Stories and Humour
2 things we'll see down the back side of peak oil
* The 45th President of the United States will be Amish.
* There's a renewed interest in HORSE-power.
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I have many ideas coming about creating
"Bohemia" at Red RocksTabitha Jean Lowdon
(this was written about the farm I had in the Otways)
Bohemianism is the practice of worshipping creativity.
Come and boheme like a bohemian in Bohemia
It is a magical place in The Otways
Bohemia is for writers and painters and music makers,
For masseurs and chefs and cob-oven bakers.
Bohemia is for kite flying, stream swimming and moon bathing,
For Tee Pees, bongos and congas.
It is for rest in the forest.
It is for laughing and joking,
And spirits freely floating.
It is for celebrating myth and ritual and ceremonies.
It is for growing bush foods and children and beautiful trees.
Come, honour the six senses with us;
With cleanliness and conservation,
With lucidity and innocence,
With gentleness and love.
Let your imagination free.....
The Magic of The Tree Tabitha Robortella july 06
I
went to visit the sequoias again. I had forgotten how they affect me.
I lost control of my legs and they ran me into the forest; along the
river, up the hills, down the hills. Everywhere there were little red,
orange, yellow toadstools. What is it that makes this forest magical?
The hushed heaviness of the air, with light top notes of birds? The
slow silence of the river sliding by? Mist hovering just above the
water… tree ferns dwarfed by Redwoods… black trunks reaching into the
sky. The root system of each tree has welcomed its neighbour and they
have all joined together. These trees know about eliminating
seperateness. It is no longer one forest; it has become one tree.
Afterwards I visited a friend. Her bathtub has a chimney. It squats
in the middle of the vegetable patch on its claw feet. I lay back in
the darkness and watched the stars shooting behind the gum trees. The
winter wind roared up the Aire River from the ocean and blew on the
flames under the bath; I could see their flickering reflections on the
banana tree and the jonquils growing beneath it. The wind blew the
diluted campfire smoke into my lungs. It was fresh. It was wild. It
made me feel primordial. I had to float because the bottom of the bath
was too hot for my skin. The water temperature was perfect, so I
pondered… Part of the magic of the forest you will find, is in its
name. The ‘forest’ is a place ‘for rest’. When I’m not getting so
excited about being in the forest, my heart rate slows down, my
breathing languors. I feel like I’m floating just above the surface of
the earth. Maybe my aura changes colour, maybe I vibrate to a
different frequency. Under the canopy, I can transcend the disease of
thinking. My mind no longer deludes me. I have found the off button, I
am no longer its slave, I know I am more than my mind.
When I
first bought my rainforest, I took my daughter for an adventure in her
backpack. I climbed down to one of the creeks. We reached the water,
and it was so clear, flowing over dark stones. I walked busily down
the creek, when some words fell into my mind; "Stop, turn around, just
watch." I looked back up from where I had come, standing on a rock in
my gum boots, green everywhere, water gurgling, tree ferns climbing
into the canopy, branches reaching out in a circle. I could hear the
distant swash of the waterfall. I felt Ayla, watching over my
shoulder, soaking it all in. I felt the beauty pouring into her soul –
she was not doing anything, not creating anything, not learning
anything, just soaking green energy into the centre of her being. Five
years before I had yearned for something for my children, standing in
the shower with my son growing inside me, composing a poem about
escaping from the noisy road next to my house. Almost every minute of
those five years I had spent consciously and unconsciously working
toward this moment. What relief at the termination of so many years of
frustration!
I walked into the neighbouring property to look for
a massive Mountain Ash I had spied from the top of my hill. I hiked
over rolling pastures, around the top of a stream (it sprang out from
the side of a hill) and came upon the giant. I gave her a hug. The
Mountain Ashes have been giving me lessons in hugging. It's just that
when you hug them, there is no niggly little fear that they will pull
away before you have finished receiving the whole hug. And they are
solid. There is so much reassuring matter in them. She was seventeen
huge steps in circumference. On my way back, I happened upon another
old Mountain Ash. This one must have been hit by lightning or burnt
down in the 1937 fire that went over The Ridge. All that was left of
her was a very tall teepee shape with seven legs. She was 27 large
steps in circumference and 8 steps straight through the middle of the
teepee.
So the magic of the trees comes from their Chi, the
relief they give me from the frustrations of bringing children up
amongst the banality of Western life, the lessons they teach me about
love, and the awe I feel for their size and the time they have spent
growing on this earth. There is more to it when you begin to plant
your own forest; developing an interrelationship with the physical
world through ritual and artistic expression. When my daughter was
born, I hid her away in a dark and quiet sanctuary, without detaching
her from her placenta, so she could ease quietly and gently into this
life. I salted the placenta daily and wrapped it in a special velvet
bag I had made. It took five days for the umbilical cord to pop off
naturally. The placenta waited nearly two years in my freezer before I
found a resting place for it. We held a ceremony and Ayla planted it
beneath a Niten. I hadn’t known about the benefits of a Lotus birth
when her older brother had been born, so he chose to plant worm
infested vegetable mulch under his special Niten (the other option had
been a sausage). Like a Scottish Findhornian, I talk to these two
Nitens, and I’ll never cut their branches off. When they have grown a
bit more, I will put a very high swing on a branch (an adult’s swing,
not a child’s swing) and I will soar on it when I want to levitate. I
imagine playing my congas by the light of a full moon beneath them.
These rituals add colour to my existence.
I felt like an artist
last year, when I went out into my cow paddock and with a swish of my
wand, banashed the grass from the spots I wanted to plant trees (this
is a more romantic way of thinking about my sprayer). My wand was my
paintbrush. Six months later, my canvass had come to life. The trees I
had planted in each hole were up to my shoulder and I could see the
pathway I had envisioned winding over the hill. I am normally a very
conservative person, but when I thought about how this living canvas
would grow over the next sixty years, I found myself jumping up and
down and screaming like a mad woman.
I was thinking about the
energy of the trees, the soft beauty of wooden furniture, and why food
cooked in a wood fired oven always tastes better (is there a
comparative classification of different types of heating energies that
Western science has not yet been able to define?), but by now the water
really was starting to get cold. So I climbed out of the bath and ran
up to the house along the sawdust pathway between the vegetables,
hoping that my friend’s Swiss WWOOFA wasn’t watching me from his tent.
I was not sure if he would understand about the magic of the tree and
being at one with the forest.
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You'll love this, Amaranth (aka Pigweed in the USA) has acquired
resistance to Monsanto's herbicide Roundup (glyphosate) and is choking
out all the genetically modified soy and cotton plants. With no other
"weeds" to compete with it, it can't be stopped. Oh, what a shame... ( :
Check out this short video.
Super Weed Can't Be Killed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-cka5s4AqE
By the way, Amaranth is actually edible!
Another interesting article on roundup resistant "Super weeds":
http://www.france24.com/en/20090418-superweed-explosion-threatens-monsanto-heartlands-genetically-modified-US-crops
Apparently farmers are being forced to either abandon their farms,
resort to conventional (non-GM) crops (oh, the tragedy of that...), or
harvest by hand.
Monsanto, in their classical "ethical" approach to all matters,
blame the farmers for over-using Roundup, and make the most
inconceivably mind-numbing suggestion, to quote the article:
"...according to Monsanto press releases, company sales
representatives are encouraging farmers to mix glyphosate and older
herbicides such as 2,4-D, a herbicide which was banned in Sweden,
Denmark and Norway over its links to cancer, reproductive harm and
mental impairment. 2,4-D is also well-known for being a component of
Agent Orange, a toxic herbicide which was used in chemical warfare in
Vietnam in the 1960s."
The human arrogance the underpins the GM movement is that we can
actually "improve on nature" (for financial profit, of course - that's
the unspoken part). Whether you believe that nature is divinely
created, evolved over hundreds of millions of years, or a blend of
both, it makes no difference - the sheer ignorance of such a concept of
improving on nature is blatantly evident. Nature has just improved on
its "weeds" and trumped the human tinkering. Nature redresses all
imbalances within it, even human created ones, so what's happened was
inevitable, it was only a matter of time.
As the old saying goes, "pride precedes a fall", and humanity is
still blind to the fact that we exist on a planet where the nature of
the ecosystem is to balance itself, nature doesn't discriminate or
grant special privileges to any one species. All systems strive for
equilibrium, as the laws of science reminds us. Science also tells us
that we need to expend considerable energy to keep a system out of
equilibrium. Ever wondered why we use so much energy as a species -
we're trying to make nature subservient to our will. Truth is that in a
causal universe, as the laws of physics describe, all action have
consequences, or for the more religiously inclined "as we sow, we shall
reap", so it's only a matter of time till the chickens come home to
roost... Personally, the only roosting chickens I'd want to see are
the Permaculture variety that feast on fallen fruit in their chicken
runs under the fruit tree orchard! ; )
So, Dr. Frankenstein's monster has returned, and turned on its creator.
Well, no surprises there, it was bound to happen.
Bring on the Amaranth I say!