One can always depend upon Tamarack Song to have a different – dare I say hollistic? – view of things. Over at Nature Skills, he has an article on Mosquito Bite Prevention. Some of his more interesting advise is thus:
Don't smell funny and they won't bite you. Avoid perfumes, "smell like you belong". (Eat garlic to mask your breath.)
Don't look like a clown and they won't be attracted to you. Natural, earth hue colors help you to blend in.
Bask on oil. Mosquitos don't like to get their wings greasy.
I find it interesting that we admire Tolkien so much, but put today’s eco-activists in jail.
My political opinions lean more and more to anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs). There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power stations.
The following excerpt is from an article concerning Wilderness Walkabouts, which I’ll be participating in in a couple weeks.
I once heard Tom Brown Jr. proclaim that, "If you don't have any place to be or a time to be there you will never be lost." This is the essence of the art of a Walkabout. You are searching, but not necessarily for anything in particular. You are following your heart and the mysteries that the world leaves for you, be they elk tracks, the top of an unknown peak or a "blank" spot on the map. Your goal is to discover beauty and blend into the landscape. Along the way you sample the wild edible plants, gather your water from the creek or spring, shelter yourself under an ancient tree. When it rains you get wet and when the sun beats down you are hot.
Whether it's one day or a week, by yourself or in a small group, on a good wilderness walkabout you are constantly faced with the unknown, both in the world around you and within. Where does this canyon go? Where will I sleep tonight? How will it be to not see anyone else for an entire day? What sort of tracks are these? Will I be able to start a fire in the pouring rain? You have left behind the known comforts of family, school, home, work, four walls and electricity in exchange for a chance to interact with Mystery for a time. The world around you becomes a metaphor for your internal landscape as you face your fear of a dark starless night and the unknown future that waits for you when you return.
Robert Young Pelton’s The Wold’s Most Dangerous Places is worthy of being added to the “books that will make you a better human being” list. Different from RYP’s autobiography, DP is adrenaline-filled and hard-hitting. That I read its 1057 pages in little over a week is probably the highest praise I can give.
The bulk of DP acts as a guidebook to the countries profiled, but there are other sections included. When people asked me what I was reading, I found it great fun to read off a couple chapter titles to them: Bribes, Drugs, Getting Arrested, Guns, Kidnapping, Land Mines, and Mercenaries are just some of the more interesting ones.
This 5th edition, published in 2003, can at times feel extremely dated. For instance, the Iraq chapter is pre invasion of Baghdad. The Mercenaries chapter doesn’t mention Blackwater, I think one of the most prominent merc groups, but I guess few knew of them before Fallujah. Pre Ariel Sharon coma, pre Hamas victory. The U.S. chapter even has profiles of Powell and Ashcroft (and, of course, the profile of Cheney mentions nothing of his marksmanship).
The political analysis and history is single-minded and the humor dark, but that’s to be expected from someone who has experienced all that RYP and his contributors have. At times his more compassionate side comes through, making it evident that he’s still part human under that large, bushy mustache.
Despite its shortcomings, DP includes detailed information on locations that you’ll never hear about it in school or the news. Where journalists fear for their lives, RYP is admired and respected by rebel groups, dictators, and special forces groups alike.
Hard-core readers of DP... seek the stone-heavy truth of experience and the wisdom-inducing perspective of intense emotional experience, tempered by the cool intellectual framework of research.
Welcome to DP: No walls, no barriers, no bull.
I went to a presentation by Forest Ethics about the Inland Temperate Rainforest (the only one in the world) today. It’s a pretty amazing region, in some ways like the Amazon, but is being destroyed by clearcutting. Forest Ethics puts pressure on logging companies by annoying people like Victoria’s Secret (who put out 1,000,000 million catalogs a day) and hardware stores to stop doing business with loggers who operate in the region.
For those interested in training and discussion in more direct action, and aren’t afraid of the FBI, Forest Defenders is hosting a Cascadia Action Camp this weekend and Wild Earth is a 4 day conference happening this June in B.C.
Northern Thailand is flooding.
You know what the funny part is? It’s not even the rainy season yet. The rainy season starts in June/July, exactly when I’ll be kicking around the North.
I suppose that’s one way to put my fancy moisture-wicking clothing to the test.
You’ll notice things are looking a bit different around here. I’ve rewritten the whole thing, from the ground up, using only vim. I’m still fiddling with things here and there, but figured it was mostly decent looking enough to move it over.
As time allows, I’ll move all the other pages over to this template. Hopefully this next weekend.
I’m not sure I like the text wrapping around the sidebar. That may change.
Last night was my first time NightWalking since the Redwoods. It seemed much darker than it ever was in California and I was afraid I’d fall off the ridge I was walking on, but, as always, my feet found the path.
I just got back from hearing Ward Churchill (who’s a registered Republican) speak. He was amazing. The lecture wasn’t really on anything in particular – he went all over the place. He doesn’t use notes, powerpoint, any of that, but you can really feel the passion in him. He shakes, cries, laughs, everything.
He also invited one his friends from the audience, a member of the Black Panther party, to come up and speak for a bit. Among a few other things, he described the morning he was walking around the sand-bagged Seattle Panther office with a riot shotgun and got the call that Fred Hampton had been assassinated. Not something you hear everyday…
Churchill is going to be speaking again tomorrow morning on a panel. If I wake up early enough (doubtful), I’ll go.
...lighten up. It's only death. We all get to meet him (or her?) at some point. Why not get to know death a little earlier, buy him a drink, slap him on the back, and fake him out? There are things worse than death, such as a full-compliance tax audit by a dyslexic IRS agent or maybe even discount prostate surgery in Monrovia. It helps to look at the big picture when understanding just what might kill you and what won't. It is the baby boomers' slow descent into gray hair, brand-name drugs, reading glasses, and a general sense of not quite being as fast as they used to be that drives this whole survival thing. Relax: You're gonna die. Enjoy life, don't fear it.
Yesterday, for my Anthropology class, I read a short excerpt from Mark Plotkin‘s book Medicine Quest, meant as a brief introduction to entheogen use in indigenous cultures. In it, the author gives a small introduction to Ayahuasca and documents a trip he took in the Amazon. I was happy that this was assigned reading – that information like this is getting out to people other than us crazies who pursue it on our own – but the professor’s lecture on entheogens today reversed my mood into depression. At times she just annoyed me, attributing Aldous Huxley quotes to Allan Watts, mispronouncing Ayahuasca, etc. But at other times, her misrepresentation of facts (and including opiates in the same lecture) was insulting.
People should be required, at the bare minimum, to at least read a well-informed book on the subject before they’re allowed to lecture on it. It makes me shutter to think that today’s lecture may have been someone’s first introduction to entheogens.
On the other hand, I never thought I’d be given a college lecture with photos provided by Erowid.
For American Indians, the important explanations of the world are spiritual ones. In their view, there is a deeper reality than the here-and-now. The real essence or wisdom occurs when one finally gives up trying to explain events in terms of "logic" and "reality". Many confusing aspects of existence can better be explained by actions of a multiplicity of spirits. Instead of a concept of a single god, there is an awareness of "that which we do not understand." In Lakota religion, for example, the term Wakan Tanka is often translated as "god." But a more proper translation, according to the medicine people who taught me, is "The Great Mystery."
While rationality can explain much, there are limits to human capabilities of understanding. The English language is structured to account for cause and effect. For example, English speakers say, "It is raining," with the implication that there is a cause "it" that leads to rain. Many Indian languages, on the other hand, merely note what is most accurately translated as "raining" as an observable fact. Such an approach brings a freedom to stop worrying about causes of things, and merely to relax and accept that our human insights can go only so far. By not taking ourselves too seriously, or over inflating human importance, we can get beyond the logical world.
The emphasis of American Indian religions, then, is on the spiritual nature of all things. To understand the physical world, one must appreciate the underlying spiritual essence. Then one can begin to see that the physical is only a faint shadow, a partial reflection, of a supernatural and extrarational world. By the Indian view, everything that exists is spiritual. Every object -- plants, rocks, water, air, the moon, animals, humans, the earth itself -- has a spirit. The spirit of one thing (including a human) is not superior to the spirit of any other. Such a view promotes a sophisticated ecological awareness of the place that humans have in the larger environment. The function of religion is not to try to condemn or to change what exists, but to accept the realities of the world and to appreciate their contributions to life. Everything that exists has a purpose.
For the past couple weeks I’ve been listening to Didgeridoo Dreaming: Aboriginal Spiritual Music. It’s an excellent two-disc set of didgeridoo, clapping sticks, and chanting. I think it’s much more conductive to inducing trance than any modern electronic music I’ve heard, even Shpongle.
When we look at life and death from a broader perspective, then dyhing is just like changing our clothes! When this body becomes old and useless, we die and take on a new body, which is fresh, healthy and full of engery! This need not be so bad!
the Dalai Lama
Pippin: I didn't think it would end this way.
Gandalf: End? No, it doesn't end here. Death is just another path . . . one which we must all take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all change to silver glans...
Gandalf: ...And then you see it.
Pippin: What, Gandalf? See what?
Gandalf: White shores . . . and beyond. A far green country, under a swift sunrise.
Pippin: Well, that isn't so bad.
Gandalf: [Softly:] No... No it isn't.
Check out Lynn White’s 1967 essay The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis. In it, she blames the shift from Paganism to Christianity for our current state of affairs, but, interestingly, states that Christianity will also be our solution. She also draws an distinction between science and technology, which I had never really thought about before.
Tonight I went to a showing of Alone Across Australia, a film about Jon Muir (no, not that one) and Seraphine, his dog, who walked across the continent of Australia. Seraphine was killed by a dingo somewhere around day 110, but Jon made it in 128 days. 4 months later he walked to the North Pole.