New Earth Times Archives

This is Now the Archives

2010-09-28T11:20:00.001-06:00

This site is now the New Earth Times archives, all 671 posts worth.

New Earth Times has a new look, a new orientation, new capabilities, and a new location. Please change your bookmarks: http://newearthtimes2.blogspot.com/ .

See you on the other side!

Site News

2010-09-27T06:50:00.002-06:00

Major upgrades are in store here very shortly.

For one, I'll be reformatting this blog to include niceties such as links. This particular blog template is so obsolete, Blogger retired it years ago.

The major change is that I'll be spinning off some subsidiary blogs. I've already started an overflow blog to handle my excess output. I've posted a lot of stuff there recently.

The major new blog will be called Dry Country News. I put out a magazine with this name sporadically between 1979 and 1997 and have always wanted to start a Dry Country News blog. As a matter of fact, New Earth Times has effectively been Dry Country News for at least six months now -- homestead happenings, banner cloud photos, signs of the seasons, monsoon updates, even Tapeworm Architecture -- all logically belong on the DCN blog.

I'll also be spinning off a "Memoir" blog to handle my autobiographical stuff. I've got some fairly hot material ready to be posted. Although I've lived an unbearably low-key life in many ways, I manage to write about it in an interesting way.

The New Earth Times blog will handle issues of a more planetary dimension. Or extra-planetary as the case may be.
I plan to link my other blogs to the New Earth Times blog with one of those gizmos that automatically tells when the linked blogs have been updated. No sense having to click on a blog that hasn't been updated.

Tapeworm Architecture: Quarai

2010-09-26T07:18:00.000-06:00

This is the second of a series of posts about the Salinas Missions. Part 1, about Abo, was posted on July 11.

Here's a picture of the ruins of the mission church at Quarai. Of the three Salinas pueblos, Quarai had the most benign location, with plenty of water from a nearby creek, and large open fields on which they could grow crops. Nearby salt lakes provided a valuable resource that could be harvested and traded with other Indian groups. The Indians did an amazing amount of trading back and forth, considering that everything had to be carried on peoples' backs.

Here's an outside view of the church. Of the three mission churches, this one is the most intact. This church was active between 1629 and 1674. All three churches were abandoned during the 1670s, due to drought and increasing Apache raids.

The inside of the church must have been a source of awe for the native inhabitants of the pueblo, who had never experience such an impressive indoor space before. Imagine this large room with a ceiling, dramatic shafts of light shining through the clerestory windows, a choir singing in the choir loft, incense burning, a priest in his vestments doing his priest routine at the altar -- an impressive spectacle all around, which is exactly what the Spanish had in mind. Soften them up with awe, and punish or kill those who misbehave -- an effective two-pronged strategy.

The Indians were hardy people, living in a harsh environment, always close to the edge. Death was never far away. There was little to be done for a broken bone or an aching tooth. Still, they had managed to survive and even thrive during good times, and they always had the tribe and their accumulated wisdom that had gotten them through everything thus far.

The first Spaniards to appear must have seemed as gods. Imagine, people who had never seen a horse before, or refined metal, to suddenly see mounted soldiers, resplendent in their armor, carrying swords and lances. What sort of magic was this? And what are those strange animals, horses, cattle, sheep and goats? Tame animals that you could ride, or milk, or walk right up to and kill for their meat? And those strange priests in their robes, carrying crucifixes, speaking of their Savior who had defied death -- such powerful magic they must have!

The Indians must have had a complex range of feelings about the Spanish:

The magic of technology must have induced feelings of awe and envy. The Spanish brought a whole new way of being with them. In addition to soldiers, priests, horses and livestock, the Spanish brought new crops such as wheat and fruit trees, new ways of building, musical instruments, an entire technological infrastructure that seems primitive by today's standards, but must have been mind-blowing to the native inhabitants.

Sucking up to power is a hard-wired human characteristic. Sucking up to the alpha male or the dominant clan has always been a good survival strategy. Hide in the shadow of the strong one, and perhaps you will be spared. Whatever the Spanish had, the Indians wanted it, too.

Fear of being brutalized also played a role. The Spanish could kill at a distance with their guns, and up close, stone spears were no match for razor-sharp swords and lances. When Onate had the left feet of all the surviving males at Acoma Pueblo amputated, word must have quickly spread through all the pueblos: the Spanish will extract retribution beyond your wildest nightmares. It's best to cooperate and do what they say. You might even get to sing in the church choir!

The drought of the 1670s was no worse than previous droughts the Indians have survived. One difference, I suspect, was overgrazing from newly-introduced livestock, which reduced the land's capacity to absorb water like a sponge during wet years, and slowly release it during drought.

Before the Spanish arrived, the Pueblos had a relatively peaceful relationship with the nomadic tribes -- they were useful trading partners with each other. The Spanish upset this equilibrium through their ineffective persecution of the Apache, which only served to rile them up.

The Spanish were stern taskmasters, demanding tribute in the form of goods and labor. The Indians were already living on the edge to begin with, and these additional demands from their parasitical overseers proved to be too much. Overwork, loss of cultural integrity, Apache raids, and severe drought were simply too much to cope with. Eventually the Indians were forced to abandon their pueblo, and retreat to the relative safety and civilization of the Rio Grande.

Our Hay Day

2010-09-24T06:29:00.000-06:00

We made our annual hay-gathering expedition yesterday. This year we bought hay from a farmer five miles down the road. Here, Laura demonstrates her hay-loading prowess. These bales were only $4.00 each, for a total of $48.00 -- money well spent.

Moving the bales one at a time in a wheelbarrow to garden level is the hardest part of the job. Here, Laura lounges on top of the bales after the job is done. There's the Rio Grande in the background. I never buy my hay until the flood season is over. Those are jujubes hanging from the tree on the left side of the picture.

Covered with a tarp to protect from rain, the hay will sit there all winter until I till it into the garden in March. Cinderblocks filled with concrete, with eyebolts embedded into the concrete, make nifty bungee tie-down anchors.

"Stuff is more valuable than money," I like to say, "as long as it's the right stuff." Hay is an excellent example of "right stuff." You can add it to your garden, feed it to your animals, even eat it yourself if necessary. (Thirty-five years ago I wrote an article for Mother Earth News about adding alfalfa hay to whole-wheat bread. They rejected it, because the concept was too extreme even for them. Alfalfa bread is really not so bad -- I separated out the green leafy part of the hay, ground it up with my hand grain mill, and added the powder to the bread dough. When famine comes, this is good to keep in mind.)

Life in the Undergrowth

2010-09-23T07:18:00.001-06:00

Laura and I have been fans of the BBC nature documentaries ever since we watched the “Planet Earth” series a couple of years ago. The BBC is spending big bucks sending film crews across the planet, evidently with the philosophy of documenting pre-dieoff Nature before it dies off. The BBC film artists use the latest high-tech techniques, such as aerial photography with motion-canceling hardware to prevent vibration, or time-lapse photography to reveal slow-moving animal and plant behavior. The camera people are famous for sitting in an uncomfortable blind for a month until they get that shot of the rare snow leopard or whatever. The BBC has definitely taken the art of nature photography to the next level.

The “Life in the Undergrowth” series -- narrated by everybody’s favorite dotty old uncle, David Attenborough -- utilizes colonoscopy-type hardware to penetrate the mysteries of insect life underground. Inserting miniature cameras with fiber-optic cables into the insects’ burrows, they have uncovered some astounding aspects of insect behavior, and I have the sense that there’s an infinite amount yet to be discovered. I’m impressed by the naturalists who have patiently watched these insects long enough, and consistently enough, to figure out what they’re really doing.

What the naturalists have discovered is a miniature world of amazing complexity and elegance. I can’t help feeling that there’s some kind of INTENT behind it all, that mere chance can’t explain how all this came to be. Many times while watching the series I would blurt out, “How’d they come up with THAT behavior?” or “Who invented THAT?”

Here’s a favorite example: There’s a type of blister beetle that lives in the desert. When the babies hatch out of their eggs and leave the nest, there’s nothing for them to eat. What are they supposed to do? Well, hundreds of them climb together to the top of a plant stalk and form a tight cluster. Then they emit the smell of a female bumblebee. At first glance, the cluster of blister beetles looks and smells like a female bee. A male bumblebee bumbles along, finds the ball of tiny blister beetles, and attempts to mate with it. Hah, fooled you! Many of the blister beetles manage to climb onto the male bee as he attempts to mate. When he finally finds a real female bee to mate with, the blister beetles climb onto her, and are transported to her nest, which is full of pollen and bumblebee larvae. Snug in their new home, the baby blister beetles eat all the pollen, and then the bee larvae as well. Finally, fully grown, they emerge onto the surface yet again, to mate with each other and perpetuate their species.

When you consider that there must be thousands of examples of insect behavior every bit as cunning as that, it gives one pause. Clearly, human consciousness has a narrow, survival-focused orientation, and has trouble comprehending anything other than the most superficial aspects of the animal world (or the rest of reality, for that matter). Oftentimes throughout the various BBC documentaries I’ve watched, the narrator reveals an anthropomorphism that is irrelevant and doesn’t actually exist except within his own imagination. For example, predators aren’t the “enemies” of the prey. There’s no “desperate search for survival” going on. The natural world exists within a serenity (no matter how violent it may seem) that most humans have simply lost touch with. Actually, we humans should drop all concepts including “serenity” and realize that there is an amazing elegance to it-all that should perhaps inspire us to shut up and let the awe take over. A little awe never hurt anybody.

Part of the human problem is that our senses, and therefore our understanding, are more limited than we realize. We are mere apes with a brain mutation, and are overwhelmed by the noise of our out-of-control mentalizing. Traditionally, humans have postulated a God “out there” who waves his magic wand and makes it all happen. More recently, some humans, whom we call scientists, have postulated the theory of evolution, which is true enough as a mechanism, but comes up short in the “how could this possibly be” department.

The situation seems clear enough: Our human senses, and our physical instruments, are simply incapable of perceiving the vast majority of existence. We are nearly blind and don’t know it. We have fought our way to the top of the food chain and there’s nothing left to stop us. We lay waste to whatever we touch. We consider ourselves to be outside of Nature, superior to Nature. Such delusions cannot stand, not in the long run, as the imminent destruction of the biosphere is about to reveal. Some of us realize what is happening, in our vague human way, yet our understanding remains locked within the intellect, and our behavior doesn’t change. I don’t see any solution to our predicament, and I don’t think anybody else does, either.

In the meantime, these BBC documentaries will allow future generations, if any, to witness the natural world as it once was. This is such an amazing world of interlocking elegance, it’s a pity we’re so busy destroying it. But there I go, anthropomorphising again.

Thought for Today

2010-09-20T21:24:00.000-06:00

"This sounds so bleak when I say it, but we need some delusions to keep us going."

-- Woody Allen

Death Spiral

2010-09-20T16:35:00.000-06:00

Common Dreams has posted an article today, "Arctic Ice in Death Spiral." The article quotes the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center as saying, "... the Arctic summer sea ice cover is in a death spiral. It's not going to recover. I hate to say it but I think we are committed to a four- to six-degree warmer Arctic."

The article continues: If the Arctic becomes six degrees warmer, then half of the world's permafrost will likely thaw, probably to a depth of a few metres, releasing most of the carbon and methane accumulated there over thousands of years, said Vladimir Romanovsky of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks and a world expert on permafrost.

That would be catastrophic for human civilisation, experts agree. The permafrost region spans 13 million square kilometres of the land in Alaska, Canada, Siberia and parts of Europe and contains at least twice as much carbon as is currently present in the atmosphere - 1,672 gigatonnes of carbon, according a paper published in Nature in 2009. That's three times more carbon than all of the worlds' forests contain.

Abrupt releases of large amounts of CO2 and methane are certainly possible on a scale of decades, he said. The present relatively slow thaw of the permafrost could rapidly accelerate in a few decades, releasing huge amounts of global warming gases.

Another permafrost expert, Ted Schuur of the University of Florida, has come to the same conclusion. "In a matter of decades we could lose much of the permafrost," Shuur told IPS.

Those losses are more likely to come rapidly and upfront, he says. In other words, much of the permafrost thaw would happen at the beginning of a massive 50-year meltdown because of rapid feedbacks.

Emissions of CO2 and methane from thawing permafrost are not yet factored into the global climate models and it will be several years before this can be done reasonably well, Shuur said.

"Current mitigation targets are only based on anthropogenic (human) emissions," he explained.

"Emissions of CO2 and methane from thawing permafrost are not yet factored in." I've been saying this for several years now, and have been waiting for the scientists to collect enough data to allow them to make this obvious statement. Well, they're busily accumulating the data, they're already making the obvious statement, and within a couple of years we'll start seeing estimates of just how bad the runaway greenhouse effect is going to be.

Can there be any doubt what the "New Earth" of "New Earth Times" refers to? I didn't know myself when I started this blog in 2004 (and had the idea for a magazine with that name several years before that). I just thought it was a cool name. But it sure looks like our "New Earth" won't include polar caps or rainforests or coral reefs or living oceans or... the list seems endless.

And now we're poised for a takeover by the denialists after the November elections. The pressure is unrelenting. Here's a rule of thumb: the worse the objective situation, the worse the denial, and we ain't seen nothing yet. I think it will be time for an updated edition of my "Brave New World" post after the elections.

Thought For Today

2010-09-16T12:01:00.001-06:00

"We’ve run out of spare decades to deal with climate change."

-- Bill McKibben

An Automatic Drip System for my New Coldframe

2010-09-15T06:57:00.000-06:00

Last fall I built a coldframe on the south side of the Ark, which I watered by hand all winter. Last winter I installed an 1100-gallon rainwater catchment tank on the north side of the Ark. This summer I connected the two.

Starting at the top of the system, this picture shows how I modified the rainwater inlet. Originally the gutter pipe had a straight shot into the tank strainer. I discovered that when it was raining heavily, the water coming out of the gutter had enough energy to shoot right on out of the strainer. This is due to the drop of several feet between the gutter and the tank, which gives the water lots of energy, and the sideways angle of the pipe, which gives the water lots of lateral velocity. I figured the answer was to install a right-angle bend at the end of the pipe, to force the water straight down into the tank.

Another improvement I plan to make this winter is to install an overflow pipe at the top of the tank, so I can pipe this excess water over to a nearby garden spot. No sense wasting water whenever the tank is full.

I have two 3/4" pipes coming out of the tank. The pipe on the left goes to the coldframe, and the pipe on the right can either fill a 5-gallon bucket, or be hooked to a garden hose.

The pipe to the coldframe is buried in a trench to prevent freezing, and goes under the Ark foundation. The fence wire is temporary, to keep my firewood stash under the water tank platform from floating away in case of a flood. (The river didn't flood this summer.)

This is the brains of the system, a low-pressure timer from Dripworks. (Dripworks offers an informative free catalog.) The water pipe runs along the ground inside the Ark. In an attempt to avoid flooding the timer, I installed it 5 feet above ground level. The valve is designed to bleed off air in case a bubble forms at the top of this awkward configuration, but it looks like I don't really need it.

A final piece of equipment -- an in-line filter which prevents clogging of the T-tape. The pipe goes through wall into the coldframe.

Looking straight down onto the final control assembly. Each outlet has its own valve, which is probably overkill, but the valves were very inexpensive. The black T-tape is an inexpensive way to drip irrigate, and performs well with low pressure.

The T-tape runs the length of the coldframe, and will soon be covered by vegetation. This is the high-flow T-tape, with emitters every 8". I'm planning on using 5 gallons of water for each daily irrigation, so I'll set the timer to open its valve for about 30 minutes each day. A tankful of water should last about 7 months. By the time the tank runs out of water next spring, my outdoor garden should be in full production. Then next summer's rains will (hopefully) fill the tank for the following winter's coldframe garden.

40 Years on the Land

2010-09-12T07:34:00.002-06:00

Judy and I moved back to the land in September, 1970. I don’t remember the exact date, but according to our family mythology, our infant daughter was 3 weeks old at the time. Since she was born on August 21, that would have put our move at Sept. 11. Sept. 11 is already taken as a “significant date,” so I’ve decided to use Sept. 12 for family mythology purposes.

So here I am, on Sept. 12, exactly 40 years later, wondering what I’m supposed to say on such a momentous occasion. How about, “Hi Mom, I’m still here, I hope you’re enjoying Heaven.” Or perhaps something with more gravitas, indicating the infinite depths of wisdom I have plumbed during my sojourn on the land.

Writing something worthy will take some time. I’ll think about it and maybe write little snippets from time to time. I just wanted to acknowledge this anniversary on the actual date.

A couple of my favorite on-the-land memoirs are “Robin and Sundew,” and “The Gangbang Queen of Howell County.” In a sense, this entire blog is an on-the-land memoir.

How did I end up on the land in the first place? I wrote an essay about this a few years ago. To read it, just click this link.

Falling Into Fall

2010-09-10T01:25:00.000-06:00

This is my latest Grasroots Press column:

For the past couple of years I’ve wanted to revive “Signs of the Seasons,” a column I wrote for the Las Cruces Bulletin in 1986-88, but have always gotten sidetracked by more “serious” topics. But obviously, whatever’s going to happen will happen whether I write about it or not. So why not write about something I love?

I have lived literally on the bank of the Rio Grande north of Radium Springs since 1973. As a beekeeper, gardener, and orchardist, I spend a lot of time outdoors, and have come to appreciate “life beyond the shopping malls.” I’d like to share some of my observations of our marvelous area with you.

We had a wet but relatively short monsoon this year – 8.57 inches of rain in slightly over two months. We’ve had six wetter monsoons since I started keeping rainfall records in1982, but in most of these the rainfall was spread over a longer period of time. Remarkably, the climate experts (www.climas.arizona.edu) didn’t predict a wet monsoon this year even as it was happening.

I’ve been looking for possible shifts in the Southwest monsoon rainfall due to global heating, but so far the data are all over the place. Since 2004 we’ve had alternate wet/dry monsoons, varying from 3.12 to 13.25 inches. Our two wettest monsoons were 2006 and 2008, with 11.90 and 13.25 inches, respectively. Some readers might remember the notorious 2006 “Monsoon from Hell” which caused disastrous flooding in Alamogordo, El Paso, Hatch, and Radium Springs. That year, we had 10” of rain in slightly over a month.

There seems to be more of a climate shift regarding the winter snowpack at the headwaters of the Rio Grande. Less snow is falling on average, and the springs are getting warmer, earlier. Those warm spring winds cause the snow to evaporate rather than melt, which reduces the runoff. We’ve long taken for granted the elegant simplicity of utilizing mountain snowpack for irrigation purposes. Ideally, the snow accumulates all winter, melts in the spring, and the runoff is collected by dams for summer allocation. However, if the precipitation falls as rain, or doesn’t occur at all, or if the snow evaporates rather than melts, the traditional irrigation model no longer works.

These days, even a very heavy snowpack will provide water for only two years. We no longer have a reserve of stored water; the availability of irrigation water is now on a year-to-year basis, depending on this winter’s snowpack. This is in stark contrast to the 80s and 90s, when Elephant Butte Lake was so full that it topped the spillway twice. One year there was so much water, they released some excess during the winter. I doubt if we’ll experience such a water glut again. In fact, before long I wouldn’t be surprised to see the snowpack fail completely some years, with a total lack of irrigation water for that year. And it might happen this winter – La Niña winters tend to be very dry. At any rate, most Grassroots Press readers aren’t dependent on irrigation water from the Rio Grande, which is not to say that they aren’t utterly dependent on nature somewhere down the line.

Fall is a remarkable time of year. The days shorten dramatically by mid-August, but temperatures don’t decrease as quickly, due to the enormous amount of heat stored within the top few feet of soil and rock. It’s this extra heat that makes autumn weather so pleasant. August is probably the most miserable month of the year, from my outdoorsy perspective, due to the heat, humidity, and mosquitoes. Yet October, a mere two months later, is one of the finest months of the year – crisp cool mornings followed by warm afternoons. And November is even better. La Niña winters tend to be sunny and dry – what I call “Chamber of Commerce weather,” so I would expect this winter to provide splendid opportunities for all manner of outdoor activities.

Autumn is our most colorful time of year. Peak color most years is early November. In the Las Cruces area, the most concentrated dose of fall colors can be found along Highway 185 as it parallels the Rio Grande between Radium Springs and Hatch. Golden cottonwoods, yellow willows, orange saltcedars, and flaming red sumac bushes combine to create a colorful spectacle.

The cotton fields are white unto harvest in November, looking like they’ve been struck by a natural fiber blizzard. But not for long, though, because farmers like to get that cotton harvested as quickly as possible, even running their cottonpickers at night if necessary. No sense tempting the weather, after all, because bad weather is always on the way sooner or later.

The chile fields, in their turn, ripen to bright shades of red. Until recent years, harvesting was a leisurely process lasting all winter, and the colorful fields provided a visual zap during a very brown time of the year. But research showed that both the quantity and quality of the chile was reduced by leaving it exposed to the elements like that, so now farmers like to get those peppers picked just as soon as they can.

As happens every year in late autumn, the waterfowl make like snowbirds and return to their winter haunts along the Rio Grande. Although they tend to concentrate in marshy areas like Bosque del Apache south of Socorro, plenty find their way into our area. Sometimes there’s a flock of a couple dozen snowy white egrets which fly in formation up and down the river about a foot above the water. (The air must be less turbulent there, making flying easier.) They make a beautiful sight as they fly, wingtip to wingtip, bodies reflecting in the water.

The sandhill cranes return from their northern summering grounds. Sometimes you can see them flying high above the river in multi-V patterns, necks outstretched, squonking back and forth to each other. Somehow the cranes epitomize autumn... slow but steady, and sure of its direction – winter is still to come, but spring is just around the corner.

Strange Insect

2010-09-09T06:51:00.000-06:00

I took this picture of a strange insect on August 5. I was holding off on posting it until I i.d.'d it, but I haven't been able to find my insect book. So here it is anyway. Pretty weird, huh. How'd you like to stick a finger in those mandibles? In all these years I've never seen one like it. Which helps make up for the fact that I swear there are fewer dragonflies this year.

Food Processing

2010-09-01T11:49:00.000-06:00

This morning we chopped up a bunch of sweet peppers with our Chop Wizard before putting them into pint tubs so we could freeze them. I was struck by the attractive blend of colors and thought, "That would make a nice blog post."

The Monsoon Continues

2010-08-25T07:05:00.000-06:00

Yesterday afternoon we got what was probably our heaviest rain since the Great Flood of '06 -- 1.83". This brings our August rainfall to 4.02". The total for the summer is 8.20 inches so far. As for the future, who knows? Last month the climate people were making noises about conditions being favorable for more rain later in the summer, and this seems to be what's happening. As a beekeeper, I'm happy about all the wildflower honey we're sure to bring in, but my back isn't so enthusiastic.

By way of comparison, the 08 monsoon, which was our all-time record, totalled 13.35", and the 06 monsoon, the notorious "monsoon from hell," totalled 11.90". So we've got a ways to go before we reach record-breaking levels, but the rains are likely to continue.

BTW the river once again didn't flood. These minor river floods are no big deal, except for turning our pasture into a soggy, muddy mess. But it's just as well that we don't get a mess if possible.

Blooming Yuccas

2010-08-24T05:30:00.000-06:00

Between Nutt and Lake Valley. I finally got around to cropping this one.

Blooming Catclaw

2010-08-23T19:11:00.000-06:00

Catclaw acacia, named for the curved thorns like a cat's claws. These thorns grab you and won't let you go. For this reason, catclaw is sometimes called "wait-a-minute bush."

A Touch of Earth Rape

2010-08-19T06:30:00.000-06:00

Here's what it now looks like in Foster Canyon, 1/2 mile from my home. I was none too pleased when a portable gravel-mining operation set up shop in the canyon about 6 months ago. (I have a problem with wild nature being destroyed for profit.) But I also knew that the canyon bottom would heal relatively quickly -- 100 years or so. Water does that -- eats away the high spots, fills in the low spots, and irrigates the new vegetation. In fact, this process has already begun: they built a berm next to the arroyo, which has already been breached. (Arroyos tend to run where they will.) The huge hole they scooped out is already filling up with new sediment, which is full of seeds, and thus the healing process begins.

What I don't understand is why they scalped the slope like that. For one, I'm surprised that a bulldozer can operate on such a steep slope. For another, I'm surprised the bulldozer operator took the risk of having his machine flip over on top of him. I guess he did it for the hell of it. Unfortunately, this slope will never heal -- it's too steep to ever be stable, and it will just erode forever. Maybe I'll walk over there and document the new gullies as they get bigger year by year.

Prickly Pears

2010-08-18T06:05:00.000-06:00

A random clump near our home.

Joe Bageant Spells It Out

2010-08-17T06:41:00.002-06:00

Lately I've been thinking about the utter uselessness of America's eco-liberal demographic, which I have a lot in common with. In the face of the breakdown of just about everything, they do... nothing. As consumers, the question has always been (and still remains) "Can I pay for it?" If so, or if they still have any credit remaining, then everything is just fine: that vacation in Europe, that home theater system, whatever. If not, then it looks like certain lifestyle modifications will be called for. But in either case, supposedly intelligent Americans seem incapable of realizing that their culture of take-it-for-granted prosperity is crumbling around them, never to return. Not only that, but the planet is rapidly losing its life-support capability. I've been watching this process for years, and it always amazes me that so many Americans can still consider themselves capable and confident when in actuality they are such a bunch of losers. Delusion runs deep among our species.

With that in mind, Joe Bageant's latest essay, "Understanding America's Class System," seems relevant. Here are some highlights:

For Americans, self-examination is not just rare, it is nonexistent, which is one source of our pathology. Missing from our national character is love of the common good, and our collective civic responsibility toward one another. But if we acknowledged collective responsibilities to the individual members of our society, then we would have to deal with the issue of class in this country. Better to medicate the entire nation. To do that, you need big government...

None of us like the idea of a ruling class. We did not from the very beginning. Yet, we no longer take effective action, because it has become impossible to identify what we might do to change anything. Instead, we react to events. That is what the ruling class wants, because if we are reactive, then outcomes can be controlled by controlling the stimuli. Keep 'em dazzled with foot work. So the stimuli keep coming at us faster than we can think. And they are presented as fate, or the result of "fast changing world events," or a banking collapse no one could have predicted -- things to which we must respond immediately. Most of us just give up. Which again, is what the ruling class wants us to do -- become a uniformly pliant mass...

And besides, the ruling class holds all the money, not to mention the media that informs the populace as to what is going on in our country. It controls our health care, our banking and retirement funds. It controls our education or lack of education, and it controls the price, quantity and quality of the food we eat. It controls the quality of the air we breathe, and soon, through pollution credits, even the price they will pay for that air. Most importantly, it holds concentrated legal and governmental authority, not to mention the machinery of both parties to grant itself more authority.

In the face of all this stands a very diverse public, which regardless of what some might claim behind a few beers, is not about to take up arms or use force to unseat the ruling class. When your life and your family are so utterly controlled by persons and forces that you cannot even see, you don't take such risks. That's not gutlessness. It's common sense.

After decades of hyper-militant consumerism and its attending alienation, and a national consciousness spun from pure capitalist bullshit and mirrors, it is testimony to the American people that they can still see to piss straight, much less recognize any sort of truth whatsoever. Yet, a portion of Americans are beginning to grasp the truth about what has happened to their country -- that it has been bought and paid for by an elite class in a nation that is supposed to be classless. They are beginning to realize that, when it comes to actually governing our country, we are powerless as individuals -- even members of the political class -- and serve the overall will of its true owners. It's been that way so long we've become conditioned to accept it as a natural state, something we cannot change, and do not even know how to question, because, like the atmosphere, it's just there.

The higher truth is something we recognize when we encounter it. We may not have the right words, or all the facts, but we can feel it in our bones. Intuition is the first glimmer in the distance. It goes unsaid that we always have the choice of not looking in truth's direction, or not looking for it at all. Seldom is it a pleasant sight, which is the chief sign that it is truth. Even the best of it arrives to the sound of ominous bells

Fried Eggs

2010-08-17T05:59:00.000-06:00

Prickly Poppies look like fried eggs.

Railroad Grade

2010-08-16T06:12:00.001-06:00

On the way home I took a picture I've been meaning to take for years -- the railroad grade south of Lake Valley. It's hard to imagine it now, but thousands of miners, families, and service personnel used to live in the Lake Valley-Hillsboro-Kingston area during the late 1800s. Little trace of them remains. Back then, you had two transportation choices: trains, and horse-drawn conveyances (wagons and stagecoaches). So there was an incentive for the monied interests to build a railroad spur between Nutt, on the main Santa Fe line, and Lake Valley. This spur, built in 1884, was used to transport people and supplies into the area, and silver ore out. People living in Hillsboro and Kingston still had to ride the stagecoach to Lake Valley, but it sure beat having to take it all the way to Nutt.

The mining boom didn't last long. Such booms never do -- the game plan is always to extract the minerals as quickly as possible, in order to make as much money as quickly as possible. Silver was devalued in1893, which ended the boom, and Lake Valley's "downtown" burned to the ground in 1895. But the railroad remained in service until the 1930s, at which time the rails were pulled up and moved elsewhere. The old railroad grade, unmaintained and slowly eroding, parallels the highway to Nutt, and can be easily traced if you know what to look for. It remains as mute testimony to the one and only time that industrial America sent its tentacles into this isolated area.

Mountain Wildflowers

2010-08-15T07:18:00.001-06:00

We drove down the west side of the Black Range to the Iron Creek Campground where we had a picnic amid the cool pines. There were dozens of kinds of wildflowers in the vicinity. Here are a couple:

Emory Pass

2010-08-13T02:17:00.000-06:00

After driving through a driving rain, we arrived at Emory Pass, where we enjoyed the view as usual. The haze is caused by billions of raindrops falling through the air. That's the banner cloud over the San Andres Mountains in the distance.

Sawtooth Ridge

2010-08-12T06:56:00.000-06:00

Between Hillsboro and Kingston. As you can see, we are now under the banner cloud.

Mulleins

2010-08-11T06:00:00.000-06:00

We saw this magnificent mullein patch south of Hillsboro. These plants are 6 feet tall.

Berrenda Creek

2010-08-10T06:21:00.000-06:00

Here we are at the ash tree next to Berrenda Creek. A couple of years ago, the creek was running bank-full and we had to turn around and try another way to continue. The paved road was blocked by high water as well, so we had to go all the way back to Hatch so we could take an alternate route to Hillsboro.

Laura and Sheila lounging in the roots of the ash tree.

Rivulet

2010-08-09T05:53:00.000-06:00

Descending the slope to Berrenda Creek, we crossed this little rivulet that runs only after heavy rains. After taking this picture, I turned around and saw a tourist looking at me:

There's that banner cloud again.

Favorite View

2010-08-08T05:52:00.001-06:00

Driving north past Lake Valley, we turn west onto the Berrenda Creek road, drive awhile, top a rise, and this is what we see. The banner cloud is still with us. Just to the left of the foreground peak on the right side of the picture, rain is starting to fall -- that's the gray smudge at the bottom of the cloud. We'll be in the middle of that rain before long.

In 1988, some of us from a local spiritualistic church fantasized about creating a spiritual retreat up here -- it's reasonably close to Las Cruces, and is very secluded. This was a totally unrealistic fantasy, of course, but this view has had a particular resonance for me ever since.

Green Desert

2010-08-07T05:50:00.000-06:00

The hills east of Nutt were as green as I've ever seen them. Usually the only green is the olive-drab of the creosote bushes higher on the hill. There's that banner cloud again.

Lake in the Desert

2010-08-06T06:11:00.001-06:00

On Wednesday Laura and I took the day off and took our favorite trip to the Black Range. I'll be posting pictures from this trip for the next week or so. This first picture shows a lake in the middle of the Uvas Valley that's usually a dry lake bed, or playa, except after heavy rains. They've obviously had some heavy rains in the Uvas Valley recently.

In the background is the Black Range. The dip in the middle of the Black Range is Emory Pass. We ended up about five miles on the other side of Emory Pass, amid the cool pines. Conditions in the lowlands: 100 degrees and dry.

The moisture conditions were perfect for the formation of a magnificent banner cloud over the Black Range. Once the monsoon gets going, a feedback loop is created in the mountains -- the mountain topography creates updrafts which in turn create a banner cloud, which rains on the mountains, which raises the humidity, which adds more moisture to the banner cloud, which creates even more rain, and so it goes. In a wet summer, it can rain every day in the mountains.

The Black Range banner cloud has a typically flat bottom. Beneath the bottom of the Black Range banner cloud, and immediately above the mountains, is yet another banner cloud. It doesn't show in this picture very well, but this other cloud is noticably pinker, meaning it is much farther away. (This is caused by "atmospheric reddening" -- the same reason that sunrises and sunsets are red.) I checked on the map and sure enough, this is the banner cloud over the Mogollon Mountains, in the Gila Wilderness, north of Silver City -- 100 miles from where this picture was taken.

You can see why they called me "Ranger G" back in the 80s.

Coming next: Green Desert.

Portulacas on the Porch

2010-08-05T05:47:00.000-06:00

Here's the entry porch to the Ark, festooned with festive hanging pots of portulacas. Last year I used gazanias for this application, but they had trouble withstanding the harsh exposure to the hot afternoon sun. So I figured that portulacas, with their fleshy leaves, would be less likely to dry out. This is another experiment that turned out well; it's always refreshing to encounter such a situation. At the bottom of the porch I've mounted little solar lights that were on sale for $1.50 each. No more stumbling up the stairs in the dark!

Shrooms

2010-08-04T06:11:00.001-06:00

Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of underground fungi. These fungi can cover many acres, and can be very long-lived -- one colony has an estimated age of 2400 years, and covers 2200 acres. My south pasture contains a fungus that produces mushrooms after heavy rains. Between July 22 and 29 we had 3.18" of rain, but even more importantly, we had at least .44 inch of rain on five of those eight days. This ensured that the soil stayed moist -- ideal conditions for mushroom growth. And grow they did -- there must be a hundred of them scattered throughout my pasture. The weather has now returned to its hot, dry default state -- ideal for the spores to blow away and spread to new locations. It's always good to know that somebody (and it's not humans) has it all figured out.

Midsummer Die-Off Syndrome

2010-08-03T13:40:00.000-06:00

Here we have two Jetsetter hybrid tomato plants. The one on the left is normal, but the one on the right decided to give up the ghost several days previously. From the first onset of symptoms to total decrepitude takes about a week. This syndrome, whatever it is, forces me to grow extra tomato plants to compensate for the ones that die prematurely.

Here's a pair of Early Girl hybrids. The one on the left is normal, and over 6 feet tall -- just the way I like it at this time of year. The one on the right has been suffering from the syndrome for about a month. It's still alive, but permanently stunted, and is producing tiny tomatoes that are too small to bother with. I suspect there are several types of "syndrome" at work here.

Many people have complained about how difficult it is to grow tomatoes these days. I remember in the early 90s we grew heroic quantities of tomatoes to sell at Farmer's Market. Maybe the occasional plant would crap out, but I don't remember such a high percentage of my plants dying.

One more problem: Ideally, tomato plants would remain healthy until frost. That way, you can pick the green tomatoes when frost is predicted, and ripen them indoors. One year I had tomatoes till the end of January. Every tomato plant that dies early is one that won't be providing green tomatoes at the end of growing season.

Compassion for Being Human

2010-07-30T06:56:00.000-06:00

My latest slogan is, "To be human is to fuck up." This seems appropriate as the planet dies around us. For all these generations, especially in America, we've been programmed with a rah-rah, can-do attitude which is bullshit, because humans inevitably fuck it up somewhere along the line. We WON'T rise to the occasion because we CAN'T rise to the occasion. We simply don't have the capacity to do so. And even if we tried, we would fuck it up. But we can still do our best to be good Buddhists or good Christians, and have compassion for our fellow sufferers. Because there's always more than enough suffering to go around.

Slouching Our Way to Antitopia -- Musings on New Buffalo Commune and the Counterculture

2010-07-29T06:16:00.000-06:00

This is my latest Grassroots Press column, which will be out any day now. I really want to retire from writing this stuff, but my word-processing program thinks otherwise. So I'm stuck with a double-bind, "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. In some perverse way I feel better when I speak out, even though I hate it when I speak out. And there is no reason to believe this this dilemma will ever resolve itself.
For this column I combined two blog posts from last year -- Sept. 21 and Oct. 1 -- and added some new material. I do like the relentless cadence of the last paragraph.

For quite some time I've been asking myself the question, "Why did the bright promise of the 60s turn out so terribly wrong?" Why was the back-to-the-land movement such a failure? As one of the few back-to-the-landers who stayed on the land, I’ve read several books on the subject to satisfy my curiosity. A couple of my favorites are Arthur Kopecky's New Buffalo: Journal of a Taos Commune, and its sequel, Leaving New Buffalo Commune, in which he ends up getting kicked out of the commune by an insurgent faction. It’s a sad tale, or it makes me sad at any rate. So much idealism, so much bright promise, so easily swept aside by the culture of exploitation that has been destroying the biosphere since long before we were born. We thought we had a better way. Some of us actually thought we could change things, or at least create a “counterculture” separate from the mainstream. Some of us invested our lives into this project. We really, really tried. It’s hard to imagine, from today’s complacent perspective, how hard some people worked to create a genuine alternative to the madness. But it was like trying to stop a bulldozer with a b-b. We were unable to conjure up a new culture when as children we had been programmed to do the exact opposite.

The sustainability "movement" has remained at entry level for the past 40+ years, while the condition of the planet has deteriorated at an ever-increasing rate. The whole "living in harmony with the Earth," back-to-the-land movement of the 60s and 70s never really caught on, not in a meaningful way. There are several reasons for this:

* Too much hard work. Post-World War 2 white people traditionally shunned physical labor, except in a symbolic sense, such as mowing the lawn or working out at the gym. In this regard, back-to-the-land seemed like a step backward to many people.

* Not enough money. Most people prefer having a "real job" with a regular paycheck with benefits. Such jobs used to be so plentiful that grubbing in the dirt seemed ridiculous in comparison.

* Too much isolation. The countryside might be beautiful, but you're surrounded by teabaggin' rednecks, and there's not enough entertainment and “culture.”

* Lack of social support. Working for an organization, you're part of the hive. The hive gives your life meaning and purpose, sort of. You have your place, you know your role, and you get paid for it. Isolated on the land, people tended to feel cast adrift as soon as the drugs wore off.

There are no doubt other factors at work, but those four cover a lot of ground. I'd say that most people who went back to the land lasted anywhere between 2 months and 2 years, with 6 months being typical. Life on the land simply proved too difficult for most of the people who tried it. There were too many hassles, and not enough rewards.

Additionally, the peace-and-love crowd drew predators and parasites, who found the peace-and-lovies easy pickings. There were some remarkably low-tone “hippies” prowling around back then. Parasites were more interested in “something for nothing” and were fairly harmless, but predators could really do some damage. That’s what ultimately happened to New Buffalo.

New Buffalo commune, located near Taos, New Mexico, started in 1967, when a rich kid bought some land free and clear, bought thousands of adobe bricks to build a compound they called the “Pueblo,” and bought basic farming equipment such as a tractor. Then he -- as they used to say -- split. By the time Kopecky showed up in 1971, the commune had undergone a complete turnover in membership, the taxes weren't being paid, the tractor had been sold. The commune was -- as they used to say -- totally untogether. Kopecky and a few of his friends stuck around, and over a period of several years gradually bootstrapped the commune to a state of serious productivity. The flame of idealism burned bright and hard for them, despite the setbacks and occasional drug-induced mayhem. As time went on they built irrigation ditches so they could irrigate their gardens, pastures, and fields of wheat and alfalfa. They bought goats and cows and started selling milk in Taos. They bought a tractor, other farm equipment, and a refrigerated truck to deliver their milk. They paid off their back taxes. They built greenhouses and solar collectors to help heat their pueblo during the harsh, high-altitude winters of northern New Mexico.

They were young, strong, and worked amazingly hard, but they never had enough money. What money they brought in was used to buy food, equipment and other necessities, and repairing their vehicles which were always breaking down. Gradually, they managed to accumulate dairy equipment and a small herd of dairy cattle. They developed a loyal clientele for their milk in Taos. In addition, they started producing serious quantities of vegetables, wheat, and hay. They wanted to start a new culture, living on the land, living in harmony with the Earth and each other. Kopecky obviously provided a lot of the focus and idealism that made all this possible.

One fact that stands out about New Buffalo is how hard they worked. They were working fools (at least, the ones who worked). They never had a consistent membership, except for Kopecky (from 1971-79) and a handful of others. His books are in journal form, written day-to-day, not overviews written after the fact. Kopecky, like all of us, didn't really know what was happening at the time. (I used to say, "You never know what's happening till afterwards." Which is to say, you need time to consolidate the data, analyze the information, and draw some conclusions. In the moment, we're all just winging it.)

New Buffalo always attracted parasites – people who came to hang out, get high, and eat free food. But it was the predators who destroyed it. There were only a handful of them, but that was all it took. The predators had lived at New Buffalo in the past, and deeply resented Kopecky, whom they considered to be on a power trip. He was everything they weren’t. The downfall of New Buffalo is like something out of Ayn Rand – pathetic losers bringing down the brightest of lights. The predators used their unearned power to cast out Kopecky and, in the process, destroy the commune.

The trouble with unearned power is, a newcomer or any unqualified person can move into a situation and be considered on equal footing with somebody who actually knows what’s happening. The oldtimer has earned his power through on-the-job experience, whereas the newcomer has much less to offer at the beginning. Yet, in hippiedom they were considered equal. The hippies had a free-and-easy attitude about power. They were trying to create a non-hierarchical paradigm in which power is shared, not imposed from the top of the hierarchy. Unfortunately this proved to be a perfect setup for predators, who could move right in and seize as much power as they were capable of, very quickly. With hierarchical power, it would be more difficult for a newcomer to do this.

As it turned out, Kopecky didn’t have any power beyond the force of his personality, coupled with his vision and his vast amount of experience. It wasn’t “his” commune, after all. Ultimately, the predators made life so miserable for him (such as, taking pot shots at him while he worked in the fields) that he and his girlfriend finally left, bitter and discouraged. This was in 1979, after 8 years of gradual progress. New Buffalo was on the verge of getting a grant to build a solar-powered, Grade A dairy barn, so that they could finally sell certified milk. The decline of New Buffalo was inevitable after Kopecky left: the cattle, dairy equipment, tractor, and anything not tied down were sold, the taxes were no longer paid, and ultimately what was left of New Buffalo reverted back to the rich guy who made it possible in the first place.

NEW BUFFALO COMMUNE * REST IN PEACE * 1967-1985

In addition to being a focused and methodical hard worker, Kopecky was almost delusional in his idealism. He reminds me of my own experience. After I moved to this piece of land along the Rio Grande in 1973, after three years of homesteading in the Ozarks, I always assumed that “something” was going to happen. (It never did.) By the early 80s it was obvious even to me that the whole back-to-the-land thing was devolving, not evolving. But it wasn’t until the early 90s that I finally realized that Ecotopia was never going to happen. Quite the contrary, actually. How about calling our brave new world Antitopia? That’s the world we’re living in now, and we’ve seen nothing yet. Things are already becoming very interesting, very quickly, and soon even the unaware will be forced to take notice.

Americans have always believed in “freedom,” which translates, mostly, into freedom to travel, and freedom to shop. The hippies refined and distilled this concept into what could be called “Perfect Freedom,” or “freedom without obligations.” The thing about hippies and communards: they were free spirits. Free spirits come and go like the wind. They will never be tied down, which is to say, they can never be depended on. Thus: Joe is a critical member of the milking team. Those cows have got to be milked twice a day. The commune really needs him. But Joe decides, on a whim, to leave the commune, or take a long vacation. Bye-bye, Joe! Too bad, milking team! Stuff like that happened all the time at New Buffalo. People came and went like the wind. It was impossible to get any continuity.

Kopecky kept asking, "Where are all the quality people who will surely be drawn to our quality scene?" He always hoped to create a superior vibe that would encourage people to stay, but he never got more than a handful or two that could really be counted on. New Buffalo never had any trouble attracting parasites and losers. But hardworking, consistent people you could depend on? Pretty rare, and they seldom stayed for long. Looking back, the dynamics are obvious: the more intelligent ones quickly said "This sucks!" and went back to school so they could make something of themselves.

Contrasted against the easygoing hippie ethic was the mainstream paradigm of selfishness, which still rules: Get a good education, get a good job, and make lots of money, all for the benefit of #1. This is far and away the path of least resistance, so it’s not surprising that this is the paradigm that dominated. Even though this paradigm is now breaking down, the damage has been done. Americans embraced the illusion of “no limits” rather than the reality of a finite planet. The sustainable path was not taken when it needed to be. Critical decades were lost, never to be recovered. Now, we are like flies trapped in amber, hoping that somehow our positive words and thoughts will save us. Virtually our every act contributes to the destruction of our planet in some way. And as the Arctic melts, and the Gulf of Mexico dies, we already know how Antitopia is going to turn out.

Thought for Today

2010-07-28T12:48:00.000-06:00

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach."

-- Aldous Huxley

Water Harvesting Update

2010-07-25T20:12:00.003-06:00

We've had 2.07" of rain so far this summer -- .67" at the end of June, and 1.40" so far this month. It's been a dry monsoon so far. Fortunately, I've managed to get all my water tanks optimized for maximum water collection. This picture shows my original 1000-gallon tank, and how water from two separate roofs feeds into it. I just added the right-hand gutter a couple of weeks ago. On the left gutter, you can see that I'm starting to add gutter guards to keep leaves out of the gutter. Eventually I'll have all my gutters guarded. The pipe on the right handles any overflow. In an earlier post I showed how it's possible to use grade-school math to figure out how much water each tank collects for every inch of rain. This is a great way to keep tabs on the water tank situation as the monsoon goes along. This particular tank collects 158 gallons of water for every inch of rain.

This is the 1000-gallon tank I installed last winter behind the tool shed. Two separate roofs, at two levels, means I have two gutters feeding into the tank. This one collects 186 gallons per inch of rain.

This is the 1100-gallon tank that collects water from the ark roof. I installed it last winter. It stores 239 gallons per inch of rain. The downspout looks flimsy, but the ends are screwed into place which makes it surprisingly strong.

At the present time I have four tanks totalling 3300 gallons. These four tanks collect a total of 706 gallons for every inch of rain, which means that so far this monsoon I've collected over 1460 gallons of rainwater. This sounds like a lot, but is actually minimal for irrigation purposes. Next winter I plan to install another 1000-gallon tank that will store the water from four roofs. This will add considerably to my water-storing capability. In fact this will be my "go-to" tank during the summer, since it should fill up after any decent rain.

I live right on the Rio Grande, so I have access to unlimited water as long as the river flows. Unfortunately the groundwater is salty and alkaline, and not suitable for anything other than emergency irrigation, so I'm more dependent on the river than I'd like to be. I fully expect that eventually (maybe even next winter, which is predicted to be dry) the snowpack will fail and the river won't flow for the entire summer. The fact that this hasn't happened in the 37 years I've lived here doesn't mean it won't happen in the future. So I'm motivated to harvest as much rainwater as I possibly can.

MONDAY MORNING UPDATE:
Heavy rain last night: the first region-wide rain of the summer so far -- from Las Cruces north to the Sierra County line. We had 1.61", which added over 1130 gallons to my water collection. Both of our arroyos ran, and the river ran bank-full but didn't quite flood. I would call this one a heavy rain, but nothing unusual.

UPDATE #2:
According to the Las Cruces Sun-News, this was a record-breaking 2-day rain -- 3.34 inches at NMSU. What's exciting for me is the rainfall total at Rasaaf Hills west of Mesilla, where I have 8 beehives -- 3.59 inches. The sandy soil in this area becomes covered with yellow carpets of Limoncillo (an excellent honey plant) after heavy rains. Now, for maybe an inch of rain a week to help develop the crop...

Fill 'Er Up!

2010-07-19T05:59:00.000-06:00

The old Conoco station at Lake Valley, NM. It must have been a long time ago when this station was active, because Lake Valley has been a ghost town for many decades.

Black-Eyed Susans

2010-07-18T14:37:00.001-06:00

Or is it Brown-eyed Susans? Rudbeckia at any rate. I've had a clump of these along the steps for many years. They do well here, which I find strongly in their favor. That, and the fact that I like daisies. Last year I had the inspiration to dig up some crowns and transplant them along the path to the tool shed, outhouse, and points north. A year later, this is what our path now looks like. They obviously appreciate the drip irrigation system I installed this spring.

Here's a closeup. This is one project that turned out very well.

They Said It So I Don’t Have To

2010-07-13T15:31:00.001-06:00

Anybody still reading this blog might have noticed that I’ve stopped writing essays. After posting “Brave New World” in December, and after my spiritual experiences this past winter, there doesn’t seem to be anything left to say. In one sense, we are so screwed. In another sense, it's way beyond that, and it’s really not so bad, it just is. But still, despite my insights, my nattering chattering word processor keeps chattering away, even though I’m not sharing the output in public like I once did.

Today I ran across an article on culturechange.org, “Struggling to be Fully Alive: Reports on Coping with Anguish.” A few weeks ago Robert Jensen put out a call asking people to share with him how they are coping with the ongoing breakdown of just about everything. He received 300 replies, and shared a number of them in his article. These are my favorites; I could have written most of them myself:

"My personal ambition seems to decrease in proportion to the increase in world suffering. I think that's part of my emotional reaction to crisis. I don't think I am fully alive. I'm not depressed, just weirdly diminished."

"[W]hat I see as the reality of our situation -- ecologically, politically, economically, and culturally -- is that we are in the last days of our species, and I just don't know what to do with that. The emotions are much too powerful, the grief, the sense of doom -- how does one deal with the real possibility of the extinction of not just millions of species, but of one's own species?"

"I feel hopeless. I feel sad. I feel amused at the absurdity of it all. I feel depressed. I feel enraged. I feel guilty and I feel trapped. Basically the only reason why I'm still alive is because there are enough amazing people and things in my life to keep me going, to keep me fighting for what matters. I'm not even sure how to fight yet, but I know that I want to."

"I have been writing for a year and a half on a lot of things as it pertains to humanity's lack of awareness and the potential to reconnect before we destroy the earth and each other. People get angry at me for it and call me 'dark' and 'negative' and 'sinful' telling me to instead move to the 'light,' 'positive' and 'love.' Whatever."

"It is considered feminine and naive to care about trees or animals. ... In addition, it is also considered weak and feminine to empathize or display a proper emotion. We are becoming a nihilistic culture which is creating citizens who are numb to their emotions. This is doing us all a disservice. We are missing out on our bodily wisdom and becoming less and less in tune with our earth."

"I have thought for a long time that the human species, notwithstanding its endless self-flattery, really is not very intelligent. One of the signs of its stupidity is, in fact, the very way that it equates intelligence with technological prowess."

"[T]he only way that the terrible catastrophes on the way could have been softened would have been for everyone on the planet to have dropped business as usual 10 or 20 years ago, and to have started retooling all of society while there was still a reasonable surplus of high EROEI (energy return on energy investment) fossil fuel left to power the *energetically* costly conversion process of re-engineering energy production, housing, cities, suburbs, farming, fishing, and transport. That didn't happen. And having lived through the period, it would have been completely impossible to motivate in the first or third world. But just as important, it is *even more* unlikely that this will begin to happen now. This is because growing energy scarcity will cut into our flexibility as people scramble to prop up floundering systems."

"[W]e in the U.S. are essentially living behind a military barricade. I heard a quote recently that 'collapse means having the same lifestyle as the people who grow your coffee.' I really, really liked that."

"Americans today are living with a profound and apparently irreconcilable disparity between what we say we are, and what we actually are. Between the promise of democracy and the reality of a crumbling empire. The result of this schism, I believe, is the national equivalent of a disassociated personality."

"I spend a lot of time in my own head going back and forth over theories, philosophies, etc. Pretty much going through a process once a month of discarding everything I thought I knew and re-learning it. While this may be a good thing in the future, it does not feel good now. Sometimes it makes me feel like I am alone and lost and that I can't find any truth in anything because I have so many different voices telling me what is right and wrong. Yet, I can never stop going back and looking at what's happening to this real, physical, lovely and loving planet and feel outrage, sorrow, and confusion and why this culture is so insane."

"Being the parent of a young child right now is a mixed blessing: He's my reason for waking up every morning and doing whatever it takes to keep up some semblance of normalcy, but it also frightens and worries me deeply when I think about his future."

"I would like to mourn but have not been able to let my guard down. I could understand 9/11, but now I am witnessing the destruction of the planet and I don't understand the magnitude of what that means. I feel on edge. I feel like I am waiting for the other shoe to drop."

"Recently several of our visionary thinkers have moved from the illusion that 'we have 10 years to turn this around.' They now say clearly that 'we cannot stop this momentum.' It takes courage and faith to speak so plainly. What can we do in the face of this truth? We can sit face to face and find the ways, often beyond words, to explore the reality that we are all refugees, swimming into a future that looks so different from the present. We can find pockets of community where we can whisper our deepest fears about the world. We can remain committed to describing the present with exceptional truth. We can cultivate a practice that enables us to witness suffering with hearts and minds open and with our faces turned toward one another."

"I'm about to celebrate my 70th birthday. I live in a rural intentional community, close to land that feeds us and supports us. I've lived long enough now to be very aware of how different the world has become, how the cycles of nature are off kilter, how the seasons and the climate have shifted. My garden tells me that food doesn't grow in quite the same patterns, and we either get weeks of rain or weeks of heat and drought. This is the second year in a row that our apple trees do not have apples on them. But most people get their food in grocery stores where the apples still appear, and food still arrives, in season and out, from all over the world. This will soon end, and people won't understand why. They don't see the trouble in the land as I and my friends do. I grieve daily as I look on this altered world. My grandchildren are young adults who think their lives will continue as they have been. Who will tell them? They can't hear me. They, and many others, will have to see the changes for themselves, as I have. I can't imagine that anything else will convince them. My grief for the world, and for them, is compounded by this feeling of helplessness because there is no way we can have the collective action you speak of when the 'collective' is still in denial."

Tapeworm Architecture -- Archeological Evidence of Cultural Parasitism

2010-07-11T07:33:00.002-06:00

These picturesque ruins looming in the distance are what's left of the mission church at Abo, NM, started in 1622 and abandoned 50 years later.

I don't have the time or inclination to write a proper essay on this subject right now, though I might at a later date. In a nutshell: when the Spanish conquered New Mexico, starting in 1598, they subjugated the Pueblo Indians. The Indians essentially became slaves to the Spanish. The Indians were required to pay tribute to their new overlords -- both goods and labor. In other words, the Spanish were parasites upon the Indians. This huge church, built with Indian labor, is an example of Spanish cultural parasitism. The church took 30 years to build, and during this time the Indians were required to neglect their true livelihoods while they worked on this monument to Spanish power.

Building something this grandiose would have been inconceivable to the Indians. They had better things to do. But this is what the Spanish forced the Indians to do "for the glory of God."

This view out a church window shows, in the far distance, barely-visible grassy mounds with bushes growing on them. These are the unexcavated ruins of where the Indians lived -- modest stone structures, used only at night and during bad weather, since they lived most of their lives outdoors.

This particular site was occupied by the Indians as early as 1150 A.D. The first mission church was started in 1622. Thus the Indians had lived successfully in this spot for 472 years, through good times and bad, feast and famine, times of plenty and times of drought, before the Spanish took over.

The Spanish bled the Pueblos dry. They were merciless. This church was finally completed in 1659, and the pueblo was abandoned between 1672-78. In other words, after nearly 500 years of successful Indian habitation, the Spanish managed to destroy the native culture in a short 50 years.

This is a fascinating story that has been told before, sort of, but never in the blunt way I'm capable of. Maybe I'll write an article for Grassroots Press about it, because the problem of cultural parasitism persists to this day. In fact, our entire planet is being destroyed by it.

Adobe Church Surrounded by a Graveyard

2010-07-05T16:45:00.000-06:00

Punta de Agua, NM. One-stop shopping: get baptized, married and buried all at one convenient location. Note the massive buttresses which strengthen the corners.

Huge Cottonwood

2010-06-24T17:35:00.000-06:00

This multi-trunked cottonwood is growing near the ruins at Quarai, NM. More about these ruins soon.

Another Mural

2010-06-23T06:30:00.000-06:00

Mountainair, NM

Choo choo

2010-06-20T20:51:00.000-06:00

Mountainair, NM. The protruding smoke is a nice touch.

Another Fixer-Upper

2010-06-19T22:14:00.000-06:00

Near Truth of Consequences, NM. A little bit of repair work and you'd really have yourself something.

Broccoli

2010-06-18T17:55:00.000-06:00

Laura displays a choice specimen.

Chow down!

Thought for Today

2010-06-11T10:06:00.000-06:00

And don’t kid yourselves, it’s not about BP, one single oil company, and it’s not about Obama or Cameron, about single politicians. There's no politician left in our Western hemisphere who has not been pre-empted by the system he or she voluntarily chooses to function in, and who doesn't voluntarily participate in perpetuating the hologram their voters long for in order to continue their feeling of comfort, so they can sit in their oversized homes and watch pictures of dying birds on oversized plasma TV's.

And please don’t be too eager to proclaim you're different, or better than that. That’s nothing but the easy way out.

Remember, you’re not watching real life with real people, you’re watching a 24/7 theater play that has no other reason to be than to provide you with what it knows beforehand you will respond positively to. Remember that, and then look at the dying pelicans.

Ilargi
The Automatic Earth

Petunias

2010-06-09T05:42:00.002-06:00

Photo by Laura.

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

2010-05-20T20:24:00.000-06:00

Sometime in the early 90s I spotted a tractor tire at a dump near Hatch. It thought it would make a splendid planter. So with great effort we loaded the tire into our truck, drove it home, rolled it into the pasture, and filled it with multiple wheelbarrow loads of dirt. Then I cut off a limb from our big cottonwood and kept it watered for a couple of years until its root system was established. Little did I suspect that using a tractor tire as a planter wasn't such a good idea for such a big tree.

Cottonwoods have large buttress roots that extend for a great distance in all directions just under the surface. These roots provide the necessary stability to withstand high winds. The tractor tire, as it turned out, strangled normal root development. We weren't aware of any problems until a month ago, when we noticed the tree leaning at a strange angle. I knew that one strong wind would knock it down. And sure enough, that's exactly what happened.

Here's the mess we were confronted with, totally blocking access to the dock. It's amazing how massive a large tree is when it's lying horizontally and needs to be cut up with a chainsaw. The beavers helped out, chewing off the bark and hauling off some of the branches. Laura is holding a chunk of wood the beavers cut off, showing the typical pointed beaver cut.

That pile of firewood on the right side is one of our old globe willows, mostly dead but still standing, that was reduced to kindling by the falling cottonwood. Green cottonwood is very heavy, and the kinetic energy of the falling tree was enormous. Fortunately, I had been planning to cut down the globe willow anyway.

The tree just barely missed our dock.

A couple of weeks later we put Neil to work cutting the fallen tree into firewood. This was his first major chainsaw job since he was 10 years old. We can now walk to the dock. We are considering leaving most of the tree in a horizontal position, sort of as a monument to itself.

Ladybugs Humping

2010-04-19T21:09:00.000-06:00

Photo by Laura.

Reality vs. Belief

2010-04-06T21:38:00.000-06:00

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

-- Philip K. Dick

Old Adobe

2010-03-31T07:25:00.000-06:00

Snow Road, west of Mesilla, NM.

Very few old adobe ruins like this still exist. Most of them have been bulldozed back into the dirt from which they came. Notice the lack of windows. Glass was expensive back then, and windows were considered a luxury.

It's unusual to have the opportunity to enter an old house like this, so we availed ourselves of it. This shot shows the shadows of the vigas and latillas on the back wall, which is on the verge of collapse.

Here's a well-preserved section of ceiling showing the large vigas, and the smaller latillas. It looks like they laid yucca leaves on top of the latillas. On top of that they would have put dirt. This would have worked well to shed brief summer showers, but the roof probably would have leaked during heavy winter rains, which can last for a day or more. Waterproof membranes (like sheets of plastic) were unvailable back then.

The interior wall was covered with mud plaster and whitewashed. The house is slowly eroding. This is the pattern the eroding mud makes as it runs down the wall in rainy weather.

Eventually this house will be torn down as a "safety hazard," which it no doubt is. Another piece of history will disappear. But all is not lost: there are doubtless other old adobes like this one which were maintained over the years and are still willing to share their secrets with anyone who cares to ask.

What To Do With An Old Stump

2010-03-28T10:37:00.000-06:00

Turn it into an eagle, bear, etc. A mailbox sticking out of the middle never hurts, either.

Old Farmhouse

2010-03-24T06:11:00.000-06:00

Calle del Norte, west of Mesilla, NM. The steel casement windows on this abandoned relic date it to whenever windows of this type were most popular. I leave it to architectural historians to determine the actual time period -- probably post-World War 2. These windows were very common at one time in southern New Mexico houses. You opened and closed them with a little crank. Their main disadvantage -- they invariably leaked cold air during the winter, which is why they were ultimately replaced by aluminum sliders.

Crumble Rock Demo

2010-03-21T06:20:00.000-06:00

Laura crumbled a rock to show how it's done. She used her hands, but Nature uses repeated frost/thaw cycles. The effect is the same:

Thought for Today

2010-03-17T21:37:00.000-06:00

The human mind has no reverse. It doesn't even have a steering wheel.

-- Ilargi

The Automatic Earth

Chinaberries

2010-03-17T05:41:00.000-06:00

Late winter is when the Chinaberry trees are conspicuous.

Dona Ana Apartments

2010-03-14T05:55:00.000-06:00

Dona Ana, NM. Classic urban adobe look -- right next to the street, barely enough room for a sidewalk, no landscaping. Life was basic back then. The big deal was having protection from the Indians, and a roof that didn't leak too much. Dona Ana is the oldest non-Indian settlement in southern NM -- older than Las Cruces.

Welcome Co-op Shoppers!

2010-03-11T06:22:00.001-07:00

There might be some Co-opers checking out this blog after reading the profile about Laura and me in the latest Co-op newsletter. Writer Randy Harris described this blog as "an unusual mix of photography, fiction, spirituality, social commentary, micro-farming, science, history and more. It's informative, insightful and fun to follow."

With that kind of buildup, I feel the need to explain that I'm in a writing hiatus right now. Something is building up, no doubt about it. Sooner or later I'll be posting something interesting to read. In the meantime there are plenty of archives to keep a reader (or photo viewer) busy, if one is so inclined. (I always recommend the "diving in at random" technique.) I'll continue posting the photographs that Laura and I take, since we enjoy taking pictures of whatever catches our eye.

Speaking about Co-op shopping, what do you think about the new bee in the "honey corner?" I'm getting a real buzz out of it!

Adobe Fixer-Upper

2010-03-10T01:16:00.001-07:00

Dona Ana, NM. They don't make them like this anymore. There are fewer of these old adobes all the time.

Thought for Today

2010-03-08T13:04:00.000-07:00

Everything we know... seems to indicate that human beings happily go along with the program -- whatever the program is -- until all of a sudden they can't, and then they don't.

-- James Howard Kunstler

Giant Cactus

2010-03-08T00:27:00.000-07:00

Near Dona Ana, NM

Plum Blossoms

2010-03-07T06:35:00.000-07:00

This Purple-Leafed Plum was in full bloom at Farmer's Market yesterday.

Finches

2010-03-03T02:12:00.000-07:00

Our finch feeder has been very popular with the finches this winter.

Rustic Porch

2010-02-28T03:30:00.000-07:00

Dona Ana, NM. An old adobe house, newly remodeled. Nice use of funky posts holding up the porch roof.

Crumble Rock

2010-02-25T09:01:00.000-07:00

This rock on our sandbar started the winter as a regular rock. After repeated freezing and thawing cycles, it has been reduced to this pile of rubble. The river will soon sweep all this away. I had no idea that the rock-to-gravel-to-dirt process happened so rapidly.

Three Arches

2010-02-24T06:37:00.000-07:00

A nice shady porch in East Las Cruces.

Adobe Apartments

2010-02-21T06:57:00.001-07:00

East Las Cruces. This is typical of the "urban adobe look" -- a long row of doors and windows right on the sidewalk.

Capilla de Don Silvestro

2010-02-18T07:12:00.000-07:00

We went to the chapel northwest of Hatch a few weeks ago, and as you can see, it's still there. This angle gives a good view of the tire retaining wall. That's a LOT of tires, and a LOT of dirt they were filled with. Which to me implies a LOT of devotion. I love the non-mainstream cultural esthetic in which functionality is the only standard of beauty.

The Gangbang Queen of Howell County, Missouri

2010-02-15T05:58:00.001-07:00

In 1968 I became a minister in the Universal Life Church. This was when the ULC head honcho, Kirby Hensley, was ordaining entire stadiums full of people at one fell swoop just because he could, and I didn’t want to be left behind. So I mailed in my application, and before long I received my official minister card which entitled me to the full benefits of ministerhood, which included marrying, burying, and baptizing. I was set to go. With a joint or two in my pocket, and my minister card in my wallet, I was ready for anything.

I only performed one official act in my guise as ULC minister. That would be in 1971, when I baptized the Gangbang Queen of Howell County, Missouri in the name of drugs.

Judy and I moved to our first homestead in the Missouri Ozarks, two miles north of the Arkansas state line, in September 1970. The local ne’er-do-wells were intrigued to have some hippies in the neighborhood, and quickly made me part of their gang. It helped that I had a little stash with me, of course. But even as the winter wore on, and nobody had any dope left, and we were reduced to drinking sweet wine product to get high, they kept stopping by and picking me up for their little adventures. Judy willingly let me go, evidently figuring that going out on “runs” with “the boys” helped keep cabin fever under control.

The weeks kept rolling by, and before long it was summer once again. One Friday evening the Ronnie and Roger Hunt stopped by with Sharon, gangbang queen of Howell County. I had already heard about her. She was famous for putting out. She would fuck almost anybody. They brought her into our trailer and she sat there on the sofa, closed in upon herself, an unhappy look on her face. Looking back, I would say that she had probably suffered sexual abuse from an early age. I felt sorry for her, but what could I do but watch the karmic drama unfold?

After a few minutes Ronnie excused himself and took Sharon out to one of our sheds for a quick fuck. While they were gone, Roger told me a story about him and Sharon. He had just finished fucking Sharon and she said, “I want to kill myself.” He replied, “That’s OK, I’m through with you now.” Such casual callousness. So utterly unconscious, and so typical.

After about ten minutes Ronnie and Sharon returned. Sharon looked even more downcast than usual. She obviously didn’t enjoy being the gangbang queen of Howell County. Then they drove away.

As was typical during their wild weekends, they stopped back in from time to time, so I got to see occasional frames from their movie. The next time I saw them, on Saturday morning, they been up all night. They had picked up Floyd, an older guy (35 or so), sort of doughy and dweeby, who had the hots for Sharon. But she wouldn’t do Floyd. Even Sharon had her limits. So Floyd was just along for the ride, but not the one he really wanted.

I saw them again on Saturday evening. Ronnie (alpha male of the group) asked me if I was interested in Sharon’s affections. I declined. For one thing, Sharon didn’t turn me on. Not my type. I preferred spiritual-type chicks who you’ve got to get to know first. And more importantly, I believed in my marriage vow. Always did. In my book, a vow is a vow. To break my marriage vow would be to lack integrity. Integrity in that regard is one thing I always maintained, for better or worse.

Finally Sunday afternoon rolled around, and so did our carload of gangbangers. They were still at it, though everybody was obviously getting tired. (Speed will take you only so far.) They were headed for the local swimming hole at a nearby creek, and asked me if I wanted to come along. I said sure, why not?

We piled into the car and I found myself in the backseat, sitting next to Sharon. We didn’t have anything to say to each other. Driving to the swimming hole took about ten minutes and during that time we didn’t say a word. Really, what conversational gambits were there? “Having a nice weekend?” “Met any interesting people lately?” “What’s your Mom think about your hobby?” Sometimes the sheer physicality of a situation is so overwhelming, words are superfluous.

When we pulled up at the swimming hole I had an inspiration. An impulse is more like it. I turned to Sharon and said, “Wanna get baptized? I’m a minister in the Universal Life Church.”

She said, “OK.” We were not going to have any profound conversations, she and I.

Everybody thought that a baptism was a fabulous idea, and they lined up on the bank to watch while Sharon and I waded into the water with all our clothes on. This was going to be just like a regular church baptism: fully clothed, full immersion.

We slowly waded over to a spot where the water was about chest-deep. I had seen baptisms before, and had even been baptized myself, so I knew just how to do it. I stood her in front of me so that she was facing off to the side. I put my right hand behind her back.

“What would you like to be baptized in the name of?” I asked her. It seemed only logical that if you were going to all the trouble to get baptized, you might as well be baptized in the name of something.

“Drugs,” she replied.

Okey-dokey then.

Raising my left hand in benediction, I said, “I baptize thee in the name of drugs.” Now the ritual had reached its moment of truth. Enough talk, now it’s time for action. The credo here is: Just Do It. So I covered her nose and mouth with my left hand and tipped her back. Total immersion. Just long enough to totally cover her entire body. Then I brought her back.

Baptism of the total immersion sort is a ritual of surrender, death, and resurrection. You have to trust the baptizer. The baptizer can drown you if he wants to. You’re laying there helpless on your back, underwater, and all he has to do is hold you down for a minute or two while you drown. But no, the baptizer doesn’t drown you; he literally brings you back to life. Into a new, sanctified, life. A life formally devoted to, in Sharon’s case, drugs.

Sharon didn’t enjoy being baptized. She emerged into her newly-sanctified life choking and sputtering, looking like a drowned rat, more miserable than ever.

The boys thought that was pretty cool, having a baptism performed for them like that. We stood around and talked for awhile while Sharon and I dried off. Then we drove on back to my place. There was nothing to say; there never had been. I never saw Sharon again, though I heard about her from time to time.

If there’s anybody who died young, it was probably Sharon. It would have been a mercy, though getting there would have been the hard part.

Spiritual Humanism

2010-02-14T08:37:00.000-07:00

In an article I haven’t posted yet, I mentioned “spiritual” humanism as a worthy alternative to the “secular” humanism that dominates the nonreligious aspects of today’s global empire.

First, let’s look at some short definitions of secular humanism:

* The doctrine emphasizing a person's capacity for self-realization through reason; rejects religion and the supernatural.

* A humanist philosophy that espouses reason, ethics, and justice, and specifically rejects the supernatural and religious dogma as the basis of morality and decision-making.

* A philosophy based on weighing and testing beliefs whether they be religious, political or social. Using critical reasoning and logic instead of faith and mysticism to help solve our problems.

There’s a lot here I agree with: reason, weighing and testing beliefs, critical reasoning, rejection of religious dogma and faith. Anybody who knows me knows that “Faith” not my middle name. I have always been a skeptic.

Now, about secular humanism’s rejection of mysticism and “the supernatural.” I have always had a scientific mind. I used to have a credo: “Keep yer eyes open and the wax outta yer ears.” Which means: keep an open mind, keep your senses open, and be as clear an observer as possible. Then when you observe a phenomenon (even a nonverifiable phenomenon), you will be in the best possible position to draw the logical conclusions (if any) from your observations.

I would define the “supernatural” as being aspects of the universe that are not commonly observed or experienced by humans, due to the overwhelming domination by our survival software. I call the consciousness engendered by this software “throwing rocks at rabbits mode.” Humans who didn’t have this survival software, or enough of it, tended to starve or be eaten by predators, and their DNA tended to die off. So it’s no wonder that humans are such a thick lot when it comes to the supernatural.

One possible definition of mysticism is that it’s an often-heroic attempt by humans to shake off the domination of their survival software so that they may, in William Blake’s memorable phrase, “see the universe as it really is: infinite.”

Actually, mysticism is the very opposite of woo-woo. Mysticism is the attempt to come back to reality from the survival software’s dream state. Of course, the experience of reality as filtered through the survival software is “real,” it’s just that it lacks a certain richness, a certain quality, that the poet William Wordsworth described as “the sense sublime of something greater interfused.”

I’ve never considered myself a secular humanist. Secular humanism leaves out too much. I found the scientific world way too sterile for my taste and left it in 1971.

Our planet today is dominated by two main paradigms:

* Religions of various sorts which depend on “received truths” from the past, and the faith of the followers to believe that these “truths” come from a “higher source” and are therefore to be believed and revered.

* Secular humanism, in which nothing is sacred.

What a choice! No wonder our planet is being destroyed!

Last week it seemed to me that spiritual humanism would be just the right combination of spirituality and humanism. So I made myself a clergyman in the Church of Spiritual Humanism. I did this as a joke of course, and to keep up with my son, who is not only a Universal Life Church minister, but he paid extra and had himself made a Prophet as well. Even though I’ve been a ULC minister myself since 1968, I threw away my wallet card long ago, and discovered that the ULC suffered a discontinuity when the founder died, so there is no record of my ministerhood, except for the events engraved upon my heart.

So I am now an “Ordained Clergy Person,” or “O.C.P.” within the Church of Spiritual Humanism. (You can just call me “Reverend Father.”) Of course, I don’t believe that humans can really ordain each other. (We do tend to overestimate ourselves.) The only real ordination comes from God, and I haven’t received this yet. (I’m just a writer with an entertaining style.)

So... after being ordained into the Church of Spiritual Humanism, I decided to read the fine print:

Does Spiritual Humanism include belief in God or other supernatural beings?

The idea of God as a supernatural force, or entity, is a matter of faith and cannot be verified by scientific method. Until verifiable evidence that stands up to scientific method can be presented to prove the existence of the supernatural, we cannot adopt the idea of God as an entity into our religious system. We feel that belief in God is not a necessary component to having spiritual experiences.

The part that hung me up was this:

Until verifiable evidence that stands up to scientific method can be presented to prove the existence of the supernatural...

In my personal reality, the scientific method (which means making accurate observations, and then drawing logical conclusions (if any can indeed be drawn) from these observations) works just as well for personal experiences, which are by definition nonverifiable. Personal experiences are the only evidence we have of the supernatural, unless you want to throw in miracles, and sometimes I think it would be beneficial, would shake things up a little, if we had a million or two miracle workers walking the highways, healing the sick, raising the dead, whatever seemed appropriate at the time.

It’s funny – after not using the “G” word for over 20 years, I’m now starting to use it again. “God” is the most precise word in my lexicon for certain contexts. But that’s just me. My own personal experiences will convince only me, and can never convince a skeptic. By insisting on “verifiable evidence... to prove the existence of the supernatural,” spiritual humanism has shown itself to be secular humanism in another guise. The “spiritual” in spiritual humanism is just another concept, and concepts can never feed the soul. All that really counts to the experiencer, at the soul level, is the lived experience of Spirit. That’s why it’s called Spirituality.

It looks like I’ll never be using my spiritual humanist credential after all, not that I ever would have, except as a private family joke with my son. But to continue the joke, I have now registered as a Universal Life Church minister, even though my son will always outrank me within the “modern” ULC. But I bet he’ll never match my one and only “official” act as a ULC Minister: the time I baptized the gangbang queen of Howell County, Missouri.

Next: The Gangbang Queen of Howell County.

Half-Baked Brain Farts

2010-02-11T07:23:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I’m reluctant to release these half-baked brain farts, but then again, that’s what makes this blog so interesting. “What’s he going to say this time?”

I have noticed that Adyashanti seems to have a dismissive attitude about non-awakened consciousness and thinking in general. This is no doubt appropriate for one of his level of spiritual attainment. But I’m just a hobby scientist, and am still fascinated by that kind of stuff in my modestly unawakened way.

Rather than blithely dismissing them as “illusion,” I tend to see thoughts and the “false sense of self” as phenomena every bit as “real” as the secretions of the liver, and worthy of the same level of investigation. How fascinating that synapse activity can generate such a complicated range of effects that can persist over a lifetime!

I believe that the “ego,” or “false sense of self,” is the output function of a set of automatic programs that have their root in neuronal activity within the brain. There’s nothing new there. What’s new is my brain fart (I used to call them “insights” but am slightly more modest now) that these programs can overlap at unpredictable times. Which makes the situation far more complicated. Rather than discrete entities outputting one at a time, or several at a time, it’s more like a constantly shimmering mass. Which can be beautiful to behold, but very confusing to the experiencer.

For a long time it has seemed to me that the “phenomenal world,” or “3-D reality,” is but the tip of the iceberg. Science does a splendid job of learning about the tip, but it’s the rest of the iceberg that allows the tip to operate as it does.

Consider DNA. It has always seemed to me that the DNA molecule cannot possibly contain enough information to encode all the genetic effects that are obviously passed from generation to generation. For example, different breeds of dogs not only look different, they behave differently. It has always seemed to me that it’s asking a lot of a mere molecule to transmit something as subtle as behavior across the generations.

And consider the brain/mind system. The brain is amazingly complicated as it is. Add the mind into the mix, and the level of complexity is enormous. I have always considered that the brain, rather than being a “freestanding unit,” is more of a “receiver” (to use a crude analogy) tuned in to the “rest of the iceberg.” This is the only way I can see the required complexity making sense.

Science has now come to understand that our Universe is almost entirely composed of dark matter and dark energy which cannot be directly observed by our senses or our instruments. (Only 4.6% of our universe is “ordinary matter.”) This is not to say that dark matter/energy are the “rest of the iceberg” that I’ve been talking about. Who really knows what the “rest of the iceberg” really is? But one thing’s for sure: even science is now telling us that there’s far more to our universe than we ever suspected.

Which is what the mystics have been telling us all along.

Purple House

2010-02-10T06:03:00.000-07:00

Hatch, NM. Every neighborhood needs a purple house.

The RV Guy

2010-02-07T06:53:00.000-07:00

Hatch, NM

"Whew, that's some hot damm chile!"

2010-02-03T05:46:00.000-07:00

Chile stand in Hatch, NM -- "Chile capital of the world."

Magical Mystery Cure

2010-01-31T09:18:00.001-07:00

When I published my “New Direction” post on Friday, I thought it would be a good long while until I posted again. Well, what do I know? Here we are, two days later, and I’m already two posts behind! So let’s get cracking here.

Anybody who has been following my blog might remember statements like “Giving it up” and “Dropping back out.” Intriguing concepts to be sure, but what do they refer to? Sometimes I find myself knowing things without knowing why. I see through the glass darkly at first. Only later do the details emerge. This is one of those times when I’m finally starting to understand what those statements I made weeks ago really meant.

Like many Americans, I have had it with this country. The situation has become so extreme that I am reluctant to articulate all the things that have gone wrong, even though I haven’t been shy about speaking out in the recent past. I have concluded that speaking or writing about negative situations contaminates my own vibrational field with negativity. (This is perhaps what is warned about by the Biblical injunction, “Resist not evil.”) This doesn’t mean that I’m choosing denial. I’m fully aware of what’s going on out there. It’s just that constant complaining, if not followed by action, is worse than useless.

I have decided to take action for myself. I have decided to TUNE OUT, and in fact already have. I’ve already noticed benefits in my own life. For years I haven’t watched TV, listened to the radio, or listened to very much canned music, so I’ve already been semi-tuned-out. But I’ve been an Internet junkie since I got my first computer in 1996, spending several hours a day logging onto various websites, under the excuse of “keeping myself informed.” But like I said, I’m totally fed up with just about everything the cultural mainstream has to offer these days, so my old habits are losing their allure. I think the last straw was when I realized that I didn’t need to know what Digby thought of Obama’s State of the Union Speech. Something fundamental shifted for me. I realized that I didn’t need to participate as a media consumer anymore, and I went cold turkey from the Internet except for checking the weather and snowpack. I haven’t missed being “informed” at all; in fact I find it liberating. Next I’ll be canceling Netflix.

But doesn’t this mean I’m giving up? Shouldn’t a citizen keep himself informed about what’s happening? In my case, at least, not at all. I already understand the trajectory of this country very well, and I doubt that it will be changing anytime soon. Whenever I choose to re-engage, I can be quickly brought up to speed. (And if I do re-engage, maybe I will have learned something useful in the meantime.) TUNING OUT means I’ve eliminated a huge distraction, a huge energy drain, from my life. I now have extra hours every day to engage with my wife, play music, or sit in my rocking chair thinking about nothing at all... which greatly enhances my spirituality and creativity. The benefits are spectacular so far. It’s a magical mystery cure for the overstimulated brain/mind system.

We all know that America is ripe for something. Like a supersaturated solution, just one seed crystal can cause a massive crystallization event. I think a critical mass of Americans are becoming desperate to try something different. People feel frustrated and helpless. Our present situation is becoming increasingly unsatisfactory. How can we become free once again? It’s hard to become free from the economic system and our joke of a political system, but it’s relatively easy to escape the tendrils of the constant media barrage we’re exposed to. (As McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message,” which I take to mean that a message of control is inherent within the electronic media themselves, and by our position as passive media consumers.) Tuning out frees us from this control, frees our time, energy, minds and spirits, and is totally risk-free. (We can always tune back in if tuning out proves to be unsatisfactory.)

Just Google “media fast” for any number of fine articles about this subject. Many people have tried it, have experienced positive benefits, and are recommending it to others. I think we’ve reached a point in this country where people are finally willing to actively disengage from the mainstream Matrix. This could catch on. I’m doing my little bit here to stoke the flame of freedom. There will be others.

Tuning out creates unprecedented time and energy for live conversation, live music, live culture, live creativity (is there any other kind?). We have unprecedented opportunities to create creative excitement for ourselves. And creative excitement can create what I call “the extra buzz,” which has more implications than is commonly supposed. It’s about time for this blog to become supernatural again. (That didn’t take long, did it?)

Cemetery

2010-01-29T06:55:00.000-07:00

East Las Cruces. I like the juxtaposition of the tombstones with the electrical substation.

Pink House

2010-01-28T07:10:00.000-07:00

Brightly-colored houses are so unAmerican. That's why I love them so much.

East Las Cruces.

Mural

2010-01-27T07:04:00.002-07:00

East Las Cruces.

Snowflake Porch

2010-01-26T07:18:00.000-07:00

East Las Cruces.

Thought for Today

2010-01-25T07:15:00.000-07:00

"The fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but for our bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is seriously challenged, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic facade exists, liberals can engage in an empty moral posturing that requires little sacrifice or commitment. They can be the self-appointed scolds of the Democratic Party, acting as if they are part of the debate and feel vindicated by their cries of protest."

-- Chris Hedges

This, by the way, is why I have finally lost interest in writing about politics, even as a spectator sport. In fact, I am rapidly losing interest in writing altogether.

Blue Mortar Joints

2010-01-25T00:36:00.000-07:00

An interesting accent to your rockwork. East Las Cruces.

Adobe Fixer-Upper

2010-01-24T06:06:00.000-07:00

East Las Cruces.

Sanchez House

2010-01-23T06:28:00.000-07:00

East Las Cruces. Lots of personal touches -- bubble lights, coyote, eagle.

St. Francis

2010-01-22T07:52:00.000-07:00

At least it looks like St. Francis, cut from a sheet of metal and standing in the Carlos Sanchez Memorial in East Las Cruces. Barely visible in the background: a wire flamingo.

Shrine

2010-01-21T06:42:00.000-07:00

This is part of the Carlos Sanchez Memorial. East Las Cruces is a notoriously rough neighborhood, so it is expedient to protect one's shrine with a fence and a locked gate.

In Memorium

2010-01-20T06:23:00.000-07:00

East Las Cruces. This corner lot has been turned into a memorial for Carlos Sanchez. You don't find stuff like this in other parts of town. In fact, you don't find it elsewhere in East Las Cruces, either.

If Your Mailbox Falls Over...

2010-01-19T04:59:00.000-07:00

... you can easily fix it.

East Las Cruces.

Cemetery

2010-01-18T00:12:00.000-07:00

East Las Cruces.

Fuchsia House

2010-01-17T08:29:00.000-07:00

East Las Cruces. Brightly-colored houses are a Latino tradition. Unfortunately, there are a lot fewer of these paint jobs than there used to be.

Avatar: The Wasteland and The Holy Grail

2010-01-17T08:21:00.000-07:00

This is my February-March Grassroots Press column:

James Cameron’s blockbuster movie Avatar deals with an important theme currently playing itself out right here on Earth: planetary destruction. Will the culture of destruction win, or not? Right now it looks like there’s little to stop the destroyers. The pro-Earth forces seem too few, too compromised, and too weak to make the necessary difference. But no worries, let’s just take $300,000,000 and create a movie with the desired happy ending!

The year is 2154, and the Earthlings have pretty well destroyed their own planet. So they’ve invaded Pandora, a paradise located in a nearby star system, for some necessary resource extraction. The Earthlings are white, corporate Americans with a militaristic bent. In this movie, at least, it looks like the Republicans took over our planet and destroyed what was left of it. With rare exceptions, the Earthlings of 2154 are a bunch of assholes. In fact, the corporate boss looks and acts remarkably like George W. Bush.

Pandora is inhabited by a race of 9-foot-tall, blue humanoids with tails who live in harmony with their planet. The Pandorans are trying to defend their home from the invading Americans, who have overwhelming firepower and a no-nonsense culture of total destruction. The ensuing conflict is what we would expect in a movie: cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, might vs. right. But Cameron turns convention on its head by making the Pandorans the good guys, and the Americans the bad guys. What a change of pace to see the Americans shipped home in humiliating defeat! Cameron has wisely (from a commercial viewpoint) tapped into the global zeitgeist of fear and frustration with the out-of-control American Empire. In movieland at least, America gets its long-awaited comeuppance.

The movie gives Cameron the opportunity to contrast two opposing cultures: the sterile, exploitative, high-tech American corporate culture, and the magical, harmony-oriented world of the Pandorans. Like Star Wars, Avatar is lifted right from the pages of Joseph Campbell. In this movie, as in real life, the Americans have lost the Holy Grail, the spiritual connection with reality which Campbell calls the “infinite depths... of the living waters of the inexhaustible source,” and consequently live in a spiritual and physical Wasteland of their own creation. The Pandorans, on the other hand, have never lost the Grail in the first place.

We are already all-too-familiar with the American Wasteland, since we live in the middle of it. Americans, and by extension the entire industrialized world, are projecting their spiritual desolation onto the planet, and in so doing, laying waste to it. The Wasteland culture reduces life to a routine whenever possible. Everything is ordinary; nothing is sacred. The wealthy set the agenda, and technocrats run everything. Indigenous cultures are destroyed. It’s all about money and exploitation; anything not for sale is valueless. As Campbell says, the Wasteland is “... where there is no poet’s eye to see, no adventure to be lived, where all is set for all and forever: Utopia! It is the land where poets languish and priestly spirits thrive, whose task it is only to repeat, enforce, and elucidate cliches... There is no time, no place, no permission – let alone encouragement – for experience.” In other words, life is always tightly programmed within the Wasteland culture, and the vital essence of life – which requires long periods of unstructured time in which to grow -- has been squeezed right out of it.

The critical mass of Americans don’t feel spiritually desolated. They don’t even realize they’re living in a Wasteland. They’ve adapted to it, and in so doing, have lost more than they realize. The Grail is a strictly optional experience – powerful, yet exceedingly subtle. Experiencing the Grail within the Wasteland culture is like trying to hear a bird singing in a tree next to a busy freeway – the bird is singing, but all you hear is traffic. (I don’t want to minimize the amazing creativity and spirituality to be found in our country. But when we look at our behavior on the national level – war, torture, environmental destruction, financial exploitation, on and on – we must conclude that something is terribly wrong with this nation.)

What’s most fascinating about the movie is the Pandoran culture Cameron created. The Pandorans are in full contact with the Grail, which I would define as the lived experience of connection with the transcendental ground of reality. The Pandorans are TUNED IN: to their emotions, to their own animal nature and spiritual nature (animal and spirit are one and the same), to the spirit of the planet that gave them birth. The Pandoran culture Cameron created is loosely based on Native American spirituality (in which everything is sacred), and as such is perhaps the first exposure many young people have ever had to a culture with a spiritual orientation to life. This is a good thing: I imagine that many a Quest has been activated within the soul of many a young person from watching Avatar. This movie might spark questions like: What is life all about? Does my pre-programmed religion or non-religion really satisfy my spiritual needs? Where are my people? Is destruction the only possible human outcome? Hopefully, questions like this help to break the tyranny of the take-it-all-for-granted mindset of the Wasteland. Even a Hollywood caricature of nature-based spirituality is better than nothing.

One positive aspect of the movie is the way in which Pandoran women – and specifically the heroine, Neytiri – are portrayed. They are the equals of men in every way; they come across as powerful, competent, physical, spiritual, sexual. Being products of Cameron’s imagination, they transcend the “mere human.” They are archetypes more than accurate representations of actual living creatures. For all practical purposes, they are goddesses. Neytiri and her cohorts are excellent role models for young women living on the cusp of a collapsing Empire. They (along with people of all sexes) will need some major inner resources as chaos fills our planet.

Cameron has tapped into the hunger for harmony and magic that many people feel within the Wasteland culture. After all, the Grail (or whatever you want to call it) is closer to us than our own breathing. Even if we’ve been distracted out of noticing it, it’s always there. So it stands to reason that a certain percentage of Americans feel dissatisfied with the spiritually primitive nature of American mainstream culture: “Where is the culture that amplifies and supports my own inner experience?” they might well ask. Mainstream America has made remarkably little progress since the heady days of the 60s and 70s, when many of us believed that surely we could create some sort of alternative to the madness. Now, 40 years later, it seems obvious that things are significantly worse. The wealthy now control all the levers of national power, the rabble are thoroughly trivialized, life is more tightly programmed than ever, and the biosphere is on the verge of collapse.

But we still have our inner experience, as free as ever. What can we ever hope to accomplish with such evanescence? As with every generation, today’s young people will have plenty of opportunities to figure this out for themselves, or not. They’re inheriting a stark new world, in which the traditional explanations will be revealed to be the prattle they’ve been all along.

In the final analysis, spirituality is not about outcomes. It’s about awakening from the hypnotism of the altered state of consciousness we take as “normal,” and reclaiming the birthright which has been ours all along. Looking at it that way, all Avatar can ever hope to be is just another movie. It’s very entertaining, to be sure, and will no doubt cause at least a few young people to seek the real thing in terms of nature-based spirituality. This is probably more than Cameron ever intended... which, along with being a blockbuster success, is not a bad outcome for any filmmaker.

Nice Detailing

2010-01-16T05:19:00.002-07:00

East Las Cruces.

Nature is Messy

2010-01-15T05:53:00.000-07:00

In this photo, our lumberjack gestures towards the mess he is about to attack. It's not really chaos, because there's definitely a pattern to this inpenetrable tangle of twigs. Nature is more complex than we can imagine. Nature is definitely not American.

Americans like to keep things simple, as befits our simple-mindedness. The epitome of American landscaping is the lawn -- two-dimensional, one species, one color. Even better would be to pave it over. You don't have to mow a parking lot. Get rid of life altogether, now we're talking!

I can't imagine a greater tragedy than turning a rainforest -- which is messiness personified -- into a cow pasture. Eliminate the third dimension, and you've eliminated billions of years of evolutionary magic. But there are burgers to be fried, and money to be made. Onward into the 21st Century!

Blue Posts

2010-01-15T05:33:00.000-07:00

East Las Cruces.

Cactus Hedge

2010-01-14T01:10:00.000-07:00

East Las Cruces. This neighborhood is over 150 years old, so there is a lot of mature landscaping. These cacti are more than 6 feet tall.

It's That Time of Year

2010-01-13T01:22:00.000-07:00

"Wintertime, when the livin' is freezy" is the best time to cut firewood with minimal sweat. We still have plenty of firewood left from 07 through 09, so this year I have the modest goal of cutting down a large saltcedar clump that's a bit too close to the Ark. Cutting it down will reduce the fire hazard, open up a nice view of North Hill, and give us a big pile of firewood for next winter.

This is one of the messiest saltcedar clumps I've ever seen. This picture was taken after I had spent over an hour cutting away at it, and you still can't see what's there. The trunks are covered with a multi-year accumulation of saltcedar leaves -- the bottom layer is so old, it's turning into humus. Additionally, everything up to a height of four feet is soaked with mud from the 06 flood. And the clump shown in this photo is only the beginning -- there's even more closer to the river.

Thought for Today

2010-01-13T01:03:00.000-07:00

"Have a Coke, be my friend." Simple, isn't it?

On the wall of Sunshine Grocery, East Las Cruces.

Two Doors

2010-01-12T01:20:00.000-07:00

After neglecting it for years, I have finally turned my attention to East Las Cruces, which is the Mother Lode for the funky architecture and folk art I love so much. I plan to make an expedition into that realm before long, hopefully on a cloudy day without the harsh lighting and shadows we usually have.

Purple Cabbage

2010-01-11T07:03:00.000-07:00

While slicing up a cabbage the other day, I realized it would make a great pattern picture.