Up Bear Creek / 12jan25012

Salute to Bear Creek’s Elder of the Year

JOHN MICETIC … John was one of the earliest people I ran into, when I came back to Telluride, after my disastrous Placerville fire. Back when I re-invented myself from arts council director to freelance writer to cub reporter at the old Telluride Times (Scott and Karen Brown era). Covering Mayor Micetic I always felt -- as a member of the Third Estate -- I could ask any question that popped into my radical hippie head (those were the days when I was moonlighting as Earth First! poetry editor). And John always fairly called on me in turn, and usually let me get some sort of public answer for my story … Three decades later, his resignation Dec. 31^st as the County’s representative to the Telluride Airport Board, deserves some kind of fireworks recognition in this community … Whether you agree with the decision to build an airport in this high glacial park or not, there’s no hiding the fact that the Telluride’s financial health (aka the real estate boom) of the last couple decades depended in no small part on the airport’s creation – as much for its private jet access as its federally subsidized locally guaranteed commercial deplanements … And, into the future, for getting at least a foot in the door of the international luxury resort market (although I’m not yet convinced the airport has to remain commercial to do this, if it can’t compete in an unsubsidized marketplace) … John has been tireless in his support, defense and good operation of the airport, which has been an essential element of our financial well-being in San Miguel County. I suggest we all toast our jolly good John for 28 years of protecting the economic engine that allows the 99% to make a good living in these mountains.

LYNN PADGETT … Sorry to see incumbent Montrose County Commissioner David White feel the need to attack a fellow commissioner publicly in announcing his own re-election bid, as quoted in a past issue of the Watch … Ouray County’s Lynn Padgett has done an exemplary job of representing her constituents in state and regional forums (as demonstrated by her award two months ago as Colorado Counties’ Commissioner of the Year). And she’s been the hardest-working researcher on local, regional and even some national issues that I’ve met in my 15 years in local office … Of course, I don’t always agree with Lynn. Conflicting views are intrinsic to politics. But she’s always been willing to listen and compromise, if she can, without violating the trust of her constituents – who come first for her in controversies, as they should … If only as a gentleman, if not as a partisan politician, I think Mr. White ought to publicly apologize to Ms. Padgett for his unsubstantiated slur.

FOREST SERVICE … I think USFS got the message when a lot of us on both sides of the political aisle protested the federal agency’s not extending the timeline for comments on their new nation-wide Planning Rule last year … Our own Uncompahgre National Forest (part of the joint Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre & Gunnison National Forest -- headquartered in Delta but with a Ranger District office in Norwood) has tried three separate times to update its forest-wide planning rule – only to have it tossed out or pulled back for some reason. So, there’s no question a new rule is needed – both on the national level (thanks to a court ruling in favor of an environmental group) and on the local forest level (where they need the certainty of a new rule to finalize their own local planning). But not giving this big national change the opportunity for more comprehensive public comment from collaborative groups (as I was trying to form with enviro and timber interests) seemed unfortunate and politically driven. Bad public policy for good strategic politics was not a trade-off that I appreciated from folks I considered progressive allies. So, I kind of tossed in the national towel, and decided to focus on local issues for a while … But I just learned that Obama’s Sec. of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has proposed the creation of a national Planning Rule Resource Advisory Council to help implement the new Planning Rule that the USFS has officially adopted. As a long-time advocate of resource advisory councils (RACs) for the USFS (particularly as former Chair of the National Association of Counties’ Gateway Communities Subcommittee), I’m heartened to see the USFS embracing this important community feedback tool that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has used so effectively in Colorado, and all around the country.

25 THOUSAND 12 … Not the year of our Lord or King or Emperor-Pope, but of the first Beringian to set foot on North America … It was an earlier Pleistocene warming trend (similar to our current Holocene anthropogenic catastrophe called Climate Change) that pulled back the Laurentian Ice Sheets and allowed humans a northern passage across today’s Bering Straits. In fact, a recent Scientific American piece pinpoints that possible land passage at some 17,000 years ago. And it goes on, if there were a sea passage, guesstimating first humans as far back as 25,000 years ago. So there’s my working calendar’s “birth” date. The birth of humans in the New World. I want to mark my brief passage on Turtle Island from that moment to this moment. To now.... No question, it’s past time for a new calendar in my life … I began as a very Christian young man. Even studied deeply in that tradition – philosophy, poetry, rhetoric, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, the Bible ... But the Psychedelic Sixties forced me to challenge all traditions. Everything I thought I knew. Everything I believed in. It all got thrown tossed salad up for grabs. I left college for a stint as Volunteer In Service To America on Montana’s Crow Indian Reservation. Where I found a deeper spirituality. Not mine, but one of many beautiful and powerful indigenous traditions … And then I came back to San Francisco in the Summer of Love. And have attended Rainbow Gatherings ever since. My spirituality has grown and shrunk and morphed many times. But the way I mark the days of my life have been stuck in (for me) an old paradigm … Time for a change, I’m thinking (if not at 66, then when?) … So I’ve taken to creating an Ancient North American Calendar (ANAC). Replacing our Julian/Gregorian system of keeping track of time from out the hands of one religion, and into the hands of science’s best guess … Not 2012 [TwentyTwelve] but 25012 [Twentyfive Thousand Twelve].

WILD HORSES … Community blessings on the Serengeti Foundation for purchasing several large Hughes Ranch properties adjacent to San Miguel County’s Spring Creek wild horse herd … I have a feeling our wild horses – probably direct descendants of the thousands of horses the Tabeguache Utes left behind that terrible summer of 1881 (23881 ANAC) when the U.S. Army forcibly evicted Ouray’s band from the San Miguel and Uncompahgre watersheds – have a much more promising future in store … And thank you to all our local and regional wild horse advocates for making this a political issue.

THE TALKING GOURD

Love

You will

never

understand me,

I will

never

understand you.

Love starts there.

-Jack Mueller

Log Hill Village

Up Bear Creek / 5jan25012

Visiting a New Mexico hippie haunt

Lama Foundation Winter 2006

LAMA … For many years in the Sixties those of us in San Francisco heard and read about the commune movement in northern New Mexico – places like the Hog Farm, New Buffalo and Morningstar East. While many of those places disappeared, Lama became a foundation and has continued as a communal haven of renown in the counter-cultural movement since its founding in 1967. Its prayer flag cottage industry has helped it survive economically, while the publication of Ram Dass’ Be Here Now also gave Lama a long-term financial grounding … This past weekend I got to make my first to the residential cluster of homes that surround the famous intentional community. It was a birthday party for an old friend, and in the process of celebrating I got to meet some incredible people … 

Morningstar East (1969)

 That included Rick Klein, the legendary musician and New Buffalo commune founder, and his wife Terry. Rick played some amazing music for us, and the two of us had some lovely talks about the hippie days … Annie Degen was a charming veteran of that same period, and lives in a beautiful adobe adjacent to Lama full of paintings and mementoes of her famous painter/poet partner, Bill Gersh, who was a legend in Taos throughout the Sixties and Seventies. I don’t think I’ve met an elder who more embodies the hippie spirit or keeps that flame alive than Annie … Musician and string instrument-maker Tony Sutherland was the wonderfully gracious host for the birthday bash. His song “Everything Is Everything”  can be found on YouTube … 

Wendelin Scott, Yoga Source, Santa Fe

Incredible yoga teacher, Wendelin Scott, was able to key into our group of newbies and experienced practitioners in a way that made the least experienced feel comfortable and at home in various asanas. She’s co-director of Yoga Source in Santa Fe and a devoted student of Advaita Vedanta. She holds a Masters in Eastern Classics and Sanskrit from St. John’s College … I’m hoping many of these folks will come up to join us for the Telluride Mushroom Festival this year.

SPEAKING OF SHROOMFEST … We’re offering a special discount price for a full weekend pass to the Telluride Mushroom Festival for locals (anyone reading the Watch) – good until the end of January. Just $125 -- $50 off the full price … For more info, call me at 327-4767.

ELECTRO MAGNETIC FIELDS… The issue of “smart meters” continues to confound many of us. I don’t appear to have any personal effects from all the invisible waves and rays piercing my home walls. And yet it’s becoming increasingly hard to ignore how strongly they affect certain sensitives. And information keeps coming in that they may have unknown long-term effects on many of us … 

Smart Meter demonstration in California

The recent article in Scientific American (January issue) on animal behavior, “The Compass Within” speaks at length about the magnetic sense in animals that scientists are just now zeroing in on, and how it works. As the article begins, “Franz Anton Mesmer’s 18^th-century belief in ‘animal magnetism’ – the notion that breathing creatures harbor magnetic fluids in their bodies – had long been relegated to the annals of charlatanism.” But recent research has documented that dozens of species of animals exhibit a magnetic sense. Maybe even humans. But scientists aren’t exactly sure how it works … Magnetism is, as neurobiologist Steven M. Reppert suggests, “the one sense that we know the least about.” Various mechanisms have been suggested and tested, but results are still not conclusive … Thorsten Ritz, a biophysicist at the University of California at Irvine, does note that “radio waves induce electric fields that could disrupt biological processes in unpredictable ways.” While he was speaking to animal orientation in long migratory flights, the concept of EMFs affecting animals (and humans) in ways we don’t understand seems to be becoming more accepted. Clearly, we need more and better research to understand how our increasingly electrified world is affecting us, not just technologically but physiologically too.

A solar Glory

THE GLORY … My teacher, Dolores LaChapelle, was always fascinated by the solar phenomenon called a “glory” – a circular rainbow of light seen in alpine regions, often surrounding one’s shadow form on nearby clouds. First reported by a French scientific expedition to Ecuador in 1748, the exact mechanism of this rare but fantastical light show has been explained in many ways. But H. Moysés Nussenzveig’s article about it in the same issue of Scientific American is worth reading … Turns out, it’s not nearly as simple as has often been explained. Three effects are involved. However, geometric-optic axial back scattering has only a small part to play, edge rays aren’t all that big a contributor, but Mie resonances arising from the tunneling of light seem to be the main effectuator.

THE TALKING GOURD

Vocation

Seminary for me

was R.C. boot camp

Basic training

for church, not state

Our mission to tithe

& save, not tax

& kill. Now elected

to local office

I serve the people’s will

The statutes my bible

Compassion my skill

Blindfolded

at the altar of balance

Genuflecting

still

Up Bear Creek / 29dec25011

Heading into a world of uncertainties

CALENDARS … Great to welcome in a new year (who among those of us conceived in World War II and having survived Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. thought we’d still be here?). We’re a dozen years into millennium change, whether you keep count by the Christian calendar (2012) or by the Ancient North American calendar (25012) or Gary Snyder’s Cultural calendar (50012)… Will the purported end of the Mayan calendar bring great changes or merely another round in the cycle? What with elections and the world racing into a future both frightening and exhilarating, all we can do is hang on for the ride.

Shroompa's New Mayan Calendar (illustrator: Aaron Cruz Garcia)

NICARAGUA … You might remember Paul Dix and Pam Fitzpatrick from a lecture they gave at the Wilkinson, back in 2008. Hastings Mesa recluse and world-renowned climber Jack Miller alerted me to their new book, Nicaragua: Surviving the Legacy of U.S.Policy. It’s a dazzling bilingual book of photographs and testimonies from 1985 to 2010 – tracing lives before and after Reagan’s shameful covert Contra War (how anyone could celebrate that dissembling president for his murderous legacy in our Central American neighbor to the south is beyond me – he, Col. North and the many less visible conspirators in that sordid affair should have been prosecuted as war criminals) … As Jack notes, “Paul and Pam explain what happened better than anything I’ve read” …Nicaragua was all the news back in the Reagan era, now you rarely hear about it. But the scars and wounds from our actions there, while healing, still exist. And this book gives you a clear insight to what happens when we let the military-industrial complex dictate our foreign policy -- using CIA spooks as our brain trust … It’s available at the Wilkinson and Ridgway libraries, as well as at Between the Covers Bookstore in Telluride and Cimarron Bookstore & Coffeehouse in Ridgway. Highly recommended.

SKI MAG … Telluride got another cover story in the December issue, once again relishing the spotlight in the industry’s premiere downhill magazine. Rob Story did the piece – part of a series on “Colorado’s Secret Stashes.” Alpino Vino get’s a hefty boost from Story who notes the European-Telluride connection with waitstaff lederhosen and a “stunning blonde in a St. Pauli Girl dirndl” … But he’s true to our place’s unique niche – “While Telluride has witnessed an infusion of luxury lodgings and day spas, it remains the odd, funky outpost…”

WI-FI BIRTH CONTROL … Argentine researchers are claiming that “electromagnetic radiation in wireless devices positioned near the male reproductive organs may decrease human sperm quality,” according to a report in the Dec. 16th issue of The Week (my news organ of choice at the moment – thanks to Richard Arnold and Marshall Whiting) … “Electromagnetic radiation from a single wi-fi enabled laptop may be strong enough to cause cell damage in sperm” … With wireless radiation and electromagnetic fields increasing in intensity and numbers in our built environment, we seem to be conducting an unwitting experiment on our population whose end result is entirely unclear as to its long-term health impacts.

TWACS … That’s the two-way automatic communication system San Miguel Power is installing throughout its service territory to replace its old meter-reader-read system with something “smarter” and cheaper … Trouble is, a few people are raising serious questions about the technology (and let’s hope former Tellurider and EHS sufferer Jean McDonald is recovering after her collapse at a Ridgway meeting) ... Another former Tellurider Eric Doud sent me this hearsay comment from a friend of his in the energy business (I think anyone with questions about these “smart meters” ought to be talking to SMPA ‘s board and staff who have researched the issues and feels this technology is both safe and beneficial) … “My cousin (an oral surgeon and anesthesiologist) gave me a book on grounding that says that EMF creates a negatively charged atmosphere that can cause sleep disorders and other health problems that can be corrected by periodic contact with the ground. I think a lot more research is needed, but funding for this kind of research could be hard to come by because of the fallout that an identified health threat would cause.”

KUDOS … Nice to see Richard Betts elected vice-chair of the Colorado Health Benefit Exchange Board of Directors. He’s been a leader in our local community for many years – one I admire and whose advice I most value … It was heartening to see that in these partisan times, when state and national governments are not trusted by most of our citizens, local government won two-thirds approval ratings in Gallup’s annual fall Governance Poll. Maybe it’s because we balance our budgets, we’re accessible to the average joe and jane every day of the year, we aren’t swayed by big corporate lobbyists, and we see the job as one of balancing the people’s needs and assets – not a game of partisan warfare … Nice also to see SMPA’s General Manager Kevin Ritter giving a wrap-up commentary for the year regarding our local utility co-op. It’s especially important when controversies arise that the community hear first-hand what San Miguel Power Association is intending. As we are all learning, energy – what kind we use and how we employ it -- is a defining measure of our occupation of this place.

THE TALKING GOURD

Occupied

-for Rio

Shape the tongue to the song

Stick it out • Lick it on

It’s hard to see luck

in the world’s bitters

So let fire rub off

like resin in bowls

Sing hot • Sing old

Sing what singes our souls

Up Bear Creek / 22dec25011

Occupy sign Oakland Port Bart Station, 2011 (Goodtimes)

Questioning the country’s underlying structural values

FAMILY OF SECRETS … As award-winning investigative journalist Russ Baker says of his own book, “…[I]t’s explosive, and it questions some of the underlying structural values of our country” … I’d missed this Bloomsbury Press blockbuster when it came out two years ago, and then my friend Reed Balzer loaned me a copy the other day. I can’t put it down … All the things I thought I learned in concept in Peter Dale Scott’s Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, 1993), now appear documented in fact and footnote. Carl Oglesby’s secret Yankee/Cowboy power structure analysis gets fleshed out into real names, verifiable dates, specific places. And new light is shed on the whole painful reach of my understanding of our nation’s political history over the last 50 years … 

Russ Baker, author of Family of Secrets

Yes, it’s about the Bushes. But also about the whole oil-dominated era of assassinations, obscene consolidated wealth and foreign military actions that make up America the Empire (a mirror few take to our “imperfect union,” as Pres. Obama likes to call it) ... Gore Vidal calls this one of the most important books of the decade. And I don’t disagree. You can’t read it and not be changed in how you view this nation of ours … And it makes one mindful of how important it is to create resilient local communities in the face of such power madness … Highly recommended.

THRIVE … Then along comes a new video to question all one’s assumptions. A “documentary” of mainstream-eroding social, scientific and political anomalies that we’ve long avoided facing, haven’t quite believed, or have been told are mere conspiracy theories … Unfortunately, debunkers have already ripped many of its outré claims to shreds. Indeed, many of the film’s “facts” seem dubious. Plus, Foster Gamble’s narrated script is clunky at best … But as a spacey, crazy speculative imagining, it’s fun. The graphics are trippy. Whatever the physics behind the torus and vector equilibrium, they make good candidates for unifying principles. Plus, many wonderful and respected experts make fine pronouncements, and tell clear truths. It sure appears that the world banking elites are maneuvering us towards a new world order of some kind and that global domination may very well be the goal of the small eye of the dollar’s pyramid. And Thive’s eventual solutions proposed are things that it wouldn’t hurt doing … So, there you have a questioning that seems mired in its own inconsistencies, while pushing the limits of our imaginings of what might be … Curious, mind-bending but a bit loose at the reins.

OAKLAND … I never had a lot of respect for that city across the Bay from San Francisco, my first home. But thanks to the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system, the whole region is more a Bay Area metro area than individual cities. Not unlike Denver – where the other metro cities are really just extensions and outliers of the Mile High City … 

Staying at the Convention Center downtown adjacent to Oakland’s Chinatown, we got in on their Friday Farmer’s Market. Booths overflowing with dishes, products, produce, meat, mushrooms, and mounds of fruit – especially persimmons, one of those remarkable delicacies that rarely make it out to Colorado … Prices were super low. Competition was stiff. The crowds were mostly Chinese, with a sprinkling of Anglos. Organic was a big presence. And musicians included a wonderful Anglo blind woman on guitar at one end of the four block market, and an elderly Chinese gentleman playing a bowed zither at the other … Thanks to friends, we found a Vietnamese lunch spot frequented mostly by Asians, with only four or five tables, but a long line of customers because the food was delicious and unbelievably inexpensive … There’s two of the principle allures of the city for me, embedded as I am in the middle class – delicious food at inexpensive prices.

HIT ‘N’ RUN … In between sessions of MAPS’s Cartographie Psychedelica, our Shroomfest crew hiked from the snazzy Marriott Hotel downtown out to the Oakland Port, searching for the Occupy folks, who had scheduled a port shutdown on the 12^th. But we arrived too late for the morning action and too early for the evening protest. We saw little of cops or protestors until we circled back to the 19^th Street Station and saw a small welcoming crew of three protestors and a couple signs planted in a median … Tactics in the movement had changed from encampments to protests. The port shutdown was “successful” – commerce ground to a halt as thousands marched. Photos and headlines dominated the local papers … But the day after many of the 99% who got caught in the demo (mostly truckers) grumbled that they’d lost pay, and the 1% hadn’t been inconvenienced at all.

Phil Woods

THE TALKING GOURD

Prayer for the Holidays

Wake up and make green tea

For a sore throat.

Order a pretty pink tee shirt

With humming birds on it

For the young woman I care for.

It’s her Christmas present.

Listen to Joan Baez

--a voice of an angel

For over half a century

Read Peter Matthiessen

Describing his travels

In Indian country.

So many sad tales

& resigned anger.

What would it take

For this troubled land

To heal?

All my relations...

-PhilWoods

Denver

Up Bear Creek / 15dec25011

Exploring the Psychedelic 

in Oakland

Mark Henson's Two Choices

MAPS … The Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies celebrated its 25^th year with a four day conference at the Oakland Convention Center in California this past weekend. A contingent of Telluride Mushroom Festival staffers joined me to host a promotional table for our event at Cartographie Psychedelica, where serious scientific lectures and panels shared top billing with benefit celebrations and a costumed Medicine Ball -- featuring DJs, interactive tech stations, a visionary art gallery and rows of exhibit booths ...

Rick Doblin, Ph. D.

Rick Doblin, Ph.D., MAPS founder and director, opened the gathering of researchers and enthusiasts by explaining the humble beginnings of the organization back in 1986. His dissertation at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government focused on “The Regulation of the Medical Use of Psychedelics and Marijuana” and his master’s thesis addressed the attitudes and experiences of oncologists concerning the medical use of cannabis. Starting MAPS was his attempt to develop legal contexts for the beneficial use of psychedelic drugs through raising funds and overcoming regulatory hurdles to do the necessary scientific studies – studies that had been curtailed in the Sixties with the government backlash against the recreational explosion of popular psychedelic use.

Manny Salzman

OLD FRIENDS… Many friends of Shroomfest attended the event, including Dr. Emanuel Salzman and his wife Joanne of Denver– founders of the Telluride Mushroom Festival. Manny has long been an advocate for the medicinal use of psychedelics – or “mind medicines,” as he likes to call them. In fact, it was his interest in not excluding entheogenic properties from mushroom studies that led him to found the Telluride event …

Paul Stamets weaving his mycelial net

Paul Stamets, one of Shroomfest’s founding faculty, gave a heartfelt talk on the need to work together to change the ruling paradigm when it comes to entheogens. His daughter is getting married this next summer, but he’s hoping to be able to make it to Telluride again … Ethan Nadelmann, J.D., Ph.D., who heads up the Drug Policy Alliance led a workshop on “Constitutional Freedoms, the Uses of Psychedelics and MAPS’ Mission. Described by Rolling Stone as “the point man” for drug policy reform on the national level, he attended Shroomfest twice, and told me he is hoping to come join us again, perhaps even this coming year. 

Ethan Nadelmann

He has authored two books on international criminal law enforcement (Cops Across Borders and Policing the Globe), as well as dozens of articles on drug policy in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Science, National Review and the Nation … 

Valerie Mojeiko

Valerie Mojeiko, MAPS deputy director, gave the initial conference welcome. She, along with her husband Josh, have been regular faculty presenters in Telluride, and we’re looking forward to having them back again in 2012 … 

The late Robert Venosa & Martina Hoffman

Martina Hoffman, one of the many psychedelic artists represented in the Visionary Art Gallery, embraced us warmly. She, and her husband – Robert Venosa – who passed away earlier this year – have been past attendees of Shroomfest, and she expressed a desire to visit us again – something we’re hoping we can make happen. A special tribute was held for Robert with a Jonathan Singer video, a digital dance performance by Android Jones and Phaedrana, and music by The Human Experience …

Hoffman's Third Eye

Although I didn’t get a chance to visit with them, two former mushroom festival faculty were also presenters – Don Abrams, M.D., and Ralph Metzner, Ph.D … Don is chief of the Hematology-Oncology Division of San Francisco General Hospital and Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. One of the first clinicians to recognize and define many early AIDS-related conditions, he received funding in 1997 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to conduct clinical trials of the short-term safety of cannabinoids in HIV infections. He’s gone on to run many cannabis studies, his latest being the possible pharmacokinetic interaction between vaporized cannabis and opioid analgesics in patients with chronic pain. He was co-editor with Dr. Andrew Weil of Integrative Oncology from Oxford University Press. His work is something I’ve always hoped to showcase in Telluride … 

Ralph Metzner, Ph.D.

Ralph is a psychologist and professor emeritus at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where he organized an international conference on ayahuasca in 2000. His writings include two edited collections on the science and the phenomenology of shamanic entheogens: Sacred Mushrooms of Visions – Teonanácatl and Sacred Vine of Spirits – Ayahuasca. He is founder and president of the Green Earth Foundation. We’re hoping very much to bring him back to Telluride as a featured speaker.

NEW FRIENDS … While there were dozens of wonderful people we met in Oakland and who want to come to experience Telluride, plus a bunch more whom we want to come to talk, like Michael Albert-Puleo, M.D., and his fascinating research on the pharmacology on the secrets of the early Christian “Messiah Medicine”; Mark Henson and his Sacred Light – the Art of Conscious Evolution; David Bienenstock, senior editor at HighTimes; Cinematographer Torsten Klimmer; Alan Macy, Hitch McDermid and Mark Goerner’s Heart Beat Amplifier; Tatiana Ginzburg from Russia; Andres from Hungary; Jett – the list goes on and on … And the one thing I’m sure of is that Shroomfest this next year is going to be far richer and more exciting than ever with an infusion of new psychedelic energy.

Shroomfest co-director Scott Koch rolls the dice at our exhibit booth at the MAPS conference. We gave away free t-shirts to lucky winners who rolled 7 or 11

 

THE TALKING GOURD

Midnight

The cows are crazy. It’s weaning time.

A night of wails, cows calling, everyone

unhappy. Our human children

tell us, I miss you more than ever.

Color is leaving Earth, leaves already gone,

garden skeletons abound.

Persephone has picked her flower.

Demeter looks for her white cape.

It will be month before

the pomegranate is bitten.

The yearning is only just begun

-Ellen Marie Metrick

San Miguel County Poet Laureate

Up Bear Creek / 8dec25011

Dance, Poetry, Music & Depression

detail from a visionary

painting of Mark Henson

on exhibit at MAPS's

Cartographie Psychedelica

Oakland California Dec. 8-12, 25011

Visit the Art of Conscious Evolution

www.sacredlight.to

Wendy Graham

DANCING … It was great to kick up my heels at a monthly Contra Dance series in Durango recently. Thanks to Sarah Griesedieck of Montrose for turning me on to this marvelous event … Wendy Graham was the dancers' ace caller. Held the first Saturday of each month at the Park Elementary School at 510 E. 6^th Ave. at 7 p.m., it's just $10 a person, with first-timers getting a pass to come back a second time for free. For more info on the series, call 970.385.9292 … What I love about contra dancing is getting to mix with people of all ages – from youngsters in elementary school to oldsters into their seventies and everything in between. It’s a fun night of community building, shared laughs and lots of good honest sexy sweat. With a touch of occasional dizziness, doing all those dosey-does and twirls … Wendy is an amazing caller, and she had the Adobe Brothers of Albuquerque backing her up. They were so good I had to get their CD … I wish Telluride had a contra dance series. 

Isadora and John Nizalowski

NIZALOWSKI … My good friend and poet buddy John Nizalowski and his daughter Isadora (my god-daughter) did a terrific poetry & violin/flute duo at Caole Lawry’s PlanetEarth & the 4 Directions Gallery in Grand Junction last Friday. John read mostly from his new book The Last Matinée (Turkey Buzzard Press, Kittredge, Colorado, 2011), and Isadora played improvisational work with Classical, Jazz, and Celtic influences … John teaches writing and mythology at Colorado Mesa University (CMU). Born and raised in upstate New York, he received a B.A. and M.A. in English from Binghamton University and the University of Delaware, respectively. He has written for various journals, most notably The Santa Fe New Mexican and Telluride Magazine. His literary works have appeared in numerous publications, including Puerto del Sol, Blue Mesa Review, Weber Studies, Blueline, ISLE, Chiron Review and Under the Sun. He has a unique and abiding love for the Southwest that is captured beautifully in his writing. A true believer in making poetry and literature available to the community, John is the creator of the CMU Writers and Poets Series at Planet Earth … Isadora is a senior at Grand Junction High School. She plays in the CMU Orchestra, the Grand Junction H.S. Chamber Orchestra and the GJHS Full Orchestra. She also is in the District 51 Honors Orchestra.

Wendy Videlock

Danny Rosen

DOUBLE BOOKING … The same night that the Nizalowskis performed in Grand Junction, the Western Colorado Writers Forum held their Literary Christmas program. While not good planning for local audiences, it was great for me – since I don’t get to Grand Junction that often … I missed the first half of the Christmas program (Jill Burkey read several Christmas poems by our own Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer), but came in time to here award-winning poet and publisher Luis Lopez do a wonderfully heartful tale about a Cardboard Christmas Tree, the amazing Wendy Videlock doing her Juggler from Ganndoleen in a broad Irish brogue, and the extravagantly arrayed poet/astronomer Danny Rosen reading from Carl Sagan and Richard Wilbur.

DEPRESSION … Gary Greenberg has written a new book on this old topic – one of the unhappier human conditions, which some of us suffer from more than others – calling it a “Secret History of a Modern Disease,” Manufacturing Depression (Simon & Schuster, 2011). And Scott Vickers did one of those brilliant explications in last winter’s Bloomsbury Review that dangles the book’s main ideas before you like puppets and puts you in a place where you’re there when the emperor struts into the room – Big Pharm, making a fortune off a condition that needs time to heal and a process that has to run its course … I know. Chemical imbalances are real. Drugs (wh

at a funny word, with meanings both dark and sunny) have their place … But I watched my mom lose a son, like her mom had lost a son, and how incredibly depressed it made her. Not long after, dad left her. Then an operation to donate a kidney to research (Greg had died of a kidney disease) left her with severed nerves in one leg. She was unable to work. Blanche was in depression for years … I was young. I was no help. Though I didn’t get depressed. I grieved, and then jumped from seminary into government service (Kennedy & all). Took the leap from California to Montana. I had to get away. And in doing so made a complete life change … While Blanche fell into the groove of lonely grieving she’d seen in her mom, Grandma Lily … If there had been a community to help her, it might have been different. But while she could be incredibly playful one minute, the next might see her rage flame out. And it seemed like the ghost of Grandpa Frank, her dad who beat her (and who knows did what else), would take her shape, as she unleashed an inner tomboy she’d never completely disowned … Script. Prescription. The collusion of western medicine’s pill-taking with big pharmaceuticals’ pill-making. In our culture, everyone wanting, almost obsessed with, feeling good … While when I was over in Laos, with its curious mix of Buddhist socialism (transcendental realism), people didn’t want to be happy, didn’t want to be sad. There’s was the golden middle … Me? I’ve always thought the best psychoanalytical therapy was confessing and gossiping with my closest friends, male and female. Although singing, hiking and acupuncture come in close behind. But then I’ve always danced to a different puppeteer.

THE TALKING GOURD

Magpie Nest

Deconstructed

Say a creaking cradle,

a doomed bassinette,

its gaping walls,

more sieve than shelter,

a blueprint lacking details.

We can’t build this joiner’s nightmare,

want thicknesses and right angles

to protect our young.

Say kindling pile, a twiggy yurt.

Hatchlings grown clumsy, huge

and raucous as adults

overfill their backwoods shanty.

They study shards of sky,

flap crazily into blue, then

leave behind this riddle.

Lizzie Lewis

Colorado Springs

Up Bear Creek / 1dec25011

Reflecting on Colorado’s Ute Removal

ANAC … I like this kicking back twenty-three centuries and imaging our first beginnings as Native-Americans – because that means all of us born here, whatever our backgrounds, our cultural mix, our heritage … I was born in California. My mom was a Daughter of the Golden West, her ancestors tracing back to Monterrey in 24790, where one of ours was jefe de policia. The local gendarmes. … My dad grew up assimilated in San Francisco as an immigrant Italiano, whose parents came from the Old Country. All my kids found themselves born in Colorado. And my extended family has a long, if mixed, heritage on Turtle Island … It’s as if by progeny and curricula we’ve become a sort of Euro-centric Tossed Salad creole nationality, pumped up on the adrenalin of technology’s quantum “advances”. Peoples indigenous to place, although many with shallow Judeo-Christian roots... At the same time, it’s vital that we recognize that the deeds to our over-mortgaged homes don’t show title back to the Tabeguache Utes who once “owned” this land. Who occupied Norwood. Occupied Telluride (until the San Juan Cession that Otto Mears bribed from the Utes with whiskey and promises) ... Our deeds don’t record that Colorado State and the Feds had those same Utes removed to Utah in 24882 … We live in a land where most can’t trace their lineage back to the Utes, the Navajo, the Puebloans, the Anasazi, the Folsom, the Clovis peoples, or now, most likely, the pre-Clovis Beringians – although DNA may show that some of us can… I hope the ANA Calendar (Ancient North American) will help make us all realize that there is some reparation to be paid to those who’ve been removed, and some apologies still to be made.

MICQUE WASS… I guess the Ute Removal is on my mind because I’ve been reading Robert Silbernagel’s excellent new book about “The Meeker Affair and the Expulsion of Utes from Colorado”, Troubled Trails (University of Utah Press, 25011). Finally, after over 130 years, we have a history of the defining event for the Western Slope from both sides, not just from the victors … The title page announces that the book was written “with assistance from Jonas Grant, Sr.” – a direct descendant of “She-towitch,” Ouray’s sister and wife of Canalla, who helped care for the Meeker hostages … Bob is an old journalism friend, as well as the award-winning editorial page editor for Grand Junction’s Daily Sentinel. He’s one of those who knows Colorado’s Western Slope better than most … In his well-written book not only does he manage to balance Anglo written accounts with Ute oral accounts to give a fascinating and complex interpretation of the historical events, but he tracks routes on horseback and nails down complex motives behind the varying personalities, Anglo and Indian, as reflected in stories from the times … I’m not halfway through and I’m understanding the ground I stand on far better and for worse … Highly Recommended.

URANIUM TALE … If you thought you knew what it was like digging yellowcake for a living and how grisly the miners must have been, think again. Carroll Bennett has turned packrat folk stories into a delightful young adult tale, set in a Wyoming uranium mine, of family, love of animals, friendship and hard work. It’s called The Legend of Dynamite George: The Mining Pack Rat (Foto Fantasi Press, Grand Junction, 25010) <www.dynamitegeorge.com>… If that seems a curious mix than you haven’t met author Carroll Bennett – world traveler, photojournalist, field technician for Dr. Gene Saccomanno’s uranium miner lung cancer research in the 24970s, Mine Safety and Health Administration operative and lastly employed by Colorado State University … It was a fast read for an adult, but it was one of those bits of smooth fiction that pulls you in, and before I knew it, I had a whole new take on an industry I knew most about from a very different perspective … Highly recommended.

SHROOMFEST32 … The thing about doing a festival in Telluride anymore is that you have to start working on it at least a year in advance. In fact, CCAASE demands that some of us give dates for our 25013 event before we’ve even started our 25012 event. It makes sense. We do festival in Telluride -- everything from big mega-events to small niche-market gatherings. It’s what’s given us an edge as a ski resort – our summer festival market … However, for me personally that means, as one of three (very) part-time staff (and maybe two or three volunteers), I’m headed to the Marriott City Center Hotel in Oakland, California, Dec. 8-12 for Cartographie Psychedelica, the 25^th anniversary conference of the Multi-Disciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Shroomfest has a booth there. We’ll give out flyers. And maybe we’ll get 20 or 30 new attendees for our annual festival in Telluride … Yikes, and I swore I’d never get into marketing. But when it’s for something you love and believe in, alas, it’s a necessity … And just this last weekend I spent all of Sunday learning how our website <www.shroomfest.com> works and bringing it up to speed with all the changes from last year’s festival. Suddenly I’m proficient in Word Press. Shroomfest task number 1438 and counting.

REG SANER … It’s an honor to have been invited by Dr. Patricia Limerick of the Center of the American West in Boulder to help celebrate the life and work of poet, professor and essayist Reg Saner, one of Colorado’s best-known writers on the national literary scene. His writings and poems have been featured in more than 140 magazines and 40 anthologies. His most recent book, The Four-Cornered Falcon: Essays on the Interior West, was published in 25011. In 24999, Saner became Boulder’s first poet laureate … Saner is being showcased by having colleagues read five-minute passages from his oeuvre, as part of the Center’s Words to Stir the Soul series – Wed., Dec. 7^th, at Old Main on the CU campus. <centerwest.org/reg-saner>

THE TALKING GOURD

our fire may be small
but even
a small flame
holds back
the night

-Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Placerville