Thiguanawat : on the thunderbird's perch

Fern and I arrived in the night with our trailer of kitchen gear in tow, sauntering up switchbacks through thick darkness, the moon barely a sliver. We had seen sunset in the vast clay filled adobes formed by the subterranean depths of a once inland ocean in our mobile journey to get to the Mesa’s shoulder. Despite being so thickly dark, the glow of Grand Junction shown dramatically in the distance at moments when we could view towards the Book Cliffs, as the switchback going up turned our truck towards the Cliffs’ grandiose jutting. Glowing lights scatter across the vast valley bottom spider-webbing out from the biggest city around. Shots of glimmer from the river snaking through the flat valley bottom flash. Blinkers from solar arrays in the adobes go on and off in an odd alien-like perfect cadence. Ranch and homestead lights scatter disordered through expanded darkness. The lights become less and less as we look away from the city itself. It’s like we were in a plane looking down, at the circuit grid below from the perch of the Mesa’s high shoulder. The Mesa juts up so dramatically in elevation that it’s easy here to get an ‘outside’ perspective¹. This is just one of many places to do so—but the Grand Mesa’s ‘Table’ in particular stands out. One whole end of it where we are poised is a short Sagebrush steppe and houses barely any trees and thus the view is vast and awe-inspiring. If you make it to the top to this zone, you feel like you’re in the heavens risen above ‘civilization’ and the adobe hills to a place of resin-thick smelling Sagebrush Artemesia tridentata short in stature, floating meadows of purple Pasqueflower - Pulsatilla and century old Gentians (Frasera speciosa) about to flower once and die.

(Chocolate Lily photo took in California a couple years ago)

above- beloved Pulsatilla.

The Ute name Thiguanawat transliterated by English (and maybe Spanish) speakers for the Grand Mesa essentially means, ‘place where the spirits in the heavens live’ or ‘land of the departed spirits and thunderbirds.’² There are not many paths up to the place of the thunderbirds by car, but we are headed to a spot 2/3 the way to these ‘heavens,’ up a similar route that was taken after the Meeker Massacre in an attempt to find the rebel Utes that killed Meeker and crew, and took captives on the other side of this flat top mountain. We are going to make camp for five days to explore the realms in-between the low-down ‘badlands’ and the ‘place of departed spirits.’ The long slump in-between where the serpents (rivers) live that stole the eggs of the thunderbird who stole the children of Utes —is an entire world, of multiple drainages, of visible geological transitions and ecological niches. You can sit in the between place, the place where the thunderbirds flew to grab the serpent to retaliate for the snake stealing his eggs and then their splattering them on the side of the Mesa forming a scar you can still see.³ The serpent shot out thunder and lightening in struggle, and formed the craters on top. The tears of the distraught bird made the lakes that filled the crevices. The Mesa reminds me of Wisconsin or Minnesota, it’s a flat and vast tabletop: a mix of open meadows, deep conifer forest thickets and houses hundreds of lakes that you could not possibly find them all in a lifetime. It’s a hunting and fishing paradise. A plant lover’s paradise. A place to cool down in summer (if you can stand the mosquitos during their early summer flush). An easy place to pop up and find edible mushrooms when (if) the monsoons hit. Whether they were made by the thunderbird’s tears or made by glaciers 500 feet deep pressing down and spilling over the Mesa’s edge while also volcanic seeps spit up and through the once swampy valley bottom floor - this place is agreed to be profoundly different than anything around it. It really is a skyward oriented island, a place where the Ute’s buried their dead in the trees just like the Thunderbirds had their nests perched high.

I host my ecology camp here through a local non-profit on this Mesa shoulder, and this is the 3rd season I have hosted them, though others have hosted ecology study camps here before me through the same org. We’re here for this Spring’s course.

We pull into the tucked away campsite on the side of the Grand Mesa, a bumpy road that leads to an outcropping full of old Piñon and Juniper trees where I have camped before alone to gather two-needle pine nuts. We find someone camped already, we can see them looking at the glow of their phone in the back of their car, their motorcycle parked in front of their rig. We sigh, and stress about what to do- it’s around 11 PM and we’re tired, wanting to just arrive and fall asleep to wake up and start setting up class camp. Not wanting to have a conversation with this person in the night about how we are about to descend on this campsite for the next five days for ecology class, we turn around in the dark, backing the trailer into a tight nook without jackknifing, and head up to the trailhead higher in elevation where we will end up doing class at least one of the days during this session. We pull into the shade of a leafed out Box Elder (Acer negundo), Fern takes out their sleeping gear from the back of my truck and lays it on the ground next to the rig to sleep. I drink some water, crawl into my bed of linen sheets and wool blankets and crash out, the wind blustering around, Spring in the desert. We cannot camp here for the formal class, but no one is going to bother us crashing here for the night in this state.

I let myself sleep in the next morning, it’s been a long week of pushing to get ready for this class along with other life obligations and also doing some contra dancing at Big B’s, getting deep into learning pottery from a studio clay perspective (I’ve done a bit of pit fire over the years) and tending to my apothecary now that my physical space is getting more dialed. I crawl out of my narrow channel for sleeping as the birds chirp outside. The class gear is all around me, our light blue canvas shelter next to my bed is folded up in a pile. I peel out of the truck bed chamber, dig out coffee supplies and my camp stove. I set up my camp stove on the ground as my tailgate doesn’t go all the way down with the trailer hitch. I make coffee and take it to sit with the spring plants by the trail to wake up slow. The air smells so good and clear up here. The memories flood as they do, of past times coming to this place or parallel places, past classes, past feelings, past times with these trees in locations far and wide, past hopes and dreams lost swirled into an instant view of a plant pattern or the waft of funky Hawthorn scent, savory Pine resin, Juniper berry. The creek is flowing low and slow. A couple years ago it was so swift we could barely cross for class and felt like we were fording a serious river. Waterfalls had poured off the mesa all around —the whole bowl of this Grand Mesa slump ringed with flowing echo, a steady roar of snowmelt runoff feeding damp soiled gardens and Aspen groves. This season it is dry, and the plants look and feel different. Some have already quickly come and gone sooner than the past. I don’t know what is normal because I haven’t been in relationship with this place over deep time, but I know what I have noticed in the short time I have observed. It can be pretty dramatically different from year to year. Everything can change in an instant too, with one big wind or rain storm, or one big life upheaval. All can be lost, or shrink, or disappear, or pivot completely. A pivot or shrink doesn’t mean the seeds aren’t there or the life isn’t just hiding out underground for a bit. In life, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t something lying in the subconscious waiting to emerge again at the right time, when well fed. Or it can mean that the pivot dissolves, reforms dreams and life and visions. We take a walk along the trail, I look for Chocolate Lily (Frittilaria), and scan for baby carrot family seeds creeping from the rocks, without telling my companion exactly what I am doing. These babies could have already come and gone being a dry year, but I know to look. There have been many rounds of seeds planted here by many people and likely not just the friends who have come here to visit or teach the past few seasons. Rocks moved ever so slightly, Lomatium macrocarpum gathererd at Tableland, Alliums from Night Owl Food Forest, Yampah Perideridia spp. from Tableland, L. dissectum from Steven’s Gulch rd and the remote Owyhee desert planted in the nooks of rock that gather moisture just on their cool edges, just enough to sink into the shade and protect. I didn’t see any young babies at first glimpse, not even the Chocolate Lily right on the path that I have shown several rounds of students where we dug and spread. It makes sense that they could have died back already. At my friend’s land in a nearby canyon in the Uncompahgre, these same plants that popped up randomly last year in one of the Gambel Oak groves on the land [a land they named ‘weary bones’], was going off last month and has died back to not be recognizable already. If they are died back over there across the Grand Valley, it makes sense that they are also shriveled up here on the side of the Mesa due to their similar elevations and aspects, eco-zones though vastly different geologies. If you don’t look, these Spring ephemerals can come and go quick, like a flash, and our attention is put elsewhere. We may not even notice they exist at all. How many come and go and we don’t know, can we know the fullest of their presence without our consistent attention? Can we know anyone’s fullest being without consistent and persistent attention?

[after class I drive back into Paonia, and notice how many people are watching big screen TV’s in their homes as I drive around at dusk, window shades open, so much attention gone to waste, so much precious attention]

Chocolate Lilies (Frittilaria sp.) are more abundant west of here as far as I have seen anyway, and in this region they are found occasionally, but do not cover entire hillsides like in the inland Northwest. This is as far as I have seen, which certainly is only a fraction of the region. They specifically spread best through disturbance, and their corms also feature cormlets that break off when dug up, and are practically impossible to keep intact. They are MEANT to fall apart when digging, at least some part of them. They are so cute and the flowers so beautiful folks often feel resistant to digging them up and moving them around, thinking they are going to hurt them, when in fact it helps them.

What does it mean when you turn the tarot card upside down? The one that signals something solidly in place, but upside down the buttons fall out of their pockets, the seeds fly out of tucked bags and crevices, a necklace falls off the head, the hat can’t stay on and reveals what was underneath tucked in the folds all along. A few days later during class, a student mentions this in our morning discussion as a metaphor for how we can change our perspective and it doesn’t mean replacing the current thing with an entirely new one, but when turning the direction of the one that already exists — it suddenly takes on a totally different form and meaning. I consider this when trying to fill four days of a course with a lifetime of perspective shift, and how to be most effective when space to integrate is needed just as much as information. Information as well as space lifts veils, or even just make us more aware that the veil is there, altering our experience, our actions, and feelings. Finding balance when teaching between space and experience, information and feeling, is a dance I’m still learning and playing with, with careful observation of my students’ reactions. While multifaceted, every person is a different learner. I see that one person may be able to handle more information, more perspectives, more hiking, or more of the elements, while another may need more time learning somatically, with plant meditations, sensory exercises that tune us into parts of us we dampen in modern society that also restricts us from widened view points, or just taking time to swim in cold water or take naps while listening to Aspen leaves ruffle. We sort through a bit in the place where our brain waves shift into a liminal state- that place right before sleep or in meditation, or even during a yoga session. Can you sit for hours with yourself on a rock and just watch? Or does every moment need to be filled with processing, deconstructing, organizing and naming all of life and it’s patterns in front of us? I say this from someone who has at times felt the need to be ‘on’ in the way or constantly organizing, but as the years have unfolded, it’s gotten easier to just be, and let all those details move through or over me, not attaching themselves in intellectual pursuit or categorization. I’ve gotten to a point where its all there, and I can walk through a landscape and gain valuable impressions without such intense study at every moment. I can click into feeling, all the interconnections wash over me, the being jutting into all directions tied here and there and through me. A lot can be left unsaid while feeling it all. The stories tumble out, into space without clear bounds, and I can be witness without trying to harness it all with words or clear rules and tenants to teach.

Making time to sit also is a radical act, in a world that pushes us to be productive in a particular kind of way, keeping our minds and bodies doing at every moment. While I’m an intellectually minded person, I also have really valued over the years the slowness in sitting, burrowing in a nook to watch what passes by me, and when I am unsure what to do with myself at times, I try to remember to prioritize this sitting work- which can sometimes teach us more than memorizing Botany in a Day, or reading every article on why the concept of wilderness is a product of violent colonialism, or trying to fish for measurable ways to ‘know’ scientifically that an ecosystem was co-created by humans in deep time.

And still, despite this, I feel the urgency in our current world, to give folks as many tools as I can to ask questions as they move out into their lives, where they can affect whether a place exists or not. Some of my students I never see again, others become my great friends. It feels like a humbling big work, to have people dedicate time out of their lives to sit with me, and listen to what I have to say, or take in the webs I weave between people and their stories, places, ideas that tumble into one another. How do we slow down when there is a justifiable sense of urgency- and yet sitting still in space could be just as effective?

My podcast project has been going since 2017, and it has been years of slowly unfolding, conversations, stories and inquiries, and at times there has been big bursts of activity, and other times slow digestion. Also- I run it alone these days, and as one person, holding a slinky of layers, I can’t work as fast or deep or widespread as I could with collaboration, and am not always the best person to do the interview, or explore the idea, but I usually have in mind someone else who could do it better or explain it better, or knows more about the thing than me. SO sometimes I do it anyway, or let the opportunity to share a story pass on. The platform gives me an opportunity to explore things through interviews with others who know more, or have sat still longer in a particular place or space, and learn from them. Despite this too, for some people, three hour interviews are a lot, and I’ve been known to do that regularly on the show. There’s a part of me too that pushes against short attention span economy, where the people who want to be engaged will slow down and take the time to listen to it all. It’s an archive and documentation- and the moment takes as long as it needs. The project has been a dance between information and space, both in the way I am able to hold it, and the way I deliver it to the world of listeners that pay attention to when a new story pops up. I feel the urgency to share as much as I can of what other’s may have to say, and yet, I often sit more these days with the best way to do so for awhile.

The next morning after our late arrival, we plan to do back over to our hopeful camp, preparing to talk to the motorcyclist camping there, making up all these assumptions and stories of who they could be.. if they will be mean to us.. or refuse to allow us to camp there.. I even dream about it. It’s interesting the stories we can create in our head about people who don’t even know or even people we do. But it’s based on something real and tangible in our world. People can be incredibly kind and also incredibly cruel. We roll in and he’s gone. A relief.

We start to slowly set up our camp, realize that we don’t have all the ropes for our canvas structure and improvise with ratchet straps. The wind picks up and blows some dust around, the scent of the two main tree species at camp mixing their aroma into a combined swirl, indistinguishable from one another. Piñon Pine (here it’s two-needle) and Juniper often are found together in ‘woodland forests’ which can take different forms depending on the desert, elevation, soil, latitude, and so on. In this case, they are growing together and many of the Piñon Pines are pretty alive and well. Piñons have been struggling the past decade or more, and trees growing at lower or hotter locations have sometimes died en masse, and those higher up have often stayed alive. At this location there are giant trees, bigger than I see most of them get, and for some reason they are hanging on strong. Piñons are suffering due to drought conditions across the west, and Pine beetles being able to take hold while the trees are weak. Before all this, when these woodlands were logged in locations across the west, and then allowed to grow back, often the Junipers repopulate, but not the Piñon Pines. In some locations, the Piñon Juniper woodland is actually demonized as invasive, especially in the Great Basin where they are reforesting back where they grew pre-ore smelting days, but also pre-ranching and over-grazing days. How quickly our psyches can get used to destruction as normal and status quoa, and life thriving as a threat to what we see as familiar, comfortable, controllable. Perhaps they are a ‘fire’ hazard as these species will burn hot and die in fire- not specifically serotinous. But a fire hazard to whom and what ideas? What makes a good and bad fire, just like a good and bad plant, is always fraught with cultural complexity, economic influence, a layer we must acknowledge is there even if we aren’t ready to wipe the lens away.

So much of what I teach in my classes (or perhaps want to explore in my work in general) actually distills down to this: as a culture founded on meadering histories of domination and power, what we perceive we cannot control or dominate, scares us into killing en masse and out of this fear we also invest a lot as a culture into narratives and viewpoints about ourselves and the land that reinforce the validity of this fear. It influences everything down to the tiny details of how we speak about life. In order to see it more clearly, we can step away and look back towards it curiously to try to understand why we fear so much.

Biscuitroot

Bitterroot

One of these things we fear includes.. wild animals. How many wild animals have we killed off willy nilly and even with vile hate? Beavers. Coyotes. Wolves, Bison. Wild Horses. Passenger Pigeon (even to extinction). Foxes. Prairie Dogs. Mountain Lions and other big cat predators. Grizzly Bears. All in the last couple centuries. We have excuses and reasons as to why these animals are ‘bad’ and must be controlled by us humans. But really, they threaten us. This is our cultural way of processing fear of that which we cannot control or chose to not try to understand. Kill. From this understanding of our fear of what we cannot control, of what wildness represents— comes everything else. The looking at why we use certain language about the land, why we divide plants into categories based on our perception of their goodness and so on.⁴

What else do we want to control, and the fear of not being able to, causing a societal somatic response translating to the normalization of rules, laws and actions to control in response? Rivers. Allowing them to breathe, and their beaver keepers to build and sink water, for alluvial plains to exist vs. channelized predictable corridors. Human made dams are seen as progress because we think they mean we can strangle and now predict, yet bulldozing the beavers’ dams. We poison the rivers to kill one fish because it ‘does not belong’ and put in another so we can pretend we are in our fantasy of the past, or maybe sell more fishing permits. We put up berms and barriers to keep the river from going too far. We flood entire cultural sites in the name of progress, economic stability, and control. The Colorado River watershed has it’s large list of questionable dam projects, that many of us can agree at this point in time, shouldn’t be there and aren’t helping anything. I grew up in southern Virginia where dams were also a thing, forming the Kerr Lake (or Bugg’s Island Lake), flooding the village sites of the Ochaneechee, who were some of the most important river traders on the Roanoke River corridor between the Appalachian mountains and the sea. At the time of the dam being built, they didn’t even need to do archaeological surveys and some archaeologists tried to as the waters were rising, and the findings still sit in university storage down at UNC in Durham. Same happened to an extent in Glen Canyon, though at least a little more acknowledgment is there that the canyon was culturally significant, and the biodiversity great. The murdering of the Ochaneechee where I grew up in Bacon’s Rebellion and the flooding of their village sites hundreds of years later, all came out of fear of what is uncontrollable or perhaps the dismissal of the importance of every place for the name of progress is also a reflection of that deeper seniment.

Control. Fear of not having control, fear of chaos, fear of wildness, of being-ness as self willed. The strict dichotomy of Apollonian (columns, phallus, squares, civilization and no emotion) or Dionysisian (queerness, nonbinary, fluid, orgy, round, nature) discussed in highly popular nihlist philosopher Nietzche’s work to demonstrate how God (the animism) is dead oversimplifies the issue. A collaboration where the multiple energies are always in a dance, and one not overpowering the other fully in any given moment sees life as never static and solidly un-evolving. Both and everything between have to be present. Allowing humans being to be again an integral part of ecosystems with our intentional interactions is pushing against the tarot card shown only one way, where control and domination is the only answer. The fear and yet worship of wild things against the stronghold of a controlled society, is also found in wilderness mythology. The wilderness is a place of horrors, and yet the perfect Eden, and you’ll see both written in a single script of John Muir, or transcendentalis Henry David Thoreau. One of the pieces we read during this field ecology class (and we’ve read in some of my past online classes through my project Ground Shots) is a bit on the religious roots of wilderness, and how much religious doctrine, and the roots of institutional religion played a part in our imagining and creating of the concept of wilderness, a place of ‘no man’ in the first place. Most of the places always had people, interacting, living and being with, and to adknowledge that by disintegrating wilderness would be having to see we were wrong about humans being entitled to dominate over wildness⁵, like wild animals, or landscapes or indigenious people.

Wild Onion

This need to control what we fear included control of native people’s cultures, languages, ability to be on the land foraging, fishing, digging, burning with fire. A life that moves between landscapes and isn’t found to a square of individualistic territory landownership as a prison is a threat to the understanding that land is means to an end, and that someone can own a space and forever decide what is to be done with it. It’s just like having an argument between two people who have vastly different religious beliefs—instead of seeing how another’s beliefs might actually come from the same common thread, the other is seen as a threat to one’s own identity. The mere existence of people who don’t fit into neat boxes, move across the land intentionally, live ‘with’ wildness rather than over it (and this is not to romantisize all indigenious cultures, some of who have depleted landscapes in the past) is a threat to the existence of a culture of dominance that cannot allow multitudes to exist for it to exist, rather only one way can be right and exist and all others need to be exterminated. Can we name an example of this happening again right now- where one people or idea needs to be exterminated in order for the other to be able to exist? There are many examples on this planet currently.

Wild Valerian

Pulsatilla to make a tincture

Zoe and Osha root

The need to control women’s bodies comes from a place of fearing their freedom, and what creative new worlds may come from that freedom. This one has been up for me a lot lately, having to tend to how masculinity is conflated with dominance, seeing women as only having purpose to uplift the need for a man to have control, through subservience to them being leader, being the one most seen, the cooler one, the one directing the energy or getting paid the most or receiving the most attention. You’ll get insulted, fucked over, lied to, deceived, led on, put down, talked over, in order to keep men in power or feeling like they have control at the cost of so much. Questioning the overt or microaggressions of misogyny means you must hate men (in the most typical of straw-man argument fashion), rather than you actually just want to seem them suffer less, and actually live masculinity in its best form- as supporters, nurturers and holders of others in their love and work and raising life of all forms. I have seen so much inability of men, people who are given so much space to take up in this current cultural paradigm without having to even work for it—- to relinguish some power to others who aren’t just given it easily, and have to fight to be merely recognized. It is a fear of losing control, or what might happen if other people are allowed to take up space. If they don’t keep control, even subtlely, then something bad will happen to them. I have seen myself be a threat to men’s egos by simply having cool projects going on, having a ton of skills including skills that are seen in this culture as ‘masculine’ or men’s skills when often these are cultural projections of what skills belong to whom. Women’s sexuality, how they are to dress. They are supposed to be always trying to be attactive to men and if they aren’t then they have no value. But if they dress too attactively, then they are just trying to get too much attention. It must always be about them. Nothing can get in the way of men keeping all the space they get to take up, and their power, and them looking out for just their male buddies keeping power and space and control no matter how shitty they act. People will use language that even seems radical and the right script, to reinforce their power, to try to confuse those who see it clearly. Women or nonbinary people are still, secondary pawns to men’s vision of their place in the world and their understanding of the land. It’s interesting and disturbing to observe how much hate men can have for women they cannot control or own. Women’s bodies, queer people’s dynamic-ness, the unpredictability of a river, the autonomy of wild animals, space taken up by people with darker skin, the nomadic transversing hoops of indigenous peoples are all threats to a need for control and power.

So much of our class this time was driven by the interests of students wanting to dig deep into the effects of misogny and patriarchy on our bodies, the land, our culture, the plants we love. I often don’t go there right away, or get at these things from other angles, but they led us fully in, and really the students lead the way. I will carry them through how they want to pull in the threads and weave them, and hold space for that.

On the first day of class we stay at camp in the dabbled shade of the Piñon Juniper trees. We discuss homework I gave for this class before we met up in person which included:

Reading William Cronon’s ‘Trouble with Wilderness’

Dan Flores’ talk on humans and coyotes (Author of ‘Coyote America’)

Jeff Wagner’s lecture on how we all eat the Colorado River, a Ground Shots Podcast episode recorded a year ago

We talk about these pieces together under the Piñon trees who’s pine nuts are rarely gathered from anymore and the ancient twisted Juniper trees who withstand harsh sun, wind and rare water with our view out into the valley across into Unaweep canyon, Dominguez canyon, the Book Cliffs and beyond. We start our time together looking deeper at how fear of wilderness, the contruction of wilderness and the inability to see limits, affects our relationship to food, medicine, shelter, home and belonging. Here we are perched up before the place of the thunderbirds, trying to get a different view, while being in togetherness doing so. We will be alone again back into the world that wants us separate, and hopefully with tools.

That first day of class, we play scavenger hunt games that nudge students to learn to describe the land without needing to name any plant or animals, and observing how our tools for map-making increases when we stretch the elastic potential of our brains to look in this way. Our bodes are tools for this map too— which way to walk, or turn, or crawl or climb? How can our body orient us in its twistings and shiftings? Turning the tarot card upside down keeps all systems in place, but our view of their function and purpose change completely. They former dominance becomes obsolete but the bones transform and become something else, another form, another perspective, another world worth pushing through fear to see. And perhaps out greatest fears may come true, but we are becoming our fear by reacting to it, and the world unfolding due to the fear of the unknown is one that is hurting so many of us. There’s only but so long we can do with these energies nudged one direction, eventually there will need to be a pendulum swing that might disintegrate the need to look away, or the need for

control, despite the pressure to keep the swing static and suspended.

We made a mead during the class on the 3rd day from our studies based on scent-forward learning on the trail where Fern and I slept the first night and had our coffee. I get students to gather leaves of plants that seems like they are in the carrot family based on our studies, and then put them together on blankets, and put together all the leaves gathered based on scent alone into groups. From there, we try to take each group one by one and see if any part of our memories tells us what the plant is from sniffing it. Often some plants get picked that are not in the family, but are sweet to look at and talk about in connection to the exercise. Some of my mentors including Marc Williams and Luke Learningdeer both based in western North Carolina, would make meads during plant walks or classes, to celebrate the moment of time, like a capsule, a snap shot, a ground shot, to be opened and experienced some other way in some other time, and the taste or smell will bring the memory back, and the memories however painful or joyful - will be what carry us through into a new world. We made the mead with Angelica, Sweet Ciciley, Osha, Yarrow, Mugwort, Ageratum horsemint among other herbs. Its bubbling away as I type this. Once I carried a mead made by Frank Cook, an ethnbotanist that tragically died but influenced so many of us, for 5 years in my truck in the west, given to me by a family in the Sierra foothills in California where he used to live in hopes of sharing it with anyone who maybe knew him. It had been tucked in their garage for years, and then I carried it for years. Eventually I opened it alone in the Nevada desert surrounded by Juniper trees with no other humans around. It’s ok to do this. I still carry seeds around I know will last, with their stories to be told, waiting for the right time and place and moment to be planted in the way they intend to be carried in wildness and intentional tending.

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things: ⭐️

I have another immersive field ecology class coming up late July also run through the same non-profit, Groundwork. We’ll be at 10,000 feet at a lake I visit often in the summers here, and we’ll be focused on the stories of the plants and the land at this elevation. We base camp, and in this particular class, we don’t get in the cars during the whole camp and walk everyday from our central place to explore the webs of life around us. Check out more on the class here.

Piñon Pine sap salve is 20% off for two days starting right now. There’s no code, its automatically set in the store during this window of time. Also, have you ever read my plant profile on Piñon Pine, I wrote while traveling the west years ago?

• My dear friend Francis, who’s music has woven with the Ground Shots Podcast since the beginning in 2017 has been in extreme medical crisis recently, from a rare disorder they struggle from. There’s a fundraiser running for them— Mother Marrow is their band’s name. The goal is 50k, and it has reached almost 20k. I would really like if the Ground Shots Podcast audience would pitch in some contribution to their fund, to help them heal during this time. Their music, heart, art and care for the world I would like to stay around longer.

• The next two weeks I’ll be headed to British Columbia, Canada for the first time, to teach sheepskin tanning at Earthkin Gathering, near Anderson Lake. I am hoping all goes well with the travels and the border, and I am looking forward to seeing old friends who will be in attendance — some I have not seen for over a decade.

• hide tanning and craft classes to be announced for fall soon! Locations in the southwest.

1. [not something I had a concept of growing up in the Piedmont region of the south over and hour from any city, perspective brought on by elevation and view was not easily possible unless you went several hours to the ocean

2. there are lots of stories of these thunderbirds and how they lived up on top of the Mesa. They influenced the rocks. Also, the summer monsoons up on the Mesa are full of thunder, and wild storms that can come and go in a short time.

3. its interesting how much retaliation is a part of old stories the world around, anad how much humans today still act out in this way. The world seems to be made of retaliation for someone’s mischief or greed or hunger for something.

4. Women are ‘nasty’ as our president says and not to be trusted if they have emotions or speak truth to power, and so are invasive plants if they get out of their lane and thrive in landscape conditions that resemble the moon

5

• (the energy of self-willedness, the ability to act in collaboration without overt force)