I have been giving thought to ways to keep a positive focus in what looks to be some troubling times in our upcoming times. There may be a lot of financial chaos for many people may more than a lot of folks realize, I think as a society we will need tools to deal with what we may well be facing to keep site of hope and focus on growth and coming together as opposed to be over whelmed.
Often when I have my grand kids for the weekend I put on a big meal one of the days a feast . They love grand dads feasts it make them happy and feel important, part of something filled with joy and celebration just in being together and alive and sharing positive time with each other.
Contemplating this and the coming times I think it could be a very positive tool for all of us to have a special meal once a week it dont have to be on the weekend as many people and families schedules are not on a 5 day system any more. But once a week put on a bit of a feast for all the family that can attend. Reinforce strong connections. Help everyone feel apart of something bigger than themselves.
Now we can take this a step farther by organizing community events say once a month. Invite people in the community to come together at a local park bring lots of food big pot luck sort o thing invite local groups musicians dancers theater folks to come and use their talents to inspire the community to find hope and joy and know they are not alone but part of something bigger something more powerful something able to stand firm in the face of doubt and darkness in the world.. That together we will not be over whelmed and that we will help and heal and teach each other to stand in the face of adversity. That together we will face adversity with diversity and we will withstand the storm.
It is 600 year since the great Renaissance It is time for a new rebirth, Let it begin, let us be an active part of it every day, We WIll Overcome.
Looking out at the snow coming down this morning got me thinking about how rough things can get in a bad snow and ice situation. Its a good idea to have some supplies on hand all the time to get you through tough times.
Things that wont go bad if the power goes down due to ice storms breaking down trees and power lines. Roads to bad to get out and go to the store or even for supplies to be replaced in the stores. When I was growing up we didnt have money on a regular basis and many families didnt have a vehicle to drive to town when we wanted or needed to so when we had money and transportation we laid in basic supplies that would last us for an extended period of time
We always had things like flour and meal salt sugar coffee and lard, dried beans rice and oats., powdered milk when we didnt cow for that. Baking powder yeast Usually things like honey as well things that keep a long time. We dried beans from the garden in summer as well as dried apples. You can even dehydrate meats and keep them sealed and they will keep for a long time. Then there is canning as long as you have a place to keep the jars that wont freeze if you lose heat. Potatoes keep for a long time in a dry place that wont freeze cellar if you have one or even a well insulated closet or in a barrel buried in the ground out behind the house.
A means to cook of course is also necessary. We cooked with propane most of the time but had a wood fired cook stove as well .. Those are harder to come by these day but you can get a break down wood camp stove you can set up outside in tough times if the need arises which is much easier to manage than a camp fire especially in more densely populated areas and suburban settings. Colman type camp stoves that will run on unleaded gas are a good back porch back up source of cooking heat as well. and in a pinch things like the Kelly Kettle camp cooker that will burn anything from twigs to pine cones will work,
I am not encouraging anyone to rush out and panic buy because there is some snow coming in but to think about being able to get by for a mater of weeks or even a month or two if things should bet bad weather wise or the political/economic situation should take a bad turn and things get chaotic for a spell. Also of you a bit of yard with arable soil and some sun get you some seeds and grow a bit of your own food and learn to preserve it. This can make a big difference in a tough spell.
Just some thing to think about folks it never hurts to have a bit set by against hard times. Have a plan and basic needs just in case.
Thinking about the upcoming year. If The tariffs on our neighbors are put in place and half the farm labor force is deported not only is the cost of food going to go way up but the availability of food may become a problem. I think it may be a good idea to re implement the old Victory Garden idea. If you have some room on your land for a garden even a small space think about what you can grow there every mouthful you grow will be important.
Start NOW order seeds and get varieties you can save see from not GMO types that dont produce viable seeds. Think about getting some flats for seed starting and a few bags of potting soil . Pic out the spot for you garden and start working on preparing the soil NOW. Till the soil now if you can so you dont have to fight grass growth in spring you can then cover the garden space with black plastic which on sunny winter days will heat the soil and kill out grass and weed seeds so you dont have to fight them come spring.
If you have a source of animal manure you can spread that and till it in before you put down the plastic to act as fertilizer. If not go ahead and get some garden fertilizer now and set it back for use come spring. Give it some thought folks you can grow a lot of food on a small plot if you plan ahead and do rotations with early mid summer and fall plantings . I will post more thoughts on this over time. Lets think ahead and do our best to make sure our families have food.
Tobacco is a Native American plant traditionally used for ceremonial purposes
Traditional Nattive American Pipes were carved from red or green pipe stone with a carved wooden stem and held a large capacity of tobacco. Used by a shaman for ceremony at specific gatherings of family clan or tribe.
The idea of Pipe ceremoney is that the smoke created a mirror between the living world and the spirit world amd would carry prayers and messages from the living to the ancestors in the spirit world
The pipes I make are not traditional Native American pipes but share the general idea on an individual basis. A form of meditation and spritual contact with ones ancestors. The DNA within our bodies carry pieces of every ancestor we have, a part of them is alive and still walking the earth with us every day. With the proper focus we can reach out to those ancestors for guidance and help with the issuies we face in life.
To set in solitude and smoke the pipe in meditation lets the smoke carry your needs and thoughts to those ancestors in the spirit world through the part of them that still lives within yourself. A very personal connection that can give you new perspective and help find a clearer path than you can find olone. The answers we need are there within us we simply have to find a calm path to find our way and this gives a tool to walk that path to connect and become more whole than we can be alone.
The set contains a personal ceramonial meditaion pipe a lighter and a small humidor to keep the tobacco fresh for use along with a rose wood case.
Things that trigger them. Sights, sounds, the feel of wind, rain or sunshine on our skin. I think that some of the strongest triggers are scents and flavors.
For me the scents from my childhood bring back vivid memories. The scent of the fire, what wood is burning in it, red cedar wood in particular is very vivid for me, it brings a feeling of calm and comfort. Not the warmest for heating but it gives me great comfort though I am not sure why that memory is not a clear one, just a feeling.
The same with foods, both eating and preparing the scent of spices being chopped, ground and mixed, of fruits as you slice them up or peel them. Many of them elicit feelings that seem to take us to another place and time. Some times its a clear memory, our mother making a certain meal, the smell of meat roasting and the seasoning blending in with the scent of the meat and vegetables, and if its open fire cooking that scent of the wood being burned adds to it. I think in some cases it takes us much further back than a single life time.
These connections are often subtle and we usually are not quite sure where they come from but we know we recognize them. I think of the time in the past that our ancestors sat around the fire, cooking the meat from the days hunt, animals, fish, the herbs and roots gathered from the environment around them and later cultivated purposefully. They became part of the culture that we descended from and that culture and its scents and flavors and textures became a part of us, passed down via genetic memories for a very long time.
I think of the burials we find in ancient sites all the way back to the stone age and the items included in those burials. There are the tools of every day life, but often they have foods and bowls for eating from, included as well. Many say, ah this was to be food for them in the afterlife, but I see much more than that. It represents who they were, what they gave to their families, how we remember them, warrior, farmer, spinner, cook and parent.
Another aspect I think of this is it keeps them still connected to the home, the family and their descendants. So that when a child or grand child needed to connect with the honored ancestor, they could set down at the hearth, lay on a fire and take a bowl of the foods once prepared or eaten at the hearth by that ancestor and connect with them for comfort or assurance, to find answers to question and challenges they faced. It was not to send food for them to live on in the afterlife the afterlife would provide its own foods. It was to provide a bridge from them back to us to continue at need to be our guidance in what we face in this life, the ones we trust the most.
This in part is what my blessing bowls represent. A way to connect to those ancestors who have passed on, but who are still an important part of who we are. To be able to include them in our current lives and ask their blessing in what we face today as well as celebrate all that they have gifted us with in our lives so far.
Ancestral Decent, Real World Immortality and The Holy Grail
Howdy Folks, Welcome to the the BriarPatch
Today I want to talk about Ancestry and ancient genetics and how all of those who have come before us, in part are alive today walking this earth within the fiber of ourselves . There is a part of the brain called the Amygdala where genetic memories are stored, and some of them go back a very very long way.
Almost everyone I have ever talked to has had a dream of falling from a great hight falling falling, over come with terror death coming to meet them, the fear is over whelming, and yet in these dreams we never hit bottom. Which is because some how before we hit bottom we caught ourselves or someone caught us, something happened so that we did not crash to our death. I postulate that this is a memory from an ancient shared ancestor of most of man kind. It is critical that they never hit bottom as had they not been saved they would have died and WE would not be here. This memory goes very very far back, back to a time when we were still in part at least tree dwellers.
I think this is probably by far the most intense ancestral memory that most of us have, but there are many many others, I have a few visions that appear in dreams of places and people and things and events that I can see so clearly that it seems I must have been there. But the setting is a place I know that I have never seen in this life time. I can see the walls their color the windows, the curtains, the carpet and flooring, the furniture hear the sounds of things being moved around, the smells of food cooking and voices in the back ground. The visions are so sharp and clear that they had to be real, but they were never part of my personal experiences, therefor they had to be things that an ancestor experienced that had great emotional impact and importance to the extent that they were written into the hormonal and genetic coding of that individual so sharply that they were passed on to their descendant’s .
Further I think its not just the personal physical experiences that leave these traces and trails within our being but the impact that others had on those lives in their time. People out side of the direct genetic lineage but whos actions and words impacted the lives of those people from which we descended. I spent much of my youth when not working the fields, Riding on my horses and mules out through the valleys and ridges of the lands around where we lived. Places then mostly no longer inhabited as people had long since moved away for jobs and incomes in far off places, mostly during the industrial boom during and after WWII. I would ride through places that I had never been taken but I always knew where I was at, I knew where any given road or trail would take me where the cliff shelters were at, where the springs with good water were at, I carried the knowledge of that landscape within me, I think both from direct genetic memories and also from stories told by others who had been there, had lived there, walked and ridden those trails, fished those streams, plowed that bottom land in their own time and so clearly told their tales that they became part of me.
We are not just our individual selves, but the genetic memories and the shared thoughts, stories and experiences shared with us by others when they talk about their lives and experiences. This sharing, this teaching can have a great impact on who we are, who and what we become and what we pass on to our descendants. In this way a vital part of those people live on in us and will be passed on to every generation that is told those stories and indeed inherits the genetic memory imprints of our experiences and their impact on our very being.
Now this is where the Holy Grail part comes in. I think about the last supper, how Jesus sat before his followers and said this bread is my flesh eat of it this wine is my blood drink of it. He did not magically convert the bread into human flesh raw and gooey laying on the plate to be chewed and swallowed by he disciples, nor did he turn the wine into sticky gooey blood for then to drink. He was speaking of course metaphorically about the substance of himself that he had given them to feed on. The ideas the passions the depth of understanding of the universe. The things he fed them at every meal and every step of every journey they walked together, making a big part of who they were HIM. In this way no matter what happened to his body, WHO he was would live on with in them and as they taught others that things he had given to them each of the new students would become in part him .. in this way he was immortal and his true self could never be extinguished and so it has been for 2000 years… Communion is not about reproducing a physical act of eating and drinking flesh and blood, but of taking on the ideas and passion the understanding that was who and what the man was, to carry it forward and share it in your own time.
This applies to more than just Jesus of course. All of out ancestors passed on parts of who they were, and when we sat at the table with parents, grand parents, and a lucky few great grand parents, aunts, uncles and various ancestors and kin. The stories they told the joys and sorrows that they presented became part of us, it was imprinted in our being and will be passed on in our own time.
From these sorts of thought came to me the idea of the blessing bowls I make. Much as the ministers set forth the bread and wine to share the passion of Jesus, we can set forth a setting at table to connect to those personal ancestors and family friends across the years, to invite them to continue to be a part of our lives, to set with us and share some time and give us the blessings again that they have shared with us before and when the meal is done the contents of the bowl and the cup can be shared among those at table as they contain those blessings that were once again shared with us by those gone in body but live with in us forever more ..
Recently I posted this picture on a wood turning site with the title some of my recent work … one responder jokingly said something along the lines of interesting work especially the fellow on the right . I replied yes I have been working on that one for more than 60 years but he is slowly coming along .. returning the jesting nature of the comment.
Then it occurred to me that we are all in fact our own works of art. We carve out a place for ourselves from the the base rock of the world we live in we mold our basic form from the clay of our existence and over time we carve sculpt and polish that form in to what we wish to be. We paint the world around us with the colors and forms that give us joy and share the joy we become with each other. extending that art with the forms we create to share with the rest of the world paintings sculpture wood working meals we cook thread we spin weave into cloth and stitch into clothing and other useful items .. its all art extended from the art that we ourselves are … and with each day we spend creating we add brush strokes and color and form to the art that we ourselves are constantly changing day to day for as long as we live and indelibly imprinted onto the memories of those around us so that much of the art that we are lives on far beyond the life of the original embodiment of art we began as.
So give thought to this and make your chisel sharp and your brush strokes clean and your colors sharp and bright … They light up the world and help feed the joy and art of all.
My newest focus is about helping folks develop an outlook on how they celebrate how to do it in a way that is positive both mentally and physically … To enjoy things they love in life in a way that focuses on high quality rather than quantity … I you drink spirits then get the very best quality and drink it in a reasonable quantity a couple shots in a nice hand made shot glass if you smoke use a nice hand made pipe using top quality blended pipe tobacco focus on the flavor and blow smoke rings and meditate on thing important to your life … all things can be used as a tool to have a positive impact on life … This needs to be our focus .
One of my focuses these days is to create tools for other artisans,. Our lives are filled with the great gifts of the work and skills of the people in our lives who often to unappreciated. The grandmother who spends hundreds of hours of her life knitting or crocheting or sewing items to make out lives better socks and sweaters and quilts.. Those who work every day to provide the family with well thought out delicious nutritious meals that keep the family healthy and crate a have of joy around the kitchen table each day. There is so much art involved in many basic parts of life that go unappreciated and unrewarded … I want to create thing to Celebrate these folks and all they do to make our daily life and experience of joy Items that can be given to those wonderful folks that spend so much of their lives crating for others and rarely could consider gifting themselves with anything. I will endeavor to crate things that will show how much they are appreciated for all they do …
Here are a few items I have been working on I will add more along the way as I complete designs and produce new ideas
TheBriarPatchProject 