on feeding the winterfire...

"Man takes root at his feet, and at best he is no more than a potted plant in his house or carriage till he has established communication with the soil by the loving and magnetic touch of his soles to it. Then the tie of association is born; then spring those invisible fibres and rootlets through which character comes to smack of the soil, and which make a man kindred to the spot of earth he inhabits."

 

-John Burroughs, from The Exhilarations of the Road, 1875 

a lot of thought, a lot of intention, a lot of action & a lot of iteration-- all go in to the simple expressions of life.  each moment affords us opportunity to stop,think,act,review--to be present, alert, responsive. sheesh.

life is clearly an adventure, an epic quest, a heartbreaking & inspiring tragicomedy-- a complex web of experience and emotion where it's somehow possible to simultaneously feel incredible excitement, love, & hope and crushing loss-- the despair that marks an age of social alienation, destruction of our wild habitat & depletion of our resource base. it's kind of just smirking while observing the never-ending dance of entropy & life - the bubbling joy of establishing connections and the crippling ripples of unraveling webs.

maybe it's just the gemini in me, but that dichotomous mental state has set the stage for a year of powerful experiences. fingers crossed. wood thoroughly knocked.

i'd like to offer up to you, dear reader, a snapshot in the development of my relationship with life, the universe and everything.  i've spent many years cultivating skills, information and passion... developing a steadily growing drive to actively face the facts of our collective experience on this hurtling ball of space rock.  at times i've been overwhelmed, paralyzed alternately with fear or freedom.  there is an immense task laid before conscientious citizens of Big Mama.  all the evidence points to a fundamental shift in the way we operate-- a descent back to sanity... a drift homewards... an anchoring of self to place through community cooperation.

to go ahead and cut the bullshit: the climate is shifting, who cares why? we must adapt.  the petrol giants are already scrambling to produce liquid fuels with an ever diminishing return on the energy extended to extract and process.  finite resources can be useful ... for a limited time. let's not behave too much like junkies, yea?

i look forward to a cultural shift towards enduring, regenerative, local, scalable solutions.  and i'm heartened by the fact that it's happening already in so many places.

...to fuel the spring

so once again i'm gassing up the truck (and, trust me, i'm smirkin about it), loaded up this time with books'n'broadfork, cloth'n'clutter, and i'm a-gonna be flyin up that highway, kipple ripplin in the wind, on my way back to Taproot Farm --for a job, ostensibly, in a place where work kinda just feels like living well--- to further develop and implement a permaculture patch, generally help out farm-wise, learn to be kind to myself when i try to sit still (maybe it's meditation, but who can tell? certainly not me), find & foster friends & family, and participate in Sustainable Potomac Highlands,  a local Transition initiative i had the privilege of learning more about on my last trip to the farm.  

so with that, i'll leave you for a time.  But i'll check in, and perhaps shift this lil bloggy-poo back towards more practical matters: hows & whys, food production, natural building, permaculture, etc. maybe even a lil alternative economics once i learn s'more about it.

till then, i'll be around, tweaking a design for a juglone polyculture and studying Yeoman's keyline plan and this topographic map here. if you're interested in some cyber-idea-bouncing send me a msg, e-mail, or leave a comment.

get dirty this year.