The Well Head.

My genetics and chemistry teachers in school would ambush us with this combined lecture on selenium. I attended Humboldt State University as a pre-med student in the mid nineties for a stretch before I returned and finished my interdisciplinary degree. The selenium lecture started off in Organic chemistry where we were taken through the exact sort of dimerization that forms when selenium is absent from a key cellular process. In genetics we are taken further later that same day, and our teacher explained to us in great detail how the absence of selenium in the soil of a huge landmass of China is actually responsible for the emergence year after year of new flu strains which emerge from that same region of China.

We depend on our teachers to ambush us with new ideas.

Early on I was interested in the idea that the gene has motility, fluidity and some ability to sort things around. The immutable gene, as steady and intractable as a keypunch card sequence never set right with me. The early epigenetic research caught my eye especially because it was done by a woman ; Barbara McClintock. By the time the first decade of the 21st century was closing we knew that our own diversity was at stake when malnutrition strikes. This brings a new dimension to war, when you consider that even the grandchild of a woman who suffered malnutrition will still have epoigenetic issues because the genome has been partially stripped of a formerly unrecognized mechanism of expression. The good news is of course that by providing nutrition is may also be possible to repair this Damage.

All of this is on my mind today because of the news from DCAR. Guembe may be dead. DCAR is struggling to keep its moral center against a possible genocide. Its strange that the same parts of Africa that we originally got most of our drought resistant strains from is barely able to provide for itself. The inability for world leaders to establish peaceful progress in that part of the world is explosively coming to light again.

Famine affects us all in a very concrete physical way. There is no reason we should tolerate it because it is a danger to the genetic health and diversity of our species. This is not even considering the potential impact of th epigenome on other species.

The race to find a way to create feeding stations and sustainable solutions for refugees continues. In his broadcast Vinay makes a really good point about resources and survival. he points out that establishing enclaves with sufficient food is not enough. You need to be able to maintain and improve on heavy machinery, you need the involvement of higher institutions and agencies that can help to create real progress. You need to be able to put in a well head.

When my dad had the well dug on this piece of property it was an amazing sight. It looked like a small building or industrial structure had been raised on site. This metal tower was erected to drive down the drill shaft from. We were lucky and found four gallons per minute about two hundred feet down. This is the sort of thing that is possible when a society is working all together. Without connection, without our ability to raise each other up, we have nothing.

No Sleep.

Our tragedy here in 2019 is not so much the diseases that are untreatable, like ReDS; ou r tragedy is the loss of life continuously from perfectly treatable diseases. The World Health Map tells the story, cholera is almost always up very high on this list. Usually the problem is poor water quality. Political strife and famine underlay these issues nearly every time.

If you are keeping score of what is going on you know that we have made some progress. The ravenous update tells us people are finally tearing down fences. The techniques already in use in India and Africa are slowly filtering west. Of course the news from DCAR and India is grim these days. Already India has dealt with a massive human tragedy of epic proportions when the country was split in the last century. It has been difficult to struggle past the cultural and political differences most of all in the regions along the border with Pakistan.

After I spent a long day in video conference with the Director of the Federal Foresight Agency I just can't sleep. There were about four of us most of the conversation and the information saturation about the plight of the most vulnerable feeding stations was intense. Maybe its the moon, really its so intense and bright tonight that I thought the sun was coming up already. Of course the situation has been dire for children in these very vulnerable situations for awhile, of course in some ways things are no different tonight than they have ever been.

Still no sleep.

We need new myths. In the old myths when Sarasvati jumped its banks and dried up the people followed Shiva to the Ganges. With the help of the mystical plant they made their way to a new river. The key was surviving with an utterly new food source, and being willing to find a new way of creating a home and food and fiber and fuel for your family.

For a long time the seed work was enough. Ark saving and keeping diversity in some of the more useful plants is rewarding because you can see real physical results from your work. The strain work with the cyano and the algae and now fungus is even more rewarding because they cycle very quickly and because such a great number of people are working on the project now. I even heard that someone in Ventura California used one of my old cyano strains that liked brackish salty water was bred to not only produce quality cellulose, it was developed with a mild green bioluminescence which beyond being amazing to look at in the new clear acrylic tanks set with fiber optics. The bio luminescence serves as a useful marker for when the batch is nearing maturity. Its easy to see the extracting layer when you put it in the spinner too.


Every year we get faster, more collaborative, there are more bright green answers. Of course there is more noise injected into the system these days. The news is so amazingly bad, that we have learned to mostly ignore it and focus on our SEHI networks. It has been gratifying to have so many eyes and ears worldwide and the children have really enjoyed sending out seed packages.

The system noise has gotten so intense its hard to know how bad things really are. It took almost a week for us here to sort out the details of who really truly had a relative in dire straits and who was being griefed. Ten of our G team members rode out in the last week headed for the city, maybe for good. There is work in the world and some people care more about the survival of the human social colony than they do their own personal safety. There was a call out for black rock rangers to come fill civic duty slots at the refugee feeding centers outside Sacramento. These G team members have a lot of muscle and a lot of tech to bring with them. Mostly they are working on setting up aquaculture in the rice fields.

Annie May earned her first three fish yesterday. These are the clear acrylic skill markers that we use in our penguin game. Her face was flushed with excitement as she ran up to the house to show them to me, leaving Tarran trailing behind with his persistent loping gait. She had a bright pink one with a number one on it for numbers, a bright yellow one on it with an "A" for letters, and a clear one with an eye on it to show that she had learned to name all of her primary body parts. Tarran was smiling as I waded through the torrent of alphabet letters that immediately came pouring out of the little girl as she touched her necklace of colored dangling fish. His cheeks were still a little golden from the sun even though it was mostly rain this week, and his blonde and brown beard had a small touch of salt and pepper in it from a few Grey hairs. He was an amazing man to take on and care for our little volunteer orphan.

It was official as well. Before Jacob started working for the District Attourney's office in Eureka he used to work as a "child snatcher". He would go into the worst scenarios imaginable and literally get the kid out. That was another reason that our Annie Mae knew to go to him. The kids and the people in the Hobo squats knew who he was, he had a sort of dark angel reputation. Annie Mae was not the first kid he got our of a bad scene probably just in the nick of time.

It was funny to watch her sort of twirl around the center of the workshop reciting and reciting her recently learned tools. It was easy to see that she would be reading in short time. Her movements had started to change and her whole body had a new softer character. Some of that was the change in her diet and the amount of fat she was allowed to eat now. It was mostly brain building grease...there wasn't time to grow much else. She ate a lot of seed butter and toast. Some of it was that she had stopped moving and trying to act like a man. Or even more so like a Hobo, always exhibiting signs of distress, always fretting. She seemed more like a child now with the rapt open gaze of someone taking in the world for deep information.

As soon as she had made it through most of the colors in the room (her next fish she was chasing after) she calmed down. One of the experimental algae tanks had some guppies breeding in it in somewhat of a closed system that cycled with other tanks of cyano to see how much use the tech had for aquaclture. For a few moments Tarran and I watched her as her face was illuminated by the fiber optics bringing dim cloudy sunlight into the tank. Annie Mae mouthed the colors of the guppy tails to herself as she watched them in the tank.

"I guess we are going to move Martha and Stump and their two kids over to the Blue House" Tarran said by way of getting down to business. "I think Annie Mae is almost ready to start going up the hill with the other kids to school a couple of days a week."

We walked out towards the back door as I asked the next question. "What did the judge say?". I tried not to let the nervousness creep into my voice but the long day longbroading with the future fed guy had worn me down.

"He said that I was lucky there was really no where else for her to go" said Tarran. "her mom never showed up at all or filed a report and there is no trace of her... not even entirely sure who she is." Tarran lowered his voice to make certain that he was out of range of the child as we watched her sing to herself watching the aquarium fish. As we exchanged long glances that pretty much communicated that we feared that Annie Mae truly was an orphan she placed one of her little acrylic fish on the wall of the tank and made it swim.

See the new me

This is a cheapID. With the appropriate type scanner you can see an image of me. Vinay says: "fix the villages first and we'll figure out the rest". When he says fix he means house or hexayurt and he is including the truly shattered villages, the unrecognized lava flow of people on the move.

This morning I had a deja-vu that rocked me to the core. An unexplainable phenomenon related to the dream cycles. The dream was one of the first ones I had about the internet after I first started blogging and journaling on livejournal as foolfaerie420. I would dream these complex dreams involving blogging on different sites and video and this rich overlaid panoply of communication seeping into everything we do. IN the dream I am keenly aware of the intensity of the purpose of the moment. The dire nature of the ReDS phenomenon we face, and the intensity of the isolation suggested by quarantine really makes all of the other problems harder to face. In the dream I had way back when we were all sort of nearly on the verge of figuring something out.

For years I have been prototyping algae, cyano and now fungus systems with a group of Open Source scientists, fabbers and bright green energy enthusiasts. Some of the larger systems we have made up at the laser cutters and I even have my guys do the basic construction. The new rage in the fermentation tanks is piping in fiber optics to the tanks. This gets the water off of rooftops and leaves outdoor areas clear for green plantings. Structurally it is easier to support the amount of liquid it takes to really produce crude and cellulose it is just ever so much easier to have them in units stacked on the ground. With an inexpensive parabolic collar on a somewhat decent plastic lens you can use a jacketed fiber optics system to bring decent sunlight to your tanks. If you pay a little extra at the start you can have sunlight daily illuminating your fuel and fiber source.

Jed is building me a workbench out of the new tanks that we have rigged in series. They are all pretty simple compared to the early biodigesters that we tried. There is a sort of waste slurry and greywater system that feeds directly into the tanks, and in the winter months the tanks go a long way to keeping the temperature decent out in the workshop. We pipe them extra light through the fiber optic harness's. Just before dawn I go in there all the time to start the fabbing orders that I have in the morning. Sometimes I need to load the 3D paper fabber with some recycled cellulose or even some of the cellulose from the cyano. Essentially there are endless small chores associated with the process. In the early hours of dawn most of the workshop glows a faint green.

The star occupant of the workshop is the new car. Its all electric except for the sterling engine which is in the trunk. The sterling engine runs the defroster and heater and takes the load of those activities off of the electrical car system. At this point I have no idea when or where I will take it. I know that living out here it is the first electric car that makes sense for me since I need to be able to re-charge on the spot if I run out of Volts out in the woods on some stupid road in the middle of nowhere.

It takes awhile to recharge the car, however as a side note I must say that while you are waiting it will turn you out a decent hot water for a cup of tea.

The main thing that I remember from the dream that I wanted to tell you...was not to give up. We are not done yet. In the dream today was the day that we were actually really starting to get the whole thing together. Out of the matrix of effort and real concern and deep human sympathy an actual movement is starting to emerge.

Keep on, keep heading on, reaching out, tinkering in the tech and making it happen.

The Ten Percent Solution...the curtain pulls away

This is the part where I pull back the curtain a little bit, this is the part where I reveal myself in some small way. Before I left for the woods, before I became a donkey wizard and a horticulturist in earnest I used to be somebody. At the start of the virtual reality boom I had a consult office..."Conceptual Artist". We had Dutch clients and American clients and I even helped build an early wind power demonstration station.

Then something happened.

There was a shift in the way that I saw the world. Perhaps it was the first nascent attempts of the dynabook to be born in the form of the OLPC, our decades long held dream of making a book that was all books, a tablet that was also a connection to a real live teacher and available to all children. The dream was coming to life as the first leaping extreme scale collaborative efforts to reach children globally were undertaken. Within a year the entire industry shifted towards production of smaller more inexpensive laptops. Linux started to be a household word and systems like Ubuntu became part of the new currency of systemic social connection as the somewhat technically adept undertook the conversion of the older systems in their immediate tribal family or group and upgraded them to Ubuntu, adding in the great open source artists tools Open Office, GIMP, Inkscape and Blender 3D. Bringing people into the open source community one re-formatted hard drive at a time so that they could learn the language of the mesh.

Everyone can speak the language of the mesh now.

So I had this crisis and I fired all my bosses. This was back during the dark ages of the second generation Bush Administration. I mean I fired *all* of my bosses...I fired the entire industrial complex. As an artist I was tired of the circular draining logic of their demands. The worst parts of society in my eyes had become a giant droning commercial for itself.

I made the children my only clients.

Phones were the key. A talk I had with Scott McNeil the Linux standards guy (LSB) helped me understand what I was searching for; I wanted to bring educational materials and connectivity to the children trapped in the brothel system, and I wanted to do it with the cellphone. It was an inspiring conversation as part of a classic mash up orchestrated by my pal Danese the open source diva. I hoped that they could work from the top down while I gathered up steam from the bottom up with the great hue ansd cry of Open Source "ALL BOATS MUST RISE!".

My reasoning was that phones would be everywhere, including becoming quickly integrated into the lives and hands of children in the brothel system. Phones have a certain social cachet that laptops distributed by totalitarian government programs do not.

A phone doesn't have much, however it can deliver games and flash cards.

As an interdisciplinary student who studied quite a lot of science including Organic Chemistry (I was pre-med for some eight years) I can tell you that flash cards are probably the most powerful teaching aid I have ever used aside from actual physical models. In combination with real concentrated effort you can go far.

The first key is reaching the children who are natural teachers so they can in turn reach other children. Trusting the desire of children to help each other. The second is making the instructional materials and models available so they can actually participate in improving the quality of their own lives. Of all of our lives in turn. We need to increase the number of useful mesh models that are openly available to teach all sorts of subjects and that can be downloaded shared and fabbed at the local fabbers or using a reprap.

Of course it was the creation of these open source teaching models that we now easily fab that got me interested in learning 3D modeling in the first place. My first classes in Blender were in the 3D virtual Second Life setting. My interest in Blender 3D gathered most of my attention as I ascended the steep learning curve of the mesh world. At the other end I found csven in the game, and other fabbers and virtual students who are interested in Augmented Manipulatives and the idea of directly translating learning environments into physical learning aids.

Beyond all that is still the primary objective. And to that end I am asking you to join me, and to ask other people to join us as well. The ten percent solution is about people with privilege and their needs met looking after people struggling with the most basic issues in human existence like water, food, health care, shelter, education, and fellowship.

From a distance using the information at hand it is possible to help establish microeducation. You can organize a local town or church to adopt an orphanage, or gather resources to be brought along on projects already existing in your community. You can help create flash cards for handheld devices and organize cellphone and computer donations. Many communities have gifted individuals working within them to try and meet the needs of these same children right in your own neighborhoods. We have not spoken about it at all openly in the superstruct discussions but prostitution still exists and is one of the most dangerous environments that children find themselves helplessly born into.

We can all find a way to participate in this problem, even just by talking openly about it.

Give ten percent of your time to finding an answer.
The Ten Percent Solution.

slicing open the pomegranate

Its a skill I learned years ago from my pal Brain. When he was a young hotshot musician he traveled the silk road with his rebab. Somehow the Usted Mohammed Omar found him and he was taken up among the friends. He became a star student on the rebab and he spent more time in that shadowy border land of Persia than he intended. Eating grapes in the shadow of the Bamiyan Buddahs he learned also how to properly eat a pomegranate.

You take just the tip of the knife, and you slice just through the rind in circles. First you go north to south, then again making quarters drive the tip of the knife through so you are breaking the skin but none of the seeds.

Now cut the pomegranate around its equator just through the skin again.

Now prepare a pretty good sized bowl of cold clean water. It depends of course on the size of the pomegranate however there is no reason to not be generous with size on this step.

You plunge the pomegranate under the water, and there with your hands you break it apart. You remove the tender seeds carefully from all of the white pith.

The seeds will sink. The pith will float. Pick out the big pieces of skin and float off the smaller ones. Drain the seeds in a wire mesh strainer or colander.

You now have bowl full of simply pomegranate seeds and clean hands.

Personally I love pomegranates with walnuts and persimmons, however the persimmons arent ready yet. The pomegranates this time of year are a newer variety that ripens in the very early fall. I forget the name.

While working on superstructing together about twenty groups using the bright green I stumbled on the Mobilizing Airillions page by PlaNetweaver and this incredible poem:

Original Airillions poem

The Rise of ‘Airillions’ came about when

World Economies tanked in 2010

Big Nose Dive spelled the demise of Big Brother

Then…One by one..we empowered..Each Other…:

By 2011 we’d dispelled the nightmares

That the future belonged to the billionaires

We’d exploded the myth that the Coin of these Lands

Was nothing to us as it Passed through our hands

We rose from our slumber to PassThePound

We wanted to send it around and around

We wanted to unleash its untapped potential

To draw on the element raw and essential

To see a great asset appreciated

Unbound and unbounded, Celebrated…Yes; feted

We wanted to plug into currency streaming

Flowing and growing towards our own dreaming

We wanted to lower the bridge on the moat

To make for Clear Passage, to float a lifeboat

To flow and to circulate as currents must do

If they are to generate energy thrust-through

We rose in the night to swing open the vault

Knowing something this rich is worth its own salt

Withdraw and deposit is all well and good

Yet stand and deliver in this neighbourhood

Means lettuce makes salad and PassThePound

Means slugs get unsluggish so wealth can abound…

And those that reside in the dollar domain

They Buck-ed the system by choosing to name

recipients reaping their one dollar giving

Land of the Free heralds Land Of The Living

Be it euro, dinar, sheqel or yen

Peso or ruble..; it multiplies when

We imbue with intention this note of exchange

Now we're turning the tide with our seeming 'small change'.

We rose from an age that had kept us all snoring

Seriously sleeping dulled-down and boring

We rose with the petals of paradise-found

Roused from our slumber to ''PassThePound "
-PlaNetweaver

I am waking up

I am dreaming. the last few nights its always the same dream. I dream of myself asleep dreaming, pulsing with energy, streaming light and sound and thoughts. In the dream I can see everywhere at once. The whole world is my body. When the wind blows through the trees I feel it like the wind blowing through the finest hairs on my skin. I am huge like the earth and yet I am my small sleeping self. I see my small sleeping self and the streams of energy reeling out in nets and streams all over the world. There are almost no words in this dream, which has made it elusive to track and tricky to remember.

At once I am asleep and yet at once I am connected to these cathedrals of light that we have painted in a place we all can see and yet wee cannot see. Cathedrals painted in light, in hidden glowing places that we approach with our angelic selves. The parts of ourselves that have form in intelligence and mind and spirit. In those halls I see the shifting web of energy as we wander through them together. It is a kaleidoscope of human heart and understanding radiating kool-aid colors and hidden vibration. Underneath the images and pulsing vibration of this deep connection, of this wind in the trees is the wind on my skin world, is this golden pulsing music. It streams out in waves and rays of streaming golden energy bursting around the people and intelligences that are connecting to me in this deep sleep.

The first night I shifted from this dream to a dream where I am riding in a vehicle with Avantgame and my younger daughter Lucretia. It must have been a personal rapid transit pod because even though we were all moving forwards towards out destination there was no real driver or any danger. There is just an urgency and a sense that we are trying to get to some specific target moment in order to fulfill a task. We are high spirited and in a playful ludic mood. There is this mass of information swirling around and the last thing we say is something like "you have to get there in time to invent the next line". The next morning I create the bright green Pan Human Sustainability Projects.

Dreams slip away so quickly. Its easy for them to get lost. The beginning of all practice is the dream book for me. Mine says in a waking scrawl "went home to start the...".

The dream returns. In the dream we are all connected in the SEHI net. The residual structure of the machines and interfaces fall away and what remains intact and glowing is intention.

A magicians trick.
The alchemical fire creates the philosophers stone.

The third night of the dream I can see your faces clearly. I do not see your faces as you read this screen. Instead I see them when you remember to give yourself a meditative moment, when you are sipping on that cup of tea that you have made with perfect hot water and that sings in your mouth and brings your senses alive. At that moment when you take a deep breath and remember that you are in this world right this moment alive and that we are all connected and I can see your faces in this dream.

The rays of connection extend all over the globe to all sorts of people. They shift and turn and scintillate bringing different people into view from different parts of the world. Waking I have only this image. There are no words from the dream, no communication other than the sight of a hundred people flashing by very quickly in this bright connected web of intention and understanding that weves the globe of habitated places together. The rays of rainbow light and images shifting and interacting with the glowing golden streaming music.

I wake up and realize that it is all true. On Global Swadeshi we have our 100th member (our 100th monkey).

And I forgot to say that yesterday my oldest daughter clockworkapol joined superstruct SEHI ranks. I convinced her that we needed her "Top-down" skills, as well as her visual anthropology and film capabilities. She joined reconstruct earlier and thought that she had joined superstruct. She is now a member of the bright green and Pan Human Sustainability Projects groups. As well as an anthropologist who has been working with large scale social problems and agencies since she was a webmonkey protegee as a teen, she is also a 3rd generation back to the land person, who was raised among the early adapter digerati and learned to read using reader rabbit. She is a very adept artist who has chosen to turn her hand towards large scale social justice projects, especially those that involve the repair and reconstruction of her own fractured community here in Humboldt.

Super these Structs

How The Exchange Works explains how the Exchange can function using fiction. In his postSuperstruct,: We're doing it wrong., worldwithoutoil suggests that we take the structs and super them together more. Bring more people in and get it to gel better.

My recent project is to take the Seed ATM and connect it to several primary superstructs: Facilitators,The Exchange,Water filtration,Self-sustainable Interconnected Communities,Gypsy Farms,Urban Food Producers' Coop,Share your seeds,Appleseed,Rooftop to Kitchen,Food diversity,Mr Franklin's Folks,Nomadic Markup Language (Nochalking),Grow Community Gardens--Teach Children Sustainable Lifestyles,Superstruct Classifieds,Africa Community Gardens Project,The New Pony Express Mail Relay Experiment,Assembly12,Analog Superthreat Warning System,Outposts of One,and my microeducation think tank.

These are the starting structs that I feel have the greatest potential to reshape our collective vision. If we super them together we can get a better picture. Now that like some of you; I have laid out all of my pet projects and solutions that have been percolating for some time, I am ready to revisit the other players and start to make sense out of the unexpected treasures to be found there.

Awaken, Adapt, Accelerate A.'.A.'.A.'. is my favorite mysterious jewel. I think I have found my own few magnets to follow Kuan Yin has been in my head lately.

Its all about cross-promotion at this point. In some ways I have literally been building a list of who I want to superstruct with the most. The Mission Input Output idea has helped me to get moving again, reviewing all of those handy side links on my SEHI profile. As soon as I have effectively connected the dozen or so superstructs that I can see easily can work together from a visionary point of view I can immediately see new ones that I want to link in. especially the projects coming out of Africa like Africa Community Gardens Project,The Refugee State: Support the Democratic Central African Republic (DCAR) Abroad!, and from India the important Save Ganga and SEWA which is built on a model responsible for much repurposing and reforestation in India and Tamil. These forays led me to interesting new to me projects like the superstruct BRIC from my Brazilian pal jorgeguberte who also set up the the Seed ATM.

We definitely need more structs and superstructs to help with the issue of water. Water filtration is a start in adressing the connection between watersheds, foodsheds, and restoration of bio vitality.

Some important super superstructing groups are : StructNet, and Seeing the Forest, Not Just the Trees and the visionary The 2019-2042 Visualization ProjectUniting Superstruct Efforts Through Collaborative Visualization founded by ARK.

This made it pretty easy for me fulfill my questing assignment to join three superstructs this week. Actually I found the The Hexayurt Project - Free Shelter, Agriculture and Infrastructure Technologies from Hexayurt guy Vinay Gupta. Of course now I have to go back and knit that in too...

Its a lot like gardening. Once you get your hands dirty its easy to see where to go next.

A Class Apart

The "G" team came out of the hills yesterday. Its been really busy ever since. They brought bales of dried algae from the algae mats up at the bear creek diesel spill restoration project. They do a lot of tarp work and a lot and a lot of plain old work.

This is our restoration, repair and repurposing team. This is the select group of people who slowly track and exhort the return of the salmon. For the last five weeks they have been doing diesel spill repair on a shell house and building a timber construction fishery station. Once they started dredging the mouth of the river and concurrently they restored the flows on the main fork here in Humboldt County the whole thing really started cleaning out and the coho came back in a steady stream of guided ancient spirit salmon. We had the stories of the arrival of these salmon from the Hupa, Karuk and Yurok to the north on the bigger of the seven dragons to guide us in their care.

It was the music that brought them. In this case I mean the G team rather than the salmon however I wouldn't rule out the influence of music on the salmon either. Our musicians had developed a combination of songs from the ancient silk road woven in with the Californios fiesta style, heavily supported by a New Balkan movement that created a place at the traditional music table for all of the band geeks to sit with the dumbek and tabla players, and watch the commanding tribal dancers do their American Tribal Style improv together, their soul dance.

Asha and I walked down the hill in the bright moonlight leading the way for a small company of musicians who will join the G team at the new Blue house for a special morning of singing. We are getting ready to put in a new set of kitchen type gardens today at the blue house and we like to start that activity with lots of deep melodious singing. The G team really enjoyed the music also, they were mostly fire dancers and musicians themselves who had created a sort of structure of two or three bands in their own company over the decades. They are lean, and tanned, and dressed in somewhat whimsical and expressive clothing considering they spend so much time out in the bush shoveling gravel.

Restoration became part of the steampunk thing when it began to provide seasonal jobs during the employment stimulation act. All of my musician friends already knew that they could use my house as a jumping off point for local seasonal employment. It was a simple step away to have them come here right from the summer circuit of festivals and concerts to do their winter recording. The enticement was the ready company of so many other fun musicians who play the same tunes.

That was back when we had lots of large scale festivals that everyone drove many miles to attend. It was easier when the festivals became smaller and more locally driven. It took years of council and walking and talking the golden trail from festival to festival to convince them to all become sustainability and repurposing festivals. Really it was just a couple of years of begging like mad right after the millennial turn. Once we created the urban free festivals (mostly through "pirate" and "steampunk" events) the system became a viable one for the artists again as long as there was decent right livelihood work at the other end to get them through winter. I mean they couldn't all live in the hinterlands of India and Bali every winter forever. After a certain point they had to decide where they wanted to live because of the cost, the time, the potential for conscription or quarantine by force, and the availability of travel slots.

So our corridor became the little India of the north. All of the same musicians had spent so much time abroad studying with the masters when it was possible; that it was a convergence of the music scenes of Istanbul, Seville, Samarkand, Hollywood, Bollywood and Kabul here just above Garberville.

Outside of the garden area this morning we are going to create from the formerly somewhat scrubby ground, looms a structure that we can see as we approach the blue house. Its tall and conical and obviously mud and cob because of its organic roundness. All summer long we have been throwing pots at the glass shop and firing them off when we run the forge ovens for the glass. We are making an ancient style dovecote. The pots do not have bottoms on them, we slice them off when we take them from our foot driven pottery wheels. The pots are instead stacked o n their side like bricks with cob as mortar in a large circle, with about six feet or eight feet diameter empty space in the center after you build up the tower about two stories tall. Its around a thousand or so pots (which is great practice by the way). Mostly the whole structure is built around a wooden frame and a doorway set in a wattle and daub circle at the base to protect from predators(the doorway faces north so you can maximize the birds use of the south west exposure). It works like this: when the doves all nest in the pots they mostly kick their manure to the inside on the structure. Once they start nesting they provide a very passive source of meat in that occasionally nestlings get kicked out and are collected in the daily collection of bird droppings. Its a soup ecology here in norcal.

We established one over at the yellow house about three years ago and it works really well. Somehow we even have some big fat city pigeons living in there now. Its funny because people always thing of the country as quiet, however when it is alive it provides a constant stream of sound. Especially at the yellow house with the donkeys and the dovetower.

There is a small circle of people awake and greeting the dawn together with tea in hand as we walk into the yard further. Annie May is excitedly winding her way around the laps and legs of the firedancers standing around the small burner and samovar. She is wearing a leather cap with a brim that Tarran had sewn for her this last week. After spending so much time in the male company of the donkey wizards she was shy at first when these stunning and vivacious women came off of the mountain together with their feathered and tatooed consorts. Of course she was unsure how the politics of her situation would change since she had lived a hard life on the juke joint trail where often the partying and hobo camps meant she would be left to the side alone and abandoned. One thing you could depend on with Annie May already was that she was a quick study and a fast learner. It was a crime that she was kept in a stroller and forced to "play baby" until she was almost six. By then you could see she was not so immature and the game was up. Here she was learning fast to skip and jump, dance clap snap and whistle.

"She wants to learn poi" said Simone, following my glance to the bobbing head of our last refugee. I made the classic face of "yes thats very interesting and good", putting my finger to the side of my cheek as if to say "Hmmmmm...Yes!". Simone flashed her bright blue eyes at me and tossed her red and blond streaked hair to the side. She was wearing a long vest with fake fur trim in bright red that matched her hair...she was always impeccable decked out like this. The G team rolled out of their beds in the morning pretty much looking this good. The look was mostly developed long ago at Burningman at the Black Rock City gatherings. A sort of repurposed chic. One of the things that they liked about our details in the woods is that it seemed to be more a continuation of that lifestyle. Our way is the heart and those that come to it find our path a precious thing. Inside the lights were on and the music was already forming up in that lovely chaotic stretching of tuning and picking at the instrument. Part of the trick when it is cold and misty like this is to just sit with your instrument in your lap for a while so that it can warm up from the latent heat of your body. Otherwise everyone has to tune twice, once tuning a cold stick and again once it warms up.

Tea sounds good.

Inside there are some low cushions and futons to sit on as well as several simple wooden stools and a small table. With a warm cup in hand I reclined as is our custom. Waiting to catch her eye, I gestured to little Annie May to come sit next to me. She was shy of me, yet not fearful. We listened to Calvin warm up and play his snaky little violin. It was an Indonesian snake skin fiddle that looked like a small banjo or jimbush. It was played standing up with a bow sort of like cello. The sound was alive with emotion and the interior world of Calvin.

In the softly breaking dawn, in the pause before the work starts in genuine, Annie May and I sat and listened as the little snaky song grew sad and full of longing. Every now and again I could see she was passing glances with Simone, they had the start of a heart bond of friendship. Obviously Annie May had survived by being resilient and finding surrogates everywhere. In our case clearly she had found her home and we had found another jewel. It seemed like she had grown already, or maybe just gotten more sure of herself physically in the space she was inhabiting.

Already it had come up with one of the neighbors, this question of her joining the class in our little cozy warm schoolroom up the hill at the honeycombed greenhouse. There were other children who walked up or were brought up in Donkey carts from the yellow house."OH" so I said, "You really want Annie May schooling all the other children in how much wild pussy and booze she has seen out on the juke joint trail?".

It was a direct reference to a conversation we had had about how useful Annie May had become to Tarran. She was spinning around the donkey barn saying "Useful...useful...usefully" wildly and ecstatically like it was a long song. We motioned for her stop, reminding her of the presence of the animals. She seemed to be able to respond fastest to sign language and we used that commonly around the animals. It was more like a game to her.

"Kurt said that all he had use for was booze and pussy and that I was no good for either". Annie May said by way of explanation after she had gathered herself together. Probably I winced even though I tried not to.

This morning in the gathering company in the Blue house she was wildly excited yet entirely physically composed. Already she was starting to mimic the physical attitude and spark of the G team Wymmn. There was no "A" team or "B" or so forth. There was just the "G" team and everyone else who either worked the field teams or worked in the kitchen or was a musician or tech or trader. We used to have trade workers who could use our wireless access, and eat and sleep in trade for usually almost five hours a day of work. Eventually there was a group of these workers who stayed on more permanent sometimes doing work trade in the hills and we moved them up into the green house to prepare the food and live a more hygenically removed life. It was possible for them to send home credits online or build them up for whatever purpose and reason. Even if it was a ridiculously expensive ice cream cone for himself and Annie May like it was for Tarran when he rode into town the other day. He still got credits trickled into his account from recordings he had made years and years ago. Firebreathing pirate punk on the accordion even then.

For Tarran the choice was simple, he wanted Annie May to have her very own first ice cream cone. Of course he also brought back packages and mail from the post office on his heavy loader Worldbike.

This morning Annie May crawled up to my shoulder while the music began to play for the dawn. She whispered in my ear "someday I am going to BE in the G team". Her eyes were sparkling at the discovery of this secret in herself. Her face was getting tan and you could see little freckles dusting her cheeks now. I nodded and winced my eyes at her making a serious smile, as if to size her up for her potential and possibilities, "Oh Yes" I mouthed at her. Acknowledging at once that she was right to not interrupt the music and that she will assuredly master herself enough to be one of these brave and strong young lions bringing repair and health to the forests and streams of our beloved little dragons.

"You just have to love them"

Annie May is used to keeping company with men and animals as she has been a climate refugee her whole life. She is very determined and she is also trying to fit in and find a home here as an orphan, still the way the child has taken to the care of the donkeys is amazing. She and Tarran were up late last night making garlands for the donkeys to wear for our special harvest party today. All of the musicians are coming with us down to the river and we will share a special meal which has already been packed for us in steel containers.

The donkeys know something special is a-foot because of our excitement and our waking early. They are wide eyed and frisky with their flower garlands on their heads. The older lead donkey Whiskey has also got an old straw hat on. We could have taken the sorghum days ago except we needed the one petrol rig to have tires to help carry the children down to the river. Its just too dangerous to have them ride with the donkeys down on the carts all loaded up in the dark. The first patch is just under a mile away however there is a nice turn out nearby and we can bring along some extra food and temporary structures with the stationwagon.

Annie May will be riding with the donkeys. There was no way to convince her otherwise. She passed her health exam yesterday and we moved her into the yellow house next to the donkey pens with the other donkey wizards. Her cheeks are already gaining color. She says about the donkeys: "Its easy...you just have to love them". The donkeys do seem to like her, and she carefully explains to them everything that will happen next. She cups their ears in her little hands and whispers right into them the way Tarran does. She laughs when they startle her by braying. Tarran says he does not mind looking after her for now. She has had him make her hair into a stern bun in the habit of the donkey wizards. It is a hard question when to expect her to be able to interact normally with the other children and even possibly attend our small school and gain literacy along with her donkey wizardry.

After we press out the sorghum tomorrow, we will ferment some of it and bottle it with champagne yeast. The rest will be boiled for syrup. The seed will be saved and also used for animal feed. The canes are dried and stored for later alcohol fermentation; we use a biologic to ferment our tincture alcohol. My neighbor to the north will be coming along to cut cane specifically for brooms. Several of our patches have large sections of colored brooms which she makes into hundreds of brooms of several sizes and shapes for different duties.

This year we are pretending that there is nothing different. Usually we have lots of outside visitors and we used to even hold a small regional festival with this beer. Our sorghum beer (along with other botanicals) was the reason so many of these unusual and amazing young people came to us in the first place years ago. Now we will limit our visitors to our usual pals and other vetted members (mostly leaders) of the Upriver Downriver Alliance of Peoples (UDAP). We will still probably have several hundred people visiting and staying overnight, including my adopted Yurok relatives, the Mendo Wymmins collective, and the dairy farmers and drivers. We are also likely to get a visit at the festival from our caravan trader pals, and with so many people coming it will feel as festive as ever. There will be fresh Salmon and grilled meat as well as fry bread and coffee and family cook camps.

This morning as we left the green house and the musicians compound we closed and locked the gates. The sound of a small snaky violin made the perfect accompaniment to the morning light breaking Grey and cool across the valley. Even the donkeys felt the muse and were silent and thoughtful as they listened to the little song. They are easier to handle and they love it when we bring along the musicians. It was dark out and there was a hubbub of conversation and witty jest to soften the reality of it. I had always hoped that we would always keep our gates open, that the roads would always stay open. 101 used to represent freedom and independence. Now I am not sure who we are in this closed state. With the addition of the child we have reached our maximum number. Even with Paul and Theo conscripted (by force I must say) this last winter hiatus there are already two small children old enough to be considered in their place and several others soon to cross that threshold. We will have to consider expansion or contraction.We are considering suspending hiatus indefinitely. Some of the parents of small children want even more seclusion than we are providing. The Braddah force on the mountain has closed the long trail and the hobo's are trapped in the north. Two juke joints have been cleared out and seized in the last two days.

Our way is meant to be welcoming, to give water and food and salt to the traveler.

Who are we with closed gates?

The Blue House

The CBE press works very well now that we have re-enforced the hopper as suggested. It created enough bricks yesterday from the foundation soil alone to create the start of the walls for the blue house, donkey pen, dairy goat pen, and chicken coop. We have found that the donkeys are fierce defenders of the chickens and they both love to shout at each other most of the day. Meanwhile two newly formed families are staying next door to the soon to be blue house in hexayurts.

Meanwhile we have only barely managed to keep a peaceful jurisdiction over this part of the valley. Mostly we are able to maintain our presence because of the upriver downriver peoples alliance. Most of the would be squatters are caught long before they even get to the old county line. We also have the support of the dairy cooperative people, including the drivers who take most of our goods to town for us, and with whom we swap products for dairy and meat. They keep the norther perimeter of the river clear as well. Ten years ago it was less of a luxury to be mostly vegetarian maybe eating fish. These days we just rely on who and what we have in place and we do have quite a lot of happy cows here in Humboldt. To think that it has been thirty years since I begged my friend Dick Bryant to consider farming organic silage for his dairy cooperative. Just a seed plot even. He saw the wisdom in farming their own fodder, and he loved his jersey cows and knew that silage was the healthiest option ("they wont have belly aches" he used to say). In twenty years they were producing organic milk as well as ice cream and when fuel prices began to double they were all sitting pretty because they were not buying hauled alfalfa. That one little seed catalog made such a difference. That and tenacious begging.

The blue house disturbs me because it is not a planned part of our system of quarantine or residence here. It was simple to have people stay at the red house who were probably fine but not entirely checked out. We have a house up on the Thomas road that takes on quarantine issues and major health problems. Mostly it is just the house of a healer with an ability to work with people. We used to have a lot more people carved out from substance abuse and stress and malnutrition. Through experience we quickly learned how to keep harmony. Its better if you keep harmful social influences to a minimum so we care for people differently when they are like that.

Once people are accepted enough to become at least allied members of our community, and they have passed quarantine, they move to the yellow house. That is the main place where we keep the donkeys and dairy goats and chickens. Usually we try and have families find a place up here on the hill in the green house where there is access to our shared schoolroom facility. Usually one of the musicians or more teaches at the daily social sessions. Our fortunes have been good in that two couples have formed at the yellow house, one with an existing boy, and now there are likely more children on the way. We decided at a meeting of the Kris that the best solution is to build up our facilities down near the trading station so that we can accommodate more work animals and provide more privacy and autonomy for our emerging family units. Its also gotten pretty crowded up here on the hill. The green house is full and so is the musicians area.

Annie May is a special case. Essentially she is an orphan. There have been a few cases in the past of children being taken in by related families, however this case is quite unique.

Our first orphan.

Annie May is similarly malnourished and stressed as her drug addicted mother was. The toll the life takes has touched her. She has had little daily regularity or care. It would be disruptive to thrust her too quickly into any intense social circle here. Her sense of self and identity would likely suffer.

Since the news came yesterday of the Bo squats getting burned out in Eureka I have had one short conversation with Annie May about her mother. Whenever her old life is mentioned in any way, or there is any suggestion of connecting her with her mother again she would start shaking and repeating the phrase that I realized I had used in her presence.

"Its no LIFE" she would say with strangely adult intensity. "Its NO life".

For now Terran the donkey wizard was happy to comb her hair and have her follow him around as he wheedled and coaxed the donkeys in and out of their work harnesses most of the day. She is only six years old however she is dexterous and quite bright. The donkeys seem to like her so its hard for anyone to complain.

Evening Chores

Before I can head down the hill for dinner a number of small chores need to be done. Some of them are as simple and fundamental as re-setting the mechanical clockwork sun trackers and sand weights. The others are time old like picking the last few ripe cherry tomatoes from the garden and spraying down the plants around the house so the tiny insect mite predators can be wet the way they like it.

Already I can hear the music rising up from the glass shop below as the musicians gather to cheer on the cooking crew. The steam whistle that signals the great samovar teakettle coming to a final solar lens powered boil signals the movement towards the evening meal and the gathering of the small community together around the giant iron cookpot below.

Its easy to step through my last few chores humming along with the song as I go. It is a familiar maquuam from the roads of California. Most of the kids that are here were just wandering and stranded when they found us. At a certain point we managed to use the glass blowing tools my neighbor is a master of to create the great parabola cookers we now use to create this lovely meal at the end of the day. Before the propane became so precious that a large tank order became rare we silvered these powerful solar soncentrators and built iron stands for the great pots and even made a crucible hot enough to keep him blowing glass out of a glory hole using a series of lenses and parabola mirrors.

The hardest part was admitting that we had the tech all along.

The easiest part was taking in the kids and road dogs off of the street who came to us like lost souls. We began to organize them into teams and set them to farming the river bars for things like sunflowers and sorgum and corn. Every year the river bars change and shift, especially since they started dredging the mouth of the Eel river almost a decade ago. We use concrete based poles and long rolls of recycled plastic fencing to demarcate new gardens each year. The plants are fertilized with collected algae and squaw fish from the river. Up here by the shop we have irrigated kicthen gardens full of herbs and tender vegetables.

This reminds me of one last chore that I need to accomplish before I scamper down the hill to the large meal at the hostel. I walk into my small house attached to the shop and flip on a few lights and the computer while I place produce in its correct cool indoor spot and wash my hands and change for dinner. Once the system is warmed up I proceede to print out a few things to take down to the dinner as small gifts: a fishing bob for Karl and a small teacup and saucer set for the little Annie May. I select a few different options from the Rep-rap printing system, choosing to print out two sets of teacup and saucer and three fishing bobs just because I have it ready to go. There is plenty of distilled cellulose from the algae distillers. The sun trackers are set on them already for tomorrow and the fiber optic system has proven to be very efficient in keeping the algae production in ther fermenters going. In fact the entire workshop has this strange green golden light that we are quite used to since we actually use the upper floor of clear plastic algae incubators as the souorce of light for the shop below. At night or before dawn it is simple to switch on the electric light at the start of the fiber optic harness. For special project areas we have special lighting, however the even distribution of light from the algae incubators is surprisingly good for most of the projects we have going in here.

While the printer shuttles back and forth through its job of printing out the 3D objects I move food across the dehydrator system in the shop. Its pretty easy to exhaust the heat from the room through these screened cupboards and this time of year you can actually dry and store quite a bit of food, the dried roma tomatoes, herbs and peppers are very treasured in the winter here in California.

Tonight it will be a fairly large meal because of the season. Its almost fall and there is still a lot of movement on the old highway. Once the rains come we encourage as many of the kids as possible to go seek some shelter in a warmer climate and to visit the urban centers more. Since the last outbreak of SARs in the San Francisco Bay area we encourage them to find a work share in the hills more than to travel the cities of the world anymore. There are lots of older people still in the hills here from the back to the land movement and the later cash crop boom that need some young people in residence to care for them and keep the woodstove going.

Without cheap diesel the life in these woods that we all share has become more physical in many ways. The best part is that we have learned to stay in closer proximity to each other for most of the growing season so that we could become self-reliant on food. It quickly became apparent that we needed to help to feed as many people as possible in the world beyond as well and so we became a sort of ashram or hostel and farm.

The little printed gifts are tucked away in my fabric bag as I skip out of the building turning down the power. The last bit of sun is gleaming off of the big acrylic parabolic lense receivers above. There are several styles and sizes of collector on the metal shop roof all turned now away from the sun towards the first light of the next new day.

The dog joins me as I walk down the driveway. My dad is already down there, he is one of the few that controls the great cooking lenses in the late afternoon. There is great danger in those lenses being handled incorrectly and we have only a handful of people who we let run the actual cooking "flame". Of course the flame we cook with is the image of the sun itself.

At the gate leading into the small scatering of buildings and yurts I hear a familiar greeting from some of the young men "There is ONE GOD" they chant in unison to me "He is the SUN GOD" now I can see them dancing and clapping the four of them "Rah! Rah!....AAaaaAAAmen Rah!".

It is the old cheer of my old long gone master and it falls on happy and receptive ears. We all jump around together like cheerleaders "Rah rah amen rah". Really it is mostly just a silly rhyme we like to repeat to each other. Within the small saying is truth, we derive our sustenance in fact at the gass shop from the sun in many ways.

In the courtyard of the main kitchen I am greeted with a cup of tea and the smell of the soup. All at once I can also smell fresh bread as the great solar ovens are off-loaded into the preparation area. There are easily over fifty people preparing for dinner, we have several sets of neighbors that are coming tonight as well and overall we will feed more than a hundred people before the evening is out. Several harvest groups have not yet come back in from the river bar fields. As we start to put the meal together at the glass shop up above the river by the road they are down below still harvesting as fast as they can into the big bundles that will work their way up the hill to the music and the food and the merry company.

For several minutes I simply sit in the courtyard silently enjoying a baked millet treat and sipping tea observing the group.

This is our way.

There is time to meld with the group as they move about cutting bread and moving great pots of corn and squash inside to cool and be served out. In the distance I can hear the sterling engine as the corn for tomorrows breakfast polenta is being ground up in our small mill house. Inside the courtyard compound we have even got several mascot banty chickens that run wild and cause occasional worries within the cooking area. Like most of the people here they just appeared one day with bright eyes and a desire for our company.

On the other side of the courtyard where the musicians and other kitchen serving people live I can hear the music getting more excited. They must be able to share the smell of the bread. As I move around the cob building which surrounds the biggest lenses the music gets louder and I see the intended recipients of my little gifts.

Off to the side of the music Annie May is sitting in her Papas lap. They have the stiff discomfort of people who are new to a large very familiar group. They also have slightly sad and lean expressions which we often see on the faces of the road travelers. At first glassblower Michael and I thought they were passers through. Simply mouths to feed until a ride came through since the little girl could not walk the longtrail. It was less that a week before Karl had made himself a makeshift pole for squawfish duty, and Annie May had gone out with the kids to pick grapes several mornings up at the neighbors on fruitland ridge. They were settling in.

Like many on the longtrail they arrived with very few things and Annie May had no toys at all really to play with. Certain that the teacup would at least give her a chance to pal with a friend I handed her the little bundle of cups, saucers teapot and sugar bowl and sent her to the tech shed to paint them while dinner was being set up. Of course I had printed out an entire cellulose tea party for three complete with flower decorated teapot. Here at the Glass Shop we have had no shortage of small children.

Karl admired his fishing floats before we sent them along with Annie May to be painted red on one side. Nearly every night this time of year one of our soups was a sort of California version of a French fish pistou...a strained fish stew. The squaw fish were not of course so delicious as the other fish we are protecting from them. With our supply of shallots and this evening fresh corn also the soup is usually quite good.

At the sound of the first bell a small group gathers and serves out some food. Over the years we have developed an order of eating that is mostly practical and usually seasonal. The younger people are still making their way up from the river with the donkeys and the harvest bundles. Meanwhile the older neighbors and people who live year round at the glass shop usually eat with the young children and musicians. One of our chores while we get our own plates ready is to portion out and set in the warmers stacks and stacks of the steel lunch pails from India that we use quite a bit now for food. Since we commonly have several stews and some millett and dal they work well to keep the food covered and warm and tasty. When it is the full moon and it is possible to harvest the river bar fields all night we actually take these containers down to the workers and sit out with them on the river sand drinking tea with the muscians playing all night by a little campfire watching the moon. In this way we can get a really large part of our food in for the year right before we have our large local new-moon viewing party where we serve our famous sorghum beer.

On the carpets under the arcade outside the musicians quarters
I sit with my bowl of soup and my millet bread. As I begin to speak to the now quieted musicians in greetings Asha, one of my close women friends gestures with the teapot she is carrying around. We exchange warm greetings as she re-fills my cup and gracefully reaches to place her curved wooden musical instrument inside of the shelving area inside. Tonight she has been playing Oud. I prefer to take my meals with a small circle of friends, and she sits besides me on the reclining pillows with her tea in hand, relishing the simple time together taking our meal of fish and vegetable stew, with some tomato and cucumber salad and millet bread. She understands my need for quiet company since food itself is quite a lot of stimlulation. On the other side of the cob walls we can hear the rowdy gathering of a dozen families at the long tables now that the food for the workers has been set aside. As the sun makes its final descent the second long slow bell rings out over the river delta valley.

In reply far away we can hear one of the donkeys braying in the distance.