Dry Crunchy Times
.....at the risk of being random...Well...we're in dry crunchy times...a couple of thoughts, we all come with an expiration date stamped on the souls of our feet. It's hard when sons, daughters, grandchildren make it clear we're no longer relevant. No longer invited to the party and put us in the back room.
Lysichiton americanus -- skunk cabbage, northern swamp medicine, first wildflower of spring in the north woods, sitting with plants on Wild Herb Ways.
The feminine is dark, cold, wet, moist, forgiving. The root can nourish breathing
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From working on🔥...the yellowstone'88 fires i first became aware 1st hand of changes afoot. Environment is rooted in place. It's not that there is herbalism in this box, politics in this box, systemic inequality in this box, wild fire and drought in this box. There is a single box and it's contents are mixed and mingled. This was a different kind of fire. Whether the shrinking glaciers in the wind rivers or the contracting retreating medicine gardens in the southwest, there was a movement from moist lush to crunchy dry. Socially likewise communities were becoming stressed like the plants. People tend to forget our lives are twined and spun in a world of wind, rain and seasons within the natural world. Just as the political wars of europe spun to a lung cough, drowning in mucus epidemic 1918-1920, an unseen unknown enemy stalking. One hundred years later we are similarly masked, stalked, victoried or defeated by the invisible. Like Francisco and Marta of Fatima, we may have seen Our Lady, heard her voice, yet we are stalked by the cough.
Visiting sw university arboretum libraries, and comparing specimens of where madrean sky island plants were noted in the early 20th centuries to the 2000's, the plants just weren't there any more as described. They were reduced, limited to portions of their range. Still there struggling and surviving though hiding in the remaining abundance. Likewise human communities where people in the past could reasonably expect to thrive were unraveling. People like the plants were moving in small bunches to preserve what they could of their authentic cultural expressions. The plants already restricted to sky islands, began to retreat to trickles of moist yin cañons and further contraction.
Extreme high pressure drought like historic late 16th century and the medieval period, between 900–1300 AD drought had returned to the south west after a brief respite of wet years in the 1980's to severe drought by the decades end. The difference being exponential human population growth, stress on the plants, mining/pumping of ground water. Just as poachers can ping a collared sheep, wolf or griz, people were using similar technologies and data bases with plants. It just wasn't possible for me ethically to gather wild plants in these drought stressed areas or disclose their locations. I remember reading rereading, Aldo Leopold for several years at Escudilla mountain and his account of the last griz shot and killed in Arizona in the 30's, and thinking about these plants in similar terms.
In terms of woke for me, it has been positive for growth. In these dry crunchy times, the woke I encountered in the early 2000's, my response went from denial to acknowledging a new generation has emerged and while it's sad i am part of the thesis, and i won't be able to contribute to the synthesis, still it's new life, although a life i don't want to enter and won't be able to enter.
All of us come stamped with an expiration date, physical decline, death, which extends to our most cherished possessions, our beliefs. i acknowledge my own dated- ness. I acknowledge the new voices, their concerns by listening. In the same way i listen to flyover geese honking, heading north. Geese like all the feathered flying are beautiful yet foreign strange, undependable yet none the less poignant. I have no possibility to embrace goose-dom and they are rightly so wary of me. As far as the woke, I have heard their generational words spoken for a lifetime. There's nothing new there. They are and have been the dominant culture. Yet I don't pretend to understand their words because i can't. They refuse to understand me on my terms, and i likewise the same. I have to be ok with being labeled the enemy, because they are the narrative. i do consider them friend or foe but hold no ill-will to them because ill-will damages the holder. Best to be wary, aloof. during the elaborate dance for which i am uninvited. Being alone and quiet is a gift. Understanding based on discursive thinking tends to be shallow empire political bound. So i understand by not understanding. I welcome the uninvited, it was what was required.
All i can say is the daily living situation across 'merica has exponentially deteriorated especially for young people coming of age. Having lived in 'merica's 5th largest city, in a dry crunchy, pressurized terrarium, there are new voices, avoid or deny them at your peril. This is a time of listening not understanding. The old ways and the real work will be there, some people will come back to it, others won't, a sharpened maul with a good handle, works as well today to split wood as before. The main thing is deepen with plants by doing plants, words will come later.
