nər-kē, -ˌnär-\
Function: noun
Etymology:
Medieval Latin anarchia, from Greek, from anarchos having no ruler, from an- + archos ruler

... gets a lot of abuse these days. People confuse chaos with anarchy. They are distinctly different and not interchangeable. Even with the growing understanding of chaos theory in nature (a butterfly farts in Belize and it snows in Minnesota, or something like that) we still confuse some basic things... but then, we're a pretty confused specie aren't we? Anyway... I make no claim to any deep understanding of science and the theories scientists arrive at by whatever means they do. What I do claim is a very basic, natural perception of the world around me. To me nature makes sense. And the chaos theory does too... kinda.



Arie Uittenbogaard does a fair job of giving a comprehendable explanation in his Chaos Theory for Beginners:

"Nature is highly complex, and the only prediction you can make is that she is unpredictable. The amazing unpredictability of nature is what Chaos Theory looks at. Why? Because in stead of being boring and translucent, nature is marvelous and mysterious. And Chaos Theory has managed to somewhat capture the beauty of the unpredictable and display it in the most awesome patterns. Nature, when looked upon with the right kind of eyes, presents herself as one of the most fabulous works of art ever wrought."



Amen to that! I like it when I find smart people who are good explainerers. If you're interested I'd also recommend a look at Chaos Theory and Fractals (by Jonathan Mendelson and Elana Blumenthal).

In a sense (and keep that fractal art image above in mind) I kind of think it a bit... mmm... interesting... that chaos theory when presented in fractal art is very much like the visions one experiences under certain entheogenic experiences. Nature is finally being understood by the western mind in a way similar (but using a far longer and more complicated route to get there) to indigenous people. Which of course is where we all came from. Except, of course, those who are descendants of those who star seeded the planets.
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My daughter Robin had her first solo with her high school choir the other night. Gads that girl can sing:


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And of course... more pics, all shot close to the farm here:
























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“There are many examples of old, incorrect theories that stubbornly persisted, sustained only by the prestige of foolish but well-connected scientists. Many of these theories have been killed off only when some decisive experiment exposed their incorrectness.”

- Michio Kaku

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