I’m still pushing to get the garden dug. I have one more full bed to dig, plus I’m probably going to make a smaller bed for the corn. The weather’s been really rainy the past two days so it’s nothing but mud—terrible for digging, but great for all of the seeds and seedlings out there. I saw when I peeked out this morning that my mesclun salad greens had sprouted overnight. I planted them quite late, but since you harvest them so small I should be able to get something from them before it gets too hot.

I haven’t been good about getting my crops in early this year, but then again I’ve been preoccupied with digging the new beds. I think I underestimated just how huge the job would be. I gave up plugging the sod into the front lawn after I dug the first bed. It was taking way too long, so after that all of the sod went into the compost bin. At least next year it should all be a breeze.

Next week I’m going to buy materials to build some trellises. I’ll build two 7ft. stretches of trellis for the butternut squash and Collin’s gourds and then a series of horizontal trellises for the tomato bed.  I can’t afford to trellis the whole bed this year, so I’ll leave the determinate paste tomatoes to sprawl and just worry about the beefsteak and heirloom tomatoes. Next year I can expand.

I’ve eaten my first semi-wild food salad this year, and a semi-wild food stir-fry with Collin the other night. It just contained lamb’s quarters and dandelion greens in addition to our store-bought vegetables. Boy, lamb’s quarters are really delicious and I have a profusion of them in the side yard. To think I had been tossing them in the compost bin all this time. I do feel a little self-conscious out there picking weeds and then carrying them into the house for dinner. I doubt that the neighbors would even notice me doing that, but it still feels a little funny.

I’m still working on the garden expansion project. Unlike the bed I created last year, which was on bare ground, all the new beds are covered in grass, so I’ve been sod-busting—quite the slow and grueling process. It doesn’t help that I’m taking the sod and then plugging it into bare spots in the front yard. That seems to take even longer than digging it up. I’m running out of time to get it all done. It sounds like the weather’s going to be kind of lousy this weekend—we’ve had a long string of wet weekends now. But I need to push to get the garden ready.

Well I lied when I said I wouldn’t check out any more books!  I’m just utterly hopeless.  Yesterday at the library I saw that in the New Arrivals they had gotten in two books this week that I had seen referenced in recent days and was curious about.

The first one was by Malcolm Gladwell—called Outliers: The Story of Success.  It was a quick little read—I had it more than halfway devoured before I left the library and I finished the rest of it this morning once I got home. 

It provoked some new interesting thoughts which I will be exploring on my blog this weekend.  (I’ll fill you in once I write the blog—if I go into it right now I’m afraid I’ll lose the juice needed to turn it into a good blog entry.)

The thing I had heard about it though was that it talked about how people without exception need at least 10,000 hours of practice in a particular area of interest before they become a master.  It made me think about all of the hours I’ve put into reading and learning about global issues and (now) attempting to write about what I’m learning.  It would seem like I’m working towards some interesting level of mastery.  I have to be getting at least close to that 10,000 hour mark.  It’s just exciting to be reminded that an apprenticeship doesn’t go on forever.  At some point a critical mass of knowledge and understanding is reached and you can begin contributing your own body of wisdom on the subject.

I’m still reading a book about the evolution of language (the book I had allowed myself to keep reading) and the other new book I took out of the library was The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal.  As I mentioned last year when I read How Many Americans, I’ve never believed in borders, so I’m interested in seeing if this guy can make a compelling case for closing our borders.

But, really, after these two books I’m going to take a break from reading for a little while.  I need to take time to assimilate all of the ideas I’ve read recently and explore them through writing.

Except that…I forgot to mention one thing.  A few nights ago online I discovered that hundreds of thousands (if not maybe over a million) of public domain books have been digitized and are available free online.  Ellsworth Huntington’s early book (circa 1915) Civilization and Climate is available, but Mainsprings of Civilization was much later (the 1940’s I think) so it’s not available.  I started to read Civilization and Climate and have given myself permission to finish it too if I wish before the moratorium begins.  I’ve only gotten to page 17 but already his methodology seems crude and his underlying assumptions extremely racist.  I can see why environmental determinism got such a bad rap.  But I still want to plow through it and seek out any nuggets worth keeping.

Every Thursday after I drop Collin off at school in the morning I go get a cup of coffee at a Burger King right near the library and then sit there and read and write while I kill some time before the library opens at 10am.  Burger King is a great place for thinking (of all available options) because of its very un-hipness.  No one else is ever in there except this one guy who has the exact same schedule as me—he shows up at the same time and heads to the library from there.  It’s rare for more than one or two other people to drift through the doors while I’m there with my coffee, so it’s very quiet.

Anyway, while I was there yesterday I was free-writing about what the most recent spate of books is teaching me.  I’m going to include the notes here (because I’m too lazy tonight to clean them up and summarize them more coherently).  Beware all of the incomplete sentences and the way the ideas in the second half of the writing contradict the ideas in the first half—it was evolving as I wrote.

Here it is:

What has my reading binge this week taught me?  It taught me just how recently in the history of our species we have begun to move out of the mythic and unconscious into a rational, conscious awareness.  Still there are many vestiges of our magical thinking—witchcraft and sorcery in recent centuries in European cultures and still in many indigenous cultures today.

--address the need for us as a species to take a longer view.  We think we are these incredibly rational beings but in fact we’re still in a phase where there’s a huge overlap between magical and rational modes of being.  The rational mode of course isn’t superior, just different and fraught with its own set of problems.

Our rational brains make possible global solutions, but more often rationality is used to promote destructive self-interest.  Magical unconsciousness was about self-interest as well, or self-interest extended as far as the tribe but no farther.  Rationality needs to take us beyond self-interest, or at least extend it to global self-interest.  Altruism would be another word for global self-interest.

I need to examine myself to see how often I’m governed by potentially magical thinking versus rational thinking.  Is my experience of the energy of the land magical thinking, or is it something else?

How can I deny the truth of many intuitions?  Am I seeing and projecting connections that don’t exist?  For instance, my intuitions about J a few weeks back?  I dreamed repeatedly of her, had her pop repeatedly to mind, had a dream about N, only to find out that J had been in Phoenix that week and had revisited the place where she lived when N was born.  It would seem that intuitions are causally related to real events.  It can’t just be chance.  So where is the line drawn between magical perception and intuition?  Is superstition and magical thinking actually a crude, early version of rationality?

Maybe intuition and direct perception is a ground—a true mode of perception.  And maybe our crude early experiences with rationality were to try to layer meaning onto intuition and direct perception.  So, magical thinking is beginning to play with meaning and to try to attribute cause and effect to events.  As we began to separate out from the events and places we were immersed in, to become conscious we became aware of everything that was “Other” and needed to make sense of that.  Our myths and superstitions were precursors to science and other modes of “rationality”.

Magical thinking is actually rational thinking, it just may not be accurate thinking, but then again scientific thought is frequently inaccurate, too.  What we’ve been up to with all these modes of “rational” thought is to try to make sense of what is.  Magical thinking wouldn’t be possible if we were still unconscious.  We need to have separated out from the matrix into discrete dots of awareness in order to have magical thinking or scientific thinking at all.

What are we evolving towards?  Direct conscious awareness. Simple, direct knowing of what is.  Expressing what is—being and knowing.  Will the making of meaning be necessary anymore?  Will metaphor be necessary?  Probably not.  Or maybe it will.  It’s hard to imagine a world without metaphor—no poetry, no art, no innovation.  Metaphor, I guess, is the language of manifestation.

I need to expand on this line of thinking, plus there are other insights hovering about from this latest group of books and I need to capture those insights before they melt away.

Discovering Civilization and Climate online this week was a good thing because it let me see clearly how rational thinking has been evolving. His crude scientific methodology seems to fall somewhere between magical thinking and modern scientific approaches. He doesn’t seem to be aware of the biases and faulty assumptions underlying his work, which makes it very similar to the faulty logic of superstition, myth, and magical thinking. But he’s also being methodical, and sincerely trying to eliminate bias (which is impossible to do when the biases are still unconscious). Even present day science is blind to what’s unconscious. I’m sure today we have just as many inaccurate perceptions underlying our methodologies—and we won’t be able to see them until we evolve past those inaccuracies. We need to enter a different paradigm before we can see clearly the inherent inaccuracies and “magical thinking” in this paradigm.

So the earth excreted life—countless globules of earth—and once excreted, life could become conscious of itself because there were now points of reference.  Self and Other came to be.  We globules of land became aware, but at the same time, only aware of our separateness.  All of this has happened in the blink of an eye.  Now we’re at the point—self-aware and conscious and awake enough—to recognize that we’re not separate at all.  Once we fully awaken to our total, unified identity we will be able to act congruently with the land.  We’ve gone through a period of chaos as billions of us groggily awakened and said, Huh?  What?  Who am I?  Where am I? and groped about and made a mess of things while we tried to get our bearings.  Now we’re sloughing off the grogginess, and beginning to get it.  Oh, I’m just a node of Gaia, connected to all other nodes.  Part of a web I am utterly dependent upon for my existence.

I’ve been on another reading binge lately, which is very bad because I really need to be writing instead.  Once I finish the book I’m currently reading I’m not going to let myself check anything out of the library for awhile.

But regardless, as usual all of these books are triggering fascinating lines of thought.  It always seems like all of the various topics have a way of converging in my mind—leading to interesting insights and clues that you wouldn’t get to without the juxtaposition of so many ideas at once.  It’s a neat kind of synergy.

The concept of Gaia—the earth as a conscious entity—keeps strengthening in my mind.  This morning a most obvious thought hit me with renewed relevance, as if it were some novel insight.  That was that the land literally birthed us.  As earth, the young rock, began to awaken, she began birthing life, excreting lifeforms from her body.  Humanity was excreted like everything else.  In my mind I view the evolution of life at high speed and I can see the molecules of earth organizing themselves, forming cells and simple organisms, being excreted onto the surface of the earth to act (somewhat) autonomously, evolving into more and more complex and diverse forms—some rooting down, some moving freely.  We humans are walking, mobile globules of land.

All of those overused phrases come to mind again, those metaphors that aren’t metaphors—earth as our source, earth as Mother, being one with the land….

Interesting how the land wanted to make parts of herself mobile.  All of us creepy-crawly parts of the land increase the ways that the earth can dance with herself, experience manifestation.  We can interact with the rooted things, the stationary things, and the other creepy-crawlies.

But we are ultimately just cells of the land, not independent at all.  I can’t quite find the right metaphor, actually.  Are we cells of the land, neurons of the land, holograms of the land, blossoms of the land?

I intuit that to be fully human we can’t be cut off from the land.  I understand that knowledge and wisdom reside in the land, come from the land.  Where else could knowledge reside?  Without the land, if I were a disembodied spirit, floating in the ether, there would be literally nothing to know.

This gets back to Jung’s “Answer to Job”.  Before God created a physical world he could not know himself.  Only by physically manifesting could there be reference points and knowledge.  Everything physical is God referencing different parts and aspects of himself.

More and more I’m beginning to think we have to conceptualize the earth as our mind.  And beyond that we have to conceptualize her as our body too.  We can’t think or know or act without her.  And we’re not just travelers on spaceship earth—like astronauts.  The earth isn’t some hulking lifeless contraption we’re using.  Earth is a pulsing, living, conscious entity of which we are an organ (cell, neuron, blossom,…).

To be fully human we have to tap into our larger mind—the Earth.  It makes the Edith Cobb thesis all the more tantalizing—genius depends upon the Earth.

I built my compost sifter yesterday and got a year’s worth of compost sifted.  I probably should have waited a little while longer to let the pile dry out more.  I’m sure I could have sifted out quite a bit more if it had been drier.  But I got a really big pile of the most beautiful compost (although very puny in comparison with the pile of cow manure).  It smelled so delicious and it was so soothing to just stand there and rhythmically rub and shake and thump the compost through.  Ah, to have my hands in dirt again!

Last week I took The Spell of the Sensuous out of the library again.  There’s just so much food for thought in there, you can’t digest it all in one reading.  I want to revisit the whole section about how language and knowledge are inextricably woven into the landscape for many indigenous tribes.  There seems to be something very important in this.  Inner and outer worlds have always been unified—to indigenous tribes this is obvious, in the modern world it’s been forgotten.

…to members of a non-writing culture, places are never just passive settings.  Remember that in oral cultures the human eyes and ears have not yet shifted their synaesthetic participation from the animate surroundings to the written word.  Particular mountains, canyons, streams, boulder-strewn fields, or groves of trees have not yet lost the expressive potency and dynamism with which they spontaneously present themselves to the senses.  A particular place in the land is never, for an oral culture, just a passive or inert setting for the human events that occur there.  It is an active participant in those occurrences.  Indeed, by virtue of its underlying and enveloping presence, the place may even be felt to be the source, the primary power that expresses itself through the various events that unfold there.

John delivered a great big pile of poop to me yesterday.  Now I need to get busy and get the new garden beds dug.  I also bought seed potatoes yesterday and I need to cut them up and let them dry so I can get them in the ground.  The garlic has sprouted and I’ve got a bag of red onion sets I need to plant, and peas that need to go in.  Collin and I started the tomatoes and peppers on Sunday.  And I’ve been potting up Collin’s herbs into larger containers—chives, parsley, basil, and oregano.  I bought a small roll of hardware cloth so I can make a sifter for the compost—I’ll try to get to that today.  Spring’s finally here—hooray!  (Although it’s been cold and snowy for the past few weeks.  Today it’s supposed to get into the 60’s finally.)

Sorry about yesterday’s entry.  I thought I was going to have enough time to write, but it didn’t work out that way. But definitely—until the land begins to speak through you, you haven’t yet become naturalized to a place.

I’m beginning to fear that I’m becoming naturalized here.  The reason I fear it is because I’ve so desperately needed to get back to my beloved Pennsylvania, but if I fall in love with the land here, I may never make it back.  It’s really weird what’s happening to me.  I know I sort of described it two entries ago, but I feel like I need to delve into it a bit more.  On Friday, Collin and I took a long way home, just to explore some territory we hadn’t explored before.  At Hudson, instead of continuing on I-76, we took highway 52 from there to Wiggins.  If I-76 is the hypotenuse of a right triangle, then highway 52 makes up the two legs—it travels east and then makes a 90 degree turn to the north.  Anyway, it was quite a pretty drive, and at one point this wild little hill appeared, with some old relic of farm machinery sitting on it and the remnants of a homestead on the flat ground below.  I don’t know what happened, but some switch seemed to flip inside of me and I was transported back in time to the 1800s.  It was like none of the modernized farms surrounding it existed—like everything modern had been completely blotted out.  I saw (and felt) through different eyes, a different reality.  It was a total immersion in the feeling-sense of a different era and lifetime.  Impossible to describe, but what a profound ache it left in my heart.  We’ve all but obliterated that way of life and deprived ourselves of that way of experiencing the land.

All weekend long that place had me in its grip.  I kept fantasizing about it—what it would be like to live there in a crude little house, to be intimately fused with the energy of that spot.  Lately, it’s been this cloying need to have my bare feet on the ground—so much so that I’ve been imagining these simple houses with dirt floors.  Dirt floors and just a small lip of stone at the doorway separating the inside dirt from the outside dirt.  Just a lip to keep the puddles outside if it rains.  I picture myself with my bare feet on that dirt, connected at all times to the earth.  I have such a desperate hunger for that kind of connectedness.

In one of my blog entries I began to explore how one becomes naturalized to a place.  I think I’ve come up with a way to measure that.  How do you know when you’ve finally become naturalized?  When the land begins to speak through you.

This land is starting to take hold of me.  As much as I long for the lushness of Pennsylvania, I think I’m starting to bond with this land too.  Lately I’ve been feeling an increasingly strong need to get out of this town, where nature has been too domesticated.  I see myself living in a little cabin amid the rolling wild prairie, with its sagebrush and yucca, coyotes and pronghorn, under the vast skies.

I want to be able to set my bare feet on the wildness and to feel it flow through me, and to learn from it.  And I need privacy that town life can’t give me.  It’s such a deep, aching need, much like what I felt in Longmont when suburbia was threatening to do me in.  I want to understand this ecosystem and participate in it.  I want to know the plants and the animals and bugs and to feel the energy of the land.

I feel like I’m turning a corner and entering some new phase of my life.  I’m about to enter (or have entered?) the second half of life, so it seems right that this is a time of transition.

Mentally and emotionally I’ve already moved into the next phase.  I understand that my life will only be meaningful if I pass on what I’ve learned.  It makes little sense to accrue knowledge if you aren’t going to share and apply it.  I’ll have to become a teacher as well as a learner.

Every night I dream about plants and herbs and preparing foods, it seems.  Last night I was making brown rice syrup, but in some beautiful, tribal, traditional setting.  I’ve been trying to figure out how to make it in real life because someone contacted me recently on the internet about a post I made two years ago where I was trying to figure out the process.  Last weekend I managed to create a syrup but it had a horrible bitter aftertaste.  I will try a new batch in a few days when I get more barley sprouted (barley sprouts provide the necessary enzymes to break the starches down into sugars).  The dream leaves me with the feeling that what I’m doing is important.  I’m trying to re-invent the wheel, basically—trying to rediscover traditional knowledge that, while it hasn’t actually been lost, is not readily available. It feels important, in this instance, not for cultural reasons but for personal reasons.  What I sense is that this process of discovery is teaching me things that are important to my development right now.

There have been a lot of interesting synchronicities in my life recently.  On Tuesday I was thinking about animal allies, and trying to figure out what my greatest animal ally would be, if I actually had one.  I know it would be one of these four: black bear, mountain lion, great horned owl, or eagle.  All four of those have figured into my life in various significant ways.

I was thinking about the eagle and how I hadn’t seen one this year.  The thought flashed that if this was my ally, I might see one in the next few days.

Driving home on Wednesday, Collin and I were crossing on the overpass just out of Brighton, about to get on the interstate.  Collin said, “Ooh look, Mom, a bald eagle!”  There it was, wheeling around on the currents created by the cars and trucks whooshing through the underpass.  It was practically at eye-level to us, just right off the north side of the overpass.

On the drive in I had seen two dead hawks along the side of the road and thought it was really odd—I don’t remember ever seeing hawk roadkill, let alone two.  It got my attention and made me think about the ally question again.  I guess it was a nudge to remain alert.  But actually, if Collin hadn’t been with me, I wouldn’t have spotted the eagle.  I had a splitting headache and was only focused on getting home.  So thankfully he was there and alert!

Birds seem important, symbolically, these days in the way in which they seem to bring earth and sky together.  And the weird way my hands morph into hawk or eagle wings and I see a hawk or eagle flash before my reflection in the mirror sometimes.  There definitely seems to be something I’m meant to learn from these birds.

My intuition tells me I’m transitioning into a new phase of learning. I can’t quite articulate it yet, but it feels like the things I’m being taught bear some resemblance to a shamanic path.  I think that as we try to uncover our full humanness it’s inevitable that we will be brought back to a connection with the land and with nature.  And when we have that connection we’re able to fuse with the matrix and become more than an individual ego, and when we’re more than ego, creation can flow through us and seemingly “miraculous” things can happen.  Shamans and healers are people who can shift into that higher form of being—they fuse with the matrix.  The teachings I’m receiving seem to be leading me along a similar path.

In January I had a dream which I wrote down elsewhere.  It keeps coming back to mind so I figure I should probably jot it down here.

I was with a group of people crossing a mountain.  We had been told by this wise, elder, shaman-type man before the start of our journey that we needed to find a particular pass through the mountain and only take that.  But as we searched for the pass (the shaman wasn’t with us) several of the men became frustrated and began suggesting alternate routes over the mountain. Eventually we found the pass and the shaman was there waiting for us.  He was rebuking the men and insisting that this was the only way we should go.  It was implied that it might be okay for others to take different routes, but for us—to achieve our mission, whatever that was—this was the only way.  The mountains were very tall, rocky, snow-covered and treacherous-looking anyway, under very ominous skies.  And the pass was more of a passage. I’m not sure if it was a deep, deep fissure in the mountain or an actual tunnel—it seemed like a tunnel.  It was a narrow, well-lit passage, about two feet wide with a sandy or dirt floor, sloping downhill.  It seemed extremely ancient.  Over time, logs had been brought in and placed as steps to make the descent easier.

We came out into a room in the rocks. There were all sorts of strange botanical items available.  I was intrigued by some exotic nut-type things that sort of resembled tiny pinecones.  They were about ½ inch to ¾ inch long and nubby all over.  I was told that if eaten in large quantities they would induce visions and hallucinations, but in small quantities they were just a highly nutritious and tasty snack.  I was going to take a small bag with me but I marveled that the US would allow them into the country given their mind-altering properties. (I got the sense that we were in another part of the world).  Then someone was displaying this green jelly—a big long glob was spread out on a table-like rock.  I was getting some of that too when they told me it was catnip jelly.  I thought, Oh no, I’ll be attracting every cat for miles around on my way back.  (As we had come down the passageway, we had passed a dog and two cats curled up together, shortly before we reached the room.)  The dream shifted then and Collin and I were moving back into the Longmont house.  I was working out front, which was very lush and abundant—everything was much, much nicer than in reality.  I realized that the energy there was actually exactly what I most needed to be immersed in at that time in order to accomplish what I needed to accomplish.

Parts of the meaning of this seem pretty obvious.  There is a particular path to knowledge, very ancient, and you must be willing to listen to the guidance you receive about the way.  It is actually a far less treacherous path to follow than the paths others take—it is well-protected.  Many have labored over the centuries to make the way easier for those who follow.

The foods I figured were metaphors, at least the nutty things were.  A few days before I had this dream I had written on my blog that a full immersion in voluntary simplicity was necessary to experience its transformative power.  Individual, discrete changes were good, but nothing like the transformation made possible by a radical immersion in simplicity.  That’s what the pinecones represented—a few of them were nutritious, just as a few changes in your lifestyle would be good for you, but a full dose led to something transformative.

The green jelly I couldn’t figure out, except for a weird synchronicity that just happened in the past few days.  At the library on Friday I took out a few books on herbalism, a topic that has always interested me but that’s really reawakening with force now that I’ve gotten back into growing things.  One book was called The Herbal Medicine-Maker’s Handbook by James Green.  I’ll have to get my own copy at some point because it teaches you how to make tinctures and distillations and there’s a myriad of other techniques for preparing herbal remedies that I haven’t seen compiled in one place before.  In the middle of the book he described how he was trying to make a glycerin-based suppository but something went awry and he ended up with a quivering mass of jello.  Eventually he tasted it and discovered it was good—the jello quality helped to diffuse any unpleasant tastes in the herbs.  He had invented herb jello.  On the next page he included a recipe for herb jello that uses regular, store-bought lime Jell-O—just the very color of my catnip jelly in the dream!

Then today I was reading another library book called Tales from the Medicine Trail: Tracking Down the Health Secrets of Shamans, Healers, Mystics, Yogis, and Other Healers, by Chris Kilham.  In the first section of the book, where the author was in the Amazonian rainforests of Brazil, I came across this:

On another occasion she and Nonata made a drink of buriti (Mauritia fluxuosa).  The fruits of the buriti palm looked a bit like small pine cones and were hard when picked.  But after a day or two soaking in water, the scaly outsides of the fruit were easily scraped off, revealing a pumpkin-orange starch.  Maria and Nonata mashed the fruits, mixed them with sugar and water, and strained the whole concoction, producing a rich, sweet, creamy drink.

While it didn’t say anything about this fruit having hallucinogenic properties I just find it odd to have come across a reference to something edible and pinecone-shaped so soon after having this dream.  (I looked Mauritia flexuosa up on the Internet and it did not look like the nubby little things in my dream.) Still, I consider it a synchronicity of sorts and I feel that I’m supposed to be learning about herbal and botanical things at this point.

When gas prices were first starting to skyrocket a year or two ago, I learned to slow down. Instead of 75 mph and above on the interstate I incrementally kept slowing down until I reached 55. And now, even though prices have dropped, I still stay between 55 and 65, except when I’m in danger of creating a traffic jam—and that almost never happens. This slowing down has taught me many things.

One thing it taught me is that speed is not healthy, not for me at least. And an arbitrarily set speed limit is not necessarily going to be a speed that’s right for me. I’ve noticed now that I go slower, that driving is rarely stressful anymore, as long as the weather’s fine. Icy roads or whiteouts are a different story, but most trips are very peaceful. When I do have to speed up for some reason, I notice how quickly my stress level rises and I realized that, when I used to drive fast, that was how I always felt. It was such an ever-present state back then that I could hardly notice it. But its absence is very noticeable, and very much relished. Seventy-five or eight-five was just way too fast for me.

When we move from place to place we move through shifting energies. I’ve been learning for the past few years just how sensitive I am to those energies and how important it is for me to acclimate to the energy of a new place. The latest piece of the puzzle is that I can’t move too quickly from place to place or my body can’t keep up with the shifting energies. Even fifty-five I feel is too fast, but I think I would get pulled over by the cops if I went any slower. It’s the best I can do. My goal, once Collin’s grown, is not to need to travel fast or far very often. When I move, I want to move at a human pace. To be present, I need to arrive with each footfall. I need to have my feet on the ground, to be supported by the earth, and to breathe in the local atmosphere. Moving so fast, as we do in this age, feels like an act of sacrilege. It disregards the earth and the skies and ourselves and our place in creation.

I need to take The Spell of the Sensuous back out of the library again because there was a place where Abrams talked about how various tribes placed knowledge in the landscape—what we would today call a mnemonic device, but which I feel is far more significant. It gets back to my idea that the land is our brain (more than brain, really--soul?). There was one story he told--I can’t remember it well--but the gist was he was traveling with an indigenous man who was telling stories connected with the landscape. He was behaving oddly it seemed, because he was talking unnaturally fast. Eventually they realized the stories were meant to be told at a walking pace as they passed the particular landmarks, but they were traveling in a truck going over 25. Once they realized this, they slowed down to a crawl and the man was able to slow down his storytelling.

There is knowledge held in the land that we will never have access to as long as we’re just quickly skimming over the surface.

I never set out to learn about weather, or the confluence of earth and sky. The subject matter seems weird, frankly. Which makes it so undeniable to me that I’m being taught, that guidance is always available to me, that the universe is alive and wise. It has knowledge it wants me to awaken to.

What I feel like I’m approaching is a metaphysics that has practical applications. You have your sky god religions, you have your earth based religions both old and new, but what’s most urgently needed is a stitching together of both parts of the matrix--a reintegration.

What do I know about earth and sky? Sky is about time, earth is about place. Sky is cerebral, rational and innovative in a technological way. Earth is grounded, creative in a generative way, nourishing. What kind of humans result from a balanced meeting of earth and sky influences? How would we live differently if the meeting of earth and sky in our hearts and our blood was balanced?

And how do we balance earth and sky? As individuals there’s little we can do about such imbalanced sky issues as pollution, but at the least we can make sure we take in enough sun energy. As for earth influences, there’s a lot we can do—everything we eat should have been allowed to express its true and full nature and only ingested when in its fullest glory of self expression. That means organic foods grown in living, mineralized soils. That means no caged or confined animals. It means eating animals who have been able to live natural lives, doing what is natural for its species to do. It may mean a return to more hunting and gathering, for only in truly wild foods can earth and sky be fully mingled. It means honoring the bird kingdom for its role in stitching together the matrix.

The foods we grow should be as close to ancestral form as possible. Plants that have been bred to mature much faster than nature intended or yield their fruits much more prolifically than nature intended will not be as nutritious and will not bring in enough earth.

I was awakened in the middle of the night a few nights ago by a dream that seemed important to remember. Even as I lay there, recalling it, I felt like I might not be recalling it accurately or remembering all of it. In fact all I really remember was seeing this small rectangular patch of wheat under a blue sky, accompanied by the knowledge that in order for earth and sky to meet, a plant must be able to express its true and full nature.

It sounds bizarre, I know. I’m not even sure what to make of it. Was the wheat field healthy (it sure looked healthy)? Was it stitching together earth and sky? Or was it so hybridized and weakened that it couldn’t participate fully? Can only ancestral wheat stitch together earth and sky or are there human-influenced wheats that are still able to express themselves healthily?

Beyond wheat, what are the implications of this? Does it go beyond plants to encompass all living things? If a human being is expressing his fullest potential, does he stitch together the matrix? A shaman who calls up the weather is doing just such a thing.

It’s such a weird concept. Why would earth and sky need to connect through living things? It does connect of course, in our blood and in the sap of plants. I suppose if our blood is deficient in one part of the matrix, like I suggested in my last entry, then earth and sky can’t fully meet.

In Secrets of the Soil, one guy said that our intestines are simply roots turned inside out. I had never looked at it that way, but it’s true. Just like microbial life attaches to the root hairs and makes nutrients more available to plant, so the beneficial microbes in our guts make nutrients more available to us.

And our lungs are like branches and leaves turned inside out, taking in the sky. And I read somewhere (probably in Secrets of the Soil) that blood and sap are almost identical substances. [Edited to say it’s actually hemoglobin (C₅₅H₇₂FeN₄O₅) and chlorophyll (C₅₅H₇₂MgN₄O₅) that are nearly identical.] We’re really nothing but mobile plants, and plants are stationary animals. Earth and sky meet in blood and sap.

So, how is a plant or animal supposed to express its fullest nature? My dream almost feels backwards—shouldn’t it have said that in order to express our fullest nature, earth and sky must meet within us? But it was the other way around.

I woke up this morning thinking about the way that people fight against their own natural way of manifesting. They’re always trying to be something they’re not. Changing straight hair to curly and curly to straight, red hair to blonde hair to brown hair to black. Getting facelifts and Botox and tummy tucks. Modulating personality with alcohol and drugs—both legal and illegal. Adopting false and shallow personas in their work and social lives.

What if everyone would just be who they are? There would still be just as much diversity and uniqueness, only it would be genuine. And somehow, according to my dream, that means that earth and sky could meet in all of us.