Author: Gwyllm

Some of these girls I have had since they were little clonelettes, back in 1996. They don’t survive in ground over winter, but have to be dug up, or cloned out again and re-root in jars over winter. I am going to experiment with straw and compost this fall, to see if they survive the wintering. I will take starts of course…

I have had great satisfaction in the growing of this plant. I thoroughly enjoy our interactions in and out of the ground…

Mary and Rowan being good sports. You my as well tie their ankles to a stake than get a willing photo out of them. My camera has become an object to flee around here, unfortunately.

They see it come out, and they scatter like the wind.

My ex-sister in law, Lisa gave us a moon and a star that have solar batteries. Usually, I like pitch dark at night but for some reason I like thetwo lights out there.

Thanks Lisa!

Mary and Rowan hanging out in the Gloaming. My favourite time, the in-betweenies as I say.

If the insects leave you alone (which does occur, usually when my mind is unclouded, I find this one of the better periods for quiet contemplation.

Ah, that is the secret of the garden I think, it reflects back very well, and also seems to ground one very well….

Putting your hands into earth, caring for all the little beings and plants gets one out of ones self.

On the Menu:

The Links

The Quote of the Day

The Article: Big Brother Bugs Portland

On the Garden: Zen Quotes & Poetry

Life and Death in the Garden.

The Bee was caught in the web of the Spider, and of course the spider was delighted, the Bee lless so. Their dance went on for hours. I wanted to free the Bee, but desisted. Obviously from the early moments of creation, this moment had been forming, and now was in full flower.

Eventually, they killed each other in their struggles…

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The Links:

Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites

Bollywood Beatles… their version of “I wanna hold your hand”

bill bennet explains marriage

Brazilian Margarine Commercial…

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Quote of the Day:

The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.

Robert Anton Wilson

The inner leaves of our Variegated Brugmansia. Amazing flowers on this little darling, which somehow survives year after year here. (with a bit of help of course)

We have tons of datura this year, always a good omen…

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Big Brother Bugs Portland

Simon Maxwell Apter

To George H.W. Bush, Portland, Oregon, is ” Little Beirut.” Downtown’s omnipresent bicycle messengers call the city “Stumptown,” and officially, the town is known as the City of Roses. In a move more befitting, perhaps, the presidential Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires circa 1982, and not the Rose City of Portland circa 2006, the FBI has been accused by Portland Mayor Tom Potter of “trying to place an informant inside the offices of Portland’s elected officials and employees, in order to inform on City Council and others.”

Since the end of the Age of Aquarius, when thousands of Californians began to migrate north to Oregon, Portland has never been particularly welcoming to the executive branch of the federal government–especially when said branch is in Republican control. Portland’s two Representatives in Congress are Democrats, and Portland’s county, Multnomah, voted for John Kerry over Bush in 2004 by nearly a 3-to-1 ratio. Moreover, in April 2005, the City Council voted, along with the mayor–and with overwhelming support from the citizenry–to withdraw Portland’s participation in the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force project.

Upon Portland’s withdrawal from the task force, NPR’s Larry Abramson noted, “Portlanders seem proud of their bluer-than-blue reputation, of the bumper stickers that proclaim ‘Keep Portland Weird.’ So maybe it was predictable that the city mocked as Little Beirut by conservatives is considering a symbolic declaration of independence.” And tucked away in the Pacific Northwest, with no Jerry Garcia or Kurt Cobain to worship, Portland has made its commitment to progressive politics the city’s calling card. The mayor’s seat is officially nonpartisan, and where major policy is concerned, the mayor has little more power than anyone else on the four-member City Council. With a robust public referendum system that presents voters with potential tax proposals, constitutional amendments and bond issues, Portland’s political system does Montesquieu proud.

By state law, police officers in Oregon are barred from investigating citizens based solely on their political, religious or social leanings, and Portlanders will be quick to point out that it was the Feds, and not local cops, who erroneously arrested local attorney Brandon Mayfield in connection to the 3/11 Madrid train bombings in May 2004. After the bogus fingerprint evidence used to arrest him fell through, the only credible “reason” behind the police action turned out to be Mayfield’s religion, which happened to be Islam.

“In the absence of any reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing,” wrote Mayor Potter in an open letter to the city, “I believe the FBI’s recent actions smack of ‘Big Brother.’ Spying on local government without justification or cause is not acceptable to me. I hope it is not acceptable to you, either.”

Of course, the FBI has a different take. In a press release coming on the heels of Potter’s letter, the Portland office of the FBI stated, “It is entirely proper for an FBI agent to ask willing citizens to provide information when those citizens feel it is appropriate to do so regarding potential criminal conduct–whether that information involves a bank robbery, kidnapping, public corruption or other crime.” Like most of America’s major cities, Portland is rife with problems, many stemming from poverty and racism–but a Tammany or Richard J. Daley-style system has never taken root in City Hall at Southwest Fourth and Madison.

Few, including Mayor Potter, Portland’s former chief of police, doubt the capability of information gathered in the field to further the prosecution of governmental graft. In Portland’s case, though, there were and are no reasons to suspect corruption at City Hall. Indeed, when Potter first complained about the incident to the FBI on May 15, special agent Robert Jordan, head of the FBI field office in Portland, wondered if his man was merely hitting on the city employee.

With no evidence unearthed at City Hall to warrant a federal investigation, it’s a “presumed guilty” situation. Potter acknowledges as much, writing, “When there is no information to indicate ANY public corruption on the part of City Council members or employees, the FBI has no legitimate role in surreptitiously monitoring elected officials and city employees.”

If the NSA has claimed ordinary civilians as their own targets for surveillance, perhaps it’s only fitting that the FBI is now venturing into the rotundas and council rooms of America’s cities to find its own prey.

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On the Garden: Zen Quotes & Poetry

Mountain fruit drop in the rain

and grass insects sing under my oil lamp.

White hair, after all, can never change

as yellow gold cannot be created.

If you want to know how to get rid

of age, its sickness, study nonbeing.

– Wang Wei, 699-761

———

Crape myrtle, brilliant red, bursting forth;

Hiding the garden.

Some days, only the Garden, entire, serene;

Yet, hiding from sight, shy, single plants.

Seeing Both, seldom, but as One:

Sweat poured from my startled brow,

Dripping on the dry earth,

And all became Sunshine

And shadows of surprise unraveling.

– Michael P. Garofalo, Above the Fog

———-

Being and non-being produce each other.

Difficulty and ease bring about each other.

Long and short delimit each other.

High and low rest on each other.

Sound and voice harmonize each other.

Front and back follow each other.

Therefore the sage abides in the condition of unattached action.

And carries out the wordless teaching.

Here, the myriad things are made, yet not separated.

———

Dust and sand in his eyes, dirt in his ears,

He doesn’t consent to stay in the myriad peaks.

Falling flowers, flowing streams, very vast.

Suddenly raising my eyebrows – where has he gone?

– Hsueh-tou (980-1052)

———-

Even plants and trees,

Which have no heart,

Wither with the passing days;

Beholding this,

Can anyone help but feel chagrin?

– Dogen, 1200 – 1253

——–

Long ago there was an immortal man

Who lived on the slope of Shooting Mountain.

Riding clouds and commanding flying dragons,

He did his breathing and supped on precious flowers.

He could be heard, but not seen.

Sighing sorrows and full emotions,

Self-tortured, he had no companion;

Grief and heartbreak piled upon him

“Study the familiar to penetrate the sublime”

But time is short and what’s to be done?

– Juan Chi (210-263 CE)

Moon to the south… our last photo entry on this track, more to come I am sure…

Pax,

Gwyllm

Thursday Night. My friend Terry comes over , and we go to explore a semi-new Organic Brewery, “Roots” down on 7th off of Hawthorne. Tasty IPA, nice crowd, Reggae Music, Dance Hall and some Dub pounding out of the door.

After 2 IPAs’ we head up the street to Caer Llwydd, settle back and crack open the Absinthe and settle in, listening to XM channel 100 (The French Channel)… Conversations dance in and out of some 40 years, touching on the latest screw-ups in Iraq to our dear Ann Coulters latest verbal car-wrecks…

The evening moves on, from 7:30, and now at 12:46 Friday morning, we talk about the failures of the education system for most of the kids…

A nice night, good music, good friendship…. 8o)

On the Menu…

The Linkage:

Article: Scotland’s Nostradamus and the Queen of the Fairies

The Ballads in two different Versions: “True Thomas”

Enjoy…!

Gwyllm

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The Linkage:

Survivalist Personals…

Loony Tunes: Ann Coulter’s Further Adventures…

Bullied by the Eunuchs

Hijaras in Pakistan…

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Scotland’s Nostradamus and the Queen of the Fairies

IAIN LUNDY

True Thomas sat on Huntley bank,

And he beheld a lady gay;

A lady that was brisk and bold,

Come riding o’er the ferny brae.

Her skirt was of the grass green silk,

Her mantle of the velvet fine;

At every lock of her horse’s mane,

Hung fifty silver bells and nine.

SO BEGINS the ballad of the quaint 13th-century figure known as Scotland’s Nostradamus and his enchantment by the Queen of the Fairies. Thomas of Ercildoune – more commonly known as Thomas the Rhymer – was a soothsayer of such repute that for a time his fame rivalled that of the Arthurian magician Merlin.

The accuracy of what happened to Thomas and how he gained his supernatural powers has become confused over the centuries, but there are common threads running through every variation of the story. It is, in essence, a fairy story but one which seeks to explain how Thomas was able to predict some of the most important events in Scottish history, including the defeat by the English at the Battle of Flodden and the Union of the Crowns of Scotland and England.

Very few “fairy stories” are given such credence as that of Thomas and his dalliance with the Queen of Elfland. After all, he was no fairy. He was a real person and his predictions – which were written down – were treated so seriously that they were consulted before both the two Jacobite rebellions.

So who was Thomas and why was he singled out for mystical powers? Born around 1220, he lived in Learmont Tower, near Ercildoune, now Earlston in Berwickshire. Close by there stood a grove of hardwood trees on the banks of Huntly Burn and as a youngster Thomas had a favourite tree under which he used to lie.

The story goes that as he lay there one day he saw the beautiful Queen of the Fairies approaching on her graceful white horse. She was wearing green silk and velvet and on her horse’s mane there hung 59 silver bells. Thomas was entranced by her beauty and readily complied when the Queen asked him to kiss her underneath his favourite tree. He then agreed to accompany her, and the two rode off into the Eildon Hills where Thomas spent seven years as the Queen’s lover in her fairy home in Elfland.

The years seemed only a few minutes to Thomas. But when the time came for the Queen to return him to mortal land, she made him promise never to speak of what he had seen. He agreed and she gave him an apple and said: “Take this for thy wages Thomas, it will give thee a tongue that can never lie.”

From then on he was known as “True Thomas”. The Queen also conferred on him the gift of prophecy.

He used his new powers to prophesy several significant historical events including the death of King Alexander lll; the succession of Robert the Bruce to the throne of Scotland; the defeat of the Scots at the Battle of Flodden; the defeat of Mary, Queen of Scots’ forces at the Battle of Pinkie in 1567; and the Union of the Crowns in 1603.

He is also said to have predicted the Scottish success at the Battle of Bannockburn and the Jacobite uprisings of 1715 and 1745.

The story of Thomas is told in the ballad Thomas the Rhymer, which was included by Sir Walter Scott in his work, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. In recent years recordings of the ballad have been made by the folk-rock band Steeleye Span and Scottish folk musician Ewan MacColl.

Thomas himself was a noted poet and is supposed to be the author of one of the oldest-known surviving Scottish stories, Sir Tristrem, also edited by Sir Walter himself.

There is one final twist to the saga of Thomas the Rhymer. One day, many years after returning from Elfland, he walked out of his house to his favourite tree under which he had first met the Queen. He has never returned and has not been seen since.

According to legend he will return one day to help Scotland in her hour of greatest need. Some might say that time is not far off.

______

Two Ballad Versions of the Tale:

Campbell HISS, II, 83

As Thomas lay on Huntlie banks –

A wat a weel bred man was he

And there he spied a lady fair,

Coming riding down by the Eildon tree.

The horse she rode on was dapple gray,

And in her hand she held bells nine;

I thought I heard this fair lady say

These fair siller bells they should a’ be mine.

It’s Thomas even forward went,

And lootit low down on his knee

‘ Weed met thee save, my lady fair,

For thou’rt the flower o this countrie.’

O no, O no, Thomas,’ she says,

‘O no, O no, that can never be,

For I’m but a lady of an unto land.

Comd out a hunting, as ye may see.

O harp and carp, Thomas,’ she says,

‘O harp and carp, and go wi me;

It’s be seven years, Thomas, and a day.

Or you see man or woman in your am countrie.’

It’s she has rode, and Thomas ran.

Until they cam to yon water clear ;

He’s coosten off his hose and shon,

And he’s wooden the water up to the knee.

It’s she has rode, and Thomas ran,

Until they cam to yon garden green ;

He’s put up his hand for to pull down ane,

For the lack o food he was like to tyne.

‘Hold your hand, Thomas,’ she says,

‘Hold your hand, that must not be;

It was a’ that cursed fruit o thine

Beggared man and woman in your countrie

‘ But I have a loaf and a soup o wine,

And ye shall go and dine wi me;

And lay yer head down in my lap,

And, I will tell ye farlies three.

‘It ‘s dont ye see yon broad broad way,

That leadeth down by yon skerry fell?

It’s ill’s the man that dothe thereon gang,

For it leadeth him straight to the gates o hell.

It’s dont ye see yon narrow way,

That leadeth down by yon lillie lea?

It’s weel’s the man that doth therein gang,

For it leads him straight to the heaven hie.’

—–

It’s when she cam into the hall

I wat a weel bred man was he –

They’ve asked him question[s], one and all,

But he answered none but that fair ladie.

O they speerd at her where she did him get,

And she told them at the Eildon tree;

______

Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, II, 251, ed. 1802

TRUE Thomas lay on Huntlie bank,

A ferlie he spied wi’ his ee,

And there be saw a lady bright,

Come riding down by the Eildon Tree.

Her shirt was o the grass-green silk,

Her mantle o the velvet fyne,

At ilka tett of her horse’s mane

Hang fifty siller bells and nine.

True Thomas, he pulld aff his cap,

And louted low down to his knee

‘All hail, thou mighty Queen of Heaven!

For thy peer on earth I never did see.’

`O no, O no, Thomas,’ she said,

‘ That name does not belang to me;

I am but the queen of fair Elfland,

That am hither come to visit thee.

‘ Harp and carp. Thomas.’ she said,

‘Harp and carp along wi me,

And if ye dare to kiss my lips.

Sure of your bodie I will be.’

‘ Betide me weal, betide me woe,

That weird shall never daunton me ; ‘

Syne he has kissed her rosy lips,

All underneath the Eildon Tree.

‘Now ye maun go wi me,’ she said,

True Thomas, Ye maun no wi me,

And ye maun serve me seven years.

Thro weal or woe, as may chance to be.’

She mounted on her milk-white steed,

She’s taen True Thomas up behind,

And aye wheneer her bridle rung,

The steed flew swifter than the wind.

O they rade on, and farther on –

The steed gaed swifter than the wind –

Untill they reached a desart wide,

And living land was left behind.

‘ Light down, light down, now, True Thomas,

And lean your head upon my knee;

Abide and rest a little space,

And I will shew you ferlies three.

see ye not yon narrow road,

So thick beset with thorns and briers?

That is the path of righteousness,

Tho after it but few enquires.

‘And see not ye that braid braid road,

That lies across that lily leven?

That is the path of wickedness,

Tho some call it the road to heaven.

`And see not ye that bonny road,

That winds about the fernie brae?

That is the road to fair Elfland

Where thou and I this night maun gae.

‘ But, Thomas, ye maun hold your tongue,

Whatever ye may hear or see,

For, if you speak word in Elflyn land,

Ye’Il neer get back to your ain countrie.’

they rade on, and farther on,

And they waded thro rivers aboon the knee,

And they saw neither sun nor moon,

But they heard the roaring of the sea.

It was mirk mirk night, and there was nae stern light,

And they waded thro red blade to the knee;

For a’ the blude that’s shed on earth

Rins thro the springs o that countrie.

Syne they came on to a garden green,

And she pu’d an apple frae a tree

Take this for thy wages, True Thomas,

It will give the tongue that can never lie.’

‘ My tongue is mine ain,’ Tree Thomas said

‘ A gudely gift ye wad gie to me!

I neither dought to buy nor sell,

At fair or tryst where I may be.

‘ I dought neither speak to prince or peer,

Nor ask of grace from fair ladye :’

Now hold thy peace,’ the lady said,

‘ For as I say, so must it be.’

He has gotten a coat of the even cloth,

And a pair of shoes of velvet green,

And till seven years were gane and past

True Thomas on earth was never seen.

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A. 7 stands 15 in the MS

82. golden green if only my copy is right.

112,3are 112,3 in the MS: the order of words is still not simple enough for a ballad.

144. goe

Jamison has a few variations, which I suppose to be his own.

11, oer yonder bank. 34. your like. 44. And I am come here to. 64. her steed. 82. garden, rightly. 102. clarry. 112. Lay your head. 121. see you not. 124. there’s few. 13. see ye not yon. 141. see ye yon. 142. which winds.

B. 32. her knee. 38. thou save.

121. MS perhaps unto.

131,2 follows st. 12 without separation.

C. 201. a cloth

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The groves were God’s first temples.

– William Cullen Bryant, A Forest Hymn

Mary’s Garden Assistant. This is the 2nd year that she has come back. We rescued her when she was young, having fallen out of the tree. We saved her from the cats, fed her and helped her to fly.

Miss Robin joins Mary when she working in the garden, often no more than a foot or two away from Mary, waiting for bugs and worms. Sadly, she turns her beak up at slugs. A bit of retraining?

She is a member of a family that has come to the same tree since we have been here at our house. I begin to suspect that there are traditional grounds for most animals…. There are also areas of our yards where swarms of gnats appear every year, like clock work.

The Tao of life, the Morphic Fields abound around and within us. The Squirrels, the Crow Tribe, The Raccoon Raiders… all have their place in our world. The gnats, the bees… (oh the bees!) all have their parts to play in the divine dance, of the garden.

They shouldn’t grow here, but somehow they do. I have raised most of them since they were wee pups. Good friends, and a wonder for the garden here in the NW.

I have always loved raising cactus. I started in San Francisco some 30 years ago. Fascinating plants, and very patient and forgiving.

A trio of beings who really dodge the camera at the best of times. This is looking to the SW…

We have some challenges for growing in our garden, as our neighbor believes that if you trim trees, they will only grow more. Thank goodness this logic doesn’t run to keeping the yard trimmed. Way to much shade!

Our Challenge every year….

Our new Fire Pit. Rowan is wild for this little number. We were looking for one of those portable ones, but ended up sticking to earth and rock, the old standbys…

Since we have put it in, we don’t eat inside any more. Nice!

I love watching the flames. It brings out the dreaming… and it turns Marys’ Garden into a magickal place for us.

More tomorrow!

On the Menu:

Big Brother’s new toy: Another bloated gas bag watching you from the sky

Quotes: On Gardeners & Trees

Two Poems on Nature: William Cullen Bryant

I hope you enjoy this edition.

Big Love,

Gwyllm

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Big Brother’s new toy: Another bloated gas bag watching you from the sky

By James Renner – Cleveland Free Times

Last week, a fire ignited at the Akron Airdock that once housed a fleet of Goodyear blimps. Firemen rushed to the 211-foot-tall structure and quickly doused the flames. Reporters and photographers descended on the landmark. Many were surprised to learn the blimps were no longer being stored there.

Turns out Lockheed Martin — the company that gave us the Trident intercontinental ballistic missile — was renovating the site for an upcoming project when the fire started. It’s being turned into a hangar for a prototype airship. If you’re frightened of this administration’s habit of spying on American citizens, you may want to stop reading.

The prototype is called the High Altitude Airship, or HAA. Lockheed Martin Maritime Systems & Sensors in Akron won the $40 million contract from the Missile Defense Agency to build HAA in 2003. It is essentially another blimp. A giant one. Seventeen times the size of the Goodyear dirigible. It’s designed to float 12 miles above the earth, far above planes and weather systems. It will be powered by solar energy, and will stay in a geocentric orbit for up to a year, undetectable by ground-based radar. You can’t see it from the ground. But it can see you.

“The possibilities are endless for homeland security,” says Kate Dunlap, a Lockheed Martin spokesperson. “It could house cameras, and other surveillance equipment. It would be an eye in the sky.”

According to a summary released by the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command, the HAA can watch over a circle of countryside 600 miles in diameter. That’s everything between Toledo and New York City. And they want to build 11. With high-res cameras, that could mean constant surveillance of every square inch of American soil. “If you had a fleet of them, this could be used for border surveillance,” suggests Dunlap.

Launch date: 2009.

Of course, mimicking its defense of warrantless wiretapping and phone-log data mining, the government maintains it only wants to protect its citizens from external threats. But as any geek can tell you, blimps were ubiquitous in The Watchmen, the seminal ’80s graphic novel in which heroes have been driven underground and Nixon is still president.

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not watching you.

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Trees and the Gardener…

Our Cherry Tree, left over from when our part of town was the largest insane asylum west of the Mississippi. Some say it still is. We try to maintain the tradition in our own little ways….

When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, higher than

the ordinary, and shutting out the sky with their thickly inter-twined

branches, do not the stately shadows of the wood, the stillness of

the place, and the awful gloom of this doomed cavern then strike

you with the presence of a deity?

– Seneca

—-

Trees serve as homes for visiting devas who do not manifest in earthly bodies,

but live in the fibers of the trunks and larger branches of the trees, feed from

the leaves and communicate through the tree itself. Some are permanently

stationed as guardians of sacred places.

– Hindu Deva Shastra, verse 117, Nature Devas

—-

The sacred tree, the sacred stone are not adored as stone or tree;

they are worshipped precisely because they are hierophanies,

because they show something that is no longer stone or tree but sacred,

the ganz andere or ‘wholly other.’

– Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries

—-

Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky,

We fell them down and turn them into paper,

That we may record our emptiness.

– Kahlil Gibran

—-

God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, “Ah!”

– Joseph Campbell

—–

Give me a land of boughs in leaf,

A land of trees that stand;

Where trees are fallen there is grief;

I love no leafless land.”

– A.E. Housman

—–

We can see from the experience of Odin that the image of the tree was the template

within which all of the sacred world could be apprehended. The tree was the framework

within which one “flew” to these Otherworlds. And since the exploration of sacred space

was also a quest into the nature of human consciousness, the tree was regarded as an

image of the ways in which we, humans, are constructed psychically. It was a natural

model for our deepest wisdom, our highest aspirations.

– Brian Bates, Sacred Trees

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Two Poems on Nature: William Cullen Bryant

A Forest Hymn

THE groves were God’s first temples. Ere man learned

To hew the shaft, and lay the architrave,

And spread the roof above them,—ere he framed

The lofty vault, to gather and roll back

The sound of anthems; in the darkling wood,

Amidst the cool and silence, he knelt down,

And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks

And supplication. For his simple heart

Might not resist the sacred influences,

Which, from the stilly twilight of the place,

And from the gray old trunks that high in heaven

Mingled their mossy boughs, and from the sound

Of the invisible breath that swayed at once

All their green tops, stole over him, and bowed

His spirit with the thought of boundless power

And inaccessible majesty. Ah, why

Should we, in the world’s riper years, neglect

God’s ancient sanctuaries, and adore

Only among the crowd, and under roofs,

That our frail hands have raised? Let me, at least,

Here, in the shadow of this aged wood,

Offer one hymn—thrice happy, if it find

Acceptance in His ear.

Father, thy hand

Hath reared these venerable columns, thou

Didst weave this verdant roof. Thou didst look down

Upon the naked earth, and, forthwith, rose

All these fair ranks of trees. They, in thy sun,

Budded, and shook their green leaves in the breeze,

And shot towards heaven. The century-living crow,

Whose birth was in their tops, grew old and died

Among their branches, till, at last, they stood,

As now they stand, massy, and tall, and dark,

Fit shrine for humble worshipper to hold

Communion with his Maker. These dim vaults,

These winding aisles, of human pomp and pride

Report not. No fantastic carvings show

The boast of our vain race to change the form

Of thy fair works. But thou art here—thou fill’st

The solitude. Thou art in the soft winds

That run along the summit of these trees

In music; thou art in the cooler breath

That from the inmost darkness of the place

Comes, scarcely felt; the barky trunks, the ground,

The fresh moist ground, are all instinct with thee.

Here is continual worship;—Nature, here,

In the tranquility that thou dost love,

Enjoys thy presence. Noiselessly, around,

From perch to perch, the solitary bird

Passes; and yon clear spring, that, midst its herbs,

Wells softly forth and wandering steeps the roots

Of half the mighty forest, tells no tale

Of all the good it does. Thou hast not left

Thyself without a witness, in these shades,

Of thy perfections. Grandeur, strength, and grace

Are here to speak of thee. This mighty oak—

By whose immovable stem I stand and seem

Almost annihilated—not a prince,

In all that proud old world beyond the deep,

E’er wore his crown as lofty as he

Wears the green coronal of leaves with which

Thy hand has graced him. Nestled at his root

Is beauty, such as blooms not in the glare

Of the broad sun. That delicate forest flower

With scented breath, and look so like a smile,

Seems, as it issues from the shapeless mould,

An emanation of the indwelling Life,

A visible token of the upholding Love,

That are the soul of this wide universe.

My heart is awed within me when I think

Of the great miracle that still goes on,

In silence, round me—the perpetual work

Of thy creation, finished, yet renewed

Forever. Written on thy works I read

The lesson of thy own eternity.

Lo! all grow old and die—but see again,

How on the faltering footsteps of decay

Youth presses—-ever gay and beautiful youth

In all its beautiful forms. These lofty trees

Wave not less proudly that their ancestors

Moulder beneath them. Oh, there is not lost

One of earth’s charms: upon her bosom yet,

After the flight of untold centuries,

The freshness of her far beginning lies

And yet shall lie. Life mocks the idle hate

Of his arch enemy Death—yea, seats himself

Upon the tyrant’s throne—the sepulchre,

And of the triumphs of his ghastly foe

Makes his own nourishment. For he came forth

From thine own bosom, and shall have no end.

There have been holy men who hid themselves

Deep in the woody wilderness, and gave

Their lives to thought and prayer, till they outlived

The generation born with them, nor seemed

Less aged than the hoary trees and rocks

Around them;—and there have been holy men

Who deemed it were not well to pass life thus.

But let me often to these solitudes

Retire, and in thy presence reassure

My feeble virtue. Here its enemies,

The passions, at thy plainer footsteps shrink

And tremble and are still. Oh, God! when thou

Dost scare the world with falling thunderbolts, or fill,

With all the waters of the firmament,

The swift dark whirlwind that uproots the woods

And drowns the village; when, at thy call,

Uprises the great deep and throws himself

Upon the continent, and overwhelms

Its cities—who forgets not, at the sight

Of these tremendous tokens of thy power,

His pride, and lays his strifes and follies by?

Oh, from these sterner aspects of thy face

Spare me and mine, nor let us need the wrath

Of the mad unchained elements to teach

Who rules them. Be it ours to meditate,

In these calm shades, thy milder majesty,

And to the beautiful order of the works

Learn to conform the order of our lives.

———

The Gladness of Nature

IS this a time to be cloudy and sad,

When our mother Nature laughs around;

When even the deep blue heavens look glad,

And gladness breathes from the blossoming ground?

There are notes of joy from the hang-bird and wren,

And the gossip of swallows through all the sky;

The ground-squirrel gaily chirps by his den,

And the wilding bee hums merrily by.

The clouds are at play in the azure space,

And their shadows at play on the bright green vale,

And here they stretch to the frolic chase,

And there they roll on the easy gale.

There’s a dance of leaves in that aspen bower,

There’s a titter of winds in that beechen tree,

There’s a smile on the fruit, and a smile on the flower,

And a laugh from the brook that runs to the sea.

And look at the broad-faced sun, how he smiles

On the dewy earth that smiles in his ray,

On the leaping waters and gay young isles;

Ay, look, and he’ll smile thy gloom away.

_______________

Our Sky over the Roof…

Have a wonderful day…

G

This one of those mono-focused entries. The destruction of important archaeological sites always puts me in a twist, especially for something like a road. Argh. The Irish Gov’t is relentless with this drive up the Gowra Valley. Write the Irish Gov’t! This is a crime against all of our histories. What has happened in other parts of the world can be stopped here, and should be.

On The Menu:

Link o’ Rama!

Land of High Kings is battlefield for fight between heritage and growth

Protests over plan to route four-lane motorway through historic sites

Poetry:William Butler Yeats

_________

Link 0′ Rama!:

Crazy Fishing Style

Snack Time!

The Monkey Chow Diaries

Shroom: A cultural history of the magic mushroom by Andy Letcher

__________

Land of High Kings is battlefield for fight between heritage and growth

Protests over plan to route four-lane motorway through historic sites

Owen Bowcott, Ireland correspondent

Tuesday May 30, 2006

The Guardian

The panoramic view from the Hill of Tara reputedly encompasses half the counties of Ireland. Windswept, grass ramparts enclose the ancient seat of the country’s High Kings. Nearby stands the Mound of the Hostages, a megalithic passage tomb.

Soon a four-lane motorway, speeding traffic in and out of Dublin, will bulldoze its way through the landscape below the Iron Age earthworks. The first scars are already visible as archaeologists investigate the lush Gowra valley for the remains of a civilisation whose monuments pre-date many Egyptian pyramids. Unless survey teams uncover a new site of “national archaeological importance”, the controversial, government-backed route through County Meath is likely to go ahead.

The row over construction of the M3 has set Ireland’s marginalised, heritage lobby at odds with the republic’s newfound prosperity and the drive to upgrade its outdated infrastructure. It has also highlighted Ireland’s increasing reliance on the car.

The row is now entering a more embittered phase. Construction of the 36-mile road, connecting Clonee, on Dublin’s congested outskirts, to Kells, north-west of the capital, was scheduled to begin early this month. The national roads authority (NRA) is blaming legal action by environmental protesters for delays costing €1m (£680,000) a week and for the number of fatal car crashes attributable to the unmodernised road.

No date has yet been set for an appeal to the supreme court over the disputed route, and the NRA has cautioned its preferred tenderer, the Eurolink consortium, not to start work until court proceedings are completed. If the case goes to Europe, it could take years.

Vincent Salafia, a Dublin lawyer fighting the Tara M3 case, denied his action had caused delays. He said he could be amenable to “mediation” if “an independent archaeological expert [was] appointed to determine whether the M3 passes through the greater national monument of Tara [or] if any of the 38 sites [already unearthed constitute] national monuments in their own right”. He lost his case in the high court.

“The government is saying the Tara monument is just the tip of the hill,” he told the Guardian. “But there are outer defensive forts which are all part of a large, single [complex]. We want to force [the road] to move further away. A route further out to the west would be better.”

Boom

The issue has rocketed up the domestic political agenda as the economy has boomed and Dublin’s commuter belt has expanded far out into the Irish midlands. Tara is barely 30 miles from the capital but car journeys can take several hours at peak traffic times.

Ireland has not experienced direct action protests against road building but the campaign has attracted celebrity support, notably from the Hollywood actress Charlize Theron and her Irish partner, Stuart Townsend.

Muireann Ni Bhrolochain, a university lecturer in Celtic studies at Maynooth, is one of the leading opponents. “Tara is one of the premier sites in Europe,” she said. “Some of the tombs date back 4,000 years and the hill was used by the High Kings of all Ireland until 1200AD. I’m not anti-roads but we have the opportunity to learn from mistakes in other countries,” she said.

Given the success of single issue candidates in Ireland’s proportional representation system, there has been talk of an anti-M3 candidate at the general election anticipated next year. Several opposition parties, including Sinn Féin and the Green party, have backed the campaign. The Labour party’s environment spokesman, Eamon Gilmore, described the route as a “betrayal of the country’s Celtic heritage that will result in the destruction of the Tara landscape”.

Many question why the existing freight railway line, from nearby Navan via Drogheda to Dublin, has not been improved to relieve congestion.

“The government said it would take until 2015 to [rebuild] the direct line from Navan to Dublin [closed in the 1960s],” said a local campaigner, Proinsas MacFheargus. “But that railway was begun in 1859 and finished in 1862. So nowadays it would take three times as long to build? They won’t open up the line because it would conflict with the motorway’s tolling arrangements.”

Julitta Clancy, of the Meath Historical Society, did not join the legal action because the costs would have put her at risk of losing her home. “We went through the planning process and found it very frustrating,” she said. “There was no remedy. We tried to persuade the government that the road could be moved, producing a better transport and heritage solution. We have petitioned the European parliament on the rights of litigants to oppose infrastructure projects. The delays to the road are not due to us but to the fact that the route picked was rich in archaeology. These sites are part of our European collective memory. We have asked for independent monitoring of the excavations. At present if they find anything in the valley … it’s the NRA that decides whether it’s a national monument.”

The M3 will also slice through Dalgan Park, headquarters of the St Columban Missionaries in the Gowra valley. The estate’s woodland and riverside walks are open to the public.

“This road will be a violation of the sacredness and tranquility of the area,” said Father Pat Raleigh. “This was given in trust to us by the people of Ireland. People are not going to enjoy a greater quality of life commuting to Dublin.”

Last year 400 people died on the republic’s roads, about 100 deaths per million people. That rate is close to the European average. The litany of casualties, however, fills the daily papers. Last week the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, joined the controversy, complaining that protests meant that “not a thistle has yet been cut” on the motorway. In the meantime, he added, existing roads were still proving deadly. “Nine people have died in the past nine months.”

Saving lives

An NRA spokesman also accused protesters of endangering the public.”The sooner we have a modern motorway the sooner we will start saving lives,” he insisted. “Motorways, because of the traffic separation, are much safer. Construction was due to start at the beginning of May … but we have to wait until all the legal challenges have been exhausted.

“We are not going through or over the Hill of Tara. The M3 has taken into account the historical significance of the area. It was known from the outset. There were two years of public reviews. More than 2,000 issues were addressed. We have tried to minimise the visual impact. The local community supports [us] and wants the M3 to be built.”

Backstory

The oldest excavated monument is the Mound of the Hostages, constructed in 2500BC. Its name derives from Niall of the Nine Hostages, a king who held prisoners from every province of Ireland as well as from Britain and Europe. Legend has it that candidates for the high kingship had to drive their chariots towards two standing stones positioned close together which opened only for the rightful king. In historic times, Tara was the seat of power in Ireland; 142 High Kings reigned from the hilltop that was revered as a sacred place with a direct connection to the underworld. St Patrick visited the hill in 433AD to convert the pagan king. One interpretation of “Tara” says it means “place of great prospect”. An Israeli archaeological team excavated the hill in the 20th century, convinced the Arc of the Covenant was buried under the soil of County Meath.

_________

William Butler Yeats – Poems

A POET TO HIS BELOVED

I bring you with reverent hands

The books of my numberless dreams;

White woman that passion has worn

As the tide wears the dove-grey sands,

And with heart more old than the horn

That is brimmed from the pale fire of time:

White woman with numberless dreams

I bring you my passionate rhyme.

——

HE VALLEY OF THE BLACK PIG

The dews drop slowly and dreams gather: unknown spears

Suddenly hurtle before my dream-awakened eyes,

And then the clash of fallen horsemen and the cries

Of unknown perishing armies beat about my ears.

We who still labour by the cromlec on the shore,

The grey cairn on the hill, when day sinks drowned in dew,

Being weary of the world’s empires, bow down to you,

Master of the still stars and of the flaming door.

——-

HE WISHES FOR THE CLOTHS OF HEAVEN

HadI the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

——–

HE HEARS THE CRY OF THE SEDGE

I wander by the edge

Of this desolate lake

Where wind cries in the sedge:

Until the axle break

That keeps the stars in their round,

And hands hurl in the deep

The banners of East and West,

And the girdle of light is unbound,

Your breast will not lie by the breast

Of your beloved in sleep.

A short note, kinda tired and all…

Monday Evening… watched some of the Wicker Man, extended version tonight. Got to the last 5 minutes, and the DVD hiccuped. Enough to make you twist. It is as if it completely disappeared.

Argh.

Hoping to have some new music on the radio show soon. Stay Tuned!

On the Menu:

The Links For This Holy Day…. 80)

UFOs Over Sacred Sites

Poem & Lyrics: Robin Williamson

I hope you enjoy

Gwyllm

_________

The Links For This Holy Day…. 80)

Mrs. Malkin’s sacrifice

Is Michelle Malkin doing the Michael Jackson thing?

More Tasteless Misinterpetations: Dutch Evangelicals calls for pray-in against the Devil

Dan Brown sequel unveiled: ‘The Rolf Harris Code’

_________

UFOs Over Sacred Sites by Brad Steiger

In the early 1970s, numerous metaphysical groups began conducting pilgrimages to ancient sacred sites around the world. Travel agencies were soon formed that specialized in offering tour packages designed to attract those individuals seeking spiritual enlightenment, rather than exotic locales, on their two-week vacation. Many of these spiritual pilgrims returned to report dramatic sightings of UFOs hovering above sacred areas.

My wife Sherry and I believe them, for we have witnessed UFO activity at Petra, the ancient Nabatean city in Jordan; Machu Picchu, the Incan metropolis located high in the Andes; the Great Pyramid of Giza; the Sphinx; the mystical city of Luxor in Egypt; Masada, the hilltop fortress at the edge of the Judean Desert; the remains of the Essene community at Qumran; the transformational vortex areas of Sedona, Arizona; the powerful Kahuna shrines of Hawaii; the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco, Peru; Mt. Nebo, the legendary burial place of Moses; the ancient Incan healing springs at Tambo Machay; the gigantic, sprawling mystery lines in the Nazca Desert; the sacred Peruvian city of Ollantaytambo; tribal medicine power places in Santa Fe and the Four Corners area of the Southwest; and an ancient pre-Navajo monastery recently discovered on private property outside of Sedona.

Higher Awareness

In addition to having observed UFO activities at these sacred sites, a number of spiritual pilgrims also claimed a personal mystical encounter with otherworldly intelligences. To many of these UFO experiencers, the contact that they received during an encounter with an alien or multidimensional intelligence at these holy places served as an initiation into higher awareness. Their interaction with an intelligence that had previously existed far beyond their normal mundane world of ordinary expectations served as an impetus to awaken their consciousness to consider undreamed facets of the universe.

At some level of the universe, these experiencers declare, there is a Force that blends and interconnects each of us to the other—and to all other living things. On some level of consciousness, every living cell is in communication with every other living cell. The UFO experience, some maintain, may be yet another method the Universe has devised to get humankind in touch with aspects of self and of other life forms in the cosmos.

In recent years the hologram has been found to be a workable analogy to illustrate the concept of the Oneness of things. What is most remarkable about a hologram is that every single part of it contains all the information about the whole, just as the DNA in each cell of the body contains the blueprint for the entire physical structure. Split a hologram in half, shine a laser through it, and the whole object is reconstituted in three dimensions.

It has been postulated by some that the entire universe may be a single hologram. It may well be that information about all of the cosmos is encapsulated in each part of it. And that includes each of us human beings. We may all be unfolded images of aspects that exist in a higher reality.

UFO as Symbol

In Wholeness and the Implicate Order, physicist David Bohn of the University of London urges contemporary men and women to become aware that the modern view of the world has become fragmented, especially in the sciences, but also in the execution of our daily lives. In science’s efforts to divide our universe into stars and atoms, it has separated us from nature. In humankind’s penchant for dividing itself into races, nations, ethnic groups, political parties, and economic classes, we have fragmented ourselves from any underlying wholeness with each other.

Perhaps there is a Higher Intelligence that has been striving for centuries to bring our species into the Wholeness, the Oneness. Perhaps the circular shape of the UFO is a symbol of the wholeness of life in the universe.

Since the most ancient of times, tribal elders, priests, and religious orders have worked to develop traditions of spirituality to provide inspiration for life’s challenges. Rituals and rites were designed to reveal certain truths, explain various mysteries, and present a process by which initiation into a higher awareness might be achieved. Spiritually, the significance of initiation lies in the death of the egoistic, physical self and its rebirth in the divine, transcendental order.

In some sacred traditions, such special knowledge and power were kept secret and remained exclusive to the initiated. Other great teachers focused their energies on arousing the sleeping spiritual senses of their students, thereby bringing about enlightenment through the personal mystical experience. These wise masters were aware that the individual mystical experience was the catalyst that awakened the initiate to the Inner Voice that speaks of a sense of Oneness with All That Is and the wisdom that the Great Mystery dwells within each soul.

Many great spiritual teachers have declared that initiation may be bestowed upon the sincere seeker by entities that exist on higher planes of being. The UFOs that appear above sacred sites may combine ancient symbols of initiation with the space age. Among these images capable of elevating one to higher awareness are the following:

Egyptian Icons

The Sphinx, created by the oldest human priesthood, represents in its majestic combination of human head, bull’s body, lion’s paws, and eagle’s wings the living unity of nature’s kingdoms. These same four animal representations also manifest in the otherworldly entities in Ezekiel’s vision of a wheel within a wheel; and they are the four constituent elements of microcosm and macrocosm—water, earth, air, and fire, the foundations of esoteric science.

The answer to the ancient riddle of the Sphinx—What first walks on four legs, then two, then three?—is the human being, the divine agent that includes within itself all the elements and forces of nature. Achieving higher awareness with the Sphinx teaches the initiate, the experiencer, how human nature evolves from animal nature and develops “eagle wings” to travel to other dimensions of a greater reality.

Many spiritual teachers believe that the Great Pyramid was a holy place in which sacred initiations were conducted rather than a tomb for Egyptian royalty, and that the sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber was an agent of the initiate’s resurrection into the Light.

In recent years, dozens of UFO and metaphysical conferences have been held near the Great Pyramid and thousands of spiritual seekers have lain in the ancient sarcophagus to make contact with the essence of the alien or multidimensional beings that they believe actually constructed the pyramid as a kind of cosmic educational toy to stimulate the nascent human thinking process.

Biblical Figures

The mysterious figure of the prophet Elijah, messenger of God, who had no known parents, who came from nowhere to challenge the forces of darkness, and who returned to heaven in a fiery chariot has come to represent to certain UFO experiencers the very pinnacle of otherworldly wisdom and resolve. For many UFO contactees, Elijah has become their spiritual mentor, or, in some cases, his essence serves as the conduit that connects them with their own personal spiritual guide.

Melchizedek, King of Salem, priest of Elohim, initiated Father Abraham with wine served in a golden chalice. Jesus of Nazareth was also a priest of the Order of Melchizedek. Many UFO experiencers have expressed their belief that the beings that they have encountered came to Earth to perpetuate the Order of Melchizedek. These beings, many believe, hold the golden chalice of Melchizedek, a symbol of supreme spiritual transformation and divine inspiration, and give assurance that the Divine Being that exists above the soul dwells in each of us.

Since very ancient times, the image of a serpent gripping its tail in its mouth and becoming a living circle has represented the ineluctable cycle of universal life. The fact that so many UFO experiencers state that their contact was with reptilian entities presents little difficulty. Throughout human history, the serpent has represented wisdom, and vast numbers of early culture bearers were described as being reptilian in appearance. From these serpentine alien intelligences, UFO experiencers say that they have been able to envision the universe as a living whole, endowed with intelligence, soul, and will. The universe is but the reflection of an invisible order of cosmogenic forces and spiritual kingdoms, classes, and species which through their perpetual involution into matter produced the evolution of life.

Child of Man, Child of God, Cross of Stars

A great number of UFO experiencers insist that the alien intelligences with whom they have been in contact revere the sign of the cross and that the cross is a symbol of profound universal teachings. The ancient Doctrine of the Divine Word taught by Krishna in India, by the priests of Osiris in Egypt, by Pythagoras in Greece, and by the prophets of Israel reveals the great mystery of the Child of Man and the Child of God.

In Hindu, Egyptian, and Greek initiations, the term “Child of God” meant a consciousness identified with Divine Truth and a will capable of manifesting it. The universal sign of the Child of Man is that of four stars in the form of a cross.

This sign of ancient spiritual transformation was familiar to the priests of Egypt, preserved by the Essenes, and worshiped by the sons of Japhet as the symbol of earthly and heavenly fire. Native American medicine practitioners and other initiates have seen in the Cross of Stars the symbol of balance, the wholeness of the Great Mystery, the image of the Ineffable Being that reveals itself in the Cosmos.

Initiation

The ancient masters predicted a time when the great mass of earthbound humanity would pass to a higher dimension of consciousness to begin a new cycle of evolution. As we have seen since the 1950s, one of the principle messages of the UFO contactees has to do with Homo sapiens graduating to a higher vibratory state and moving into a higher dimension.

Both the ancient teachers of wisdom and the contemporary UFO experiencers state that in the series of cycles that constitute the planetary evolution of Earth, all humankind will one day develop the intellectual, spiritual, and transcendent principles that were previously manifested only in the Great Initiates. Such a development may require many more thousands of years and will likely bring about unimaginable changes in the overall condition of humankind. The supreme goal of spiritual transformation is to reproduce divine perfection in the soul. Only when spiritual seekers can say that they have acquired divine freedom and conquered fate can they become true prophets, seers, healers, and initiators. Only those who control themselves through spiritual discipline can teach others. Only those who have set themselves free can set others free.

In Healing States by Alberto Villoldo and Stanley Kripper, the shaman Don Eduardo speaks of the true meaning of initiation:

“Initiation represents a readiness to assume responsibility for the planet and for serving humanity.

“Initiation helps one to forge a link between oneself and an ancient lineage of knowledge.

“Initiation is not graduation. It is only the beginning of the great work that lies ahead of the initiate.

“Initiation is basically a salute to the spirit of a person whose consciousness has been awakened.”

And, as Don Eduardo emphasizes, initiations are taking place all the time: “Initiations can occur on the way to the supermarket or on top of the Himalayas. And the most powerful initiations…are bestowed from the hands of the masters who work directly from the ‘overworld.’ These initiations may occur in our dreams or during meditation or may take us by surprise…when we least expect them. But in the final analysis we make the choice to be initiated ourselves.”

(Brad Steiger is a professional writer who deals with the all aspects of the strange and unknown.)

_______________

Poem & Lyrics: Robin Williamson

Through the Horned Clouds Lyrics

I see your faces

blown through the horned clouds

in the silent cities

they call me so loud

come through the fire

come through the foam

come at the world’s night

call the herds home

dearest child dearest child

Most High

please don’t let our fancy die

till all the grapes are gathered from the vine

when you come

will you sound the harp

give to the blind

cat’s eyes in the dark

o will we know you for what you are

you who have come so far

sweetest fair sweetest fair

Most High

don’t let them cut that ladder before its time

for all the grapes to be gathered from the vine

He comes again

She comes again

through the mist of time

through the mist of rain

no more words my heart brims over

in the sea of circustance

rows for the rocky shore

we who have sworn

by the dead and the unborn

wheels within wheels

O Most High.

——-

Me and the mad girl lyrics

I learned in school

That I was mad if they were sane, you see

They had to beat me black and blue

They said it hurt them more than me

But I learned who were my enemies

and I learned who were my friends

I learned to read between the lines

When I was 10

I’d do anything to get out of school

Away from the teacher’s stick

To shoot streetlamps with my slingshot

Smoke cigarettes and get sick

Steal apples in September

Fight shadows in green June

Or just sit and smell the burning leaves

Of an autumns afternoon

Of an autumns afternoon

Once I met a mad girl

As she came hopping through the furze

Her clothes all stuck with fluff and stuff

Bearded barley and bristly burrs

and I was high among the branches green

and she, she hadn’t seen me there

As she went shuffling with her shadow

and snatching at the air

Wild weeds, wilting

Were twined all in her curls

and I could tell by her mad blue eyes

She was a mad girl

She was thin as any sparrow

Her song it had no tune

Just scuffling through the piney glades

Of a summer’s afternoon

Of a summer’s afternoon

I came dropping through the branches down

She started round in surprise and fear

I don’t know what I had to say

But something I knew she had to hear

She picked up a piece of flint

Drew back her arm and flung it high

Not a bad throw that cut my cheek

Just below the eye

Mad girl, mad girl

Before you ran away

I knew you were as mad as me

and as sane as a summer’s day

Mad girl, mad girl

We both were wrong again

You took me for an anemy

and I took you for a friend

I took you for a friend…

——

Witches Hat

Certainly

The children have seen them

In quiet places where the moss grows green

Coloured shells

Jangle together

The wind is cold, the year is old

The trees whisper together

And bent in the wind they lean

If I was a witches hat

Sitting on her head like a paraffin stove

I’d fly away and be a bat

Across the air I would rove

Stepping like a tightrope walker

Putting one foot after another

Wearing black cherries for rings

If I was a witches hat

Sitting on her head like a telegraph pole

Id fly away and be a bat

Across the air I would roll

Stepping like a tightrope walker

Putting one foot after another

Wearing black cherries for rings

——

When Evening Shadow Fall

When evening shadow fall

All tongues at last will tire of bustling trade

The brightest eye at last grows dull

And the finest flowers fade

Life is short o life is sweet

Sweeter is the love you gave to me

Sure by cold death we two must parted be

But life is sweet

When evening shadows fall

Gaze long upon the lamps that light the sky

And sing again that oldest song of all

Poor mortals born to die

________

Biography

Between 1966 and 1974, Robin Williamson was one half of the Incredible String Band, but his career did not founder after ISB’s demise, although it might be said to have taken a few quirky turns, including collaboration on a spy novel and the publication of a bizarre semi-autobiography. Away from these literary avocations, Williamson formed the Far Cry Ceilidh Band with Stan Schnier and Mark Simos, but never made it to the recording studio. In 1976, Williamson met with harpist Sylvia Wood, and together with Chris Caswell and Jerry McMillian, they formed Robin Williamson and His Merry Band. Between 1977 and 1979, they released three albums: the highly traditional Journey’s Edge in 1977, American Stonehenge in 1978, and A Glint at the Kindling in 1979, which featured the epic historical cycle, “Five Denials on Merlin’s Grave.” After the breakup of the Merry Band, Williamson started to tour solo, offering highly ambient sets dominated by traditional stories set to song. Releases of this period include Songs of Love and Parting and the dedicated folklorist’s Legacy of the Scotish Harpers. Williamson’s concern with the British bardic tradition also manifested itself in several books and tapes containing spoken renditions of traditional tales. Subsequent projects have seen the the prolific Williamson recording tapes and discs of music for children and pouring his energies into environmental projects for the Scottish Wildlife Trust. ~ Leon Jackson, All Music Guide

______

Jeremy Sneaks Up On The Pentax….

Wonderful day here in Portland. Rain, Sun, more Sun! The trials of the “sunbreak”… a term used in the NW for those moments when the sun peaks through… It rained for some 8 hours straight last night…

A Happy Birthday To My Sister Rebecca! (Call ya soon!)

On the Menu:

The Links

Pharmako Gnosis Tour Part II – The Party

Poetry: Gary Snyder Part II

I hope you enjoy…..

Gwyllm

___________

The Links:

Enter the dragons

BeatHippieRaver

Why We Fight

___________

Pharmako Gnosis Tour Part II – The Party

Dale comes in from the reading, finding a rather full house to his bemusement….

Mix Master Morgan, Mary, and PK enjoying Dales’ offering for the gathering: Absinthe….. a lovely green, oh yes….!

Gayle telling stories about her times in Equador. She is heading back soon from what I gather….

Dale mixing up the medicine for all of the guest…

Jeremy and Laura relaxing half way through the gathering….

On past Midnight…… 80) Cymon, Ed, Mike H, and friends around the table in the Dining Room….

A lovely night……

___________

Poetry: Gary Snyder Part II

Long Hair

Hunting Season:

Once every year, the Deer catch human beings. They

do various things which irresistibly draw men near them;

each one selects a certain man. The Deer shoots the man,

who is then compelled to skin it and carry its meat home

and eat it. Then the deer is inside the man. He waits and

hides in there, but the man doesn’t know it. When

enough Deer have occupied enough men, they will strike all

at once. The men who don’t have Deer in them will

also be taken by surprise, and everything will change some.

This is called “takeover from inside”.

Deer Trails:

Deer trails run on the side hills

cross country access roads

dirt ruts to bone-white

board house ranches,

tumbled down.

Waist high through manzanita,

Through sticky, prickly, crackling

gold dry summer grass.

Deer trails lead to water,

Lead sideways all ways

Narrowing down to one best path –

And split –

And fade away to nowhere.

Deer trails slide under freeways

slip into cities

swing back and forth in crops and orchards

run up the sides of schools!

Deer spoor and crisscross dusty tracks

Are in the house: and coming out the walls:

And deer bound through my hair.

——

Manzanita

Before dawn the coyotes

weave medicine songs

dream nets — spirit baskets –

milky way music

they cook young girls with

to be woman;

or the whirling dance of

striped boys –

At moon-set the pines are gold-purple

Just before sunrise.

The dog hastens into the undergrowth

Comes back panting

Huge, on the small dry flowers.

A woodpecker

Drums and echoes

Across the still meadow

One man draws, and releases an arrow

Humming, flat,

Misses a gray stump, and splitting

A smooth red twisty manzanita bough.

Manzanita the tips in fruit,

Clusters of hard green berries

The longer you look

The bigger they seem,

`little apples’

—————-

For a Stone Girl at Sanchi

half asleep on the cold grass

night rain flicking the maples

under a black bowl upside-down

on a flat land

on a wobbling speck

smaller than stars,

space,

the size of a seed,

hollow as bird skulls.

light flies across it

–never is seen.

a big rock weatherd funny,

old tree trunks turnd stone,

split rocks and find clams.

all that time

loving;

two flesh persons changing,

clung to, doorframes

notions, spear-hafts

in a rubble of years.

touching,

this dream pops. it was real:

and it lasted forever.

————

this poem is for bear

“As for me I am a child of the god of the mountains.”

A bear down under the cliff.

She is eating huckleberries.

They are ripe now

Soon it will snow, and she

Or maybe he, will crawl into a hole

And sleep. You can see

Huckleberries in bearshit if you

Look, this time of year

If I sneak up on the bear

It will grunt and run

The others had all gone down

From the blackberry brambles, but one girl

Spilled her basket, and was picking up her

Berries in the dark.

A tall man stood in the shadow, took her arm,

Led her to his home. He was a bear.

In a house under the mountain

She gave birth to slick dark children

With sharp teeth, and lived in the hollow

Mountain many years.

snare a bear: call him out:

honey-eater

forest apple

light-foot

Old man in the fur coat, Bear! come out!

Die of your own choice!

Grandfather black-food!

this girl married a bear

Who rules in the mountains, Bear!

you have eaten many berries

you have caught many fish

you have frightened many people

Twelve species north of Mexico

Sucking their paws in the long winter

Tearing the high-strung caches down

Whining, crying, jacking off

(Odysseus was a bear)

Bear-cubs gnawing the soft tits

Teeth gritted, eyes screwed tight

but she let them.

Til her brothers found the place

Chased her husband up the gorge

Cornered him in the rocks.

Song of the snared bear:

“Give me my belt.

“I am near death.

“I came from the mountain caves

“At the headwaters,

“The small streams there

“Are all dried up.

– I think I’ll go hunt bears.

“hunt bears?

Why shit Snyder.

You couldn’t hit a bear in the ass

with a handful of rice!”

Pharmako Gnosis World Tour “2006″

Pharmako Gnosis World Tour Bus (Hey Jeremy!)

_____________

The Links:

Plastic Martians…

Beware of Laughing At The Man Wearing New Balance Sneakers

Gene experts say we are not entirely human

Alien Skulls: The Great Debate

Museum of Computer Art…

_______________

The Talk at Powells’, June 1st 2006

Jan Introducing Dale…

Jan has been on the Portland book scene for many a year. She used to work at Looking Glass Books, arraigning speaking engagements for many a writer, including Terence McKenna and Martin Prechtel…

She moved over to Powell’s a few years back, and it is always a pleasure seeing her when we cruise by the store on Hawthorne…

Dale Speaking…

Dale spoke first on what he calls, “Horizon Anarchism” dealing with changes that will take place over millenia as opposed to rapid/spiked changes that most people look at as signpost..

The talk went on from there, centered on Pharmako Gnosis… with a reading of one of my favourite chapters…(on DMT) It comes across nicely when it is spoken, the poetic side leaps out in rich detail…

Enraptured….

A nice audience. Good comments, and lots of laughter. In the audience were friends of Dales’ back some 36 years to when they all lived on Gary Snyders’ land in the Sierras. There were several members of Earth Rites there, and many people who I recognized from events around town. Over all, a nice balance…. of smiling faces!

Dale going into detail about the concepts of Horizon Anarchism, and how the state has been perpetuated from so long ago…

The talk was very enjoyable. You will be able to hear it on Earth Rites some time next week I believe, as Jeremy will be sending it up for us to put up for your enjoyment

More tomorrow or Monday, stay tuned! 80}

Gwyllm

_______________

Poetry: Gary Snyder

second shaman song

Squat in swamp shadows.

mosquitoes sting;

high light in cedar above.

Crouched in a dry vain frame

— thirst for cold snow

— green slime of bone marrow

Seawater fills each eye

Quivering in nerve and muscle

Hung in the pelvic cradle

Bones propped against roots

A blind flicker of nerve

Still hand moves out alone

Flowering and leafing

turning to quartz

Streaked rock congestion of karma

The long body of the swamp.

A mud-streaked thigh.

Dying carp biting air

in the damp grass,

River recedes. No matter.

Limp fish sleep in the weeds

The sun dries me as I dance

———

Civilization

Those are the people who do complicated things.

they’ll grab us by the thousands

and put us to work.

World’s going to hell, with all these

villages and trails.

Wild duck flocks aren’t

what they used to be.

Aurochs grow rare.

Fetch me my feathers and amber

A small cricket

on the typescript page of

“Kyoto born in spring song”

grooms himself

in time with The Well-Tempered Clavier.

I quit typing and watch him through a glass.

How well articulated! How neat!

Nobody understands the ANIMAL KINGDOM.

When creeks are full

The poems flow

When creeks are down

We heap stones.

———

The Spring

Beating asphalt into highway potholes

pickup truck we’d loaded

road repair stock shed & yard

a day so hot the asphalt went in soft.

pipe and steel plate tamper

took turns at by hand

then drive the truck rear wheel

a few times back and forth across the fill–

finish it off with bitchmo around the edge.

the foreman said let’s get a drink

& drove through the woods and flower fields

shovels clattering in back

into a black grove by a cliff

a rocked in pool

feeding a fern ravine

tin can to drink

numbing the hand and cramping in the gut

surging through the fingers from below

& dark here–

let’s get back to the truck

get back on the job.

—–

Regarding Wave

The voice of the Dharma

the voice

now

A shimmering bell

through all.

Every hill, still.

Every tree alive. Every leaf.

All the slopes flow.

old woods, new seedlings,

tall grasses plumes.

Dark hollows; peaks of light.

wind stirs the cool side

Each leaf living.

All the hills.

The Voice

is a wife

to

him still.

Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water.

The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken.

Although its light is wide and great,

The moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide.

The whole moon and the entire sky

Are reflected in one dewdrop on the grass.

Dogen

__________

Excellent Talk at Powell’s! Nice Gathering after, Pictures tomorrow, and oh yes, excellent Absinthe! Lots of laughs. Wish you were there!

Pax,

Gwyllm

On The Menu:

The Links

The Article: Summer Land – The Periodic Autonomous Zone – HAKIM BEY

Poetry: Ancient Breton Poetry

__________

The Links:

Is It Raining Aliens?

Dock Ellis Says He Pitched 1970 No-Hitter Under The Influence of LSD

Music Eases Perception Of Chronic Pain

Lovely Stuff…

___________

Summer Land – The Periodic Autonomous Zone

HAKIM BEY

I would guess that the old life way of transhumancy always proved both enjoyable and practical, at least in small scale economies. Twice a year you get up and move, travel, change your life and even your diet – – a taste of nomadic freedom. But always the same two places. One place is typically more heimlich than the other — the village, the hearth; while the other place is typically wilder than the first, and this one might be called the place of Desire, of Summer.

In the tales of Finn Mac Cumal and his Fenian band we nearly always meet them at this wilder end of the spectrum, the greenwood, the landscape of the hunt which reaches “back” in time to a more golden pre-agricultural age, and also “aslant” in time — to Tir nan Og, the Land of Summer, realm of the Tuatha de Danaan, who are both the Dead and the Fairies. We forget that the Fenians spent only half the year free in the forests. They were like transhumants — they owed the other half of the year to work (military service) for the King. In this respect they resembled the Irish peasants, who until recently practiced pastoral transhumancy. Traces may survive even now. Irish folklore certainly preserves the image of this Summertime freedom; “Nature” always seems somehow interlaced and even confused with “Culture” in Irish tradition (as in the zoomorphic capitals of the Book of Kells), in ways which have often impressed the foreign observer as uniquely Irish.

Elizabethan colonists compared native Irish with native American Indians: — both were perceived as “wild” — and both received the same treatment from the English. Transhumancy gives a people the chance to remain in touch with Nature in its “merrie” aspect (as Morton of Merrymount would have phrased it), even if that people’s economic life is virtually defined by agriculture, peonage, and drudgery. This explains the “radical” aspect of poaching, from Robin Hood to the Black Laws, and also the universal human romanticization of hunting.

This romanticism begins already even in hunter/gatherer societies, where the prestige (and fun) of the hunt provides far less food for the tribe than the (comparative) drudgery of gathering — and the romanticism continues to this day. I think of my two late uncles, who cultivated the country romance of the hunt like characters out of Turgeniev’s Sketchbook. I find it impossible to despise this romanticism, which appears to me so clearly as the last remnant of Paleolithic freedom in a world given over to the gridwork of the plow — and the highway.

In effect Romanticism itself can be said to revolve (if not resolve) around this tension in the Nature/Culture spectrum. The transhumant must be a sort of practical romantic, an “ambulatory schizophrenic” who functions as a personality, “split” between the magnetic poles, and ambulating back and forth according to the weather.

Winter………………………………Summer

village……………………………….mountain or forest

work…………. Pivot:……………..play

agriculture……….festival………..pastoralism/hunt

fireside………(axes of …………. ” bothy” (the hut of greenery)

narrative…………the year) ……..adventure

reverie………………………………desire

etc.

When agriculture reproduces itself, through a process of further rationalization and abstraction, and creates industrial culture, then the split widens beyond breaching. The transhumants lose the basic structure of their economy through enclosure of village commons and loss of “forest rights” or traditional grazing lands. Pure nomads, who provide (as Ibn Khaldun recognized) a necessary dialectic tension in traditional (agricultural) societies, become “redundant” in the Industrial regime — but they do not disappear. The Tinkers and Travelers still roam around Ireland as in the 18th and 19th centuries (and perhaps even in prehistory). But the transhumants are simply doomed. The liminal space they once occupied, in between settlement and nomadry, in between Culture and Nature, has simply been erased.

The psychic space of transhumancy however cannot be so easily disappeared. No sooner does it vanish from the map but it re-appears in Romanticism — in the new-found appreciation for landscape and even wilderness, in “Nature worship” and Naturphilosophie, in tours of the Alps, in the Parks movement, in picnics, in nudist camps, in the Summer cottage, even in the Summer vacation. Nowadays “reformers’ want children to attend school year round, and they criticize the summer vacation of two or three months as an inefficient remnant of an agricultural economy. But from the (romantic) viewpoint of children, summer is sacred to freedom — a temporary (but periodic) autonomous zone. Children are diehard transhumants.

To a certain extent — and from a certain point of view — we now inhabit a “post-industrial” world; and it has been noted that precisely to the extent that this is so, “nomadism” has reappeared. This has its good aspects (as in Deluze and Guattari) and its bad aspects — as for instance in tourism. But what has become of transhumancy in this new context? What situations might we elucidate by seeking out its traces?

A very clear trace or remnant of psychic transhumancy expressed itself in the 1920’2 – 1950′s in America as the summer camp movement. A great many of these camps were inspired by various progressive and radical tendencies — naturism, communism and anarchism, Reicheanism and other psychological schools, oriental mysticism, spiritualism — a plethora of “marginal” forces. The utopian rural commune like Brook Farm was diluted into a low-cost summer vacation for cranks. During the same period countless thousands of “vacation communities” were created, with cabins only a bit less primitive than those of the camps. My family owns one in a decaying lakeside resort-town in Upstate New York, where all the streets are named after Indians, forests, wild animals. These humble communities represent the “individualist” or entrepreneurial version of the summer camp’s communalism; but even now some vestiges of seasonal communitarian spirit survive in them. As for the camps, eventually the majority began to cater to children, those natural citizens of summer. As the price of sheer hedonistic idleness went up and up, soon only the children of the well-to-do could afford camp — and then not even them. One by one the camps began to close, a slow decline over the 70′s, 80′s, and 90′s. Desperate measures are still attempted (“Marxist Computer Slim-down Camp”; neo-pagan gatherings and holistic seminars, etc.) — but by now the Summer Camp almost seems like an anachronism.

Now the Summer Camp may be an extremely watered-down version of the utopia of transhumancy — much less the utopia of utopia! — but I would argue that it is worth defending, or rather, worth re-organizing. If the old economics failed to support it, perhaps a new economics can be envisioned and realized. In fact such a tendency has already appeared. As old Summer Camps go bankrupt and come on the market, a few are acquired by groups who try to preserve them as camps (with perhaps some year-round residents), either as private or semi-private summer “communes”. Some of these neo-camps will simply serve as vacation retreats for the groups who acquire them; but others will need extra funding, and will thus be drawn into experiments in subsistence gardening, craft work, conference-organizing, cultural events, or some other semi-public function. In this latter case we can speak of a neo-transhumancy, since the camp will serve not simply as a space of “leisure” but also as a space of “work” for the primary participants.

Summer “work” appears to the transhumant as a kind of “play” by comparison with village labor. Pastoralism leaves time for some arcadian pleasures unknown to full-time agriculture or industry; and the hunt is pure sport. (Play is the point of the hunt; “game” is a bonus.) In somewhat the same way the neo-summer camp will have to “work” to get by, but its labor will be “self-managed” and “self-owned” to a greater extent than Winter’s wages, and it will be work of a “festal” nature — “recreation”, hopefully in the original sense of the word — or even “creation”. (Artists and craftsfolk make good citizens of Summer.)

If the economy determined the downfall of the old summer camp movement, the state played a role as well: — regulations, restrictions, precautions, insurance requirements, codes, etc., helped raise the real cost of running a camp above the level of feasibility. One might almost begin to suspect that “the State” somehow felt the camp movement as some vague sort of threat. For one thing, camps escape the daily gaze of control, and are removed from the flow of commodities and information. Then too, camps are suspiciously communal, focuses of possible resistance to the alienation and atomization of consumerism and “modern democracy.”

Camps have an erotic subversiveness to them, as every ex-Summer-camper will testify, a wildness and laxness of super-ego, an air of Misrule, of Midsummer Night’s dreams, skinny-dipping, the crush, the languor of July. The camp cannot be reconciled to the ideal of the industrial production of leisure (“holiday package”) and the reproduction and simulation of summer as a theme park, the vacation process, the systematic “emptying-out” of all difference, all authentic desire.

Inasmuch as the State distrusts the camp, the neo-camp will (to that extent) need to cultivate certain forms of invisibility or social camouflage. One possible disguise for the neo-camp however would be to assume the precise guise of an old-fashioned half-bankrupt summer camp. After all, the Summer camp is not illegal, and if your group can meet the insurance requirements, why not fit yourselves into an already-existing archetype? Provided you’re not running a kids’ camp, or an openly-proclaimed Anarcho-Nudist retreat, you might be able to pass yourselves off as just another bunch of harmless make-believe Indians with a month’s vacation to waste.

My defense of the summer (neo-)camp is based on two simple premises: — one, a month or two of relative freedom is better than absolutely none; two, it’s affordable. I’m assuming that your group is not made up of “nomads” or full-time freedom fighters, but of people who need to work for a living or are stuck in a city or ‘burb most of the year — potential transhumnats.

You want something more than a summer vacation – you want a summer community. Splashing in a humble Adirondack lake is more pleasureable to you than Disney World — provided you can do it with the people you like. Sharing the costs makes it possible, but also makes it an adventure in communicativeness and mutual enhancement. Making the place pay for itself or even turn a little off-the-books profit would transform your group into true neo-transhumants, with two economic focuses in your lives. Even if you seek legal status (as a tax-exempt educational center religious retreat, or Summer camp) your proprietorship affords you a certain degree of privacy which — if used discreetly — can exceed all legal bounds in terms of sex, nudity, drugs, or pagan excess. As long as you don’t frighten the horses or challenge local interests, you’re simply another bunch of “Summer people”, and as such expected to be a bit weird.

Of all the versions of the TAZ imagined so far, this “periodic” or seasonal zone is most open to criticism as a social palliative or an “Anarchist Club Med.: It’s saved from mere selfishness however by the necessary fact of its self-organization. Your group must create the zone — you can’t buy it pre-packaged from some tourist agency. The summer camp can’t be the social “Revolution”, true enough. I suppose it could be called a training-camp for the Uprising, but this sounds too earnest and pretentious. I would prefer simply to point to the desperation felt by many for just a taste of autonomy, in the context of a valid romanticism of Nature. Not everyone can be a neo-nomad — but why not at least a neo-transhumant? What if the uprising doesn’t come? Are we never to regain the land of summer even for a month? Never vanish from the grid even for a moment? The summer camp is not the war, not even a strategy — but it is a tactic. And unmediated pleasure, after all, is still its own excuse.

___________

Ancient Breton Poetry

The Dance of the Sword.

(Ha Korol ar C’Hieze.)

Blood, wine, and glee

Sun, to thee,–

Blood, wine, and glee!

Fire! fire! steel, Oh! steel!

Fire, fire! steel and fire!

Oak! oak, earth, and waves!

Waves, oak, earth and oak!

Glee of dance and song,

And battle-throng,–

Battle, dance, and song!

Fire! fire! steel, etc.

Let the sword blades swing

In a ring,–

Let the sword blades swing!

Fire! fire! steel, etc.

Song of the blue steel,

Death to feel,–

Song of the blue steel!

Fire! fire! steel, etc.

Fight, whereof the sword

Is the Lord,–

Fight of the fell sword!

Fire! fire! steel, etc.

Sword, thou mighty king

Of battle’s ring,–

Sword thou mighty king!

Fire! fire! steel, etc.

With the rainbow’s light

Be thou bright,–

With the rainbow’s light!

Fire! fire! steel, Oh! steel!

Fire, fire! steel and fire!

Oak! oak, earth and waves!

Waves, oak, earth, and oak!

The Lord Nann and the Fairy (Aotron Nann Hag ar Gorrigan)

The good Lord Nann and his fair bride

Were young when wedlock’s knot was tied–

Were young when death did them divide.

But yesterday that lady fair

Two babes as white as snow did bear;

A man-child and a girl they were.

“Now, say what is thy heart’s desire,

For making me a man-child’s sire?

‘Tis thine, whate’er thou may’st require,–

“What food soe’er thee lists to take,

Meat of the woodcock from the lake,

Meat of the wild deer from the brake.”

“Oh, the meat of the deer is dainty food!

To eat thereof would do me good,

But I grudge to send thee to the wood.”

The Lord of Nann, when this he heard,

Hath gripp’d his oak spear with never a word;

His bonny black horse he hath leap’d upon,

And forth to the greenwood hath he gone.

By the skirts of the wood as he did go,

He was ware of a hind as white as snow.

Oh, fast she ran, and fast he rode,

That the earth it shook where his horse-hoofs trode.

Oh, fast he rode, and fast she ran,

That the sweat to drop from his brow began–

That the sweat on his horse’s flank stood white;

So he rode and rode till the fall o’ the night.

When he came to a stream that fed a lawn,

Hard by the grot of a Corrigaun.

The grass grew thick by the streamlet’s brink,

And he lighted down off his horse to drink.

The Corrigaun sat by the fountain fair,

A-combing her long and yellow hair.

A-combing her hair with a comb of gold,–

(Not poor, I trow, are those maidens cold).–

“Now who’s the bold wight that dares come here

To trouble my fairy fountain clear?

Either thou straight shall wed with me,

Or pine for four long years and three;

Or dead in three days’ space shall be.”

“I will not wed with thee, I ween,

For wedded man a year I’ve been;

“Nor yet for seven years will I pine,

Nor die in three days for spell of thine;

“For spell of thine I will not die,

But when it pleaseth God on high.

“But here, and now, I’d leave my life,

Ere take a Corrigaun to wife.

*

“O mother, mothe! for love of me,

Now make my bed, and speedily,

For I am sick as a man can be.

“Oh, never the tale to my lady tell;

Three days and ye’ll hear my passing bell;

The Corrigaun hath cast her spell.”

Three days they pass’d, three days were sped,

To her mother-in-law the ladye said:

“Now tell me, madam, now tell me, pray,

Wherefore the death-bells toll to-day?

“Why chaunt the priests in the street below,

All clad in their vestments white as snow?”

“A strange poor man, who harbour’d here,

He died last night, my daughter dear.”

“But tell me, madam, my lord, your son

My husband-whither is he gone?”

“But to the town, my child, he’s gone;

And at your side he’ll be back anon.”

“What gown for my churching were’t best to wear,

My gown of grain, or of watchet fair?”

“The fashion of late, my child, hath grown,

That women for churching black should don.”

As through the churchyard porch she stept,

She saw the grave where her husband slept

“Who of our blood is lately dead,

That our ground is new raked and spread?”

The truth I may no more forbear,

My son–your own poor lord–lies there!”

She threw herself on her knees amain,

And from her knees neer rose again.

That night they laid her, dead and cold,

Beside her lord, beneath the mould

When, lo! –a marvel to behold!–

Next morn from the grave two oak-trees fair,

Shot lusty boughs high up in air;

And in their boughs–oh wondrous sight!–

Two happy doves, all snowy white–

That sang, as ever the morn did rise,

And then flew up–into the skies!

————

Alain the Fox

The bearded fox is yelping, yelp, yelping through the glades;

Woe to the foreign rabbits! His eyes are two keen blades.

His teeth are keen; his feet are swift; his nails are red with blood.

Alain the fox is yelping war: yelp, yelping in the wood.

The Bretons making sharp their arms of terror I did see,

It was on cuirasses of Gaul, not stones of Brittany.

The Bretons reaping did I see, upon the fields of war;

It was not notched reaping-hooks, but swords of steel they bore.

They reapt no wheat of our own land, they reaped not our rye;

But the beardless ears, the beardless ears of Gaul and Saxony.

I saw upon the threshing-floor the Bretons threshing corn:

I saw the beaten chaff fly out from beardless ears off-torn.

It was not with their wooden flails the Bretons thresht the wheat;

But with their iron boar-spears and with their horses’ feet.

I heard the cry when threshing’s done, the joy-cry onward borne

Far, far from Mont-Saint-Michel to the valleys of Elorn:

From the abbey of Saint Gildas far on to the Land’s-End rocks.

In Brittany’s four corners give a glory to the Fox!

From age to age give glory to the Fox a thousand times!

But weep ye for the rhymer, though he recollect his rhymes!

For he that sang this song the first since then hath never sung :

Ah me, alas! Unhappy man! The Gauls cut out his tongue.

But though no more he hath a tongue, a heart is always his:

He has both hand and heart to shoot his arrowy melodies.

—–

Bran (The Crow.)

Wounded full sore is Bran the knight ;

For he was at Kerloan fight;

At Kerloan fight, by wild seashore

Was Bran-Vor’s grandson wounded sore;

And, though we gained the victory,

Was captive borne beyond the sea.

He when he came beyond the sea,

In the close keep wept bitterly.

“They leap at home with joyous cry

While, woe is me, in bed I lie.

Could I but find a messenger,

Who to my mother news would bear!”

They quickly found a messenger

His best thus gave the warrior:

“Heed thou to dress in other guise,

My messenger, dress beggar-wise!

Take thou my ring, my ring of gold,

That she thy news as truth may hold!

Unto my country straightway go,

It to my lady mother show!

Should she come free her son from hold,

A flag of white do thou unfold!I

But if with thee she come not back,

Unfurl, ah me, a pennon black!

So, when to Leon-land he came,

At supper table sat the dame,

At table with her family,

The harpers playing as should be.

“Dame of the castle, hail! I bring

From Bran your son this golden ring,

His golden ring and letter too;

Read it, oh read it, straightway through!

“Ye harpers, cease ye, play no more,

For with great grief my heart is sore!

My son (cease harpers, play no more!)

In prison, and I did not know!

Prepare to-night a ship for me!

To-morrow I go across the sea.”

The morning of the next, next day

The Lord Bran questioned, as he lay:

“Sentinel, sentinel, soothly say!

Seest thou no vessel on its way?”

“My lord the knight, I nought espy

Except the great sea and the sky.”

The Lord Bran askt him yet once more,

Whenas the day’s course half was o’er;

“Sentinel, sentinel, soothly say!

Seest thou no vessel on its way?”

“I can see nothing, my lord the knight,

Except the sea-birds i’ their flight.”

The Lord Bran askt him yet again,

Whenas the day was on the wane;

“Sentinel, sentinel, soothly say!

Seest thou no vessel on its way?”

Then that false sentinel, the while

Smiling a mischief-working smile;

“I see afar a misty form–

A ship sore beaten by the storm.”

“The flag? Quick give the answer back!

The banner? Is it white or black?”

“Far as I see, ’tis black, Sir knight,

I swear it by the coal’s red light.”

When this the sorrowing knight had heard

Again he never spoke a word;

But turn’d aside his visage wan;

And then the fever fit began.

Now of the townsmen askt the dame,

When at the last to shore she came,

“What is the news here, townsmen, tell!

That thus I hear them toll the bell?”

An aged man the lady heard,

And thus he answer’d to her word:

“We in the prison held a knight;

And he hath died here in the night.”

Scarcely to end his words were brought,

When the high tower that lady sought;

Shedding salt tears and running fast,

Her white hair scatter’d in the blast,

So that the townsmen wonderingly

Full sorely marvell’d her to see;

Whenas they saw a lady strange,

Through their streets so sadly range

Each one in thought did musing stand;

“Who is the lady, from what land?”

Soon as the donjon’s foot she reacht,

The porter that poor dame beseecht;

“Ope, quickly ope, the gate for me!

My son! My son! Him would I see!”

Slowly the great gate open drew;

Herself upon her son she threw,

Close in her arms his corpse to strain,

The lady never rose again.

There is a tree, that doth look o’er

From Kerloan’s battle-field to th’ shore;

An oak. Before great Evan’s face

The Saxons fled in that same place.

Upon that oak in clear moonlight,

Together come the birds at night;

Black birds and white, but sea birds all;

On each one’s brow a blood-stain small,

With them a raven gray and old;

With her a crow comes young and bold.

Both with soil’d wings, both wearied are;

They come beyond the seas from far:

And the birds sing so lovelily

That silence comes on the great sea.

All sing in concert sweet and low

Except the raven and the crow.

Once was the crow heard murmuring:

“Sing, little birds, ye well may sing!

Sing, for this is your own countrie!

Ye died not far from Brittany!”

In Honor of Walt Whitman… Happy Birthday Walt!

For Walt, who gave The US… its first real Poetic Voice. His works are still very fresh, and wonderful. Walt gave us a new way of speaking the verse. His touch is everywhere from Lamont to Allen G., and beyond. We are all in his debt, for the changes he wrought…

A Walt Quote: “A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books”.

oh.. and one more: “I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease… observing a spear of summer grass.”

Great stuff indeed.

———

It is also the 10th anniversary of Tim Leary’s passing onto the next Bardo. Here is to you Tim, and to Rosemary as well. Hope the journey is a good one, we miss ya Tim. Thanks for blazing a trail that some of us still try to follow, and thank you for your concern with the species and the planet. May you be reborn even more conscious than you were.

Here it is Wednesday night and all. Slight drizzle in Portland, humid but lovely. I did a search on a person I knew in Boulder back in 66-67… strange, he was closely associated with Ira Cohen of all people… small world.

Here is to hoping that we will see you at Powell’s on this Thursday at 7:00 PM for Dale Pendells’ visit and book signing… I can promise you that it is going to be a very good event.

On The Grill for tonight:

The Links

The Article: Ipomoea violacea : from PHARMAKO/GNOSIS by Dale Pendell

Poetry: Walt Whitman

Have a nice one!

Gwyllm

__________

The Links:

If you haven’t heard Dale speak… here is a talk of his from Sacred Elixirs…

Dale Pendell Speaking on: Where Entheogens Aren’t, And Why

As Seen On TV!

Keanu Reeves Slams Police State As Scanner Lights Up Cannes

Burning Wheel … a friends site, please check it out!

____________

Ipomoea violacea : from PHARMAKO/GNOSIS by Dale Pendell

An Excerpt from Dale Pendell’s Book

Ipomoea violacea : from PHARMAKO/GNOSIS

Common names: Tlitliltzin. Heavenly Blue. Pearly Gates. Morning glory.

Ololiuhqui, sometimes applied to morning glory, is the Nahuatl word for the seeds of Turbina corymbosa (Rivea corymbosa), a closely related plant.

Part Used:

The seeds

Chemistry:

Lysergic acid amide (“LSA”). By chemical extension, if the two protons clinging to the nitrogen atom are replaced by ethyl groups, we have d-lysergic acid diethylamide (“LSD”). LSD has not yet been found in a plant.

[structural formulae for LSA and LSD appear here]

Besides ergine (d-lysergic acid amide), ololiuhqui and other psychoactive morning glories contain isolysergic acid amide and half a dozen other closely related compounds of various toxicities, including ergometrine (ergonovine), a powerful uterotonic.

Ergine, or LSA, is about one-twentieth the potency of LSD.

Effects:

Albert Hofmann claimed, after self-experiment, that LSA was a narcotic-sedative as much as a hallucinogen.

moving and flowing–

dream/waking

blur.

Or are we dreaming

always?

Colors. Plants, ready to talk. Me, just as I am. Act of faith.

The Ally:

Much esteemed by a few aficionados. Most find LSD both more reliable and more pleasant. The plant freaks smile to themselves and gently shake their heads.

Not the same. Not the same.

The indigenous people of Oaxaca use various species of Ipomoea, as well as ololiuhqui, for divination and curing, exactly as had the Aztecs five hundred years before them. Gordon Wasson wrote that ololiuhqui and tlitliltzin are more widely used today in Mesoamerica than teonanacatl, the sacred mushroom.

Many mesoamerican Indians believe that the tlitliltzin speaks so clearly and plainly that the services of a shaman are unnecessary. Unlike the mushrooms, the seeds are usually given to one person at a time.

The Plant:

Ololiuhqui, “the round ones,” in Nahuatl. Sometimes coaxihuitl, or coatl-xoxouhqui:

Snake plant, the green snake plant.

The Ally:

Some claim it to be profound.

Effects:

10:15 pm.

Drank a cold water infusion of Heavenly Blue. Not bad tasting. Herbal and wild, but not bitter.

The Plant:

Xtabentum: “precious stone cord,” Mayan.

Tlitliltzin: “the sacred black ones,”

Mazatec: na-so-le-na: “flower-her-mother.”

Mayans call morning glory xtontikin, “dry penis.”

Effects:

10:40 pm.

Took a shower and a bath. Soaking in the tub felt good. Closed my eyes. A weird and penetrating sound wormed into my thoughts. Opened my eyes: it was the faucet, leaking. First alert.

Standing, bending, towelling off brings some slight nausea. Some anxiety.

But I was even more anxious before I started. Mainly I just want to lie down. If I had a uterus, would I be cramping? Maybe. Tightness in the gut.

Closing eyes, thoughts/mental events are loud, amplified. Try to keep my eyes slightly open, follow my breathing.

The Plant:

In 1629, Hernando Ruiz de Alarcon described the use of ololiuhqui in his Treatse on the Heathen Superstitions. Alarcon had been brought to the attention of the Inquisition because he was torturing and conducting his own autos-da-fé, matters of Inquisitional jurisdiction. The investigation that followed found that his error had been made out of ignorance rather than malice, and his zeal was recognized and rewarded with an eccesiastical judgeship in the Holy Office.

The religious character of the War on Drugs has been obfuscated as much as possible. Only when the speciousness of the arguments of public health and crime are refuted by logic, science, and sociological research do the warriors sometimes reveal their true beliefs and prejudice: i.e. that the use of entheogenic plants is a threat to civilization itself, by which they mean their religious hegemony. Willfully exploring self and consciousness with the aid of plants is considered worse than mere criminality, it is seen as heresy and blasphemy, as an attack on the Holy values of the true church of Western rationalistic materialism.

And it is punished accordingly. Twenty-year-olds in their tie-dyeds, arrested at Grateful Dead shows for possessing LSD, are often given longer prison terms than embezzlers or killers.

Almost all of them [the Indians] hold that the ololiuhqui is a divine

thing . . . And with the same veneration they drink the said seed,

shutting themselves in those places like one who was in the

sanctasanctorum, with many other superstitions. And the veneration with

which these barbarous people revere the seed is so excessive that part

of their devotions include washing and sweeping even those places where

the bushes are found which produce them, which are some heavy vines,

even though they are in the wilderness and thickets.

–Hernando Ruiz de Alarcon, 1629

The War on Drugs was launched by the European invaders shortly after their arrival in the New World. Possession of the sacred seeds was made a crime, and Alarcon, like other ecclesiastical authorities, began a campaign of uprooting and burning the vines wherever he could find them, along with those who loved them. The Holy Inquisition itself was formally inaugurated in 1571, set up to ferret out lapsed maranos, sephardic Jews who had feigned conversion to Christianity, in addition to exterminating heresy among the Indians. The Inquisition specifically ordered the prosecution of divination by hallucinogenic plants.

Since preaching has not sufficed, rigorous punishment is needed,

because, being–as they are–children of terror, it may be that

punishment may accomplish what reason has not been sufficient to,

since the Apostle said, compelle intrare. [“Compel them to

come in.” Luke 14:23.]

–Hernando Ruiz de Alarcon

A war of sacraments.

Wine was the blood of Christ, but the Aztecs had their own sacred plants:

teonanacatl, “God’s flesh,” the sacred mushroom, and teotlacualli, “food of God,” an unguent prepared with ololiuhqui.

The sorcerers persuade the people with such ease that they find it

unnecessary to use menaces or torture or threaten them with the wheel

of blades of Saint Catherine or the gridiron of Saint Lawrence.

–Fray Diego Duran

Alarcon complained that in spite of severe punishments, the Indians seemed to be more concerned with maintaining the good will of the ololiuhqui than with escaping the fury of the Inquisition.

aco nechtlahueliz: let it not be that he become angry.

Effects:

10:50 pm.

Drifting.

Phantoms. Truths. Insights. Connections. Poems.

River of dreaming.

“There aren’t any good things in those values.”

Values/thoughts. Dharmas. All are ill. Dukkha. The Way of Makyo is the Path of Ill. Up to your armpits in samsara.

Go further.

11:00.

Ring? Or ring in the mind? Which telephone? Either way it wakes me up.

Thoughts, jokes, all flowing down the river and over the falls.

Who is guest and who is host? We dine together. The guests pay their way

by talking and telling stories. But the banquet is interrupted.

(a pebble striking bamboo . . .)

Who knocks? Serres’s parasite. Alcibiades banging at the door.

The gods come to visit.

The Poison:

Don’t take It unless you want to know everything simultaneously,

hell & heaven, terror & ecstasy –

When I tell you to try it it is afterwards in a room with solid

furniture, remember that.

–Alden Van Buskirk, “Lami in Oakland”

Matters of State and Liberty:

Alarcon’s program was the extirpation of heresy, sycretism, and the works of the Devil. He feared divination, and he feared the resemblances of Mesoamerican religion to his own. He feared the easy way that the Indians could assimilate Catholicism without denying the older gods of their own land. He feared the little carved animals and figures, the “idols.” He found them hidden in piles of rocks at passes and crossroads. He found them hidden in churches where the people would place their offerings of copal. He even found one that had been built into the base of a large cross (after the cross had been struck by lightning). And he found them in the specially woven baskets that hid the ololiuhqui.

The special baskets contained ritual objects along with the seeds: a small carving, a piece of incense, pieces of embroidery, “little girls’ dresses, and things of this nature.” An ololiuhqui basket was passed on to the owner’s descendents. Sometimes the basket was placed inside of a larger, carved wooden box.

Alarcon’s advice for catching the heretics:

1. Arrest the delinquent outside of the village, so that he cannot take precautions or warn others.

2. Place guards at his house and place his nearest relatives under guard.

3. Don’t trust the local authorities as “usually there is no one who is faithful.”

4. The judge should seize the evidence in person, as the delinquent Indian will often swallow the idol if

it comes into his reach “even though he is already convicted and knows that if he swallows it he will

surely die.”

5. In searching a house be diligent, examining even old and dirty pots.

. . . while it did not actually show up in the house, she had an old,

dirty pot covered with a potsherd in the courtyard of the house. The

black pot was full up to the brim with ololiuhqui, and in the middle

of it, in the depth of the pot, wrapped in a rag, was the little idol,

which was a little black frog of stone.

–Hernando Ruiz de Alarcon

As Moses said,

I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.

The Ally:

Tlitliltzin is above all a plant of divination. Divination was its principal use by the Aztecs, as it is in Mesoamerica still today. Alarcon reported, with some indignation, that some of the Aztec doctors “practice ololiuhqui drinking as a profession.”

Whether it is the doctor or another person in his place . . . he

closes himself up alone in a room, which usually is his oratory, where

no one is to enter throughout all the time that the consultation lasts,

which is for as long as the consultant is out of his mind, for then

they believe the ololiuhqui or peyote is revealing to them that which

they want to know.

–Hernando Ruiz de Alarcon

Alarcon distinguishes between the false results of divination, “just a representation of the imagination caused by the conversation,” and the true results, which are revealed by the Devil.

Despite Mathias having been selected by the eleven as Judas’s successor by the casting of lots, the Church inveighed against divination of any form. Fortuna had been mostly disassembled by Chance– but the Devil, the one who could speak truth, was a far deadlier foe.

The Devil usually mixes something of our holy religion in those

apparitions of his so that he whitewashes his malice and lends a

color of goodness to such a great evil.

–Hernando Ruiz de Alarcon

Effects:

11:15.

I’m fairly comfortable. Don’t want to get up. Some belching. Dog sleeping upside down with all his feet splayed out into the air: from me? Fluidity begins. Formerly distinct partitions between categories, perceptions, and thoughts blur, visually.

Ripple in a clear lake: grass and sedges rippled beneath.

In the mountains at a lake, wave patterns on the transparent surface of the water. Sunrise. Birds darting over the lake like bats, feeding. Blue.

Grasses on the bottom of the lake and his mind fell through.

Out across the lake the breeze breaks up the glassy surface into alternating patches of smooth and rippled water, like pages, the rippled areas like an ancient script.

Cursive runes. Stelae.

An oasis on the Silk Road. Takla Makan.

The letters and words of an eidetic alphabet. The script of knowledge.

WE WILL SHOW YOU HOW TO READ OUR LANGUAGE. YOU MAY ASK US ANY QUESTION.

The world as poison. This world. Of all possible and parallel and coexisting universes, this particular one: the one in which stones are heavy and thoughts light. “The world is a drug.” Not a metaphor but a tautology.

“What are the poisons?”

WE ARE THE POISONS.

All dharmas are poisons. Stone in the mind, goose in a bottle.

“What is seeming and what is real?”

WE WHO SHOW YOU THE REAL ARE SEEMING.

The light on the water supported his weight. In the middle of the

lake he thrust his hand into the water.

Curings are performed at night, and quiet is important. Sometimes the doctor speaks into the patient’s ear, reminding him of his questions. To an outside observer it may appear that the person is talking to himself.

Sometimes the ally speaks in visions rather than in voices. If the visions are hellish, it is said to be because a taboo has been broken. The remedy is to eat chilies and salt and to go to sleep.

Effects:

11:30.

(hey, he still hasn’t moved up off of the bed)

(yeah, what’s he doing down there?)

The words are sinking. The clock is running down.

(Yes. That means you are dying.

The time alloted to works is not infinite.)

Words sinking.

(some may rise up, have their own life,

live for awhile in the free air like butterflies . . .

live for a season.)

I have arrived at square minus one.

From here we could go anywhere.

A voice would lead me.

(a voice whispering into my ear…)

The Poison:

turn out lights, lie alone in dark room &

start imagining anything, start with any image & let it send out

another. Don’t drink or take any depressants. Luck.

–Alden Van Buskirk, “Lami in Oakland”

Effects:

all a dream we dreamed

one afternoon long ago

–Robert Hunter, Phil Lesh

Karma is the link from one thought to the next. Ahhh, endlessly arising.

Dharmas and phantoms, Mara and Buddha. The uninvited guest is the ring.

The knock. Door bursting open. Alarm clock. The medicine.

The Poison:

I am ready to come back to you. I’ve lived my life a

million times over in a few hours, seen everything, known too

much, & now I’m burnt out, want only love & peaceful madness

of America seen & shared with your eyes.

–Alden Van Buskirk, “Lami in Oakland”

Matters of State and Liberty:

It is worth noting that Aztec religion and society were both hierarchical. That the Aztec nobility evidently had no trouble integrating the use of entheogenic plants into that hierarchy should give pause to those who believe that if only more people today would use hallucinogenic drugs, our society would perforce become kinder, gentler, and more egalitarian.

The Plant:

Considering the easy availability of psychoactive morning glory seed, the ease of growing them, and their tolerance of many climate zones, it is remarkable that more plant people do not make use of this ancient and time-tested plant. It says something about the availability of LSA’s better known diethyl cousin.

The Plant:

I. violacea: quiebraplato, “plate breaker.”

Mixe: piH pu’ucte.sh, “broken plate flower.”

Ma-sung-pahk: Mixe, morning glory, “bones of the children.”

La’aja shnash: Zapotec, “seeds of the virgin.”

Gordon Wasson and Jonathan Ott note that the contemporary Mexican term for morning glory seeds, semillas de la virgen, probably does not refer to the Virgin Mary, but to the virgin who ground the seeds.

Effects:

1:00 AM: Music. Grateful Dead in a long jam with Branford Marsalis. All the instruments distinct and separated.

2:00 AM: Gut still hard. Tired. Mind still very active, but I will sleep and let the dream be dreaming.

The dreams of the children.

The little ones who come to tell you.

The plant children, our children,

who grind the medicine.

(Dale Pendell in Hawaii….)

____________

The Poetry of Walt Whitman…

On the celebration of his birthday…

Miracles

Why, who makes much of a miracle?

As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles,

Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,

Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,

Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,

Or stand under trees in the woods,

Or talk by day with anyone I love, or sleep in the bed at night with anyone I love,

Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,

Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,

Or watch honey bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,

Or animals feeding in the fields,

Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,

Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,

Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;

These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,

The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,

Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,

Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,

Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

To me the sea is a continual miracle,

The fishes that swim–the rocks–the motion of the waves–the ships with the men in them,

What stranger miracles are there?

—–

Earth! My Likeness!

Earth! my likeness!

Though you look so impassive, ample and spheric there,

I now suspect that is not all;

I now suspect there is something fierce in you, eligible to burst

forth;

For an athlete is enamour’d of me–and I of him;

But toward him there is something fierce and terrible in me, eligible

to burst forth,

I dare not tell it in words–not even in these songs.

———-

A Leaf for Hand in Hand

A Leaf for hand in hand!

You natural persons old and young!

You on the Mississippi, and on all the branches and bayous of the

Mississippi!

You friendly boatmen and mechanics! You roughs!

You twain! And all processions moving along the streets!

I wish to infuse myself among you till I see it common for you to

walk hand in hand!

————

Darest Thou Now, O Soul

1

Darest thou now, O Soul,

Walk out with me toward the Unknown Region,

Where neither ground is for the feet, nor any path to follow?

2

No map, there, nor guide,

Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand,

Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, are in that land.

3

I know it not, O Soul;

Nor dost thou–all is a blank before us;

All waits, undream’d of, in that region–that inaccessible land.

4

Till, when the ties loosen,

All but the ties eternal, Time and Space,

Nor darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds, bound us.

5

Then we burst forth–we float,

In Time and Space, O Soul–prepared for them;

Equal, equipt at last–(O joy! O fruit of all!) them to fulfil, O

Soul.

————

A Clear Midnight

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,

Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,

Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou

lovest best.

Night, sleep, and the stars.

May 30 1431

Joan of Arc (Jeanne la Pucelle) is burned at the stake in Rouen, France for relapsing into heresy. After having signed a confession a week earlier, Joan appeared in court wearing difformitate habitus — degenerate apparel — or more precisely, men’s clothing.

Late evening… A bit of this and that. I remembered Jesse L. Weston going on about Jean and her dealings with the Faeries, and how eventually they were the death of her, as she would not give them up, and felt that they were real, and divine. Of course you cannot hold beliefs like that today either… Today marks the anniversary… I always thought she encapsulated a certain… beauty of spirit.

We have an interview from the L.A. times with Dale Pendell. This came out just after Pharmako Dynamis appeard back in 2003. I wrote a review that his publisher used, and am very tempted to finish writing one on Pharmako Gnosis. An amazing book. Each volume speaks well to me. I often pull them off the book shelf and give them a go, a chapter at a time. They stand up over the long run, which really is the test for me.

I have been asked to write more frequently about my various adventures over the last 4 or so decades. I put a lot of living in during those times… yet I find it hard to put some of it down. I will try more often. I noticed it has been a year or so since I talked about my first LSD adventures… What I have in mind is a series of dreams that I once had, and the strange spell that they created. Stay Tuned.

Poetry today is actually lyrics of Hildegard von Bingen. I was sorely tempted to do the latin versions as well… I think they read nicely, and I hope you will enjoy them. I listen to her music frequently. I will put some on the radio if there are request.

Enjoy,

Gwyllm

———

On The Menu:

The Links

The Article: An Interview with Dale Pendell “The Poet of Plants”

The Poetry: Lyrics of Hildegard Von Bingen

—————

Fight The Fascist: The OpenNet Initiative

Million Mime March…

Batwoman Returns, in a very special way…

And last but not Least: “The Ross Sisters’! (Yeah!)

Home/Office Decorating Idea!

__________________________________________

The Poet of Plants – by Emily Green

Oct 19, 2003

Los Angeles Times

Citation: Green, Emily. “The Poet of Plants” Los Angeles Times. Oct 19, 2003

Dale Pendell Has Written Two Books on Botanical Pharmacopeia That Resonate With a Lusty Wit. He May Be America’s Answer to Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Right Down to the Opium.

The first conversation with Dale Pendell is like an overseas telephone call with a lag on the line. I speak. He listens. He thinks. Then he responds in such perfectly formed sentences that I can almost hear the commas.

The stilted speech is surprising. As a writer, Pendell is so fluent that he can make a list of drug side-effects sound interesting, a feat he routinely performed in his two books. Delve deeper into his work and you find poetry, beautiful poetry.

Pendell, 56, has been writing since the 1960s, but his work is little known. I discovered it last spring while serving as a judge for the 2003 Pen Awards overseeing the “Creative Nonfiction” category. As a case containing 57 books arrived at the office for consideration, two things worried me. The amount of reading and the “creative” part. Nonfiction is hard enough to get right when it’s written the old-fashioned way, straight up—who, where, why, when.

As it turned out, the books were at least 50% hard-luck stories, most of them trenchant. There was a war correspondent who got shot, an equestrienne whose leg was crushed by her horse, a profoundly moving brace of Korean stories of search for identity after diaspora. Daniel Ellsberg was there, recounting the events that led to the leaking of the Pentagon papers. There were a couple of biographies, wisecracking sociology from a newspaper columnist and ruminations on the essence of the West.

Then there was Pendell. In his 2002 book “Pharmako/Dynamis,” he merrily rolls out the pharmacology, history and botany behind a host of mind-altering drugs, including Psilocybe mushrooms, peyote, coffee, tea, heroin, Ecstasy, wine, tobacco and absinthe. They are classed by the nature of the high: “phantastica,” “exitantia,” “inebriantia” and others—or, in plain English, tripping, speeding, drunk and so on. Almost every drug is taken back to a plant source, and that plant’s trading history.

At the outset of judging, I wondered if Pendell was in the right category. Three months later, as the judging committee argued over finalists, I became convinced that his was the only book that actually met the brief of creative nonfiction. Yet, on the face of it, it was a dictionary, mainly of controlled substances. “A reference,” read one judge’s comments.

You can certainly look things up in it, including safety measures for taking Ecstasy, or how to score an opium poppy and apply the harvest in interesting places. But it wasn’t like any reference I’d ever seen. Pendell borrowed just as freely from pharmaceutical industry texts as medieval herbals. He used poetry, classical plant taxonomy, chemical equations, prose, anecdotes, jokes, slogans—whatever worked. The prose was indecently interesting, angry and eloquent, like that of a young Christopher Hitchens. The poetry was enigmatic one moment, lusty the next, witty, passionate—whatever it felt like.

Structurally, however, it was odd. It was, arguably, half a book, a continuation of Pendell’s companion volume, “Pharmako/Poeia.” When this appeared in 1995, the good and the great of the Bay Area Beat movement came out in support of it. Allen Ginsberg wrote a review for the jacket, calling it, among a long string of things, “an epic poem on plant humors.” Pulitzer prize-winning poet Gary Snyder supplied the introduction. The synthesizer of Ecstasy, Berkeley scientist Alexander Shulgin, gave his imprimatur to the chemistry. Yet there were no reviews in the major press. It has sold 12,000 copies in eight years, which would be a handsome figure for a Junior League cookbook.

The publication of “Pharmako/Dynamis” last year received slightly more recognition. Richard Gehr of the Village Voice called Pendell “the best writer on drugs to come along since the late Terence McKenna charted the beautiful and terrifying ‘invisible landscapes’ revealed by DMT and psilocybin mushrooms.”

Drug writer. Hard to argue. But what does that make his book? It reads so smoothly, its structure almost escapes notice. Under autopsy, however, there it is. The element that keeps the various information flowing is poetry. There is a narrator, like a Greek chorus, or in this case, a heckler, who prompts the greater text to sing in different voices. How many books manage witty asides that can jump into chemical signatures, then take off into a hallucinatory odyssey about crack cocaine, seamlessly?

The voting was long over, and my argument for Pendell as a finalist had prevailed, before the obvious dawned on me. Ginsberg was right in his volcanic blurb for “Pharmako/Poeia.” It was an epic poem. So is the sequel. I went back and pored over the construction of both books. The author of the head shop encyclopedia began to look less like a writer on drugs and more like an original Western Romantic, an American answer to Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth, right down to the opium.

we meet on a july afternoon on the porch of his new cabin in the Sierra. He’s just moved to the mountains from Oakland. Most of his belongings are still in packing boxes. It’s midday, 100 degrees, the valley opposite shimmers with heat and a licorice-like scent hangs in the air from the baked scrub.

Pendell is taller than the jacket pictures suggest, lean, a born climber who hops easily from boulder to boulder on a stone outcropping near his house. I expect a wild woodsman, but instead he’s more textbook Berkeley, with twin earrings and slightly bushy eyebrows, the sort usually found on Englishmen in Victorian cartoons. When he listens, he tilts his head graciously toward his guest, like an interested minister.

He is, it turns out, the son of a minister. He has just returned from Orange County from a memorial service for his father, Thomas Roy Pendell, a life-long Methodist pastor who served at seven Southern California parishes. He seems relieved to be home, but apologizes for what he says is a cold he caught on the plane.

He suggests that we set ground rules for when the interview turns to illegal drugs, but then he doesn’t ask for any. Eventually, he has two specific requests. Could we not name the town where he lives and could we point out that though he spent time in jail for smuggling marijuana, he asked for and received a full presidential pardon? It was from Ronald Reagan and signed by a Justice Department official named Rudolph Giuliani.

We have been speaking for an hour before the first stutter erupts. It happens when the subject turns to the city where he spent puberty. “The Methodists move their pastors around,” he says, “so we moved to various places, including SSSSSSan Diego.”

Later, when I ask him about it, he says that he stuttered strongly as a child. “I never committed suicide, but I thought about it,” he says. “I wouldn’t use the telephone. I never wanted to introduce myself to anybody. I was morbidly shy.”

His father’s household was run according to scripture. Drink was off limits, as in: “It Is Good Neither To Eat Flesh Nor To Drink Wine, Nor Any Thing Whereby Thy Brother Stumbleth, Or Is Offended, Or Is Made Weak.” Romans, 14:21.

However, Pendell couldn’t help but wonder what Paul meant in Romans 14:13: “I know, and am persuaded by the Lord Jesus that there is nothing unclean of itself” and Verse 20, in which he reiterates, “all things are indeed pure.” In 1964, age 17, still legally a minor, Dale Pendell left home and plunged headlong into all that purity out there.

Enrollment as a physics major at UC Santa Barbara lasted only a semester. He was rapt at the sheer elegance of physical equations, but already slipping toward poetry, raunchily. “I was at the southern end of the filthy speech movement,” he says. “It wasn’t filthy speech, though. It was just good erotica that I would post in my dormitory window. People would come by and read and think, ‘Oh, this is today’s offering,’ ” he says. “Anyway, I ended up in the dean’s office.” The stutter disappeared in front of the dean, he says. “Something about deans and police brings out my eloquence.”

He left Santa Barbara thumb-first. First stop, Berkeley. Then he crossed the country to New York with the writer Larry Beinhart (Beinhart, he explains, wrote the book “Wag the Dog,” adding appreciatively, “Good mystery writer.”)

By 18, Pendell was a heroin addict and had begun smuggling marijuana from Mexico to the U.S. He was so high while trafficking 200 pounds of Gold Brick, or enough pot to make a donkey groan, alarm bells didn’t sound when a window blind opened in a motel room next to his and he got a glimpse of a wall-mounted tape-recorder. Two separate arrests led to a four-month jail term in a Mexican prison, and a year-long one in Texas.

The addict’s whisper opens “Pharmako/Poeia.”

(hey!)

I hear you.

(any cops around?)

These are just words.

(yeah right …

any prospective

employers around?)

I don’t want to hear this

(then why did you call me?)

Back in Berkeley by 1967, Pendell says, “I finally realized that heroin was affecting my luck.” He retreated to the mountains. “I hiked up as far as I could. I wanted to be as far away as I could from people. I stayed there as long as I could. I took as much LSD as I could. All of the hatred kind of fell into the earth.”

He spent the next 14 years in and out of the California mountains, first on a mining claim in the Trinity Alps, near the Oregon border. He panned enough gold to make jewelry and gather material for his first anthology of poetry, “Gold-Dust Wilderness.” He hiked among the ponderosa pines and became friendly with an old-timer named Red Barnes, who Pendell couldn’t help but notice used to mentholate his tobacco using a local plant, Salvia sonomensis.

This, he says, is when it struck him that he didn’t know anything about the plants that covered the hillsides: their names, their properties, if you could smoke them, what happened then. “I wanted to know what the most common plants were,” he says, “the ones that didn’t have showy flowers, or any flowers at all, and weren’t in any of the those wildflower books.”

He began charting the anatomy of the hillside, collecting, pressing and drying plants, beginning what would become over the next 10 years a large herbarium. In the process, he got the idea for a book. He wanted to look at power plants, plants whose fruits are so dominant in our society we don’t even see them, or think of ourselves as taking drugs, like when we jolt ourselves awake with coffee.

In 1974, Pendell moved south, to the central ranges and Nevada County. Here a group of back-to-the-landers, led by poet Gary Snyder, the inspiration for Jack Kerouac’s “Dharma Bums,” were forming a poetry community. The following year, Snyder would win a Pulitzer Prize for for his poetry anthology “Turtle Island.”

Pendell used his plant know-how to start making and bottling an organic spruce root beer. The proceeds went to start a poetry magazine, Kyoi-Kuksu: Journal of Backcountry Writing.

Pendell studied Buddhism with Snyder, a discipline that to Western Romantics was what Unitarianism had been centuries earlier to Coleridge. Still, the most touching moments in the Pharmako series capture Pendell and Snyder not meditating, but partying. This is buried in the reference section of “Pharmako/Dynamis”: “Illustrating how any song written in ballad meter could be sung to any ballad tune, Gary Snyder once sang for me Blake’s ‘Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire Rousseau’ to the tune of ‘Mary Hamilton,’ ‘Barbara Allen’ and the ‘House of the Rising Sun.’

“Actually,” Pendell adds gleefully, “Blake violates the fourteener in the second line and it works better if you drop the second spondee.”

It was Snyder who helped a then-28-year-old Pendell finally subdue the stutter. “We were going to do a reading as a benefit for the magazine in Nevada City at the American Victorian Museum,” Pendell remembers. “Gary agreed to read at it, and a number of other fine poets. I was terrified. What was I going to do? Gary said, ‘Don’t worry, just read from the gut.’ ” Words came. Since then, says Pendell, fluency has been a “a continuous practice. If I start, I have to keep a channel open to where it all comes from, or I can’t talk at all.”

Hence, the long-distance effect, those perfect sentences.

In 1974, Pendell married Snyder’s assistant, Merle Goodkind, and became a father to her 2 1/2 year-old old son, Isaac. Asked what she did for a living, Pendell responds, “Her specialty was grace.” Later they had a daughter, Marici.

Pendell wrote this for Goodkind in 1975, a year after they met. It is called “Spring Song” and reads like a wedding vow.

Flowers know:

open with the first sun;

crack the drudgery,

drying soil,

quick as they can.

Pines sprout:

know water won’t last,

no time to waste

in the hasty spring.

Birds know:

songs rise with the morning.

we, also.

Come let’s kiss the greening-

tomorrow’s feet are lost to labor-

Brush our backs against the sun;

lie together, let these mountains

Rush, beneath us, back to sea.

Poetry is like modern art. A lot of people can’t tell whether it’s good or not. Allen Ginsberg thought that Pendell’s was good, and admired the pluck behind the root beer journal enough to contribute his own work. “We were first publication of some of Allen’s poems,” says Pendell. “Then he would send certain people my direction.”

Pendell kept the journal going six years. He built a cabin on rented land. His family got by—just. By 1981, he says, his “allotted time in heaven” had expired. Merle had lupus and needed better health care. They had two young children. He shut the magazine, sold the root beer company and moved to Santa Cruz to pursue a double major in creative writing and computer science at the UC campus there.

It led him to his second great mentor, philosopher Norman O’Brown. Pendell was in awe of O’Brown’s 1966 book “Love’s Body.” After a chance meeting, the philosopher pursued a friendship with Pendell because he was interested in plants. “We walked together a great deal,” says Pendell. “I used to show off by quoting poems by heart. He would answer back in Greek.”

This time as a student, Pendell finished both university degrees, with honors. When he graduated, a linguistics professor suggested, “Why don’t you support your poetry habit with programming?” For the next four years, Pendell wrote paper jam recovery programs instead of poetry. He scolded his now teenage son Isaac for smoking pot. It took Isaac to point out that he was becoming conventional, he says.

“I’d say, ‘Well, pot’s much stronger now.’ “

In 1989, a three-week trip to the Amazon reminded Pendell of the old Trinity Alps idea for the book on power plants. It would be a pharmacopeia, a Greek term meaning “book of drugs, with directions how to make them.” Conventional pharmacopeias deal with what would have been in Pendell’s father’s medicine box. Pendell’s would embrace his, and beyond. He had only one line playing in his head like a mantra. “Tobacco, marijuana, then you’re in the jungle.”

He programmed by day and wrote by night. “The idea was that through immersion in each plant, something would come across in my style that would create a signature for the plant,” he says. “For example, the stimulant chapter turned out to be the longest.”

In January 1993, the book was almost halfway written when Isaac, then 22, died in a snowboarding accident. There is a gut-wrenching passage in “Pharmako/Poeia,” when Pendell, terrified and tripping, finally faces his son’s death. His marriage to Goodkind was never the same after Isaac died, he says.

When Pendell finished the first half of the book, Gary Snyder’s editor, Jack Shoemaker, sent sample chapters to Mercury House, a nonprofit San Francisco press. Pendell thought it was a prank when its publisher, Tom Christiansen, phoned to accept the book. “I said, ‘Come on, who is this?’ “

The commission enabled Pendell to take a sabbatical from the software job to finish writing. Six months later, as rough drafts circulated among Pendell’s friends, there was confusion and shock. There was even a chapter on huffing solvents. Norman O’Brown asked him to take it out. “He said, ‘Everyone will know it’s a drug book,’ ” says Pendell.

Pendell left it in. “I thought of the information that I came across—that not all solvents are alike, some are much more dangerous than others—as harm reduction. I may reach somebody. The message: use toluene not gasoline, or better yet, nitrous oxide. Use ether, not chloroform.”

The text unnerved Mercury House sufficiently to affix this cautionary note: “A manuscript draft of Pharmako/Poeia caused us some concern. The author of this remarkable work was clearly exploring perilous terrain along his ‘Poison Path.’ This is a route we strongly advise others not to follow (except through this book, and through other approaches that lead in the direction of wisdom without dangerous self-experimentation).”

Pendell had his own definitions of danger, which come across plainly in the chapters that follow. “Huffers,” he speculated, “probably have an interesting terminology to describe the subtle differences of effects [between solvents], and it would be worth recording, if you could find an informant who is still articulate.” The chapter is the only one in his books where readers will find the words, “get off and get help.”

But with other drugs, he experimented freely on himself. Salvia divinorum, or “diviner’s sage,” only really kicked in, he reported, when he accidentally doubled the dose. The entry for wormwood begins, “The first effect was loosening of the sinuses . . . . Much stronger than the Japanese wasabi horseradish . . . . After some minutes I noticed that I wasn’t writing anything. I was just staring off into space. And the space was beautiful. The light was brighter. Mottled sunlight filtering down through the walnut tree. . . . The light was different, softer and more intense at the same time. I felt great, actually. I gazed around my studio and spent a lot of time looking at my painting . . . . A little tightness in the head and around the eyes.”

There is a recipe to make absinthe from scratch, and a time-saving alternative where you only have to doctor the Pernod.

The potential for ridicule is not lost on him. “Timothy Leary had a joke about LSD research,” he says. “You couldn’t write about LSD with any authority if you hadn’t tried it. On the other hand, if you had tried it, then how could anyone trust what you said?”

But for Pendell, the more ridiculous thing would be reporting on LSD without having taken it. “The approach is phenomenological,” he says. “We’re trying to work with what’s happening in real time and somehow convey that.” The science behind play is tricky territory. Pendell is not above trotting out ten-dollar words for instant authority.

As the book was revised and finally published, it was dedicated to Isaac. Along with Ginsberg and Ecstasy chemist Shulgin, actor Peter Coyote supplied a jacket blurb. Their task: somehow prime the public for the book.

I suggest to Pendell that he’s still trying to shock the dean. He nods and laughs in agreement. “I stated at my father’s memorial service that maybe I’ll emerge from adolescence in the next decade.”

Then I ask if he’s not also trying to shock us. Why he doesn’t do drugs the understood way? Secretly? Is he not simply a reflexive contrarian? Again, an acknowledging laugh. “Norman O’Brown gave me a lot of trouble that way,” he says. “He said, ‘At least I’m not working out my Oedipus complex with drugs.’ “

But as the door opens for a defense of drugs, Pendell has one ready and it’s serious. The stumbling brother debate may have started with his father, he says, but now it’s with the world. It’s at the heart of his work. It’s over what gets banned, what doesn’t, and the War on Drugs. “It’s not that if you make a place for Dionysian energy, this kind of wild and unpredictable God, that everything will go OK,” he says. “That’s not true at all. But the cost of trying to suppress it is even worse. Then you sacrifice your own children.

“In the United States today we now have more people in prison than any other country on a per capita basis. The majority of these are for drug crimes. It’s a war against ourselves. It’s a war against our children. It was problematical for the Greeks but at least they came to recognize you have to admit a certain amount of chaos. You can’t try to live risk free. If you try to live completely risk free you’re going to destroy what you had. What’s a really secure environment? San Quentin is pretty secure.”

Society, he says, is police enough. “The solution is to let it be worked out by the culture. Peer pressure. Societal norms. Everyone knows that if you take a drink first thing in the morning, it’s not a good thing.”

But aren’t his books encouraging people to do drugs? “Encouragement is the big full-page ads in High Times,” he says. He has plenty of readers who don’t do drugs at all, he says. Bye the bye, he adds shortly afterward, he’s not exactly stoned all the time, either.

The irony, says Pendell, is that writing books about drugs largely requires staying off them. Plus, we grow out of them, he thinks. Heroin affected his luck. He’s at an age where he’s got to think of his liver when it comes to alcohol. LSD was a “great blessing” in his life, he says, but one of its teachings is to stop doing it. Marijuana can be useful on very rare occasions. He has one tobacco cigarette a day. But he won’t say no to an afternoon glass of home-brewed absinthe.

He offers one to illustrate the benignity of the drink, and I think to see if I’ll accept it. I do, curiously. After an hour, though it is getting later, everything seems just a little brighter. “There’s something about mottled light,” he says. “The change to the absinthe drinkers, you suddenly have light breaking out of everywhere.” Pendell reckons you can explain all of expressionist painting with absinthe. In a future project, he says, he wants to do a “pharmacological study of philosophy. Not enough attention has been paid to what philosophers have been drinking or imbibing.”

As he began writing the sequel, “Pharmako/Dynamis,” in 1996, his 22-year marriage ended. He moved to Santa Rosa and wrote—furiously. The theme of the new book: speed. It began with a mischievous look at the teetotaler’s stimulant of choice, coffee. By the middle of the text, he is describing the metallic taste of freebase cocaine.

Keep wanting

to get back

to where things were clear

Then there is a spirited defense of Ephedra, and a paean to Ecstasy, part-and-parcel of an ebullient horniness that permeates the second book. There is attention to sexual side-effects of drugs, which ones “give good lead,” which take it away. The Ecstasy chapter merrily contrasts a middle-aged generation of users who first used the drug in marriage counseling, whom Pendell fondly describes as “mush pile” sensualists, to the stomping ravers of the early 1990s. One anecdote has three friends admitting their feelings for each other while on the drug, a week later becoming lovers, dubbing themselves a “truple” and looking for things that came in threes.

His mood throughout was euphoric. While writing the second book, Pendell was in love. In 1998, living in Sonoma, he met Laura McCarthy, a visiting poet and book-binder from New York, who moved west and married him. McCarthy has an easy warmth and a ready, musical laugh as she describes her old East Coast longing for a place where leaving the house means emerging outdoors instead of into an apartment building hallway.

An excerpt from Pendell’s poem “The Dream Walker,” from the 1999 anthology “Living With Barbarians,” captures his wife as a refugee from Manhattan.

She

Looked for songs in the dry moss trees;

Picked them up where flames swirled.

Her thirst frightened the flowers;

Only the cacti survived.

She made her home in a land dry and barren as the moon.

Of course she grew lonely.

Someone who loves poems should take her home.

Her curling breath so dry would crack the tongue.

Pendell took her home. When she appears halfway through our interview, he hugs her and demands, “Aren’t I lucky?”

Over the next several days, in phone calls between Los Angeles and the Sierra, Pendell reports that what he thought was a cold turned out to be pneumonia. A friend tells him lungs equal grief. There has been a lot of death in the last five years. Ginsberg died in 1997, O’Brown last year, and Merle Goodkind succumbed to lupus in the spring. Then, in June, his father died.

But as antibiotics kick in, and he and McCarthy unpack their moving boxes, he’s feeling better. Twenty two years ago, he left the mountains reluctantly, for his wife and children. Now he’s back. Each day, he feels ambushed by joy.

He’s debating which to finish first, a book about his hero, Norman O’Brown, or the third drug book, “Pharmako/Gnosis.” He is toying with a “free the drug plants” campaign, complete with a green ribbon. “This is a DIY operation,” he says. “The first step in trying to clean up the mess of the drug war is free the plants.”

He also wants to circulate “Boycott Companies That Drug Test” bumper stickers. America’s office workers are drug free on a wink, he argues. They are routinely given two weeks’ notice before marijuana tests, so the drug can clear their systems. Once they take up jobs, inside every office is “a shrine to a coffee pot,” and outside, a bar.

But where another opponent of the war on drugs would be stumping for Ralph Nader, America’s poet of the second pharmacy is converting a country barn to a library to accommodate what he estimates are 10,000 pounds of reference books and botanical specimens. Part of him wants to be heard, not just by his father, but by every Methodist in America, by scientists, the DEA, his jailers. The other half wants to disappear into the wilderness.

Dale Pendell’s life adds up only if you give it enough columns. He’s a study in contradictions. He devoted his most lucid moments to recording his most stoned ones. He’s a mountain man-cum-computer programmer, an exaltant stutterer, Hamlet on absinthe. He insists on defending substances that even liberals abhor. He signed up with a publisher ideologically opposed to making money. He wrote highly technical reference books as epic poems. He wants to change the world without joining it.

When pressed about why he sought a presidential pardon, he bristled that all the Los Angeles Times wanted to know about were his teenaged crimes, then dismissed the long fight for the pardon as a theatrical act of no merit. He wants credibility, and to be incredible.

The single underlying theme always returns to the Bible, to Romans, to Paul and the stumbling brother. Pendell questions if the world can reasonably be asked to slow down to the pace of the slowest walker. Witness the stutterer who found his voice. Today, for the pastor’s prodigal son to speak at all, he has to believe what he’s saying. When that happens, the poet can’t help but find a pulpit.

_________

Hildegard von Bingen (1098 – 1179)

O you happy roots

O you, happy roots,

with whom works of miracles

and not works of crime,

for burning predestined you were planted.

And to you, thoughtful fiery voice,

becoming the whetstone,

subverting the darkness.

Rejoice in that which is on top.

Rejoice in him,

who the many did not see on earth,

although they ardently cried for.

Rejoice in that which is on top.

—–

O Holy Fire

O Holy Fire which soothes the spirit

/alt (para clete?) O fire of the spirit which I have tried

life force of all creation

holiness you are in living form

You are a holy ointment

for perilous injuries

You are holy in cleansing

the fetid wound.

O breath of holiness

o fire of loving

o sweet taste in the breast

you fill the heart

with the good aroma of virtues.

O fountain of purity

in/with whom it is considered

that God collected the lost / That God made the strangers one with us

and the sinners/damned saved.

O robe of life and hope for the companions

our brothers all of the church

and the belt of honesty

save the blessed.

Caring for all those

who are held down by enemies

and dissolve/break the chains/restraints/laws.

whom the divine will save and free.

O path of strength

that enters all places

in the high places and in the plains

and in all the depths

you call and unify all.

From you the clouds/smoke flows,

the ether files,

stones/jewels have/given their feeling/moods/qualities

water streams shown their way. (given their course)

and earth made green and fresh.

You always teach comprehending

by inspiriational wisdom with pleasure/joy/happiness.

Praise be to you,

who is the sound of praise,

and joy of life, hope and noble strength

giving the premium of the light.

——

Holy Spirit, bestowing life unto life

Holy Spirit, bestowing life unto life,

moving in All.

You are the root of all creatures,

washing away all impurity,

scouring guilt,

and anointing wounds.

Thus you are luminous and praiseworthy, Life,

awakening, and re-awakening all that is.

———

O soul, so fulfilled

O soul, so fulfilled,

that your flesh,

which arose from the Earth,

stepped from this world

as a culmination of your journeys.

Hence divine knowing

was reflected in you,

as a crown.

And Sacred Spirit

gazed upon you as its home.

For divine knowing

was reflected in you,

as a crown.

Glory to the Holy Trinity;

Parents, Child and Loving Spirit.