Saturday, January 22, 2022

Arndt: Yab Yum

Thanks to the inimitable Robert Report  which I recommend as essential reading for all denizens of the San Juans 

https://therobertreport.net/2022/01/22/yab-yum

let me share this tiny gem from Aspenite Burnham Arndt:



End of the Day

the peaks drop into

deep blue shadow.

Yet desire remains

white hot


Photo by Jerry Roberts


Tuesday, January 18, 2022

REMEMBERING JACK PETERS

 


Jack, his daughter Pamela and granddaughter in the pack

A Passion for Learning & Mushrooms

Pamela  Peters

Dr. Jack Peters came to discover the magic of mushroom hunting relatively late, when he was in his 50s. It was 1988 when he flew us in a private, chartered Cessna prop plane into the infamous Telluride airfield for the Wild Mushrooms Telluride conference for the first time. We both fell in love -- with the town, the people, and naturally the mushrooms. 

We found Boletus edulis [B. rubiceps], chanterelles, Hydnum imbricatum [Sarcadon imbricatus], Amanita muscaria, and so many more that first year. Though, more than the wild mushrooms, it was returning Fungophiles, and the amazing, groundbreaking lectures that kept us coming back. Over the years we heard the most amazing (and often crazy sounding) ideas from Paul Stamets, Rick Doblin, Terence McKenna, Gary Lincoff, John Sir Jesse, Dr. Andrew Weil, Sasha and Ann Shulgin, and so many more!

Once in a while Jack and I would bring along someone else to join us: a romantic partner, a friend, a sibling, even a young child. Mostly though it was Jack and I who attended mushroom gatherings in Telluride. It was there that we both learned about, and tried, Psilocybe cubensis. Again, Jack was with me during this magical and transformational experience. Jack was a pioneer in many aspects of his life, and I am truly fortunate and honored to have lived part of my life alongside of him. It is with great reverence, joy and sadness that I bid him a last farewell.



Dr. Jack at Shroomfest24 in Elks Park with festival-goer & child 


Partying with Visionaries

Art Goodtimes

In the early days of the Telluride Mushroom Festival, I was the local hired man. Engaged to work logistics. Make arrangements for the conference, known back in those days as Wild Mushrooms Telluride. As such, I wasn't immediately invited to the faculty parties. But one year Jack reached out and I found myself entering the third-floor Main Street condo he'd rented, looking down on the resort town's night-life action. All the principals were there and many of the loyal attendees, whom event-founder Dr. Manny Salzman had named the Fungophiles. Like the conference-turned-festival, this party was an eclectic mix of mycologists, psychonauts, illicit growers, and mainstream professionals (even some ex-military), now peppered with us myco-crazies.

Dr. Jack was passing around trays of fresh Psilocybe cubensis, some as big as apples. As a counter-cultural poet & mycological society member from San Francisco, I was quite familiar with taking magic mushrooms in the Mt. Tam woods with fellow hippie drop-outs. But here we were in a condo facing down on Colorado Avenue on weekend high-season Telluride, rubbing shoulders with a well-dressed crowd of strait-laced-looking folks, many beyond middle age, openly ingesting entheogens -- with Jack as our host.

I think it was my initiation into entheogens as medicine -- not so much counter-cultural tripping  as therapeutic body healing, heart expansion and mind exploration. And here we are decades later, so many of us Fungophiles fascinated to see that mainstream culture has finally caught up with visionaries like Dr. Peters. Thank you, Jack.


Dr. Jack with grandkids (all photos courtesy of Pamela Peters)






Monday, January 17, 2022

Itki for It and We for HeShe?


PRONOMINAL NEOLOGISMS





Blessed Tu Bishvat. 

That religious feast that connects us 

to the trees  & all  Gaia's mysteries


As part of our Kinship Book Club network <https://www.ptreyesbooks.com/event/kinship-book-club-vol-1>, Western Colorado University professor John Hausdoerffer makes a proposal based upon a question by the Center for Humans and Nature's Gavin Von Horn, "If everything is connected, shouldn't we call everything we?"



This follows on the earlier proposal by Robin Wall Kimmerer to substitute "ki" -- a Potawatomi suffix indicating "of the earth" for the pronoun "it" in order to show  in English that all things are animate -- i.e., basically to do away with the neutral "it."  As a pre-school teacher and director in my early years, I've modified that slightly.  Studying how we learn at U.C. Berkeley night school, I discovered that we learn best, children and adults, when we are taken from the known into the unknown. Not when new words are sprung on us Jack-in-the-Box.  Instead of substitution -- in this transition to a new animate name for a former neuter -- I'm adding the Potawatomi (Bodéwadmi Zheshmowen) suffix  "-ki" to the familiar English pronoun "it." Which has led me to working on a poetry chapbook project I'm calling "Itki"

John's point in this piece below about the water cycle on a mountain demonstrates what this "we" change might look like in English. If everything is truly connected, why not make that fact audible in English by substituting the first person plural pronoun for all third person singular pronouns?



Roxanne Swentzell, Mud Woman Rolls On, 13011






Saturday, January 15, 2022

In Praise of Gay Cappis

For the last two years I've pretty much withdrawn from the world, and certainly the political and administrative world of county politics. Throat cancer, a hernia, Covid and now prostate cancer -- my focus has been on my own healing. In hiding. Thus, itki was only yesterday I learned of the passing of one of the most important women I've ever met. 

I can't begin to tell you how much Gay Cappis inspired me. Her philosophy of local government was with me for the entire 20 years I served as San Miguel County Commissioner. She taught me that as an elected official you worked to make the laws fit the citizens, not to force the citizens to fit laws -- particularly those that made no provision for reasonable exceptions. In some places that could have meant the "good old boy" system of favoring friends. But in San Miguel County Gay favored everyone. 

As a newcomer to the county forty years ago I experienced first-hand her ability to find a way to register a car with title problems or get an important license, even if a crucial piece of the requirements couldn't exactly be met. Little things in the perspective of government, but huge things for newcomers struggling to make ends meet. Gay found a way to help every person that came through the San Miguel County Clerk's door -- not to break the laws, but to bend them as far as reasonably possible. Her motto was: For the people. First!

I was so impressed I endeavored to follow her example for as long as I was in office. To serve the people and to uphold the law, in that order. But my mere two decades as a commissioner were no match for the number of years she gave to public service. Always with a smile and with infallible good humor. 

In my mind Gay Cappis will always be remembered as the very best model of a true public servant.






Thursday, January 13, 2022

In Praise of Robert Bly

 


One of the great American poets of my generation has passed. Those of us who came of age in the Sixties had a poetry hero in Robert Bly. By the time I was writing poetry in the San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, I'd found the Sixties lit mag of translations that had begun in the Fifties. And I was hooked. Leaping poetry. Itki made so much sense!



Then I went back and found old copies of The Fifties. I began to realize there was a vast world of poetry beyond our borders.  I had come from a seven-year seminary indoctrination. Thankfully, Brother Antoninus (William Everson) had led me into the sphere of influence of the San Francisco Renaissance poets: Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Lew Welch, Lenore Kandel, Gary Snyder and later Jack Spicer -- to name the most prominent in my personal pantheon.




Snyder and Welch led me to the Beats -- Ginsberg, Kerouac, DiPrima. I was intrigued by Ginsberg performances. Loving his anti-war stance and incandescent presence. Kerouac in his poetry was a wild reservoir of jumping jive language. I was put off by DiPrima, though, who rolled her window up on Market St. when I tried to introduce myself, and I couldn't understand her poem in a Playboy knock-off, urging everyone to fill their bathtubs because the revolution was coming. There seemed to be a bit of the unexamined, self-destructive, self-inflated egotism among some of the Beats that rubbed my woo-woo skin the wrong way.
Bly introduced me to a very different style. I devoured Silence in a Snowy Field in the early Sixties. His deep image technique intrigued. That led me back to Pound and Williams and then George Oppen, who I had the good fortune to meet on Mt. Tamalpais. We became friends. His Imagist books made deep sense to me and imagery became central to my work. When Bly came out with The Light Around the Body with poems railing against the Vietnam War, I was on board. That the work won the National Book Award only cemented my admiration.


I fell completely in love with Bly's Tomas Tranströmer translations in 20 Poems. I carried that dog-eared chappie around everywhere. At an anti-nuclear conference in Chicago, I got to see him perform before students at Northwestern University. He used a dulcimer to accompany a poem or two -- endearing him to me as I was a closet aficionado of the dulcimer as well. And he demonstrated how simple hand movements accompanying a poem made for much more entrancing performance chops than merely reading the words on the page. Bly's brilliance had seeped into every pore of my lyric sensibilities -- opening distant worlds of poetry, teaching me to let poetry leap not just ride a set rhythm, exposing me to deep images and poems  of political activism that were more than mere cant. 


Finally, in the start of the Seventies Ferlinghetti's City Lights brought out The Teeth Mother Naked At Last, and itki blew my frigging head off. Here was a compendium of counter-cultural tropes I'd been embracing after years sequestered in the locked medieval tabernacle of a seminary. And itki was beautiful poetry, dazzling images, cultural anthropology. Christianity, America's democratic facade, the war that powered the economy -- everything lay exposed. "...the mad beast covered with European hair rushes / through the mesa bushes in Mendocino county..." and "...Let us drive cars / up / the light beams / to the stars..."

I wasn't so taken with Iron John. Itki was important.  But I had already embraced feminism by the time itki came out, and his trying to heal the wounded father in his life, in the life of so many men, while needed for the culture at large, wasn't what had me in itki's grip. But Bly's poetry and his earlier publications had taught me so much, I still held him in great reverence.  As life would have itki, my dear friend and brilliant poet Judyth Hill of New Mexico and now Colorado, had the wondrous fortune to actually study with him, to have him as mentor and friend. She has given me permission to share this marvelous poem of hers in praise of one of America's greatest poets of our times. 

 
Photo by Bruce Bisping of the Star Tribune


Ghazel Overheard
for Robert Bly

Ache of morning without you, ache
of the book I open seeking you, ache
of absence, ache of voice in my closest listening.

Snow falls in the fields of many grasses
where this October the fox hid, voyeur of pond.
Writing poems, you said, the same: a wild listening.

Odin slung from the Tree, Inanna, stripped of crown, jewels, dominion.
Falstaff and midnight's chimes, Jesu, Jesu, the green green of Ireland,
every loss and landscape play the music of listening.

Cezanne stood in one place, Mont Sainte-Chapelle in another,
connected by the portolan of seeing. We wrote every poem
because you were listening.

The elk herd is here today, wearing thick winter fur,
the small ones near their mothers. Nuthatches, chickadees,
flicker's flash of underwing orange, choral listening.

I only know to leave by losing everything.
I have a house, then I don't: words on the page, then
nothing. Do you hear me listening?

When the plaster cracked revealing the Golden Buddha,
we sat sesshin exactly the same as the day before.
This is our practice, over and over. We are listening.

Wagonload of hay, boxwood, Tranströmer, Antonio
Machado, Rilke. You left us so many gifts. I kept
your Giant mask, the beanstalk still (g)listening.

Yeats wrote Lake Isle of Innisfree on a London bus,
that's the secret, isn't it? Longing eclipses the distance from home to here,
you to us, poem to page. You just keep listening.


JUDYTH HILL

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

Kinship Panel Tonight

Pt. Reyes Bookstore Zoom Session

Kinship Book Club #2 

Wednesday, Jan. 12, 13022 (Western Slope Calendar)



I know a number of people wanted to tune into to tonight's panel discussion but weren't sure how to register, so here's the URL to get you there (you might have to copy and insert in browser on some machines)


Here's what Gavin Van Horn, one of the co-editors of the Kinship series, has suggested will be our format. "After introductions, I will offer some framing. What's the kinship series all about? For volume 2, why did the series focus on 'Place' as critical for kinship/kinning? etc."

  • Lisa Maria Madera
  • Enrique Salmon
  • Lilian Pearce
  • Aaron Abeyta
  • Diane Wilson
  • Devon Pena
  • Art Goodtimes
  • Curt Meine 

The order of the evening zoom will be roughly as follows (times shown are PST -- those of you in MST (Denver) change 6 pm. times to 7 pm times):

1) 6:00-6:05pm – Stephen Sparks of Pt. Reyes Books welcomes

2) 6:05-6:15pm – Gavin offers some framing

3) 6:15-6:45pm – Book's writers and poets introductions and readings

4) 6:45-7:00pm+ – A conversation shaped by audience questions

Come join in and help shape the discussion.