Usually I feel a sense of dread or mild depression at the prospect of winter and the cold, bleak days ahead, with nothing to look forward to, nothing to enjoy.

But growing my own food has gotten me back in touch with the cycles of the seasons--in a way that lets me appreciate them. I love the way various vegetables act like bridges. They keep me engaged with the seasons. It’s late October and my chard is still going strong. I still need to harvest a ton of it and freeze it today or tomorrow because I know it can’t last much longer. It’s been going strong for five months now. Plus there’s still the fall beets and carrots in the ground, plus a few straggling peas the frost hasn’t managed to kill yet. In the house I’ve got a half dozen butternut squashes left, and still some watermelon, cantaloupe and zucchini in the fridge. I’ve got rosemary, catnip and basil growing on the kitchen windowsill and today or tomorrow I’m going to get some sprigs of lavender from John’s to try to get to root over the winter. Also, there’s a small bunch of parsley growing in the garden and I might try to take a small division from that to grow indoors over the winter. Yesterday I ordered some garlic bulbs online. It wasn’t clear if they were sold out or not. I’ll have to wait to hear back. They said to order early (mid-September) because they sell out quickly. But hopefully they still have something in stock. And when/if those bulbs arrive I’ll have another gardening task to do that will help keep me engaged with the seasons and the land.

If I have the money to spare I’d like to order some asparagus and strawberry crowns for next year. Of course I won’t get a crop from either of them until the following year, so it would be an investment and I would be operating under the assumption that I’m staying put here for awhile.

Already I’m beginning to plan for next year. There’s still plenty to do over the winter. I’d like to build an open shelf unit to put in the south-facing living room window. That’ll become my dedicated seed-starting place.

If I can afford it (and the landlord allows it) I’d like to build a henhouse and run next year and get a few chickens. Some other things I could work on over the winter: building crates for root-cellaring, building drying racks and a compost sifter, assembling a compost-tea bucket with aerators, building a cold frame. I saw some neat tomato cages in a book. They had painted wood frames with wire panels stapled on. It would be nice to build some of those some time. And some bean tripods.

I was on some cooking forums online the other day and people kept mentioning things like buying an expensive bunch of chard at Whole Foods, or buying some sprigs of basil or other herbs, and for the first time it all sounded rather odd to me. We go to some centralized place in the community to buy expensive food that’s mostly been trucked in from some other place. It seems so unnatural and contrived. I want to nurture my own food, to watch it grow, to pick it at the peak of perfection and be able to enjoy it immediately, if I wish. It seems so much simpler that way.

Well, I don’t think I’ve mentioned it, but the US economy is self-destructing. Considering it was a house of cards built on shifting sands, is it any wonder? I’m just waiting for the full-scale panic to hit. Yesterday the market dropped 700 points, which is the largest drop since the depression. It only takes a very few people to start a panicked, snowballing run to pull their money out. Then look out--things are going to get crazy. Life as we know it will be drastically changed.

The best thing I can be doing is what I’ve been doing--becoming more and more self-sufficient. Next year I’ll grow a bigger garden and maybe get some laying chickens if the landlord allows. My worry is surviving this winter if it all goes to pot. I really need to get a pressure canner and a lot more jars. I don’t have a whole lot from the garden I can can, but I could do a lot of jars of beans and soups. I should be able to root cellar the butternut squash and also makes soup from it. I still need to make some pickled beets and pickled zucchini.

I’ve never had any money in the market, and frankly I don’t believe in it. I know I sound like a crusty, out-of-touch old timer. But at least I’m not stuffing wads of cash under my mattress. For one thing, most publicly-traded companies do not operate ethically--so why would I loan money to fund something I find morally objectionable? The fact that I might eventually profit from their actions would make me just as culpable. Even the so-called “socially responsible” companies are problematic because a lot of what they produce just isn’t necessary and their existence inevitably takes a toll on the environment. Patagonia, the yuppie outdoor gear and clothing company, is just one example.

I don’t believe in retirement accounts. The only retirement account I fund is my health and adaptability. If I maintain my health and I have skills in all areas of self-sufficiency, what more would I possibly need in my retirement years? The only things I need to fund between now and then would be a piece of land, a small shelter and whatever tools and supplies would be necessary to be self-sufficient. None of that requires vast savings or bank financing. As much as possible I want to limit my involvement in national and global economies. A homestead economy is the level of magnitude I’m comfortable with, with some excursions into the local economy.

As far as health goes, I intend to maintain it as best as possible through diet, exercise, fresh air, sunshine, herbal remedies and alternative treatment. As much as possible I will stay away from the medical establishment, since it isn’t concerned with healing anymore, rather it’s only concern is profit.

I read recently that the average 18-65 year old takes eleven different prescription drugs per year, and people over 65 take twenty-eight different prescriptions! Doctors have mainly turned into drug pushers. You would think there might somewhere be a spark of the desire to heal, hiding inside of these so-called physicians, but it must be hidden deeply. Shoving chemical after chemical into a body is not healing! Meanwhile the pharmaceutical companies reap obscene profits while making people sicker, and slickly convincing them they need even more drugs! And in a number of cases the parent company of the pharmaceutical companies also owns agrochemical and industrial chemical companies. So they poison the food, the land and the air and then when we sicken from it all they further poison our bodies with their drugs, all the while reaping unimaginable profits.

I read an article the other day that said that organic food will soon be less expensive than conventionally grown food. With fuel prices only going up and the dollar weakening, plus yields going down in the abused conventional fields--yeah, the day is surely coming. In so many ways we’re reaching our day of reckoning. We will have to make things right again, or we’re just not going to survive.

This massive government bailout worries me because it’s all a sham. It will look like something’s been done, but the same debt exists. We’re not choosing a new paradigm. We’re not examining the whole pretense of financing with money you don’t have. An economy that runs on wishes is a farce. They want to push this bailout so that lenders will loosen their guidelines for loans and credit lines for the little guy, so the economy can keep humming along. In other words letting people buy with only a wish. That’s what caused the problem in first place. People wishing their way into gargantuan palaces. Instead of wishing their way into palaces, they should’ve bought their way into humble shacks.

But let’s pass this measure so we can loosen credit again and let the people make more irresponsible decisions. They want to pass it to regain a sense of normalcy, but that old normalcy was totally dysfunctional and untenable in the first place. They want to protect their political careers and this move will allow the façade of normalcy to reappear hopefully long enough to get them reelected. But it will be temporary. We can put off the day of reckoning, but not for long. Our economy is a total farce. We require a new paradigm.

I hear all of these people worrying that they might lose their entire life savings. And I think, this could be a good thing. It’s only money! So you lose something that was never real in the first place. Once you get over that, you might finally see that human capital and environmental capital are the only real kinds of capital anyway--and if we are good stewards of that capital it’s all any of us need. At least the possibility is here for people to break out of this misbegotten paradigm. The surest way would be to let consequences unfold naturally with the inevitable greater depression that would follow. Am I heartless for wishing a depression on us? What would a depression be but a true reckoning of our wealth? A true reckoning is what we need. The GDP is not the measure of our wealth. It’s not what we’re producing. The measure of our wealth has got to be any profits left after all costs of production have been accounted for. Including environmental costs.

All at once I’m encountering a slew of writers who address the importance of place. Here is a great quote I read yesterday by Barry Lopez in Crossing Open Ground:

The second landscape I think of is an exterior one, a kind of projection within a person of a part of the exterior landscape. Relationships in the exterior landscape include those that are named and discernible, such as the nitrogen cycle, or a vertical sequence of Ordovician limestone, and others that are uncodified or ineffable, such as winter light falling on a particular kind of granite, or the effect of humidity on the frequency of a blackpoll warbler’s burst of song. That these relationships have purpose and order, however inscrutable they may seem to us, is a tenet of evolution. Similarly, the speculations, intuitions, and formal ideas we refer to as ‘mind’ are a set of relationships in the interior landscape with purpose and order; some of these are obvious, many impenetrability subtle. The shape and character of these relationships in a person’s thinking, I believe, are deeply influenced by where on this earth one goes, what one touches, the patterns one observes in nature-the intricate history of one’s life in the land, even a life in the city, where wind, the chirping of birds, the line of a falling leaf, are known. These thoughts are arranged, further, according to the thread of one’s moral, intellectual, and spiritual development. The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes.

And aren’t genes just a codified form of our relationship to the land?

Another thing Lopez wrote about was also interesting. He noted that the brightest children are fascinated by metaphor. This ties together with Edith Cobb’s ideas about genius and landscape--we use metaphor to internalize the land--and also with the idea that geniuses are better able to make novel associations. Associations are practically synonymous with metaphor. (What molecule was it that was intuited by the image or dream of a snake eating its tail--benzene?)

In one of Paul Shepard’s essays he talks about the research of a woman named Edith Cobb. She believed that the external terrain of childhood forms a model for internal cognitive development.

Perhaps the most remarkable document on childhood in this century is Edith Cobb’s Ecology of Imagination in Childhood. Surveying the lives of geniuses, she noticed a common thread—the return in moments of creative meditation to the place of childhood in imagination or sometimes physically, a trip that helped toward a solution to a problem. The original meaning of the term genius loci referred to a unique sacred power. What was it, Cobb asked, about the original experience that made it useful to the psyche in a recapitulated travel across the juvenile home range; in what sense was it an organizing force?

She concluded that the adult faith and intuition that order permeates the cosmos, that no bit of data or bizarre idea was truly disparate, that searching would be rewarded, extends from the singular imprint of an intensely inhabited space about thirty-five acres at a crucial time of life. Played through, the child’s transit, time and again, locked this literal, objective reality into an unforgettable screen, through which other, novel objects of the mind would be envisioned by the questing adult as though they were details of a landscape. Just as the mnemonist studied for thirty years by A.R. Luria ‘placed’ images for later retrieval along a path in the mind’s eye, at some less conscious level a holding ground is absorbed. The juvenile home range is a tiny universe, whose trees, rabbits, culverts, and fences probably register some kind of metaphorical series whose branching, skittering fleetness, subterranean connecting, and boundary-marking function in relation to a speculative field of half-formed and elusive ideas follows a paradigmatic system of relationships. An anatomical model for this unlikely neural representation of place is seen in the fundus of the eyes of vertebrates, where the colored oil droplets in the cells of the retina, differing according to the frequencies of light in different parts of the visual field, form an eerie landscape that can be seen with an ophthalmoscope. Edith Cobb’s own genius has given us insight into the primordial meaning of coherence as a function of a specific, tangible, ecology, swallowed by the nine-year-old in repeated excursions.

What excites me about this line of thought is the possibility that part of our minds exists outside of us, in the landscape. While it seems that Cobb was saying we build up internal neural networks in childhood that replicate the external environment, to me it almost seems like our neural networks extend out from us into the environment. It is as though the whole earth were brain, or mind. I find it especially interesting that Cobb found geniuses to frequently use landscape as a means of gaining knowledge or insight. They’re tapping into the larger mind we’re all part of. I’ve said before, I believe that tapping into our full human potential means tapping into our larger identities--identities that extend out beyond the boundaries of our skin.

Cobb talked about geniuses who returned to the landscape of their childhood. This implies that they left that land at some point. But what if you stayed put? What might be possible in a lifetime of building up internal and external neural networks? Of enlarging the self, extending more and more deeply into the environment? Until we become rooted in the land once again I don’t think it will be possible to reach our full human potential.

Shepard, in a related essay, mentioned that the classical definition of genius was “the spirit of place”. It’s by tapping into the spirit of place, the larger mind, that we can achieve “personal” genius. All knowledge is out there. None of it is personal. It simply waits to be located. When I’ve said “Place holds potential”, I mean that very literally. There’s a very visceral way I’m sensing that place holds unique knowledge. We become who we are by our unique interactions with the land. We can’t become the same person in a different locale. We don’t gain the same knowledge.

These days the line between nature and nurture have blurred for me. It’s all one seamless experience of responding to nature. I think I can begin to see the next phase of our evolution. Instead of consuming matter in the childish way that we do, we will begin to convert matter into spirit. By knowing the land we will expand Mind and eventually begin to know who we are--Gaia. And once we recognize ourselves to be this entity, Gaia, then maybe we will shed the idea that Gaia is an isolated dot in the universe, and begin to extend our identity and mind out into the cosmos. Eventually we will recognize that we have always been the Mind of God.

But if we can just reach Gaia-Mind, that would be hugely transformative. Our human potential could begin to unfold and it surely wouldn’t be tied to consumption. We would stop trying to make the ego look bigger. Instead we would grow our Mind.

I think we would regain a more fluid way of being and perceiving, as in our primordial days only with deep conscious awareness. The egoic, rational brain which is so clumsy and a hindrance, could recede in importance. Direct experience would again be primary.

I’ve often found the rational brain gets in the way. I hate the fact that I always have maps in my head; always have a name for the place I’m in or the place I’m going. I don’t want a representation of place. It interferes with my ability to know a place. I have enough “past life memories” to remember the older, more fluid and direct way of experiencing. The rational mind, while so important for building consciousness, really dumbs down reality.

Intuitive, fluid, spiritual beings--that’s our destiny if we don’t kill ourselves off first.

I’ve been trying to encourage a more fluid way of being to take hold in me. For one thing, since reading the Temple Grandin book, I’ve been trying not to censor my imagery. I’m becoming aware just how ever-present my imagery is. It is always flashing up, probably in every moment, if I was just aware enough. My “haunting” may just have been me moving into that more fluid way of seeing. There are layers of reality here, always. I want to get a handle on what I’m seeing, why certain imagery wants to be connected with certain thoughts, actions, or places.

One example (I know this sounds bizarre and psychotic but I think there’s legitimate knowledge here): lately when I look in the mirror I see a flash of an image overlaying my reflection. It’s a bird, probably an eagle, but maybe a hawk, with its wings outstretched in flight.

I’ve also had tons of past life images arising as I read and write and think. I see the land before all this manic human destructiveness and development took place and it makes me so said.

My computer crashed yesterday. Is always seems to happen when I’m counting on it most--I need to be able to place these kittens on craigslist. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about it yet. I could just order a new power supply, but that doesn’t address the underlying cause of why I keep blowing through power supplies. I could get it really fixed, but I’d have to borrow money to do that. Or I could borrow money to get an inexpensive laptop and worry about getting this computer fix when I have more money. It’s such a nuisance.

The book I couldn’t think of the other day is Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of our Ancestors, by Nicholas Wade. I may need to get my own copy of it at some point, because there’s a lot food for thought in it.

I’m reading several books at once now. One is a small book by the Chickasaw writer, Linda Hogan, called Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World. It is written very beautifully. In “All My Relations” she described her participation in a sweat lodge ceremony. The healing comes from reconnecting and becoming one again with all of creation. That’s what all healing really is, isn’t it, becoming whole in the deepest, widest way possible. She says:

We speak. We sing. We swallow water and breathe smoke. By the end of the ceremony, it is as if skin contains land and birds. The places within us have become filled. As inside the enclosure of the lodge, the animals and ancestors move into the human body, into skin and blood. The land merges with us. The stones come to dwell inside the person. Gold rolling hills take up residence, their tall grasses blowing. The red light of canyons is there. The black skies of night that wheel above our heads come to live inside the skull. We who easily grow apart from the world are returned to the great store of life all around us, and there is the deepest sense of being at home here in this intimate kinship. There is no real aloneness. There is solitude and the nurturing silence that is relationship with ourselves, but even then we are part of something larger.

In another essay, “A Different Yield” she says, “In American Indian traditions, healers are often called interpreters because they are the ones who are able to hear the world and pass its wisdom along. They are the ones who return to the heart of creation.”

Also in the same essay she writes about myth:

An essential part of myth is that it allows for our return to the creation, to a mythic time. It allows us to hear the world new again. Octavio Paz has written that in older oral traditions an object and its name were not separated. One equaled the other. To speak of corn, for instance, was to place the corn before a person’s very eyes and ears. It was in mythic time that there was no abyss between the word and the thing it named, but he adds that ‘as soon as man acquired consciousness of himself, he broke away from the natural world and made himself another world inside himself.’

I find it interesting that Paz implies that language came first, then came consciousness. My rational brain would think just the opposite: a conscious being would begin naming things, creating more separation, inserting words and symbols between itself and direct experience. But I think I can intuit it his way, especially when I think about the myths that say that the first languages were song. Fused with the natural world, singing an object would fuse you with it momentarily, you would take up its identity and comprehend it in its totality. A completely different concept than what we call “language comprehension” today. It was a way of feeling different energies, attuning to different natures. Perhaps beginning to feel discreteness through song, using language as another sense, we began for the first time to grasp our own discreteness.

Now that Collin’s back in school and I’m able to get the library again, I’m back in the groove of devouring books. I read a fascinating book on human evolution (the title is eluding me at the moment). Since the sequencing of the human genome was completed five years ago they’re gaining all sorts of fascinating corroboration for such things as when we first left Africa, how many of us left (maybe just a single tribe of about 150),where we went from there, who various modern cultures descend from, when various groups split off from one another, and on and on. I loved that the book wasn’t afraid to imply there are racial differences even in such hot button issues as intelligence. Jews, for instance, are statistically more intelligent. The author believes this can likely be attributed to the fact that for 800 years in Europe Jews were forbidden from participating in certain occupations, such as agriculture, and largely worked in finance and trade. This required higher-level mental functioning and so they eventually evolved higher IQ’s. The author’s point was that evolution is ongoing in humans and happens with relative speed and results from our interactions with the unique environment we find ourselves in.

I’m starting another book, Traces of an Omnivore, by Paul Shepard. I read his book The Others not too long ago. I’ve just been skimming through this one a bit and found some interesting parts about the importance of place. I may have to do some deeper digging into his writings. According to the guy who wrote the intro, most of Paul Shepard’s works are out of print. (Why is it that these writers whose ideas feel so pertinent to me are always out of print?) Nobody talks about the importance of place these days.

I’ll write more about this over the weekend. It’s all stirring up a lot of thoughts, but I’ll be better able to write and reflect on it from home (I’m in a parking lot at the moment).

I had a chance to do some poking around online on the subject of Asperger’s syndrome. It gets more and more interesting. I’m becoming convinced that I have it based on the descriptions I’ve read. I also took an online test that said it was very likely I have it.

I don’t believe it’s a disorder though and I resent the medicalizing of personality. To not conform with the norm is, I believe, a very good thing. One website pondered what the world would look like if all of the Aspies (that’s what they’re called) through the ages never existed. So many of our great inventors and visionary thinkers are suspected of having had Asperger’s syndrome. Another website suggested that if the world were populated by Aspies there would probably be no war. It’s all such fascinating stuff. Aspies aren’t oriented to the group. Without group identification there’s little room for conflict.

I’m beginning to think this is an evolutionary adaptation, preparing us for a new age--a new, post-consumer, post-ego, internal locus of control, adult age. It seems to be an extension of the individuation process. We went from unconscious and tribal to conscious, egoic, isolated dots. Maybe supraconsciousness involves the final severing of our tribal identities, which as egoic beings we still carry with us. Much of the conflict in our world comes from our vestigial tribal needs-- to belong to a group, to fear the “Other”, “us” being better than “them”, there being safety in following the herd and conforming.

To still be identifying with the group is the true dysfunction. To me it seems like we’re evolving to be little gods. When we were unconscious and fully tribal, we were fused with the Divine but unaware. Then we separated from the Divine and could see it personified “out there”. Now we’re coming full circle. We individuate, separate from the group, and eventually become enlightened enough so we can see we’re not separate at all. We return to a sense of oneness, but it is so different from the tribal concept of oneness. I can be the individual, the dot, and I can also be the collective. The tribal stuff now seems like a clumsy and misguided stage but of course it was necessary. It was our infancy and the glimmer of memory we carry from those times does contain TRUTH. But it is only in our enlightenment that we can fully grasp that truth.

To not identify with the group of course does not mean that we’re antisocial. I care deeply, probably too deeply, for humanity and I also care deeply for individuals. But from where I’m at with my semi-supraconscious vision I have what appears to others to be too much detachment and aloofness. It looks as if I’m cold and uncaring, when the truth is I have an extremely high degree of caring. It’s just not bogged down by the egoic need to belong.

I’m struck by the foreshadowing in my dream last month about my eye and ear problems. A big aspect of Asperger’s syndrome is problems with sensory processing. I figured out yesterday that my difficulties with night driving are probably a result of the syndrome. I have a tendency to hallucinate when driving at night and I think it’s because my mind has a hard time processing what I’m seeing. It can’t figure out what a dark shadow by the side of the road is so it starts filling in details. I end up seeing it as a black bear that’s about the lumber out into my path. I see Pennsylvania hills when I drive on flat I-76 at night. I see the road curving one way until I get right on top of that spot and then I can see it curves the other way.

My mystical, visionary side probably also results from the syndrome. My mind is so visual, and fluidly makes visual associations. Like Temple Grandin with animals, I have a fluid visual way of seeing reality that totally bypasses logical, rational thought. This is an incredible gift!

In her book she kept mentioning how autistics have trouble with accessing or using their frontal lobes. I suspect the frontal lobes are tied to our egoic phase of evolution, our separating phase. The fact that there’s a problem accessing the frontal lobes is not necessarily a problem in my eyes. Maybe they’ve been just a crutch, something we temporarily needed. Maybe as supraconscious beings who live much more fluidly they won’t be so vital.

There’s so much food for thought here. I’m so excited by all of this!

Oh-- back to the dream--it’s funny that I was so bothered when the doctor implied my problems were psychological. I find it appalling that there are people who believe those with Asperger’s syndrome need to be cured. Severe autism that is being unnaturally induced by whatever, be it vaccines, chemical exposure, radiation--who knows--that warrants a search for a cure (or more likely a means of prevention). But try to cure Aspies! That would be unconscionable.

Well, I have a lot more research and thinking to do on this.

I’ve been having a crazy time of it here for the past week and a half. When I woke up on Saturday the 16th, Little was missing. This was disastrous in itself, but made all the worse by the fact that she left behind six kittens who weren’t eating solid food yet. By late in the afternoon I had to run out to the store to buy bottles and kitten formula because the babies were starving and distraught.

The first couple of days were very distressing and exhausting. There was a learning curve with the bottles and I worried that they weren’t getting enough to eat or were getting dehydrated. And I was distressed about Little. With no body to bury there’s no easy closure. Was she locked in someone’s shed somewhere, frantically trying to get back to her babies?

Anyway, things have been gradually settling down as we get into a routine and the kittens start to eat some solid foods. I’m not making up quite as many bottles now. They’re almost five weeks old now, so I could just force the issue, but since they’ve already endured one trauma, I’ll let them continue to have the bottle a little bit still.

My main theory about what happened to Little is that an owl got her. Two mornings after she vanished, when Collin and I pulled out of the driveway at 6 am, we saw a great horned owl sweep down out of a tree towards a cat on the street, but with our car coming it flew right back up into the tree. A few days earlier I had heard an owl in the night and thought it was neat since you don’t often hear owls in town. And I had seen a strange animal dropping in the yard (with fur in it) that may have come from an owl flying over.

Little was such an awesome cat. I really miss her. I think maybe it was just her time to go though. I was going to have her spayed this fall, once the kittens were weaned (even though technically she isn’t my cat), but I couldn’t help thinking she might turn into a very depressed and miserable cat once she was fixed. Motherhood gave her life such incredible purpose. She was a fierce protector and an incredible provider. (I’ll never forget the whole episode with the mice earlier in the summer; for several weeks before she got too pregnant with this litter she was bringing multiple mice home nightly for her last litter…into the house, alive, of course.) I had a hard time picturing Little as a contented house cat.

This whole experience of living in a town overrun by unneutered cats has been eye-opening. Of course the cat issues here are a real problem, especially when you have people who put food out for the cats (like the old guy across the alley) but take no further responsibility for them, such as having them neutered or taking them to the vet when they’re injured or ill. So the food encourages a bigger population, but the crowding leads to vicious fighting and terrible injuries among the toms, and disease is the main way population is kept in check. It’s not good.

But, I’ve come to believe, neither is the unnatural lives we force our house cats to lead, particularly the strictly indoor ones. To take away their ability to reproduce (which of course is necessary if we’re to keep them as pets) takes away the primary purpose and meaning in their lives. (Imagine if most of us humans were spayed or neutered before puberty!) It robs them of a major component of their natural selves. And indoor cats are so often left alone, without the company of others of their own kind. To have had the opportunity to see a cat colony in action has been really something! The relationships and pecking orders, the fathers playing with their offspring--all of it is so beautiful to watch. It makes me sad for the house cats (Khatru) who never got to experience that. I’ll never forget when we first moved here and I let Greta outside. After a while I went looking for her and found her in the dappled shade in the backyard, lounging very amiably with two other very elderly cats. For all those years I’d deprived her of true community with her own kind (well, I guess Khatru counts for something) and finally she got to enjoy it. And sunshine--indoor cats miss out on the healthful benefits of sunshine. And getting to supplement their diet with grasses and herbs and grasshoppers and mice.

I’m now at the point of thinking it’s irresponsible to have pet cats (and it’s also irresponsible to feed feral ones). In a book I read recently, The World Without Us (Alan Weisman), the author suggested that of all the domesticated animals on earth, the cat is the only one who would be likely to survive if humans were gone. The best solution is probably to let all cats return to their wild state.

But then I think about co-evolution and how all the cats I’ve known seem to relish their association with humans. With Little I often got the feeling that she recognized us as partners in kitten-rearing, like co-parents. And it certainly was a great arrangement for her to rear her kittens in the shelter of my house and get fed delicious treats all the time.

In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan talked about how perhaps corn and potatoes use humans to help propagate themselves, and the same may be true for cats. It may be a strategic move to associate themselves with humans.

I guess I don’t really know what I believe now. I used to rigidly believe the whole responsible pet ownership spiel: spay or neuter and keep the cat safely indoors. Now at least I understand the issues isn’t black and white. Yes, spayed and neutered and kept indoors makes sense for us, but we play God when we do that and I’m not sure that’s entirely right.

It has been so gratifying to witness the natural lives of cats here. I’m so glad I’ve had the chance to do that.

Besides being consumed by cat issues lately, the other thing I’ve been thinking a lot about is, of all things, autism. We’ve had a huge increase in cases of autism and vaccines are strongly suspected to be a prime cause, especially in a lot of severe cases.

But what I’m interested in now are the milder cases and the more high-functioning cases, especially those with Asperger’s syndrome. I’ll admit I know next to nothing about this. I’m just starting to focus on for the first time.

The thing that got my attention was a woman on the comment board on an alternative health website I frequent. She often participates and her comments are fascinating because she has autism. Something she said recently jolted me because it made me think maybe I have a very mild version of autism!

There are certain things that really fit. My sensitivity to sound for one thing. My relative insensitivity to pain compared to other people’s. My highly visual nature. And language--this is interesting. I’m extremely verbal and can often express myself very eloquently in one-on-one situations, but in groups of more than a few people it has often felt to me like a switch literally switches off and I can barely speak. The other time that happened (and the most dramatic time of all) was when I was in labor. I was rendered almost mute. It felt like my access to language almost shut down. Trying to find words was like swimming through some murky world.

See this is so interesting because it’s all about framing. Until now I’ve chosen to consider myself highly-sensitive, which to me has a sort of positive spin to it. To switch to a label such as autism, a disorder or syndrome gives it all a very negative spin. There’s the implication of being deficient, of something being wrong. I don’t like that concept.

One website listed all of these famous accomplished people, like Einstein, who are now suspected of having been autistic. I think that kind of labeling is detrimental. To label highly accomplished people as having a disorder; that seems off-base. They may differ from the norm, but whats to say the norm is an optimal state? The fact that these highly accomplished people accomplished what they did, doesn’t that indicate some sort of higher functioning over the “normal” people who accomplished no great things?

At the library last week I took out a book by an autistic woman, Temple Grandin. Her autism led her to some profound insights into animal behavior. It’s all so interesting. Basically she sees autistic people as being somewhere between animals and “normal” people, perceptually, cognitively, emotionally.

There’s a lot of food for thought here. Someone on the comment board on the website suggested maybe autism is some sort of evolutionary adaptation. For the profoundly autistic, I would have to say no way. But, hm, this sets me off thinking about the higher functioning cases as it pertains to our current global predicament. Maybe their ability to “see” almost more primordially or holistically is an advantage. Maybe they have really valuable gifts that will help us transition into a sustainable world. I need to spend more time exploring this. It’s awfully interesting stuff.

Collin goes back to school tomorrow already! I don’t know how that can be possible. So it will be my crazy life of commuting back and forth all the time again. It seems so ridiculous.

We’re getting a slight drizzle as I sit here now and I was just thinking about how much I love the smell of damp earth—I was thinking damp Pennsylvanian earth, since it has such richness—not damp Coloradan earth. But then I remembered something. At John’s the summer, pulling weeds after a rain, you could just smell ocean. It was so strong coming up from the sandy soil. I often forget this was once a shallow sea, yet the sea lives on here and is part of the energy of this place. I get stuck in my impressions of this place as always having been arid. I dislike the dryness so much. And yet sea is part of the personality of this place too—an ancient part yet still so strongly held here I’m able to smell it, to breathe that old identity in, right here in this time.

I did a search online last night for Ellsworth Huntington and learned that I should be able to borrow most of his books through interlibrary loan. Most of them are held in university collections (I should have figured) and quite a few of those are in offsite annexes. BUT, they are still available! I was a bit disturbed to see that he had written a book on eugenics. Yikes! Aside from that little tidbit, he seemed to have been a very well-respected Yale scientist.

Somewhere in my search last night I came across a brief bio of Huntington that someone had posted. It was very bare bones, hardly informative, and at the bottom summed up his work in one sentence that basically said he preached environmental determinism, which has subsequently been totally disproven. Bah!

Jared Diamond, I remember, in Guns, Germs, and Steel seemed very worried that he would be accused of environmental determinism. I think he really has continued the work of Huntington, and yeah, maybe you could label it all determinism, but I tend to think of it as potentialities and propensities held in climate and locale. To me, it feels like there’s truth hidden here. When school starts again I will start to borrow these books and have a look myself.

If you take a cactus and put it in a pot with a well-drained sandy mix, give it lots of sun and not a lot of water, that cactus will express itself quite differently than if you put it in a rich potting mix, set it in the shade, misted it and watered it frequently. Is that determinism? I guess so.

A prickly pear growing on rangeland behind Snyder here is an expression of this place. It obviously cannot express itself in the misty, shady hills of Pennsylvania.

Is it too far of a stretch then to say that humans express themselves differently in different locales and climates? And that we thrive better into certain locales than in others?

Last night I had a bout of sleeplessness in the wee hours. When I was first awakened I saw this aerial image of forested Pennsylvanian hills and valleys, with mist rising up from the valleys. Then I saw an aerial image of the plains of Colorado, flat and dry.

With the Pennsylvania image I had the impression of respiration. I sensed the living trees transpiring and the interaction of shade, sun, moist humus, cool valleys, mists and air currents. It was a very active, alive place. Colorado by contrast didn’t have a lot going on. There wasn’t much moisture, so not hardly any transpiration going on. Not much vegetation. Air currents seemed higher--like something separate, not really born of the confluence of earth and sky the way it was in the Pennsylvania image. It was as if the air rode in from other places and was just passing through, not being birthed by the local conditions.

Why does this feel important? What can I learn from this?

I need to get ahold of Ellsworth Huntington’s books. I feel like there might be something there that would be of use to me. I will have to do a search online.

I’m thinking again about the man calling up the weather. Standing in that dry scrubland, making the clouds build and roil--wasn’t he somehow, through his own body, creating a link between earth and sky that hadn’t existed before? Without him, the air currents would ride over, remaining separate from the dry earth. But he created the confluence that could bring rain.

Collin went to P’s house Wednesday evening, so I am starting my two week stretch of solitude. Yesterday didn’t really count because I spent a large part of the day at John’s watering the lawn and garden (and feeding the cats) since he’s still camping in the mountains with his family. He gets back today, so I don’t need to go back over there.

There have been some fleeting thoughts while Collin was here that I haven’t had time to explore. Something about cucurbits for one thing, though I know how goofy that must sound.

It’s just that I’ve planted so many of them this year: zucchini, butternut squash, pickling cucumbers, watermelon, and cantaloupe. And especially with these ridiculous cucu-melons growing…I just see more clearly than ever how all of these different fruits are really the same, just choosing to manifest with slight variations. They evolved in specific locales orginally, developing their variations based on those local conditions and qualities. But they really are more or less the same thing manifesting. Just with a twist.

Okay, I know this is nothing profound--or it doesn’t sound profound. It just builds on everything I’ve been learning somehow. People are like cucurbits--the same phenomenon around the world, blossoming forth but with regional variations based on conditions and qualities held in the land and environment. We interact with the land and rise from it in unique expressions. “What wants to manifest here?” has to be one of the most vital questions we could ever ponder.

The garden continues to thrive. I just went out a little while ago when I first got up and picked lettuce, cucumber, and zucchini. The butternut squash are several inches long and there are a ton of them. It looks like there’ll be a ton of cantaloupe too, although right now they’re just little nubs. I’ve seen at least one watermelon, too.

We’ve got a couple of mystery melons growing on one of the cucumber vines. The only thing I can figure is that quality control standards were a little lax with that batch of seeds and it was able to cross-pollinate with a watermelon, because that’s what it looks like. The big one is about 4 inches in diameter already. I’m sure it won’t amount to anything taste-wise (a cucu-melon!) but right now it looks for all the world like a watermelon.

Even the small lima and green bean bushes have blossomed so we might yet get something out of them.

I planted the fall peas and a batch of fall beets, radishes and spinach, all of which are poking their little heads up.

So far this intensive method seems to be working amazingly well. My latest thought is to quadruple the size of the garden next year--up to about 400 square feet. I think I’d be able to raise most of the veggies we need with a garden of that size. I still need to get a pressure canner so I can preserve everything. At least for now I can water bath can pickles and jams and tomato-based things. And freeze and root cellar things.

I also want to build some cold frames at some point and maybe some solar pods, so I can start growing earlier and keep growing later each year.

I’d like to establish an herb garden along the side of the house too. I made an initial attempt with a few herbs this year, but some little critters kept eating everything as soon as the plants had a few little leaves. The catnip I even encircled with a bit of fencing to keep the cats out, but it was obviously something quite a bit smaller than a cat that got it. I don’t know what I’ll have to do to critter-proof the area until things get well established. I’m perfectly willing to share with other creatures, I just wish they’d not take the whole plants!

My thinking has been kind of cloudy for weeks. Last night I had an anxiety dream about seeing a doctor about eye and ear problems. I don’t remember the dream very well but I know I was a kid and I was waiting for Mom to show up because I wouldn’t be able to pay otherwise. I think the doctor was also a shrink; at any rate she kept insinuating that my problems were psychological.

In truth, I desperately need to get to the eye doctor because my ancient eyeglasses are worse than useless. The scratch-resistant coating flaked off long ago and now the lenses are so scratched I see everything through a haze. It’s a toss-up whether I prefer to go without glasses entirely, in which case everything is terribly blurry and out of focus, but clear in its own way--or wear them and be able to focus, but only through a thick haze.

Not being able to see well, physically, has always seemed to affect my mental clarity. I don’t know why, but that’s the way this.

Also, my ears have been bothering me lately. I just finally got them all healed from several years of mysterious oozing and now, especially at night, they hurt like I’m about to get another infection. I don’t want a repeat of two summers ago. I can’t figure what causes these problems. I had thought it was allergy-related--and it may be--but this is one of the mildest allergy seasons I’ve had in years. For the past couple of days I’ve had sinus issues too. It just may be the air is so dry lately. It’s been up near 100 degrees for the past several days. Anyway, all of these issues leave my head feeling thick and mucky.

Yesterday, Collin and I ate the first zucchini from our garden, and soon the beets ought to be ready. So far it’s been all leafy things-- lettuce, spinach, and chard--plus a few radishes. The cukes and the cantaloupe are blossoming, so there’s promise there, the corn is getting taller, and the butternut squash is about to blossom. The only things not doing well are the beans (limas and green beans); those plants are just straggling along. I don’t know if they’ll produce anything. I gave them some organic plant food yesterday—we’ll see if that helps.

Snyder seems to be going downhill fast. More and more people of dubious quality keep moving in, especially into the rental houses. I left my driver’s license in the glove box of my unlocked car the other week, and it vanished. The new kid up the street stole one of Collin’s fireworks. I’ve been awakened in the middle of the night by raucous partying. And two nights ago it was a verbal spat at such a pitch I’m sure it could’ve been heard over most of town. That was from John’s old house--some really high quality people living there! His yard has become a tangled weed-infested lot with junk piled everywhere and dogs on short chains.

Anyway I heard the woman screaming at the top of her lungs, hysterically, but the only thing I can make out was something like, “You never spend any time with me. He’s more important to you than me.” The level of this woman’s rage and hysteria was truly remarkable.

And as I lay there tossing and turning and drifting in and out of sleep I kept having thoughts about how largely egoless I’ve become and how that really changes everything. The extreme level of upset that woman was gripped by is a result of ego. It’s an identification with “me” as an isolated dot, a “me” that tries futilely to manipulate other isolated dots to meet its own egotistical needs. A “me” that will always be sorely disappointed. So much of the suffering in this world is due to ego.

When you largely transcend ego, you also largely transcend suffering.

A little while ago I had the treat of seeing a beautiful vivid orange oriole in the side yard. Earlier in the week I had seen him and his mate in the tree right outside the front door, so they may have a nest nearby or they may just be in the neighborhood because one of Joe’s trees is flowering magnificently right now. And then about five minutes later, the oriole was followed by a blue jay (they don’t show up in my yard too often). I’ve always loved jays even though they were a nuisance when I had bird feeders.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately on the Internet about permaculture. It seems to be a way we're reconnecting with the earth and the particular ecosystem to which we belong. Still, there’s something missing I sense. I can’t quite put my finger on it yet, but I’ll let it incubate.

I think it may have something to do with there still being too much human willfulness involved, too much ego imposed on the landscape. Granted, there is a highly developed level of mindfulness in creating these balanced and self-supporting systems. And yet they are being imposed on the land. I think to be truly integrated into an ecosystem, we have to tune into the spirit of the land and resonate with it, asking ourselves, “What wants to manifest here?” Rather than merely mimicking a healthy ecosystem, we need to let the ecosystem birth our human endeavors.

I’m sure there are some who are practicing this deeper kind of permaculture but I haven’t come across anyone trying to articulate it yet.

I need to get better at articulating my ideas about the land. It all seems like such a vital piece of the puzzle and no one else is addressing it. I need to be able to share what I’m learning.