It's been quite a week since I last blogged. I made my plans to depart from this beautiful place, which happens tomorrow when I head back to the Netherlands where I will be housesitting and rabbit sitting for friends, and visiting with friends, and offering a permaculture talk. Towards the end of August I will go back to North America with Chloe the cat, who is currently sensing impending change and complaining, as she may wonder if she is being left.

I had what I can only call a visitation from my mother yesterday morning. It occurred while my body was asleep, but it did not have the quality of a dream. It was palpable. She gave me the best hug and a smile and said "Life is for living." I said "Sometimes I'm afraid to live" and she responded with a smile and said something to the effect of "Those little dramas are not important." I woke up smiling and have been smiling since.

My plan is to be in the northeast for a few week, do some visiting, possibly offer a permaculture event in New Hampshire, and then head back to Montana with Chloe and Lasky.

I've been watching old movies; Vertigo, North by Northwest, Bell Book and Candle, Lifeboat, Rear Window...lots of fun.

I continue to read various news and information sources online and it really is interesting. There seems to be a trend of growing awareness, and at the same time plenty of "same old same old." As always, time will tell.

I've been going a bit stir crazy here by myself for the last few weeks. Again I am reminded that even I need other people! The woman whose house this is, "S," came back yesterday...she works in Milan during the week and is here on weekends. Her husband is working abroad currently. Besides the fact that I like her and we have great conversations, interacting with another person, one with whom I share language, immediately lifts my spirits. I feel much more sane. I guess my hermit days really are over!

This semester I am teaching two sections of Psychology of Gender at BVU and I'm having a great time with both of them. The students are engaged and enthusiastic about the material. It's a lot of fun and very gratifying for me as a teacher.

In conversations with S we've been discussing some of the fascinating quirks and contradictions and blind spots in humans. I am continually fascinated by the tendency of many humans to fear the unknown to the extent that they shut themselves off from difference, while others embrace the challenges of exploring the unknown. Why is it that some people believe they need the solidity of fixed beliefs, while others are more open to ambiguity and uncertainty? there are numerous psychological explanations, and infinite variables in how individuals are imprinted that lead them to be as they are, us to be as we are, but it still raises my curiosity.

I've decided to offer the online Healing Magic class for free, donations accepted, starting September 8.

I just found this very interesting thing at CommonDreams.org. It is a link to the Grassroots Network Alliance page which allows you to easily send a survey to any and all present public office holders and candidates for public office in your city, state, and nationally in the US. Click on it, check out the survey, and it is likely that, like me, you would like to know how your public servants and those who wish to serve will represent you. I think this has great potential!

This past week has been challenging for me. I am here in the 700 year old stone house in the mountain village. I feel isolated because I don't know people here and I don't speak the language, and I haven't felt motivated to change either of those things. There are 2 buses a day to town, but I haven't felt like going. My back and legs are mostly OK, with the occasional muscle spasm in my low back or a hip, and I just don't want to be somewhere in pain unable to move well waiting hours for a bus. That is my own self imposed limitation. I really have grown weary of travel and adventure, and am enjoying "staying put." I'd like to be staying put with friends around though. My own social weirdness exists...really loving many people and enjoying them, and at the same time craving and enjoying solitude to the point of having too much of it right now...anyway, you get the picture.

I know that "wherever I go there I am" and so I bring my own mental processes with me. I tend to engage in dilemma thinking, what should I do, which of the infinite options is the right one? Should I stay in Europe or move to Israel because they are not the US (a place that seems increasingly fucked politically) or should I go home, because North America really is home. I booked a ticket back to the US, so unless something changes that's what I'll do.

I keep reading various websites with news, commentary etc. and the degree of political decrepitude that dominates the US government is appalling, no longer surprising, very disappointing. Really I think Washington DC should be walled off. Let the politicians eat each other alive, and let us be done with them. What an amazingly corrupt group. There are so many morally spiritually underdeveloped people who are drawn to power and who are unfit for power. I don't even need to name names here.

Human drama...thousands of years of it and still the wheel turns and we are on it. Aren't we tired of this yet??

P.S. It's quite a bundle of realities we've got going here ain't it?

I want to be on the North Amerian continent. I love the land there. It is home.

I have only been on 4 continents in my life, and as much as ilove and feel kinship and history in Europe and Israel, and I was only in Afria once briefly as a child, I feel a sense of home on Turtle Island, so that’s where I’m going.

I saw this great article, “Urban farming takes root in Detroit”...check it out.

Here is a sample of what I have read about in the last week. At the bottom is a section of visions from other sources.

• Stabbings in London occurring so frequently that now teachers, nurses, and other frontline workers will all be provided with kevlar vests.
• Increase in the amount of rats, wasps, squirrels, in British towns.
• Less auto traffic in the US.
• A batch of teenage pregnancies in Massachusetts. School administrator fabricates a “pregnancy pact” to explain away lack of access to birth control.
• Election violence and fraud in Africa.
• Food riots in Africa.
• Natural disasters in China and the United States.
• Ongoing war in Iraq.
• Tensions mounting between the US and Israel on the one side and Iran on the other.
• US and UK “leaders” ignore constituents disagreement with war and torture policies.
• Arctic ice almost gone.
• Polar bears losing habitat. When one escapes south to Iceland it is shot.
• Overwhelming evidence of corruption and law breaking points directly to the US chief executive, US Congress turns a blind eye while citizens cry out for justice.
• Drought in Spain.
• Drought in California.
• Drought in Georgia.
• Drought in Australia.
• Fires in California. Big Sur burns.
• Hostages freed in Central America.
• Torture survivors sue UK government.
• US maintains concentration camp at Guantamo Bay despite numerous SCOTUS and lower court rulings that it is operating illegaly.
• US maintains prison ships on the move.
• US maintains prison camps in eastern Europe.
• US moving forward on installation of missile silos in Eastern Europe.
• Olymbics about to begin in China. The Free Tibet movement has established their cause as part of the theme of these games.
• US government officials helped shape oild deals with US companies, friends of the president no less, for Iraqi oil.
• Local developers in Maryland received sweetheart deals on public lands from their friend, a county executive.
• Rainbow Family members arrested by Forest Service. A Crowd of Rainbows surrounds the arresting officers. Officers use teargas and rubber bullets.
• Psychologists at the VA are told by superiors not to diagnosis Iraq war veterans with PTSD or PTSS because treatment is too costly.
• In Texas deliberate measures are taken to inter a “white” woman receiving a public burial in the “white” section of the local cemetary.
• A french company announces the compressed air car for sale in the US in 2010.
• Notorious racist Senator Jesse Helms died.
• Presidential candidate Barack Obama positions himself further to the right by backpeddling on Iraq war pullout and by supporting new FISA bill which effectively increases surveillance on Americans and excuses illegal surveillance conducted by the White House and prominent telecommunications companies.
• The Kinneret Sea, also called the Sea of Gallilee, Israel’s source of water, is drying up.
• Denver Archdiocese pays out over $5 million ro survivors of sexual abuse at the hands of catholic priests.
• US uses interrogation and torture techniques learned from Chinese military handbook.
• A 15th Century scuplture. poorly secured above a door at the Metropolitan Museum in NY, fell and shattered.
• The Pentagon, regular producer of quantities of toxic chemical waste, refuses to clean up their toxic waste.
• A young woman “supermodel” jumped off her apartment balcony and killed herself.
• The SCOTUS reduced to a negligible amount the punitive damages assessed against Exxon and awarded to Alaskans as a result of the drunken crash of the Exxon Valdez which resulted in an historic oil spill, massive pollution, loss of wildlife, and long term environmental damage. Damages were reduced to less that 5% of one current quarter’s profits.
• Evidence points to US officials involved with black market sales of nuclear weapons. 6 US warheads “accidentally” lost track of and moved from one location to another, eventually recovered. Story buried.

I’ve also seen visions of another sort.

• The old world of dinosaurs, goblins, earth spirits in late stages of giving way to the modern mechanical patriarchal. The vision was of one world crumbling as another rises, and as this other one rises to it’s pinnacle and starts to collapse, rising from below remnants of the old world combining with parts of the new to create something new yet again. This has happened before, and it will happen again, and we are in it now.
• I’ve seen visions of US small towns getting old and crumbling, and in some of them groups of people who learn how to navigate climate changes and collapse in infrastructure, creating new thriving communities.

Here is the link to an article I just finished writing.

Watching the modern film Beowulf and reading some of it again gives rise to these thoughts.

The story symbolizes the death of the old, the dragon, and yet the survival of the old world in the mother, and the rise of the modern patriarchal mechanized sterilized world, but not without a cost to that new world, for it is born out of violence and the gradual disconnection from the spirits of Earth and the rise of monotheism.

This made me think about Permaculture, and some of the language I have used about "return to sustainability" and other such references to bringing back elements of the past. I see, now, more clearly that the work is to integrate the modern with the ancient, not to return to anything, and not to leave everything behind.

I'm sure this is not a unique idea, but it feels like an "aha!" to me. Working with an underlying principle of bringing together the truly ancient and more recent with the skills of the present we should be able to create something that really works!