Up Bear Creek / 9feb25012

Locals’ discount tickets for Mushroom Festival extended to end of the month

SHROOMFEST 2012 … It’s early to be thinking about a summer event, but thanks to a grant from CCAASE, the Telluride Institute is offering special local discount passes to the four-day event (Aug. 16-19) at cut-rate prices  … This year’s featured guests include the inimitable Gary Lincoff, mycologist/philosopher king; Kat Harrison, psychonaut, artist and entheogenic researcher; Professor of Mycology Tom Volk of the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse; myco-historian David Rose; raw foods guru of the San Juans, Katrina Blair; teenage mycological wunderkind Devon Enke; and dozens more … To buy local discount tickets, contact Scott Koch. For more info, check our website or visit our Facebook group, “Telluride MushroomFestival” … In addition to the Telluride Institute which runs the event and CCAASE, our sponsors include the Wilkinson Library, the Palm, the Nugget, the Telluride Watch and Alpine Lodging.

TELLU-ENVY … Durango was proud to have landed a spot on National Geographic Adventure’s “Top Ten Great Races in Amazing Places” with its Iron Horse Bicycle Classic, according to the Durango Telegraph (Feb. 2^nd issue). But the Telegraph was disappointed that Durango didn’t make NGA’s “Best AdventureTowns,” which included Telluride, Silverton and Pagosa Springs … “Telluride, our glitzier neighbor to the north … was praised for options from ‘schussing around Mountain Village’ to its bevy of summer festivals, all the while ‘Bridalveil waterfalls … thunder down in the distance’ … Curiously enough, the photo representing Telluride was shot on the Colorado Trail “in the San Juan Mountains near Telluride,’ a bit of a stretch, but then again so were the recommended $399/night accommodations.”

Isabel Allende (photo by Peter Morgan, AP)

ISABEL ALLENDE … Having read Bob Shacochis’s excellent journalistic account of the 1994 invasion of Haiti by the U.S., The Immaculate Invasion, it was telling listening to an audio-book reading of Allende’s Island Beneath the Sea about that half of the Antilles island the French called San Domingue. No better way to understand the legacy of slavery there than to read Allende’s dazzling novel – her characters like new friends and old enemies … Highly recommended.

MOUNTAIN LIVING … High and Dry is the name of the San Miguel Basin Cooperative Extension newsletter. It’s the second issue of the second volume, and it’s packed with solid information, like the opportunity to get free trees (if you’re a landowner with over two acres), or participate in a Master Gardener class, or get the latest 4-H happenings. There’s even a great clarifying chart showing the various kinds of community collaborations and what they can mean in practice … And if you’ve never met Mary Watson, then you have a treat – she’s celebrating her 30^th year with Extension at the Glockson Building in Norwood, and remains as friendly and welcoming a county employee as you’ll ever meet … Get the newsletter on-line by calling Mary at 327-4393.

TEK … That’s Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and Four Arrows (Don Trent Jacobs) calls for a partnership of neuroscience and TEK to find solutions facing the world today, in a lead article in The NoeticPost, a bulletin from the Institute of Noetic Sciences (V. 2, #2) … “Unlike typical Western sciences,” explains Four Arrows, “the data from Indigenous wisdom is generated from observations over long time periods in one location and is substantiated by applications to real-world living. Also, rather than attempt to be acultural and objective – a limiting if not impossible feat – Indigenous wisdom embraces a holistic subjectivity that honors authentic reflection on lived experience and relationships with others” … He cites as examples of this kind of thinking – “a non-anthropocentric worldview and realization of interconnectedness.” Four Arrows goes on to say, “…[I]n contrast to neuropsychological and anthropological inferences that human violence and competition are basic features of human nature, many Indigenous cultural histories have long revealed that healthy reciprocity and cooperation are more defining traits” … Four Arrows explores these ideas in depth in his book, recent with co-authors Jongmin Jongmin and Gregory Cajete (who attended the Headwaters conference in Gunnison several years back), Critical Neurophilosophy and Indigenous Wisdom (Sense Publ., 25009) … You can visit Four Arrows website, <www.teachingvirtues.net> … Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell wrote as an endorsement of John Perkin’s book, Shapeshifting: Techniques for Global and Personal Transformation, “Only a handful of visionaries have recognized that Indigenous wisdom can aid the transition to a sustainable world.”

WEEKLY QUOTA … “I think all the squaws were killed because they refused to go further. We took one boy into the valley, and the infants were put out of their misery, and a girl ten years of age was killed for stubbornness.” –Deposition taken from The Majority and Minority Report of the Special Joint Committee on the Mendocino Wars, California, 1860.

DOLORES COUNTY … The Dove Creek Press recently announced that Republican Rodney Johnson will run for commissioner against incumbent Ernie Williams in District 2 and current Dolores County Chair Doug Stowe will try for a second term in District 3.

 VFTS102… That’s the fastest turning star in the universe (so far). A blue giant, out in the Large Magellanic Cloud, going over a million miles an hour … As reported in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

THE TALKING GOURD

walking at two below

both questions and answers

come out as clouds

-Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Placerville