Reading, Listening, Offering!

A handful of recent inspirations, and new bits of offering coming up through Ground Shots

(in the wilderness with Signal Fire, circa 2017)

Hey ya’ll.

I’m putting together a little summary of… “what i’m thinking about and up to, and inspired by and horrified by list” right now, and well here’s some of it. Inspired by other folks on substack who conjure up these summaries weekly or monthly and I find them fascinating. I can’t promise one every month or week right now, as a labeled from outside sources as ‘drifter’ and ‘grifter’ mover, shifter, regularity in such a way, would take a flipped over and shifted alchemical revisiting. Here, I am, at the moment. A lot of things, and also begging to be allowed to be an EVOLVING individual not a thing you thought yesterday. Nor tomorrow, or static in this very fleeting moment never still.

(2016 in Yosemite National Park, at a spot above the valley, full of ghosts, Jeffrey Pines, Oaks that didn’t burn up, coyote spirits, acorn grinding stones and milkweed. squirrel feet earrings.)

I’ve been planning the next year, reevaluating how I want to approach my work and how much ART has been always a huge part of it that I have ignored often in the past, or pushed aside, or thought, oh this isn’t important, but it keep weaving back, especially at highly emotional moments where the poetry, the color, the cadence and chorus cannot be stopped, because it in an inevitable part of it all. Who I am. I’m not just a plant geek, social critique, ecology weaver, critical philosopher, but a creative that makes things and puts words together that doesn’t fit into the framework of accessibility oftentimes, and I still battle these different sides of me and how they want to express at different moments. I’ve realized that the artist in me cannot be unwoven from it all. I’d rather die than become monotone.

(I have been many beings, and am many beings, all in one being, and will forever be all of them and one of them and the future unknowns, all at once. Always interesting thinking we know people, really. 2016. Yosemite. California.)

I’m constantly battling what ‘vulnerability’ looks like or what is appropriate. I’ve honestly been driving myself crazy lately around what is appropriate.

I’m not just an ecologist who has been studying plants on the road for over a decade at the sake of certainty and social consistency. If anything, the more I’ve looked, and seeked, the more I’ve realized that what we’re told is bullshit. It certainly makes it hard to continue on sometimes, to continue to do the dance of the inbetween.

Not that I ever fully believed say Babylon and the ‘hoop’ were separate places and spaces, but certainly existing in Babylon full on takes a kind of…self convincing, a kind of self-delusion.

We’re all navigating it all the time.

Culture is vibrant.

Creative. Massive. Nuanced. Fun, or horrifying.

I’ve been desiring lately to dance in the novelty of culture, but not just the kind that is driving through strip malls, but the one that means color, music, art, avant-garde, shared experience.

My experience out away from that for awhile has built up, and my sense of need has flipped. I was just talking to my friend Leah Song, of Rising Appalachia, when they came through town recently, on the changes that happen in life (eventually we will get it together to do a podcast episode). Leah and I can relate as Aquarius’ on the need for independence, and seeming aloof, not following an easy path, but being more complex than that.

(2016, among rubble and fire ruins, Lodgepole and Incense Cedar remerging where it wasn’t before)

I’ve been dreaming of what culture I could get drenched in. Full of color and art and dance and madness and conversation, and reflection, space to express, share with other humans, despite vast differences.

Every street corner is an infinite being of possibility.

Music:

Lately, I’ve been listening to a certain musician on repeat.

Ren.

Have you heard of him? Holy shit.

Talk about an artist who addresses mental health, societal ills, cultural madness, while also doing it through a medium that is undefinable— poetry meets classical music, meets rap, reggae, some other kind of performance art all together.

I find his music super cathartic, as mental health issues have affected my personal life greatly, and also I’ve had an incredibly hard time living in the modern world as I’ve gotten older, and often am told I am the problem for questioning it all together, rather than conform and accept.

I battle with that a lot right now as I feel like financially, I need to change how I am doing my work, in order to sustain it better, and I feel horrified by the idea that I might need to enter deeper into babylon to keep this all afloat, a project to me, that has been all about planting seeds of questioning, how we engage one another, and land and the swirls in between, in the current world we live in.

and seeds, yes. come in many forms.

Here’s two of his latest Youtube video music releases.

Hi Ren, his recently most listened to (millions of views) video/music combo capturing mental health, societal ill, and madness in a single entity.

Sick Boi, literally just released. is brilliant.

And this band Ren is frequently a part of, The Big Push. Here is a moving music video that looks at gender and culture and love: Why My Woman? Honestly, everything he touches is brilliant.

He doesn’t have a record label and probably doesn’t plan on getting on any time soon despite his millions of Youtube downloads of original music and self-created videos. I am blown away to the point of watching some of these over and over, and some art has come through in this, too. It honestly brings me a lot of comfort, to see someone channel something so vital, important, maddening and cathartic, meaningful in the world we live in.

I would say listen when you’re ready for an emotional rollercoaster of intensity and reflection.

‘Tending’ can look a lot of ways. What seeds are being planted here?

“I feel like its not me, its the world that’s sick

Were given everything we need and we commodities it

We consume, we destroy like were parasitic

Science tells us that its suicide and still we commit

Im not sick, we are sick, we are standing on a cliff In the name of progress

we jump off the precipice 

Im not sick I’m the virus, you’re the virus, hypocrite!

How can you sit there with that smile on And tell me that I’m sick?”

So, what am I reading?

I started picking up Susan Tweit’s books. Susan, I recently did an interview this past December in rural Colorado, is an author and ecologist who writes about the west especially the deserts, among many other things. We dig into the nature of memoir in this episode, while weaving in land connections and tendrils, as always, somehow.

Check out the episode, if you haven’t yet. (Here it is below, but try it on iTunes, etc. too)

Oh yeah, you can check out the show notes for the episode straight from my website where I link all the things, but the musician that is featured in the beginning of this episode is an old comrade from the Asheville punk house days (when punk houses actually existed in Asheville, and the general vibe of Asheville was a lot more homespun) where I remember Riddy playing music in living room shows, and now well they are like a country music / rock star of sorts, being featured on Western AF’s Youtube channel and more (Here’s the video for Old Maid’s Draw which is featured at the beginning of Susan’s episode). Find Riddy Arman’s music on all the spots like Spotify and whatnot. Better yet, buy their music directly from them.

I am currently reading her book, ‘Barren, Worthless and Wild’, yes, a provocative name, especially meant to to describe a desert she lived in that is actually full of life. It’s a play on words, listen to our convo on the podcast to hear her mention and contextualize it. It’s good thus far. I’ve spent some time in that desert, so there’s some familiarity to me, being able to see the place as she describes it.

I just finished reading local writer to where I’m currently staying, Craig Child’s book ‘Virga and Bone.’ This book is a multi-faceted essay collection which focuses on a few different locations where he has some poignant stories to retell about his experiences there. As usual, Craig Childs’ work is awe-inspiring and thought provoking, often sending you into microcosmic rabbit holes in place or in history. He seems to be able to write about the land that inevitably makes it feel profound, and you’re left with deeper respect, curiosity and connection.

Here’s an excerpt:

This impression of the land is a hunger.

I would see ten thousand arches if I could.

I would draw them and pin them on the map of my mind.

I would be the wind scraping ground, every pass plucking out another grain of sand.

I would take lifetimes to scramble and poke, quick heart of a weasel, scanning eye of the vulture.

Love of this land is dangerous.

It wants more and more.

This place will pull you in, like young Everett Ruess exploring the arms of Escalante in the early 1930’s, scratching his name in rock, Nemo, which means no man, and he was never seen again.

Also thinking about:

The ancient Tale of Gilgamesh and how it is connected to Juniper, and the ancient art of telling fortunes by reading entrails. Strange, but fascinating, I know. I’m going to do a separate Substack post on this, stay tuned.

Obsessed with:

Recently I finally dug deeply into iNaturalist to understand how to use it and what it was all about. And holy shit, how have I not been using this for Ground Shots work all these years. I have over a decade of place-based photos of plant organized by year and location on my external hard drives, and I’m slowing uploading things on there and organizing them by ‘project,’ mainly location.

I’ve been slowly uploading photos from the Colorado Trail Plant-a-go project too, which was a walking land tending and curious ecology observation project I did with Gabe Crawford, in 2020. We documented our walk on the Ground Shots Podcast if you want to learn more and scroll back in the archive to find the episodes.

One of the things we did was make meticulous plant lists, and document the plants with as many photos as we could, some using a little macro lens for my phone. The lists haven’t been published publicly, nor have many of the photos from the walk.

I have organized GPS points we collected for the seeds we planted (Lomatiums, Yampah, Wild Onions and Mariposa Lily, etc.) in a private Google map, but this iNaturalist map that is forming from the project documents the plants across the trail and some other areas of Colorado, because the metadata from my phone stays with the photos, and when I post them on there, the location is found. Super cool. Check it out here if you want to see plant photos from the Colorado Trail 2020 walk or even a handful from my Nevada mini-walk this past summer. Get on iNaturalist and add me there! (@groundshotsproject) I love checking what other people are seeing and testing my plant ID knowledge, even trying to guess where someone is without looking closer at first. I’m pretty obsessed with getting on there and looking up plant genus’ and locations, and honing in to see if people are actually seeing what they claim they are.

For example, I saw that there indeed has been Yampah found near the Colorado Trail spot close to Jefferson, CO (a little town where we hitchhiked and got a burger after 10 days out, actually, it was basically just a gas station) and a few other unexpected places. Some Yarrow was misidentified as Yampah, and so I offered corrections. We were looking for Yampah out there on the walk and never saw it but were hoping to. Cool to see that it is likely hiding out in places! (Yampah is a culturally significant food plant with a slightly sweet root)

iNaturalist is an evolving collaborative project among scientists and citizen scientists alike and plants aren’t the only thing you can document on there! I sure wish we had a better understanding of how to use it when we were on the Colorado Trail so people could watch what we were seeing as we walked and posted when we had service. Next time!

New offering:

I’m offering a Philosophy of Ecology and Land class, online. Starting in a few weeks. To take place for a few weeks. I’ll be announcing the deets in the next few days on here and social media beyond. It will be a study group, a mini session of focus on some key topics that I think will generate a lot of discussion and thought provoking questions. Some key topics will be: fire, water, disturbance, wildness, land and religion, introduced plants, and more. I hope you’ll join the group!!

New podcast episode:

Episode 72 of the Ground Shots Podcast is with Lisa Ganora, herbalist and plant chemist, out of Paonia, Colorado.

I will be releasing this episode early for Substack subscribers and Patreon members, soon! I will also be giving Patreon folks a mini article Lisa wrote on plant synergy in the coming days, as well. Stay tuned and keep your eyes peeled for the episode! I’ll also be sharing info for Ground Shots fans on some of Lisa’s epic upcoming online and in person programming if you are interested in learning from her after you listen to her interview. In the meantime, subscribe to the podcast on your platform of choice to catch episodes when they are published. Here’s the link to the show on iTunes. Do us a favor and give a review while you’re there (five stars and a written reflection?)