American Travelers Uncovered At Their Own Expense

I'll be traveling soon and have been studying the TSA site in hopes of passing the security exams I will encounter along the way. And I wonder to myself, if it's really this dangerous to fly, then why isn't it banned altogether as so many other health risks are these days?

It's amazing how much fear our government is in when it comes to travelers. Every particle must be examined and X-rayed. And now, passengers must stand in a Stick 'Em Up pose and have naked photos taken. Why would someone willingly give their government which is supposed to protect them, not expose them, a naked photo of them self, but not dear Granny or their own child?

Granny would take better care of that naked body shot than anyone else and protect it from all other eyes because it embarrasses her to even have such a thing, and she's embarrassed for you. She'd probably tear it into a million pieces, then burn it to make sure no one ever saw it.

And most children would also be embarrassed to possess a nude photo of their parent, and would hide it from any friends that may see it. Any parent who gave their child a naked photo of themselves would be considered a pervert. Conversely, any parent that gave a stranger a photo of their child naked would be a pervert. Any parent so afraid of their own child that they forced them to strip down upon entering and leaving the house needs help. And any child old enough to stand up for them self should never allow this kind of abuse from a parent. If a child is this dangerous, then they should be confined behind barbed wire and constantly monitored by professional guards.

What if you were a woman and had been raped by a knife-wielding man and from that point on demanded that all men, including relatives, entering your house submit to a strip search to make sure they weren't carrying any weapons or other dangerous objects? People would pity this woman and think her paranoid and in need of psychological help in order to regain her confidence and ability to live in a world were most are harmless and only a few dangerous. Wouldn't it also help such a woman to own a gun and learn self-defense techniques? America is this woman and has been attacked, but she hasn't been given the tools and confidence to face the world again.

Why would we trust the government and an invisible viewer with an image of our naked body but not a close friend or relative? It seems that a relative or close friend would be a better guardian and more respectful of this image than a person or government that has no personal love or interest in us. Not all of us are Playboy Play Mates or gigolos and there's a reason for that.

We live in a society that is image-obsessed, thinking that image is everything, and tells us everything about a person. Yet, increasingly, we are afraid of human touch and contact. We are paranoid of physical touch, which is not a cold image.

I've observed this fear of human contact around my little town. I've seen girls snap at men for touching them in the smallest way or by accident when passing by. I've seen guys stand like statues, their arms crossed over their chests in large crowds, glaring at anyone who dares tap them on the shoulder.

I've overheard girls talking about "the circle," an invisible area that others should know better than to enter. Evidently, there is an unspoken rule these days that says "thou shalt not cross within a few inches of any other person at any time." These girls were agreeing with each other that it was very rude of others to get too near, even though they were in a crowd. And this wasn't even about being touched or bumped up against, this was about getting too near although never having made physical contact. Yet, these same girls will post their image and every detail of their lives online and dress attractively. If one really doesn't want to be touched or have anyone get near to them they should refrain from bathing several days before going into public, step in a fresh dog pile, dump an ashtray over their head, and spill a glass of whiskey and coke on their clothes, and write "leper" across their forehead.

If you wanted to keep me at a distance you'd put on too much perfume. It works every time. My eyes roll up into my head, I feel as if a plastic bag is being wrapped around my head, and I wish there was a tobacco smoker in the vicinity to hide the smell (incidentally, where I live the indoor tobacco ban supposedly includes perfume, incense, candles and other strong smells in the air. I doubt that anything other than the tobacco ban is enforced).

Anyway, I'm not so much offended by the radiation factor of the full-body scan in airports, as by our society's willingness to give a government such power and a nude photo, which they never paid for. I don't know about you, but giving away naked photos of myself wasn't what I paid for when I bought my airline ticket. It offends me and breaks my heart when I see people standing in a pose reminiscent of a crucifixion.

Once, a long time ago, a man was hung on a cross, judged between two criminals. His crime was that he was a king, a person with dignity and who desired all people be royalty and their nakedness covered. He was naked and the entire world saw him and became obsessed with the image of him naked and bleeding, prone, unable to cover himself from our gaping and disrespectful eyes. And now, we are all like him, naked, being judged with the terrorists although we are royalty.

Anyone who thinks a naked body scanner protects them from death is a hypocrite. That America is this weak, this afraid is sad. A naked body scanner cannot save us or protect us from evil. Uncovering people has never saved anyone from crime. Whenever people are uncovered, laid bare, and treated as criminals by their master or government it has been a time of great suffering and hatred.

Can a naked body scanner read a heart? If it could I'd put the things at the entrance of every state capitol building and in Washington, D.C., for this is where the most danger to American safety resides. These few men and women have images that appear clean and safe, but are their hearts free of terrorist threats, do they use their pens as weapons of defense against evil or to enact evil upon women and children by stealing freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and fought for by a few belligerent and brave souls during the Revolutionary War?

I'm not Jesus and I won't sacrifice my life for a government that is afraid of me. If I sacrifice my life and my dignity it will be for those I love and for freedom and those brave enough to love me.

What is America so afraid of, what is our government afraid of? Why do we believe it makes us safe to hand over our freedom and ease of travel to a government agency? When a government restricts and controls freedom of movement and travel, rather than increases it we should be very concerned. When a government accuses all citizen travelers of being potential threats, then we must wonder why. Has America grown so weak and prone, so exposed and defenseless that it fears everything and everyone? What happened to the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave? Where are those who remember these words and what they mean?

Free doesn't mean tobacco free, sugar free, or free from something. It means free to DO something. Freedom is an action, not something that is excluded from the mix. We've twisted the word free to mean something is missing and that somehow this is a good thing. We now identify ourselves as free from this or that, rather than free to do this or that. America is not free if it thinks it's terrorist free. America is free when it's free to do, to take action, to move about, to stand for freedom, to stand against evil -- because evil is everywhere and always will be.

The only way to fight evil is with freedom to do, not freedom from.

Note: I will be requesting a pat down in place of the full body scan wherever possible. I can see who is touching me and prefer this human touch, even if slightly invasive and humiliating. I'd rather not lie to myself that I am fully clothed by stepping into the full body scanner. I much prefer the truth and the truth is often quite unpleasant -- which is why so many silently step into the scanner.

image: Amelia Earhart

Kid, Inc: Are We Raising Our Nation's Children Like Animals?

It's that time of year -- autumn. The birds have quit twittering and the children have stopped playing. The last couple of years I have noticed a strange thing which I never used to notice. Perhaps, my hearing is more astute, but this sound of absolute silence in the air the week that the kids are herded back into their holding pens and fattened up for slaughter after a few years of corporate corn and antibiotics is nearly like a death.

One doesn't notice the sounds of the children ringing in the air up and down the streets while the robins are training up their young ones until it's gone. I swear I could hear a pin drop from down the street this week. I don't see these children or know them, but somehow, their activity and sound fills the air.

And I wonder, how is it that the very air, nature itself seems to know the children are gone?

A few months ago, when watching Robert Kenner's documentary Food, Inc (http://www.foodincmovie.com/ ) I was struck by the similarities between the way we raise much of our food and the way we raise our children. If it's not humane or healthy to raise chickens in a windowless and crowded shed, then how is it acceptable to treat humans with souls this way?

Food, Inc shows one chicken grower that is broken in spirit because she has been forced out of tobacco farming due to our nation's biases and fears which are reminiscent of those that incited tobacco and alcohol prohibitions earlier in the last century. She now spends her days in the sheds clearing out the bodies of the chickens that die every day. Her sheds had windows in them at the time of filming, but the company she was contracted with was fighting her on this, wanting her to get rid of them. Without sunlight animals die -- so do children.

Where I live we have some formerly beautiful Art Deco schools built in the 1920s and 30s. Even back then, people were concerned about energy use and thus, these schools were specifically designed to absorb as much solar heat as possible and to allow the class rooms to be well-lit because, according to the research of the architects and school system, children learned better with more sunlight.

Not only did the architect want the children to absorb light while in their classrooms, but aesthetic beauty and grandness. The classrooms were designed with very high and beautiful ceilings and fine materials. Back in the old days we knew that Creativity Class is everywhere and in everything, and that inspiration is embedded even in the floors we walk upon and the windows we look out of.

But we have lowered the ceilings, placing false panels in. We have blocked up the grand and beautiful windows, leaving only a few small sections open. Our idea of energy use is one of not using any, rather than of absorbing and using more in wise ways. And as we have hidden the high ceilings that invite children's minds to soar, as we have blocked out the light coming in and the ability to see out, so we have also done to our children -- blocking the light of inspiration from getting in or the ability to see out.

Our children are like those chickens, no longer allowed to run loose in the sun. Those chickens die in the dark, are over crowded and diseased. Those chickens can't stand up on their own legs. They peck at each other and kill each other because they have nothing else to do. And those that raise them have no pride or dignity in what they do because they are told they must do this or loose their contract. How many teachers are in similar situations?

And then, there is a farmer interviewed in Food, Inc, that raises his animals in a more traditional and humane way. He has joy in his eyes even though he works hard and is not rich. His cows and pigs love him when he comes around and he loves them even though he will one day kill them. But think of it, wouldn't you rather the farmer loves his animal and the animal loves him, for when the day of slaughter comes, that farmer is going to make sure this animal is slaughtered as humanely and cleanly as possible, for he respects it and the life it provides for him.

Are we feeding our children the right "food" in school, or only a false and indigestible diet? Are we making them fat and weak, unable to stand with dignity and joy, by penning them in dark sheds and muddy pens? Are we injecting our children with pharmaceutical drugs and treatments because we've overcrowded them, rather than letting them loose on the range?

We don't want our food genetically engineered by giant foreign corporations, nor do we want our livestock and poultry treated inhumanely. So, why is it acceptable to treat our children this way? It's not.

[Note: It is stated in Food, Inc, several times that if Big Tobacco can be beat so can Big GMO companies. Obviously, there is an anti-tobacco bias and some ignorance in the documentary. Those same giant companies that have pushed genetically modified corn and soybeans upon us are the exact same companies that have fought to ban tobacco production and use. Were it not for our ignorance of how exactly important tobacco farmers and tobacco production are to the United States of America's dignity, health, and economic prosperity we would not be spiting the very hand that feeds us in favor of foreign nicotine replacement "therapy" and grains with terminator technology. Every single ban on tobacco adds money and dictatorial control of our country to a giant foreign interest or U.S. corporation with strong links to foreign interests. These foreign corporations have eaten up U.S. corporations and states, and think of U.S. citizens as swine, not as humans.

Most tobacco farmers are very conscious of the land and possess hundreds of years of farming knowledge, which has been erased by the hatred of their main money crop. As illustrated in Food, Inc, most tobacco farmers have been reduced to extreme debt and poverty and now raise animals in a way that turns their stomachs and is anti-American and immoral. Because we have fallen for the fear of propaganda we have gotten rid of one of America's most important crops and allowed foreign corporations to dictate to us and our politicians what we can and can't eat.

Not everyone has to smoke, but everyone has to eat, and banning tobacco is actually affecting the health of our children who are forced to eat the unhealthy crops and unhealthy animals that now replace tobacco. Bring back tobacco farming and we will weaken these giant foreign corporations and their power over our nation's leaders and food supply. Banning tobacco will actually increase cancers and autoimmune disorders in the coming years because the replacement crops are usually genetically engineered (with your tax dollars at the local university for a foreign pharmaceutical or agricultural corporation) with proteins foreign to the human body that cause inflammation of soft tissue (such as lung tissue) over time.]

Tolkien, Tobacco, Censorship, and Liberty

I recently received a very nice hard back edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings as a gift. I last read this work when I was 13 years old and have wanted to read it since the film versions came out, but never got around to it.

I like to do a little research upon an author following a reading of them. It is helpful to understand a little of the private interests and passions of an author to understand why they care so much about their literary creations, and work so hard upon them.

I found it interesting that Wikipedia's biography of J.R.R. Tolkien had to use a picture of him from 1916 in military uniform, when he was an unknown and only 24 years old. The only other picture of him on the Wikipedia bio was of Tolkien in 1911, when he was 19.

The probable reason that Wikipedia could not, or would not use a more appropriate picture of J.R.R. Tolkien, one that showed him during the time he became known to the world outside of the University of Oxford for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is because there aren't many close-up photos of him without a tobacco pipe in or near his mouth.

Usually, a Wikipedia entry displays, or should display the first defining photo as the one that shows the person as they are most known and recognized by the world, not as they looked in childhood or as a teen. The childhood photos, should be relegated to the section pertaining to childhood. If the bio is describing Bette Davis or some movie star known for her good looks, the defining picture should be one that shows her at her peak, not one that shows her as an old hag. A picture of the youthful Albert Einstein would not be the defining image the world has. It would look out of place and odd when we all know he had unkempt white hair. Perhaps, Einstein carried his pipe a bit lower than Tolkien which allowed for the illusion that he was a tobacco-free thinker.

J.R.R. Tolkien was born in 1892 and died in 1973, which means he lived to be 81 years old. If he hadn't smoked he would've lived forever and The Lord of the Rings would look quite different (although, in the literary world one's creation is considered to make one immortal). I wonder if writing about Hobbits smoking tobacco qualifies as 2nd or 3rd hand smoke? And why does he look so much happier with the pipe than without it? He's probably glad he's not stuck on a piece of our modern PhrankenPharma nicotine gum.

Unlike the film version, which depicts the victorious Hobbits returning to their peaceful and untouched home in the Shire, the book shows an entirely different picture. Tolkien shows that the last battle is the one closest to home.

In the final chapters of the book, the Hobbits; Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Merry return home to the Shire after having gone to Hell and back, saving the earth from the dark evil of Sauron by tossing the Ring of power into the depths, forever cutting Sauron off.

The Hobbits return home to find gates across the roads, Rules which dictate the lives of the Shire; preventing the inhabitants from lighting fires, freely travelling, sharing food or home with strangers; and that beer and tobacco are no longer allowed for use amongst the common folk, being reserved only for the few who lord over them. Anyone that breaks a rule or speaks up is confined in the Lockholes by the Shirriffs who enforce the Rules.

There is general poverty amongst the people and the land. The homes have been burned down and ugly row houses line the road where once beautiful trees grew. The gardens have gone to weed, and the new mill belches out dirt that pollutes the river and air. The wizard, Saruman, has decided to set up a monopoly over the lives of the Shire Hobbits, which began innocently enough with a prohibition upon beer, but escalated to every aspect of life.

Merry wonders "What's the matter with this place?" ("The Scouring of the Shire," The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien).

One of the native Hobbits explains: "We grows a lot of food, but we don't rightly know what becomes of it. It's all these 'gatherers' and 'sharers', I reckon, going round and counting and measuring and taking off to storage. They do more gathering than sharing, and we never see most of the stuff again" ("The Scouring of the Shire").

"[O]n every wall there was a notice and a list of Rules. Pippin tore them down. There was no beer and very little food, but with what the travellers brought and shared out they had a fair meal; and Pippin broke Rule 4 by putting most of next day's allowance of wood on the fire.
"'Well now, what about a smoke, while you tell us what has been happening in the Shire?' he said.
"'There isn't no pipe-weed now,' said Hob; 'at least only for the Chief's men. All the stocks seem to have gone.....'" ("The Scouring of the Shire").

"'No welcome, no beer, no smoke, and lots of rules....'" ("The Scouring of the Shire").

"'There's hundreds of Shirriffs all told, and they want more, with all these new rules'" ("The Scouring of the Shire").

Sounds a bit like my town and the rest of the country. The bigger the jails, the larger the police force the more criminals are invented. In the United States of America one is lucky if they have never been arrested or jailed. At least, 1 out of every 25 people is jailed in their lifetime, far exceeding Russia or China.

Many good people are sitting in our jails and prisons at this moment, some for traffic or parking tickets. In a jail not far from me sits a grandfather who loves his grandchildren and became their guardian when the children's mother (his daughter) became a neglectful drug addict. He protested Social Services constant and intrusive visits to his house to make sure he was taking care of the children and was arrested for standing up for his rights and family. He committed no crime other than doing the right thing and for telling Social Services to stop coming to his house.

"'So things went from bad to worse. There wasn't no smoke left, save for the Men; and the Chief didn't hold with beer, save for his Men, and closed all the inns; and everything except for Rules got shorter and shorter, unless one could hide a bit of one's own when the ruffians went round gathering stuff up 'for fair distribution': which meant they got it and we didn't....'" ("The Scouring of the Shire").

The four Hobbits, returned from battles, set about "raising the Shire," and waking the inhabitants from their sleep and powerless condition. They route out Saruman's thugs, although not without some loss of life. The Shire was ready to overthrow the Rules and those that forced them to live in a world "fair" only to the greedy. When we hear the words "fair" and "unfair" we need to ask what exactly is meant by these words, for most often they are employed by mean misfits of society.

After freeing the captives from the Lockholes, Frodo is appointed Deputy Mayor until the Mayor is properly recovered from his time in prison. Frodo promptly lays off the majority of Rule enforcement:

"The only thing that he did as Deputy Mayor was to reduce the Shirriffs to their proper functions and numbers" ("The Grey Havens," The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien).

Not only did the Hobbits save the earth from Sauron, an equivalent to our Satan, but they introduced Middle-Earth to tobacco smoking. The Prologue of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings details a bit of the history of this "art" in the section entitled "Concerning Pipe-weed":

"There is another astonishing thing about Hobbits of old that must be mentioned, an astonishing habit: they imbibed or inhaled, through pipes of clay or wood, the smoke of the burning leaves of a herb, which they called pipe-weed, or leaf, a variety probably of Nicotiana. A great deal of mystery surrounds the origin of this peculiar custom, or 'art' as the Hobbits preferred to call it....

"And certainly it was from Bree that the art of smoking the genuine weed spread in recent centuries among Dwarves and such other folk, Rangers, Wizards, or wanderers, as still passed to and fro through that ancient road-meeting. The home and centre of the art is thus to be found in the old inn of Bree, The Prancing Pony....

"Hobbits first put it into pipes. Not even the Wizards first thought of that before we did. Though one Wizard that I knew took up the art long ago, and became as skilful in it as in all other things that he put his mind to."

How much longer before this book is banned for its universal message of liberty and of overcoming evil? How much longer before it is censored and conveniently forgotten, along with so many other great works of literature? Will our children and grandchildren find this book, complete and as its author wrote it? Already, its author's image is being censored, in a way typical of Soviet Russia, when it commonly erased images of those no longer politically correct. And pipe-weed is nearly banned in favor of Saruman's Phake Pharma Nicotine monopoly of patches, gums, lozenges, inhalers, and other patented "therapies" for those that enjoy life too much.

images: J.R.R. Tolkien

COP15: Disdain for the Tree of Life

It was an article in The Copenhagen Post which first perked my interest in the big Un's Climate Change Conference (COP15).

When I see Beauty and merry-making banned I get suspicious. When I see the spirit of Puritanism and Piety rising like an angry flood across the green land and seeping like an acid beneath the doors of homes and hearts my senses quicken and a stiff ridge rises along the trunk of my spine, traveling the branches of my brain.

"[Christmas] is a religious holiday that has no place at a United Nations function, according to the Foreign Ministry's Svend Olling...." ("Christmas trees banned for climate summit," The Copenhagen Post, 4 Dec. 2009).

"'We have to remember that this is a UN conference and, as the centre then becomes UN territory, there can be no Christmas trees in the decor, because the UN wishes to maintain neutrality,' said Olling" ("Christmas trees").


Jadis, Scrooge, the Grinch, and Puritans don't like Christmas trees either. They prefer cold stone, frozen streams, continual Fimbulvetr, and never having to see evergreen life which defies winter's breath. They are afraid of Spring's warm breath; and large powerful men with wise white beards who keep lists, wear royal crimson, and bring gifts and drop coal upon those who need warming of their constricted hearts. They are afraid of an old one-eyed man sustained upon wine with his eight-legged steed, or his modern team of eight leaping and jingling reindeer.

COP15 claims to be a religious neutral zone, but the banning of decorated and glowing evergreens and observance of Christmas is a highly religious and fanatical act. The hatred of Christmas is rarely an atheist hatred, but always a religious fanatic hatred.


COP15 has very effectively displayed a fear, not only of The Great Flood, but also of The Live Tree. Within the Great White Stone Circle ("No Man's Land") there is barely a live twig across the desert. The few trees are in winter's sleep, and those planted previous to the great gathering are looked upon as inferior due to the fact that they were planted in a time when man believed nature had a pattern and could be guided by pattern.


The dislike of The Live Tree is also evident in the little movie produced for the opening ceremony, "Please help the world," in which the child instinctively clings to the lone and dead tree for protection from The Great Flood swirling beneath her.


The child-actor knows to cling to the tree, knows it should represent shelter from the storm, but in a windswept world where one has lost their Faith (the teddy bear) to the gaping chasm, and The Live Tree is reduced to a skeleton of dry kindling, there is no savior, no refuge from the storm. There is only crucifixion.

The world of COP15 is not one of benevolence or of hope, but of apocalypse, fear, and dark ignorance. It is a world of Deep Ecology, the deep ecology of hell and its laughing lies.

The world will look and feel exactly as the landscaping and the film depict it if the Frost Giants of Copenhagen have their way. They are pulling our tails.

Rather than pushing against the weight of the good people of the world, trying to get them into the dark barn, they are pulling tails with fear in order to get us to pull away from the discomfort and into the barn -- the very place we don't want to go.

The Live Tree represents all that this new group of religious fanatics cannot stand: Life, Knowledge, Protection, Birth, Connection to Heaven, Connection to Hell, Sacrifice, and Resurrection.


The Live Tree, the Christmas Tree is one of the most universal, most religiously neutral symbols inherited by man. Coupled with fire or light it is even more universal. COP15 wants this and ALL myth, ALL religions of the past desiccated. The only way to achieve this goal of obliterating these inherited "religious" symbols is to obliterate the blood in which these beliefs are stored.

Those who believe they will gain profit or save the earth by signing to the treaty will be signing in blood -- the blood of innocents, the blood of the children in their country.

Those who refrain their hand from signing the treaty will be those who have tasted of the fruit of knowledge, who desire the fruit of life, who hold to the ties of the wise elders, the courage of mythic heroes, and the divine patterns instilled in the earth upon which they know and love. Those who do not sign will stand with solid faces against the storm and they will shelter under The Great Tree. Those who do not sign will be like living trees spreading their branches over the children of their land.


images from top to bottom: Jesse Tree, Saint-Quentin Basilica, Aisne, France;
Woman With Flowers, Iran; Olive Tree; Flag of Iroquois Confederacy; detail of Crucifixion, Antonello da Messina; Yggdrasil, Oluf Olufsen Bagge, Prose Edda (1847); Happy Christmas, Viggo Johansen

Great Rivers and Thanksgiving

What if there were a river, large and raging, meandering through the land, clear and deep, endless and generous. What if this river supplied water for drinking, crops, energy, swimming, fishing, transportation, and homes for animals. And this giant stream never ran dry, always supplying the needs and the joys of all who utilized it and were thankful for it and would accept it.

But what if one day, a man came through the land spreading fear amongst the hearts, telling the people that they did not deserve the water of the river and should feel guilty for loving the water rather than being thankful for its many gifts. And what if the people of the land, knowing they did not deserve such greatness and gifts as the river gave to them, decided that indeed, the man was right, and they should stop wading in the stream or diverting the water to the fields, or chasing the silvery fish that lived in its pools.

And as the river began to be more and more avoided, only looked upon from afar as a kind of delicate and separate entity, something to be guilty about using so much; the fields began to become parched places, grave yards of skeletons that once produced the richness and oils of the world. No longer did the lines of the angler drift across the shadowy places on summer evenings, or the laughter of children sparkle in the sun-glinted splashes along the sandy banks.

The people of the land became parched and poor, afraid to touch the gift of the river for fear of contaminating it, not remembering that the river was greater than they and could wash away their dirt and grime, cool them, water them and make them rich beyond measure.

The great river continued to flow but its gifts continued to be rejected by the land. There was plenty of need for it, but the people were convinced that they could survive without it and that it was their duty to sacrifice their happiness to it. The river was wasted, and the land cried out for it, but the people afraid of themselves, believed the stranger's lie that the river needed protecting from them and their careless ways.

One day a giant chasm opened up and swallowed the river. The chasm had an insatiable appetite. Because the people of the land were helpless to divert the river, afraid of contaminating it with their touch, afraid of tempering nature, they stood and watched the chasm swallow the waters of the river. Slowly, even the source of the river gave up and less and less water flowed until one day only a salty and toxic trickle flowed into the endless pit. The fish died, the cattails, the birds, and the aquifers under the ground disappeared.

Why would a people believe the stranger and not accept the great generosity of the river? Why would they believe it was good to allow the water to be sucked up by a dark pit?

Do we accept the generosity of the rivers in our life in spite of being undeserving? Are we thankful for it? Do we use that generosity to water our land, our soul, and provide fruit and energy for life? Or do we waste it by rejecting it and allowing the water to go into a gaping cavern that does not appreciate or have use for the water's gifts?

Generosity does not require one to be perfect, it's only desire is for acceptance and thankfulness. Those who continually snub generosity will become dry and parched land where nothing grows and where certain streams will refuse to go even when attempts at diverting them are made.

image: View From Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After A Thunderstorm - The Oxbow (1836) by Thomas Cole

On Time

Time. That eternally and infinitely timeless subject, time. There are so many ways to look at it and wonder and wonder.

Time is divided, subdivided, chopped up and categorized in so many ways, depending on the time of day and the age in which one looks at it. Historical time is most often labelled as linear, running along a straight line in one direction from some point buried in the sands of, well, time.

A day runs from morning to night for some and from sunset to sunset for others.

We often say, when not at a destination exactly when planned, that we are late, not on time. But we are always on time, because we live on time, every moment is time.

We say that some things are "timeless," which means that they transcend time, and are not ever on time at all because a timeless thing is not pegged to our time's segment upon the line.

But it seems quite evident that a straight linear time is not how time is organized at all. It must be circular, although it may not be repetitive.

Our earth is always hinting at the roundness of time. Everything moves in circular, spinning, and rotating motions.

What if time began at a point upon a circle and life is composed of two opposing forces that also began upon that first moment, and these two opposites are repelled from each other? If the two opposing forces are repelled they move in opposing directions from each other around the circle of time, thinking that they are going in opposite directions and further away from each other.

And for awhile the two opposites are spaced very far apart across the diameter of time. But as they each proceed further along the circle they become nearer and near each other until the moment they each reach the same point. The two forces will either merge with each other, becoming one or clash violently.

In the end the very thing we believe we are running from, that is opposed to everything we believe in will be the very thing we bump into or become.

This may explain, too, why we may be running out of time, because we are nearing the other side of the circle's diameter, drawing nearer that point of merge or clash (see "New Theory Nixes 'Dark Energy': Says Time is Disappearing from the Universe," 13 Sep. 2009, www.dailygalaxy.com).

image: oil press

Last Harvest

There are two harvests. The first one is sweet, green, and ripe. The second is hard, dry, and shriveled.

There is always that fig tree and its dropping fruit mentioned in the Bible as metaphor. Many of us cold climate moderns know only of crab apples and chokecherries, and nothing of figs or that there is such a thing as two harvests from a tree.

The fig tree has two harvests, the spring one, and the later fall harvest.

But we do have two harvests in the northerly zones. We have forgotten this because we often throw the second harvest away or leave it to mold on the stem. I was thinking of this as I sat quietly alone on the grass, shelling peas. Old, dry and bitter peas.

The second harvest is picked, dried, kept in a dark place and brought out for later --in the spring where it will grow into a plant.

Some plants, such as carrots, produce seeds that only produce one piece of edible produce. Other seeds, such as peas, produce one plant but many pieces of edible produce.

Many of us don't save the seeds, but instead order new ones from the catalog every year. If we saved the seeds we would be more likely to wonder a bit about that second harvest and what it means. What does it mean to be saved, put aside, and hidden in a secret place out of winter's cold?

image: Rye Fields (1878) by Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin