from Margaret

Firstly, thanks so much for such a lovely and educational forage walk on Sunday. So good. I didn't know I was allowed to eat hostas! I haven't tried yet but you can trust that I will.

And then. If it's not too late.... some photos...

pickles inside my messy apartment:

turnip greens + purple onions, turnip greens+nori+garlic*garlic*garlic,sweet potatoes+carrots+ginger+ehhhh, i forgot=
soooooooooooooo good!

a pretty shot of some super lush yarrow:

some of my experiments in indoor food raising this early spring - lettuces and peas (from some commercial seed mass-produced who knows where --- maybe this is not so much in the spirit of salvation jane? but it was a photosynthetic endeavor i had fun with, and i liked the plants' company):

I've been looking around for photos from the Centro San Bonifacio garden last year and haven't found. It's
a shame I don't have them because the garden's about to change a lot with some grant money that just came
in. So as it goes a little bigger and more legit i'm afraid that there won't be as many of the really
awesome and inspiring sort of anarchic methods of caring for the "weeds" from sidewalk cracks and maybe moving them into raised beds when space allows, that kind of thing. But who knows, their new development director is really sharp and definitely values the knowledge about plant medicine and i think her head
and heart are in the right place. So we'll see.

heart,
margaret

In a conservation organization that is on the more independent/grassroots side of conservation organizations, in that it starts from the point of view of (somewhat cloudy and prodded, though existent) desire statements of indigenous communities, what do you do when it is hard for the staff to hear a request to not use disposable plates and cups for eating when there are washable ones right there? When it is considered piggy to re-eat out of someone’s used disposable cup instead of taking a new one? When everyone drinks Coca Cola, eats take out, thinks nothing of factory farming, noise pollution, leaving all of the lights on, going cruising in the car for no good reason, and is involucrado in the corporate-industrial waste land? How can you live with yourself (that is, the HOW, the process) when the most radical thing to do is to suggest against using a disposable plastic plate, and to ask that people even START to think about the effects of their actions, while trying to offer tools to indigenous communities to keep their land, forests, to farm sustainably, to “sustainably develop”, to counteract logging, etc.

The civilization will crumble under the weight of it’s own obesity. Only then will the mass erupt if it hasn’t been squashed. We are ants who can persist if we climb into the right crevices and lay the right estercol to be fermented.

I saw so much erosion this weekend. More than I’ve ever seen. I was to an indigenous community where the land was so trashed it might as well have been paved. On the highway to Creel (the main international tourist hotspot in all of North Mexico known for its surrounding gorgeous canyons and beauty – for visual consumption), you see logging truck after logging truck, some with neatly packed bundles of tree corpses, and some with even more efficiently stacked perfect squares of milled lumber. What’s worse, as we leave the forest from the state-government-sponsored workshop (Secretaría de Desarollo Social), we see a few logging trucks driving into the forest at night, empty, on their way to illegally clear the forest. And we go back to the cabaña and drink, work done.

Where is the lifeline of the death culture (or the deathline)? How do we cut off its balls? How do we reproduce like parasites that love to eat up and recycle the yum yummy taste of the rotting industrial edifices? Where can I escape Maseca, metaphorically and otherwise? Are there any cultures left that are not suffering from civilization? Are there any examples of CULTUREs that are actually recovering right now, or are we all in decline?

-- Marcos

I take two busses and a train from Tucson to arrive in Creel, Chihuahua, Mexico, the tourist and transportation capital of the Sierra Tarahumara. From there I ride in a four-wheel truck with people from my organization down to the community of Batopilas. The ride is literally breathtaking, incredible. It follows the mountainside into a deep subtropical canyon, where there are papaya trees, banana trees, avocados and mangos, narrow brick streets, colonial-ish architecture, there in the town of Batopilas. It reminds me of what I think the south of Mexico must look like.

The river is rushing and gushing, Rio Batopilas, that separates the community from the decaying ruins of the hacienda that was the home of a rich mining magnate from the U.S., Alexander Sheper. We hike through the canyons, which are shockingly beautiful despite the damaged state they are in. They are riddled with abandoned silver mines, which fed the consumer appetite of industrial society for the past century, and the hills are piled with the dregs of the rock waste. Plants are retaking the land, but recovery is always much slower than the pace of human movement. The hills are being trashed and eroded by goats, as the forests and desert are being degraded by cows.

But there is still an incredible beauty here in the rocks, in the sheer force and clarity of the river, in the sight of isolated Tarahumara and mestizo singles and pairs hiking through the bush, with their brilliantly colored fabrics: harvesting baskets of cactus for dinner, bringing groceries back from Batopilas, or for whatever other reason they are walking.

In the road down to Batopilas, there are giant piles of mine tailings just dumped in mass along the canyon. Nothing grows on them, they are saturated with chemicals. In the process of mining, they mix the rock pulp with chemicals in order to separate the desired ore, and the leftovers are tailings. The tailings are draining straight into the river, and it is contaminating the downstream communities with dangerous chemicals, apart from the lead that is coming out of the abandoned mines in great quantities.

The people must drink purified water, they can no longer healthfully harvest water from the river. Much if not most of the bottled water in Mexico is from the Coca Cola or Pepsi Cola corporations, Vincente Fox having been the president of CocaCola Mexico. I just realized lately that almost all of the water in the industrialized world must be purified because it is so contaminated, as are all of the fish living in the waters.

At twilight I go swimming in the river, just beyond a hanging foot bridge crossing the expanse of both sides of the canyon. It is idyllic and beautiful, it is twilight and also with me is a beautiful and spontaneous young Mexican man soaping himself up in the river. There are little girls running across the foot bridge and palm trees loom against the red-purple horizon with the towering Sierras in the background. Apart from the many problems I know that afflict these communities and this land, it is easy to temporarily forget them in the tranquility of that beautiful place.

--Marcos

The rocks here are amazing. The mountains are composed of giant piles of boulders. There are narrow chasms with unseeable depths between large slab rocks and boulders. There are caves and amphitheaters. The land speaks.

The colors of the red rock, along with the different lichens and green tints clinging to them, seem to shift my consciousness, things become more surreal. Spontaneous strange sounds from unknown creatures, depths of texture and color that have been buried and bulldozed in the mad-made linearness and mechanical simple infrastructure of our cities, are here present, and lead you on a different path.

There is really a simple way to grasp some of the differences between an industrialized human and an indigenous one. Picture what you are surrounded by and interact with every day. Are you surrounded by SOUNDS of cars, refrigerators, alarm clocks, car alarms, toilets, computers, human voices amplified by the hard solid walls of buildings, radios, televisions, recorded music? Or are you surrounded by the sounds of the different textures of wind, bird calls, lizards scurrying up rocks, nuts dropping off trees, the sounds of your feet on gravel, grass swooshing, rivers running, buffalo stampeding?

Are you surrounded by the IMAGES of bricks, cars, appliances, indoor spaces, fluorescent lights, words, signs, billboards, grocery store shelves, metal, plastic, glass, concrete? Or are you surrounded by the IMAGES of complex beings, who if watched or examined have some of the most psychedelic patterns, intricate and beautiful, or of expansive landscapes, of the infinite subtleties and hidden explosions of color and all of the movements – the slithing, the writhing, the surfing, gliding, coasting, inching, fleeing, running, jumping, slithering.

What do you SMELL? Do you smell the deep ancient smell of wet leaves and earth, of grassy must, of what is carried in the wind, of scat, of wild fruit, of rivers and fur and hide and tree bark and burning wood? Or do you smell gas, perfume, fabric softener, fresh packaging, the office, the upholstery, tar, car exhaust? Do you walk through different textures, varied surfaces, always watching, constantly aware of what is approaching around you and what you are moving through, or are you always on flat surfaces, sidewalks, floors?

--Helga

I feel life riveting through me this weekend – myself slowly relaxing out of the frantic urban pace, playing physically demanding and intense games with people in the open plain, running around freely, sitting around campfires hearing stories and poetry, hearing people’s struggles and pleasures, crawling up rocks, sleeping in caves.

In this context it seems almost absurd that in the worlds of psychology and philosophy, people are only starting to realize that as we have evolved for millions of years with certain patterns of existence, feeling natural environments and patterns and rituals in our bodies, in our language and culture and relationships, that it might actually be unhealthy and unsustainable to live in such radically unstable industrial systems that we have never adapted to and have only existed for a tiny fraction of the human experience.

To me this is not something to debate, because I can FEEL the difference so deeply, as I always notice too with the people who accompany me on my wilderness trips, and it makes me curious and confused about what great force or addiction must be compelling people to believe that indoor existence in cities – separated from the very processes and sources of life and other beings that make up the world – is desirable.

-- Helga

from Dave:

One big reason that autumn is my favorite time of year is the annual bloom of asters and goldenrods, and the pale lavender flowers of Drummond's aster are on display right now. This is one of our more accessible local wildflowers and once you recognize it you'll notice it around town. And being an "accessible" wildflower is pretty remarkable in this heavily disturbed Chicago region. It's a sign of strength.

The botanic name of Drummond's aster is Aster sagittifolius drummondii. All asters are members of the diverse Compositae or Asteracae (sunflower) plant family. The meaning of the word "aster" was "star" in the ancient world. Words like asteroid, asterisk and disaster take on new interest when seen this way. And many of the flowers in the aster/composite family have obvious disk and ray flower structures. Think of a daisy or a garden sunflower and you can imagine why our ancestors compared them to our own star, the Sun.

The genus name "sagittifolius" has a different story. In the past, plants were sometimes given a name based on the religious holiday that occurred when the plant was in bloom. So it's easy to guess that this aster has something to do with the constellation Sagittarius, but its connection with the heavens is a bit more subtle. Drummond's aster has what is known as a sagittate - or arrow shaped - leaf form. It also has leaf tissue that extends along the stem which is a helpful identification aid.

So it is the "arrow" metaphor that links Sagittarius (the Archer) in the heavens with a durable and handsome wildflower that manages to persist in this increasingly un-wild world.

Fellow fermenter,

After awaking on Sept. 3 at the crack of light and cooking my day’s supply of freshly winnowed rice (pebbles and all), I rode my bike ten miles down the Baptism River Road to Finland, MN, where I met up with Fuzzy to go riding on Island River. We got to the river. Another shit year for rice, he says, it’s thin, we were late, but mostly the water levels are so low (sometimes by feet) that you can’t paddle through the rice beds. We go to another lake and he tells me usually the rice covers many times what the tiny patches are this year. Never mind I say – we are subsistence ricers, we’ll take what we get. It starts to lightning as we pole through the lake.

By the time we get in I am wet and shivering in the rain. He drops me off in town. I make some phone calls trying to redeem repeatingly failing Craig’s List attempts to get my few things from Chi to Mpls. I bike up to the land with my bag of rice on wet mud – harder than I was anticipating – and when I arrive at our parking area, there is a pickup with two fifty-gallon drum halves filled with bear fat and two bear carcasses. It is already starting to rot and we have to haul it ½ mile uphill to our land to render it.

For over two days, we render what we can. The hunters throw out most of the bears, who are honestly just cubs, most of them less than 150-200 lbs. They keep a few prime cuts, and the rest that goes wasted could honestly feed a village. Night has fallen; it’s raining. I am carrying the carcass up hill and I slip on a rock and the carcass lands on the dirt and I simultaneously shriek and howl and whimper and cuss and cry and grind my teeth at the intensity and horror of the whole thing. We do as much as we can but still lose buckets and buckets of meat and fat. I fall ill and am out for days, just now recovering. This is harvest season…The return POB is my personal one now – POB 477. Love, Mark

October 11, 2007
by Bill

I stepped outside the other day and the city smelled like fennel. The next night when I stepped out, the air was damp and almost warm. I caught a whiff of wet rock and realized it had started to rain.

I have never looked forward to the rainy season until this year. Last year, I learned how to enjoy it – dressing warmly and in layers, and hiking or biking the hills of the Marin Headlands. I came to enjoy the surprising coziness of hiking up toward the sky on an overcast day and one time hiking in fog so consuming let I could barely see twenty feet in front of me, let alone the panoramic views of the hills, the bridges, the bay, the ocean, and the urban areas nestled amongst them.

The garden is all about beans and brussels sprouts right now. I get an occasional small harvest of potatoes, strawberries, carrots, lettuce, and roses. Also, I recently harvested a small quantity of Cipollini onions. I like to roast them whole and tossed in with some chunks of root vegetables.

I have scattered a bunch of seed – some greens, onions, and carrots. There are a few things coming up from that effort, but nothing that I recognize yet. The mustard is self-perpetuating at this point, and I am happy about that. The calendula has also germinated abundantly. Some consider it unsightly, but not me. I love it and appreciate its volunteerism. I tend to deadhead it in order to keep it looking nice for longer. Several years back, I made a couple batches of calendula liniment. I use it on occasion, but haven’t needed to make more, as a little goes a long way.

One of my favorite combinations is borage flowers and calendula flowers together. The summer borage has died back, but new plants are coming up all over and if I’m lucky, their flowering will overlap with the calendula, which may be on its way out by then.

I recently got a new load of poopy straw from the small farm behind my house. I took my compost pile apart and put it back together upside down – incorporating some of the new materials, and saving some for later layering. The worms in my compost pile and in my soil are very long and very fat. I try not to hurt them when I handle the compost, but inevitable one or two (or more) seemed shocked or lifeless after the procedure. It saddens me. I find that I talk to the worms quite a bit as I sift through the compost.

I am going to plant some garlic this month, and am excited to see it grow. Growing my own garlic has been such an unexpected pleasure – even though the supply never lasts very long…

(to be continued)