voyages of the bloody, snake, chariot

'Elephant Revival' Magical Reality

2011-11-18T10:16:00.000-08:00

> Perhaps the beginning of ‘Elephant Revival’ is in November, 1985. That
> was when 18-months-old, Bonnie May Paine, of Tahlequah, OK. began
> whistling songs with grace, and prodigious musical charm.
>
> Perhaps the beginning is spring of 2002 when Bonnie and Daniel
> Rodriguez, (D-ro) spent a night on a rooftop over Norwich, CT, making
> music until sun-rise.
>
> Perhaps it was at the bluegrass festival in Keystone, CO in August of
> 2003 when Bridget and Dango met while dancing in the rain.
>
> Perhaps it was several weeks later when Bridget, Dango, and Bonnie
> found each other at the Winfield Music Festival and had a rapture of
> music that lasted until the sun rose.
>
> It was then that Bridget and Bonnie realized they were "soul sisters"
> destined to fight over the same clothes in thrift shops across the
> United States of America.
>
> Perhaps the beginning is in early November 2003 when Daniel Rodriguez,
> (D-Ro), was bound from Mystic, CT. to Los Angeles, CA. In Kansas he
> made the strange, mysterious and momentous decision to take a left
> turn and go to Tahlequah instead, to continue to make
> music with Bonnie.
>
> Perhaps it occurred at Webs World of Fun in Ponca City, OK. in late
> November of 2003 when Dango and Bonnie were both booked and Dango and
> D-Ro met for the first time throwing horseshoes on the back lawn.
>
> Perhaps the beginning of Elephant Revival is in February 2004 when
> Bridget Law visited Bonnie in Tahlequah and they slept in the same bed
> and Bonnie heard the “crazy” musical jam playing in Bridget’s dream.
>
> Perhaps the beginning is in May 2005 when Dango Rose was busking in
> front of the elephant cage at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo.
>
> The cage contained a couple that had been paired for 16-years. For
> unknown reasons the male was traded to the Salt Lake City Zoo. The
> male died from separation in the back of a big truck traveling on I-80
> through Wyoming. Shortly thereafter the female was dead in the
> elephant cage in Chicago.
>
> Perhaps the beginning is the summer of 2006 when Sage Cook
> encountered and jammed out with Bridget, D-Ro and Bonnie at the Loving
> Oven Kitchen at the Rainbow Nationals outside of Steamboat Springs,
> CO. on July 4.
>
> Then, at the Winfield Music Festival the following September, Sage
> musically engaged Dango. Dango then invited Sage to Tahlequah to
> record songs.
>
> The recording session led to Sage, Bonnie, D-Ro, and Dango opening up
> for ‘The Drew Emmitt Band at Tahlequah’s Dream Theater as ‘Dr. Paine.’
>
> And it was, after these events of the summer of 2006, that all the
> other members of what became ‘Elephant Revival’ understood that Sage
> was the magical, missing, last piece, the keystone, that made the band
> complete.
>
> And yet, there is no doubt the first official performance of the full
> band, Bonnie, D-Ro, Sage, Bridget and Dango as ‘The Elephant Revival
> Concept’ took place in October 2006 at the Gold Hill Inn in Gold Hill,
> CO.
>
> The question of the true origins of the band mirrors the quantum
> physics and magical-reality questions of whether there ever is
> tangible cause and effect, or coincidence in the quantum and magical
> universe. And the quantum and magical universe is from where
> ‘Elephant Revival’ comes.
>
> Other undeniable facts of the band’s origin is that most all
> initiating events transpired in the magical-reality of Tahlequah.
>
> Tahlequah is where the Trail-of-Tears, which started in the Southern
> Appalachians, ended in the 1830s. Tahlequah is the new capital (1838)
> of the Cherokee Nation. Bonnie is tribal Cherokee.
>
> And it is often noted that the reality of Tahlequah is not of the
> usual post-modern, waking consciousness. The city signs are written
> in English and Cherokee. Shamans, not M.D.’s, are the respected
> healers. Many believe the place is an important vortex where
> synchronicity routinely happens.
>
> And the place in Tahlequah where many of the band’s initiating events
> happened is the Spring Creek.
>
> Spring Creek is an Eden-like place.
>
> During the sweltering Oklahoma summers very cold, clear, healing
> waters bubble forth from the earth. The creek abounds with crawdads,
> bass, ancient arrowheads and other native artifacts.
>
> There is no lack of serpents in the garden. There are venomous copper
> heads and water moccasins, and benign king snakes.
>
> A long-held tradition is the gathering of Bonnie’s family and
> unofficial tribe, at the creek, every summer.
>
> The gathering celebrates the birthday of Michael Paine (Bonnie’s dad)
> every July 7. And the gathering sustains and supports musicians.
>
> During the summer of 2005, at the Spring Creek, band-members received
> ideas and inspiration for songs. They wrote germinal, definitive
> songs. They first performed songs at the creek. They had all-night
> jam sessions in which the water sounds and night sounds of the creek
> were important parts of the jam. Jugs of wine were drunk and many
> truths became known.
>
> If there is one place where the unique, definitive sound of the band
> emerged, that place would be the Spring Creek.
>
> Then came the magical-reality of Nederland, Colorado.
>
> It is often noted that Nederland retains much of its character as a
> rough and tumble mining camp. A huge amount of mineral wealth (gold,
> silver, tungsten) has been extracted from the earth around Nederland.
> And yet, by far, the larger fortune was derived from the Caribou Ranch
> Recording Studio.
>
> The likes of Stevie Wonder, Elton John and Michael Jackson recorded at
> the studio, walked the streets of Ned, and did impromptu performances
> at the town’s rustic watering holes.
>
> The likes of Dan Fogelberg, Stephen Stills, Joe Walsh and Chris
> Hillman have lived in the vicinity of the small town of 1,400.
>
> Dango was the first band-member to settle in Ned in 2001. Bonnie
> first came to Ned, in 2004, after being invited by Vince Herman, of
> Leftover Salmon and Great American Taxi (They had met earlier that
> year at a chaotic music festival in Lake Tahoe, CA).
>
> In late 2006 and 2007 band members settled and re-settled in Nederland.
>
> In 2007 ‘Elephant Revival’ became the unofficial house band of The
> Stage Stop in nearby Rollinsville. From this hallowed old musical
> venue the band established its formidable local Front Range fan base.
>
> And then the band began touring in Bessy, Sage’s 1989 Thomas
> school-bus which he had converted to run on vegetable oil fuel. And
> they left a french-fry, or Thai food smelling trail from the East
> Coast to the West Coast, and everywhere in-between. The band has
> traveled astronomical distance, over 350,000 miles, since they began
> touring in 2007. In autumn of 2009 Bessy was retired as the bands
> tour bus and Ivan-Dured, a 97’ Freightliner from Mount Shasta CA. took
> over the bio-diesel reigns.
>
> And then came the fulfillment of one of D-Ro's most long held dreams.
>
> When D-Ro was nineteen years old he piled into a car with some good
> friends and drove from Connecticut to a Dispatch show at the Electric
> Factory in Philidelphia, PA.
>
> It was that night while being inspired greatly by the energy that
> Dispatch was giving and the songwriting of Chad Stokes', that led him
> to a "knowing" that being a professional musician/songwriter/shaman
> was what D-Ro wanted to be.
>
> In 2006, six years later, backstage in Burlington VT. at a ‘Michael
> Franti’ show where Chad's other band ‘State Radio’ was the opener,
> D-Ro got to meet and express his admiration to Chad while Bonnie and
> Bridget performed with Michael Franti and Spearhead.
>
> Chad tried the best he could to defuse D-Ro's worship. He remembered
> the Philadelphia show at the Electric Factory as the show where he
> fell on his head.
>
> D-Ro gave him a demo-tape of some recordings he had put together with Bonnie.
>
> They kept in touch over the next few years, and in 2009 on a solo
> vacation Chad contacted D-Ro and met up with ER at The Sawtooth Music
> Festival in Stanley, Idaho. As D-Ro recalls, “He brought us
> watermelon and fed us while we were writing set-lists; he rafted with
> us down a river in Idaho; he sat in with us at a couple concerts; he
> ran our merchandise for us."
>
> One of the best parts for him was the long drives and conversations he
> would have with his once musical hero. "It was surreal, but mostly
> real," says D-Ro. The tour winded down, and Chad ended up staying a
> few days with Bonnie and Dan at their small apartment in Nederland.
>
> ER then began performing with State Radio at some of their Colorado
> shows. During a concert at The Aggie Theater in Fort Collins, Chad
> proposed that ER become part of his record label out of Boston, MA,
> "Ruff Shod."
>
> Elephant Revival's second album, "Break in the Clouds," released on
> "Ruff Shod" (Nov 10') charted #2 on the I-Tunes Singer Songwriter
> Chart. This led to ER opening for Dispatch at a sold-out show at the
> Boston Garden in June of 2011.
>
> This past autumn ER garnered a standing ovation and encore performance
> during a feature showcase at ‘The Americana Music Awards’ during "The
> Music City Roots" Radio Broadcast in Nashville TN.
>
> Their music has also been featured on NPR's "All Things Considered."
>
> And now all members of the band are fulfilling their most long-held
> dreams. The musicians/songwriters/shamans of 'Elephant Revival' are
> sharing their music and visions with the world.

Itz-ing

2011-05-14T10:24:00.000-07:00

(For the full 'narrative of the voyage of the bloody, snake chariot'
see www.libbyhome.blogspot.com )

(Itz, is an ancient Mayan concept regarding the supernatural power
that emanates from the flow of life-effusing/life-dispersing fluids -
particularly blood.)

Why is this last April 20/(4/20) different from all other 4/20's?

On all other 4/20's there are memory issues. Memories of the day are hazy.

And yet I will not forget this past 4/20. Memories of the day retain
vivid clarity.

This last 4/20, for me, is more about being Hitler's birthday, the
anniversary of the Columbine Massacre, days that live in infamy. For
on this 4/20 I was hit (cold-cocked) to the head.

I was hit harder than I've ever been hit in my 56 and-a-half years.
And my head was broken open and I bled or itz-ed more copiously than
I've ever itz-ed in my life.

I'll start at the beginning.

It has been a terrible sadness to see my neighbor of the past nine
months, young Eric, sink into mental illness and violence.

It is often noted that our hometown, Nederland, CO, retains much of
the character of its wild, mining camp origins. And yet, 21st Century
Nederland is more like a wild, mining camp on acid. The wide-spread,
on-going use of LSD and other entheogens is perhaps the most defining
thing of the character of this place.

I am not being judgemental about entheogeons (molecules that bring us
to the infinite). I have partaken of them for over 40 years.

They work for some people. They could be an important agency for the
on-going evolution of our species.

And yet, entheogeons do not work for everybody

For many, entheogens can be a kind of miracle grow for any genetic
predisposition for psychosis that may exist in an individual.

And such is the case with my neighbor, young Eric.

In the beginning we were good friends. We spent many hours playing
music together.

And then the dark whispers in young Eric's mind began speaking to him,
all the time. The dark whispers spoke of dark, evil, nefarious,
over-arching, conspiracy against him.

When it became plain to me how deep into the sickness of the mind
young Eric had sunk, I recoiled from him. We stopped speaking to each
other. I tried to avoid contact with him, his violence, his mental
illness.

I hoped this would make me less of a target for his sickness of the
mind. But it made me more of a target.

On April 19, young Eric took our garbage can.

And yet, this garbage can was not just a garbage can.

When we first moved into our place in Nederland in August, 2010, there
was a putrid, malodorous accumulation of garbage and excrement on our
front porch.

Much of it was from the previous tenant. And yet, much of it was from
young Eric.

It required a Herculean effort to clean this squalor (an external
manifestation of the internal).

Putrid, festering garbage had to be placed in large, black, plastic trash bags.

Underneath the main pile of garbage we found two plastic garbage cans
with the most putrid, most festering of the garbage.

We gagged and some vomited in the effort to bag this slime.

After the garbage was bagged a heroic effort was required to hose the
garbage cans out, so they could be used again.

It was one of these garbage cans that young Eric took.

I flashed to the movie 'The Big Lebowski', and declared "This
aggression will not stand!"

The next day 4/20 I arose at the crack of noon and began preparing to
go to the big celebration in Boulder.

I saw young Eric on the porch, and in a voice that was more amused
than angry I asked, "Hey, What's up with the garbage can?"

Young Eric explained that he had bought the garbage can at the local
hardware store and that the garbage can was his.

I replied (with some heat) that it wasn't his garbage can when he had
left it there the entire previous summer full of disgusting, putrid
offal, it wasn't his garbage can when it was emptied, it wasn't his
garbage can when it was cleaned, it wasn't his garbage can for the
last eight months when it was being used by us.

Then young Eric began speaking in the tongue of mental illness. He
said that "the great Sam Libby was about to be unclothed, was about to
be made to stand before the world in his nakedness. He began rubbing
my stomach and berating me for not being an observant Jew, because I
ate pork. And then he called me a fat, Jew bastard. (Eric believes
that 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' are the gospel truth.)

I began jabbing young Eric with my index finger telling him to get his
hands off me. Young Eric continued to put his hands on me.

I had brought my lunch out on the porch and left it on the railing.
Young Eric flipped the plate off the railing to the ground.

I then went toe-to-toe with young Eric and shouted loudly, in his
face, that he was a "white devil fuck." (Young Eric wears his hair in
dreads, he poses as a Rastafarian, and yet, he is a mentally ill,
white devil fuck. I was feeling it.)

My arms were at my side. There was no way I could block the punch.
Young Eric punched me right between the eyes.

One of those vivid, clear memories I retain of the day is seeing young
Eric's clenched, ringed fist the moment before impact

My head snapped back. It was as if a blood-bomb had gone off. The
blood was gushing from my head.

There was a moment when I thought I was going out. And then I
surprised the shit out of young Eric (but not half as much as I
surprised myself) by coming back with a right to young Eric's mouth
that busted his lip open.

Young Eric is 24 years-old. Young Eric is about six foot three. I'm
five foot eight. Young Eric's arms have at least a foot of reach on
me.

Young Eric was wearing a ring with a sharp metal edge that had gouged
me to my sinus cavity (later, at the hospital in Boulder, the guy who
was sewing me up with 16 stitches said "Dude, I can see into your
sinuses.")

I immediately tasted my blood. I went to a very primal place.

I raged and I charged.

For every punch I landed, young Eric landed two. He kept his aim on
the place where he had already busted my head open.

Where I was standing it felt like he was trying to kill me.

Still I raged and charged and backed him up to the door of his apartment.

Then he grabbed my shirt with his left hand, and kept me a young Eric
arm's length away from him, and began punching me where the blood was
gushing with the other hand.

I kept on swinging but I couldn't reach him. I tried to break his
grip, but couldn't.

There was a moment when I thought, "This is me being kilt."

And I thought, "We die alone."

Young Eric was laughing the way a white devil fuck laughs as he
pummeled me where he had broken my head open.

But then my friend Josh intervened.

He tried to pull young Eric off-me.

Young Eric punched Josh.

And then I broke young Eric's grip and got inside, and got my weight
behind punches that began the beating of young Eric to the ground.

Josh and myself got on either side of young Eric and beat young Eric
to his knees with his shirt over his head.

I pulled back and began aiming a kick to young Eric's ribs (My plan
was to scientifically, methodically kick every one of young Eric's
ribs in - I was still tasting my gushing/itz-ing blood).

But when I began to put my kick in motion, my entire leg went into a
prolonged and agonizing spasm.

The fight ended with young Eric on his knees pitifully (like a
bee-otch) begging us to stop hitting him.

We did.

But my bleeding/itzing didn't stop.

My blood covers the porch that was the arena of these events just
described. There is a trail of blood from our house to the Nederland
Police Department. I bled all over the Nederland Police Station, until
the Nederland Ambulance crew finally stopped most of the bleeding.

The Nederland Ambulance crew wanted to just pile me into the ambulance
and take me to Boulder Community Hospital, and yet I have no health
insurance and I was told the ambulance ride would cost me $3,000,
which I don't have.

I finally got a ride to the hospital from another neighbor, the E-man,
got stitched up, and hitch-hiked (even though I looked like I just
escaped from Victor Frankenstein's castle) back to Nederland.

When I returned to my place, young Eric was waiting on the bloodied
porch and threated to "Fuck me up good if I ever set someone on him,
again".

Young Eric is charged with 3rd degree assault (a misdemeanor).

His mentally ill narrative of what happened is that he was attacked by
Josh and myself and that we should be charged with assault.

When he see's me he yells, "Tell the truth old man!"

So I have - the whole truth and nothing but the truth - so help me God.

The stitches have been taken out of my head and I now wear a scar that
goes from my forehead down the bridge of my nose.

It looks like an ancient rune whose meaning has long been lost.

And yet in this runic scar is young Eric, naked in his violence and
mental illness for all to see.

And what of the supernatural power that emanates from the flow of
life-effusing/life-dispersing fluids, particularly blood.

All I can tell ya is that in my chest I feel this supernatural joy and
amazing grace in being still alive.

Liberty First!

2011-02-04T14:58:00.000-08:00

It had seemed like Proposition 19 had big momentum and the national
repeal of cannabis prohibition was imminent.

And then Proposition 19 which would have brought the end of cannabis
prohibition in California (and eventually the end of cannabis
prohibition in the rest of the country) was narrowly defeated by 53.5
percent of California voters.

Opponents of this measure for the repeal of prohibition included many
medicinal cannabis
growers seeking to preserve their profits. And yet, for the most part,
Proposition 19 was voted down by Republicans and the many tea
baggers/douche baggers who have taken over the Republican Party.

Proposition 19 would have made it legal for adults 21 and over to
possess up to an ounce of cannabis, smoke it in non-public areas, and
cultivate it in private plots. It would have also granted local
authorities control over commercial cultivation and sales of cannabis.

Supporters of Proposition 19 emphasized such benefits of cannabis
legalization as reduced law enforcement costs, additional tax revenue,
and stronger restrictions on under aged minors getting access to
cannabis (which seems to have been an unconvincing argument since many
California mothers voted against it fearing it would increase their
childrens' access to cannabis).

These benefits would certainly happen if repeal of prohibition would
happen, and yet the most important benefits of repeal would be an end
of government interference in a private decision, an end of government
infringement of natural right, an end of the government's war on the
U.S. Constitution, an assertion of American citizens' constitutional
rights, and the end of The War on Plants.

The great opportunity in this struggle for repeal of prohibition is
the possibility that the tea-baggers/douche-baggers can be made to be
consistent,
that they can be made to at least limit their hypocrisy.

Tea-baggers profess that they are against government interference in
our lives. They profess to be for the full restoration of our
constitutional rights, they say they are about personal freedom.

And yet, in a clear demonstration of their fundamental hypocrisy, many
tea-baggers continue to be adamant, war-on-plants, warriors.

Cannabis prohibition is the most clear and present danger that
government poses for millions of American citizens. For growing,
using, transporting or distributing a plant American citizens are
imprisoned, have their private property confiscated, have their
children taken from them, are deprived of their constitutional and
natural rights. It is the main reason why these United States of
America, this land of the free, leads the world in the percentage of
its citizens who are imprisoned (we have a larger percentage of our
citizens in prison than China, Cuba and North Korea).

The last thing that must happen in these United States of America for
cannabis prohibition to fall, and a rebirth of freedom, is for the
tea-baggers/douche-bagger to end the
hypocrisy, to be consistent.

Reply Forward

Dispensary Review by Hassan i Sabbah

2011-01-10T15:27:00.000-08:00

Soon after the fateful presidential memo to federal prosecutors on
July 7, 2009, the Nederland landscape suddenly and dramatically
proliferated with
medical cannabis dispensaries making this little town, reputedly, the
most and best cannabis medicated community...perhaps in the world (see New York
Times, Herald Tribune and Rollin' Stone Magazine).

Now there is only four.

And yet, even though there are fewer, it is possible, that like an
invisible hand, the best dispensers to Colorado medical cannabis
patients survive and continue to serve.

And even though Nedicate, at 150 North Jefferson, Suite 3b, is the
priciest, it is, at this time, my personal favorite.

A feast to the eyes as well as the brain is the sparkling, jewelry bud display
of their featured strains: Triple Diesel (and Bob Marley's favorites)
Lamb's Breath, and Light of Jah. The dispensary's inventory also
could include such popular favorites as Strawberry Cough, Grape Ape.
Mother's Finest, Maui Wowy, Blue Cheese, and Blue Moon.

One hundred percent of the cannabis is grown by the dispensary, and
they do a fine job.

Nedicate and their sister enterprises are not fooling around.

Nedicate, Well, (at 3000 Folsom Street, Boulder) TreeLine Medical
Cannabis dispensary, in Vail, Colorado and Colorado Bubble Company, a
hashish laboratory in Boulder, are all owned by Boulder
Cannabis-Entrepreneur Bryan Swantun.

At the Colorado Bubble Company premium medical grade hashish is
produced by water/ice extraction, and inverse carbon dioxide. The
bubble company makes strain specific, bubbling-until-its-white-ash,
bring-you-to-paradise-as-described-by-the-Koran, earwax consistency -
quality hashish.

This is the hashish dispensed at Nedicate.

This hashish costs $42 a gram. (I too, gulped)

A gram of bud is $15 for members $16 for non-members.
An-eighth-of-an-ounce is $50 for members, $55 for non-members.

"We sell only the best, medical-grade cannabis," says Nedicate Manager
Koby Malone.

And then there are the edibles.

I got some Peanut Butter Cups.

I was advised by Malone that I should only
ingest one quarter of the Peanut Butter Cups which contain 2.4 grams
of Medical Marijuana (Hashed) (It says so on the package).

And yet, I ate the whole thing (this is how The-Old-Man-Of-the-Mountain rolls).

I was seeking to throw-off a sinus infection that had been oppressing
me for the previous two weeks. I fell asleep and when I awoke twelve
hours latter, in a seemingly miraculous manner - I was healed.

And in addition, in those Peanut Butter Cups, I was transported to the
gates of this paradise
where there is no final truth and all is permitted.

What They Choose to Write Music About

2010-12-02T14:00:00.000-08:00

I have to begin this review of the just released album "Break in the
Clouds" by confessing and testifying - I love Elephant Revival!

I love each member of the band not only for their superb musicianship,
their songwriting, as singers and tellers of narrative in the lyric
and music of the song. I love them for being magical, wonderful Human
Beings. I love the drive for absolute harmonic perfection in the song
which they seek and achieve. And, perhaps, the thing I most love is
what they choose to make songs about.

In the general law of relativity musings of Daniel "D-ro" Rodriguez in
his song "What Is Time?" the song goes:

"...Even Einstein said “Time is not a condition in which we live,

It's a condition in which we think”

And we can change the ways we think..."

The thought naturally goes on that by changing the way we think - we
can change time and the Human Condition.

These lyrics voice a perennial message of the band which is: Our
reality is ours' to create.

In his time travel evoking instrumental "Lexington" Daniel "Dango"
Rose musically narrates an elementary school trip to a historic
mansion in his native Illinois in which he is thrown back into the
American Civil War.

The time trip raises extreme concerns among his teachers of their
young, sensitive student's mental health.

This sense of being psychically sensitive and to some extent haunted
by our personal and collective past time is again presented in Rose's
song "Sleeping With Your Clothes On".

Rose writes: "Is that a cricket in the kitchen
Or is that a tune left unwritten
Was that you of who I'm dreaming
Riding horses through the valleys of Virginia
Bareback in the brier
Soaked by the rain
Asleep with the light on
Asleep with the light on

"You are gone now my dear departed
Broken shades the broken hearted
As I'm dreaming in the morning
Distant shores of distant yearning
Take me back to the river
Back through the valley
Over the highest mountain
Asleep with the light on."

It is also evoked in Bridget Law's in all ways amazing instrumental
"Ancient Seas".

Law evokes her Celtic musical heritage and influence, and in all ways
exhibits her own transcendent, individual, musical genius. She has
composed a beautiful, passionate piece of music that seethes, crashes
and boils with the primal waters and the force of ancient oceans.

In his song "Feathers Fly" Rodriguez narrates his experiences of
loving fellow band member Bonnie May Paine and makes a universal,
timeless anthem about the power of love:

"...We gaze into the stars, bodies on the ground.
Our minds and hearts they leave, become part of the sky.
Now we can go and live forever.
And if we die today, at least we'll know the secret".

"Drop" is Paines' description of her mystical, magical union with the
unity of the universe, and the universe's mystical union with her:

"...But the hour was one time because
I slipped into a flower
Recalled the time to climb the vine
A honeysuckle tower
I was water brought to lifted leaves
Of daffodils and day lilies
Drank into the grace of trees
The aspens eye, the willows weep

That hung so low it touched below
The surface of a still puddle
Did I behold, reflection told
Looking back at me, the eyes of my body
So I jumped in, back into my skin
And sang this song of where I'd been."

And last but in no way least is the prodigious and wise songwriting
and in all ways distinctive singing and musicianship of Sage Cook.

In "Go On" Cook gives his sage advice to all who are leaving their
childhood and preparing to begin their autonomous life:

"...don't wait don't fear

don't work too hard less you love it

cause you're here

you're here through ever shifting shades of now

somehow

its love its LOVE

love it keeps me high enough

the drugs and sex have lost respect and sacredness

its sad but true

most things can hurt or help its up to us

I know we're here to sew some seeds

I hope they grow..."

Another perennial theme of the band is voiced in this song which is:
In the on-going creation of your reality - be guided by Love.

Few bands have the distinction of being the creators of a whole new
gender of music. Elephant Revival are the progenitors of a musical
form which has become known as Transcendental Folk.

This label is an attempt to in some way describe the musical, lyrical
and unworldly, extrasensory powers of the band both personally and
collectively.

During the bands live performances the traditional ending of the show
is for Paine to sing a'capella, in her own inimitable style. This band
tradition is carried on in their albums.

'Break In the Clouds" ends with Paine singing "Breathe" - her call to
transcendental consciousness:

"Open your hands
Breathe deep
Calm yourself
Breathe

Down the valley
Beneath the trees
Alongside the river
That's where you'll be
Whispering through the patient wind carrying cottonwood seed
Saying to resistance now, release
There is a stillness in the ground beneath your feet

Still there is movement to be found both remind us to

Open your hands
Breathe deep
Calm yourself
Breathe."

Alternative Conspiracy Theory - The Assassination of J.F.K.

2010-11-05T15:57:00.000-07:00

We are approaching the 47th anniversary of the assassination of J.F.K.

I can't help noting that 40-years-ago if you believed Kennedy was killed by a C.I.A. conspiracy, if you believed aliens from outer space were regularly visiting our planet and corn-holing humans (especially those that live in trailer parks), if you believed the C.I.A. were conspiring to put micro-chips in every one's butt - you were considered to be a crackpot and a fucking lunatic.

And yet 40 years later, in wide swaths of the geography and culture of this nation, (these United States of America), if you do not believe these conspiracy theories - you are considered to be a crack-pot and a fucking lunatic.

Conspiracy theory is no doubt a peculiar mental illness of our particularly paranoid times, and yet - perhaps - conspiracy theory can be said to be a new art form of our day.

In that spirit I will now reveal the TRUTH that is out there.

The homo-sexuals killed Kennedy!

When Jacqueline Kennedy became our nations first lady in January 1961 she found the White House badly in need of a make-over. She appointed the first White House curator, formed the Fine Arts Committee for the White House which was charged with procuring furnishing and artwork owned by previous presidents and/or first ladies, or furnishings and artwork which were representative of previous periods in the White House's history.

She maintained that she was not trying to impose her stylistic tastes, but was just trying to honor American history and craftsmanship.

For three days in January 1962, Jacqueline Kennedy was filmed and interviewed by CBS
as she conducted the nation in a behind-the-scenes tour of the White House make-over. On the night of February 14, 1962 three out of four television viewers and 100 percent of the homosexual television viewers witnessed the make-over.

The homo-sexuals hated it.

Homo-sexuals in New Orleans and Dallas (the same people who eventually founded the tea-bag (douche-bag) movement) decided - that night, that no-taste, bee-otch Jacqueline Kennedy must die.

There were homo-sexual gun men all over Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. They were in the book depository building, they were on the grassy knoll. But while homo-sexuals can be very adapt with knives, they are hopeless with firearms.

They missed Jacqueline and hit Jack.

I am not the first person to expound this conspiracy theory. I am merely elaborating on the conspiracy theory of Jim Garrison, district attorney of Orleans Parish, Louisiana from 1962 to 1973, who was latter immortalized by Oliver Stone in his movie J.F.K.

Garrison's investigation resulted in the arrest, trial and acquittal of prominent New Orleans gay business-man Clay Shaw.

Garrison alleged Shaw and other homo-sexuals somehow linked to the C.I.A. conspired and killed J.F.K.

And that's my conspiracy theory.

And I'm sticking to IT....

alternative conspiracy theory - aliens from outer space

2010-10-25T15:22:00.000-07:00

After fully examining all of the data this has been my alternative conspiracy theory re: aliens from outer space (not to be confused with those illegal ones from Central America).

The powers-that-be (p-t-b) of this world (Earth - I believe) made a secret covenant with aliens from outer space when ufo's first were widely noted in the skies beginning in the 1940's.

In return for advanced alien technologies (atomic weapons, cell phones, microwave ovens, stealth air craft, slinkies) the p-t-b allowed the aliens to have their way with anyone living in a trailer or a trailer park.

This explains the clustering of abduction narratives from these places.

The abduction narratives are, for now, inexplicable. I ax ya - why would technologically advanced creatures, able to cross the cosmos - go to trailer parks, abduct the denizens of such establishments, transport them to operating theatres in alien space craft, and shove mysterious surgical instruments up their butts?

Then there was the ufo sightings over 23rd Street in the Chelsea section of lower Manhattan, at 1:30 p.m., Wednesday, October 13.

I have watched the video.

New Yorkers would not break stride and make eye contact with someone conducting a mass ax murder on the street. And yet they came to a full halt to lift their gaze to the sky where unidentified objects were flying.

Major media have (as of Friday, October 15) debunked the sightings. They claim it was a bunch of party balloons accidentally released by children in nearby Mount Vernon during a party to celebrate their teacher's engagement.

And yet New Yorkers stopped in their tracks to look to the sky with postures of awe-struck wonder.

Hard to believe that a bunch of party balloons would do that.

On the day of the sightings a September 13 press release from Stanley A. Fulham, a retired airforce officer came to light predicting October 13, 2010 as the date for a massive UFO display over the world’s principal cities.

According to Fulham, the aliens were to neither land nor communicate on that date; they are aware from eons of experience with other planets in similar conditions their sudden intervention would cause fear and panic.

The press release also shilled Fulham's new book.

The press release/book is new age gospel.

Benevolent, immortal aliens have come to stop us from reaching the tipping point for carbon dioxide build up in our atmosphere and the ensuing extinction of all life on the planet. They have come in peace with technology to clean the earth's atmosphere of green-house gases.

They will save us from ourselves.

The press release reeked of crack-pot new age orthodoxy.

I still wonder about a bunch of party balloons stopping jaded New Yorkers, in the middle of the day, on 23rd Street.

No doubt we live in strange times.

And yet - I gotz my conspiracy theory - and I'm sticking to It...

The Peewink Mountain Fire

2010-09-20T15:06:00.000-07:00

On Friday, September 17 around 4:20 p.m. The Peewink Mountain, on the Northeast side of Nederland, Colorado, started to burn.

The infamous and nearby Fourmile Canyon Fire had just been declared the most destructive fire in Colorado's history after incinerating 169 homes. This fire had just been declared officially extinguished.

Very moderate, but very hot and very dry winds were blowing from the Northeast. Soon the mountains were misted with smoke and all could smell the fire.

It was the eve of Yom Kippur, the most sacred day of the Jewish Calendar, the culmination of the days of awe, the time when Jews are called to mystery, the time when Jews are called to examine the existential parameters of the Human Condition.

I am Jewish - but only on my mother's and father's sides of the family. I am appalled and disgusted by all organized religions, including Judaism. Organized religions are horrible parodies of spirituality.

And yet, The Peewink Mountain Fire caught me at a strange time. For the first time in many years I am somewhat materially vested.

Around 5:30 p.m. a terrible mistake was made. For some reason a reverse 911 call told residents they had to evacuate town. Soon after the call I ran into Michigan Mike Torpe, of Nederland Music Festival fame. He told me to tell everyone I saw - to flee.

People freaked out. Heavily loaded SUV's and pick-up trucks could be seen racing out of town.

And suddenly I was in the presence of Mystery, I was examining the parameters of the Human Condition, I was making an evacuation plan.

Soon after, I was told that Boulder County officials were saying there was no evacuation order, and that the fire was mostly contained. Three air-tankers had quickly responded and had bombed The Peewink Mountain with slurry.

People stopped thinking worst-case-scenario. People chilled.

I went food shopping and organized a celebratory feast. All present were invited.

And after feasting I accepted the Mystery's invitation to the fast, and I accepted the Mystery's invitation to examine the existential parameters of the Human Condition.

Something Biblical - Revisited

2010-07-15T15:54:00.000-07:00

There is something biblical going on.

And yet it has nothing to do with Johnny Patmos and his Book of Chucklelations.

On 9/11 a great opportunity for liberation consciousness was offered to our nation - and squandered by our nation.

For a while people stepped back from this consumers' special olympics on steroids - this obsessive buying and selling of things that we really don't need, with money we don't really have, this hopeless entanglement in the material, tacky smeg - stepped back from that 24/7 stupid sound about Tiger Woods, Carrie Underwear, Sarah Palin, Oprah etc. And, perhaps, for a little while, people perceived the existential parameters of the human circumstances, the dynamic uncertainty, the mystery.

In a fiery, cinematic moment the most seemingly secure lives - based on good incomes, secure retirements, fat 401k's - ended on that day it rained burning people.

But then people resumed the consumers' special olympics on steroids - this obsessive buying and selling - resumed the mindless 24/7 drone about dysfunctional celebrities, corn-holing aliens, conspiracy theory.

And then capitalism on steroids crashed and burns.

It is as Lenin (not John) prophecized - The capitalists sold the sub-prime mortgage ropes from which they hanged and jerked.
But then our government, as well as ourselves, are revealed as being total, complete bee-otchs of the corporations. The Great Bail-Out occurs. Wall Street and the banks are saved from their grievous delusions. Everyone else becomes eligible for food stamps.

And then the consumers' special olympics resumes - in a somewhat curtailed way. And the 24/7 stupid sound of the media cycle resumed, in full force.

Now cometh the BP Blow-out.

Again a great opportunity - perhaps the last opportunity for liberation consciousness is offered to us as a civilization - to us as individuals.
It is the time for us as a civilization, for us as individuals to end our consumers' special olympics, to end our business-as-usual as slaves of consumerism, bee-otches of the corporations.
It is the time for us as a civilization, for us as individuals to make our plan for Exodus from the grid, Exodus from being slaves of Big Oil.

It is the time to seize the means of energy production.

It is the only commonsensical and moral response to these Biblical things.

Nature Gods of the Summer Solstice

2010-06-02T13:52:00.000-07:00

In the Northern Hemisphere, during the longest days and shortest nights, during the time of the most fecund and rapid growth of plants, particularly food plants, our ancestors would be closely observing the movement of the rising and the setting sun on the horizon. They would observe the apparent standing still or solstice of the sun. Then they would observe the sun's movement on the horizon towards winter, and the re-ascendancy of the darkness.

It would take several days for our ancestors to discern this movement of the sun. And that day, June 24, became Midsummer (the middle of the growing season).

In many traditions it was a magical time when the membranes that separated the world of humans from supernatural realms was stretched thin and became permeable. On the eve of Midsummer Day the realm of the fairies and other mythological beings intersected with the world of humans. On this night the present was no longer separated from the past and the future, making it possible for the dead to return, making it possible to see what was to come. On this night it was possible to slip away from the world of the business-as-usual, the world of waking consciousness.

This is the premise of William Shakespeare's play 'Midsummer Night's Dream'.

June 24th, (the summer solstice holiday that is the flip side of the winter solstice holiday of December 25), and the night or eve of the day also became the time of wild gods of nature who embodied dark, relentless, not-conscious forces of nature.

When Northern Europe was Christianized, June 24 became the feast day of Yohannan the Baptister, (a.k.a.) John the Baptist, who is, essentially, a wild god of nature.

The Baptister was an ascetic desert hermit who lived on locusts and wild honey, during the Roman occupation of Judea. Organized Christianity assigns The Baptister a secondary role to Rabbi Yeshua (a.k.a. Jesus) in the spiritual, political and social movement that swept Roman-occupied Judea 2,000 years ago. And yet, Flavius Josephus, a Jewish/Roman historian who wrote the only surviving historical account of the time of the Jewish uprisings against Roman occupation says it was all about The Baptiser.

During the Roman occupation of Judea the royal family of Israel and the priests of the Temple of Jerusalem collaborated with the hated Roman occupiers and lost their credibility and moral authority. During this time poor, wandering rabbis or teachers, in no way affiliated with traditional spiritual or social authority, arose.

The Baptiser was one of these rabbis. He was the leader of a back-to-nature spiritual movement. When he immersed a fellow Hebrew in the Jordon River, he washed away the taint, the corruption, of Roman slavery and Greco-Roman urban civilization. He preached spiritual renewal in the wilderness as happened during the time of Moses, the time of the deliverance from Egyptian slavery and the 40-year purifying exodus in the wilderness.

The Romans were called 'the new Egyptians".

Yeshua in the first Greek scriptures is called a tekto¯n, long taken to mean “carpenter.” A more accurate translation could be something like stone worker or a day laborer. He could have worked as a laborer in the construction of the grand Greco-Roman city of Sepphoris, whose ruins are near Nazareth.

During his three year ministry as a rabbi Yeshua spoke his doctrine to the Jews living in the Greco-Roman cities. He called for a Gandhi-like, non-violent resistance to the Roman occupation, although many of his followers were armed with swords and the long knives of fishermen.

The Romans didn't understand what the 'kingdom of heaven' was. But they knew that whatever it was - it wasn't the Roman Empire.

When Yeshua led his people into Jerusalem during the observance of Passover, the nationalistic celebration of the Jews victory over Pharaoh and the Egyptians, the rough equivalent of the 4th of July, the Romans, of course, regarded the movement as an uprising against the Roman Empire. And, of course, they mobilized the ultimate instrument of Roman Empire state terrorism - crucifixion.

And yet, according to Josephus the movement that the Romans felt was the greatest threat to their occupation of Judea was The Baptiser’s back-to-nature movement. The Yeshua movement was considered a footnote to this history.

The canonical gospels grapple with this issue of who is the star of the story - Yeshua or The Baptiser. And in newly Christianized northern Europe the residual pagan forces often sided with The Baptiser.

Before Northern Europe was Christianized June 24 was the day of the Greenman or the Wild Man, the symbol of nature's rebirth, and the irrepressible forces of nature. Throughout Northern Europe the face of the Greenman still stares out at us, carved in stone or wood, depicted even on the stained glass windows of Christian Churches.

It is often a grotesque face with plants vigorously sprouting from his mouth, nose, eyes or ears.

At Midsummer the Greenman is at the peak of his wild, potent, nature powers. At this time he is in sexual union with the Goddess. And this sexual union gives birth to all the abundance of nature.

By making June 24 The Baptiser's day, Christianity incorporated the pagan traditions (bonfires, jumping through fires, rolling burning wheels into bodies of water, scheduling marriages at this time) that the church was unable to stamp out - try as they might.

The Baptiser was often portrayed in leafy and rustic attire, sometimes with horns and cloven feet (like Pan) and with the foilage of the Greenman, sprouting from every orifice of his face.

The Maypole Cultural War

2010-05-02T05:51:00.000-07:00

The Maypole and the festivities that happen around it ignited the

first cultural war in early colonial America, a cultural war that, in

many ways, persists to the present day.

The tradition of the Maypole happens in places influenced by the

German Mythology. In this mythology the Maypole is

Yggdrasil, the tree of life, which brings together, connects many

worlds and realms. It connects the underworld with the middle world

(our world) with the heavens. It connects the mortal realm with the

realm of the gods and the immortals, it connects the realms of death

with the realms of life. And it connects the male with the female.

The first explorers and settlers of Anglo-America came from

Elizabethan England, William Shakespeare's England, Merry Old England.

It was Merry Old England because of its tradition of holidays, and

folk festivals which unabashedly remained essentially pagan, such as

the Maypole festival.

Merry Old England's calendar is similar to Merry Colorado's calendar

in that both are marked by seasonal celebrations which are also free

spirited, unruly musical festivals such as Telluride, Rocky Grass,

Yarmony Grass, Nedfest.

The Maypole ceremony derives from prehistoric phallic worship and

sympathetic magic. Sympathetic magic is about the belief that like

produces like, that a festival that is about free and open sexuality,

music and dance will result in a spirit of fertility that will bring

an abundant increase in food crops, livestock as well as Human

fertility.

England's King James I who reigned from 1603-1625 as Cromwell and the

Roundheads began to rise, revived and supported Maypole festivals to win support

among rural common folk, to entertain his court, and to mock the

Roundheads.

Roundhead Phillip Stubbes wrote a description of an English Maypole

festival in the early 1600's: "... all the young men and maids, old

men and wives, run gadding over night to the woods, groves, hills, and

mountains, where they spend all night in pleasant pastimes.... The

chiefest jewel they bring from thence is their Maypole, which they

bring home with great veneration.... And thus being reared up with

handkerchiefs and flags hovering on the top...they fall to dance about

it, like as the heathen people did at the dedication of the Idols....

Of forty, three-score, or a hundred maids going to the wood

over-night, there have scarcely the third part of them returned home

again undefiled....

Stubbes was sure that the "grand captain of all mischief" the one that

was called "my Lord of Misrule" was Satan himself. He called the

Maypole festival an exercise in "heathenry, deviltry, whoredom,

drunkenness, pride and what not".

In 1644, when Cromwell and the Roundheads took power,

the Maypole Festival was banned, prohibited throughout England.

Yet Maypole festivals continued as a symbol of resistance to Cromwell and

his so-called Republic which was really a dictatorial theocracy.

The earliest erection of a Maypole in America occurred in 1628 in what

is now Quincy, MA., not too far from the Roundhead colony of Plymouth

Plantation. It was erected while Charles I still ruled.

Fifes, horns, fiddles, Indian drums and Indian flutes played as the

Maypole was raised to celebrate the return of life and the freedom and tolerance of

the new multi-cultural, multi-racial community.

The incident is described by Roundhead William Bradford, governor

of New Plymouth:

"They set up a Maypole, drinking and dancing about it for several days

at a time, inviting the Indian women for their consorts, dancing and

frisking together like so many fairies, – or furies rather, – to say

nothing of worse practices. It was as if they had revived the

celebrated feasts of the Roman goddess Flora, or the beastly practices

of the mad Bacchanalians... They changed the name of the place, and

instead of calling it Mount Wollaston, they called it Merry Mount, as

if the jollity would last forever. But it did not continue long...

The Governor of Merry Mount, the erector of the Maypole, and noteable

Elizabethan was Thomas Morton.

He was an influential, socially connected lawyer and social reformer. He defended the

poor and oppressed from the rich and powerful. He rubbed elbows with

the likes of Francis Bacon and Shakespeare, and he was a life-long friend and

drinking buddy of Elizabethan playwright Ben Johnson.

In 1622 he visited the Plymouth colony and was disgusted by the

intolerance of the Roundheads towards all who in any way differed from

them. He was revolted by the Roundheads genocide of the American

Indians.

He called the Roundheads the "Lords of Limbo".

He returned to America in 1624 and established a colony and fur

trading post on a spit of land in what is now Boston Harbor. He

initiated a warm, amiable relationship with the American Indians, whom he loved and

respected.

As a result the Indians traded their furs with

Morton and the free colonists of the community which was eventually

named Merry Mount - and did not trade with the Roundheads. As a result

Merry Mount became the fastest growing and most prosperous English

colony in the Americas.

In 1628 the colonists erected an 80 ft. Maypole, topped with

deer antlers. Around this Maypole the mostly male English

colonists danced with and courted American Indian women.

This provoked a Roundhead crusade.

The Roundheads under Myles Standish raided and occupied Merry Mount the

following month (June). They chopped down the Maypole and arrested

Morton. He was put in stocks in Plymouth,

given a kangaroo trial and marooned on a desert island off the coast of

New Hampshire.

The only thing that saved Morton from the Roundheads' gallows and dungeons was

his social connections back in England.

He was left on the island without food or tools and the Roundheads

hoped that he would starve to death. But he was supplied with an

abundance of food by his American Indian friends and allies who

eventually assisted him in escaping the island, and returning to

England.

Merrymount survived without Morton for another year. But was

continually embattled by the Roundheads who called the colony Dagon,

after the 'evil' Semitic Sea God. They eventually razed the colony to

the ground.

In England Morton began a lawsuit against the Massachusetts Bay

Company, the political power behind the Roundheads' colonization of New England.

Morton gained influential backing for his cause. Charles I, who was eventually

beheaded by the Roundheads, backed Morton and revoked the Massachusetts Bay

Company's

charter. As a result the Plymouth Plantation was isolated, and the

Roundheads were no longer supplied by England and other English

colonies making Plymouth "a place of woe." Many colonists left

Massachusetts for the relative safety of Connecticut.

In 1637 Morton published 'New English Canaan' a scathing denunciation

of the Roundheads' colonization of New England. He called for the

creation of a multicultural America along the lines of Merry Mount.

Morton's victory was short-lived. Soon after the book's publication the Roundheads

began the English Civil War.

In 1642 Morton fled England and Cromwell's theocratic tyranny and

went to Maine.

But in the end Morton couldn't help himself. He went to Plymouth Colony to confront and denounce his mortal enemies.

He was arrested and accused of being a Royalist “agitator”, and put on

trial for his role in the revocation of the colony's charter, as well

as charges of sedition. He was imprisoned in Boston.

The Roundheads kept delaying his trial until Morton's health failed in the dank

dungeon. Only when he was broken, and mortally ill was he released. Morton's life

ended among the West Country planters of Maine. He died at the age of 71 in 1647.

In Morton's war with the Roundheads the Maypole not only became the symbol of

Yggdrasil. The Maypole became the symbol of the then unrealized possibility that

Anglo-America could be a free,

tolerant, multi-cultural, multi-racial society.

In the Roundheads' war with Morton the whipping post and the

hangman's gallows became the symbols of the America that was created

by the Roundheads after their apparent victory over Morton and the

multi-cultural, multi-racial community of Merrymount.

And yet in these United States of America, non-Hispanic whites will

soon be a minority, and our multi-cultural multi-racial reality could

be more like Merry Mount than the Plymouth Plantation.

It's a No-Brainer

2010-04-01T13:36:00.000-07:00

(Nederland, Colorado will vote in April re: a municipal law to make
the town into a free cannabis zone.)

This month voters in Nederland will have the opportunity to take part
> in, and to further an important international movement/progression to
> restore our most basic, natural, Human Right.
>
> In 1976 Amsterdam in particular and Holland in general allows for the
> possession of as much as five grams of
> cannabis and the cultivation of as many as five cannabis plants.
> Coffee shops that dispense cannabis are still technically illegal. And
> yet the the commonsensical decision is made by Dutch law enforcement
> authorities to
> not squander law enforcement resources to prosecute those who are
> violating the prohibition on cannabis.
>
> There is less cannabis use, now, in Holland then there is in Italy,
> Germany, the U.K., Spain, and far less cannabis use then in these
> United States. It may be counter-intuitive to many, but it seems when
> cannabis ceases being the outlaw weed it becomes less attractive to
> many, and the profane, non-medicinal use of the plant diminishes.
>
> On July 1, 2001 Portugal decriminalizes cannabis (which is a plant)
> and all drugs (which are not plants). Drugs are said to be
> decriminalized, not legalized. Drug use is still prohibited by law.
> Possession and use are still, technically, offenses under Portuguese
> law. And yet violations are administrative violations. No criminal
> charges are made. Violations are not prosecuted.
>
> While drug use and cannabis use across the European Union has steadily
> increased since 2000, in Portugal prevalence rates, the rates that
> people consume a substance in the course of a lifetime, have
> diminished.
>
> The U.K and Estonia have the harshest most draconian drug laws in the
> European Union. And yet these countries have the highest rates of
> cocaine use in the European Union. These United States has the
> harshest, most draconian drug laws in the world. And yet this country
> has one of the highest rates of drug use - in the world.
>
> It is a no-brainer.
>
> When cannabis prohibition is de facto repealed, when drug abuse is
> treated as a public health issue and not a law enforcement/criminal
> justice issue - then everyone wins - except for pandering, whore
> politicians who manipulate the irrational fears of their conservative,
> Christian constituency's for personal gain and power.
>
> Last April Mexico passed a law that allows for the possession of
> ridiculously small amounts of cannabis and drugs, amounts that are far
> less than the quantities that are usually acquired by Mexican users or tourists.
>
> The intent of the law is said to be to allow Mexican law enforcement
> to be better focused on the bloody, escalating war against the
> drug cartels. The intent of the law is said to be to stop Mexican police
> from extorting money from those caught with small amounts of mota
> (cannabis) and drugs (which the Mexican police will never stop doing
> since it is the major part of their income).
>
> What Mexican politicians have done, is to evade the issue, and evade a
> confrontation with the United States' hated force of international
> oppression the Drug Enforcement Agency (D.E.A.)
>
> The issue is Mexico's grotesque slaughter - the stacked, decapitated,
> tortured, and mutilated bodies. The issue is the assault on,
> brutalization, degrading of the Mexican national psyche.
>
> In this carnage is a clear, not
> pretty picture of the business-as-usual (b-a-u) of
> Mexico and the United States.
>
> The politicians in the United States serve the agendas of the lunatic,
> Christian, fundamentalists, in creating/perpetuating a prohibition
> that does not distinguish between plant medicines and drugs, that
> makes national policy a lunatic thing of sinners and their sins, that
> has the United States, this land of the free, with the highest
> percentage of its population incarcerated (of all countries in the
> world), and a so-called war on drugs which is really a war on the
> constitution, on the most basic natural rights, a war on plants.
>
> This creates a massive multi-billion dollar black market which further
> corrupts an already corrupted Mexican government, police, and
> military, and further corrupts American federal and international law
> enforcement.
>
> Then the world is thrown into the Great World Depression II (GWD II) because of
> the limitless, greed of those masters-of-the-universe who control
> the American banking system and Wall Street.
>
> And now the Mexican cartels are just intensifying their greedy,
> murderous, corrupted, black market capitalism to preserve their
> profits, their markets - like an invisible hand.
>
> We have been here before.
>
> The politicians in the United States serving the agenda of the
> lunatic, Christian fundamentalists made alcohol prohibition happen.
> This led to an intensifying of the corruption of government, of the
> police, of our society - just like in Mexico.
>
> Then the GWD I happened. Then there was the
> gangland violence and slaughter marked by such events as the
> Valentines Day Massacre in Chicago.
>
> And then the problem was so easily solved. Franklin Delano Roosevelt
> repealed alcohol prohibition.The gangsters and criminals no longer
> could do their gangster capitalism - only Wall Street and the Big
> Banks could do gangster capitalism.
>
> And so ended our American Valentine Days of the Dead.
>
> Soon after becoming president President Barak Obama announced that
> federal police
> would not raid medical cannabis dispensaries in compliance with state
> law.
>
> In July, Obama issued a memo to federal prosecutors in states
> with medical cannabis laws telling them not to waste scarce federal
> resources on people in "clear and unambiguous compliance" with state
> laws.
>
> And yet, last November, in Breckenridge, 70.9 per cent of voters
> passed a municipal law, that went into effect on January 1
> to legalize cannabis, that allows for the use of cannabis - without a
> note from a doctor.
>
> Specifically the Breckenridge municipal law allows for the possession
> of up to one ounce of cannabis as well as cannabis paraphernalia for
> people 21 or older.
>
> Preliminary Breckenridge Chamber of Commerce business statistics
> indicate that the municipal law attracted skiers and snowboarders and
> mitigated for the local ski resorts and businesses an El Nino winter
> of modest snow.
>
> In Nederland an effort to establish a summer cannabis festival
> celebrating the many uses of the cannabis/hemp plant was squelched by
> local churches. And yet opposition to the festival was understandable,
> inevitable.
>
> The proponents of the cannabis festival made a confused
> presentation/justification for the use of cannabis and why there
> should be a cannabis festival in Nederland.
>
> Let there be a clear presentation/justification for why there should
> be a municipal law in Nederland that allows for the use, cultivation,
> distribution, transportation of cannabis without a dirty, stinking
> note from a doctor.
>
> When our ancestors were no more, and yet no less than bands of
> primates in the nature of the African savannas, they had the natural
> right to utilize, to cultivate every and any plant they found in their
> natural environment.
>
> Long ago, our ancestors found many uses of hemp/cannabis. The
> archaeological records show that humans have been using/cultivating
> cannabis for at
> least 14,000 years. It is one of the first plants cultivated by
> Humans.
>
> The natural right to use any plant found in nature precedes and
> supersedes the power of the United States and the state of Colorado.

For those of you who shape your observations and opinions on religious
doctrine, please note that the Christian, Islamic, Jewish and Hindu
scriptures all clearly state that God gave the Human the right to
use/cultivate any plant found in nature of which the Human had uses
for, with the possible exception of a couple of trees in the Garden of
Eden.
>
> The United States and the state of Colorado has no right to prohibit,
> to make illegal a plant that is
> found in nature. The nation, the state has no right to tell people which
> seeds they can grow and which seeds they cannot grow.
>
> These are our natural rights as Human Beings.
>
> The law that Nederland residents have the opportunity to vote on will
> allow for people 21 and over to use, cultivate, distribute, transport
> cannabis and its derivatives as well as paraphernalia.
>
> Vote YES for Natural Right/Natural Law.

The Suffering/Dying/Reborn Gods/Goddesses of the Vernal Equinox

2010-03-03T13:53:00.000-08:00

(A version of this story first appeared in 'Mountain Music'. To see
the full narrative of 'The Voyage of the Bloody, Snake Chariot' see
www.libbyhome.blogspot.com )

The oldest and most joyous celebrations/festivals are those that mark
the end of the dead season and the rebirth of life around the time of
the spring equinox. These celebrations/festivals, often are centered
around a re-occurring theme (an archetype). This archetype is of the
dying, sojourning in the underworld and then being reborn with the
spring - gods/goddesses. And these joyous celebrations/festivals often
have a dark side.

These gods'/goddesses' deaths/rebirths coincide with the deaths and
rebirths of life in general but specifically are focused on the
deaths/rebirths of vital agricultural foods such as barley, corn and
grapes.The gods/goddesses become the personification of the food
plant.

Barley was the most important food crop in Northern Europe until the
16th Century. The old English folk song 'John Barleycorn Must Die' ,
(popularized in the modern world by the band Traffic) is the personalization of
the pagan Anglo-Saxon god of the barley, Beowa, whose name is the old
Anglo-Saxon word for barley.

In the song John Barleycorn is made to suffer the way the barley plant
is made to suffer through the stages of its cultivation, such as its
harvesting and threshing. But the last verse of the song speaks of the
revenge of the god of the barley's spirit which resides in the beer
and brandy made from his body - the hangover.

'And little Sir John in the nut brown bowl (beer vessel)
Proved the stronger man at last
And the huntsman he can't hunt the fox
Nor so loudly blow his horn

And the tinker he can't mend kettles and pots

Without a little of Barleycorn.'

The song alludes to the primal realities of the human condition and in
particular the annual sacrifice of the Barley King.

The men of the ancient Anglo-Saxon tribes, every year, would choose
among themselves the man who would be the Barley King.This man would
be treated as a king, for a year, until the planting of the barley,
sometime around the spring equinox.. Then the Barley King would
carefully dance amidst the freshly planted barley. Then he would be
quickly, violently, bloodily killed, his body dragged between the rows
of barley so his blood would run in the fields' furrows - so that the
barley would grow.

The Barley King's body was then eaten during the fertility feast that
followed and the next Barley King took his place.

In the Americas the agricultural gods and goddesses of death and
rebirth personalized the corn crop.

In the Creek Indian myth of the origins of corn, the Corn Woman
Goddess is an old woman who appears to be in all ways mortal, except
that every day she produces these abundant, delicious meals of corn.
Her family has no idea where the food is coming from. One night her
sons spy on her. In the various versions of the myth the sons find
that the corn is being transformed and produced from the old woman
scraping her sores or scabs, or cutting her nails, or from the water
that washes her feet, or even from the old woman's feces. In all
versions of the myth, the origin of the old woman's corn is something
so disgusting that her family refuses to eat the corn.

The Corn Woman Goddess then tells her sons to clear a large plot of
land, and then to quickly, violently bloodily kill her, and then drag
her body around the clearing seven times. This the sons do and where
the old womans blood splashed or fell, seven months later, there the
sons found corn.

In the Penobscot Indian myth of the Corn Mother, she is the first
goddess of the people, before the people filled the land. But when the
people fill the land they kill all the animals and there is no food.
The Corn Mother tells her husband to quickly, violently bloodily kill
her and then to have her sons drag her dead body on cleared ground by
her long, silky hair, until her flesh is torn off, scraped off of her
bones. Seven months latter they find corn where the flesh of the Corn
Mother had been scraped off her bones.

Bacchus/Dionysus was violently killed as is the grape in the process
of making wine. His body was torn into pieces, he sojourned in the
underworld, and challenged the powers-that-be that he found there and
then he is reborn in the first shoots of the grape vine.

The Romans celebrated the Bacchanalia, on March 16 and 17th, to
celebrate the rebirth of the god, the rebirth of the grape.

In the Bacchanalia Bacchus/Dionysus is celebrated as the god of
spring, of fertility, of new life, merriment, mirth, wine, and
revelry. The god was celebrated with drunkenness and orgies.

The Jesus Christ of conventional Christianity shares most of the
attributes of these suffering/dying/rebirthing agricultural gods. Easter was the
first Christian holiday, and in many places the myth of the death and
rebirth of Christ was superimposed on pagan holidays and festivals
that celebrated the rebirth of the suffering/dying gods/goddesses of the
cultivation.

Buffalo Heart

2010-02-25T16:12:00.001-08:00

Elephant Revival was the featured band at the Buffalo Heart Project (B.H.P.) benefit at the Boulder Theater on Feb. 5th which raised thousands of dollars for emergency heating assistance for people living on the Pine Ridge and Rose Bud Reservations of the Lakota people during this particularly cold and trying winter of 2010.

The concert was in all ways a major, defining event for headliner Elephant Revival, which is on the cusp of a major breakout into the greater national musical scene. It also defined the bands unique social activism.

Elephant Revival is the leader in an emerging new, influential musical genre being called Transcendental Folk. All the musical artists who joined Elephant Revival for the benefit concert contribute in some way, to the defining of this new musical genre.

The Plenty Wolf Singers, a traditional Lakota Drumming Society, initiated the concert with prayer and invocation to the Great Spirit/Creator with sad yet triumphal traditional drumming and singing.

The music of the Plenty Wolf Singers is the song of our shared American landscape/American topography, a sad primal lamentation of dispossession and attempted genocide, where economically worthless badlands become Indian Reservations forming new frontiers of despair, hopelessness and oppression. Still the song of the Plenty Wolf is also a song of joy, triumph, and transcendence. A song of still abiding in this bleak, arduous American landscape still connected to a persisting, living counter-culture.

The intention of the evening pulsed forth & gained cadence as the drum, the living heartbeat of the American landscape, inaugurated and invoked the evenings magical unfolding.

The Plenty Wolf Singers were joined by a surprise special guest Silent Bear, a fellow resident and musician from the Rose Bud Reservation. Silent Bear received permission from Pete Seeger to alter the words to Seeger's famous Vietnam protest song, “Bring Them Home.” Silent Bear’s song adaptation entitled “Bring Him Home” - is reference and homage to Leonard Peltier who spends his 34th year wrongly imprisoned for a crime he did not do. The song became a shared, heartfelt prayer for justice to come to a place where there is no justice.

The Plenty Wolf Singers were a persisting presence during the concert providing a focus to the show as the bands were setting up, as well as ending the concert with ceremony and prayer.

Jim Page was another persisting presence during the show acting as master of ceremony and providing historic context and demonstrating why he is the most notable, worthy American songwriter plying his craft, today.

Page played his haunting, signature song, '(accompanied by Elephant Revival) ‘The Wind did Blow', about the wind that blew and froze the corpses of the men, women, children, and old people murdered by the U.S. 7th Cavalry at Wounded Knee, South Dakota on December 29, 1890.

As emcee, Page wove his own songs in between the other band's sets throughout the evening. Page included his own verse of Woody Guthrie's 'This Land is Your Land,’ and a current protest song penned about the war in Iraq, 'Collateral Damage'. His song ’Heroes &Survivors’ referenced the overpowering will of humanity to carry on through oppression and persecution. Page sang of ‘Anna Mae’ Aquash, a member of the American Indian Movement (A.I.M.) who was found murdered on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1976.

As the late great folk legend Utah Philips stated, “Jim Page is one of the great songwriters of our times. He is a master of the songwriting craft. Jim Page’s songs get right to the point. He looks at the world clearly and reports what he sees with compassion, humor and a biting sense of irony."

The Buffalo Heart Project Benefit was a night, which invited all participants to break-out their best protest songs, and 'The Boulder Acoustic Society' accepted the invitation. They took the posture of rabble-rousers and ended their set by bringing it into the audience. They sang the timeless protest song, "Lift Every Voice" and Steve Earle's "Oxycontin Blues."

Reed Foehl stood before the packed theater with nothing but his harmonica and acoustic guitar evoking a young Bob Dylan in the early days in Greenwich Village. And like young Dylan his songs were sad laments of isolation and alienation. He covered Dylan's "Visions of Johanna" beautifully.

Laura Goldhamer & The Silver Nail also sang songs of isolation and alienation, and the hope of transcending - rising above. The bands songs were illustrated by an on-stage slide show projected on a bed sheet.

Many sad songs were sung. Many angry songs of protest were sung. And yet, in the end, all anger and sadness was transcended by E.R.'s songs of hope and grace.

A magic moment occurred when headliner Elephant Revival took the stage, stood silently posed in the moment and then charged into the savage blood rhythm of their Celtic battle song, with the unlikely title 'Single Beds Were Made for One'.

The quintets fusion of Scottish/Celtic fiddle tunes, original folk pieces, traditional ballads, psychedelic country, & indie rock, and powerful reggae grooves has such a beautiful animal/creature vitality, that it made the dancers dance in new archaic ways.

Other Elephant Revival songs spoke to the delusion of apartness and separateness, while within the narrative of the song - the delusion is overcome. Other songs spoke to the power we all have to make the world anew.

As a whole Elephant Revival’s songs speak of the band member’s collective vastness and great generosity of spirit.

Elephant Revival hails from Nederland, Colorado - a place whose precious minerals have been mined out, yet Nederland is amazingly rich in its abundance of musical talent. Bands and talents such as Stephen Stills, Dan Fogelberg, Joe Walsh, Leftover Salmon, String Cheese Incident, and Yonder Mountain String Band have emerged from this part of the Coloradoan Front Range to take their place in the greater national musical scene. The unanimous, local folk wisdom is that Elephant Revival is next.

The kind of social activism that was showcased by The Buffalo Heart Project Benefit comes natural to Elephant Revival band members. Bonnie May Paine (vocals, washboard, djembe, musical saw) is tribal Cherokee from the capital of the Oklahoma Cherokee - Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Most all of the other band members have some connection to the Indian Territories of Oklahoma. From there springs forth their song of hope, comfort, and transcendence to the oppressed.

Many sad songs were sung at the Buffalo Heart Benefit. Yet, in the end all sadness was transcended through the convergence of musicians singing of an emerging new consciousness in these changing times. The music, all pervasive and elevating, represents an emerging new musical genre known as “Transcendental Folk.”

Micro-Chips in the Butt - Revisited

2010-02-14T19:59:00.000-08:00

Georgia and Virginia have recently joined with North Dakota,
California and Wisconsin in prohibiting, by state law, the
involuntary implantation of microchips into peoples' butts..

The debate in the Virginia House of Delegates was often of a
theological nature with Delegate Mark L. Cole (R-Fredericksburg), the
bill’s sponsor, sharing his concerns that the micro-chips could be the
“mark of the beast” described in the Book of Revelation.

"My understanding — I’m not a theologian — but there’s a prophecy in
the Bible that says you’ll have to receive a mark, or you can neither
buy nor sell things in end times,” Cole said. “Some people think these
computer chips might be that mark.”

I want to again (see www.libbyhome.blogspot.com 'narrative of the
voyage...) clearly and loudly state that I am TOTALLY against
micro-chips being implanted into peoples' butts.

These states have not gone far enough in combating this clear and
present danger, if you ask me.. They should put
anti-microchips-in-the-butt slogans on car license plates. A
suggestion: Live Free of Micro-Chips in the Butt - Or Die. Or this one
(which I personally live and die by) the only way you're going to get
a micro-chip in me - is in my cold, dead butt.

And yet, with all this being said, I still can't help noting that even
if Americans had micro-chips
implanted into their butts they would be no more the bee-otches of
the corporations' agenda, and that Damn Debil - then they are right now.

The Damn Debil is like rust - he never sleeps - he's always, 24/7,
thinking of ways to put micro-chips in peoples' butts

And yet, all I know, is that micro-chips in the butt would not make Americans
any more enthusiastically, ready and willing to go to the barricades,
to go to the town meetings, to go to the tea-bag parties, to go to the
Massachussetts voting booths to fight against their own best
interests,.

Having micro-chips in their butts could not make Americans any more
adamently, militantly moronic in buying into this Sarah Palin
faux-grifter-populism which only serves the interests of the bankers,
wall street gangsters and black-hearted Republicans who continue to
lead the charge into the valley of death, and the Great World
Depression II (GWD II).

Lupercalia - The Celebration of the Divine Male

2010-01-31T23:48:00.000-08:00

Our culture's Hallmark Card celebration of St. Valentines Day is a
shadow, a feeble, lame, Christianized, commercialized remnant of the
savage splendor of the pagan holy days known as the Lupercalia - a
joyous, musical, fertility festival in honor of the god Pan/Faunus,
and the pure, eternal and sexual life force.

In the Roman World Lupercalia was celebrated from February 13 - 15.
The holiday had pre-Roman antecedents that probably involved human
sacrifice. But in the Roman world, during the Ides of February,
priests of the god Pan/Faunus, wearing nothing but goat-skins (that
did not conceal their genitals) would sacrifice two goats and a dog in
the Lupercal, the cave where Rome's mythological founders Romulus and
Remus were suckled by a she-wolf - the hill on which the city of Rome
was founded.

Two, high-born male youths would be led to the sacrificial altar and
would be anointed with the blood of the sacrificed animals.

A sacrificial feast would follow. And then the priests of Pan/Faunus
would make the hides of the sacrificed animals into whips. The whips
were then given to three, young, naked, male patricians.

Meanwhile, the women and maidens of Rome would line up around the
Palantine Hill.

The whip-wielding youths would then run around the hill
striking the lined-up women, who would jostle each other to be in
position to be whipped.

They did this to ensure fertility,
prevent sterility, and to ease the pain of child birth.

Shakespeare's 'Julius Caesar' begins at the Lupercalia of 44 B.C.
Julius Caesar urges his childless wife, Calpurnia to stand directly in
Mark Anthony's (not the Latin American music pop star - Julius
Caesar's best friend and comrade - a Roman patrician who was a fervent
adherent of Pan/Faunus and did everything he could to be awarded the
honor of running around the streets of ancient Rome naked, with a
shaggy whip) way so she could be properly whipped.

In the play Caesar says to Anthony, "Forget not, in your speed,
Anthonius, To touch Calpurnia; for our elders say the barren touched
in this holy chase shake off their sterile curse."

The days of the Lupercalia were known as the days of purification. The
intent of these days was to repel the powers of evil, to avert plague
and pestilence, ruin, and untimely death, and to liberate the powers
that promoted the fertility and the health of people, the increase of
herds of livestock, the abundant growth of crops, and to honor the god
Pan/Faunus.

In some myths Pan/Faunus is the son of Bacchus/Dionysus. In other
myths he is the son of the trickster god Hermes/Mercury. He is the god
of shepards, their herds of livestock, mountain wilds, hunting, and
rustic music.

He has the hindquarters, legs, hairiness and horns of a black goat.
He has the power of arousing panic, (the word is derived from his
name - the Greeks credited him with inspiring the panic among the
Persians that led to the victory of the Battle of Marathon in 490
B.C.) inspiration, beautiful
music and sexuality.

He (and Zamfir) is always depicted with his signature musical
instrument - the Pan flute.

The myth of the origin of the Pan flute involves Pan/Faunus' attempted
seduction of Syrinx, a beautiful water nymph. Syrinx, attempting to
escape Pan/Faunus' attention ran to her sister water nymphs. Syrinx's
sisters transformed her into a hollow, water reed, to hide her from
Pan\Faustus. When the wind blew through the hollow, water reed it made
a sad, plaintive melody. Pan/Faunus couldn't identify the specific
reed that Syrinx had been transformed in to, that was making the sad
and beautiful song. So he cut seven, or in some myths, nine reeds,
joined them side by side in gradually decreasing lengths to make his
definitive musical instrument.

And he is a skilled, supernatural musician.

Pan/Faunus challenges Apollo, the god of the lyre, to a contest. The
mountain god Tmolus is chosen to judge the contest. King Midas (famous
for turning all he touches into gold) just happens to be present at the contest.
Tmolus declares Apollo the winner of the musical contest. Then Midas
disagrees and contests the decision. Apollo then turns Midas' ears
into long donkey ears.

Pan is 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' the title of the seventh
chapter of the book 'The Wind in the Willows' the classic of
children's literature written by Kenneth Graham and published in 1908.
Syd Barrett of 'Pink Floyd' used the title of the book's seventh
chapter as the title of the band's first album. In the children's book
Pan/Faunus is the god that gives the Human the ability to forget pain
and suffering.

Nothing about Pan/Faunus involves a Hallmark valentine's version of
romantic love, the sanctity of monogamy, or marriage. He taught
shepards how to masturburate so as to make their profession more
tolerable and easier on the livestock. His greatest sexual conquest is
the moon goddess, Selene.

To hide his hairy, black, goat form he wrapped himself in a sheepskin.
And then he drew, he charmed the goddess to earth, into a dark forest
with the beauty of his music.

And then he shagged her.

The Lupercalia honored Pan/Faunus in his manifestation as the god of
shepards and their herds, who wards off the wolf. The Romans associated
him with the power that stopped the she-wolf from eating the infants
Romulus and Remus and instead led the she-wolf to nurture the brothers
so they could found Rome.

The Lupercalia was very much a music festival. All the music had
sexual themes which the early Christian
church considered to be totally obscene.

In 476 A.D. Pope Hilary ended all overt celebration of the holiday.
But then a plague engulfed
Italy, and many came to believe the plague was the result of the
suppression of the pagan religious observance.

Christian missionaries were killed, in Italy, when they attempted to stop the
celebration of the Lupercalia. People who called themselves Christians
continued to covertly celebrate the holiday
through the the 5th Century.

And this is the reason why Christianity's, and our cultures depiction
of Pan/Faunus is very similar to the image of The Devil/Satan. And
this is the reason why the Hallmark Card Corporation will never put
Pan/Faunus on no dirty, stinking valentine cards

Repeal of Prohibition

2009-12-31T01:56:00.000-08:00

Those who suffered under the oppression "the stupendous blunder" of
alcohol prohibition entered the first Great World Depression (GWD I),
they entered the decade of the 1930's, believing they would not live
to see the day when alcohol prohibition would be repealed.

Republican President Herbert Hoover, who had presided over the The
Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 (and did little to avert or mitigate
the consequences) was a fervent supporter of alcohol prohibition. The
democrat who was emerging as his party's presidential candidate,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was known to inhale and completely
enjoy his martinis. And yet during his time as a New York state
senator The Anti-Saloon League (one of the most prominent
political/Christian religious organizations in the maintenance of
alcohol prohibition) reported that Roosevelt had a "perfect voting
record" in support of alcohol prohibition.

During FDR's campaign he gave only one unequivocal speech in favor of
the repeal of prohibition. He declared that he would, "correct the
stupendous blunder."

FDR considered prohibition to be a stupendous blunder because $100's
of millions of taxes (billions and billions of dollars in 2010 money)
that could be collected for the New Deal (that Roosevelt was already
planning) were instead going into the pockets of gangsters and
corrupted police and public officials. He considered prohibition to be
a stupendous blunder because it led to wholesale contempt and
disregard of the law. And he considered prohibition to be a stupendous
blunder because he knew that America badly needed a drink.

During the rest of his campaign he studiously, politically avoided
speaking on the subject of prohibition.

Then during the 1932 Democratic Convention, in Chicago, a floor fight
broke out about making repeal of prohibition a plank in the Democratic
Party's platform. The "wet" democrats won. In his acceptance speech
FDR said, "This convention wants repeal. Your candidate wants repeal."

In November, 1932 FDR won with 57% of the popular vote. He became
president on March 4, 1933.

On March 12, FDR had his first radio, fire-side chat with the
impoverished, destitute, anxious American people.

After the radio speech FDR knew he had connected, given hope. While he
was relaxing with two of his top aides in the oval office, after he
had given the fire-side chat, he said, "I think it's time for a beer."

That night he began planning the repeal of prohibition.

FDR knew the Volstead Act, which had imposed the hated prohibition in
1919, permitted the legalization of beverages with as much as five per
cent alcohol content. The next day, March 13, 1933, FDR sent to the
House a three sentence message requesting the legalization of 3.2
beer.

Ten days later on March 23, 1933, FDR signed an amendment to the
Volstead Act allowing for the manufacture and sale of 3.2 beer
(Cullen-Harrison Act). The act became law two weeks later - April 7,
1933.

At 12:01 a.m. on April 7 sirens, fire alarms, and bells sounded across the
country. In Chicago crowds stood 12 deep at the newly opened bars. In
front of the White House 800 people assembled. A local Washington,
D.C. brewery sent a truck full of Hawaiian Guitarists and beer and a
sign that read, "President Roosevelt - The First Beer is For You."

"Thousands of bars opened overnight," recalled author Studs Terkel,
"with every other beer on the house.

"In the midst of the Depression it
was a note of hope that something would be better," said Terkel.

By March 24 (two days after FDR had signed the law legalizing beer)
Milwaukee Breweries had hired more than 600 workers. Beer brewers in
New York City announced plans to spend $22 million to refurbish their
semi-derelict plants and bring workers back to the plants' assembly
lines.

In the 48 hours after beer taps opened on April 7, 1933 brewers paid
$10 million in state, federal and municipal taxes (about $155 million
in 2010 dollars).

Final repeal of the 18th Amendment, that had definitively imposed
prohibition, didn't happen until December 5, 1933, which perhaps
became the second happiest day for Americans during the GWD I.

There are many Americans, alive today, who believe they will not see
the day when cannabis prohibition will be repealed. And yet, the
oppression, the prohibition, the cultural war against those who use
and love the flowers of the cannabis plant is
fraying, unraveling.

During the presidential campaign Barak Obama made it clear he inhaled
- "That's the point, isn't it?"

One of his first decisions as president was to appoint, former Seattle
Police Chief, Gil Kerlikowske, as the 'Drug Czar' (head of the White
House Office of National Drug Control Policy).

Kerlikowske immediately said that he wanted to "banish" the idea that
the government was fighting a war on drugs and plants which was really
a war against Americans. "We're not at war with people in this
country," he said.

Soon after becoming president Obama also announced that federal police
would not raid medical cannabis dispensaries in compliance with state
law.

In July, Obama issued a memo to federal prosecutors in states
with medical cannabis laws telling them not to waste scarce federal
resources on people in "clear and unambiguous compliance" with state
laws.

In California a petition to bring to referendum the legalization of
cannabis (would legalize the possession of up to an ounce, and
cultivation within a 25 square foot area, for personal use) has
received more than 680,000 signatures. The petition only needed 433,
971 valid signatures.

Polls indicate at least 56 per cent of Californian voters are
ready to vote for the repeal of cannabis prohibition.

If and when this referendum issue is approved by California voters at
least $1.6 billion of state and municipal taxes will be raised during
the first year of legalization.

If and when Californians vote for the repeal of cannibis prohibition a
decisive blow will be thrown against the whole stupendously stupid
blunder, and cannabis prohibition will fall.

Isolation/Alienation the Rebirth of the Light

2009-12-25T15:05:00.000-08:00

Many times this time has not been about the rebirth of the light, the
birthday of Dionysus. Christmas has often been a time when this Jewish
kid from Norwich, CT nursed/nourished isolation and
alienation, took a perverse joy in embracing cold and bleakness.

Six years ago I first came into contact with The House of Paine/Garde
and Tahlequah, OK. I came into contact with Magical Realism and It's
Music.

The time since has never been devoid of magic, and yet this particular
time has often been particularly arduous times of isolation,
alienation, the indifference of the elements.

There was the Christmas time, six years ago, when Bonnie ( the Bonnie
Paine), Dan ( the Daniel Rodriguez) y Yo
were traveling from Tulsa to Denver in a raging blizzard, in two
vehicles (see 'narrative of the voyage of the bloody, snake chariot'
at www.libbyhome.blogspot.com).

My car (the original bloody, snake chariot - a 1989 Toyota
Tercel) had a broken, distributor cap. Only the heavy moisture of the
blizzard allowed the electricity to continue working in my engine. And
then when we got to Salina, Ks. and the other side of the blizzard, the
electricity became weak, feeble.

We gave each other Christmas presents and had to part at a gas station
parking lot, in the middle of the
night, in a cold, icy wind - Bonnie and Dan to Colorado - me, to a
six hour, 15-20 m.p.h. (maximum) adventure, east on the shoulder of
I-70, back to the missile base.

There was the Christmas Time I took my leap into the wild, blue
yonder, the dynamic uncertainty of transiting the length of Mexico to
arrive in San Cristobal de la Casas, Chiapas, with 200 pesos to spare
(see 'narrative of....' at www.libbyhome.blogspot.com).

And then there is this Christmas times when I am again arrived at the
place I ought to be, with the people I ought to be with, in the right
time.

It is an arduous time in that yesterday arrived here in Oklahoma City
with the Great Blizzard of 'O9.

It is an arduous time in that I am struck and shaken when it comes
crushingly home to me that each person is such a universe on
to themselves, that each person is such a Mystery.

And so, I come to the conclusion which I often come to - it is about
posture in the face of Mystery.

The posture of embracing, respecting and, most of all, loving and
being compassionate to The Mystery/The
Universe of the Other, is the Victory, the
Transcendence of isolation, alienation, cold and bleakness.

De mi Corazon - May y'all be joyously Reborn in the Resurgent Light,

Kai Bacchus/Dionysus

Dionysian Solstice

2009-12-04T17:06:00.001-08:00

(A version of the following story first appeared in the December issue
of 'Mountain Music'. To read the full narrative of 'the voyage of the
bloody, snake chariot see www.libbyhome.blogspot.com )

Perhaps the days that we are living through, now, give some idea of the
terror and anxiety that our ancestors felt in the time of the fading,
the seeming dying of the light.

For our early ancestors every year's descent
into winter solstice darkness felt like the end of the world, just
as the winter solstice day of December 21, 2012, feels like the end
of the world to many, today.

Our ancestors would closely note the movement of the rising and setting
sun on the horizons. Eventually elaborate ancient observatories, such
as Stonehenge, would be built to observe this movement, to fix the point on the
horizons at which the rising/setting sun would stand still and then
begin the movement to the springtime, the movement to the rebirth of
the light.

It would take about four days for our ancestors, and their ancient
observatories to discern this movement of the sun. And that day,
December 25, became the birth day of gods, such as the Greeks'
Dionysus, and Christian Orthodoxy's Jesus -
potent, solar gods of liberation and illumination who like the food
and shamanistic
plants died and were reborn.

These gods' birth day became celebrations of the light, celebrations of
the resurgence of the life force. The eve of the day and the day would
be celebrated with
shamanistic plants, the kindling of lights, bonfires, uninhibited,
free behavior, music and dance.

Dionysus like Christian Orthodoxy's Jesus was born right after the
Winter Solstice, the son of a divine father (Zeus) and a virgin mother
(Semele). They were both hailed as the King of Kings, and both were
murdered. Both
conquered death, were reborn, and elevated to be beside their divine
fathers. Both made water into wine.

And yet, the wine, Dionysus is the god of, is not like our wine.
Dionysus' wine was a mixture of fermented grape and the rye ergot, a
fungus that infects ripe rye and is a powerful entheogeon (Albert
Hoffman was studying rye ergot extracts in 1945 when he "discovered"
LSD).

Dionysus was the god of the cultivation of the shamanistic, power
plants. The devotees of Dionysus would deliberately cultivate this
fungal blight on an important food plant to make the wine of Dionysus.

The wine of Dionysus makes you trip hard.

And that's the way the Greeks participated in, observed all the
Dionysian Festivals including the Winter Solstice/Birthday Celebration
known as the Lenaea, the festival of the original girls gone wild.

The birth day of Dionysus was the day the year's wine was born, in
that the grape wine had stopped fermenting and was ready to be drunk.

The Greeks believed the winter solstice time was when the boundaries,
the membranes that separated the light and the dark, the living and
the dead, the masculine from the feminine, the gods and the Human,
mortals and immortals, drunkenness and higher consciousness, tragedy
and comedy became stretched and permeable. The gods, goddesses, the
satyrs, the nymphs, the spirits of the dead, and all manner of
devotees of Dionysus attended the Lenaea. Participants would wear
masks and disguises depicting themselves as such archetypal entities.

Many of the Greek plays that have survived were written for the
Lenaea, for Dionysus is the god of theatre, the god of music, the
god of ecstatic dancing and ecstasy itself.

The day was tragic in that the god had been murdered. The day was
joyful, comic in that the god had outwitted death and had been reborn
into his greater and further powers.

The intent of all Dionysian festivals was to allow devotees to fight,
to conquer, to suffer, to triumph as the god did. To share in the
cosmic triumph of the light and the life force and the manifesting of
this eternal life force in vegetative fruitfulness, and abundance.

The disguising of participants as satyrs, and nymphs concealed
excesses, and what would usually be considered unacceptable behavior,
under a mask. Participants in the festival colored their bodies with
plaster, soot, vermilion, and different sorts of green and red juices
of plants. They wore goat and deer skins round the loins, covering
their faces with large leaves and masks.

And yet the Dionysian Festivals were not about drunkenness and sexual
license. They were about leaving the business-as-usual of the Human
Circumstances and going into a novel and strange world.

Drinking the entheogenic wine was considered to be a joyous duty of
gratitude to the god of wine. To not drink the wine was considered
shameful.

The boisterous, joyful music of flutes, cymbals, and drums,
were common to all Dionysian festivals. There would be processions led
by women dressed as Bacchae (all devotees of Dionysus), Lenae/Maenads
(women who resisted Dionysus and were driven mad), Thyades (ravers,
women who had accepted Dionysus and had retained their sanity),
Naiades, Nymphs, and other mythic females, bearing oversized
phalluses, and wearing garlands of ivy. Men, some disguised as women,
would follow.

The choruses sung on the occasion were called dithyrambs, and were
hymns addressed to the god in the freest metres and with the boldest
imagery, in which his exploits and achievements were extolled.

During the earliest Lenaeas young men were sacrificed. They would
literally be ripped apart by nine savage, blood thirsty, drunk,
ecstatically dancing Lenae/Maenads (the original girls gone wild) and
the ripped flesh would be eaten by the women in a strange, disturbing
spiritual ecstasy. Eventually the ecstatic dancing would
produce a baby, the divine Dionysus child, in a winnowing basket,
crowned by snakes.

Eventually it would be a young hill goat that would be ripped apart by
the Lenae/Maenads, eaten bloody and raw and then miraculously reborn
by the god's ecstatically
dancing, mad priestesses.

The sacrifice celebrated the eternal continuity, cycle of birth, life,
death, and rebirth.

The festivals celebrated the liberation/illumination possible to the Human in
theatre, dance, music, art, the cultivation of shamanistic,
entheogenic plants, spiritual insight and prophesy.

Christians didn't celebrate December 25 as Jesus' birth day until the
Fourth Century A.D. The residual Dionysian traditions of celebrating
the day with drunkenness and sexual licentiousness would cause
organized Christian denominations to periodically ban the practice of
celebrating Christmas.

And it wasn't until the Sixth Century A.D. that organized Christianity
stamped out the overt worship of Dionysus by Greek wine-makers.

And yet, in spite of organized Christianity's best repressive efforts
there is something Dionysian about our culture's celebration of the
winter solstice.

The Vibration of the Coming of the Great Awakening

2009-11-04T16:57:00.000-08:00

Here in these United States, We, the People of these United States,
are reduced to being a very anxious, a very stressed, dispirited,
indebted, increasingly impoverished, working class facing the on-set
of the Great World Depression II (GWD II).

Many tick off the days of the Mayan Calandar as they masturbate
fantasies of the end of the whole depressing narrative of Human
History, which has all led to the present moment. They tick off the
days of the Mayan Calendar as they masturbate fantasies of the end of
the world in December 2012, just three years away.

I say, with complete confidence, the planet Naburu is not coming with
the Apocalypse. Nor will cosmic nuclear blasts from the center of the
galaxy annihilate all that ride on this planet and the darkness of the
present moment in the Human Circumstances.

And yet, I say with complete confidence - something really significant
is about to happen.

We are about to be awakened from our stupor, from our sleep-walking,
from our normal business-as-usual (b-a-u) death-in-life. For there is
nothing that so focuses the collective mind of Humanity then a Great
World Depression.

Soon it will be impossible to not see what complete slaves/bee-otches
of corporation agenda we have become. It will be impossible not to see
the anti-Human intent of the corporations' agenda. It will be
impossible not to feel the Vibration of what is to come.

By December 2012 there will be a nation-wide repeal of the prohibition
on cannabis, because during Great World Depressions government is
unable to sustain prohibitions on alcohol, prohibitions on cannabis,
on a very stressed, very anxious, dispirited, indebted, impoverished
and really angry working class.

Then things will happen.

Means of production will be seized. There will be mass Exodus from the
corporations' agenda.

By December of 2012 it will be seen that what happened in the late
1960's and early 70's was the fitfull stirrings of some greater
awakening - The Great Awakening.

The Feast in the Wilderness of the Integration of the Other

2009-11-02T15:27:00.000-08:00

The Thanksgiving Feast at Plymouth Plantation in 1621 was a harvest
celebration. These kinds of feasts were important
observances to both English and Wampanoags.

The Pilgrims/Roundheads (as the partisans of Oliver Cromwell were
known as) had lost half their population during their first winter in
the wilderness. But in the spring Indians appeared.

One of them, Squanto, spoke English, and had traveled extensively in
Europe (he had been invited on to an English ship and was Shanghaied
to London, where he became a carnival exhibit).

The Wampanoags taught the Roundheads the cultivation of native crops.
They taught them how to survive in Southern New England. This was the
celebration of that first harvest.

There were about 50 English men, women, and children. There were about
90 Wampanoag warriors with the Great Chief Massasoit.

Massasoit's people had been decimated by smallpox. He knew of the
treachery of English and Dutch ship captains who had murdered,
kidnapped, extorted, raped, enslaved and robbed Indians.

He watched the Roundheads die during their first winter. He hoped winter
would solve his illegal immigrant problem. There were Wampanoags who
really wanted to nip the problem in the bud.

But Massasoit took pity on the starving white people. So many had died
from the plagues and pestilences. He told his people there had been
enough death.

That Spring he sent Squanto and the others to help the white strangers.

The people he was breaking bread with during the first Plymouth
Thanksgiving, and those people's children would so oppress the
Wampanoags that in 1672, (51 years later) Massasoit's oldest son, King
Phillip (a.k.a Metacomet) would lead an uprising that would spread
throughout New England. Although Metacoment's uprising had initial
success, he was ambushed and killed by the English and their Indian
allies in 1677. The people Massasoit was breaking bread with and their
children would cut off his oldest son's head, impale it on a stake,
and leave it in front of Plymouth Plantation for 30 years.

The second Thanksgiving Celebration at Plymouth in 1637 (16 years
latter) celebrated the slaughter of as many as 700 men, women and
children on Pequot Hill in Mystic, CT., and the end of the 'Pequot
War'. That Thanksgiving was the beginning of an annual tradition of
Thanksgiving Celebrations.

But during that first Plymouth Thanksgiving Feast all those horrors
were in the future.

That Thanksgiving feast anticipated the present moment, this
multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-ethnic reality, of the integration
of the Other, that has become the reality of these United States.

It anticipates the moment that will soon come when people of color
will again be the majority.

Everyone feasted and celebrated their shared humanity as
equals in that vast wildness, that vast dynamic uncertainty.

There were three days to feast. There were three days to celebrate the
integration of the Shadow, the radically different Other.

Music is the greatest force for this multi-cultural, multi-racial integration.

In the only account of the celebration, written by Edward Winslow it
is noted there was music,
singing and dancing.

There were similarities, universalities, parallels in the music of the
English and the Wampanoags.

The Wampanoags had flutes. They had large
drums made from hollowed out stumps, that were communally played by
societies of drummers. They had small hand drums. They had frame
drums. They had rattles, rasps, conch shell trumpets, whistles, striking
sticks.

The songs the Wampanoags sang had intricate harmony, were
rhythmically complex.

There was much call and response in their songs. The Wampanoags were
doing intricate choral, church-music-like, complex harmonizing long
before the European ships appeared.

During harvest celebrations Wampanoag leaders would give ritual
speeches that were perceived to be music by Europeans because they had
rhythm and melody.

The English had fifes, hornpipes (similar to an oboe), frame drums,
perhaps a fiddle, perhaps other string instruments that were the
ancestors of the modern guitar. And the Roundheads had a very
developed, extensive repertoire of church music.

Being the Puritans that they were the Roundheads disapproved of the
Wampanoags' dancing, and the music that accompanied the dancing.

And yet the Roundheads church music was strangely familiar to the
Wampanoags, as was the Wampanoags community choral songs strangely
familiar to the Roundheads.

There is a Narragansett (the Wampanoags' neighbors and historical
adversaries who became allies during King Phillip's War) legend that
some years before the first European ships arrived, Narragansetts, and
other tribes including the Wampanoags heard music, a song. The tune
was heard "in the air" by many Indian people who lived on the Atlantic
coast.

Because the song was beautiful, it was learned, it was sung, it was
included in the music of many tribes.

When the Wampanoags first visited the Roundheads' Congregational
Meeting House (the feast also celebrated the completion of seven
homes, the meeting house, and three buildings for the storage of food)
during that first 1621 Plymouth Thanksgiving they heard that
same song during the thanksgiving service, the song which had been heard "in the
air". And, according to the Narragansett legend, the Indians joined in
the singing of the song. And knew it at least as well as the
Roundheads.

The song is known as 'Old Indian Hymn', and is still sung at the
Narragansett Church on the tribe's reservation in Rhode Island. The
hymn's last verse goes: "There is a stream that issues forth, From
God's eternal throne, And from the Lamb, a living stream, Clear as a
crystal stone.

To the Narragansetts the song speaks to their survival as a people, as
a unique tradition, as a culture which like the stream in the song,
issues forth from God's eternal throne.

This sharing of music was a beginning of what becomes known as
American Music. Songs such as 'Amazing Grace', Dixie, Jambalaya, Sugar
Time, familiar lullabies come from the fusion of European and American Indian
precedents.

The first Plymouth Thanksgiving was preceded by a thanksgiving feast
in the Jamestown, Virginia Colony. That first Thanksgiving occurred
when Captain John Woodlief led newly-arrived English colonists to a
grassy slope along the James River and instructed them to drop to
their knees and pray in thanks for a safe arrival to the New World. It
was December 4, 1619, and 38 men from Berkeley Parish in England
vowed:

"Wee ordaine that the day of our ships arrivall at the place assigned
for plantacon in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually
keept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God."on December 4,
1619.

That thanksgiving did not in any way involve anyone beside the English.

The Virginia thanksgiving was preceded by the thanksgivings of Spanish
Colonists.

Spanish Explorer Pedro Menendez de Aviles arrived at what is now St.
Augustine, Fla with 800 Spanish settlers on September 8, 1565. The
Seloy Tribe were invited to a Catholic Mass of Thanksgiving, followed
by a meal.

The Seloy were outnumbered.

The Spanish shared their
cocido, a stew/soup made from garbanzo beans, salt pork, laced with
garlic, as well as hard tack (sea biscuits), and red wine. But there's no
evidence that the Indians were allowed to participate in the religious
festivities as equals, were able to celebrate their shared humanity,
or their music, as equals in that vast wildness, that vast dynamic
uncertainty.

The Spanish came in overwhelming force with a much more deadly
military technology. They didn't have to seek out the good will of the
native people.

The feast in the wilderness of the integration of the radical Other
may have happened when Don Juan de Onate celebrated a Catholic Mass of
Thanksgiving on the banks of the Rio Grande (then called the Rio
Bravo) near present day El Paso, on April 20, 1582. But if it
happened, it happened in an unlikely way.

Onate, who was of Basque ancestry, had made one of the great fortunes
in New Spain/Mexico from the
slave labor of Indians at his silver mines in Ciudad de Zacatecas.
Using his private fortune, he brutally reconquered and oppressed the
Pueblo Indians. He arrived in New Mexico with a four-mile caravan with
over 80 wagons, 10,000 head of livestock, 560 colonists.

Many of the colonists were secretly, defiantly Jews who were trying to
escape the Inquisition that had just arrived in Mexico City.

No local Indians were invited to the celebration.

Boulder was founded by a party of gold seekers who stopped off here in
October 1858 on their way to the Cherry Creek diggings. Liking the
look of the mountains to the west (they knew enough geology to know
those mountains were a likely spot for gold, and silver), they began
prospecting and struck paydirt in January 1859.

And of course that strike which made every one of the gold seekers
stinking rich, was accompanied by a thanksgiving celebration.
Only the white prospectors and their families were included in that celebration.

The Fur Trappers/Mountain Men Rendezvouses
marked the resumption of the feast in the wilderness of the integration of the
Other.

And what grand, drunken, musical, Dionysian feasts they were.

While there were many free trappers, most mountain men were employed
by major fur companies. The life of a company man was almost
militarized. The men had mess groups, hunted and trapped in brigades
and always reported to the head of the trapping party. This man was
called a "boosway", a bastardization of the French term bourgeoisie.
He was the leader of the brigade, the head trader and overall CEO.

The North West Company, held a rendezvous in the Boise Valley in 1819.
The system was later implemented by the Rocky Mountain Fur Company,
whose agents would haul supplies to specific mountain locations in the
spring, engage in trading with trappers, and bring pelts back to
communities on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers in the fall. This
system continued when other firms, particularly the American Fur
Company owned by John Jacob Astor, entered the field.

The annual rendezvous was often held at Horse Creek on the Green
River, now called the Upper Green River Rendezvous Site, near
present-day Pinedale, Wyoming. By the mid-1830s it attracted 450-500
men, essentially all the American trappers and traders working in the
Rockies, as well as numerous Native Americans.

The Rendezvouses were the grand pay day. It was the pinnacle of a
mountain man's year. It was an event redolent with alcohol, a wide
variety and vast quantity of food, women, sport, music and dancing.

And mountain men/fur trappers were grateful and gave thanks.

It was a whole new level of multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-ethnic
contact. The Rendezvouses were attended by American Indians from many
nations. Anglo-Americans, French Canadians, Cajuns, Afro-American who
played on the instruments of the frontier. They sang, danced, shouted,
moaned and played fiddles, banjos, harmonicas, mandolins, guitars,
wash-boards, base buckets in sheer exhilaration in the vast wild ness
of the Rocky Mountains.

True the beaver pelt industry was the spearhead of the toxic,
non-sustainable "development", the rape and exploitation of the North
American continent and its native people by greedy corporations. True
it introduced that horrible gateway drug, the scourge of alcohol, to
many American Indian people. And yet the rendezvouses more completely
anticipate the present moment, this
multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-ethnic reality, of the integration
of the Other, that has become the reality of these United States.

Everyone feasted and celebrated their shared humanity as
equals in that vast wildness, that vast dynamic uncertainty.

And from this came the multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-ethnic
integration of the Other that we know and recognize to be - American
Music.

Bring Back the King

2009-10-18T21:50:00.001-07:00

Once upon a time (from 1933 - 1978), in the Hindu Kush Mountains,
Afghanistan was a relatively peaceful, stable, amazingly beautiful
country.

Until 1973 it was ruled by King Mohammad Zahir Shah, a beloved,
pro-cannabis monarch.

That year, while the king was visiting Italy (for eye surgery and to
treat his lumbago), he was overthrown by a jealous, resentful, evil
cousin, Mohammed Daoud Khan (the Villain Daoud), who was backed by the
C.I.A., Richard Nixon, and The War on Plants.

According to reports from US spy agencies and Afghan sources in
Holland, the King offered armed protection and horticultural advice to
marijuana growers, encouraging them to increase their yield with
modern fertilization and green-revolution innovations. The King's top
aides were allegedly involved in overt hashish smuggling. DEA
officials even allege that the King's private jet was used to smuggle
tons of hashish to Italy and other European countries.

The king was a kind and wise ruler. He introduced free elections, a
national parliament, civil rights, liberation and education for women,
universal suffrage. He didn't want to oppress his proud, warrior
people with taxes to support the government, the monarchy. He didn't
need to. He funded the government, the monarchy, his private jet with
the proceeds from the sale of quality Afghani Home-Grown Hashish, some
of the most primo Hashish in the whole world.

When President Richard Nixon read the reports from U.S. spy agencies,
about the King, he said, "We can't have this."

Nixon, the C.I.A. and the War on Plants overthrew the legitimate, the
successful government, the beloved monarch that peacefully governed
Afghanistan.

There were many who wanted to fight and perhaps die to bring back the
King. But the King didn't want his people to suffer the horrors of
civil war. He abdicated.

From the overthrow of the legitimate governance of Afghanistan backed
by Nixon, the C.I.A., the War on Plants came the disruption, the
unravelling, of the country. It brought chaos and weakness which
brought the cultivation of poppies (which before the overthrow of the
King was discouraged and was not extensive). It encouraged the Soviet
Union to occupy the country.

The Soviet Occupation created the jihad against Soviet Occupation,
which was backed by the Pakistani Secret Service (I.S.I.) and the
C.I.A., in which people like Osama bin Laden were created.

From this came 9/11.

From 9/11 comes the extraordinary power that Gee Dub and Shotgun Dick
usurped, because they could.

And from this comes the total screwing of the pooch, this horrible
lurch into the Dark Side, in which we are arrived at in this
so-foreboding moment.

Meanwhile, in Italy, the King lived in a modest four-bedroom villa. He
played golf. He played chess. He smoked Primo Home-Grown Afghani Hash
- some of the most exquisite Hashish in the world. In 1991 he survived
an attempted assassination (by a knife-welding man who posed as a
Portuguese Journalist).

In April 2002, while Afghanistan was under NATO occupation The King
returned to Afghanistan. He opened the Loya Jirga, the grand assembly
of all the representatives of the Afghan People.

There were many who wanted The King to rule. There were many who
wanted to bring back the Constitutional Monarchy. But Gee Dub, Shotgun
Dick, the C.I.A., the War on Plants - did not want this. They wanted
the heroine-dealer Hamid Karzai, who has alway been the bee-otch of
the oil industry.

The beloved King died in his homeland on July 23, 2007. He was 93.

And yet, this story still can have a near-fairy tale, happy ending.

The King had six sons and two daughters. Four of the sons live. In
2008, a grandson was preparing to run in the 2009 election. But Gee
Dub, Shotgun Dick, the C.I.A., the War on Plants told him to step
aside for the corrupt, heroine-dealer Karzai, who has always been the
bee-otch of the oil industry.

And yet Afghanistan can still become a relatively peaceful, stable,
very beautiful place - again.

Bring back the Constitutional Monarchy.

Legalize the sale of quality Afghani Home-Grown Hashish, some of the
most primo, exquisite Hashish in the whole, damn world.

Columbus

2009-10-12T17:41:00.000-07:00

Columbus was of Jewish ancestry.

Many who came to America with him were of Jewish ancestry.

The Jewish world of the Iberian Peninsula was murdered in 1492. Jews
were given the choice of converting to Catholicism or being burnt
alive, dispossessed of all material goods, dispossessed of life.

Some, like Columbus, became devout and sincere Catholics. But many
defiantly, secretly remained Jews.

Those of Jewish ancestry were the first targets of the Inquisition.
Every "convert" was suspect. More than 90 percent of those murdered by
the Inquisition were "Judaizers."

The Jews came to America because at first the Inquisition wasn't here.
But then the Inquisition came.

The survivors who remained true to themSelves were those that obeyed
the dreams, the portents, the magnetisms, the polarities. Those that
found secret powers of navigation/migration.

They fled to the highest mountains, crossed to the other side of the
most desolate, deadly deserts. They engaged the spirit/demon of place.
They engaged the aboriginal. They were shaped by IT!. Their
descendants are much more like the Indian than they are the first
ancestor that crossed the water.

Jah (Department of Enviromental Protection) D.E.P.: True Possession of
Place in the Time of the Connecticut Indian Casino (see
www.libbyhome.blogspot.com)

Columbus Day has become a day when many celebrate their self-loathing
about being American, when all the hideous details of Columbus'
initial, personal raids, and the destruction of the garden that once
was these Americas is recalled.

And yet, I propose, that this be the day when we Americanos see that
(perhaps, partly, as a result of our bloody, violent, oppressive
history), we Americanos have heightened possiblities/powers of
submitting to the dreams, the portents, the magnetisms, the
polarities, the secret, hidden powers of navigation/migration.

Winfield, 2009

2009-10-03T14:43:00.001-07:00

In the beginning Bill Monroe, took the quintessential American musical
idiom and re-invented IT, and he in turn was re-invented, re-created
by IT.

This quintessential American musical idiom was patriotic and
conservative (but always nursed an anti-rich people resentment). It
was religiously orthodox (in a lunatic, fundamentalist way). It was
played by extremely talented and skillful musicians in a fast, fluid,
novel way.

And it was danced in a joyous American way.

It is called bluegrass music (because of Monroe's origins in the Blue
Grass state of Kentucky).

Then, starting in the late 1960's, the hippies took IT over. They
re-invented bluegrass. And then were themselves re-invented by IT.

This still quintessential American music preserves remnants of its
lunatic fundamental orthodoxy. It still preserves an anti-rich
people/corporation agenda political resentment. And IT is a kind of
psychedelic music, broadly influenced by entheogenic plants, attaining
greater and further powers of musical virtuosity, fluidity, speed,
novelty, musical elegance.

And is danced to in a joyous, American way.

Winfield (which began in earnest in 1971) remains an important place
in the continuous furthering of Bill Monroe's and Kentucky's legacy.

When the Teluride Bluegrass Festival was founded, Winfield was an
important antecedent, inspiration, model. Teluride was a further
continuance of the spirit of Winfield.

And the spirit of Winfield, the spirit of the bluegrass music festival
as we know them, perhaps begins in the lunatic American musical
religiosity at Cane Ridge, Bourbon County, Kentucky in 1801, with a
(huge for that time) frontier, camp meeting in the first Great
Kentucky Spiritual/Musical Awakening.

Frontier families traveled by wagon 50 to 100 arduous, rutted miles.
During that four-day festival credible witnesses testify that at least
3,000 of the 20,000 people in attendance fell to the ground under the
unnatural excitement, in a religious and musical ecstasy. People
convulsed and contorted. Other effects were wild, ecstatic dancing,
spinning on the feet in the manner of the whirling, dervishes of the
East.

People sang, shouted, moaned and played the instruments of the
American frontier; fiddles, banjos, harmonicas, mandolins, guitars,
wash-boards, base buckets in a state of feverish
religious/sexual/musical/sheer exhilaration.

The influence of Cane Ridge, Kentucky is still plainly visible in the
intense, speedy, paroxysms of music. This supernatural musical
influence is seen and heard in all the acoustic music performed, and
yet is especially apparent during the musical championship
competitions.

In the National Flat Pick Guitar contest held on the afternoon of
September 19, there were 37 contestants from 19 states and from
Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.

This year first place was won by Bryan McDowell, 18, a high school
senior from Canton, NC. This achievement was preceded by McDowell doing
the amazing and unprecedented feat of taking first place in the Walnut
Valley Mandolin contest and the Walnut Valley Old Time Fiddle contest.

This is the first time one individual has placed first in three
contests at the Walnut Valley Festival in the same year.

Second and third places in this contest were won by close friends of McDowell.

Second place was won by Brandon Davis of Independence, VA. Davis
placed third in this competition in 2008. This year, third place was awarded to
Eric Hardin of Warrensville, NC. Hardin placed first in the banjo
competition in Winfield in 2004.

McDowell plays fiddle, Davis plays guitar and Hardin plays banjo. In
their band 'Second Circle'. They all play each others instruments.

Featured performers at this year's festival were: Bill Barwick,
Stephen Bennett, Roz Brown, Tom Chapin & Friends, Beppe Gambetta, The
Greencards, Buddy Greene, Ron
Block & Jeff Taylor, Pete Huttlinger, The Infamous Stringdusters, Wil
Maring & Robert Bowlin, Marley's Ghost, Andy May, John McCutcheon,
Adam Miller, David Moran, Joe Morgan & Friends, Mountain Heart,
Mountain Smoke, David Munnelly Band, Notorious, Barry Patton, The Kati
Penn Band, Prickly Pair & The Cactus Chorale, Sawmill Road, Trevor
Stewart, Still on the Hill, Linda Tilton, The Wilders, The Wiyos.

At least half of Winfield campers bring a musical instrument. For
many, of the about 16,000 people attending, the Winfield experience
does not revolve around headline performers or the music contests, but
around the impromptu stages in the campground, (particularly Stage 5)
that feature the rich talents of Winfield regulars, and the all-night
jamming.

A child of Winfield, (she's been musically engaging Winfield from the
time she was ten-years-old) Ms. Bonnie May Paine is a star always and
everywhere and yet she is especially in her element at the Winfield
campground stages and jam sessions.

She is a Nederland resident, angelic singer, player of washboard,
guitar and musical saw, too, and is a huge part of the enormous groove
of Elephant Revival.

"I love Winfield," says Paine. "Winfield is the place musicians go to
grow as musicians. When I am leaving Winfield I feel I have
progressed in music, I have received a higher education in music.
Every year I will do everything I can to be here, to see everyone, to
hear where the music
is going, to be part of this musical community. Pretty much everyone I
know comes to Winfield to play at the campground," she said.

Paine's musical vehicle at this year's festival that played the
campgrounds' Stage Five and also Stage 4.75 was an all-lovely,
all-lady band 'Cottonwood Snow', that also included her sister Ms.
Annie Rose Paine, stand-up base, and
Allyson Olassa, accordion.

"And yet," says Paine. "It's just plain wrong that musicians like
Randy Crouch, Split Lip Rayfield, Mike West, who have been for so long
a big part of the Winfield experience, have been important teachers,
and entertainers, have to pay to get in and can't even sell their
cds," she said.".

"It's a testament to the power of the Winfield that so many of these
in all ways amazing artists, are going year
after year, paying to come in, paying to lead the pickin' in the
campgrounds, to just be part of this amazing, friggin', music
festival, even though they haven't been hired for the main stage, even
though their cd's are not even being promoted by the festival," said
Joey Cantoni, of Denver.

"These guy are the bomb! These guys are the music! These guys are
Winfield! These guys are the campgrounds, and the campground stages.

"You can friggin' quote me on that. However you want to," said Cantoni.

Last year tropical storm Ike flooded the Cowley County Fairgrounds.
Most all camped for free on the shores of Winfield Lake. It was the
first time in the history of Winfield that the festival was free for
those whose Winfield experience is centered around the impromptu
campground stages and the all-night jam sessions.

"Last year was the best Winfield, ever," Paine said.

Micro-Chips in the Butt

2009-09-24T13:23:00.000-07:00

I want to clearly and loudly state that I am TOTALLY against
micro-chips being inserted into peoples' butts.

And yet, I can't help noting that even if Americans had micro-chips
inserted into their butts (when they get their Mexican Flu vaccine
innoculations - for instance), they could be no more the bee-otches of
the corporations' agenda - then they are right now.

In science-fiction scenarios micro-chips are placed in peoples' butts
to enable anti-Human, totalitarian powers to fine-tune its control
over the Human.

The micro-chip in the butt is often associated with the Book of
Revelation's, number of the beast, the number all must wear to buy and
sell in the time when the damn Debil rules.

All I know, is that micro-chips in the butt would not make Americans
any more enthusiastically, ready and willing to go to the barricades,
to go to the town meetings, to go to the tea-bag parties (the
non-pornographic ones) to fight for the right of the corporations to
make filthy, obscene trillion-trillion dollar profits by treating the
American people like they be scanky, crack-ho's, with micro-chips in
their butts.

Having micro-chips in their butts could not make Americans any more
adamently, more militantly, more radically stupid in fighting against
their best interests and for the best interests of the corporate,
medical insurance gangsters and the pill pimps.

Exodus/Migrations

2009-09-16T16:09:00.001-07:00

The Monarch Butterflies bring sparkles of splendor as they pass
through, pass over in their annual migration back to the mountains of
Michoacan, Mexico.

They arrive/end their long migration in the Sierra Madre around Dia
del Muertos (November 1).

Another sign of the passing of this defining time, 'The Stupid Summer
of Ort Nine ('09)'.

These United States of America, this nation, is so revealed as being
the most toxic of corporation kleptocracies (rule by the thieves).
Americans are revealed as being the greatest bee-otches, the greatest
slaves, the most easily manipulated by this corporation kleptocracy's
agenda.

This summer of lunatic rantings, of Tourette's Syndrome wanes with the
drafting of a Congressional Bill that is being rightfully called 'The
Medical Insurance Corporations' Profit Preservation and Enhancement
Act'. This summer wanes with the money changers receiving record
bonuses as they resume the party on Wall Street.

I've been thinking much, listening to the music in my head of one
Woodrow Wilson (Woody) Guthrie. I can't help thinking that this
present moment is what Woody would have considered to be the worst
case scenario, a time to despair about the Human Agenda vs. the
Corporation Agenda, a time to despair about this land that once was
mine land, your land, this land that was made for you and me.

And yet, behold the Monarch Butterfly.

Each Butterfly is its own Revolution. Each Butterfly is its own
Transformation - from the Worm.

And when the Worm is Transformed into the Butterfly, the Butterfly is
guided in long, arduous Exodus by secret magnetisms, polarities,
hidden navigational powers - to arrive at a place of destiny and
refuge where they have never been before.

Health Plans

2009-09-05T02:19:00.000-07:00

Here in Oklahoma City summer has blinked. The searing heat has broken
(for at least a little while). The first, cool nights have happened.
The autumn and winter constellations are in the late night/early
morning sky. And I can say, with some confidence, that what didn't
kill me (congestive heart failure) has made me stronger.

I am old enough and experienced enough to know this is often not true.
What doesn't quite manage to kill ya often succeeds in totally
crippling ya, totally messing ya up. When I left the hospital back in
early June, I knew there was a distinct possibly that this was going
to be the case with me. I knew there was a distinct possibility the
rest of my life was to be a foreshortened, sickly, pill-taking thing.

And yet, it doesn't seem to be the case (except for the pill-taking).

When I left Saint Anthony's, people in the hospital's business office
strongly advised that I immediately apply for Social Security
disability benefits, which include Medicare coverage. I dutifully
filled out the applications, had appointments at the local Social
Security offices (which have been relocated as a result of the federal
building being blown up in 1995), did all that was required in the
bureaucratic process, wondered if the government really wanted to help
me.

Then I got this letter from the government that essentially said I was
a bum and I should get a job.

The letter, pretty much, said there was nothing physically prohibiting
me from doing the work that I've been doing, pretty much, all my adult
working life - being a free-lance, self-employed, newspaper reporter.

Except for the fact that ya have a better chance finding a job
manufacturing buggy whips, than writing for newspapers, I think the
government's conclusion about me has some truth to it.

St. Anthony's Hospital and my cardiologist while I was at St.
Anthony's are sending me bills. Bills that, I'm pretty sure, I won't
be able to pay in this lifetime and probably not in the next.

I walk at least three miles a day and walk as many as ten miles in a
day, with some of those miles being walked in the furnace heat that
Oklahoma City summers are famous for. And during these walks I sweat,
and I meditate on my personal and our national dysfunctional
narrative/discussion about health care.

The bottom line is that no one should die in these United States of
America if they don't have money or insurance. And no one in these
United States of America should have to go broke because they get sick
or get hurt.

And yet, in the end, we all must take personal, imaginative
responsibility for our own healing.

I'm not talking callousness, lack of compassion towards the other. I'm
not talking about the placement of blame on people for creating a
reality, being the author of circumstances in which they get sick or
hurt - an attitude that seems to be intrinsic to many new age
philosophies, an attitude often held by the young and the healthy.

Until recently, I too thought I was bulletproof.

During the discussion of the Hillary Clinton health plan in 1993-94 I
tried to be interested. But my personal health plan (when I was
wounded or sick I would find a cool, dark place, lick my wounds, and
be healed, or die) was still working.

I've been much more interested in the current, national health care discussion.

And I have a new personal health plan.

Don't look on your advancing years as things that will inevitably
cause physical, and mental diminishment.

See your advancing years as agencies, as opportunities that will allow
you to unleash greater, and further powers.

Let your heart always beat with acceptance of whatever the moment
brings, always beat with love, compassion and acceptance of your
fellow human beings.

Resonate with the universe, so the universe can resonate with you.

And in the words of that great, late philosopher and soul brother,
James Brown - "I feel good."

The Value of a Human Life

2009-08-22T14:54:00.001-07:00

The Gee Dub Hoover Administration, the economic crisis, and the health
care discussion have all served to vividly define the situation of
these United States of America (see 'narrative of the voyage of the
bloody, snake chariot' at www.libbyhome.blogspot.com ) - for those who
have eyes to see.

We live in a pure plutocracy (rule by the rich, socialism for the
rich, government welfare for the corporations). Government by the
money, for the money, from the money, rules.

Every first world country in the world, except for these United States
has universal health care. We are the only country, in the world, that
has this profit/greed-driven health care system from Hell. In this
Americans are revealed to be the greatest bee-otches of the
corporations' agenda.

The Christian Right, which has been such a big political factor in all
this, has chosen not to serve two masters. The Christian Right only
serves Mammon.

Everyone walks around spouting such crack-pot, lunatic political
non-thought all of which precludes taking effective political action.

What if JFK's assassination, Oklahoma City, 9/11 are all dark,
nefarious, government conspiracies? The only logical response would be
to organize armed insurrection against the government. This would have
to involve blowing up the buildings that house the powers-that-be,
assassinating politicians and corporation executives.

I don't see those who are spouting this crack-pot, lunatic political
non-thought doing this. They are only spouting lunacy which precludes
taking any effective action, and justifies endless masturbation of
conspiracy theory.

In this profit/greed-driven health care system from Hell the value of
a human life is judged to be about how much money you have - and only
that. You might be an important artist, musician, writer. You might be
a good parent, a loving, compassionate pillar of your family, your
community. You might have worked hard all your life, been a steady
provider for others. But if in the end when you are face to face with
the existential parameters of the Human Circumstances - if you have no
money - you are given the bum's rush out the hospitals' door.

We have again come to a time, in our shared national experience, when
it is the time to take it into the streets.

Any politician who works against true reform of health care is
revealed to be the medical insurance gangsters, the pill pimps -
whore.

It's time to take back our country.

This land is my land. This land is your land. This land was made for
you and me - and definitely wasn't made for the dirty, stinking,
black-hearted plutocrats.

Passionate Intensity

2009-08-07T16:25:00.000-07:00

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Yeats and the headline (the current, stupid, 24/7 media sound) speak
of the same thing. It's about the best among us lacking conviction,
while the worst among us, the ditto-heads in the new wars of religion
and hatred are full of passionate intensity.

This discussion of health care is already the most passionately
intense discourse this country has had since Vietnam. Like Vietnam it
has the immediacy and urgency of who will live, and who will be maimed
and die to serve the corporations' agendas, the corporations' profits,
who will serve that "shape with lion body and the head of a man,

"A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,"

This discussion is no longer a coherent, democratic discourse. It
involves the birthers who are the same people who are shouting down
sane discussion of health care.

This passionate intensity is a thing of thuggery, of militant, radical
stupidity. It is being prompted and exploited by the pill pimps and
medical insurance gangsters. They are trying to perpetuate
government-sanctioned, obscene, predatory profit on sick people and
nothing else.

Extreme national polarization is again upon us. The coming national,
economic, cultural turmoil will make the Time of Vietnam pale in
comparison.

We do not live in a world where dark, nefarious conspiracy gives the
masters-of-this-world greater control, greater power. We live in a
world where things fall apart, the centre does not hold.

Who Cares?

2009-07-27T15:58:00.001-07:00

The most worrisome thing about President Obama's proposed health care
reform is big business-as-usual (b-a-u), (the pill pimps and the
medical insurance gangsters) are for it.

On this issue the corporation agenda and the Human agenda are
fundamentally and diametrically opposed. And yet President Obama's
plan begins with the servicing, the complete appeasement of the
interests and agendas of the corporate gangsters.

I've been much aware of this personal and very public issue as I
continue to seek medical care in the aftermath of a medical crisis, as
a card-carrying indigent, Okie, congestive heart failure.

That which is being proposed requires everyone who is not indigent to
be paying customers of the medical insurance industry. The poorest and
the sickest will continue to be dependent on the kindness and
not-so-tender mercy of the government. All who can possibly pay must
pay the vig to the medical insurance gangsters, even if they don't
have any medical issues.

If you aren't paying the vig to the medical insurance gangsters you
will be fined and penalized by the government.

Small businesses would be required to provide medical plans to their
employees. The only plans that would be affordable will be those with
huge deductibles. The insurance plans may kick in when the medical
bill exceeds many thousands of dollars.

This is a class struggle. It is the corporation's agenda against the
Human Agenda. It is them against everyone else.

This proposed health care reform is much like the bail-out of Wall
Street after that greed-induced crisis. Meaningful reform will not
happen if it's all about the appeasement, the bail-out of those whose
greed created the problem.

It starts with calls to man the barricades. It starts with the
recognition of who is opposing effective, universal health care -
which is a Human Right.

It is government from the People, for the People, by the People
against government from the money, for the money, by the money. It is
a life and death struggle.

One or the other must perish.

Living Long, Or Not

2009-07-18T00:10:00.000-07:00

>I had a dream.
>
>In this dream a disembodied voice of great authority repeatedly told
>me that I would live to be 135-years-old.
>
>In the dream I would repeatedly scoff at this prophecy pointing out
>that I lived, what some say is, a reckless life. I don't worry about
>health and diet. I eat what is put before me. I accept dynamic
>uncertainty.
>
>In this dream I repeatedly replied to this voice-with-authority saying
>that its prophecy was ludicrous - impossible.
>
>And yet this disembodied-voice-of-authority would repeatedly assure me
>that I would live to be 135-years-old.
>
>I'm not banking on it.
>
>Perhaps it's like Fedallah's prophecies to Ahab (see Moby Dick) or the
>witches prophecies to MacBeth. I am being no more nor no less reckless
>in light of this dream.
>
>Little more than a month ago I was almost dead (see www.libbyhome.blogspot.com).
>
>I was diagnosed with congestive heart failure in late May. In my
>googling I am told that it is possible to live many years after a
>diagnosis, and yet 50 percent of those diagnosed with congestive heart
>failure are dead within five years.
>
>I don't think I will be among that 50 percent of us heart failures who
>are dead within five years. I have a supple heart. I feel good.
>
> And yet - you got to at least consider it.
>
>At the same time consider rhesus monkeys who are part of an experiment
>on aging at the University of Wisconsin. Some are given a restricted
>diet with 30 percent fewer calories than is considered normal while
>some get to eat whatever they please.
>
>The two decades old experiment is demonstrating that caloric
>restriction slows aging in primates. While just 13 percent of the
>dieting monkeys have died of old age, 37 percent of the feasting
>monkeys are dead of old age.
>
>Pictures of the monkeys on radical diets show unhappy, starved,
>emaciated creatures
>
>Of course pharmaceutical corporation scientists are looking for a pill
>that would duplicate the effects of starvation. And they have found
>resveratrol, which is in red wine.
>There are resveratrol pills already commercially available.
>
>This all raises the possibility that the life span of primates,
>particularly us Human primates, can be extended by 30 percent or more.
>It's possible a time may come when 135-year-olds wouldn't be
>particularly unusual.
>
>I'm not banking on it - and yet it is something to be considered.
>
>I fear that for many it would be more years of being dead in life,
>imprisoned in business-as-usual, (b-a-u), corporation agenda, doing
>work that you hate to buy things that you don't need.
>
>And yet it could be the possibility of time to be spent as Mawlana
>Jalal-al Din Rumi advices - "Start a huge, foolish project, like
>Noah...
>
>It makes absolutely no difference what people think of you."

Midsummer

2009-07-06T00:06:00.000-07:00

It is midsummer.

It's about the middle of the growing season.

In this time the sun is no longer standing still (the word solstice is
Latin for the standing still of the sun). In this time of brilliant,
scorching light, the sun has begun its first movements into the
darkness of winter.

The longest days are becoming shorter, and the shortest nights are
becoming longer.

Elizabethans, such as William Shakespeare, discerned that in this
time, the membrane between waking consciousness and supernatural
realms becomes stretched and thin. And denizens of wonder realms,
supernatural creatures freely pass into the realm of our waking
semi-consciousness.

And this no doubt happens in this time of music festivals, Dionysus,
and the Okie Party Ghetto (see www.libbyhome.blogspot.com).

Persian Flashbacks

2009-06-24T21:44:00.000-07:00

Herman Melville's 'Moby Dick' is a visionary, prophetic work that
speaks to the United States' national destiny/fate.

In the 1850's (the time of the mythic hunt for the Great White Whale)
the vast majority of the people of the United States were of Northern
European ancestry, and the vast majority of these were Anglo-Saxons.
Yet the demographics of the crew of the Pequod are much like the
present population of the United States' which is peopled by all
varieties of the Human (The officers of the Pequod, however, were
uniformly savage Quakers from Nantucket Island).

And of this multi-hued crew of the Pequod, Persians constituted an
important and disturbing component.

Ahab, out of his own pocket, employed his own harpoon boat crew
consisting of his personal prophet Fedallah and four other outlandish
Persians.

Fedallah is the harpooner. His origins are mysterious, and we know
little more than that he is a Parsee, or Persian fire-worshipper, that
he wears a black Chinese-style jacket, and that he has his long white
hair wound like a turban around his head.

"...concerning Fedallah. He was such a creature as civilized, domestic
people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but
dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging
Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the
continent - those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which
even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly
aboriginalness of earth's primal generations, when the memory of the
first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants,
unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked
of the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end; when
though, according to genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the
daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins,
indulged in mundane amours."

Fedallah also likes to stand in Ahab’s shadow so that he seems,
eerily, not to cast a shadow of his own.

It’s fated that Fedallah must die before Ahab will or can die.

My fate/destiny has been strangely interwoven with the fate/destiny of
Persians, the Persian Nation (Iran). During the travels of my youths I
was there, experienced, lived through (just barely) the Islamic
Revolution.

This experience was defining, life changing. I am flashing back as I
observe what is happening now.

The Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA's) overthrow of a
democratically elected government in Iran (the Mossadagh Government)
in 1953, and the creation of the Shah's regime defined the United
States' style of carrying the big stick and strutting the world any
way the corporate agenda dictated.

The overthrow of the Shah in 1979 announced the beginning of the time
of the United States' loss of control, the beginning of the loss of
the power to fulfill every iota of the corporations' agenda.

I cannot foresee what this revolution of Persian fire-worshippers will
bring. My guess is that whatever comes, it will come forth from a sea
of blood and tears. And whatever comes will be strangely interlinked
to the destiny/fate of the United States.

Hebrew Dionysus

2009-06-08T18:19:00.001-07:00

The Myth, the Archetype of Dionysus/Bacchus breaks out in the Hebrew
World with King David and Rabbi Yeshua ben Yosef.

There is no Human more beloved by divinity then the King David.

Although David is a great horn dog, sending the husbands of women he
desires into the thick of battle where they would surely be killed, he
is the flavor of Human that the god of the original testament loves.

He is the dancing-ous, the most ecstatically drunken Hebrew in the
Bible. He ecstatically, drunkenly, fearlessly dances through the
streets of Jerusalem. He is a poet, songwriter, a musician, a rapper,
a great warrior, and an even greater lover. He is a mortal God of the
is-ness of the limit-less feast/party of more life in life.

Rabbi Yeshua's first defining miracle, his first demonstration that he
is House of David, was the making of the water into wine. This is the
way that Dionysus/Baccus always rolls.

Christian priests and clergy will always break this story out to speak
of how the Rabbi Yeshua (a.k.a. Cheese-us) endorses marriage. And yet
a thing illuminated by this miracle story is how poorly Christian
priests and clergy have read their own scripture.

A conscious reading of even the canonical text tells of how Rabbi
Yeshua arrives in his hometown, Nazareth, with a bunch of his
commercial fishermen friends. Everyone goes to a high society, rich
peoples' wedding, probably without wedding presents. And they then
drink all the wine.

The narrative is a story of the power, the Myth, the Archetype of the
Jewish Mother. Miriam tells her son that this will not stand,
something has to be done about the drinking of all the wedding party's
wine, even if it means breaking into the cosmic wine cellar.

Rabbi Yeshua protests to his mother, says its not the time to be
revealed, in this way.

His mother says, in no uncertain terms, that there's no better time to
reveal himself - as Hebrew Dionysus.

Rabbi Yeshua, not wanting anyone to be hurt or killed, does what his
mother says.

In this time another Hebrew Dionysus is breaking out from the Hebrew
World. He is Matisyahu. He is a poet, a songwriter, a rapper, an
ecstatically drunken dancer, a lover, and a warrior for the Lubavicher
Hassidic movement.

Israel ben Eliezer, 1698 - 1760, the founder of Hasidic Judaism, lived
during a time when the center of Jewish tradition, practice was
rigidly formally centered on the academic study of Talmud. Organized,
normative Judaism lacked joy, creativity transcendence, spontaneity.

Ben Eliezer taught that the ordinary person filled with a sincere
belief in God, and whose prayers come from the heart, is more
acceptable to God than someone versed in and fully observant of Jewish
law who lacks inspiration in their divine service.

Hasidic Judaism became a Davidic thing of ecstatic dancing, singing,
prayer, direct experiencing of the transcendental.

Ironically the Lubovitcher Hasidic movement of which Matisyahu is an
important part, is about Hasidic Judaism returning to an intellectual,
not emotional comprehension of divinity. It emphasizes mind over
emotion, it's about the formal study of Torah rather than ecstatic
worship.

The Lubbavitcher movement, as it is known now, is the creation of
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. He taught that a Jew's central
purpose was to return to the orthodox tradition of Judaism, the
learning and dissemination of Torah, which benefits one's fellow Jew,
and hastens the arrival of the Messiah.

Schneerson, who died in 1994, is considered to be the Messiah, by Lubavicher's.

I saw and heard Matisyahu at the first Wakarusa Music Festival at
Mulberry Mountain in Ozark, Arkansas, in June.

I was moved.

It was all Davidic, the dance, the song, the love, adoration between
the king, the mortal god of the party and the people, all
ecstatically, drunkenly dancing.

I was so moved that I visited Matisyahu and his people at the Shabbos tent.

And I was disappointed in that their shabbos/sabbath was a formal,
rigid thing of the thou-shalf-not. It was a thing that was not made
for the Human. In their shabbos/sabbath the Human is made for, made to
obey all the thou-shalt-nots of the normative, formal rigidity of the
Orthodox Judaism.

Not Dead, Yet - Going to Wakarusa

2009-06-01T16:29:00.000-07:00

Reports of mine imminent "rising to the next level" are greatly exaggerated.

As I sit in the is-ness of Oklahoma City - I feel, at last, rested
(see 'narrative of the voyage of the bloody, snake chariot' at
www.libbyhome.blogspot.com). And Oklahoma City is a beautiful,
engaging place of wonderful friends, synchronicity and music.

Through this illness I have been advised to decipher the message my
body is conveying in it's crisis, in it's congestive failure of the
heart.

The message I take is that the human circumstances are surrounded and
pervaded by mystery. The doctors have no clue about why my adrenal
glands will suddenly secrete large amounts of the hormone aldostrine,
raising my blood pressure to dangerously high levels, bringing on the
congestive failure of the heart, bringing the weeks of insomnia,
bringing the engagement of the existential perimeters of the human
condition, bringing the engagement of death.

And because the human circumstances are surrounded and pervaded by
mystery then it's about posture in the face of mystery. And in the
engagement, in the refusal to deny death, to engage dynamic
uncertainty is the promise of more life in life.

And yet the message is also about the wake-up call about being against
that final frontier - aging. And the necessity of taking care of diet,
exercise, the meditation on being - the common-sense treatment of
one's physicality.

No doubt, I am wounded.

Yet I feel my life force, my libedo, my will to in all ways engage the
world, rallying.

I will not go easy into the great, good night.

The doctors tell me that I should have died.

And yet I'm not dead, yet.

It's all gravy, all infinite sause/source, from here - on, from now - on.

And I'm going to the Wakarusa Music Festival at the Mulberry Mountain
in Arkansas.

2009-05-24T22:43:00.000-07:00

The physiological cause of my debilitating respiratory distress,
breathlessness, insomnia, has been revealed. It's not Mexican flu, not
an infection of the lungs, not lung disease.

It's congestive heart failure.

About ten years ago I was diagnosed as having hyper-aldostrine. For
some reason my adrenal gland produced large amounts of a hormone which
elevated my blood pressure to dangerously high levels.

This condition was brought under control. Damage that the high blood
pressure may have caused to my heart and kidneys healed.

Then as mysteriously as the overproduction of aldostrine began, it stopped.

The doctors refused to believe that the overproduction of aldostrine
had stopped. They continued to pimp their pills, (because that's how
they roll) which caused extremely low blood pressure, which resulted
in an irregular heart beat.

I stopped taking the pills.

Then as mysteriously as it began and then stopped, it began again,
about two months ago.

My kidneys were again damaged by the high blood pressure. Fluids
accumulated around my lungs and heart, pressing against these organs,
restricting the efficiency of these organs.

When I would lie down, I would begin drowning in fluids in my chest,
not being able to breath.

I learned to sleep standing up. I grew to fear sleep.

It seemed so easy to die.

During the long sleepless hours of the night I would examine the life
that I came into, the transformation after the first crisis of health,
the first time of hyper-aldostrine.

I learn to live with a high level of dynamic uncertainty. I learn to
live with little or no certainty about where I will lay my head, how I
will subsist, what the future may or may not bring.

I learn to live in the moment with little fear or anxiety.

I come into further and greater powers of love, compassion, joy,
empathy, synchronicity and music.

I know that with the unconditional acceptance of the moment, with the
acceptance of the is-ness of death - comes more life in life.

During the long, sleepless hours of the night I had no choice but to
also contemplate mortality its own self, the diminishing and
weakening, the intermitten-ness of the eternal life force.

I am an American with no health insurance. I will not seek medical
attention until I am near death. And then I went to the magical
reality of Tahlequah, Ok. And then I went to the emergency room of the
Tahlequah City Hospital.

I was diagnosed. The fluids were drained from my chest. The high blood
pressure was stabilized.

But then I was put back on the street with no effective medications to
address the hyper-aldostrine issue.

Two days latter I was in Oklahoma City with an even higher blood pressure.

I write this in the cardiac ward of St. Anthony's (the patron saint of
lost things) Hospital in Oklahoma City.

I write this knowing that I have again side stepped death (and yet
all apparent triumphs over death are temporary maybe just fleeting
things).

I am confident that my hyper-aldostrine will be brought under control,
and that I will have at least a fighting chance to return to full,
robust health.

I write this in complete acceptance of transformation and whatever
comes in the is-ness of the moment.

The Castles of the Cold War

2009-05-07T18:08:00.000-07:00

The castles of Europe are often picturesque. And yet as far as being
defensive strongholds they are feeble things when compared with the
nuclear-blast resistant missile bases or military communication
centers in the middle of North America.

These massive, structures of cement and steel, deeply embedded in the
vast expanses of the American prairie are the most indestructible
Humans have ever devised and built.

They will be here long after the castles of Europe have crumbled to
dust. They will abide as monuments to the most intense,
constellation/realization of the Archetype of Apocalypse.

Many of the sites are no longer military installations. They have
become private, not-business-as-usual (n-b-a-u) real estate. And with
news of the disintegration of Pakistan and the possibility of
jihadists seizing nuclear weapons, and world pandemic, these sites are
again massively, magnetically, attracting the energy which is being
co-opted by the Archetype of Apocalypse.

Sometimes when I think of growing up in the depths, in the dark chill
of the Cold War I find mySelf saying - did that really happen? Did the
Human Condition, the Human Circumstances, get so weird, go so far
astray.

And yet, when you stand in the place where an intercontinental missile
was poised to deliver a hydrogen bomb to the biggest cities in the
Soviet Union with no other purpose than to kill at least 10 million
people per launch - then you realize there are no limits to how weird,
how far astray the Human Condition, the Human Circumstances can go.

Preparations for the nuclear annihilation were done in secrecy. But
all the covert measures the United States took never stopped the
Soviets from getting the secret of the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb,
the multiple re-entry war heads.

And what was done in secrecy is now shouted from the rooftops.

It was all about no nuclear war contractor being left behind. It was
all about the fulfillment of every bit of the nuclear war
corporations' agenda. It was about creating a state of perpetual war,
perpetual terror so a small group of people could realize obscene
profits like has never been seen before.

It was about politicians running for public office on the missile gap,
claiming that the Soviets were far better nuclear armed than we were,
and we had to do something about it, now.

In fact the Soviet missiles, the Soviet nuclear bombs, were much like
Soviet manufactures in general. The missiles couldn't hit the side of
a continent. The bombs were probably duds.

The C.I.A. knew this. And yet they would grossly overestimate Soviet
capabilities to justify the expenditure of billions and billions and
billion so that no nuclear war contractor was left behind, so that no
aspect of the nuclear war contractors agenda was left unfulfilled, so
that a small group of people could make obscene profits like the world
has never seen.

This was the business-as-usual (b-a-u) of the Cold War.

What has yet to be done with these decommissioned sites in the heart
of the North American continent, which have become n-b-a-u real
estate, is to do this ultimate defining, presentation of the message
of what these sites were really about.

And in the doing of this they will become the most important monuments
- which will force people to examine how weird, how far astray the
Human Condition, the Human Circumstances can go.

And then maybe - we won't go there.

The Mexican Influenza

2009-04-26T12:53:00.000-07:00

Because I am an American without any medical coverage my health plan
is to seek a cool, dry place and lick my wounds, do a dance of healing
with dynamic uncertainty, until I am healed - or dead.

So naturally I don't have any medical confirmation of my condition.
And yet, I returned to these United States from Mexico with general
respiratory distress, and a slight fever.

This winter has been an arduous time for my respiratory system. I have
worked and lived in dust-laden environments. In Oklahoma and Mexico
people smoke tobacco with total abandon. I've done a lot of
second-hand tobacco smoking. At first I thought that my respiratory
problems were the result of this.

I have been waking in the middle of the night struggling to breathe,
drowning in the fluids in my lungs. This then becomes the struggle to
control the panic and then to control the breath.

It has been a mild case, as they say. The worse, for me, is over. My
lungs are clearing. It is a relief to know what the problem is, that
my immune system is up to the challenge, that I am too old to be among
the most vulnerable.

Again Fortuna has been with me.

And yet I have a feeling that this influenza will reap a rich harvest
of death, that this is a further increment in the
realization/constellation of the self-fulfilling prophecies of the
Archetype of Apocalypse (see www.libbyhome.blogspot.com 'the narrative
of the voyage of the bloody, snake chariot').

I am writing this to give warning to the people I have been in contact
with the last couple of weeks - especially those between the ages of
25 to 45 (which is the ages of the reported fatal cases in Mexico). If
you run into any respiratory problems - take it seriously. This is a
time for even proud Americans without medical coverage to quickly
utilize hospital emergency rooms.

A vaccine is at least several long months away. In the meantime the
anti-virus medications that are said to be stockpiled all over the
country/world are said to be effective against the influenza - at
least for now.

Be not anxious.

But be Conscious.

This is not a drill.

The Archetype of Apocalypse

2009-04-22T12:08:00.000-07:00

The Great Problem of this time is that Humanity is collectively,
unconsciously, under the power of the blind, self-fulfilling
prophecies of the Archetype of Apocalypse.

The content, the recurring patterns of all mythologies, fairy tales,
the supernatural fairy tales of all organized religions, are
Archetypes.

All cultures have their creation story Archetype, and their
end-of-the-world/Apocalypse Archetype.

We are now collectively, unconsciously realizing/making to happen the
Archetype of Apocalypse with a whole new level of focused, fervent
intensity. All are talking Mayan Calendar/Book of
Revelation/Nostradamus/Hopi Prophecy/2012, all variants of apocalyptic
new age, and organized religion twaddle.

And yet all this talk lacks Consciousness. It is a 24/7 stupid sound.

Archetypes are not only primal, universal patterns of myth. They are
autonomous/mythic/psychic entities with a life of their own. They feed
on the moments available nervous, anxious, unconscious energy to
fulfill their Archetypal Agendas.

We must receive the Archetype of Apocalypse with Consciousness.

The many prophets/profits of doom among us, those who serve the agenda
of the Archetype of Apocalypse, are just doing business-as-usual
(b-a-u). They are the imaginatively impoverished priests/authorities
of organized religion who see that the Archetype of Apocalypse is the
last button organized religion can press to terrorize, manipulate,
gain power, and profit from others. They are people trying to
establish a spiritual authority fraud/lie to terrorize, manipulate,
gain power, and profit from others.

To those who can see every moment has something of the creation and
something of the defining of the Apocalypse within IT.

Be careful what you wish for.

Be not anxious.

Be Conscious.

The Medicina, The Musica

2009-04-06T07:32:00.001-07:00

The Medicina expresses/reveals ItSelf in the Human in Peyote Songs.

As soon as I got to the desert where the Great Medicina lives I began
seeking Musicians, as well as the Medicina. I found neither until the
last full day I had in the high desert.

And then this youngblood Mexicano arrived with his guitar and an
ancient, wonderful Spanish thing with It. And his stunningly beautiful
older sister arrived with her 50 peso, key of C, Andean flute. And
then the Great Medicina was with us.

Then I had to go.

It was the Saturday before Palm Sunday, the official beginning of
Semanya Santa (Holy Week), when Latin Americans have their vacations
and travel and all buses are full.

In anticipation of this I had bought a non-refundable round-trip
ticket from Austin to Monterrey. It was now time to take the bus from
Estacion Wadley to Monterrey. If I didn't get to Monterrey on time
there would be no ride for at least a week, and I would lose the $50
Americano paid for the return trip.

The ticket office opened at 1:30 p.m. Everyone told me the bus would
depart at 2 p.m. When I bought the ticket, the woman who sold it to me
said the bus would leave at 2 p.m.

We began playing in the shade in the central plaza in front of the bus
ticket office.

The previous day our Peyote Song was a kind of a Blues thing. We
started the Song the same way we had started it the previous day. Then
it went someplace so different and so magical, and so strange.

The song had an enchantment and IT transfixed those who played it,
those who heard IT. And it soared into the transcendent sky.

And yet there was one within hearing of the song who was not
enchanted by the song.

The driver of the bus arrived at 1:35 p.m, then stiffly walked past
us, past my backpack, into the ticket office, then back past my
backpack, past us - to the bus.

The driver was annoyed by the song.

When the song ended we all asked, "Where did that come from?" in the
songs lingering rapture.

Then we heard the bus starting, and we saw it pulling away (at least
20 minutes before it's scheduled departure time).

I ran to a nearby refresco (soda) stand and asked if that was the bus
to Monterrey.

It was.

And now the bus was about a hundred yards away and picking up speed.

I am fat, and old, and my head was full of Peyote. Yet, I ran from the
shade into the full scorching blast of the mid-day sun. And I did an
all-out sprint, yelling out to the driver. It could have been my
personal best for a 200 to 300 yard dash. I began closing with the
bus.

Then the driver put the pedal to the medal.

I picked up a rock and threw it at the bus receding into the distance.
But it was a feeble throw.

I was soaked in sweat, on the verge of fainting. Yet I ran back to the
ticket office.

The lady called the ticket office in Estacion Catorce, about eight
miles away, the buses next stop and left instructions for the driver
to wait for me. But she told me the bus would wait no longer than half
an hour - if that. She said I had to get a ride to Estacion Catorce
"muy rapido".

The hired, private transport in the desert are mostly Willey's, old
Detroit-built jeeps. Usually there was at least one about to drive
Peyoteros, those seekers into the desert where the Great Medicina
lives.

But now there was none.

Again I ran back to the ticket office.

The woman called for a taxi. A small, old car driven by a much older
senior Senor arrived soon after.

I embraced my young musician friends and got into the taxi.

I told the Senor of my circumstances. And he got angry. And he drove
that old, little car like it was a race car.

As we got to Estacion Catorce we could see the bus, and it was
beginning to pull away from the ticket office.The Senor put peddle to
metal, bounced and flew over the rutted streets, got abreast of the
bus, pulled in front of it, and then stood on the breaks.

The bus stopped in the smoke and stench of burnt out break. And when
the driver got out of the bus he was called an ugly, retard, the
result of a terrible, monstrous miscenegation.

And it seems to me that there is much truth in what the Senor said.

During the drive to Montorrey the driver played truly bad Mexican
music and turned back to look at me with disdain and hatred. And it
seems to me a dangerous thing that someone so stupid and ugly is
allowed to drive a bus.

And yet, 24-hours latter, I am arrived safely back in Austin, Tejas,
as if in a Peyote Song.

Mexican Days of the Dead

2009-04-02T15:29:00.000-07:00

This grotesque slaughter directly affects relatively few Mexicans. Yet
the deluge of images of decapitated, tortured, mutilated bodies,
stacked human heads is an assault, a brutalization, a degrading of the
national psyche.

The more it bleeds, the more it leads in the newspapers, the
television news. And yet there is a higher consciousness/revelation to
those with eyes that can see. For in this carnage is a clear, not
pretty picture of the dirty, stinking, business-as-usual (b-a-u) of
Mexico and the United States.

The politicians in the United States serve the agendas of the lunatic,
christian, fundamentalists, in creating/perpetuating a prohibition
that does not distinguish between plant medicines and drugs, that
makes national policy a lunatic thing of sinners and their sins, that
has the United States, this land of the free, with the highest
percentage of its population incarcerated (of all countries in the
world), and a so-called war on drugs which is really a war on the
constitution, on the most basic natural rights.

This creates a massive multi-billion dollar black market which further
corrupts an already corrupted Mexican government, police, and
military.

Then the world is thrown into the Great World Depression II because of
the limitless, greed of those masters-of-the-universe who controlled
the American banking system.

And now the Mexican Cartels are just intensifying their greedy,
murderous, corrupted, black market capitalism to preserve their
profits, their markets - like an invisible hand.

We have been here before.

The politicians in the United States serving the agenda of the
lunatic, christian, fundamentalists made alcohol prohibition happen.
This led to an intensifying of the corruption of government, of the
police, of our society - just like Mexico.

Then the Great World Depression I happened. Then there was the
gangland violence and slaughter marked by such events as the
Valentines Day Massacre in Chicago.

And then the problem was so easily solved.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president in 1933. In 1934 he
repealed alcohol prohibition.

And so ended our American Valentine Days of the Dead.

All that is needed to end the Mexican Days of the Dead is an end of
the prohibition on plants (cannabis and coca leaves), and addressing
drug addiction, particularly the scourge of crank, with a sensible
national public health policy.

Every day delayed becomes another Mexican Day of the Dead.

Mexican Hometowns

2009-03-28T13:51:00.000-07:00

I arrived in Estacion Wadley fried and frazzled by the voyage, with a
splitting headache (from lack of coffee). And yet as soon as I got to
this place in the high desert where the Great Medicina lives - it all
got much better.

Everyone remembers me, and despite that, I am made welcome, warmly
greeted, doors are opened up to me.

Even if it is not ingested the Great Medicina emanates healing powers
here in this place in the high desert where she lives, where people
have made Pilgrimage to Her for at least 3,000 years.

Home is not where you come from. Home is where you are going to. Home
is where you always go back to. And, therefore, I have two very
different hometowns in Mexico.

My other hometown is Laconja, Chiapas, a Lacondon Mayan pueblo in the
middle of what remains of the Lacondon Jungle (near the ruins of
Bonapak, near the border with Guatamala).

I spent much of the winter of 2006 there. Then went to Guatamala and
Hondurus. Then returned. And I will return there again.

The ancestors of the Lacondon Mayan lived in the cities of the
Yucatan. They resisted the Spanish until the 18th Century. When the
Yucatan was mostly conquered they made Exodus to the darkest, deepest
jungle in Central America.

They created a new agriculture. They made gardens in the jungle. They
kept the jungle between themselves and so-called civilization until
1950.

And then an airstrip was built near the ruins of Bonapak.

First came the archeologists, then came lunatic, evangelical,
christian missionaries from California.

The missionaries found two Lacondon Mayan pueblos.

In Laconja the Shaman/Chief was a funny dude, by all reports, he
brought a lot of mirth into his jungle world. He thought the
missionaries were complete idiots, in a funny way. Everyone accepted
the missionaries as you would accept the village idiots.

But then the Shaman/Chief died young, with no successor.

It was all the evangelicals needed to rip this indigenous culture asunder.

In the other Lacondon Mayan pueblo after nearly 60 years of
evangelical christian effort cheese-us christ is accepted in the
pantheon of the gods as a minor god of commerce.

But in Laconja about 40% of the pueblo are now lunatic, evangelical,
christian terrorists.

Five years ago one of the last traditional shamans of Laconja, an
elder, was doused with gasoline and burnt to death (see
www.libbyhome.blogspot.com) for trying to preserve the tribe s
entheogen tradition.

Ishmael is the son of the Shaman/Chief and the owner of the Tucan
Verde (check it out next time you are in Chiapas). He refuses to
refute and deny who he is. He is the most visible resistance. His
oldest son was murdered in January.

We are brothers. His fight is my fight. And to the lunatic,
evangelical, christian terrorists I am a gringo that needs a dousing
of gasolina and a bic.

Laconja is one of my Mexican hometowns, and yet it is a scary place.
There I got lost in the jungle. There the Great, White Worm was
implanted in my head (see www.libbyhome.blogspot.com).

And yet here in Estacion Wadley the Great Medicina rules.

The Huecholes, after traveling for at least 500 miles, are arriving
for the Pilgrimage to Her.

We are all in her emanations/resonations.

Seeing Out of New Eyes

2009-03-24T00:37:00.000-07:00

Since I was seven, my eyesight has been poor.

But I have somehow lived long enough to come to that time when sight changes.

And the changes have all been good. And now my eyesight is said to be
20/20. And now I am constantly and easily entertained, just
observing/seeing with new clarity, new focus and farsightedness - with
no need of corrective lenses (see www.libbyhome.blogspot.com).

It is as if I have, not only new external eyes, I also have new powers
of contemplative vision.

And I contemplate the enhanced powers of seeing/observation that are
described in the only part of Herman Melville's 'Moby Dick' that
occurs after the 'Pequod' has been staved in and sunk, after the
Pequod has gone down, and when Ishmael holds forth from the verenda of
the Golden Inn, Lima, Peru, sometime in the 1850's.

To the extent that a person is able to come into the further powers of
embracing dynamic uncertainty, a person comes into other enhanced
powers, powers of observing the world, of hearing the world, of
sensing the world, of resonating with the world.

Such is the case with Ishmael/Jonah in the play, The Righteous Mutiny,
which is based on the Town-Ho chapter of 'Moby Dick' and the Steelkilt
Mutiny.

In Richard Reeve's introduction to the play (see
www.libbyhome.blogspot.com) he writes: "Here is the only glimpse we
get of the post-apocalyptic Ishmael...

"Here is the storyteller, confident, in control of his material and
his audience, creating a transfixed atmosphere infused with an epic
stature. Here alone our minds eye is presented with the new man,
reborn through the maelstrom of apocalypse, living in a world of a
different order...

"... Out of Ishmael's recognition of the mythic depths that move
through himself and others develops the sanction to become a
mouthpiece of the living story, the story of the world. I go so far as
to make the claim that in Ishmael, Melville has defined a new order of
hero, the hero of observation.

"...In Steelkilt's story all the vague spiritual attributions
previously assigned to the whale get solidified into an omnipotent
avenging arm of justice. The tale of Steelkilt's mutiny shows that not
all men are the enemy of the white whale. In fact leviathan becomes
the avenger for Steelkilt, the whole man living in harmony with the
cosmos.

"...The Righteous Mutiny sets on stage a passageway to the
post-apocalyptic world...A man true to his higher Self, who gets
hauled up the mast himself a Christ in the face of infectious petty
tyranny that defines our warped social order, this man the Cosmos will
defend, preserve and set into a new world the rest of us are still
clamoring to reach.

"...Libby's rendering of the Golden Inn realizes more completely than
Melville's the new world...

"...It is here that the imaginative window broadens not for the sake
of Moby Dick, but for the life of the myth. Libby unlocks Melville's
hints. The result allows the play to carry on the myth autonomously,
into the new reality, as it must...

"...We are being swamped daily with the constellation of the archetype
of the apocalypse...

"...The seamless insertion of D. H. Lawrence's insights into Jonah's
ayahuasca vision puts on stage perhaps the most important question
America has faced since day one.

"...What happens when the Pequod goes down?

"It's a question we'd better start taking seriously...", Reeve writes.

And in the wrapping of the mind around this question is
post-apocalyptic awareness, (a knowing of what truly is important) an
experiencing of transcendent liberation from the business-as-usual
(b-a-u) of this world, a growing in the resonation with the universe.

At the Golden Inn, South Austin

2009-03-17T15:33:00.000-07:00

I left resonating with Tahlequah, and this time first seen in dreams.

I left loving the 'quah!!!

A brief stop in Dallas. A night stroll in Dealy Square, and the Grassy
Knoll, the place of the intensification of our on-going national
derangement, our on-going national defining/revealing, our on-going
national apocalypse.

And then my tent was pitched in the front yard of the Temple of the
Goddesses, South Austin's equivalent of Lima, Peru's Golden Inn as
described by the Prophet Herman Melville in 'Moby Dick', the home of
Megan, and Kaila, and Krista, and Megan's sister Bailey Kate who is
visiting with their friends Lacy and Bobby, and this beautiful world
of South Austin women.

The Golden Inn chapter of 'Moby Dick' is the only part of the novel
that takes place after the apocalypse, after the Pequod has been
staved in and has gone down with all - except the one who will tell
the truest word, the greatest, whitest American Myth.

The Golden Inn chapter is the key to the Sacred American Literature.
This chapter is the key to the book (see The Mutiny at
www.libbyhome.blogspot.com ).

There are clues for those who can read.

The Golden Inn is the chiche (corn beer) house of the surviving,
underground Incan Nobility of Peru in the 1850's, the last resistance
to the Inquisition.

Chiche means spit in Spanish. Only women's spit would do the divine
alchemy of fermenting the corn to make the corn beer.

And yet Incan Nobility would not drink the chiche of any woman. They
only drank the chiche fermented by the saliva of the Ahkalona, the
chosen women, the Goddesses.

The Golden Inn is the Temple of the Goddesses. It is where Ishmael is
delivered from the Ocean, from not human realms, from Oceanic Mystery,
from a relentlessly masculine world (the whale fishery).

Here at the Golden Inn he sets his feet on land again. And what a
landfall. He is immediately immersed in a totally female context, a
place of the Beauty and Mystery of the Goddesses.

When the Goddesses order him to explain hisSelf, he must comply.

And in the explaining is the interpreting.

Here he gives interpretation.

And in this interpretation is post-apocalyptic awareness, a narrative
of the experiencing of transcendence, a growing in the resonation with
the other.

Irish Dionysus/Bacchus

2009-03-07T12:42:00.000-08:00

(this op-ed piece first appeared in the march, 2009 issue of the
current. for the full 'narrative of da voyage of da bloody, snake
chariot see www.libbyhome.blogspot.com or myspace/jahdep )

I have found myself on March 17 in places where you wouldn't tend to
believe there would be many Irish about to properly celebrate The
Day.

And yet I have found Irish Dionysus/Bacchus in unlikely places.

In 1978 I was in Dacca, Bangladesh. By a series of meaningful
coincidences I found myself at the offices of CONCERN (the rough
equivalent of the Irish Peace Corp) on March 16 (St. Paddy's Day-Eve).

What ensued is a legendary party/debauch in the history of Southern Asia.

We drank like Indians. We drank like Russians. We drank like Mexicans.
We drank like Irish (and God invented whisky to prevent the Irish from
taking over the world). We drank until ecstatic ecstasy. We drank
until ecstatic oblivion. We drank until the last person standing -
fell to the ground.

(PUBLIC HEALTH DISCLAIMER - You are advised to drink responsibly, to
drink no more alcohol than is medicinal (this amount will vary for
each person but in general is no more than two at the most three
drinks in any 24 hr. interval). And yet maybe once, no more than twice
a year, it is this writer's personal opinion that you should go there.
This personal opinion is only partially supported by medical research. I
am not advising you to do this. I am not a medical doctor (however, I
know someone who is).
All I'm saying is that it works for me.)

A detachment of the Bangladeshi Army was sent to guard us as we
slumbered in the grass and bushes, Later, a representative of the Government of
Bangladesh, thanked Allah that nobody got killed, nobody got hurt.

Mexico City goes all out on St. Paddy's Day. There are parades with
the brave sound of bag-pipe mariachis.

In Mexico it is most of all a celebration of the Patricio's (those of
St, Patrick).

The Patricios were refugees from the famine who signed up for the U.S.
Army's adventure in Mexico/the Mexican War (1846-48). They mass
deserted from the invading Protestant army to fight alongside their
Mexican compadres.

There are over 300,000 Mexican citizens of Irish ancestry.

There are major celebrations in Japan, Singapore, and Russia. And yet,
until recently, Ireland was the last place you would want to be on
March 17.

Ireland was once the most oppressed-and-kept-down-by-religion-places
(see 'Angela's Ashes' by Frank McCourt) in all the world (even more so
than Oklahoma). In the 1970's more than 90 percent of the Irish went
to church every week. In the 1970's Irish law mandated that pubs close
on March 17.

And then the Catholic Church was devastated by more than a decade of
scandals involving serial child abuse by clerics.

Now less than 44 percent of the Irish go to church, and this
percentage of the population who are church-goers is rapidly
diminishing.

Some Irish describe their country as post-Christian,
post-organized religion.

Now the doors of the pubs of the Emerald Isle are again joyously
thrown open to greet The Day.

This Day may no longer be thought of as an observance of an organized
religion's holiday. And yet it will be, forever, an excellent excuse
to have a party.

Solanthe...

The Great Ice Storm of '09/Great World Depression II (GWD II)

2009-02-25T14:41:00.000-08:00

It is a post-apocalyptic world, a post-apocalyptic forest here in the
foothills of the Ozark Mountains.

The world's economy has crashed, and it continues to burn. Those
former masters of the universe continue to hang and jerk at the ends
of the toxic sub-prime mortgages they sold. There was another
devastating ice storm in Oklahoma (see 'narrative of the voyage of the
bloody, snake, chariot' at www.libbyhome.blogspot.com). And suddenly
the familiar is no longer familiar.

It is the most rigid trees with the hardest, most unyielding wood that
fall, become stubs of themselves under the weight of the ice.

It is the most flexible, the most supple that are best able to dance
that dance with dynamic uncertainty, best able to emerge from the
melting ice, from the meltdown the most unscathed, most able to seize
the new possibilities of the new forest, the new world.

Be light, be nimble - in the dance.

What Would John Brown Do (WWJBD)?

2009-02-12T12:11:00.000-08:00

I asked that question when I was being massively busted for growing plants (see 'The Jah Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) at www. libbyhome. blogspot. com or myspace/jahdep).

About 20 members of the Connecticut State Police Major Crime Unit was coming at me, armed with M-16's, dressed in military camouflage uniforms. A loaded pistol, safety off, was stuck in my face. My plants were being uprooted. My life was being uprooted. There was a helicopter hoovering overhead.

I had been ratted by someone whom I had considered to be a good friend who had informed on me for a $5,000 taxpayer-paid bounty.

The "major crime" I was being arrested for was growing 56 cannabis plants, a plant that (according to the archeological evidence) has been cultivated by people for at least 14,000 years.

It is the corporation not the Human agenda that makes plants illegal, that rewards the person who informs against their neighbor.

I could see with a terrible clarity what our United States of America has become.

I asked WWJBD? I wished that I had a rocket launcher. And I suspected, the way John Brown suspected, that people may have to be hurt or killed before intolerable injustice is redressed, before slaves are made free.

The national history that has culminated in Barak Obama's hopeful, joyous triumph is definitely not all puppy dogs, ice cream, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King.

Everyone is seeing the hand of Lincoln, of King in this moment. I see the bloody, uncompromising, fearless hand of Brown, whose truth goes marching on.

Brown is the only true revolutionary in our American History. He is the single most important person in the liberation of the slave, in bringing truth to the face of power, in bringing forth this moment.

His is the only correct posture in the face of intolerable injustice, in the face of Human bondage.

Mr. President, I know you have a lot on your plate with the world's economy crashed and burning, with the capitalists hanging and jerking from the subprime mortgage rope that they sold.

And perhaps in the face of the poverty and destitution that through no fault of their own - many are entering, many may ask - WWJBD?

And yet, Mr. President, no time will be too soon to end this intolerable, unjust war against plants, this war against the natural right of the Human to use all plants found in nature, this war against the constitution, this war we can no longer afford, this war in which we have a higher percentage of our population incarcerated then any other country in the world.

President Obama - end this war.

Finding the Road to Mexico

2009-01-24T12:40:00.000-08:00

Some People are made up of rhyme, coincidence, omen, periodicity, and presage... they meet whom they seek...a hundred signs apprise them of what is to befall...

....what we seek we shall find...

...ask only for high things.

...for we are the authors of our circumstances.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

My circumstances could be described as being stranded in Tahlequah. And yet, it is a blessed thing to be situated in the realismo magico of the 'quah.

I am meeting those whom I knowingly, or perhaps not consciously knowingingly seek.

I am finding the employment that is seeking me, which is the employment that I (consciously or not) seek.

Something Biblical

2008-12-24T10:47:00.000-08:00

There is something biblical going on.

And yet it has nothing to do with Johnny Patmos' 'Book of Chucklelations'.

On 9/11 a great opportunity of liberation consciousness was offered to our nation.

For a while people stepped back from this consumer special olympics on steroids - this obsessive buying and selling of things that we really don't need, this hopeless entanglement in the material - stepped back from that 24/7 stupid sound about Britney Spears, Carrie Underwear, Brad Pitt, Dr. Phil etc. And for a little while people tried to wrap their minds around the existential parameters of the human circumstances, the dynamic uncertainty, the all-pervading mystery that can turn the wee lives of mice and humans awry.

In a fiery, cinematic moment the most seemingly secure lives - based on good incomes, secure retirements, fat 401k's - ended on that day that it rained burning people.

But then people resumed this consumer special olympics on steroids - this obsessive buying and selling of things that we really don't need - resumed the mindless 24/7 drone about Hannah Montana, corn-holing aliens, conspiracy theory.

And then capitalism on steroids crashed and burns.

It is as Lenin prophecized - The capitalists sold the sub-prime mortgage ropes from which they hang and jerk.

And once more people step back from this consumer special olympics on steroids - this obsessive buying and selling of things that we really don't need - step back from that 24/7 stupid sound about Oprah, Madonna, Martha Steward, O.J. etc. and again try to wrap their minds around the existential parameters of the human circumstances, the place where true treasure lay, the dynamic uncertainty, the all pervading mystery that blow up the delusions of certainty, the delusions of security.

This is the moment we all share in these days of ebbing and then slowly ascending light.

A Card Carrying Okie

2008-12-04T12:17:00.000-08:00

That I am I.

That my soul is a dark forest.

That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.

That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.

That I must have the courage to let them come and go.

That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.

D.H. Lawrence - Studies in Classic American Literature

Last year while hiking the Appalachian Trail I lost, (it fell out of a hole in my pocket) my Connecticut Drivers' License.

Homelandt Security didn't make it easy, and yet, I have replaced my Connecticut driver's license with an Oklahoma driver's license.

My papers are in order.

The new identification card places me, geographically, in this very intense, this very real 'realidad magico' deep in the capital and the heart of the Cherokee Nation, this terminus of trails of tears, where what comes after, begins.

My license card says my vision is in no need of correction (the only drivers license I've ever had that doesn't require me to wear corrective lens, see 'narrative of the voyage of the bloody, snake chariot' at www.libbyhome.blogspot.com).

I am still a passer-by.

And yet being a card-carrying Okie, to some extent, defines my range. I range from here to all other places, all other possibilities. I range from these Tahlequah mysteries to all other mysteries.

And I am again bound for Mexico.

The Question in the Dream, Inside the Dream, in the 'Quah

2008-11-06T13:33:00.000-08:00

"...in dreams we stand in this great democracy of the possible and there we are right pilgrims indeed. There we go forth to meet what we shall meet."
Cormac McCarthy

When I encountered that resident of Tahlequah, OK and the Wonderworld, the singer/songwriter/musician, James Townsend, of the My Tea Kind, in this place of Realidad Magico, he immediately told me we were in Dream Time.

James told me of a recently dreamed prescient dream of suddenly, unexpectedly seeing me in the 'Quah. And in that dream James asked "What the hell is Sam Libby doing in Tahlequah?"

I ponder this question on the fifth anniversary of first arriving in the Realismo Magico (Magical Realism) of the 'Quah, of arriving in this time first seen in dreams (see 'Narrative of the Voyage of the Bloody, Snake Chariot at www.libbyhome.blogspot.com).

My being in Tahlequah has never been a thing of conscious decision or doing. It is a thing of mysterious magnetism, attraction, meaningful coincidence, music, mysterious migration/movement/transformation.

Everything about this visit in this time - is dream-like.

Business-as-usual (b-a-u), Babylon is falling. A person-of-color is president-elect of these United States of America. It is a glorious, transcendent Ozark autumn. There is great hope and anxiety in this dream democracy of the possible that we now find ourSelves in.

We are all pilgrims going forth to meet what we shall meet.

communique from Okie Party-Ghetto Militia and Garden Club

2008-10-04T15:46:00.000-07:00

(The Okie Party-Ghetto Militia and Garden Club are stalwart defenders of all the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution.

We Seek the Restoration of the Republic.

Most of Life is about being Present.

So therefore, we are full Participants (Is-ists in da Is-ism) in that on-going creation of that Mysterious Dionysian Universe of Music, and the Feast and the Revelry of the Human Liberation.)

These are Days of Awe.

The business of what usually Is

Swings in the breeze.

Falls like a House of Cards.

And what was said and done in Secret,

is now yelled from the roof tops.

So, therefore - Be Dionysus

If we are only able to Imagine this Time

as Destitution and Poverty,

then it will be that,

and nothing more.

So, therefore - Be Dionysus

He who teaches the cultivation of that which gladdens the hearts of Mortal Gods.

He the Productive, Overflowing, Abundant, Intoxicating power of Nature,

which takes Us to the Further and the Greater.

He, the Giver of Joy,

Disperser of grief and sorrow.

Great God of the Party.

Wherever there is Community around the Mysteries:

The Mystery of the Party-Ghetto,

The Mystery of the Gardening,

The Mystery of the Liberation

He Is There,

And So Is

The Okie Party-Ghetto Militia and Garden Club

End of Festival Season

2008-09-29T15:21:00.000-07:00

Thousands of people in an ultimately sold out Yarmonygrass, (at Copper Mountain, CO in August) endured biblically bad weather - including sleet, hail, freezing rain, cold rain, thunder and lighting while it snowed. Thousands of people at the Mulberry Mountain Festival (in September) in Arkansas were struck by hurricane winds in excess of 80 m.p.h. Thousands of people in Winfield, Kansas were evacuated from the flooding caused by Hurricane Ike.

But, in the end, most everyone got what they came for, paid for, endured.

All the major jam/grass festivals, in spite of sometimes very adverse weather conditions, reported record attendance. This summer's festivarians got an incredible line up of the stars and rising stars of that hard-to-define, psychedelic musical genre known as jamgrass\nugrass. They got the full spectrum of the music from the traditional acoustic to the fusion/rave side.
And they got amazing, noteable, memorable parties.

"This music, these music festivals are about people running from the bubble-gum, running from the waste land of mainstream pop music, and running to music and musical events that have authenticity," says Eric Peter Abramson, the maker of the documentary 'Years in Your Ears', about 'Left Over Salmon', and the rise of the summer musical festival as we know them in Colorado.

"It's about music that has an authenticity of musical idiom, of lyric, of sentiment, of experience narrated," said Abramson. "It's about musical events in which people find a sense of community around and in this music," he said.

"Everyone, all the musicians that play music in these festivals have started, they all have a background in something that can be regarded as a kind of acoustic, traditional blue grass. They're all graduates of some blue grass project," said jam/grass legend Peter Rowan, who played with Bill Monroe, as well as Jerry Garcia.

At a press conference on the final day of Yarmonygrass, Rowan attempted to describe what is the shared components, the commonalities of the music that is played at jam/grass festivals.

"Music, by its very nature, can't stand still. It can't stand still for individual musicians, can't stand still for musicians collectively. Why should it? Who would want it to stand still, stagnate? he asked.

"All good musicians, all real music lovers they hope to see musicians surpass themselves, transcend themselves. That's what jamming means. It's about musicians' ability and willingness to go where the music and the moments takes them. It's about the audience letting the musicians go there.

"It is a leap into the wild blue yonder to go up on stage with a bunch of musicians unrehearsed, one could say unprepared but knowing that something will build in the jam, that everyone will have something important to give. "Jam music is an open, free, and yet co-operative, integrative music which goes towards a new paradigm of music, a new paradigm of consciousness
"I have never been disappointed by what results from the jam," Rowan said.

"And yet blue grass remains somewhere in all the music that gets played at these festivals. Its the place you turn to, come back to, the common language we all share," he said.

"I strongly believe our music is an effective and proper soundtrack for the progressive, and environmental movement - the green movement, said Aaron Redner, the fiddler for 'Hot Buttered Rum' which tours in a biodiesel fueled bus.

"My personal goal with music is to provide a bridge between classical music and Americana music," said Radner, a classically trained violinist.

"Hot Buttered Rum' might jump from swing jazz to old-school fiddle, to straight-ahead rock," he said.

"These festivals provide an opportunity, a place to see where everyone is going in the music, said Rowan.

"Good people, good music, good times. "And that's why people will come to these festivals every year," he said.

Protest Song

2008-09-22T12:44:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the original, the proto-type of the protest song writer is Jesus, who was known to his contemporaries as Rabbi Yeshua.

The legendary seer Edgar Cayce narrated accounts of visions of Yeshua and his disciples in which Yeshua was a musician and a singer who played the harp (not necessarily the mouth-harp) and sang his shock rhetoric, his message to the face of power, about how the kingdom of heaven was inaccessible to the rich and greedy ("easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle") and how the poor, the humble, the opressed were blessed because ultimately they, collectively had the power to come into the transcendent liberation, and inherit the earth.

Woody Guthrie is perhaps the quintessential, most influential American protest song writer.
The lyrics of his song 'Jesus Christ', and Over My Dead Body resonate with Yeshua's original, shock rhetoric, his revolutionary, heretical message:

'Jesus Christ was a man who traveled through the land
A hardworking man and brave
He said to the rich,
Give your money to the poor
But they laid Jesus Christ
in His Grave

'They have all the money
but we have the will
And I would rather be a match
than a paper dollar bill
They say they will incorporate the world
Over my dead body

This same quintessential, protest song message is brought to this, our time by song-writer James McMurtry.

Vietnam Vet with a cardboard sign
Sitting there by the left turn line
Flag on the wheelchair flapping in the breeze
One leg missing, both hands free
No one's paying much mind to him
The V.A.
budget's stretched so thin
And there's more comin' home from the Mideast war
We can't make it here anymore
That big ol' building was the textile mill
It fed our kids and it paid our bills
But they turned us out and they closed the doors
We can't make it here anymore
See all those pallets piled up on the loading dock
They're just gonna set there till they rot
'Cause there's nothing to ship, nothing to pack
Just busted concrete and rusted tracks
Empty storefronts around the square
There's a needle in the gutter and glass everywhere
You don't come down here 'less you're looking to score
We can't make it here anymore
The bar's still open but man it's slow
The tip jar's light and the register's low
The bartender don't have much to say
The regular crowd gets thinner each day
Some have maxed out all their credit cards
Some are working two jobs and living in cars
Minimum wage won't pay for a roof, won't pay for a drink
If you gotta have proof just try it yourself Mr.
CEO
See how far 5.
15 an hour will go
Take a part time job at one of your stores
Bet you can't make it here anymore
High school girl with a bourgeois dream
Just like the pictures in the magazine
She found on the floor of the laundromat
A woman with kids can forget all that
If she comes up pregnant what'll she do
Forget the career, forget about school
Can she live on faith? live on hope?
High on Jesus or hooked on dope
When it's way too late to just say no
You can't make it here anymore
Now I'm stocking shirts in the Wal-Mart store
Just like the ones we made before
'Cept this one came from Singapore
I guess we can't make it here anymore
Should I hate a people for the shade of their skin
Or the shape of their eyes or the shape I'm in
Should I hate 'em for having our jobs today
No I hate the men sent the jobs away
I can see them all now, they haunt my dreams
All lily white and squeaky clean
They've never known want, they'll never know need
Their sh@ don't stink and their kids won't bleed
Their kids won't bleed in the da$% little war
And we can't make it here anymore
Will work for food
Will die for oil
Will kill for power and to us the spoils
The billionaires get to pay less tax
The working poor get to fall through the cracks
Let 'em eat jellybeans let 'em eat cake
Let 'em eat sh$%, whatever it takes
They can join the Air Force, or join the Corps
If they can't make it here anymore
And that's how it is
That's what we got
If the president wants to admit it or not
You can read it in the paper
Read it on the wall
Hear it on the wind
If you're listening at all
Get out of that limo
Look us in the eye
Call us on the cell phone
Tell us all why
In Dayton, Ohio
Or Portland, Maine
Or a cotton gin out on the great high plains
That's done closed down along with the school
And the hospital and the swimming pool
Dust devils dance in the noonday heat
There's rats in the alley
And trash in the street
Gang graffiti on a boxcar door
We can't make it here anymore

"I think about toning it down when I might get my ass kicked," said McMurtry in a phone interview with 'Mountain Music. "But I usually go ahead and play it like I should," he said.

"We usually piss somebody off. That's how we know they're listening," said McMurtry.

"My main motivation for writing protest songs, all songs is to make a living out of writing and performing of music.

"I don't know if I'm making a difference. No one will know for a while," he added.

Music and lyrics © 2004 by James McMurtry

The Song - Rockygrass 2008

2008-08-21T12:37:00.000-07:00

The Song - Rockygrass 2008

In the beginning Bill Monroe, took the quintessential American musical idiom and re-invented IT, and he in turn was re-invented, re-created by IT.

This quintessential American musical idiom was patriotic and conservative (but always nursed an anti-rich people resentment). It was religiously orthodox (in a lunatic, fundamentalist way). It was played by extremely talented and skillful musicians in a fast, fluid, novel way. And it was danced in a joyous American way. It was called bluegrass music (because of Monroe's origins in the Blue Grass state of Kentucky).

Then, starting in the late 1960's, Sam Bush and the hippies took IT over. They re-invented bluegrass. And then were themselves re-invented by IT.

This still quintessential American music preserves remnants of its lunatic fundamental orthodoxy. It still preserves an anti-rich people/corporation agenda political resentment. And IT is a kind of psychedelic music, broadly influenced by entheogenic plants, attaining greater and further powers of musical virtuosity, fluidity, speed, novelty, musical elegance. And is danced to in a joyous, American way.

For the 36th year in Lyons, the music and the counter-cultural bluegrass sub-culture which surrounds and pervades the music, was celebrated at Rockygrass.

Monroe's legacy was still very much there in Garrettgrass Gospel Extravaganza (who performed gospel music on Sunday morning), JD Crowe & The New South, and Peter Rowan Bluegrass Band (Peter Rowan played with Bill Monroe, and also played and hung out with Jerry Garcia).

And the greater, further, new psychedelic possibilities of the music were well represented by The Steeldrivers, Russ Barenberg & Bryan Sutton, John Cowan Band, Bela Fleck & Friends, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas & Edgar Meyer, Infamous Stringdusters, Psychograss, Abigail Washburn & The Sparrow Quartet.

Perhaps the furthest psychedelic, classical possibilities of the music was represented by Punch Brothers, Featuring Chris Thile. They incorporate into their music a musical dissonance that is reminescent of the classical music of the early 20th Century. They played a 40 minute, four movement' classical-style suite, 'The Blind leaving the Blind'.

The Punch Brothers could be the rough equivalent of what happened to American jazz in the 1950's when it for the most part stopped being a music that was joyously and athletically danced to, and became a very challenging, intellectual, esoteric music that had to be intently listened to.

And yet the band that seized the show was Carolina Chocolate Drops.

Carolina Chocolate Drops clearly demonstrate that bluegrass is not only the music of mountain white people, that in fact, the thickest roots of the music extend to Africa and black string bands.

The festival crowd rose to their feet and embraced the music of the black musicians of the Carolinas' Piedmont. Rhiannon Giddens, was embraced by the crowd as a lost and now found sister, and Justin Robinson, and Dom Flemons were embraced as lost and now found brothers in the music.

And it was a further demonstration that bluegrass is in all ways the quintessential American music.

An intent of Rockygrass is to musically empower, to impart the tradition, the virtuosity of the music, the craftsmanship of the musical instruments to new generations. Young people who attend 'The Academy' during the week that precedes the actual festival learn to play the music, learn to make the musical instruments from world acknowledged masters.

But, perhaps the greatest cross generational thing that happens at Rockygrass is when old, grizzled, veterans of the festival become fresh faced youths in the mystery of the playing, the picking, the participating in the song.

NedFest

2008-08-19T19:52:00.001-07:00

The 10th Annual Nederland Music & Arts Festival is here. Again Nederland celebrates the area's vital, vibrant, indigenous music scene with the presentation of the key players and rising stars (many of who are local residents) of that astounding, psychedelic music known as Bluegrass, Jazz/Fusion, Jamband.

And again the Nederland/Boulder area celebrates the re-birth of the music.

The story of this renaissance of music and Nedfest is the story of an itinerant music lover/pilgrim - Michigan Mike who arrived in Boulder on November 30, 1992 when this areas' legendary music scene of the late '60's and 70's had become a receding memory.

He arrived in the area, a mere youth. He saw the dying of the song. He framed the intent of bringing IT back. And now, at this 10th Annual Nedfest, Mike and everyone else celebrate total Victory.

Mike's first job in the area was as D.J. at the Dark Horse playing "standard party music". This evolved into a Grateful Dead Bootleg Night. This evolved into totally hooking up with Leftover Salmon. This evolved into The First Foot Stompin' Mountain Movin' Music Festival at Mike Henry's pld place on Cold Springs Road.

"Kegs of beer and a tarp extending off the garage enabled a really good time for Nederland locals to jam out," remembers Mike.

This evolved into the Second thru Fourth Non-Annual Foot Stompin' Mountain Movin' Music Festival at Mike's no heat-no water cabin on Caribou Road which was equipped with a covered stage - and of course kegs of cold beer.

"There was not a lot happening in the bars for people my age when I moved to Ned," Mike recalls. The PI (Pioneer Inn) and the Assay office hosted some hard rock and blues band now and then. But that was about it.

"The place for Gen Xers was called Top of the Square, which, except for open-mic rarely hosted live music.

"It was the same in Boulder. The Boulder Theatre had just closed down. And J.J. McCoves and many other music venues had been turned into pool halls. There just wasn't much going on, hadn't been for at least 10 years," he said.

Mike, in his work, booking and promoting music, soon became a key, central figure in the areas' music scene.

"I convinced the owners of Top of the Square to let me bring in a band once a week. A quick and significant increase in business convinced them to knock down walls and convert from an intimate little four dining room restaurant/bar into one big party area. It was a huge hit and by July 1996 I was booking five nights of music a week there!" says Mike.

"By August '97 I had booked more than 300 nights of music. It was The Club, even if you lived in Boulder. Because Boulder had absolutely nothing going on at that time, either. People were coming out in droves for the live tunes. Other businesses in Ned saw this, and started booking live bands also. And hence the '90's Nederland music scene began to bloom.

"Many bands got their start at The Top, while others were already big names. Nederland Acid Jazz, Bluegrass Wednesday, Charles Sawtelle & Whippets, Tony Furtado, Wendy Woo Band, Zukes Of Zydeco, Zambeeland Orchestra, Skin, Fe', Chief Broom, Roots Revolt, Foxtrot Zulu, Fat Mama, Sherri Jackson Band, Hypnotic Clambake, Magraw Gap, Ben Stevens, Blackdog, Floodplain Gang, Bruce Hayes, Mark Diamond, Motor Bootie, Tribal Folk, PSOAS, Odd Men Out, Wiley Cotton Band, Catawampus Universe, Dexter Grove, Chitlin, Johnny O. Band, Kim Reece & White Bred Funk, Kester Smith, Dave Grant, Steve Owen, Acoustic Food Chain, Adrian Romero & Love Supreme, Available Jones, Bambochee, Bleecker Street, Blue River Rounders, Blunt Instruments, The Boulevards, Brainbone (w/ Drew Moore), Brethren Fast, Buckethead Dog, Butlers and Thieves, The Buzz Harvest, Cajun Style!, Chip and the Chowderheads, Chocolate Cow, Chuck Grossman, Craig Corona Band, Dank, The Deadbeats, Double Dose, Doublestop, Drip City, Durt, Dwight & the Terrestrials, Free Funk Ensemble, Funk & Wilde, Furious Howard Brown, Government Grown, The Great Swannee Orchestra, Heptagram, HiFi Mofo, Higher Ground, Jack & Mike, Flipper Jester Trio, Jazz Ficks, John Randal Band, Koro, Launching Lydia, Legba, Liquid Playground, Loose Roots, Mountain Music Project, Mumbling Douglas, Acid Jazz with Nandeska, The New Originals, Old Soul, On Air, OPUS, The Organ Grinders, Otis Roach Band, Pete Fiori & Friends, Pickabillys, Rhino 2 Rhino, Rubber Spark, Seldom's Ark, Shankis Lonvernia, Acoustic Prostitution, Schwagg, Mucis, Rasputin, Sammy D. & Master Cylinder, Side Of Fries, Soul Tractor, Spike & Jerry, Steve Burnside & The "G" Forces, Stubblefield, The O'Malleys, Tom Yermack, Tree Full Of Pigs, Tribe Of Butterflies, Uncle Daddy, Uncle Woody, Union Wage, Vermiscious Knids, Zale & Friends, members of Leftover Salmon, members of String Cheese Incident, plus many more, said Mike.

The First Annual Nederland Music & Arts Festival was held at the Jeff Garcia Memorial Baseball Field in August of 1999 and featured Skin, Roots Revolt, Higher Ground, Available Jones, Fe', Blackdog, Wiley Cotton Band, The Buzz Harvest, Chuck Grossman, Steve Ray Liedlich, Patrick Latella and special guest MC: Vince Herman (of Leftover Salmon).

"Nedfest is a great homegrown festival that gets better every year," says Vince Herman.

"It's hard to put on a fest without big cash behind you," he noted

"A land mark year for the event was two years ago," recalls Herman. "Mike jumped up the caliber of musician by adding Dr. John and Sam Bush. But even the first Nedfest 1999 line up was great with Keller Williams and Yonder Mountain.

" This festival benifits the community and that is why it keeps getting passed. It says something, does something good for the town. It shows it has an abundance of character. You're not celebrating a dead guy. But celebrating life, community and fellowship.

"Lets hear it for the little guy (Michigan Mike) who managed to pull off this great, wonderful thing," Herman said.

"In the future the fest needs a new site with camping to get to the next level," was Herman's suggestion for future improvement.

The Paineapolooza

2008-08-14T17:04:00.000-07:00

If the Paineapolooza doesn't kill you - it will make you stronger.

From the morning of July 31 to the morning of August 3, as many as 400 hardy, partying souls - some traveling from as far away as Nederland, some 700 miles away - endured high humidity, blood sucking insects, high gas prices, and temperatures that soared to 111 degrees, in the shade.

And not only did they survive, but they thrived during the Paine family's extended week-end gathering of archaic revival, Elephant Revival, My-Tea-Kind, love, musical shamanism, good food that gladens the heart, cold showers, bathing and boating on and in Lake Murray, Oklahoma.

Nederland's 'Elephant Revival' was the headline band of the music festival. But other musical acts participating in the festival were Oklahoma's 'My-Tea-Kind, The Frankies, Joe Mack, Okie Jew-Boy, Missouri's 'Wayward Traveler', and Norway's Ole (pronounced Uhla) the amazing Norwegian Folk Fiddler.

"If it wasn't for the cold showers I probably would have been dead by the second day," said Nederland resident Mark Tongland. "But not only did no body get hurt (too much) or killed, it was an intense, joyous. life-altering experience for most everybody."

"Is this a great country or what," said Uncle Mark Paine (the biological uncle of Nederland resident Bonnie Paine, and the metaphorical uncle of many others).

("If you don't get caught," he added.)

"The Paineapolooza is from, by and for the Okie Party Ghetto Militia and Garden Club," Uncle Mark said.

"We are stalworth defenders of the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. We fight for the restoration of the Republic. And we really enjoy good music, good food, gardening, and having world-class, great parties," he added.

"Lake Murray (near the Oklahoma/Texas border) is an arduous place this time of the year, but this is such a good time," said Nederland resident Spence Seare - whose culinery skills can be regularly sampled at Nederland's Back Country Pizza.

Seare won the hearts of all with these same culinary skills which richly contributed to the on-going feast - a regular feature of the Paineapolooza..

"After the Paineapolooza I feel I can go anywhere in the world - equatorial Africa, Antarctica, Salt Lake City - and I will be empowered to party," Seare said.

The Sauce/Source of Musical Attraction

2008-07-05T14:59:00.000-07:00

On July 4, after the fireworks in Nederland, CO at the Shining Star Cafe, 'The Elephant Revival' will celebrate the release of their debut album.

This eclectic/blood rhythm/Celtic, Gyptic, Blue-Grass, Reggae roots band will also be celebrating the source/sauce of their musical attraction/influence.

The source/sauce of their musical attraction/influence begins with the fundamental attractiveness and talent of these prodigious song writers/musicians/singers. Dan Rodriguez, Bridget Law, Sage Cook, Dan Rose, Anna Rose Paine are all bright, shining, rising stars.

And then the angelic song and way of Bonnie May Paine is simply irresistible magic.

The career of this band has just begun. And yet 'The Elephant Revival' has already drawn communities of devotees, bands of camp followers that extends from the Rockies to the Ozarks, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

In these anxious, troubled times, as business-as-usual tethers, as people are further anxiously alienated from the source/sauce of life, from their cultural/evolutionary origins, alienated from their basic humanity the song of 'The Elephant Revival' is one of integration with blood rhythmic musical roots, the song is one of integration of experience, the song is of shamanistic healing.

The origins of this musical band's song is diverse including but not limited to Celtic (Scottish/Hebrides), Latin American, Cherokee, Progressive Blue Grass, Gypsy, Reggae, folk, rock 'n roll influences. In the totality of these influences, everyone is provided the possibility of access, can be participants in the song and the blood rhythm dance of the song, can be part of a musical community sharing intent and purpose.

In these anxious, alienated times the song of 'The Elephant Revival' is a song of hope, a song of engaging the greater and further possibilities of the end of business-as-usual and the beginning of this new age of the not-business-as-usual.

The band's vehicle is an old school bus named Bessie who has been transformed by the mechanical genius of Sage Cook into a bio-diesel powered vehicle of a hopeful future.

'The Elephant Revival' moves resonates with the political, social transformative tides of the not-business-as-usual of what comes after the ways of wretched excess, of what comes after the time when mystery can no longer be denied.

A message of the song of 'The Elephant Revival' is that we all can potentially seize this anxious, trouble day and not only survive, but elegantly, audaciously thrive.

A message of the song of 'The Elephant Revival' is that we need not be anxious, we need not be alienated, for we are all connected, we are all one, we all resonate in the song of our common, musically-integrated humanity.

The song is about the embracing of the mystery that surrounds and pervades the human condition.

This debut album is a musical photograph of 'The Elephant Revival's' vital, dynamic continuous movement in the song.

They are much greater and further along.

Special Magical Reality

2008-07-05T14:50:00.000-07:00

Special Magical Reality

It has been over a month-and-a-half since I crossed back through the tortilla curtain from the place where Peyote lives to again see with new eyes.

The seeing of Peyote is still with me. And in addition to this, I really do have new eyes.

I am at the age where a persons' seeing physically, materially changes. Most of my life I have been severely near-sighted, needing thick correctional lenses. Now, the physicality, materiality of my eyes have changed. I can see, unassisted.

I am healed.

And all events, circumstances, people, mysteries I encounter mark this moment, this space as a time and place of special magical reality.

This is the time of the tornado, the whirlwind (see 'narrative of the voyage of the bloody, snake...' at myspace-jahdep) in the space I transit (within the boundaries of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Colorado).

I haven't encountered a tornado, but I am always in the time, at the place where the whirlwind, the mystery of mental illness (which is always speaking the same language as religion) touches the earth.

This time is being marked by the deranged and the derangement of people. This time is being marked by the search for meaning that the encounter with lunacy, the lunatic other inevitably illicits.

But this time is being marked, shaped, determined by the meaning found in these events, circumstances, people, mysteries encountered.

And this seeking and finding of meaning in the apparently meaningless is the true human vocation.

Stay tuned to the next 'narrative of the voyage of the bloody, snake chariot...

The Whirlwind

2008-07-05T14:48:00.000-07:00

Back in Norman, OK, (see ’The Great Ice Storm of ’07’ at ’narrative of the voyage of the bloody, snake chariot’ at myspace/jahdep) here in tornado alley, April is a cruel month of violent weather.

The season changes. The atmosphere is a boiling, stirred witches’ brew of hot, cold, yin, yang, wet, dry, positive, negative polarity, creation, destruction, revelation, trouble and toil. And the whirlwind comes down from the green thunder clouds, the sirens sound and tornado touches the world.

Everybody who lives here long enough will have their story of when the whirlwind touched their world. Inevitably there is a fascination. Some even chase IT. Some do not have to go a step out of their way to reap IT.

There has been a series of particularly notable tornado seasons. Now, every weather prediction of rain is a prediction of thunder and lighting. Every prediction of thunder and lighting is a prediction of the whirlwind.

At this time all are, to some degree, soldiers who survey the lay of the land for scare holes, fox holes, places to flee where the whirlwind is less likely to reach down from the sky to touch the lives and plans of mice and humans.

The Lay of the Land

2008-07-05T14:47:00.000-07:00

When I crossed to this side of that great river, Uncle Mark put my strong back, weak mind to work.

I worked with surveying crews. I cut lines of sight through the thick briar patches of North Texas, with a machete. I transited the briar patches to help survey trees marked for preservation. I humbly assisted in the accurate, mathematically consistent observing and describing of the lay of the land of residential and commercial properties, undeveloped land that could soon be made into residential and commercial properties.

And with new eyes for observing and describing the lay of the land, I now observe and describe the lay of this homelandt of ours.

It is an anxious land fearful of imminent dispossession, destitution, a whole new magnitude of great economic depression, as the world’s economic system continues to teeter and fall.

The great southern wall of the United States of America is being put into place. In Oklahoma a law is in effect which allows police, immigration officials, homelandt security to check the papers of anyone who even vaguely looks Latin American, or is otherwise suspicious. If your papers are not in order you are stopped, cuffed, and thrown face down on the highways’ center strip. You are put in crowded cages and eventually deported.

So many people in the homelandt’s heartland are addicted to crank. Politicians campaign on their drug war credentials. But most public money that is spent on this great war against the U.S. Constitution is spent to arrest and imprison people whose only crime is the peaceful cultivation of plants.

It is an angry land which is coming to understand that the government of the United States of America serves nobody but the filthy rich, the corporate agenda.

But there is some good news in this homelandt of ours. The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the second amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the right to bear arms and organize militia.

The good news is that there are limits to how far a government can oppress an armed citizenry.

Monterrey Mexico/Casablanca

2008-07-05T14:45:00.000-07:00

Monterrey, Mexico is an about two-and-a-half hour bus trip to the United States.

So close. Yet, so far away.

The first night, here, I slept in a dormitory room at a "huespedes/guest house" on the wrong side of town with at least 25 other dudes (the only cheap place I could find) who were also making their plans for getting across that frontier that divides and brings so many realms together.

I have my papers in order. I do not have an immediate reason for fearing the security organs of our brave, new homelandt. But most here are between the border and a hard place.

Two movies with Humphrey Bogurt keep playing in my head.

When I was in the mountains and desert of Real de Catorce I saw in my mind's eye, ran into many synchronistic references to 'The Treasure of the Sierre Madre'. Here in Monterrey I see in my mind's eye, run into synchronistic references to 'Casablanca' ("Play it again, Sam").

I see in 'The Treasure of the Sierre Madre' the indisputable truth that where your heart is, is where your true treasure lies.

I see in the playing of 'Casablanca' in my minds eye that the world is fast entering a black magical reality with parallels to the black magical reality that Europe, the world entered into during the decades of the 1930s, and 1940's.

I see that everyone will have to choose. I see that everyone will define themselves by their choice.

Back to the Desert - El Senor Diablo - Back to the Border

2008-07-05T14:43:00.000-07:00

Back to the Desert - El Senor Diablo - Back to the Border

From the cities of Itz (see myspace/jahdep) I was summoned back to the desert where Peyote lives.

I wasn't summoned to eat the Great Medicina. I was summoned to know more about the desert, the place, the light and the dark, the context that Peyote pervades.

Cristobel, de Chicago, a lunatic/traveler in many realms was encountered in Estacion Catorce. He explained that the reason people come to this desert where Peyote lives, the reason why people leave this desert where Peyote lives, the things that everybody doesn't want to talk about in this place where Peyote lives is - El Senor Diablo and his Black Magic.

Cristobel spoke a truth that I sensed when I last came and left this place, eleven years ago (see Jah D.E.P. myspace/jahdep).

He spoke of the history of this place, how populated Real de Catorce, Estacion Catorce, Estacion Wadley, Potrero, Luz, were in the early 20th Century, how this was a place rich in gold, silver, copper, zinc, how people spoke French and attended the opera, and didn't believe in El Senor Diablo, thought the future was going to be more of the same.

And then he spoke about this place of at least 50,000 people being reduced to a population of about 500.

He spoke about a particular hippy "discovering" this place in the early 1970's, and how the place has been re-populated (there's about 5,000 people living here now), and how particular groups of people come here for many years, and just as suddenly stop coming here, and how they are replaced by a new, different group of people who start coming here, regularly.

After Cristobel, Mocho was encountered.

Mocho, who looks like a young Cheech, was born in the deep desert. His parents ate Peyote. He eats Peyote every day. He brings people to ritual and ceremony in the desert where Peyote lives, he is related, connected to the principle Peyote Brujos in the desert.

When Mocho was told Cristobel`s, de Chicago, theory, he didn't disagree.

"El Diablo es un amigo de miyo (The Devil is a friend of mine,") he said.

And then the time came for me to leave the desert where Peyote lives, and go to Montorrey, where I now write, and make plans to cross that great river that divides and brings together many realms.

Cities of Itz

2008-07-05T14:39:00.000-07:00

Cities of Itz

The ruins of La Quamada (the burnt place) mark the most northern extent of the classic Central American sacred architecture, and this architectures premise that the universe is maintained by the power of the Itz, the human sacrifice, the power generated by the fatal release, the flowing of blood, the release and flow of all fluids of the human body.

The intent of the sacred architecture was to frame the human sacrifice, the fatal, ceremonial release of blood/Itz. The sacred architecture and its ceremony was meant to be a kind of nuclear reactor of Itz.

The corpses would be rolled down the steps of the pyramids leaving a glistening streak of blood/Itz from top to bottom.

The classic Central American civilizations observed and created a stark, bloody but strangely hopeful universe. Impeccability was possible in the face of the mystery of the Itz/human sacrifice. Impeccability could transform humans into gods/immortals. Impeccability in the face of the mystery could transform the universe into a subtly more hospitable place for the Human.

But by the end of the classical age the cult of the Itz/human sacrifice degenerated into a fearsome, morbid cult of death. In the last days of Quamada, the sacred architecture was adorned by tortured corpses, rotting skulls and body parts.

And that is how the city was decorated when the walls of the city were breached and the city of 15,000 people was burnt and put to the knife around 950 A.D.

Close to Quamada is the storybook beautiful, colonial city of Zacatecas which is also built on Itz.

The indigenous people fought a long, desperate war of resistance against the Spanish who came in force because there was gold and silver. Those who survived the war were made slaves in the mines.

The Eden Mine of Zacatecas was worked until the 1950's. It was one of the richest mines in Mexico. It is a place heavy with the blood and tears of slaves.

The mine allowed the Spanish to build a beautiful, idealized, sentimentalized, imagined Spanish City, with no capital restraints.

The callejornidas (see 'narrative of the bloody, snake chariot' - dark and the light...at myspace/jahdep), the Dioynesian street parties that erupt throught the streets of Zacatecas Thursday night through Saturday night are a revived miner tradition.

When the miners were temporarily freed slaves they would hire a band, and prostitutes, they would get stinking drunk, dance in the streets, Itz vomit and semen, until the police came and Bacchus/Dioynesis would seem to be arrested.

What the Medicine Says

2008-07-05T14:37:00.000-07:00

Paco P. became my guide in the realm of the Great Medicina.

When Paco was a youth he ate a plant in the desert (not Peyote) that took him to many realms. He never quite returned from these many realms to the realm of the business-as-usual (b-a-u)

All in his extended pueblo say he is "a little lost". But they recognize that in his perpetual journeys in the many realms, he is a shaman. They love him, they respect him, they will listen to him - no matter how lunatic he is.

He is an about 40 year-old, artisano who sells the drums, the jewelry he makes, in the little street on the east side of the main plaza in Real de Catorce. He plays blues' harmonica. He looks at the world with the eyes of a child.

When we first talked to each other, on the street of the artisans, we told each other of our personal legends, the realms we travel in. We played harmonica.
We went to the ruins he lives in.

The ruinous dwellings have restored, mostly intact roofs. They have electricity (more or less). They have no indoor plumbing. People sleep on mattresses or on pads on the dusty floor.

To get to Paco's ruins required a descent to the river gorge that divides Real de Catorce and the ascent of the slope on the other side.

He asked me to help him to water his garden.

There was no discernable garden. There were widely seperated patches of high desert vegetation. There was a functioning water faucet accessible by a steep, treacherous climb zig-zagging through the ruins above Paco's dwelling. We each carried two water filled dry-wall buckets at a time to all the widely seperated patches of vegetation. We did this until I nearly passed out. Then I sat down for five minutes. And then I resumed the portage of the water.

The following day he invited me to the marginally reborn ghost town of Lower Potrero on the other side of the mountain tunnel that gets you into Real de Catorce.

Lower Potrero is a place inhabited by these breakfasting on beer, smoking of huge spleefs of ganj - lunatics.

The first person I encountered was Don Pete, the unofficial mayor/interpretor of dreams/shaman/beer drinker. He looks a lot like Willy Nelson.

We drank beer, smoked huge spleefs of ganj, played music and spoke of the apocalypse, the creation, the kingdom, the brotherhood of Angels. We did this until the full moon rose. And then we continued doing this well into the full-moon illuminated night.

Around 3 a.m. Paco woke me up.

He said he wanted to walk in the full moon, lunatic light, straight up to and through the about two mile tunnel to Real de Catorce (an about 10 mile ascent).

I listened to him. Then I tried to get back to sleep.

Paco then placed three tangerines around my head and then he ravenously ate all the other food in Don Pete's dwelling.

When we awoke he said he had eventually gone back to sleep and had a dream.

He said he now knew how lower Portrero could get all kinds of government money.

He told me to come with him as he knocked on at least a dozen doors of Lower Portrero and spoke of his plan, his project. He spoke of government money that was available for the preservation of the pueblo's culture. He spoke of government money for mothers and there children. He spoke of the kingdom of heaven.

Everyone listened.

When he spoke of the kingdom of heaven, it was noted. They asked where that was coming from?

He said it was coming from Don Samuelito (yo).

After the last door had been knocked on, he broke out five large Peyotes. He peeled them. He offered them to all he encountered. He offered it to a drunk viejo (old man) who looked at the mid-morning with the eyes of a child.

The Viejo said - "Take care with that. That is Peyote. You should take Peyote when your spirit is strong, when Peyote calls for you."

Paco gave me Peyote. But I followed the Viejo's advice.

Peyote told me when it was time to give IT to strangers. IT told me when to come to the desert where IT lives. IT told me when IT was time. And then IT told me that IT is a consciousness that pervades this desert. And then IT told me:

"Be not afraid of this desert, this universe. The kingdom covers this world - if you are able to see.

Tierra Sagrada

2008-01-31T11:36:00.000-08:00

For at least three thousand years people have been coming here to the high desert of Real de Catorce in the oldest, continuous pilgrimage, the oldest known pilgrimage in the history of the Humano.This place has always been known as the Sacred Land that is infused with the light and sublime Spirit of the Great Medicina - Peyote.When I was last here, 11 years-ago, I developed my second full-blown kidney stone.In the middle of a deep sleep, in the back of my pick-up truck, I was awakened by the unmistakeable, the unimaginable sensation of a jagged piece of glass moving through my body.It is the most hellish pain human flesh is subject to, in this horrendous world.And yet, I was led to the Great Medicina.Desperate circumstances require desperate measures.I took a wild, crazy leap into the wild, blue yonder. I ate a huge quantity of Peyotes, buttons as big as your head. I ate the Great Medicina raw with no preparation no mitigation of the taste. I chewed as little as possible, took huge gulping bites.And then I walked in the desert and awaited the spirit of the Great Medicina to come over me.I had to take a piss. And when I pissed a heart-jaring, gravity rainbow of bright blood happened.It was a long piss. It seemed as if I was to piss away all of my blood. It was itzing - large.The Mayans know bleeding/itzing is about releasing the primal, sacred energia of the universo.And just when it seemed as if I was running out of blood to piss, I heard the most wonderful, joyous sound.It was the sound of a jagged pebble of glass pinging off of the desert rock I was pissing against.All that night I danced with my machete as I cut the thorny desert brush to stoke the fire of the altar to the Great Medicina.When the sun woke me, I went to my pick-up truck.Someone had broken the back window with their hand and a rock. The glass had cut deeply into that hand. Again there was blood all over the place.There were valuables in the truck. All the valuables were still there. The things that were missing was a bag of laundry, and a broken tape recorder.As I walk this high desert I realize that the healing of the Great Medicina did not stop with the kidney stone. (As if that was not enough.)The Great Medicina began the great sloughing off of my old skin and began the definitive coming into the new skin.

I am returned to Real de Catorce

2008-01-21T13:33:00.000-08:00

After 11 of, perhaps, the strangest years of my life, thus far, I am returned to Real de Catorce.

As I walk the old cobble stones of this desert place of magical reality in the Northern Mexican highlands I am reminded of how I left all that was familiar, static, stagnant repetitious in my former life and entered into the realms of the Wonder World which I inhabit now.

Here in Real de Catorce many strange realms intersect. For at least 3,000 years people have come here to experience the mysteries of the great medicine - Peyote. For about two hundred years this has been a place of healing by the miraculous intervention of St. Francis. In May, 1997 I left this place to return to the United States and began a voyage that led to betrayal, being down by law, being reviled and despised and then led to the shedding of the old skin and the coming into the new (see Jah D.E.P. at www.libbyhome.blogspot.com).

The beginning of this most current voyage, which I am now narrating, began with me being again reviled and despised and driven out of Mystic, CT (see narrative of the voyage...at www.libbyhome.blogspot.com). But the voyage since leaving the Mystic has been borne by fair winds of spirit. The voyage has been a succession of beautiful, wonderful engagements of the world. I seek and find the employment that is seeking me. I am able to give. I am with those I love. I resonate in their being. I grow in The Power of Love. I shed the old skin and come into the new.

And yet the morning before I crossed the border I again cried out in my dream, woke myself with my scream.

I was on the train going from Austin to Del Rio, Texas. The train was stopped over in San Antonio. It was early morning, all were asleep.

I dreamed I was staying at someone's place. They had these seemingly benign, cow-like animals, that were treated as pets. When I was alone with these creatures they attacked, covered me, and were suffocating me.

As it was, in my dream, two years ago when I was entering Mexico on a bus (see narrative of the voyage...at www.libbyhome.blogspot.com) I was, at first, unable to make a sound. Then I was able to make some muffled, stifled sounds. Then I woke myself with a full-throttled scream

Unlike two years ago my scream didn't seem to be particularly noted by my fellow passengers. They briefly wakened. Then they went back to sleep.

The only experience that I can think of which could be a source of this dream is the supernatural, flying red heifer.

Two weeks ago I was at Uncle Mark's Phat Farm. Uncle Mark and his wonderful family are all denizens of the Wonder World. When I was there it seemed to be the time to bring this beautiful, fat, red heifer to the slaughter house.

Moving like murderers and assassins we herded the red heifer to the lip of the trailor. She saw cheese-us in the trailor, in the tunnel. She turned around. Mark whipped her in the face.

And then magical reality interposed. The red heifer sproughted wings. From a dead stand still she leaped over an at least four foot high fence with at least two feet to spare.

Three times, that day, she was almost recaptured. But it did not happen until three days latter.

My interpretation of my dream is that when you stay in static stagnant repetitious circumstances, the people in those circumstance will form expectations of what you should be.

And so you must be a leaping into the wild, blue yonder red heifer passer-by - so that you can be who you are - so you can be free to accept the invitation.

Emanations From the Center

2008-01-21T13:27:00.000-08:00

In Oklahoma there are round-ups and forced deportations of Central Americans in the enforcement of the harshest state anti-immigrant law, yet enacted.

There is a bitter irony that this is being done to people who are essentially American Indian people, and that this is being done in Oklahoma.

The state draws Central American people because it is known in Central America that Oklahoma is Indian Country.

Central America was the center of the pre-Columbus world of the Americas. Indian people in Oklahoma have always felt, been moved by the cultural, spiritual emanations from the .

The Great Cheyenne Chief Quanah Parker, born in the sacred Wichita Mountains in South West Oklahoma, found Peyote Religion in Mexico.

Severely wounded during the last armed Indian uprising on the Southern Plains, Quanah Parker took refuge in Mexico. There a cuarandero, a peyote shaman, helped heal body and mind. In his healing vision Quanah Parker saw the Hebrew tribesman Rebbi Yeshua ben Yusuf - who gave the medicine.

In fighting for the legalization of Peyote religion in the state of Oklahoma Quanah Parker testified that the power of the medicine was that it made people in all ways healthy and helped people lead lives that were more Christ-like.

Quanah Parker knew it was never about being a Christian – it was always about becoming The Christ.

A great wall is being built between the The United States of the Homelandt and Central America. It will fall it will fail as did the Great Wall of China, Hadrian's Wall, the Berlin Wall.

There's something about the universe that doesn't like walls.

And a wall can never stop the emanations from the center.

The Great Oklahoma Ice Storm of '07

2007-12-14T10:27:00.000-08:00

Oklahoma is an arduous place.If it's not dust bowls it's locusts, if it's not cataclysmic tornadoes it's chiggers. If it's not copperheads it's great ice storms. I am here at ground zero of the historic Great Oklahoma Ice Storm of '07. The storm is historic in that it is the greatest, most extensive, involving the greatest percentage of the state's population, most persisting electricity outage in the history of the state of Oklahoma. The weight of ice brings down, disconnects the cable. Ice storms shred the grid.Aboriginal prophets Black Elk, MoonFace Bear (see Jah D.E.P. at www.libbyhome.blogspot.com ), tell of a time when the very nature of electricity will change as the very nature of the world will change. They tell of a time when the electricity will stop. Inevitably, almost by definition, it is not-business-as-usual (n-b-a-u) when the electricity stops. When the electricity stopped, we (my host Phillip and his lovely daughter Donna) soon realized it was a great excuse to have a feast. The readiness is all - Phillip is ready for The Great Oklahoma Ice Storm of '07. Phillip lives for these events. When the electricity stopped, he broke out a kerosene heater, great jugs of water, propane lanterns. I had made an abundant Pasta Sinatra the previous day. Phil had prepared a large crock of succulent ribs, vegetables, sauerkraut, also biscuits. We drove into Norman to see if there still was a United States of America. And we knew there was when we saw the bright light of the Walmart. The Walmart had just gotten its electricity back. The shelves of food were being restocked. There was a festive mood. Phillip got essential food stocks such as baklava, also propane. We then ventured into darkest, deepest Norman. There were small, scattered patches of light in the residential neighborhoods, the downtown, the university. We were about to give up our search – and then we found it. An essential service had been restored. There was a lighted-up, open liquor store. Inside all were joyous. All were in an almost reverential awe of the miracle of the lighted-up, open liquor store. In and of itself, it was another good excuse to have a feast, to have a party. About 30 hours after the electricity stopped – it started again. The electricity went on as Phillip and myself were making a greater, further plan for the feast. Business-as-usual is resuming in Oklahoma. But there is no reason why the not-business-as-usual feast can't continue. And in these darkest, shortest days of the year I wish all a joyous solstice feast of the n-b-a-u.

The Falling Towers: Oklahoma City

2007-12-06T15:52:00.000-08:00

"XVI THE TOWER

The Power of the consuming, purifying fire destroys the old and sweeps it away," reads the Handbook for the Aleister Crowley Tarot. Nothing is spared; the tower of the ego will be shaken to its very foundation.

"Anything you attempt to cling to will be destroyed…The apparent securities of the past have begun to waver and topple…Times of desperation and inner tension."

In 1993 an attempt was made to topple The World Trade Towers, but at 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995 the first tower, the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, was destroyed in a moment. And in that moment, our nation collectively drew the Tarot Card, XVI The Tower - that has prophesized this time.

That moment and this space of prophesy is marked by the 'Outdoor Symbolic Memorial' at the crater in Oklahoma City, where once stood the tower.

The moment is framed by two monumental twin gates. The East Gate has 9:01 monumentally chiseled on it. This gate is said to represent "the innocence" before the destruction. The West Gate has 9:03 monumentally chiseled on it. The moment when we are said to have been "changed forever".

But the 'Outdoor Symbolic Memorial' in Oklahoma City attempts to celebrate the resumption, the continuing of an unexamined, stagnant, static, repetitious business-as-usual (b-a-u). By 'The Survivor Tree' a 90 year-old American Elm that survived the near-by blast, is monumentally chiseled into cracked cement, "The spirit of this city and this nation will not be defeated; our deeply rooted faith sustains us."

In this time of the falling towers any thing, any materiality, any opinion, any political/religious orthodoxy, any static, stagnant repetition, will not sustain, cannot be clung to – the center will not hold.

In this time of the falling towers is the time for the Crazy, Scary Leap into the Wild Blue Yonder of the Not-Business-As-Usual (N-B-A-U).

Four Years After The Great Leap Into The Wild, Blue Yonder

2007-11-28T09:08:00.000-08:00

...We cannot see that invisible winds carry us, as they carry swarms of locusts, that invisible magnetism brings us as it brings the migrating birds to their unforeknown goal. But it is so. We are not the marvelous choosers and deciders we think we are. IT chooses for us and decides for us.

D.H. Lawrence - Studies In Classic American Literature

G. and myself thought we knew why we were leaving Connecticut, (he in his Jeep Cherokee, me in the Toyota Tercel that was the last materiality/physicality of The Bloody, Snake Chariot) on October 28, 2003.

G. thought it was about picking up a girl friend in Los Angeles. I thought it was about meeting with a son of a Hopi Elder. Something about the release of prophecy.

We were, perhaps, in a state of denial regarding what we were really about. For it is now clear that we were crazy leaping into The Wild Blue Yonder.

On our ways to California, (in our different vehicles)(see narrative of the voyage of the bloody, snake chariot http://www.libbyhome.blogspot.com/ ), we took a strange, unplanned for left turn in Kansas. And then we entered into Oklahoma. Ad then we entered into The Wonder World (a place of no specific geography). And then we encountered and engaged beings of this Wonder World and their song

The Beings of the Wonder World are known by their rhyme, their rhythm, their synchronicity, their vastness, their life force, their boundlessness, their in the moment-ness, as well as their song. The Beings of the Wonder World are known by their fruit (listen to the song of 'The Elephant Revival Concept,' My-Tea-Kind,' 'The Infinite Sauce', Randy Crouch, Jeff and Vida).

The Great, Crazy Leap Into The Wild Blue Yonder is about more life in life in a Time and Space Without Boundaries.

It is the time to be attentive, receptive, to engage winds of spirit, inexplicable magneticisms, strange synchronicities, that bring us to unforeknown goals.

Signs in the Sky

2007-11-20T15:13:00.000-08:00

There are signs in the sky. Energy corporations concede the bell curve of past the peak oil is inescapably real. Business-as-usual continues to teeter in this solstice time - the darkest time of the year.

A very faint, very strange comet, Comet Holmes mysteriously becomes a million times brighter becoming very visible to the naked eye in the constellation Perseus.

I have watched as the comet fades, for now, in the Kansas sky. But the constellation of the Archetype of Apocalypse is intense and intensifies.

The stagnant repetition of the 24/7 news cycle is of $100 barrels of oil, jihadists seizing the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, ice sheets sliding off Greenland and\or Antartica, sea level rising as much as 80 feet, the coming of strange days with much stranger days to follow.

Carl Jung was clear about this. Archetypes are far more than universal, psychic patterns of Myth. Archetypes are autonomous entities. They have a life of their own. They feed on the psychic energy that humanity makes available to them.

The Archetype of the Revelation at the End-of-Time, the Archetype of Collapse, the Archetype of the end of the world-as-we-know-it, the end of the day of the car-key monkey (see Jah D.E.P. www.libbyhome.blogspot.com) is feasting.

Be not anxious.

In as much as you are business-as-usual you are invested in the worst-case-scenarios of the collapse of the b-a-u.. In as much as you are n-b-a-u you are able to see that in every moment there is something of the Creation and something of the Apocalypse and that heaven covers the face of the earth – if you are only able to see.

What About The Mutiny?

2007-10-30T09:22:00.000-07:00

This last summer was defined by The Mutiny described by The Prophet Melville in Chapter 52 of 'Moby Dick'.

It is a thread of thought, of philosophy that I began exploring with my good friend Rick Reeve, ten years ago (see www.libbyhome.blogspot.com). It is a thread I dropped when I left Mystic, CT in July, 2005. It is a thread I picked up when I returned to Mystic last April.

The Mutiny must be, more fully, more explicitly brought into the world.

The Prophet Melville, throughout his tortured life, was riven by the spiritual/artistic need to bring The Mutiny into the world, to overthrow the tables in the whore house of the business-as-usual, (b-a-u) and the pressure to be pinned into conventional circumstances, to be a whore in the whore house of the b-a-u.

It is a struggle that all, to some extent, must engage. On Melville's sacred mountain, in Pittsfield, MA (where Melville wrote 'Moby Dick') I more fully felt his struggle.

'Moby Dick' was meant to bring a mutinous, revolutionary, heretical transformation of the world. The Steelkilt Mutiny is the clearest description of this. It is as clear as Melville felt he could make it and still have a novel that would be publishable, with some potential of making money in the marketplace of ideas of Melville's time.

When I returned to Mystic I picked up the thread of The Mutiny. I tried, again, to bring it to the attention of The Mystic Seaport - which lamely seeks to evoke the Great, White Myth of The Prophet. I tried to bring it to the attention of the b-a-u, the local theatre establishment.

It all was rebuffed.

I persisted.

I heard something in my inner ear.

It was revolutionary, mutinous, heretical drum rocking the streets of Mystic, New London. It was the Dioynesian rock that a theatre production could be potentially built on.

I knew IT could not be forced. IT had to take on a life of ITz own.

IT did.

Spontanously, naturally there were all these green lights which allowed 'Mutiny Drum', to play New London's Sail Fest.

The streets of New London were rocked with revolutionary, mutinous, heretical drum. Some revolutionary, mutinous, heretical word with a rhetorical beat was screamed was pounded on the late Saturday night of the festival (It had to be screamed. It had to be pounded. No access was given to a sound system).

IT was heard.

And then IT was minimized, marginalized.

Most thought I should be taking medications.

And when 'Mutiny Drum' was leaving, it was shouted from the roof-tops (I think I know by whom) - "Sam Libby must die!"

And so I must, as we all must.

We must die to our little, grasping b-a-u selves to come into our Greater Being.

I now know what I must do.

I must make The Mutiny into a screenplay - into The Movie.

It must incorporate that revolutionary, mutinous, heretical beat that I heard in my inner ear, that rocked the streets of New London.

And The Mutiny continues....

At Home in The Woods

2007-10-17T15:20:00.000-07:00

This pilgrimage to Mt. Greylock, (see http://www.libbyhome.blogspot.com/ 'Narrative of the Voyage of the Bloody, Snake Chariot') has been fraught with what at first seem to be disasters, and then turn out to be grace-laden deliverences from disaster in which I remain physically intact, in a relatively safe harbor, having lost nothing that couldn't be recovered or in the end wasn't needed.

This pilgrimage is permeated by meaningful coincidences - for there is no other kind of coincidence.

There is no telling who will come up or down the trail to share the Appalachian Trail lean-to on the crest of the Great Whale of the Berkshires. So far there has been a boy scout troop with the adult scout leaders, there has been fathers and their sons, there has been college freshmen engaged in their first adventure on the trail, there has been a singles' club from New York City, there have been firemen, professors, doctoral students, architects, there was an ascetic hermit and there have been thru hikers finishing their last hundreds of miles in the over 2,000 mile journey from Georgia to Maine.

Some of the long section hikers or thru hikers have become slaves of the trail, doing a static, stagnant repetitious, arduous ting, which is nothing but hard work. Others are deep into a mystical vison quest, having a great adventure into a realm of adventure which I hope they will never depart.

The Appalachian Trail is Walt Whitman's open road of which he sings. The longer a person is on the trail, the more their essential nature shines forth for all fellow travelers on the trail to see.

I resonate with the being of all who have shared the lean-to with me. And those who have shared the lean-to resonate with mine. I have enjoyed all of their company - even the most anti-social, even the most anxious.

Until now it has not been cold enough for the peak colors of the seasons to come forth. The changing of the color of the leaves is driven by cold nights and frost. These have just started. My camping gear is coming to its limits. The time to leave the back of the Great Whale of the Berkshires is coming soon.

I am glad I resonated in ITS Being.

Riding The Whale

2007-10-17T15:11:00.000-07:00

I'm camped out in an Appalachian Trail Lean-To on the mountain ridge that culminates at Mt. Greylock. Today I've descended to the town of Adams, MA. And after I finish writing this I will ascend the mountain (probably in the rain), a round trip of about 14 miles.

This is the ridge that the Prophet Herman Melville could see from his home in Pittsfield, MA where he wrote 'Moby Dick.' It is said that when Melville was writing the parts of the book that described the Great White Whale or the actions of the Great White Whale he would move his writing desk to the part of his house where he could see this ridge, and image the greatest creature of The Wonder World.

The ridge does kind of look like a great serpentine whale.

And on this holy mountain I have been contemplating the nature of The Wonder World and the nature of The Leap into The Wild Blue Yonder.

A few days ago two youngblood newbees came down the trail. They reminded me of myself and my good friend Cliff Hamill when we first took that wild leap on to the trail about 32 years ago. They were totally joyous in the moment. They weren't well equipped or prepared. But they were dancing with Life as they found IT.

We had some good discussion of Selassie.

The trail is such a wonderful invitation to adventure, to the not-business-as-usual, to the Leap. But even such a wonderful thing as the Appalachian Trail for many long hikers or thru hikers becomes a thing of such wretched static stagnant repetion.

There is never a bad New England foliage season. There are some that are more wonderful then others. But all are good. I feel blessed being in these Berkshires this time of year. Whenever I am not in New England this time of year I feel ripped-off. But many of the people I am encountering on the ridge are very busy, quickly moving people continually thinking of the clock and calendar, and oblivious of the place and the moment.

Many hikers have recoiled from the Leap. It has become a thing of camping equipment consumerism. Most hikers have cell-phones. Most hikers are totally not in the moment.

What is their hurry?

Many start Life with good Leap. But the business-as-usual (bau), is to recoil from Leap, to make what begins as Wild, Crazy Leap into the Wild Blue Yonder into a thing of dwelling on making your quota of miles, figuring out where you are going to sleep, what you are going to eat, where and when you are going to shit.

The n-b-a-u, the Mutiny that the Prophet Melville wrote about is about having the confidence in the Leap to know that you need not be anxious about any of this. It is about the confidence, the knowing that if you fully engage the Leap, that if you in no way recoil from Leap. You will - strangely enough - be supported by the Universe.

The Circumstances of the Demi-Urgical Resistance

2007-09-08T12:40:00.000-07:00

On Friday, August 31 a truly ugly incident happened, in the Mystic, CT.

The Maenad banished me forever, from the apartment, the back porch, from the place which she inhabits with The Shak, the place where she, The Shak and myself were talking.

When The Shak y yo went to his car in the parking lot, below, to get the things I needed to take my leave from the Mystic, the Maenad, from the porch, announced she was going to call the police, and then ran inside the apartment.

The Shak said he figured she was crazy enough to do it.

The Maenad returned to the porch and told us that she had done it. She said she told the police that I was carrying herbs (I wasn't. I quit ya gotz some?).

Then she ran inside, ran out and announced she hadn't called the police, "this time." She continued denouncing me. She continued yelling that I was carrying herb. She ranted about how I had been kicked out of the Coffeehouses of the Mystic

When I had been able to I would come into The Green Marble Coffeehouse with beer for all the workers there who were over 21 years-old, and who swore they would not use beer as a gateway to crank, crack, heroine and prescription anti-psychotics.

At the Marble you are suppose to pay $2 for your first cup of coffee, $1 for a refill. But because I was getting love for the beer, pretty much all the workers would charge me $1 for my first coffee. Everyone except for The Marble's Radney, (see The Mutiny at www.libbyhome.blogspot.com ), he who is deluded and believes he is not just a worker on a ship, but is somehow an investor in the ship of the business-as-usual (b-a-u).

When Radney learned that there were improprieties in the re-fill policy he banned me, forever, from the premises.

The other coffeehouse of the Mystic is Barteby's (named after the Hermann Melville character in the short story, 'Bartleby, The Scrivener'). The proprietor is Ross Mandell. Ross y yo go back to Miss Abby's Nursery School, in Norwich. I grew up with him. We are cousins by marriage. Before I left The Mystic two years ago I was Bartleby's Floor Manager, I mopped and swept the floor.

He is a bruddah Hebrew Warrior. Of course I brought him beer, cases of beer, when I was rich with beer.

Ross y yo agreed that in return for the beer I would not have to pay for refills of coffee and I wouldn't be charged $.35 for a bag of potato chips with my breakfast sandwich.

But there is a woman Radney who works at Bartleby's. When I bought the breakfast sandwiches she would charge me for the potato chips. She persuaded Ross that the free coffee refills were between him y yo. But potato chips were far too valuable to give away to a bum like me.

Ross reneged on our agreement. He denounced me to The Shak and the Maenad when they went into Bartleby's. I wasn't kicked out of Bartleby's. But I do not often go there.

Anyway, the Maenad continued denouncing me from her balcony\stage two stories above The Marble. She was doing what she likes most - creating an ugly, very public scene.

I had gotten all the stuff I needed out of The Shak's car.

We embraced.

The Shak said he was so sorry "it had come to this." He said, he hoped the next place I went to would treat me better than the way the Mystic had.

I walked to the station and took the next train.

Now, I can almost hear some of yous suspecting that this is me, again, prevailing on friends.

But, dudes, it is not.

I got to Mystic on Friday, April 13. I had work at the brewery by the end of April, through May, June, and July. I didn't take. I had more than enough money for my daily bread.

I was able to give.

The Beer Pimp (B.P.) got me the job at the brewery. He is a friend of at least eight-years, an inspired net-worker. He enlists only his people. At the beginning of the summer he considered me to be - "one of his people."

After work one day B.P. y yo went to the Maenad's and The Shak's. The Maenad and The Shak invited B.P. to look at and critique their art.

B.P. set himself up as a great maestro, art authority, dictator of the local art galleries. He was pretty critical.

After he left, the Maenad asked me what I thought of B.P.'s paintings, his art.

I told the truth as I had the light to see the truth. I told the Maenad that I thought B.P.'s art was trite, superficial, ultimately artless and meaningless.

Then the Maenad asked me if I thought B.P. was gay.

I told her there are many people that suspect that B.P. packed his butt with gerbels. I said that I didn't know. But with that being said, I told the Maenad that B.P. has had long, passionate sexual relationships with some of the most beautiful women in the Mystic.

But when it got back to B.P. - he was told that I said he packed gerbels.

Anyways.

B.P. stopped employing me at the brewery by late July.

In July we were all feasting in the summer of Mystic Love. We were feasting on drum, beer, the discussion.of Selassie.

But from the moment I had arrived in the Mystic, Friday, April 13, it had always been arduous to hang out with the Maenad. She chose to be anxious about me, threatened by me, my presence, jealous of the love that The Shak and myself have (we are definitely not packing gerbels).

She is scared that the discussion will lead to The Shak, perhaps, making a leap into the wild, blue yonder.

In late July, just when it was becoming clear that I was no longer employed at the brewery, The Shak wrote me an e-mail.

He wrote that the Maenad had "scape-goated" me for the troubles in their relationship. He wrote that it had become difficult for him to sleep, that he had taken a walk in the middle of the night, that he had experienced things of the wild animal and the night, and then a voice spoke in his ear, and told him to give, to do what the Maenad wanted.

He wrote there would be no more drumming on the porch. I could not come to the porch unless invited (I was doing that anyway.).He said he was going to focus on quitting the drinking and smoking.

I had heard The Shak speak of this voice that he heard in his ear.

Two years ago I had left the Mystic with The Shak and Gee Q a.k.a. Gee. We went to the wonderland of Tahlequah, OK. We arrived in the Copper Head Snake season. One of the first things we saw in Tahlequah was a huge Copper Head, which had been shot in the face, and was hanging in a tree.

Gee and mySelf were joyous about being in the wonderland of Tahlequah, OK. But The Shak heard this same voice in his ear saying that if he stayed in Tahlequah he was destined to be bit by a Copper Head.

The voice told him to flee.

It was The Shak's vehicle that had brought us to Tahlequah. He fled in his Ford Escape leaving Gee y yo stranded, abandoned.

It took me a long while to figure out my brewery employment had ended. I continued living with no anxiety about tomorrow. When I got the e-mail from The Shak - I was broke, didn't have a dime to my name.

I had brought many cases of beer to The Shak's to the Maenad's back porch. I became anxious about fasting. I sent an e-mail to The Shak asking for $5, so that I could eat, could buy some dark chocolate, tip during the happy hour at the Daniel Packer Inn, with it's feast of happy hour food.

As soon as I asked, The Shak began seeing, being anxious about Copper Heads. He felt that I was playing him. It culminated on the back porch Friday, August 31. The Maenad's psychotic outburst was triggered when I noted that her gossiping had ended my employment.

During this summer of Mystic Love I gave everything I could. My mistake was that when it came time to fast, to embrace the fast, to not wear a sour, fearful, anxious posture/ face in the face of the mystery of the fast, to oil my hair and embrace the spiritual feast of the fast, I became fearful, and asked for $5.

This ugly incident, as well as being finally expelled from the Garden of Phil are clear signs that it is the time to embark on the next leap into the wild blue yonder.

I will find my serenity in these Days of Awe.

I will walk the Appalachian Trail, climb Mt. Greylock, MA., visit the home of the Prophet Melville.

Then I'm going west, getting into a vehicle that will become the new physicality, materiality of the Bloody, Snake Chariot. And then I'm taking IT through Central America to South America,

And the narrative of the voyage continues...

End of the Summer of Mystic Love/Beginning of the Days of Awe

2007-09-05T09:13:00.000-07:00

The 10 days of the High Holidays and the days in-between are the 'Days of Awe' in the Jewish calendar.

Here in the Northeastern United States there are many more than ten of those perfect days of glorious, clear weather, transcendent quality of light, like it was on September 11, 2001.

At the end of the Summer of Mystic Love I have finally been expelled from the garden of Phil. His father is putting the property on the real-estate market. I have been attacked and bitten by a neighbor's trained attack dog .I have been banned from coffee houses and residences. In my wake are anxious, angry people.

I have (at least for now) no place to lay my head in Mystic, CT. I am (for now) expelled from the garden of the Mystic.

It's all good.

I don't blame anyone - except mySelf and the demi-urge.

The demi-urge is a Greek Gnostic Myth. He is a fallen God enslaved by lies and delusions who is under the delusion that he is the master, the enslaver, the creator of this world.

No doubt the demi-urge is master of the fallen world of the business-as-usual (b-a-u).

But because the human has a spark of not-busihess-as-usual (n-b-a-u), has a spark of true divinity, has the further, greater possibilities - every human is potentially far greater than the demi-urge.

Greek Gnostics believed the God of the Bible, or at least the Old Testament is the demi-urge. He is the god of the recoiling from the Humans' greater, further existential possibilities. He is the god of heroine, crack, crank, prescription anti-psychotics, tobacco products, and alcoholism. He is the god of the corporate agenda. He is the god of orthodoxy, god of the recoiling from freedom for the illusions of security. He is god of b-a-u.

The demi-urgical resistance is greatest when new, further, greater powers of Human consciousness, experience, freedom, being are about to emerge.

In these Days of Awe the world's financial system, b-a-u teeters. Lies and delusions peel away. And what is said and done in secret is yelled from the roof tops.

And it is time to stand naked, in awe, in to the face of Mystery, in these Days.

Marathan Drumming/Reading of 'The Jah DEP'

2007-08-13T09:05:00.000-07:00

On August 17, 1997 Steven J. Gambini (a.k.a. Fuckface) went to the Montville, Connecticut State Police Barracks and there "he ratted and he ratted and then he ratted some more. He ratted until even the cops were tired of hearing his rat voice."

Gambini ratted on his friends, their cannabis cultivation on the premises of the North America Wildlife Association (N.A.W.A.) in East Lyme.

He did this for a blood money reward.

And thus began the final fall of the wildlife rescue organization.

On Friday, August 17, starting at 6 p.m. the tenth anniversary of this infamy will be marked by a marathon reading/drumming of the underground classic 'The Jah Department of Environmental Protection: True Possession of Place in the Time of the Connecticut Indian Casinos' ( http://www.libbyhome.blogspot.com/ ).

It will be in front of The Green Marble Coffee House and The Mystic Disk in Mystic, Connecticut.

A tale of lunacy, betrayal and being down by law, Jah DEP is a revolutionary/heretical/mutinous rant which calls for rising up and overthrowing the master of this world.

There will be an open circle of drummers to accompany the reading, and there will be an open circle of readers.

Bring Your Drum

Bring Mutinous Intent

Update on The Summer of Mystic Love, 2007 and The Mutiny

2007-08-03T10:58:00.000-07:00

It is the Summer of Mystic Love, 2007 - but, of course, it isn't in any like the image of the Summer of Love, 1967, of course, it isn't in any way like what could be pre-imagined, predicted.

And in the same way it is The Mutiny.

Almost miraculously, I haven't yet been expelled from the garden of Phil. And, in all ways miraculously, Phil is communicating with me as I abide in the shed in his garden.

As already noted (see 'narrative of da voyage of da bloody, snake chariot,' www.libbyhome.blogspot.com ) after a friend pursuaded him that it was terribly arrogant to consider yourSelf to be cheese-us, Phil (who was a fucking lunatic) would describe himself as being John Da Baptist. In this office he would meticulously maintain this beautiful, but structurally unstable bird bath in the middle of his garden.

About two weeks before he died, because he was having trouble walking, he had me, in the middle of the night, attend to the baptismal font of the birds.

At the time I was not sensing the honor that was being confered on me. But while passing the bird bath several weeks ago, Phil made me sense this, insisted I attend to the bird bath, keep it's waters sparkling clean. And while I was at it, I too could be baptized - for a Human is reborn in water and spirit, and I could shower with the garden hose - and keep my ass clean.

As already noted (see 'narrative of da voyage of da bloody, snake chariot,' www.libbyhome.blogspot.com ) I am intermittently employed at a brewery that manufactures fine, locally made beer and ale. I am paid in Americano dolars and a shit-load of brewery-reject bottles, cases of beer.

I like this beer so much that I drink it even when I'm not working. When I return to this village of Da Mystic with a shit-load of brewery reject bottles, cases of beer, it is like the revolution, the mutiny has begun, like it's Christmas in June, July, or August, like the workers have seized the store houses of beer and the feast has risen to a new level.

I freely distribute the beer and ale, in love, to those of Da Mystic who are over 21, who I know or don't know.

I recognize this as I thing of grace. I am grateful to those who have enabled these circumstance to contribute to this moving feast that is Da Mystic. For the Feast is (if not everything) pretty high up there. The Feast of the engagement/integration of the Other. The Feast of the Song. The Feast of Love.

For as Thorton Wild Sez in 'The Bridge of San Luis Rey': "Now learn, learn at last, that anywhere, anytime you may expect grace...the world is ready...love is enough; all these impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

and as Willy sez: Drink and Smoke Responsibily.

Don't make Beer a GateWay Drug to heroine, crack or prescription anti-psychotics.

And Enjoy Da Feast!!!.

The Apocalypse (Revelation) in the Post-Christian World

2007-07-11T15:18:00.000-07:00

It begins with the knowing, that is possible for everyone, of the Humans' original relationship with the universe, the original posture in the face of Mystery.

But the Human is hard-wired to project authority, spiritual authority on to others. From this comes the horror of priesthoods, clergy, and all the spiritual "authorities" of business-as-usual (bau) organized religion.

The word and way of Rebbe Yeshua ben Yosef, that is hidden in plain sight in the canonical gospels of organized christianity, is shock rhetoric denouncing the organized judaism, the organized religious orthodoxy of his day, it is a posture, a knowing of the true avocation of The Human.

His word denounces christianity and all the orthodoxies of this day.

He says:

If you want to pray - go into a closet and lock the door. If you want to give to another do not make a show of your giving in a church, a mosque or a synagogue. Those who make a public show of their praying and their giving they have their public, b-a-u reward.

He violated all the major orthodox practices of his time and place. He did not follow dietary laws. He did not keep the sabbath.

He lived as a homeless, possession-less rebbe/teacher/healer.

He says:

Look what I have done. There will be those that come after me that will do equal or greater.

An organized religion that claims to be based on the word and the way of Rebbe Yeshua is inevitably a lie, a systemized, organized hypocracy whose original and continuing intent is to defuse the core heretical, revolutionary, explosive, not-business-as-usual message (n-b-a-u) and make it the ultimate b-a-u. The intent of all the proclaimed authorities of all organized religions is to exploit the nature of the Human, to have power over others, control of money, material resources, real estate.

He says:

Know them by their fruit.

The horrors, the sexual abuse of children, religious wars to exterminate the incorrectly believing other, suicide bombers, the constellation of the archetype of Apocalypse, are the inevitable fruit of organized religions.

The fathers of organized christianity, as far back as the 4th Century A.D. had glimmerings of this day, this time on the other side of organized christianity.

This time was inevitably the Apocalypse because it was the time of the end of the lying, hypocritical b.a.u. on the word of Rebbe Yeshua, the end of all proclaimed christian authorities' power over people, money, real estate.

Archeological discoveries in Egypt and Jerusalem proclaim that this is the time when what was done in secrecy is being shouted from the roof-tops.

The newspaper headlines are daily proclaiming that the b-a-u of organized religion, the b-a-u of this world is making the Archetype of Apocalypse into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Be Afraid! - is the message.

It is the last message possible, the last means of holding on to b-a-u power for all morally bankrupt organized religions.

He says:

Be not anxious.

He says you can choose to be not anxious.

And in this choice is the beginnings of the mutiny, the beginnings of the greater, further, unmediated possibilities for the Human of more life in life.

The Mystery of The Fermentation

2007-06-25T13:27:00.000-07:00

The Good News is - it is your choice to be anxious, or not to be anxious. You choose your own posture in the face of mystery.

And in choosing to be not anxious the door to the Great Hall of the Feast is opened - the Feast of all good things that come from the earth and gladden the heart of the Human, the feast of the joyful, authentic engagement, integration of experience, the joyous, authentic engagement, experience of the other.

I work intermittently at a microbrewery.

It is in an old factory on the eastern most edge of the rust belt, a factory that has risen, fell, become ruins, then been restored. It will perhaps fall again, and perhaps rise again in the fermentation of the business-as-usual (b-a-u).

But the not-business-as-usual, (n-b-a-u), the Feast covers the earth if you are only able to see.

I enjoy the brewery. I enjoy the smells, the alchemical plumbing, the great vats that contain the mystery of the fermentation.

I enjoy the worship of Bacchus that is my work in the brewery.

When the beer begins to flow into the new bottles I give the old blessing.

Kai Bacche!

Glory to Bacchus!

May the herbs that come from the earth, may the fermentation gladden the heart of the Human.

When a bottle comes down the assembly line without a bottle cap I raise it high, drink deeply, belch, and then tell my co-workers that there aien't nothing like the first beer of the working day.

But they know that.

The first most important ting is - Be Not Anxious.

Don't go through the gateway of beer to do crack, heroin or prescription anti-psychotics.

As Willy sez - Drink and Smoke Responsibly.

And the most important ting -

Enjoy the Feast!

Death Over Runs My Position, My Location in The Mystic

2007-06-21T10:52:00.000-07:00

In my efforts to evade the constabulary and ignite the mutiny, I have not disclosed my position.

But death has found and over run my position, my location.

I was given refuge in The Mystic in the garden shed of my friend Phil Crazy-Like-A-Fox.

Phil was a fucking lunatic.

When he was 17 years-old in Andover (the same college prep academy that gee dub went to) and on his way to Yale, Phil was afflicted with the archetypal pathogens of schizophrenia.

Instead of being on the inside track of the business-as-usual's (bau) highest possibilities, he became an institutionalized drug stupefied non-being.

But Phil had the courage to rise up and not be forever fallen. He broke through the stupefaction and non-being of the "anti-psychotic drugs". He rode his bicycle many miles to work at the nastiest, dirtiest jobs in a boat yard. He mastered the mediums of the boat paint, epoxy, fiberglass. And he transcended these mediums and realized the higher possibilities of art, the artful depicting of the being in a special, eternal, haunted moment. The artful depicting of the reality of a fallen angel. (There will be an exhibition of Phil's paintings at the Emporium in Mystic.)

In the end ephedrine (the legal speed sold at gas stations and convenience stores) became his favored substance of abuse. He said that it reliably enabled him to break through the stupefied non-being of the anti-psychotics, the stupefied non-being of b-a-u. He said it made the moment special - every moment the 4th of July.

He took way too much. Last Sunday, June 17, Phil blew up his heart, and was dead before he hit his kitchen's floor.

He was 51 years-old.

Those who know him, know something of his story, believe he died at Andover, thirty-four years ago, when his highest possibilities of the b-a-u died.

Schizophrenia was, no doubt, the end of Phil's life of the b-a-u. But, perhaps, it was the beginning of his true life, the life of the not-business-as-usual (n-b-a-u), the life of the higher and further possibilities of the n-b-a-u, Phil's life as an artist, musician, and the higher, further possibilities of a fucking lunatic. No doubt death is the end of the life of the b-a-u. And yet, perhaps, it is a new beginning in the realization of the further and higher possibilities of the Human in the n-b-a-u.

Phil's intent when he gave the narrative of his life was to persuade the listener (there weren't many) that he was The One, that he was The Christ, that he was a Prophet, Master-of-Time, The Future Man.

But people close to him persuaded him that it was horribly arrogant to call yourself The Christ.

Phil would then try to persuade the listener (there weren't many) that he was John The Baptist.

I am guilty of being reluctant to be persuaded.

But I now declare:

Phil is The Christ!

Phil is John The Baptist!

Phil is Future Man!

Phil is The One!

Love ya bruddah - already miss ya.

And now that my position, my location has been over-run by death, I will soon be expelled from his garden, from the refuge of the garden shed.

But the mutiny - continues.

The Mutiny in The Gospel of Judas

2007-06-14T11:44:00.000-07:00

The Prophet Herman Melville is a Gnostic Prophet. The 'Steelkilt Mutiny' described in Chapter 53 of 'Moby Dick' is a Gnostic/Qabalistic Mutiny.

The nature of The Gnostic Mutiny is described in 'The Gospel of Judas', a legendary gnostic text that was buried for 1,600 years and thought to have been completely destroyed by the founders of organized Christianity. This text was, with the assistance of the National Geographic Society, mostly restored, published and brought back into the world in early 2006.

Although Melville did not have access to 'The Gospel of Judas' or the gnostic texts uncovered in Nag Hammodi, Egypt in 1945, he did have access to gnostic texts.

It is an, in all ways, remarkable and revolutionary story told by the Gospel of Judas and other gnostic gospels. It is an, in all ways, remarkable and revolutionary story told in the Steelkilt Mutiny.

The creator and master of this world is a fallen god, a megalomaniacal demiurge (much like Ahab, and somewhat like Radney, the antagonist of 'The Mutiny' - see www.libbyhome.blogspot.com ).

Any human being who is manifesting the spark of divinity within them (such as Steelkilt, such as Ishmael/Jonah - see 'The Mutiny' at www.libbyhome.blogspot.com ) is more powerful than the master of this world. Those of the spark have the natural right to rebel against, to overthrow the authority, the power of those of the megalomaniacal demiurge, the masters of this world.

Not only do those of the spark have the right and the power to ignite this mutiny to overthrow the demiurge - there is a supernatural groove in the universe that will support and facilitate this mutiny. That is why The Great White Whale, the Moby Dick does what he does (see www.libbyhome.blogspot.com .

There is a supernatural groove in the universe that supports revolutionary, mutinous change in the human circumstances. It supports, facilitates the ongoing creation by the Human of a transcendent universe, of more life in life in a time and space with no known limits.

There are no coincidences in the recent uncoverings of gnostic texts that had been hidden for 16 centuries. In the Gospel of Judas, Rebbi Yeshua ben Yosef (a.k.a. cheese-us) prophesies that organized religion, the most insidious manifestation of the demiurge, would continue it's lying, hypocritical mastery of humanity. But that in due time that which had been hidden, suppressed would be shouted from the roof tops, and the mutiny against the master of this world would begin, and the master of this world would be judged, condemned, and overthrown.

The fathers of organized Christianity spared no efforts to suppress the gnostic texts which they knew, which they know, is the ultimate heresy against their lying orthodoxy, their hypocritical, demiurgical authority. But in spite of these efforts the headlines of newspapers, the documentaries on The Discovery Channel shout out almost daily denunciations of the master of this world's orthodoxy.

This is the time of which Rebbi Yeshua prophesied.

This is the time of the Gnostic Mutiny.

RISE UP!!!

Mutiny Drum - The Mutiny Begins

2007-06-13T11:00:00.000-07:00

On Thursdays at 6 p.m. there will be a Mutiny Drum Circle at the library garden of the Mystic/Noank Library (near the Mystic Baptist Church on Zion Hill).

In the mythic/poetic reality, the most true reality, in the truth of the Prophet Herman Melville, (see The Mutiny www.libbyhome.blogspot.com) Ahab's ship 'Pequod' encounters another whaling ship from Nantucket, the 'Town Ho'. Tashtego, the Wampanouag harpooner from Martha's Vineyard, after swearing elaborate, arcane oaths of secrecy is told the story of the Steelkilt Mutiny (a mutiny led by one Steelkilt, a Lakesman from Buffalo, N.Y . a.k.a. The Buffalo) that had occurred on the 'Town-Ho'.

Tashtego must take these elaborate, arcane oaths of secrecy because the implications of the narrative of the mutiny are considered to be so dangerous by the crew members of the 'Town-Ho' that tell the story. The narrators of the story know they are telling a story that is explosively revolutionary, heretical, so fundamentally opposed to the business-as-usual (b-a-u) of the whale fishery, of the (b-a-u) of the world.

The intent of the Mutiny Drum drum/dance circles is to bring the Steelkilt Mutiny into the world of the b-a-u. The Mutiny is a catalyst for the not-business-as-usual (n-b-a-u). It is a mutiny that is to manifest, constellate in percussive impact, in dance, in theatre. The first official scheduled gig of Mutiny Drum will be at the New London Sailfest on July 16th and July 17th. The further intent is for Mutiny Drum to become the basis of a theatrical production.

But this is, in all ways, a mutiny. We, band of mutineers, intend nothing less than the overthrow of the master of this vessel of the (b-a-u) that we all find ourselves aboard.

We drum for the transcendent liberation.

Bring your drum.

Bring Mutinous Intent!!!

The Summer of Mystic Love, 2007

2007-05-30T13:37:00.000-07:00

...to expand one's individuality beyond established meanings, to seek meaning not on the terms of the culture we live in but to mindfully define it on our own terms, to push the edge of what is known and to embody the life of the myth we have ourself created or discovered...

There is a weird synchronicity in the Mystic in that many, here, are re-discovering the myth of the 1967 San Francisco/Haight-Ashbury Summer of Love, and seeking to create their own myth of the Summer of Mystic Love, 2007.

Pete 'The Shak', in the course of our 'Mystic Dialogues had the revelation that the human creates ideas to explain their emotional state.

Perhaps that is what is happening here in the Mystic. Many, here, are in an emotional state in which they are seeking, wishing for, intending that magic enter the business-as-usual (b-a-u) and make the b-a-u into the not-business-as-usual (n-b-a-u). Many people are seeking, wishing for extraordinary, magical times of the further human possibilities. Many are wishing for/seeking more life in life in a time and space that transcends the known boundaries of the human circumstances.

Gee-Dub has done some wonderful work in raising consciousness. The lie that this is a country whose government is from the people, for the people, by the people has been stripped away. It is now clear that this country's government is from the money, for the money, by the money. The corporate agenda rules and the human agenda does not matter (is not real).

When I see the real news, the mythic news, the news in the tabloids by the supermarkets' check-out counters, I see that it is plain to many that Gee-Dub is 'Drunk-(And all coked-up) And At-The Wheel - Again!!! (see shock rhetoric at www.libbyhome.blogspot.com ).

Those that were alive during the summer of '67 (I was 12), can't help but to see the similiarities. L.B.J. was unpopular (but no-where near as unpopular as Gee-Dub). The anti-Vietnam protest movement had gone main-stream American politics and was going to be a huge factor in the following year's presidential elections. The established myths of nationalism, heroism, organized/orthodox religions - were hemorraghing. There was an intense constellation of the archetype of apocalypse. There was a similiar mass state of emotion that required the creation of ideas to explain the reason all were sharing a similar emotional state.

I say, Bring IT On! Whatever IT will be - I look forward to IT.

I am well positioned for the 'Summer of Mystic Love 2007. I do not want to reveal my position - suffice it to say that I am able to evade the constabulary. I am being paid in American dollars for bottling, canning and drinking beer. (I feel some moral ambiguity about being part of the manufacture of a known "gate-way drug", but I try to hold a Dioynesian/Qabala posture before the mystery of the fermentation.)

For me the Summer of Mystic Love, 2007 is not about hippies, puppy dogs and ice cream. It is about a 19th Century whaling ship mutiny. IT is, The Summer of the Mutiny (see www.libbyhome.blogspot.com ).

For a mariner, a sojourner, a mutineer in this fallen world can have no greater love for their shipmates then to rise up and overthrow the b-a-u, the master of this ship.

And to do their gospel duty, their pilot duty of testifying of the power of the holy spirit.

Mutiny Manifesto I

2007-05-02T12:03:00.000-07:00

Who's over me? Truth hath no confines.That which is best and oldest in me – has no master.

No sin against man is beyond forgiveness. Blaspheme against the father, blaspheme against the son, and it will be forgiven. But whosoever blasphemes and sins against the Holy Spirit can never be forgiven. God's wrath forever rests upon him.

Delight,-top gallant delight is to him,who acknowledges no law or lord,but the Lord his God,and is only a patriot to heaven.

Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth.

Delight is to him-a far, far upward and inward delight- who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth,ever stands forth his own inexorable self.

Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation!

Treat us decently and we are your men. But we won't be flogged!

The Mystery of the Mutiny

2007-04-24T16:26:00.000-07:00

In the mythic/poetic reality, the most true reality, in the truth of the Prophet Herman Melville, (see Righteous Mutiny www.libbyhome.blogspot.com) Ahab's ship 'Pequod' encounters another whaling ship from Nantucket, the 'Town Ho'.

Ahab hails this ship, as he hails all whaling ships by asking if they have any news of the Great White Whale. If the ship were to answer that they did not, then Ahab would tell 'em to fuck off and rudely sail away. But the captain of the 'Town-Ho' says he does have news of The Great White Whale.

There is an exchange of mail and a gam, a rendez-vous of the whaling ships. The two captains confer on one ship. The first mates confer on the other ship. Crew members move freely between the two ships.

Most of the crew of the 'Town-Ho' are Polynesians who have only recently left their Pacific islands to become whalers. But there are a few white crew members who were perhaps on the ship during the time of the Steelkilt Mutiny, or had joined the crew when the memory of the mutiny was still fresh.

Tashtego, the Wampanouag harpooner from Martha's Vineyard, after swearing elaborate, arcane oaths of secrecy is told the story of the mutiny.

He must take these elaborate, arcane oaths of secrecy because the implications of the narrative of the mutiny are considered to be dangerous by the narrators because they are so revolutionary, so heretical, so fundamentally opposed to the business-as-usual (bau) of the whale fishery, of the (bau) of the world.

Tashtego talks in his sleep. Many hear his dream narrative. They awaken him so he can tell the story consciously.

Tashtego refuses to tell the story until everyone swears the same elaborate, arcane oaths that he took. All the crew take these oaths seriously. Ahab, nor any other officer of the 'Pequod' learn of the Steelkilt Mutiny.

The 'Town-Ho' chapter of 'Moby Dick' is the only part of the book that happens after The Great White Whale and the hemp kills Ahab. It is told after the 'Pequod' has been staved in and sunk with the loss of all the crew except one who lives to tell the story.

It is being told by Ishmael/Jonah in an American Indian (Incan) place/context, the Golden Inn in Lima, Peru. Ishmael makes a special point of noting that he is telling the story just as he told it to his friends Don Sebastian, and Don Pedro, who he identifies as Spanish Grandees, but who are, in fact, descendants of Incan Royalty. All are drinking chicha, corn beer which is fermented by the saliva of women. The Incan aristocracy did not drink the spit of any woman. They only drank the spit of the Ahkolona, the chosen women.

The narrative is being told by Ishmael/Jonah in a narrative style very different from that of the rest of the book. It is being told with the confidence and authority of a prophet who has been in the belly of the whale on the bottom of the sea, who has been naked in the face of oceanic mystery, who now brings prophecy to an orthodox, idol-worshipping, wicked Ninevah/Lima.

And the reader never finds out the information that the captain of the 'Town-Ho' imparted to Ahab re: The Great White Whale.

(stay tuned for the next 'narrative of the voyage of the bloody, snake chariot,' the doctrine of the mutiny' - www.libbyhome.blogspot.com )

Back in the Mystic

2007-04-15T21:23:00.000-07:00

The Quick and Los Muertos of San Agostin

2007-04-08T16:13:00.000-07:00

Tripping hard is like war.

Most of your time is spent in the minutia of attending to your physical/astral chariot's movement through international time and geography. There's the issues of transportation, lodging and meals.

Then there's the times when 'normal' time is punctuated with times of sheer terror, of being thrown into life/death struggle where all bets are off and you are naked in the face of great, dark mystery.

From under the volcano I returned to Quito, Ecuador to again be reunited with my bruddah - the Chief Rollin' Rock, returned to South America from his niece's wedding.

And then we were tripping hard, returning to Colombia.

We returned to the beautiful, white city of Popayan. And then we were going down a long, bumpy, unpaved road in a crowded bus to San Agostin - one of the most important archeological places in South America.

San Agostin is the place where a great urban civilization flourished from 200 A.D. to 800 A.D. And then this technologically sophisticated culture/civilization mysteriously disappears, leaving one of the world's greatest cities of the dead. The homes of the living were simple, unadorned. The tombs of the dead are elaborately, extravagantly engineered and decorated with monumental statues. The tombs celebrate a joyous, phallic, sun-worshipping fertility cult that reveled in all the permeations in the union/integration of Human/God, Goddess, Human/Animal, Life/Death.

The image of the dead in the great tombs is that of a newly born, upside down infant beginning their new upside down after-life in the joyous rebirth of death.Most of this lost civilization's energy went into the construction of this great city of the dead, that existed side by side with the city of the living. Now only the city of the dead remains. It dominates the landscape, the geography of the present city of the living, and extends far beyond it.

There were far more people living in this place during this lost civilization's classic age, then there are now. The most constant employment in this place is grave robbing.The Chief and myself did what you're suppose to do when you visit this place. We went horse-back riding to the archeological sites. We visited the most monumental of the monumental places.

It was good exercise. Afterwards was one of the rare times when the Chief had appetite for food.

We are recognized as a flacco/gordo, skinny man/fat man, Laurel and Hardy, Quixote and Pancho kind of comic team. The Chief is a skinny dude. He is very consciencious about suppressing all appetite for food with super-human quantities of cigarettes and strong coffee. I remain a man of appetite. I still have a paunch. Therefore I am a gordo. This was one of the rare moments when we both had appetite.

We went to a cheap, good restaurant The Fogon (The Hearth). We both ordered the plate of the day, an ample dish with rice, beans, plantains, potatoes, and good, but tough, chewy beef. We both hungrily engaged our food.

Suddenly the Chief grabbed my arm. He grabbed my arm like a man who was drowning. And when I looked into his eyes I saw that he was drowning. I knew immediately that a big clot of tough, chewy beef had lodged in his throat. I knew immediately that he was suffocating - dying.

I didn't have to think about it. I just did it. I did the Heimlich. But it was a far from perfect application of the maneuver. I could feel how lodged the clot of food was in the Chief's throat. I knew I hadn't moved it.

I squeezed a second time. The clot stayed lodged in the Chief's throat. I began to panic.

Then I squeezed a third time and the tough, chewy clot of beef flew from the Chief's mouth, across the restaurant.He began to breathe.

When I knew the Chief was alright I began laughing, then howling with laughter. Then the Chief joined me in the laughter to the consternation of all the other diners in the crowded restaurant.

When I returned to the restaurant, alone, for breakfast, the beautiful duena, the owner of the restaurant was really concerned about the Chief. She was very relieved to know that all is well with him.

She then related her narrative, her memory of what happened.She said that she knew my first attempts to save the Chief failed. She said a woman, whom she had never seen before suddenly appeared behind the Chief and smacked him really hard in the back. (As she was giving me her narrative I vaguely remembered that there could have been another presence, a female presence, with the Chief and myself in that terror-laden moment. I could vaguely remember someone hitting the Chief in the back.) The Duena swore that it was the woman, who she had never seen before, and her hard blow to the Chief's back, that dislodged the clot of beef from the Chief's throat.

But the Chief doesn't remember anyone else being in the Heimlich moment. He says that he's certain that my third Heimlich maneuver did the trick.

Afterwards I spoke to a new friend from San Agostin. He is a shaman and a grave robber. He spends a lot of time with the dead.

I asked him what the ancient dead of San Agostin are like.

He said they're good people. They still walk the earth in a sacred way.

Back Under the Volcano

2007-03-25T17:04:00.000-07:00

I am in Riobamba, Ecuador. From where I sit and write I can see the Black Dragon. She is smoking, venting apocalyptic mushroom clouds.

From where I sit it is sometimes possible to see the lights of Peleos, the town that was completely destroyed every man, woman, child, old person incinerated, when she blew in 1886.

All of Riobamba witnessed the eruption of August 16. The people here also speak of it as if it was an awesome and terrible dream, as they do in Banos - see narrative of the voyage of the bloody, snake, chariot at www.libbyhome.blogspot.com . But it is in this direction that the ash, cinder and pyroclastic flows go.

I was in Riobamba three weeks ago when I took one of the last train rides in Ecuador and rode the devil´s nose. But I really didn´t see where was. I didn´t see Riobamba and its sacred geography.

In 2002 a pyramid was discovered on the top of a nearby mountain. It is said to be the largest, and oldest pyramid, about 4,500 years-old, in the world. Some believe it is the first and greatest artifact of Andean civilization. Local shamans say it was and still is the most powerful focus of shamanistic healing energia in all of South America.

http://www.volunteershuacaynan.blogspot.com/

Archeologists are just beginning the scientific plundering of the place. They´re searching for gold.

And it is from here that I, definitively, begin my voyage of return to Colombia, to Caracas, Venezuela and my return flight to New York to perhaps see with new eyes the place from where this voyage began.

The Sacred Valley

2007-03-19T14:22:00.000-07:00

South America is the continent richest in shamanistic, consciousness altering plants. And of all the places in South America perhaps the valley of Vilcabamba has the most shamanistic power plants.

The place name is derived from the Vilca or Wilco tree (Anadenanthera colubrina), the sacred tree of the Incans.

The shamanistic tradition of the preparation and use of the medicine derived from the sacred tree has been lost. Substances improperly derived from the tree can cause paralysis and death. Most of the trees were destroyed by the Spanish who used the bark for tanning hides.

But the modern draw of the valley is still the shamanistic power plants. People come here to participate in new age shamanisism involving San Pedro cactus and San Ysidro mushrooms.

In this valley there is also morning glory, dactura, and reputedly the best cannabis in all of Ecuador.

Still in the Quito Glow, (see www.libbyhome.blogspot.com), I am not going out of my way, I am not taking a drunkard's posture before the shamanistic power plants.

I quit - ya gotz some?

But even more importantly do you have authenticity in your posture before the mystery of the power plants?

Among the many foreigners who live here there are some who conduct San Pedro cactus/sweat lodge ceremonies. But I see no authenticity in them.

This place's reputation as the valley of longeivity, the place where people routinely live to be one hundred years or more, has come into scientific dispute.

Vilcabamba was a very isolated place until the 1960's. People didn't know or remember their birthdates. When the local, old people first encountered foreigners, they would tell them, possibly just to play with them, that they were one hundred years old, or much older.

But I am always encountering these beautiful, vigorous old people, here, who stay fresh and new as they advance into their further and greater powers.

From Under the Volcano to the Sacred Valley

2007-03-16T10:20:00.000-07:00

The Black Dragon built up to a code yellow alert. She was the headline in all the Ecuador papers. She even made the Spanish language version of CNN. She covered thousands of acres with ash. She had an eruption and a major lava flow that threatened a hydro-electric plant.

And then she did what she always does.

She defied all expectations, predictions and anticipations.

She abates.

I left Banos de la Agua Santa. I rode the Devil's Nose, one of the last train rides in Ecuador. I marvelled at the beautiful, enchanted city of Cuenca, the jewel of Ecuador.

And now I am arrived in the Sacred Valley of Vilcabamba.

This is the valley where it is said that the inhabitants frequently live to be well over 100 (however, the scientific observation has failed to verify this).

But it is, nevertheless, the sacred valley, sacred long before the Incans came here.

It is a green, lush place surrounded by distinctive hills and ledges.

Everyone speaks of the energia.

Under the Volcano II

2007-03-06T10:27:00.000-08:00

I am hearing, smelling, and seeing the volcano, all the time.

I came to Banos de la Agua Santa on Friday. There was more activity on Saturday then there was on Friday, more activity on Sunday then there was Saturday. Now the volcano is always smoking, intermittenly but more frequently erupting in lava flows, its brimstone smell (not unpleasant-almost like the smell of incense) settles on the town, and its roar, like distant thunder is heard in the town.

I am corrected on the nature of The Black Giant. The mountain is a female. She is The Black Dragon. Tungurahua, means throat of fire. She is the most active volcano in this part of the Andes. She has a significant eruption about every 80 years. Last significant eruption was followed by three days of darkness.

Every once in a while she has a catastrophic eruption when the whole mountain becomes a bomb and she takes out the world as it is known. All who live under the volcano know she is much more dangerous - being that she is a female.

The residents of Banos suspect that this could be the once in a while when the mountain will be a bomb. But they say they will not allow the army to move them this time. They say that if the mountain will be a bomb, then whatever happens will be very quick.

When I climb the heights above the city to observe, I can't help thinking that this was the way Pompeii was. That this was the way the world was in Noah's day, just before it began raining. People do the business-as-usual, fatalistic about what is or what is not to come.

¿Quien sabe? Senor.