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A Wilderness Between Us
April 15, 2018 § 14 Comments
The world was white. From ground to sky the white was constant, and etched in it were the vertical brown streaks of tree trunks. Stepping outside on the first day of spring the forest around my house was gone, entombed in snow. Ice came first, so that when the snow followed for several hours it sheathed every branch and twig. Heavy with now frozen leaves, the smaller beech are bent downward, tips touching the ground until all of these young trees become arches, man sized croquet wickets frosted and strewn about the land.
On the barest winter day, I can look to the southeast and make out the shape and color of my nearest neighbor's house through the foreground of maple and poplar. Today there is just the solitude of white.
The unseasonable eight-inch snowfall was followed days later by highs in the sixties, which retreated to nights below freezing, and only days later shot back into the seventies with beaming sun, to land once again in the cold of the thirties. The entire month of April has been a mix of glorious spring warmth and bouts of freezing rain and snow. Apple trees are budding, hyacinths are donating flashes of pink and purple to the landscape, and trout lilies are breaking from the leaf litter in such densities as to make the forest floor look like it has a carpet of grass. Then a quick layer of ice will fall in the dark of night to test them all.
In early April the House of Commons Library detailed how the richest one percent of the population is on track to own two-thirds of all of the world's wealth by the year 2030, should trends maintain as they are. Oxfam reported prior to this that eight billionaires have as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population – 3.6 billion people. All of the land that is being gutted and made uninhabitable, and all of the laborers the world over who stoop and heft and daily erode their bodies through exertion and chemical exposure are part of a great machine that exists to send a steady stream of excess to a small handful of individuals.
Capitalism was supposed to have corrected the contradictions and failures of feudalism, and it seems to have done so by creating a class of people with no loyalties, no fidelity to place or people or principle other than a berserk lust for profit. Capital and its controllers float freely over the borders that cage the underclasses. Money and power write and erase laws, and at whim wage war against the peasant class and nonhuman life with a cold business class gusto.
Centuries ago, the edicts of lords could only reach so far. Kings and their vassals had broad power of life and death within the ringed walls of cities. This power held sway in the nearby villages and hams, but dissipated at the edges of settlements until the commands that they bellowed were shorn of all pomp and circumstance in the reality of the wilderness. In the wild there is no king and money buys no quarter, a truth so bare that the masters of civilization have tried to destroy any incarnation of wilderness the world over with visceral contempt.
The wild suffers no man's stories. The order of the world was set in the rock and soil long before any human named them, and the immutable simplicity of this order is visible in the golden sunlight that beams through a forest canopy, in the sweep of a raptor's flight as it falls upon its prey, and in the stinking decay of a maggot eaten animal slowly returning its flesh to the ground.
We are invited to walk within this order, to find humility in the gifts and tragedies of nature. Conversely, if we try to subjugate this order to our own narratives, then we are invited to suffer and die. The lords of capital, who worship a god named production, have chosen the latter. Technocratic full spectrum dominance casts eyes over the entirety of the planet.
Where are we to escape to?
This past week French police came in a force of thousands to evict the ZAD, a sprawling piece of farmland crisscrossed with hedgerows that has been occupied by anarchists and recalcitrant farmers for years in an attempt to prevent the construction of an airport. Previous eviction attempts always failed and sparked waves of tumultuous protests in the cities. In January the French government finally abandoned plans to build the airport, and this latest attempt to boot the anarchist squatters was the most intense.
Blockades were built and fire bombs thrown in response to police concussion grenades and tear gas. After days of battling the residents of the ZAD, which included the wholesale destruction of many of the homes and structures they had built there, the state finally backed off, unable to break the will of the occupants. The victory of the Zadists is not total however, as police currently hold a piece of the land under their control, and have thousands of officers stationed in the region. Barricades are being rebuilt, and the future of autonomous life in the ZAD stands on a razor's edge, as does the success of people around the world who attempt to carve out a space for themselves to freely exist.
For the Zapatistas in Mexico, the Kurds in Rojava, and even all of the people camped out on a pipeline easement in the backwoods of the rural United States, danger abounds for those who dare shuck off the rule of the wealthy.
If the wilderness is gone, we fight where we stand. Instead of escaping to an unseen frontier, let us invite the wild in. Let it consume civilization from the inside out.
Eight clouds arise. The eightfold fence of Idzumo makes an eightfold fence for the spouses to retire. Oh! That eightfold fence.
-Kojiki, "Records of Ancient Matters"
In James Clavell's novel, "Shogun," the character Mariko explains to Blackthorne that in a world of paper walls and crowded spaces, that to avoid going mad and killing one and other, they rely on a type of mental compartmentalization, hiding their true selves deep within a mental maze. She refers to this as the "eightfold fence."
In a world of facial recognition technology, big data, electronic tracking of the movement of nearly all people in some regard or another, are we not pushed deeper and deeper within the fence complexes of our minds? As civilization and its capitalist architecture demands more and more of our time, our effort, and our attention, less and less remains for us to keep for ourselves. Interests and hobbies are commodified as advertising opportunities. Free time is gig time, driving around strangers for a few extra dollars. The precious moments of our lives are harvested by corporations to be sold back to us as monetized Instagram "lifestyle" posts.
Our eightfold fences shall guard our hidden wild. Within us we can foster vast wildernesses and let them grow fecund and thick. Loving the smell of woodsmoke and the bitter cold of a stream clinging to our ankles, the wind pressing on our faces and our lover's breath on our necks. Detesting the rich with contempt for their pathetic pleasures while desiring so entirely to watch the failure of their industrial projects. When the wilderness is rooted deeply within our thinking, safe from being uprooted by contact with the madness of the world, we can safely expose it to one another, and foster a wild amongst us.
They have worked very hard to make commerce the primary human relationship. We cannot cede the space between us, the last space, the space where all potential for rebellion to their false order exists.
We must let each other know that we have no love for this false narrative. We must make it safe to declare that our allegiance is to life, not to the dreams of wealthy men. The wilderness can be reborn between us, and there give us refuge.
A chill blew across the land with the gray dawn. Diagonal rain falls on my daughter and me as we walk past the barn to tend to our morning chores. Mayapples seem to have all decided that this was the morning to reveal themselves. They line the drive like sentries, somehow already inches high where yesterday they were completely hidden beneath the soil. Dark pink flowers are blossoming on the tips of the jane magnolia, daring to brave the cold air that feels entirely out of place.
We are invited to take our place within the order of the world. Or we are invited to die.
To the Core
February 20, 2018 § 9 Comments
Each time the sledgehammer struck the iron wedge, a clang echoed through the sliver of woodland. When I was a ten-year-old boy, this strip of pine trees was Sherwood Forest. With twine, laundry line, and whatever cordage I could scrounge I would lash sticks horizontally from tree trunk to tree trunk, on top of which I would lay pine boughs to create make shift shelters and forts. Rope slung from a branch would be used to swing wildly back and forth, and though only a few inches above the ground I felt as if I were way up in the canopy.
Now I was cutting down the standing dead pines in my parent's suburban backyard that were once such a source of magic. My mother and stepfather will be putting their house on the market in the spring, and I travelled home with my family to help them get the place in shape. Standing in six inches of recently fallen snow, I made face and back cuts in the trees I once played amongst, in this little windbreak that I once felt was a forest. So thoroughly dead and light the trees were, that their weight wasn't enough to topple them. Entangled in the chaotic crisscrossing and interweaving of branches thirty feet up, the trees would not fall until I hoisted their severed bases in my arms, and began walking them away from their stumps.
Once on the ground, limbed and bucked, I gathered up the branches and carried them to a brush pile at the back corner of my parent's yard. Hidden amongst bushes and small trees, a series of old T-Posts still stood at various angles on the western edge of the property. One strand of rusted and cracked barbed wire still connected them, demarcating the line between two former farm fields, and seemingly, between the past and the present.
Really staring at a house will betray all of the slight flaws that go so easily overlooked when one is just living in it. Creaks in the floor, poorly placed trim, cracked paint, rotting wood. My parent's house was built sometime in the 1980's, which should not seem old. However, it was clearly built as part of a rush of development that swallowed up farms, forests, and marshes north and west of Chicago in that era. Pulling electric sockets from the kitchen walls, my sister's boyfriend noticed the lack of ground wires. As I painted the living room, I saw how the wooden window frames were aged and flaking. Drywall seams on the hallway ceiling were obvious. Apparently, in the master bathroom a pipe in the wall had recently snapped. We triaged the most obvious issues, but everywhere we looked, if we really looked, we saw more that was either failing from age or from a complete neglect by whoever did the original work thirty something years ago.
From the outside, if you were to drive through the neighborhood, one would probably think, "This is a really nice place." The houses are relatively big, the yards are relatively big, and everything has that "American dream" sort of aesthetic. It is suburbia, but not the chain link fence and small brick bungalow suburbia of the 1960's. It is the two-story, four bedroom, half acre suburbia that seemed so optimal in 1995. That is, until the full on, three-car-garage, two air conditioner, and finished basement with a mini kitchen McMansion craze of the 2000's came in and made it irrelevant.
The area where my parent's have their house used to sit at the very edge of development. To the west were vast cornfields and pockets of forest. Plenty of big box stores and chain restaurants flourished there for a time. A mall is a five-minute drive away. But as the years passed, the cornfields were bought up and the little patches of forest were cut and scraped clean. Like an infestation, suburbia expanded. Where once I saw cows roam on grass, there are now hundreds of homes. How a neighborhood was crammed onto that pasture, I'll never understand.
Strips of stores replaced the farms, and now where the western edge of development lies, I am not sure. But I do know that a large number of the retail structures that housed restaurants and stores when I was in high school are now vacant. Apparently when the newer bigger houses were built further down the interstate, the money went with them. The owners of the now abandoned commercial real estate have refinished the building's exteriors, as if praying to some gods of commerce to please bring back the stores. But the gods have moved on, and now they hover over the Meijers, and Caribou Coffees, and Verizon Wirelesses some ten miles yonder.
What are people supposed to do with an empty Wal-Mart or a vacant Best Buy? When are we allowed to bulldoze the corpse of the strip mall, and bury its rubble? The twenty years these places were in business, workers smiling at customers, it was all an illusion. A sleight of hand to make this place seem relevant so money could be siphoned to some far away bank account. The employees now long let go, who knows where they went? Maybe they followed the displaced foxes and pheasant.
Entropy is a constant, yet it seems so constantly ignored. The cost of maintaining merely what we have is enormous, but it is so much less exciting to think about than the new things we could have that are just around the corner.
Standing in my parent's front yard I look down the street at all of the other homes. With snow covered yards and roofs, the place looks quaint. Yet I wonder about the rot. None of these houses could have been built well. The desire to turn a quick profit that informed the shoddy workmanship on my parent's house could not have been contained merely to this one structure on this one block, or in this one town, or this one state. I once heard that all of the palm trees in Phoenix were brought into the city around the same time, so that in so many years, they would all begin to die at about the same time. I do not really know if that is true, but it has me wondering if the suburbs will all start falling into massive disrepair at the same time.
Last week a nineteen-year-old man went into his old high school in Parkland, Florida and shot seventeen people to death. Mass shootings are becoming passé in America at this point, and only those with really high death tolls and really young victims even provoke much of a reaction. What could possibly cause a person to want to commit such an atrocious act? What kind of rot exists in their soul? What kind of maintenance and upkeep has been avoided in the person who walks up to a series of strangers and executes them? Further, what kind of emotional and spiritual work has gone long undone in a culture that churns out these damaged individuals over, and over, and over again?
Doing something well, making something that will last, is not prized in this culture. All that matters is completing the transaction. Once the purchase is made, the relationship is over and the poor sucker holding the bag can deal with the fall out. Empty and depressing malls ring towns of financially strapped families living in factory framed houses. Adults work wherever there is work for however long they have to while children are shuffled through overcrowded and underfunded schools until the bell rings and they are sent out into the meaningless wastes of suburbia. By some miracle a few of them turn out exemplary, while others muddle through it towards a life of alcohol and anxiety medication. Sadly, there are those who join the ranks of rising suicide numbers while for some, the isolation and emptiness of life in capitalism push them into online enclaves of the angry and marginalized. In these holes they fester together, often lionizing lone wolf killers and school shooters.
Tragedy is all but unavoidable.
How do we tend to needs that have gone unmet for decades? How do we do social upkeep in a culture that wants us to believe that there is no society, only hard working winners, lazy losers, and a stop at Chick-Fil-A in between? How do we build places worth living in, and how do we make lives worth living? While trillions are spent on militaristically enforcing empire around the globe, our bridges and water mains crumble, and our population has sunk into such a deep pit of despair that it spends almost every non-working hour escaping into a drug or a fictional landscape. Hell, even those working hours are often only accomplished with the aid of a chemical, be it a pharmaceutical or just some whiskey in the thermos or coffee cup. Then a quick dash home to watch the game, or to binge watch netflix, or to strap an AR set on your face.
It seems as though easy problems are the only ones that get tended to. A coat of paint is pretty easy to apply, and carpets can be steamed and come out looking pretty nice. The creaking floor in the bathroom is another issue altogether. The tile has to come up to get to the subfloor, and the tub has to come up to get to the tile, and if you're pulling the tub you are going to have to pull up that counter top that hangs in the way.
Shit. Throw down an extra plush rug and hope it muffles some of the sound.
Days later, back in my own woods the sun is shining as I walk towards my garden. It is seventy degrees out in February, and so I am told the polar vortex has split in two, or something of the sort. I see tulip leaves gently shifting mulch to the side so they can grow skyward. My daughter walks next to me and I point out to her the small green spikes of daffodils breaking through the well-thawed surface of the Earth. Cranes whoop overhead, and I smile. They have made that journey countless times.
Then I wonder if there is something we haven't broken.
The Freeze and Thaw
January 8, 2018 § 4 Comments
Cold air bites at the tip of my nose and the upper rim of my ears as I crunch across the driveway to the wood pile. Pulling from a rick consisting mostly of Ash, I load my arms. We burned through the last rick of wood too quickly. Sub zero temperatures moved in right after the winter solstice, and for weeks they held strong, the winds at night drawing the heat from our cabin through every crack and seam. Wool blankets cover the windows, and we trade light for heat. At night we nestle into our bed as a family, buried under our down comforter, which can effectively create an ecosystem all its own. Before sunrise though, I will feel my cheeks getting cold, and I will head to the kitchen to find the last embers of the fire on the verge of extinguishing. In the dark I will snap small sticks with my hands, then feed them into the steel belly of the woodstove, and layer split wood on top of that. I wait, watching, listening. When I am sure that the fire has taken, I head back towards bed with the orange flicker lighting the way.
The year has rolled over on the calendars of western humans, and the northern hemisphere has had its shortest day in this particular planetary revolution around the sun. It is a time of transitions and resolutions, reflections of the year passed and goals laid out for the year to come. Personally, I feel that we are in a time of exposure. Open secrets once whispered and acknowledge but never loudly spoken are no longer able to be contained. An obvious example of this is the so called, "me too" movement in which powerful men in politics and entertainment who used their status to sexually assault others were publicly exposed, which then blew open the door for women in a variety of industries and lifestyles to report on the bosses and colleagues who used their positions as leverage to seek and sometimes force sexual attention. Basically, a lot of men in a lot of places of power have been using that power to harass and assault women (and yes, sometimes other men) and a lot of dirty laundry has been aired all at once.
Open secrets are not uncommon in our society. Uncomfortable truths that we all come to know, but fear to speak about lest our murmurings disturb the delicate balance of our universe, and tip the whole order into disarray. One of these open secrets that is getting more and more attention is the fact that the police in the United States are arguably a bigger threat to many people than criminals. With nary a legal or civil consequence for their actions to be had, police killed another thousand or so Americans in 2017. The case of former Mesa, Arizona cop Philip Brailsford being acquitted of murdering Daniel Shaver attracted a lot of attention after the body cam video of the event was released, and the general public viewed what was essentially a snuff film with horror, aghast as Brailsford smugly derided the weeping father Shaver who begged for his life before being murdered. Most of the population too, now accepts that the police and justice systems by and large treat black Americans far differently, and far worse, than they treat white Americans.
Of course, when a nasty truth comes to light, especially a truth that cuts right through the heart of a person's – or nation's – identity, there are those who will flat refuse to believe it. In the case of the many exposed men who have been accused of sexual assault and rape, there are cadres of defenders who nit pick each case looking to find where the accuser is either lying, or perhaps sought or deserved her treatment. It is just so with the issue of police in America. With each new horror show of a news story, even those complete with heartbreaking video as in the case of Daniel Shaver, there are defenders of the system, professional analyzers who find the moment the victim screwed up by not, in their moments of terror, following some command or by having made some innocuous and unconscious movement of the hand. Then they scream, "See! He deserved to die!"
To these reactionaries desperate to believe that everything is OK, women who are abused and harassed by their bosses and colleagues deserve it if they ever take a meeting with a man alone, and untrained and fearful civilians must act with professional precision while teams of academy graduates laden with military firearms and earning a government wage can ignore standards and statutes alike while engaging in murderous street justice.
However, if we believe all these stories of rape and assault, we then have to start examining our culture and try to understand their source. If we believe that the police are racist and unnecessarily violent and murderous, then we have to start examining our culture and try to understand why. Such digging leads to dangerous places for the egos and identities of many. Our lies are pillars that hold up entire institutions and ways of viewing ourselves and the world around us. We have cursed and damned so many people to live out their days in slums or cages, if we haven't just flat out killed them. If these sentences of impoverishment, imprisonment, and death were all the extension of a society built on lies, then that would make us some pretty terrible people.
Yes, better to not look down that well.
I find myself in a bookstore fairly regularly, and I have noticed that over the past few years, there has been significant growth in the survival magazine market. Of course, there are the homestead magazines, the gardening magazines, the hunting magazines, and the straight up gun fetish magazines, but then the other day I noticed something new. It was a magazine that had on its cover a man, a boy, and a woman, all presumably a family. They carried packs, radios, and firearms. A setting sun painted their faces a golden hue, or who knows, maybe it was a distant nuclear blast, as they stood near a ruined vehicle in some scrubland. The father was handsome with chiseled cheek bones, and the lightest Hollywood smattering of dirt across his brow. In true marketing fashion, this was a magazine with a good looking family surviving a civilization ending EMP blast, bug out bags in tow.
Seeing this I thought to myself that I think it is basically an open secret now that our society is fucked. We are fucked, and no one is coming to save us. Things are going to get steadily worse and worse until the entire façade of civil life breaks into a series of dysfunctional pieces, and deep down, everybody knows it.
A few weeks ago a friend came over to my house, and as she helped me truck firewood from the front of our land to the house, I made a comment about this to test my theory. I cannot now remember how I snuck it into the conversation, but at some point I said, "We're fucked," in regards to the future stability of our climate and the world of human comings and goings. She looked at me with a light, knowing smile, and very sincerely said, "Oh yeah." I might as well have told her that the sun would set.
Of course, my friends are not exactly going to be a random sampling of the population, and they are all going to fall under an umbrella of social consciousness and ecological concern, to be sure, but the increase in television shows, magazines, and books that all orbit the topic of surviving the collapse of society, to me, is telling. For now, we can treat the topic with a bit of irony should we not find ourselves in like company, and laugh at the commercial selling dehydrated beef stroganoff that one can store in their closet for emergencies.
But the idea is out there. Year's worth of promised solutions to energy and ecological woes have not been delivered. The fires are worse, the floods are more frequent, and still the powers that be are drilling and scraping for every last bit of hydrocarbon. I think most people assumed that somewhere, some group of serious people was laying out the roadmap of transition, and making sure that it would be implemented. The consequences are rolling in as expected, but the global solutions are nowhere to be found. A few companies absorb government subsidies and put out press releases to keep the investors chomping at the bit, but a look around does not show me a world much different than the one in which I walked as a child thirty years ago.
If it becomes understood that this society as it exists has no future, that would mean we have to ask ourselves serious questions about how, or if, we are going to survive. That is a deep, black well indeed.
With a night rain came warm air. Gray morning light expands through the wood revealing a half decayed carpet of leaves. Only islands of snow remain, and they are thin and vulnerable. I have eagerly awaited this warm front. The straw in duck and chicken houses needs tossing, and when out in the animal yards I begin to survey first the damage; a plastic rain collection barrel has burst at its base. Then I look to the work; scraping away the ground in front of every gate and door, as the heave of frozen Earth has made opening and closing most of them quite difficult, and no fix was to be had during zero range temperatures.
Animal gates and hen house doors that cannot be closed again once open are not a problem that can be ignored. Raccoons and foxes are particularly hungry this time of year, I can only imagine. A day or two above freezing are opportunities not to be squandered. Winter is only beginning.
All Bets are Off
December 8, 2017 § 11 Comments
In the dull glow of my headlights, he drags the deer off of the road while a cigarette clings to his lower lip. My hazard lights blink rhythmically, an orange glow rising and falling on the grass lining the shoulder of the road. His son stands back and watches, and the man stumbles as the deer kicks her legs. I was the first to pull over, having seen the doe lying in the road as I drove passed her. She craned her neck and swung it in a large halo arc as if trying to shake free of an invisible infliction now crippling her. After a quick U-turn and parking my jeep in the grass, I approached the doe to find that she did not seem to be losing blood, but she clearly could not stand. A broken leg, or legs, perhaps.
The man and his son pulled over a few moments later. I had a gun in my car, but I was within town limits and not eager to commit a firearms violation. Ironically enough, I chose not to bring my knife with me to town this morning. The man's son procured one from his pocket after his father had moved the injured animal out of the path of traffic. He flicked the blade open and it clicked into place. Turning the handle outward, he said, "Dad."
I have made an effort to always treat the act of killing an animal as significant. What ceremony I make in the moment before I kill could be preposterous and meaningless for all I know. But I make ceremonies anyway because I am wary of hardening off, of callousing myself in manners of death. People who talk to trees do not create a business of clear cutting forests, and people who are humble in the act of killing for food do not develop a blood lust, or a sick enjoyment of the act of taking life.
Extending her neck by tugging on one of her ears, the man pulls the short blade across the frightened doe's throat. I see the dark blood on the wet green grass, and I whisper to her. Orange light from my flashers pulses as the deer's breath quickens. The man and his son return to their car and drive off. With my hood pulled over my head to hide from the night's chill, I stand and watch the doe slowly die. Steam rises from the hole in her neck, and at first I speak, suggesting that she think of her mother, of days spent in the forest, of running and the wind. Then I am quiet, wondering if human voices may be hideous to her, especially in light of the circumstances. I spend the minutes silently, and somberly, until her tail flutters and her body writhes with that last flow of electric vitality that animates us all. When she is entirely still, I wait a minute longer before approaching. Her eyes are glass. My fingertips drag across her barrel.
I load her into my trunk, and head home.
Just like that, Ventura, California went up in flames. Wildfire season has drifted long past its October peak, and a week into December southern California's hills are ablaze. Anaheim suffered massive fires already this year, as did the wine country region north of the bay. 2017 has been a record year for wild fires. Washington state, Oregon, Montana, British Columbia, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Croatia; all were affected by droughts, record temperatures, and other conditions which saw elongated fire seasons and increased destruction.
Then there were the hurricanes. Houston was underwater after Harvey dumped rains that obliterated records. Florida was walked over by Irma. Puerto Rico and several other island states were utterly hammered by Maria, and months later they still endure a lack of electricity, clean water, and supplies.
With one million cars destroyed by floods, and countless homes needing gutting or even total rebuilds for those consumed by fire, the fallback for most people is some form of insurance. In order to function, an insurance company must presume that the likelihood of a maximum payout is very small. In a world of increased storm intensity or fire frequency, the numbers insurance companies use as a foundation for their business model no longer stand.
The same runs true for health insurance. Conceptually, health is supposed to be the presumed baseline for any given human being paying into the system. Injury or severe illness should be the outlier. At least in the United States, that no longer is the case. The CDC reported in October that the American obesity rate is at an all time high, with one in four Americans registering as obese. In July, the CDC reported that more than one-hundred-million Americans are either diabetic or prediabetic, which breaks down to one in three people.
Of course, regarding insurance, increased natural disasters and a dramatic slide in human health quickly conjure images of the mathematical doom and gloom scenarios of increased premiums, failing markets, and government bailouts. But beyond the obvious morass of economic consequences, when I think about insurance as a concept, what comes to mind is the modern desire to iron out the disruptions of life.
People in modern, western societies would like to move the starting line of existence out of a wild and chaotic world and into one which is static and controlled, a world in which disasters and loss are flukes, like bugs in a software system that with enough attention and manipulation can eventually be eliminated entirely. With large material acquisition comes the desire for permanence and predictability.
A house is the greatest expense in one's life, typically. To labor for decades on decades in order to pay for the house, as well as to fill it with stuff, is dangerous business in a world that can take it all away with one fell stroke. Insurance is a casino game we play, regularly laying a chip on a low probability event "just in case" the unthinkable happens. Is there a greater fear than being reset to zero after years and years of numb drudgery, all of it in the service of stacking up a bigger and bigger pile of things? The entire edifice of consumer society rests on the idea that we will work today and that the things we buy will still be ours tomorrow. No longer able to live in the world, to see the providence in the fields and streams, only the store shelves can keep us alive, and so we tithe the gods of chance praying that the future is long and uneventful.
The ravages of civilization and its primary bag man of capitalism are skewing all of the odds. The seeds of climate change long planted and fully in bloom, the coastal property will flood, and the house in the hills will burn. War will rage, broken people will commit mass murder, and infrastructure will fail. On top of all that, the long process of killing the family farm, destroying decent wages, and handing out subsidies and favorable legislation to agricultural and pharmaceutical corporations has placed a too heavy burden on individual human bodies and the ecology that keeps them alive. Health is no longer the baseline. Diabetes cases will increase, cancer cases will increase, mental health will decline, opiate addiction will flourish.
A numbers game generated to give the masses a sense of safety, to propagate the illusion of a world of stability and permanence will fail. It is a game that was always predicated on growth, on there always being more, on the energy and capital to rebuild bodies and homes and cities to always be plentiful. And now what? What becomes of the modern world when there is no promise of tomorrow? How will people respond when certainty decomposes and there is no promise of rescue from rare events that quickly become regular? Forget the markets, and behold the global philosophical breakdown.
The temperature was just below freezing when I hung the doe from a young maple tree outside of my house. In the darkness my cold hands were warmed as I pulled her entrails from her body cavity, slowly, so as not to burst her full stomach. With the sunrise I was outside, my newly sharpened knife barely dragging over the membrane connecting the deer's hide to her muscle. So finely honed was the blade that it took but the faintest painter's touch to complete the work. I cut away strips of white fat and fed them to my dog who was eagerly observing me. The chickens were given the viscera and the carcass. One foreleg was placed in the forest, a gift for the ravens.
The meat of the animal was divided into three piles, most of it wrapped in used plastic bags. One of the piles was for us, and the two others were for friends of ours. They are the families on whom we rely for anything from companionship to childcare to car repair. In this way I pad my security, with a surprise trip to a friend's house, fresh meat and a dozen eggs in hand.
Tomorrow was always an illusion.
Through the Veil
November 9, 2017 § 14 Comments
My wife and daughter are asleep, so I move quietly through our small house. Stepping into my shin-high mud boots, I pull my heavy coat over my arms, flipping the hood forward over my head. Gravel crunches under my feet as I take the few steps across my driveway to the ring of bucked maple logs stood on end that encircle my fire pit. Sitting down onto one of these pieces of damp wood I exhale into the cold night. Fog from my mouth drifts upwards and I follow it with my eyes. The moon is two days shy of full but its glow remains mostly diffused by a curtain of thick clouds, which are streaming across the navy sky. Breaks and gaps in this near solid gray mass offer glimpses of the shining white lunar face before shrouding it once again.
Earlier in the day I imagined having a fire in this moment, but the notion seems silly now. It is approaching midnight, and the charcoal and bits of scrap wood on the ground before me are wet from the recent rains. Clicking a lighter, I hold its fire to the wick of a little candle that I drew from my pocket, and when the flame is passed I set the candle down on the ground before me. I breathe out again, and again I watch the fog from my mouth arc and pull as it dances upwards, the vapor now a milky white saturated by the candle's glow.
Samhain is when the veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead is at its thinnest. The tall trees bending overhead are mostly bare. Life is retreating into the soil, sequestering itself to the root ball and the burrow, mulching itself deeply under a quilt of leaves and dry grass. The frogs are silent, the humming insects gone. By day, murmurations of starlings ripple and contort across the sky as they pass through to warmer meridians, and by night the barred owls call into the lonely dark. I am outside in the cold this Halloween night to speak through the veil.
My words are mostly those of gratitude. But I also speak of sorrow and longing. Sitting in that deep blue night with pale moonlight drifting through fast moving clouds, I could feel myself aching for another world. A world smelling of moss on stone. A world marked by black earth running the lines on our palms like ink. A world of hair perfumed with wood smoke. A world of antler and hide, iron and feather. A world where predawn divination heralded by heaven's movement is silently considered and a sunset punctuated by a raven's call is taken in the day's considerations.
We all seek signs and signals, but now gather them from within the gyre of our madness rather than from without.
The knife I carry is a fixed blade. It has a mahogany brown wooden handle and a leather sheath that fixes to my belt. I had it sharpened the other day, as years of use have dulled its edge. Yes, I paid a man a couple dollars to do it for me, as knife sharpening is actually quite the learned skill, and despite owning a whetstone, my talent for honing knives is not that great. The man who sharpened it owns a small knife store in town, and he carries some very fine pieces. As I perused his shelves I came to thinking about knives and the fetishization of knives that exists within certain communities. There are preppers, backpackers, and people who obsess over gear for their every-day-carry, or EDC, which is sort of a combination of gear obsession and prepping. For people in these niche subcultures, the knife holds a special place as the penultimate survival tool. When I think about middle aged men driving to work on an expressway or taking a city bus with an expensive knife in their briefcase or laptop bag, I wonder if somewhere inside of them they aren't longing for a different world too. I wonder if perhaps they do not also long for a world of greater utility. I imagine men in suits awaiting catastrophe so they can have a chance to be useful, and to use simple tools to accomplish necessary goals. How many carry a knife through a prefabricated world of plastic and fiberglass so that maybe one day on the way home, they can skin a rabbit?
It is not just knives either. It's trail running shoes, paracord bracelets, flashlights, and anything else that can be myopically focused on across forums and Amazon reviews so that when the big day comes, when an active shooter or an earthquake or Kim Jong Un himself comes to devastate their town, these people can haul ass across the rubble and then lash together a makeshift raft in the dark.
That job they worked so hard to get is boring them to death, so they imagine the day when it all disappears in a cloud of ash, and until then, they carry their high priced survival tools like totems, fingering the fire steel in their pocket like a rosary.
Another day, another festival of homicide. In a small church within a small town in Texas, twenty-six people were shot dead with another twenty wounded. Casualties like this are the numbers one would see in tribal warfare. Why within a supposedly homogenous culture are individuals declaring war on the people around them? The fact that it is even possible for a person to look at a group of people in their town and then to execute them all makes it evident that there is decay in place of meaningful bonds between people in what are communities now in name only. Interactions having been shorn of the elements that would in times past have bound people into networks of mutual aid and survival, now are reduced to momentary transactions. I need you only for the briefest time and only to run my credit card. Soon a machine will even do that. Where once we sat in a circle to laugh, to sing, to plan, and to belong, now we quickly shuffle through crowded streets frustrated by the human obstacles in our path, at best politely tolerating one and other, at worst loathing the multitudes, feeling revulsion at their presence the way one does when viewing an abscess or a tumor.
As people scramble to comprehend the "why" behind this mass murder, there are those who quickly assign responsibility to political factions they detest, a tune which we have all now heard before. Far right conspiracy theorists and militia members have done just this by going so far as to manufacture content that generates the appearance that the murderer is a leftist. If we cannot come to grips with why this culture that so thoroughly hates life churns out a steady drip of maniacs, then by gum we will at least make certain to tarnish whole swaths of people who we do not like, even if it means deceiving those we claim affinity with.
Daily, hourly, hell, every few minutes people are turning to the little oracles in their pockets for signs and signals. Trying to tease out meaning and perhaps a glimpse of the future by reading the tea leaves of click bait headlines that algorithmic compilers have assembled for their various social media feeds. Like a crystal ball psychic gauging your responses, the more you click, the more the algorithm fine tunes your respective results so you get just the reading that you want. You shape reality with your preferences, advertisers all too happy to oblige, priming your rage for the moment you see a behavior or hear an idea that falls outside the constantly narrowing boundaries of your worldview.
Civilization is a collective psychosis. Each human mind perceives its own version of reality. In slow times and small groups this is a far more manageable conundrum. Foundations of understanding can be built from simple observations – rock, tree, fish – and a shared worldview can then take shape. No two identical, but similar enough to agree upon the environment in which they exist and how to go about surviving. Civilization instead defines existence from the top down, and has drawn and quartered any and every faint inkling of the sacred or the mystical. Feelings of interaction with the living world around us have been demoted to the status of juvenile ravings. In the hyper complex modern world, entropy now is fracturing language. Symbols are bled of their meaning only to be recuperated by charlatans leaving the denizens of the national plantation unable to come to terms over how to define their present context, let alone their future. So they check their devices for an update.
Spinning in the fray the algorithms draw battle lines, and the anima mundi just whispers, speaking through the old ones who yet remain for any who might still care to hear.
Through the veil I speak my gratitude, and my sorrow. She breathes, "patience."
Boldly Through the Darkness
October 9, 2017 § 27 Comments
I wake to rain. Hard rain falling on the steel roof of our cabin, a torrent surrounding us, not pitter-pattering but rushing through the tree canopy and over our heads with a roar. Dawn is not yet broken, and in the dull gray I hear the rain and am satisfied. I fall back into sleep.
In the late morning I walk with my daughter to the front of our land. Rain still, and we in our slickers carry the day's compost load and a small cloth bag which I use to collect eggs. My daughter trails several feet behind me, slowed as the umbrella she insisted on carrying blocks her view.
Through the gate into the chicken paddock, a maybe six thousand square foot piece of land at the forest's edge. Behind the chicken house a blue open topped barrel catches rainwater, and as I approach it, I hope it has at least filled to the halfway point. The days and weeks have been dry of late, rains sparse, just enough to keep the well-mulched garden alive. Across the county creeks are empty, lake waterlines low. I see that the barrel is in fact totally filled, water running down its bulk. I am grateful. In the back corner of my garden is the duck house, with its own blue barrel and small pond to boot. Both are full. Likewise, the rain collection tank at the barn is topped off.
We made it through another summer. In a few months this water freezing will be my concern, but not today. Today I give thanks.
Autumn finds me a bit morose this year. The season for me is a time of culmination and reflection, and while a bit of melancholy coloring the edges of my mind this time of year is not unexpected, it has come heavier this particular season. I am feeling the wounds of the world. My gut cries for the wild, and I am tugged by yearning, wanting to run and to howl and to pant for breath in a deep and fecund wood in some other time, in a place long before or long after humanity's grand attempt to subdue and control the beating heart of the Earth.
A man shot and killed a lot of strangers in Las Vegas the other day. The immediate reaction of many people was to presume this man belonged to an opposing political faction than their own, and in a macabre game of hot potato they tried to excoriate their enemies by tossing him like a live grenade into the other's camp. Some howled for gun control laws. Others crafted bizarre conspiracy theories. We have seen this play out time and again in cases of random mass murders. Such events are almost a seasonal holiday in the US at this point. With such frequency it is a shame that so rarely is it uttered with any volume that these happenings are the result of the particulars of the culture.
Life in the modern, capitalist west is tedium. It is an exhausting bore. Without any substantial sense of belonging or meaning, stripped of spirit and tasked with an endless quest for money that buys less and less, people are miserable. Life has been shorn of all of the ceremonies and customs that once bonded a people and gave them a sense of purpose, and they are left with mere commerce. If a person out in public is not engaged in some act of buying or selling, they are loitering, they are a nuisance to be moved along. Most of the public has come to understand this unspoken premise, and they enforce it with vitriol at the sight of the homeless, the panhandler, the protestor. "Get a job!" they yell, but what they mean is "participate," by which they mean "succumb, as I have, and call it virtue, as I do."
The malaise of existence in this world where the wild is all but extinguished is felt far and wide, whether it is understood as such or not. Absent community and a deep sense of both autonomy and personal value, people become damaged. This damage expresses itself in myriad ways, as each individual filters the abuse of the dominant culture through their specific experience and biology. For many, self-medication is the obvious solution. People drink away the boredom and the sorrow. They smoke away the frustration and rage. Some turn to harder drugs, those with money buy them from a doctor and stay on the safe side of the legal apparatus. Those with less acquire their narcotics from a street dealer. Both buy their way out of feeling the depression, the pointlessness, the pain. The former boost pharmaceutical stock prices, the latter boost the share values of private prison enterprises.
For others, it is all too much to bear, and they kill themselves. In rare cases, the desire to kill turns outward.
It's actually strange that this outcome is seen as strange. We are a people who isolate themselves in personal domiciles, personal cars, individual cubicles. From others we hide under headphones and behind screens communicating without voices or faces, just curt text and childish pictographs. By and large our hands never touch soil, our noses never smell wood smoke, our muscles don't pump with lactic acid, our brows do not know sweat, our eyes do not know starlight. We have hammered the circle of time into a straight line, and bent the circles people used to sit in while they sang and laughed into single file queues in which we are silent, eyes cast down lest they meet another's.
We do not live. Living is active. We are only active in the pursuit of making someone else rich while we earn just enough to make it until the next paycheck, and then we are passive. We sit and stare, trading entertainment for experience, hoping that watching others pretend to live will suffice by proxy.
Of course, there are outliers. There are some who recognize the ugliness of this existence, who with blood pumping in their veins take to the streets against the police and politicians who hem us all in with laws, with the confiscation of the commons, and with the baton and gun that back it all up. These people are too few, and the great proportion of the public spits at them. Any mention of the great crimes and shortcomings of civilization indicts all who refuse to act, and most prefer not to act, knowing that to act against power is dangerous. Further, most know that acquiescence of conscience and soul is far easier when one's fellow downtrodden don't ever talk about it. If we all agree to call the cage freedom, then it is freedom. If we call the plantation the country, or the economy, then we cease to be exploited and can through the power of linguistic device instead be the citizen.
Of course, the heart and the head can only be fooled so much. So the cracks in the veneer are filled with alcohol, drugs, shopping, watching, and occasionally a foray into homicide.
I was reading about the buffalo the other day. In the nineteenth century the US military set out to intentionally destroy the buffalo, even if by turning a blind eye to white hunters who illegally killed buffalo on Indian lands. It was remarked by Col. Dodge that "every buffalo dead is an Indian gone."
After the plains Indians had finally succumbed to the genocidal pressure of white settlement, and their remnant bands were forced into reservations, white ranchers brought cattle to their lands. There were some Indians who asked if they could hunt the cattle, primarily as an attempt to maintain their culture. They wanted to sing their hunting songs and perform their ceremonial dances. After allowing it briefly, the whites decided it was best to just package the meat and give it to the Indians.
What becomes of people when you strip them of everything that makes them human? What becomes of people who no longer sing? What becomes of people when they have been taught to insist that the world is silent, and dead? This is all of our heritage. Somewhere far enough back, your progenitors were brought into the fold through death and indignity. Their songs are silent. Their ceremonies are forgotten. And so we stumble blindly forth, in dark corridors seeking. In the black, some remain broken, others take up with history's killers, and angle to fill the role of the abuser.
In my region there are those who want to cut the forests. They think that they have observed the forest long enough to know how to control it. They think they have the wisdom to manage a forest better than it can manage itself. How does one argue? The only words they will accept are in their own language, the language of domination, the language that insists on seeing only disparate pieces in a grand machine, the language that has exorcized the sacred.
I cannot convince you to leave the forest be in that language. I cannot convince you to seek the wild with those lifeless words. I cannot convince you to abandon this culture in the language that it birthed.
You have to feel it. Perhaps you do already. Perhaps you aren't sure what you feel, other than a general sense that something is not right. Do not snuff it out. Nurture it. Breathe life into it. Let it guide you to others. Give yourself permission to feel even if it is only the pain. Move boldly through the darkness, and listen for the howl.
My Absence
October 6, 2017 § 4 Comments
Over the last year I have been engaged in a writing project with a friend, which is why my posts on this blog dropped off. With that effort now wrapping up, I am ready to return to writing essays for this blog. Before you ask, no, the writing project I was working on is unfortunately not on the same type of material I write for this blog. Expect something from me shortly.


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Posts Tagged 'Split testing'
114 – Introducing Split Hero for split testing with Adam Lacey
Adam has been on the podcast before, but on that occasion he was talking about his life as a freelancer, not as the owner of a SaaS app! He's founded a company called 'Split Hero' which is laser focussed upon one thing – split testing your WordPress website pages and gain meaningful data back about which one wins! Hang on a minute though… what is a 'split test'? Well, I'm glad you asked…Read More

subset: commoncrawl


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THE FILE 35,000+ digital originals; 17,000+ 4x5s; 35,000 35mm.
OVERVIEW For the past 20 years, Glenn Randall has specialized in Colorado wilderness landscapes, in all four seasons, mostly shot on 4x5, more recently with a 21-megapixel Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III or 22-megapixel Canon EOS 5D Mark III. Files include unique views and unusual angles as well as exceptional renditions of familiar scenes, such as the Maroon Bells. Collection also includes muscle-powered wilderness sports such as expeditionary mountaineering, ice climbing, skiing, whitewater rafting, hiking and backpacking in the western U.S. and Alaska.
COLORADO LANDSCAPES Rocky Mountain NP, Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness, Indian Peaks Wilderness, San Juan Mountains. Also, 4x5 coverage of Black Canyon of the Gunnison NP, Boulder Mountain Parks (The Flatirons), Comanche National Grassland, Dinosaur NM, Eagles Nest Wilderness, Flattops Wilderness, Great Sand Dunes NP, Lost Creek Wilderness, Mesa Verde NP, Pawnee National Grassland, Raggeds Wilderness, Sangre de Cristo Wilderness and Weminuche Wilderness as well as other Colorado wilderness areas.
OTHER COLORADO COVERAGE Muscle-powered outdoor sports: ice climbing, hang gliding, hiking, backpacking, backcountry hut-to-hut skiing, ski-mountaineering, alpine skiing, whitewater rafting and kayaking, plus rock climbing (historical shots from 1980s). Elk in Rocky Mountain NP.
OTHER SPECIALTIES Grand Canyon NP (whitewater rafting and the environmental impacts of Glen Canyon Dam). Expeditionary mountaineering in Alaska
SPECIALTIES Landscape work is ideally suited to fine-art wall decor and the calendar and greeting-card markets.
GEOGRAPHIC AREAS Western U.S.: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Utah. Central America: Cancún. South America: Argentina (mountaineering on Aconcagua), Chile (alpine skiing).
RECENT COVERAGE Ongoing project to photograph sunrise from the summit of Colorado's 54 14,000-foot peaks. I completed the project in August 2013.
CREDITS More than 1,000 photo credits, including 68 covers. Author and photographer for two books of Colorado landscape photographs, Rocky Mountain National Park Impressions and Colorado Wild & Beautiful, both published by Farcountry Press. Sole photographer for BrownTrout's 2009 and 2010 Colorado Wilderness Calendar. Magazines/Newspapers: America West Airlines, Audubon, Bride's, Geo, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Outdoor Photographer, Outside, Powder, SKI, Skiing, Sunset, Weekly Reader, Wilderness. Books: Falcon, Lyons & Burford, New Readers, Scott Foresman, Scribners, many regional publishers. Author: Eight text-driven books (Lyons & Burford, Lyons Press, plus regional and specialty publishers) and more than 200 magazine articles, many accompanied by my photographs. Advertising/Corporate: American Express, Colorado Outward Bound, Sun Microsystems, many outdoor-equipment companies. Calendars: Audubon, Avalanche, Barnes & Noble, BrownTrout, Nature Conservancy, Runner's World, Sierra Club, Smith-Southwestern, Teldon. Print Sales: More than 10,000 prints of Colorado landscape images sold to personal and corporate clients; Denver's Cobe Laboratories owns more than 100 20x24-inch and 30x40-inch prints.
COMMENTS For 34 years, Glenn Randall has delivered exceptional service and quality to clients. His specialty in large-format and high-res digital Colorado landscapes rose from his belief that the diligent local photographer should be able to produce the best possible collection of images of nearby locales. Randall says, "I believe that the strength and depth of my collection of Colorado landscapes is testimony to the success of that strategy."
NONEDITORIAL SERVICES Offers superbly printed, elegantly matted and framed prints of his best landscape images. Sought-after landscape photography workshop instructor. Please visit www.glennrandall.com.
Glenn Randall
2945 Colby Dr.
Boulder CO 80305-6303
303 499-3009
303 499-8041
» Photographer's Bio


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Title: Crossed (Matched #2)
Author: Ally Condie
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Blurb: Rules Are Different Outside The Society
Chasing down an uncertain future, Cassia makes her way to the Outer Provinces in pursuit of Ky–taken by the Society to his sure death–only to find that he has escaped into the majestic, but treacherous, canyons. On this wild frontier are glimmers of a different life and the enthralling promise of a rebellion. But even as Cassia sacrifices every thing to reunite with Ky, ingenious surprises from Xander may change the game once again.
Narrated from both Cassia's and Ky's point of view, this hotly anticipated sequel to Matched will take them both to the edge of Society, where nothing is as expected and crosses and double crosses make their path more twisted than ever.
My Review: So let me start this review with a confession. I have like thirty books just sitting around that need to be read and reviewed. With that being said I've had this book collecting dust for over a month and I have been so reluctant to read it. I can't properly explain why especially because I enjoyed Matched. So although I did grudgingly pick this book up I was blown away. I started this book and was bewitched.
Crossed picks up a few months after where Matched ended. Cassia has been working in farming camps in the hopes of being stationed in the Outer Providences and therefore be closer to Ky. Crossed is told from both Ky's and Cassia's POVs and in the first half of the book it is great in letting the reader know how close their paths are to crossing. (I did find their switching narratives to be confusing at times and often had to go back and reread a few pages or most of a chapter.) Because I don't consider it a spoiler I'll spill: they do eventually find each other. The way their meeting was building up I expected it to be the climax of this book and also the ending. Well it's not. Their reunion was exciting and beautiful and totally awesome. I loved it. But there is so much that happens in this book: action, romance, lies, deceit and plot twist after plot twist.
In trying to be honest I'll say that Condie's bewitching only lasted until the halfway point in the book. After Cassia and Ky find each other the book completely changes. A lot still happens but the characters change and that definitely changed the tone of the book.
- Cassia, for example, is a really tough/ strong character. I love that. Especially in this book. She is every bit of the tough heroine as I've ever seen them. However, after she finds Ky I don't see the strength anymore. I'm not sure if this was done purposely by the author or what but she went from thinking and acting like a grown woman to resembling an adolescent.
- Ky has always been a strong character. But in this book Ky narrating really lets the reader get to know him. His history, his character, his personality and also his flaws. His biggest flaw, I find, are his insecurities. Which by the way, was a major turnoff. Also, in verbatim he says that telling people you're whole story gives them ammunition to hurt you. He therefore never let's anyone know everything about him not even Cassia. Well this results in A LOT of secret keeping which really upset me. That tends to be a pet peeve of mine and this resulted in a lot of frustrated brakes from this book. It's one of the things that made me dislike the book and in a way, him too. I never knew him to be insecure or insincere but then again he wasn't narrating in Matched. Maybe he was really good at hiding it.
Overall, Crossed is not a bad book. My biggest disappointment was the change of pace and tone in the second half of the book. I think if the book was consistent and ended the way it started it without a doubt would have gotten a 5 star rating from me. This book is without a doubt captivating and interesting and it presents a lot of questions that I'm hoping will be answered in the final installment of this trilogy, Reached. And yes, I do plan on reading it. However, in a bit of a spoiler I'll say that this book does not seem to lead to the happily ever after one would hope to see. Yet I'm still interested to read how Condie finishes this series off.


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Recently, NCAA Men's and Women's Ice Hockey Rules Committee approved a standardized overtime format for all regular-season games and in-season tournaments beginning with the 2018-19 season.
When a game remains tied after regulation time, teams will play five-on-five for five minutes to determine a winner. If neither team scores, the result will be a tie. No other options, including alternative formats for points in conference standings, will be permitted.
These rules aren't final, yet. All rules changes must be approved by the NCAA Playing Rules Oversight Panel, which will discuss ice hockey rules change proposals during a July 25 teleconference. The National Collegiate Hockey Conference isn't pleased with this proposal and is speaking out against it.
For those fans that are anti-3-on-3, consider this. All of the other competitive men's hockey leagues use the 3-on-3 overtime to break ties. (S/T @RecoveringOPS)
NHL = 3×3 then SO
AHL = 3×3 then SO
ECHL = 3×3 then SO
OHL = 3×3 then SO
WHL = 3×3 then SO
QMJHL = 3×3 then SO
BCHL = 3×3 then SO
AJHL = 3×3 then SO
USHL = 3×3 then SO
If NCAA changes rules, 5×5 and then tie.
If Ice Hockey Rules Committee is successful in enacting their new changes, these type of exciting finishes will hit the trash bin of history.
For the people that like looking at statistics. Finally, recently, the NCHC penned this response for the Rules Committee's proposal. Check out NCHC commissioner Josh Fenton's tweet.


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Model 7: Mindful Moments
Quote: "If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking. Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk." Raymond Inmon
Key Learning: Keeping a healthy mind and body requires a mix of consistent emotion and spiritual activity (reliable and easy) blended with dynamic learning.
Key words: Simplicity. Joy. Lightness. Motivation. Meaningful. On track. Healthful. Calming. Mantra. Sacred space. Ritual. Reflection. Ease. Focus. Blend. Variety. Tempo. Magic.
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The utmost care used in replicating classical European design elements can be seen the moment you enter the facility. Decorative wainscoting, stylized crown moldings, and ambient lighting set the backdrop for the office's sophisticated yet intimate mood. Mahogany-stained solid walnut floors create depth and warmth, continuing into the office's seven operatories.
Richly colored area carpets run the length of hallways and anchor the seating area in the reception lounge where custom, silk-upholstered chairs cluster around a beautifully carved dark-wood fireplace. Overhead, a sparkling crystal chandelier suspends from a recessed tray ceiling, creating additional drama. Above the fireplace's mantel, a 52-inch, LCD highdefinition television is concealed behind a VisionArt® system that shows a fine art print or a photographic image when the television is not in use. Patients can also enjoy a variety of reading materials available on the built-in bookshelves surrounding the fireplace. A water fountain sings softly in the background and there are plenty of edible amenities to help patients pass the time when awaiting treatment. Accessories with the charm of a French salon reoccur throughout the office, reflecting its inviting continental theme.
The amazing decor was the result of very specific research to properly hone the design and specifications that would be required to successfully begin the project. "I knew that my old facility would not support the kind of practice that I wanted to build [with additions such as] a steri-center, panoramic X-ray, an in-house dental laboratory space, and a larger reception lounge," notes Dr. Wilhelm. "[We] used Henry Schein's office design center to incorporate the ideas I wanted…and took photos of their best-designed dental offices in Southern California. My wife and I also traveled to Europe-and visited almost every five-star hotel from San Francisco to San Diego to photograph features that were the most client pleasing."
"The energy and morale of the staff has increased dramatically…and the patient case acceptance has soared."
"This was extremely educational and informative…and made my decisions much easier," adds Dr. Wilhelm. "Mike Dukes and Rich Kofron also personally spent time with me by taking me to [some] dental conventions, familiarizing me with products that were currently on the market."
The project presented the opportunity to incorporate the latest and best in dental technology into an environment with a truly exceptional capacity for patient comfort. Quality dentistry is enhanced through extensive use of lasers, sterilized water in all operatories, massaging dental chairs, digital X-rays, and DENTRIX practice-management and dental-imaging software. The new facility has greatly reduced stress and created happier, more productive employees. "The new equipment makes work easier and faster, and has definitely improved the quality of life for me and my employees," remarks Dr. Wilhelm. "My patient flow has doubled and referrals are at an all-time high."
"The key benefit was how the equipment could improve efficiency…and help the Doctor achieve the high degree of creativity that he was seeking," notes Mike Dukes, Equipment Sales Specialist. "The energy and morale of the staff has increased dramatically…and the patient case acceptance has soared. Dr. Wilhelm wanted to fulfill his vision of extremely high-quality dentistry with a high return on investment…and an eye toward doubling production."
"The new equipment makes work easier and faster, and has definitely improved the quality of life for me and my employees," remarks Dr. Wilhelm.
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they envision. "Basically, Henry Schein assisted me with everything-from design and equipment and supply purchasing to interacting with the contractor to make sure that the office was completed per the design specifications. Without their help, the office would not be as successful as it is," comments Dr. Wilhelm. "[Also], Mr. Jeff Perkins from Henry Schein Financial Services (HSFS) was extremely valuable in expediting the financing for the project. Without his help and professionalism the project would have been much more difficult. I would highly recommend HSFS to other dentists." Dr.Wilhelm's office reflects his healthcare philosophy and his commitment to his profession. The spacious and well designed new facility acts as a canvas where he and his staff create beautiful smiles and better health for their patients.
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the word is, BIG bridal bouquets
GORG Rosa Clara wedding gowns
winter wedding in England more can be seen here
winter cocktail time idea, champagne paired with smores!
Hey, winter brides, wouldn't it be great to get this style in a good fake fur? for all animal lovers, including myself, ya gotta look past the real fur part. what do you think, yay or nay?
I would love to hear what you all think?
Apparently, I'm obsessed with fast tracking it to winter, as I sit through another Indian summer day here in Milano. A. and I are off to Assisi for a fall weekend (hopefully it will feel crisp there) to attend an art opening for two of my dear friends\ former colleagues, can't wait!
It's our first time to Assisi, so excited and if you want to see snippets of our travels
I will writing about it here


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Tricon inks coproduction deal with French producers
Tricon Kids & Family has secured a co-pro agreement with Savoir-Fer and REAZ for Me, Myself & My Selfie, a new CGI-animated comedy short-format series.
Deals: eOne, Tricon, Double Dutch
Tricon sold numerous scripted programs into Australia and European markets, while Double Dutch picked up the international sales rights to The Scarehouse (pictured).
Tricon hires VP of U.S. factual development
Toronto-headquartered Tricon Films & Television is beefing up its L.A. office with the appointment of Jeffrey Hevert (pictured) as VP of U.S. factual development.
Tricon grabs international distribution rights to Sensitive Skin
The Canadian pay TV dramedy, based on the original BBC series, is shooting for six weeks in Toronto (star Kim Cattrall pictured).
Fuse to air Cock'd Gunns on Friday nights stateside
The deal marks the latest international sale for the faux mockumentary about an inept heavy metal band from Tricon Film & Television.
Lewin Webb to head, expand Tricon scripted division
The veteran producer-director's credits include I Declare War (premiering at this year's TIFF), Winged Creatures and Casino Jack.
Tricon to handle IFC titles worldwide
The exclusive deal, coming ahead of MIPCOM, starts with the Canadian distributor shopping Comedy Bang! Bang! (pictured) and Bunk .
Carrie Mudd, Neil Court pact to launch Peacock Alley Entertainment
The veteran global TV execs will produce primetime factual and scripted TV programming and digital content, while also serving as a bespoke distributor.
Canadians big series sellers at MIPTV and MIPDOC
9 Story Entertainment, Canamedia, Entertainment One, Cineflix Rights and BuzzTaxi Communications will be leading the charge for Canada at the annual TV market.
Playback Indie Survey profile: Tricon Films and Television
The prodco's president, Andrea Gorfolova, tells Playback about expanding business into the U.S. and surpassing distribution goals in 2011.
Tricon adds to distribution team
Nick Solowski comes to the producer/distributor as manager of international sales and acquisitions.
Peace Point acquires 100% control of DIDtv
The prodco is relaunching the division as Peace Point Entertainment USA.


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I love All Hallow's Read.
It's a relatively new tradition started by Neil Gaiman - the basic premise is that it would be really nice if, at Halloween, people give a scary book.
No, not instead of candy, but as an additional fun thing to do. Give someone a scary book, give them something fun and scary to read.
I love the tradition - I think it's awesome.
People all over have embraced the idea - this year many have combined it with Bookcrossing (the act of leaving books with specially marked stickers for strangers to find, take and read, then pass along to others - with a tracking number for the book so that people can track a book on its journey) There's also a hashtag being used on Twitter (#allhallowsread) as people are sharing the love of giving a book for Halloween.
This year, apart from wanting to physically hand a few scary books over to people in person, I thought I'd do a little online "give a scary book" - so I've set up two fun giveaways.
First, I'll be purchasing a copy of Terribilis by Carol Weekes, a fantastic new thriller published by Atomic Fez. I'm doing that through the Goodreads giveaway - a great online book and reading community. (I love that Goodreads offers this "giveaway" capability, allowing a random person who enters/requests the book to win. (I've registered the giveaway, but as of early this morning it hasn't yet gone live)
Second, I'm giving away a three story Halloween themed chapbook of mine called Tricky Treats.
It collects three stories I had previously published in Crossroads magazine: But Once A Year, Treats and Tricky Treater (along with a poem: Holiday Demons). All four pieces were reprinted in my book One Hand Screaming, but I thought putting together a special short ebook for Halloween might be fun. (Note: the Halloween stories collected contain ADULT content and are meant for a mature audience -- ie, they're not meant to be read by young people)
Tricky Treats normally retails for $1.50 and is available at Amazon, Smashwords as well as many other places where you can buy ebooks, but I'm offering it free to as many people who want it.
To get Tricky Treats free, simply go to Smashwords and use the coupon code: KH45F. You can download various different versions of it and load it to the ereader of your choice.
The coupon will be good until November 2nd.
Happy Halloween - enjoy your reading!


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ROSWELL, N.M. — Dressed in blue jeans, boots and an oversized cowboy hat, Smiley Wooton walked the grounds of his animal auction house here, detailing the intricacies of livestock life and death — whether it's a cow, pig or goat.
ROSWELL, N.M. — Dressed in blue jeans, boots and an oversized cowboy hat, Smiley Wooton walked the grounds of his animal auction house here, detailing the intricacies of livestock life and death — whether it's a cow, pig or goat.
The barrel-chested rancher, who is also a Chaves County commissioner, says making informed decisions on which animals live and which go to slaughter is ingrained in the cultural fabric of this agricultural community of 48,000 in southeastern New Mexico, even among its children.
He pointed to dozens of photos of 4-H winners posing with prize animals they raised from infancy. "Every one of these kids knew that animal would end up on somebody's plate," he said. "Everyone here gets that."
Now, that prevailing local wisdom is being challenged. The owner of a livestock processing plant wants his slaughterhouse to become the nation's first in years to begin butchering domestic horses.
Valley Meat Co. owner Rick De Los Santos, whom most folks know as a hard-working family man, had slaughtered cattle at his plant for two decades before it closed in 2012. A faltering economy, he says, prompted his decision to switch to horses.
Although Wooton and others favor the plan, condemnation has poured in from across the country. And though locals aren't picketing in this close-knit community where high school students have slaughtered animals in agriculture classes, many quietly say they, too, oppose killing horses.
"A horse's brain is rigged differently than a cow's," said resident Cassie Gross, who insists that many domestic horses are medicated with drugs that could leach into the drinking water. "A bolt to the forehead isn't a sure kill. It's not humane."
Two years after Congress voted to defund horse slaughterhouse inspections in 2005, state bans in Texas and Illinois shut down the three remaining plants nationwide — prompting many unwanted horses to be exported for slaughter in foreign markets.
De Los Santos says 158,000 U.S. horses were shipped to Mexico and Canada last year — product that could provide jobs in Roswell. After months of legal wrangling, including suits filed by animal advocates and even the state of New Mexico, his bid seems to be on hold.
A state district judge this month issued an injunction to stop the plant from opening after New Mexico's state attorney general filed suit, claiming the plant would contaminate the food chain. And the latest budget passed by Congress cut funding for inspections of horse slaughter plants, a move that animal advocates say should keep entrepreneurs like De Los Santos out of the horse-killing business.
"Americans care for horses, we ride horses and we even put them to work. But we don't eat horses in the United States. And we shouldn't be gathering them up and slaughtering them for people to eat in far-off places," Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States, said after the budget's passage.
Wooton and others beg to differ. They say politicians in Washington and the state capitol in Santa Fe should stay out of Roswell's — and De Los Santos' — business.
"This man has been raked over the coals so doggone long, it's frustrating for everybody," Wooton said. "Nobody loves horses more than cowboys. But society has made horses bigger than they are. They're livestock, a tool of the ranch business, not household pets."
Local leaders have some advice for out-of-state activists who pledge to protest if one horse is slaughtered here: Stay home.
"People are tired of the East and West Coast telling us what to think, do and say," said Greg Nibert, an attorney and county commissioner. "These outsiders treat the rural West as their national playground. They ignore the fact that residents' lives and livelihoods are at stake."


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Ughtasar Petroglyphs
V - II millenium BC - Syunik Marz
One of Armenia's least known and interesting attractions is to be found at the top of Ughtasar Mountain. Aside from the natural beauty of the mountaintop valley, the views and the small lake, there is an abundance of ancient petroglyphs which are between four and seven thousand years old. Unfortunately, this is one of the most difficult places to reach, with a solid 4x4 needed and with no real roads leading up to it, compounded by a short visiting season. See the "Getting there" section below for details.
Rock—carvings are a unique source for the study of ancient culture. Discovered on the territory of Armenia, they have been know as "Itsagir", i.e., goat-letters, and though they attracted the attention of certain investigators at the beginning of the 20th century, they were not studied at that time. Interest in rock art monuments grew during the first decades of the 20th century, when A. Kalantar indulged himself in their study. Unfortunately, very little has been preserved from the rich material collected by him. A. P. Deniyokhin also took part in the discovery of rock carvings in Armenia. During field studies the archaeologist S.H. Sardarian has discovered numerous rock carvings on the slopes of Aragats and the Gueghama mountains. Groups of rock carvings have also been found in Western Armenia. In 1966 exceptionally rich centres of rock-carvings were discovered in historical Syunik. The archaeological expedition of the Institute of Archaeology of the Armenian Academy of Sciences began its studies in Syunik in 1967—1968, and discovered a large number of carvings on several thousand rocks in historical Syunik, i.e., in the regions of Sisian, Yeghegnadzor and Azizbekov. The collection of these rock carvings arouses a great deal of interest among various specialists, particularly archaeologists. The present collection comprises only a small amount of the material gathered at Syunik, being the main groups of rock carvings of Ughtasar; the rest will be published gradually in the next volumes of this series. The recently discovered rock art monuments occupy the territory of several dozen kilometres along the mountains near Tsghouk, on the slopes of Ughtasar, at the feet of the Vartenis mountain chain, and the sources of the Yeghegis, Arpa and Vorotan rivers. The rock carvings discovered to date are so numerous that it is not possible to include even the most necessary ones in one large volume. More than 2000 decorated rocks were discovered at Ughtasar, in the region of Sisian. The big centres of rock carving art, Ughtasar and Jer'majur, are in the region of Sisian about 3300 metres above sea level. Here, in the mountain meadows where cattle breeders settle in summer, the soil is rich with Alpine flora. Along the area, in the valleys and near the rock-chains as well as around the small lakes, one can see traces of ruined dwelling sites, cromlechs and various graves. The study of these rock-carvings is possible only during summer months. Most of the time, nearly nine months of the year, the rocks are thickly covered with snow. The rock carvings are mostly on "tombstones," and these decorated rock-fragments are scattered at the feet of mountains, in valleys including the slopes and bottom of Ughtasar, which took its name after the resemblance it has with the camel ("ught" in Armenian means "camel"). The carvings are graphic and voluminous and have been represented horizontally or vertically on the flat, brown and black rock—fragments. The composition "carvings" which comprise from 10 to 50 pictures, amount to several hundred patterns. The depth of their cutting is 2—6mm, while the width is 2~21mm. In the rock-carvings of Ughtasar and Jer'majur, the entire wealth of the Armenian fauna is designed. There, we can see most animals of that time, both wild and tamed, such as goats, mouflons, gazelles, deer, aurochs, horses, boars, dogs, wolves, jackals, panthers, bears and lions, Aurochs, bizons, however, are met very seldom. At the same time scenes which represent bunters with bows and arrows, pikes, spears, and shields are numerous. Among them we can see hunting objects, lassos, traps, and also aurochs that lead the cart, covered carts and sledge-like ones, too, ploughs and carvings which represent the universe. Birds, in general, do not occupy a significant place. The rock carvings of Syunik are based on scenes referring to social life and the ritual, We encounter too often with single or collective hunting scenes of goats, aurochs, deer, boars etc. The abundance of such scenes in the rock-carvings of Ughtasar and Jer'majur may at first glance, seem to be a survival of ancient times. These rock-carvings of Armenia with so many hunting scenes assert B. B. Piotrovsky's conclusion according to which, with the spread of half-nomadic cattle-breeding, hunting once more becomes significant. The importance of cattle-breeding is testified by the abundance of rock-carvings representing cattle and small-cattle. The Cyclopean fortress and the lodgings situated over 3 kilometres high at Ughtasar, have, apparently, served as temporary dwelling sites for cattle-breeding tribes. The "graves" and their carvings prove that they were in use for many hundred years. Scenes of ceremonial dances, i.e. dances in pairs and collective dances, have been reproduced too. The rock-carvings of Syunik represent subject scenes, where single episodes of primitive people's social life are depicted with the surrounding nature. These decorated rock-fragments of Syunik are mainly "tombstones" and they are made by cattle-breeding tribes who settled in those pastures at a certain period of the year. It is difficult for the investigators to determine the accurate date of these rock-carvings. The form, style and the theme of the execution of the rock-carvings may be of great importance in determining their date. The comparison of the monuments of material culture of Syunik and other regions of Armenia with those of the Transcaucasus and Asia Minor, gives us enough basis to consider the rock-carvings of Syunik as belonging to the V-II millenium B.C..
Getting there
Trips should only be made from mid-July to late September, since the mountain is snow covered most of the rest of the year. You can either hike up to Ughtasar, following the track below, or you can take a car. In Sissian you can ask at one of the hotels for a car with a driver. The drivers in town have set a fixed price of 25,000 dram (about $70) for a jeep that can take up usually 4 passengers. The price is the same regardless of whether it is one passenger or 4. It is about an hour to drive up, and you need a serious 4x4 with great clearance. Even a Niva is not recommended.
- GPS log of track from highway to petroglyphs of Ughtasar (file says gpx format, but it is in fact in text format)
Zoom in to see the trail to the petroglyphs.
<googlemap lat="39.6215933" lon="46.0524417" width="800" height="600" zoom="12"> 39.68624,46.05152, Ughtasar Petroglyphs </googlemap>