It was a beautiful sunny warm day. The wedding was really wonderful. This old Italian stone castle house was filled with flowers and the cherries on the trees are almost ripe. The peaches and almonds and apricots and figs have a ways to go. Roses are blooming, and lavender. The people were decked out, friends and family from the south of Italy, the UK, the US, came to celebrate. The ceremony was sweet and real and beautiful. I officiated in Italian and English, which went well, and was fun and exciting. Afterwards there was antipasto and wine at a the B&B in the village, and then a 10 course meal down the hill in the valley at the ristorante of the mayor, that was just amazing. By the end of the meal, after all the good-byes, I came back to the house and crashed.

After napping for a few hours I woke up and checked my email to find that the IRS has decided that they are taxing me on dividends for the year 2006, and the tax is more than the dividends! My only course is to appeal it in tax court. I realize as I write this that there is a kind of taboo against discussing tax issues openly. I am pretty pissed off about this. How the IRS can tax me $1010 on $270 of dividend income is beyond me. I have provided them with the information which verifies this, but they don't accept it so I have to deal with this bullshit. Of course they have nearly doubled the amount with interest and penalties. I made $7000 in 2006, and less in 2007. It’s annoying, and rocks my equanimity, but it’s also a good exercise in perspective, balance, and trust.

Tonight, after everyone went to bed, I was sitting outside under the waxing gibbous moon and wondering...what happens next? The world is turning and the human wars are escalating. Environmental change is escalating and will reach some kind of crisis point in the relatively near future. Perhaps if humans make some drastic changes we may stave some of the worst, but perhaps not. With that awareness, afer eating one of the most extraordinary meals of my life, I sat under the moon and wondered, what do I do next? I can be here until mid September. There are workshops, classes and possibly other teaching opportunities in front of me. The US is not an appealing place. Where shall I go? How shall I live? Not new questions for me, or for this blog, but they presented themselves strongly again tonight.

I realized something. By letting go of a lot of material and human attachments a few years ago, traveling and web spinning from community to community, I have made many attachments with people. There are so many people I love, and who love me, all over the place, which means I am always not with some of the people I really love, including Lasky. I am most of the time with people I love who love me,which is the greatest, but I don't have a primary family or even a primary community like most people do. It's a sticky web in some ways, it both connects and , as I travel and makes web connections, the web becomes a way of measuring distance too.

I no longer think in the way I used to about finding the safe place to be when the shit hits the fan. I am thinking more in terms of...if things happen that make it that I have to stay where I am, wherever that is at any given time, how will I make that work? What resources are around me right now that I can use for survival? What can I offer to make myself valuable, worth keeing around and feeding etc.? It's very different in different places of course. In Tel Aviv the resources are very different, and would be I think harder to access, than in the Italian Alps. The Bitterroot Vallley in Montana offers a whole different set of resources and challenges than the ranch in Sonoma Cty. California. What I can offer seems to be differen tin different places too. Some of the skills and talents I have are needed more in some places, and others in other places, so as I travel I am always needing to notice and adjust myself accordingly. It's an interesting exercise.

It's sunny and warm today. I planted a vegetable garden. It feels so good to dig and plant, and I am aware that physically I have very little stamina right now. Some of it is that I haven't eaten much meat lately, and also I feel that I am still recovering from the heat exhaustion I experienced in Israel.

There are two more workshops scheduled for me to teach. Here are links to the websites:

Urban Witchcamp
and
Urban Permaculture

Both feel timely and significant. Luckily they are both in July so I have some time to rest up before heading into the intense schedule of two 3-day workshops.

Today it is a bit cloudy and cool, windy even. The house has been a bustle of activity in preparations for the wedding Saturday of the two people who live here. This is a 500+ year old stone house, with a tower room, that the couple marrying have worked on for the last 10 years cutting windows through the stone and reinforcing them with concrete, making tile floors and putting in plumbing, electricity, telephone, wood stove and fireplace; it’s a beautiful place but not opulent. It is simple and rustic. I know the woman because her mother has been a friend for a long time and I have been around as the bride was growing up, and we are friends. Now she is in her mid 30’s. I am only getting to know the man in the couple. He is from Genoa but moved to this village because of family connecions, bought this little castle, and has been fixing it up. Outside there are many kinds of fruit trees, grapes, terraces...it’s quite a wonderful place. The wedding will be here on saturday morning. I’m performing the ceremony.

Today we have been selecting music. It’s great to have a music library. It’s a very pleasureable task to select music for a lovely event celebrating love.

I have been reading the news and see things developing, food crisis, more disaster, riots, more and more blatant corruption and greed driven violence as the corporate government monster is also moving towards it’s demise; it struggles and will continue to do so ever more intensely as the crisis builds. This is going to get ugly. It fills me with a sense of dread to read what I just wrote. I am a pretty positive person and I take great joy in living and I am not blind or in denial. The avalanche is just starting and a lot of people are going to be burried before the mountain stops collapsing. Sadness doesn’t even begin to describe what I feel about what’s coming. Horror is more like it. I know that many wonderful things are and will continue to happen, and I am all for it, but I see what I see.

Now, notice that this is exactly what the news is designed to make me feel. The news that is covered and the way it is covered is designed to make me feel that I am about to go under, that all is despair and woe and that I have no power, that I am not free.

Horse hockey! It’s just time to plant food, grow soil, save seed, and share! The more people do that the easier it will be to transition away from the multinational global economics of food distribution and get back to people and Earth, which, by the way, used to work. It still does ina lot of places! If everyone would plant something, and also buy locally grown food, there would be a huge shift in the economic base away from the ruling elite and towards local people involved with local Earth.

Are you ready for the next installment? I am in the Budapest airport coffee shop with WiFi and a wall plug. Hooray!

The four of us visited Wahat al Salaam/Neve Shalom/Oasis of Peace, the intentional Arab Jewish Christian village after the workshop at Adamama.

This village is on a hillside overlooking a valley with a long history of battles. The land was granted to the village by the monastery that owns a lot of the land in that valley. This happened in the 1950’s I believe. We had been invited by the wonderful woman we met who came to the drumming with her son (I don’t use names in my blog) and it was a real pleasure to sit with her, drink tea and eat brownies, to see her family’s beautiful very Arabic marble with archways and fruit trees in the home which she designed, to meet her husband and sons, and see her mother’s paintings. We discussed the workshop we’d just experienced, saw her collection of Goddess figurines from Europe, India, and the middle east, and relaxed. We four were sleep deprived, I was coming out of sickness, and we were all in workshop re-entry. Her neighbor came to visit and asked many interesting questions about magic, witchcraft, and Reclaiming, and then she told us about the House of Silence, a building in the village made as a place for people to go and express themselves in whatever tradition(s) they observe. We all jumped on that and wanted to see it so our hostess took us there. It is a large egg shaped concrete space with a stone floor and the most amazing acoustics. Every sound is amplified. You can sit and listen to your heartbeat. The four of us started to tone and chant and sing and it was so beautiful to be in the sound, to feel it move through me, and to hear the harmonies. It was perfect after the workshop, and to be in that place on the hill looking out at the valley and hills and city in the distance was very moving; the beauty, the contradiction of land and industrial sites in the distance. I will return there. Our friend let me know very clearly that I was welcome to come stay with them anytime, and made a point of letting me know she meant it, and was not just saying it as a courtesy. Her generosity is a beautiful and moving gift.

This village has 55 families there, a guest house and café, a library and more I did not see. Currently there are 300 families on a waiting list to move there. The municipality which governs the village will not allow them to build more houses. They will not allow the correct name in Arabic to be on the signs. Even in a peace oasis beaurocracy and fear have a grip. I am relating what I experienced and learned, which is a tiny fraction of what there is to experience and learn there.

I said to our friend, before I met her husband that he must be a very interesting man to break so with tradition. This is a modern home, and our friend is an accomplished academic, not easy for a woman in Arab culture. She said to me “Yes he is extraordinary, and we are Palestinians who do not do provocative things so we are not perceived as a threat.” That was interesting to me, and kind of sad too. The sadness was about the cloud of suspicion that can exist around people because of their ethnicity, or religion, or skin color, or whatever.

Our visit was short as it was night, we were tired, and we still had another friend to meet for dinner. I don’t feel that this writing does justice to the quality of the visit or the people or the place, so as you think about what I’ve written and the tone of my experience, multiply the beauty I have written about by a factor of 10.